Hello Hello world,
I am obviously not doing this as much any more because life is busy BUT some updates:
I went home and my parents sold my childhood home and it is deeply affecting me but I will write more on that later
I got a new job! As you saw if you have me on linkedin. It was so insanely fast and all because of Gabby. She had someone she knew refer me for this assistant job. They rejected me and then the SAME DAY they offered me an interview for the mailroom program. AND I GOT IT.
I start tomorrow, it’s in the Chrysler building, and it’s a for profit company so I’ll actually get fun stuff!
No hate to non-profits they do good work but at the same time… they pay for it with their employees’ sanity.
I have been having heart palpitations and it’s leading me to believe that I am dying. Get your goodbyes in now!
My apartment is infested with flies and I’m really trying my best.
If I’ve ever annoyed you first of all I’m sorry and secondly you’re legally required to tell me so I can worry about it forever, okay?
Material Girls
The following blog post contains spoilers for the movie Materialists written and directed by Celine Song. You should go see it, and quickly.
Materialists was a great movie. Not exactly the romcom return to form we were expecting but rather a dramatic contemplation on modern love and one of our oldest institutions, marriage. I think the film definitely had some issues, but overall I was entranced by the themes it raised. Overall this was one of the best modern romances I’ve seen and it accomplished that by talking about stuff that really no other popular literature is seriously talking about.
In an era where we question all of our institutions, Song looks one of our oldest in the face and asks “What’s the point?” What is the point of marriage in our post-modern, post-feminist, post-nuclear family world? Is it just a transfer of wealth? A transfer of domestic ownership? A sacred ceremony of love? It manages to get at our most basic instincts with the bookending of the cave people. I absolutely love that shit, I’m always thinking about cave people unironically. Even when we live in a complex metropolis we’re really cave people who have needlessly complicated our lives. Celine Song starts the movie by showing two people with (what we would call) absolutely nothing. They don’t have wealth or a house, just flowers and stone tools. This plays perfectly into the title and theme of the film because what separates us from these cave people is not our minds or our hearts but rather our stuff, our cities, our cultures, our “materialism”.
Materialist is a fun word because it obviously means someone who is preoccupied with possessions or the physical, but it also refers to the philosophical doctrine that all things, event consciousness and mental states, are the result of physical processes and interactions. Our characters, much like ourselves, are obsessed with their physical worlds, apartments, jobs, hairlines, heights, and of course, wealth. With the rise of therapy speak and therapy media, we’ve become inundated with romance films that talk about some bygone era of dating a love. The truth is, modern dating is often about these physical attributes but no movies ever talk about them. Money is SUCH a taboo subject now, especially as a post-grad from Princeton. People are so coy about how much they make and how much is in their savings and how much their parents send them per month. It was refreshing to watch a movie that explores it wholeheartedly. The movie asks, can people be happy together when they’re broke? The movie answers yes, but strangely it affirms the thesis that “only people of similar economic backgrounds and upbringings will be happy.”
The most interesting part of the movie (in my opinion as a short man) was the stuff about height. It’s kind of funny to say out loud because height is such a funny thing to talk about. There’s literally no way to take a short guy seriously when he’s complaining about height-ism. Shortness is a cultural punchline that no one is able to surmount because talking about it just makes you look more absurd. Funnily enough the only way to transcend shortness is to stop caring about it. As a 5’8” man this is what I managed to do through years of being called “elf” and sitting in the front row of class photos. The movie managing to seriously talk about it is impressive, in my opinion. Pedro Pascal, the former short man that he is, talks about how women actually approach him now, how he feels more confident at work. These might seem comical but it’s true.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he has a chapter called “Why Do We Love Tall Men?” It’s a good book and it talks about a lot of the snap judgments people make including sexism, racism, and the like. A summary of it can be found here. Essentially, in surveying fortune 500 CEOS and thousands of other working professional men, Gladwell found some crazy shit. Only 14.5% of the male US population is over 6ft, and only 3.9% were 6’2” or taller. Despite this statistic, the average height for a fortune 500 CEO was about 6 feet tall, and 30% were 6’2” or taller. In fact out of all categories, gender, height, race, the least represented was men under 5’6”. Gladwell says that being short is just as much a barrier to success as being a woman or african-american. Additionally, in a large survey of men, it was found that each inch of height was equal to $789 a year more in salary, even more in upper management positions. Obviously this is probably due to a variety of reasons, most CEOs are WASP men who were probably fed nutritionally rich diets as children, but it’s strange given the country average how much of an advantage it is to be tall. Gladwell attributes this to our cultural attitudes towards physical stature which makes sense. It’s just what Pedro Pascal experienced and it’s just what many men experience.
