So it was not the condemned making the choice in The Lady, or the Tiger, it was his beloved. I had completely forgotten that. The choice is not what would you choose for yourself, but what do you think the barbarian princess chose for her lover: Brutal death or life in the arms of another.
I did not in any way remember this part. I really think I only remembered how much I hated not knowing the ending; I'm not sure I ever engaged in the actual question of what did she choose. I'm not sure I care. I came back to this from Life of Pi, where I (sadly true) delighted myself with the comparison of choosing stories with or without tigers. And they do parallel. But where the story is asking the reader to extrapolate what is most likely the course of action taken by the character as written, the movie (and its preceding novel) is asking the viewer to choose which they would prefer. Maybe the two could be the same, but I think there's a huge difference. I guess you could choose your ending to the short story based on what you think will follow and what you'd rather see if you could keep reading, but I think you're constrained by the parameters of the character making the choice. Who is not you.
Or maybe it's the chronology that makes it so different. In Lady, it's about what will happen to this man. In Pi, it's already happened to him and your decision of which story you prefer does not affect him in any large degree. In Pi, it's more about you. So of course I prefer that.
But in first making the connection, I thought it was about the man in the arena. (BTW, this is all tying into Spartacus as well, so my pop culture serendipities continue to multiply). I knew he didn't know what was behind each door. I thought the question was which would he prefer. I thought my answer at the time was probably the lady because duh, but now I might think that was too safe a choice. Following Pi logic, choose the tiger because that's a better story. But it's not his choice.
Reading Jacob's Bates Motel recaps. The latest referencing, as the show did, Blake's The Tyger. Seriously, it's all coming up tigers lately. When it's not the Other. Can the tiger be the Other? Should it? And let's not get into where the tiger stands in societal privilege, the other recurring theme I keep coming across recently. The tiger can stand for so many disparate things. Are pop culture Tigers always male?
Yeesh. In what furnace was my brain? Anyway, it's all a mess in my head, not knowing what connection I really want to make here.
"Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." -- Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas
Arena boy sure is bound to his princess, and we can imagine bother crime and kindness coming his way, even if we disagree with which is which. Because we never hear what choice he would make. We wonder if the barbarian princess would choose his death to avoid seeing him with another, but couldn't he conceivably make the same choice?
I guess I'm just thrown by how different the story is than what I thought I remembered. Also weird it was written in 1882, and the person taking control of fate is a woman, and the person without real agency is a man. Isn't that odd? Maybe we're supposed to fear the power of this woman, who is bound to make a choice based on her barbarian emotions. Another example of how women shouldn't be in charge of things.
Why can't I ever think straight, untangle the webs to a readable skein? Time to end this ramble.
"while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger."--Sylvia Plath
Showing posts with label talking to myself. Show all posts
Showing posts with label talking to myself. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
useless blather
The spring started out with my voluntarily hanging at coffee shops for the sun and the cabin fever remedy. I'm so ready to be busier next term. Crossed fingers. Now I'm just avoiding roofers/traffic and biding time until the mail comes, hopefully with my check in it!
So comfortably ensconced in a westside Starbucks with a fake fire. Kind of comfy, but since daylight savings is still messing me up, feel like I'll fall asleep despite the caffeine. Thought maybe using the computer would be more conducive to staying awake than reading, though I really want to get going on the next Harry Dresden book.
Don't think I want to go into any of the stuff I've been talking about in my latest entries. Not feeling like I have anything new to add.
Really, I've got nothing. I should do some research on things to do spring break when I visit the folks. Usually it's an opportunity to just be able to chill and not worry about doing anything. But since winter term has been so uneventful, I'm over it already. I'll need something else.
There's computer work I can do of course, but I haven't been very likely to do it thus far. IDK. Don't want to think about all that either.
So yeah, this entry is pretty much worthless, even in context.
So comfortably ensconced in a westside Starbucks with a fake fire. Kind of comfy, but since daylight savings is still messing me up, feel like I'll fall asleep despite the caffeine. Thought maybe using the computer would be more conducive to staying awake than reading, though I really want to get going on the next Harry Dresden book.
Don't think I want to go into any of the stuff I've been talking about in my latest entries. Not feeling like I have anything new to add.
Really, I've got nothing. I should do some research on things to do spring break when I visit the folks. Usually it's an opportunity to just be able to chill and not worry about doing anything. But since winter term has been so uneventful, I'm over it already. I'll need something else.
There's computer work I can do of course, but I haven't been very likely to do it thus far. IDK. Don't want to think about all that either.
So yeah, this entry is pretty much worthless, even in context.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Rambling thoughts that only make sense to me
So here it is, February of 2013, and I'm in a holding pattern of some sort. I'm annoyed by it, but not despairing because I think the next month or so will bring changes. We've got more spring coming this way, the time of change, and we've got spring break, followed by a new term, new schedule. Things will change one way or another, and that's a good thing. So if all I seem to be able to do these days is lounge around watching TV, doing kakuro, and listening to podcasts, not eating well, not exercising, not doing anything proactive, that's okay. It will pass.
Thing is, right now I can't think what I want to do. I just want to do something that's less passive. I always worry about how much stimulation I take in in an attempt to not have time to deeply reflect on "important" things, but I don't know that it's something I always do to avoid deep thought. I think it's just an inertia thing. But I've found lately that I downplay most of those kind of thoughts, either because I've entered into a deeper level of repression, or just because it feels unnecessarily histrionic to ascribe a more portentous meaning to these things.
It's that worry about complacency again, but it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it's part of self-acceptance to not be as hard on myself as I used to be. It's probably a good thing. Of course, it could be lowered expectations. Although how they could be even lower...
Anyway.
What does it mean to waste your life? We're back to POV, something I've considered before. Wasted according to who? There's this set of things you do, this set of things you could do, this set of things you'd never do, and those set of things you don't know that you might do. I think it's important to not just do the things you do, to consider the possibilities, even to reevaluate the things you'd never do or leave yourself open to discover those things you didn't know about before. But you have to follow your own path to find the other things; I don't think you can force it. I'm into widening my environment to let other things filter in around the edges of my established world, but I'm not sure the best way to do it.
But see, that's still relatively passive. I've spent a great deal of my life as an observer, acting mostly to position myself in such a way as to see what I need to see without being seen by others looking back. Back to that idea in Cloud Atlas that you only know yourself in the gaze of the Other. If that's true, I'll never know myself because I refuse to legitimize wholly the gaze of the Other upon me. I doubt I could change that, but maybe I can still use the idea somehow. Especially now that things seem less urgent and dangerous. I'm less self-conscious, less worried about being seen now than I probably ever have been. Surely I can use that to my advantage?
If there's a way to -- not objectively, not dispassionately, but calmly? maybe -- consider the assumptions others make about me in a way that allows me to come to a new understanding of myself, that could be a good thing. I just still don't see why -- I'm a bit stubborn about that still. I don't know if I'm insisting on my perspective or running from the truth though. Probably both.
It sounds defensive, which is one thing I remember infuriating me from my youth, when I was told in an argument not to get defensive. And I remember very little from my youth, but that burning injustice still stings. How to tell the (very legitimate) difference between being overly defensive, meaning reacting without thinking to a presumed attack, and defending your view or your actions from a real attack meant to shut YOU down without having to think about the point you're making? It goes to something Jacob (and others) have said about telling girls to be polite or nice means denying them their own voice, being polite or nice is a self-abnegation, losing your voice and ceding the ground to the others around you. The Others who only see you as an adjunct to their story where they're the hero. The ultimate idea of being defined by the Other as seen in and ultimately rejected by Dollhouse.
That's part of the issue I have with that idea. Still, consensus can be a more complete picture. There are things some of those Others who are closest to you see and understand that are of value. I just -- it also goes to the idea of needing validation from another, something too many women my age and older seemed to too often succumb to in the form of their relationships with men. Not only just the idea of getting validation from the men themselves, but legitimization from society for doing the thing you're supposed to do, pairing up with a man and all that follows. It's a security thing, an on the surface easy way. Follow the track that so many do, take on the labels "everyone" does in the right order, and you always know who you are. As opposed to forging your own path and having no ready definitions to apply, no easy, well-defined personas to take on. Of course, I understand now that no path is easy, even if you do what's expected. There's always problems. But often those problems arise from the dissonance between the label you bought into and what you want and need for yourself as a labelless, real person.
So I no longer know if it's harder to be adamantly nebulous and rejecting labels or to take on labels that only fit uneasily. At least if the former, you're playing dolls with yourself, trying out different specific Barbie outfits to see which feels better and which you need to burn. Whereas if you try so hard not to allow any of the premade outfits, you've got nothing to wear and nowhere to go except a nude beach of nonidentity. Probably the best thing, and what I think the younger generations excel at, is mixing and matching. Not tossing out the wardrobe entirely, but just picking a hat here, a skirt there, whatever you want. And it's about using the labels as they're understood, but showing that you get the artificiality of them. Using that artifice to create a self-made synergy. So not rejecting the labels, not accepting them, but recognizing they're artificial constructs, and using bits and pieces as -- not fetishes, but -- symbols of deeper meaning, that meaning needing to be taken in context of all the other symbols to be understood or to be occasionally subverted or radicalized.
