Grim and cloudy here today. The clouds are sealing the valley in again, which is good, as it means I'll just do my damn work. Of which there is copious amounts. I've been in bowl-like valleys before, but I've never been in one where the clouds come down in quite this way and seal the thing quite so tightly (in the time it took me to write this post, the mountains disappeared and anything more than two houses away is just a sheet of white). That's better than early last week, where the clouds were shaped like mushrooms, and it gave my Child of the 80s anxiety.
Yesterday, they were hanging the Christmas lights in the old town, so I hope they will be lit by the time Patty gets here, but I am not sure, as she will be too early for the Christmas markets.
Yesterday I noodled around a bit by designing logos for Palatine Crescent (production company thingy with Kali -- which basically just means a way for us to have a cool name while we write the massive novel and finally write the WWII aviator chicks screenplay and noodle with a treatment for something else). It is cool. It is made of deep thoughts about gender, a random free font from the Internet, and a bad photo of a rug from a home catalog. Collage is your friend, but I need to redo it with using the full tag-line, trying it in lower-case, and seeing if I can get the text to run fluidly on a curved white banner placed over the stripes, which I'm not sure how to make happen in Pixelmator. Another day, another battle.
Sam has just read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for the first time. While I'm still getting over the fact that EVERYONE wasn't required to read this in sixth grade and that, that I was may explain any number of things about my personality, I'm going to take this moment to say that I think it's largely filled with obvious observations that would surprise very few of you, but it's a quick read, and you should probably catch up with that if you haven't.
Poems for DST. Have I mentioned I've been writing poetry again? This is what Switzerland does to me, and not in the good way. But USians, change your clocks. We're 6 hours apart again (it was five this past week).
Yearbooks are the latest self-esteem mechanisms in high schools. Is there, anywhere, a balance between anti-bullying and self-esteem, while also not bombarding people with messages that they are wildly successful just for showing up? Nothing hurt and humiliated me more in school than getting "most improved" awards. I was the worst at some things, and remained so, but because I got slightly better, they wanted to make me feel good. It was embarrassing, and antithetical to the experiences I had outside of school -- like in dance -- where I had to earn every scrap of attention, but where ever scrap of attention was like pounds of medals and remain moments I still savor. Nothing was more humiliating though than having to walk up on stage to receive Most Improved in Physical Education awards -- Look at this girl! We are showing her off! She cannot catch a ball and does not play well with others! Rumours you have heard that she is beautiful somewhere and somewhat else are just rumours! She finds dodgeball very hard!
Meanwhile, anti-bullying efforts are under attack because they are viewed as political because they "normalize" homosexuality. What I want to know is, if you believe someone is going to burn in hell, why do you think it's your job to make them suffer -- especially if they don't share your beliefs -- in this life? I understand, at least abstractly, the trying to save people from hell thing; it's the hastening people's way there business where I get confused.
I have no doubt in my mind that Ian McKellen is right about this. There is significant, explicit pressure in Hollywood, in New York, in the industry as a whole, not to come out and the image-making machine makes it easy for that explicit pressure to be frames as no different from marketing supposed alliances between heterosexual stars. But it is different. I love matters of persona, but this is one place where it's poisonous.
Keith Olbermann talks about his partisanship -- two days before he got suspended. One of the things I like about Olbermann is the union of anger and articulateness in his public persona and the way that relates to stories about anger in the backstage parts of his career. I poke at it, because it's interesting to me because you could say I have that sort of stuff going on with me too; at least that's how it feels from here. I really have no idea how I come off to other people, despite the endless calculation.
I'm pretty thankful for the way my parents treated such things. Namely, no bullshit, and an honest understanding that they trusted me not to be reckless with my sexual health.
After reading that article, (and seeing that amazing French condom TV ad) I am amazed and in no small part jealous of that fact that teens in Western Europe can have adults listen to them w/o one of their peers being dead or pregnant first.
My question is this; My situation as a teen was that of being a mousy wallflower constantly having to dodge creeps. No one seems to believe that such a phenomenon happens; creeps only bug "bad girls" who were "asking for it". How does a young person get help for a problem that society refuses to believe happens, I wonder?
My armchair opinion, as someone who had a similar teenage experience:
It is not so much the appearance of the female target that matters, as it is the construction of young women as commodities for male use in the mind of the man doing the targeting, a construction encouraged by patriarchal thinking which goes unacknowledged in mainstream culture despite it informing so much of how we think about gender and heterosexual relations.
So, to beat what many consider a tired old drum of feminist thought, it's objectification, not "appreciation", that's the issue. And I think in order to expose it, we need to ask the right questions of people who don't see it in order to get them to overturn their assumptions. Like the interviewers in this video did in re: the assumption that people "choose to be gay":
Oh yeah, it was definitely a case of guys feeling that they needed to put someone in their place in order to maintain their place in the pecking order. I was, and still am, amazed at how difficult it was to get help on the problem. Dad would just get angry at me (?), and a great many other adults would just either tell me to ignore them of change the subject.
And then they turn around and act confused as to why so many girls and young woman think Edward Cullen's behavior isn't inappropriate...
As a result, in addition to being put off of sex for a very long time, also had the feeling that I was either not very intelligent, or had something wrong with me in the "communicating with others" department. I am willing to admit that some of that was probably a case of me inheriting the "Irish Catholic Super-Oblique Hint Dropping" gene, but still...
In the first few months after starting the Dream Job, it was all I could do to not gawp like a fish whenever I would say, "We need to do it like this..." and folks would agree with me. No arguments, no derailing, no "are you sure", etc.
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Date: 2010-11-07 02:58 pm (UTC)I'm pretty thankful for the way my parents treated such things. Namely, no bullshit, and an honest understanding that they trusted me not to be reckless with my sexual health.
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Date: 2010-11-07 07:14 pm (UTC)My question is this; My situation as a teen was that of being a mousy wallflower constantly having to dodge creeps. No one seems to believe that such a phenomenon happens; creeps only bug "bad girls" who were "asking for it". How does a young person get help for a problem that society refuses to believe happens, I wonder?
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Date: 2010-11-08 01:49 am (UTC)It is not so much the appearance of the female target that matters, as it is the construction of young women as commodities for male use in the mind of the man doing the targeting, a construction encouraged by patriarchal thinking which goes unacknowledged in mainstream culture despite it informing so much of how we think about gender and heterosexual relations.
So, to beat what many consider a tired old drum of feminist thought, it's objectification, not "appreciation", that's the issue. And I think in order to expose it, we need to ask the right questions of people who don't see it in order to get them to overturn their assumptions. Like the interviewers in this video did in re: the assumption that people "choose to be gay":
no subject
Date: 2010-11-08 05:40 pm (UTC)And then they turn around and act confused as to why so many girls and young woman think Edward Cullen's behavior isn't inappropriate...
As a result, in addition to being put off of sex for a very long time, also had the feeling that I was either not very intelligent, or had something wrong with me in the "communicating with others" department. I am willing to admit that some of that was probably a case of me inheriting the "Irish Catholic Super-Oblique Hint Dropping" gene, but still...
In the first few months after starting the Dream Job, it was all I could do to not gawp like a fish whenever I would say, "We need to do it like this..." and folks would agree with me. No arguments, no derailing, no "are you sure", etc.