Being woefully behind in watching Oscar-nominated movies, I went to Redbox and got the only qualifying one in there. Blue Jasmine, if you haven't seen it, is about a posh woman who falls from greatness and has to move in with her not-posh sister. Cate Blanchett plays Jasmine and spends the movie in varying degrees of nervous breakdown. (She never talks to Frodo, not once!)
Her character is isolated from everybody else in the movie. I don't sympathize with her character. The audience is not, generally, going to feel sorry that she cannot be very very rich anymore. Her loss is only vaguely understandable. We watch her in her isolation.
But there's one part in the movie where I felt like she got all of us. She's sitting down across a booth from her sister's two kids. They've heard some things about her; she got picked up in the street, talking to herself. She admits to it, over her Stoli martini, drunk like in the rest of the movie. She tells them she had to have electro-shock therapy to set her brain right. Why? They ask her.
Jasmine: There's only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.
She speaks for us exactly once, and it's awesome.
3.02.2014
2.26.2014
8/52
feb 19. i asked the baby to smile. i'm not good with babies.
feb 20. dad working
feb 21. alberta st, portland
feb 22. mama cookin
feb 23. train ride home
feb 24. back to school view
feb 25. rei trip
7/52
feb 12. laundry day
feb 13. this was a first
feb 14. San Francisco at night
feb 15. friends! bottomless mimosas!
feb 16. mission district in SF
feb 17. on a hike we saw this
feb 18. san fran at daytime
6/52
feb 05. the day the principal bought pizza for everyone in the school. (Also the day of the Seahawks' parade)
feb 06. reflections
feb 07. so close!
feb 08. some snow
feb 09. sunday checklist
feb 10. He's okay
feb 11. fridge
2.23.2014
A Quick Recovery
This spring I get to go visit Lindsay in Botswana, which is very exciting. I'm traveling alone, though, and I can't help but think of the movie Taken. What if I am captured by human traffickers on my international travels? According to the movie, I would need an interested party with a particular set of skills to come rescue me. And although I'm drugged, beaten up, and prostituted, in the end it will be fine because I will be rescued and, like, all better immediately.
I don't like that movie. The daughter, the one that's taken, goes through a horrible ordeal and comes out on the other side completely unchanged. She's like the ark in Raiders, been in a pit of snakes but no worse for wear.
Many movies, TV episodes, and video games use the damsel in distress as an easy plot device to motivate a central male character. Stories revolving around a rescue have a couple advantages. The central character's motivation tends to be clearcut. The high stakes are built-in as are the obstacles. The whole story structure can fall pretty quickly easily into place, leaving the author room to get on with the action. Rescue and even damsel stories are not bad in and of themselves, but they commonly make the mistake of treating the rescuee - the object of the story - like just an object.
Where this mistake bothers me the most is in the "return" part of the story. The object of rescue, having endured enough terrors - because, remember, the captured person needs to be in serious danger in order to motivate the protagonist and raise the stakes - is rescued, and we see them return to normal in the matter of a few closing minutes.
I was disappointed by an instance of this in a recent (for me) episode of Angel. (Now, the writers on Angel go to the damsel well all the time - Cordelia, as far as we can tell, exists in order to be captured and rescued.) "Billy", season 3 episode 6, is about a man (Billy) who imparts violent misogynist rage upon other men by touching them. The central moral question to the episode is whether Billy is infecting these men or rather just uninhibiting them - the violence and the rage against women being already inside them, innate.
It's one of the first episodes of that show where I've seen some promise of it reaching the heights of Buffy in its ability to blow up real evils and explore them through fantasy. It's an exciting episode.
Wesley comes into contact with Billy, and later, when Fred is stuck alone with him, he starts to attack her. He pursues her in hopes of killing her, his friend, potential love interest, and colleague. It's Amy Acker and she's just a little thing.
When the impact of Billy wears off of Wesley, Wesley is horrified, embarrassed, and devastated (as it goes) by what he's put Fred through. He quits the team. He won't leave his apartment. He's returned (see wheel) and changed. Fred, on the other hand, doesn't get a scene like that. She doesn't get to change. We see her, after the ordeal, showing up at Wesley's door, forgiving him and asking him to come back to work. She's been attacked, verbally and physically, by a best friend, and she doesn't miss a beat.
I want a scene where she can't sleep, where she cries at night, where she wakes up with night terrors. Then have her go and forgive Wesley. Make it hard for her because it would be (hard) if she were a person. Give her real pain and real courage. Make it her story, too.
