Brawlin'

So, I think I have enough experience as a girl and as a person who got into an awful fucking lot of fights in school to talk about this. It's 'girl fighting'. And every stereotype that goes with it.

And I'm not going to say what you think I will.

First of all, girls fight. No, we do. Maybe not that often and it's maybe not as big a deal, but girls fight. There's this stereotype that girls don't get into fights--it's so pervasive and deeply-ingrained that I actually successfully used it to my advantage as a kid in order to fucking get away with fighting as much as I did. Since girls don't fight, and small cute girls especially don't fight, no one was willing to report that I had kicked their ass and they were even less likely to be believed in the event they did. Why do my genitals and stature immediately influence my proclivity and ability to get into physical altercations? They don't. Girls fight. Full stop.

I also don't understand how or why stereotypical 'girl fight moves' are so laughable. Or are considered 'fighting dirty'. Or are just plain unacceptable. People actually think that girl fights don't count as fights because so much of it consists of no one actually fighting. Well, maybe they don't. But guy fights don't either. Guys throw punches when they fight and try to put each other in headlocks, but 90% of any given guy-fight is spent circling each other, trash-talk, spitting, and not technically making contact with anyone else. You can't have it both ways, people.

And pulling hair, scratching, biting, eye-clawing, and the like aren't 'fighting'? Or they don't count and are 'playing dirty'? Except for professional settings, the whole fucking point of a fight is to break the fucking rules. Either you're breaking the rules, or there are rules to be followed. Again, you don't get both. No, girls don't just swing at each other. Yes, they sometimes claw and pull hair. But so what? Why is that disallowed? Why doesn't that 'count'? It's still a fight. That's like saying a chihuahua isn't a dog because it's small. It just looks a little different, but I assure you, it is in fact a dog.

Look, here's the thing about clawing and pulling hair: there's nothing wrong with either of these. Personally I see them as legitimate tactics. And smart ones. If you claw someone's eyes at arm's length, you're attempting to disable them and keeping them away from you at the same time. That's not a bad plan. Same with pulling hair--if you can grab a fistful of hair, you can control the opponent's head, which makes the rest of them pretty easy to control as well.

Enough about 'fair fighting' and shit. There is no such fucking thing. If you're going to get into a fight, do whatever the fuck you want. I don't fight anymore, mostly because I'm not bullied anymore and also because I'm an adult now and can be put in jail for doing it. The only legitimate excuse I can come up with for getting into a fight at my age would be if I felt I was otherwise in danger.

And in those circumstances, you and I and everyone else are completely entitled to do whatever the fuck we want in order to not die.

So shut the fuck up about 'girl fights'. It's still a fight. I'm just as capable of biting you as I am of punching you in the fucking face.

Snap, Crackle---SHIT

So, I don't crack whips anymore.

Here's the thing. I used to do it all the time. I also used to wear a bandana all the time and wore the same one so often that the ends were frayed and I could basically snap it like a whip. No, seriously. It made a noise that stopped the fucking traffic in the halls of my 2000-student high school. I was a kid who wasn't especially threatening so I needed all the help I could get when it came to scaring the fuck out of people.

But, I don't do that anymore.

I used to do it all the time. I thought it was cool. (It more or less goes without saying that I have an extremely warped perception of what 'cool' is.) Then my brother brought home a whip.

No, this is not a dirty joke.

Anyway. I thought the whip was cool so I cracked it in the back yard. I failed. Really, really hard. I actually missed like no one's business and hit myself in the face. For those of you who don't know, the sound a whip makes is caused by the flagellum moving faster than the speed of sound--that crack is a sonic explosion. Which is why it's dangerous. I'm extremely lucky I didn't kill myself or put an eye out--I hit myself under my left eye and I'm insanely lucky I didn't even break skin. Scared the fuck out of me though.

Ow.

So, yeah. I don't snap whips anymore. Whips are insanely unwieldy, the shortest are six foot long and they go up to twelve. I'm five foot. That is not a great height for whips.

Also, my eye hurts like a bitch today. Too much rubbing. That's what SHE said.

And what.

Thanks, Ma

Apart from all that twee rubbish about giving me life--which, if you think about it, isn't actually especially noteworthy because if this hadn't happened then you obviously wouldn't be around to know--I'm grateful to my mother for one very specific thing.

