I'm in the habit of coming up with really funny but realistic dialogue or one-liners without a scene or context to accompany it. (Usually the lines allude to what the conversational context is but there's no actual scene.) I don't always know which characters say what. My favourite OC of the moment is my Primeval character, Naomi, whose characterization was built largely on these one-liners. Sometimes I just can't find a good place or person to use the lines, and it frustrates me.
One thing I think I'm fairly good at is coming up with characters just interesting and unusual enough to be interesting without being unbelievable or idealized. Naomi specifically is a pretty good example of a character who has a lot of very weird traits and experiences but also believable flaws and shortcomings that make her accessible, human, and balanced.
Though I'm not religious myself and am usually pretty flagrantly anti-theist (outright against religion), for some reason I really like specifically indicating a character comes from a Jewish background. Not because I think being Jewish is weird somehow, but because it's a trait that's just uncommon enough to be interesting but still completely plausible.
Today I came up with a line that has to do with this, but unfortunately have nowhere to put it. Naomi can't be the speaker because she only fulfills part of the requirements. The line is this:
"I'm an Irish Jew. Who the fuck am I going to marry that won't send my mother into fits? There are only eight other Jews in Ireland and I'm related to all of them."
Naomi is, of course, Jewish, but not Irish. She comes from good New York City working-class Jewish roots, which is a big part of her characterization. So she couldn't have said that.
I also had to look up how likely it was that there were Jews in Ireland. There can't be any more than a few thousand of them in the entire country. Everyone else is Catholic.
Kind of a shame, in the end. It'd be pretty freaking funny to have a character with such an unlikely combination of backgrounds.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Chatterbox
Anyone who has driven a boat with an outboard motor knows it has only two speeds: glacial and airborne. There is no intermediate setting. For this reason I consider myself an outboard motormouth. I only have two settings when it comes to conversation--awkward uncomfortable silence, or nonstop chatter. There is no in-between.
Unless I'm in an environment in which I feel extremely comfortable and secure, I generally start off with new people extremely shy and quiet and warm up and become more talkative as time goes on. Partly because I'm severely socially phobic (I'm terrified of making myself look stupid), partly because I don't warm up to new people straight away, and partly because I hate the sound of my own voice. That last one is the result of childhood bullying--when I was very young I was a motormouth. I spoke my first words before I was sixteen months and scarcely shut up from that day on. I loved to talk. I loved it more than anybody around me could reasonably be expected to listen. My mom got so tired of listening to me jabber one day that she told me her ears were sleeping and she couldn't listen right now just to get a few hours of peace. I lived in England long enough to adopt an English accent but not long enough to be seen by my peers as equal to them and was always mocked for residual Americanisms; upon moving to the US, I was mocked for my Yorkshire accent. To spare myself the torment, I simply spent ten years a selective mute. I still haven't quite been able to shake it.
So people who get to know me better are usually quite surprised when the verbal floodgates open because they had no idea I could talk that much. I quite like talking, actually, but there aren't too terribly many people with whom I feel comfortable enough to talk as much as I really want--thus the handful of people I do trust end up subjected to a truly mind-boggling amount of chattiness. I just store it all up until I can talk to them and then let it all out. It's dizzying. I jump from one tangent to the next without stopping to breathe. A conversation about bubblegum could somehow result in social commentary about Volkswagens without pause or reasonable transition.
The rest of the time I just give off the appearance of being very unsociable even though I normally really want to join in with the conversations around me. I just never feel very welcome and worry I'm going to get mocked for the way I talk, which today is equal parts American and Yorkshire and has the same effect as a cheese grater on the temporal lobe.
Fortunately I have some very accommodating loved ones who just let me run off at the mouth all I want. I talked nonstop with my boyfriend's dad for days and he followed everything I said without once getting lost or having to ask me to repeat myself. Boything just kind of sat there following the conversation like a ping-pong ball back and forth across a table. He'd never met anyone who could keep up with his dad in conversation--and I'd never met anyone who could meet me parry for parry.
Most people quite like the sound of my voice (I sound like my mom and therefore HATE IT), so even when they have no idea what I'm trying to say they're usually very happy just to listen. I blame the accent. It makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am.
Unless I'm in an environment in which I feel extremely comfortable and secure, I generally start off with new people extremely shy and quiet and warm up and become more talkative as time goes on. Partly because I'm severely socially phobic (I'm terrified of making myself look stupid), partly because I don't warm up to new people straight away, and partly because I hate the sound of my own voice. That last one is the result of childhood bullying--when I was very young I was a motormouth. I spoke my first words before I was sixteen months and scarcely shut up from that day on. I loved to talk. I loved it more than anybody around me could reasonably be expected to listen. My mom got so tired of listening to me jabber one day that she told me her ears were sleeping and she couldn't listen right now just to get a few hours of peace. I lived in England long enough to adopt an English accent but not long enough to be seen by my peers as equal to them and was always mocked for residual Americanisms; upon moving to the US, I was mocked for my Yorkshire accent. To spare myself the torment, I simply spent ten years a selective mute. I still haven't quite been able to shake it.