On one hand it feels extremely derivative, or even somethings adolescents have always done, but it's at a new level now, it's viral. And it's active, not passive, for males and females. I think it's in the knowingness of it now. Well, I can't go down that rabbit hole because all I know about kids at this remove is what I see on TV or in the movies or read. And artists have always been more knowing.
Anyway.
Not sure how I got to trying to understand -- whatever. I liked the Barbie analogy.
So back to me. :) Boring subject. How does that all help me understand life, the universe and everything? I spent my life trying to ignore the labels. I tried on some identities, but I never took them seriously. My dark observer undercut my posturings at every turn. Oh, I'm a film nerd, I'm alternative, I'm into punk, I'm a leftie, I'm an underground zine maker, I'm a city person, I'm a writer; all things I have thought about myself at different times, but I never really allowed myself to try and externally express any of it. Or to talk to others from those positions. They were just what I thought of myself, but I felt that showing those things on the outside was pretentious and was posturing. In my twenties I had more disdain for people who needed to shove their personas in other people's faces than practically anyone else. It all felt desperate and a lie and I wouldn't allow myself to do it and hated when others did.
I don't know why that was such a big deal. Why was self-expression perceived with such cynicism? Maybe because I never felt my external truth and my internal truth ever matched? Maybe I just was always afraid to be challenged to prove myself worthy of the persona I was adopting. If I ever felt any of the labels that applied to me were true, rather than me trying to be something I wasn't, maybe really getting into it would have been easy. Maybe would have been fun.
I don't know when I decided everything was a lie.
I see others as I see myself, therefore everyone else is a liar? It just seems like I had a view that everything was so cliched or something. All the stuff you go through in high school and college, I had read about it, I had seen it somewhere, so the fact that I was going through it was nothing special, I was nothing special. I rebelled as a teenager, but only internally, because that's where it mattered. It ties back to the gaze of the Other. The external self is what others see, and not what you see. Anything you do for yourself is internal. If you have to wear a mohawk and a leather jacket with safety pins to be a punk, that's just to show others that you think you're a punk. That has nothing to do with what you actually are. It's all about show.
That's what's so hard about all of that. This weird distinction I make between what's for real and what's for show and thinking they don't ever match. Or thinking it's somehow a statement about someone's character that they make everything a show. While at the same time, honestly, being envious of those who do it. I see others as I see myself, therefore I view them with both admiration and contempt? I envied the arty kids in high school, but I never once thought of emulating them or trying to be one of them. Even today I get a thrill when I see anyone, of any age, with a intricately constructed external persona (hello hipsters). I'm so happy that someone can do it, when I just can't. I've learned to accept the admiration part and ignore the contemptuous part that wants to scoff at the artificiality of it. Maybe by the time I'm 80 (god forbid) I'll be a crazy lady with a purple mohawk.
I think I've always been concerned with what is real and fake, probably too concerned. Probably thinking that there's some sure way to tell the difference. Every time I tried out a persona, in my mind, it always felt like a costume. So even today my "fashion" sense is almost nonexistent. I've never really tried to decorate myself or transform myself from the outside in, even though I think that's something that could be done, carefully. Humorless, practical, utilitarian, puritanical -- those are huge forces in me. Yet I'm not actually humorless or puritanical at least, so that's something. But I do think those conservative tendencies are what lead to the cynicism, and recognizing that they're conservative and therefore less optimal, I try and reject them.
I have terrific parents who have always supported me and wanted the best for me, who have never tried to push me in a predetermined direction, but let me make my own choices. Yet I seem to still have picked up this -- not self-hate, but -- self-doubt maybe. I always fall on the side of distrusting myself or thinking the worst of myself, even as I have a strong sense of self and stand firmly in the world, not swaying with the winds of others. It's a weird thing. It's also why the comment in Conversations With Dead People between Buffy and Holden really hit home. You do have a superiority complex, and you have an inferiority complex about it. This motherfucker of a Janus-headed coin, where I in one way only really trust myself to define myself, yet I always distrust the conclusions I make about that topic because it's all a self-promoting, self-aggrandizing lie to make myself seem cooler than I am. But other people, they don't know shit about me. (Partly because I try to tell them as little as possible.)
I reframed my whatever the fuck it is not being able to express myself thing as purposeful mystery. Other people always judge me by what I look like or how I seem to act, and I look nondescript and my movements are small and quiet and smooth, so I'm giving them nothing. Therefore anything they think about me is wrong, based on incorrect assumptions. Ha! What a joke. I'm bland on the outside, but if they only knew what I was inside, but they never will. It's got to be all about fear, right? I'm afraid to be myself on the outside? Or is there nothing to translate? Maybe I'm bland on the outside because I'm essentially bland on the inside. Or maybe I just don't know what the fuck I am and lack the ability to figure it out. Kevin.
And again, anyway.
What does this backwards looking self-reflection do for me? Am I learning anything I didn't know? Am I figuring out how to mitigate the bad and accentuate the good? I really don't know. I honestly don't think that how I express myself externally is all that important, but I leave open the possibility that I'm wrong about that. Maybe that is a key to something. I'm sure some of it is the fat thing. I think of myself as ugly and that might feed into anything having to do with externalities. Not like grotesque ugly, just not at all attractive in the context of my culture. I suppose I lack confidence in my ability to present myself in any way that would make anyone overlook the basic fact of my appearance. Maybe all the rest of the self-definition springs from that. Maybe the dichotomy I mentioned above is all about it. Maybe that's the whole reason I privilege inside to outside, intellect to physicality. I've allowed that my brain is beautiful, but my body is not; therefore I ignore the external as much as possible and make the internal all important. Maybe that's the one thing that if I could get over it somehow would revolutionize my life. I don't know. On the one hand it seems too simple, but on the other hand, in all my life I've never managed to do that one thing, so maybe it's not.
And it feels so ridiculous, I know all the arguments for how stupid that whole idea is, yet it's there. I think I even know intellectually that it's not true, but I can't believe it. I'm evening feeling like crying right now, which means this is important because I just don't cry. Weird.
Maybe I should work on that more directly, privilege that as something important to change and not ignore. I don't know how. Affirmations are a lie. A cheat to try and trick yourself into believing something that's not true. That's unfortunately how I feel. Again feel, not think. You would think that if I truly put intellect ahead of everything, I could get past the unreasoning feelings like that.
Love yourself. I mean, it's not like I don't, it's just that it's not absolute. Like I feel I have to overlook my faults to love myself or something. Well, we all do that when it comes to love, right? I'm continuing to understand why I've never loved anyone enough to want to spend a significant portion of my time/life with them.
A few years ago, when I had yet another friendship blow up due to a combination of issues on both sides, after a few weeks of misery and a concatenation of self-loathing and self-pity and anger, I came to a very intellectual decision that I think ultimately made my life better. I was stuck with myself for life. I could hate myself and doubt my every move and blame myself for not being able to be a proper human or I could accept myself, faults and all. Up until then, it might have felt like a defeat, giving up on the possibility of changing myself for the better, but at that point, it was what I had to do to survive, and it made sense and made me feel a bit cleansed, made the experience at least closer to cathartic.
I made peace with myself. But I still have doubts, and I refuse to give them up because I think it is important to evaluate yourself and try to make yourself be better if you can. But accepting myself as I was at that instant was important. Maybe it and not just age has helped me reach a less histrionic view of my issues, made the abyss seem less like painful fear and more like common anxiety. But that self-acceptance was also a very internally directed handshake. It was not about accepting how I look or anything like that, it was about accepting my personality quirks. It was a step. Maybe I can work backwards.
If the core issue is that unquestioning acceptance of external -- ranges from ugly to unappealing to unremarkable -- looks as a negative, and that basic assumption leads to equal assumptions about what is really me and what is me pretending to be something I'm not, and that leads to disdain for my need to pretend to be better than I am, and that leads to disparagement of what I am that I would need to rise above it, etc., then can I work back from accepting some parts of what I am as okay to accepting that I don't need to worry about pretense versus reality -- no, it's breaking down. I don't know how to follow that thread. Does not compute.
But what does work is that my agreement with myself that day did lead to less self-hatred and more self-acceptance. It didn't lead to determining the "truth" of what was real or what was wished for or anything, it left that out of the equation. Which I think is good. The search for self-knowledge is always important and will never stop, but the need to arbitrarily say this is really what I'm like and this is a sham, this is something other people think I am and this is something I want to be is diminished. Maybe true self-knowledge is all of those things collapsed together in 4d space. Maybe there's no real way to separate them anyway. Maybe it's more important to realize that you are who you wish to be.
I guess that's all I've got for now. As usual, more questions than answers. But the hope is to get ever closer to the right questions, and this was useful. For me anyway.
