Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

This Holiday Season, Do Exactly As I Tell You And Nobody Gets Hurt

Mr. Irresponsible's taking a week or so off to meet with his lawyers and plot a few fresh ways to brutalize his many enemies. But I didn't want to leave you without some food for thought as we head into the holiday season. So please enjoy, won't you...

MR. IRRESPONSIBLE'S FIVE-POINT PLAN FOR SURVIVING THE HOLIDAYS 2005

Let’s begin by clearing some etymological underbrush.

The Holidays: What Are They? (And Aren’t They?)

The holidays are no longer a ritual celebration of the winter solstice, and they haven’t been that for many generations. They’re also not the modern creation that’s been abstracted from that ancient observance -- a time of gauzy good feeling in the warm embrace of your family. And the truth is, you know that. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or Wiccan Yule, you know in your heart that the things the holidays really ritualize are more profound than Hallmark images of home and hearth. And what are they? Anger, frustration, and the soul-scorching cruelty that only your closest loved ones can deliver.

I haven’t had time to check this statistic, because I only made it up a minute ago, but social scientists report that a staggering 87% of mid-winter suicide attempts are a direct result of “that terrible thing my mother (father/sister/brother/husband/wife) said to me over the holidays.”  No one is really sure why so many family resentments burst to the surface during the holiday season -- some feel it has to do with the enforced air of jollity that paradoxically spawns thoughts of hatred and misery, while others believe it’s the metaphoric presence of absent family members with whom one has unresolved business. There are those who believe that it is related to the unusually high intake of sugars and fats, and the concomitant loosening of inhibitions. I have a simpler theory: I believe that families spend all their energy trying to separate, and when forced back together they simply go nuts.

Fortunately, Mr. Irresponsible is here to do what Mr. Irresponsible does -- reduce intractable behavioral problems to easy bromides and tut-tut them away. Just follow these few simple rules and you too can live through the holidays.

1) DON’T Make Eye Contact

This is a first principle, and not some sort of half-baked metaphor. What I mean is, when the holidays bring you together with family members, don’t look them in the eye. Eye contact triggers a physiological phenomenon called “Prester’s Invitation,” in which a neurochemical is released that temporarily anaesthetizes the shame centers of the brain, and also serves to induce short-term amnesia with regard to past arguments and recriminations. Eye contact, no matter how fleeting or accidental, is like waving the Green Flag at a Formula One racer. It says, in effect: “Come on in, the screaming’s fine!” Do not, do not, do not offer this opening to family members at the holidays. Avert your gaze at all times, even if it means stumbling into furniture or other obstacles. (There’s a seasonal expectation that one has had a drink or two, so no one will notice anything amiss.) Wear sunglasses or a welder’s helmet if you have to. (I like this one.)

2) DO Bring a Book

Or a crafts project, or maybe those “Learn French in Two Weeks” flash cards you’ve been meaning to study. Maybe you’ll be able to get a jump on next year’s taxes. The point is, find some way to make the time go by in a useful fashion. Why sit numbly, staring into space and ignoring your cousins’ attempts at small talk when you could be alphabetizing newspaper clippings or sorting stray buttons and ignoring your cousins’ attempts at small talk? This year I plan to read through the enormous stack of handwritten letters I’ve received from the Guatemalan orphan child I sponsor, Eusebio. At least I think his name is Eusebio. It might be “Eugenio” or possibly “Guillermo.” I’m not sure, as I’ve never been able to make it through one of his hand-scrawled missives in toto. To be honest, his penmanship is atrocious, and his diction and syntax are worse. And he’s so repetitive -- it’s “Que Dios te bendiga, Sr. Irresponsible” this and “No tengo ningún zapatos” that until you just want to scream. I’m not sure what it is they’re teaching these kids on my dime, but it sure doesn’t seem to be the rudiments of written expression. I mean it, they better straighten up. It’s not like I can’t come up with another way to tax-shelter twenty-eight bucks a month.

