You Want Weird? We’ll Show You Weird! You Want Psychologically Twisted? We Got That, Too!

Parents are still subsidizing their adult children (this coming after we learned that parents subsidize their adult children):

At 23, Jason McGuinness lives a postcollege life in Manhattan that is very nearly typical. He works as a media research analyst, making about $30,000 a year. Sharing a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up building with a roommate on the Upper East Side, his portion of the rent is $1,100 monthly.

The walls are decorated with pennants and posters from Syracuse University, his alma mater. He orders takeout dinners, carries peanut-butter sandwiches to work and occasionally takes in a Mets game with friends.

And like many of his peers — educated, employed, urban-dwelling young adults — he receives monthly assistance from his parents, in the form of a $300 check and the payment of his cellphone bill.

. . .

Middle-income parents earning less than $72,600 a year can expect to spend $190,980 on a child through age 17, according to 2005 government statistics. But Dr. Schoeni said that parents can plan on paying almost 25 percent of that amount again over the next 17 years, or $42,280 in 2005 dollars. This sum includes higher education but also much more.

Parents pay $2,323 a year to help support children 25 and 26 years old, said [University of Michigan associate professor of economics and public policy] Dr. [Bob] Schoeni, and $1,556 annually for offspring 33 and 34. (All amounts are in 2001 dollars and reflect support to children living both independently and at home.)

All of which is well and good — until you hear that the adult children of David Maysles* are also subsidized, which is when it just gets really post-modernly weird:

While some parents earmark contributions for food and rent, others expect their children to take care of the basics while they pick up special expenses like a vacation.

“I’m enjoying watching them spend their inheritance,” Judy Maysles, a real estate agent in Manhattan, said about the support she provides to two grown children, John, 30, who works with a hedge fund in New Jersey, and Celia, 27, a filmmaker. “I’d rather spend it now and watch them and enjoy it with them. I think that a lot of my generation feel that way.”

She bought her daughter appliances for a house in Portland, Ore. Now the proceeds from selling that property are enabling Celia Maysles to make a documentary about her late father, the documentary filmmaker David Maysles.

Eventually, most children outgrow the need for a stipend. But the instinct of parents to give — and of children to receive — can linger on. When John Maysles got a dog four years ago, his mother told him he couldn’t leave it alone all day.

“So I pay for doggy day care,” she said. “It is $16 a day. Probably he could afford it, but it has been on my credit card and I haven’t changed it.”

Aggh! Don’t bring up pets in connection with the Maysles family! (Thursday Styles is on fucking fire this week!)

*Maysles co-directed the creepy documentary Grey Gardens, which basically defines “emotionally fraught parent-adult child relationship.”

Less God, More Singing; Brooklyn Fathiests Get That Old Time Religion

I feel a Sunday Styles feature coming on (.pdf):

Gina Duclayan lights one candle and then another and intones a familiar sounding prayer.

“Baruch ha-or ba-olam (radiant is the light within the world),” she says, closing her eyes and moving her hands from the candles to her chest, if inviting in some higher power.

“Baruch ha-or-ba-shabbat.” It is Friday night and Duclayan and husband Daniel Radosh are lighting Shabbos candles and saying a prayer over challah and wine (substituting grape juice for wine, so their children can also partake) like many Jewish couples all over Brooklyn.

But there is one main difference: Duclayan and Radosh don’t believe in God. Call them “the new fatheists,” growing number of Brooklynites who are turned off to organized religion — there’s just too much “God begat this” and “God smote that” for them — yet still need spirituality in their lives.

. . .

[Religion inspiring the best in Mankind is] what drives atheist Arthur Strimling to services at Kolot Chayeinu, a Jewish congregation in Park Slope that’s so liberal that the mission statement says, “Doubt can be an act of faith.”

“My grandfather and father were staunch atheists, and so am I,” Strimling said. “But am of the generation that saw Martin Luther King and other ministers defending the best values, with courage and fortitude, in the name of God.

“You don’t need God to do those things, but it proved to me that spiritual hunger is not something I wanted to fully extinguish in myself.”

So when Rabbi Ellen Lippmann talks about the Torah, Strimling finds himself interested, even if he doesn’t believe the passages.

“Reading the Torah is about examination,” he said. “It’s creative and humanizing process and I love that. In the Torah, God is a complicated idea. If I believe in anything, it’s that humans’ hunger for God is so universal that it can’t be ignored. It must be in the DNA.”

