Quirkyalone

Zeitgeist | Imaginary Bitches (A Review)

Aug 28, 2009 - Written by Deborah Hymes  |  Filed under: Dating, Featured, Friendship, Movies, Pop Culture, Relationships, Single Life, Video

Choosing to remain single in a coupled world is sometimes a lonely gig, never more so than when all of your close friends are smugly cocooned in their couple-bubbles. It can make you feel like the last single person on Earth.

As once-single friends morph into couples, it often becomes irritatingly apparent that they no longer understand the challenges or  perspectives of singledom. You sometimes feel like hitting them over the head, yet you still love them and yearn for common ground to maintain your friendships. This painful conflict is played out to hilarious effect in the engaging Web series Imaginary Bitches.

Eden is the last single girl in her circle of friends, refusing to compromise her standards simply to have a boyfriend. After an amazing date with a guy she really likes, Eden calls each of her friends to share her exciting news, but they’re only interested in talking about their relationships. Increasingly dispirited with each aborted call, Eden discovers, to her astonishment, that she has conjured an imaginary friend named Catherine—a friend who’s avidly interested in discussing all the details of Eden’s date.

But Catherine proves to be less a “friend” than a total bitch, with something nasty to say about Eden and all of her real girlfriends. That’s right, Eden herself is not exempt from Catherine’s bitchiness. Furthermore, Catherine is soon joined by a second imaginary bitch named Heather. The imaginary bitches quickly establish their presence in all of Eden’s relationships, leaving her to deal with the fallout even as they help her sort out her friendships and her love life.

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Zeitgeist | Defending Marriage . . . and Singledom

Aug 13, 2009 - Written by Deborah Hymes  |  Filed under: Featured, Pop Culture, Quirkytogether, Relationships, Single Life

You’d think it was the first time anyone’s ever gotten a divorce.

Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent admission in The Atlantic that she’s divorcing her husband after 20 years (following her own extramarital affair) has ignited a firestorm of high-minded controversy debating the pros and cons of marriage. The story was picked up nationally, with nearly all the major news outlets chiming in online, on air and in print.

The particular point of contention is Ms. Loh’s theory that perhaps the reason we have a divorce culture is because we marry too often. Citing “all the abject and swallowed misery” she observes in modern marriage, she wonders, “Why do we still insist on marriage?”

Then she really gets down to it, ending her polemic with a

“final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.”

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Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for Quirkyliving

Aug 09, 2009 - Written by Onely  |  Filed under: Personal Growth, Politics, Pop Culture, Single Life

“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It debuts today and will appear every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. We welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.

Dear Quirkyalone,

Besides Oprah, who is a good model of single living in our culture?   –Special K

Dear Special K,

Good question. I think it’s much easier to come up with examples of poor single role models than admirable ones. Momentarily blocked for ideas of my own, I googled “single role models.”  Here’s a sampling from the first page of results:

Using Role Models to Succeed With Single Women

Lack of Male Role Models For Young Children From Single-Parent Families

They Were Single Too: 8 Biblical Role Models, by David M. Hoffeditz

“Oh dear,” I thought, “Surely there must have been a few notable singles since John the Baptist?” With Google apparently hijacked by heteronormatives, I was forced to actually search of my own brain for ideas. Here’s a sampling from those results:

Notable Singles Nowadays

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

She is not only a “wise Latina”, but she has supported gay rights, which is crucial for being nominated as Supreme Quirkyalone. Singles, as a (somewhat) oppressed demographic themselves, should be accepting of all kinds of relationships, not just couplings and definitely not just heterosexual couplings.

And speaking of Supremes:

According to this Ebony article, singer Mary Wilson “says that being single has allowed her to develop in ways that being married did not. ‘Now, I can play without asking permission from my husband or parents,’ she says. ‘I like the idea of being able to make my own choices about what to do.’ ”

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Twitter’s Aspiring Micro-Celebrities

Apr 13, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Pop Culture, technology

Note: This piece was also published on the Huffington Post. I find myself evolving into a technology social critic, perhaps a new evolution in career as an uncredentialed urban anthropologist. So watch for more stuff like this in this blog space, as well as more directly quirkyalone-related stuff, especially as the group blog finally launches within about a month.

