Blah-scar Nominations

When I was younger, the Academy Awards were the living end: the pinnacle of glamour, the acme of accomplishment, the very height of American can-do attitude with a healthy dose of beaded gowns. The red carpet, the shots of an audience in stitches - when I first started watching, the show was hosted by Billy Crystal, who was irascibly, harmlessly funny - the tearful speeches, the interminable running time: it felt so big, like everyone who mattered was in that room that night, and they were all dressed to impress.

Seen through the eyes of a child - a child slightly obsessed with old Hollywood, who, in the sixth grade, wrote a report on the Fatty Arbuckle scandal - the Oscars represented the untouchable loveliness of Hollywood. 1994 was the first year I watched, and the show was both a tease (those clips! Of Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption!) and a barge (it lasted for hours: it was literally the longest show I had ever watched). In more recent years, the Academy has done away with some of the stateliness, and the clips are a little less enticing, but it's still basically celebrating the best of cinemasphere.

Or is it?

Yesterday, the nominees for 2012 were announced, and, like every year, there's backlash. "Where's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? What's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close doing in there? Do I spy Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon on that list?" Lists like this are always contentious, because film, like all other art forms, is subjective. The Academy has always revelled in a certain filmic elitism: comedies never get nominated, animated features have been ghettoized, and the movies that actually get seen by regular civilians are nowhere to be found.

Example: Tin-Tin was a marvellous movie, full of action and comedy and excellent performances. The Academy, though, is slow to adapt to changing technologies like motion- and performance capture, so movies like Tin-Tin, that use emerging techniques in order to make some truly stellar movie moments, get ignored. Don't believe me? Do you honestly believe that Puss in Boots, a Shrek spin-off that was pretty much greeted with "Did we really need this?" deserves an Oscar more than the beautifully choreographed chase through Morocco?

Or the question of motion capture, period: Andy Serkis, who has made his living playing characters that aren't quite human (Gollum, Cesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the animated Captain Haddock in Tin-Tin). He does beautiful, subtle work. But he often does it in a motion-capture suit, and the character's is filled in around him in post-production. Serkis doesn't look like George Clooney or Brad Pitt, but his characters are creations that straddle the line between "human" and "other," and after this summer's Rise, there was a motion from fans to recognize good work.

The Academy ignored that work completely.

As I get older, I realize that the Oscars aren't really about celebrating what's truly great, even though that does sometimes happen: The Artist is nominated this year, and it should win. The other nominees were divisive: Tree of Life, The Help and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close split the critics, and flicks like War Horse are such transparent Oscar-bait that I avoid them out of a sense of duty. But mostly, the Best Picture nods always take themselves so seriously: so many dramas and period pieces, so many dying kids and dying moms and failing husbands and injured animals - it's all too much.

Part of it is growing up, and becoming less enamoured with Hollywood - the old-time glamour is gone. The machinery of the industry is much more in-your-face. Box office get discussed around water coolers. Comedies get ignored at awards shows. I've aged out of the demographic that will take in every last thing Hollywood says as gospel: the cacophony of awards and critics isn't silenced by the Oscars, only frothed up further. I wonder if my kids will crouch by the TV on the night of the Oscars, breathlessly watching the Hollywood elite celebrate each other's work. I somehow doubt it. Part of me doubts that I'll be there, either.

Your Mommyblog Doesn't Wear Combat Boots

Last year, mommyblogs were all the rage, and Mormon mommyblogs were especially au courant. Slate published a shamefaced essay, written by a self-proclaimed feminist who couldn't tear herself away from all the shiny, happy young women who were photoblogging and writing love notes to their impossibly handsome husbands. Emily Matchar, the author of the Slate article, wrote about her cringe-y, self-judging relationship with these blogs: as a young feminist,she wasn't really looking to become a young stay-at-home wife and mother, making pom-pom garlands and jellies. But Matchar talked about craving the other side of the post-feminist discourse, the one that doesn't focus on BPA in the baby bottles, episiotomies, and work-life-balance fraught terror of screwing up your kids while your kid, in turn, ruins your own professional and personal life.

