Best Of Dais

10 Alter Egos from the Baby Name Tinder App

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I like Dais. It’s gender neutral. It’s fun to say. It’s very punnable. It’s unique. My mom already uses it. For a very confused gender fence-sitter, it does the job. I’m writing under it, directing under it, even my professors use it now. But sometimes I wonder, if I went full-time boy and transitioned completely…what kind of boy would I be? What name would suit that?

In order to find some answers, I downloaded Kinder, which is like Tinder, but for baby names. I selected my categories: English (England), English (New Zealand), English (United States), English (Australia), English (Celebrity), English (Celebrity kids) Irish (Ireland) and Mythology. And then I got to swiping.

As I kept swiping left on name after name, I imagined who I could possibly be with a name like…

Jaxson Johnston

Likes: Miller High Life, saying “cool cool cool no doubt no doubt no doubt” and thinking it’s my cool thing that I made up when it’s clearly Andy Samberg’s

Dislikes: Professors who don’t understand my “worldview,” Girls who post selfies with Lana Del Rey lyrics as the caption

Twitter Handle:@jaxandviolence

Chandler Johnston

Likes: Those belts that have like…crabs embroidered on them, Huge Teas from Cookout, going to Five Points on the weekend, Hard Rock Cafe T Shirts, The Doors

Dislikes: FRIENDS. MATTHEW PERRY. BEING CALLED CHANANDLER BONG.

Twitter handle: @notsarcastic

Flannery Johnston

Likes: Pat Conroy novels, Instagramming pictures of lakes, poetry slams, calling girls on Tinder “madam,” quote tweeting Trump’s tweets with a cutting quote from The Office.

Dislikes: Southern Gothic Short Stories, STEM majors, peacocks, Starbucks, people who call me “Flan”

Twitter handle: @hardtofind

Caden Johnston

Likes: The collected works of Charlie Kaufman, Folding Ideas video essays, complaining about how feminism is ruining Hollywood, Fred Armisen

Dislikes: Country music, the Marvel franchise, people who say they will be a “smidge” late and then a “smidge” turns out to be a half hour, Oscar bait

Twitter handle: @cadenable

Archie Johnston

Likes: Quoting That 70’s Show in conversation, highlighting my hair, wearing button downs over t shirts, retweeting tweets about how terrible straight men are without a hint of self awareness

Dislikes: Riverdale as a concept, people who wear shorts even in the winter, Lifetime movies, girls who don’t like being called “Fair Maiden”

Twitter handle: @IdesofArch

Jax Johnston

Likes: playing bass clarinet, tweeting pictures of tattoos with the caption “one day…” even though I’m terrified of needles, hats, trying to make people call me “JJ” or “J Squared” when I’m feeling fancy.

Dislikes: wearing shoes, banana pancakes, fake punks, buttoning shirts, the Establishment, Mark Zuckerberg, reading books, the Ras Trent SNL sketch

Twitter Handle: @JaxPoetic

Mathew Johnston

Likes: Daily Mass, snapchatting pictures of trees, John Mulaney, retweeting stuff from The Dodo, harboring a lot of crushes on girls that I “love like a sister” and encouraging them to pray for their future husband.

Dislikes: Girls going for terrible boys when the perfect boy is right in front of them all along, readers who mess up location names during Mass, singing hymns

Twitter Handle: @nojustonet

Kyler Johnston

Likes: quote tweeting things with #hottake just to get more attention, yoga, journaling, those hoodies that look like they’re dirty even tho they are clean, being contrarian in philosophy classes, making up deep quotes and crediting them to “anonymous”

Dislikes: phonies, people who let others’ opinions get to them, meat, the way the world is just…so online all of the time, labels

Twitter Handle: @touchtheky

Ricky Johnston

Likes: Bo Burnham, vine compilations, tweeting screenshots of my own twitter draft folder, claiming to be soooo drunk when I’m completely sober, podcasts, karaoke

Dislikes: Ellen DeGeneres and everything she stands for and has been involved in, she knows what she did.

Twitter handle:@yeahareallygoodbook

Arie Johnston

Likes: Attention from girls named Lauren, stock car racing, stealing kisses, slowly building up someone’s trust and then tearing their world apart in front of millions, Arizona, mailing journals to my ex after they dumped me, real estate

Dislikes: decision making, commitment, perfectly good 22 year old girls with eyes like the amber the mosquito got trapped in in Jurassic Park

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Best Of Dais

We Should All Be Working In Aprons

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Chefs do it, artists do it, why can’t writers?

