What kind of person are you?

So, here’s one… I’ve become interested recently in people’s perceived need to categorize themselves. As much lip service as we pay to avoiding stereotypes, people are anxious to stereotype themselves as much as possible. People identify themselves with other groups and it is a nearly universal way of describing oneself (from hair-color to coffee preference, people want to be “a ____”, more than just themselves). It is understandable given our social makeup, but can, like most things in life, also be amusing at times.

It becomes amusing when people attempt to categorize themselves to mask the undeniable fact that they are simply a whackjob. Like today, I was going to grab some lunch (a sandwich of course) and could not help but overhear one side of a cell phone conversation. A young woman was talking with the sort of projection that would make a classically trained stage performer proud, and discussing her marital issues with someone who, I’m sure, is now at least partially deaf.

In the middle of the conversation she dropped this little nugget: “I never wanted to think of myself as the kind of woman who calls their husband’s mother to complain after every birthday gift, but it has become a problem so that’s what I do now.” Wait, what? Is that a category of woman? Really? There is some subgroup of women out there who call and complain to their mother-in-law about lame birthday gifts from their husbands? If that is a “kind of” woman, I don’t want to know about it. I would rather just believe that this woman is not so much part of some commonly accepted category, but just, as noted above, a whackjob.

If it’s true and this is a category of woman in our culture, then I think we should treat every young girl like an at-risk youth in danger of being recruited for a gang. Lots of scared straight videos showing perplexed and bitter husbands trying to figure out why their mother is scolding them for buying their wife a perfectly good toaster oven. You know, stuff like that.

But I guess it is always better to be part of a group with certain characteristics than just admit that it is really just you who are crazy. And even if there are other crazy people like you out there, that doesn’t really make it any better for the rest of us.

Ok, moving on…..

I think I’m going to formally shut down my Entertainment blog (the one I have completely orphaned for months) and start posting some thoughts I have about movies and music and TV on this blog. There are several reasons and I know you want to know them so here they are:

1. I can’t really keep up with one blog while pretending to practice law, much less 3, so I’ve got to make some cuts somewhere.

2. I think I’m the only person who ever read it.

3. It might prompt me to be less neglectful of this blog.

4. Somehow the cool template I had got all screwed up so it looks like rubbish right now and I don’t have the time or know-how to fix it.

5. I want to make sure you, my faithful blog readers, do not miss out on any opinions I have about the entertainment world. My opinions on this subject are just far too important. (e.g., I don’t think that new Bionic Woman show is going to last in part because the new Jamie Summers has a strong right arm, but a really weak chin. You can’t have a superhuman action spy-babe with no chin. You just can’t. My wife was good enough to point this out to me. Now, see what you might have missed if I had chosen to only post that on my entertainment blog? Alarming, isn’t it?)

So, I’m going to post the long entertainment post I’ve been working on which may end up discussing everything from recent movies to new TV shows on here. So, in anticipation you may want to set aside a good 45 minutes of time you will wish you could have back to read it in the near future.