When these sprightly blogs cross my path,I fall on them like wolves on sheep. I want to read every entry of each blog, but as I go through and look at wedding pictures (the dresses are all sacks, the bride and groom are undergrads), I feel a creeping queasiness. I'm jealous...and also angry...and then glad they're not me...and then jealous again.

The Mormon mommyblogs seem so simple: gratitude flows from each entry. They're the polar opposite of most young people's personal blog. I've always had more glass-half-empty stuff to say, and online, it become very easy for a blog to become a litany of moody song lyrics, YouTube videos that will somehow express how I feel, links to bummer news stories, and Instagram posts of half-done crosswords, half-eaten meals, and half-drank pints. We're kind of a downer, at least on the internet. Compared to the mommyblogs, which feature sweeping images of the Utah mountainscape (so gorgeous I would consider converting just to live there [Not really. --Ed.]), my life is blah, boring. Their sun shines constantly.

One of my high school teachers once asked me what I wanted to do after I graduated. I shrugged and said, "I dunno, what are the qualifications for becoming a mom?" I've never actually had huge biological clock urges - even now I feel worried about things like baby weight and whether or not it's okay to let your infant just sleep on the floor (on a mat! I suspect the answer is still no, though). But there's something very primal and instinctual about becoming a parent. These young women have become more than parents, though. I would say that they're super-moms, but I don't mean that their parenting skills are any better than mine would be. They just seem to have their shit together, in a way that I am very far away from.

Part of the appeal of blogging, as Matchar points out, is that not everything you do, say, or think needs to make an appearance. My own blog, through sprawling in its scope, doesn't touch on everything, and the Mormon mommybloggers keep it even tinier. There are lovely photos of their young children and of large family parties. There are posts about pregnancy, and dinners with friends. There are video montages about Christmas. But their professional lives don't get mentioned - it's easy to imagine that these women spend all their time grooming their toddlers and choosing the perfect red lipstick, and that jobs are something for husbands and fathers, not for them. Larger social issues almost never get raised - these girls will never post about Mitt Romney or fiscal responsibility, not when their kids are doing something adorable.

The effect of these willful blind spots is that these writers seem to be transmitting from inside a snow globe - their lives are so beautiful, so magically perfect, that it's impossible to see if they work at the magic, and if they do, how hard. None of the seams show, but that also means there's no crack for me to sneak through. It's life, in a vacuum, with the perfect shade of red lipstick.

300 Hipsters, No Porn

The number one thing that brings people to this site isn't me.

Oh sure, I randomly get Facebook shoutouts from people who are all like, "I love your blog!" which is great, because most of the time, I feel like I'm writing in a vacuum. Not an actual vacuum, mind you, because, though I am fairly small, my curves would prevent me from bending myself into a neat enough package to shimmy inside the canister of your family's Dyson Rollerball. Just, like, it can be lonely out here in the blogosphere. I'm not well-versed enough in self-promotion to have the thousands of hits that other (louder, better) bloggers have. I'm not especially well connected, and I tend, because I am dumb, to burn bridges almost as fast as I can build them - perusing the masthead of a local newspaper that I am a fan of (and would like to someday write for) revealed the name of a man with whom I had recently had some lousy email back-and-forth. (There's another place to which I'm now too self-concious to submit! Good one, Kaitlyn!) There've been girls who approach me at parties and say, "I read your blog," and I love that, because it makes me feel micro-famous, and then we coo at each other over what great tops we're all wearing. I love that too.

I've learned things from writing here. I've learned how hard it is to be consistently good, twice a week: "good" meaning "good writing", but also punctual, well-edited, factual, and respectful of my sources. I've learned not to write when I'm angry, because the cooling-off period is crucial in not sounding like an ill-informed pot-banging troll. I've learned that I need to disguise the identities of the scumbags in my life, even though they don't deserve it. I've learned that social media like Twitter and Facebook can be instrumental in expanding my readers from a few dozen to a few hundred, and that walking the tightrope between personal and public can be daunting but exhilarating: writing about surgery, for example, netted me plenty of well-wishers on Facebook, and it also let me say just how scared and lonely I felt in my situation.

