Dinosaurs

This is adapted from a couple of old posts.

Here’s the thing about dinosaurs.

They should be imaginary. Everything else that cool from childhood turns out to be fake; fairies and dragons and hobbits and trolls and magic and unicorns and elves and so on.

Or they should be a lie, which only you find out later in school, and then you feel kind of sad and stupid for having loved them so naively. Like racist cowboys and commodified princesses and disease-ridden pirates. Maybe you learn to ironically embrace the myth of them, but the reality is always there, reminding you that nothing is ever wholly good.

Except dinosaurs! Because they were real, and you never learn that they weren’t as awesome as they appear. No bearded, pony-tailed high school sociology teacher ever sits on his desk and breaks the news that, despite what The Man would have you believe, they were really three feet tall and lived on tofu.

In fact, they are so cool that crazy people try to deny their existence. They claim it is because of the Bible, but really it is because they know that dinosaurs are so cool, they’re cooler than God himself (which is probably why God got rid of them and replaced them with humans).

Also note that, while the internet has ruined such formerly awesome things as zombies, vampires,* ninjas and Trogodor, dinosaurs have, if anything, been enhanced by internet attention.

The only way dinosaurs disappoint us is by no longer being alive. And that is mostly a problem for today's children, I think. Until their first trip to the natural history museum, they imagine that the dinosaurs there walking around in zoo-type habitats. The girl pictured above was wildly unimpressed to find the dinosaurs at the Field Museum didn't have their skin on, but when I was little, I thought of dinosaurs as skeletons first, and only later learned that they were once fully-fleshed creatures. I blame the Discovery Channel and their CGI dinosaur programing.

Luckily, there is a super-cool and adorable solution to this problem.

Dinosaur Robots.

*Actually, Twilight ruined vampires.**

**Actually, nothing can ever ruin vampires, at least not for me.

Ada Lovelace Day (3/24/09)

This is probably the last BlogClassic, since most of the rest is just stuff I wrote in order to fulfill my goal of writing something everyday (I know, this is the crap that I actually put thought into). I debated whether or not to post this, since its timeliness has passed, but it was the first 'blog about something day' that I participated in with my shiny new (now old) blog, so it's kind of historic.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815, London – 27 November 1852, Marylebone, London), born Augusta Ada Byron, was the only legitimate child of George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. She is widely known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

(thanks, Wikipedia!)

So, did you know that today (that it, March 24th) is (was) Ada Lovelace Day?

I sure didn’t until a few minutes ago, which makes me sad because if I’d known about it before the children left I’d have made it a “teaching moment” (yes, I do kind of hate myself for using that phrase). Also pretty sad is the fact that I wouldn’t even know who Lovelace was if I hadn’t read The Difference Engine.

Here’s a little something about me: I really like computers. Not just what they do, and what they let us do (which should be pretty obvious ‘cause hey, blog), but how they work. I like the concept of them, I like to know about them. I like the language of computer programming.

Why did nothing ever come of that interest? It might have a little something to do with the fact that, despite being an honors/AP student back in the day, I was expressly discouraged from taking any computer science classes on more than one occasion. Because they’re hard. Because I was more of a creative type. There was no explicit sexism, just the very clear suggestion that I was the wrong kind of nerd for that sort of thing. But I wonder, did boys who liked English and music and art get the same advice? If they didn’t, it’s messed up. Of course, it’s pretty messed up if they did, too.

So, anyway, here’s my contribution to the day.

A Woman in Technology I Admire:

Mary Lou Jepsen (born 1965) was the founding chief technology officer of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), an organization whose mission is to deliver low-cost, mesh-networked laptops en masse to children in developing countries. For her work in creating the laptop Time Magazine named her to its 2008 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

(thanks again, Wikipedia)

Monthly Mix (from last month)

I'm going to try to post a new 8tracks mix every month (It'll be like the world's most infrequent podcast). Here's the one I made last month, along with some random bitching.

Songs to pretend you’re sitting on a beach on a warm summer’s night.



By the by, I’m sitting here watching The X-Files, and there was just a preview for some iteration of Stargate that featured the most fakest looking explosion in the history of television.

This coming from a veteran watcher of B-grade science fiction. Seriously. It’s one thing to pull those kind of shennanigans mid-episode, when the suspension of disbelief is in full swing, but in the preview? Come now.

