And when I say “our,” I’m not resorting to some rhetorical device. Nope. I actually follow these people [see below] on Twitter. Although I gotta tell you, me “following on Twitter” is rather rhetorical in itself, as my “following” pretty much consists of clicking the little Follow Me button and then forgetting all about it unless some tweet catches my eye when I finally think of something to post. I do SO not see how people keep track of other people on Twitter and Facebook and blogs and websites. WHERE do they find the time? And why are they not sharing this with the rest of us? If they have some Secret to Extra Hours, they need to spread the word, because the rest of us here are suffering mightily under the constraints of having only 24 of them in every day.
Anyway.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Remember when I talked about the People of Wal-Mart.com? Remember how funny I found this site? Just full of hilarity. And horror:
And then there’s Cake Wrecks. I follow them, too. They’re all about cake-decorating-related disasters:
So from time to time I’d see one of their tweets and follow the link to the photo and read the snarky comments and just giggle away. And call in The EGE, who’d snort and shake his head. Often, though, he seemed sort of sad about it, rather than gleeful. You know: not quite getting into the whole spirit of making fun of everyone who’s not as perfect as you are. Huh. Imagine.
Then we traveled some to San Antonio and Houston, and so of course whenever we went into a bookstore, I had to check to make sure The Book was on the shelves. Last time, with Living the Creative Life, it took forever before Border’s carried it. Maybe they never did. So I’ve been keeping an eye on them with Creative Time and Space. Happily, it’s always there, sitting on the shelf, often in a nice face-out display that—I swear!—I had nothing to do with!
(Thanks, Kathleen! And all the rest of y’all, too, who’ve got my back in the bookstores~~)
Anyway. So whenever I’d checked up on my own book and was happily browsing the aisles, checking out the other books, wishing we had a Border’s within 300 miles of Midland, which we do not, I’d see the even-nicer table-top display of Cake Wrecks, the book. The book is just like the blog, with photos of cake-y disasters captioned with commentary. Not a lot of meat, but funny, you know? Often hilariously so.
Then I received a note from Book People, a way-cool (so I’ve heard from so many, many people) indie bookstore in Austin. I’d sent them info about Creative Time and Space, hinting oh-so-delicately that gee, how could they possibly continue to LIVE without setting up a signing. Not actually threatening, you know, maybe a voodoo hex of the most minor sort should they say “no.”
They said “No,” they were not interested (and they said it just like that, although they did add that they would be ordering the book, which is something, apparently, as I guess they hadn’t ordered the last one). I was all like, “Well. Fine.” Better to have the book in stock there than not, right? So all was cool.
Until I read on the Cake Wrecks blog that they’d just had a fabulous Signing Event at Book People in Austin. Fabulous! With New Friends and Delicious Barbeque and Fun Times Had By All.
You know the part in Bird by Bird (or maybe in Operating Instructions, since I’ve read all Ann Lamott’s non-fiction many, many times, except maybe not so much the later, more over-the-edge religious stuff, which is still wonderful and funny but also sometimes kind of scary) where she talks about schadenfreude in writers, how you get that little thrill when you hear that some fabulously successful NYT Book Review top Author of The World has hemorrhoids? Or just checked into the Betty Ford Clinic (do they still even go there?) for rehab?Like that?
Well, what’s the opposite of that, when you get a little sad, just the teensiest bit ticked off and maybe wracked with spasms of boiling envy when you read about someone else’s joyous good fortune? Plus barbecue! Which, if I ate meat, would be the meat I would eat. Let’s just say that Not All Pork is Created Equally Wrong. Some pork is less wrong than other pork, OK?
So what’s the flip side of schadenfreude? Don’t say “envy, fool,” because that’s too easy. Plus “fool” isn’t going to help matters any.
And then I read that the people who do the People of Wal-Mart site have an agent and a book deal and appearances on tv and, and, and.
And, yeah, sure, my ego gets involved here. I’ll admit that: I think my book is a great book and deserves Fame & Fortune and maybe its own zip code. At least some gold lame pants and a Cadillac limo, you know? So that’s part of it, and I won’t deny it.
But something else started bugging me. Why is it that we so love making fun of other people and their stuff? Their clothes, their hair, their cars, their cakes?
