America thrives on polite fiction, stories we tell ourselves to justify our thoughts and actions. A few weeks back I was at a management workshop. The lady running the class said something to the effect of:

Employees cry when you confront them because they’re being passive-aggressive. And by backing off, you’re teaching them that it’s okay to cry when confronted on their bad behavior.

Wow. I mean, way to swipe everyone with the Giant Paintbrush of Manipulativeness. How about this?

Employees cry because some of them were bullied by authority figures and are programmed to be submissive to halt perceived attacks.

Employees cry because they’re terrified of failure and can only “read between the lines” and chalk up everything you say as a huge, job-threatening loss.

Employees cry because everything else in their life is going to total shit and this is the last straw.

Employees cry because they’re human beings, and human beings don’t want to be told they’re bad.

Some people are really manipulative. But most? Handle with care.

When my husband and I started dating, we only went out to lunch. It was all we could afford. (We still go to lunch every Saturday. Gotta keep doing what you did when you met.)

Frugality is a value that we cherish and share. Every now and then, I like to make a mental checklist of what money means, to put it all in perspective. For me, money is important to:

• Put gas in my car to visit my family across town
• Buy fresh food in season and occasional nice things like wine and chocolate
• Keep up my house so the roof doesn’t leak and the pipes don’t corrode
• Be able to take care of my dogs when they get sick or try to kill each other
• Travel to far-flung places and experience new people, music and food
• Get the occasional haircut so I don’t end up looking like Cousin It*
• Buy technology tools and musical instruments, as technology and music are extremely important to me
• Socialize once or twice a week

Things I could absolutely not give a rip about include:

• Retail therapy — buying stuff to make myself feel better
• “Look at me, I’ve MADE IT!” stuff. Nothing you buy will make you interesting. Also, we can smell your debt.
• Television. There is nothing on cable TV that is worth $60 a month.
• Eating out every day. Sandwiches are fine.
• Fashionable clothes. I will never be a stylish person. I’m ok with that.
• A new car. Driving the one I own into the ground. It gets me from A to B. It’s fine.

I’m hoping that in a few years, I will have my net savings at a level where I can sustain the freedom to work for myself (only as necessary) and do all the little projects that have been building in my head. At the very least, I want a year off. There’s too many cool things to do to watch life pass you by.

What’s important to you, money-wise? What’s not?

*In college, I did not cut my hair and I looked like Cousin It.

Cintra Wilson writes a biting, if meandering column on J.C. Penney moving into Manhattan. Specifically snarks about the plus-sized mannequins in a typically size-2 town.

Popular woman’s blog Jezebel comments that some of her observations are nasty, anti-fat and inappropriate for the New York Times. Fair complaint.

Then all hell breaks loose, wherein a chorus of seemingly educated people (NYT readers? Jezebel fans?) bulldoze the author in her comments, even after she apologizes. Such attacks include:

• Plenty of anti-thin smack, because everyone who is a size 2 is a starving, self-absorbed masochist
• Attacks on the author’s hair and face
• Attacks on the author’s femininity, or lack thereof
• Ageist crap because the author is not in fact 25
• Plenty of good old-fashioned c-words, w-words and other words that specifically demean women
• Conflation galore between Cintra and all other evil hate groups in the world

The lesson, class? It’s still OK in 2009 America to marginalize people if they’re Mean. Oh, what a wonderful opportunity to lose our usual polite repression and let the sexism and ageism all hang out — she threw the stones first, Mom! Plus, she may be a Rich, which means she never gets hurt or sad. Ever.

Still a lot of Ugly in the masses, and it ain’t all on the outside.

That’s what my friend Nick says to me after I mention on Twitter that I’m really done with Facebook.

He’s right. This is about the fourth or fifth community that I’ve invested a lot of time in, then decided that it’s not a real “community”. It’s a bunch of people being as mundane as humanly possible. Sorry, guys, I realize I’m not an MIT-faculty-caliber intellectual, either, but I really do not care about the trivial details of your kids, cats, desk jobs or drinking escapades. I just can’t.

Twitter’s getting on my nerves, too — smarter people, still a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Bottom line is, I want more than small talk. Maybe I’ll go back to… emailing people.

Dear Sheriff Joe Arpaio,

As a Mesa resident, I implore you to do something about prostitution being run under the guise of massage parlors.

Why you? For two reasons:

1. You have taken visible steps to combat street-walking prostitutes. I believe this has driven the girls to find other venues for work, including massage parlors.

2. Mesa has made it very clear that businesses operate under a different legal system than individuals. Businesses pay taxes, individuals do not. I live behind commercial property and they happily arrested a young man who was blasting his car stereo behind our house each Sunday morning. When I called in the bar behind our house for leaving their doors open while playing live music, the acidic community officer responded, “Whadaya want me to do, arrest the bar?” Businesses are getting away with crime in Mesa. Period. I don’t know if it’s due to corruption or just underfunding, but they are.

Don’t get me wrong — I think prostitution is not a societal evil. There are hungry women and strikingly marginalized men, and that’s the way they meet each other’s needs. I don’t object to consenting adults doing such business. Here’s what I object to:

Thirteen-year-old girls being smuggled into the country and imprisoned in massage parlors.

When we see children walking the streets, we do not tolerate it. Well, who is screaming and yelling for the ones silently desperate behind business fronts?

Do you really think that it’s a coincidence that massage parlors have increased by 60 percent in Mesa over the last three years? I promise you our backs and necks have not become that much more sore.

Something dirty is going on. If we’re going to be the Valley’s red light district, regulate the goddamned industry. We know that pay-for-favors is happening:

The owner professed shock when the detectives told him his employees had admitted giving sexual favors to customers for an extra price. The owner said he’d heard about other places that did that, but denied any such activity at his business.

With no way to charge him, they told him to keep his nose clean and let him go.

…

Seeing no signs of business, the detectives headed across the parking lot to another parlor in the same strip mall.

The lights and signs out front indicated it was open, but the door was locked and no one answered after repeated knocks.

Fitzgerald and Heckel said it’s not unusual for illicit parlors to suddenly close in the middle of the day when they see police coming. They said many operations have surveillance cameras that let them know police are approaching.

Because of Mesa’s gross administrative ineptitude and inability to protect its city from harm, we cannot be certain that minors and trafficked immigrants are not being exploited against their will. So please go in there, Sheriff Joe, and bust this up. Nobody is going to fault you for protecting teenagers and stopping human trafficking. You would be a hero to many.