Thing is, right now I can't think what I want to do. I just want to do something that's less passive. I always worry about how much stimulation I take in in an attempt to not have time to deeply reflect on "important" things, but I don't know that it's something I always do to avoid deep thought. I think it's just an inertia thing. But I've found lately that I downplay most of those kind of thoughts, either because I've entered into a deeper level of repression, or just because it feels unnecessarily histrionic to ascribe a more portentous meaning to these things.
It's that worry about complacency again, but it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it's part of self-acceptance to not be as hard on myself as I used to be. It's probably a good thing. Of course, it could be lowered expectations. Although how they could be even lower...
Anyway.
What does it mean to waste your life? We're back to POV, something I've considered before. Wasted according to who? There's this set of things you do, this set of things you could do, this set of things you'd never do, and those set of things you don't know that you might do. I think it's important to not just do the things you do, to consider the possibilities, even to reevaluate the things you'd never do or leave yourself open to discover those things you didn't know about before. But you have to follow your own path to find the other things; I don't think you can force it. I'm into widening my environment to let other things filter in around the edges of my established world, but I'm not sure the best way to do it.
But see, that's still relatively passive. I've spent a great deal of my life as an observer, acting mostly to position myself in such a way as to see what I need to see without being seen by others looking back. Back to that idea in Cloud Atlas that you only know yourself in the gaze of the Other. If that's true, I'll never know myself because I refuse to legitimize wholly the gaze of the Other upon me. I doubt I could change that, but maybe I can still use the idea somehow. Especially now that things seem less urgent and dangerous. I'm less self-conscious, less worried about being seen now than I probably ever have been. Surely I can use that to my advantage?
If there's a way to -- not objectively, not dispassionately, but calmly? maybe -- consider the assumptions others make about me in a way that allows me to come to a new understanding of myself, that could be a good thing. I just still don't see why -- I'm a bit stubborn about that still. I don't know if I'm insisting on my perspective or running from the truth though. Probably both.
It sounds defensive, which is one thing I remember infuriating me from my youth, when I was told in an argument not to get defensive. And I remember very little from my youth, but that burning injustice still stings. How to tell the (very legitimate) difference between being overly defensive, meaning reacting without thinking to a presumed attack, and defending your view or your actions from a real attack meant to shut YOU down without having to think about the point you're making? It goes to something Jacob (and others) have said about telling girls to be polite or nice means denying them their own voice, being polite or nice is a self-abnegation, losing your voice and ceding the ground to the others around you. The Others who only see you as an adjunct to their story where they're the hero. The ultimate idea of being defined by the Other as seen in and ultimately rejected by Dollhouse.
That's part of the issue I have with that idea. Still, consensus can be a more complete picture. There are things some of those Others who are closest to you see and understand that are of value. I just -- it also goes to the idea of needing validation from another, something too many women my age and older seemed to too often succumb to in the form of their relationships with men. Not only just the idea of getting validation from the men themselves, but legitimization from society for doing the thing you're supposed to do, pairing up with a man and all that follows. It's a security thing, an on the surface easy way. Follow the track that so many do, take on the labels "everyone" does in the right order, and you always know who you are. As opposed to forging your own path and having no ready definitions to apply, no easy, well-defined personas to take on. Of course, I understand now that no path is easy, even if you do what's expected. There's always problems. But often those problems arise from the dissonance between the label you bought into and what you want and need for yourself as a labelless, real person.
So I no longer know if it's harder to be adamantly nebulous and rejecting labels or to take on labels that only fit uneasily. At least if the former, you're playing dolls with yourself, trying out different specific Barbie outfits to see which feels better and which you need to burn. Whereas if you try so hard not to allow any of the premade outfits, you've got nothing to wear and nowhere to go except a nude beach of nonidentity. Probably the best thing, and what I think the younger generations excel at, is mixing and matching. Not tossing out the wardrobe entirely, but just picking a hat here, a skirt there, whatever you want. And it's about using the labels as they're understood, but showing that you get the artificiality of them. Using that artifice to create a self-made synergy. So not rejecting the labels, not accepting them, but recognizing they're artificial constructs, and using bits and pieces as -- not fetishes, but -- symbols of deeper meaning, that meaning needing to be taken in context of all the other symbols to be understood or to be occasionally subverted or radicalized.
On one hand it feels extremely derivative, or even somethings adolescents have always done, but it's at a new level now, it's viral. And it's active, not passive, for males and females. I think it's in the knowingness of it now. Well, I can't go down that rabbit hole because all I know about kids at this remove is what I see on TV or in the movies or read. And artists have always been more knowing.
Anyway.
Not sure how I got to trying to understand -- whatever. I liked the Barbie analogy.
So back to me. :) Boring subject. How does that all help me understand life, the universe and everything? I spent my life trying to ignore the labels. I tried on some identities, but I never took them seriously. My dark observer undercut my posturings at every turn. Oh, I'm a film nerd, I'm alternative, I'm into punk, I'm a leftie, I'm an underground zine maker, I'm a city person, I'm a writer; all things I have thought about myself at different times, but I never really allowed myself to try and externally express any of it. Or to talk to others from those positions. They were just what I thought of myself, but I felt that showing those things on the outside was pretentious and was posturing. In my twenties I had more disdain for people who needed to shove their personas in other people's faces than practically anyone else. It all felt desperate and a lie and I wouldn't allow myself to do it and hated when others did.
I don't know why that was such a big deal. Why was self-expression perceived with such cynicism? Maybe because I never felt my external truth and my internal truth ever matched? Maybe I just was always afraid to be challenged to prove myself worthy of the persona I was adopting. If I ever felt any of the labels that applied to me were true, rather than me trying to be something I wasn't, maybe really getting into it would have been easy. Maybe would have been fun.
I don't know when I decided everything was a lie.
I see others as I see myself, therefore everyone else is a liar? It just seems like I had a view that everything was so cliched or something. All the stuff you go through in high school and college, I had read about it, I had seen it somewhere, so the fact that I was going through it was nothing special, I was nothing special. I rebelled as a teenager, but only internally, because that's where it mattered. It ties back to the gaze of the Other. The external self is what others see, and not what you see. Anything you do for yourself is internal. If you have to wear a mohawk and a leather jacket with safety pins to be a punk, that's just to show others that you think you're a punk. That has nothing to do with what you actually are. It's all about show.
That's what's so hard about all of that. This weird distinction I make between what's for real and what's for show and thinking they don't ever match. Or thinking it's somehow a statement about someone's character that they make everything a show. While at the same time, honestly, being envious of those who do it. I see others as I see myself, therefore I view them with both admiration and contempt? I envied the arty kids in high school, but I never once thought of emulating them or trying to be one of them. Even today I get a thrill when I see anyone, of any age, with a intricately constructed external persona (hello hipsters). I'm so happy that someone can do it, when I just can't. I've learned to accept the admiration part and ignore the contemptuous part that wants to scoff at the artificiality of it. Maybe by the time I'm 80 (god forbid) I'll be a crazy lady with a purple mohawk.
I think I've always been concerned with what is real and fake, probably too concerned. Probably thinking that there's some sure way to tell the difference. Every time I tried out a persona, in my mind, it always felt like a costume. So even today my "fashion" sense is almost nonexistent. I've never really tried to decorate myself or transform myself from the outside in, even though I think that's something that could be done, carefully. Humorless, practical, utilitarian, puritanical -- those are huge forces in me. Yet I'm not actually humorless or puritanical at least, so that's something. But I do think those conservative tendencies are what lead to the cynicism, and recognizing that they're conservative and therefore less optimal, I try and reject them.
I have terrific parents who have always supported me and wanted the best for me, who have never tried to push me in a predetermined direction, but let me make my own choices. Yet I seem to still have picked up this -- not self-hate, but -- self-doubt maybe. I always fall on the side of distrusting myself or thinking the worst of myself, even as I have a strong sense of self and stand firmly in the world, not swaying with the winds of others. It's a weird thing. It's also why the comment in Conversations With Dead People between Buffy and Holden really hit home. You do have a superiority complex, and you have an inferiority complex about it. This motherfucker of a Janus-headed coin, where I in one way only really trust myself to define myself, yet I always distrust the conclusions I make about that topic because it's all a self-promoting, self-aggrandizing lie to make myself seem cooler than I am. But other people, they don't know shit about me. (Partly because I try to tell them as little as possible.)
I reframed my whatever the fuck it is not being able to express myself thing as purposeful mystery. Other people always judge me by what I look like or how I seem to act, and I look nondescript and my movements are small and quiet and smooth, so I'm giving them nothing. Therefore anything they think about me is wrong, based on incorrect assumptions. Ha! What a joke. I'm bland on the outside, but if they only knew what I was inside, but they never will. It's got to be all about fear, right? I'm afraid to be myself on the outside? Or is there nothing to translate? Maybe I'm bland on the outside because I'm essentially bland on the inside. Or maybe I just don't know what the fuck I am and lack the ability to figure it out. Kevin.
And again, anyway.
