http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB4jucuiFbg
http://www.jerismithready.com/quiz/
I like to take online quizzes... (don't lie, you do it too). After finding out that some person called Jeri Smith (who is apparently a writer) thinks that my spirit animal is an otter (I can't tell you how pleased this makes me. It was just the sort of egocentric glee that online quizzes are supposed to inspire!), my boyfriend, who is currently borrowing my DVD's of BBC's 'Planet Earth' series, reminded me that there is a scene in which a group of otters take on a crocodile.
The river otters are the best part of any zoo, I think there is no arguing with me there. And apparently, they (/we, thank you Jeri Smith!) are total bad-asses as well.
Moral of the story: Crocodiles of the world, don't mess with us otters just because we're fuzzy and cute. We will bite your tail, and you will have to piss off! And won't you feel stupid...
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Story Stew
The world has fallen on hard times. Perhaps this is where the obsession with fairy tales comes from. And it isn't just me. So many books and movies that are coming out now find themselves set in those timeless kingdoms, those places we recognize although they have never been real. For awhile, back when I was in high school, the tendency seemed to be fleshing out the old narratives with details, aka Ever After and the Gregory Maguire books, making characters that had once been simply good or bad more complex, with more needs, and history, and secrets. The fairy godmother was REALLY Leonardo DaVinci. The Wicked Witch of West simply had a skin condition...
But I see now that films, books, art, and even fashion are reaching back into that primal stew where stories come from, and thus so many things have become deliciously strange, dark, image oriented instead of dialogue driven, focused on feelings and not facts. As much as I love this, I do find it is a little discomforting to see these things, stories that don't follow a narrative too closely, that seem more like dreams, that I understand without being able to explain why. Sometimes I understand why a character is about to do something cruel, or crazy, or self-destructive without needing a character map or a line of weak dialogue. Archetypes are humming and glowing on the screen and off the page, with the life they've had since we sat down around the fire to comfort and teach each other with stories, and it seems we have returned to a place where we trust our own understanding rather than asking for explanations. No need for exposition about the politics or economy of this particular long ago and far away. We are just peaking in, as viewers, as children wanting to be told a story, not as grown-ups who want to know why someone is being a bad parent, or monarch, or crone in the woods. Perhaps when things get tough, we need our narratives to be simpler, our monsters to be uglier, our solutions more definite and final.
Or maybe we are just in a place where our own needs are more childlike, as the world around us becomes less certain, a place where everything seems new, and things we thought we knew have to be figured out again, and on our own this time. Maybe all the help and advice that was coming from the system that sustains us seems to be less dependable now. Without someone telling us how to be in the world, without any definite path to success, we have to turn back to our own insides for answers. What makes me successful? What makes me good? What is my work in this world?
Maybe the bum on the street is starting to look less like a burnout, and more like his previous incarnation as the hermit, the wise man. Maybe it isn't that he doesn't understand us. Maybe it is that we've forgotten that we understand him.
But I see now that films, books, art, and even fashion are reaching back into that primal stew where stories come from, and thus so many things have become deliciously strange, dark, image oriented instead of dialogue driven, focused on feelings and not facts. As much as I love this, I do find it is a little discomforting to see these things, stories that don't follow a narrative too closely, that seem more like dreams, that I understand without being able to explain why. Sometimes I understand why a character is about to do something cruel, or crazy, or self-destructive without needing a character map or a line of weak dialogue. Archetypes are humming and glowing on the screen and off the page, with the life they've had since we sat down around the fire to comfort and teach each other with stories, and it seems we have returned to a place where we trust our own understanding rather than asking for explanations. No need for exposition about the politics or economy of this particular long ago and far away. We are just peaking in, as viewers, as children wanting to be told a story, not as grown-ups who want to know why someone is being a bad parent, or monarch, or crone in the woods. Perhaps when things get tough, we need our narratives to be simpler, our monsters to be uglier, our solutions more definite and final.
Or maybe we are just in a place where our own needs are more childlike, as the world around us becomes less certain, a place where everything seems new, and things we thought we knew have to be figured out again, and on our own this time. Maybe all the help and advice that was coming from the system that sustains us seems to be less dependable now. Without someone telling us how to be in the world, without any definite path to success, we have to turn back to our own insides for answers. What makes me successful? What makes me good? What is my work in this world?