And then I got really snippy and thought about how, if I’d been taking photos of all the Bad Art I’ve seen over the years, I could make a book of that, with my own snarky comments—and let me tell you, the people of The People of Wal-Mart and Cake Wrecks don’t know from snarky once I get my voodoo on—and it would be a best-seller for sure. With a tour! And a signing at Book People! And an agent! TV appearances! Big bucks! People would LOVE this.
And then a friend sent me a link to Regretsy.com, and I realized someone’s beat me to it. You know a book deal is already in the works here.
In case you haven’t heard of Regretsy, it’s the site where they make fun of all the stuff on Etsy that you’ve been making fun of in the privacy of your own computer room. You know, the stuff that relies heavily on glitter glue and popsicle sticks.
And I’m entranced by this shit. Just like everyone else on the planet. And then I start wondering why. But I’m only kind of vaguely wondering why, because the rest of the time I’m laughing my butt off, wondering what in the world these people were thinking and exactly how drunk they had to be when they thought it would be a good idea to take that photo and upload it to etsy with a price on it.
For the last week, though, I’ve been watching myself, taking note of what makes me laugh at this stuff and when. Because sometimes it’s not funny when the people at People of Wal-Mart make fun of some huge woman dressed in gold lame. Sometimes I look at her and look at how everything matches and think that here’s someone who made some kind of effort to look nice when she went to the store. She tried. She’s standing behind her cart, using a cane, and has no idea that she’s become the butt (literally) of a joke shared by millions of other human beings around the world. And then I look at the photos and see that many of them are poking fun of older people, women my age wearing Halloween socks, people who committed the sin of being all Matchy-Matchy, people who violated the Hip Code by going out of the house in some sort of Outfit that they thought looked pretty good, never mind if they were horribly, horribly mistaken by our standards.
{Because what in the world is it that has dictated that the only way to be Hip any more is to dress as if you couldn’t possibly care less about how you look? The lank, greasy hair, the mis-matched wrinkled clothes, the sloppy flip-flops and dun-colored sweatshirts. That’s hip. Everything else is laughable. Yeah, I’m sure I’m going to show up in some People of Wal-Mart photo if I go there very often, because—omigod!—I’m 1) old and 2) all Matchy-Matchy. Plus I wash my hair, which is just trite, you know?}
Oh, sure: some of this stuff is just horrid. The people dressed with way, way too much of their bodies exposed.
The vulva earrings and their scarily freakish commentary.
The cakes with the buyer’s instructions mistakenly added to the message on top.
Are you laughing? We all are. This stuff is hilarious.
But why? Why is it so much fun to make fun of other people’s stuff? Why do we feel so happy to look at the things other people have done that somehow don’t measure up to our standards of decency or correctness or rightness or propriety or whatever?
I started looking at the People of Wal-Mart’s targets, and many of them aren’t people who are covered with racist tattoos and wearing an obscene in-your-face t-shirt. Many of them are of people who made some sort of an effort in dressing themselves and going out into the world. Many of them are old or poor and don’t have a lot of options. The one that did it for me was an old woman wearing some sort of holiday socks, and I thought about what her life might be like, about how she might have once celebrated Halloween with her kids, who are all gone and maybe don’t call very often, and she’s on Social Security and can’t afford to really celebrate much of anything, but she managed to scrape together $3 to buy a pair of Halloween socks at Wal-Mart, and those make her really happy.
And I’m sitting here typing this with tears in my eyes.
And go from there: The people decorating those cakes. How many of them do you want to bet do not speak (or write) English as their first language? The bakeries at your local grocery stores are not paying the Big Bucks to graduates from culinary school. Imagine, if you will, that you suddenly find yourself decorating cheap cakes at a grocery store in Dusseldorf. I don’t know—I can’t fathom any circumstance under which this would happen to me, as I can’t even BAKE a cake, much less decorate it, and no one would ever dream of paying me actual money to do either, and I have no desire to travel to Germany, since I—duh—don’t speak the language. But suppose I did end up there, decorating cakes for a living. And people were calling up on the phone and ordering cakes and telling me what they wanted written on the top. And after I’d wrangled the blue icing into that little pastry tube, which—I’m sorry—looks like some kind of prop in a porn flick—I’d try to write out what I thought they’d told me. Doing my anal-retentive best to be accurate with both the words and the decorating.