 
3) DON’T Take The Bait

Proximity with family members who are for the rest of the year sequestered at safe distances creates danger. Sometimes it is this closeness alone which serves as the trigger for the release of some long-simmering grudge or grievance. Add a surplus of liquor, a deficit of comfortable seats and the stultifying effects of forced-air heat and you have a environment in which there is an overwhelming probability that things will be said that can never be taken back. What to do? I suppose one could, if one were so inclined, “work on one’s emotions” and “show personal growth” and “become more mature” and “rise above it all.” But these things take time and effort, and our immediate problem is getting to New Year’s alive. 

With this in mind, let me suggest two items which will help enormously: a cheap longhair wig and a pair of wireless in-the-ear stage monitors like those employed by professional musicians. (Mr. Irresponsible likes the Shure P4TRE3 system, which is flexible and reasonably affordable at just under $1200 MSRP.) Place the ear buds in your ears and obscure the equipment with the wig. You may, if you choose, employ a confederate to hide nearby and, Cyrano-like, whisper encouraging thoughts into a connected microphone. I prefer to connect a sound source such as an MP3 player, hide the rig in a closet, and go on about my holiday business. Now what do I hear? Invitations to re-open ancient slights? Cutting criticisms of my life choices? The puzzled words “Hey, what’s with the hair? You look like that guy from Twisted Sister”? No sir. All I hear is a pleasant wash of carefully-chosen music. I’ve been listening to a lot of Bossa Nova lately, so any challenges sent my way simply waft past on a cushion of calming acoustic guitars and the comical sight of my relatives’ mouths twisting into hateful accusations I’ll never have to listen to.

4) DO Have An Exit Strategy

One of the unfortunate facts about the holidays is that they have, for the last couple of generations, morphed into an open-ended festival of pain that may last as long as six weeks. The modest amount of actual office work that gets done between Thanksgiving and, say, the second week in January only makes it easier for slackers and layabouts to impose a sort of general period of sleepy unreality on those around them. Anybody who’s ever been on the receiving end of one of those gut wrenching “Oh, you don’t have to head back just yet, do you?” invitations has witnessed the phenomenon for themselves. So it’s critically important to have an unalterable date and time at which to make one’s escape. Note that it’s not good enough to have ticketed reservations for a given flight or train -- the host or hostess in the grip of this feverish attempt to extend their hospitality is unlikely to be swayed by the possibility of added expense and trouble (i.e., your added expense and trouble). And then where will you be? Stuffed like a Chicken Roulade into some niece or nephew’s cruelly undersized, cartoon-branded bed, suffering through an extra God knows how many nights of fitful, miserable sleep, stumbling to the bathroom at 2 AM, tripping over toys the tots have already forgotten they ever wanted and wondering in icy torment why some people bother to have home heating at all if they’re going to turn it down to 62 overnight. No, the trick here is to have hard, firm plans for the immediate post-holiday period. These should be the kinds of things that can’t conceivably be postponed or rescheduled. Some suggestions:

Gall-bladder surgery (No one knows quite what this is, so you’re on safe ground if they ask)

Some “work I have to do for the Government” (Adopt an air of mystery when you say this, and smile enigmatically)

Plans to compete in the Grand Prix at LeMans (Negligible domestic interest and no stateside TV coverage, so you’re not likely to be caught out)

A long-scheduled reunion of your insurance-agent licensing exam prep class (Believe me, nobody’s going to ask you to elaborate on this)

5) AND IF ALL ELSE FAILS:

Narcotize, Narcotize, Narcotize

Let’s talk now about a last-resort, scorched-earth sort of solution. With proper attention to hydration and a strategically-placed infrastructure of chairs, cushions and crash pads (these may be rented from any theatrical supply house which ordinarily caters to stuntmen), it is possible to stay under the influence of a good central nervous system depressant from just before Thanksgiving until just after New Year’s. An RN or home health-care aide may be employed to monitor vital signs and do a little light cleaning, and also impart the appearance of medical necessity to the proceedings. Health insurance, it should be noted, will not generally cover this.