But the number one thing that draws people here? Is this.

In 2010, I wrote an entry with the fateful phrase "hipster porn" embedded somewhere in the code. Since then, hundreds of perverts come each week, from all over the world, and discover that, much to their dismay, there are no photos of tattooed baristas, bike mechanics, photobloggers, and vegans doing unspeakable things to each other while smoking/drinking/attending concerts/whatever it is hipsters do. Instead: hello! Kaitlyn here!

It makes me laugh that "hipster porn" is my main draw, because I actually work damned hard at this little blog. I've parlayed it into a couple non-paying writing gigs, like my Beginner's Guides over at HuffPo and an internship at Spacing. I've also snagged a real, live, paying blogjob over at XOXO Amore, where, aptly enough, the focus is all about sex. Over the years, I've done writing for free, for experience and training, for exposure, for cash. It's all been some kind of work, but its also all been for me. I'm greedy like that.

I love writing. Folks have told me I'm good at it - my mom and girls at parties at parties, yes. Strangers too. That's gratifying, but I've never designed this site to be anything more than the place I come when I need to write - and baby, you better believe that's a need. You don't write 300 thousand-word blog entries because you're sort of interested in writing - you do it because you're a writer, and writers have to write. It's what we do.

There's that rule: 10,000 hours to get from good to great. By those standards, I'm years - and hundreds of blog posts - away from true mastery. These last 300 posts have given me great entries that may never be read again, and terrible ones that someone out there just loves. It gives me a safe place to play - to write haikus and talk about horror movies. I might not always write here, on this blog, on this internet. But writing is just a no-brainer: I need it. I always will. Hipster porn or no.

Even MORE Five Things

Five more things? 'kay. Sure.

1. My musical firsts are kind of embarrassing. First concert? Swollen Members. First CD purchase? The Clueless soundtrack. The Clueless soundtrack actually had a bunch of decent bands on it - Beastie Boys, Radiohead, and Supergrass, what? - but the main reason I bought it was so that I could listen to Jill Sobule's "Supermodel" on repeat. I'm not proud of that.

I bought it at Victoria's A&B Sound, a slightly seedy three-story CD store that was totally amazing to a pre-teen. It was stuffed to the rafters with bands I had never heard of, and just flipping through the racks while my parents made serious faces at the Springsteen section gave me a thrilled, liberated feeling: there were so many different people I could be! I was young enough to buy whole-heartedly into the notion that I could define myself by the music I listened to, and pop-culturally savvy enough to start understanding that there were definitely bands that liking - or even being aware of - had cachet. And so, that knowledge in hand, I plunked down $17.99 and made my first formal venture into music fandom. Thanks, Jill Sobule. You were there.

2. I once quit a job after 20 minutes because my boss told me I couldn't drink water on the job. Because, as she explained, "if you're thinking about your thirst, you're not thinking about my business." Shocked, I left.

3. Even though I have an English degree, I struggle mightily with novels. Magazine articles, essays, and short stories are totally my bag, though. It's shameful to admit that I've stopped keeping up with new books, and that even if I know that something noteworthy's been published lately, I likely won't read it. But I feel bad about that! To make up for it, I tell anyone who will listen about that article I read this morning, which endears me to my friends and alienates receptionists.

4. I put The Commodores' "Brick House" on every single mix tape I made in high school. I'm not even sure why I loved that song, but I'm pretty sure it stems from That '70s Show, starring my boy Topher Grace, who, as Eric, told a date-ready Donna (Laura Prepon) that she was "really...brick house" when he meant she was really hot. I liked that show so much, and was definitely charmed by Eric and his skinny portrayer. I've always wanted someone to tell me I was really brick house.

