I Smell a Short Story

Or maybe a summer blockbuster. Have you heard of the one-eyed filmmaker who's having a tiny camera inserted into his prosthetic eye so he can make a documentary about surveillance?

Okay, first: Yikes! That picture freaks me out. Second: Um . . . I think this is kind of terrifying. On the one hand, it really does mean that anyone at any time can be RECORDING WHATEVER YOU SAY OR DO. And on the other hand, how many people would want to have these for themselves? I can imagine a whole society of people who are so determined to document their every moment that they demand these eye cameras and spend their entire lives creating movies of their lives, instead of living them.

Or is that just me and my own paranoia?

The Boy

I don't think it's any secret that The Boy is a doofy little spaz, but I wanted to share a few recent examples.

#1 - C got a Sonicare toothbrush for Christmas, which The Boy fell in love with. I'm all about encouraging the kid to love dental hygiene, so I promised him I'd get us a set when I got my tax return. I did as promised (because I'm that kind of girl), and as he was brushing his teeth yesterday morning, he called to me, "Hey Mom! Come here! Look!" I went to look, and was informed, "You bought me a Sonicare toothbrush, and look: It says, 'Son, I care.'"

#2 - He got out of the shower this morning and the entire front of his head and body were visibly DRY. He had clearly done nothing but stand with his back in the spray for ten minutes. So I made him lean over the side of the tub to wash his hair. And when he stood up . . . still covered in shampoo. He's a disaster. But at least his teeth are clean.

#3 - He's writing a story called Mathmatics Mishap for some of the younger kids at his school, and illustrating it in Power Point (no idea why he's using Power Point, but whatever). Here's one page--look how cute it is:



He has to turn in the form to register for his 7th Grade Electives by the end of week. I still can't quite believe he's that old. I mean, look at #2 above! He's barely past the stage of singing, "Standing in the shower, washing my bummy, now," which he spent plenty of time doing once he was big enough to be in the shower by himself. Come to think of it, at least then he was washing something. Besides those teeth, of course.

“The Superman exists, and he’s American.”

C and I discussed it at length, and decided to take The Boy to a matinee viewing of Watchmen yesterday. We were a little unsure because of all the . . . not the violence, but the darkness. C and I are both comfortable that screen violence isn’t going to turn The Boy into a sociopath (and The Boy is in fact squeamish, so while he enjoys seeing combat and things exploding, he’s not one for blood and guts as I was at his age), but we were concerned about the way certain issues would be portrayed.

It turns out that we needn’t have worried. The film is darker than dark, and bloodier than necessary (predictably, The Boy avoided seeing all the blood by turning his face into my shoulder), but deep, too. Too deep, really, for The Boy to have gotten much of it. In fact, he admitted that sometimes he was kind of bored.

After, the three of us talked about what The Boy had taken from it, and what his thoughts were, but he wasn’t sure what to think (other than a strong desire to have seen much less blue schlong, which I can’t really fault him for). After we explained things like the way these superheroes were some of the first to be portrayed as complex (and often very screwed up) characters with layers upon layers of history and personality and ISSUES (ohmygod the ISSUES), and about the idea that no one is totally good, nor is anyone totally evil, he saw it. And I have to say that there are few Moments in Parenting for any English Major that can compare to your first discussion about Man’s Inhumanity to Man. So he saw things, and he got it, but only after the fact. We had some good discussion, and I think it was a good experience overall, but The Boy admitted later that he liked The Dark Knight much more. I can see why, because compared to Watchmen, TDK is like a toddler’s birthday party. When we got out to the parking lot, I suggested we go home and look at puppies and flowers and anything pretty.

There’s so much tension and misery. So much ugliness and fear. But still, there’s hope. And life. And goodness.

Alan Moore won’t have anything to do with this movie, but the director (the guy from 300, which I’ve neither read nor seen) seems to love Moore with complete fanboy ardor and remains very, very true to the graphic novel. Moore knows that humans a much more frail and weak and sloppy and gross than they ever want to admit to being, and the movie is no different. In fact, I think one of the characters, the “new” Nite Owl, is even drippier for a while than his counterpart in the book. The director also catches the way Moore allows that women hold humanity and life together, even if men have all the power. Watchmen never does anything to empower women, even if the movie shows that Laurie Jupiter can kick major ass, but it doesn’t bother me that much because it doesn’t necessarily denigrate women, either. In fact, it occurs to me that Alan Moore and Judd Apatow see women that same way: They both seem to think that women are awesome, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them, so they don’t do much at all.

Anyway, the movie looks right and it feels right, but sometimes it sounds a little wrong. There’s a scene, for example, where one of the main characters is standing near a bank of elevators with captains of industry including the likes of Lee Iacocca, and the tinkling elevator music is an instrumental version of the Tears for Fears song Everybody Wants to Rule the World. It’s a silly moment and a break in the tension that I don’t remember ever getting when I read the book.