Or as atheist Lee Pardee, who attends Unitarian services, put it: I may be an atheist, but I love singing in the chorus!

“When I first joined this congregation, I was so pleased by the songs. There’s no God in them! It’s just like church, but all the words have been fixed,” Pardee added.

“I can actually sing the hymns and believe in them.”

Hamotzi Lechem Min Ha-Monkey

Now that Passover is upon us, the city’s zoos are again flooded with observant Jews feeding the monkeys leavened products:

Security has been tight this week at the Central Park Zoo, with ticket takers, staff, and guards on the lookout for suspicious packages of cookies, pretzels, hot-dog buns, and pound cake. Observant Jews have till Wednesday to clear their houses of hametz (leavened products) before Passover, and every year many of them take their castoffs to the zoo. Baffled zoo staff note that the snow monkeys are the main beneficiaries of the pre-holiday pig-out, apparently because the polar bear’s glass wall is too high and the sea lions would only be interested if offered gefilte fish. “If a big group comes in carrying bags, admission is going to notice,” says zoo spokesperson Kate McIntyre.

The small, pink-faced snow monkeys (Japanese macaques) may not mind the interruption to their grooming routine and carefully prepared diet of fruits, greens, and nuts, but their caretakers sure do. Standard protocol is to politely ask food-throwers to stop. If they persist, security hovers and asks again (last year, one food-flinger said, “I don’t answer to you; I answer to a higher power”), but they are rarely ejected. “They really don’t know why they shouldn’t do it,” says one zoo volunteer. “They think they’re doing a good deed. I can’t say they like it when I tell them to stop. My answer to them is to take it to a shelter.” Other volunteers aren’t so tolerant. “If we see them do it, we should either frisk them for food or throw them out,” insists one.

As Usual, The Times Styles Section Is Right On Top Of Current Trends

You know it’s hard out there when you primp:

The social kiss is unpredictable, agreed R. Couri Hay, the society editor at Hamptons magazine.

“I never kiss on the first meeting,” he said, “but if someone offers a kiss, I feel I have to be polite and take it. Generally I really don’t want to be covered in lipstick.” The kiss “has been dumbed down,” Mr. Hay said. “It is supposed to be a sign of affection, but I’ve seen people recoil when they see someone they don’t even know coming in to lick their cheek.”

Despite the awkwardness, the cheek, or social, kiss is displacing the handshake, once the customary greeting in American social and business circles. It may be a growing Latin influence, an aping of European manners, the influx of women in the workplace or just a breakdown of formality: no one seems to know. It’s not just celebrities smacking the air or diplomats puckering up with the European style double kiss or Soprano family wannabees mimicking a sign of forced fealty.

. . .

The awkwardness — and inevitability — of the social kiss has led to strategies to deal with it. “I position my face just slightly to the side,” said Jeff Elsass, a Pilates instructor at the BioFitness Center in Manhattan, who is frequently greeted with kisses during his workday, “then I wait and see what the other person is going to do. That slight turn of the head can take you past the lip and the cheek.”

NYU Fat Admirers Discover America’s Obsession With Fat Porn

We had no clue gender studies survived the millennium:

At 5-foot-3 inches and 430 pounds, Bigcuties.com webmaster Heather Boyle is on a mission: To tell the truth about being fat.

To a group of about 70 students, Boyle openly discussed fat sexuality, the movement behind it and its implications in today’s society.

“We’re somehow social outcasts,” said Boyle, who spoke last night at the Silver Center. “Diets are society’s way of telling you what you should look like, but 64 percent of America is overweight. If we’re the majority, then whey are we being treated like the minority?”

Since she was 18, Boyle has modeled for various magazines and now runs Bigcuties.com, a subscription-based fat porn website, which currently has 16 models that pose both nude and clothed and star in soft core and hard core films.

“Fat sells,” she said, describing the pornography on her website as identical to any other type of porn.

But Boyle’s appearance almost didn’t happen:

Boyle’s own reception at the Silver Center spoke to these concerns about the treatment of overweight people like herself.

Professor Don Kulick, director of NYU’s Center of Gender and Sexuality, said his department was met difficulty when accomodating Boyle for the event. When he asked the Silver Center building maintenance crew to move a couch from the first to the seventh floor so Boyle could sit in that instead of a chair, the building maintenance did not respond.

After Kulick and the center’s administrator, Robert Campbell, appealed numerous times over the course of two weeks, school administrators still denied the request. Their only response was that the couch was too heavy to move, Kulick said.