And speaking of SciFi, I’m miffed about the channel’s change of spelling (to SyFy), not just because it’s idiotic, but because they seemed to have changed it in part to attract the lady-viewers, who I guess totally hate science fiction. But are super into nonsensical homophones.

Twits (3/27/09)

Here’s what I hate about Twitter:

The verb “to tweet.”

Not because I’m an old fuddy-duddy. I’ve got no problem with internet-based, made-up verbs.

But the service is not called Tweeter. It is called Twitter. Therefore, you do not Tweet, you Twit. (Wordplay!)

Seriously, though.

Use “Twitting. “

(see, it’s an angry chick because... uh... chicks tweet? now that I think about it, they totally chirp, but whatevs, I like that chick)

Did I include this just because of the chick? Of course.

Epic Fantasy (4/1/09)

iWeb's blog template automatically include a picture with each entry, and I'd often find myself struggling to find an appropriate one. Sometimes, that lead to nonsense, sometimes, to total greatness. I include the picture I found for this entry as evidence of the latter.*



Some time in 2008, a friend and I were in the Books A Million in Staunton, VA (a store, by the way, which shelved novelizations of the Star Trek movies as “Literature,” a section distinct from mere “Fiction”), wasting our lives, as was the style at the time. Something spurred me to begin ranting about Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I gotten to this point in the rant: “And even though I never thought they were great, and now don’t even like them anymore, I have to buy each new book as it comes out just because I’v devoted so many hours of my life to this story. I don’t even want to know but I have to know how it ends...”

And my friend said, “You know Robert Jordan is dead, right?”

I stopped mid-step, mouth agape, “Wha---?”

“For like a year now.”

In a film version, we’d now cut away to a shot of pigeons flying off the roof of the mall to illustrate the volume of my exclamations of dismay. I believe I referred to the deceased author as a fucking bastard, which in retrospect was a bit harsh.

Especially since I’ve recently learned that the first volume of the final book of the series (the first of three) will be released in November of this year. Here is an enthusiastic (to put it kindly) fansite’s take on the news.

While closure will be nice (cross fingers), I am leery of this three-volume business. Calling three books one book doesn’t make the series any shorter. Saying they were only split up because there were too many words to fit into one book is no excuse (I’m looking at you, George R. R. Martin. And you look a lot like my dad, btw.).

I say this with love, but epic fantasy has got to be stopped. I’m a big dork who is as interested in made up history as real history, who doesn’t baulk at the thought of a book that is as thick as it is wide, who will happily spend an entire weekend sitting under a tree reading what is basically a thinly-disguised rewrite of Lord of the Rings as long as the writing is passable and the characters are engaging. I am the genre’s target audience (except, arguably, for being female) and I am ready to give up on it all together because I am so tired of having my socks knocked off by the first entry in a series and then find myself, four or five books later, slogging through tout of obligation with no idea why I ever enjoyed this crap (you better not let me down, Patrick Rothfuss).

Is this all about publishers pressuring authors to drag things out as long as the books remain best sellers? Does it happen because, once authors reach a certain status, they become unwilling to make the sort of sweeping editorial changes that made their first books so tight? Is it that the ideas remain exciting but the process of writing becomes ever more tiresome? Does one loose all sense of perspective after a decade of getting paid to fantasize?

Robert Jordan is the perfect punching bag when you want to bitch about series that start with a bang and end with a very, very drawn out whimper, but to be honest, I never thought his books were all that good. The writing is incredibly repetitive, which is why it baffles me that the series went on so long... he never seemed to have that much to say. His characters got broader rather than deeper as the series went on, and that starting from an assemblage of stock figures. The books were never more than mildly entertaining (to teenage me, now-me would never have gotten past the Mars-Venus gender relations in book one).

George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, was that good. A Game of Thrones was fabulous; funny, genuinely tragic, disturbing, loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, featured male and female characters of equal depth and diversity, and best of all did not indulge in the moral absolutism that makes much of the genre seem so childish. The prologue alone kept me awake for a couple of nights (remember those zombie guys from beyond the Wall? yeah, I barely do either).

