As much as i love posting pictures of places and things, i’m somewhat protective of pictures of my immediate family. I had a few pictures of my dad and brother hanging out on my brother’s porch, but i didn’t like that it showed enough background landmarks to determine whereabouts he lives… so i chose to not post them. I wish i’d managed to get some indoor pictures so i could have posted something. That’s on my to-do list for the next time i visit, because i like seeing their smiling faces.
When i was in Chicago, my dad and i went through my grandma’s enormous box of family photos. In that box are hundreds of pictures – even some old daguerreotypes. I took pictures of some of them until i realized there were just too many, at which point i started scanning them in on my parents’ computer. I emailed them to myself, and just took an hour or two to crop ‘em, clean them up, and now i’m posting them.
Holy snap and good gravy, i can’t believe i’ve forgotten to post these. These are from my vacation back in, what, August? Clicky to view parts one and two.
Okay, so my parents picked me up at the train station after my nice long ride on Amtrak. I had a funny little moment where i thought i was going to wind up being over an hour late; turns out that my phone hadn’t bothered to change time when we crossed the time change line. Fun stuff.
It feels like i didn’t get as many pictures of Chicago as i did of Michigan, but my dad, stepmum and i did take a few trips to various parts of Chicago and East Chicago specifically for the purpose of taking pictures. So without further blathering, here are some pictures behind the cut.
The large pictures don’t play well with the new layout. And there are a few other minor layout adjustments that need to be made.
Fixed, i think. I’m sure in a week or two, i’ll see something that looks wrong and i’ll hafta go back in and fix it. Such is life.
I will be resolving both of those issues in the next day or two, but first i have to decide: find some way to auto-resize all of the images? Or go back to each individual post and manually fix them? Y’all, that’s a LOT of pictures. I’ve got my work cut out for me. Lucky for me, i like a good bit of tinkering.
I had an interesting thought earlier, as i was driving. And naturally, with no pen, paper or keyboard to record the thought, it seems to have disappeared forever into the ether. This is not an uncommon thing for me, but that does little to ease the frustration of sitting here, fingers poised over keys, waiting for the thought that cannot be tempted back for love nor money.
So i’ve put on my headphones, started some music and am going to type for a bit. See if something interesting comes of it.
I’ve had a strong urge to cut my hair for a while now. I sometimes dream of having long thick hair; something that i can hide behind or truss up in fancy styles: whichever my mood dictates. But it’s just not meant to be: my hair is thin, soft and fragile. When it does manage to get long, it can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be frizzy or stringy, so it alternates between the two.
So every now and then i buzz it down to the scalp and leave it be until it’s too long to ignore. It’s currently at that unignorable stage – it has to be wetted and combed in order to be presentable. Granted, i don’t currently care much about presentable, given that i’m currently amongst the 10.2% of the population that can’t find gainful employment. Common sense and my husband both tell me that, with regards to haircuts, it’s best to wait on anything that the outside world might consider drastic.
There are other things about me that are simply not meant to be; the same can be said of anyone and everyone else out there. We want to be taller, shorter, thinner, fatter, older, younger; the grass is always greener, likely because it’s fertilized with shit. Life doesn’t get easier or better when fat people lose weight, when the poor become rich, or when short grow a few inches.
Of those three things, all of them contain some amount of myth, as they are part of the mythos of the Better Life. What is difficult for some may well be impossible for others – and the distinction doesn’t lie in determination of will, but in circumstances often beyond our control.
There are thin people who want to gain weight, and are just as tired of being told to eat a sammich as i am tired of being told to stop stuffing cheeseburgers into my face. There are tall people who are tired of hearing “how’s the weather up there”, tired of the jokes about amazons or basketball players, just as there are short people tired of being teased about “little man syndrome”. There are rich people who think their lives would be easier if they didn’t have so much to worry about losing – just as there are poor people who think their lives would be easier if they suddenly came into a large sum of money.
