My last blog post was… a while ago. Many moons. So many, in fact, that I don’t remember how many precisely. As I write these posts offline and I’m too lazy to go and check, I’ll have to settle for inaccuracy. But after all those months, I’m back. And I’m writing about something interesting. I have an original topic to write about. Something no one has ever written about on their blog before. Ever.
I’m writing about the movies I just watched (by which I really mean watched two days ago).
Scintillating, no? No? Aw, man… Eh, well, original or not, it’s what I’m writing about, since I found a logical flaw with my opinion on abortion and my arguments about homosexual marriage aren’t fully concise yet. And neither of those other two topics were really original anyway, were they?
All right, so, I saw The Day After Tomorrow. What a barrel of laughs! First-rate comedy. My little brother told me afterwards it was a disaster movie, but I maintain it’s definitely a comedy.
I mean, there’s these huge tornadoes, monstrous things, touching down in Los Angeles all over the place. And helicopters are still flying?! Between the funnels? Obviously they did it for laughs. It’s the same thing with the reporters calmly filming these giant whirlwinds that are stripping high-rises of their exteriors and killing people around them left and right. We’re supposed to laugh at the absurdity. They even put a little inside joke in there, just for L.A. residents; LAX international airport—without any planes touching down or taking off, and no traffic, even though the tornadoes literally arose out of the blue within minutes.
And there were the wolves. And the fact that one of the main characters was married to a woman trying to impersonate Michael Jackson. And the Little Cancer Patient, the impersonator’s shaven-headed surrogate son who survives the end of the world. (By the way, have we never heard of triage, people? You know, the practice of culling people in a desperate situation, giving aid to those that will actually live before wasting time on walking dead boys? Except, of course, he couldn’t walk. He could lie in his bed like a very endearing but useless lump.) And the fact that the northern hemisphere rather suddenly goes subzero while the southern hemisphere is… untouched? There was simply so much put in the movie that strained credulity that they must have done it on purpose, as some kind of weird humour.
There was also the blatant preaching about global warming… don’t get me wrong, I think that greenhouse gasses are bad and so on. I just think that no one has any idea what will happen from it, and I think that this sort of climate change has happened before (little Ice Age, anyone?), and—you know, I’m going to delay my thoughts on global warming for another blog post lest this one get too long. I’m already at 477 words and counting. But the preaching and the heavy-handed irony—I just had to laugh at it.
At the same time as this was a comedy, however, it was also a tragedy. They. Burned. Books. I have never been as traumatised by a movie before. Ever. It was worse than Hostel. It was worse than Dungeons & Dragons. It was worse than Pirates!
But that’s not what I really had to say on it. I was really going to talk about something I don’t think the writers thought about when they wrote their script. Near the end of the movie, only the southernmost parts of the southern states are not covered in ice. The surviving Americans have crossed the Rio Grande and are refugees in Mexico. They would be illegal immigrants except that Mexico allowed them access after the President agreed to forgive all Latin American debt. I thought that was quite generous of the Mexican President to bargain like that on behalf of all of Latin America but at the same time I think he was quite stupid—he should have held out for more, what with the annihilation of all Americans as his bargaining chip and all.
But at any rate, there is a huge refugee camp in Mexico. It’s gigantic; it makes Hartisheik and Dadaab look like a family camping trip. And the president has set up shop there. Yes, that’s right, President not-Cheney (formerly Vice President not-Cheney, but he became president after President not-Bush died) is also a refugee. He, however, still commands the military, which saved some helicopters, and at the end of the story he sends them to New York to get the man who tried to warn him about everything. Oh, and anybody else who might have survived. Never minding how the devil they got there all the way from Mexico without refuelling (in Chinooks or similar models, too, which are supposed to have a range of about 500 miles…) or how they plan to get back, the President, in a televised broadcast that goes out exactly as the surviving people are being rescued, says that he’s done this. Specifically, he says, “I’ve ordered an immediate search and rescue mission to bring them home.”
Home. It sounds absolutely wonderful, doesn’t it? They survived, they’re alive, they’re going to go home. Everyone can be happy.