Beyond not giving female characters real shakes at personhood, I dislike the quick recovery of formerly damseled characters because I worry it impacts our idea of how long it takes real people to heal after traumatic events. It's difficult to support someone through that process, and with our society's general discomfort around victims, I'm afraid it's easy to think, "Can't you be like what's-her-name? Get over it, already."
I don't like that movie. The daughter, the one that's taken, goes through a horrible ordeal and comes out on the other side completely unchanged. She's like the ark in Raiders, been in a pit of snakes but no worse for wear.
Many movies, TV episodes, and video games use the damsel in distress as an easy plot device to motivate a central male character. Stories revolving around a rescue have a couple advantages. The central character's motivation tends to be clearcut. The high stakes are built-in as are the obstacles. The whole story structure can fall pretty quickly easily into place, leaving the author room to get on with the action. Rescue and even damsel stories are not bad in and of themselves, but they commonly make the mistake of treating the rescuee - the object of the story - like just an object.
Where this mistake bothers me the most is in the "return" part of the story. The object of rescue, having endured enough terrors - because, remember, the captured person needs to be in serious danger in order to motivate the protagonist and raise the stakes - is rescued, and we see them return to normal in the matter of a few closing minutes.
 |
| Narrative Wheel |
It's one of the first episodes of that show where I've seen some promise of it reaching the heights of Buffy in its ability to blow up real evils and explore them through fantasy. It's an exciting episode.
Wesley comes into contact with Billy, and later, when Fred is stuck alone with him, he starts to attack her. He pursues her in hopes of killing her, his friend, potential love interest, and colleague. It's Amy Acker and she's just a little thing.
When the impact of Billy wears off of Wesley, Wesley is horrified, embarrassed, and devastated (as it goes) by what he's put Fred through. He quits the team. He won't leave his apartment. He's returned (see wheel) and changed. Fred, on the other hand, doesn't get a scene like that. She doesn't get to change. We see her, after the ordeal, showing up at Wesley's door, forgiving him and asking him to come back to work. She's been attacked, verbally and physically, by a best friend, and she doesn't miss a beat.
I want a scene where she can't sleep, where she cries at night, where she wakes up with night terrors. Then have her go and forgive Wesley. Make it hard for her because it would be (hard) if she were a person. Give her real pain and real courage. Make it her story, too.
Beyond not giving female characters real shakes at personhood, I dislike the quick recovery of formerly damseled characters because I worry it impacts our idea of how long it takes real people to heal after traumatic events. It's difficult to support someone through that process, and with our society's general discomfort around victims, I'm afraid it's easy to think, "Can't you be like what's-her-name? Get over it, already."
2.11.2014
2.09.2014
Ground Story
I'm not sure whether to call this "groundwork" or "backstory". It's like the thing you hate the most in any superhero movie. But I want to get it down because I have some other posts I want to write that depend on you knowing where I'm coming from. Also, if I don't write it down somewhere, I might forget, and that would be confusing.
Okay, second disclaimer: this is going to be a religious-based post. I know that's not usually what we do here on the Westovarian, and, trust me, I'd rather write about Angel or Buffy or anything else featuring David Boreanaz. (I have a weakness.) But the whole point of the blog is, informally and communally, to try to figure out what becoming an adult, and living in general, looks like. So let me get this out of the way - I'm sure Annie and Rachel have whole different takes - so I can get back to just writing about television.
Birth
I was born and grew up in a Christian home of the mega(ish)-protestant persuasion. My family was involved in the church, and while, at home, my parents weren't really into bringing up the whole God thing, many of my friends and the people I respected were church folks.
Growing Up
I was one of those kids who was a pain in the ass at home, but a DREAM to all other adults. I was good at school - I could sit still and maintain eye-contact - and I got a lot of my self-worth through these interactions with adults in authority. Being at church was no different, and when those adults told me I should be a good Christian, you had better bet your butt that I was going to become a great Christian.
High School
Oh boy, by this point, I had really made it. I remember thinking, "This is it. I have everything figured out." I knew all the steps. Step 1. Respect yourself - don't be like 95% percent of girls, all touching boys and stuff. Step 2. Morality - do it. Step 3. Support the sinner, not the sin. Step 4. Keep a level head and keep it together. Step 5 - Step etc. Be a pillar in the community. Go to church. Pray. And lots of other stuff. You know, be close to God. It took a lot of effort, but I was nailing it.
