Dear Amritsar,
The other day, somebody posted a message on my blog that I wasn’t fit to lick lonelygirl15’s boots, and, even though I have no idea who that is, I got the distinct impression that I was being insulted. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I consulted Emily Post’s Etiquette: Manners for a New World. What she had to say was ve
Hey, Babe,
Let me stop you right there. You need to stop flossing with the laces of your boyfriend’s tennis shoes, drop the dead donkey and programme your VCR to self-destruct if you ever watch Tom Cruise in any of his Mission Impossible reboots. Sometimes the right thing to do is the most obvious.
But, Emily Post? Seriously? You know, her first columns about interpersonal relationships were written on stone tablets, right? Seriously. The first question she answered was what to do when somebody sets your toga on fire in a vomitorium! (Her advice – do not get creative about putting out the fire, water works well – made sense, but still…) I know a lot of people adore her, but Emily Post was no lady! Did you know that she used to spit on the crowds that came to hear her play? That’s right! Then, she stabbed her girlfriend Nancy to death, and died of a drug overdose before the trial started! And, she wore white before Easter! Not only that, but…umm…sorry, but I think I may have confused Emily Post with Sid Vicious. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I did. Still, look at her record! This was the woman who told a distraught fremblotte from the planet Aristachus IV that if she wanted her griblings to stop making blastcytes at the dinner table, she/he/they/slothrop should serve garssloupes without first removing the crayatons! I know, right? You serve your griblings garssloupes without first removing the crayatons, and they’ll just drop their moobleys right at the dinner fop. Then, then you have a real problem! (I would have advised her/him/them/slothrep to drop the griblings down a duragizer until they behaved, but nobody asked me…) Heavens to Mergatroid (Bert Lahr’s second wife, not the villain from the ayeayePhone app Star Blap: The Seriously Condensed Adventure), how can you trust somebody who gives such unhelpful advice? Look, I’m not saying Emily Post killed my dog. Dale Carnegie’s dirty paw prints were all over that one – he took influencing people way too seriously. I’m just saying that if you have a choice between somebody who died when computers took up a room and had bugs that were not metaphors for programming errors but were actual insects, or somebody whose entire career has been on the Internet, well, who do you think would be a better guide to life in the modern media-saturated world? You don’t have to answer that – it would be me. Of course it would. Let me give you another example: according to Emily Post, you shouldn’t talk on a cellphone while walking down the street because you might accidentally walk into a stranger. Ooh. Wouldn’t that be awkward – walking into a stranger? Now, if you had asked me, I would say that you shouldn’t talk on a cellphone while walking down the street because the low level radiation will slowly turn your brain into cerebral stew! Walking into somebody or feeding a family of four (non-zombies) on brain bouillabaisse – honestly, which do you think would be more awkward? Alright, I may have been a little melodramatic, there – the science doesn’t really support the cortical dinner course conceit. Still, that just proves my point. Emily Post was writing in a simpler time, when you could pass off folk wisdom as something that had worked for millennia just because it had worked for millennia. Today, we back up our opinions with science. This gives modern advice columnists a solid grounding that previous generations of advice givers just didn’t have. Even when we get the science wrong. Or, the science itself is proven wrong. Fortunately, in those cases, better science comes along to bail us out! It’s time non-sciencey Emily Post passed the torch to a new generation of advice columnist. And, if she isn’t willing to do that, I will wrestle the torch from her 50 year old corpse!
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: maybe I shouldn’t write columns after drinking a dozen Fin Grizzlies, but advice columning is a vicious game. A vicious game. Mostly vicious. A game, maybe not so much.