So people who get to know me better are usually quite surprised when the verbal floodgates open because they had no idea I could talk that much. I quite like talking, actually, but there aren't too terribly many people with whom I feel comfortable enough to talk as much as I really want--thus the handful of people I do trust end up subjected to a truly mind-boggling amount of chattiness. I just store it all up until I can talk to them and then let it all out. It's dizzying. I jump from one tangent to the next without stopping to breathe. A conversation about bubblegum could somehow result in social commentary about Volkswagens without pause or reasonable transition.
The rest of the time I just give off the appearance of being very unsociable even though I normally really want to join in with the conversations around me. I just never feel very welcome and worry I'm going to get mocked for the way I talk, which today is equal parts American and Yorkshire and has the same effect as a cheese grater on the temporal lobe.
Fortunately I have some very accommodating loved ones who just let me run off at the mouth all I want. I talked nonstop with my boyfriend's dad for days and he followed everything I said without once getting lost or having to ask me to repeat myself. Boything just kind of sat there following the conversation like a ping-pong ball back and forth across a table. He'd never met anyone who could keep up with his dad in conversation--and I'd never met anyone who could meet me parry for parry.
Most people quite like the sound of my voice (I sound like my mom and therefore HATE IT), so even when they have no idea what I'm trying to say they're usually very happy just to listen. I blame the accent. It makes me sound a lot more sophisticated than I am.
mentality
I'm very blase about being deeply emotionally and mentally unstable, to the point where I usually give off an impression of being much better adjusted than I am and coping with my problems way more effectively than I actually do. In fact they're as much a handicap to me as any physical disability. People compare mental illness to physical illness all the time as a way of describing how it's caused by chemical imbalances and bad experiences over which the sufferer has no control and must simply deal with the fallout. Not entirely a fair comparison since pneumonia or the flu and even cancer can go away, whereas there is no cure for mental illness just as there's no cure for, say, multiple sclerosis or amputation. Medication doesn't 'cure' depression or schizophrenia or anything else any more than it can 'cure' a debilitating permanent illness. You do with your mental illnesses what you do with a physical handicap: you get therapy, you take what medications best mitigate the worst of your symptoms, and you learn to accommodate a problem that isn't going to go away. Living life with any disability is more about compromising in your day-to-day life than it is about making it go away entirely. A prosthetic limb doesn't make an amputation go away, it simply allows a person to live a normal life and not be immediately apparent in a crowd as someone suffering a serious handicap--and such is the case for the medications and therapies associated with any kind of mental illness.
I think part of my problem--one part of a much more complicated big picture that comprises my psychiatric health--is that I'm less ill than I am damaged. The results are still the same. I still have severe anxiety and depression, but I've noticed my diagnoses tend to change as the 'fad' mental illnesses of the day change. It's hard to describe but essentially I have good reasons to think that my problems are only partially caused by those pesky neurochemical imbalances or a predisposition for the genetic components of mental illness. (My mom used to adamantly insist--and would still if I hadn't insisted on no longer discussing the subject--that I was bipolar because my paternal grandmother is bipolar. Not only have I not heard this story substantiated by anyone else, a single grandparent suffering even a strongly genetic mental illness like schizophrenia--which has a whopping 90% occurrence between identical twins, meaning that if one twin has schizophrenia then the other is 90% likely to also be diagnosed with it, suggesting a major genetic factor considering twins share identical genes--doesn't dramatically increase your risk of being diagnosed. The likelihood of family members both being diagnosed with bipolar disorder dramatically decrease the further they are from the sufferer; monozygotic twins have the highest rate at 85%, followed by 60% if the sufferer is a parent and down to just 10% with a grandparent. With no family history, by the way, bipolar has a 2% occurrence in the general population.)
I'm not saying my brain is completely normal. It isn't. I just don't think the problems are entirely due to it. Admittedly I base this on the fact that more or less consistent symptoms have been diagnosed at various points in my live as different flavours of anxiety, childhood bipolar mania, regular depression, and attention deficit depending on what was most commonly in the public consciousness at the time of the diagnosis. In the early and mid 90s, it was attention deficit; five years later it was clinical depression. Not that I'm denying actually suffering from anything with which I was diagnosed--except maybe attention deficit, since I'm able to focus my attention unusually well on anything I don't find completely eyeball-numbing boring and I defy anyone not to let their mind wander when they don't have any interest in the subject before them. All I'm saying is I don't think it was the only cause and missed a big part of the picture.
Most of my problems are mental instabilities and emotional disturbances and behaviour problems commonly found among abused children and the survivors of any kind of abuse. I only recently began to think of my treatment as abuse, in small part because of a blog called Pervocracy (to which I was linked for its hilarious 'Cosmocking' segments), in which the writer laid down a simple fact that I'd never considered before: abuse needn't have been extreme in order to have been abuse. People who chain their children up in the garage are abusers, but so are people who keep their children on an invisible chain by the use of brutal intimidation and calculating cold manipulation. Children who suffer even very slight abuses often grow up emotionally stunted, prone to violent mood swings, develop explosive violent tempers, and have great difficulty making and maintaining relationships of any kind with others. Worst of all, they're known to become abusers themselves and exhibit the same bad behaviour as the people who hurt them. People who are hit are more likely to hit others; people who are sexually assaulted are more likely to sexually assault others.