My senior year this started coming apart for me. I saw the Mel Gibson Jesus film and was staggered by the brutality. I had been taught that I was supposed to have a relationship with Jesus like he was my best friend. But here was a guy getting whipped and taking it because he loved me (?), and his Dad was letting it happen. I'm sorry, that's weird. That is not the human, familiar-y love it was pitched to me as.
I also read through the Bible with my church small group. I was okay with all those mass killings in the Old Testament, but when we got to the Sermon on the Mount, I started getting angry. Jesus, in there, tells us to be perfect - "Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. You must
be complete in unconditional love as I am towards you and am towards the world." Wait a second - I knew all the steps to being a Christian, and they were hard, but I was doing them. What kind of guy would Jesus have to be to tell his followers to do something impossible. Actually impossible.
Jesus would do things that were cryptic. He'd refuse to answer the disciples questions and often say things in order not to be understood. ("The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing by never understanding [...]") As far as I could tell, he was a big, fat (okay, skinny) jerk who wouldn't like me very much.
I graduated High School and went away to a Christian college still mad about that.
College
Freshman and Sophomore year: still trucking along in my religious life but without much gusto. About the Jesus thing, I was generally mad but in a background-y sort of way.
Junior and Senior year: bad things happened. I'm not going to say more about those things other than, because of them, I started to really fall apart. I had lived my entire life in a safe, stable environment until my junior year of college. That I hit all those good-Christian steps in high school, I attributed to me. I had value as a person because I was level headed. My identity was wrapped up in being independent, supportive of other people, an accomplished student, and a responsible individual. Junior and senior year, the circumstances I had taken for granted my entire life changed. All those things I prided myself in went away.
I went to counseling.
[I have to say, throughout everything, the community at Whitworth (my college) could not have been more supportive. Friends, other students, administrative staff, and faculty cut me a lot of breaks. I don't think a lot of people who go through hard things get that kind of communal backing, and as hard as that time was for me (it was pretty bad), it would have been a lot different, a lot worse, without the help of those people. ]
I told my therapist about how much I was letting myself down. About how crazy I felt. I cried a lot. She told me that, at some point, it had to be enough that I was a child of God.
Her advice didn't help me at the time. What helped me was drugs, by which I mean antidepressants. The advice would help later.
College, Bonus Lap
I went to an extra semester of college, and, halfway through, I was able to go off the antidepressants. What I had was a circumstance-based serotonin depletion that about six-months worth of some sweet pill was able to fix. My experience of life got a lot better.
Mitch and some of my Theology-major-y friends talked about God stuff all through college. They threw around some ideas like, "It's God that matters, not us or our relationship with him" and "It's more important what happens now than what happens after we die".
One of these friends happened to be a guy, Lee, I grew up with in church and who also traveled halfway across the country in order to go to college at Whitworth. He died, suddenly, of an enlarged heart during my bonus year in college. (I wrote a thing and a thing about that several years ago.) His funeral was what you'd expect for a young person, packed and extra sad. Lee was studying to be a pastor, and the impact of his fledgling people-centered ministry was extolled again and again.
Later
It was because of Lee's funeral - and the latent experience of all these other things - that my faith began to change. I knew, from experience, that I could no longer rely on myself to be a good or stable person. I had seen how my circumstances and my brain chemistry affected my behavior and my ability to function. Plus, my friend had just died, and nobody talked about how many times he went to church or how "good" of a person he was. All anybody seemed to care about was their relationship to him. How much he cared for them and vice versa.
What I Believe
It has to be enough that I am a child of God. I don't have value because of the things I do. (I would do horrible things under some specific set of circumstances.) I have value because God has made me and loves me, even though it makes no sense to me.
There are two kickers to that: 1) not having value because of my own actions extends to the action of asking Jesus into my heart. "Asking Jesus into one's heart" is what, in Protestant Christianity, separates the people who go to hell from the ones who are saved. I no longer think that's how it works. 2) If my value - my entire value - comes out of being a child of God, then everybody is just as valuable as me. God made everybody and loves everybody - from a hell perspective, whoever he chooses is entirely up to him. God makes us eternal. He makes us matter.
Because it's not up to me, whether I go to heaven or whether I have value, the only thing that's left on the line is meaning. Am I going to have meaning in my life or am I just going to waste time? Since other people have value because they are children of God. I figure the way to have meaning in my life is to love other people, to love God (which I am, admittedly, still pretty fuzzy on) and love other people.