Maybe the bum on the street is starting to look less like a burnout, and more like his previous incarnation as the hermit, the wise man. Maybe it isn't that he doesn't understand us. Maybe it is that we've forgotten that we understand him.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Grapefruit
I just had a genuine fairy tale experience! Well, sort of. A guy in a ball cap just rang my doorbell and gave me fruit. A grapefruit, an orange, and an apple. It was delicious, but I am now remembering how innocent girls in stories wind up screwed because they ate the fruit, sometimes brought to them by someone who rang the bell. Shoot, the fruit-thing is even biblical... but this guy didn't have a snake tattoo or anything. Nor was he a snake himself. He looked like he was only selling fruit door-to-door until his death metal band makes it big. He didn't seem like he was helping a wicked queen or a fallen angel exact its revenge, though that would be EXTREMELY metal...
If it had JUST been an apple, I'd have been suspicious. And I don't think it was braeburn apples in the garden of eden, which is what dude gave me. Adam and Eve are always portrayed in paintings as eating red delicious, but I'm thinking it was probably more like a cute little heirloom apple that brought about the fall of man, don't you think? Disney Snow White eats what looks to be a chemically-enhanced-and-engineered, grown-in-Chile-and-purchased-at-Wal-Mart sort of very red and delicious apple. Just the sort of UN-fresh fruit not sold by the people at Hawkins Brothers, who have the freshest fruit and apparently come, unbidden, to your doorstep with creepy gifts that are sort of quasi-sexy in nature. I am suddenly very aware that I'm naked... now that I think of it, it was also pretty weird that the guy who brought me the fruit was naked. Curiouser and curiouser...
A pomegranate would also have been a little dicey. Too myth-y. This is how we end up in the underworld for part of the year. No one with pure intentions would bring you a pomegranate.
It was the grapefruit that threw me. I'll go look that up in my dream dictionary, just in case I hallucinated this whole event to begin with. I hope it doesn't mean I have a brain tumor.
See, if I were a boy, this wouldn't be an issue. That narrative always works out fine for the hero. Aren't you supposed to trust the wise man on the road, and take the things he offers you? Don't those strangely-inappropriate gifts always help out later?
I don't know. I'm confused. My lips are tingling in a psychosomatic, oh-dear-god, I-hope-my-evil-stepmother-didn't-lace-that-shit-with-rat-bait sort of way.... Then again, last time I ate a peach, my face got quite puffy... Damn you delicious fruit and your horrible side effects!
See, if it had been candy, I wouldn't have taken it. Even I'm not that stupid. Wise men on the road don't even try and pull that shit.
Well, in the off-chance that I'm the hero of this epic, and not the doomed heroine of this tragedy, I'm gonna go plant the rest of this creepy free fruit in my backyard and see if I get a giant grap-or-apple-tree. This is if I don't fall asleep for a hundred years...
If it had JUST been an apple, I'd have been suspicious. And I don't think it was braeburn apples in the garden of eden, which is what dude gave me. Adam and Eve are always portrayed in paintings as eating red delicious, but I'm thinking it was probably more like a cute little heirloom apple that brought about the fall of man, don't you think? Disney Snow White eats what looks to be a chemically-enhanced-and-engineered, grown-in-Chile-and-purchased-at-Wal-Mart sort of very red and delicious apple. Just the sort of UN-fresh fruit not sold by the people at Hawkins Brothers, who have the freshest fruit and apparently come, unbidden, to your doorstep with creepy gifts that are sort of quasi-sexy in nature. I am suddenly very aware that I'm naked... now that I think of it, it was also pretty weird that the guy who brought me the fruit was naked. Curiouser and curiouser...
A pomegranate would also have been a little dicey. Too myth-y. This is how we end up in the underworld for part of the year. No one with pure intentions would bring you a pomegranate.
It was the grapefruit that threw me. I'll go look that up in my dream dictionary, just in case I hallucinated this whole event to begin with. I hope it doesn't mean I have a brain tumor.
See, if I were a boy, this wouldn't be an issue. That narrative always works out fine for the hero. Aren't you supposed to trust the wise man on the road, and take the things he offers you? Don't those strangely-inappropriate gifts always help out later?