And all of these thoughts, they’re valid to some degree. It’s like the person who, in this economy, dares to complain about their job. No doubt there are dozens of people more than happy to jump their shit about how they should be grateful to have a job at all. Problem is: both sides are right. People who have jobs are indeed lucky to have them, but they’re also facing heavier workloads and longer hours to make up for the people their companies can’t afford to hire. They’re developing ulcers or losing hair over the proverbial axes hanging over their necks.
Life is just hard. That’s it. End of story.
But not really. Hard doesn’t mean Not Beautiful. Doesn’t mean Not Worth It. Far from it.
And here’s where i get stumped. Because the Why isn’t as simple as any metaphors about closed doors and opened windows, or the darkest hours being just before dawn. If you’re religious, you can give pause and consider the miracle of human life, the act of creation, the awe of it all. If you’re an atheist, you can still pause and consider that even if human beings aren’t divine creations, we’re still some amazingly intricate creatures. But even that doesn’t really answer the Why. Just because my molecules reflect events in the cosmos, doesn’t mean i’m going to stress any less over making sure the rent and utilities get paid.
Balancing the mundane and the magical… sometimes i wonder if such a thing is even possible. I know i’ve yet to really figure it out. Sure, i’m made of star stuff – but so are we all. In that, i’m no more or less special than anyone else. So then i guess there’s awe to be had in the idea that in this immense world, we’re all so similar while being so different. We all bleed red, but we have fingerprints like snowflakes.
Awe, yes; comfort, no… if for no other reason than i believe those two things might well be mutually exclusive. How can we ever come together, with so many things to divide us? Gender, race, orientation, religion, political association, tax brackets; we all have some privilege that’s deprived of someone else. So life is hard. But the fact remains that we somehow manage to come together at times, even if only momentarily… and life is beautiful.
I think that’s all i got, for now. In re-reading before posting, it feels a bit disjointed. But i’m feeling a bit disjointed, so i guess it’s only fair that my writings would be as well.
Ben once told me his recipe for shortbread: equal parts butter, sugar and flour. So i grabbed a stick of butter, squished it into a measuring cup: 2/3rds of a cup. Gotcha. Got the flour and sugar out of the freezer, measured all the appropriate amounts into a mixing bowl, and went to down. Added some cinnamon and clove while i was at it, because YUM.
I couldn’t find a baking pan; apparently they’re all on vacation, or Ben keeps them in a secret cupboard. So i figured i’d roll it out into cookies, which i did.
Once they were baking, i decided to make a large batch of my pad thai sauce. That went off without a hitch, and i now have a half-filled jar (the size of a big jar of pasta sauce, which is what it used to contain) of it hanging out in my fridge. I can have my ghetto ramen pad thai anytime my little hormones desire it. Which they do. Often. And frequently.
That done, i checked back in on the shortbr… the hell? All of the cookies had merged into one large glomp of bubbling stuff. Oh dear.
Um. What to do, what to do… i found a muffin tin and scooped the stuff into three of the muffin cups. Put it back in the oven, where it merely sat and bubbled malevolently at me. In retrospect, i’m wondering if i actually measured everything correctly. I mean, did i think i used 2/3rds of a cup of flour… but did i really? Damn my brain fog.
I think next time, i will make Ben hang out in the kitchen with me when i make it; that way, if it just refuses to work out, i’ll know if it’s something i did wrong this time, or if shortbread just hates me.
I can eat my worth in pad thai. Which, to be specific, is a metric fuckton of pad thai.
There aren’t many Thai restaurants in my particular ghetto-burb of Atlanta, and the nearest pad thai places tend to be way the hell overpriced. Added to which, i am not going anywhere NEAR my front door on Black Friday.
So i had a conundrum on my hands. Because i NEEDED pad thai, more than my dogs need bacon.
It is known in my family that i am Not A Cook. At best, i am a pretty good baker. But Not A Cook. Bake your face off, yes; cook a mostly-edible dinner… maybe. There are jokes about pudding flambe in my past, and i refuse to divulge just how much those jokes are exaggerated.