Those few silly moments aside, though, Watchmen is no fun. No fun at all. It’s moving, and it may even be important, but the only real fun I had with it was in discussing it with C and The Boy after. That, and watching the trailer for the X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie. GAH! I was so excited by the trailer that I think I may have floated up out of my seat a little bit! I can’t WAIT for that one!! We also saw trailers for Pixar’s Up, which looks adorable, a new Seth Rogan movie that looks like other Seth Rogan movies, the new Star Trek, and the new Terminator. Eh, and meh. I’d see them, but I probably wouldn’t want to pay for it.

I would, however, pay for a t-shirt with Sally Jupiter on it.

Catching Up with Depeche Mode

Not really. I'm not Depeche Mode, although I did see them in concert that one time when I lived in Detroit. I had a crap time, by the way, mostly because of a girl I used to call Sunshine Super Shannon. As the young kids say: Bish plz.

Anyway, you're catching up with me. I spent the best Saturday morning ever watching the last episodes of Season 2 of Angel (so much fun was going on with Angel while so much horrible stuff was happening with Buffy--it must have been marvelous comic relief for those who watched both when they originally aired), working on my mom's sweater, and talking on the phone.

I usually hate talking on the phone, for the most part, but an old friend--and I mean old enough to have raced me through second grade homework assignments--called because "he needed to hear a sane woman's voice." See, he's a state cop and Marine, and had spent two weeks away doing Marine stuff only to come home for 24 hours before having to go away again for cop stuff. He was calling me from the road, though, having had to leave the cop stuff early because his wife called him, "crying and having a breakdown."

I'm not quite sure what he expected to hear from me, but I had to give him the speech about how hard it is to be a mom when you love your kids so much, want to be perfect for them, feel so lucky to have them and be able to take good care of them, and yet feel horribly guilty because all you want is for them to LEAVE YOU THE HELL ALONE. Because good, grateful mommies never want to do anything more than be with their loving broods.

And then I reminded him how, sure, there's pressure on dads/husbands, but that the fatherhood bar is set SO LOW that all men have to do is change the odd diaper, cook a meal, and show up to a school function, and they're GREAT DADS.

Ugh.

I think I schooled him. I actually think I got through to him a little bit. Here's hoping.

And here's the sweater so far:

This is the back, and there's still a long way to go. See the pattern up in the corner? That's what it's supposed to end up looking like. Believe it or not, I'm actually starting to think maybe it will.

And now I have to have some lunch and get some housework, and then figure out what to make for dinner. We have a new employee at work who moved here from Miami. She'd been staying in a long-term hotel deal, but now she's in her apartment. The trouble with that is that her FURNITURE isn't in her apartment yet. Poor thing. She doesn't know a soul here besides the people we work with, so . . . I'm thinking she might enjoy an evening of eating something home-cooked (not to mention getting to eat it while sitting at a table).

Off to the grocery store . . .

“Oh, my buddy Tim Bass he's working pumping gas. And he makes two fifty for an hour . . .”

I couldn’t wait to get a job when I was in high school, and the job I wanted more than anything was to be able to work at the tiny gas station and mini-mart about two miles from home. It had two self-serve pumps and a little store that could only hold about three people at once. You could buy gas, cigarettes, soda, and Beeman’s Gum, which was pretty much all I wanted to buy when I was sixteen.

I had such fabulous daydreams about working there—I could sit behind the counter at the register, drinking bottles of Mountain Dew (it came in fat green glass bottles then, wrapped in a thin layer of foam that was very pleasant to peel off and shred), smoking my Winston Reds (because you could still smoke indoors then), listening to the radio, and reading to my heart’s content. I could sell people coffee, pop, snacks, quarts of oil, and gallons of wiper fluid. I’d be the keeper of the keys to the bathroom. My friends could visit me while I was working, and there would be no shortage of hot men to ogle and dispense change to.

It was clearly the perfect job, but my mother was convinced I’d get robbed, raped or killed, and wouldn’t even let me apply. Alas.

Sometimes I think I’d still like to have that job, although now I’d skip the cigarettes and Mountain Dew, and rotate in some knitting along with the reading. Should I be embarrassed that I have little enough ambition that getting paid to read, knit, ogle men, and work a cash register still appeals to me? Was my education truly a waste?

I Get Too Hungry for Dinner at 8

“The threat of the male gaze has been making many women and gay men ill for years, but men’s magazines show that the threat has now become general enough to be counted a cultural worry. All men now experience other men’s looks, and that is one of the anxieties these magazines sometimes exploit and sometimes suppress.” –Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books

I spent a good part of my life being influenced by “the male gaze.” My dad had no idea how to contend with my mother, let alone how to relate to a daughter, so it became important to me at an early age to be fairly “boyish.” I wouldn’t wear dresses or skirts. I asked for and received toy guns, learned to use a grease gun and helped to reload shotgun shells. I had by own compound bow and .22 rifle. I played ball, climbed trees, insisted on a red boy’s bike with a thing on the handle that made noises like a revving motorcycle, I picked up and/or touched all manner of gross things, and I never, ever cried in front of anyone. Why?