I write in bed.

(It is a beautiful library, I do love it all 5 times a year I visit to print scripts)

I know, I know, I go to a beautiful school with a beautiful library there for the express purpose of being a quiet place to work. But I don’t work in the quiet. I usually have a record playing, or Doctor Who scores, or, most often, Netflix playing in another tab.

If I were to write in the library it would require getting out of bed, putting on tights, then pants, then probably my binder, then a flannel, then a number of ponchos and scarves, then my combat boots, then packing my very heavy weighted blanket and laptop and filling up my yeti cup. It’s a lot of effort to sit in a less comfortable chair for a few hours and then packing it all up again just to go to bed.

Not to mention it’s now 2:08 am, my creative schedule spikes after midnight. So I write in bed.

It sucks.

Mike Birbiglia said in his seminal work Sleepwalk With Me that the key to good sleep was making sure your bed was just a space for sleeping. My bed is my space for everything. I don’t know what a work life balance is.

Enter: The Apron.

I’m not going to convince myself to get out of bed to write, that’s not happening. But I will do whatever is possible to keep my Sleeping Time and Writing Time separate.

When it’s time to write, I turn on my heating pad and put it at my feet, kick off my duvet and just rock the weighted blanket, and soon, when the mailroom at my college processes it, I’ll put on an apron.

Artists wear aprons, chefs wear aprons, dads wear humorous aprons that say “Kiss the Cook,” it’s the perfect outer-uniform to assume a Job.

An apron is the lowest maintenance way to go from non work mode into work mode. It’s an article of clothing that is purely functional. Just the clear barrier I need to go from Work Dais to Fun Dais. So then, the question remains: which apron?

I could go with the canvas-y ones that GBBO contestants wear, or a pinstripe Bradley-Cooper-in-that-Bourdain-show number, or the yellow ruffle daisy print one I had as a child that serves as a nostalgic metaphor for my misplaced femininity.

But no, one night while watching Bon Appetit videos I saw my dream apron: a single piece of fabric, crossed in the back. A quick google led me to The Strategist, a vertical of NYMag, my media boyfriend I fight with but still love.  Lo and behold: this linen blend Japanese apron:

And it has POCKETS! Pockets!!!

Seriously, try it. Put on an apron before you it at your desk job. Taking it off at the end of the day, though a simple gesture, is enough of a ritual to trick your brain into going out of work mode. Plus, it keeps your outfit cute, or makes a casual ensemble look a little more put together.

Before you say “But Dais! Writing in bed is still bad!” I live in a dorm. A single room. My idea of a home office is moving to the hard plastic chair next to my record player. I wrote this in bed, I wrote a play in bed, I wrote a piece my nemesis in nonfiction class called “gimmicky” in bed, I’m okay. When I get rich enough to live in more than one room, then I’ll try moving. But for now, I’ll write in bed in my apron.

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A Catholic Review of Janelle Monae’s “PYNK”

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From Torch, the Catholic Music Reviewer:

Janelle Monae, known for often wearing suits and men’s clothes, takes a comfortingly feminine lens to her new video for PYNK. Cruising through what looks like the hills between Victorville and Barstow (color-corrected to be pink) in a pink Corvette hovercar with her own personal #girlgang, they pull up to a restaurant with a sign out front: GRRLS EAT FREE AND NEVER LEAVE.

Already, this music video is promoting generosity between women: they are offering to feed and house any woman who needs it.

Monae then appears in uber-feminine frilled pink pants, meant to blur the line between masculine and feminine, because they may be pink and frilly, but they are still pants, and therefore masculine. She sings “Pink, like the inside of your baby” honoring the sacred role of women to be mothers. “Pink, behind all of the doors, crazy” obviously referring to a woman’s terrain: the home, and whatever “craziness” it may include. “Pink, like the tongue that goes down, maybe” in reference to the tongues of fire from Pentecost.

Tessa Thompson, close friend of Monae, appears between her legs, a celebration of the divine feminine and the power of birth.

“If you got the blue, we got the pink” in the chorus emphasizes the role of Eve as a counterpart to Adam.

The rest of the video is a blur of women celebrating their close friendship.

Exercising together…

Having a sleepover and discussing biology…

There are also a number of images that refer to penetration, perhaps the penetration of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost, as referred to previously?

There is a frankly worrying sign labelled “PUSSY POWER” but fortunately a cat was shown previously, so this is a clever joke meant to subvert a political message.

