theology&geometry

I made this a long time ago but I figure it’s always a good time to remind people to join the club.

Internet, it is 2:14 a.m. and I am looking at this issue of InStyle like I would look at some dude I’d been, uh, hanging out with for a little while but who still insisted on burping every other second and pinching my ass when I squeezed past him to get the beer he demanded I go fetch because the game was on and he couldn’t bear to remove his hands from the wasteband waistband (*Freudian typo!) of his pants and stand up. To get his beer or put the toilet seat down. In other words, I’m casting a jaundiced eye* upon this horrible played-out stereotype of a magazine, so I’m going to end this farce of a relationship now. And not by abandoning this project, oh no. By finishing what I started, and getting the metaphorical beer and shaking it up and spewing it in that belching dude’s face. Because, frankly, he promised to get me off and he did not. Which oughta be a crime.

ONWARD WE SHALL FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT, HO!

(more…)

Internet, I feel like I have voluntarily cast myself into the desert and am not even halfway across the first dune. The thing is, the desert looked completely walkable at first glance, but now I realize that every step takes extra effort because I’m WALKING ON FREAKING STUPID SAND.

I am, of course, being overly metaphorical here in my attempt to describe what it’s like to realize that I am only 80 pages in to InDesign InStyle and there are seemingly three thousand five hundred sixty four pages to go. I feel like maybe I need a new system to expedite the process, but then I think that that’s a coward’s way out. What I really need is to crank up the JT and just power through.

So here it comes: The power.

(more…)

All right, you beautiful bastiches, let’s get this crazy train rolling again. I’ve had six hours of sleep and I am ready to muffpunch the universe. I mean read this magazine.

Where were we? Oh yes, page 50. OH FUCK, THERE ARE WEREWOLVES. Hang on while I make a pot of incredibly strong coffee to help me cope. … Okay, that’s better. Sheesus, magazine, werewolves? Because vampires are so played out? Teen Wolf, Taylor Lautner, Shakira in a cage, Wolf Blitzer—WAIT WHAT? Oh god, it hurts. Make it stop. I can’t wait until the spread on how mummies are the latest supernatural hotties. The rest of the page is devoted to Spanx swimwear. Because, remember? We love our bodies this month. Even if that means wearing a full-body glove in the pool.

Simon G. has a giant rock for you to put on your finger. I’ve got a finger for Simon G.

More after the jump!

(more…)

One of the fun things about moving is the slow and steady trickle of the former tenant’s mail that you get to receive for a few months (or, if you’re super fortunate, years). When I moved into this house, I suddenly became the recipient of fashion catalogs from stores I literally had never even heard of, all of which were peddling stretchy, layery black things for exorbitant amounts of money.

My house’s previous occupant was somewhat of a fashion maven, from what I can tell. I was initially tipped off by the literally dozens of fancy dry-cleaning coat hangers she left behind (very kind of her, no sarcasm), but my suspicions were confirmed when cards and flyers in the mail from upscale boutiques kept landing in my mailbox every day.

Today, though, I scored my greatest previous-tenant mail pull yet: The February InStyle magazine. HOLY CRAP, THIS THING IS WORTH LIKE $18, RIGHT?

I don’t read fashion magazines, or women’s magazines, or many magazines at all for that matter. Most recently I had been riding on a 2008 Christmas subscription to Print, gifted by my parents, but it ran out and I’m too cheap to renew it. And I used to take Smithsonian (another longstanding parental Christmas gift tradition). And in college I was guilty of subscribing to Rolling Stone for maybe a year. I love love love The Week and took it for free when I paid for a Salon.com subscription (note to self: I should really think about re-subscribing to The Week … not Salon).

I had a torrid love affair with YM (which I was allowed to take as a 14-year-old only because my mother thought it was still the quaint Young Miss magazine she remembered) and Seventeen when I was in middle and high school. I can probably trace every neurosis about my body and relationships back to those glossy tomes, which I would read and re-read until I could recite the articles and tell you what page the cover spread fell on. Oh boy, I gobbled that mess up.

I graduated to Cosmo in high school because I was having a lot of fun thinking of myself as this mature sexual being (please) but really I just liked to read the silly sex tips and wonder if people actually did all that shit (they don’t).

I fell off the women’s magazine wagon during college, when my feminist theory classes taught me the priceless art of decoding. Once I had decoded the everloving fuck out of everything, I realized that there were no magazines directed toward my demographic (young, female) that I could really get on board with. Except maybe Bitch (Bust was a wolf in feminist sheep’s clothing) and Ms. (I subscribe to neither now.)

I’m getting off track, as is my way.

So here I sit, a February 2010 InStyle magazine in front of me. I just smelled it. It smells amazing. Bleached paper and locked ink and somewhere, possibly, a perfume sample.

I’m about to crack this baby open and go through it, cover to cover. And I am going to write down every idiotic thing that flits across the absurd stage that is my brain. (My apologies to Glossed Over, which everyone should be reading because it is fantastic.)

We start with a cover (rest of the entry is after the jump because it got SO DAMN LONG)

(more…)