Timmy's in the Sandbox, Checking Bloomberg News

The AP is reporting that "A cheap laptop boasting wireless network access and a hand-crank to provide electricity is expected to start shipping in February or March to help extend technology to school-aged children worldwide." In other words, we're about to start enabling in our young kids the same sullen, narcissistic self-absorption our teenagers currently enjoy. To which Mr. Irresponsible can only say: Good job! Bring it on!

A teenager who's jacked into an iPod or staring relentlessly into the face of a PSP is a teenager who isn't mooching around for money or whining unattractively about his lowly status in life. Similarly, an eight-year-old who's busy navigating the Nicktoons site on his own crank-powered lime-green laptop is one who isn't... well, I don't actually know what it is eight-year-olds do. They're not allowed past the entrance of the PGA Tour golf course on which I have my lavish yet tasteful home, and the guards have standing orders to escort any strays to the gatehouse. (I also have certain security measures in place.) Whatever it is, though, the world will be a better place with less of it going on. Quieter, certainly, and a good deal less sticky. So here's to the forward-thinking guys and gals of the MIT Media Lab, and a tip of Mr. Irresponsible's battered brown fedora. You geeks are okay with me.

Just One Second, I'm Putting Some Things Away

Sometimes an advice columnist has to look below the surface of human behavior. (Not too far below, though, because that's where all the dark and scary stuff lives. And who wants to buy themselves a piece of that? The trick is to skim along the surface like a speedboat, only occasionally, and only as necessary, dipping a toe into the turbulent sea foam. Dip more than a toe and you create drag, which slows you down and makes it harder to zip away when things get knotty.) Sometimes you have to look at the messages our behavior sends. Like the message being delivered in New Mexico, which apparently has a new "Commit a Sex Crime, Meet a Movie Star" program. They're not describing it exactly that way, of course. The wire story simply describes a ride-along by actor Richard Gere with Bernalillo County deputies as they check in on sex offenders in the Albuquerque area. But come on, imagine you're a convicted pedophile answering the knock at the door for one more grim home inspection by burly deputies who hate your guts. Now imagine opening the door and seeing instead the twinkly blue eyes of the world's dreamiest practicing Buddhist. Would that or would that not qualify as the best day of your sad, desperate life?

Gere, it should be noted, is researching an upcoming role as a federal agent investigating a possible sex crime.  But hell, isn't every actor out joyriding in dune buggies or flying with the Blue Angels "researching" something? The members of SAG do more research than the Rand Corporation. Strictly speaking, it shouldn't even be called "research" at all -- I'm personally hesitant to equate what they do at, say, CDC to something Heath Ledger spends a spare weekend charging to his loan-out corporation's credit card. So at least let's call this what it is: An incentive program for sex criminals. And I'm willing to go on the record right here, right now: Mr. Irresponsible stands foursquare against incentivizing sex crimes. That's my position and I'm sticking to it, at least until somebody challenges it. (Remember: Like a speedboat.)

The New Nots... Not

Long ago, in a previous life, Mr. Irresponsible was a feature writer for one of the big newsweeklies. (Note: When I say "a previous life" I'm talking about an earlier time in my actual current life. It's not a reference to some patchouli-soaked hallucination of a long-past existence in which I was a woman named Shahara or a small sunburned boy tilling the fields of Mesopotamia. I feel the need to clarify this because the mail this weblog gets is already quite weird enough, thank you.) In that capacity I learned to fear Tuesday mornings, for the following reasons: Monday was the day when sleepy, hacky wire-service reporters would rouse themselves from the torpor of the weekend to file their second-laziest stories of the week (the laziest appearing late on Friday or over the weekend). And Tuesday was the day when feature editors would wake up realizing they had two hours to cook up a slate of suggestions for that morning's editorial meetings, and would in a panic comb the wires looking for trends. A word about trends: As defined by the mainstream press, a trend is any set of two or more vaguely similar stories moving on the AP or Reuters wire in one 24-hour period, regardless of whether they are moored in observable reality or, much more likely, filed offhand as a sort of limbering-up for the actual work to come, the way ballplayers play pepper in the infield before the game. (See above.) So as a magazine writer on a Tuesday morning your job is clear: Sink the trend story you are inevitably about to be assigned. Bad-mouth it, start a whispering campaign against it, undermine it in ways both big and small. Then go out to lunch. Then spend the rest of the week avoiding your editor's eye.