Except “home” is in freaking Mexico. What gives President not-Cheney the right to welcome them “home” to Mexico? Home implies ownership. It implies a sense of belonging, and so on and so forth. If he were simply welcoming them to the refugee camp, welcoming them back to the remnants of American society, that would be one thing. Or if he were anyone else but the leader of the aforementioned remnants, perhaps he could get away with welcoming them “home” to Mexico. But when it’s the President of the US, it seems a bit presumptuous to welcome anyone home to Mexico.
I wonder if the writers thought about that before they wrote it? Was it a feel-good line, or did they purposefully stick a statement with such shades of Manifest Destiny into the movie?
This all goes along with my pet theory about what happened the day after The Day After Tomorrow, by the way. I think that after America is frozen, the remnants of the US take over, or at least attempt to take over, northern Mexico. Yep, I think we just invade them and try to take the territory. Because President not-Cheney’s gratitude for Mexican hospitality aside, I don’t think Americans are equipped to become second-class citizens the way we make immigrants second-class in our society. I think we’d definitely have an armed uprising in that sort of situation.
Something that also occurred to me is that Catholicism and Islam would be the shapers of the future in the days after the end of the movie. White westerners being all dead (Europe was frozen too, see), China, India, Japan, &c. &c. being wiped out… We’ve got the Middle East left, and Latin America and Africa. I would love to see how that goes down, and what country fills the vacancy left by America.
But enough about The Day After Tomorrow. On to the second movie, Léon, The Professional. It’s about a hitman who takes in this girl whose entire family was shot to death right next door to him. She survived and is now going to be trained by him. And stuff. It’s really quite implausible.
The main thing I got from that movie is “never, under any circumstances, be poor in New York.” I mean, damn. People shoot off guns and everyone looks the other way? The cops try to kill people with RPGs? Holy cow. That leaves off obviously psychotic people in high positions in law enforcement with equally obvious thugs popping in and out of his office and… hmm. Well, that sounds kind of like Bow Street in the beginning but then again, this is America in the age of lawsuits and ass-covering. I really don’t think that someone quite so blatantly crazy would be high up in the D.E.A.
So there were some major flaws. But with a willing suspension of disbelief, everything works out. And it was quite a pretty movie; all the explosions were refreshingly noisy and destructive and the guns were awesome. Also Jean Reno and Natalie Portman did a fantastic job. Absolutely stunning; you could really believe that they were who they were purporting to be. Gary Oldman, however, managed to do something that I never really expected he would be able to do: he gave me to know the reason he was picked to play Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. I always thought he was exceptionally ugly for someone chosen to play a man described as being devilishly handsome, and I never understood that particular casting. Until now. He’s actually handsome in Léon! If quite insane…
I think I would have liked the movie, though, except for two things. I think the first is fairly obvious. The main character’s a hitman. Who can root for a hitman? Sure, he’s nice to the girl and he saves her and whatnot, but… he’s a hitman. His entire life revolves around killing people he doesn’t know so that he can be paid. And not even very well: one person is worth $5000. That’s the price of a life. Cheap, isn’t it? And you know he’s killed many, many people because he’s got massive credit stocked up with the mob boss (theoretically; I’d like to see him try to actually extract his money…). And he teaches the girl how to heartlessly kill people, too. Sins of the surrogate fathers or something, I suppose.
So really, how can I seriously connect with him and root for him?
I can’t. Which brings up the second problem. I can’t really connect with the little girl either. She’s twelve years old, bloodthirsty in the extreme, and can’t wait to lose her virginity. She had to walk right past her slaughtered family without batting an eye and has been beaten and stuff, but… twelve years old and she wants to kill people she doesn’t even know just for practice and she wants to have sex with a man a minimum of four times her age?
Sorry, I can’t connect with that.
No matter how tragic the back-story, there are just some things I can’t excuse. Killing with no motive but money is one of them.
So there you have it. My thoughts on these two movies, both watched and written about when I should have been studying for Algebra… oh well. Can’t study all the time, no?
I wouldn’t see either of them if you haven’t already.
03 November 2008
01 June 2008
Sunday Scribblings: Curves; or, The Witch of Agnesi
I'm back after my work-induced hiatus! I read the prompt for this week’s Sunday Scribbling, and my first reaction was “what the hell?”