What I like about my beliefs is that they're pretty portable. There's no fear of being "tarnished" by other people who have different opinions than me. There's no pressure to evangelize. No agenda other than to show up for people around me. It's a straight and narrow path that I can take off into the bushes all I like.
What Now?
You'd think I'd be super tolerant with my new shiny set of beliefs. But when my brothers visited me last month, I ended up getting in a conversation about religion with one of them and shouting, "Your beliefs are bullshit!" when he brought up some "love the sinner not the sin" arguments that I recognized from my past. It's not good.
And what I believe in doesn't really come with a community. There are no bylaws saying that we all need to show up once a week to worship together or else we're going to hell. I don't even know if other people think this way, as I avoid bringing up religion, as a rule.
But, on this blog, I want to talk about what doing life looks like for me and, hopefully, what it looks like for other people, too. So I hope I've explained well enough where I'm coming from, what I've had to work with, so far.
Thanks for listening.
Okay, second disclaimer: this is going to be a religious-based post. I know that's not usually what we do here on the Westovarian, and, trust me, I'd rather write about Angel or Buffy or anything else featuring David Boreanaz. (I have a weakness.) But the whole point of the blog is, informally and communally, to try to figure out what becoming an adult, and living in general, looks like. So let me get this out of the way - I'm sure Annie and Rachel have whole different takes - so I can get back to just writing about television.
Birth
I was born and grew up in a Christian home of the mega(ish)-protestant persuasion. My family was involved in the church, and while, at home, my parents weren't really into bringing up the whole God thing, many of my friends and the people I respected were church folks.
Growing Up
I was one of those kids who was a pain in the ass at home, but a DREAM to all other adults. I was good at school - I could sit still and maintain eye-contact - and I got a lot of my self-worth through these interactions with adults in authority. Being at church was no different, and when those adults told me I should be a good Christian, you had better bet your butt that I was going to become a great Christian.
High School
Oh boy, by this point, I had really made it. I remember thinking, "This is it. I have everything figured out." I knew all the steps. Step 1. Respect yourself - don't be like 95% percent of girls, all touching boys and stuff. Step 2. Morality - do it. Step 3. Support the sinner, not the sin. Step 4. Keep a level head and keep it together. Step 5 - Step etc. Be a pillar in the community. Go to church. Pray. And lots of other stuff. You know, be close to God. It took a lot of effort, but I was nailing it.
My senior year this started coming apart for me. I saw the Mel Gibson Jesus film and was staggered by the brutality. I had been taught that I was supposed to have a relationship with Jesus like he was my best friend. But here was a guy getting whipped and taking it because he loved me (?), and his Dad was letting it happen. I'm sorry, that's weird. That is not the human, familiar-y love it was pitched to me as.
I also read through the Bible with my church small group. I was okay with all those mass killings in the Old Testament, but when we got to the Sermon on the Mount, I started getting angry. Jesus, in there, tells us to be perfect - "Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. You must
be complete in unconditional love as I am towards you and am towards the world." Wait a second - I knew all the steps to being a Christian, and they were hard, but I was doing them. What kind of guy would Jesus have to be to tell his followers to do something impossible. Actually impossible.
Jesus would do things that were cryptic. He'd refuse to answer the disciples questions and often say things in order not to be understood. ("The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing by never understanding [...]") As far as I could tell, he was a big, fat (okay, skinny) jerk who wouldn't like me very much.
I graduated High School and went away to a Christian college still mad about that.
College
Freshman and Sophomore year: still trucking along in my religious life but without much gusto. About the Jesus thing, I was generally mad but in a background-y sort of way.
Junior and Senior year: bad things happened. I'm not going to say more about those things other than, because of them, I started to really fall apart. I had lived my entire life in a safe, stable environment until my junior year of college. That I hit all those good-Christian steps in high school, I attributed to me. I had value as a person because I was level headed. My identity was wrapped up in being independent, supportive of other people, an accomplished student, and a responsible individual. Junior and senior year, the circumstances I had taken for granted my entire life changed. All those things I prided myself in went away.
I went to counseling.
[I have to say, throughout everything, the community at Whitworth (my college) could not have been more supportive. Friends, other students, administrative staff, and faculty cut me a lot of breaks. I don't think a lot of people who go through hard things get that kind of communal backing, and as hard as that time was for me (it was pretty bad), it would have been a lot different, a lot worse, without the help of those people. ]
I told my therapist about how much I was letting myself down. About how crazy I felt. I cried a lot. She told me that, at some point, it had to be enough that I was a child of God.
