Impossible to Please

And to be around!

Please, please, help get me out of this pissy mood! I'm just... frustrated with everything, raw and edgy and for no discernible reason. I know a lot of it is the the thoughts on feminism, and art, and presentation and... it pushes my buttons, makes me want to be revolutionary and militant and not at all placating. Or kind. I'm not feeling particularly tolerant or kind. It's a sense of complaceny that bothers me, I think, or the hair triggers of things that I KNOW are not symbols of anything but personal interest (Slash is really pushing my buttons today, as is Brokeback Mountain and it has nothing to do with two men fucking, and everything to do with removing women from the narrative, and yes, yes, I know all the responses, totally get the idea of finding two men together hot, it's not the content, it's the absence, if you know what I mean).

It's subtle sexism, and striving for identity. It's being pissed off that someone gave my niece a toy vaccuum and my nephew a bunch of trucks. Or walking into a room and having someone check out my ass instead of asking what I do. Or fuck, any of the number of people who ask if I'm married yet, then give me the sympathetic eyes of, "Oh poor baby, all by yourself." It's the 18 thousand chicklit books that suggest (in ways that are more subtle, more pervasive, and more damaging than any romance novel with an 18 year old virgin getting it on with a 32 year old) finding a man is the ultimate path to happiness - not education or career or contributing productively to the world around you.

It's the fact that we've never had a female president, that we still have trouble recruiting women for the hard sciences and yet don't value women in the social sciences or the arts, that we act like those things are "lesser" by virtue of not being science. It's a zillion things not helped by the fact that I'm currently inhabiting the traditional female role of "Assistant" in a male dominated office and feeling the pressures and identity shifts of that role. Feeling like I'll never get out of it.

So, I apologize for being pissy, and I ask- in return for letting this topic fly free - for things to get me out of this mood. Write me a treatise on a character you love, post a picture of something that cracked you up, fic of course is always welcome:) But really, anything would be good.

And to start, a few things that have helped alleviate the pissiness:

1. Out of nowhere, perhaps sensing my mood, KCRW played both "Cold Water" and "Wish You Were Here". That, right there, was almost enough, although both songs make me ridiculously teary.

2. Evita was on last night, and I watched and sang along, because yes it's kind of silly and far too idealized, but the whole revolutionary thing makes me happy (even though, well... yes, I do know the history there, and realize that Peron was a dictator, not a liberator). Musicals just make me happy. I can't help it.

3. I outsmarted Photoshop, and while I can't remember how, the end product was succesful!

4. There is a new Belle and Sebastian album coming out, and what I've heard so far is lovely!

Happy Sigh

I'd say that the rush of being hit with sentences fully formed is incomparable - it's better than ice cream, it's even (generally) better than sex.

Crossposted to farscapefriday. The challenge is The Alien Girl. Which means all of you should go forth and write something because the weekly challenge, it's a gettin' lonely:)


Sisters Grim

When Baywatch dreams failed him, unable to envision the running and the splashing and tropical cues and colors of bikinis and tan feminine flesh, he switched his cultural radar and imagined them as fairy tales instead. But that never worked much better.

It was so easy to picture Chi as Little Red Riding Hood, small girl gone astray, but far too often she was the wolf, wide seamless eyes and sharp teeth and clever paradoxes. Hot breath on his skin, eager to eat him up.

Zhaan could have been a fairy godmother, a fairy princess, but she too had ogre's teeth, had wicked stepmother tendencies and they'd all locked someone in a cage, had all taken a pound of flesh.

He could see Aeryn as Snow White, the black hair and the ruby lips and the pale skin, but as soon as the hunter took out the knife, the fantasy turned to something bold and bloody, ending with the lost princess holding a red heart in the palm of her hand, sheathing the knife and walking further into the woods, away from castles and queens and tiny men eager to have their washing up done.

It was easier to picture them as myth – as goddess and huntresses, Athena, Hera and Aphrodite. Moya herself was a golden apple. Easier to see them as temptresses and the fates, spinning out the threads of his destiny as they charted their own.