This condemnation of heightism is… for lack of a better word, hilarious. It’s hard to take this seriously. Part of the reason is the men who choose to champion it on the internet. So-called “meninists” often use female height preferences as a means to whine and complain about how hard it is to be a man in this world.
Anecdotally, I have also never struggled to talk to women because I was short. I have struggled because I’m awkward and weird. Maybe this is a chicken and the egg situation but nonetheless the fact stands, no woman I’ve been seriously interested in has rejected me because I’m short. It’s true, I see those drunk tiktok interviews where a girl demands her guy be 6ft plus and hung like a horse but those people don’t really exist, at least in the social sphere I’ve cultivated. That’s not to say that being short hasn’t affected my life. As I mentioned before, I was bullied, called names, and I think this A) made me develop a sense of humor and B) turned me into the kind of person who is good at taking a joke if it means everyone is having a better time.
If we’re into the anecdotal stories I have a funny one. I think a lot of these guys who complain about women hating short, broke men just need to stop dating republican women. I am not saying that liberal women have lower standards but I am saying that I have seen the ugliest, shortest, balding, possibly and quite likely brokest men on the planet walking beside perfectly normal (but alt liberally) women in the east village. This same doctrine helped me. I grew up in a kind of suburban/rural area that was very caucasian. My middle school was called Cedar Heights but the other schools called us “See More Whites” if you know what I mean. At Cedar Heights I completely struck out with women. Every time I liked a girl I was either creepy or weird or just a really good friend. I then went to high school at a very diverse place and my luck completely turned around. I’m not saying Liberal women like ugly men and republican women like hot men, but I think republic women will only date ugly men who at least follow conventional beauty standards. And if you’re hispanic, jewish-looking, short, or balding you better move your ass to Bushwick.
Anyway, wow. I kind of got off topic there. Regardless, I was just really interested in The Materialists because it managed to talk about these laughable cultural aspects in a serious way… you should see it.
Overcompensating for something…
I have been watching Benito Sinner’s Overcompensating. I never watched his tiktoks, I never listened to his podcast, everything i know about this is from Gabby and the internet.
Despite everything I’m about to say, I really like it. I am loving watching it and about to finish. It’s a great first show for someone and you should all check it out. The truth is though, there’s some issues with it. Some of the jokes don’t land, some of the characters are underdeveloped (like Grace) and my biggest issue is that I can see him writing it. I know that doesn’t make any sense but let me explain. My least favorite thing in a movie or tv, oftentimes with young writers doing things I’m familiar with (like college) I feel like I can sort of see through them. I can see why they’re making the writing choices they're making and it takes me out of it a little bit. The reason is because I sort of hate college fiction written by people in college. Benny drama and his friends are no longer in college any more, which is very evident, but he said that he started writing the show either when he was at Georgetown or just when he left. The awful truth is that Benny falls into the same autofiction traps that I’ve been seeing in creative writing classrooms for years now and it sort of makes me cringe.
Yates University is obviously an Ivy League, elite East coast school cognate, Benny is obviously playing himself, and the whole thing is exactly what the jock in screenwriting 101 thought the teacher meant when she said “write what you know.” My favorite example of this was a girl in my fiction class who wrote a brave, hard-hitting, character piece about a girl who was nervous about moving to New York and starting her consulting job next year. The catch? This girl went to Columbia. Totally different thing. I got so confused that at one point I was giving her feedback and started referring to the main character as “you”. Same exact thing happened in screenwriting class multiple times.
One of the biggest perils of this kind of auto-fiction is that it attempts to make the personal universal. Benny introduces himself (in sort of an over-used “of course you’d be like that” manner) as a “valedictorian, homecoming king, football captain” as if this a totally normal common thing. I don’t know what kinds of high schools you guys went to but usually the football captain wasn’t that smart. This trend continues when people talk about finance jobs, secret societies, and shit that I don’t think is as normal as he is making it seem.
Other than that there’s this general feeling of “Oh and then he’s having the characters do that so that he can do that” which takes me out of it. The best stories make you forget it’s a story. My best example of this is all the exposition it takes to explain the characters when they’re rather simple.
This isn’t thought out but I will think on it more and see if I can formulate a thought. But I’m curious if anyone else felt the same way.
Best, Love, Wishes,
Daniel Drake