misfitS pOLITICS
We talk. We write. We entertain. Or so we think.
 Dear Boston, these are not pants. Thanks.
Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- This is kind of a super-sized column because you people have a LOT of questions this week. Plus, I held about half of them out for next week because I can’t write 12,000 words at once. So, hold your horses, I will get to it next Friday! This week, Daryl wants to make fun of the way Bostonians talk and Jimmy thinks that a new TV duo bears some resemblance to a great New England sports partnership. Rex needs me to fix baseball, Mike wants to know why we call it “Fall” and Sicaiothrax is having trouble figuring out strippers. Dee is a little down on humanity these days, but I am hoping that a story from Smatt will maybe change that a little bit. And finally, Alex teaches you how to date your cousin!!! Submitted by: Daryl Do people from Boston pronounce "femur" as "FEMA"? It is more of a “femah”, but yea, pretty much. Funny thing about accents, though, they are never quite what they are portrayed by outsiders, and Boston is no exception. In some cases, the accents are spot on (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, for obvious reasons...Ben’s needs work) but more often than not it is too New York-inflected and an obvious fake to the locals. Like, you ever watch Ray Donovan? Nails on a chalkboard...it’s close, but they just don’t quite get it. {Technical analysis...it isn’t just dropping the “r”, you have to kind of add a half syllable, too. So “sure” doesn’t become “shah”, it becomes “sho-ah”} In writing this, I came across this story, and I am sad to report (if you didn’t already know), that Jay Thomas lost his battle with cancer. Oh...sorry Bostonians, you need some translation… Eddie LeBac died. I also can’t really figure out why some places (like Boston) are so accent-famous, and others aren’t. A lot of shows based in New York feature exaggerated voices from Brooklyn and Queens, but they are never really central to the show like it seems to be for anything based in Boston. And let’s not even start on the Upper Midwest...once the Coen brothers made Fargo, it became mandatory that every person on any show from the upper midwest eat cheese curds and bratwurst at all times and talk like they are recapping their favorite hotdish recipe. You know, kinda like @molratty! Side note: I could go for a paczki right about now… Conversely, though, the makers of ER, or Chicago PD or any of the many other Chicago-based shows never made a point to have the show covered in Chicago accents, and I can attest to those accents being just as absurd as Boston’s. Also, special note: I still have a wee bit of my native accent;-). The same goes for Philadelphia (Cold Case, Philly...um, Boy Meets World): if you meet someone from Philly, you know it the second they ask you for a glass of “wooter”, but TV makers don’t seem to make that a key part of their writing. I don’t really have a theory as to why this is, so instead I am going to talk about the difference between accents in Greater Boston. In truth, the people in the real heart of the city (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the South End and even much of not-Boston but close Cambridge) don’t really have accents. They come from all over the world, so there is very little by way of Pahking the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd. Even notoriously afflicted places like Charlestown, South Boston, Allston and Brighton are losing their accents as the neighborhoods get younger, richer and more influenced by outsiders. The western suburbs, which have always been wealthy and regionally diverse, were never really hotbeds of dropped r’s and use of “pissah” as both a noun and an adjective, and are likely becoming even less afflicted. The real accents are to be found to the north and south of the city, extending a very long way. The average person in Nashua, NH (45 miles from Boston) or Providence, RI (60 miles) probably sound more like TV Bostonians than do the residents of Brookline (2), Newton (6), Wellesley (12) and Needham (10). The really fun part, though, is that the North Shore and South Shore accents are actually quite different. This is really indicative of a quirk of metro Boston: the two shores are just on opposite ends of a very small city (Lynn and Quincy are definitely North and South, respectively, and are maybe 15 miles from each other in a straight line?) but they may as well be separated by a flaming ocean. Unless she is driving to the Cape, Jenny would have very little reason to ever go to the South Shore, and by the same token, Justin would rarely, if ever, find an excuse to go to the North Shore unless it was to pass through on the way to New Hampshire or Maine. And, obviously, someone has done very serious study on this subject...so just read (and listen to) this. This reminds me of a joke!!! Good Ol’ Boy from Alabama is visiting Harvard and stops to ask a local “Hey, can y’all tell me where the library’s at?”. The be-tweeded elitist Harvard man responds “At Harvard, we never end a sentence in a preposition.” To which the visitor replies “Oh, I’m sorry...can y’all tell me where the library’s at, asshole?”.  Sean Hannity and Tomi Lahren arrive at the Fox News/Planned Parenthood Annual Ramadan Festival