Anyway, a lot of factors go into the development of and successful coping with mental illnesses. There is always the genetic factor but if that were all there was to it then every mental illness would have a 100% occurrence rate in identical twins (same DNA, remember?), and none do. It could well be that I have that genetic predisposition but lots of people have stronger genetic links that never display psychological issues of any kind because they never experienced the kind of bad experiences that set off that chain reaction.
In the end, like I said, I think I'm damaged more than imbalanced and it results in me exhibiting psychological instabilities with a range of symptoms--difficulty with relationships, trust issues, mood swings, poor self-esteem, and a lack of motivation--that are sufficiently common and vague to be present in just about every psychiatric diagnosis in the book. As well as just being things that even otherwise totally neurotypical people experience from time to time. It's easy to misdiagnose such problems.
Had I been born more recently, I would probably be put squarely into today's common mental illness somewhere at the light end of the autism spectrum. Admittedly I do have a few characteristic tendencies like social awkwardness and weirdly vast knowledge of very specific subjects, but the major ones don't apply to me. I'm not socially awkward because I have difficulty with the nonverbal aspect of human interaction--to the contrary, I'm exceedingly good at reading people and adjusting my tactics accordingly--and any learning disability not easily explained by my being of very limited intelligence.
There does happen to be one autistic trait I have that's actually kind of weird. Temple Grandin invented a light compression machine as a teenager to help her cope when she found herself overwhelmed by the day-to-day social interactions she didn't understand. The pressure helped calm her down. Some autistic people, children especially, are surprisingly easily soothed often by being slightly squished. It just happens that I share this trait. I don't like being confined in any way, but weight and pressure are very comfortable on me. When I sleep I'm usually more comfortable literally folding as much of myself under the bulk of my weight as I can. During the boything's visit, he kept rolling onto me in his sleep and I actually preferred being slept on because I found it extremely comforting even though he weighs well over 200 pounds. Most people would feel suffocated. I just fall asleep.
Still, you can't make a whole diagnosis based on one weirdly specific symptom even though I can't adequately explain why I have it at all.
I think part of my problem--one part of a much more complicated big picture that comprises my psychiatric health--is that I'm less ill than I am damaged. The results are still the same. I still have severe anxiety and depression, but I've noticed my diagnoses tend to change as the 'fad' mental illnesses of the day change. It's hard to describe but essentially I have good reasons to think that my problems are only partially caused by those pesky neurochemical imbalances or a predisposition for the genetic components of mental illness. (My mom used to adamantly insist--and would still if I hadn't insisted on no longer discussing the subject--that I was bipolar because my paternal grandmother is bipolar. Not only have I not heard this story substantiated by anyone else, a single grandparent suffering even a strongly genetic mental illness like schizophrenia--which has a whopping 90% occurrence between identical twins, meaning that if one twin has schizophrenia then the other is 90% likely to also be diagnosed with it, suggesting a major genetic factor considering twins share identical genes--doesn't dramatically increase your risk of being diagnosed. The likelihood of family members both being diagnosed with bipolar disorder dramatically decrease the further they are from the sufferer; monozygotic twins have the highest rate at 85%, followed by 60% if the sufferer is a parent and down to just 10% with a grandparent. With no family history, by the way, bipolar has a 2% occurrence in the general population.)
I'm not saying my brain is completely normal. It isn't. I just don't think the problems are entirely due to it. Admittedly I base this on the fact that more or less consistent symptoms have been diagnosed at various points in my live as different flavours of anxiety, childhood bipolar mania, regular depression, and attention deficit depending on what was most commonly in the public consciousness at the time of the diagnosis. In the early and mid 90s, it was attention deficit; five years later it was clinical depression. Not that I'm denying actually suffering from anything with which I was diagnosed--except maybe attention deficit, since I'm able to focus my attention unusually well on anything I don't find completely eyeball-numbing boring and I defy anyone not to let their mind wander when they don't have any interest in the subject before them. All I'm saying is I don't think it was the only cause and missed a big part of the picture.
Most of my problems are mental instabilities and emotional disturbances and behaviour problems commonly found among abused children and the survivors of any kind of abuse. I only recently began to think of my treatment as abuse, in small part because of a blog called Pervocracy (to which I was linked for its hilarious 'Cosmocking' segments), in which the writer laid down a simple fact that I'd never considered before: abuse needn't have been extreme in order to have been abuse. People who chain their children up in the garage are abusers, but so are people who keep their children on an invisible chain by the use of brutal intimidation and calculating cold manipulation. Children who suffer even very slight abuses often grow up emotionally stunted, prone to violent mood swings, develop explosive violent tempers, and have great difficulty making and maintaining relationships of any kind with others. Worst of all, they're known to become abusers themselves and exhibit the same bad behaviour as the people who hurt them. People who are hit are more likely to hit others; people who are sexually assaulted are more likely to sexually assault others.
