Appropriately enough, something that I forgot in the last post is that I seem to be having some cognition problems since I started the lithium. Even after the fuzziness faded, for the most part, once I got used to the meds, I still had memory problems. They weren't as bad as when I was on the effexor, but they are still there. I really can't remember names at all. I blank on movie titles and the names of actors. I'll have a word on the tip of my tongue, I can even see the object or person in my head, but I can't remember the name of it. It took me two weeks of mulling it over in the back of my mind to remember that it's the lead singer of OH FUCK I can't remember it now. So yeah, it sucks. And if I had to do this while taking a class with a good deal of memorization, like either of my art history courses, I'd be completely screwed. Guess taking any foreign language classes are out now.
But what is probably even more troubling to me is that I seem to have lost some of my ability to make connections between ideas. I keep telling people that this medicine made my IQ drop 20 points. Everyone seems to kinda laugh this off, but it is genuinely how I feel. I have a difficult time making the connections needed to understand some Newsweek articles. I keep thinking of my Rhetoric class, reading Foucault and having that light bulb moment. There's no way I could even understand Foucault now. I couldn't even read the text, much less make the needed connections. And I can't seem to get any fiction writing started. Even when I think I have an idea to start with, I can't come up with what follows. It sucks.
I once saw an interview with the author of a (non-fiction) book about the connections between bipolar disorder and genuis in creative/artistic pursuits. In laying out her case in the book, she brought up several great artists who, though undiagnosed in thier lifetimes, usually because there was no such thing as a bipolar disorder diagnosis, have reportedly displayed symptoms common to bipolar disease. She also studied several living artists with a documented history of bipolar disorder. It's interesting to wonder if what helps make one an artistic genius, or even just creative, also makes one bipolar.
Now, I'm not disgnosed as bipolar, but I am on a combination of drugs typically prescribed to bipolar people. I also don't think I'm going to create some great masterpiece. But I still wonder about the "is it worth it" question. If we had these drugs then, do you think it would have been better for Van Gogh to have his mental illness under control if it meant he never produced Starry Night or any of his other masterpieces? Do you think he'd have taken the medication if it meant he wouldn't paint? The same question could be asked about so many people now famous for their artistic endeavors. Hell, even about non-artists. Someone, maybe even the author I wrote about above, said that Winston Churchill was probably bipolar. Can you imagine how different history might have been if Churchill was on lithium, instead of just self-medicating with alcohol?
I'm not really looking for any concrete answers. I'm not going to run off to my doctor to ask for a med change. And I'm certainly not going to just stop any medication. All that said, I still would love your thoughts and opinions.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
I Don't Want to be a Zombie
When making the initial decision about whether or not to begin taking psychiatric drugs, I was scared to death, afraid I’d end up a drugged out zombie. While there are tons of unflattering portrayals of people on psychiatric drugs and psychiatric drugs themselves from movies, television, and literature that I could choose from, the one I kept coming to was a character in Anne Rice’s “The Witching Hour.” In the beginning of the novel, the reader is introduced to Deirdre Mayfair, who turns out to be the biological mother of the main character. She has been put on heavy psychiatric drugs for several decades, by the order of her family. She opens her eyes, but that is the full extent to which she interacts with the outside world. I felt that I would rather die than end up like Deirdre Mayfair, even if it was what was “best” for me and my loved ones.
Of course, that was an extreme worry, especially when we were only talking about putting me on an SSRI anti-depressant. As long as I’ve been on the “right” anti-depressant, I’ve had no large problems. Of course, even then, there was a certain amount of tinkering going on to get the “right” anti-depressant…but I did not have the kind of issues I was worried about before I started taking them.
The same cannot be said, however, of adding other drugs to the regiment, as any loyal reader knows. The lithium has proved to have a longer and more difficult adjustment period and I’m still sorting through and dealing with the side effects of it. And I’ve been thinking a great deal about when it stops being worth it, when you should change meds, things like that. Do you have to act like something out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for it to be too much? What if the meds just interfere so much that you can’t function like a real person, can’t get/keep a job? I’m not thinking of changing meds now, but I’d like to share the side effects I’m dealing with now, some minor but annoying and others that I feel are interfering or could interfere. I’m sharing the side effects so that those who don’t have experience on psychiatric drugs can see what it is like and, for those of you who do have that experience, maybe I can get some advice. I would also love to hear anyone’s thoughts on when those side effects would be too much for you.
Ok, so there are still basic general things that are still going on that I’ve written about before. I’m not going to grow my hair out again because it got so gross and was falling out after I started taking the lithium. I still have the “can’t feel my stomach” phenomenon, which is only slightly annoying. I had hoped that it would help me curb my eating, but it actually hurt it. I tend to eat with my eyes, eat comfort food and junk food, and I don’t know when to stop eating until I’m about to puke. I’ve also lost my taste for chocolate, unless it is in ice cream/shake form, trading it in for a craving for salty and greasy food and gummy candy.
Something I didn’t connect to the lithium until recently, and in all reality could really be a side effect of my birth control implant, is the acne I’ve been experiencing. Not to be too gross about it, but I have been getting clusters of acne that don’t turn into whiteheads and don’t heal. They end up looking like large red areas on my face. Many of these are along my chin line. I’ve also felt them in my hair, but I can’t see those so much. I didn’t have the clearest skin before but they were usually individual whiteheads in the T-zone which cleared up rather easily. I also have problem areas on my body, which don’t seem to be clearing up at all. When I saw that this wasn’t going away, I became diligent about washing my face twice a day. When that didn’t do it, I bought an acne fighting moisturizer. I’ve now moved on to a trio of acne controllers sold together. It’s only been a couple of days. We’ll see how it goes. But I hate being in my mid-20s and having to fight acne this hard, when it doesn’t seem like it is working. I know it sounds shallow to worry about this, but it does interfere in my life. I don’t want to face people during job interviews, when doing things for the organization I volunteer with, or in other social settings with these hideous red spots on my face. I don’t want to take pictures, even to commemorate an occasion. And I’m even more nervous when I wear make-up to “hide” the blemish, as I’m always afraid that it just makes the blemish stand out more. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this new regime works.
Another thing that I hadn’t noticed a lot until recently, though it also seems shallow, is the effect of the drug on my sex drive. It’s complicated to explain, so please bear with me. It’s not that I don’t want sex. It is also not that I don’t enjoy sex when I have it. But I don’t seek it out and I don’t initiate it. It’s been months since I’ve been to Craigslist looking for some strange. I suppose, on the one hand, it’s a good thing for me. It has smoothed out a good deal of my compulsive sexual tendencies and I know several people who would say that is a good thing. But, on the other hand, it might be contributing to the lack of physical relationship between Obsedian and I, as if I didn’t have a hard enough time initiating sex with other women. It could also create problems if/when I start a relationship with someone who isn’t as sexually aggressive and comfortable initiating the sex as TyRoy. I have always felt, and still do feel, like sexual contact is an important part of any intimate romantic relationship. I never wanted to be “that girl,” the one who didn’t have sex with her man, who wasn’t GGG with her partner, who was experiencing “lesbian bed death” with her girlfriend. But maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about becoming that woman. Even though I might not actually initiate the sex, I do try to think of things TyRoy might like, wear panty hose and high heels for no reason other than to arouse his sexual interest, though I think most women, me included, just have to smile at him to get him aroused. And, though I still haven’t been able to push myself on her, I have developed a good way to get to see Obsedian more often, in private, and late at night. Now I just have to have the balls to act.
Last but not least, we have the tremor, which I’ve written about before. The doctor put me on a beta blocker, propranolol, which is typically used to control blood pressure. I take a very small amount and we end up bumping it up everytime I go to see him. It was working ok, though I was having a hell of a time trying to remember to take the middle of the day pill. Then, about a week and a half ago, the tremor started bothering me again. Mostly it’s just been the benign shaking that only I notice. I’ve also had a couple of twitches in my body. None of that was too major though. But then Friday morning I had an episode of bad shaking and that fuzzy feeling that I thought I had left behind once I got adjusted to the meds. I really detest that fuzzy feeling. I was glad when it seemed to disappear, as I knew I probably couldn’t work or function like a normal person while having that feeling. I started to feel better after some sleep, though the tremor is still bugging me.
Ok guys. So there it is. Tell me your thoughts.
Of course, that was an extreme worry, especially when we were only talking about putting me on an SSRI anti-depressant. As long as I’ve been on the “right” anti-depressant, I’ve had no large problems. Of course, even then, there was a certain amount of tinkering going on to get the “right” anti-depressant…but I did not have the kind of issues I was worried about before I started taking them.
The same cannot be said, however, of adding other drugs to the regiment, as any loyal reader knows. The lithium has proved to have a longer and more difficult adjustment period and I’m still sorting through and dealing with the side effects of it. And I’ve been thinking a great deal about when it stops being worth it, when you should change meds, things like that. Do you have to act like something out of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for it to be too much? What if the meds just interfere so much that you can’t function like a real person, can’t get/keep a job? I’m not thinking of changing meds now, but I’d like to share the side effects I’m dealing with now, some minor but annoying and others that I feel are interfering or could interfere. I’m sharing the side effects so that those who don’t have experience on psychiatric drugs can see what it is like and, for those of you who do have that experience, maybe I can get some advice. I would also love to hear anyone’s thoughts on when those side effects would be too much for you.
Ok, so there are still basic general things that are still going on that I’ve written about before. I’m not going to grow my hair out again because it got so gross and was falling out after I started taking the lithium. I still have the “can’t feel my stomach” phenomenon, which is only slightly annoying. I had hoped that it would help me curb my eating, but it actually hurt it. I tend to eat with my eyes, eat comfort food and junk food, and I don’t know when to stop eating until I’m about to puke. I’ve also lost my taste for chocolate, unless it is in ice cream/shake form, trading it in for a craving for salty and greasy food and gummy candy.
Something I didn’t connect to the lithium until recently, and in all reality could really be a side effect of my birth control implant, is the acne I’ve been experiencing. Not to be too gross about it, but I have been getting clusters of acne that don’t turn into whiteheads and don’t heal. They end up looking like large red areas on my face. Many of these are along my chin line. I’ve also felt them in my hair, but I can’t see those so much. I didn’t have the clearest skin before but they were usually individual whiteheads in the T-zone which cleared up rather easily. I also have problem areas on my body, which don’t seem to be clearing up at all. When I saw that this wasn’t going away, I became diligent about washing my face twice a day. When that didn’t do it, I bought an acne fighting moisturizer. I’ve now moved on to a trio of acne controllers sold together. It’s only been a couple of days. We’ll see how it goes. But I hate being in my mid-20s and having to fight acne this hard, when it doesn’t seem like it is working. I know it sounds shallow to worry about this, but it does interfere in my life. I don’t want to face people during job interviews, when doing things for the organization I volunteer with, or in other social settings with these hideous red spots on my face. I don’t want to take pictures, even to commemorate an occasion. And I’m even more nervous when I wear make-up to “hide” the blemish, as I’m always afraid that it just makes the blemish stand out more. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this new regime works.
Another thing that I hadn’t noticed a lot until recently, though it also seems shallow, is the effect of the drug on my sex drive. It’s complicated to explain, so please bear with me. It’s not that I don’t want sex. It is also not that I don’t enjoy sex when I have it. But I don’t seek it out and I don’t initiate it. It’s been months since I’ve been to Craigslist looking for some strange. I suppose, on the one hand, it’s a good thing for me. It has smoothed out a good deal of my compulsive sexual tendencies and I know several people who would say that is a good thing. But, on the other hand, it might be contributing to the lack of physical relationship between Obsedian and I, as if I didn’t have a hard enough time initiating sex with other women. It could also create problems if/when I start a relationship with someone who isn’t as sexually aggressive and comfortable initiating the sex as TyRoy. I have always felt, and still do feel, like sexual contact is an important part of any intimate romantic relationship. I never wanted to be “that girl,” the one who didn’t have sex with her man, who wasn’t GGG with her partner, who was experiencing “lesbian bed death” with her girlfriend. But maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about becoming that woman. Even though I might not actually initiate the sex, I do try to think of things TyRoy might like, wear panty hose and high heels for no reason other than to arouse his sexual interest, though I think most women, me included, just have to smile at him to get him aroused. And, though I still haven’t been able to push myself on her, I have developed a good way to get to see Obsedian more often, in private, and late at night. Now I just have to have the balls to act.
Last but not least, we have the tremor, which I’ve written about before. The doctor put me on a beta blocker, propranolol, which is typically used to control blood pressure. I take a very small amount and we end up bumping it up everytime I go to see him. It was working ok, though I was having a hell of a time trying to remember to take the middle of the day pill. Then, about a week and a half ago, the tremor started bothering me again. Mostly it’s just been the benign shaking that only I notice. I’ve also had a couple of twitches in my body. None of that was too major though. But then Friday morning I had an episode of bad shaking and that fuzzy feeling that I thought I had left behind once I got adjusted to the meds. I really detest that fuzzy feeling. I was glad when it seemed to disappear, as I knew I probably couldn’t work or function like a normal person while having that feeling. I started to feel better after some sleep, though the tremor is still bugging me.
Ok guys. So there it is. Tell me your thoughts.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Sometimes I Feel Like I Can't Do Anything Right
Even when I am doing better, it still feels like it is never enough. As I said in my last post, I am frustrated and disappointed with how my job search is going, or not going as the case may be, and with how little I'm actually doing currently for the places that I have tried to volunteer with. Thankfully, I was able to be more productive for my household, but it still doesn't feel like enough. When a person's largest problem is that they don't don't feel like they are worthwhile or contribute to society on the whole, it doesn't help that person to actually not be able to contribute in a positive way to their own livelyhood.
Another recent development that hasn't really helped me is that I've started going through a decent amount of pain for a frustrating percentage of my time. I'm not really sure why this is either. In high school, I started seeing a chiropractor after prolonged back and neck pain and limited upper body mobility that my general practicioner didn't really think was anything at all. It is the chiropractor's opinion (and mine) that my back and neck pain are probably a result of a car accident when I was 12. I see him on an irregular basis, when I have an issue. I have, at different times, experienced nagging leg pain, what I imagine restless leg syndrome feels like. It usually only bothers me when I lay down to sleep. Stretching gives me temporary relief. At my most recent physical in July when I was having this problem, the doctor's nurse told me that it was a vitamin deficiency and to start regularly taking a multi-vitamin. This in combination with a trip to the chiropractor stopped the pain. For awhile at least. I had to stop the multi-vitamin about a month in because it had iron and iron causes me to have horrible heavy periods. I should have looked for another but it is very hard to find a multi-vitamin without iron. And I mostly didn't have any more problems with it until last month. Maybe one night here and there, but nothing like this. The nagging pain has started to bother me when I am sitting as well as when I lay down to sleep. It makes me want to move, to stretch out farther in bed, to shift position, which makes me not a great person to sleep in the same bed with or to even sit on the couch with sometimes. And the pain has started to spread to my forearms. I've been taking ibeprophen every 6 hours. I went to the chiropractor two weeks ago. It helped for a couple days, but then came back. I'm not sure what to do now. I'm not sure if it is the result of back problems and nerve pinching. And I can't really afford to go to... well, any doctor to explore what it could be. But it sure makes sleeping and functioning even less fun that it was before. I'm kinda screwed all the way around.
Then there is the latest bit of drama. BT's ex gf, the one he was with after he left me, sent me a message on myspace to apologize for everything. I responded, thanking her, telling her that, though she said she didn't believe anything he had said about he and I, I had a hand in the end of the relationship, that I wasn't innocent, and that I didn't wish her ill, as there was enough blame to go around. I also told BT that she had contacted me, giving him the gist of the conversation but not copying it, because I didn't want him to find out through her or any mutual friends of theirs and be upset that I hadn't told him. I am really trying hard to be civil and friendly with him. She replied with some info about their relationship that I hadn't asked for, though it had to do with some legal issues I knew they were having that I really don't want to be a part of. That's when I heard from BT- he wanted a copy of the messages to use in the legal wranglings, despite my saying that they weren't going to help him. While he didn't get angry, as far as I could tell, he did REALLY want me to give them to him. When I let her know about his request, including the fact that I had told him to have his JAG lawyer call me or get a court order, she got mad at me for ever having told him about her messaging me. So, in a petty moment, I said fuck it to myself and sent it on to him. There was a moment in there when I felt like maybe I wasn't going to be the hated pariah in this whole situation. Maybe my ex-husband wouldn't hate me and we could at least be civil, even if we couldn't be friends, and I wouldn't feel like the woman he got with after me, who no doubt heard lots of bad things about me and felt all kinds of bad things about me, many because she felt that I had hurt the man she loved, doesn't hate me. Guess not.
Fuck. I really wish I could drink without a blindingly painful hangover, because getting really drunk is about all I can come up with right now.