Sometimes I honestly liked the butch things I did, had, and wore, but mostly I just wanted to be with my dad. I wanted him to like me and to approve of me, and it just seemed like the more boyish I was, the better he’d like it.

Don’t get me wrong—he never, ever gave off any kind of “I Must Have a SON” vibe, (which is a good thing, as his only children are my sister and me), but I knew he wouldn’t be comfortable playing with dolls or having tea parties, so . . . I learned to do what I knew he’d be comfortable with. I knew my mom loved me and would want to spend time with me no matter what, so I guess I didn’t make much of an effort on her behalf. The Catholic school girl deep inside of me actually feels guilty for that, but I suppose that’s another post.

So, despite the fact that I spent a lot of time hiding out in my room reading library books, encyclopedia volumes, Erma Bombeck, Richard Simmons diet books, and whatever trashy paperbacks I could get my hands on (also fodder for another blog post), I spent most of one summer filthy, playing with the neighborhood boys and wearing a blue tank top with the number 44 on it almost daily. Despite the fact that I spent an entire winter creating a set of standardized tests (the Iowa Test of Basic Skills) on graph paper, complete with answer key, to administer to my sister and the neighbor girl when I forced them to play School with me the following summer, I asked my dad to take me to The Club with him, where I sat on a bar stool drinking Cokes, listening to my dad and his friends talk about cars and guns while they drank beer, smoked, and spit tobacco into empty bottles. Despite the fact that I used my sister’s Barbies and Strawberry Shortcake dolls to dramatize many a girly (and often Valley of the Dolls-type) storyline, I begged my parents to let me get a hunting license on my 12th birthday.

Sometimes I was Who I Was, but often I was the kid I thought my dad would want to spend time with. In truth, I learned a lot of good stuff. I know how to use guns and hunt and fish. I know how to change the oil in my car (although I pay someone to do that for me), and I know how to change a tire. I can drive a tractor hauling a wagon, IN REVERSE. I know how to use tools, how to read a map, and I can deal with cleaning up dead birds or other creatures who end up meeting their doom in my house or yard without outward signs of revulsion. My sister, however, who didn’t play The Perfect Little Son, can’t do ANY of those things.

So there’s that.

But I guess my point is that I’ve been aware that men are/might be looking at me from a very early age, and that I let it be important to me from a very early age. It evolved, as you can imagine, into wanting to be physically attractive to men, which involved any number of corrective garments, weight-loss programs, skin-care regimens, hair goo, and hours in front of a mirror. Plucking, poking, brushing, curling . . . all to (frankly) little avail.

Happily, I’m getting to a point where . . . Eff that. You know? I’m slowly becoming happy and confident enough in myself that I don’t care who is or isn’t looking at me, or what they might see. I only like wearing make-up for special occasions. So there. I don’t like fussing with my hair, so it’s cut to look nice without fussing. Take that. I’m clean and comfortable, and beyond that, all anyone should care about is how well I behave. So HA, ha, beauty industry. Bite me, anyone who thinks I should look like a model! Bite me hard.

I used to be so very grateful that I didn’t have a daughter to raise, because I couldn’t imagine getting her through it. I can see more and more evidence, though, that the quote from above is true, and that I’m going to have to be aware that getting The Boy through the fear of the gaze is going to be an issue.

I don’t want it to be that way! I want things to be more equal between men and women, of course I do, but . . . not this way! I don’t want men to have the kind of comeuppance wherein their looks have to be scrutinized and pressured and threatened! I want it to be the OTHER way! I want women to be able to have the same, “I’m so awesome that it doesn’t matter if I’m fat and have crazy hairs growing out of my ears—how can you not want me,” attitude that men do. Or used to. You know?

Not Much, You?

I finally forked over the $25 to become a lifetime member of Library Thing, which means I can finally get the rest of my books cataloged. I stalled out with the 200 books they allow you for free a long time ago, and then something made me think about it yesterday and I gave them my money. You know what's especially cool? Once all my books are actually entered, I'll be able to use my Touch to check the catalog even when I'm not at home. Oh, technology. How you entertain me. Look at the little screen shot I made on the Touch--so cute!


I can make the pages bigger so I can actually SEE them, of course, but I think they look so tiny and pretty like that. I'm a dork.

Here are two more pics for your viewing excitement. The first one is the hat I'm giving my dad for his 60th birthday, as modeled by The Boy.


And this is an example of the Tiny Bowknot stitch, which had been confounding me. Hooray for me for figuring it out, and hooray for the book Knitting in Plain English, which helped me get there.


This is just the guage swatch, but the tiny bowknots are supposed to become a cardigan/spring jacket for my mom. I've never made a sweater, so . . . please cross your fingers for me.