Breaking You Off

Now that I'm back at work - and can we all just take a moment to sigh along with me, in relief that I've found something that seems to suit me and that, once I get past the stage fright of meeting new folks and learning new things, will allow me to thrive? AHHHHH....that felt good - I remember the thrill of the weekend.

I've written before about the special joys of the long weekend, and about how having a short weekend can ruin one's life. I was chatting with a girlfriend tonight, and she said that having two days off in a row is a terrible thing for her. She just lazes all day the first day, and rushes joylessly around on the second day. She doesn't really enjoy either. Me, I need a proper weekend, but everyone's different. Some people need a two-day workweek. Some folks need ten minutes to gulp down a cup of coffee and check in with their nanny. We call those people ER doctors, and we don't pay them nearly enough money.

Work psychologists encourage people to take mini-breaks during the day. Stare out the window for a minute, walk around the office, take a brisk walk at lunch. It can be so easy to forget to take those moments in the business of work, and I often put them off when I'm deep into the expense reports. But those mini-vacations are help us function. They relieve eyestrain, stretch out tight muscles, and get a dose of vitamin D. They also keep the brain alert: mistake to stand up when things are viewed with a fresh pair of eyes, and they keep frustration at bay. I'm not saying that y'all should spend our work hours staring out the window, but stand up for yourself: breaks are important.

My old boss was stingy with break time. Lunch hours were carefully monitored, and employees were instructed to sign in and out very day. There were no coffee breaks. The expectation was 100% work, 100% of the time. Coupled with that six-day work week, my life became threaded with work, and it was impossible to de-escalate the stress I felt at the constant demands. That's never a good sign. Bosses might give breaks grudgingly or generously, but they should give them.

I've slipped back into a high level of productivity at work, which is terrific. In my off-the-clock hours, I sometimes forget to breathe. I'm feeling the pressure of DOING THINGS on the weekend. I've got girls' brunch on Sunday, an ushering gig at night, a movie party on Friday, and a friend date during the day. Every last moment is scheduled! I love my friends, but it turns out that my downtime is precious. Like gold. Sometimes, I need to take breaks from my highly scheduled life - take a break from having plans all the time, take a break from heading from the gym to the movies to the doctor's to my bed. Downtime is so good for me - it lets me have my creative time, to take long showers, to sleep in those extra ten minutes. And then when I step into my work, or hang out with my friends, I feel recharged and enlivened, ready to take on gym, doctor's expense reports, brunch, drinks, movies, and more.

The Secret Life Of The 25-Year-Old Girl

I don't read Toronto Life, because it's rarely relevant to my life: despite living in Toronto, and loving it deeply, I don't move in the rarefied circles of charcuterie gastropubs and $500 purses. Their beat is to cover the lifestyle habits of the upwardly mobile and aspirational Torontonians, and they do it thoroughly and well. TL's major faux pas isn't that their topics are narrow in scope, but that there's a first-person smugness ingrained in their articles. The writers aren't encouraged to draw a larger picture for the reader, so I wonder about the relevance of a story about, say, controversy about a fight at a Toronto private school that might otherwise draw me in.

With their recent cover story, "The Secret Lives of 13-Year-Old Girls," TL lays bare Alexandra Molotkow's cybersexual coming-of-age story. Reading certain sections, I found myself nodding, because I could identify with the longings of young teenage girls. We desperately want to know about sex - more than just body parts, but feelings and experiences. At the same time, 13-year-olds are too young to have any meaningful mastery of their interiour sex lives, and the ones who are sexually experienced at that age often seem damaged later on. The internet provided a safe barrier to explore and express sexuality, without the danger of engaging in real, hands-on, consequence-y sex.

I remember exchanging emails with a boy from summer camp, trading stories about what we would do to each other next summer vacation. These were pornographic short stories, and my parents stumbled across them, which led to a major screaming match over what would have happened if my younger brother (who was six years old at the time) had found them. My parents weren't actually worried about my grade-school brother; they were worried that I was somehow going to end up a victim of a sexual predator, even though, in those X-rated emails, I was definitely the more crocodilian of the two of us.

