Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Okay so here is the ultimate irony: Me, aka Wordy Van Wordster, could not use my words due to having no voice. I went to BlogHer '08 with a bad case of the croup. In grownups this is called laryngitis and meant I was often so hoarse I had to use hand signals and sign language. Here are some important and good lessons from that: a. Women are awesome at interpreting and reading minds. If you have to go without a voice, do so in a group of women. They will know exactly what you mean, and if not? b. They will have pen and paper in their purse so you can write. c. Also, women are fabulous at covering for you and keeping up a good conversation so that even if your sole contribution is impassioned nodding, you still feel like it was the best chat ever. d. All waiters in San Francisco can read lips. I had a ridiculously good time at BlogHer '08. Rumors of (silent) girlie squealing and excited hugging were not at all exaggerated. It's lucky I lack almost any social hangups or filte...

Case in point...Jami Gertz then and now... Bret Easton Ellis' book Less than Zero exploded into our culture in 1986, earning him fame, a movie deal and shining a light on a generation and culture that revealed itself, through Ellis's words, as self-indulgent, pointless and degenerate. Or so the preceding generation presumed. As all preceding generations presume when watching the follies of the youths. The mid-80s brought a crackdown on the party lifestyle, just in time for me to hit the main party age. In 1984, I watched high school seniors vehemently protest two things: making the drug X illegal and enacting The National Minimum Drinking Age Act . Elders may have been impressed to finally see Gen X care about something passionately, but I'm sure they felt it was too bad that the inspiration was drugs and alcohol (very ironically, I am sure, in a fair number of self-righteous cases). Still, thanks to Nancy Reagan we learned to Just Say No and thanks to Tipper Gore we could...