Anyway, a lot of factors go into the development of and successful coping with mental illnesses. There is always the genetic factor but if that were all there was to it then every mental illness would have a 100% occurrence rate in identical twins (same DNA, remember?), and none do. It could well be that I have that genetic predisposition but lots of people have stronger genetic links that never display psychological issues of any kind because they never experienced the kind of bad experiences that set off that chain reaction.
In the end, like I said, I think I'm damaged more than imbalanced and it results in me exhibiting psychological instabilities with a range of symptoms--difficulty with relationships, trust issues, mood swings, poor self-esteem, and a lack of motivation--that are sufficiently common and vague to be present in just about every psychiatric diagnosis in the book. As well as just being things that even otherwise totally neurotypical people experience from time to time. It's easy to misdiagnose such problems.
Had I been born more recently, I would probably be put squarely into today's common mental illness somewhere at the light end of the autism spectrum. Admittedly I do have a few characteristic tendencies like social awkwardness and weirdly vast knowledge of very specific subjects, but the major ones don't apply to me. I'm not socially awkward because I have difficulty with the nonverbal aspect of human interaction--to the contrary, I'm exceedingly good at reading people and adjusting my tactics accordingly--and any learning disability not easily explained by my being of very limited intelligence.
There does happen to be one autistic trait I have that's actually kind of weird. Temple Grandin invented a light compression machine as a teenager to help her cope when she found herself overwhelmed by the day-to-day social interactions she didn't understand. The pressure helped calm her down. Some autistic people, children especially, are surprisingly easily soothed often by being slightly squished. It just happens that I share this trait. I don't like being confined in any way, but weight and pressure are very comfortable on me. When I sleep I'm usually more comfortable literally folding as much of myself under the bulk of my weight as I can. During the boything's visit, he kept rolling onto me in his sleep and I actually preferred being slept on because I found it extremely comforting even though he weighs well over 200 pounds. Most people would feel suffocated. I just fall asleep.
Still, you can't make a whole diagnosis based on one weirdly specific symptom even though I can't adequately explain why I have it at all.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
the word is...
Languages are nothing if not efficient and adaptable. They adopt new words as needed and drop obsolete ones. Words for very specific things usually don't exist without reflecting some level of necessity, no matter how weird they sound. Medical and psychiatric terms are the most commonly added and altered ones--'giggle incontinence' as a descriptive term for 'laughing so hard you pee yourself' wouldn't exist unless it was something that happened a lot. Still, some things are so specific it seems weird that people even felt they needed a name at all. The Germanic dialect spoken in Pennsylvania Dutch communities has a specific word for the little bits of poop that get stuck around the anus--everyone has probably experienced this but it seems extremely weird that anyone felt compelled to give it a proper word.
Here's a euphemismic term you probably didn't know existed.
'Lavender marriage'.
A lavender marriage was a handy euphemism in Hollywood during the 20s to the 60s for a marriage done purely for public image maintenance. Most stars had to agree to a morality clause in their contracts, which prohibited them from publicly doing things that were seen as unwholesome and socially unacceptable--which, at the time, included any sexuality other than the red-blooded heteronormative kind. The problem is, then as they do now actors were just as subject to speculative rumours then as they are today--when an actor was suspected of being a homosexual, people didn't shut up about it. The problem is that then, as now, sometimes the rumours were true and it was extremely bad for not only the actor's image but the studio's image as well. Sometimes it just looks a little suspicious for a young, wealthy, successful, attractive, and famous actors to literally have women throwing themselves at them and not apparently showing any interest in them. People talk. Sometimes the talk contains a kernel of truth.
Simply saying 'BUT I'M NOT GAY!!' doesn't put gossip to rest. Not a lot does, not even the usual 'solution' to this problem as applied by the studio heads--the lavender marriage.
A 'lavender marriage' was a real marriage done for appearance's sake. A gay or supposedly gay star would publicly court and marry somebody (usually another movie star--nothing captures public interest quite like celebrity relationships) of the appropriate gender in order to appear straight to the public. It was basically a decoy marriage--like fake jewellery that just looks good on display and isn't genuine.
Nobody knows quite when the term was created, but people suspected of homosexuality have been marrying for appearances alone since time immemorial--usually royalty, but anybody well-known enough to have rumours circulating about them did it and generally pursued their preferred relationships on the side. (And not always secretively.) In early Hollywood, however, a gay star was a sufficiently common problem of sufficiently taboo status that a term was necessary to denote a loveless marriage that serves no purpose other than to give the appearance of dutiful, wholesome heterosexuality from people who would rather be hanging out in gay bars.
Pretty weird, huh?
Here's a euphemismic term you probably didn't know existed.
'Lavender marriage'.
A lavender marriage was a handy euphemism in Hollywood during the 20s to the 60s for a marriage done purely for public image maintenance. Most stars had to agree to a morality clause in their contracts, which prohibited them from publicly doing things that were seen as unwholesome and socially unacceptable--which, at the time, included any sexuality other than the red-blooded heteronormative kind. The problem is, then as they do now actors were just as subject to speculative rumours then as they are today--when an actor was suspected of being a homosexual, people didn't shut up about it. The problem is that then, as now, sometimes the rumours were true and it was extremely bad for not only the actor's image but the studio's image as well. Sometimes it just looks a little suspicious for a young, wealthy, successful, attractive, and famous actors to literally have women throwing themselves at them and not apparently showing any interest in them. People talk. Sometimes the talk contains a kernel of truth.