I find, when I talk to my girlfriends now, a common, obsessive theme in our early high school years: we were fascinated by sex, and completely unable to express our fascination. Fearful of being branded a pervert, or worse, I kept my interest carefully hidden away, but I wondered what it would be like to kiss, to touch. Online, where I was a far better writer, I could express some of those desires without the burning shameface that broke out if I even thought about saying my feelings out loud. Molotkow graduated from online chatrooms to early social networking sites, inadvertently becoming a schoolmate's cyberstalker. She finds solace online: it's an escape from the unrelenting shittiness of high school. Going online makes her feel less alone, reassuring her that there are others like her out there, even if they don't go to her school, or are her age.

She shrugs off the alleged dangers of the anonymous internet by flashing her bullshit detector: "I suppose I should have been afraid of meeting strange, older men from the Internet....[b]ut these men passed online background checks: they were friends of online friends, and their 'netiquette' was okay." It was a common trope in the 1990s for news media to report that your children were at risk if they surfed the internet alone - that unsupervised kids were being lured into online chats with old perverts pretending to be frisky young teens. In reality, more than 95% of adults engaging teens in chats owned up to their age, and they were also forthright with their sexual intentions. Without exception, the victims were older than 13 - the same age that Molotkow was when she started cybersexing. To top it off, studies have shown "there is some evidence that adolescents who visit chatrooms are more likely to have problems with their parents, to suffer from sadness, loneliness, or depression, to have histories of sexual abuse, and to engage in risky behavior than those who do not go to chatrooms." In her article, Molotkow admits to three of those four risk indicators - it seems like, more than anything, her prodigious smarts saved her from some potential abuse, and she was luckier than she was smart. Trusting your gut on the internet seems less safe than your average blind date, but there are actually very few incidences of straight-up molestation. In the most recent stats I could find, internet-related events account for about 7% of statutory rape cases in America. It's a tiny minority that garnered huge media attention, because the internet, at that time, was new, and the rules were unwritten.

It's the same story with sexting now. Molotkow poo-poohs the idea that sexting is worth getting riled up over, dismissing it as a younger generation's chatroom, and hey - at least the kids are doing it to each other and not anonymous Russian human traffickers. Unfortunately, she undercuts her position by recounting the dramatic tale of "Jessi Slaughter:"

I’m disturbed by the antics of kids today: take Jessica Leonhardt, an 11-year-old Floridian known as “Jessi Slaughter.” Last year, on a teen message board called StickyDrama, she was accused of sleeping with a musician popular among 11-year-olds. She posted a video of herself to YouTube refuting the claim and threatening her haters: “I’ll pop a Glock in your mouth and make a brain slushy.” [...] In yet another online video, her father yelled at the attackers, saying he knew who they were and invoking the “cyber police.” Unfortunately, there is no such thing as cyber police. In Leonhardt’s last missive, she claimed to be in foster care; her dad passed away of a heart attack this summer.

There are issues with the article - the passages describing her early masturbatory successes were uncomfortable, to say the least - but what's most frustrating is that Molotkow's experience is normal without being representative. The inability to capture the salient issue is Toronto Life's biggest stumbling block, and again, they made me wonder about how this woman's emerging online sexuality had any bearing, other than squicky feelings of retrograde voyeurism, on my life.

Writing an article about what technology means to teenagers is one thing, but this was a more personal (and dated) narrative. She didn't bother talking to any current thirteen year old girls about their technologically enhanced dating/erotic/sexual adventures. She didn't even speak to other women, now in their 20s, who would have been the same age and having the same experiences. Molotkow is a funny, quick-witted writer with an instinct to overshare, and it eats up words that could be used to widen the scope of the article. Like all nostalgia pieces, it's most interesting to those who were there when it happened, and it's likely that a thirteen-year-old girl reading the piece would have no idea what she was talking about: the technology has changed, the rules have changed, even as teenaged girls and their animal need to know their own sexuality remains constant.