Her advice didn't help me at the time. What helped me was drugs, by which I mean antidepressants. The advice would help later.
College, Bonus Lap
I went to an extra semester of college, and, halfway through, I was able to go off the antidepressants. What I had was a circumstance-based serotonin depletion that about six-months worth of some sweet pill was able to fix. My experience of life got a lot better.
Mitch and some of my Theology-major-y friends talked about God stuff all through college. They threw around some ideas like, "It's God that matters, not us or our relationship with him" and "It's more important what happens now than what happens after we die".
One of these friends happened to be a guy, Lee, I grew up with in church and who also traveled halfway across the country in order to go to college at Whitworth. He died, suddenly, of an enlarged heart during my bonus year in college. (I wrote a thing and a thing about that several years ago.) His funeral was what you'd expect for a young person, packed and extra sad. Lee was studying to be a pastor, and the impact of his fledgling people-centered ministry was extolled again and again.
Later
It was because of Lee's funeral - and the latent experience of all these other things - that my faith began to change. I knew, from experience, that I could no longer rely on myself to be a good or stable person. I had seen how my circumstances and my brain chemistry affected my behavior and my ability to function. Plus, my friend had just died, and nobody talked about how many times he went to church or how "good" of a person he was. All anybody seemed to care about was their relationship to him. How much he cared for them and vice versa.
What I Believe
It has to be enough that I am a child of God. I don't have value because of the things I do. (I would do horrible things under some specific set of circumstances.) I have value because God has made me and loves me, even though it makes no sense to me.
There are two kickers to that: 1) not having value because of my own actions extends to the action of asking Jesus into my heart. "Asking Jesus into one's heart" is what, in Protestant Christianity, separates the people who go to hell from the ones who are saved. I no longer think that's how it works. 2) If my value - my entire value - comes out of being a child of God, then everybody is just as valuable as me. God made everybody and loves everybody - from a hell perspective, whoever he chooses is entirely up to him. God makes us eternal. He makes us matter.
Because it's not up to me, whether I go to heaven or whether I have value, the only thing that's left on the line is meaning. Am I going to have meaning in my life or am I just going to waste time? Since other people have value because they are children of God. I figure the way to have meaning in my life is to love other people, to love God (which I am, admittedly, still pretty fuzzy on) and love other people.
What I like about my beliefs is that they're pretty portable. There's no fear of being "tarnished" by other people who have different opinions than me. There's no pressure to evangelize. No agenda other than to show up for people around me. It's a straight and narrow path that I can take off into the bushes all I like.
What Now?
You'd think I'd be super tolerant with my new shiny set of beliefs. But when my brothers visited me last month, I ended up getting in a conversation about religion with one of them and shouting, "Your beliefs are bullshit!" when he brought up some "love the sinner not the sin" arguments that I recognized from my past. It's not good.
And what I believe in doesn't really come with a community. There are no bylaws saying that we all need to show up once a week to worship together or else we're going to hell. I don't even know if other people think this way, as I avoid bringing up religion, as a rule.
But, on this blog, I want to talk about what doing life looks like for me and, hopefully, what it looks like for other people, too. So I hope I've explained well enough where I'm coming from, what I've had to work with, so far.
Thanks for listening.
"Sleep No More! Macbeth doth murder sleep!"
I was drawn to the witches since I was a witch when I was in Macbeth and because of that I had a lot of intimate moments where I was involved in the story. If you show that you're open, they interact with you. I helped one of the witches wash blood off her shoulders, I dressed a man and helped him down the stairs, I got dragged into a room with a tea party and had a private conversation with the Queen Witch, I ate candy with the taxidermist... I can't even express how cool it all was.
The point is: Go See Sleep No More. Do it.
2.05.2014
5/52
jan 29. my vocabulary list from period 5
jan 30. broadway
jan 31. bond fire with friends on a beach
feb 01. nate!
feb 02. hikes
feb 03. trying to trick kids into learning their vocab
jan 04. My terrible diagram of the beginning of Hamlet Act I Sc II
1.30.2014
Dirty Laundry
Alright, so this happened a couple apartment buildings down from mine, yesterday evening at 7 p.m.: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-rogers-park-sexual-assault-20140130,0,46020.story
A 24-year-old woman was sexually assaulted in her apartment's laundry room. I've gone from feeling a bit sick about it - I was walking, alone, in front of that building, at 6:50 - to angry. SHE WAS DOING HER FUCKING LAUNDRY!