Simply saying 'BUT I'M NOT GAY!!' doesn't put gossip to rest. Not a lot does, not even the usual 'solution' to this problem as applied by the studio heads--the lavender marriage.
A 'lavender marriage' was a real marriage done for appearance's sake. A gay or supposedly gay star would publicly court and marry somebody (usually another movie star--nothing captures public interest quite like celebrity relationships) of the appropriate gender in order to appear straight to the public. It was basically a decoy marriage--like fake jewellery that just looks good on display and isn't genuine.
Nobody knows quite when the term was created, but people suspected of homosexuality have been marrying for appearances alone since time immemorial--usually royalty, but anybody well-known enough to have rumours circulating about them did it and generally pursued their preferred relationships on the side. (And not always secretively.) In early Hollywood, however, a gay star was a sufficiently common problem of sufficiently taboo status that a term was necessary to denote a loveless marriage that serves no purpose other than to give the appearance of dutiful, wholesome heterosexuality from people who would rather be hanging out in gay bars.
Pretty weird, huh?
The Thought
One thing we all say but rarely mean?
'Oh, it's the thought that counts!'
Usually in regard to some extremely inappropriate or unwanted gift. We say it to console ourselves and stop that initial impulse to beat the person to death who got a diabetic a cake-of-the-month membership for a whole year. Or gave the guy bound to a wheelchair for life a treadmill. After all, at least they cared enough to TRY and get a gift right? Even though we never actually feel that way and still end up with an unwanted present and a murderous urge. Sometimes it's pretty obvious no thought was given or, worse, the gift is a passive-aggressive message of barely-contained contemptuous criticism. My mom doesn't get on with my dad's mom; early in their marriage, when my parents both had demanding jobs for Grumann Aerospace in, of all places, Cape fucking Canaveral--you know, where they fucking LAUNCH ROCKETS--my grandmother frequently criticized her for not cooking meals for my dad when they were working a fifty hour week each. My mom likes to cook but never had the time, nor the energy, but my grandmother gave her a set of wooden spoons and a 'beginner' cookbook for Christmas their first year. She's lucky she lived in New York and my parents in Florida because even in the photos she looks like she's ready to kill someone. (Thinking about it, though, my mom looks like that a lot. She's not a very nice lady.)
So we doggedly insist the thought is what counts even when we're not thrilled with the result.
I know I'm guilty of this.
One of the few occasions on which I actually did appreciate the thought was very recently and, like so many of my anecdotes, involves the boything. It was extremely sweet even though I thought I was going to give myself a hernia laughing.
The first time we were together, he shaved his chest.
Back up for a second here. I never initially had any interest in Max as a boyfriend and didn't for a long time. He's sweet and cute, but not my physical type. I know, I'm shallow--deal with it. I don't find him unattractive, just not what I typically go for--I almost exclusively prefer men (and women) who fall in the range of 'androgynous' to 'feminine'. So this guy and this chick are way hotter to me than anybody who resembles the cast of 'Baywatch'. The harder a time I have telling what their plumbing might be, the sexier it is, and I've never been into the 'bear' types. Just not a big fan of body hair.
Max, however, is upholstered. He has more shag carpeting than my parent's first house from the 70s. He is excessively furry in ways that seriously make me think somebody in his family history had sexual congress with a Wookiee. Or Bigfoot. Or something. Or maybe he's like a werewolf or something. All I can be sure of is that the part of his genetic code that dictates his body hair is probably not human in origin.
Like I said, I am not into body hair on anybody and it has nothing to do with hair being 'unfeminine' on women or any sexist belief like that because I don't like it on anybody. In the end I don't especially care about Max's because I adore him, but he knows I'm not fond of people who have more upholstery than my car. (And before anybody gets mad at me, I never said it to him in direct reference to his own body, it was just something I mentioned before we got together because I'm not exactly shy about my indiscriminate sexual tastes. I never did, and never would, say something like, 'Well I like you but you're too hairy.' That would be mean.) Because he is aware of this, he's fairly self-conscious about it and the first time we were together he shaved his chest.
I didn't expect it and it's not like I didn't know he was half Wookiee--I'd seen him shirtless before so I knew he had chest hair from the neck down. It was so unexpected and looked so out of place (PROTIP GUYS: if you're going to shave just one patch of body hair, you are not going to fool anybody because a hairless groomed area looks out of place if you otherwise have a fur coat) that it was painfully funny even though it was probably really inappropriate to laugh. I couldn't help it. IT WAS AN INTENSE SEXUAL MOMENT AND I LAUGHED UNTIL I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO PASS OUT. And then I couldn't breathe and had a coughing fit but he's very easygoing and hard to upset so he just laughed right along.
