As many of you know, I recently broke my scaphoid. As a result of this unfortunate accident, I was forced to spend two and a half months with a cast on my left arm. This particular cast was especially intrusive because it included my thumb, holding it in a position pointing away from the palm. Having my thumb forced into this position had a few rather annoying side effects: I could no longer fit my hand through the sleeves of any of my coats, and I was constantly tapping the spacebar accidentally.
With a broken scaphoid, you are forbidden from doing any lifting whatsoever with the injured arm. As a result, I’ve become very skilled at doing things exclusively with my right arm. Indeed, after a few weeks I began to take delight at the way people would go quiet and stare at me while tying my shoes or washing dishes, knowing that I was about to be treated to an outburst of “wow, you’re doing that pretty well with one arm”. While my right arm was learning its true capacity for independence, however, its encastulated counterpart was degrading into a fragile, withered husk.
Although breaking a scaphoid is a bummer, there are some neat things that happen when your arm takes a two and a half month leave of absence to repair itself, especially when the cast is removed and the arm tries to return to duty.
Here are a few curious particularities of life with a hand fresh out of a cast:
--One of the first things I did when I arrived home from the hospital was rush to the bathroom to wash my hands. I hadn’t given my hands a proper wash in months, and I expected that running warm water over my withered left hand would feel like a long-overdue immersion in a stream of ambrosia. Alas, it did not. Because my wrist and thumb had been locked in place for so long, they painfully recoiled at even the most basic scrubbing motions. In addition, the skin had become thin enough that it was extremely sensitive to the temperature of the water; my hand was either frozen or scalded, no matter how much care I dedicated to adjusting the taps. This experience was the first, and perhaps most profound, disappointment of my recovery.
--My first post-cast shower was much better. It was the first time in months that I would be able to shower naked, so I was very excited. I don’t want to exaggerate the trouble with wrapping my hand in plastic to take a shower—it really wasn’t that bad—but I nevertheless began to crave the freedom to scrub and waggle each of my digits in whatever manner I chose. The hot water and the movements still hurt, but they didn’t sear the way they had the night before, and the sheer joy of having warm water run over my naked wristflesh more than compensated for any unpleasantries.
--Because the skin on my left arm was more sensitive to hot water, the formerly-casted regions of my arm turned red during the shower, as though the cast had left an imprint. These portions of my arm also shrivelled up in the way your fingertips shrivel if you’ve been in the bathtub for a long time.
--The skin under the cast becomes very sensitive, and nowhere is this more evident or interesting than in the shower. The roughness of my chest hair made it painful to rub soap over my chest. Washing my hair felt like I was plunging my hand into a pool of suds and needles. When the sense of touch exaggerated to the point that previously harmless strands of hair force you to pay attention to them, the geography of your own body becomes more detailed much more dangerous.
--An area under a cast gets much more hairy than usual. You could see the imprint of the cast by a fuzzy stencil of dark black fuzz on my arm. I did not think thumbs could get so hairy.
--Although it stands to reason, I had never realized that every time I wash my hands, I instinctively shake the water off them. This is something you should never do when it hurts to bend your wrists.
I didn’t need to break a bone to know that my body is a remarkable device, but the trouble caused by a tiny fracture did allow me to appreciate it in new ways. As my wrist regains strength, redevelops its familiar muscular bulges, and begins to bend like it did before, it becomes easier to forget the scalding capacity of lukewarm tap water or the sharpness of chest hair. I’m not going to encourage people to go out and break their scaphoids, or any other bone for that matter, but I will say that the experience forces you to think differently about the way that your body fits into the world it inhabits; it’s remarkable how many properties of things can remain hidden as long as your body sticks together, supports weight, and bends the way it should.
Friday, 8 February 2013
Thursday, 6 December 2012
The power of the PANK
For my inaugural blog post, I would like to talk about PANKs. If you are unfamiliar with this term, then I am thrilled to be the one to introduce it to you. “PANK” is an acronym that means “Professional Aunt, No Kids”. I think “PANK” is worthy of attention for a few reasons, not least of which is how absurd and hilarious it sounds.
Indeed, the sheer slapstick joy of its sound is the first thing that struck me about the term PANK. I was introduced to the term a couple days ago while watching a livestream of Timescast on nytimes.com, which featured a segment on the lucrative potential of tapping into the hitherto unplumbed PANK demographic. Apparently, It is estimated that PANK spending accounts for over 9 billion dollars per year in the United States. The Timescast segment is full of sentences that sound deliciously absurd—a few highlights:
“What we have learned is that there are 23 million PANKs out there—one in every five women”
“Laura Mignott knows all too well what it’s like to be a PANK”
“The value of marketing to PANKs has already been uncovered by some retailers and store owners”
“PANKs are doing a lot more than splurging on the occasional fancy dress”
Sentences like these are funny enough to warrant a discussion of PANKs, but the absurdity doesn’t end at the grins elicited by the term’s purely phonetic delights. The story behind the PANK movement is almost as entertaining as the moniker it has christened for itself.