What does this backwards looking self-reflection do for me? Am I learning anything I didn't know? Am I figuring out how to mitigate the bad and accentuate the good? I really don't know. I honestly don't think that how I express myself externally is all that important, but I leave open the possibility that I'm wrong about that. Maybe that is a key to something. I'm sure some of it is the fat thing. I think of myself as ugly and that might feed into anything having to do with externalities. Not like grotesque ugly, just not at all attractive in the context of my culture. I suppose I lack confidence in my ability to present myself in any way that would make anyone overlook the basic fact of my appearance. Maybe all the rest of the self-definition springs from that. Maybe the dichotomy I mentioned above is all about it. Maybe that's the whole reason I privilege inside to outside, intellect to physicality. I've allowed that my brain is beautiful, but my body is not; therefore I ignore the external as much as possible and make the internal all important. Maybe that's the one thing that if I could get over it somehow would revolutionize my life. I don't know. On the one hand it seems too simple, but on the other hand, in all my life I've never managed to do that one thing, so maybe it's not.
And it feels so ridiculous, I know all the arguments for how stupid that whole idea is, yet it's there. I think I even know intellectually that it's not true, but I can't believe it. I'm evening feeling like crying right now, which means this is important because I just don't cry. Weird.
Maybe I should work on that more directly, privilege that as something important to change and not ignore. I don't know how. Affirmations are a lie. A cheat to try and trick yourself into believing something that's not true. That's unfortunately how I feel. Again feel, not think. You would think that if I truly put intellect ahead of everything, I could get past the unreasoning feelings like that.
Love yourself. I mean, it's not like I don't, it's just that it's not absolute. Like I feel I have to overlook my faults to love myself or something. Well, we all do that when it comes to love, right? I'm continuing to understand why I've never loved anyone enough to want to spend a significant portion of my time/life with them.
A few years ago, when I had yet another friendship blow up due to a combination of issues on both sides, after a few weeks of misery and a concatenation of self-loathing and self-pity and anger, I came to a very intellectual decision that I think ultimately made my life better. I was stuck with myself for life. I could hate myself and doubt my every move and blame myself for not being able to be a proper human or I could accept myself, faults and all. Up until then, it might have felt like a defeat, giving up on the possibility of changing myself for the better, but at that point, it was what I had to do to survive, and it made sense and made me feel a bit cleansed, made the experience at least closer to cathartic.
I made peace with myself. But I still have doubts, and I refuse to give them up because I think it is important to evaluate yourself and try to make yourself be better if you can. But accepting myself as I was at that instant was important. Maybe it and not just age has helped me reach a less histrionic view of my issues, made the abyss seem less like painful fear and more like common anxiety. But that self-acceptance was also a very internally directed handshake. It was not about accepting how I look or anything like that, it was about accepting my personality quirks. It was a step. Maybe I can work backwards.
If the core issue is that unquestioning acceptance of external -- ranges from ugly to unappealing to unremarkable -- looks as a negative, and that basic assumption leads to equal assumptions about what is really me and what is me pretending to be something I'm not, and that leads to disdain for my need to pretend to be better than I am, and that leads to disparagement of what I am that I would need to rise above it, etc., then can I work back from accepting some parts of what I am as okay to accepting that I don't need to worry about pretense versus reality -- no, it's breaking down. I don't know how to follow that thread. Does not compute.
But what does work is that my agreement with myself that day did lead to less self-hatred and more self-acceptance. It didn't lead to determining the "truth" of what was real or what was wished for or anything, it left that out of the equation. Which I think is good. The search for self-knowledge is always important and will never stop, but the need to arbitrarily say this is really what I'm like and this is a sham, this is something other people think I am and this is something I want to be is diminished. Maybe true self-knowledge is all of those things collapsed together in 4d space. Maybe there's no real way to separate them anyway. Maybe it's more important to realize that you are who you wish to be.
I guess that's all I've got for now. As usual, more questions than answers. But the hope is to get ever closer to the right questions, and this was useful. For me anyway.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Morning musings, or second verse, same as the first
There are times when I get the crazy idea to write a series of essays about myself. But then my inner voice is all over the stupidity, worthlessness, never going to happenicity of that. But it's still there in my mind, especially when I'm feeling this 40s version of angst, which is less fiery pain and more feet are about to slip on the ice -- all the time. But not off balance, just poised over the swirly abyss of my own inner depths. Like if I could just jump into it, it would be terrifying but ultimately transformative. Yet I continue as I am, living on the surface, back from the edge, making do. Because transformation is so uncertain, yes, will I like what comes out the other side. But more importantly, transformation takes actual effort, and I seem to avoid that as much as possible. Do the basics of what needs to be done in all things, then just skate by.
I don't think I always was like this. I don't know if it's part of growing older or just part of the flatness of affect, the genial apathy, the no hope but no despair either of the life I live now. It's a balance, and I've always thought of balance as good, but is it a balance between the right things? Is this see-saw all the way on one side of a vast plain of possibility?
I've always lacked specific ambition. Now I lack general ambition. Giving up, settling, getting by; I've fucked myself over for sure because the goals I did strive for have led me here. And here is easy and doesn't require a lot of drama or inner turmoil, yet it also doesn't provide joy, intense satisfaction, excitement, giddiness...
Easy going, doesn't really care, go with the flow -- it's ridiculous how none of those celebrate the agency I've always fought so hard to embrace. Yes, I run my life the way I want, I make my choices and take responsibility for them, but I'm slippery, I slide out of the way of things to follow my course; I don't confront obstacles head-on, but ignore them or find alternate routes. Nothing wrong with that, but it does mean spending most time looking to dodge, and little time setting my path, heading toward a goal.
I make lists all the time. It's becoming a pathology probably. But the one list I have the most trouble with is goals. Beyond staying financially healthy, and physically healthy, and paying off debt and enjoying what entertainment I want, what is there to aim for? Part of it is finances, settling in to a relatively simple life as both penance for and restoration from the excesses of my 20s and the schooling of my 30s. If paying off most debt and using real money for everything is your main goal, other things do fall from view. It's another way of fending off the need to think of what kind of life I want to live of course. It limits the options along one axis, which keeps the graph weighted along one side.
I haven't been excited about a course of action I've taken much lately. Yes, this summer I went to Slayage and explored Vancouver/Victoria and it was glorious. I've greatly enjoyed movies I've seen or books I've read. I've had moments of fun. But it's so -- like a splash in a still ocean, it is felt, but recedes quickly, merged into the surface of calm. Even while avoiding typical scenarios like marriage, suburbia, or a 9-5 job, I've still fallen into a rut of complacency and stasis. And it is what I was going for, so it's not like it's surprising that I got here. You do make your own life, one way or another.
Most days I'm happy to be where I am. But then I just get that feeling that there's untapped potential in myself to live life another way, to keep my personality and habits and comfort levels and likes and dislikes and the whole package, but still run a slightly different course. Maybe a course that would incorporate a little more passion for life, a little less sleepwalking.
In a funny way, I feel like that thing that I avoid is art. Not other people's art, I regularly enjoy the creative outputs of many people in many disciplines, but my own. Not that I'm a blocked writer or could be a sculptor or anything that specific. But I don't even do crafts or play with fashion, or write blog posts beyond what I did with my day or, if I'm really working it, recapping what happened in a book or tv show I watched. I do nothing that deeply taps into my creativity. I make lists. I read other people, watch others' stories. Because I'm afraid there's nothing there? Because I've never successfully understood how to individuate my presence into the world? Because my presence is so diffuse and noncommittal?
My inability to make concrete, bar all other options choices and distaste for allowing other people to define exactly who I am is part and parcel of not being a solid presence in the world. If it's concrete, it's defined. Even if only in one moment in time, if I'm fully formed at that point, then I cannot be anything other than that. It's fear, but not from a place of cowardice I don't think. I understand why I am this way, but I still think I need to find a way to be something beyond a cipher for myself.
On the plus side, it could be that I'm closer to being ready to do something about it. A lot of the issues plaguing my younger self feel so much less important now. I'm less self-conscious, less afraid of making mistakes in public at least, more forgiving. That could help. I've almost always known intellectually anyway that no one is looking at me, other people being preoccupied with their own shit, but that doesn't mean I don't look at myself. Maybe it's time to stop trying so hard to see what I am from the outside. Maybe it's time to experience myself. I just wish I had a good idea of how to start.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Buffy needing darkness, a rambling (as usual) musing
Listening to yet another "was Riley good for Buffy" conversation, this time on Hellmouth Podcast for A New Man, I revisited an old pet peeve of mine. The following is just my rambling way of working through my thoughts on it.
I've always had a little trouble with the idea that Buffy rejected Riley because he was a good guy or boring or not dark enough. To me, the quality that Buffy needs from a partner isn't darkness, and I think it does the character a disservice to phrase it that way. It's not about darkness or evil. That's not what drew her to Angel. I mean sure, he was a mysterious force at the start, cryptic guy, but I never got the sense Buffy thought of him as dark. Just mysterious, which was a draw of course. But she fell in like with him before he was unveiled as a vampire, and then she loved him despite herself. But not because he was evil. If he were evil, she would have staked him, not offered up her neck. And she wasn't drawn to Angelus.