Not because it’s about curves, which is what it’s about, by the way. It was because of this sentence within the prompt: “In mathematics, the concept of a curve tries to capture the intuitive idea of a geometrical one-dimensional and continuous object.”
I wondered why it would have such an odd assortment of bolded words, plus things that are not continuous are called curves all the time around the math department at my university. So I, being the genius I am, went back to the prompt and discovered that the word “Winkipedia” was in fact a link to the Wikipedia article on curves. Then for no reason I thought of L’Hospital stealing Bernoulli’s work on curves, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
So I clicked the link and was taken to the Wikipedia article and, because I’m one of those special people who actually went and got a math degree, I understood this article. I knew exactly what it meant, except it was saying this bullshit stuff about curves. It was calling paths curves! The horror! And then I got to the part in the article where it says, Terminology is also not uniform. Often, topologists use the term "path" for what we are calling a curve, and "curve" for what we are calling the image of a curve. Aha! It all makes sense now! The fact that the article author doesn’t mention that most times the “curves” referred to are actually called “continuous mappings” is niggling but then again, it was probably an unemployed math graduate writing the article during unfilled spare time in the first place. You can’t expect too much.
But anyway, reading through the article, I see that the author pops down to the subject of the length of curves. I again disagree with his notation, since it’s much easier just to introduce the notion of polygonal paths over partitions of the [a,b] interval and go from there, but in any case, I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t already know this shit understanding it. It’s like out of nowhere he starts using supremums and Epsilon notation and mentioning Lipschitz-continuous and stuff. I don’t believe that supremums are generally introduced in undergrad math until upper division, and even then there’s usually three or four prerequisite upper division courses before you get there.
And then we get to the Curves in Differential Geometry section, and the author pulls manifolds out of the ass of mathematics, neglecting that you have to go through the mouth and esophagus and stomach and the entire rest of the gastrointestinal system to get there, and says it’s basic. Kind of makes you feel stupid if you don’t get it, doesn’t it?
This is a basic notion.
Well, yeah! Sure, that’s a basic notion! If you’ve spent four years of high school chugging through the mathematics programs to AP calculus and then a further four years in college devoted to a mathematics major and you took a topology course and 1) remembered what was said, 2) had a good enough teacher or book that you understood what was meant, 3) applied yourself to internalising it and 4) planned to continue on and make mathematics a part of your daily life. Then yes, it’s a basic notation.
But if you don’t fit that profile, it might as well be magical runes to you, mightn’t it?
Then I read further and the author casually mentions Ck, a notation and concept that was introduced to me in a course that was about half last-year BS (not BA, mind, BS, more rigorous degree) math students and about half graduate students. Oh yes. Basic. Moving on to Algebraic curves, there’s another basic notion, C(K). You’ll get bonus points from me if you can tell me the core difference between Ck and C(K). The last paragraph of this part looks mightily suspicious, like it was ripped from a textbook somewhere.
And the history of curves… dude. This part is full of half-assed shit. But whatever.
Moving on to more interesting topics than the criticism of the supercilious writing of one author by another equally supercilious one, let’s talk about how the Marquis de L’Hospital stole Bernoulli’s work! The great betrayal of one mathematician by another, scintillating accounts of how all of integral calculus was… all right, fine, it was early intellectual theft and L’Hospital got away with it because he was an aristocrat, so it was also the rich taking advantage of the poor. What else is new?
What about the Witch of Agnesi? The Witch of Agnesi, the curve yx2 = a2(a – y). It looks witchy, doesn’t it? The name arises from an interesting and quite disturbing story of repressed homosexuality and horrific murder.
Maria Agnesi, a young, disaffected woman who was the only daughter of Baron Ludmillio Agnesi, had learned to speak Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew by the time she was eleven. This unnerving display of intelligence frightened her father, and he forbade her to learn anything else. Higher knowledge was restricted from her, and she was locked in her room when it was discovered that she was secretly visiting the family library at nights and learning mathematics and physics.