But i reiterate: i NEEDED pad thai. And Ben was asleep.
I went to the kitchen and started nuking some ramen noodles while i pondered my problem. Given that our microwave is a glorified EZ Bake oven, i had plenty of time to figure it out. And figure it out i DID. Check this out:
3 tbsp Pad Thai sauce (not fish sauce; i think the stuff i have has a tamarind base)
1 tbsp peanut butter
1 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp orange juice (we had no lime juice, arg)
1 tsp sugar
Mixed it all up, proclaimed it freaking astounding, and got my noodles out of the microwave. Drained the broth (i’d cooked the ramen noodles with the flavour packet added to the water), put the noodles into a bowl, and spooned about 2/3rds of the sauce onto it. If i’d heated up veggies to go with it, i’d have used the whole thing.
And holy snap, it was so good, the phrase “make you wanna slap your momma” came to mind.
In the future, things i would add to this:
veggies (especially green onion)
maybe some sprouts (mm, crunchy)
eggybits
Another possible change in technique: cook the noodles until almost too soft, then flash fry them with veggies and sauce. But that might be too much effort. Or just too much time to wait for overwhelming deliciosity.
I also think that i’m going to have to make a large batch of this stuff, so that i can have fake pad thai whenever i want it.
Long story short: i’m closing down a few other blogs and moving their content here. The artwork isn’t going anywhere; it’s just no longer bogarting the domain. If you’re subscribed via RSS, these extra posts may show up, but they may not. In any case, there’ll hopefully be more content here soonish.
I’m going to start by explaining the title of this post in sections.
Socially acceptable – sure, there’s no shortage of people willing to spend oodles of time mocking Twilight and its fanbase… but it’s still something that’s shown in theaters, still something you can easily buy at almost any store with a book section – without walking through a beaded curtain. I could go to my local 24-hour Kroger and pick up a copy of Twilight – something i couldn’t do with Debbie Does Dallas, or even a copy of Playboy magazine. (Granted, i live in the south, where you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays – so that may be a regional thing, at least in the case of nudie mags.)
Another aspect of the “socially acceptable” bit: based on what i’ve heard from my friends, girls/women seem to have no problem asking their boyfriends/husbands to come with them to watch Twilight in the theaters… but how would they feel if their male companions asked them on a date to a strip club? I don’t see that going over well, not at all.
Girl – it is marketed as a Young Adult novel, not as an adult romance novel. That may be the fault of the publishing house, rather than the author – but regardless of who put it in that category, that’s still how it’s being marketed.
Porn – This one needs a bit more description than the rest of the statement, as it’s the most controversial.
What do you call a movie that centers around a male lead, where any/all female characters exist solely for the purpose of the male’s stimulation and gratification? Where the male lead is desired by every female in the movie? Where the females are only there to make the appropriate noises and faces that better enhance the male’s excitement? You’d probably call it porn.
But wait, what happens if you swap the genders? A movie that centers around a female lead, where any/all of the male characters exist solely for the purpose of the female’s stimulation and gratification? Where the female lead is desired by every male in the movie? Where males are only there to make the appropriate noises and faces that better enhance the female’s excitement?
That, my friends, is still porn. But that’s what Twilight is.
In male porn, the males are actually relatively disposable. They are a walking penis – whose ultimate goal is to make the women make those noises and faces that the viewers (stereotypically men) are there to see. The men who watch porn generally don’t want to watch men having sex with women, they want to imagine themselves as the man who is having sex with women on screen.
In Twilight, Bella is relatively disposable; the Twilight fans aren’t there to see her, they’re there to proclaim themselves Edward or Jacob fans: they themselves want to be desired by Edward or Jacob.