The term “PANK” was created a few years ago by Melanie Notkin, who is also the brains behind savvyauntie.com. Melanie is both an aunt and a marketer. As explained in The Power of the PANK, a special report authored by Notkin and a marketing research firm, Notkin was inspired by how unprepared she felt when she became an aunt: “When Melanie first became an aunt in 2001, she found herself concerned by the lack of resources for women like her, and she also saw market opportunity.”
Notkin created SavvyAuntie because she wanted single women to have the power to fulfil their desires, specifically those desires related to giving gifts to other people’s children. Making PANKs more visible to advertisers was a primary motivation in creating Saavy Auntie—thanks to the Savvy Auntie, “now advertisers are able to find her and reach her”. This may sound a bit insidious, but Notkin’s branding seems to be a labour of love to PANKs, rather than a desire to exploit them on behalf of the makers of cashmere bonnets or video games. I have never met Notkin, but the short interview clips I’ve seen give me no reason not to think that her love of PANKs is genuine, as are her ambitions to provide the “help” she thinks they need.
The New York Times calls Savvy Auntie a “lifestyle brand”. What I find interesting is that such branding is aimed at marketers, rather than at consumers. I admit that I am largely uneducated in the world of marketing, but this approach seems to be an inversion of the way I’ve always understood branding to work. Instead of a company like Apple or Jagermeister convincing folks that there is a lifestyle waiting for them if only they use its products, we have a group of consumers banding together to plead to companies and marketers to recognize them as a significant, legitimate, and affluent demographic.
Notkin’s special report, The Power of the PANK, is full of sentences that are as interesting as they are hilarious, with golden quotes like: “Move over soccer moms. There’s a new group of smart, powerful women spenders out there. PANKs have time, income and a passion for purchasing for the kids in their lives”.
But, of course, the report isn’t just noteworthy because of the inherent silliness of the term PANK; it’s also an interesting example of the intimate ways that marketing and identity are linked together. As the introduction to the report explains, advertisers are looking to create new ways to help women assert themselves as women, and the PANK brand is an attempt to do that:
“Moms remain critical to their strategies, but they are looking for other ways of defining women that may not be motherhood-based. The focus of our research was to identify new segments of women, regardless of their mom status, to help determine how marketers and communicators can reach them, and to build an engagement profile to maximize their potential.”
There is much discussion these days about the way that our personal information is mined and stored to facilitate advertisement. So far, most of the discussions I’ve heard about companies collecting personal information about potential customers has been replete with concerns about privacy, Orwellian surveillance, propaganda, Skynet, and a bunch of other scary-sounding stuff. In the case of Savvy Auntie, these concerns are not only unimportant, but the very notion of a PANK strives to embrace all the things that keep paranoid privacy advocates awake at night; PANKs want to make it as easy as possible for advertisers to know about them and how they can best be marketed to, all while having their identities and senses of self worth directly contingent upon the way they relate to these advertisers.
Absurd though all this may seem, Notkin might be on the right track. If she is fighting for society to recognize a woman’s importance in a child’s life, regardless of their “mom status”, then her methods might just be effective. If marketers bank on PANKs and celebrations of this lifestyle enter popular culture, then PANKs might be able to feel as though they are fulfilling their roles as women, regardless of any insufficiencies regarding their “mom status”. Repugnant though many will find this idea to be, Notkin’s efforts could very well have the desired effect.
Now that the internet enables projects like Savvy Auntie, which make it easy for a group to stand up and prove its viability as a market, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to influence popular culture by proving that previously ignored segments of the population are worthy of mainstream attention (so long as these segments have disposable income, of course). It’s kind of like petitioning a rock band to visit your town or a Hollywood studio to make a sequel to a cult classic, though here we’re talking about proving the commercial viability of an entire lifestyle and means of self-recognition.
If Notkin is right, and this bottom-up style of lifestyle branding is indicative of things to come, then we can rest assured that the future will be full of PANKs. In a sense, we might all be PANKs someday, and that prospect is almost as fascinating as it is hilarious.
References/further reading:
The Power of the PANK
http://pankpower.com/images/Power-of-the-PANK-Report2.pdf
Savvy Auntie
http://savvyauntie.com/defaulthome.aspx
Timescast, December 3, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/12/03/business/100000001936259/newspapers-continue-to-struggle.html
Indeed, the sheer slapstick joy of its sound is the first thing that struck me about the term PANK. I was introduced to the term a couple days ago while watching a livestream of Timescast on nytimes.com, which featured a segment on the lucrative potential of tapping into the hitherto unplumbed PANK demographic. Apparently, It is estimated that PANK spending accounts for over 9 billion dollars per year in the United States. The Timescast segment is full of sentences that sound deliciously absurd—a few highlights:
“What we have learned is that there are 23 million PANKs out there—one in every five women”
“Laura Mignott knows all too well what it’s like to be a PANK”
“The value of marketing to PANKs has already been uncovered by some retailers and store owners”
“PANKs are doing a lot more than splurging on the occasional fancy dress”
Sentences like these are funny enough to warrant a discussion of PANKs, but the absurdity doesn’t end at the grins elicited by the term’s purely phonetic delights. The story behind the PANK movement is almost as entertaining as the moniker it has christened for itself.
