~18~ i don’t care if my engagement ring is cubic zirconia

I don’t care if my engagement ring is cubic zirconia.

In a heated, yet still friendly exchange one Friday night this winter, one of my girlfriends told a table of margarita-drinkin’, enchilda-eatin’ Kellogg students that she wouldn’t care if her boyfriend proposed to her with a ring of genu-wine cubic zirconia.

“What?? Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, if he was investing the money somewhere else, like real estate or something, I would totally be all for that.”

“Shut up. You would care. You would wear a fake diamond? Why not a semi-precious stone, like an emerald, or a ruby or something?”

“No, I really wouldn’t care. Really. I swear.”

One guy at the table totally backed her up, which made me think it might be a gender thing, arguing that he wouldn’t personally propose with CZ because his wife would have killed him. But if the woman had been okay with it, he probably would have too. On the other hand, some of the other guys at the table were like, “Noooo way. Too embarrassing.”

Historical note: I did learn this winter in my marketing strategy class that the whole diamonds-as-a-symbol-of-love is a manufactured concept, originated by DeBeers mid-century when no one was buying diamonds.

Even still, I think I’d be very unhappy to receive cubic zirconia. I’d much rather a semi-precious stone, or seriously, no stone at all, if it came down to finances and investing that same amount of money elsewhere.

Where do you weigh in on this? Rock or no rock?

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~17~ i don’t care about my shampoo brand

I don’t care about my shampoo brand.

Or my conditioner, either, says my sister.

She’s not lying. Whenever I go home to New York City to visit her, the shower in her apartment holds some kind of mixed-berry-herbal-essenced bulk thing they were selling at Duane Reade or that puke-green Garnier Fructis bottle. (What is with that shampoo anyway? It’s everywhere.)

She doesn’t care. She believes it has the same effect on her hair (i.e. a dead part of her body, anyway) as any other shampoo.

It cleans. ‘Nuff said.

I have to totally disagree. I care. I really care.

I mean, some shampoos and conditioners are goopy, heavy, and residue-y.

Some shampoos don’t do the job, and some smell fun-KAY.

On top of that, shampoos and conditioners have all kinds of parabens and phthalates and other chemical nasties that have a history of doing bad stuff to human people.

Nooo thank you.

Plus, your hair is one of those things you have to wear every day. And people see it. Kind of like your skin. Do you really want some craptastic stuff cleaning that precious accessory of yours? No ma’am, you don’t.

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~16~ i don’t care if my food falls on the ground

I don’t care if my food falls on the ground.

I will still eat it.

Unless the food is wet, or the ground is wet, increasing the likelihood of capture of grainy dirt particles that might mess with the texture of my food.

I will still eat it. And the 7- or 10-second rule be damned.

Discuss.

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~15~ i don’t care if I take the last bite of dessert

I don’t care if I take the last bite of dessert.

Or any shared food, for that matter, said a couple of friends of mine at lunch in New Orleans this weekend.

I’m sure you’ve all been in this situation before.

There is a delicious tiramisu, molten chocolate cake, or in our case, Commander’s Palace bread pudding on the table and you want to take the last bite. But you don’t, because you don’t want to appear greedy.

Even if you’ve only had a few bites yourself.

Even if you know that no one else is going to take it, and what’s more, no one else is going to mind you taking it, you still won’t.

What gives? Why do people do this?

It’s cultural for me. There’s a lot of family-style eating in Chinese culture, and it’s sort of rude for the young person at the table to take the most succulent bits of a dish when it first arrives at the table, and to take the last bits if there is only a little left. You’re sort of supposed to wait until someone older “forces” you to eat it, by physically putting it on your plate.

Weird, I know, but it’s just sorta stuck with me until today. The other thing is that I am usually honest-to-god really full from dinner by the time dessert comes out, so no matter how good it is, I’m finito before the last bite of dessert appears anyway.

Do you care? Do you think it’s rude?

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~14~ i don’t care about engagement stories

I don’t care about engagement stories.

Surprising conversation with a very reasonable and awesome friend of mine:

Her: “I like your blog. I totally care about service in a restaurant. But you know what I don’t care about?”

Me: “No. Tell me.”

Her: “People’s proposal stories.”

Me: “What? Really?? You don’t mean that. I mean, what do you mean?”

Her: “I don’t know! Like, when someone gets engaged, people are all, ‘How did he do it?’ …But that’s not the first question I’d ask.”