Submitted by: Jimmy Chemtrails
Is "Hannity to Lahren" the "Brady to Moss" equivalent in the field of idiocy? Simply unstoppable. Is there another duo - Brady/Moss, Montana/Rice, Cousy/Russell that comes close to the superlatives that Hannity/Lahren bring to dumbassery? This sort of remains to be seen, but it is not a bad analogy. Hannity would be Brady in this example - the legend of idiocy, the GOAT, the long-time consistent perpetrator of remarkably consistent, world-class idiocy - and I think that sort of fits. It’s not perfect, since there are a lot of idiots on television (and radio) and I am not sure that Hannity has separated himself from people like Keith Olberman in the way Brady has lapped every other Quarterback of his time, but it is close enough to work (Olberman is a problematic analogy...great quarterbacks don’t get run out of town as often as he has, so I don’t have a good parallel. Kurt Warner, maybe?) I’m not quite sure that Tomi Lahren is to crazy what Randy Moss is to catching footballs just yet. She clearly has that kind of talent, and her early-career work has shown a fantastic ability to be delusional, insufferable and incredibly arrogant, but she’s never put together a full season. Part of Hannity’s greatness is that he is crazy in a way that his bosses love...he appeals to other crazy people in a way that advertisers are willing to pay for. Tomi hasn’t balanced that, yet, and she got herself fired by Glenn Beck (he’s like Trent Dilfer crazy - good enough to win with the right crazy supporting cast, but he can’t drive the crazy train). It is worth noting, though, that Randy Moss had kind of flamed out before he met up with Tommy Touchdown. He had six great seasons in Minnesota (about 1400 yards and 13 TD’s per season), then he had a mediocre season with some off-the-field issues and got shipped off to Oakland, where he turned in two really poor and disinterested seasons. After that, the Patriots traded for him, and he (surprisingly) came alive under the focus and discipline of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady’s Patriots, catching an NFL-record 23 Touchdown passes in 2007. He never quite recaptured that magic, although his 2009 season (1,264 yards, 13 TD’s) was very good, and he was pretty much a non-factor by 2010. And here is where the analogy gets tough...I’m not sure Randy Moss was even Tom Brady’s best wingman. Certainly his 2007 season is beyond anything we’ve seen from anyone else, but there are a bunch of other guys with longer-term partnerships with Brady. Troy Brown had 200 catches in Brady’s first two seasons as an NFL QB, Julian Edelman has been his most trusted target for the past four seasons, and before that (even during Moss’s time), Brady looked regularly for Wes Welker when he needed a key third down conversion. Rob Gronkowski does things that no Tight End in football history has ever done, and Brady finds him for nearly a touchdown per game when they play together. In fact, Gronkowski’s 69 TD catches from Brady are nearly twice as many as the next player (Moss’s 39). Weird fact time!!! Tom Brady has thrown 456 regular season Touchdowns (fourth all time), but has used a wider variety of receivers than anyone else in doing so. Peyton Manning used 49 receivers for his 539 TD’s, and Brett Favre and Drew Brees used 61 and 58 for their 508 and 465, respectively. With the additions Brandin Cooks, Rex Burkhead, Dwayne Allen and Mike Gillislee, combined with Edelman’s injury and a desire to not overuse Gronkowski, that number is almost certain to rise even further early this season. Don’t put it past Belichick and Josh McDaniels to sneak Malcom Brown or Dontae Hightower into the offense to steal one at some point, as well. Back to the question. I’m excited about this pairing. Hannity is a legend in the field of idiocy, and Tomi Lahren has LeBron James-level talent. Is Hannity the kind of teammate to bring out her best? I think he can do it, but the proof will be in the on-screen product. All of your analagous pairs turned in years of brilliance, usually with multiple championships...I think Hannity is an idiot on that level, but Tomi has a lot of work to do to be considered a true great of idiocy. {Skip to October 31, when Tomi defends her “slutty slave” costume on the air by proclaiming “I can’t be racist, Sean, I’m hot.”