I've mentioned this before, but my all-time favourite writer EVER is the late humourist and playwright Jean Kerr. She wrote several plays, including 'Mary, Mary' in collaboration with her husband, drama critic Walter Kerr. For a time it was the longest running play in Broadway history. But Jean Kerr is better known for a book of her collected humour essays entitled 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies', which was a national bestseller and spawned a movie starring Doris Day.

Today, she's largely forgotten. Her books are out of print and hard to find and her plays are no longer being performed. Hardly anyone knows who she was or what she did and I always felt like this was a terrible shame because she truly was an incredibly funny woman.

And I probably wouldn't know she existed myself, were it not for my mom.

When I was about ten or so, my mom checked out a bunch of books on tape for me to keep me busy on an upcoming ten-hour road trip to North Carolina. (I can't read or anything in the car because I get carsick.) Among them, for whatever reason, was an abridged recording of 'Please Don't Eat the Daisies'. I don't even know why she picked it, since it was never in the children's section and it honestly doesn't look or seem like a book a ten-year-old girl might enjoy, but she did, and from there on I was in love with Jean Kerr's wit and humour.

It actually took me over a decade to track down any more of her work--I did attempt to learn more about her in the late 90s and early 2000s but never found much of anything. Most of what I found was about the movie version of her book and nothing about what else she wrote and where and how to find them. All of her books were out of print and had been for many years. So I just kind of gave up for a while and tried to accept that I was probably never going to be able to read them.

Then randomly one day a family friend gave me a very old copy of another of her books: 'The Snake Has All the Lines'. By this time the library from which I borrowed and re-borrowed the audiobook had closed and taken its copy with it, so I was very happy to not only have something of hers I hadn't read before, but also because it reinvigorated my desire to track down more of her books. Over the next few years, aided by the increase in user-to-user transactions on Amazon that hadn't existed before, I managed to find the rest of her books. They're some of my most treasured ones.

Reading Jean Kerr's work was what really kickstarted my love of writing. I'd enjoyed writing before then, but wrote only fiction and poetry; it was Jean Kerr who showed me that you can write about absolutely anything and everything, no matter how mundane, and you can even make it incredibly funny. While I have long since abandoned any ambitions of literary success, I've never stopped writing. I hope I never do. I want to keep writing--and reading--forever.

And I have my abusive mother to thank for it.

A Shame...

In high school while taking journalism as well as writing and editing for the school's paper, I became friendly with a classmate named John. (Who was also eerily similar to my dad--same dress sense, modes of speech, and even nearly identical glasses frames.) He also happened to be a real hardcore Bible-humping near-fundamentalist Christian. We weren't friends, but we were friendly, but the fact that we got on as well as we did always strikes me as surprising. I don't generally get along with really religious people and my views on religion were pretty much the same then, only less critical.

John and I would chat in class (we were allowed to!!) and these chats often became theistic/scientific debates. I was never trying to convert him--nor was he trying to convert me--but was interested in how he viewed the world. He wasn't fiercely skeptical of science, and knew more about the details than most mouth-frothing religious loons. The two seem so diametrically opposed to me (and still does) and I was genuinely interested in hearing how he squared the two.

Even when our debates grew heated--as they occasionally did--our relationship stayed the same. He was just a genuinely nice guy, and very intelligent. His religious beliefs held him back sometimes though--I got the feeling that he might have had an inkling that his beliefs were on shaky ground. Which is a shame.

Now, John had a terrific radio voice--just that articulate, clear, even, hard-to-define thing that makes a voice so commercial-sounding. This combined with his intellect could have taken him a long way. Since we weren't friends, though, we never spoke again after graduation.

A couple of years ago I discovered a series of creationist Christian propaganda videos attacking evolution. They were done in Flash animation with a male voiceover, and the second I heard the voice I immediately thought of John. It sounded just like him. (He had a very distinct sort of low softness in his speech that sorta stuck out. There were no credits that I could see so I've no idea who the narrator really was, but if it's John part of me will be disappointed. I knew he was about as likely to change his mind about his beliefs as I was (read: when pigs fly down to play ice hockey with the devil), but part of me had hoped that maybe one day he might at least come to terms with the opposing assertions of science and the bible. Funnily enough, evolution wasn't something I remember him saying he disagreed with. He never said he agreed with it, either, so it could go either way.


John liked me enough that he asked me to sign his yearbook. I left two words, words I think everyone should consider:


Question everything.