Still, it was really sweet even though I made him promise never to do it again. He doesn't look right like that and it was pretty futile anyway. In the three days I was with him it started to grow back and snuggling with him was like cuddling a sheet of sandpaper. I love him to bits and I wouldn't want him to change himself drastically just because he thinks that's what I want.
Funny and misguided though it was, it will probably live on forever as the cutest and silliest thing anybody ever did for me.
'Oh, it's the thought that counts!'
Usually in regard to some extremely inappropriate or unwanted gift. We say it to console ourselves and stop that initial impulse to beat the person to death who got a diabetic a cake-of-the-month membership for a whole year. Or gave the guy bound to a wheelchair for life a treadmill. After all, at least they cared enough to TRY and get a gift right? Even though we never actually feel that way and still end up with an unwanted present and a murderous urge. Sometimes it's pretty obvious no thought was given or, worse, the gift is a passive-aggressive message of barely-contained contemptuous criticism. My mom doesn't get on with my dad's mom; early in their marriage, when my parents both had demanding jobs for Grumann Aerospace in, of all places, Cape fucking Canaveral--you know, where they fucking LAUNCH ROCKETS--my grandmother frequently criticized her for not cooking meals for my dad when they were working a fifty hour week each. My mom likes to cook but never had the time, nor the energy, but my grandmother gave her a set of wooden spoons and a 'beginner' cookbook for Christmas their first year. She's lucky she lived in New York and my parents in Florida because even in the photos she looks like she's ready to kill someone. (Thinking about it, though, my mom looks like that a lot. She's not a very nice lady.)
So we doggedly insist the thought is what counts even when we're not thrilled with the result.
I know I'm guilty of this.
One of the few occasions on which I actually did appreciate the thought was very recently and, like so many of my anecdotes, involves the boything. It was extremely sweet even though I thought I was going to give myself a hernia laughing.
The first time we were together, he shaved his chest.
Back up for a second here. I never initially had any interest in Max as a boyfriend and didn't for a long time. He's sweet and cute, but not my physical type. I know, I'm shallow--deal with it. I don't find him unattractive, just not what I typically go for--I almost exclusively prefer men (and women) who fall in the range of 'androgynous' to 'feminine'. So this guy and this chick are way hotter to me than anybody who resembles the cast of 'Baywatch'. The harder a time I have telling what their plumbing might be, the sexier it is, and I've never been into the 'bear' types. Just not a big fan of body hair.
Max, however, is upholstered. He has more shag carpeting than my parent's first house from the 70s. He is excessively furry in ways that seriously make me think somebody in his family history had sexual congress with a Wookiee. Or Bigfoot. Or something. Or maybe he's like a werewolf or something. All I can be sure of is that the part of his genetic code that dictates his body hair is probably not human in origin.
Like I said, I am not into body hair on anybody and it has nothing to do with hair being 'unfeminine' on women or any sexist belief like that because I don't like it on anybody. In the end I don't especially care about Max's because I adore him, but he knows I'm not fond of people who have more upholstery than my car. (And before anybody gets mad at me, I never said it to him in direct reference to his own body, it was just something I mentioned before we got together because I'm not exactly shy about my indiscriminate sexual tastes. I never did, and never would, say something like, 'Well I like you but you're too hairy.' That would be mean.) Because he is aware of this, he's fairly self-conscious about it and the first time we were together he shaved his chest.
I didn't expect it and it's not like I didn't know he was half Wookiee--I'd seen him shirtless before so I knew he had chest hair from the neck down. It was so unexpected and looked so out of place (PROTIP GUYS: if you're going to shave just one patch of body hair, you are not going to fool anybody because a hairless groomed area looks out of place if you otherwise have a fur coat) that it was painfully funny even though it was probably really inappropriate to laugh. I couldn't help it. IT WAS AN INTENSE SEXUAL MOMENT AND I LAUGHED UNTIL I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO PASS OUT. And then I couldn't breathe and had a coughing fit but he's very easygoing and hard to upset so he just laughed right along.
Still, it was really sweet even though I made him promise never to do it again. He doesn't look right like that and it was pretty futile anyway. In the three days I was with him it started to grow back and snuggling with him was like cuddling a sheet of sandpaper. I love him to bits and I wouldn't want him to change himself drastically just because he thinks that's what I want.
Funny and misguided though it was, it will probably live on forever as the cutest and silliest thing anybody ever did for me.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
knowledge is power... sometimes
We may all deny it happens to us, but deep down inside when we don't understand something it scares the fuck out of us, even though we can--and will--ignore that fear. The ability to surmount our natural panic response is both good and bad. On the plus side, it allowed us to overcome a very elemental and universal fear within the animal kingdom: fire. Almost unique among the animal kingdom, humans aren't scared shitless of flames, which allowed us to harness its power and begin our climb to the top of the food chain. On the other hand, this same ability is responsible for really stupid counterintuitive decisions, like splitting up or going into dark rooms in horror films--we're so good at ignoring fear that we don't treat it as the survival tactic that it is. Fear is an immensely important part of survival. Any animal that doesn't make a habit of running from unusual and unexplained shit doesn't live long--the reflexive aversion to whatever we can't immediately understand is what keeps us from ending up in the jaws of predators or the victims of rare but deadly natural phenomena.
