Because wack is stoopid, ridiculous and avoidable. Yet wack is persistent. I heard my friend's voice in my mind while paging through a recent Urban Outfitters catalog.

Does this make my ass look wack? Well, you've fallen prey to the Anti-Pants Agenda and you look like the lovechild of Lady Gaga and Eustace Tilley. So yes. Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? Do you have a yeasty, medical need to air out your crotch like that? Do you work in a discothèque in Aladdin's palace? No? Then: Yes. Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? You were great in that one scene in A Passage To India, but stealing wardrobe from the set is a no-no. Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? Are you an angel based on the hooker from Pretty Woman? Yes? Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? Sorry, sweetie, all the sexyface in the world won't allow me to ignore the fact that you're wearing acid-wash looking jeans. You have a lovely figure. But… Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? Let's see… Rebel without a cause from a little house on the prairie is saved by the bell? Your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? Toplessness is soooo Fall 2008. Therefore you are out of style; therefore your ass looks wack.

Does this make my ass look wack? El. Oh. El.

Earlier: What Clothes? Urban Outfitters Presents Naked & Half-Naked Chicks
Fall At J. Crew: Romantic Ruffles, Destroyed Jeans, Hideous Shoes
5 Hideous Things Urban Outfitters Wants You To Wear This Summer
May Anthropologie Catalog: Totally Watered Down

So women, for the first time in the past seven economic contractions, are exiting the workforce. Will they do anything? Will someone need them? What about their needs? Because, as I told a guy on Sunday, in a town where everyone you know is an "independent contractor" and "codependence" is a slur and "energy independence" is a goal is, like, a society totally in denial about this basic fact of human nature which is that we need to be needed.

I had, that same day, already cried upon seeing The Wackness, a movie about the codependent relationship of a psychiatrist and his pot dealer, two highly indispensable men, men whose remuneration is commensurate with the urgency of the need for the the things they provide and are, for that very reason, sad. Because those things, duh, are drugs. And dependence on drugs — or alcohol or money or the simulacrum of buddyship — is not enough. "It's not enough, not nearly enough," Luke's dad says, matter-of-factly, when he returns home to find his family in the process of being evicted and tries frantically to offer up the $26,000 he's earned hustling all summer to save the cause. And you're like, huh? But it's nineteen ninety four!

But see, that's the point; Luke's dad's face is resigned, relieved even. People get evicted. All the time, especially now, and especially then, in New York in the nineties, when all the talk was growth and prosperity and liquidity. That's the thing about "progress", it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game if there's some thought given to the interdependence of things, like eking out a sixteen cent a share earnings increase from a lucky harvest or training the staff on a more efficient piece of software or switching accounting standards or closing a factory, and when it's that latter one some folks get evicted.

So anyway, Luke's family sleeps in motel, Luke in a cot beside his parents' bed, where he lies awake at night and watches, in a grossly manipulative gratuitous tearjerkoff of a scene that is like almost too corny to tell you about but:

His dad puts an arm around his mom in his sleep. They "spoon" or whatever.

**

I was one of two people in the theater, so I really don't know if anyone else completely lost it in this scene. I am thinking no, because I have issues with crying, in that I can't generally do it unless I am watching a movie in which case Jersey Girl has been known to do the job. The last time I cried not in a movie context I was coming down (up? away?) from Vicodin. It was that night I was at that wedding, the night of the great Tampon miscalculation, at 30th Street Station, and when I say "night" I mean around 5:30 a.m., when I gave up trying to sleep because it was just too damn cold, which was my fault for pairing a strapless bridesmaid's gown with nothing a cardigan I'd burned a dinner plate-sized hole while dulling my senses on the Vicodin. Anyhow, so I got a hot water at McDonald's and sat in a booth and let the tears start in confidence the usual 5:30 a.m. crew would be too preoccupied brokering peace accords between their various personalities to notice.

"Hey, you were in here earlier!" It was not to be.

"I asked if you'd been drinking, and you said, it's 2:30 a.m. and I'm wearing a bridesmaid gown, what do you think?"
I didn't remember this, but it seems like the sort of excuse an alcohol dependent person would make up, which is to say, I had used a version of it with a cop once after a bachelorette party. God I fucking hate weddings.