} As native Houstonian, I’m surprised how bigly people misunderstand the fourth largest city (and most libertarian city in US, possible world). What cities in the US are similarly misunderstood? Further, do people really recognize the importance of Houston (refining/petrochem). I’m not totally sure that Houston is really that misunderstood, to be honest. Most Americans with even a modicum of general knowledge know that Houston is a) huge, and b) the center of the US Energy industry. And I think that most Americans have an inherent understanding of its importance, especially as it relates to everything oil and gas related. Slightly underestimated? Possibly, but I don’t think it is that dramatic. I think it is a stretch to call it the most libertarian city in the US, although that is an inherently hard-to-define term, so it is hard to argue definitively. Certainly with no income tax and lax zoning rules, Houston is far from the Nanny-State, but it’s still not socially hands-off enough to really be called a truly Libertarian place. Take New Orleans, for example, with its notoriously lax social behavior laws...or Las Vegas, where the only building code is that whatever you build has to be bigger and more absurd than the last thing someone built. Both of those places also enjoy a greater “freedom of lifestyle” (I made that term up) than Houston does. It is maybe a little misleading to call it the fourth largest city in America, since metro areas are a better measure of that than just the city-limits population. When we think about the influence and importance of a city, it is more useful to think of people who identify as being somehow attached to the city rather than people who technically live within the city limits. Jacksonville, Florida is about 35% bigger than Boston, Seattle or Washington, DC, and almost twice as big as Atlanta, but there is no way you could visit those places and think that Jacksonville is the “biggest” city. All four of those other cities have metro areas that are 2-4 times bigger than Jacksonville, and that is what gives you the sense of the size and scope of the city when you are there. Even by that measure, Houston is clearly one of America’s major metropolises, and its place in the public conscience may not quite reflect that, but I don’t think it is too far off. The US has, basically, three mega-cities: New York (20 million people), Los Angeles (14) and Chicago (10). After that there are a bunch of very large, very important cities with between 4 and 6.5 million people (in order): Dallas, Philly, Houston, Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, Riverside, Phoenix and Seattle. Houston seems like it is pretty adequately placed in that group. Obviously, the one that really jumps off of that list is Riverside, which is really a combination of Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario and surrounding areas, more commonly referred to as “The Inland Empire”. The problem, in this analysis, is that there is really no central place here...there is just a massive sprawl of congestion stretching east from Los Angeles. It is too far from LA to call it part of the city, and it is too big to call it a distant exurb. So it exists as a massive, non-descript and thoroughly unexciting swath of humanity nestled between desert and mountains. With, oh, you know, four and a half million people (that is more than about half of states). Roughly half of those people are terrorized by Landlord Brownskin. If you want me to name cities that are misunderstood, I might start with those cities. Not one of them individually, but as a collective, it is just much bigger than you probably realize. I may also include New Orleans, which is substantially smaller than most Americans would likely guess and culturally punches way above its weight. Or Hunstville, AL, which is not remotely what most non-Alabamians think of when they think Alabama (NASA’s rocket propulsion research center and the Marshall Space Flight center drive that). To be really honest, I think Chicago is probably bigger than most non-midwesterners think. San Jose is probably underestimated in its influence, which is too often attributed to San Francisco. But to the point about Houston and the public conscience...I can’t think of a significant TV Show or Movie that was set in Houston, unless you count astronauts announcing that they have problems. It is clearly, as pop culture goes, less relevant than Texas’ other giant metro area, Dallas. So, it does seem to be somewhat under-counted in pop culture, and I am not totally sure why that is. Maybe y’all are just boring!!!  Really, would you have rather a picture of Terry Francona?