So even though you like to pretend you have way bigger balls than you actually do, deep down you are a big pussy and evolution made you that way so you'd flee any potential danger. It's better to be afraid of shit that can't hurt you in the end than it is to be fearless in the face of new threats. A common fear--of snakes, for example--may be an evolutionary throwback to a time when our ancestors lived among deadly ones and learned to fear all snakes just to avoid the dangerous ones.
In the end, if we don't know what it is we're scared to fucking death of it.
The explanation for everything that scares us has a real-world answer, despite our inclination to believe in some kind of sixth sense that alerts us to otherworldly phenom.
But that doesn't stop us getting scared of it.
One thing that scares everybody who experiences it, long after they know what it actually is, is something called 'sleep paralysis'. If you know what this is, it's because you've experienced it before. If you don't, sleep paralysis is basically when your brain wakes up before it gets back in control of your body. When you sleep, your brain shuts your body down and stops it from moving. Or mostly stops it from moving anyway--most people twitch or flail in their sleep but for the most part have no muscle control, and your brain does this to stop you from getting up and physically acting out your dreams, which could hurt or kill you. (People in whom this mechanism doesn't work sleepwalk. Far from being genuinely funny, sleepwalking can often be deadly when people wander asleep and unaware into traffic or down stairs. At least one murder in Canada was successfully defended as a result of sleepwalking.)
So you can't move in your sleep. Once your REM cycle ends your brain puts everything back on again and most people don't wake up during a REM cycle. When you do, the connection is re-established instantly and you won't have any problems. But, every now and then you'll find yourself awake and mentally sharp before you get that control back and you'll become keenly aware that you can't move anything. This is fucking scary. Everything feels as heavy as lead and you find yourself desperately trying to achieve any kind of movement.
It never lasts more than a couple of seconds, but a couple of seconds is a really long fucking time to be completely without bodily control.
The first time it happened to me I didn't know what it was--I guessed, ultimately correctly, that my body was still 'asleep'--and panic set in swiftly. I'm aware of what it is now but that doesn't make it any less difficult to cope.
So even though you like to pretend you have way bigger balls than you actually do, deep down you are a big pussy and evolution made you that way so you'd flee any potential danger. It's better to be afraid of shit that can't hurt you in the end than it is to be fearless in the face of new threats. A common fear--of snakes, for example--may be an evolutionary throwback to a time when our ancestors lived among deadly ones and learned to fear all snakes just to avoid the dangerous ones.
In the end, if we don't know what it is we're scared to fucking death of it.
The explanation for everything that scares us has a real-world answer, despite our inclination to believe in some kind of sixth sense that alerts us to otherworldly phenom.
But that doesn't stop us getting scared of it.
One thing that scares everybody who experiences it, long after they know what it actually is, is something called 'sleep paralysis'. If you know what this is, it's because you've experienced it before. If you don't, sleep paralysis is basically when your brain wakes up before it gets back in control of your body. When you sleep, your brain shuts your body down and stops it from moving. Or mostly stops it from moving anyway--most people twitch or flail in their sleep but for the most part have no muscle control, and your brain does this to stop you from getting up and physically acting out your dreams, which could hurt or kill you. (People in whom this mechanism doesn't work sleepwalk. Far from being genuinely funny, sleepwalking can often be deadly when people wander asleep and unaware into traffic or down stairs. At least one murder in Canada was successfully defended as a result of sleepwalking.)
So you can't move in your sleep. Once your REM cycle ends your brain puts everything back on again and most people don't wake up during a REM cycle. When you do, the connection is re-established instantly and you won't have any problems. But, every now and then you'll find yourself awake and mentally sharp before you get that control back and you'll become keenly aware that you can't move anything. This is fucking scary. Everything feels as heavy as lead and you find yourself desperately trying to achieve any kind of movement.
It never lasts more than a couple of seconds, but a couple of seconds is a really long fucking time to be completely without bodily control.
The first time it happened to me I didn't know what it was--I guessed, ultimately correctly, that my body was still 'asleep'--and panic set in swiftly. I'm aware of what it is now but that doesn't make it any less difficult to cope.
what we have here is a failure to properly supervise
My dad is a computer programmer and software engineer of unusually advanced skill levels, which made him particularly well-sought-after to the government during the 80s and 90s when most people only got this kind of education through universities because the government hadn't yet given any grants or incentives to put people through the training. So for a good chunk of my life he's been employed by various government agencies and companies that do contracting work with the feds (including Lockheed Martin and Grumann Aerospace), even though he isn't himself a government employee even when the government was paying his salary. He's always been an independent contractor, which meant that even when he was working on military bases the government didn't provide us a place to live. So my parents have always had to find housing within commuting distance of whatever military base he was working on, and not always conveniently closeby because the areas immediately around bases have notoriously high cost of living. He worked for the US Air Force the entire time we lived in Yorkshire into the mid-90s, but we lived in a civilian neighbourhood. When his contract with Lockheed expired, we moved back to the states and my dad got a job that again had a lot of contacts with the government without being entitled to the benefits of actually being a government employee.