Another recent development that hasn't really helped me is that I've started going through a decent amount of pain for a frustrating percentage of my time. I'm not really sure why this is either. In high school, I started seeing a chiropractor after prolonged back and neck pain and limited upper body mobility that my general practicioner didn't really think was anything at all. It is the chiropractor's opinion (and mine) that my back and neck pain are probably a result of a car accident when I was 12. I see him on an irregular basis, when I have an issue. I have, at different times, experienced nagging leg pain, what I imagine restless leg syndrome feels like. It usually only bothers me when I lay down to sleep. Stretching gives me temporary relief. At my most recent physical in July when I was having this problem, the doctor's nurse told me that it was a vitamin deficiency and to start regularly taking a multi-vitamin. This in combination with a trip to the chiropractor stopped the pain. For awhile at least. I had to stop the multi-vitamin about a month in because it had iron and iron causes me to have horrible heavy periods. I should have looked for another but it is very hard to find a multi-vitamin without iron. And I mostly didn't have any more problems with it until last month. Maybe one night here and there, but nothing like this. The nagging pain has started to bother me when I am sitting as well as when I lay down to sleep. It makes me want to move, to stretch out farther in bed, to shift position, which makes me not a great person to sleep in the same bed with or to even sit on the couch with sometimes. And the pain has started to spread to my forearms. I've been taking ibeprophen every 6 hours. I went to the chiropractor two weeks ago. It helped for a couple days, but then came back. I'm not sure what to do now. I'm not sure if it is the result of back problems and nerve pinching. And I can't really afford to go to... well, any doctor to explore what it could be. But it sure makes sleeping and functioning even less fun that it was before. I'm kinda screwed all the way around.
Then there is the latest bit of drama. BT's ex gf, the one he was with after he left me, sent me a message on myspace to apologize for everything. I responded, thanking her, telling her that, though she said she didn't believe anything he had said about he and I, I had a hand in the end of the relationship, that I wasn't innocent, and that I didn't wish her ill, as there was enough blame to go around. I also told BT that she had contacted me, giving him the gist of the conversation but not copying it, because I didn't want him to find out through her or any mutual friends of theirs and be upset that I hadn't told him. I am really trying hard to be civil and friendly with him. She replied with some info about their relationship that I hadn't asked for, though it had to do with some legal issues I knew they were having that I really don't want to be a part of. That's when I heard from BT- he wanted a copy of the messages to use in the legal wranglings, despite my saying that they weren't going to help him. While he didn't get angry, as far as I could tell, he did REALLY want me to give them to him. When I let her know about his request, including the fact that I had told him to have his JAG lawyer call me or get a court order, she got mad at me for ever having told him about her messaging me. So, in a petty moment, I said fuck it to myself and sent it on to him. There was a moment in there when I felt like maybe I wasn't going to be the hated pariah in this whole situation. Maybe my ex-husband wouldn't hate me and we could at least be civil, even if we couldn't be friends, and I wouldn't feel like the woman he got with after me, who no doubt heard lots of bad things about me and felt all kinds of bad things about me, many because she felt that I had hurt the man she loved, doesn't hate me. Guess not.
Fuck. I really wish I could drink without a blindingly painful hangover, because getting really drunk is about all I can come up with right now.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Disappointment
*Sigh* I started the week before last pretty excited. Joblessness has been getting me down lately, but I got some advice that pushed me to go ahead and start purueing volunteer opportunities, then adjust my scheduling if/when I got a job. I decided on signing up to volunteer with an animal shelter (the same one where I got my older cat) and the metro LGBT community center. All the while, I would continue to do work for my folks and apply for jobs, including jobs I might not normally apply for.
Well, two weeks later and I'm pretty much nowhere. Which is where I started. So at least I didn't move backwards.
I filled out the application to volunteer at the animal shelter Monday before last. I still haven't heard from them. I checked out the website and it said that, because they have a large number of people who want to volunteer, it often takes 2-3 weeks for them to get back to anyone. Selfishly, I was hoping to be able to fill some time up sooner.
In what I thought was a good sign, I heard back from someone at the LGBT community center the day after I sent them an email and was invited to join their membership committee meeting last Sunday. It was a great meeting and I felt energized and hopeful. I was only supposed to contact two other LGBT groups, go to one of their meetings, and tell them about our upcoming activities. The one group doesn't meet for a few weeks, but going to talk to the other group is more complicated. I took the women's football team during our meeting and it was suggested that I ask if I could come speak to them just before a practice. I never heard back from them. I also didn't hear back from the committee's leader, who had said he would provide talking points when we went to talk to these groups. Last Sunday, we had a specific event that we were supposed to be promoting, which was supposed to happen next Saturday. It has now disappeared from the website. I sent another email but it isn't looking so good....
I'm still applying for jobs. I even applied to a few housekeeping jobs. And one of them sent me an email back saying that they were going with more qualified applicants. I know, I know, I know. This means that they are looking at candidates who have previous housekeeping exprience. But what I read was that I'm not even qualified to be a housekeeper. Ever feel like you'll never find a job? Then, you start to look back at times where you messed up on jobs, and you start to think that you don't deserve a job. Today Mom said that they don't call it a "down" economy just because all those numbers are down. It's the people that are down too. In my head, I keep imagining our cities and towns turning into those dark, dirty, scary places of late-1970s and 1980s indie movies. I watched Repo Man last week. Wow....... That movie is crazy.
Helping around the house was going well, but health issues have derailed that the last half week or so. Sorry if this is TMI but- Well, my period started up today, so I'm guessing that my need to sleep for 18 hours a day was some lovely PMS. So I haven't gotten out to do the shopping that I was supposed to do for my folks and we don't have alot of food around right now. But I did manage to be awake to go with my mom to her eye appointment today, as she was worried they would dilate her eyes and she didn't want to drive herself home. Yay me!
Lastly, there's the love life. Meh. What love life? My regular lover has been out of town for work and, when home, too tired and overloaded to hang out. And my other dating relationship seems to be at a standstill. Partly because of lack of privacy, also because of a lack of sexual aggression on both our parts, and well other stuff. I don't want to push anything and I really don't think either of us know exactly what we want so it's kinda just where it's at.
So, no lovin', no job, and no selfish selflessness. Let's hope next week is better.
Well, two weeks later and I'm pretty much nowhere. Which is where I started. So at least I didn't move backwards.
I filled out the application to volunteer at the animal shelter Monday before last. I still haven't heard from them. I checked out the website and it said that, because they have a large number of people who want to volunteer, it often takes 2-3 weeks for them to get back to anyone. Selfishly, I was hoping to be able to fill some time up sooner.
In what I thought was a good sign, I heard back from someone at the LGBT community center the day after I sent them an email and was invited to join their membership committee meeting last Sunday. It was a great meeting and I felt energized and hopeful. I was only supposed to contact two other LGBT groups, go to one of their meetings, and tell them about our upcoming activities. The one group doesn't meet for a few weeks, but going to talk to the other group is more complicated. I took the women's football team during our meeting and it was suggested that I ask if I could come speak to them just before a practice. I never heard back from them. I also didn't hear back from the committee's leader, who had said he would provide talking points when we went to talk to these groups. Last Sunday, we had a specific event that we were supposed to be promoting, which was supposed to happen next Saturday. It has now disappeared from the website. I sent another email but it isn't looking so good....
I'm still applying for jobs. I even applied to a few housekeeping jobs. And one of them sent me an email back saying that they were going with more qualified applicants. I know, I know, I know. This means that they are looking at candidates who have previous housekeeping exprience. But what I read was that I'm not even qualified to be a housekeeper. Ever feel like you'll never find a job? Then, you start to look back at times where you messed up on jobs, and you start to think that you don't deserve a job. Today Mom said that they don't call it a "down" economy just because all those numbers are down. It's the people that are down too. In my head, I keep imagining our cities and towns turning into those dark, dirty, scary places of late-1970s and 1980s indie movies. I watched Repo Man last week. Wow....... That movie is crazy.
Helping around the house was going well, but health issues have derailed that the last half week or so. Sorry if this is TMI but- Well, my period started up today, so I'm guessing that my need to sleep for 18 hours a day was some lovely PMS. So I haven't gotten out to do the shopping that I was supposed to do for my folks and we don't have alot of food around right now. But I did manage to be awake to go with my mom to her eye appointment today, as she was worried they would dilate her eyes and she didn't want to drive herself home. Yay me!
Lastly, there's the love life. Meh. What love life? My regular lover has been out of town for work and, when home, too tired and overloaded to hang out. And my other dating relationship seems to be at a standstill. Partly because of lack of privacy, also because of a lack of sexual aggression on both our parts, and well other stuff. I don't want to push anything and I really don't think either of us know exactly what we want so it's kinda just where it's at.
So, no lovin', no job, and no selfish selflessness. Let's hope next week is better.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Economic Paradigms
Before I jump on my soapbox, I’d like to beg your forgiveness. While I’m not sure that I could have made this all make sense when I was at my best, I am really afraid that this might be incomprehensible, as it seems like my IQ has dropped 20 points since I started this medicine, but I feel like I need to try to get it out anyway, whether or not it makes any sense or any difference.
Next, I should say that I don’t understand the economy. I’ve never really wanted to. I’ve never taken a class on it, or even read a book on it. I have an IRA that I don’t pay attention to that I got from my high school graduation. But I do have a love-hate relationship with politics and news, so it is hard to avoid economics these days. And I know, generally, what each side is fighting for and against, the principles and theories that each side says is guiding them. But I can’t claim to have any idea what is best.
But it isn’t just a lack of education and understanding of economics that prevent me from feeling like I can claim what option is “best.” It is that there is also the question of “What is BEST for what and for whom?” For someone who holds the belief that the country is best as a strictly capitalist economic structure (which it hasn’t been for a long time, but whatever), then they would think that it would be a necessary evil for people and corporations that couldn’t hack it to go under, for the country to go through more economic strife if it meant maintaining and/or reasserting a strict capitalist structure. Most of these people think that capitalism is best for the general good, that capitalism provides the best opportunity for innovation, for people to rise through the work force, for individual and group liberty, etc. And many also believe that it is what is best for them. Even if they aren’t rich now, they still think they could be rich, could run a successful company that they don’t want heavily regulated, and that they don’t want to give more of their money to the government in the form of taxes. This goes for every theory. The theory that a person or group prefers benefits them in some way, just as it also benefits the greater good. I used capitalism as an example, but it is true of all these theories and, also, it is almost impossible to follow one of these economic or political-economic theories completely. There’s always a mix of something else in there too.
But I guess what’s been bugging me lately is the attitude around me. “Both my parents taught me about goodwill and I have done well by their names.”-Ani. We’ve never had a ton, though we’ve never wanted, but my family always encouraged the idea of spreading it around. I remember my stepdad inviting guys he worked with over for Thanksgiving when they didn’t have family nearby to spend the holiday with. This Christmas, I overheard him in the other room telling someone about how all the guys he worked with pitched in to get the poorest among them proper clothing to shovel show in. It was all second-hand work gloves and boots, but it made all the difference to him. So, how can this same man unsympathetically advocate throwing people on the streets if they face foreclosure, without any recognition that some people were tricked into ARMs or the simple economic fact that it would be net a lender more to change the terms of the mortgage than just foreclose? Who calls those to use government help, not just welfare but even unemployment benefits, bums? Who doesn’t want to pay more in taxes, to have less personally, because he says that, even if it were to JUST go to create more jobs, those jobs would only go to the same old people, not actually employ those who are currently unemployed? I could go on, but it’s depressing.
But the fucked up thing is that, if I present a specific example, he usually agrees with me, has a more compassionate stance, based on the reality of the situation. When I asked him if I was a bum, as I’m currently living off of him and my mother, he said that I wasn’t a bum, that I was just going through a difficult time, but that it was different because I was relying on family. When I pointed out that, if for example I went on disability for one reason or another, I would be taking money that I had paid in on my paychecks, which is also what unemployment benefits are. These things are part of why we pay taxes. When I asked him if he didn’t think that the government should take taxes that go to public education, he said that he thought that was ok. So, he obviously doesn’t think that the government shouldn’t do anything. Or he at least believes that there is not a current privately funded system to do those things for us. But the big picture answer stays the same. No higher taxes. Let companies and corporations fail. Let us go through what we’ll go through, as a country.
One of the high-profile liberal bloggers that I read regularly, John Arvosis, recently wrote about how tired he personally is of the sob stories surrounding home foreclosures, especially as he’s worked hard, sacrificed, and maintained his payments on a condo he bought after saving a sizable down payment and doing his homework on loan terms and interest rates. His biggest point is that he might care about home foreclosures if the news stories he read didn’t use people who did stupid things or were planning on flipping the house for more than they originally paid as examples, but instead showed real people that had been taken advantage of by fast-talking, misleading mortgage brokers. While John got a lot of flack from commentors, a few did share their personal stories of being mislead or outright lied to, while others pointed to stories in their local paper or on their local news stations that highlights real people who had been mislead or lied to about the terms of their loans.
To me, the lesson seems to be that when one gets down to specific examples, to the level of the individual, the story can often change. One part of me things that this means that the best way is to bring up a specific real life example of an individual to sway someone who might only be thinking of themselves or sticking to their larger economic and political views, rather than the good of those currently less fortunate, along with the reminder that they could be that less fortunate person at any time. An example of this might be to talk about the real life person I know who was just laid off from his job at a small company that didn’t have to give him any notice during which he could look for another job and doesn’t currently have much saving because he just paid for the burial of his son. If he doesn’t take the unemployment benefits, which he has been paying into all of his working life, he and his working wife could lose their home and cars while he is looking for a job. There is no reason this man shouldn’t take the benefits available to him and he is not a bad person for making use of this safety net, which seems to me like a mass savings account. And I do think that this might be able to sway the person, get them to agree with you in the moment, maybe even make them change their idea on a vote, but I’m not sure it’ll make any long term difference. I suppose as I think about the larger liberal movement and also all the –ism movements that I follow, the real argument needs to be about everyone, what rules and rights and privileges should be afforded to everyone, not just a few, based on what one thinks a human is entitled to from their government and from other people. For example, saying that no recently unemployed person who is eligible for unemployment benefits under the current law should be denied them, have it made difficult to get them, nor should they feel a stigma attached to taking a security net benefit that they have been contributing to for the duration of their working lives. Unfortunately, that broader argument is going to be more difficult to sway someone on, as they already have their own view of what a human is entitled to. So I’m not really sure how to answer this or fix any of this, except to share it with others, knowing most people won’t change their mind.
I’ll leave you with another Ani song. I guess I paid attention to it for the first time tonight when she was playing on PBS. It highlights what I feel right now, the difference in my head and my stepdad’s head between what is right and what is wrong in this situation, when I learned a good deal about helping others from him.
Sorry, it's sideways. What do you expect from youtube?
Paradigm - Ani DiFranco
I was born to two immigrants
Who knew why they were here
They were happy to pay taxes
For the schools and roads
Happy to be here
They took it seriously
The second job of citizenry
My mother went campaigning door to door
And holding to her hand was me
I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening
But I suppose like anybody
I had to teach myself to see
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to church
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to school
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to the house of my family
All that stuff that was not lost on me
Teach myself to see each of us
Through the lens of forgiveness
Like we're stuck with each other (god forbid!)
Teach myself to smile and stop and talk
To a whole other color kid
Teach myself to be new in an instant
Like the truth is accessible at any time
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm
I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening
Next, I should say that I don’t understand the economy. I’ve never really wanted to. I’ve never taken a class on it, or even read a book on it. I have an IRA that I don’t pay attention to that I got from my high school graduation. But I do have a love-hate relationship with politics and news, so it is hard to avoid economics these days. And I know, generally, what each side is fighting for and against, the principles and theories that each side says is guiding them. But I can’t claim to have any idea what is best.
But it isn’t just a lack of education and understanding of economics that prevent me from feeling like I can claim what option is “best.” It is that there is also the question of “What is BEST for what and for whom?” For someone who holds the belief that the country is best as a strictly capitalist economic structure (which it hasn’t been for a long time, but whatever), then they would think that it would be a necessary evil for people and corporations that couldn’t hack it to go under, for the country to go through more economic strife if it meant maintaining and/or reasserting a strict capitalist structure. Most of these people think that capitalism is best for the general good, that capitalism provides the best opportunity for innovation, for people to rise through the work force, for individual and group liberty, etc. And many also believe that it is what is best for them. Even if they aren’t rich now, they still think they could be rich, could run a successful company that they don’t want heavily regulated, and that they don’t want to give more of their money to the government in the form of taxes. This goes for every theory. The theory that a person or group prefers benefits them in some way, just as it also benefits the greater good. I used capitalism as an example, but it is true of all these theories and, also, it is almost impossible to follow one of these economic or political-economic theories completely. There’s always a mix of something else in there too.
But I guess what’s been bugging me lately is the attitude around me. “Both my parents taught me about goodwill and I have done well by their names.”-Ani. We’ve never had a ton, though we’ve never wanted, but my family always encouraged the idea of spreading it around. I remember my stepdad inviting guys he worked with over for Thanksgiving when they didn’t have family nearby to spend the holiday with. This Christmas, I overheard him in the other room telling someone about how all the guys he worked with pitched in to get the poorest among them proper clothing to shovel show in. It was all second-hand work gloves and boots, but it made all the difference to him. So, how can this same man unsympathetically advocate throwing people on the streets if they face foreclosure, without any recognition that some people were tricked into ARMs or the simple economic fact that it would be net a lender more to change the terms of the mortgage than just foreclose? Who calls those to use government help, not just welfare but even unemployment benefits, bums? Who doesn’t want to pay more in taxes, to have less personally, because he says that, even if it were to JUST go to create more jobs, those jobs would only go to the same old people, not actually employ those who are currently unemployed? I could go on, but it’s depressing.