On my first day at South by Southwest, an annual geek conference dedicated to celebrating the brightest minds in emerging technology, I already felt like a speck of Internet dust because I only have 157 Twitter followers.

I took drastic measures and pulled out my iPhone for an old-fashioned phone call. My confidante was my former business partner Adam. I knew he would immediately understand. In that moment, I officially hated the Internets.

Just a day before, I was giddy about attending South by Southwest (SxSW) for the first time. Billed as the center of digital creativity, and not to be confused with the film or music festival that immediately follows it, “South by” attracts entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, advertisers, and venture capitalists. By day, thousands of us roamed the Austin Convention Center to go to panels like “Mad Men on Twitter” (now even Peggy Olsen has a Twitter account), “Love in the Cloud: Online-Only Marriages,” and “What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?” At night, shoulder-to-shoulder parties raged.

As much as I wanted to have the random, stimulating conversations in the hallway that everyone says defines the event, something felt very wrong. In fact, my first tweet was: “I feel contrarian urge coming on in first day of #sxsw never seen more distracted sea of people.”

SxSW felt like a flashback to high school, but all the kids are former debate and math team nerds. Summoning all their repressed teenage angst, my fellow conference participants seemed to be taking a new shot at the yearbook superlatives. I quickly realized I was living in the vortex of a geek popularity contest.

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This Is Your Brain on Twitter

Mar 10, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Pop Culture, technology

Note: This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday night around midnight, I was loitering on the sidewalk outside a San Francisco bar with two friends, about to head home but not quite ready to call it a night. A guy standing nearby on the sidewalk told us that that our red, green, and blue jackets, respectively, made us look like the lightbeams that create a color spectrum on television sets and computers. It’s hard to imagine a geekier pick-up line than “You look like RGB!” But that’s what passes for flirtation in 2009 San Francisco in the (waning?) era of web 2.0. He wanted to take a picture of us and upload it to Flickr.

As a writer who also works a product manager in social media, I know the web 2.0 type.

I quickly realized that this web 2.0 boy was part of the Twitter cult, or, as they call themselves, the Twitterati.

The Twitterati are in full effect in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, and Seattle, where members live their lives as performance art. They exist, therefore they tweet.

Whenever they watch a sunset, eat something delicious, or feel disappointed by a product, they tap out a message on their phones or laptops. Some of them tweet a few times a day, some as many as ten. Or they twitpic, uploading photos. They also seem to believe Twitter is going to revolutionize our lives.

I was looking for a bit more excitement to cap off my evening, and now I had found it. My friends went home and web 2.0 and I hung out on the sidewalk for another hour. First we talked about where we live and what we do, but then, about Twitter! His unself-conscious fervor fascinated me. I played anthropologist, listening to him gush about how Twitter was ushering in a new era of connection that we so desperately needed after the Bush era of fear and division.

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Quirkyalone at the Oscars

Feb 20, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Pop Culture

Who are you rooting for Sunday night at the Oscars? Do you see any quirkyalone heros or storylines in the mix? Happy-Go-Lucky is nominated for best screenplay; earlier, I called it the must-see quirkyalone movie of 2008. So I’m definitely rooting for Poppy and Happy-Go-Lucky in the writing category. Rachel Getting Married is pure art. It’s about marriage, but maybe it’s a quirkytogether marriage. It is a quirky wedding weekend, almost unbelievably multicultural, complete with such revealing moments, I felt like a fly on the wall as I watched. I rarely get that feeling from movies. They’re usually so formulaic and staged.

In other technology news, here’s a neat app that lets you follow everyone’s live tweets on the Oscars. Add your quirkyalone-Oscar observations below. Tweet! Tweet!