Submitted by: Rex
{Alex suggested that there should be ties in baseball} How does the math work on that? Never mind tradition (I do, though). How does it work? Look, I get it: baseball loves its traditions and never wants to change anything. Throwing a hard object at 100 mph at someone’s head, or barreling through a stationary catcher at full speed to try and dislodge the ball, or scratching your nuts and spitting tobacco in public are all somehow super important to the game and can never be changed. But some of those traditions are really fucking stupid. Like...why does the manager wear a uniform? Coaches in every other sport dress like regular people...in basketball and hockey they wear suits, and in football they wear pleated khakis from 2002 or whatever sweaty practice clothes they had in the laundry basket at the office. Soccer coaches? My god...they all look like they walked right off of Joseph Abboud’s runway. But baseball managers, for some reason, feel the need to dress as if they could be called upon to go into the game at any moment. Stop it, guys...you are old and fat, you aren’t fooling anybody. You don’t need to have a number, Skip. Also, I just learned that the second of those coach links, current Shanghai PISG coach (formerly of Zenit St. Petersburg, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and Porto) Andres Villas-Boas, who is maybe the most stylish man in all of professional sports, is not at all related to Brazilian model Simone Villas Boas. And since you are now saying “Who is Simone Villas Boas?”, I will go ahead and take the liberty, in the spirit of Alison Brie, or posting a totally gratuitous picture of her looking suspiciously like Jessica Rabbit. Back to the point, though, if anyone in baseball would get their head out of 1953 and look around, they’d realize that extra innings in a regular season game is a stupid idea. The Red Sox and Yankees played a game last month that went 16 innings and lasted nearly seven hours. THAT IS NOT FUN!!! All it does is leave fans bored, ruin everyone’s TV schedule for the rest of the day and wear out an entire pitching staff for like three days. And for what? So you can have a winner in one of 162 regular season games? Repeat...ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY TWO GAMES!!! I know that baseball people like to treat the sanctity of the game as if it is the single most important resource managed by humanity, but you’ve already ordered up juiced baseballs, you can change this, too. The math would be simple. You could do it like hockey used to do it, where a winning team gets two points, a losing team gets none and teams that tie get one each. In that sense, a tie is half of a win, and if everyone ends up playing the same number of games, then ties are essentially disregarded and your normal “Games Behind” calculation that baseball fans are used to still applies. Or you can do it like they do in soccer, where they devalue ties (because there are more of them) and winning teams get three points while ties award one point to each team. That makes a tie worth only one third of a win and theoretically encourages more aggressive play at the end of close games, but it requires a new standings system based on points (like hockey) rather than the more normal standings. The choice of record-keeping is entirely discretionary based on the goals of the league, but either would work fine. And, if you wanted to maintain extra innings, you could just limit it to one or two extra innings and then call it a tie. That preserves some of your historical strategy and understanding of the game, but eliminates the incredibly tedious, mind-numbingly useless idea of playing 17 inning games in late April.  Strippers!!!
Submitted by: Mike Out Yonder
1) Why is Autumn also called Fall, and why it has the useless 'n' in it? 2) Is pumpkin spice everything an insidious plot to kill us all? I always assumed that it was because leaves fall off of trees, temperatures fall and the sun falls lower and lower in the sky every day, and most etymology sources say that it is shortened from “the fall of the leaves”. The phrasing seems to have originated in England in the 12th or 13th century but fell out of favor in the UK within the last couple hundred years, even while it has remained popular in the United States. As for the silent ‘n’...it is a remnant of its root, the latin “autumnus”, and the survival of the ‘n’ is probably just because it allied early with column and the two of them were well-supplied and armed sufficiently to live through the great N purge of 1728. Forum and decorum weren’t nearly as lucky... Fall is also my least favorite season. I really don’t have anything against Fall on its own, what with its spectacular colors, consistently nice weather and Halloween-related spike in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup consumption. The beer is good, too. I just hate the end of Summer so much that Fall bothers me because of everything that it promises: short days, cold weather, snow and massive spikes in the budgets for heating oil and skin lotion. I used to get really bad seasonal depression, which stopped when I moved to Arizona and mostly never really came back, but it is not wholly gone. Fall also means, to your second question, the annual explosion of pumpkin spice everything. The intrusion of pumpkin spice (which really is just some combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice) into every corner of the food, beverage and fragrance universe is a somewhat recent phenomenon, and frankly, it has gotten totally out of hand. This has got to stop, America. They make Pumpkin Spice Cheerios now!!! I’m not a coffee drinker, so I will pass on the lattes, which seem to be Ground Zero of the Pumpkin Spice infiltration. You can absolutely sign me up for the baked goods, whether it be cakes, muffins or cupcakes. That is more driven by my unhealthy love of cream cheese frosting than anything else, but I am all in on the Pumpkin Muffins at Stop & Shop for the next two months. Side note: I know I have said this before, but it bears repeating. Once we developed the technology to put cream cheese frosting on red velvet or spice cakes, there is absolutely no reason for carrot cake to still exist. It’s the rotary phone of food. I also like a good, subtle, non-sweetened Pumpkin beer, although more than one is usually too much. I don’t want it to taste like pie and I don’t want the glass covered in sugar...I just want a nice fall flavor. Boston Beer Works does it really well if you are near Fenway or the TD Garden in October. Most pumpkin beers are too sweet, though...the first three sips are nice and then it is overkill. Beyond that, though, we need to try and erase this scourge as quickly as possible. We don’t need candles and (non-frosted) donuts and cereal and cookies and candy and whatever other monstrosities the ad wizards will dream up this year. It’s like Americans don’t have the patience to go all the way from Back-to-School until Halloween without a seasonal event in between, so we have dreamed up a generic “fall” flavor and try to count the introduction of Starbuck’s Lattes as an unofficial holiday. Given the problematic-ness of Columbus Day, we are probably like three years out from replacing it with “Pumpkin Day”... So...plan to kill us all? Probably note. Plan to turn us all into the grown-up cast of Pretty LIttle Liars? Possible... Submitted by: Sicariothrax Why do strippers exist? Demand. I’m not going to give you too many details, but I have been in quite a few strip clubs in a lot of places. I’ve been in really expensive ones, I have been in really seedy ones, and pretty much everything in between. I’ve had friends who danced both occasionally and as a regular job, some of which consider it a great (and lucrative experience) and some of which have...less fond memories. I’ve been in a seemingly-normal bar in St. Petersburg Russia when two impossibly attractive women came out of the back, jumped up on each end of the bar and started stripping. Most interesting part of that, other than there being nothing in the atmosphere of the bar that said “strip club”, was that St. Petersburg apparently allows only topless stripping. That may be the only actual law in the entire city. Strip clubs are pretty interesting places, really, and they all have some things in common, other than $14 Bud Lights and the smell of scented glitter lotion. Being a girl in a strip club is a thoroughly unique experience that is simultaneously awesome, awkward, liberating and kinda depressing. I could write about that at great length, and I do have some good stories that I may tell you if someone asks a question that I think they’d be appropriate for, but that’s not really the point of this question. I tell you all of this so that you don’t think I am coming at it from a place of judginess or ignorance. This is based on substantial observation. Strippers exist because enough men are pigs of such weak constitution as to be willing to pay money to simply look at a woman naked and to pay even more money for that woman to transparently pretend that she gives even the slightest shit about him. They don’t even care that she very obviously and unapologetically leaves at the very moment the money runs out. It is a pretty remarkable phenomenon when you think about it...there are roughly 400,000 women in America who are gainfully employed based on simply being a woman, pretending to like men and allowing them to look at parts of her body that literally half of the adult population possesses. No, I am not calling every guy who has ever walked into a strip club a pig. I get that they bring a certain amount of “forbidden” appeal that makes things like bachelor parties fun (side note: Sicariothrax has a question about bachelor parties, too, which I will cover next week). But strip clubs do not remain in business because of normal-ish guys who go once a year, spend a couple hundred bucks and pay to have their bachelor friend paddled on stage by a large-breasted “law student” whose real name is absolutely Destiny and who totally thinks you guys are the coolest customers she has met all year. But if you are a regular at a strip club? This doesn’t reflect well on your character... Funny, as I was writing this answer on Thursday afternoon, the following tweet scrolled across my TL:
 We can totally date, right?
Never-minding that you should all follow Ms. because she is both smarter than (most of) you and has ridiculously great hair, I feel like this sort of sums up the dynamic that creates strippers. It is an admittedly extreme example, but still, guys...try to be better…
{Before you get too mad at me, remember that this is only have of my unifying theory to explain 94% of humanity.