But the fucked up thing is that, if I present a specific example, he usually agrees with me, has a more compassionate stance, based on the reality of the situation. When I asked him if I was a bum, as I’m currently living off of him and my mother, he said that I wasn’t a bum, that I was just going through a difficult time, but that it was different because I was relying on family. When I pointed out that, if for example I went on disability for one reason or another, I would be taking money that I had paid in on my paychecks, which is also what unemployment benefits are. These things are part of why we pay taxes. When I asked him if he didn’t think that the government should take taxes that go to public education, he said that he thought that was ok. So, he obviously doesn’t think that the government shouldn’t do anything. Or he at least believes that there is not a current privately funded system to do those things for us. But the big picture answer stays the same. No higher taxes. Let companies and corporations fail. Let us go through what we’ll go through, as a country.
One of the high-profile liberal bloggers that I read regularly, John Arvosis, recently wrote about how tired he personally is of the sob stories surrounding home foreclosures, especially as he’s worked hard, sacrificed, and maintained his payments on a condo he bought after saving a sizable down payment and doing his homework on loan terms and interest rates. His biggest point is that he might care about home foreclosures if the news stories he read didn’t use people who did stupid things or were planning on flipping the house for more than they originally paid as examples, but instead showed real people that had been taken advantage of by fast-talking, misleading mortgage brokers. While John got a lot of flack from commentors, a few did share their personal stories of being mislead or outright lied to, while others pointed to stories in their local paper or on their local news stations that highlights real people who had been mislead or lied to about the terms of their loans.
To me, the lesson seems to be that when one gets down to specific examples, to the level of the individual, the story can often change. One part of me things that this means that the best way is to bring up a specific real life example of an individual to sway someone who might only be thinking of themselves or sticking to their larger economic and political views, rather than the good of those currently less fortunate, along with the reminder that they could be that less fortunate person at any time. An example of this might be to talk about the real life person I know who was just laid off from his job at a small company that didn’t have to give him any notice during which he could look for another job and doesn’t currently have much saving because he just paid for the burial of his son. If he doesn’t take the unemployment benefits, which he has been paying into all of his working life, he and his working wife could lose their home and cars while he is looking for a job. There is no reason this man shouldn’t take the benefits available to him and he is not a bad person for making use of this safety net, which seems to me like a mass savings account. And I do think that this might be able to sway the person, get them to agree with you in the moment, maybe even make them change their idea on a vote, but I’m not sure it’ll make any long term difference. I suppose as I think about the larger liberal movement and also all the –ism movements that I follow, the real argument needs to be about everyone, what rules and rights and privileges should be afforded to everyone, not just a few, based on what one thinks a human is entitled to from their government and from other people. For example, saying that no recently unemployed person who is eligible for unemployment benefits under the current law should be denied them, have it made difficult to get them, nor should they feel a stigma attached to taking a security net benefit that they have been contributing to for the duration of their working lives. Unfortunately, that broader argument is going to be more difficult to sway someone on, as they already have their own view of what a human is entitled to. So I’m not really sure how to answer this or fix any of this, except to share it with others, knowing most people won’t change their mind.
I’ll leave you with another Ani song. I guess I paid attention to it for the first time tonight when she was playing on PBS. It highlights what I feel right now, the difference in my head and my stepdad’s head between what is right and what is wrong in this situation, when I learned a good deal about helping others from him.
Sorry, it's sideways. What do you expect from youtube?
Paradigm - Ani DiFranco
I was born to two immigrants
Who knew why they were here
They were happy to pay taxes
For the schools and roads
Happy to be here
They took it seriously
The second job of citizenry
My mother went campaigning door to door
And holding to her hand was me
I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening
But I suppose like anybody
I had to teach myself to see
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to church
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to school
All that stuff that got lost
On its way to the house of my family
All that stuff that was not lost on me
Teach myself to see each of us
Through the lens of forgiveness
Like we're stuck with each other (god forbid!)
Teach myself to smile and stop and talk
To a whole other color kid
Teach myself to be new in an instant
Like the truth is accessible at any time
Teach myself it's never really one or the other
There's a paradox in every paradigm
I was just a girl in a room full of women
Licking stamps and laughing
I remember the feeling of community brewing
Of democracy happening
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Update to "More freewrite..."
This is what BT posted as a comment to this post on Myspace:
So I don't know what to write or say to that. It seems to be to just be more "woe is me" without ever taking credit for anything or asking what one could do to make it better. What fucking bullshit. You know, no one makes me want to hurt myself like him....
And SERIOUSLY- you care about me??? Where was all this caring when you left me less than a week after I got out of the hospital and promptly moved another woman into your place? Where was that caring when you demanded that I do all the work for a divorce and beg my parents for money so that I could pay for it, so that you could marry that woman, so that her and her children could get your military benefits when you re-deployed, despite all your claims of horrendous PTSD? Caring is about what you actually DO, all the time, not just a phone call here and there, not just words that don't mean anything when not backed up by actions, and not just when the newest crazy bitch allows you to talk to your female friends and exes. And I fully allow that you can and probably should hate me forever for what I did to you. That's why I left you alone once I got that you were really gone, except to talk about the real issues of the divorce. But you don't seem to want to allow me to have my pain over what happened. AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! "They say time heals everything but I'm still waiting."
All that I wanted was to let yo know that I still think about you, still
care about you, and still worry about you. I am very sorry if all that upsets
you, so do not fear, I will be gone from Kansas in about 3 months, back to
active duty, and another state, and hopefully back to Iraq. I am very sorry if
my calling you upset you, but something inside me told me to call you, and you
know that I always follow those instincts. But you may rest easy, as you just
said, you are not sure you want us to remain friends, so I will not contact you
again, and if you wish, my phone will always be on for you, as I do still care
for you.Goodbye Ava
So I don't know what to write or say to that. It seems to be to just be more "woe is me" without ever taking credit for anything or asking what one could do to make it better. What fucking bullshit. You know, no one makes me want to hurt myself like him....
And SERIOUSLY- you care about me??? Where was all this caring when you left me less than a week after I got out of the hospital and promptly moved another woman into your place? Where was that caring when you demanded that I do all the work for a divorce and beg my parents for money so that I could pay for it, so that you could marry that woman, so that her and her children could get your military benefits when you re-deployed, despite all your claims of horrendous PTSD? Caring is about what you actually DO, all the time, not just a phone call here and there, not just words that don't mean anything when not backed up by actions, and not just when the newest crazy bitch allows you to talk to your female friends and exes. And I fully allow that you can and probably should hate me forever for what I did to you. That's why I left you alone once I got that you were really gone, except to talk about the real issues of the divorce. But you don't seem to want to allow me to have my pain over what happened. AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! "They say time heals everything but I'm still waiting."
More freewriting than writing...
Can't sleep because of my "restless leg syndrome". Ok, so it probably isn't that but I don't know what the hell to call it and it sure as hell feels like what the commercials describe. Keep thinking that I should have stolen some of my Gram's meds for RLS when I was visiting last week. And a few Vicoden while I was at it.
Laying here wondering why you called me. St Patty's Day. You were between bars. I can't deny that a part of me envies those who can and do go out to bars, drink, smoke, have a good time, though I also have to admit that I wasn't that wild when I was drinking, mostly due to a lack of designated drivers. But I think I kinda rained on your parade when you called. I didn't have much to say, no recent good news in my life, and I wasn't happy and drunk myself.
But I'm not sure what you expect to hear. I don't exactly feel comfortable telling you about seeing and fucking my ex-bf while I was out of town visiting my grandmother, the one who really dislikes you, the one who just got out of jail and still owes me money that I got from you. And I know you don't want to hear about the only consistent friendship and bed partner that I do have, a man you despise and think stole me from you, among other crimes. And you've known that for the past couple of weeks I've been too depressed to really do much of anything, including hang out with most of my other friends or do anything constructive, like get a fucking job. Thankfully, just the driving and singing of my road trip helped that some, but.... I don't really feel like you want to hear about me being happy. Hell, I didn't feel like hearing you all happy-drunk, especially because of issues that were between us about alcohol. Not that I begrudge you happiness, but I just wish it felt like it was a little more real and lasting, instead of something that can only fuel more drama in your life.
The day before this call, while sitting at a red light, the driver of the car next to me lit up a cigarette. The weater was beautiful and we both had our windows down. I caught a long, lingering whiff of her cigarette smoke before the light changed. It reminded me of you. One might think that, after a childhood living with my grandparents who both smoked like chimnees, I would associate the smell of cigarette smoke with them. And I guess I do, but I usually associate them with the smell of stale, lingering cigarette smoke in a too-small room. But fresh cigarette smoke..... Hell, if it wasn't for the interest of another man, memories of you might have ruined my experience at a day-before-Valentine's-Day party. One of the other players at my Spin The Bottle table was a smoker. He tasted like you. Hell, he even kissed kinda like you. And a Juggalo to boot.
So I'm still wondering what you expected when you called last night. I guess I just think it is all a little too soon for all this. Even if I wanted to remain friends with you, which I'm honestly not sure I do want to, because it hurts to fucking much still, I'm not sure I'm in a place to do that. When people are friends with their exes, they usually end up trying to get back together. Unless they have significant others at the time, in which case they just cheat. The prime example being my ex-bf I just saw and all your ex-gfs who crawled out of the woodwork once you were married and gainfully employed. Just don't know what the fuck you wanted or expected. Not sure any answer will actually make me sleep any better.....
Laying here wondering why you called me. St Patty's Day. You were between bars. I can't deny that a part of me envies those who can and do go out to bars, drink, smoke, have a good time, though I also have to admit that I wasn't that wild when I was drinking, mostly due to a lack of designated drivers. But I think I kinda rained on your parade when you called. I didn't have much to say, no recent good news in my life, and I wasn't happy and drunk myself.
But I'm not sure what you expect to hear. I don't exactly feel comfortable telling you about seeing and fucking my ex-bf while I was out of town visiting my grandmother, the one who really dislikes you, the one who just got out of jail and still owes me money that I got from you. And I know you don't want to hear about the only consistent friendship and bed partner that I do have, a man you despise and think stole me from you, among other crimes. And you've known that for the past couple of weeks I've been too depressed to really do much of anything, including hang out with most of my other friends or do anything constructive, like get a fucking job. Thankfully, just the driving and singing of my road trip helped that some, but.... I don't really feel like you want to hear about me being happy. Hell, I didn't feel like hearing you all happy-drunk, especially because of issues that were between us about alcohol. Not that I begrudge you happiness, but I just wish it felt like it was a little more real and lasting, instead of something that can only fuel more drama in your life.
The day before this call, while sitting at a red light, the driver of the car next to me lit up a cigarette. The weater was beautiful and we both had our windows down. I caught a long, lingering whiff of her cigarette smoke before the light changed. It reminded me of you. One might think that, after a childhood living with my grandparents who both smoked like chimnees, I would associate the smell of cigarette smoke with them. And I guess I do, but I usually associate them with the smell of stale, lingering cigarette smoke in a too-small room. But fresh cigarette smoke..... Hell, if it wasn't for the interest of another man, memories of you might have ruined my experience at a day-before-Valentine's-Day party. One of the other players at my Spin The Bottle table was a smoker. He tasted like you. Hell, he even kissed kinda like you. And a Juggalo to boot.
So I'm still wondering what you expected when you called last night. I guess I just think it is all a little too soon for all this. Even if I wanted to remain friends with you, which I'm honestly not sure I do want to, because it hurts to fucking much still, I'm not sure I'm in a place to do that. When people are friends with their exes, they usually end up trying to get back together. Unless they have significant others at the time, in which case they just cheat. The prime example being my ex-bf I just saw and all your ex-gfs who crawled out of the woodwork once you were married and gainfully employed. Just don't know what the fuck you wanted or expected. Not sure any answer will actually make me sleep any better.....
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Minefields
I don’t tend to “date”, as such. Until the past two years or so, I would get deep into a relationship early on, usually before the previous relationship ended, and stay in that relationship long-term, until the next one came along. For all that practice at relationships, one would think that I might have gotten good at it, but that was not the case. But at least I had experience in that. I didn’t have experience at the whole dating thing.
Actually, I don’t think I really do have much experience with the whole dating thing. After the confidence boost and push to control my own sexuality that MP gave me, I hopped around a bit, but I wouldn’t call that “dating” either. There was a “date,” meaning there was a meeting in a public place, usually for a meal, so we could scope each other out, then there was usually sex. Basic sex in a box set-up. Most guys tended to come back, as I was discreet and not clingy after the sex. Guys don’t usually pass up free sex. A few guys either just disappeared or faded away, some of them I’d slept with, some of them we didn’t get the chance. Some of them I developed a modicum of friendship with, and I usually paid them the courtesy of a message here and there, at least let them know when I stopped being interested in fooling around. But for the most part, everyone knew what was what and, while I was sometimes disappointed when someone would just disappear, I accepted that was what it was and just let it be. No calls or emails. While explanations are always appreciated, they don’t owe me one and, really, I don’t owe them one.
But “dating” is different. It’s all bullshit and calculation and façade, even when one attempts to really be real. I’m not the most social of people. I’m ok once I get to know people and can usually come off well with small groups of people. But I don’t really like doing it for very long. It’s too much work. Hell, sometimes even people I know, people I’m close with, are too much work. I remember how relieved I was to get to just BE, be myself, be nothing, with TyRoy after a four-hour car ride with my grandmother. You know, that might be a good simile for dating: Dates with new(-ish) people are like a long car ride with my grandmother, only I know where I shouldn’t step with my grandmother. Dates are wholly new minefields.
But we brave the minefields because sometimes the treasures we find in the fields and on the other side of the fields are ones that complement our own. But I think we can always find treasures there. Also, I guess the sex in the box relationships, the dating relationships, and the LTRelationships all present different minefields. I’m just more comfortable navigating the sex in the box and LTRelationships. But back in December, knowing that I didn’t really want to bed hop as hosting is rather uncomfortable for me right now and the meds somewhat alter my sex drive, and knowing that I wanted a LTRelationship, eventually, though probably not completely monogamous and I wouldn’t want to jump right in, so I started “dating.” I don’t think I’ve been what one would term successful.
I think the most successful I’ve been is more in developing a friendship that may never become physical with the woman I’ve been dating. In my experience, dating or even just fooling around with women, especially, usually, more femme women, there’s a problem getting the physical aspect going. I’m really just not that sexually aggressive. Also, I know what it’s like to have someone who is too sexually aggressive be all over me, making me uncomfortable, but be too stupid to get my hints for them to back off. I don’t want to be that person. And currently we both have issues hosting the other. But I really do enjoy her company. She is one of the few women that I know who really gets and agrees with my non-monogamy. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband is very very much like my own ex-husband. Blah blah blah. You get the picture. We get each other. And I think we are both pretty much ok with not labeling or limiting what we are or aren’t to each other.
Now, I’ve had less luck with the boys. Things just not fitting. Not bad guys, though. Now I’m trying to navigate that part of the minefield I had only really seen in sitcoms and romantic comedies. You know, I’m not really sure if it has a title. It’s not really a “break-up” because you were never together as a couple. Calling it “the brush-off” sounds mean, but it might be the most accurate. In LTRelationships, I’m used to the drama-filled break-up with someone you still love very much and who still loves you and the gradual process of trying to become friends, because you both know each other in very close, intimate ways. And, with the sex in the box, as I wrote above, you accepted that no one owed anyone anything, and just let it be.
But ending a “dating” relationship, especially early on, is different. I’m probably putting way too much thought into this, though. I went on a couple dates around the beginning of the year with a guy I was sorta interested in, but we had a couple weeks where our plans fell through and we didn’t really communicate very much, then he kinda disappeared. I sent a text or two, saying hi and asking if he wanted to hang out. When I got no answer I stopped. No need to stalk, right? Now, I have absolutely no idea why he stopped communicating with me. But I would guess that he didn’t struggle for days with if he should stop seeing me and how he should do it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good guy who didn’t appreciate my company. But I really doubt it.
I, on the other hand, spent days thinking about how to end things with someone that I had a few dates with recently. [NB: I probably sound like a completely patronizing ass, especially if he happens to read this, but I can only write from my side and to get across the point I am attempting to make. Sorry if I step on any toes. But, then again, everyone I date knows about my blog so….) For the most part, I don’t think two people are ever equally interested in each other at any given time. It might be close but it’s never equal. And when you are in a situation where you just don’t fit, where you just aren’t “feelin’ it,” but the other person did nothing wrong, I don’t see any reason not to at least try to minimize any hurt feelings. This is even more true if you think that the other person is already more invested in the relationship than you are. But, on the other hand, it isn’t fair to anyone to continue when you know it isn’t going anywhere, especially not where they want it to go.
Grrrr….. But I’m still so torn. Do most people have this same dilemma? Is it different for men and women, generally? Do men and women prefer different methods, namely does one gender prefer to be disappeared on vs. getting as nice and civil of an explanation as one can honestly give them? And do most people put more thought into one or the other? Is there a possibility that the guy I was dating around New Year’s really thought about it long and hard before he stopped returning my text messages? This shit is too fucking hard. Not sure I’m up for this stupid shit right now. I have loving friends, and I get sex regularly at this time, so I think I’ll just let a LTR find me, if it’s going to. And keep a first aid kit handy, in case I stumble upon any more minefields I want to walk through.
