Open All Night

I enjoy the Sunday paper. Besides pilfering it for its coupon goodness, I take my time reading it. It sometimes takes me until Thursday or Friday to get through it, depending on how much fiber I consume during the week. I turned to the Life section, and there were two primary cover stories. One was on Maya Angelou; the other was on Barbie’s 50th anniversary. Naturally I read the Barbie one.

The Barbie article was meant to be very light-hearted, but came off as pretentious. It was written as a “50 facts you didn’t know about Barbie.” That was all fine and dandy, but then it had sidebars where they asked actual doctors what Barbie should look like when she’s 50 and what plastic surgery she would actually require at that age. I am not sure why, but that just struck me as wrong.

Speaking of pretentiousness, why does anyone care about Maya Angelou? I cannot think of many public figures that irritate me more than her. I have read (and heard) some of her works, and have never thought it even better than average. She perpetually harps on grace (it was even in the title of the article), but then she usually manages to insert some divisive comment in her rhetoric. However, she is smooth, and eloquent, so noone catches it. How many of you remember her campaign against Jeopardy! for being racist? Give me a break. Time to stop sniffing the ink. Maybe you would write something that isn’t garbage. Everyone talks about how her writing “moves them.” The only thing it moves me to do is to put another section of the paper under my arm and head off to the latrine.

And that my friends, is coming full circle.
-Michael