...when Bruce Springsteen sings "You ain't a beauty but hey, you're alright, and that's alright with me", I swoon, but when Sinatra sings "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable", I roll my eyes and skip to the next song?
(Yes, I'm doing my posthumous-Big Man review of my Springsteen catalogue. I can't imagine how Springsteen is going to handle the sax parts when he tours again. I don't see him going all-acoustic forever.)
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Fuck you very much, Gretchen Rossi
I do it to myself, I know. No one comes to my house and turns on The Real Housewives of Anywhere - I'm the one who was looking for something to have playing as noise to fall asleep by. And it was Lost Footage! Wherein Gretchen confesses to having had a bulemia problem in high school/college. Cut to the reunion show couches and Andy asking follow-ups, including the $64 Billion question: What was your highest weight?
Gretchen "ummm"s for a second and then tries to buffer the blow with "I know this may not be high to a lot of people" and I'm expecting to hear 170 maybe, which is five pounds under what I weighed in January when I started my South Beach/calorie-counting campaign. No, not a lot for some people. Then she says "140", and my eyeballs start to bleed. 140 is ten pounds fewer than I weigh now after carrying on said campaign for five fucking months.
Alexis jumps to her defense - "And you're how tall? Five three?" and I don't even remember what the answer was. I just remember it not being sufficiently different from my height to justify thinking that 140 would look significantly larger on her frame.
It's not Gretchen's fault, really, that she thinks 140 is so disgustingly huge that she had to force herself to purge whatever she'd just eaten. Little girls and grown women are bombarded by messages telling us how we're supposed to look and what we need to change to achieve that look hundreds of times every day. It's my fault for expecting any kind of sane message from that source.
And if I choose to believe Andy Cohen asked that question to underscore how incredibly out-of-touch these people are, that's between me and me.
Gretchen "ummm"s for a second and then tries to buffer the blow with "I know this may not be high to a lot of people" and I'm expecting to hear 170 maybe, which is five pounds under what I weighed in January when I started my South Beach/calorie-counting campaign. No, not a lot for some people. Then she says "140", and my eyeballs start to bleed. 140 is ten pounds fewer than I weigh now after carrying on said campaign for five fucking months.
Alexis jumps to her defense - "And you're how tall? Five three?" and I don't even remember what the answer was. I just remember it not being sufficiently different from my height to justify thinking that 140 would look significantly larger on her frame.
It's not Gretchen's fault, really, that she thinks 140 is so disgustingly huge that she had to force herself to purge whatever she'd just eaten. Little girls and grown women are bombarded by messages telling us how we're supposed to look and what we need to change to achieve that look hundreds of times every day. It's my fault for expecting any kind of sane message from that source.
And if I choose to believe Andy Cohen asked that question to underscore how incredibly out-of-touch these people are, that's between me and me.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Brave Girls' Club
I don't want to come across as superior or dismissive, but...(and we all know what everything after that is) after reading things like A Thousand Splendid Suns and A Thousand Sisters (I didn't notice the "thousand" theme until just this minute), it's hard to think of deleting Facebook from one's smartphone as brave.
And yet, we all have our own stories, and no one deserves to suffer in any degree. My strapping a band of sharpened wire to my thigh doesn't help any women who are risking rape when they collect water for their children; at the same time, I can live without a phone with a data plan and sponsor one of those same Congolese women.
It's impossible to compare pain; we all only have the frame of reference we've achieved. I guess I just wish there was a little more perspective, maybe? Awareness of one's privilege? Let's be real - any problem that can be solved with collages and affirmations is still a "first world" problem. It would be nice if Afghan women could "Secret" themselves into empowerment.
I understand being the change I want to see...the trick is finding out what that change looks like. Yes, be compassionate. Yes, be kind. But when it comes to the disparity of opportunity between my world and the worlds of the developing nations...don't Western people have a right to their feelings? Trapped is trapped, no matter what materials the prison walls are built from. Am I except from pain because I have indoor running water and electricity?
Maybe some acknowledgement of the privilege is what I want to see. The wannabe brave girls have enough money for the course and the materials...that right there would feed a lot of hungry kids.
Maybe it's just the excessive navel-gazing. They keep telling me that the way to stop feeling sorry for myself is to help someone else. Maybe that's what's missing - giving it back. Yes, feel joyful and fulfilled in your skin, but then help someone else feel good in theirs. The hero's quest isn't just about the destination, but about coming home to show others how to survive their own quests. At least, that's what I remember. Time to reread Joseph Campbell.
Thank the Maker for the Internets.
- Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction
Their summary of the hero's quest has 17 steps, the 15th of which is "The Crossing of the Return Threshold: The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. This is usually extremely difficult."
Well, this has wandered away from what I thought was my point, and maybe for the good. If figuring it all out was easy, somebody would've done it by now.