Actually, I don’t think I really do have much experience with the whole dating thing. After the confidence boost and push to control my own sexuality that MP gave me, I hopped around a bit, but I wouldn’t call that “dating” either. There was a “date,” meaning there was a meeting in a public place, usually for a meal, so we could scope each other out, then there was usually sex. Basic sex in a box set-up. Most guys tended to come back, as I was discreet and not clingy after the sex. Guys don’t usually pass up free sex. A few guys either just disappeared or faded away, some of them I’d slept with, some of them we didn’t get the chance. Some of them I developed a modicum of friendship with, and I usually paid them the courtesy of a message here and there, at least let them know when I stopped being interested in fooling around. But for the most part, everyone knew what was what and, while I was sometimes disappointed when someone would just disappear, I accepted that was what it was and just let it be. No calls or emails. While explanations are always appreciated, they don’t owe me one and, really, I don’t owe them one.
But “dating” is different. It’s all bullshit and calculation and façade, even when one attempts to really be real. I’m not the most social of people. I’m ok once I get to know people and can usually come off well with small groups of people. But I don’t really like doing it for very long. It’s too much work. Hell, sometimes even people I know, people I’m close with, are too much work. I remember how relieved I was to get to just BE, be myself, be nothing, with TyRoy after a four-hour car ride with my grandmother. You know, that might be a good simile for dating: Dates with new(-ish) people are like a long car ride with my grandmother, only I know where I shouldn’t step with my grandmother. Dates are wholly new minefields.
But we brave the minefields because sometimes the treasures we find in the fields and on the other side of the fields are ones that complement our own. But I think we can always find treasures there. Also, I guess the sex in the box relationships, the dating relationships, and the LTRelationships all present different minefields. I’m just more comfortable navigating the sex in the box and LTRelationships. But back in December, knowing that I didn’t really want to bed hop as hosting is rather uncomfortable for me right now and the meds somewhat alter my sex drive, and knowing that I wanted a LTRelationship, eventually, though probably not completely monogamous and I wouldn’t want to jump right in, so I started “dating.” I don’t think I’ve been what one would term successful.
I think the most successful I’ve been is more in developing a friendship that may never become physical with the woman I’ve been dating. In my experience, dating or even just fooling around with women, especially, usually, more femme women, there’s a problem getting the physical aspect going. I’m really just not that sexually aggressive. Also, I know what it’s like to have someone who is too sexually aggressive be all over me, making me uncomfortable, but be too stupid to get my hints for them to back off. I don’t want to be that person. And currently we both have issues hosting the other. But I really do enjoy her company. She is one of the few women that I know who really gets and agrees with my non-monogamy. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband is very very much like my own ex-husband. Blah blah blah. You get the picture. We get each other. And I think we are both pretty much ok with not labeling or limiting what we are or aren’t to each other.
Now, I’ve had less luck with the boys. Things just not fitting. Not bad guys, though. Now I’m trying to navigate that part of the minefield I had only really seen in sitcoms and romantic comedies. You know, I’m not really sure if it has a title. It’s not really a “break-up” because you were never together as a couple. Calling it “the brush-off” sounds mean, but it might be the most accurate. In LTRelationships, I’m used to the drama-filled break-up with someone you still love very much and who still loves you and the gradual process of trying to become friends, because you both know each other in very close, intimate ways. And, with the sex in the box, as I wrote above, you accepted that no one owed anyone anything, and just let it be.
But ending a “dating” relationship, especially early on, is different. I’m probably putting way too much thought into this, though. I went on a couple dates around the beginning of the year with a guy I was sorta interested in, but we had a couple weeks where our plans fell through and we didn’t really communicate very much, then he kinda disappeared. I sent a text or two, saying hi and asking if he wanted to hang out. When I got no answer I stopped. No need to stalk, right? Now, I have absolutely no idea why he stopped communicating with me. But I would guess that he didn’t struggle for days with if he should stop seeing me and how he should do it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good guy who didn’t appreciate my company. But I really doubt it.
I, on the other hand, spent days thinking about how to end things with someone that I had a few dates with recently. [NB: I probably sound like a completely patronizing ass, especially if he happens to read this, but I can only write from my side and to get across the point I am attempting to make. Sorry if I step on any toes. But, then again, everyone I date knows about my blog so….) For the most part, I don’t think two people are ever equally interested in each other at any given time. It might be close but it’s never equal. And when you are in a situation where you just don’t fit, where you just aren’t “feelin’ it,” but the other person did nothing wrong, I don’t see any reason not to at least try to minimize any hurt feelings. This is even more true if you think that the other person is already more invested in the relationship than you are. But, on the other hand, it isn’t fair to anyone to continue when you know it isn’t going anywhere, especially not where they want it to go.
Grrrr….. But I’m still so torn. Do most people have this same dilemma? Is it different for men and women, generally? Do men and women prefer different methods, namely does one gender prefer to be disappeared on vs. getting as nice and civil of an explanation as one can honestly give them? And do most people put more thought into one or the other? Is there a possibility that the guy I was dating around New Year’s really thought about it long and hard before he stopped returning my text messages? This shit is too fucking hard. Not sure I’m up for this stupid shit right now. I have loving friends, and I get sex regularly at this time, so I think I’ll just let a LTR find me, if it’s going to. And keep a first aid kit handy, in case I stumble upon any more minefields I want to walk through.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Oscars 09- (Belated) Post 3
I know, I know, I know. I’m late. I’m always late these days. But I wanted to finish what I’d started and write about the movies I had forgotten I had seen (and the one I saw after I wrote the first two posts.) Here goes:
The Dark Knight
The nomination (and win) from this movie went to Heath Ledger for his performance as The Joker. I thought that it was a brilliant performance. From everything I’ve heard, Ledger came to director Nolan with a head full of ideas about how to play this Joker. I have to state for the record that Tim Burton’s Batman, with Jack Nicholson as The Joker, was one of my first favorite “non-kid” movies. And while they are very VERY different, I do like both Joker performances.
Unfortunately, I do not think that anyone will ever know if Dark Knight was a success because of our morbid fascination with Heath Ledger’s death, or if it would have been just as successful without that event. Just as I’m not sure we’ll ever know if Ledger would have won this Oscar for this performance if he had not died before the release of the film. I also wonder if there wouldn’t have been a deeper discussion of Dark Knight’s themes of privacy vs. surveillance, certainty vs. chaos, etc, if so many people hadn’t been focused so closely on Heath Ledger’s performance, viewed posthumously. So I’m not sure if it deserved to win outside of its current context, but I do think it was still a great performance and great film.
Tropic Thunder
I was pretty surprised that this movie was nominated for any of the main Oscars. So to see Robert Downey Jr. nominated for Best Supporting Actor was pretty surprising. Especially when he was “the dude playin' the dude, disguised as another dude!” One of those dudes being a white Australian man playing an African-American man. From the beginning, I had a weird feeling about the “black-face” aspect of Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, but, when the movie came out, I just couldn’t pass up what I was hearing from everyone was a hilarious satire of both war movies and the Hollywood movie-making system. I even went with an African-American male, who seemed to enjoy the movie a great deal.
I would say that I would like to submit a few new categories to the Oscars. One is stolen from a friend, who suggested that there should be a special category for people playing real people in biopics. Often these actors and actresses are nominated in the general category. But I think that there is a difference between measuring how good Marion Cotillard is as Edith Piaf (for which she did win Best Actress 2008), when she has recordings, writings, and pictures of the woman, and how good Julie Christie or Ellen Page were in their films, when they don’t have those things. In some ways, it is harder to play a real person, not just to look like them, but to act, move, talk, etc, like them, while still seeming real. So I submit that there should be a “Best Actor/Actress portraying a Real Person” category.
I also submit a “Best Cameo” category. There would be a limit to the amount of screen time that an actor/actress could have to be considered for this category. But I have heard of several instances when someone put in a performance that was amazing in a pivotal role that gave them very little screen time and other were upset when they got nominated for “Best Supporting Actor/Actress.” It is often thought that those nominations should go to people with more screen time, who put in “more work” on their movie. Thus, the “Best Cameo”. I’m bringing this up in discussing Tropic Thunder because, if there was a category for “Best Cameo”, I would have nominated Tom Cruise for his role in Tropic Thunder. He is all kinds of greasy, fat, smarmy, and gross. He plays the role with his whole heart. And anyone who can dance like that, like no one is watching, when in reality millions will see it, should get some kind of an award.
Wall-E
I bought this movie for my mother for Christmas and watched it with her. I thought that it was an incredibly cute, animated, good for kids, but has something for every age group kind of movie. It was beautifully realized. It had positive “female” roles, ones that weren’t just a princess or a girlfriend. It was also a message movie where one can take the message to heart or just enjoy the movie, unlike, say, Happy Feet, which annoyed even this liberal-commie bastard. I would recommend the movie for a light-hearted night but, while visually stunning, I’m not sure it ranked for screenplay or any of the big categories.
Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films
These were all very interesting. I went with a man I met recently, we’ll call him “White Shadow.” He told me that, during the Oscar ceremony, the filmmaker of one of the shorts said that he had worked four years for that fourteen minutes of film. Some of these short films are really a labor of love. A filmmaker has to tell a complete story in a very small amount of time. I think the most fun of the nominated shorts was “Oktapodi” about an octopus using the terraced seaside of Greece to rescue his/her mate from a truck heading to a restaurant. It was brightly colored, fast-paced, and cheerful. I also really liked “This Way Up”, about a father/son funeral home workers who go on a very strange journey just to ensure that their client gets to her rightful resting place. Strangely, though, it was the other animated shorts included in the collection, the ones that got “highly recommended” but not nominated, that I liked the most. There was one about a man who was ?not? hit by a meteor, resulting in his conscious and visible body being 90 cm. away from his physical, able to act, but invisible self. Yes, it sounds weird, but I totally dug it. I think it was French. That would explain a lot, huh?
Milk
Ok, so I actually didn’t get to go see Milk like I had planned. I had intended to take Obsedian (a young woman I’ve been dating recently) to the film, so that I could ensure that these young folks get some education in Gay History. But we ended up going to see something else. Which brings me to…..
Rachel Getting Married
This was a very good movie. Not for everyone, granted. It is shot with hand-held digital cameras, in everyday settings, with no added music. It is just the story of the weekend of Rachel’s wedding. Well…actually… it is the story of Rachel’s sister, Kym, getting a weekend-long furlow from rehab so that she can attend her sisters wedding. Now because she was in a movie about Nazi’s and the Holocaust, where she was naked much of the time, I can understand why Kate Winslet won Best Actress. But, of the performances that I’ve seen, I think that Anne Hathaway’s raw, emotional, expressive performance should have won. Honestly, I would not recommend this movie to anyone having difficulty dealing with an addict because, to me, it hit so close to home. The character Rachel states over and over again throughout the movie how Kym has made things all about herself, which, in my mind, is just typical addict behavior. The biggest example of this is that the movie’s title is “Rachel Getting Married´ and yet the main character is Kym. I think that this has been my favorite of the movies that had major Oscar nominations.
Oscar Show
Ummmm…..Well, I kinda didn’t watch the show. Usually I will flip back and forth between the show and something else. Usually I am alone and at my own house where I have control of the remote. I did get to see some of the acceptance speeches. Overall, I’m fairly happy with winners. But, honestly, I enjoy seeing the movies a great deal more than I do watching the awards show.
Let me know what you think about any of the movies you have seen, or just any opinions you have. Nighty, night, kids.
The Dark Knight
The nomination (and win) from this movie went to Heath Ledger for his performance as The Joker. I thought that it was a brilliant performance. From everything I’ve heard, Ledger came to director Nolan with a head full of ideas about how to play this Joker. I have to state for the record that Tim Burton’s Batman, with Jack Nicholson as The Joker, was one of my first favorite “non-kid” movies. And while they are very VERY different, I do like both Joker performances.
Unfortunately, I do not think that anyone will ever know if Dark Knight was a success because of our morbid fascination with Heath Ledger’s death, or if it would have been just as successful without that event. Just as I’m not sure we’ll ever know if Ledger would have won this Oscar for this performance if he had not died before the release of the film. I also wonder if there wouldn’t have been a deeper discussion of Dark Knight’s themes of privacy vs. surveillance, certainty vs. chaos, etc, if so many people hadn’t been focused so closely on Heath Ledger’s performance, viewed posthumously. So I’m not sure if it deserved to win outside of its current context, but I do think it was still a great performance and great film.
Tropic Thunder
I was pretty surprised that this movie was nominated for any of the main Oscars. So to see Robert Downey Jr. nominated for Best Supporting Actor was pretty surprising. Especially when he was “the dude playin' the dude, disguised as another dude!” One of those dudes being a white Australian man playing an African-American man. From the beginning, I had a weird feeling about the “black-face” aspect of Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, but, when the movie came out, I just couldn’t pass up what I was hearing from everyone was a hilarious satire of both war movies and the Hollywood movie-making system. I even went with an African-American male, who seemed to enjoy the movie a great deal.
I would say that I would like to submit a few new categories to the Oscars. One is stolen from a friend, who suggested that there should be a special category for people playing real people in biopics. Often these actors and actresses are nominated in the general category. But I think that there is a difference between measuring how good Marion Cotillard is as Edith Piaf (for which she did win Best Actress 2008), when she has recordings, writings, and pictures of the woman, and how good Julie Christie or Ellen Page were in their films, when they don’t have those things. In some ways, it is harder to play a real person, not just to look like them, but to act, move, talk, etc, like them, while still seeming real. So I submit that there should be a “Best Actor/Actress portraying a Real Person” category.
I also submit a “Best Cameo” category. There would be a limit to the amount of screen time that an actor/actress could have to be considered for this category. But I have heard of several instances when someone put in a performance that was amazing in a pivotal role that gave them very little screen time and other were upset when they got nominated for “Best Supporting Actor/Actress.” It is often thought that those nominations should go to people with more screen time, who put in “more work” on their movie. Thus, the “Best Cameo”. I’m bringing this up in discussing Tropic Thunder because, if there was a category for “Best Cameo”, I would have nominated Tom Cruise for his role in Tropic Thunder. He is all kinds of greasy, fat, smarmy, and gross. He plays the role with his whole heart. And anyone who can dance like that, like no one is watching, when in reality millions will see it, should get some kind of an award.
Wall-E
I bought this movie for my mother for Christmas and watched it with her. I thought that it was an incredibly cute, animated, good for kids, but has something for every age group kind of movie. It was beautifully realized. It had positive “female” roles, ones that weren’t just a princess or a girlfriend. It was also a message movie where one can take the message to heart or just enjoy the movie, unlike, say, Happy Feet, which annoyed even this liberal-commie bastard. I would recommend the movie for a light-hearted night but, while visually stunning, I’m not sure it ranked for screenplay or any of the big categories.
Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films
These were all very interesting. I went with a man I met recently, we’ll call him “White Shadow.” He told me that, during the Oscar ceremony, the filmmaker of one of the shorts said that he had worked four years for that fourteen minutes of film. Some of these short films are really a labor of love. A filmmaker has to tell a complete story in a very small amount of time. I think the most fun of the nominated shorts was “Oktapodi” about an octopus using the terraced seaside of Greece to rescue his/her mate from a truck heading to a restaurant. It was brightly colored, fast-paced, and cheerful. I also really liked “This Way Up”, about a father/son funeral home workers who go on a very strange journey just to ensure that their client gets to her rightful resting place. Strangely, though, it was the other animated shorts included in the collection, the ones that got “highly recommended” but not nominated, that I liked the most. There was one about a man who was ?not? hit by a meteor, resulting in his conscious and visible body being 90 cm. away from his physical, able to act, but invisible self. Yes, it sounds weird, but I totally dug it. I think it was French. That would explain a lot, huh?
Milk
Ok, so I actually didn’t get to go see Milk like I had planned. I had intended to take Obsedian (a young woman I’ve been dating recently) to the film, so that I could ensure that these young folks get some education in Gay History. But we ended up going to see something else. Which brings me to…..
Rachel Getting Married
This was a very good movie. Not for everyone, granted. It is shot with hand-held digital cameras, in everyday settings, with no added music. It is just the story of the weekend of Rachel’s wedding. Well…actually… it is the story of Rachel’s sister, Kym, getting a weekend-long furlow from rehab so that she can attend her sisters wedding. Now because she was in a movie about Nazi’s and the Holocaust, where she was naked much of the time, I can understand why Kate Winslet won Best Actress. But, of the performances that I’ve seen, I think that Anne Hathaway’s raw, emotional, expressive performance should have won. Honestly, I would not recommend this movie to anyone having difficulty dealing with an addict because, to me, it hit so close to home. The character Rachel states over and over again throughout the movie how Kym has made things all about herself, which, in my mind, is just typical addict behavior. The biggest example of this is that the movie’s title is “Rachel Getting Married´ and yet the main character is Kym. I think that this has been my favorite of the movies that had major Oscar nominations.
Oscar Show
Ummmm…..Well, I kinda didn’t watch the show. Usually I will flip back and forth between the show and something else. Usually I am alone and at my own house where I have control of the remote. I did get to see some of the acceptance speeches. Overall, I’m fairly happy with winners. But, honestly, I enjoy seeing the movies a great deal more than I do watching the awards show.
Let me know what you think about any of the movies you have seen, or just any opinions you have. Nighty, night, kids.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Oscars 09- Post 2
First things first. Yes, I have seen Heath Ledger's Oscar nominated performance in Dark Knight. I thought it was amazing, as was the movie iteself. I'll write it up soon.
