Love and hate are abstract, but what happens when you love and hate is not abstract.

Twice this week I've heard women talk about ex husbands / boyfriends / partners as having been "in control of the remote" or "the one controlling the channel changer." I was turning this metaphor over in my head during shavasana today. It implies that the men were in control of the relationship, but it also implies that the women think of themselves or their lives as being like television. Whoever controls the remote is more or less a person sitting on the sofa and this is supposed to symbolize agency? I understand the idea, but as a mechanism for conceptualizing agency and romantic relationships, I find it a bit disturbing. What would be a positive relationship, one where you each get to use the channel changer equally?

Last of the famous

I watched "America's Next Top Model" last week and that show about the Pussycat Dolls, who, I'll admit, I'd never even heard of until seeing the promotions for the show, although I did hear the "don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me" (which I often mis-speak as "don't you wish your boyfriend was hot like me") song in Oman on New Years Eve at a bar full of equal parts rich British girls and their pretty boy boyfriends from Dubai spending a fashionable holiday in quaint, nearby Muscat, men in various forms of Islamic dress, prostitutes, and engineers (both men and women) from India. The dance floor was crowded and the grope-factor was high, so I stayed away. My kind hosts bought me a monstrously expensive scotch, which I didn't really drink because everyone else was super blasted, and I designated myself the designated driver.