The central figures in these sorts of stories are often as minimally-described (i hesitate to say “stripped down”) as possible. Bella is an Average Girl that quickens the cold heart of the vampire to new-found love… in the same way (and with exactly the same realism) that Willie The Pool Boy doesn’t get called to the house to clean out hair clogs from pool filters, but to satisfy the lady of the house as only he can.
Characters like Bella and Willie need to be disposable so that the viewer can easily imagine themselves in their position – that’s part of the fantasy involved in pornography.
Some might argue that Twilight is fantasy, maybe erotica – but definitely not porn. After all – porn isn’t socially acceptable. There’s a difference between porn and erotica, but determining the delineation between the two often depends on who you ask. Some say that porn is graphic or sexually explicit, whereas erotica is not; it comes down to a matter of just how much is described/shown.
In my opinion, the difference between porn and erotica is the characters – do they actually have a personality, do they have any depth to them? We don’t need a fifty-page outline of their life story, but even a hint of depth goes a long way.
One of the criteria of the heroine in a romance novel is that she is simultaneously generic and exceptional. She is often described with words and phrases such as vibrant, full of life, fiery, or tempestuous. (I once had a particularly vibrant set of curtains, but it honestly never occurred to me to get into a hot and steamy relationship with them.) This heroine needs to be generic enough that she can be mentally replaced with/by the reader, but at the same time, all of the other characters in the story need to view her as exceptional – to titillate the reader’s replacement fantasy.
The vampire mythos allows us to extent this to hyperbolic heights. The female protagonist is not only the most exceptional girl in town, or the most exceptional lady in court; she is the most exceptional woman that this being has encountered in centuries. The deal is only sweetened by the distance between the vampire’s reactions – he didn’t just reject all of those other women, he probably killed them brutally. This is the end-all-be-all version of having the man on your arm insult his most recent ex in your presence.
I’ve heard some Twilight fans claim that it endorses or encourages abstinence in its teenage readers. Abstinence is about more than figuring out which body part should or shouldn’t go into which orifice. If it encourages young women to carefully consider the potential long-term and/or life-changing consequences of a sexually active lifestyle? Great. I’m not of the opinion that everyone should wait until they’re married, but i do think it’s a good idea to wait until you’re in a healthy and safe relationship – both with yourself as well as with your partner. I’d love to see some statistics on whether or not that’s actually the case: are teenage Twilight fans more likely to abstain from sexual relationships?
Even if that does turn out to be the case, therein lies another problem: Twilight does not promote healthy and safe relationship dynamics. The series promotes codependency as preferable or optimal in a relationship. It’s viewed as the epitome of romance; anything less than the perpetually thrilling barb of mutual deceit and emotional manipulation is not regarded as Real Love.
It promotes an ideal that is, in reality, an incredibly destructive social dynamic. With a Debbie Does Dallas-style fantasy, it happens or it doesn’t. But with a Twilight-style fantasy, you can always keep trying until you turn your relationship(s) into that. If your Vampire Lover abandons you, well, there’s always the Werewolf boy next door.
I am an organ donor. When i die, i want my body donated. Take what other people can use from it, and then send it on to science, where it can be used to teach medical students or further some understanding of whatever’s applicable.
My grandfather died when i was 2; he had lymphatic cancer, and when he died, he donated his body to science in the hopes of furthering understanding of cancer and such. When my grandma died three years ago (of nothing other than old age – she was 93), we did the same thing. I was not able to be there when she was dying, but i was able to get into town the next day. My dad and i went to the hospital to take care of whatever paperwork needed to be done; when they asked if we wanted to see the body, neither my dad nor i had any interest. Partly because we didn’t want that to be our last memory of her (my dad was also out of town when she died), but also: she wasn’t in there anymore. It was just the shell that, at one point, happened to house one of our favorite souls on the planet.
We told them that, as per her wishes, we wanted her body donated to science. I was more than a little dismayed to find out that this was such a rare request that they had to actually make an hour’s worth of phone calls to find out what all was involved in the process.