The second book was as good as the first. The third was slightly too long, and a bit too bogged down in the intrigue stuff, which works better, I think, when the supernatural stuff is there to put it in perspective. But hey, it was still better than a lot of what’s out there. The fourth slid into okaysville. The fact that only half the characters were featured did not, LoTR-style, increase the suspense, so much as it screwed up the pattern of juxtaposed viewpoints that worked so well in the first books. I have a feeling that when the series ends (he better bring it to the fifth book), I’ll look back and think that it would have been awesome as the trilogy it was originally supposed to be.

Just stick to the trilogy format. That’s all that need be done, authors. If you find that your story has grown too big to fit into three books, make it smaller. You can always write another series in the same world.

As an example of doing things right, take Jacqueline Carey. She wrote three great (and sexy) books about a spy/courtesan in an alternate-universe Renaissance Europe. Then, because she wanted to keep writing and people wanted to keep reading, she wrote more books (about the “next generation,” if you will). These books, I feel, are not as good. But I don’t feel obligated to read them, because the story that initially hooked me is finished. Still, I do read them (as do her other fans). I read them with no expectations that they’ll live up to the original, and so I can enjoy what’s there to be enjoyed.

Is this my longest blog ever? Possibly.

Is that ironic? Yes.

Here’s a mildly relevant comic:

Fiction Rule of Thumb

*Seriously, fantasy art is totally insane, and often bears little to no relation to the content of the book. I've read some perfectly reasonable and thoughtful books that I was totally embarrassed to take out of my house because the cover was, like, a chick in a metal bikini holding a flaming sword. And I get to the end of the book and be like "Wha? Where was that sword lady?" because she'd never even appear in the novel.

Sick of Extrapolating and Netflix reads my blog?

A BlogClassic Double Feature, with entires posted on 3/25 and 3/31, respectively

Sick of Extrapolating

A New Yorker cartoon which accurately captures my TV browsing feelings lately.

The best part is, if you’re a lesbian, you even get to feel that way in movies about “gay people.”

Because “gay people” is code for “gay men.”

And some one needs to figure out away to inform the Netflix recomendation-bot that just because I might occasionally enjoy a film about two girls discovering their forbidden love for each other one fateful summer doesn’t mean I automatically give a crap about two boys doing the same thing.

Which is why, no matter how stupid it was, I’m kind of sad The L Word is off the air. It was nice to have one hour a week in which lesbianism was the norm and they had to go out of their way to include a token guy in the cast.

Netflix Reads my blog?

Or so it would seem, as only a week ago I was complaining about the lack of lesbian-movie-specific recommendations (since the category “Gay and Lesbian” is mostly full of the dudes), and lo... their new, ridiculously specific categories offer me:

“Gay & Lesbian Movies Featuring a Strong Female Lead”

I was also offered:

"Visually Striking Gay/Lesbian Drama"

"Critically-acclaimed Foreign Sci-Fi & Fantasy"

"Cerebral Independent Comedies"

"Romantic Movies from the 1980s"

add “BBC Mini-Series Based on 19th Century Literature” and that pretty much covers my movie preferences.

Color me both impressed and creeped out.

Hipster? So What? (3/13/09)

Lots of people have derisively called me a hipster in my day (most frequent offender: my brother. Also my hipster music friends). Yet most people I know also claim to hate hipsters, are ever-vigilant against the threat of hipsters ruining the things they like, and would be mortally offended to be described as one.

However, no one had ever reasonably explained why being a hipster is so bad. Things that have gotten me called a hipster lately are: reading internet comics (more nerdy than anything, I’d think), liking Neko Case, wearing wellies (also referring to said boots as “wellies”), having a blog and liking (allegedly) “ironic” tote bags. Oh, and wearing large, vintage-esque sunglasses. I get called out for that on an near-weekly basis.

These things seem inoffensive. In fact, a lot of them are simply what I would (totally objectively) describe as having good taste and liking the finer things in life.

The best anyone seems to be able to come up with to explain why “hipster” is a dirty word is something about how they expend energy to be cool (rather than just going about their business with the faith that they are cool by default, which is what most people I know do*), and may in fact misrepresent their tastes to be perceived as cooler than they actually are by their peers. Which, I find, is only offensive to people who are also doing that. Some one pretending to like what you like is harmless. Some one pretending to like what you are just a little better at pretending you like is an opportunity to make yourself look like the shit at their expense. Hence the prevalence of the insult “poseur” amongst my high school clique.