It wouldn’t be pretty, and there’s no telling what those cakes would actually say. I’m willing to bet that’s what’s going on in the vast majority of these cases: people who don’t speak the language doing as good a job as they can, trying to make a living so they can pay the bills.
[I’m not someone who orders cakes from a bakery. Hell, I’m not someone who EATS cakes from bakeries. But if I were, if I’d done this a time or two, I think I would have learned to print out what I wanted to go on the top of the cake and take that printed sheet to the bakery and hand it to the people taking my order. Wouldn’t that make sense?]
And Regretsy. I don’t know what to say about the vulva earrings or the paper clip strung on a wire, but I’m guessing that most people who take the time to make something and photograph it and put it on Etsy are really, really trying to find their path, their niche, the thing they can do. I remember being a kid (whoa! a memory!) and being completely driven to make things, anything, and not having the skills or the tools and supplies to do it. I made everything for which I could find instructions, and it all sucked the Big Winkie. But I kept thinking, I think, that someday something would click. Luckily for me, I found Stitching. I discovered what is, for me, the sheer joy of putting embroidery floss through fabric.
Other people are still searching for whatever will do it for them. Maybe some kid, some 8-year-old boy, put that paper clip on that wire and put it up on Etsy. Maybe that was, for him, his first brave experiment into trying out a neo-Punk grunge aesthetic that wouldn’t make his brothers laugh themselves silly and beat him to a bloody pulp. Maybe that mermaid hair clip was made by someone just starting to feel their way around mixed media crafts, someone young, perhaps, and isolated, without money for magazine subscriptions or classes or workshops.
Imagine all of these scenarios. Then imagine what it would feel like to get online and see a photo of your or your work with that snarky little caption that makes you look like the only goober on the planet, the one everybody else—EVERYONE else—is laughing at.
Sure, sure: some of these things are jokes. Some, like those earrings, are just wrong (you could argue that the earrings themselves are actually pretty good, and that there’s a whole Judy Chicago-esque thang going on there. If only it weren’t for that “convo me” note at the end. . . .) But what does it mean that we find it all so hilarious?
For me—and I’ve been watching me, watching how my brain works (having just talked to Roz, how could I not?)--and I find that when I’m hitting on all cylinders, chugging along, getting work done, I have no interest in following the links on Twitter and looking at this stuff. It’s only when I’ve gotten tired, or have hit a rough spot and have come to a dead stop that those links become so enticing, so easy to follow. And, from there, it’s just endless clicking. Look at this! And this! And omigod, look at THIS! (No, there aren’t supposed to be links there; it’s rhetorical.)
And then last night I went to Buddhist meditation again, and the instructor gave us homework. Homework? I thought I was just going so I could meditate in a group. Who knew there’d be homework? Although, seeing as how he’s a retired teacher, I guess I should have expected an assignment, right? I’ll just be lucky if he skips the whole grading thing, cos then I’d get into my severe Grade Grubbing Mode, and life would be tense. Tense-er.
He talked about the ethical life, the moral life, which, in Buddhism, means observing the Five Precepts:
...not harming living beings. ...not taking things not freely given. ...avoiding sexual misconduct. ...avoiding false speech. ...avoiding intoxicating drinks and drugs causing heedlessness. And then, at the end, the assignment for us to think about:
How does living an ethical life set us free?
And I’m thinking about how I feel when I spend five minutes laughing at the People of Wal-Mart, or making fun of the cakes someone decorated or the purse someone crafted out of a log. I do not feel free. I laugh, but I feel a little crummy about it, as if I’m helping propagate something I don’t much care for. I rail about the things I hate in society: the greed, the divisiveness, the bigotry, the consumerism, the selfishness. If I’m going to rail against it, shouldn’t I be doing something to balance it out instead of something that just feeds our whole post-modern consumer-driven corporate-dictated wanton gluttony of self-centered superiority?
Something like, oh, creativity, for instance?
I’m hoping that, the next time I’m tired and a little bit frazzled and tempted to go see what new monstrosity they’ve posted on one of those websites, I resist that urge. (It’s what I’m always telling the cats, right before Moe, sitting with his ears cocked back, makes the lunge toward his sister, sleeping peacefully on her back, blissfully (and temptingly) unaware: “Resist that urge!”)
Maybe I won’t. But at least I’ll be aware. Maybe I’ll play a little computer Solitaire instead.
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