I made a distasteful joke to my friend about how it's incidents like this are why I don't do laundry. Her response was, "Actually, I hope […] you have Mitchie do it. Geeze 2014 and this is how we're empowered: delegating household chores to men so we don't get raped."
And - I don't know this, but let me project - if they catch the man who did this, and if they decide to prosecute, the defense will take the following route:
Defense: Were you drinking that night?
And what if she had a beer with dinner?
Defense: Where did you get the beer?
Possibly the supermarket.
Defense: How intoxicated were you, exactly?
Defense: Why were you doing laundry at that time of night?
Defense: Do you ever invite men over to your apartment?
And so on. Regardless of how unrelated her activities were, that night, to a stranger attacking in her laundry room, the defense will pry at her life and turn it upside down to let everything fall out - all its minutia and ordinariness. And the defense will do this because what else can they do? And also because it might work. She's both victim and witness, after all - the weight of the whole trial rests on her - and the jury might find her guilty of doing anything while female.
At some point, I really hope we as a society start taking sexual assault seriously because when we talk about gender equality, we talk about the difference in pay or about traditional gender roles. We rarely discuss the impact on women of being under the threat of violence, 24/7. We get on with our lives and take our chances.
1.28.2014
4/52
jan 22. brain food! #finalsweek
jan 23. i came home to fresh air and jon playing guitar. it was nice.
jan 24. solo dance party with the postal service
jan 25. volcano choir
jan 26. a jon fox breakfast
jan 27. visiting my mentor teacher
jan 28. it's been one of those days when cooking is the highlight of the day.
Sex at Dawn
There's cake in the house.
"I'm reading this book" I said, for weeks, to whoever I was with when I ran out of other things to say. I finished the book, and now its newly learned contents are bumming me out. So I'm eating the cake.
The book is Sex at Dawn by Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. (I just went to their website and saw that they have some readers photos posted. In these photos, people pose nude with the book. Pretty weird. But of course, if I published a book and people posed nude with it, I'd be stoked.)
I recommend the book. It's an anthropology-ey take on what human's prehistoric sex lives must have been like, as well as their lives in general. It's engaging. There are jokes, which end up being a lot better than what you would expect from an anthropologist.
While the book does talk a lot about sex, its overarching argument, I would say, is that prehistoric people lived in a way that was different - and notably better - than how we think they did. Since the length of human history is much shorter than human prehistory, our biology adapted mainly under those prehistoric conditions. It's what "natural' to us.
In prehistoric times, Ryan and Jetha argue, people lived in small (~150 individuals) tight-knit bands where fierce egalitarianism was the law. Everything was shared - food, protection, communal responsibilities. Personal property was at a low, which makes sense when you think that everything they owned, as nomadic people, they had to carry. (Anybody who's gone backpacking can tell you how soon all that crap you packed doesn't seem to matter as much.) Adults would have several simultaneous sexual relationships going over time, which meant that sex was not commodified, which meant that women were allowed to be people rather than fiercely guarded property. Resources were plentiful, wars extremely rare, and everyone had a community to belong to.
The big bad, according to the book, was the emergence of agriculture. It cut down on the variety of foods people ate. Droubts and pestilences hit harder because people couldn't move somewhere that wasn't affected. The concentrations of people and livestock, together, was a boon for disease. Upper body strength was a distinct advantage for the first time in that it was necessary to manipulate a plow. Men sought to control female sexuality because they had personal property and didn't want to pass it on to someone else's son. On top of all that, many children were needed to maintain the farms, and with many more children, more farmland was needed in order to feed them. The population skyrocketed. Wars started to break out.
It's hitting me pretty hard, right now, because Ryan and Jetha's prehistoric world takes care of some of my least favorite parts of contemporary life:
1. The high percentage of unhappy/broken marriages.
2. Our isolation from and anonymity among one another, especially as adults.
3. That we have to go to work so goddamn much.
4. Gender inequality and the persecution of women and girls throughout the world based on their sex.
5. The negative impact we have on the environment.
As far as fixing issues 1 - 5, though, the book is unhelpful. One can't very well, at this point, start a campaign against agriculture. It's bothering me, making me sad, the ways in which life seems stacked against human happiness and how impossible it seems to change that.