It's a Duck, it's Quacking

Anyone who's ever done their homework on the subject knows that Christianity is basically plagiarized from a lot of other religions--including the pagan beliefs that preceded it. It's no coincidence that Easter tends to coincide with the spring equinox and Christmas falls close to the winter solstice--both important symbolic events in a lot of long-dead polytheist faiths--and both holidays incorporate symbols and practices, like eggs and rabbits and evergreen trees, that had significant meaning to another religion. The pagan roots are evident in more or less every permutation of Christianity but it's most obvious in Catholicism.

Catholicism predates other denominations, so it was the one that the 'heathens' were first exposed to. The first Catholics from Celtic and Germanic and Norse tribes were converts from various flavours of paganism--because old habits die hard, they didn't entire drop everything associated with their former belief. (Even Emperor Constantine, after he converted to Christianity, routinely made sacrifices to Ares and Apollo.) Because of that, and possibly also because the church itself was trying to make itself seem appealing to pagans, a lot of practices and rituals persisted despite having nothing to do with Christianity at all--they were rooted in pagan beliefs.

But all Christian denominations view Christmas and Easter with reverence and embrace the pagan symbols they've absorbed. What makes Catholicism stand out as being clearly based on paganism is the fact that it is itself essentially paganism.

Think about it.

On paper there is only one god, but Catholics revere the Holy Trinity of father and son and holy spirit. They are on the same level. They are all gods. Look at the way Catholics in particular worship the Virgin Mary. What is she but a goddess?

Look at the saints. The saints are demigods. Like the gods of Greek mythology, the saints are cast as the protectors or stewards of specific things--of war, of learning, of travel, of childbirth. The list goes on and on. Even today, when some Catholics want to, say, pray for a safe journey when they're about to go on a trip, they pray not to their head honcho god but to Saint Christopher.

What is that but paganism?

Catholics really hate it when you point that out.

Culture Clash

I like to think of myself as being a typically open-minded person who accepts other people and our differences. Different strokes, right?

However.

The next time someone tries to defend the indefensible and thinks that 'it's just a part of their culture' is an acceptable rationale, I'm going to fucking kill them with a screwdriver. Because this is the stupidest, lamest, most worthless excuse in the entire world. (It ties for first place along with using 'it's part of the religion' to defend the most horrific abuses and crimes.) If your culture is founded on things that are not in at all okay in a civilized world, that part of your culture is not worth preserving and you should be ashamed of yourself and your people for perpetuating and defending it.

It's rude to show the bottoms of your feet in Saudi Arabia. That's cool, I can live with that. The French eat horse. I'm cool with that, as well. Differences that pertain to food, familial structure, education, language use, and certain gestures are completely innocuous and I'm 100% okay with those things because they harm nobody.

You know what's not okay?

Hurting people. Denying people basic human rights. Killing people. Treating people as less than human. That shit isn't good.

Ruthless and often violent discrimination of certain demographics based on factors over which they have no control--race, sex, sexuality, their place of birth--is rife in certain parts of the world. Women are denied the most basic of freedoms in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Homosexuals are killed outright. I do not give a single microscopic fuck about what those cultures or religious beliefs say about these things because these things are absolutely unambiguously wrong. It is wrong. It is not okay to do these things and I don't give a fuck what your religion or cultural tradition dictates. You should not be doing it and I am disgusted that anyone else in the world is allowing this to continue in the name of tolerance. You can't be tolerant of something that's intolerant.

For whatever reason, 'cultural differences' are taboo. We can't oppose them if we aren't of that culture. If something is done in the name of culture, tradition, religious belief--it's untouchable. And that needs to stop. It isn't okay and nobody anywhere is in any way obligated to defend it. And anyone who tries to defend it should be ashamed of themselves. How can you defend that shit? Why is a crime not a crime when culture and god are evoked in its name? It isn't. Something are wrong, full stop, and holding onto these things just because it would be uncouth to demand they be changed is almost as bad as committing them in the first place.

Women in the Middle East are by and large not people. They can't go out, drive, go to school, get jobs, or even enter certain establishments--sometimes they need an escort, but most of the time they're just banned outright. Women are treated like property. They are regularly beaten and raped, then punished for being a victim. Marriages are arranged without any consideration to anyone's feelings or right to run their own life. Women are killed for being the victims of crimes, for something that isn't their fault. You cannot defend this. This is not at all acceptable, and the fact that it's an integral part of the culture doesn't mean anyone is obligated to accept it--we, as people, are obligated to stop it. Especially because, being 'part of the culture', they're easily defended and made to seem, if not harmless, then at least made to seem justifiable.