I’ve also heard the slightly more damning critique that “hipster culture” is so entrenched in privilege that it is inherently racist, sexist, pretty much discriminatory against everyone who isn’t a white dude. I say, I believe you are speaking of American culture, my friend. There is no one more annoyed than I with “ironic” racism and other such nonsense, especially from self-described progressives, but I don’t think that you can single out one sub-culture as worse than another (unless that sub-culture is, like, white supremacy).

Anyway, the point being, call me a hipster all you want. I’m prepared to admit that I basically fit this description:

“Hip-ster \ˈhip-stər\ noun: A slang term used to describe a person in their twenties to early thirties, generally from a middle class upbringing whose sense of identity encompasses many of the following elements and/or activities: a pretentious knowledge of independent music, art and film, wears thrift store or handmade clothing, has childhood nostalgia, an interest in DIY activities, consuming organic/vegan/vegetarian foods, usually possessing some level of higher education, a well developed sense of irony, often possessing a general knowledge of and strong opinion about world politics.” -How to Impress a Hipster

I’d take issue with the word “pretentious,” or at least argue that I am only pretentious concerning literature. However, as many people (ahem, my brother) use the term pretentious to mean “more knowledgeable than I am inspired to be on this particular topic, and yet perversely not ashamed of their unnecessarily superior knowledge,” I don’t object too strenuously.

Basically this is a description of the sort of person who has been responsible for a lot of the positive social change since the middle ages, the bourgeois intellectual.

So, seriously, what’s wrong with that?

*Obviously, we all say that we don’t care if people think we’re cool or not. This is only true depending on how you define “cool.” I don’t care if people think “Wow, there’s a chick who is way in tune with the latest trends!” but I do care if people think “Wow, there’s a chick way who’s interesting and worth getting to know!” And so most does everyone else. Because we are social creatures.

Retail Therapy, It Works! (posted 3/13/09)

I heard Old Navy* was having a sale on dresses, so I went and bought some and now I don’t hate my life so much anymore. It’s cheaper than real therapy!

I also had the following encounter with an employee.

Me: (minding her own business) Do dee do do, browse browse browse... 

Him: (whispering) Do you have the coupon?

Me: Guh?

Him: (with odd intensity) The coupon! 30% off! I happen to have one (reaches into pants pocket) right here... If you can answer one question correctly... Are you a Cubs fan or a Sox fan?

Me: (sensing “I don’t give a care” is not correct) Uh... the Cubs?

Him: (unduly congratulatory) Correct! Now, do you have a boyfriend?

Me: No... (as I say this, I hear the voice of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters yelling “When a creepy guy asks you if you have a boyfriend you say YES!”)

Him: Well, it’s good all weekend, so he could use it too... But only if he’s a Cubs fan!

Me: (jocular, confused as to how she acquired this fake, coupon-sharing boyfriend) As if I’d date anyone who wasn’t!

Fin.

I have this strange mental block where, though I’m accomplished at randomly lying to strangers for fun and profit (maybe not something I should admit on the internet?), when some weirdo asks if I’m seeing someone, I’m never on the ball enough to make one up. I usually end up doing exactly the same thing I did above; blurting out no and hearing Dr. Venkman reproach me in my head. And then, usually, the weirdo starts hitting on me, and I wait for an opening to tell him I’m actually gay, which never, ever actually shuts him up.

However, that did not happen today, and the coupon did basically make one of my dresses free, so whoo-hoo!

I got to say, its pretty awesome that long empire-waist dresses are In Style these days (I refuse to call them “maxi-dresses” because eww.). It’s a look that has many advantages for me; wearable in all temperatures, easily transitions from day to evening, comfy, allows one to actively play with children with little chance of accidentally exposing cooter/buttocks, and, best of all, the empire waist draws attention to the face-boob area (my best area).


*I know, I know, the child labour. I’m an evil, evil consumer. But I’m also cheap, and, besides being expensive, more ‘ethical’ clothing retailers tend not to carry much that fits me. So I’m going to go with the old “make it easier to buy and I’ll buy it” excuse.