The area they ultimately settled was a relatively inexpensive choice at the time, and the reason for this was because it was mostly rural then. It's still pretty undeveloped outside of the widely-spaced pockets of suburbia and you don't have to drive far to see farmland. But at the time it was just about the edge of the known universe, an untamed winderness on par with the Australian Outback or the Sahara, which was why we could afford to live there. Today it's one of the most painfully non-urban places to live--basic cost of living is estimated to be around $75,000 a year, more than twice the national average minimum wage and over four times as high as two full-time minimum wage employees can earn. It was just starting to undergo a boom when we moved there so every year the schools got more and more crowded as they struggled to accommodate more and more children than they had initially been built for.
By the time I left my elementary school, it had about 850 or 900 children attending it, in a building never built for more than 700, so it's putting it pretty lightly to say it was a tight squeeze. Every available space was converted to classroom space and there were at least a dozen portable trailers around the perimeter that were all being used. They just stuck the things wherever they could find space with access to a door, so they took up huge portions of what were initially playgrounds, soccer pitches, and baseball fields. Kids outside for gym and recess could pull faces at the windows and rap the sides of the trailers, which became a huge distraction and carried big penalties.
This story has a point, I swear.
Anyway, so there were way too many kids and not nearly enough room for all of them and the classes relegated to the portables usually supplemented class time with outdoor lessons, not least because the trailers were little more than airless metal boxes that got unbearably hot and stuffy in spring and summer. Anything that could be moved outdoors usually was, which was where a lot of science experiments ended up.
Fourth grade science classes included a study of mold (ew!) that invited hands-on experiments that couldn't be done indoors because mold quickly gross smelly as well as toxic; the teachers in the portable classrooms would douse popular kinds of bread with water and leave them outside under a covering so they would grow mold and the students could observe the animation of food in real time.
These two stories coincide one very worrisome day.
A group of kindergarten students had escaped supervision for a short time one spring and wandered into the forbidden forest of portables to commit illegal acts of distraction and came upon the science experiment. Being young and therefore stupid, they didn't know what it was. Nobody knows which students did it or when, but when the science class went to check on their moldy bread they discovered it missing. Teachers put the pieces together and realized--to their horror--that some small child or children had actually eaten them, mold and all.
Shockingly, nobody came down with a telltale sign of food poisoning to point to the culprits and nobody ever found out who was responsible for the lapse of adult supervision. But whoever mistook mold for a tasty snack, they probably had enough bread mold in their systems to fight every case of syphilis on the eastern seaboard.
Which actually makes me heave a little bit just thinking about it.
The area they ultimately settled was a relatively inexpensive choice at the time, and the reason for this was because it was mostly rural then. It's still pretty undeveloped outside of the widely-spaced pockets of suburbia and you don't have to drive far to see farmland. But at the time it was just about the edge of the known universe, an untamed winderness on par with the Australian Outback or the Sahara, which was why we could afford to live there. Today it's one of the most painfully non-urban places to live--basic cost of living is estimated to be around $75,000 a year, more than twice the national average minimum wage and over four times as high as two full-time minimum wage employees can earn. It was just starting to undergo a boom when we moved there so every year the schools got more and more crowded as they struggled to accommodate more and more children than they had initially been built for.
By the time I left my elementary school, it had about 850 or 900 children attending it, in a building never built for more than 700, so it's putting it pretty lightly to say it was a tight squeeze. Every available space was converted to classroom space and there were at least a dozen portable trailers around the perimeter that were all being used. They just stuck the things wherever they could find space with access to a door, so they took up huge portions of what were initially playgrounds, soccer pitches, and baseball fields. Kids outside for gym and recess could pull faces at the windows and rap the sides of the trailers, which became a huge distraction and carried big penalties.
This story has a point, I swear.
Anyway, so there were way too many kids and not nearly enough room for all of them and the classes relegated to the portables usually supplemented class time with outdoor lessons, not least because the trailers were little more than airless metal boxes that got unbearably hot and stuffy in spring and summer. Anything that could be moved outdoors usually was, which was where a lot of science experiments ended up.
Fourth grade science classes included a study of mold (ew!) that invited hands-on experiments that couldn't be done indoors because mold quickly gross smelly as well as toxic; the teachers in the portable classrooms would douse popular kinds of bread with water and leave them outside under a covering so they would grow mold and the students could observe the animation of food in real time.
These two stories coincide one very worrisome day.
A group of kindergarten students had escaped supervision for a short time one spring and wandered into the forbidden forest of portables to commit illegal acts of distraction and came upon the science experiment. Being young and therefore stupid, they didn't know what it was. Nobody knows which students did it or when, but when the science class went to check on their moldy bread they discovered it missing. Teachers put the pieces together and realized--to their horror--that some small child or children had actually eaten them, mold and all.
Shockingly, nobody came down with a telltale sign of food poisoning to point to the culprits and nobody ever found out who was responsible for the lapse of adult supervision. But whoever mistook mold for a tasty snack, they probably had enough bread mold in their systems to fight every case of syphilis on the eastern seaboard.
Which actually makes me heave a little bit just thinking about it.
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