Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Baby Talk
NIGHT - Ext.
ME
I think I want to be a baby
YOU
That'd be alright
ME
I'd learn 15 languages but I wouldn't have to use them just because I knew them. I could just cry and gurgle and smile.
YOU
But no one understands that. Why do you think colic is such a headache and rage inducing mystery?
******************************************
What!? Another post? But Vnss, you have so many other things to do. This is true. I made a list of them this morning. But maybe I am not the multi-tasker I always thought I was. I want to think about this problem I have with not talking. Sometimes I don't want to talk, or I don't have anything to say, or I don't want to share what I have to say. I can understand how this can be difficult for people, and by people I mean the Russian. But for anyone. I think my sister finds it hard sometimes too. It must be, to know there is something and then to have it not communicated to you, as if I don't trust you enough, or it was mean, or that I am holding back, or I thought it was too stupid to mention. This must be difficult, namely because the other person doesn't know the reason I am not talking. It is usually as simple as there is nothing to say, or I don't think whatever it was that passed through my mind was worth it, but they don't know that.
In truth, sometimes that isn't true, sometimes I don't think it is worth the hassle of responding to something that I think is going to inspire a conflict that I don't think is worth having. Or if it is worth having, I am not ready to have it because I don't know how I feel about it or what I think of it. Simultaneously, I do feel something else. I don't want to defend how I respond to things. I don't have to talk about everything, or respond to everything just because people expect it or desire it, and I don't have to feel guilty about not meeting those expectations. I do, anyway, but...
When I was in Spain with my mother, I would often have this little dilemma in my head, about talking or not talking. And I realised over time, and this is what makes me think that I should communicate more, that people around me can sense that I am having this argument with myself, because the tension escapes me and affects them, through my body language, my facial expression and what I do say and how I say it. My mother is the same way, but with less control over her verbalizations. I didn't always want to have a hard conversation with her when we were walking but we would end up behaving as if we had had it anyway, except with no resolution. When you spend that much time with someone, in the end, talking always seems better. I guess it is the same with living with someone.
It's a question of judgment though, I think, and if I don't even have the to talk or not to talk argument in my head, I think I should be able to keep my mouth shut just because I want to.
Why do I occupy the fence all the time? How do I learn how to be bold and right or bold and wrong?
We made hamburgers, or the Russian made hamburgers last night, with Kettle Chips. Delicious. Though we had a lamb, pork, beef mix, and I think all beef would be best. Would have been better without fruit flies everywhere? Is it me that smells like overripe fruit or are there just way more fruit flies than usual? Gross me out. Such a busy weekend coming up. J sent me money for an Osheaga ticket to see Josh Ritter. Wow. Continually overwhelming. The Russian's friend is staying with us this weekend, as well, and it is Bby's birthday. We are having some peeps over on Saturday, as well, to housewarm.
Nice to be busy. But I should get to!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Deadgirl
I spent the day with J today, wandering around, very relaxed, ending up in the Old Port to have coffee with Bby and P. I drank a lot of different things today, finally found an excellent matcha smoothie which satisfied me. Met CM, the head of Forward House, this morning, and it was an excellent meeting. He has such an extraordinary capacity for speaking without expectation, for sharing I guess. I tried to talk about my recent desire to try and communicate on different terms with people, treating logic and reason, and emotion, as if they are equally valid and valuable. Not to say that I think people should run their lives ralphing their emotions onto others with no prep, but I do think it would create a kind of compassion and care for other people that is often lacking when you approach something from a rational and logical perspective only. I think it lends what could be an important and wrenching conversation a sense of detachment that is destructive or at least can obscure.
This didn't come out of nowhere, obviously. I was thinking of a conversation the Russian and I had about this movie we saw on Friday, Deadgirl. The plot is: two teenage boys, outcasts, who find a living, but unkillable nubile and naked girl chained to a table in an abandoned asylum. One wants to use her as a sex slave (and punching bag, as she can't be killed), and the other wants to free her, or save her, but is confused by the fact that this bad guy is his best friend. Goriness, rape, and violence ensue.
Granted, it is an awesome premise, and I liked the movie, I really did. But there was definitely something fundamentally disturbing about it. Beyond the rape, and the violence these boys inflict on this monster, who may or may not be a woman, or was once a woman, what really cut me was the way in which the movie completely silenced the female sex. The undead girl can't speak, she can only growl and hiss and fight back (not enough to free herself, but enough for the movie to have some intense and creative gore), and the only other female characters are a pretty, popular girl with no character except as a fantasy object for the good kid, and a woman the evil kid and another guy try to kidnap to create another deadgirl. The latter's brief appearance is actually awesome, but exists as a kind of aside to the narrative, or maybe, and this is what I hope, as a reminder that not all women are cum repositories or trophies, just in case anyone in the audience was getting the wrong idea.
This silencing made it much easier for me, as the audience, to accept the premise that the deadgirl was a thing, a monster, and not a girl, not a human. And this must have been even easier for male members of the audience. This, in turn, facilitated thinking about all the male oriented aspects of the film, and forgetting that they were all based on the subjugation of women. So I found myself talking about the teenage male social hierarchy and how the deadgirl becomes a means for the outcasts to improve their station, and how her body is a literal representation of teenage male desire/fantasy (or male desire more generally, regardless of age), male friendships, and the importance of power, dominance and ownership to all of these things.