And, I also acknowledge how wrong and creepy those moving mannequin mascots are. They are unpleasant to look at, and also the whole “buy this dress so he’ll marry you” thing is verily fucked up, even without the dismemberment.

I just tried to find that commercial to embed (In case you’re lucky enough to have missed it), but it doesn’t seem to be on Youtube. Basically, a boy mannequin is so impressed by girl mannequin’s cute sundress that he proposes to her. But when he tries to put the ring on, her finger falls off (quel faux pas!). Luckily, he takes off his own finger and gives it to her. True love!

Okay, now I’m starting to feel bad about my new dresses. Shut up, brain!

UPDATE (2/23): Shakesville has a nice little rant about how awful these commercials are.

Haircut (posted 3-7-09)

I got my hair cut today (Update: It's been barely three weeks and this haircut has already grown out to look exactly like my old haircut. Berg.) and I didn’t get any guff for cutting my own bangs. Is this because I am so brilliantly good at it she couldn’t tell, or was she sympathetic to DIY haircuttery because of These Tough Economic Times?

I always get nervous about getting my hair cut, not because I’m worried I’ll end up with bad hair, but because there is something about having my body (or its parts) in the hands of a professional authority figure that makes me feel sure I’m going to be criticised.**

There was the check-up I had right before starting middle school, when the doctor asked how much excersise I got. I told him that I liked to swim and play soccer and ride my bike a lot, and he looked me up and down and said “Well, that can’t possibly be true.”

There was the gyno who insisted that I stay on birth control after I told her I was gay (she was the first person I told) because I might “change my mind.”

So, it’s pretty obvious where I got this fear from. But it really, really bothers me that I can’t get over it.

If some one came up to me on the street and said “Your hair sucks!” I could easily respond with “Well, I like it, so the hell with you, sir!” or perhaps “Why yes, it does suck today! Humidity makes fools of us all!”

Yet when a stylist says that I really shouldn’t die my own hair, or trim my own bangs, or wax my own eyebrows, even though I know that most of those comments are financially motivated, I get all tongue-tied and apologetic. Even when I end up hating the cut, which has happened once or twice, I’ve never had the temerity to ask for a refund, or even for it to be fixed, because it feels like my fault for not being, I don’t know, better at having hair.

Today, however, I got none of that cringe inducing “Who dyes your hair/cuts your nags/waxes your eyebrows ?” lead up to a “Well you really shouldn’t!”

I didn’t even get asked what kind of products I used, and therefore endured no speech about why those are the worst ones I could use and I really need to buy these.

I suspect I have the TET (Tough Economic Times) to thank for that. If so, I will be able to tell my children that one good thing came out of the Bush presidency.

*The light in my room is apparently too dim for my computer’s camera (the iSight, Apple’s best-ever use of the “i” prefix), so all my pictures come out weird, and often, with a little editing, weirdly awesome. I like the totally-accidentally-achieved oil painting look on this one.

**The only exception to this rule is the dentist. And that is only because, since I knocked out my two front teeth playing baseball with a bunch of oddly-dressed vampires (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!), I’ve already had my most embarrassing dentist visit ever and they can only go up hill from there.

Happy Moments (originally posted 3/6/09)

Since Lost has been good again this season and my interest has been renewed, I’ve been catching up on all the episodes I missed when I was “so over” that show.* Last night I saw the where Merry (um, “Charlie”) makes a list of his five happiest moments, and started wondering what mine would be.

Also, someone who used to be one of my best friends, with whom I stupidly got out of touch, is having major surgery right now, and I watch way too many medical dramas to not be mildly freaked out about that. Update: She's recovering slowly but surely

So, in the interest of distraction, and because it’s always good to remember good things that happened, and people the happened with, especially if you haven’t seen those people in a long time, here’s a list of Five Happy Moments I Can Think of Right Now**

1987ish- Playing in the flooded street. For pretty much the rest of my childhood every time it rained I hoped it would flood. I think part of what made it so fun was that I usually wasn’t allowed to do things like a) play in filth, b) get my clothes soaked and c) play in the street and all of a sudden, all three at once! Kudos to my parents for acknowledging crazy circumstances and just running with it. Or maybe they were busy freaking about the destruction everything stored in the basement.