The term “PANK” was created a few years ago by Melanie Notkin, who is also the brains behind savvyauntie.com. Melanie is both an aunt and a marketer. As explained in The Power of the PANK, a special report authored by Notkin and a marketing research firm, Notkin was inspired by how unprepared she felt when she became an aunt: “When Melanie first became an aunt in 2001, she found herself concerned by the lack of resources for women like her, and she also saw market opportunity.”
Notkin created SavvyAuntie because she wanted single women to have the power to fulfil their desires, specifically those desires related to giving gifts to other people’s children. Making PANKs more visible to advertisers was a primary motivation in creating Saavy Auntie—thanks to the Savvy Auntie, “now advertisers are able to find her and reach her”. This may sound a bit insidious, but Notkin’s branding seems to be a labour of love to PANKs, rather than a desire to exploit them on behalf of the makers of cashmere bonnets or video games. I have never met Notkin, but the short interview clips I’ve seen give me no reason not to think that her love of PANKs is genuine, as are her ambitions to provide the “help” she thinks they need.
The New York Times calls Savvy Auntie a “lifestyle brand”. What I find interesting is that such branding is aimed at marketers, rather than at consumers. I admit that I am largely uneducated in the world of marketing, but this approach seems to be an inversion of the way I’ve always understood branding to work. Instead of a company like Apple or Jagermeister convincing folks that there is a lifestyle waiting for them if only they use its products, we have a group of consumers banding together to plead to companies and marketers to recognize them as a significant, legitimate, and affluent demographic.
Notkin’s special report, The Power of the PANK, is full of sentences that are as interesting as they are hilarious, with golden quotes like: “Move over soccer moms. There’s a new group of smart, powerful women spenders out there. PANKs have time, income and a passion for purchasing for the kids in their lives”.
But, of course, the report isn’t just noteworthy because of the inherent silliness of the term PANK; it’s also an interesting example of the intimate ways that marketing and identity are linked together. As the introduction to the report explains, advertisers are looking to create new ways to help women assert themselves as women, and the PANK brand is an attempt to do that:
“Moms remain critical to their strategies, but they are looking for other ways of defining women that may not be motherhood-based. The focus of our research was to identify new segments of women, regardless of their mom status, to help determine how marketers and communicators can reach them, and to build an engagement profile to maximize their potential.”
There is much discussion these days about the way that our personal information is mined and stored to facilitate advertisement. So far, most of the discussions I’ve heard about companies collecting personal information about potential customers has been replete with concerns about privacy, Orwellian surveillance, propaganda, Skynet, and a bunch of other scary-sounding stuff. In the case of Savvy Auntie, these concerns are not only unimportant, but the very notion of a PANK strives to embrace all the things that keep paranoid privacy advocates awake at night; PANKs want to make it as easy as possible for advertisers to know about them and how they can best be marketed to, all while having their identities and senses of self worth directly contingent upon the way they relate to these advertisers.
Absurd though all this may seem, Notkin might be on the right track. If she is fighting for society to recognize a woman’s importance in a child’s life, regardless of their “mom status”, then her methods might just be effective. If marketers bank on PANKs and celebrations of this lifestyle enter popular culture, then PANKs might be able to feel as though they are fulfilling their roles as women, regardless of any insufficiencies regarding their “mom status”. Repugnant though many will find this idea to be, Notkin’s efforts could very well have the desired effect.
Now that the internet enables projects like Savvy Auntie, which make it easy for a group to stand up and prove its viability as a market, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to influence popular culture by proving that previously ignored segments of the population are worthy of mainstream attention (so long as these segments have disposable income, of course). It’s kind of like petitioning a rock band to visit your town or a Hollywood studio to make a sequel to a cult classic, though here we’re talking about proving the commercial viability of an entire lifestyle and means of self-recognition.
If Notkin is right, and this bottom-up style of lifestyle branding is indicative of things to come, then we can rest assured that the future will be full of PANKs. In a sense, we might all be PANKs someday, and that prospect is almost as fascinating as it is hilarious.
References/further reading:
The Power of the PANK
http://pankpower.com/images/Power-of-the-PANK-Report2.pdf
Savvy Auntie
http://savvyauntie.com/defaulthome.aspx
Timescast, December 3, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/12/03/business/100000001936259/newspapers-continue-to-struggle.html
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