Tag Archives: magazine

Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan: (adj) free from provincial ideas or attachments; at home all over the world

As he sat down, he stared at me.

It was a very small waiting room in a dentist’s office, so what I was doing was noticeable. It was also quite obvious that he found my activityfunny wisdom on words that begin with a C
 humorous.

I was reading Cosmopolitan Magazine.

There were three choices: Popular Mechanics, Highlights for Kids, and Cosmopolitan.

I suppose if I were trying to confirm my masculinity, I should have thumbed through Popular Mechanics, though mechanical things have never been particularly popular with me.

I decided to comment since he continued to stare at my magazine. “I’m reading Cosmopolitan because it was here—and I was curious.”

He nodded his head in disdain.

I ventured one more sentence of explanation. “Don’t you ever wonder what women are thinking about us?”

He didn’t even look up for this question—just shook his head.

While I was waiting my turn to be drilled, I learned three things about women of this day and age, from perusing Cosmopolitan.

  1. Women are much more concerned about what men think and feel than men seem to be about women.
  2. For some reason, a woman thinks it is her fault in some way when she ends up with a man who is unable to communicate or seems to have “lost interest.”
  3. Women feel they can pursue a five-point plan to transform their hopeless situations to better, more romantic results.

I simultaneously was filled with admiration and sadness.

I found the pursuit placed in this magazine to be far from cosmopolitan, since “cosmopolitan” is the ability to function and be successful in any culture or environment at any time.

This magazine more or less was a handbook to explain to women why they are not crazy, insecure or extreme in their misgivings.

What the magazine was trying to impress upon its readership—mainly female—is that men are waiting for the right signals to become objective, interesting and involved.

When it came my time to head for the dentist’s chair, I closed the magazine and thought, I could probably make a million dollars by printing a magazine that encouraged women to be themselves and realize that men will eventually come in their direction since the alternatives are limited…and they do get horny and hungry.


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Brochure

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Brochure: (n) a small book or magazine containing information or pictures about a product or service.

Dino-words.

These are words which are extinct from the lexicon because they’ve been replaced by other terms and inventions, rendering them useless to the common man or woman.Dictionary B

Two that quickly come to my mind are “tri-fold” and “rubber cement.”

Come listen, my children, and you will hear…

Of what it was like to advertise in fear.

What were we afraid of? Putting together a tri-fold brochure that needed to be typed or, God forbid, type-set, and then cut out and rubber cemented in perfect symmetry onto panels, hoping that when it was shot with a printer’s camera, it would look somewhat like what you originally envisioned.

It was so easy to get things crooked.

The rubber cement was so messy.

And once you glued something down twice, to pull it up and glue it again created wrinkles, bumps and missing pieces of black ink from the letters.

Printers would encourage you by saying, “It’s nearly as good as the original…”

The idea of digital, which allows you to duplicate the original in perfection, was decades in the future, as you took your tiny knife and trimmed the paper down to just the right size, hoping that the corners you glued would not print off shadows. Of course, to achieve that, you had to make sure you didn’t shoot it too dark–or your original layout of printing would appear as a box instead of just words.

The brochure seemed necessary. It was a way of communicating that you were a prosperous organization which had the time and money to put together a pamphlet which explained who you were and therefore gave you credibility.

Now such a simple little task can be achieved in five or ten minutes on a computer and zonked out through your printer–with machines that will even fold it for you.

Progress is a beautiful thing–as long as you remember what you did before progress, and never lose the childlike sense of appreciation for being freed from monotony and meticulous, meaningless maneuvers.

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