1989sh- Making noodles. I’m not really clear on what was so great about this (though in the picture above, I’m clearly having a Time), I was totally obsessed with making noodles from that day on. Still, when I try to picture a happy family times, this is the first instance that comes up. For a white, middle class family with 2.3 kids, we really didn’t get up to a lot of wholesome family togetherness.

1993ish- South Dakota. We were driving from somewhere to somewhere else (which is what most of my childhood vacation memories consist of) and my brother or I saw a little creek out the window and began demanding that Dad pull over so we could play in it. Remarkably, he actually did. It was freezing and slippery and awesome. I wish I had a picture for this one because I was wearing a pretty fabulous outfit, which consisted of calf-length leggings covered in huge neon pink, green and orange flowers and a black t-shirt with the same flowers (in puff-paint) on the front. I had adorned one corner with an acid-washed denim scrunchie. Also, on that trip we visited the Corn Palace, which has nothing to do with anything, but I thought I'd mention it because it's awesome.

This next one is mildly pathetic, but I’m just writing them down as they occur to me.

1996ish- I’m getting ice cream after a with my soccer team after a game. The ice cream place has one mirrored wall. When I accidentally glance that way, I immediately look down (so there’s no chance of seeing myself and being reminded how fat and hideous I am) and, since we are all still wearing our little white shorts and tall orange socks, I can’t tell which legs are mine and which belong to the other, things girls. This was such a joyful realization I was inspired to get actual ice cream (not frozen yogurt!) and eat it guilt-free for the first time since in at least 6 years. I was walking on air for the whole weekend, thrilled with the idea that I might actually be mistaken for a thin (and therefore worthwhile) person from time to time.***

2004ish- Kicking ice into Lake Michigan with some friends in the middle of the night. Or, an equal alternative: Sitting around another friend’s pool, stoned, talking about phone numbers. These are the sort of memories where on night stands in for dozens of similar nights. Basically, when we were all home from college on winter or summer breaks, we would occasionally end up doing nothing at all, and those were always the best times. It seems like now, getting together with anyone is such a nightmare of scheduling (and, lately, traveling) that there is this obligation to make a plan and do something to justify the effort. Not that going out and seeing art, or whatever other activities are planned, aren’t fun, but that comfortable, just sitting around and enjoying each other’s company without pressure to be entertaining and make it worth the trip to see and be seen doesn’t really to happen anymore.

I said five, but I can think of a least three more. Though the late 90s are pretty much a total wash... I mean, there are plenty of things that happened in those days which were formative or important, and a lot of things that sucked at the time but in retrospect were probably good, but I can’t think of a single moment of plain happiness. Even all the times I skipped school to get stoned with people were more about the absence of any immediate unhappiness.

Considering my tendency to be nostalgic about everything (remember the little 70s girl on the No-More-Tangles bottle? I miss her and her, and her perfect blonde ponytails), the fact that I can find nothing to be nostalgic about from, say, 7th-12th grade is pretty telling. In fact, despite for a brief bright spot when I was in San Francisco, I pretty much hated everything about life from the time I started wearing a bra until the road trip that I took to Maine the year after I graduate from high school.

You heard it here! All cool people were miserable as teenagers!

*As an aside, I think it’s pretty awesome that ABC has every episode of the show available to watch online. I’m sure it makes all kinds of financial sense for them, so it’s not like, altruistic. But it’s also a really nice gesture to fans, since the show is so full of complex and subtle call-backs to earlier events, and really benefits from rewatching. Furthermore, it’s an indicator they actually understand why people like the show and what makes it unique, which is pretty rare in network television).

**”Happiest” seems like it would require a lot of intense thought and debate.

***Yeah, that’s more than mildly pathetic. It is, in fact, pretty tragic. However, the upside is that now, whenever I am feeling neurotic about how I look, I can remember that moment, and think of pictures of myself from that era and remind myself how utterly insane I was back then. And how much time I wasted in middle school and high school being miserable about the fact that I was too fat to exist, when looking back (at the few pictures I allowed to be taken of myself) I was a perfectly acceptable, even pretty cute (if you can get past the Goth regalia) kid.

And Another Thing... (originally posted 3/1/09)

Allow me to clear something up.