It reminds me of an "Angel" episode I saw the other day. Angel is being grumpy/rampage-y, but not outright evil. (He gets a shot at complexity. Woohoo!) He rides an elevator to hell, vowing to kill evil at the source, uproot and banish it, but he finds that when he steps out of the elevator he's back where he started, on Earth, where evil is mixed up in every bit of us. He has an epiphany (and a face bruise):
But even believing that kind actions - that loving other people - is what matters doesn't make me feel better. How can I feel good about small actions and choices when what it seems like what the world needs is a huge structural shift - a trip through time to take agriculture away? I guess I'll feel better once all this book stuff fades a bit from my mind. Until then, I'll just keep eating cake for breakfast. Cake at Dawn.
"I'm reading this book" I said, for weeks, to whoever I was with when I ran out of other things to say. I finished the book, and now its newly learned contents are bumming me out. So I'm eating the cake.
The book is Sex at Dawn by Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. (I just went to their website and saw that they have some readers photos posted. In these photos, people pose nude with the book. Pretty weird. But of course, if I published a book and people posed nude with it, I'd be stoked.)
I recommend the book. It's an anthropology-ey take on what human's prehistoric sex lives must have been like, as well as their lives in general. It's engaging. There are jokes, which end up being a lot better than what you would expect from an anthropologist.
While the book does talk a lot about sex, its overarching argument, I would say, is that prehistoric people lived in a way that was different - and notably better - than how we think they did. Since the length of human history is much shorter than human prehistory, our biology adapted mainly under those prehistoric conditions. It's what "natural' to us.
In prehistoric times, Ryan and Jetha argue, people lived in small (~150 individuals) tight-knit bands where fierce egalitarianism was the law. Everything was shared - food, protection, communal responsibilities. Personal property was at a low, which makes sense when you think that everything they owned, as nomadic people, they had to carry. (Anybody who's gone backpacking can tell you how soon all that crap you packed doesn't seem to matter as much.) Adults would have several simultaneous sexual relationships going over time, which meant that sex was not commodified, which meant that women were allowed to be people rather than fiercely guarded property. Resources were plentiful, wars extremely rare, and everyone had a community to belong to.
The big bad, according to the book, was the emergence of agriculture. It cut down on the variety of foods people ate. Droubts and pestilences hit harder because people couldn't move somewhere that wasn't affected. The concentrations of people and livestock, together, was a boon for disease. Upper body strength was a distinct advantage for the first time in that it was necessary to manipulate a plow. Men sought to control female sexuality because they had personal property and didn't want to pass it on to someone else's son. On top of all that, many children were needed to maintain the farms, and with many more children, more farmland was needed in order to feed them. The population skyrocketed. Wars started to break out.
It's hitting me pretty hard, right now, because Ryan and Jetha's prehistoric world takes care of some of my least favorite parts of contemporary life:
1. The high percentage of unhappy/broken marriages.
2. Our isolation from and anonymity among one another, especially as adults.
3. That we have to go to work so goddamn much.
4. Gender inequality and the persecution of women and girls throughout the world based on their sex.
5. The negative impact we have on the environment.
As far as fixing issues 1 - 5, though, the book is unhelpful. One can't very well, at this point, start a campaign against agriculture. It's bothering me, making me sad, the ways in which life seems stacked against human happiness and how impossible it seems to change that.
It reminds me of an "Angel" episode I saw the other day. Angel is being grumpy/rampage-y, but not outright evil. (He gets a shot at complexity. Woohoo!) He rides an elevator to hell, vowing to kill evil at the source, uproot and banish it, but he finds that when he steps out of the elevator he's back where he started, on Earth, where evil is mixed up in every bit of us. He has an epiphany (and a face bruise):
But even believing that kind actions - that loving other people - is what matters doesn't make me feel better. How can I feel good about small actions and choices when what it seems like what the world needs is a huge structural shift - a trip through time to take agriculture away? I guess I'll feel better once all this book stuff fades a bit from my mind. Until then, I'll just keep eating cake for breakfast. Cake at Dawn.
1.26.2014
Anti-Complexity: the American Way
One
of the many things that one can say about this country is that we dislike
complexity. So we make simple solutions to everything we possibly can even when
the complex answer is obviously the correct answer or the more intriguing
answer.
- Peter Gomes
Mitch and I were up late one Friday night, and we watched the pilot episode of "The Fall", a Northern Irish crime drama about a serial killer who's scary and creepy in a sad, mundane way. (Kyle Ritter says it's the most intense thing he's ever seen! Or something.) The pilot itself was enough to give us our fair share of bleakness, so we searched Netflix for a palate cleanser.