Also...THAT IS A JOKE, PEOPLE!!! Submitted by: Smatt Hey, Alex! I'm suddenly dating my childhood sweetheart again, who's also a widow. This is a total minefield, right? So...honestly? This is actually kind of adorable:-) I mean...minefield? Sure. I don’t know all of the details (were you ever married? are there kids involved?), but there could be myriad issues around unresolved feelings, resentment over lost time and other interim relationships, children adjusting to new parental relationships and confusion over what their other parents (who were, of course, those interim relationships) really meant to Mom of Dad. You know what, though? You can figure all of that out...relationships are always complicated, and later-in-life relationships after each party has accrued more life history are even more complicated. Children dealing with the loss of a parent, and the addition of a new adult in their lives and a drain on their living parent’s attention add an additional layer of complication. Mostly, I just feel like basically people should be happy. Losing a spouse is a terribly traumatic event on a whole bunch of levels, and I don’t think someone is ever the same after that. Getting divorced isn’t as tragic, but the effects can be similarly debilitating. In the simplest terms, I just think it is nice if people can find each other and make each other happy after bad things happen. Does that guarantee a happy ending? Of course not, and there is obviously a chance that whatever broke you up in your teens is still an issue, or that there are other relationship-killing issues. And if that happens, it will be sad and you’ll be upset at the ending of a relationship...but I hope you would still be able to consider it valuable time spent with a worthwhile person and that you both bring happiness to each other for as long as you remain together, be it a month or happily ever after. Submitted by: Dee Overall - response to Harvey has been positive, people coming together to help neighbors, etc. However, some publications have taken opportunities to attack victims of the Hurricane, or to say that the only reason people are helping others is because of "momentary suspension of cruel capitalistic world view". Is it just me, or have we become more cynical or nihilistic in our overall worldview, because I don't remember these types of takes or attacks during previous disasters. That politico cartoon today, women's march saying they're only going to donate to poc or lgbt communities I don't remember this during Katrina or Sandy or after 9/11. I don’t remember seeing those kinds of reactions, either, although I was a freshman in college for 9/11 and I was about two weeks into parenting a 10 year old when Katrina hit, so I wasn’t super tuned into the pundit class for either. And we probably didn’t get it for Sandy because ¾ of those talking heads live in New York, so they were all too busy being flooded to complain. It is kind of sad, though...they are just coming from a place where everything has to be critiqued and criticized. I said the other day that these are the sorts of people who will look at firefighters after they put out a fire in their house and announce “Well, that’s great, but did you have to get everything so wet?” It’s a form of Gen-X and Millennial hipster-cool where you can just never admit that anything is good (unless, inexplicably, it is the truly awful Red Hot Chili Peppers). That’s not a new phenomenon, really. Just about the first thing you learn in business school is that there is no business plan into which any first year can’t poke at least 25 holes. It takes almost no real intelligence to think of reasons that it will fail...the real value is in the person who can identify the 25 reasons that it might fail and figure out how to overcome those things, and find the reasons (which are usually people) that the business will succeed. Probably worth revisiting Teddy Roosevelt’s absolutely exquisite Man in the Arena (formally Citizenship in a Republic) here. I’ll pause for a second while you ruminate on “those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” OK...back. Total non-sequitur...one of the real treats of having children is feeding them at 3:00 in the morning. In these half-sleep memories, your mind goes to some pretty strange places, and I have one very vivid memory of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (so, August 23, 2010). I was feeding the girls in the middle of the morning and thinking about how weird it was that we were already up to the letter K by August 23rd of that year Digression: for the uninitiated, tropical storms are named in alphabetical order, alternating male and female names. There are always six sets of names used in a rotating basis, and each year the ‘A’ name switches between male and female. Also, the names are re-used for years until there is a storm of significant impact as to make the name unusable going forward. So, this year there was a Tropical Storm Don, and there will be another in 2023...but Harvey, due to its severity, will be replaced with some other male H name. Anyway, on August 23, 2010, Hurricane Danielle was in process and Hurricane Earl was forming, which made Katrina seem pretty weird for the same dates. And that got me thinking...what happens when you get past Hurricane Zelda? Do they start using double letters? Because I have a good list for that…