And yet, we all have our own stories, and no one deserves to suffer in any degree. My strapping a band of sharpened wire to my thigh doesn't help any women who are risking rape when they collect water for their children; at the same time, I can live without a phone with a data plan and sponsor one of those same Congolese women.
It's impossible to compare pain; we all only have the frame of reference we've achieved. I guess I just wish there was a little more perspective, maybe? Awareness of one's privilege? Let's be real - any problem that can be solved with collages and affirmations is still a "first world" problem. It would be nice if Afghan women could "Secret" themselves into empowerment.
I understand being the change I want to see...the trick is finding out what that change looks like. Yes, be compassionate. Yes, be kind. But when it comes to the disparity of opportunity between my world and the worlds of the developing nations...don't Western people have a right to their feelings? Trapped is trapped, no matter what materials the prison walls are built from. Am I except from pain because I have indoor running water and electricity?
Maybe some acknowledgement of the privilege is what I want to see. The wannabe brave girls have enough money for the course and the materials...that right there would feed a lot of hungry kids.
Maybe it's just the excessive navel-gazing. They keep telling me that the way to stop feeling sorry for myself is to help someone else. Maybe that's what's missing - giving it back. Yes, feel joyful and fulfilled in your skin, but then help someone else feel good in theirs. The hero's quest isn't just about the destination, but about coming home to show others how to survive their own quests. At least, that's what I remember. Time to reread Joseph Campbell.
Thank the Maker for the Internets.
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes about "The Adventure of the Hero:"
"The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life." -- (Campbell, 121)
- Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction
Their summary of the hero's quest has 17 steps, the 15th of which is "The Crossing of the Return Threshold: The trick in returning is to retain the wisdom gained on the quest, to integrate that wisdom into a human life, and then maybe figure out how to share the wisdom with the rest of the world. This is usually extremely difficult."
Well, this has wandered away from what I thought was my point, and maybe for the good. If figuring it all out was easy, somebody would've done it by now.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
The world according to Charles Barkley
“There are only five real jobs in the world: teacher, fireman, policeman, doctor, and someone working in the service. Everybody else should just chill out and enjoy life.”
So it is written.
Friday, June 10, 2011
I've let this lay unattended for far too long.
I had a great idea for a post a few days ago but completely failed to log in and post it, so I'm stuck with a question I stole from The AV Club: What is (are) your most re-read book(s)?
My first thougth is to be all, "Well, I've read Anna Karenina twice," which is true, but my memory is so bad that I doubt I could give you an outline of the important plot points. But I know I love reading it, and I wrote a paper on it in grad school that got a good grade, so.
My second thought is that it has to be Little Women, although I may be getting confused between how many times I've read it and how many times I've watched different versions of the movie. Despite never completely buying the way Laurie could just "Psych! I really love your little sister" like that; despite not understanding why a person would wear one glove and carry the other...time with the Marches is always warm and well spent.
Once I'd scanned the whole AV article (there were far too many words to read each one), yeah, that's pretty much gotta be it. The olde Hitchhiker's Guide. It never fails to make me laugh out loud, especially when I read the quotes I still use on a regular basis ("To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem").
I don't even remember why I first read THGTTG - I was never a science fiction kid despite a mom who watched Star Trek (TOS) compulsively. (Star Trek just got on my nerves: they left paradise three times? Whatever with them.) I know I was familiar with it when I was a freshman in high school (because of things that were happening in my life at the same time) but have no idea how it originally introduced itself to my consciousness. I only know that I'm SO grateful it did: not only did it give me credibility with my geekish techy friends, it gave me a witty comeback when people ask why I don't drink. "What's so horrible about being drunk? Have you ever asked a glass of water?"
My first thougth is to be all, "Well, I've read Anna Karenina twice," which is true, but my memory is so bad that I doubt I could give you an outline of the important plot points. But I know I love reading it, and I wrote a paper on it in grad school that got a good grade, so.
My second thought is that it has to be Little Women, although I may be getting confused between how many times I've read it and how many times I've watched different versions of the movie. Despite never completely buying the way Laurie could just "Psych! I really love your little sister" like that; despite not understanding why a person would wear one glove and carry the other...time with the Marches is always warm and well spent.
Once I'd scanned the whole AV article (there were far too many words to read each one), yeah, that's pretty much gotta be it. The olde Hitchhiker's Guide. It never fails to make me laugh out loud, especially when I read the quotes I still use on a regular basis ("To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem").
I don't even remember why I first read THGTTG - I was never a science fiction kid despite a mom who watched Star Trek (TOS) compulsively. (Star Trek just got on my nerves: they left paradise three times? Whatever with them.) I know I was familiar with it when I was a freshman in high school (because of things that were happening in my life at the same time) but have no idea how it originally introduced itself to my consciousness. I only know that I'm SO grateful it did: not only did it give me credibility with my geekish techy friends, it gave me a witty comeback when people ask why I don't drink. "What's so horrible about being drunk? Have you ever asked a glass of water?"
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