picking assorted nits

I’ve been meaning to write that I spent much of last weekend indulging in an orgy of reality TV – I bought a season each of What Not to Wear and How to Look Good Naked. The latter has me avmbivalent; on the one hand I’m thinking that Carson, snarky as he can be, is a genuinely nice guy and concerned for the women he’s helping. And in one way it feels like progress that he can choose to prance around (what? I’m not sterotyping. Carson Kressley prances) and make comments about going off to look at hot guys in a mainstream TV show; on the other hand it feels like maybe gay guys still need to prance in order to appear nonthreatening, and how sad is it that we still have so much baggage between the sexes that a man has to be nearly a caricature before a vulnerable woman can feel safe around him. Plus, of course, there’s the obvious manipulation: clearly the women expect him and have previously arranged to take time off, and it seems unlikely that every woman is surprised by the “nude” (actually well-covered with a flatteringly draped piece of cloth) photo session. I suppose it’s possible, if what I’m watching is the first season and if they taped most episodes before the show aired – certainly in What Not to Wear there’s a more convincing mix of people who know how the show goes and people who don’t.

Finally, it seems unlikely that when they take a woman who hates her body mostly because it’s showing natural signs of age and common amounts of weight gain, and they show her in bra and panties on a billboard, every single person who walks by thinks she’s beautiful and sexy. I certainly don’t find some of them beautiful in that getup (I’m not thrilled about my own signs of aging and recent weight gain either). Granted they all look gorgeous in the nude photo session, but with professionally-done hair and makeup and artfully draped coverage, who wouldn’t? I appreciate the idea of the show and the whole concept of teaching a woman she can be beautiful, I think the new haircut and lessons on flattering clothing may even be helpful in the long-term, and I like the idea that beauty isn’t limited to size 0 and age 21. But the idea that we are all beautiful in all circumstances sounds to me too much like the idea that we should all have high self-esteem because we’re all above average. I’ve seen beautiful women of all ages (Hepburn in her 80s springs to mind) and in a wide range of sizes (Queen Latifah has beautiful face, skin, and shape) and almost every women has things to be proud of in both appearance and interior. But not every woman is beautiful, and that’s fine.

I still enjoy the show, though.
(Clarification: Carson Kressley is a large reason for the success of two well-known TV shows, a dedicated gay activist and apparently a world-level equestrian. I don’t think he’s a caricature, just his persona on the show.)

We had our first Toastmasters meeting here last night. I was more or less dragged kicking and screaming into it – the raison d’etre for this chapter is to improve people’s English so they wanted a native English speaker. I’m happy to help, just not thrilled about spending my whole evening on it (I got home last night just about in time to read email, poke around online a little, brush my teeth and go to bed).

But it was more fun than I expected: our ‘sponsors’, the experienced Toastmaster guys, did tend to drivel on a bit, but I thought our own people’s speeches were very good. Since I got pressured into being VP Education, I’m responsible for lining people up to speak and to do various other jobs. I felt bad a little, because the first speaker was so nervous he was visibly shaking, but he held it together and did well. The second speaker was stellar – apparently her past experience includes being a “demo lady” at computer shows. I think the nearest US equivalent would be the women who stand on platforms with the cars at car-shows. So she’s very used to speaking in front of an audience, though in the past she was repeating someone else’s words rather than her own.

I took the “Language Evaluator” role, and expect to be taking it at most meetings for a while. So I get to pick on people’s grammar, pronunciation and word choice. it’s rather harder to do that than to correct written English as I’m more used to doing, but I’m sure I’ll get better at it. It would have helped if the sponsors had told me to keep it general and not mention names *before* I started speaking. Oops. Fortunately I’d only mentioned a few people who are very experienced (in one case, has near-native fluency) before they told me that part. Most of the speakers are pretty fluent. I identified five common mistakes: not pronouncing plosives (generally ‘t’, often ‘d’, sometimes ‘k’) at the end of a word or syllable; ‘d’ for ‘th’ in some contexts; omitting word endings especially for adverbs or gerunds; mixing up ‘he’ and ‘she’; confusing ‘l’ and ‘r’. Those last two are extremely common in Chinese speakers learning English, but I only heard them a couple of times last night – and when I did, they were from our guests the Toastmaster sponsors, not my colleagues.

It’s kind of an odd experience when you stand up to correct people and get an ovation that includes whoops and hollering. I guess it was because I was the only one of us in an evaluator role. I’ve gotten a couple nice emails today, too.