DISCUSSIONS TO HAVE WITH CHILDREN:

Before showing this video, talk with your child about Theology of the Body and celebrating the female form without undermining the Church’s teachings.

There are a number of images referring to Pentecost, so perhaps show this to any Confirmandi you may know. How does Confirmation mix the blue of the profane with our mundane pink?

Rating: 6/10

Catchy, but it’s no Oceans.

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Best Of Dais

“Sierra Burgess is A Loser” is Watered Down John Waters

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It’s a testament to the movies of the eighties, but all the wrong parts.

Every year since I’ve started college, I write a longer and more complex version of the same paper: Comparing the Adapturgical Approaches of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on Film. In research for this, I watch a lot of teen movies. Like, a lot. Even the terrible ones. I focused mainly on Just One of the Guys, the 1986 Twelfth Night adaptation that turned the Shakespearean play into a sex comedy. I wrote it off as a product of its time, how it was full of sexist jokes and used breasts as a punchline. It’s just what was considered okay at the time.

That’s what I want to do with Sierra Burgess is a Loser, the Netflix movie based on Cyrano de Bergerac that I’ve been waiting for for a whole year. I want to say “oh, well, transphobic jokes weren’t as big of a deal then.” “Making fun of the disabled was still seen as okay.” But the entire crux of the movie rests on smartphones. This is all too modern of a modern adaptation.

And by “adaptation” I mean “A movie where one of the characters kinda has a similar name and role to a character from literature.” If you are looking for an actual adaptation of Cyrano, I’ll point you to The Adventures of Serena Berg, a queer webseries adaptation with an Asian trans woman lead. I thought this review would be picking apart the adaptation choices, but the title and the overarching concept of the plot are the only relics from Rostand’s work.

The screenwriter of the film defended her use of the first transphobic joke, saying she needed to use it to demonize the villain, and it doesn’t represent her personal views. Excuse my frankness but that doesn’t matter a bit. I don’t care if I’m hearing transphobic bullshit from the concept of evil incarnate, it still hurts. I’m trying to learn screenwriting myself, and already I know there are far more appropriate (and less lazy) ways to communicate villainy.

One of the main scenes that made me think of old 80s movies was the scene where Sierra and her friend Dan run into love interest Jamey and his little brother. Sierra refuses to speak, because Jamey would recognize her voice, so Dan introduces her as “my deaf sister” and Sierra clumsily signs something. Jamey, who knows ASL, inquires why her name is “Shit Pizza” in ASL before introducing her to his brother, who is actually deaf. That whole thing is a mess top to bottom, not to mention Dan taking advantage of Sierra’s temporary muteness by loudly proclaiming her a “hermaphrodite.”

It’s obvious that the movie is inspired by 80s movies. I mean, heck, Sierra’s parents are played by Alan Ruck and Lea Thompson. The movie ends in a character by character freeze frame epilogue. But this isn’t the eighties. No character, no matter how relatable, can hide under a car and kiss her crush without consent in this day and age without some pushback. Regardless of how many cute animal pics they send to each other (which, by the way, is not how teenagers nowadays flirt, but showing them sending actual memes would date the movie down to a specific month, such is the life cycle of the meme.)

The movie was supposed to be a triumph for girls who are plus sized. But I’m afraid it could be interpreted as a triumph for people who believe romantic love is deserved to them because of a disadvantage. She lies, deceives, hacks into someone’s private social media account, does whatever she can to keep her crush thinking she’s thin. That’s not self love, that’s shame, shame that is magically fixed by her writing a song about how she’s not a rose, she’s a sunflower (which, by the way, is a poem I literally wrote in 11th grade.) This Ditty Ex Machina is another lazy scriptwriting trick to make everyone forgive her, even if she betrayed their trust over and over again.

It’s not a totally awful movie. Noah Centineo’s character, Jamey, is one of the better written love interests of the genre. He’s insecure, loves his brother, and has all the “football player with a heart of gold” personality traits CMM had in A Cinderella Story. He’s the perfect antidote to toxic masculinity I would want boys to have. The casting is excellent, and the actors did the best with the script they were given, save some terrible fake flute playing. Sure, it’s predictable, but predictable is the point.

So the question remains: how do we pay tribute to the older movies we love while keeping the smart writing we expect today? It’s easy. Take an element you enjoy. Is it problematic? Then don’t use it. Is it not? Go for it. It’s not that difficult, in fact, it’s realistic to make a character mean and still woke, just look at leftist Twitter.

Even Regina George reminded Karen she couldn’t just ask people why they’re white. And she’s famously a Mean Girl.

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