I view my body as the temporary housing of my soul. I like to decorate it with piercings and tattoos, because really: who moves into a house and doesn’t decorate? And yet, i have little to no interest in fashion; ironic, perhaps, but that’s another post. My piercings are mostly decorative, but my tattoos are milestone markers – they all tell stories of events and realizations that had a profound impact on my life, on who i am as a person. But again, those stories are a bit of a tangent, so i’ll leave them for a later post.
I do and do not have any huge attachment to my body. Obviously, it’s the only one i have right now, and as such i want to treat it well and keep it in decent working order. I want it to last as long as it can. But here’s where i slightly disagree with the comic i posted above: i don’t subscribe to the belief that when we die, that’s just it. I believe that when i die, my soul will move on to pastures anew – could be another body, could be another level of existence. I dunno. I don’t know if i believe in Heaven/Hell/Valhalla/Nirvana or whatever. I know this much: i can’t prove they don’t exist (given that you can’t prove a negative), but whatever it is that lies beyond, i’m not quite ready to find out for certain.
In a lot of ways, i see my own body as irrelevant. It’s where i live, and so that makes it relevant to this life, to my current life. But it’s not the end-all-be-all, and it’s not the center of the universe; it doesn’t even have to be the center of anyone else’s life. If someone else doesn’t like it? That’s their problem, not mine. If i don’t like it, that’s my problem – not anyone else’s.
Here’s the thing: in the grand scheme of things, i am a speck, standing on a speck of a planet, which is warmed by a star that is a but mere speck in the universe.
Some people (myself included) think of this and see it as awe-inspiring – they marvel at the vast expansiveness of the universe, at the possibilities that such an unimaginably large thing can barely contain. Others see this as a diminishment, as an indicator of their “insignificance”. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best in his cosmic sermon (which is definitely worth checking out). As he mentions in this speech, he had been contacted by a psychologist who studied the effects of things that made people feel insignificant, and wanted to do a survey with the people who saw one of DeGrasse Tyson’s shows (which involved a ginormous zoom-out from a person to the universe). His response?
“There’s something wrong here. Why does he feel small, but when i look up at the universe, i feel large? Then i realize, the problem is: his ego is too large to begin with. He came to the problem thinking too highly of who and what he was to begin with. Because then, everything that happened in the show destabilized his self-image. Whereas, i know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomenon in the cosmos. And it’s our 15 pounds of gray matter that figured this out!”
Parts of this amazing speech are captured beautifully in this video, Symphony of Science:
Do yourself a favor: don’t just scroll past that video. Watch it. Then watch it again. DO EET NAO. For several weeks now, i’ve been trying to resist the temptation to just post the video and the lyrics and shout BECOME ONE WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE!
And yes, if you watch both the (above-linked) sermon and the music video, you’ll notice that they chopped up DeGrasse Tyson’s speech to make it say something only slightly different:
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??
It gives me chills just thinking about it. Here’s another awesome quote from Carl Sagan in that video:
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself
It makes my throat lumpy to be faced with such beauty, with such an affirmation of the beauty of being made of star stuff. And sure, some of this may sound a bit new-agey, but like DeGrasse Tyson, i’m not going to apologize for the findings of astrophysicists.
An iron meteor created the Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona (which is 4,180 feet across and 570 feet deep) some 50,000 years ago. The iron in my blood comes from the same source as the iron in that meteor. In the light of such amazing stuff, i find it mind-boggling that anyone can have the audacity to think things like the size, shape and/or color are valid reasons for discriminating against another human being. Again, i quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson:
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically
We are all connected. Our own individual atoms are all put together differently, and yet we ultimately have the same origins.
I just subscribed to this blog* based on one particular line (from this post):
I discussed this fear in therapy a lot, which was much more enjoyable than facing the fear.
Ohhhhhhhhh boy, do i ever know all about that. Storytime! Grab your blankies and some cookies.