Me: “So what’s the first question you’d ask?”

Her: “Are you sure you want to get married?”

Personally, I love proposal stories. I think if he did it on a rocky bluff, or in a Tiffany’s store, or in a decorative garden sculpture at the Palace of Versailles, that it is wonderful and awesome. And it tells me more about you as a couple, which I like.

I know, you didn’t think I was this cheesy, but it’s out there now.

I do assume, however, that by the time you get engaged, you both think it is a good idea. I also assume that I have heard about your significant other before, and that I have reasonable reason to believe you like them. All those requirements being satisfied…tell me how you got engaged! I want to know! yay.

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update on ~9~ i don’t care about fingernail clipping

Odd, wonderful and timely, a New York-based artist has taken up my cause against fingernail clipping on the subway.

artist jayshells surveyed people on their top pet-peeves — and guess which one made it into his public art campaign??

That nasty nail clipping thing. That I care about. A lot. (Check out the original post here.)

Take that, Mike! kapow!

(Thanks to Curtis and Becca for this awesome gem.)

Photo credit: Animal New York

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~13~ i don’t care about food (a guest blog by ed)

I don’t care about food.

You may have at one point heard me say that I don’t eat.

You may have even heard me say that I like to chew my food, enjoy the flavors, then immediately spit it out to avoid calories.

On the contrary, those who truly know me know that I do eat… a lot… and constantly.  In fact, I’m chowing down on cheddar jalapeno flavored Cheetos as I type this blog entry (my keyboard will, indeed, need to be wiped off later).

While I do consume abundantly, I don’t really care about the type of cuisine, the chef who cooked my meal, or the number of Michelin stars a restaurant receives. I’ve been to my fair share of upscale restaurants and a number of restaurants on the other side of the spectrum, and I’ve been, for the most part, equally satisfied with each experience.

I do caveat my statements by mentioning that I am a vegetarian (no meat, no fish), which I consider more so a religious constraint than a true food preference.  However, when dining with friends, family or co-workers, I am very flexible when picking a place to eat and usually defer to the majority, as most establishments will have at least one vegetarian-friendly option on the menu.

Now you may be asking if I, then, consider food to be merely a source fuel for the body.  On the contrary, I appreciate good food.  Several of my friends are super talented cooks, and I’m always excited to taste the dishes they make when invited to do so.  I also enjoy going to upscale restaurants and trying out their unique creations, as well as taking in the ambiance. However, unless a dish is absolutely inedible, either because the ingredients have gone bad or the meal was prepared inappropriately (e.g. burnt or severely undercooked), you won’t hear me say that I think something that I eat is “bad.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not a picky eater. I’d be content dining at Per Se in New York or at a Denny’s in Decatur.  Whether or not I’d complain that I was in Decatur is a whole other story.

In a nutshell, I’m easy.  Take note, potential suitors!

About me:

I’m a second year student at the Kellogg School of Management, where Jenn and I are both finishing up our MBA programs. While there are some things that I don’t care much for, there are others that I care dearly about, including the brand of my underwear, the type of starch used on my dry cleaning, the level of the Dow, the availability of a treadmill at the gym, and little people (I’m scared of them). Oh, and of course, I care about Jenn, who has granted me these two seconds of recognition. And believe me, I am relishing them.

(Photo credit: NYCulinarian, amuses-bouches, 11 Madison Park)

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~12~ i don’t care about your facebook status update

I don’t care about your Facebook status update.

The only I-don’t-care I have received from more than one person, on independent occasions, is this one.

People get pretty fired up about the ego-centrism that accompanies status updates about the state of your cuticles, or the flavor of your post-workout frozen yogurt. In fact, people don’t care about this so much that it’s almost bordering on being disqualified for the purposes of this blog. Because what you’re really telling me is that, yes, you care, and what’s more, you seriously dislike people’s status updates.

But for now, I’ll let it slide.

I kind of like status updates. My friend Adam wrote one that had nothing to do with anything one day, and I still remember it: “Call me butter, ’cause I’m on a roll.” Clever, no? Entertaining, right? On the other hand, there are bad ones. And I thought in honor of this I-don’t-care I’d take a random sampling of today’s Facebook status updates from my personal wall, and let you be the judge. Do you care?

How am I supposed to get anything done today when I have the cutest little redhead in my arms – and all she wants to do is snuggle and make me get back into bed with her?