I don't know. I'm confused. My lips are tingling in a psychosomatic, oh-dear-god, I-hope-my-evil-stepmother-didn't-lace-that-shit-with-rat-bait sort of way.... Then again, last time I ate a peach, my face got quite puffy... Damn you delicious fruit and your horrible side effects!
See, if it had been candy, I wouldn't have taken it. Even I'm not that stupid. Wise men on the road don't even try and pull that shit.
Well, in the off-chance that I'm the hero of this epic, and not the doomed heroine of this tragedy, I'm gonna go plant the rest of this creepy free fruit in my backyard and see if I get a giant grap-or-apple-tree. This is if I don't fall asleep for a hundred years...
Monday, April 4, 2011
Rescue
The first step, for me, is acknowledging that the expectation of rescue is really quite spiritual. This is how I will begin to shed the guilt of being 'here' in the first place, 'here' being almost 28, living in my mother's home, paying off a college degree I am not using with money earned from a full-time retail job that cannot support me. It certainly cannot support any dreams I have hoped to live out, any dignity I have expected to have. Not to mention that I hate my job, 'Sporting Goods Department Head at Blain's Farm and Fleet'. Lord, how I hate my job! It is flattening my feet, making me tired and fat, and instilling me with such a deep-hatred of my fellow man that I am beginning to relish the idea of any kind of apocalypse that would remove me/them from this planet. Pictures of the Blain family might as well be Chairman Mao posters, or images of Big Brother, the Farm and Fleet eagle at the top of my newsletter might as well be rendered in gilded ink, be stamped 'From the desk of Joseph Goebbels'. My tendency towards hyperbole does not take me too far from the truth in this case. I truly believe that these people are bad. I truly believe they think that I am stupid, and that they can make money off me while shaming me for not working harder, to say nothing of the poor Indonesians who are making the crap that I sell in my department, nor the poor saps who buy this shit with their hard earned money. I want capitalism to fold, I want democracy to buckle, and I want every miserable son-of-a-bitch whoever asked me to check in the back for something to have his brain devoured by a zombie against the backdrop of a smog-filled sky, while dead, three-headed ducks float by on a green river of toxic waste.
And I know I am not supposed to feel this way! On the one hand, I am supposed to feel very lucky that things are not nearly as bad as they could be, given the history of human experience, and on the other I am supposed to be putting up some sort of fight to improve things, for myself and/or for others, aka adjusting my work ethic, morals, expectations, etc. Everything is fine, but in the off-chance that you want it to stop sucking you will have to worker harder/smarter/etc. Independence may well be a state of the soul, but I would argue that it is easier to achieve such a state with a job that can pay your rent without destroying your spirit/leave you praying for nuclear fall-out. And as of late, not knowing how to proceed on a new path or to adjust to the one I find myself on, my hope has turned to the unrealistic place it always has, aka lottery winnings, being the next J.K. Rowling with my 5 awful first pages of my awful first novel, coming into a large amount of money through some improbable familial or romantic connection, etc. I have been ashamed of myself since childhood for relying so naively on the idea that help was coming. After all, one who needs help cannot help themselves, so one should not wish for help, let alone expect it to fall from the sky. Middle class people are not supposed to believe they cannot help themselves. Educated people are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves. Feminists are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves. And I am (or have been told that I am) all of these things.
So, in summation, I'm a little angry. At the world, at everyone who told me things were going to be ok, everyone who told me to follow my dreams, everyone who told me to forget them, everyone who told me to buck-up, everyone who told me to give up. So basically, everyone. Even you. But mostly, I am furious at myself. Because I am not supposed to feel angry at Prince Charming for never showing up, because I was never supposed to believe in him in the first place.
But whether it is Prince Charming slaying the dragon, or Uncle Charles Dickens sending in a kind, wealthy relative at the most desperate of moments, or the helicopter swooping up beneath you as you lose your grip on the cliff-face, I believe the implication is the same. Help is coming. Believe, and do not give up hope. When you surrender your control, you gain the aid of the universe. And not in the form of the zombie-apocalypse, which I believe is generally viewed as something to be avoided, despite my rigorous and hopeful planning...