I think the movie was pretty great in that I got a sense of all of those things. And yet, and yet, where are the women in all of this? Women are the people (and can I just emphasize that they are in fact, people, voiceless or not, vacuous or not) that those hierarchies are built on, they are the people being fought over and dominated and owned and fantasized about and desired. And that this does not define them, they are not defined against something else (a male something else). So when I was talking about this movie, I didn't want the Russian to relate to the deadgirl more than the teenage boys, I wanted him to relate to me. I wanted to be able to communicate the feeling of relating to the deadgirl, the fictional undead girl, instead of to the fictional teenage boys, and I wanted him to feel that. I didn't want to talk about it in way writing this demands me to, in a logical and rational way. I wanted to communicate that I didn't think it was right, that it didn't feel right, to talk about this movie the way we were talking about it. I told him that I wished I could slice open part of me and part of him, and press the raw parts together, and transfer the sick feeling the movie and the resulting conversation gave me. It was a feeling of voicelessness, not because I couldn't speak, but because the words were incapable of communicating what I wanted to say. I wanted to speak with something else.
The Russian said something really interesting, though maybe I am not remembering it correctly. It was about the impossibility of relating to another person or their experience or soemthing close to that. "Except, this movie did that." And it's true, it did, kind of, for both the teenage boys and for the feeling that I have had, sometimes acutely, and sometimes in a more foggy way, that as a woman, I am more accessible to men than men are to each other, as in, they think they have access to me that is their right, because they are male and I am female. Film is amazing that way. Or I guess, art is kind of amazing that way.
Anyway, it was a horror movie, and it scared me. Scared me good. I wonder what other women in the audience felt.
Ehm. Since the last post, I have traveled to Spain, met the Russian's family in Calgary, moved in with said Russian, been funemployed, gotten a job at Forward House, and graduated. Blanks to be filled in.
This didn't come out of nowhere, obviously. I was thinking of a conversation the Russian and I had about this movie we saw on Friday, Deadgirl. The plot is: two teenage boys, outcasts, who find a living, but unkillable nubile and naked girl chained to a table in an abandoned asylum. One wants to use her as a sex slave (and punching bag, as she can't be killed), and the other wants to free her, or save her, but is confused by the fact that this bad guy is his best friend. Goriness, rape, and violence ensue.
Granted, it is an awesome premise, and I liked the movie, I really did. But there was definitely something fundamentally disturbing about it. Beyond the rape, and the violence these boys inflict on this monster, who may or may not be a woman, or was once a woman, what really cut me was the way in which the movie completely silenced the female sex. The undead girl can't speak, she can only growl and hiss and fight back (not enough to free herself, but enough for the movie to have some intense and creative gore), and the only other female characters are a pretty, popular girl with no character except as a fantasy object for the good kid, and a woman the evil kid and another guy try to kidnap to create another deadgirl. The latter's brief appearance is actually awesome, but exists as a kind of aside to the narrative, or maybe, and this is what I hope, as a reminder that not all women are cum repositories or trophies, just in case anyone in the audience was getting the wrong idea.
This silencing made it much easier for me, as the audience, to accept the premise that the deadgirl was a thing, a monster, and not a girl, not a human. And this must have been even easier for male members of the audience. This, in turn, facilitated thinking about all the male oriented aspects of the film, and forgetting that they were all based on the subjugation of women. So I found myself talking about the teenage male social hierarchy and how the deadgirl becomes a means for the outcasts to improve their station, and how her body is a literal representation of teenage male desire/fantasy (or male desire more generally, regardless of age), male friendships, and the importance of power, dominance and ownership to all of these things.
I think the movie was pretty great in that I got a sense of all of those things. And yet, and yet, where are the women in all of this? Women are the people (and can I just emphasize that they are in fact, people, voiceless or not, vacuous or not) that those hierarchies are built on, they are the people being fought over and dominated and owned and fantasized about and desired. And that this does not define them, they are not defined against something else (a male something else). So when I was talking about this movie, I didn't want the Russian to relate to the deadgirl more than the teenage boys, I wanted him to relate to me. I wanted to be able to communicate the feeling of relating to the deadgirl, the fictional undead girl, instead of to the fictional teenage boys, and I wanted him to feel that. I didn't want to talk about it in way writing this demands me to, in a logical and rational way. I wanted to communicate that I didn't think it was right, that it didn't feel right, to talk about this movie the way we were talking about it. I told him that I wished I could slice open part of me and part of him, and press the raw parts together, and transfer the sick feeling the movie and the resulting conversation gave me. It was a feeling of voicelessness, not because I couldn't speak, but because the words were incapable of communicating what I wanted to say. I wanted to speak with something else.
The Russian said something really interesting, though maybe I am not remembering it correctly. It was about the impossibility of relating to another person or their experience or soemthing close to that. "Except, this movie did that." And it's true, it did, kind of, for both the teenage boys and for the feeling that I have had, sometimes acutely, and sometimes in a more foggy way, that as a woman, I am more accessible to men than men are to each other, as in, they think they have access to me that is their right, because they are male and I am female. Film is amazing that way. Or I guess, art is kind of amazing that way.
Anyway, it was a horror movie, and it scared me. Scared me good. I wonder what other women in the audience felt.
Ehm. Since the last post, I have traveled to Spain, met the Russian's family in Calgary, moved in with said Russian, been funemployed, gotten a job at Forward House, and graduated. Blanks to be filled in.
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