So when he asked what I was crying about and I thought, it is just weddings, and the fact that I had nowhere to go at the end of the night, because this dude I'd been making out with had a girlfriend who needed to stay at his place because she lived with her fiance and couldn't very well go back there right now; yeah, it's muddled but pretty symbolic, right, though fearing he would not respect the symbolism I just said:

"I guess I'm worried I'll never have kids."

"I have six daughters. You want one of them?"

"I live in a fifth-floor walkup," I said. (No.)

"I live in a halfway house!" Laugh. "Do you know what a halfway house is?"

Uh, yeah. Ten years before, in fact, I'd known half the halfway houses in Philadelphia, not because I'd been addicted to anything but because I was an anxious young reporter assigned to a sort of nebulous urban blight beat and desperately sure I might as well be. I wanted the police commissioner, an old Giuliani pal named John Timoney hellbent on clearing the streets of junkies and crackwhores and syringes and the singularly uncivilized stench of shits shat by people unhealthy enough to excrete in places other than toilets, to fund drug treatment programs too. I wanted him to invest in recovery and rehabilitation and detox beds — with all due respect commissioner, that is actually cheaper than sending them to jail, just let me show you this RAND study! — but anyway, John Timoney had a daughter who was a junkie and a son who would five years later get busted with half a million dollars worth of weed and he was not up for this line of reasoning. "Treatment, young lady, doesn't work," John Timoney had told me in so many words.

But see, he was wrong, not because I'm pretty sure his daughter is finally clean now, because you never know when that might end. But because Jimmy, a mere eighteen months off cocaine — cocaine, which is such a seriously obnoxious drug to get into abusing — had noticed a girl crying on his way to catch the bus home from his graveyard shift and stopped to ask her why. She asked him why. "I'm a Christian man," was his meek response, and she did not think an American man had ever spoken those words so truly.

Tempered by the hangover's throbbing realism and the imperative to conclude this thing with some grand proclamation on — Jesus Christ, what was this post about? oh wait, the wage gap, seriously? — I should first state that, of course, there are a lot of truly "Christian" men and women out there, I met a lot of them visiting halfway houses and rehab centers and also, working phone sex, and while I don't really personally care to speculate as to whether the source of their kindness and compassion and humility was the same Higher Power that left the track marks or a few rogue but well-meaning neurotransmitters, I could maybe use that giant endless tangent to venture that people like to be interdependent with other people, in fact they need it, and they need to be needed, and when people suddenly cannot figure out how they are needed or who they can trust long enough to learn to need or what about their lives even really seems necessary, they sometimes do fucked-up shit like go on benders or quit their jobs and leave the workforce altogether. And when whole big swaths of the population are suddenly awarded the privilege to want things as well, as has been the general trend over the last century or so, there are going to be hiccups as everyone shuffles around and figures out for themselves that they have needs.

***
And yeah, that is obvious, but in the moment it can feel totally, like, wack, but then you step away for awhile and maybe have a beer and read what you've written and think "No my friend, your brain is what is wack, maybe look into Wellbutrin next time you contemplate leaving the workforce."

Women Are Now Equal As Victims Of Poor Economy [NY Times]

Hahaha, suck it; I got them all right. What, do you think I'd actually admit it if I didn't? Whatever, so I can name the Senate Majority Leader I still have nothing to say to you today, so you might as well take the quiz yourself.

• This week we discussed matters of national importance. Like threesomes.
• Michelle Obama and the role of a first lady actually are matters of national importance. But omg her dresses are purdy!
• Michelle doesn't wear short shorts. Chuck Bass wears short shorts!
• A bunch of idiot teenagers in Gloucester, Mass made a "pregnancy pact", and now a whole mess of 'em are up the stick. Sigh.
• A teen who is no longer pregnant: Jamie Lynn Spears. She gave birth to wee Maddie Briann yesterday.
• A Polish teen got caught in the middle of the abortion battle.

• On a lighter note, we learned how to give birth to queefs.
• We bet teh hotness Josh Peck wouldn't mind some hilarious queefing! Especially on weed.
• And it's Friday. So spend the weekend pondering the great mysteries of your life and relax…remember, days off are the dopeness, not the wackness.