The earliest lessons from school and family were how to avoid these situations. Stay away from dragons, poverty, and cliff-faces. Go to college, don't have babies until you're ready, and learn to support yourself. All good advice, all loving and sound. All from people who believe in me, who believe the world is a good place, a place that nurtures and provides the worthy with what they need. And knowing this, I have tried to follow these bits of advice the best way I know how, which has proved to be not good enough, or the world too changed for any effort of mine to matter at all. I still feel like I am trying to hold on to the side of a skyscraper with my fingernails, and worse, that help isn't coming for I haven't proved myself to be worthy of it. If it did come, say in the form of a free-place to live, I would surely learn, in my bitterness, to resent it.
And still, I will not let the notion go. It is a bit of hope trapped in the box when all the evil is released on the world, or a stubborn way of not getting a master's degree, or keeping myself from believing that I will be in retail my whole life. I don't know what form I should put my faith in. But I am somewhat glad, embarrassed as I am by my silly girlishness, that it has not abandoned me, when everything indicates that it should. If the woodsmen wants to slay the big bad wolf, I think he and I can work out the gender-role issue later. Right now, I just want to believe that he is still coming.
And I know I am not supposed to feel this way! On the one hand, I am supposed to feel very lucky that things are not nearly as bad as they could be, given the history of human experience, and on the other I am supposed to be putting up some sort of fight to improve things, for myself and/or for others, aka adjusting my work ethic, morals, expectations, etc. Everything is fine, but in the off-chance that you want it to stop sucking you will have to worker harder/smarter/etc. Independence may well be a state of the soul, but I would argue that it is easier to achieve such a state with a job that can pay your rent without destroying your spirit/leave you praying for nuclear fall-out. And as of late, not knowing how to proceed on a new path or to adjust to the one I find myself on, my hope has turned to the unrealistic place it always has, aka lottery winnings, being the next J.K. Rowling with my 5 awful first pages of my awful first novel, coming into a large amount of money through some improbable familial or romantic connection, etc. I have been ashamed of myself since childhood for relying so naively on the idea that help was coming. After all, one who needs help cannot help themselves, so one should not wish for help, let alone expect it to fall from the sky. Middle class people are not supposed to believe they cannot help themselves. Educated people are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves. Feminists are not supposed to believe that they cannot help themselves. And I am (or have been told that I am) all of these things.
So, in summation, I'm a little angry. At the world, at everyone who told me things were going to be ok, everyone who told me to follow my dreams, everyone who told me to forget them, everyone who told me to buck-up, everyone who told me to give up. So basically, everyone. Even you. But mostly, I am furious at myself. Because I am not supposed to feel angry at Prince Charming for never showing up, because I was never supposed to believe in him in the first place.
But whether it is Prince Charming slaying the dragon, or Uncle Charles Dickens sending in a kind, wealthy relative at the most desperate of moments, or the helicopter swooping up beneath you as you lose your grip on the cliff-face, I believe the implication is the same. Help is coming. Believe, and do not give up hope. When you surrender your control, you gain the aid of the universe. And not in the form of the zombie-apocalypse, which I believe is generally viewed as something to be avoided, despite my rigorous and hopeful planning...
The earliest lessons from school and family were how to avoid these situations. Stay away from dragons, poverty, and cliff-faces. Go to college, don't have babies until you're ready, and learn to support yourself. All good advice, all loving and sound. All from people who believe in me, who believe the world is a good place, a place that nurtures and provides the worthy with what they need. And knowing this, I have tried to follow these bits of advice the best way I know how, which has proved to be not good enough, or the world too changed for any effort of mine to matter at all. I still feel like I am trying to hold on to the side of a skyscraper with my fingernails, and worse, that help isn't coming for I haven't proved myself to be worthy of it. If it did come, say in the form of a free-place to live, I would surely learn, in my bitterness, to resent it.
And still, I will not let the notion go. It is a bit of hope trapped in the box when all the evil is released on the world, or a stubborn way of not getting a master's degree, or keeping myself from believing that I will be in retail my whole life. I don't know what form I should put my faith in. But I am somewhat glad, embarrassed as I am by my silly girlishness, that it has not abandoned me, when everything indicates that it should. If the woodsmen wants to slay the big bad wolf, I think he and I can work out the gender-role issue later. Right now, I just want to believe that he is still coming.
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