To me, what is similar about Buffy's more intensely passionate relationships isn't just that they were vampires, therefore somewhat evil, dark and dangerous. It's that they're from her world. They operate within it in a way closest to how Buffy operates, which is different from Riley or even Xander, and different from how the other vampires and demons deal with the world.
It's not about evil, it's not about the bad boy in any direct sense. Self-proclaimed nice guys need not feel threatened or depressed that Riley didn't get the girl, nor do they have to find ways to make it her fault that the relationship failed. Like many things in BTVS, it's a metaphor, much like the bad boy in cinema is a symbol more than a reality. So sometimes it is saying some women want the bad boy, the man who will treat them like shit, just as some men seem to want a cruel woman. But often the bad boy is symbolic of difference, of rebellion, or of the feminine. I'm thinking James Dean in Rebel. Bad on the surface, sensitive within. Women who go for that aren't looking to be treated badly or roughly, they're identifying with someone who isn't Captain America or Tim Allen, who isn't a soc or a jock, someone more in tune with traditional feminine qualities like empathy, intuition, sensitivity and openness to the world, not someone more traditionally male who seeks to dominate it through physical strength and force of will. These bad boys also usually have a more nuanced understanding of what the world is like, that it's not made for them, and an understanding of oppression. This is not the symbolic perfect white male ideal who's gone through life without realizing how many breaks he's had, how relatively easy it's been for him, who has never really had to come up against significant barriers so never had to question the world view he was taught. That perfect man works for some women, perhaps because they too have had the privilege not had to question what they've been taught about the world, perhaps because they seek the status that goes with it. But some of us are operating within a different paradigm.
I've gotten far afield from where I wanted to go (so new), but not too far, because now I'm going to talk about Riley. Riley was that guy, the one who continued to view the world pretty simply as a black and white, orderly place, a world where he could make a difference, could impose order when it went awry, a world where he had a pretty high status and was in control. He wasn't arrogant or cruel or particularly misogynistic or chauvinistic, he was a genuine nice guy, but simple. Buffy woke him up to some reality, opened his eyes to a grayer world, and he got pushed off his simple track and began questioning what he had been taught. He even went so far as to declare himself an anarchist, which he never was and never will be. But as much as he learned from Buffy and the Scoobies, he never really developed a more complex world view. The Initiative turned out to be evil, but their overall perspective and strategies were still the way to do things. He still saw the world simply. He lived a very goal-oriented life, planning out his desired future, acting to make his desires come true. Not a bad way to live, nothing wrong with it if it works for you. But that's not Buffy's world anymore, not since she became the Slayer. It can't be.
((Finding out you're the Slayer at puberty coincides with becoming a sexually mature woman for more reasons than one. Becoming the Slayer is a metaphor for becoming a woman, realizing that there's something different about you that makes you not completely human in the eyes of the patriarchal lenses that seem to abide. Having that realization is pretty intense, and definitely the end of childhood. ))
The world Buffy has to navigate is full of incredibly complex situations, not at all clear choices, and obstacles that appear without warning and have to be dealt with regardless. She's had to develop a very nuanced and complex case-by-case based strategy for dealing with her daily life that Riley never had to face. But Angel and Spike to some degree have. They live in the world of demons and myth as Buffy does. They too used to be fully human, living their own unexamined lives, when they were chosen to walk in a far larger, wilder realm. Since they managed to hold on to or reclaim their humanity in tandem with the beast within, they've had to negotiate ways of surviving in that more complicated world. I guess, simply put: They get it; Riley doesn't.
Of course, the wider world, the world full of danger and magic and very complex moral dilemmas doesn't have as much to do with order as it does with chaos and random uncertainty. And anyone who lives in that world develops very different coping mechanisms and strategies than someone living in (or thinking they live in) a world of order. When order is the norm, it's hard enough to deal with the occasional bits of chaos that creep in, but if you survive those, you can find a way to ignore them or to do as Riley did and pick your times to fight them and your times to pull back and regroup. Riley doesn't live in the chaos, he just visits there on occasion and works to keep that world away from his own. Buffy has to live in the chaos, where order is the unusual mode of being. She can't just drop in and out as needed because of who she is. Being the Slayer isn't part of her life she can turn off after 5:00, it affects every aspect of her existence, even when she tries to step away from it.
Buffy doesn't need darkness or evil, she doesn't normally want to be treated badly, even if she did go through a depression that led her to use Spike to punish herself for a while. She needs someone as a partner who acknowledges the same reality, lives in the same world and has developed similar strategies to deal with it.
Maybe that does manifest as darkness in the eye of the beholder, but darkness as a descriptor is too vague and misleading. It's about the feminine really. The long-standing dichotomy we use to discuss these things is male being intellect, power, order, control, light, science; female being emotion, compliance, chaos, the wild, dark, magic. Riley and Buffy were in a sense just as opposed and unlikely lovers as any of her beaus. He's the Initiative; she's the Slayer. They each learn from one another a great deal, and try walking in each other's worlds, but it ultimately doesn't make them more alike because they live in those separate worlds, Buffy out of necessity, Riley maybe out of choice or maybe because he just can't navigate the other and be happy. (The fun part is that I see Buffy as yang to Riley's yin in season 5 at least, which casts a really interesting dissonance on top of the more traditional male/female dichotomy they seem to symbolize. I <3 Joss Whedon.)
Anyway, Buffy lives in the wild places, yes, in the dark. When Riley tries to join her there, he picks that almost perfectly wrong way to do it, focusing on the exterior details of her vampire bites versus the more profound interior differences between the two of them in the ways they live in the world. He didn't get it, it didn't work for him, so he set a new goal, took off, and found something that did work for him, that kept him in his world, doing the work he was fulfilled doing. Buffy didn't try to cross into Riley's world in season 5. She toyed with it in season 4, found it wasn't right for her, and tried to bring Riley back home with her instead. So she didn't meet him halfway, and she owns that. But I think she blames herself too much for not giving him what he needed when to do so would have gotten her killed or changed her into a different person. As a slayer, she can't escape the chaos.
Buffy and Angel almost worked not because he was dark and could be evil. First, they had the Romeo and Juliet first love, star-crossed thing, which was passionate and intense, but their relationship survived the Angelus resurgence because of the maturity they both gained dealing with the adult ramifications of that turn and the choices they both had to make to come out of that alive and whole. The childish first love became Buffy's first adult relationship. It was a dive into the wild, the chaos, that they survived, first separately and then together. They share a history and understanding gained on that journey that can't be replicated. Angel gets it.
Buffy and Spike almost worked not just because he was evil, although that played a part in the beginning of their physical relationship. Spike thrived in the wild, and he had insights into what it was to be the Slayer and what it was to walk in the dark. He knew what it was to die and come back. And Buffy was in a place where she couldn't connect with anyone else. She was self-destructive and Spike stayed by her side through it. But season 6 Spike didn't fully get it either. He was on the opposite end of Riley then, trying to take Buffy to a place of pure chaos, away from even the bits of order the Slayer attempts to coax out of the wild. But season 7 Spike with his full humanity restored finally got it, and eventually understood that Buffy had grown past her own self-hatred, and they got past the crazy to a place where they could fully connect. They too traveled a journey together that no one else fully shared or understood. Spike gets it.
And maybe it's as simple as the fact that Riley and Buffy were together at a less tumultuous emotional time. The history he shares with Buffy doesn't hold as much weight, isn't singular enough to bind them together in a shared understanding. Riley never navigated the wild with Buffy in any meaningful and long-lasting way. Maybe there is some truth to the idea that those romantic dramas will ultimately result in a more intense bond. Most people don't need that, but most people don't live in the wild. That doesn't make Buffy a drama queen, just someone living her perforce intense, brutal existence.
Back to the metaphor, not that we left it. Joss created what I would argue is the greatest female hero ever for that time (or now in my mind). In defining her world, her philosophy, her relations to that world, he managed to combine the chaos of the wild feminine with a hero who takes action. Who gradually finds ways to traverse the chaos and mingle in some order without trying to bend the world to a masculine will or blow it up if it won't comply. She has the most intense connections to the lovers in her life that can do the same, and who can treat her as an equal partner in the endeavor. Buffy's so-called need for darkness is actually her need for a partner who can see the complexity of her circumstances, will attempt to navigate her world with her, and will accept her as an equal. Riley thought he saw the first, but didn't. He attempted the second, but not in any way that showed he understood it, and therefore failed. And he never fully succeeded at the third either. He wasn't a hidebound sexist, but he never gave equal credit to the intuitional, emotional feminine ways of dealing with chaos, never saw those strategies to be equally effective as his attempts at control, and couldn't fully accept that Buffy could be his protector just as he could be hers, in true egalitarian partnership. Open your eyes to the dark, Riley Finn, and then we'll talk.
--------
I could ramble on forever without streamlining my point, I think. Maybe in future I can come back and try to make this coherent and separate out the different strands of argument. It could happen.