But the gauntlet has been thrown down and I have been challenged to give my opinion on who/what should win and who/what will win. I don't think I'm particularly good at things like that, but I have been reading Entertainment Weekly for....forever so I know what it looks like. Here goes:
Best Picture
The Nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen) , Frost/Nixon, Milk (gonna see Saturday), The Reader (seen), Slumdog Millionaire (seen)
Who should win: Unless seeing the other two movies changes my mind, I think Slumdog Millionaire should win. It's a great fairy tale, well-shot, heart-warming.
Who will win: Slumdog Millionaire. It also has a great, almost didn't get distributed insider story.
Best Director
The Nominees are: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (seen), Stephen Daldry for The Reader (seen), David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Ron Howard for Frost/Nixon, Gus Van Sant for Milk (will see Saturday)
Who should win: Obviously, unless seeing the other movies changes my mind, I actually think that David Fincher should win for Button. I think he brought a singular vision and visual style along with an impecable eye for detail to a unique story. Didn't like the movie itself- too long, narrative dragged, didn't like the narrative framing- but I did like what I consider direction.
Who will win: Danny Boyle
Best Actor
The Nominees are: Richard Jenkins for The Visitor, Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon, Sean Penn for Milk (gonna see), Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler
Who I think should win: I think that Penn or Langella should win, even though I didn't see those movies yet, because, even just in the commercials, one can see that they really try to embody these real people.
Who I think will win: Mickey Rourke. Hollywood loves a come-back
Best Actress
The Nominees are: Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married, Angelina Jolie for Changeling (saw tonight), Melissa Leo for Frozen River, Meryl Streep for Doubt (seen), Kate Winslet for The Reader (seen)
Who I think should win: Either Meryl Streep who I think gave an excellent performance in Doubt or Anne Hathaway who I hear gave an excellent performance, which I really want to see.
Who I think will win: Kate Winslet, because everyone knows you get an Oscar when you are in a movie about the Holocaust.
Best Supporting Actor
The Nominees are: Josh Brolin for Milk (gonna see), Robert Downey Jr for Tropic Thunder (seen- oh crap forgot about seeing that movie, gotta review that too), Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (seen), Michael Shannon for Revolutionary Road
Who I think should win: I kinda think Heath Ledger. Not sure how much of that is swayed by his death, but what the hell. He'll never get another chance.
Who I think will win: Heath Ledger.
Best Supporting Actress
The Nominees are: Amy Adams for Doubt (seen), Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Viola Davis for Doubt (seen), Taraji P Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler
Who I think should win: I personally really liked Viola Davis' performance. I hope she wins.
Who I think will win: I really don't know. Maybe Amy Adams???
Best Original Screenplay
The Nominees are: Dustin Lance Black for Milk (gonna see), Courtney Hunt for Frozen River, Mike Leigh for Happy-Go-Lucky, Martin McDonagh for In Bruges, Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon for Wall-E (seen)
Who I think should win: Black for Milk. Maybe it's just because I know about the backstory of his writing of the script. He wanted to make a movie about Harvey Milk. There was already a book, The Mayor of Castro Street, about Milk's life and the rights to that book were already owned by a film studio, stuck in development hell. So he did the legwork, source materiel research, interviews, etc, to write the script.
Who I think will win: Black for Milk
Best Adapted Screenplay
The Nominees are: Simon Beaufoy for Slumdog Millionaire (see), David Hare for The Reader (seen), Peter Morgan for Frost/Nixon, Ever Roth and Robin Swicord for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), John Patrick Shanley for Doubt (seen)
Who I think should win: Roth and Swicord for Benjamin Button. I saw that because, considering the short story that they had to work with and what they came up with from it, well, I think it's kinda amazing.
Who I think will win: Probably Slumdog Millionaire, just because I think that movie is going to sweep every category it is in.
And there you have it folks. My opinions on the biggest categories. We'll see how close I am come Sunday night.
But the gauntlet has been thrown down and I have been challenged to give my opinion on who/what should win and who/what will win. I don't think I'm particularly good at things like that, but I have been reading Entertainment Weekly for....forever so I know what it looks like. Here goes:
Best Picture
The Nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen) , Frost/Nixon, Milk (gonna see Saturday), The Reader (seen), Slumdog Millionaire (seen)
Who should win: Unless seeing the other two movies changes my mind, I think Slumdog Millionaire should win. It's a great fairy tale, well-shot, heart-warming.
Who will win: Slumdog Millionaire. It also has a great, almost didn't get distributed insider story.
Best Director
The Nominees are: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire (seen), Stephen Daldry for The Reader (seen), David Fincher for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Ron Howard for Frost/Nixon, Gus Van Sant for Milk (will see Saturday)
Who should win: Obviously, unless seeing the other movies changes my mind, I actually think that David Fincher should win for Button. I think he brought a singular vision and visual style along with an impecable eye for detail to a unique story. Didn't like the movie itself- too long, narrative dragged, didn't like the narrative framing- but I did like what I consider direction.
Who will win: Danny Boyle
Best Actor
The Nominees are: Richard Jenkins for The Visitor, Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon, Sean Penn for Milk (gonna see), Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler
Who I think should win: I think that Penn or Langella should win, even though I didn't see those movies yet, because, even just in the commercials, one can see that they really try to embody these real people.
Who I think will win: Mickey Rourke. Hollywood loves a come-back
Best Actress
The Nominees are: Anne Hathaway for Rachel Getting Married, Angelina Jolie for Changeling (saw tonight), Melissa Leo for Frozen River, Meryl Streep for Doubt (seen), Kate Winslet for The Reader (seen)
Who I think should win: Either Meryl Streep who I think gave an excellent performance in Doubt or Anne Hathaway who I hear gave an excellent performance, which I really want to see.
Who I think will win: Kate Winslet, because everyone knows you get an Oscar when you are in a movie about the Holocaust.
Best Supporting Actor
The Nominees are: Josh Brolin for Milk (gonna see), Robert Downey Jr for Tropic Thunder (seen- oh crap forgot about seeing that movie, gotta review that too), Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (seen), Michael Shannon for Revolutionary Road
Who I think should win: I kinda think Heath Ledger. Not sure how much of that is swayed by his death, but what the hell. He'll never get another chance.
Who I think will win: Heath Ledger.
Best Supporting Actress
The Nominees are: Amy Adams for Doubt (seen), Penelope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Viola Davis for Doubt (seen), Taraji P Henson for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), Marisa Tomei for The Wrestler
Who I think should win: I personally really liked Viola Davis' performance. I hope she wins.
Who I think will win: I really don't know. Maybe Amy Adams???
Best Original Screenplay
The Nominees are: Dustin Lance Black for Milk (gonna see), Courtney Hunt for Frozen River, Mike Leigh for Happy-Go-Lucky, Martin McDonagh for In Bruges, Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon for Wall-E (seen)
Who I think should win: Black for Milk. Maybe it's just because I know about the backstory of his writing of the script. He wanted to make a movie about Harvey Milk. There was already a book, The Mayor of Castro Street, about Milk's life and the rights to that book were already owned by a film studio, stuck in development hell. So he did the legwork, source materiel research, interviews, etc, to write the script.
Who I think will win: Black for Milk
Best Adapted Screenplay
The Nominees are: Simon Beaufoy for Slumdog Millionaire (see), David Hare for The Reader (seen), Peter Morgan for Frost/Nixon, Ever Roth and Robin Swicord for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (seen), John Patrick Shanley for Doubt (seen)
Who I think should win: Roth and Swicord for Benjamin Button. I saw that because, considering the short story that they had to work with and what they came up with from it, well, I think it's kinda amazing.
Who I think will win: Probably Slumdog Millionaire, just because I think that movie is going to sweep every category it is in.
And there you have it folks. My opinions on the biggest categories. We'll see how close I am come Sunday night.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Oscars 09- Post 1
I am a big fan of movies, as many of you know. I think to call myself a cinephile might be taking liberties, however. I have taken a few film classes, which I loved, but I don’t feel like I’m well-“viewed” enough to be a cinephile. I do try however. I have seen many classic “classics” and have a ton more on DVD and even VHS waiting to be viewed. I also try to watch new classics as they come out. For the past two years, I’ve taken advantage of AMC’s Oscar movie viewing promotion. You pay a flat fee to see all the movies in a row in one day, and get a large popcorn and large drink to boot. It’s a good opportunity to see all the movies at one time, but no one ever wants to go with me and it’s always crowded with people. Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem seeing a movie by myself. In fact, I’ve done it quite often, especially since I see a lot of weird movies that no one else I know wants to see. But going to see five movies all by yourself in a crowded theater when almost everyone else has at least one companion can make for a long depressing day. And that isn’t even counting how depressing the films can be, though they do always seem to put the most fun, comedic movie last- Little Miss Sunshine year before last, Juno last year.
This year, however, I just couldn’t do it. I do want to see all the movies. That isn’t in question. What is in question is whether or not I can deal with a dozen hours alone in a cramped theater with loud strangers. I’m even more anti-crowd and anti-social these days than normal. I don’t think I can. And I don’t want to waste the money on something I bail on after only one movie. Also, as it is all day on a Saturday, I would be giving up one of the few days that the people I know, most of whom have regular Monday thru Friday day jobs, can hang out. On the other hand, I can catch the movies over a period of time during a weekday, or on a weeknight when I’m not busy. Oh, and, I really don’t think I could sit through all three hours of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again right now.
But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the movies with Oscar nominations that I’ve seen so far. *******BEWARE: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!********
Doubt
[Saw this movie over the Christmas holiday while in the suburbs of Slightly Larger Midwestern City, after visiting my grandmother in the hospital, and just after a particularly upsetting (to me) argument with TyRoy. I wasn’t in the best mental state.]
I wish I had written about this movie right after I saw it. It was one of those movies where, once I left, I thought “mmhmmm.” I would like to poll people who have seen this movie to see who they believed.
The movie is basically a war of wills between a very conservative, by the book, headmistress nun at a Catholic school and the liberal priest who serves the congregation, ostensibly over whether the priest had an inappropriate relationship with the schools one African-American student (set in 1960s). As the movie progressed, I found myself flip-flopping on whether I believed anything inappropriate had occurred. Despite the widely-publicized priest pedophilia scandals, I initially wanted to believe that the nun was just an overzealous reactionary who wanted to get the priest to leave, by any means necessary, and who would believe any horrible thing about the priest, because of his liberal views. But, in the end, the priest caves and leaves. Is he really an innocent man who just doesn’t think he will ever be able to overcome the suspicion of this nun, or is he really guilty? While I agreed with many of the points that the priest made, especially “Certainty is an emotion, not a fact,” I still don’t know if what I think really happened. I’m sure that is the point, though.
One of the things that struck me the most was how differently men and women were treated and how women, namely Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius, made the most of what little power they had in their situation. Time and again, throughout the movie, Father Flynn’s actions usurp Sister Aloysius’ power, whether he realizes it or not. Actually, in most instances, he doesn’t seem to realize that what he is doing could be viewed that way. His actions are rather heavy handed ways of demonstrating his privilege. The most obvious demonstration of this is how he takes the seat behind Sister Aloysius’ desk when brought in on the pretenses of discussing the Christmas pageant. The seat behind the desk is the seat of power, the seat from which Sister Aloysius reprimands bad students. But once Father Flynn arrives, Sister Aloysius is relegated to a less seat. Also, the priest assumes that she will serve him coffee. Like a woman who waits on a man to open the door for her, the priest waits for the nun to serve him. Though she has served longer and has worked to obtain a high position, it is obvious that she will never be considered as high as Father Flynn, even if he had had an inappropriate relationship with a student. That is not to say that she is not without power, however. A schoolyard of children is silenced just with a word. The nuns demur to her opinion. Parents are at her beck and call. This position does offer her power, just as the teaching positions offer the other nuns’ power and even more purpose. But they are constantly reminded that they only wield that power within a very small sphere.
The part of the movie that shocked me the most, however, was the discussion between Viola Davis’ Mrs. Miller, the mother of the student in question, and Sister Aloysius. When the Sister hints to Mrs. Miller that there might be an inappropriate relationship between Father Flynn and her son, Donald, Mrs. Miller reacts in a quite surprising way. Basically, in her own 1960s way, Mrs. Miller says that she puts her son’s ability to get into a good high school as a result of graduating from a good private elementary school above any other concerns and that she is not sure if a relationship that others might regard as inappropriate is really all that inappropriate. According to her, Father Flynn has been the only person who has shown interest in her son, when he is in an environment that is harsh to him as the first and only black student. She also suspects that her son is gay, so any “inappropriate” relationship might actually be consensual, in her opinion. While Sister Aloysius, the most of the audience, is quite shocked by this reaction, from anyone, much less the parent of the student, I can see where Mrs. Miller is coming from, when I really think about it. If you really wanted your child to get the best education, in the most accepting environment possible, especially knowing that he was facing discrimination on two fronts (being black and, at the very least, less masculine/more sensitive than other boys), do you think you might overlook something suspicious, especially if you felt that bringing that to light would destroy his chances?
I suggest watching it if you want a tense drama that doesn’t give you answers. Though you might not want to watch it with Catholics or Catholic-haters, or someone who was abused as a child.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
[Saw on a ‘date.’ Maybe not a good idea. Kinda killed any thoughts of romance, what with the whole theme of mortality.]
Bring caffeine. This movie is long. Most people that I’ve heard talk about it also talk about falling asleep during the film. Not that it is uninteresting, exactly. Visually, the film is stunning. The aging stuff is amazing, though just not-real enough to be a bit creepy to me, though I know I look way too hard. The scene late in the movie where Brad Pitt is made to look younger than he currently is…amazing. But, narrative-wise, it was a little slow. Also, I just couldn’t suspend my disbelieve enough. I wanted to know why the hell this was happening to him, what the purpose of his life and his backward aging was supposed to be.
Then it made me cry when it probably wasn’t intending to. At the end, when his body is that of a young teenager but his mind is that of an old man, when he can remember how to play the piano but can’t remember who people are, I was heart-broken. It reminded me so much of my grandfather, who, after his stroke, couldn’t remember hardly anything, but could manage to take apart anything you left near him, though he had no clue what it was, what it did, or remember how to put it back together.
Watch it at home, so you can pause for bathroom breaks, if you want to kill three hours on beautiful visuals.
The Reader
[Watched last night. Decided to watch it first since the other movie I was planning on seeing was supposed to be more uplifting.]
First, if Kate Winslet wins an Oscar for this movie, with its Nazi backstory, fans of the HBO show Extras will be laughing their asses off.
****BIG SPOILERS*****
WTF? She’s illiterate???? I had read reviews of this film and they all talk about how her lover accidentally finds her again by coming to her trial for crimes committed during WWII while she was a Nazi but that that she hides an even bigger secret. Early in the movie, when she makes him read aloud to her during their affair, I picked up that it was probably because she couldn’t read, but I was really hoping that wasn’t the big secret. It was. Stating that she is illiterate would have gotten her a much lighter conviction, but she is too ashamed to say it, just like her cowardly ex-lover is too afraid to say that he has figured out that she is illiterate and talk about all the things he saw when they were involved because he now knows that she worked for the Nazi’s, though he never knew anything about it when they had the affair. So she spends decades in prison and doesn’t want to live on the outside.
Grrrrrr. I really did like the questions about culpability and justice and rule of law that the movie hints at but it was completely derailed for me by the illiteracy thing. It asks a great many questions about who should really be punished and why are the people that are being punished being punished. In the movie, a mother and daughter are the only survivors out of 300 women who were locked inside a church to sleep overnight during a death march and the six guards, who did not open the church doors after an Allied bomb hit the church and started a fire, are on trial for murder. It is pointed out that the six guards are only on trial because this book has brought publicity to this particular incident, where as the thousands of other guards at the hundreds of other camps who were complicit in deaths have not been brought to trial. In her own defense, Kate Winslet’s character Hannah, frustrated, asks the judges what they would have done in her position: Should she never have taken this better job opportunity as a guard? I think the best thing to come out of this movie for me is that I now want to know more about, perhaps read a couple books on, how Germans, psychologically, as a group, have been effected by the knowledge that Nazi’s committed atrocities, while also knowing that many/most Germans at the time were Nazi’s.
Honestly, skip it.
Slumdog Millionaire
[Second movie tonight.]
I’ve been hearing about this movie for awhile and was torn in how I felt about it. I have liked Danny Boyle’s, the director, previous films. The story seemed interesting. Most of the reviews of the film were very good. On the other hand, there has been some backlash. First of all, ‘slumdog’ is not an Indian phrase used to describe people from slums. It actually doesn’t appear to be a phrase used by anyone anywhere, except in this film. (In fact, many Indians find this made up term quite offensive.) Also, I have heard it criticized as “poverty porn”. (I’ll get to that later.) Also, I’m just a little suspicious of a white Western director making a movie centering on people of a different culture in their culture.
But I have to say that I liked the movie. It was both dark and gritty and a feel-good romance, rise up out of poverty story. It is a fairy tale in the older sense, that there is tragedy, terror, and loss for our hero on his journey, but that it mostly works out well. I personally liked how the story was told, with flashbacks explaining how the main character, Jamal, gained the answers to the questions through his hard-knock life experiences. I also think that it might behoove more subtitle-ists to look at how the subtitles on this movie are not just placed at the bottom of the screen and highlighted so that they stand out. It would help make some movies more readable. But I came out feeling pretty happy.
