I Like My Brain
Sep. 21st, 2008 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fjLovely day yesterday, which I spent in Londom Fields Park in the afternoon. Went to a small coffee shop I happen to know in the area as well to have lunch and read The Guardian, it was all about the credit upheaval this last week. I just returned from my usual dinner at the local pub Sunday night, and since this weekend has been filled with atrociously unhea;thy food (Pizza! Everyone else's dessert! Chocolate cupcakes specially made for me!) I opted to just have the big dish of meats & mozarella with bread, while reading The Sunday Times, also all about the catastrophe on the markets.
One article was a sort of eavesdropping report on Kensington, a report on the sort of Are All Those Fat Cats Finally Suffering? It told of how in the last decade the neighborhood was taklen over by US financiers as it straddles the New York and Tokyo time zones and has housing USers like because of the movies. But, according to the article, these new inhabitants moved in with their own values, and I paraphrase instead of quote because I did nbot bring the newspaper home, these bankers and their wives asked, nay, told their landlords to install power showers and new kitchens, while warning their dry cleaners not to lose garments any more or risk being sued. That part, embedded in a description of excess, also came of as a sort of Those Cheeky Rascals, Those Americans, not being content with the atrocious water pressure and dank unvented kitchens Brits have been living with for centuries when paying £4000 a month for three bedrooms! And insisting they get their clothes back, too!
I immediately had the idea for a new sitcom about a US banker family in Kensington, now pinching pennies and scrambling, being taken under the wing by their brit neighbor who had managed to not sell the family home but was already used to dumpster diving behind the local Tesco for out-of-date perfectly fine food. The bankers would still be 'Yanks' by insisting on customer service and amenities in poverty, but they would take every one of the absurd money-scrooging schemes of the neighbor and push it into commercial overdrive. It would satisfy the basic need of every average UK TV viewer: feel suprior to 'Yanks' even when the 'Yanks' are doing better, and get to laugh at old gentry eccentricity. A 'To The Manor Born' for the new millennium.
Also an article about Purity Balls, that new phenomenon in the USA of girls going on a date to a special dance with their fathers, pledging at that formal to stay pure and chaste, in front of a crowd consiting of other girls and thei fathers, until marriage. The father's role is to build up and 'guide' their daughter under the idea that if the father doesn't make the daughter feel valued and beuatiful, she will look for that validation outside the home. The article managed to transcend the usual lurid reporting of this being some form of Incest-Lite, and more of a strange new mode of trying to stay involved with your children and keeping them on the straight and narrow. Of course now the girsl are trying to outdo each other by pledging to not even kiss their boyfriends until that first moment of lifting the veil at marriage. But what if you do not like the kiss, what is he doesn't know how, the reporter asked? Well, these 12 year old girls answer, let's hope he took care of that, and it will be wonderful anyway. So my next idea was for a short story about the opposite: surrogates of the appropriate opposite gender but with same-sex attractions hired to teach these people, once they become young adults and ready for marriage, how to even touch, or kiss, but without emotional involvement. I am sure I could make the tortured reasoning why having a gay tutor teaching a young girl not to be a limp frightened partner is not a form of breaking purity could be made to work in this already tortured Evangelical context.
Still, the newspapers were mostly full of the cataclysm, making it sound like every bank account could be null and void any moment now. After this difficult week I have had, discussed elsewhere for future employment reasons, I did not feel intimidated or even further depressed at all; instead I kept having this feeling on the edge of my mind that this upheaval was calling me to transform into something else, that there was an opportunity here. The business environment of the last twenty years is drastically going to change, it seems, and somehow I wonder if I should go with it.
One article was a sort of eavesdropping report on Kensington, a report on the sort of Are All Those Fat Cats Finally Suffering? It told of how in the last decade the neighborhood was taklen over by US financiers as it straddles the New York and Tokyo time zones and has housing USers like because of the movies. But, according to the article, these new inhabitants moved in with their own values, and I paraphrase instead of quote because I did nbot bring the newspaper home, these bankers and their wives asked, nay, told their landlords to install power showers and new kitchens, while warning their dry cleaners not to lose garments any more or risk being sued. That part, embedded in a description of excess, also came of as a sort of Those Cheeky Rascals, Those Americans, not being content with the atrocious water pressure and dank unvented kitchens Brits have been living with for centuries when paying £4000 a month for three bedrooms! And insisting they get their clothes back, too!
I immediately had the idea for a new sitcom about a US banker family in Kensington, now pinching pennies and scrambling, being taken under the wing by their brit neighbor who had managed to not sell the family home but was already used to dumpster diving behind the local Tesco for out-of-date perfectly fine food. The bankers would still be 'Yanks' by insisting on customer service and amenities in poverty, but they would take every one of the absurd money-scrooging schemes of the neighbor and push it into commercial overdrive. It would satisfy the basic need of every average UK TV viewer: feel suprior to 'Yanks' even when the 'Yanks' are doing better, and get to laugh at old gentry eccentricity. A 'To The Manor Born' for the new millennium.
Also an article about Purity Balls, that new phenomenon in the USA of girls going on a date to a special dance with their fathers, pledging at that formal to stay pure and chaste, in front of a crowd consiting of other girls and thei fathers, until marriage. The father's role is to build up and 'guide' their daughter under the idea that if the father doesn't make the daughter feel valued and beuatiful, she will look for that validation outside the home. The article managed to transcend the usual lurid reporting of this being some form of Incest-Lite, and more of a strange new mode of trying to stay involved with your children and keeping them on the straight and narrow. Of course now the girsl are trying to outdo each other by pledging to not even kiss their boyfriends until that first moment of lifting the veil at marriage. But what if you do not like the kiss, what is he doesn't know how, the reporter asked? Well, these 12 year old girls answer, let's hope he took care of that, and it will be wonderful anyway. So my next idea was for a short story about the opposite: surrogates of the appropriate opposite gender but with same-sex attractions hired to teach these people, once they become young adults and ready for marriage, how to even touch, or kiss, but without emotional involvement. I am sure I could make the tortured reasoning why having a gay tutor teaching a young girl not to be a limp frightened partner is not a form of breaking purity could be made to work in this already tortured Evangelical context.
Still, the newspapers were mostly full of the cataclysm, making it sound like every bank account could be null and void any moment now. After this difficult week I have had, discussed elsewhere for future employment reasons, I did not feel intimidated or even further depressed at all; instead I kept having this feeling on the edge of my mind that this upheaval was calling me to transform into something else, that there was an opportunity here. The business environment of the last twenty years is drastically going to change, it seems, and somehow I wonder if I should go with it.