I ended up watching some of the "Stephen Fry in America" series because I love Stephen Fry to the ends of the Earth. Mitch fell promptly asleep. The show was okay, and before this post turns into a play-by-play of what I watched on Netflix, I should get to my point. (See quote above!)
Stephen Fry met with Peter Gomes, the then pastor and professor of divinity at Harvard.
Peter Gomes is a gay black Republican pastor who, among other things in this clip, talks about American's disdain of complexity. (As if to prove his point, the title of this clip on YouTube is "He Exists: A Gay, Black Republican" like those things were antithetical.)
It reminds me of an ad that I see at my gym which reads "Is Plate Color the Key to Weight Loss?" While color might impact our dietary habits to some (small) amount, it's pretty obvious that weight loss and dietary/nutritional health is impacted by a large number of factors. No matter what "Lose Belly Fat with this one Weird Trick" internet sidebar ads try to tell you.
Then there's also the waves of nonverbal-communication obsession that seems to ebb and flow. It's relied upon in police interrogation interviews with questionable effect. It would be so simple if our bodies gave us away when we lied, but for as often as that's been in vogue, it's proved to have little to no reliability.
Gomes goes on to say, "The notion that God could have two thoughts simultaneously [...] is hard for many Americans to believe."
In the name of simplicity, Christians tend to banish large swaths of people to hell, police gather false confessions, and weight watchers buy fiestaware. But it's not just where the simple answer is wrong that's a bummer. Like Pastor Gomes pointed out, the complex answer is often the more intriguing one. In our clear cut, yes/no, way of looking at things, we're in danger of making our understanding of life rather dull.
Unless, of course, you watch "The Fall". In which case, you know that every guy you see on the street is probably a serial killer - not dull at all. Godspeed, everybody.
- Peter Gomes
Mitch and I were up late one Friday night, and we watched the pilot episode of "The Fall", a Northern Irish crime drama about a serial killer who's scary and creepy in a sad, mundane way. (Kyle Ritter says it's the most intense thing he's ever seen! Or something.) The pilot itself was enough to give us our fair share of bleakness, so we searched Netflix for a palate cleanser.
I ended up watching some of the "Stephen Fry in America" series because I love Stephen Fry to the ends of the Earth. Mitch fell promptly asleep. The show was okay, and before this post turns into a play-by-play of what I watched on Netflix, I should get to my point. (See quote above!)
Stephen Fry met with Peter Gomes, the then pastor and professor of divinity at Harvard.
Peter Gomes is a gay black Republican pastor who, among other things in this clip, talks about American's disdain of complexity. (As if to prove his point, the title of this clip on YouTube is "He Exists: A Gay, Black Republican" like those things were antithetical.)
It reminds me of an ad that I see at my gym which reads "Is Plate Color the Key to Weight Loss?" While color might impact our dietary habits to some (small) amount, it's pretty obvious that weight loss and dietary/nutritional health is impacted by a large number of factors. No matter what "Lose Belly Fat with this one Weird Trick" internet sidebar ads try to tell you.
Then there's also the waves of nonverbal-communication obsession that seems to ebb and flow. It's relied upon in police interrogation interviews with questionable effect. It would be so simple if our bodies gave us away when we lied, but for as often as that's been in vogue, it's proved to have little to no reliability.
Gomes goes on to say, "The notion that God could have two thoughts simultaneously [...] is hard for many Americans to believe."
 |
| Exhibit A |
In the name of simplicity, Christians tend to banish large swaths of people to hell, police gather false confessions, and weight watchers buy fiestaware. But it's not just where the simple answer is wrong that's a bummer. Like Pastor Gomes pointed out, the complex answer is often the more intriguing one. In our clear cut, yes/no, way of looking at things, we're in danger of making our understanding of life rather dull.
Unless, of course, you watch "The Fall". In which case, you know that every guy you see on the street is probably a serial killer - not dull at all. Godspeed, everybody.
1.21.2014
3/52
jan 15. meeting jon and our friend trevor for happy hour.
jan 16. watching the dress rehearsal for reader's theatre.
jan 17. driving home
jan 18. clowning
jan 19. i guess i should use this now. #superbowl
jan 20. eric eddy and sun and nature
jan 21. stamping books, sipping the finest, watching amy poehler
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