Happy 29th Birthday, Future Me.

Birthday! Cake! Ice cream! Fresca! Yoga! Cuddling! Walking in the November rain! Mexican food! Yay! In the spirit of the new year - it's my birthday tomorrow, and I'm going to be turning 28, which makes me feel simultaneously unformed and totally old - here are my New Year's Resolutions for The Age Of Twenty-Eight:

• to get smart about money. I have vague notions about where my money goes - rent, food, Coke Zero, second-hand CDs from Sonic Boom - but it tends to move through my bank account like it's acting of its own accord. Grown ups don't live like that. I mean, some grown ups do, but I want to be one of those responsible-style people who pays off student loans and shit. I have aspirations for myself that involve money, and it's likely that the banker (who, for some reason, is wearing a monocle and those old-timey armbands in my head) will take a careful look at my bank statements and say, "You spend roughly a third of your paltry income on Coke Zero. You can't buy a house. You can't even buy a tent. Get out!" and then I'll have to cry on the sidewalk looking very miserable indeed.
  
  
• to be nice to my body. I finally kicked that ED habit last year, but I've also gained some weight, and I want to look and feel my best. As previously discussed, trips to the gym will definitely help with that.
  
  
• to start thinking of myself as a real writer. I got a sweet gig as a producer's assistant, a ten-month contract that ends next September, and I'm inordinately pleased with myself for getting that job. But, at the same time, I want to take a page from my pal Kelli's book. During her last 9-to-5 contract, she started building her writing network, and landed a weekly page at the Globe and Mail and a full-time spot at Torontoist. That is what's known as "awesome" in my book. I don't do the same kind of writing as Kelli, but there's no reason I can follow the same kind of path. I imagine that it's lined with incredibly awkward white-wine-fueled small talk at magazine launch parties, but hey: that's why God invented Xanax.
  
  
• to be kind to myself. This is really the big one, and feels very ashram/flowing yoga pants on paper, but I spend so much time being hard on myself. When my boyfriend and I fight, it's tough not to immediately jump to "He hates me and we're breaking up!" When I gain a couple pounds, I can see myself ballooning up past Dress Barn sizing and ending up in one of those outfits that is less outfit and more wearable tent. When I don't land a writing gig (curse you, Hairpin! Your articles make me laugh and I want to join your club!), I start self-talking myself down in a pit of talentlessness and self-loathing. And so on. I want 28 to be the year I knock that shit off. It's okay to have a bad day, to have a fight, to take a swing at a job and miss. That's called "being a human being." After spending years of my life hating myself every time I made a mistake, this is the year of getting over myself and taking my lumps without a lump in my throat.

So, check back in with me in a year. Will I have gotten paid for my words? Will I be svelte? Will I be sort of muscular with enormous hooters, which is pretty much the most likely scenario? Will I still be spending boatloads of money on Coca-Cola products? I'll see you in 2012 with the answers. Safe money is definitely on Coke Zero, though.

Gym Math

Every few years, I go through the urge to totally revamp my body. I have friends who have become aerobics instructors, who have run half-marathons, who have taken up yoga and who have transformed themselves, through the power of Youtube workout videos, into more toned, svelter versions of themselves. My roommate has stunk up our hallway with her in-room workout B.O. for the last few months, but I can't deny the end result. She looks terrific. Her skin is clearer and she's lost weight, which makes all the times I had to see her doing jumping jacks in a bra and cotton panties worthwhile. For her.

I do not generally enjoy exercise. It's not that I hate being active, but there's a mental block about going to the gym - it's far, I'm cold, I don't have the right clothes, I don't have the right playlist, I don't have enough time, I'm already too fat for a forty-minute workout to change anything, I'm hungry, I don't want to leave the house, and so on, ad nauseum, forever. I equate going to the gym with unpleasant tasks like getting my teeth cleaned: it's good for me, but I don't enjoy it.