But, of course, there are flaws. I just didn’t get how everyone started speaking English all of the sudden. I think the audience is supposed to assume that Jamal and his brother learn it from the English-speaking tourists, but I just don’t buy that they learn to speak perfect British English from tourists, nor do I buy that they would speak English amongst themselves, other Hindi speakers, and on Indian television. Also, the movie makes me want to ask someone who has lived in India if it is plausible that the final question on a game show of intelligence would be about a French book. Finally, though I know this is supposed to be a fairy tale, with a happily ever after, I find it hard to believe that the main character’s love interest, Latika, will be able to just live happily ever after, after she’s (presumably) been raped by Jamal’s brother as a young teenager and then given to a crime boss who abused her.
As for some of the criticism I’ve read online, especially on blogs about race, well, I’m still thinking about it. Of course, the one blog that had several posts discussing it is down right now, so I can’t look back at what others have written, now that I have the experience of seeing the movie for context. Generally, I’m not sure how I feel about the issue of “poverty porn”. It seems to me that, since silent films, there have been films about people living in poverty. Extremes are inherently dramatic, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are many movies about poor people and many movies about rich people, and fewer about the people in between. I think that “poverty porn” is viewed as bad is because it is PRIVILEGED people getting ENJOYMENT out of other people’s, already marginalized people’s, supposed misery and, especially in making it from a “far off” country, eroticizing that misery. I have to acknowledge that I’m still trying to understand this particular concept and do not know how I feel about it.
I would mostly suggest going to see it, if you don’t mind a couple subtitles.
Ok, kids, that’s it for now. I’m supposed to go see the Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films today and I’ll probably catch a couple more before the big show. Let me know if you’ve seen any films that have nominations and what you thought. Thanks.
This year, however, I just couldn’t do it. I do want to see all the movies. That isn’t in question. What is in question is whether or not I can deal with a dozen hours alone in a cramped theater with loud strangers. I’m even more anti-crowd and anti-social these days than normal. I don’t think I can. And I don’t want to waste the money on something I bail on after only one movie. Also, as it is all day on a Saturday, I would be giving up one of the few days that the people I know, most of whom have regular Monday thru Friday day jobs, can hang out. On the other hand, I can catch the movies over a period of time during a weekday, or on a weeknight when I’m not busy. Oh, and, I really don’t think I could sit through all three hours of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again right now.
But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the movies with Oscar nominations that I’ve seen so far. *******BEWARE: SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!!********
Doubt
[Saw this movie over the Christmas holiday while in the suburbs of Slightly Larger Midwestern City, after visiting my grandmother in the hospital, and just after a particularly upsetting (to me) argument with TyRoy. I wasn’t in the best mental state.]
I wish I had written about this movie right after I saw it. It was one of those movies where, once I left, I thought “mmhmmm.” I would like to poll people who have seen this movie to see who they believed.
The movie is basically a war of wills between a very conservative, by the book, headmistress nun at a Catholic school and the liberal priest who serves the congregation, ostensibly over whether the priest had an inappropriate relationship with the schools one African-American student (set in 1960s). As the movie progressed, I found myself flip-flopping on whether I believed anything inappropriate had occurred. Despite the widely-publicized priest pedophilia scandals, I initially wanted to believe that the nun was just an overzealous reactionary who wanted to get the priest to leave, by any means necessary, and who would believe any horrible thing about the priest, because of his liberal views. But, in the end, the priest caves and leaves. Is he really an innocent man who just doesn’t think he will ever be able to overcome the suspicion of this nun, or is he really guilty? While I agreed with many of the points that the priest made, especially “Certainty is an emotion, not a fact,” I still don’t know if what I think really happened. I’m sure that is the point, though.
One of the things that struck me the most was how differently men and women were treated and how women, namely Meryl Streep’s Sister Aloysius, made the most of what little power they had in their situation. Time and again, throughout the movie, Father Flynn’s actions usurp Sister Aloysius’ power, whether he realizes it or not. Actually, in most instances, he doesn’t seem to realize that what he is doing could be viewed that way. His actions are rather heavy handed ways of demonstrating his privilege. The most obvious demonstration of this is how he takes the seat behind Sister Aloysius’ desk when brought in on the pretenses of discussing the Christmas pageant. The seat behind the desk is the seat of power, the seat from which Sister Aloysius reprimands bad students. But once Father Flynn arrives, Sister Aloysius is relegated to a less seat. Also, the priest assumes that she will serve him coffee. Like a woman who waits on a man to open the door for her, the priest waits for the nun to serve him. Though she has served longer and has worked to obtain a high position, it is obvious that she will never be considered as high as Father Flynn, even if he had had an inappropriate relationship with a student. That is not to say that she is not without power, however. A schoolyard of children is silenced just with a word. The nuns demur to her opinion. Parents are at her beck and call. This position does offer her power, just as the teaching positions offer the other nuns’ power and even more purpose. But they are constantly reminded that they only wield that power within a very small sphere.
The part of the movie that shocked me the most, however, was the discussion between Viola Davis’ Mrs. Miller, the mother of the student in question, and Sister Aloysius. When the Sister hints to Mrs. Miller that there might be an inappropriate relationship between Father Flynn and her son, Donald, Mrs. Miller reacts in a quite surprising way. Basically, in her own 1960s way, Mrs. Miller says that she puts her son’s ability to get into a good high school as a result of graduating from a good private elementary school above any other concerns and that she is not sure if a relationship that others might regard as inappropriate is really all that inappropriate. According to her, Father Flynn has been the only person who has shown interest in her son, when he is in an environment that is harsh to him as the first and only black student. She also suspects that her son is gay, so any “inappropriate” relationship might actually be consensual, in her opinion. While Sister Aloysius, the most of the audience, is quite shocked by this reaction, from anyone, much less the parent of the student, I can see where Mrs. Miller is coming from, when I really think about it. If you really wanted your child to get the best education, in the most accepting environment possible, especially knowing that he was facing discrimination on two fronts (being black and, at the very least, less masculine/more sensitive than other boys), do you think you might overlook something suspicious, especially if you felt that bringing that to light would destroy his chances?
I suggest watching it if you want a tense drama that doesn’t give you answers. Though you might not want to watch it with Catholics or Catholic-haters, or someone who was abused as a child.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
[Saw on a ‘date.’ Maybe not a good idea. Kinda killed any thoughts of romance, what with the whole theme of mortality.]
Bring caffeine. This movie is long. Most people that I’ve heard talk about it also talk about falling asleep during the film. Not that it is uninteresting, exactly. Visually, the film is stunning. The aging stuff is amazing, though just not-real enough to be a bit creepy to me, though I know I look way too hard. The scene late in the movie where Brad Pitt is made to look younger than he currently is…amazing. But, narrative-wise, it was a little slow. Also, I just couldn’t suspend my disbelieve enough. I wanted to know why the hell this was happening to him, what the purpose of his life and his backward aging was supposed to be.
Then it made me cry when it probably wasn’t intending to. At the end, when his body is that of a young teenager but his mind is that of an old man, when he can remember how to play the piano but can’t remember who people are, I was heart-broken. It reminded me so much of my grandfather, who, after his stroke, couldn’t remember hardly anything, but could manage to take apart anything you left near him, though he had no clue what it was, what it did, or remember how to put it back together.
Watch it at home, so you can pause for bathroom breaks, if you want to kill three hours on beautiful visuals.
The Reader
[Watched last night. Decided to watch it first since the other movie I was planning on seeing was supposed to be more uplifting.]
First, if Kate Winslet wins an Oscar for this movie, with its Nazi backstory, fans of the HBO show Extras will be laughing their asses off.
****BIG SPOILERS*****
WTF? She’s illiterate???? I had read reviews of this film and they all talk about how her lover accidentally finds her again by coming to her trial for crimes committed during WWII while she was a Nazi but that that she hides an even bigger secret. Early in the movie, when she makes him read aloud to her during their affair, I picked up that it was probably because she couldn’t read, but I was really hoping that wasn’t the big secret. It was. Stating that she is illiterate would have gotten her a much lighter conviction, but she is too ashamed to say it, just like her cowardly ex-lover is too afraid to say that he has figured out that she is illiterate and talk about all the things he saw when they were involved because he now knows that she worked for the Nazi’s, though he never knew anything about it when they had the affair. So she spends decades in prison and doesn’t want to live on the outside.
Grrrrrr. I really did like the questions about culpability and justice and rule of law that the movie hints at but it was completely derailed for me by the illiteracy thing. It asks a great many questions about who should really be punished and why are the people that are being punished being punished. In the movie, a mother and daughter are the only survivors out of 300 women who were locked inside a church to sleep overnight during a death march and the six guards, who did not open the church doors after an Allied bomb hit the church and started a fire, are on trial for murder. It is pointed out that the six guards are only on trial because this book has brought publicity to this particular incident, where as the thousands of other guards at the hundreds of other camps who were complicit in deaths have not been brought to trial. In her own defense, Kate Winslet’s character Hannah, frustrated, asks the judges what they would have done in her position: Should she never have taken this better job opportunity as a guard? I think the best thing to come out of this movie for me is that I now want to know more about, perhaps read a couple books on, how Germans, psychologically, as a group, have been effected by the knowledge that Nazi’s committed atrocities, while also knowing that many/most Germans at the time were Nazi’s.
Honestly, skip it.
Slumdog Millionaire
[Second movie tonight.]
I’ve been hearing about this movie for awhile and was torn in how I felt about it. I have liked Danny Boyle’s, the director, previous films. The story seemed interesting. Most of the reviews of the film were very good. On the other hand, there has been some backlash. First of all, ‘slumdog’ is not an Indian phrase used to describe people from slums. It actually doesn’t appear to be a phrase used by anyone anywhere, except in this film. (In fact, many Indians find this made up term quite offensive.) Also, I have heard it criticized as “poverty porn”. (I’ll get to that later.) Also, I’m just a little suspicious of a white Western director making a movie centering on people of a different culture in their culture.
But I have to say that I liked the movie. It was both dark and gritty and a feel-good romance, rise up out of poverty story. It is a fairy tale in the older sense, that there is tragedy, terror, and loss for our hero on his journey, but that it mostly works out well. I personally liked how the story was told, with flashbacks explaining how the main character, Jamal, gained the answers to the questions through his hard-knock life experiences. I also think that it might behoove more subtitle-ists to look at how the subtitles on this movie are not just placed at the bottom of the screen and highlighted so that they stand out. It would help make some movies more readable. But I came out feeling pretty happy.
But, of course, there are flaws. I just didn’t get how everyone started speaking English all of the sudden. I think the audience is supposed to assume that Jamal and his brother learn it from the English-speaking tourists, but I just don’t buy that they learn to speak perfect British English from tourists, nor do I buy that they would speak English amongst themselves, other Hindi speakers, and on Indian television. Also, the movie makes me want to ask someone who has lived in India if it is plausible that the final question on a game show of intelligence would be about a French book. Finally, though I know this is supposed to be a fairy tale, with a happily ever after, I find it hard to believe that the main character’s love interest, Latika, will be able to just live happily ever after, after she’s (presumably) been raped by Jamal’s brother as a young teenager and then given to a crime boss who abused her.
As for some of the criticism I’ve read online, especially on blogs about race, well, I’m still thinking about it. Of course, the one blog that had several posts discussing it is down right now, so I can’t look back at what others have written, now that I have the experience of seeing the movie for context. Generally, I’m not sure how I feel about the issue of “poverty porn”. It seems to me that, since silent films, there have been films about people living in poverty. Extremes are inherently dramatic, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are many movies about poor people and many movies about rich people, and fewer about the people in between. I think that “poverty porn” is viewed as bad is because it is PRIVILEGED people getting ENJOYMENT out of other people’s, already marginalized people’s, supposed misery and, especially in making it from a “far off” country, eroticizing that misery. I have to acknowledge that I’m still trying to understand this particular concept and do not know how I feel about it.
I would mostly suggest going to see it, if you don’t mind a couple subtitles.
Ok, kids, that’s it for now. I’m supposed to go see the Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films today and I’ll probably catch a couple more before the big show. Let me know if you’ve seen any films that have nominations and what you thought. Thanks.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Now That It's Over - Everclear
Now That It's Over - Everclear
Yeah right!
One, two, three, four
Break down, shake for me
Nothing ever is the way you want it to be
Nothing even tastes right now that it's over
Break down, shake for me
Don't write words unless you want me to read them
Nothing really matters now that it's over
Maybe we can be friends
Now that we're older
We can have fun like we did in the early days
Now that it's over
Yeah right!
Break down, shake for me
Nothing ever seems the way it ought to be
Nothing ever seems right now that it's over
Yeah, now maybe we can be friends
Maybe we can be closer
We can have fun like we did in the old days
Now that it's over
Oh yeah...
My bad dreams just don't seem the same
Baby without you
I wish you were willing to accept the blame
Yeah, for everything you do
My nightmares just don't scare me now
Baby without you, yeah yeah
I wish that I could find the words to tell
In the best way possible, you and your friends to go to hell
Yeah right!
Whoa, breakup time is never easy to do
Nothing ever ends the way you want it to
Nothing seems to make sense now that it's over
Yeah, now maybe we can be friends
Yeah, now that you're leaving
You can be nice to me
Maybe I'm dreaming
I am a lot better now than just okay
Maybe I am just wakin' up in my own way
Now that it's over
Now that it's over
My bad dreams just don't seem the same
Baby without you
I wish you were willing to accept the blame
Yeah, for all the shitty things you do
Nightmares just don't scare me now
Baby without you
I wish that I could find the words to tell
You to politely go fuck yourself
Yeah, now that it's over...
Every break-up has two sides. I made lots of mistakes, huge mistakes, heart-breaking unforgivable mistakes. I won't say I fucked him over as bad as he fucked me over, but I think that it'd be hard for a stranger who heard both side, or just watched it like a movie, to say who did worse. Either we are both villians or we are both victims. But it doesn't mean that we both don't still have, and shouldn't have, a shitload of pain and anger. This song could come from either of us or both of us.
I never thought I'd be divorced before I was 30. I never thought I'd be divorced. I never thought I'd be married.
Yeah right!
One, two, three, four
Break down, shake for me
Nothing ever is the way you want it to be
Nothing even tastes right now that it's over
Break down, shake for me
Don't write words unless you want me to read them
Nothing really matters now that it's over
Maybe we can be friends
Now that we're older
We can have fun like we did in the early days
Now that it's over
Yeah right!
Break down, shake for me
Nothing ever seems the way it ought to be
Nothing ever seems right now that it's over
Yeah, now maybe we can be friends
Maybe we can be closer
We can have fun like we did in the old days
Now that it's over
Oh yeah...
My bad dreams just don't seem the same
Baby without you
I wish you were willing to accept the blame
Yeah, for everything you do
My nightmares just don't scare me now
Baby without you, yeah yeah
I wish that I could find the words to tell
In the best way possible, you and your friends to go to hell
Yeah right!
Whoa, breakup time is never easy to do
Nothing ever ends the way you want it to
Nothing seems to make sense now that it's over
Yeah, now maybe we can be friends
Yeah, now that you're leaving
You can be nice to me
Maybe I'm dreaming
I am a lot better now than just okay
Maybe I am just wakin' up in my own way
Now that it's over
Now that it's over
My bad dreams just don't seem the same
Baby without you
I wish you were willing to accept the blame
Yeah, for all the shitty things you do
Nightmares just don't scare me now
Baby without you
I wish that I could find the words to tell
You to politely go fuck yourself
Yeah, now that it's over...
Every break-up has two sides. I made lots of mistakes, huge mistakes, heart-breaking unforgivable mistakes. I won't say I fucked him over as bad as he fucked me over, but I think that it'd be hard for a stranger who heard both side, or just watched it like a movie, to say who did worse. Either we are both villians or we are both victims. But it doesn't mean that we both don't still have, and shouldn't have, a shitload of pain and anger. This song could come from either of us or both of us.
I never thought I'd be divorced before I was 30. I never thought I'd be divorced. I never thought I'd be married.
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
"Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E becomes final today."-Tammy Wynette
October 2007 to February 2009. That is as long as my marriage lasted. It's bittersweet.
I've been trying to pickup and organize my living space (basement) lately, a little at a time. Last night, I finally got around to putting honeymoon pictures into the photo albums I'd bought for my mom and I. Yeah, I've been either distracted or lazy for at least a year. I had put photos into albums for BT's grandmother and mother, even sent a small album overseas to BT himself, just never got around to doing my own. And I'm guessing Mom won't want hers now, but I wanted to get it done and then put away. It was nice to remember that short but amazing time we were together, the things I probably never would have done without him, but they were just memories.
I tried to get to bed early. That didn't work so well, but I still got myself up early to get ready for court. Shower. Dress. Passed up wearing the black dress slacks that I got married in. Put on a necklace and perfume bought with love by someone else, makeshift amulets to protect my heart and spirit. Make-up to cover the acne caused by the new drugs and to make myself look more serious in front of the judge. I snap several pictures of myself before I go, to see if I look different after all of this is done.
Alone, by my own choice, I drove to the courthouse, parked, found the courtroom, and a seat in the gallery. It wasn't quite traffic court. More glossy wood than that. But not quite the courtroom of "Law & Order" either. I was early. I was trembling, shaking, nervous. I'd never been in a courtroom before. Settled in with a Newsweek on top of the bright yellow folder that held all my divorce documents, the signed decree of divorce that had arrived just the day before in the mail.
