The Dining Room Table

Pretty much everything about my life is great, except our dining room table.

We don't really have a dining room, just a space where our long living room runs into the kitchen, where the wall color changes from "Wilted Spinach" to "Fake Blood." Here, a laminate-pasted particle board and aluminum rectangle mocks my only real family value.

When I was growing up, we didn't sing together or go to church, and early efforts at family meetings by my stepdad were quickly abandoned; but we ate together every night. The only way to get out of eating with the family was to be eating with someone else's family -- it wasn't enough to simply have food, it had to be an intergenerational experience involving food cooked in a kitchen. I mostly hated the obligation, until one day a good friend who had (I imagined) a perfect family told me he only ate with his brother and parents on holidays and stuff -- most nights, his mom left tacos or something in the kitchen of their three-story, planned community house, and they ate on their own. Alone, I guess. And suddenly dinner together, across from each other, represented the kind of solid, stable, supportive structure I'd always yearned for. I still hurried from the table, but sometimes not so quickly.

And so it makes sense to me now that even though we were poor, my mom spent $200 on a heavy, dark table at a garage sale, shortly after marrying my stepdad. We were only four, but there was room for six at the least and 10 or 12 when both leaves were put in, for holidays or birthday parties. The chairs had high, carved backs, and the table legs curved down to heavy canine feet. Someone once put a pan down with nothing but a thin tablecloth underneath, so now there's a white moon burned into the top -- something painful at the time, now with a sort of sweet history.

I think when I moved out before junior year of high school, my family stopped eating together. My mom was a vegetarian anyway, my stepdad all meat and potatoes, and he and my sister never got along anyway. Without me as some sort of equalizer, I guess the structure seemed too flimsy. Even with the heavy, dark table.

We don't exactly have a dining room, and we're not really a family, but Brian and I still eat, often together. Like my mom, I think it's not enough to just have food -- dinner should be a communal experience. I want placemats and place settings, and a pan burning a crescent into the wood. I want to clear the table before dinner, not just shove clean a space for my cereal in the morning. It's not the 22 minutes spent sitting, or the pasta, but the feeling of being with friends at a bar, or at church, if you believe, or even reading a book - just being connected to some other human presence in a specific moment.

So I've been looking on craigslist for a big, heavy wooden table, something dark, no mid-90s oak with padded wheeled chairs, nothing "Scandinavian" or minimalist, and definitely no metal and glass structures. It might be misguided to imagine a carved wooden rectangle will bring with it the gravitas of family, but it will be something -- at the least, it will help define the space between giant TV and kitchen.

Yesterday, over a fancy cheese plate, Melissa asked me to be a bridesmaid! According to the fun little bridesmade guidebook she presented me with, this involves many responsibilities. Primary among them: keeping things fun and fabulous. The book actually talks about being fabulous, specifically. I will try my best. Brian will be a groomsman for Nate; I'm not sure if fabulous is an explicit part of the deal or not.

If they go with their current pick for venue -- The Edgewater -- I think fabulousness is inevitable. It looks gorgeous and (according to Brian, via Nate) has an outrageous minimum charge: easily more than my salary, pre-taxes.

I'm very excited to get to help with colors and dresses and flowers and whatever Melissa wants second opinions on. With her and Nate's good taste (and her parent's apparent resources), it sounds like it will be an amazing time.

Escaping Halo 3 to the IMA last night, I knew the evening TV would be a little different than my usual gym accompaniement of the Today show. But I had no idea how weird TV had become. I always thought VH1 was the more mature music channel, a step above the Real World and TRL (though who doesn't miss those two months of middle school when we could've set our watched by the regularity of KC and JoJo at number one every afternoon?).

Last night, VH1 followed an hour of Britney's most bizarre year ever (how did I miss her frenzied, bald, umbrella- weilding car smashing incident?) with The Pick-Up Artist.

A motley crew of awkward-but-seemingly-nice-enough guys role-play picking up hotties per the pseudo academic guidance of the magician and "former" nerd extraordinaire Mystery. That is his name, and, apropos I suppose, he slinks around all ruffled and feathered in a costume of flouncy shirts, cowboy boots, large hats, tight pants, and goatee -- in essence, dolled-up like a pirate too flamboyant even for Disney's Caribbean. One of few men for whom wearing an eye patch or a paisley ascot would seem more reasonable than not.

He also speaks very creepily in a slow, calm voice with big words, medium-sized social theory, and diminutive intentions. Possibly the magician is hypnotizing his audience with his uber-controlled speach?

I don't know that any individual recommendation he gave was particularly degrading or sleazy. His advice on body language seemed valid, his statement that there are no good pick-up lines correct, and his directives on approaching women in a nonthreatening way was very studied. But therein is Issue #1: people have been seducing and charming each other for centuries, but for the most part it's done through a genuine connection or personal charisma, not through a con man's formulaic checklist of do's and don'ts.

Issue #2: It's a how-to show for men about picking up women. Not for people to picking-up other people, not for establishing a good relationship, or meeting the right person, or any of the countless other issues people impose on the very natural act of mating. It establishes a clear gendered power structure via subtle manipulations, it promotes deception and objectification, and it pretends any two people can successfully play out the same prescribed interaction. The show is no more based in reality than Mystery's costumes are based in real style, and the men following him are as duped as the women they target.