5. My fears include deep water, deep space, fainting in public (especially on the subway), that my eye is twitching when I talk to strangers, that I'll die alone, that I'll die in a fire, drowning, electron-microscope photographs, being too hot, spiders, tarantulas, spiders in my hair, spiders in the bathroom, giant spiders as surprise plot points in movies (what? It happens - have you seen Lord of the Rings?), and gaining weight. Feel free to use any of those to make fun of me, except for the spider thing - I will cut you for real if you tease me with a rubber spider.

Five More Things

Last week, I started getting a little more intimate. Not in that "let me slip into something more comfortable, like a marabou stiletto and a satin shortie bathrobe" kind of way. More like, "let me make self-conscious eye contact in my therapist's office while I systematically shred several Kleenex over the course of a fifty-minute hour" sort of way. Or even more like, "let's get drunk together and talk slurrily about all the boys we've kissed before throwing our arms up in the air and screaming 'Wooo!' when our right-now favourite song comes on the jukebox" sort of way.

1. I like to bake, but I rarely branch out past the standard chocolate-chip banana muffins or oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies. (I seem to used baking as a vector for chocolate.) Like most of my culinary adventures, baking is less an adventure and more a meditation. Some of those recipes, I've made so often that I've got 'em memorized, and making up a batch of muffins is a forty-minute exercise in sifting and mixing and measuring that allows me to reach, stretch, twirl, and turn my brain off. It's nice.

2. When I argue, I argue less about being right - I'm rarely right, and I'm not a jerk when I realize I'm not - but more about being heard. For someone to say, "I acknowledge your viewpoint" is what allows for my peaceable resolution.

When I was younger, my sister and I fought like animals, and she is the queen deluxe of pushing my buttons. But the moment I learned how to say, "I'll talk about this with you when we're both less angry," was the moment our relationship became more open. It meant that she could admit, hey, she has been jonesing for a fight. It meant she could say that she thought I was wrong without me turning all red and glassy-eyed. And it meant we talked about the stuff that was actually happening (I'm tired, I had a fight with my boyfriend, I spent all day at work, I'm lonely, I'm afraid) rather than all the stuff that was masquerading as The Issue (I'm going to straight-up MURDERIZE YOU if you don't unload the dishwasher and I MEAN IT, etc.).

Most of the time, these days, I start a fight/allow a fight to continue because I'm feeling like my feelings are being pooped on. I give the cold shoulder, I use pathetic straw man arguments, I start yelling - all desperate ploys to trick the other person into saying, "Hey man, I see where you're coming from. That must really suck." There doesn't even need to be an apology - hell, if you're not sorry, don't give that "Pfft, I'm sorry" that really means "I'm sorry you're so stupid," because I can see through that and it activates my all rage nodes. Just a little bit of empathy works wonders with me. Barring that, time. Barring that, gift baskets - the kind with the fancy jams and pretzel sticks. Nothing says, "I'm sorry you're so stupid and wrong, but that's okay because we're still generally on the same page about everything except the ethics of small businesses vs. big box stores" like pretzel sticks.

3. The only mega-series I've read has been The Dark Tower by Stephen King. I was about two years too old to get into Harry Potter - my sister was enthralled, but I stopped reading after the third book - and while I've attempted the Lord of the Rings cycle at least twice, I just can't get into it. I have no beef with long books, having read Infinite Jest, The Stand and a few other 1000+ page books (books that long can only really be described as "tomes," right?), but if someone said to me, "Oh, you like epics? Have you read Twilight?" I would laugh so hard my nose would bleed. It's not about quality, because King and Stephanie Meyers are probably on about the same page, writing-wise, and Rowling and Tolkien are miles above them both. It's about reading a yarn that's mine - some of us like magic with walking trees, some like sparkly-ass vampires, and others like broomstick rugby. Those just aren't my jam.