(Actual answer: there is no Zelda, they stop at W and then start using Greek letters.) I had another thought in the middle of the night once, when I was putting a Big Bird diaper on one of the girls. Sometime in mid-1969, there were a bunch of writers sitting around a table at the Children’s Television Workshop, presumably smoking HUGE quantities of drugs, and one of them looked at the rest of them and said: “Guys, I have the best idea. You’re gonna love it. It’s like this huge bird...I mean like a seven, eight foot tall bird. And he’s bright yellow...BRIGHT yellow. And you know what we’re gonna call him? We’re gonna call him ‘Big. Bird.’ Cuz he’s like this really big bird. Like a HUGE fucking bird.” Man, no wonder baby boomers are so fucked up. You people had some really fun drugs. Submitted by: Goo Gwaba (somewhere in Greater Tacoma) So...what do you think about dating a coworker you've known for a year? You seem to get along well, have similar personalities, beliefs, etc. Not a supervisor-subordinate situation. Any advice? I guess the real question is what you mean by “co-worker”. Do you work together closely on a regular basis, or do you just happen to work in the same place? And really, how much do you care about this job in case things go bad? I would normally plan for this by assuming the worst - in this case, a messy breakup - and thinking about how you’d handle it. If you could live with a bad breakup, either because you can simply avoid each other or because you’d happily just find another job, then I don’t see the harm in pursuing it. But always assume the worst...that it ends badly and the other person is completely insane about it. If you are OK with the consequences, then feel free to go ahead. Or, if they are just so insanely hot that you are willing to roll the dice! Also make sure to check your employee handbook: there may be a (constitutionally dubious) requirement that you disclose a relationship to HR. That is not terribly uncommon, although it may not apply until you are married or at least live together. I actually know several people who work in the same place as their spouse and do so happily. None of them work together really closely, but at least one woman works in a company of only about 75 people, so they can’t be THAT far apart on a normal day. We actually have a former Misfit who once worked in the same place as his spouse, and...actually...you know what? That is a terrible example...he got fired, likely for being a lazy ass, she is the household breadwinner and there is great resentment and unhappiness and...other stuff...and I need to move on… Not related to your question, exactly, but one of my college roommates worked at a hedge fund outside of Los Angeles after college. Maybe four years in, she got involved with one of the partners who was almost 15 years older than her, married with two children and, obviously, in a position of authority. She kinda knew it was a bad idea, and I think that looking back she was probably a little bored and appreciated both the scandal of it and the lack of expectations on his part. She was kind of getting ready to end it (which may or may not have been messy) but someone else in the firm found out, which kind of forced the issue. The Managing Partner determined that she couldn’t stay at the firm (he was a partner, and kind of a superstar). He also figured out very quickly that, if that was his position, she absolutely had their balls in a vice. So, the firm had to pay for an attorney to take them to the cleaners on her behalf. In the end, she got a severance payment of nearly five years salary (which she is pretty sure the other partners made him pay). She also got glowing recommendations from several other co-workers because, and here is the real kicker, she was going to quit in six months anyway to take the summer off before business school. So, she cashed her check, went to the Virgin Islands to tend bar for six months, earned the good graces of the other partners for not making it worse and started business school at UCLA in the fall. One final story and I will let you go, since this is WAY too long already. Maybe two years ago, a co-workers of mine came into my office on Monday morning and announced “Alex, I have a question for you. How closely related is too close to date someone?” He was at a family wedding and had met a second cousin that he had either never met before or met only once or twice when they were really, really little.. She was 30-ish, he was maybe 34 or 35. Their mothers are cousins, but obviously not close enough that they spend that much time together (he lives up here, she is from New Jersey). They hit it off superbly, he thought she was super cute and she clearly felt the same attraction...enough that they actually discussed the question of… “Wait...could we, like, date..?” I told him that I didn’t really find it at all that creepy, but that the family dynamic could be really tough to deal with. If, for example, they dated seriously but then broke up, that could be super, super awkward. And in the end, that, combined with the challenges of living a couple hundred miles apart, made them both decide to pass...but he saw her at another wedding this summer and they are both still single (although she moved to California). So...I’m just saying...the ship hasn’t totally sailed yet.
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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