The judge was an older, slim, white haired gentleman, infinitely patient with the people who's cases were before him. Very few people had lawyers. The two cases before me were uncontested cases where only one party came to wrap things up, just as mine was. Just give the decree to the judge to sign and the settlement to him to review. Take the stand to answer his questions, full names, where and when the marriage occured, affirm incompatability, is the wife returning to her former name, do you think the settlement is fair and equable, thank you. Then file the papers with the clerk and send a copy to the other party.
It was pretty easy, all things considered, easier than many folks' divorces. Probably because we are both broke and poor and don't have children together. On the other hand, I have to say I feel like it shouldn't be easier to get into this contract than it is to get out of it. Then again, hopeless romantic that I am, I am a huge supporter of prenuptual agreements. Make arrangements when you love each other, to avoid fighting even more once you hate each other.
I left the courthouse feeling slightly more free and much more settled. I have a certain amount of closure, even though I'll always have unanswerable questions. I rode back home, listening to Ani, who he claimed was just another man-hating feminist singer, in response to my distaste for the unflattering, only-good-for-sex picture that one of the musical groups he liked painted of women. *Sigh* But it's over now. Back to the life that is my new normal. Change out of my dressy court clothes, so that I can do some yard work. I have to pick up more shit. Only this shit is from the four-legged variety of dog. It's smellier, but less emotionally toxic.
October 2007 to February 2009. That is as long as my marriage lasted. It's bittersweet.
I've been trying to pickup and organize my living space (basement) lately, a little at a time. Last night, I finally got around to putting honeymoon pictures into the photo albums I'd bought for my mom and I. Yeah, I've been either distracted or lazy for at least a year. I had put photos into albums for BT's grandmother and mother, even sent a small album overseas to BT himself, just never got around to doing my own. And I'm guessing Mom won't want hers now, but I wanted to get it done and then put away. It was nice to remember that short but amazing time we were together, the things I probably never would have done without him, but they were just memories.
I tried to get to bed early. That didn't work so well, but I still got myself up early to get ready for court. Shower. Dress. Passed up wearing the black dress slacks that I got married in. Put on a necklace and perfume bought with love by someone else, makeshift amulets to protect my heart and spirit. Make-up to cover the acne caused by the new drugs and to make myself look more serious in front of the judge. I snap several pictures of myself before I go, to see if I look different after all of this is done.
Alone, by my own choice, I drove to the courthouse, parked, found the courtroom, and a seat in the gallery. It wasn't quite traffic court. More glossy wood than that. But not quite the courtroom of "Law & Order" either. I was early. I was trembling, shaking, nervous. I'd never been in a courtroom before. Settled in with a Newsweek on top of the bright yellow folder that held all my divorce documents, the signed decree of divorce that had arrived just the day before in the mail.
The judge was an older, slim, white haired gentleman, infinitely patient with the people who's cases were before him. Very few people had lawyers. The two cases before me were uncontested cases where only one party came to wrap things up, just as mine was. Just give the decree to the judge to sign and the settlement to him to review. Take the stand to answer his questions, full names, where and when the marriage occured, affirm incompatability, is the wife returning to her former name, do you think the settlement is fair and equable, thank you. Then file the papers with the clerk and send a copy to the other party.
It was pretty easy, all things considered, easier than many folks' divorces. Probably because we are both broke and poor and don't have children together. On the other hand, I have to say I feel like it shouldn't be easier to get into this contract than it is to get out of it. Then again, hopeless romantic that I am, I am a huge supporter of prenuptual agreements. Make arrangements when you love each other, to avoid fighting even more once you hate each other.
I left the courthouse feeling slightly more free and much more settled. I have a certain amount of closure, even though I'll always have unanswerable questions. I rode back home, listening to Ani, who he claimed was just another man-hating feminist singer, in response to my distaste for the unflattering, only-good-for-sex picture that one of the musical groups he liked painted of women. *Sigh* But it's over now. Back to the life that is my new normal. Change out of my dressy court clothes, so that I can do some yard work. I have to pick up more shit. Only this shit is from the four-legged variety of dog. It's smellier, but less emotionally toxic.
Monday, February 09, 2009
To Work or Not To Work
This weekend we went to Slightly Bigger Midwestern City to see my grandmother and celebrate my uncle's birthday together. My grandmother asked me if I was applying for jobs yet. I confirmed that I was. I also told her, as I've told many people recently, that I'm trying to work extra hard to pitch in around the house and do things for my family. Right now, while my meds can impede things, I'm attempting to push through the difficulties, get used to a normal schedule, and to be more than the lump of flesh sitting on the futon. I know that if I went from just sitting around all day to working even part-time, I'd have a very difficult transition and even more tired than I usually am when starting a new job. I'm also acutely aware that all my bills are paid for by my parents, with no financial help from me. I figure that if I push myself to do what not ungrateful and not lazy people would do then I'll be seen as not ungrateful and not lazy.
But my mom threw me for a loop with some comments that she made on our way home. She mentioned that she had heard my comments to my grandmother about finding work, and that she had heard me say the same things the previous weekend at my uncle's house. My mom expressed to me that she was displeased that I seemed to put so much emphasis on finding a job. She pointed out that I wasn't in dire straits financially, as my parents are paying what bills I have and providing a place to live and food to eat. (Yes, somehow I now feel ungrateful for wanting a job.) But her bigger worry was that I would push myself too hard and either take a job that I liked but that I would end up losing because the meds that just settled down got messed up again or that I would take a job I didn't like that would cause me to spiral and lose that job. She would like me to just take it easy and allow myself more time on the current meds before I put myself out there too much.
It is not like I don't understand what she said or why she felt the need to say it. I'm well aware that I had what might have been a great job offer last month, which, unfortunately, coincided with when the Lexapro dropped off and the Prozac didn't pick up the slack, like it was supposed to. I couldn't even get out of bed in the morning to go to the job, much less see how bad I'd mess it up by being there. And, honestly, it isn't like I don't have a difficult time with the more mundane aspects of life. I get tired much more easily than I ever used to. Just one trip to one store, be it grocery or wal-mart, wipes me out. I also have weird... spatial disturbances.... I'm not sure how to easily describe it. It happens when I move my head to fast, either up or down or from side to side. It feels like what happens when you are just a bit drunk and you move your head too fast, only it doesn't last as long. I guess when a person is drunk, they expect it and they're already out of it enough not to care. When you are sober, it's disconcerting. In addition to the above, I still have the tremor, some times worse than other times, though the beta blocker helps. I also don't like too many people. Tend to get a little paranoid around strangers and need a larger bubble of personal space. All of these things combined, as well as all the others that I'm not remembering right now, and, now that I think about it, bad memory should be on that list too... where was I? Oh, yeah- all of these things combine to make me worry that I could keep a job, even if it was one that I really liked and tried my hardest at. Those things also tend to limit what I would even consider applying for. I probably couldn't do a job where I had to stand eight hours. I couldn't do a job where I had to have steady, precise hands. You get the picture.
I should also say that it isn't like I'm hurting financially or lifestyle-wise. I will grant that I would be someone's slave for a week if they would either fix my car or have it fixed. My poor car :( Like I said before, I have a place to live, food to eat, everyday needs met, and what few bills I have paid. I don't go out as much as I would like and tend to look longingly at books I want, but a little less consumerism could probably do us all good. And I have plenty of books and movies here to catch up on anyway.
But it brings up some questions surrounding my future employment that I've been trying not to think about lately. I worry about my ability to get and stay employed over my lifetime. I've never really been able to keep a job for a very long time, though most of my jobs have also been in high turnover, low pay, service industry jobs and some I quit when I moved to a different area. But I know that I have a problem consistently keeping a job. I also have a hard time starting a new job when I find one. I've also had long-ish periods of unemployment, especially during and after a hard time in dealing with my depression or during and just after a crisis in my life. (Wow. I sound so pathetic.) It isn't as if I am physically disabled. It isn't like my mental illness is debilitating either. It would seem that the only thing stopping me from working is my own laziness and self-defeating attitude. But, on the other hand, this has been the pattern of my whole life.
I don't want to give up on myself though. To quit before I've even started, especially now that I"m on not just a new medicine, a new anti-depressant, but a new set of drugs, who's combination, for better and for worse, have new effects. A new set of drugs that I'm sure my doctor is hoping will make me better able to live a more "normal" life. I also feel like my life can't move on really until I am more free and independent, or at least in a position where I can choose to be dependent or not, where it would be a choice for me to live with my parents, whether to save money or just to be close to family, or to live on my own here in this city or to start over again somewhere else or to shack up with a hot lover or ten.
So I'm left wondering what road is best to take. I've been trying to take life much closer to one day at a time, not have expectations but enjoy things, feel things, love while I can as much as I can, try to be good. But now.... well, I just don't know. Please feel free to give advice...
But my mom threw me for a loop with some comments that she made on our way home. She mentioned that she had heard my comments to my grandmother about finding work, and that she had heard me say the same things the previous weekend at my uncle's house. My mom expressed to me that she was displeased that I seemed to put so much emphasis on finding a job. She pointed out that I wasn't in dire straits financially, as my parents are paying what bills I have and providing a place to live and food to eat. (Yes, somehow I now feel ungrateful for wanting a job.) But her bigger worry was that I would push myself too hard and either take a job that I liked but that I would end up losing because the meds that just settled down got messed up again or that I would take a job I didn't like that would cause me to spiral and lose that job. She would like me to just take it easy and allow myself more time on the current meds before I put myself out there too much.
It is not like I don't understand what she said or why she felt the need to say it. I'm well aware that I had what might have been a great job offer last month, which, unfortunately, coincided with when the Lexapro dropped off and the Prozac didn't pick up the slack, like it was supposed to. I couldn't even get out of bed in the morning to go to the job, much less see how bad I'd mess it up by being there. And, honestly, it isn't like I don't have a difficult time with the more mundane aspects of life. I get tired much more easily than I ever used to. Just one trip to one store, be it grocery or wal-mart, wipes me out. I also have weird... spatial disturbances.... I'm not sure how to easily describe it. It happens when I move my head to fast, either up or down or from side to side. It feels like what happens when you are just a bit drunk and you move your head too fast, only it doesn't last as long. I guess when a person is drunk, they expect it and they're already out of it enough not to care. When you are sober, it's disconcerting. In addition to the above, I still have the tremor, some times worse than other times, though the beta blocker helps. I also don't like too many people. Tend to get a little paranoid around strangers and need a larger bubble of personal space. All of these things combined, as well as all the others that I'm not remembering right now, and, now that I think about it, bad memory should be on that list too... where was I? Oh, yeah- all of these things combine to make me worry that I could keep a job, even if it was one that I really liked and tried my hardest at. Those things also tend to limit what I would even consider applying for. I probably couldn't do a job where I had to stand eight hours. I couldn't do a job where I had to have steady, precise hands. You get the picture.
I should also say that it isn't like I'm hurting financially or lifestyle-wise. I will grant that I would be someone's slave for a week if they would either fix my car or have it fixed. My poor car :( Like I said before, I have a place to live, food to eat, everyday needs met, and what few bills I have paid. I don't go out as much as I would like and tend to look longingly at books I want, but a little less consumerism could probably do us all good. And I have plenty of books and movies here to catch up on anyway.
But it brings up some questions surrounding my future employment that I've been trying not to think about lately. I worry about my ability to get and stay employed over my lifetime. I've never really been able to keep a job for a very long time, though most of my jobs have also been in high turnover, low pay, service industry jobs and some I quit when I moved to a different area. But I know that I have a problem consistently keeping a job. I also have a hard time starting a new job when I find one. I've also had long-ish periods of unemployment, especially during and after a hard time in dealing with my depression or during and just after a crisis in my life. (Wow. I sound so pathetic.) It isn't as if I am physically disabled. It isn't like my mental illness is debilitating either. It would seem that the only thing stopping me from working is my own laziness and self-defeating attitude. But, on the other hand, this has been the pattern of my whole life.
I don't want to give up on myself though. To quit before I've even started, especially now that I"m on not just a new medicine, a new anti-depressant, but a new set of drugs, who's combination, for better and for worse, have new effects. A new set of drugs that I'm sure my doctor is hoping will make me better able to live a more "normal" life. I also feel like my life can't move on really until I am more free and independent, or at least in a position where I can choose to be dependent or not, where it would be a choice for me to live with my parents, whether to save money or just to be close to family, or to live on my own here in this city or to start over again somewhere else or to shack up with a hot lover or ten.
So I'm left wondering what road is best to take. I've been trying to take life much closer to one day at a time, not have expectations but enjoy things, feel things, love while I can as much as I can, try to be good. But now.... well, I just don't know. Please feel free to give advice...
Thursday, January 08, 2009
The Dog Dies, and other rantings
I'll get to the dog later. I'm just hoping that this is somewhat coherent, as I'm now fairly certain that the new anti-depressants aren't kicking in as the other one drops off, so I'm getting crazier by the minute. Or at least I feel like it. I've even caught myself curling up, from the cold in my bedroom before the heater kicks in, and stopping myself because I don't want to even look like the stereotypical tv/movie crazy lady, holding herself close, all alone. I'll freeze to death first, thankyouverymuch. *Deep breath* I keep trying to remind myself, and listen when those around me remind me, that I'm actually dealing with this better than I usually do, as I've informed the people around me within the first few days and called my doctor about the medication after the first few days and before I became suicidal. That is all a huge step up from what I usually do. Also, while I would usually worm my way into the bed and company of the closest romantic significant other when I started feeling bad (because somehow their love would magically protect me from myself and/or I could blame them when they didn't live up to my expectations/huge need and I hurt myself or made some suicidal gesture or attempt), I am trying really hard not to do that. I want to curl up with TyRoy and stay with him. I think if I asked, he would be more than happy for me to be there. But, as MP often reminds me, I'm alot for one person to deal with. I'm trying to spread it around and to delegate appropriately. TyRoy's friendship and love help a tremendous amount. We talk and write often. I'm sure I'll see him when he has time off. But I also lean alot on my mom right now. She knows how I'm feeling. She knows exactly where I am. She still holds my meds. She pushed me into not putting off calling the doctor until I was really awake, so I didn't waste more time. As it would be much easier for her to deal with any legal and medical issues if I was hospitalized (though she is still not my legal next of kin, until the divorce comes through), it's best to always be in contact with her, have her up on the situation. Even when I'm with TyRoy, he has all her numbers, just in case anything happens. And I'm trying to keep in touch with my other friends, because I know the isolation can get to me, even when I am the one doing it. I'm trying. Not sure if it's working or if it will work. Fuck. I think what makes me most upset about this is that I was just starting to feel like I might be getting closer to being a person living with a mental illness, rather than a person suffering from a mental illness. I've spent the last year and 3 months or so being someone suffering from a mental illness, feeling like I was controlled by it, feeling like my life was just fighting a losing battle against it. I was just starting to feel like that might not be it, like it might be something I could negotiate within a relatively happy life. But currently I feel like I'm battling just to not let it all slip away again.
But anger helps. Which brings me to the first thing I wanted to rant about. This evening, I was flipping through AM radio stations and decided to listen to a bit of the rantings of Michael Savage and his listeners. For those of you who don't know, I do listen to a bit of conservative and right-wing talk radio, mostly to know what the other side is saying. Know your enemy, right? One of his topics today was if pot should be legalized. A man training to be psychiatrist called in, decrying the evils of marijuana, as a gateway to other drugs, as a drug made infinitely more potent by chemists and growers which lead it to cause all kinds of psychiatric symptoms and illnesses. The psychiatrist-in-training also said that a high percentage (I think he said either 90 or 95%) of people prescribed psychiatric medications just needed a kick in the butt and a change in diet. OMFG! On the subject of weed: I would not go so far as to say that this man did not see people who smoked marijuana, especially the more potent varieties grown these days (as compared to the pot of the 1960s or even 1980s), and had a variety of bad trips, which lead to, as he said, suicidal attempts/gestures and visual and auditory hallucinations. I had a friend when I was a teenager who was only smoking marijuana on a very regular basis and started to get very paranoid, even when not stoned. But, for all the people I've known who've smoked marijuana, I've never known anyone who experienced LSD-like episodes. Maybe we just get skunk here in the Midwest. Also, I hate this whole "gateway drug" bullshit. Yes, almost everyone who does heroin has smoked marijuana. But correlation is not causation. Those people do not do heroin BECAUSE they did marijuana. I know I can't come up with a GOOD example that seems the same to me, but I have a bunch of things in my head. Being born is a gateway behavoir for becoming a homicide victim. Also, in terms of parsing out correlation and causation, maybe it isn't the drugs that caused the psychiatric problems, or at least not at first. It might have something to do with the fact that people who already have mental illnesses often self-medicate, even when they don't consciously know they are doing it. Then the drugs might exacerbate problems they already have with their brain functioning or just damage the way their body, especially their brain functions, causing even more illnesses, both psychiatric and physical. And they might have sought help if their psychiatrist wasn't a patronizing prick who wouldn't even try to work with them for a plan of medication but instead thought that they should change their diet and get a kick in the butt. I agree that medications get over-prescribed. But they get over-prescribed typically to people with insurance, who can pay, in communities (and of genders and sexual orientations) that accept that medicines can and do work for mental and emotional problems. The rest of people, sometimes people who really need it, don't have access to, or are taught not to take, the medications that could help them. Honestly, while I come from a therapy-friendly family and one that encourages the use of needed medications, I did not want to go on psychiatric drugs. It took a hell of a lot for me to start anti-depressants. But, you know what? I kinda wish the "psychiatrist" I went to in my mid-teens hadn't been so focused on how I was an idiot for what I wanted to take on my hypothetical deserted island and how the continued effects of the "Epstein-Barr" that he claimed I still had after my mono would go away once we bought this book and changed my diet. Because maybe he might have seen that I was suffering from depression, not Epstein-Barr, and I should be getting real therapy to help me learn how to manage it and possibly start the experimentation with drugs when I was 15 and had years and years and years left on my parents' insurance, before I was in college and paying for the education I was missing by not wanting to get out of bed. I bet that asshole loves Savage and his psychiatrist-in-training caller.