4. I get obsessed with places. Last year, after reading a foodie profile of Copenhagen, I wanted to go to Denmark so bad. That grew to mean Scandinavia in general, because of Robyn and ski sweaters and a general feeling that the countries were a lot like Canada, except nicer. Canada-plus. Right now, it's Utah. I've been reading all these ridiculous Mormom mommyblogs and their family vacations always have them spending their quarters in the Beehive State. Utah seems demographically crazy (I'm not a Mormon by any means), but there's something to be said about a state that looks like this. And this. And this. I think the general wanderlust can be attributed to getting bored in same-old-same-old Toronto - I love this place, but my shoes aren't nailed to my front steps, you know? There's only so many days in a row I can orient myself to the CN tower.

5. For the first time in my life, I've managed to keep plants alive for longer than 6 months. Hell, the cacti under my care (sorry, "care") have been thriving! I don't know if this is some sort of metaphor for finally being well enough to care for something else, or a metaphor for accepting the things you're good at, but in either case, it's awesome.

Five Things

It was trendy, for a while, to make lists of 25 or 50 or 3,000 things that one felt one should share with one's Facebook friends (and is it just me, or is "one" one of the more pretentious pronouns out there?), which would lead to people "tagging" other folks whose lists they wanted to see, and there would be cascades of lists happening everywhere, itemized tidbits of information raining down on unsuspecting Facebook compadres.

This is my 297th post. This blog has given me a chance to spout all kind of opinions on the interwebs, and I've loved writing it, but there's only so much you can glean from a person based on how much he or she resents Margaret Atwood (in my case? Plenty. Sorry Maggie. If it makes you feel any better, I liked what you had to say about Toronto's libraries this year). I figured, hey, why not do a litter series of stuff for whoever reads this to get to know me better.

1. I've never liked my name. Kaitlyn is a 1980s name, and has always reminded me of other people rather than me. I think my mom had some regrets, too: despite it being spelled with a "y" on my birth certificate, she spelled it Kaitlin for most of my childhood, and told me much later that the reason for the switch was that Kaitlyn had a trendy vibe that the "i" undercut (somehow?). I found out in high school and switched it back, leading to all kinds of mix-ups on attendance forms that I used to my advantage. Either way, the name is silly. My friend Mark and uncle Kevin call me Kate, a short-form that delights me because it makes me feel even less like myself, and my friend Liz calls me Kaiko, which I love.

My brother and sister have classic, albeit very white-person, names, and I like to think that my parents learned that naming their kids after characters in Paul Newman movies isn't a good life decision for anyone.

2. I am totally addicted to Coke Zero, but rarely finish the last couple sips. If Coke made a 330 mL can, that would be perfect. Instead, I just leave tantalizing droplets in all the fifty thousand cans I leave littered through my life and infuriate everyone.

3. I'm 28 years old, and I still sleep with my baby blanket. When I left for university, my parents told me that people would laugh at me if I brought it, but people were awed when they found out my blanket had made the trip to higher education. They all said variations on the same thing: "My parents told me people would laugh, so I left it behind." They usually said it with a wistful, envious look on their faces as they ran their fingers along the sateen binding of my battered and much-loved blanket.

4. I have pretty wicked social anxiety. For years, I dealt with that by drinking until I felt loosey-goosey enough to talk to people, but that's not really a long-term solution, liver-wise. Social anxiety, for me at least, is a constant feeling of being looked at, judged, and found lacking, and the fear of screwing up in front of all those judges. It's based on nothing in reality, but can be really hard to shake - in my case, it's led to panic attacks at work and in uncomfortable social situations. Talking to sales people and receptionists is the worst, along with waiting in lines.

Talking about social anxiety has been something I've only started to do recently. There are a few people with whom I feel truly comfortable, like my immediate family, my close friends, and my boyfriend - almost every other interaction I have is tinged with a bit of panic. It usually goes something along the lines of "What if you fainted right now?" and that little thought becomes a roar so loud, I can't hear anything else. I become convinced I'm too hot, or that I'm dizzy, or that I'm going to faint from hunger if I haven't eaten in more than a couple hours. Let me say again that I know these aren't rational thoughts, but irrational thoughts are pretty tough to dismiss when they're causing a physical stress reaction.

