Ho, Ho, Ho, Merrrry.....wait, we missed it!

After a couple of weeks of lots of holiday horror stories and "shocking" breaches of Christmas etiquette, I was a bit surprised to see that on Christmas Eve, most of the columnists didn't even touch Christmas. (Maybe they figured any train wrecks are now far beyond stopping....).

• Abby revisited the issue of reading or not reading collections of private letters between deceased relatives (I responded to this one after the original October column)
  
• Kathy and Marcy of Annie's Mailbox counseled a high school student who's being buillied about her Jolie-like "duck lips"
• Dan Savage, whom I read weekly, but rarely write about here (partly because most of his answers are a bit out of my range of expertise, and partly because when I started this blog I checked the "no adult content" box, and generally try to avoid profanity, etc.) gives a slight nod to "last minute Christmas gifts," but mostly covers the standard Savage Love grab bag of spanking, smelliness, and electro-stimulation.
• Miss Manners hits on foreclosure and telecommunications
  
• And Carolyn wrote about HPV, of all things!

Golly gee whillikers, where can a girl get a little holiday spirit, or at least a little festive forehead slapping?

• Amy hits the spot, featuring a woman (I'm guessing) who is obsessed with the fact that her relative cannot send Christmas gifts on time. The gifts always arrive eventually, but she'd apparently do away with gifts altogether rather than have them show up late. How old is she, 9? Unless there are kids thinking Santa's been run over (by a reindeer?) because the presents aren't there, what's the big friggin' deal? Amy conveys basically the same sentiment, though not in so many words.
• Prudence devotes all four of her weekly featured letters (plus the video!) to Christmas conundrums (conundra? help me, Latin speakers!). Get ready for simmering sibling entitlement, multicultural mishaps, mysterious gifts from married men, and my two favorites: absurdly political Christmas cards and prank gift wrapping that would give Wile E. Coyote a run for his money.
• Carolyn's last pre-holiday live chat also had a few doozies: gourmet cooks griping about lame holiday food, obnoxious custody arrangements, and this, my favorite one (scroll all the way down to the bottom):
  

Washington, DC: Carolyn

Any tips for surviving driving my sister from one parent's house to the other this weekend? It's a three hour trip and she commandeers my radio, criticizes my driving, and generally drives me nuts every time we're in the car. Plus, she'll be ready late and want to stop at every Starbucks we pass, which will make her have to pee. I'm anticipating the three hour drive will take roughly 4.5 with her in the car. How do I do it so we arrive at parent no. 2's house with me still in the holiday spirit?

Carolyn says: Read this, see how funny this is, and treat yourself to a foofy hot somethingorother on one if not all of the stops.

Gentle readers (to snag a phrase from Miss Manners), thanks for sticking around for year two of A Little Help Please?! Happy holidays, and see you in the new year! (unless things are boring at home, in which case I'll see you, like, tomorrow).

Higher Education

I haven't written much (anything?) about Dan Savage since, like, July, which I think is just a scheduling issue more than it is anything else: his new columns come out on Thursdays, and Thursday is when I'm really tired and lazy, and have to be at work earlier than any other day. So I end up skipping over him. And I by skipping, I mean never-getting-around-to-writing-about. Because I still read every week.

Anyway, this week's column seems as good as any to link back to--it's a summary of his latest speaking tour around several universities "out East." This is particularly appropriate because I knew nothing about Dan Savage until he came to speak at MY university several years ago, which led to my reading his entire online archive, and following the weekly updates on The Stranger's website.

At these events, students submit anonymous questions on 3x5 cards, and Dan selects the most entertaining/useful/horrifying/enlightening ones, and reads them and answers them aloud. The column features questions that he didn't get to in his speaking engagement, such as:

When did you first realize you were LGBTQ, and how did people react to that? Did you struggle to find support?

I didn't realize I was L, B, T, and Q until I arrived in Albany. And I'm not sure how friends and family are going to react to my recently discovered lesbianism, bisexuality, impending transition, and questioning status—question: now that I'm LGB and T, what outstanding Qs could there be?—but I expect they will be supportive. Just as confused as I am, but nevertheless supportive.