I've always had a little trouble with the idea that Buffy rejected Riley because he was a good guy or boring or not dark enough. To me, the quality that Buffy needs from a partner isn't darkness, and I think it does the character a disservice to phrase it that way. It's not about darkness or evil. That's not what drew her to Angel. I mean sure, he was a mysterious force at the start, cryptic guy, but I never got the sense Buffy thought of him as dark. Just mysterious, which was a draw of course. But she fell in like with him before he was unveiled as a vampire, and then she loved him despite herself. But not because he was evil. If he were evil, she would have staked him, not offered up her neck. And she wasn't drawn to Angelus.
To me, what is similar about Buffy's more intensely passionate relationships isn't just that they were vampires, therefore somewhat evil, dark and dangerous. It's that they're from her world. They operate within it in a way closest to how Buffy operates, which is different from Riley or even Xander, and different from how the other vampires and demons deal with the world.
It's not about evil, it's not about the bad boy in any direct sense. Self-proclaimed nice guys need not feel threatened or depressed that Riley didn't get the girl, nor do they have to find ways to make it her fault that the relationship failed. Like many things in BTVS, it's a metaphor, much like the bad boy in cinema is a symbol more than a reality. So sometimes it is saying some women want the bad boy, the man who will treat them like shit, just as some men seem to want a cruel woman. But often the bad boy is symbolic of difference, of rebellion, or of the feminine. I'm thinking James Dean in Rebel. Bad on the surface, sensitive within. Women who go for that aren't looking to be treated badly or roughly, they're identifying with someone who isn't Captain America or Tim Allen, who isn't a soc or a jock, someone more in tune with traditional feminine qualities like empathy, intuition, sensitivity and openness to the world, not someone more traditionally male who seeks to dominate it through physical strength and force of will. These bad boys also usually have a more nuanced understanding of what the world is like, that it's not made for them, and an understanding of oppression. This is not the symbolic perfect white male ideal who's gone through life without realizing how many breaks he's had, how relatively easy it's been for him, who has never really had to come up against significant barriers so never had to question the world view he was taught. That perfect man works for some women, perhaps because they too have had the privilege not had to question what they've been taught about the world, perhaps because they seek the status that goes with it. But some of us are operating within a different paradigm.
I've gotten far afield from where I wanted to go (so new), but not too far, because now I'm going to talk about Riley. Riley was that guy, the one who continued to view the world pretty simply as a black and white, orderly place, a world where he could make a difference, could impose order when it went awry, a world where he had a pretty high status and was in control. He wasn't arrogant or cruel or particularly misogynistic or chauvinistic, he was a genuine nice guy, but simple. Buffy woke him up to some reality, opened his eyes to a grayer world, and he got pushed off his simple track and began questioning what he had been taught. He even went so far as to declare himself an anarchist, which he never was and never will be. But as much as he learned from Buffy and the Scoobies, he never really developed a more complex world view. The Initiative turned out to be evil, but their overall perspective and strategies were still the way to do things. He still saw the world simply. He lived a very goal-oriented life, planning out his desired future, acting to make his desires come true. Not a bad way to live, nothing wrong with it if it works for you. But that's not Buffy's world anymore, not since she became the Slayer. It can't be.
((Finding out you're the Slayer at puberty coincides with becoming a sexually mature woman for more reasons than one. Becoming the Slayer is a metaphor for becoming a woman, realizing that there's something different about you that makes you not completely human in the eyes of the patriarchal lenses that seem to abide. Having that realization is pretty intense, and definitely the end of childhood. ))
The world Buffy has to navigate is full of incredibly complex situations, not at all clear choices, and obstacles that appear without warning and have to be dealt with regardless. She's had to develop a very nuanced and complex case-by-case based strategy for dealing with her daily life that Riley never had to face. But Angel and Spike to some degree have. They live in the world of demons and myth as Buffy does. They too used to be fully human, living their own unexamined lives, when they were chosen to walk in a far larger, wilder realm. Since they managed to hold on to or reclaim their humanity in tandem with the beast within, they've had to negotiate ways of surviving in that more complicated world. I guess, simply put: They get it; Riley doesn't.
Of course, the wider world, the world full of danger and magic and very complex moral dilemmas doesn't have as much to do with order as it does with chaos and random uncertainty. And anyone who lives in that world develops very different coping mechanisms and strategies than someone living in (or thinking they live in) a world of order. When order is the norm, it's hard enough to deal with the occasional bits of chaos that creep in, but if you survive those, you can find a way to ignore them or to do as Riley did and pick your times to fight them and your times to pull back and regroup. Riley doesn't live in the chaos, he just visits there on occasion and works to keep that world away from his own. Buffy has to live in the chaos, where order is the unusual mode of being. She can't just drop in and out as needed because of who she is. Being the Slayer isn't part of her life she can turn off after 5:00, it affects every aspect of her existence, even when she tries to step away from it.
Buffy doesn't need darkness or evil, she doesn't normally want to be treated badly, even if she did go through a depression that led her to use Spike to punish herself for a while. She needs someone as a partner who acknowledges the same reality, lives in the same world and has developed similar strategies to deal with it.
Maybe that does manifest as darkness in the eye of the beholder, but darkness as a descriptor is too vague and misleading. It's about the feminine really. The long-standing dichotomy we use to discuss these things is male being intellect, power, order, control, light, science; female being emotion, compliance, chaos, the wild, dark, magic. Riley and Buffy were in a sense just as opposed and unlikely lovers as any of her beaus. He's the Initiative; she's the Slayer. They each learn from one another a great deal, and try walking in each other's worlds, but it ultimately doesn't make them more alike because they live in those separate worlds, Buffy out of necessity, Riley maybe out of choice or maybe because he just can't navigate the other and be happy. (The fun part is that I see Buffy as yang to Riley's yin in season 5 at least, which casts a really interesting dissonance on top of the more traditional male/female dichotomy they seem to symbolize. I <3 Joss Whedon.)
Anyway, Buffy lives in the wild places, yes, in the dark. When Riley tries to join her there, he picks that almost perfectly wrong way to do it, focusing on the exterior details of her vampire bites versus the more profound interior differences between the two of them in the ways they live in the world. He didn't get it, it didn't work for him, so he set a new goal, took off, and found something that did work for him, that kept him in his world, doing the work he was fulfilled doing. Buffy didn't try to cross into Riley's world in season 5. She toyed with it in season 4, found it wasn't right for her, and tried to bring Riley back home with her instead. So she didn't meet him halfway, and she owns that. But I think she blames herself too much for not giving him what he needed when to do so would have gotten her killed or changed her into a different person. As a slayer, she can't escape the chaos.
Buffy and Angel almost worked not because he was dark and could be evil. First, they had the Romeo and Juliet first love, star-crossed thing, which was passionate and intense, but their relationship survived the Angelus resurgence because of the maturity they both gained dealing with the adult ramifications of that turn and the choices they both had to make to come out of that alive and whole. The childish first love became Buffy's first adult relationship. It was a dive into the wild, the chaos, that they survived, first separately and then together. They share a history and understanding gained on that journey that can't be replicated. Angel gets it.
Buffy and Spike almost worked not just because he was evil, although that played a part in the beginning of their physical relationship. Spike thrived in the wild, and he had insights into what it was to be the Slayer and what it was to walk in the dark. He knew what it was to die and come back. And Buffy was in a place where she couldn't connect with anyone else. She was self-destructive and Spike stayed by her side through it. But season 6 Spike didn't fully get it either. He was on the opposite end of Riley then, trying to take Buffy to a place of pure chaos, away from even the bits of order the Slayer attempts to coax out of the wild. But season 7 Spike with his full humanity restored finally got it, and eventually understood that Buffy had grown past her own self-hatred, and they got past the crazy to a place where they could fully connect. They too traveled a journey together that no one else fully shared or understood. Spike gets it.
And maybe it's as simple as the fact that Riley and Buffy were together at a less tumultuous emotional time. The history he shares with Buffy doesn't hold as much weight, isn't singular enough to bind them together in a shared understanding. Riley never navigated the wild with Buffy in any meaningful and long-lasting way. Maybe there is some truth to the idea that those romantic dramas will ultimately result in a more intense bond. Most people don't need that, but most people don't live in the wild. That doesn't make Buffy a drama queen, just someone living her perforce intense, brutal existence.
Back to the metaphor, not that we left it. Joss created what I would argue is the greatest female hero ever for that time (or now in my mind). In defining her world, her philosophy, her relations to that world, he managed to combine the chaos of the wild feminine with a hero who takes action. Who gradually finds ways to traverse the chaos and mingle in some order without trying to bend the world to a masculine will or blow it up if it won't comply. She has the most intense connections to the lovers in her life that can do the same, and who can treat her as an equal partner in the endeavor. Buffy's so-called need for darkness is actually her need for a partner who can see the complexity of her circumstances, will attempt to navigate her world with her, and will accept her as an equal. Riley thought he saw the first, but didn't. He attempted the second, but not in any way that showed he understood it, and therefore failed. And he never fully succeeded at the third either. He wasn't a hidebound sexist, but he never gave equal credit to the intuitional, emotional feminine ways of dealing with chaos, never saw those strategies to be equally effective as his attempts at control, and couldn't fully accept that Buffy could be his protector just as he could be hers, in true egalitarian partnership. Open your eyes to the dark, Riley Finn, and then we'll talk.