I don't know why these things happen. I know how they happen, and when (work settings are a particularly intense trigger, because hello, work is stressful, and because my last job was such a gong show), but the why is a tricky one. I know I'm not alone - a lot of my family and some of my friends are under the spell of mild to moderate social anxiety, and we've commiserated about the challenges and frustrations of feeling totally tweaked when everyone seems relaxed and, you know, normal.

5. The only kind of pants I really wear are sweats and capris. Jeans? I always feel weird in jeans, and I rarely wear them. My boyfriend is sighs wistfully and saying, "But your ass? In jeans? Damn," but I can barely go ten minutes without hitching them up or scrunching them down. Jeans are not my friend, but linen capris than make me look 63 are totally my jam.

How Much Is That Diamond Dog Brooch In The Window?

I have sadly developed a new interest this year, one that, if taken to its logical conclusion, will end up costing me lots and lots of money. No, I haven't taken up designer drugs or overpriced yoga wear - I've started browsing online for jewelry.

I was never really a jewelry person. My friend Rachel is - she has a wall of bangles and barrettes, of feathered hairpieces and bauble necklaces. She buys from thrift stores and local boutiques, and has such an array of choices that she can, and will, create a look that is literally like something you might see in the pages of a magazine. Aside from her irrational attachment to the colour mustard, Rachel is one of my most stylish friends, and a lot what she does to finish her looks is all in the way she accessorizes.

I have my standard choices that affect my look from day to day, like my stretched-out earlobes that offer a peek at the landscape behind me, but are small enough not to scare the children. Those earrings give me an ever-so-slightly edgy look, which I forget about all the time because I've worn them for so long. When I worked at a bakery five years ago, I had to take them out for health and safety reasons - a ridiculous notion, because the earrings literally screwed into my earlobes. My bosses insisted, which definitely contributed to my general malaise at that job - that, and all the ambient flour, leading to a dryness level in the bake shop that led to nosebleeds.

Ahem. I digress. In high school, I had stretched ears, but my look was a lot more day-glo raver girl, a look that was, in hindsight, very stupid. I also dyed my hair pink and wore orange eyeshadow, so, like, you know - not a style icon, I was. Thank god I didn't wear a ton of jewelry, or I would have probably ended up looking like one of classmates, who wore a hemp necklace threaded with jawbreaker-sized wooden beads. (Let's just all agree right now that the intersection of late-1990s fashion trends and the reasoning power of a 16-year-girl's mind led to very bad decisions regarding accessories and leave it at that.)

I never really follow trends when it comes to jewelry, mostly because I can't afford to follow trends in jewelry. The upper style eschelon always seems to be suggesting that women dangle beads from their head or wear enormous hats, looks that work best for women who spend most of their time in front of cameras or donating money, and rotating between bangles and brooches and rings and all the others is damned expensive. For the plebes, most women only have a few pieces of fine jewelry throughout their lives - engagement rings, maybe a nice bracelet for an anniversary, or a gift to one's own self once the divorce is finalized.

So my new interest in jewelry is a little unsettling, because I just can't afford to love anything I see - it costs me in either heartbreak or cash, and neither is fun. There are a couple things baby investments I've made in the last couple months, like Catbird's dreamy little memory ring. (Catbird is my jewelry spirit animal - I covet so many of their little gems, because their jewelry combines subtlety and beauty in a way that a lot of modern designers skips.) I've got a little cache of bike-themed pendants, and friends and family spoil me with more. But I troll online for rings and pendants, and I'm not sure why.

I think part of it stems from being set up in life - I've got an apartment, a job, a closet full of not unstylish clothes, and so I'm not wanting for anything. At the same time, I can't afford the frivolities in life, so nice jewelry is out of the question. It becomes part of the window-shopping landscape - things that are theoretically in reach, but that actually purchasing them would make me very hungry indeed. They're the things that make life prettier, lovelier, but not necessarily worth the dip in quality of life they would cost me.

But maybe one day, I'll treat myself to a quail egg on a string and smile at myself in the mirror.