But here's the thing: one of my friends is getting married in six months, and she is a bona fide babe. It's borders on ridiculous: she's got this face and nice hair and a smokin' hot bod. She's also smart and funny, which is generally my territory, since I don't have "pretty" on 100% lock. I have to bring my A-game to this wedding. You can't tell if someone is smart or funny in photos - you can, on the other hand, definitely tell how many chins they have. I've made a pact with myself to be my funny, smart and generally awesome self while doing my bridesmaid duties, but since this is going to be a photo-heavy event...to look good doing it.

So: the gym. When I get there, I usually have a good time. I like the crosstrainer and the rowing machine, both of which are mindless and fun. The last time I was there, I was listening to the new Childish Gambino album, and I almost launched myself off the crosstrainer with laughter at some of his more risque lines. The time before that, I attended a Pilates class; I got the giggles and just could not stop. Despite my not loving commute trip there, it turns out that being at the gym makes me laugh. It also gives me a chance to catch up on my reading - although reading a magazine is actually kind of tough on the more aerobic machines, it's perfect for the stationary bike.

My fears about looking stupid are also kind of off-base. I do look stupid, but not outside the bell curve of stupid-looking gym rats. For every lipgloss-wearing 22-year-old in all-black workout gear and a high, shiny ponytail, there are thirteen middle-aged men in fleece tracksuits with sweat pouring off them, trying not to expire on the treadmill. There are six old men with enormous guts and spindly little legs doing bicep curls in the middle of the room. There are three school-aged children furiously peddling on excerbikes they won't be big enough to use for at least another three years. And that's only in the gym room - there are whole dance studios and pools full of uncoordinated, old, fat, unfashionable people for me to just blend right into.

The other side of the coin is that, no matter what I eat, I seem to be bloated, gassy and generally smelly. My boyfriend can attest to this - I burped in his face (by accident!) the other day and he was like, "What is WRONG with you? What have you been eating?" He was right to be put out. I am not a good little digestor. I think I can trace it back to a nasty bout with whooping cough in the ninth grade, and the subsequent run of nuclear-grade antibiotics that were prescribed to knock the retro disease out of my system. Antibiotics, as it turns out, kill all bacteria, even the good ones in your gut. They don't just come back, either - Wired points out that, even two years after a course of antibiotics, gut flora just isn't as diverse. A lack of diversity in gut bacteria can lead to obesity, which in turns flattens the diversity further. And so on, forever, until we all become those big fat blobbos like in Wall-E.

My dirty little secret is that I'm a pretty healthy eater. Maybe my portions are too big, but I eat a varied diet of leafy greens, orange fruits and vegetables, and low-fat proteins. I don't eat that much dairy, or bread, and I don't gorge on pasta. So it's infuriating that I'm past the high end of the healthy BMI range, and I'm active and smart about diet. Like, what do I have to do to lose weight? Do some bloodletting? Cut my hair? What? I'll do it - I don't want to be the fat bridesmaid in my pretty friend's pictures. You know, the one that looks like the hot air balloon with legs.

Obviously, the secret is going to be more gym and less food. Not much less food, because I love snacks - seriously, yogurt with almonds and blueberries are my jam - but there's always room for 10% less food and 50% more gym. That means feeling 60% hotter on a day that is 100% not about me, and that is going to be awesome.

Scmecks Ed

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine ran an interesting and reader-provoking article called "Teaching Good Sex." Focusing on a private school in Philly's approach to sexual education, the article raises the interesting question: what if we actually taught kids about sex? Not just abstinence, contraceptives, or disease prevention, but actual pleasure and intimacy?

The article is quite sweet, which isn't surprising. In 2009, the magazine ran a charming piece on the perils and triumphs of coming out in middle school. That author spoke to several young men and women about their experiences, including one boy who realized at the age of eleven that he didn't want to live a lie. In the midst of It Gets Better messaging, the writers focused on children for whom it had already gotten better. The article didn't gloss over some of the negative parts of being out at such a young age - the naysayers who crow "It's all a phase," or the specter (and reality) of bullying, especially in the smaller schools and towns - but overall, things looked bright for these kids.