All this is by way of saying: Man, am I glad I'm not a newsweekly feature writer today, because if I were, I'd be hunkered down trying to avoid writing a three-column meditation on what somebody up the food chain would probably have dubbed "The New Nots." The second I saw these three non-starters lined up on the AP entertainment wire like Manny, Moe and Jack, grinning their idiot grins and beckoning with their empty eyes, I knew some editor somewhere was ginning up a trend story:

Klein Doesn't Blame Cruise For Breakup
Chesney Doesn't Regret Zellwegger Marriage
Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson Not Dating

Stories like these raise questions in the normal mind, chief among them: Hey, who cares? But in the mind of the magazine editor, trained to troll for thready connections in the vastness of the Zeitgeist the way a Great White circles lazily, patiently, waiting for the tip of a flipper in the waters above, the mere fact of proximity renders these three dumbass non-stories something somehow larger than themselves: A trend. If I were still working those fields (and had been unable to plant the requisite seeds of doubt in my editor's mind) I'd be drafting something like this right about now:

Across Hollywood last week, from The Ivy to The Grill, the cream of young show business was exhibiting the latest in PR fashion: The artfully-crafted denial, the story that says "No" and yet "Yes" at the same time. Call them "The New Nots"...

I could go on. Once upon a time, I did. But I've been lifted up and borne away from all that, and you can be too. The next time you open a magazine and spot a story that you know in your heart has been cobbled together from the odd breakaway pieces of a pop culture that's ever more disposable, the next time you see in the opening paragraph the words Call it...  or Observers have dubbed it... or They are not alone... -- Do yourself a favor. Do as Mr. Irresponsible did all those years ago. Say to yourself, as I did to my editors on so many Tuesday mornings like this one: "You don't really want to do that, do you?" Then take yourself to lunch.

No Publicity, Please, We're British

If you broke into my lavish yet tasteful home and held a gun to my head, I would have to confess that I've only been dimly aware of the visit of Prince Charles and the former Camilla Parker Bowles to America. The good news is, dim awareness seems to be what the couple and their handlers are going for -- a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that only six percent of Americans are "very interested" in the royal walkabout, with a three percent margin of error. This means, statistically speaking, that you could drive around your neighborhood playing your car radio too loud and you'd impact a broader swath of US public opinion than the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. It isn't all the prince's fault, either. The wife, poor thing, is still fighting something of an image problem. When The Daily Mirror's man in New York showed her picture to people in Times Square, some of them took her for Barbara Cartland. Ms. Cartland, it should be noted, passed away six years ago. So if wowing the States with the glamour of the monarchy is the goal, well, these two may not have the stuff. The only "Wows" they seem to be drawing are the kind contained in sentences like "Wow, could those people we don't care about be any dowdier?" or "Wow, Barbara Cartland came back from the dead!" Even an apparent strategy to light the couple up in the reflected glow of "a good cross-section of interesting and influential New Yorkers" seems ill-conceived when you consider that one of them is Kim Cattrall. ("I see. You acted in a terrible program on the telly and now you foist your fading sexuality on people in Barnes & Noble. How terribly interesting.")

Mr. Irresponsible yields to no one in his admiration for Britain, which has managed to sustain a relatively civilized culture even as its standing in the world has dwindled from titan of the seas to last-kid-picked-for-the-softball-team. But you know what? The next time the Brits want to make a splash on the American stage, they should send us Eddie Izzard. He's witty and he looks good in pearls.