Speaking of conservatives, what is it about having a dick that makes people more conservative??? Ok, ok, ok-- correlation is not causation. I don't honestly know many women who are liberal either. And the ones who do claim to be liberal are in certain areas, but, because of their life experiences, or lack there of, don't often subscribe to a larger liberal feminist, pro-queer, anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-ablist, anything I'm ignorantly forgetting, agenda. And I'm sure that there are people out there who would look at my life or even just my writings and say that they don't see me going by that either. But I try. I don't try to say "I'm not anti-whoever but why do they insist on blank?" or "I have friends/lovers/relatives who are whatever so I can't be racist/sexist/whatever". I try to honestly listen to claims made about the privilege I enjoy as a white college-educated middle-class cisgendered able bodied (just looked it up and I guess that is the term out there but that sucks) female, to be aware of it, and to not accept it as something that is rightfully mine. There are lots of ways I've changed how I act and think and, I'm sure, more that I should change but do not yet know of. If someone points it out to me, I will try to listen and think about it without defensiveness, but I know it isn't the job of someone who is of a certain race or gender or class to teach me how to not be an ignorant bigot. I am not saying I"m perfect, but I try to be more fair and egalitarian and less prejudiced. But if I hear one more man who's never been in that position talk like he knows and everyone should get his opinion about the actions of a less privileged group he knows nothing about I'm going to scream. Just because you knew some lazy women on welfare does not make you an expert on all the myriad of men, women, and children who make use of welfare programs. Just because you don't like damned dirty hippies talking about how Tibet should be its own country, under the rule of its religious leader, autonomous from the Chinese government, doesn't mean that the religious rule of the Dalia Lamas was nothing but female child slavery and those hippies should shut up. Oh, unless you want to decry the male child soldier slavery in Africa and the rule of religious leaders in Iran. Just because you went to a school that had comprehensive sex education and passed out condoms doesn't mean that those things are the reason that girls at your high school got pregnant. Maybe there were other factors, like their self-esteem, like their socio-economic status, like the messages that society on the whole gave them, like the fact that their male partner may have pushed them into sex before they were ready and/or without protection. But whatever the reason, that doesn't mean that sexuality or sexual contact should be demonized all around. Also, no excuse for not reciprocating a sex act that can under no circumstances get one pregnant. You know, I know this is the "pussy" female answer but can't you guys just grow the fuck up and stop feeling like your privilege is so threatened that you have to piss on anyone you percieve as "taking what's yours"? Honestly, it's a HUGE TURN-OFF.
Finally, to the title- The Dog Dies. (Might be a little late but ****Spoiler Alert*********) Lately, I really hate how I can't seem to get away from movies that play on the shit I'm already dealing with. This Christmas, my mom, who loves movies with dogs in them, wanted to see Marley and Me. I knew it was based on a book, on a true story, but that's all the extra info I knew. I'm sure I would have gone with my mom sometime around now if I hadn't read an article about how not only does the dog die in the end of the film, but it is used to pull extra extra hard at the viewer's heartstrings. He nicknamed the movie "New Yeller." Well, for as much as my mom loves movies with dogs in them, she can't stand it when the dog dies. If she hears about it beforehand, she won't watch any movie where the dog dies. Needless to say, we will never watch Marley and Me. I'm really glad we didn't try to go see it over our Christmas holiday in Slightly Bigger Midwestern City, as my grandmother's 18 yr/o dog was at the time getting around very poorly and we were all afraid we would have to put him to sleep. I don't think I could have done that movie then. This all probably just means that people should be more aware of what movies they go see, though, to be fair, not all reviews of Marley and Me included that tidbit, which I'm sure parents who took their younger kids might have liked to know before they had to explain that their own dog would someday die. Yes, sometimes, people should just pay more attention. My mom and I decided to go see a movie the weekend after we found out that my uncle had cancer. She wanted to go to the new theater by her work so we just picked a movie that looked ok that was playing soon. We went to see In the Land Of Women. In which Meg Ryan's character has cancer. And loses all her hair. And looks painfully, unhealthly thin. I told Mom that I wasn't going to let her have the final say again.
Then again, sometimes nothing can really prepare you, even if you think beforehand that it might be sad, you sometimes can't guess how sad. I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight. I've read several reviews and knew what it was generally about. I thought it might be sad but I didn't think it would be as sad as it was for me. I should say though that it doesn't take a great deal for me to cry at a movie. It takes very very little, in fact, so I don't blame the movie usually. I don't here. And I made it through most of the movie without tears. But I started when Cate Blanchett's character, dying in the hospital, started to have breathing troubles and the doctor or nurse assured the daughter that it was normal, that her breathing would get shallower. It took me right back to being in the hospital room with my grandfather that last day and how those last hours and minutes are never as peaceful as movies make them out to be. I can still hear that noise, the sound of him trying to breath as his lungs filled with liquid. I cried because it was one thing I knew the movie would never convey. I continued to cry as Brad Pitt's Benjamin came back into Blanchett's Daisy's life, as she became an elderly woman and he didn't remember her. The innocence of people who've lost their memory was highlighted by the young (and thus innocent) appearance of Benjamin. For those people, who knew how old Benjamin truly was, it seemed difficult to take it to heart when he got upset and cursed at them because he didn't think they'd given him the breakfast he didn't remember that he'd just eaten. I think sometimes it's harder to not take it to heart in our reality when the person appears to just be an older version of the same person who once disciplined us. It's harder to remember that it's not their fault. It's harder not to want to WILL them to remember how to be who we think they should be. I think one of the things that really got to me was that the chronologically old/phycially childish Benjamin still had that magical twinkle of mischief and curiousity. The same one that I remember my grandfather having right up until end. There was always some little joke that he made you feel like was just between the two of you. And my grandfather loved to tinker with things, so, even after the stroke, when he couldn't remember exactly what he was doing or why, his hands still felt the need to take things apart, or attempt to. It was hell trying to get him to leave in the IVs and tubes at the hospital. Even once he got home, he'd take his feeding tube out of his stomach. Even when Grandma would try to cover it up with a weird girdle thing and two shirts, he'd find it and take it apart, after having forgotten about it, out of sight out of mind. Even though I'm crying right now, I'm also smiling because he could be such a little shit! But smart and sweet and I miss him.
I went with a woman for whom it should have been worse than it was for me, though I didn't see her cry. I don't know her very well and, in our conversation before the film, I found out that she had had a son, but he died in 07, when he was less than a year old. Somehow, she seems to be more ok with it than I am with my grandfather's death. In the movie, Benjamin dies, as an infant, in Daisy's arms. After the movie, my companion alluded to the fact that it was a bit hard, but that was nothing like how he'd passed. I didn't ask her to share anything more specific, though if she'd wanted to, I would have listened.
Well, with that, I think I'll go to bed. Don't take any of this too seriously. It's just the ravings of a mad woman.
But anger helps. Which brings me to the first thing I wanted to rant about. This evening, I was flipping through AM radio stations and decided to listen to a bit of the rantings of Michael Savage and his listeners. For those of you who don't know, I do listen to a bit of conservative and right-wing talk radio, mostly to know what the other side is saying. Know your enemy, right? One of his topics today was if pot should be legalized. A man training to be psychiatrist called in, decrying the evils of marijuana, as a gateway to other drugs, as a drug made infinitely more potent by chemists and growers which lead it to cause all kinds of psychiatric symptoms and illnesses. The psychiatrist-in-training also said that a high percentage (I think he said either 90 or 95%) of people prescribed psychiatric medications just needed a kick in the butt and a change in diet. OMFG! On the subject of weed: I would not go so far as to say that this man did not see people who smoked marijuana, especially the more potent varieties grown these days (as compared to the pot of the 1960s or even 1980s), and had a variety of bad trips, which lead to, as he said, suicidal attempts/gestures and visual and auditory hallucinations. I had a friend when I was a teenager who was only smoking marijuana on a very regular basis and started to get very paranoid, even when not stoned. But, for all the people I've known who've smoked marijuana, I've never known anyone who experienced LSD-like episodes. Maybe we just get skunk here in the Midwest. Also, I hate this whole "gateway drug" bullshit. Yes, almost everyone who does heroin has smoked marijuana. But correlation is not causation. Those people do not do heroin BECAUSE they did marijuana. I know I can't come up with a GOOD example that seems the same to me, but I have a bunch of things in my head. Being born is a gateway behavoir for becoming a homicide victim. Also, in terms of parsing out correlation and causation, maybe it isn't the drugs that caused the psychiatric problems, or at least not at first. It might have something to do with the fact that people who already have mental illnesses often self-medicate, even when they don't consciously know they are doing it. Then the drugs might exacerbate problems they already have with their brain functioning or just damage the way their body, especially their brain functions, causing even more illnesses, both psychiatric and physical. And they might have sought help if their psychiatrist wasn't a patronizing prick who wouldn't even try to work with them for a plan of medication but instead thought that they should change their diet and get a kick in the butt. I agree that medications get over-prescribed. But they get over-prescribed typically to people with insurance, who can pay, in communities (and of genders and sexual orientations) that accept that medicines can and do work for mental and emotional problems. The rest of people, sometimes people who really need it, don't have access to, or are taught not to take, the medications that could help them. Honestly, while I come from a therapy-friendly family and one that encourages the use of needed medications, I did not want to go on psychiatric drugs. It took a hell of a lot for me to start anti-depressants. But, you know what? I kinda wish the "psychiatrist" I went to in my mid-teens hadn't been so focused on how I was an idiot for what I wanted to take on my hypothetical deserted island and how the continued effects of the "Epstein-Barr" that he claimed I still had after my mono would go away once we bought this book and changed my diet. Because maybe he might have seen that I was suffering from depression, not Epstein-Barr, and I should be getting real therapy to help me learn how to manage it and possibly start the experimentation with drugs when I was 15 and had years and years and years left on my parents' insurance, before I was in college and paying for the education I was missing by not wanting to get out of bed. I bet that asshole loves Savage and his psychiatrist-in-training caller.
Speaking of conservatives, what is it about having a dick that makes people more conservative??? Ok, ok, ok-- correlation is not causation. I don't honestly know many women who are liberal either. And the ones who do claim to be liberal are in certain areas, but, because of their life experiences, or lack there of, don't often subscribe to a larger liberal feminist, pro-queer, anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-ablist, anything I'm ignorantly forgetting, agenda. And I'm sure that there are people out there who would look at my life or even just my writings and say that they don't see me going by that either. But I try. I don't try to say "I'm not anti-whoever but why do they insist on blank?" or "I have friends/lovers/relatives who are whatever so I can't be racist/sexist/whatever". I try to honestly listen to claims made about the privilege I enjoy as a white college-educated middle-class cisgendered able bodied (just looked it up and I guess that is the term out there but that sucks) female, to be aware of it, and to not accept it as something that is rightfully mine. There are lots of ways I've changed how I act and think and, I'm sure, more that I should change but do not yet know of. If someone points it out to me, I will try to listen and think about it without defensiveness, but I know it isn't the job of someone who is of a certain race or gender or class to teach me how to not be an ignorant bigot. I am not saying I"m perfect, but I try to be more fair and egalitarian and less prejudiced. But if I hear one more man who's never been in that position talk like he knows and everyone should get his opinion about the actions of a less privileged group he knows nothing about I'm going to scream. Just because you knew some lazy women on welfare does not make you an expert on all the myriad of men, women, and children who make use of welfare programs. Just because you don't like damned dirty hippies talking about how Tibet should be its own country, under the rule of its religious leader, autonomous from the Chinese government, doesn't mean that the religious rule of the Dalia Lamas was nothing but female child slavery and those hippies should shut up. Oh, unless you want to decry the male child soldier slavery in Africa and the rule of religious leaders in Iran. Just because you went to a school that had comprehensive sex education and passed out condoms doesn't mean that those things are the reason that girls at your high school got pregnant. Maybe there were other factors, like their self-esteem, like their socio-economic status, like the messages that society on the whole gave them, like the fact that their male partner may have pushed them into sex before they were ready and/or without protection. But whatever the reason, that doesn't mean that sexuality or sexual contact should be demonized all around. Also, no excuse for not reciprocating a sex act that can under no circumstances get one pregnant. You know, I know this is the "pussy" female answer but can't you guys just grow the fuck up and stop feeling like your privilege is so threatened that you have to piss on anyone you percieve as "taking what's yours"? Honestly, it's a HUGE TURN-OFF.
Finally, to the title- The Dog Dies. (Might be a little late but ****Spoiler Alert*********) Lately, I really hate how I can't seem to get away from movies that play on the shit I'm already dealing with. This Christmas, my mom, who loves movies with dogs in them, wanted to see Marley and Me. I knew it was based on a book, on a true story, but that's all the extra info I knew. I'm sure I would have gone with my mom sometime around now if I hadn't read an article about how not only does the dog die in the end of the film, but it is used to pull extra extra hard at the viewer's heartstrings. He nicknamed the movie "New Yeller." Well, for as much as my mom loves movies with dogs in them, she can't stand it when the dog dies. If she hears about it beforehand, she won't watch any movie where the dog dies. Needless to say, we will never watch Marley and Me. I'm really glad we didn't try to go see it over our Christmas holiday in Slightly Bigger Midwestern City, as my grandmother's 18 yr/o dog was at the time getting around very poorly and we were all afraid we would have to put him to sleep. I don't think I could have done that movie then. This all probably just means that people should be more aware of what movies they go see, though, to be fair, not all reviews of Marley and Me included that tidbit, which I'm sure parents who took their younger kids might have liked to know before they had to explain that their own dog would someday die. Yes, sometimes, people should just pay more attention. My mom and I decided to go see a movie the weekend after we found out that my uncle had cancer. She wanted to go to the new theater by her work so we just picked a movie that looked ok that was playing soon. We went to see In the Land Of Women. In which Meg Ryan's character has cancer. And loses all her hair. And looks painfully, unhealthly thin. I told Mom that I wasn't going to let her have the final say again.
Then again, sometimes nothing can really prepare you, even if you think beforehand that it might be sad, you sometimes can't guess how sad. I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight. I've read several reviews and knew what it was generally about. I thought it might be sad but I didn't think it would be as sad as it was for me. I should say though that it doesn't take a great deal for me to cry at a movie. It takes very very little, in fact, so I don't blame the movie usually. I don't here. And I made it through most of the movie without tears. But I started when Cate Blanchett's character, dying in the hospital, started to have breathing troubles and the doctor or nurse assured the daughter that it was normal, that her breathing would get shallower. It took me right back to being in the hospital room with my grandfather that last day and how those last hours and minutes are never as peaceful as movies make them out to be. I can still hear that noise, the sound of him trying to breath as his lungs filled with liquid. I cried because it was one thing I knew the movie would never convey. I continued to cry as Brad Pitt's Benjamin came back into Blanchett's Daisy's life, as she became an elderly woman and he didn't remember her. The innocence of people who've lost their memory was highlighted by the young (and thus innocent) appearance of Benjamin. For those people, who knew how old Benjamin truly was, it seemed difficult to take it to heart when he got upset and cursed at them because he didn't think they'd given him the breakfast he didn't remember that he'd just eaten. I think sometimes it's harder to not take it to heart in our reality when the person appears to just be an older version of the same person who once disciplined us. It's harder to remember that it's not their fault. It's harder not to want to WILL them to remember how to be who we think they should be. I think one of the things that really got to me was that the chronologically old/phycially childish Benjamin still had that magical twinkle of mischief and curiousity. The same one that I remember my grandfather having right up until end. There was always some little joke that he made you feel like was just between the two of you. And my grandfather loved to tinker with things, so, even after the stroke, when he couldn't remember exactly what he was doing or why, his hands still felt the need to take things apart, or attempt to. It was hell trying to get him to leave in the IVs and tubes at the hospital. Even once he got home, he'd take his feeding tube out of his stomach. Even when Grandma would try to cover it up with a weird girdle thing and two shirts, he'd find it and take it apart, after having forgotten about it, out of sight out of mind. Even though I'm crying right now, I'm also smiling because he could be such a little shit! But smart and sweet and I miss him.
I went with a woman for whom it should have been worse than it was for me, though I didn't see her cry. I don't know her very well and, in our conversation before the film, I found out that she had had a son, but he died in 07, when he was less than a year old. Somehow, she seems to be more ok with it than I am with my grandfather's death. In the movie, Benjamin dies, as an infant, in Daisy's arms. After the movie, my companion alluded to the fact that it was a bit hard, but that was nothing like how he'd passed. I didn't ask her to share anything more specific, though if she'd wanted to, I would have listened.
Well, with that, I think I'll go to bed. Don't take any of this too seriously. It's just the ravings of a mad woman.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)