However, both articles exist in sort of an alternate universe. American public policy has largely been divided over sex ed for kids - from 1996 to 2010, about half of American states offered truncated and morally judgmental courses in their public schools through funding from a policy called Title V. In order to get that funding, school boards had to commit to teaching things like "abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children" and "that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects." Support for the program came from parents and social conservatives, who felt that any mention of contraceptive use diluted the message that sex = married, monogamous sex.

As a Canadian, I was exposed to a variety of sex education throughout the years. In the fifth grade, I labelled parts of the penis and vagina. I somehow missed the canonical demonstration of condom use - roll it down over a banana, girls! - but I ended up with a fairly thorough understanding of what diseases might erupt or what a penis looked like. We talked about rape and sexual harassment, and about sexual orientation, but I don't remember any conversations about pleasure, intimacy, or the importance of communication. Sex is about so many things - procreation, intimacy, power relations, gender politics. It's about reclamation, like the girls who participated in SlutWalks after being told that rapes were a result of too-sexy clothes. It's about commitment, sometimes. Other times it's about joy. But running through it all, sex should be about pleasure.

With all the worry about gay kids, pregnant teenagers, and chlamydia outbreaks in the rest home, we so rarely touch on the basics. Sex is fun (mostly), but it comes with its own communication skill set. Just as marriage isn't a natural state of being (even if the conservatives tell you it totally is and that you're a freak if you're not in holy matrimony), talking about sex isn't something that just comes naturally to adults. It's like long division or good grammar: it needs to be taught, the younger the better. It's not like your husband slides a wedding ring on your finger and you're DTF with mad skillz.

The gap between "aware of sex" and "ready to have sex" isn't huge. All the better to fill it some positive, communication-heavy theories, then. Not talking about sex doesn't mean it doesn't happen. People are engaging in unsafe behaviours because they can't talk safely or openly about their experiences. Disrespect never gets called out. You might feel kind of gross when your boyfriend takes your heads and not-so-subtly steers it towards his erection, but if someone doesn't cock an eyebrow and validate your squicky emotions, the shame and weirdness of that moment can act as a barrier from bringing it into the light. Worse, if you mention it to your girlfriends and they all know exactly what you're talking about, it can perpetuate the normality of not-okay behaviours.

Teaching about something and giving permission to do it isn't the same thing. Students learn about space launches and the Holocaust, but nobody's telling them to get out there and reenact 'em. Sex education for kids and teenagers falls under the same ideology. It's important to have authority figures who are comfortable addressing the vagaries of the human experience from all angles. Sex isn't just about penis-in-vagina; it's about being open with your partners and being comfortable. The article talked about one student who had been the target of a nasty Facebook post implying that she was giving oral sex at parties; the incident came up during the sex ed classes as an example of "things that are not okay."

I don't know what the future holds for American students. The program profiled in this article was offered at a private school, and many of the online commentors expressed the sentiment that teaching sex ed was what was holding America back from being an Old Testament utopia/a math-and-science powerhouse/free of teen moms/whatever. I like to think that the graduates of that class have much better skills to work with in the soft science of sex, and even if they choose never to have sex with anyone, the ability to talk through a tough situation. Sex is hard. Love is hard. That's why they should teach it in schools.

Community Service

Community fans have been up in arms about NBC's recent decision to put the cult-inspiring sitcom on the shelf. The fear has come out in many forms (tweets, blog posts and soothing insider reports from New York magazine and others) that the show won't return, or will return in a truncated, rag-doll version of itself in the desolate summer months. The fear isn't totally unfounded, since Community pulls in fewer viewers each week than the almost universally reviled Whitney, but NBC has remained with underperforming shows in the past.