--------
I could ramble on forever without streamlining my point, I think. Maybe in future I can come back and try to make this coherent and separate out the different strands of argument. It could happen.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Jacob-inspired musing material
Jacob wisdom from recap of True Blood finale (http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/true_blood/and_when_i_die-1.php?page=17):
"...all other things being equal -- if Tara were out of the picture and Sookie had just killed Debbie on her own, let's start there -- then you are looking at a particular story, which is that when you choose to deviate from the norm, when you go it alone, or queer, or however you're going to do it, even just unmarried, that decision cuts both ways. Yes, you get to be free and true to yourself, but also, you have opted out of the game and can't expect validation from the game.
"...all other things being equal -- if Tara were out of the picture and Sookie had just killed Debbie on her own, let's start there -- then you are looking at a particular story, which is that when you choose to deviate from the norm, when you go it alone, or queer, or however you're going to do it, even just unmarried, that decision cuts both ways. Yes, you get to be free and true to yourself, but also, you have opted out of the game and can't expect validation from the game.
As Jessica's learning, you can either be a sex warrior gender revolutionary or a socially validated Good Girl, but you can't have both. And you can't flip back and forth between Sexy Faery You and Nice Christian You, not forever. You have to become something that is both. It is a trade-off. A wonderful, powerful, scary-as-hell trade-off.
"And I think for whatever reason, at this time in our culture, we've fallen into a lazy lull of somehow feeling owed something, in this way. That instead of acknowledging that living by our own lights and being true to ourselves might have a cost, we manage to either conform or do it half-assed and then whine about it later. "All I did was act like a slut and then you called me a slut" is not a well-formed sentence or valid complaint. "All I did was act like a slut, a word with zero meaning or power over me" is a well-formed sentence, and allows at least for the possibility that life is an unfair place for grownups and crybabies alike.
"As I said, it gets twisted by the fact that Tara died in the middle of it, but if you follow just the thread of Mine, His, Hers, it's a pretty complicated idea. "Why can't you both be Mine" is a meaningless question, because "Mine" isn't just about feelings -- it's about facts, and death, and danger. But to rebel against this idea that "You have to be His or you won't be at all," that can't possibly be a bad thing either, right?
"I think this is what it looks like, all this brain matter all over the kitchen. I think if you're willing to risk the danger of the real world, and be a complete person, the first thing that's gotta go is your fear of being the bad guy. Because it's not like Sookie killing a person in self-defense is really all that different from Sookie having one of her boyfriends take care of it for her, which is what you're really saying when you say Mine: Kill those that threaten me, so I don't have to get my hands dirty.
"Our mistake lies in thinking that grace attends any more to purity than to experience. But that's just nostalgia too: Because now is difficult to deal with at any given time, the past was always easier and kinder and clearer and purer. And that is imaginary, and reactionary, and gross, and scary. Especially when you apply it to yourself, which shouldn't be a show for other people anyway. Because the truth is, nobody lives that way.
"Nobody stays clean. We weren't designed for that. When your hands get dirty, all you have to do is wash them."
This is why I read his recaps; I always get things to mull over from his way of saying things that is so different from how I would say them but still meaningful to the things I think about. That dissonance is invigorating and extremely helpful.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Thoughts that arise while reading comments online
Reading some online comments this week made me send this tweet: Everyone's a martyr in their own way, in their own not that martyric way. #captainhammerrevisedfortheinternet
It just occurred to me in a clearer way than normal that the martyr complex I've noted in annoyance in people is universal and in me as well. Not that I didn't know it, but it was really -- well, like I said, clear to me at that point. Someone was saying she was annoyed that Buffy's faults were overlooked and she was put on a pedestal by everyone, whereas the poster felt the need to counterbalance that by always pointing out where she did less than stellar things. The funny thing is I feel EXACTLY the opposite. I always see Buffy HATORZ online or off, talking about how they love the show but hate the character. Or if not hate, don't like very much, put low in their list of favorites. They're always calling her selfish and blaming her for more things even than all the things she blames herself for, and I always feel like those of us who like her are in the minority and should speak up. Exactly the opposite.
And I realized that that's probably true of things like the Season 6 debate. To me, I can't bring up liking the season (and I'm terrified to even mention Marti Noxon online for fear of what comments would ensue) without the people who hate it jumping on to say how it sucks. I've often thought that you could have a forum titled Discussion of Buffy Season Six for Those Who Love It and still those who hate it would have to state their case over and over on it. So it's entirely possible that the haters of the season feel like those nuts who love it never shut up about how great it is and would even be on an Anti forum and...You get the drift.
So the reason (I've always felt like) American Christians always act as though they're martyrs, standing proudly as representatives of a group that's socially victimized and derided (even though you can't get through a day in the U.S. without something about Christianity being right in your face) is not because Christians are just deluded or hypocritical, it's because of this prevalent strain in people of getting off on being the only one who sees the light. Or part of the select group that sees the light in a sea of obtuseness and misunderstandings. Like it's a byproduct of the group instinct, or the us against them, or a result of righteousness being linked to oppression.
I have to wonder if it's more of an American thing than a general one. Yet then there's the internet. Full of people standing up for their minority view in the face of the oppression of the majority, who actually consist of those you notice that could be just some of the few people that actually disagree with you. We may seek news and opinions written by those we agree with, but what we really notice, what really sticks with us and just strikes the deepest into our hearts and minds is those who disagree with us. And it doesn't take many of them. And then we feel alone, under attack from these different opinions that suddenly seem to be all over. Even if they're really not. Is it a function of individualism, part of the idea that we're all different? Or is it a reaction against that? Rebellion or an unusual form of conformity?
Mea culpa, too.
It just occurred to me in a clearer way than normal that the martyr complex I've noted in annoyance in people is universal and in me as well. Not that I didn't know it, but it was really -- well, like I said, clear to me at that point. Someone was saying she was annoyed that Buffy's faults were overlooked and she was put on a pedestal by everyone, whereas the poster felt the need to counterbalance that by always pointing out where she did less than stellar things. The funny thing is I feel EXACTLY the opposite. I always see Buffy HATORZ online or off, talking about how they love the show but hate the character. Or if not hate, don't like very much, put low in their list of favorites. They're always calling her selfish and blaming her for more things even than all the things she blames herself for, and I always feel like those of us who like her are in the minority and should speak up. Exactly the opposite.
And I realized that that's probably true of things like the Season 6 debate. To me, I can't bring up liking the season (and I'm terrified to even mention Marti Noxon online for fear of what comments would ensue) without the people who hate it jumping on to say how it sucks. I've often thought that you could have a forum titled Discussion of Buffy Season Six for Those Who Love It and still those who hate it would have to state their case over and over on it. So it's entirely possible that the haters of the season feel like those nuts who love it never shut up about how great it is and would even be on an Anti forum and...You get the drift.
So the reason (I've always felt like) American Christians always act as though they're martyrs, standing proudly as representatives of a group that's socially victimized and derided (even though you can't get through a day in the U.S. without something about Christianity being right in your face) is not because Christians are just deluded or hypocritical, it's because of this prevalent strain in people of getting off on being the only one who sees the light. Or part of the select group that sees the light in a sea of obtuseness and misunderstandings. Like it's a byproduct of the group instinct, or the us against them, or a result of righteousness being linked to oppression.
I have to wonder if it's more of an American thing than a general one. Yet then there's the internet. Full of people standing up for their minority view in the face of the oppression of the majority, who actually consist of those you notice that could be just some of the few people that actually disagree with you. We may seek news and opinions written by those we agree with, but what we really notice, what really sticks with us and just strikes the deepest into our hearts and minds is those who disagree with us. And it doesn't take many of them. And then we feel alone, under attack from these different opinions that suddenly seem to be all over. Even if they're really not. Is it a function of individualism, part of the idea that we're all different? Or is it a reaction against that? Rebellion or an unusual form of conformity?
Mea culpa, too.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Where am I?
So obviously been falling down on my self-imposed comic recapping job. It was easy to do when I had a scheduled time for it, less easy when my schedule changed and life stuff happened and I just didn't reschedule. Now I've had a bunch of stuff added to my plate of late and just haven't had time free when I was feeling like I could take on a project that required some thought and creativity. No comments about limited amount of creativity and thought that might actually appear to be in the recaps; the point is it takes some effort on my part and I've been not in the zone.
Lame excuse, but there you go. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll be back to it. I seem to have a 2-hour break whilst in the middle of nowhere (in relation to my home) on TTh now that may give me an in again to the blog. So we'll see how that goes.
Funny to talk as though I have readers. I know I don't, but that's the blog convention, to pretend you have an audience, and an audience that cares.