I started therapy when i was 8 or 9, and i went regularly (once a week) until i went to college at age 18. From that point, i went about once a month until i was about 20. Then, in my mid-20s, i was back in therapy for about two years to help me deal with some really intense life-crap that was going on at the time. Okay, Storytime’s over.
See what i did there? Or rather, what i did not do? I didn’t go into the Why I Was There bits, which i could easily write an entire blog’s worth about (more on that in a minute). In the 8-18 range, i saw three different therapists and one psychiatrist. Each time i saw someone new, it took me about 4-5 sessions just to get them caught up on my history, on why i was there. It was an easy way to Not Talk About It. It was more recitation than actual discussion or explanation. By the time i had the main story out there, i had an idea of who i was working with, and the ways in which i could manipulate them into letting me get away with even more Not Talking About It. I like to think that last bit, the manipulation part, was less a conscious decision – but in all honestly, i don’t know if that’s actually true. I do think it was a defense mechanism: because talking about fear is a hell of a lot easier than actually facing it.
It’s the recitation bit that’s really potentially harmful, though. It lets us fool ourselves into thinking that we’re actually dealing with things, actually making progress. It’s not progress. It’s not moving forward. It’s not always moving backward, but it can be a lot of side-stepping.
To explore this, let’s look at recitation in other mediums – specifically, in theatre. If you go to watch a play once, you’re going to (hopefully) enjoy it, get wrapped up in it, and enjoy the performance. If you’re an usher, and you watch the play multiple times, you’re going to notice that the actors are very often using the same inflections and intonations in each repeat. Some really good actors can stay grounded in the moment of their deliveries, and manage to retain the emotional impact; with those actors, you’ll notice (if you watch repeatedly and carefully) slight variations in the retellings.
I hesitate to use this analogy because it does have its failings – the primary one being that when most individuals break into recitation, it’s not a conscious decision to engage in an act. However, the analogy works in that our recitations can retain phrasing and intonation from previous tellings of our stories. The problems sneak up on us when we’re not grounded in the delivery, when we don’t take into account who we’re telling, why we’re telling, or even what might have changed between this retelling and the last. When that happens, these recitations are not really honest.
To be fair: recitations are partly natural and even potentially helpful. If you have to tell the same story over and over, it’s only natural that you’re going to develop an efficient and effective way of telling it. If you just need to convey information, there’s nothing wrong with it – so long as you are utilizing it as only part of the therapeutic process.
But recitation doesn’t let you look at the situation from a different angle, or let you relate it to current events in your life. It is a snapshot, an elaborate Polaroid of Who You Were At One Point. When we try to use recitation as a means of relating to someone else’s life experience (“I know what you’re going through, [insert story]“), it can be outwardly destructive (although usually unintentionally so).
Very rarely will we encounter someone who calls us out on this behaviour. This is partly because it isn’t always perceived as performance, but also partly because of the cost vs. benefit of calling us on it. This lets us believe that this mode of relating personal experience is, for the most part, a successful one.
In a therapeutic context, recitation is most likely to occur relatively early in the relationship. The therapist, if they’re particularly insightful, may very well see that we are delivering the canonical version of Our Life StoryTM. However, they’re also going to recognize that the trust in the relationship has not yet been established; responding in a manner that might put the person on the defensive is more than a little counter-productive. Calling them out early (or sometimes, at all) runs the risk of making them feel invalidated or alienated – both from the therapist as well as from the therapeutic process.
What this means is that we ultimately cannot rely on others to call us out on our evasive maneuvers or behaviours – can not and should not. Part of the process of becoming more whole and healthy people involves developing more self-awareness and cultivating habits of self-honesty.
* – A few things of note, here: the blog i initially linked is a damn good blog – very insightful and intelligently written – and i would have subscribed to it anyway; the quoted bit was just icing on the proverbial cake. I also don’t mean to detract from the primary point of the post by taking out just one quote and using it to expand on it in an entirely different direction. It’s just such a damn good statement, and can be applied to SO MANY THINGS. Love it, i does.