We all have our favourite under-the-radar choices. My boyfriend got me into Community, and he rolls his eyes every time I get overly excited about it, because, as he points out, he was into it first. I retort with Fever Ray. He comes back with E.T. (my childhood had some pretty serious pop-culture gaps in it), I point out the Crumpler bag he bought after I dragged him into their store, and then we just devolve into our reptile selves and slither around for a while, dragging our pop culture discoveries hideously behind us. We all do this. I crowed for months about King Of Kong, the amazing documentary about the world of arcade video record setting: "I showed you that!" I would cackle every thing it was mentioned. It's not pretty.

Mister Boyfriend was the one who first exposed me to Community, through their second-season zombie Halloween episode. I showed up half-way through and was completely flummoxed. Watching Community requires a basic understanding of who's who: the group dynamics aren't complicated, but you need to know that Jeff Winger is a bit of a juicebox, for instance, or that there's love quandrangle stuff between Britta, Annie, Jeff and Troy, and then the jokes will start flowing. Watching a few episodes of the first season is basically all anyone really needs to understand what's going on at Greendale, but it's not like Friends: viewers who benefit most from the sitcom's delights are the ones who pay attention and watch each episode multiple times. Casual viewers are likely not to enjoy it quite as much. For a drama like 24 or Lost, networks are comfortable allowing storylines to develop week-to-week and leave late-arriving viewers out of their loop, but sitcoms are expected to be accessible to even the most unaware viewer.

The show, in the last season, has started departing from its original premise of "mismatched friend group" and started looking more at the mechanics of storytelling. It started with the genre episodes, which collected cliches from action movies, zombie flicks and spaghetti westerns and spun them out into great, glorious 22-minute mindfucks that exist, somehow simultaneously, as spoof, homage, commentary and A+ example. Characters who were still wholly themselves found themselves transposed onto other types: sweet, high-strung Annie, for example, can exist as herself, but also become a leather-shorted paintball outlaw with a heart of gold in the western episode and, a few episodes later, be a cracked-out production assistant on a commercial shoot gone horribly wrong.

I want to talk for a second about the last episode NBC aired before yanking Community from its slot. Last week focused on Dean Pelton's attempt to update his college's recruitment commercial - what starts as a simple one-day shoot turns into Heart Of Darkness. Like, literally. Abed, who barely appears onscreen in this episode, films the school's descent into madness, which involves unzipped hoodies with no undershirt, a possum, a Chinese man wearing a blond wig under a baldcap, forced hugging, mo-cap suits, and Luis Guzman. The Dean's attempt to elevate a school he barely believes in to perfection drives him insane, and Abed's camera is there to capture it.

Last week's episode was one of the most interesting things I've ever seen on TV. The Dean's character, who is usually a punchline, was awarded a gravitas that didn't feel forced - he's a lunatic, sure, but usually he's a benignity. Give the man some power (something, interestingly, he doesn't get in his role of head of the school) and his drive to make the most of it creates some very weird moments. It was so over the top, but...thinking about the Dean over the last two seasons...it's possible to see the seeds from which this madness would sprout. His perfect costumes? His excitable nature? His upbeat yet despairing attitude towards what his school can do for its students? Those are all there since day one. The Dean's craziness in this episode is what happens when you take the Dean to extremes. Not any other character. Annie's craziness looks different. So does Troy's. The writers are good to their characters, and the actors respond with performances that had me literally on the edge of my seat. I kept turning to Mister Boyfriend with my mouth agape, like, can you even believe they'd put this on TV?

I don't know what the future holds for Community. Part of me wants the show to end next season - four years of school, four years of amazing, game-changing show. Donald Glover's rap career will take off, Dan Harmon can move to Shocase to start producing whatever new craziness his brain is going to dream up, and the show can live forever on DVD. Part of me wants what Troy and Abed treat as a mantra for Cougartown - "six seasons and a movie!" Most of me just hopes that the show comes back from its hiatus refreshed and invigorated. Abed's cocked eyebrow closes the last episode; we'll be waiting, Abed, spreading the word, forcing our friends and families to watch this weird, wonderful gem. I won't even say, "I watched this first."