When I listed “vampire-themed romance” as a guilty pleasure, I was emphatically not referring to the Twilight series. Though I’ve read all four books and seen the movie, I don’t so much like them as I am intrigued, confused and mildly disgusted by them. In fact, one might say I appreciate them ironically, in that I appreciate them in a way that is contrary to their literal intention (assuming that their literal intention is to tell a romantic story about a teenager and her vampire boyfriend, rather than to brainwash a generation of young women into subservient baby-making machines, that is...)

Here’s what I don’t get. How can there be so many girls (and not a few women) out there who think there’s something romantic about a patronising stalker who physically prevents his girlfriend from doing anything he disapproves of? Or a manipulative bully of a “nice guy” who believes that being in love with a woman is a license to take advantage of her friendship in order to try to force himself on her or trick her into physical intimacy (I actually disliked Jacob a lot more than Edward. Bella at least agrees to participate in Edward’s bullshit, but Jacob persists despite her repeatedly telling him to stop)? I can understand the teenagers, a bit, as when I was one myself I was actually in that relationship I didn’t see anything wrong with it until much later. But shouldn’t grown up ladies know better? And shouldn’t grown up lady authors think twice about publishing a book that indicates fucked up asshole love is true love?

In fact, there were times when I got the distinct impression that the characters had motivations that the author herself didn’t understand (unless we’re meant to see Bella as an unreliable narrator, which would make Stephanie Meyer a way more sneaky and subtle writer than seems possible). It was pretty obvious to me that Edward resisted making Bella a vampire because it would mean giving up a significant amount of control over her. It’s a move right out of the creepy boyfriend play book, but its pretty clear Meyer meant us believe his stated motivation (some claptrap about her eternal soul).

This is why I actually liked the movie a bit more than the book. With most of Bella’s internal monologue stripped away, the audience had to view the characters’ behaviour with a certain amount of detachment (the cheesy special effects, I think, inadvertently enhanced this), which made their general fuckeduppitude more obvious. I also liked how Edward, who in the book is presented as utterly flawless, came off as just as much of a freaked-out adolescent basket case as Bella. It made the relationship seem less accidentally-creepy-cause-it’s-suppose-to-be-sweet and more deliberately-creepy-to-make-a-point-about-obsessive-teen-love (this was possibly aided by the fact that I am fully grossed out by Robert Pattinson, both in the movie and in real life).

I’m also interested in (and troubled by) what the success of Twilight means for vampire fiction as a whole. It has always been about the subversion of repressive sexual norms, gender roles, religion, “traditional morality,” but now the genre’s hottest commodity is a vehicle for preaching abstinence and heteronormativity, with plenty of casual sexism and a soupçon of anti-choice rhetoric tossed in for good measure.

How sad is it that in a series about a sexy vampire and a sexy werewolf there are only a couple of instances of entirely accidental homoeroticism?

Very. Very sad indeed.

Guilty Pleasures (originally posted 2-28-09)

I'm gonna re-post some of the "better" (it's all relative) entries from my iWeb blog here, in a little series I'll call BlogClassic**

I recently had a mildly heated phone discussion with a friend regarding guilty pleasures (he took issue with my listing some here Actually, all that nonsense is gone... so i guess this post is pretty much worthless now. Still keeping it up though!). It was late at night and I had a cold, so I didn’t necessarily acquit myself well, but I swore to him that I would regain the upper hand with a brilliant and well-reasoned blog post on the subject.

Hi, friend! If I may paraphrase your point, you believe that the term “guilty pleasure” should be removed from cultural discourse because a) if you like something, you should own and publicly defend that something from its critics, not save face for yourself by ghettoising that loved something as a guilty pleasure, b) the use of “guilt” is problematic, because you shouldn’t feel guilty for liking what you like OR c) you should stop liking anything that is so bad it makes you feel guilty.

Pause while I assume that I am correct.

Part of the problem here is that calling something a guilty pleasure can mean several different things; you like it even though everyone else thinks it sucks or you like it but you don’t want to be associated with the sort of people who like That Kind of Thing (I’d call that an Embarrassing Pleasure), you like something despite readily acknowledging its lack of artistic merit/redeeming value (an Escapist Pleasure) or you are interested in that thing as a cultural phenomenon or artifact (an Ironic Pleasure*), and finally, you like something despite knowing that it is bad for you (a real Guilty Pleasure).

