Writer Vixen Explains It All

TMI

Best of Writer Vixen

People are always telling me more than I want to know. This happens so frequently that I wonder if my face somehow sets up an expectation of sympathy and understanding that my personality can’t deliver on.

Waiting in line is a particularly hazardous undertaking. The bank, the post office and the grocery store offer endless opportunities to trip a TMI land mine. Like people in movie theaters who forget that they’re not sitting in their living rooms—where they apparently take phone calls during movies and talk back to the screen—something about standing still somehow causes people to forget the concept of social boundaries and prompts them to indiscriminately share their personal lives.

Or maybe it’s just something about standing in proximity to me. Clearly inspired by my utter lack of interest, strangers constantly launch into long-winded stories about their marriages, their relationships, their sex lives (or lack thereof), their aches and pains, their political opinions, their mothers.

Banning the Burqa

Best of Writer Vixen

At President Sarkozy’s request, the French parliament has established a bipartisan panel to study ways of restricting the burqa in French society, including an outright ban on wearing it in public. Calling the garment “a sign of subservience [and] debasement” for women, Sarkozy boldly declared that the burqa “is not welcome in France.”

Host to Europe’s largest Muslim population—about 5 million people—French society has long debated whether the garment is an affront to women's rights and to the nation’s hard-won secular tradition. Although it’s been outlawed in schools and other public buildings since 2004, Muslims in France are increasingly adopting the trend. So the rest of world is watching the escalating debate with keen interest, and many western nations are asking the same questions as France.

If You Can't Get a Life, at Least Get a Clue

Best of Writer Vixen: Originally posted May 2007

I had lunch at Café Rouge in Berkeley on Saturday afternoon (still the best cheeseburger in the entire Bay Area). As I sat at the bar flipping through Sue Ostler’s Relationships that Rock!—research for my latest literary idea about a series on successful singledom—a demanding, nicotine-edged voice intruded on my reveries.

“Relationships that Rock! . . . Is that a book about marriage?” The voice insisting on my attention emanated from the expensively dressed, perfectly manicured woman of a certain age seated to my right. She was washing down the last of her linguine primavera with the last of her second martini.

“Actually,” I replied, “It’s about being happily single.”

“Being single sucks!” she declared loudly.

Embarrassed for her, I looked away as I sipped my Diet Coke. Undeterred, she turned to the 30-something bartender with the trim beard who was trying to suppress a smile as he cleared away her plate. “I’ve been single since 1968 so I should know what I’m talking about!”

Paris in Prison—That's Hot!

America’s favorite celebutante got grounded.

Paris was a bad girl. You might think that repeatedly driving drunk, ignoring probation restrictions, and then—repeatedly—driving without a license would merit an actual punishment.

Instead, she has to stay alone in her room 23 hours a day for 23 days. No laptop. No cell phone, BlackBerry, or television. Well, there is one TV on the unit, but she doesn’t have the remote.

Paris has repeatedly complained that she’s being treated differently. And she actually has a point. Anyone else would have been arrested and had their car impounded the first time they were caught driving with a suspended license. Anyone else, upon repeatedly ignoring the restrictions placed on her, would have been sent to jail back in March. Anyone else would have served their time in the general population among the other 2,200 overcrowded and fungus-ridden (they give you a pamphlet) inmates housed dormitory-style at the Century Regional Detention Facility.

Instead, she’s confined to a private cell, minus her hair extensions—it's The Simple Life!