Font-ain Of You

Good design aways freezes me cold. Nothing showy: I'm talking about the ubiquitous, IKEA-brand design that everyone has, the stuff that just sort of quietly exists in the world without call attention to itself. I loathe lucite chairs and mirrored dining room tables, just as I've grown weary of the kitschy, Mary Englebreit-looking design. Things that scream "Look at me!" give me the willies - it's the same reason I rolled my eyes at Agyness Dean and generally find the Kardashians to be a total mystery, fame-wise.

I just watched Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's debut documentary about the iconic font that's used everywhere from the New York City subway system to American Apparel signage. The doc discusses the font's visual impact - it looks so clean and modern, it inspired a whole slew of corporations in the mid-1950s and 1960s to move away from the swirly, comic-sans, exclamatory advertising style they had been working with and re-brand themselves as sleek, transparent, modern companies, in large part because the font could convey that they were sleek and modern. It sparked a movement towards clear, clean design that some designers would decry as soulless and oppressive - but we see Helvetica on the daily, because that sense of crisp professional trust is still embedded in its lines.

Font love is the natural resting place of the object fetishization that has dominated design for decades. It's hard not to get drawn in when designers talk about their favourite fonts - comic sans and papyrus seem universally reviled, but to the untrained eye, there's nothing inherently offensive in them. They might be less gorgeous than some of the more widely-used fonts, but folks also seem to love using them. Design snobs make me lose my mind, because they judge people who legitimately don't have a preference between Arial and Helvetica to be rubes, when the reality is that most untrained people a) can't tell the difference and b) don't care at all.

The design saying "form follows function" took me a long time to wrap my head around - like, form does the what now? But I finally started to get it when I read the New York Times Magazine article a few years ago called "The Road to Clarity," an insider's look at the ins and outs of designing highways signs. The author was swept up in the minutiae of the font choices, because in that case, it can be a matter of life and death: how heavy the letters are, how far apart they sit on the sign, how readable the final product really is, can all impinge on how quickly drivers can comprehend the information contained therein, and, obviously, make choices about what to do next. The function of the sign - conveying information - dictates the form of the font - being as legible as possible.

Bu why, then, isn't there just one or two fonts? After all, the information's going to come at us anyway, so why not just standardize the whole world? Make it all crisp and clear! Helvetica forever!

Looking around my room, I can see lots of fonts: the label on the Campari on the windowsill, for instance, features elegant serifs rimmed in gold and set against a navy background. The effect is one of casual, retro opulence - nothing too fancy, but especially when set against the bright ruby colour of the liqueur itself, it reads in my mind's eye as vibrantly upscale. The Coke Zero bottle beside me features a wealth of fonts and symbols: the classic swoopy font is set in red against the black background, and the bottle itself is a voluptuous curve; together, the elements work to create an image that's both trustworthy - that classic logo! - and modern. The choices that are made in product design may not save lives the same way highway signs might, but they all matter to someone. Just look at Coca-Cola's bottom line: you know those guys aren't messing with that look without some serious head-scratching.

I take a little bit of umbrage at the over-the-top opinions expressed by the designers interviewed in Helvetica - not because it's not important, but because they're such dicks about it. In the past, we were much less savvy consumers, because the products were much less intelligent in their marketing. We look at vintage buzzwords and laugh at how naked and needy they seem, and it strikes us as preposterous that anyone would fall for those snake-oil jobs. Now, though, we need to work through several layers of meaning in a design moment: images, products, packaging, and signage have all thoroughly and insidiously infiltrated our world.

There's a great shot in the movie of poster proofs hanging on a lightbox behind a designer's talking-head interview: it's the same image (crowded skateboarding park, big dusky sky, oversaturated purples, navies and electric yellows), and the time/date/place information done over and over, each proof using a different font. And each poster feels slightly different: the fatter, statelier fonts giving an ironic gravitas to the event, the electro fonts making it feel energetic, and so on. It wordlessly illustrates how important design can be, and how good design creates something you may not even be aware is orchestrated: it just leaves you feeling like you've learned something new.