When I was at IWU, I didn't really have any basis of comparison for what other schools were like. Now that I go to a school 20 times its size, when I see entertainers on TV or in print that I heard speak there, I wonder what they thought of our tiny little stage in the Hansen Student Center, and if we were completely ridiculous. Ah well, how much better can a columnist or comedian do than wind up with an intelligent-yet-ridiculous audience? Seems ideal to me.

Wedding Columns Gone Wild

Not even Dan Savage can avoid vital reader questions about wedding etiquette...

Note: when I created this blog, they (um, blogger.com) asked me to indicate whether it should be identified as containing "adult" content....I didn't even think about this until I realized that Dan Savage will probably be making occasional appearances. So I decided, I'll link to him, and talk around him, or maybe use code words when necessary....but I probably won't copy and paste excerpts from his columns here, except for the very tame bits. And then, what's the point really?

This actually works out well because Dan Savage has such a nicely maintained Web site. I'm posting extended quotes from my other columnists, when relevant, because I'm not sure if the links to their columns will go bad as time goes by--but that's no problem with the extensive Savage Love archives at our fingertips. Thank God.

Advice For Amy

Here's an entertaining article I found this morning. It was written for USA Today five long years ago (ok, so it's not exactly news) when Amy Dickinson ("Ask Amy") joined the Trib to fill the hole left by Ann Landers' death. The author, Emily Toth, gives a bit of insight into Amy's colorful background (reporter? lounge singer? single mother?) and also offers a devoted and affectionate tribute to AL, explaining just why she was so darn good.

In the last 5 years, Amy has definitely held her own--she's still not so "pithy," as the article points out, but she doesn't beat around the bush. She's fresh and entertaining but consistent, which I think is vital--you don't want every answer to sound the same, but you do want to understand and be able to anticipate your advisor's values and attitudes toward various issues--you need to know it's the same person, the one you trust, writing back each morning. I love her, though I don't always agree with her. (She's never printed any of my argumentative responses, alas).

Toth pokes fun at Amy's apparent WASP-ishness--the best advice-givers have always been Jewish, she claims, and it's hard to argue with her. But you can't deny that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to say, "Sure, I'll pull up a chair to Ann Landers' 56-year-old desk and give it a whirl."

I speak figuratively of course--Ann Landers' real desk is owned and used by Dan Savage--true story.

And, what? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a column called "Miss Mentor"?? I've got to check this out.

Ah, Love

There's no better way to introduce you to Cheryl Lavin (image from www.chicagotribune.com), author of "Tales from the Front," than by giving you a peek at Thursday's column. Her long-running feature on the challenges of finding and keeping love caters both to couples, who typically complain about each other's altered physical appearance after years of marriage, and singles, inevitably bitter, who list their "nice" qualities and ask why they can't find a date.

In fact, my one (to date) successful (as in, printed) advice column submission was related to this very issue. I gave a particularly obnoxious "nice guy" what-for and she printed it(!), thoughtfully providing me with a secure alias ("Beth") to protect me from...the niceness he would surely inflict on me, if he knew where to find me.

Since then, I've always felt a little bond with Cheryl (may I call her Cheryl?)--a bond that was solidified this morning when I read her headline:

"Unending discussions about nice guys and overweight wives"

...and snorted. As long as she's aware of it, I'll go with it! I also admire her boldness (apathy?) in throwing together these two topics that have nothing to do with one another except that they create the most sheer volume in her virtual mailbag.

I have to believe that this is really annoying for columnists....for the most part, they get asked the same questions, over and over and over and over again. Usually I (or anyone!) can guess how the columnist is going to respond without even reading the answer...unfortunately, that response is never "Look at yesterday's column, dumbass."

Instead, columnists exhibit a number of different approaches to this issue, from mocking the readers with a wry-but-weary headline, as Cheryl did, to abbreviating their answers with a handy, versatile acronym. This technique was made famous by Ann Landers (MYOB/mind your own business) and perfected by Dan Savage (DTMFA/dump the motherfucker already).

One final note on Cheryl: she is notorious for printing whole columns made up of readers' anecdotes, with little to no actual advice or even, um, writing, of her own. She did it with mine over a year ago, and she did it this morning. Does this even count as a column anymore?

And could this blog be any drier? I haven't written for an audience in awhile...it might take some time to refine my, um, voice. Please bear with me!