I’ll own up and admit that, having just come up with this breakdown of the sketchy end of the Pleasure spectrum, the “guilty pleasures” on my profile page don’t all fall into that category as I just defined it (though I could argue that pretty much all of them are bad for me... except Phish. Phish never hurt anyone).

So, regarding point (a), I fully agree that we should own up to our Embarrassing and/or Escapist pleasures, though the latter is much easier to admit to than the former, I think.

For example, Grey’s Anatomy is an Escapist Pleasure of mine. It is silly and melodramatic (but, I’ll argue to the death, no more stupid than a number of less-singled-out-for-mockery shows aimed at men) and, while I acknowledge that, it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment. Therefore, in “coming out” as a fan of Grey’s Anatomy, I’m not putting myself in the awkward position of having to argue the the show’s artistic merit, I’m merely saying that I am entertained by it.

So if I were to say “Ah, Grey’s Anatomy, what a guilty pleasure you are!” (not that that’s something I’m likely to say), I wouldn’t feel like I was being disingenuous about my tastes or not giving the show the spirited defence it’s due. And probably most people who talk about their trashy pop culture guilty pleasures mean the same thing, not “I’m ashamed to admit I think this is good,” but “I like this despite realistically assessing it’s quality.”

On the other hand, I enjoy the band Death Cab for Cutie, and I have a number of hipster/music geek friends who would greet that revelation with horror (guess we’ll see how many of them read this blog). It would be easy to say I like DCfC inspire of their lameness, but I don’t actually think that they are lame. In fact, I think they’re pretty great. So now, I’m stuck in a discussion about what makes a band good (in which the phrase “emo” is probably going to be tossed around with unpleasant frequency). Not that its bad to defend what you like, and not that I don’t like a spirited argument with my PBR (duh), but some times it is easier to just say “Yeah, it’s not great, but I like it anyway.”

And, yeah, that wouldn’t be cool, because then these judgemental elitists could go on thinking that no one worthwhile likes Death Cab for Cutie. But it also wouldn’t be some huge betrayal, as your tone on the phone seemed to imply, dude-friend, because I don’t really feel I owe Ben Gibbard anything beyond the price of an album.

As to point (b), it may be the Catholic upbringing talking, but is a little guilt really such a bad thing? I think guilt is a useful counterbalance to self-indulgence (which is also underrated). Example: a year or so before Liz Lemon made it popular, back when I was in grad school, I was wildly in love with the mysterious off-brand cheese puffs sold at the corner store near our rehearsal space. They were super cheap, they melted in ones mouth, and they could be easily obtained in the five minutes between class, rehearsal, meeting,s etc. The fact that they were a genuinely Guilty Pleasure in that I knew they were bad, so much so that I was mildly ashamed to be seen purchasing or eating them, meant that they were a rare treat, often a reward for a crappy day or an incentive not to stab fellow scholars in the eye. Consuming them felt vaguely illicit and rebellious.

Had I not felt guilty about my shady snack choices, I probably would have eaten them a lot more often in lieu of other, more-difficult-to-obtain food that contained actual nutrients. They also probably would not have tasted as good.

Now, as to point (c), guilt could have stopped me eating fake Cheetos altogether (which would have been sad), but it could never stop me liking them. Guilt, in my experience, has much more power to make you regret something than to prevent your doing it in the first place.

Well. This argument has gone on longer than I intended, so let me sum up:
Sometimes people say something is a guilty pleasure because they like it despite it being mostly meritless, and that’s cool (but they should really call those things “Escapist Pleasures”)
Sometimes people say something is a guilty pleasure because they don’t want to admit to thinking something that most of their friends and acquaintances revile is actually pretty good. If these people would own up to their Embarrassing Pleasures, they might open closed minds, but they’re under no obligation to do so.
Sometimes people like things they know are bad for them. These are genuine Guilty Pleasures, and as long as the guilt and pleasure balance out, it’s all good.

So, there you go, friend. Start using my new terminology immediately!

*I didn’t talk about Ironic Pleasures so much, since I don’t think anyone born after the mid-seventies can be unfamiliar with the concept of appreciating something ironically.

**This, then, would be NewBlog, which I am totally willing to take off the market if the consumers demand it.