These things are not justifiable. These things are not okay. And they need to be stopped.

The Aztecs (as well as many other cultures) practiced gruesome human sacrifice. It was an integral part of their culture, of their religion. The practice was stopped. The Chinese mutilated the feet of girls for hundreds of years, a horrific painful process that crippled them for life. It was an integral part of their culture. The practice was stopped. Widowed women in India would be burned alive on their husband's funeral pyres. It was part of their religion and culture for centuries. The practice was stopped.

Because these things are not okay. They never have been, and they never will be, and just because it's part of the culture or religion doesn't mean it's anything but wrong to do it. 'Culture' should stop being a shield. I don't care about your culture. I care about your people. And your people are being wronged in the most repulsive and egregious ways because of your stupid, disgusting, horrible culture.

I don't fucking care about cultural differences. If a cultural difference results in harm or discrimination of innocent people, that culture is not worth defending or preserving. It should die out. It should be eradicated. It should be stopped.

Not everything in the world is black and white. Very few things are. Almost everything is shades of grey. But some things are wrong no matter what, they are objectively wrong. You should be outraged that such atrocious crimes are committed regularly and defended fanatically. You should be outraged that they become accepted and expected parts of life. And you should be outraged at yourself, at everyone in the world, because it has been allowed to continue, above scrutiny and above the laws of human decency, for as long as it has.

A culture in which people are treated like anything but people is a culture that needs to be wiped out. If you're a member of this culture and defend the horrors you wreak on innocent people, I just want to tell you that your culture is disgusting--and so are you.

True Love

Dirty secret:

Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' is simultaneously my favourite and most hated romantic comedy ever.

On the one hand, you have vapid shallow Hero and her Claudio, who decides he loves her after setting eyes on her once (par for the course in Shakespeare) and then accuses her publicly and humiliatingly of adultery based on nothing but hearsay which was in turn based on something someone who didn't know her very well glimpsed through an open window. (That turned out to be a trick in the end anyway.) Not only is Claudio a complete prick about it, Hero takes him back! Willingly! He only apologized when he thought she was dead for god's sake. He sounds like a complete asshole and emotionally volatile. I wouldn't marry him. I wouldn't even hold hands with him.

On the other hand, you have Beatrice and Bennedick. They are possibly the funniest, most adorable couple in the entire Shakespeare canon. Within the context of their exchange in the play (which also happens to be their first on-stage argument and the first time she verbally trashes him--the first of many), you learn that they have a history together that might or might not have been at one time youthfully romantic. These are two people who are very similar to the point where it makes them often not get along. But immediately apparent is that behind all their arguing is an affectionate animosity. While Kate and Petruchio from 'Taming of the Shrew' don't actually like each other one shred, Beatrice and Bennedick clearly do actually care for one another. And I love it. So much of staged romance throughout the ages is unrealistic. Here you have a couple who have no problem saying it like it is. "Look, you drive me up the walls and sometimes I hate the sight of you, but I adore you."

And then there's the plot device that gets them together in the first place. It's been copied a thousand times and never quite imitated successfully. Even Shakespeare himself couldn't recreate the relationship he created with Beatrice and Bennedick. Two people who clearly adore one another but don't admit their feelings are brought together by scheming friends who manage to convince them individually that the other has privately confessed love. It's a completely contrived plot device that has, again, been used a derpjillion times. And it's never very good except when Shakespeare did it.

Beatrice and Bennedick are hands-down my favourite Shakespearean couple. My favourite characters in all of Shakespeare full stop. They're so easy to relate to, at least for me. I've always expressed my affection in various levels of violent verbal insult. If I take the time to concoct a really good verbal barb, it means I care about you. If I didn't I would have just called you a fucktard and taken a longer lunch.

You can keep Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Kate and Petruchio, Rosalind and Orlando. Two of those relationships involved suicide and murder, one was completely fucking abusive, and the other was based on lies. Beatrice and Bennedick are the only couple who probably won't end up in marriage counselling. They don't need to. They'll get it out of their systems by calling each other imaginative horrible names, and then go to bed and have uninhibited hate-sex until they make up and have makeup sex.

That's the only reason I like 'Much Ado' to begin with. Sometimes I even just fast forward through the parts with Hero and Claudio. I don't blame Don Jon for sabotaging them. I would too. I just want to see Beatrice and Bennedick argue themselves into true love.

Because, at least in my world, love wouldn't be love without that animosity. I'm not sure what that says about me, but for once I don't actually care.