Lately been watching the Killing. Awesome Seattle noir mystery set inside a Vermeer painting. Totally geeking out over how beautifully it's shot. Almost don't care about the story or the mystery or the characters. It's just so pretty. Maybe I'm finally developing more of an eye for TV/Film visuals. That stuff used to just fly by me, but now I take the time to pay more attention. It's very interesting.
Also watching the Good Wife, which has more nuanced characters than most legal procedurals I've seen. Got through season 1 and moving on. Haven't seen Game of Thrones yet.
I watched Winter's Bone and Kick-Ass at home recently, found both enjoyable. Watched Rango and Super in the theaters and enjoyed them as well. Read all of Watchmen finally. Absolutely brilliant. Guess I'll have to see what they did with the movie at some point. Reminds me I want to see Sucker Punch for myself and see on which side of the divide I fall. Also hearing great things about Hanna. And want to see Scream 4 'cause I loved those movies. Yes, even the third one.
Finishing up the Shield with my viewing friend this week. That's been a fun ride. I think we'll probably move on to Spartacus next.
Been listening to a lot of podcasts: Gobbledygeek, NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour, Slate's Gabfest, Hellmouth & Investigating Angel podcasts, Nerdist, WTF with Mark Maron being in the highest rotation. Also Potentialcast, but I'm up and down with that one. I think they do a great job, and often it's fun to listen, but the tone is pretty well established to be snarky, MST3K-style and I just don't like hearing all Buffy episodes subjected to that. That's why I can't read TWOP Buffy recaps; I actually like (read freakin' adore) the show and it pains me to hear every aspect of it made fun of. Snark where appropriate is vastly different from make fun of everything even when they enjoyed the episode. Just not my thing.
I found myself, while rewatching Amends for example, thinking about how awful they're going to treat that episode, and it makes me sad and overly defensive. So I have to take a deep breath and move on from them sometimes. Bryan Curry is a great antidote because he talks about what he likes as well as what he doesn't, as well as tackling bigger themes that the potentials couldn't cover just because they haven't seen the whole show.
And that's about it for my entertainment food lately. As always, enjoying io9. And also Brain Pickings. Noel Murray (AV Club) on Fringe and Buffy. Jacob Clifton (TWOP) on anything anytime. Don't know why I turned this entry into a few of my (current) favorite things, but it is what it is.
Gotta head back into the breach now. Later
Lame excuse, but there you go. Maybe in the coming weeks I'll be back to it. I seem to have a 2-hour break whilst in the middle of nowhere (in relation to my home) on TTh now that may give me an in again to the blog. So we'll see how that goes.
Funny to talk as though I have readers. I know I don't, but that's the blog convention, to pretend you have an audience, and an audience that cares.
Lately been watching the Killing. Awesome Seattle noir mystery set inside a Vermeer painting. Totally geeking out over how beautifully it's shot. Almost don't care about the story or the mystery or the characters. It's just so pretty. Maybe I'm finally developing more of an eye for TV/Film visuals. That stuff used to just fly by me, but now I take the time to pay more attention. It's very interesting.
Also watching the Good Wife, which has more nuanced characters than most legal procedurals I've seen. Got through season 1 and moving on. Haven't seen Game of Thrones yet.
I watched Winter's Bone and Kick-Ass at home recently, found both enjoyable. Watched Rango and Super in the theaters and enjoyed them as well. Read all of Watchmen finally. Absolutely brilliant. Guess I'll have to see what they did with the movie at some point. Reminds me I want to see Sucker Punch for myself and see on which side of the divide I fall. Also hearing great things about Hanna. And want to see Scream 4 'cause I loved those movies. Yes, even the third one.
Finishing up the Shield with my viewing friend this week. That's been a fun ride. I think we'll probably move on to Spartacus next.
Been listening to a lot of podcasts: Gobbledygeek, NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour, Slate's Gabfest, Hellmouth & Investigating Angel podcasts, Nerdist, WTF with Mark Maron being in the highest rotation. Also Potentialcast, but I'm up and down with that one. I think they do a great job, and often it's fun to listen, but the tone is pretty well established to be snarky, MST3K-style and I just don't like hearing all Buffy episodes subjected to that. That's why I can't read TWOP Buffy recaps; I actually like (read freakin' adore) the show and it pains me to hear every aspect of it made fun of. Snark where appropriate is vastly different from make fun of everything even when they enjoyed the episode. Just not my thing.
I found myself, while rewatching Amends for example, thinking about how awful they're going to treat that episode, and it makes me sad and overly defensive. So I have to take a deep breath and move on from them sometimes. Bryan Curry is a great antidote because he talks about what he likes as well as what he doesn't, as well as tackling bigger themes that the potentials couldn't cover just because they haven't seen the whole show.
And that's about it for my entertainment food lately. As always, enjoying io9. And also Brain Pickings. Noel Murray (AV Club) on Fringe and Buffy. Jacob Clifton (TWOP) on anything anytime. Don't know why I turned this entry into a few of my (current) favorite things, but it is what it is.
Gotta head back into the breach now. Later
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Bus ride - rare moment of contentment
Almost in writing mood. Not useful for being soon on the clock. And not having paper. On bus, having a closing shift to look forward to. Summer flying by but feeling decent. Have made some conclusions that can't really lead to anything concrete in reality but seem important. Still no good ideas on career stuff, but circling. Eventually will spiral in to an answer. See? Feeling good, not stressing. Retail summer good for me. Out of rut, more active, less conflicted. All leads to happier if less introspective me. I suspect those things are connected. But sometimes you have to stop recycling the same thoughts for a while, leave room for something new to show up. I appreciate the break. Also feel healthier with more energy which has to help. Increased work interaction also making me more socially inclined. Just a good time. Maybe that's why I need to write it down, for something to look back at and remember when down times return. Usually my journaling so depressing. Good to remember I can be content.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
I've got my recap for 10 mostly written, just not typed. Spring is kicking my ass this year and usually not able to focus on much until Thursday. Blech. Anyway, will type it up soon.
Have a dentist appointment today, then need to get ready to fly to my parents' place and claim their former car as my own. Then have to sell my car. I think I finally have everything organized to do that; just have to post on craigslist.
Hopefully writing all this down will help me keep it in what passes for my mind. This is your brain; this is your brain on histamine. Any ques -- what was I saying?
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
thinking to myself (aloud)
Is the key to blogging imagining that you're a celebrity and everyone wants to know everything you do? Or is it more pretending it's a letter: A cleaned up one to your parents, a raunchy one to your friends, a rant to your co-workers, or a complaint to the editor? Because I can't really accept that it's a journal to yourself. And I think most people would agree that bloggers are writing to somebody, some audience out there. Therefore blog is not equal to journal. Blog is more equal to news report. That's helpful to me, being all behind the curve in this area.
Monday, March 3, 2008
questions
What is the deal with it? Why should words be embarrassing? Why is the very act of getting down words triggering such a huge amount of self-censorship? What is the exact attitude to it? Writers have to throw down tons of unimportant, irrelevant, impractical, banal, and uninteresting words all the time to clear out the system and allow the ideas that matter to arise. And seriously, who’s going to see it? And if someone did, who cares? Who are you worried is going to read, judge, condemn, ridicule, feel superior? And what does that matter? Even on-line, so someone reads something you write that’s juvenile or dumb or whiny or whatever; how is that so bad? What is so awful down in your core that can’t be allowed into the light of day? This obsession with hiding away is incomprehensible. I mean, you have like 10 friends total anyway. And none of them would be bothered by anything you would say or write or tell them, probably not pay any attention.
And others are as usual paying more attention to their own stuff to spend time critiquing your life. And what is posterity and perfection of image and why is that important to you of all people? How is that allowed to stop you from doing, writing, saying, expressing, attempting anything at all, especially when you consider you’re only censoring yourself from yourself? Seriously, why the big deal about this? And is it important, irrelevant, minor, major, inconsequential or what to get past it? Would it be helpful or just kind of fun, or mortifying or destructive?
And secondarily, what does that attitude, belief, feeling about life have to do with any other acts and impressions and ambitions you have or don’t? Is it the key to unlocking yourself? Is there a key for that? What self would you be unlocking and what would it mean? Is it possible to open the door on your own? Is it dangerous? Do you have to be brave?
And others are as usual paying more attention to their own stuff to spend time critiquing your life. And what is posterity and perfection of image and why is that important to you of all people? How is that allowed to stop you from doing, writing, saying, expressing, attempting anything at all, especially when you consider you’re only censoring yourself from yourself? Seriously, why the big deal about this? And is it important, irrelevant, minor, major, inconsequential or what to get past it? Would it be helpful or just kind of fun, or mortifying or destructive?
And secondarily, what does that attitude, belief, feeling about life have to do with any other acts and impressions and ambitions you have or don’t? Is it the key to unlocking yourself? Is there a key for that? What self would you be unlocking and what would it mean? Is it possible to open the door on your own? Is it dangerous? Do you have to be brave?
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