I don’t have any idea if this refers to a pet, a person, or a doll, but um..what the heck do the 700 people who are your Facebook friends supposed to do with this? Find it incredibly bizarre? Care?

Our president is blocking traffic on Wilshire and now I can’t go get my second cup of caffeine from Starbucks. *sigh*

I liked this one because it has to do with Obama, who I care about, and traffic, which our guest blogger Dixie sure doesn’t care about.

i’m obsessed with ben & jerrys milk & cookies flavor. om nom nom nom nom.

I’m lactose-intolerant. So generally speaking, I don’t care about status updates that have to do with ice cream.

I HATE it when it’s gorgeous outside and I have to stay inside doing work:*( Boo Work!

Yes, I also dislike this situation. But I don’t care that you hate it when it’s gorgeous outside because if you hated it that much, you’d stop goofing around on Facebook, get your work done, and go outside. Also, is that a tear emoticon? fail.

Lebron just jutted James Johnson….wow

If you follow this blog a little, you’d know how I feel about this status update (hint: see yesterday’s post).

Direct quote from the cable operator: “How many TVs do you have? Please give me a numerical answer.”

Ok obviously I care about this status update. Because I enjoy any commentary on redundancy or egregious misuse of the English language. Yessir I do.

What’s your take? Do you care about people’s Facebook status updates?

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~11~ i don’t care about the NBA playoffs

I don’t care about the NBA playoffs.

Apparently these started this weekend. Who knew? I sure didn’t.

More generally, I don’t care about the National Basketball Association. Not anymore, anyway. I used to, when I was a kid, and the Knicks were decent. My friend Meredith and her Dad would invite me to exciting home games that I would care about, played at Madison Square Garden. (Sidenote: I don’t care about sports venues that have nonsensical names, for example Madison Square Garden, which is on 7th Avenue, is the shape of an oval, and has no horticulture to speak of.)

Now, I realize this leaves me exposed to criticisms of being a fair-weather fan, but I can assure you, if the Knicks were good right now, and they were in the playoffs, I still wouldn’t care that much. This may come as some surprise to friends of mine who know that I do care about some professional sports quite a lot. For instance, I care a great deal about [American] football. Indeed, my Sundays are often ruined by a bad performance by the NY [Football] Giants, of whom I am a lifelong fan. My mom refused to cook dinner on Sundays when the Giants sucked. Which they did, a lot, in my youth. So, we ate pizza.

I digress.

What I don’t care about, is a Kobe-Lebron matchup this year. I can even say with some confidence that I wouldn’t recognize Lebron James on the street. I mean, I might, but probably because of groupies and the impeccable sense of style that tends to come along with major basketball fame (witness Michael Jordan). In fact, I might just think he was a very tall African American man who happened to like to hang out with large bodyguard-like men and paparazzi.

I just think basketball has become all about inordinately large men in singular displays of ridiculous athleticism — it doesn’t feel like a team sport anymore, which is what I think I used to love about it.

Does anyone else hear me on this one?

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~10~ i don’t care about paying taxes

I don’t care about paying taxes.

I wish I could say I was a truly good and magnanimous citizen, but this i-don’t-care didn’t originate with me. Because I hate paying taxes. Hate hate hate it.

Even though I rationally understand that taxes pay for good things like schools (which I love) and infrastructure/public transportation (which I loooove) and unemployment benefits (yes, I even love these, having collected at one point in my life), I still can’t understand why I have to cough up every April 15.

Seeing as how that was yesterday, my friend and I thought this would be an excellent and timely post for Controversial Fridays.

Anyway. The person who told me this says that paying taxes every year neither makes her angry, nor does it make her particularly happy. It’s just a fact of life. She’s never been upset, she says, unless she’s planned particularly poorly, and even then, she doesn’t think it’s the IRS’ fault. She’s just mad at herself for being a financial doofus.

I don’t know. It just seems a little akin to putting on antiperspirant every day — a necessary evil that could might give you cancer, but really, it’s for the greater good. In this case, those W2s and 1040s and stuff arrive in the mail and I feel my blood start to boil. I think there’s a special place in my stomach lining devoted solely to a tax ulcer.

Maybe I’m the financial doofus. Maybe that’s why this gets me so upset this time every year.

Do you care about paying taxes? I mean, really, wouldn’t you rather not?

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