She escaped from the prison her family had caged her in and fled the Agnesi estate and Italy entirely, disguising herself as a man and travelling to England. Here she caught the eye of a beautiful young noblewoman, who did not know that Maria was cross-dressing, and the two began a whirlwind romance that ended in marriage and, that night, shock and horror on the part of the noblewoman when she discovered that Maria was not, in fact, a man. Maria persuaded her to keep quiet and try and give the marriage a go, but in the end, the noblewoman was not able to persuade herself that Maria was the one for her. She fell in love with a nobleman and began to have an affair with him.
Unable to catch the eye of the woman she loved, Agnesi’s life went down the drain, and she once again had to flee when her wife’s paramour found out about her, this time right ahead of the hangman’s noose and charges of homosexuality and impersonating a man. She fled to Prussia, and it was here she first killed. About to be raped, she stabbed a man in his neck and he died. She carved the last equation she had learned before she left home, yx2 = a2(a – y), into his chest. She then began a murderous killing spree that spread across Prussia and Flanders, always carving that equation into the bodies of her victims. This equation, which looked mystical to people not in the know about math, and the knowledge that she was a woman (and of course in those times any woman capable of killing so many fine, superior men must by definition be in league with the Devil) inspired people to start calling her a witch.
When she was finally captured, she gave her name as Maria Agnesi and her last words before she was burned to death were “yx2 = a2(a – y).” She was actually silenced by an arrow to the throat because people thought she was calling on the Devil, and thus was spared the pain of burning to death. Ever since, the equation has been called, “the Witch of Agnesi.” Interesting, ne?
Actually, that’s pretty much entirely bullshit, except that she was called Maria Agnesi and she did learn all those languages. But in fact it’s called the Witch of Agnesi because the book that Agnesi wrote, Instituzioni Analitiche, was mistranslated: versiera (the versed sine curve) was mistranslated as “wife of the devil”, or witch (avversiera being the actual word for wife of the devil).
My story was more interesting. Or at least more fun to write. Anyway, I don’t really have much to say on curves except this. Curves are pretty. I like curves. Curves are my friends. My thoughts meander around crookedly just like they do!
Oh, and how many of you peeps understood that Wikipedia article? Honestly?
Not because it’s about curves, which is what it’s about, by the way. It was because of this sentence within the prompt: “In mathematics, the concept of a curve tries to capture the intuitive idea of a geometrical one-dimensional and continuous object.”
I wondered why it would have such an odd assortment of bolded words, plus things that are not continuous are called curves all the time around the math department at my university. So I, being the genius I am, went back to the prompt and discovered that the word “Winkipedia” was in fact a link to the Wikipedia article on curves. Then for no reason I thought of L’Hospital stealing Bernoulli’s work on curves, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
So I clicked the link and was taken to the Wikipedia article and, because I’m one of those special people who actually went and got a math degree, I understood this article. I knew exactly what it meant, except it was saying this bullshit stuff about curves. It was calling paths curves! The horror! And then I got to the part in the article where it says, Terminology is also not uniform. Often, topologists use the term "path" for what we are calling a curve, and "curve" for what we are calling the image of a curve. Aha! It all makes sense now! The fact that the article author doesn’t mention that most times the “curves” referred to are actually called “continuous mappings” is niggling but then again, it was probably an unemployed math graduate writing the article during unfilled spare time in the first place. You can’t expect too much.
But anyway, reading through the article, I see that the author pops down to the subject of the length of curves. I again disagree with his notation, since it’s much easier just to introduce the notion of polygonal paths over partitions of the [a,b] interval and go from there, but in any case, I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t already know this shit understanding it. It’s like out of nowhere he starts using supremums and Epsilon notation and mentioning Lipschitz-continuous and stuff. I don’t believe that supremums are generally introduced in undergrad math until upper division, and even then there’s usually three or four prerequisite upper division courses before you get there.
And then we get to the Curves in Differential Geometry section, and the author pulls manifolds out of the ass of mathematics, neglecting that you have to go through the mouth and esophagus and stomach and the entire rest of the gastrointestinal system to get there, and says it’s basic. Kind of makes you feel stupid if you don’t get it, doesn’t it?
This is a basic notion.
Well, yeah! Sure, that’s a basic notion! If you’ve spent four years of high school chugging through the mathematics programs to AP calculus and then a further four years in college devoted to a mathematics major and you took a topology course and 1) remembered what was said, 2) had a good enough teacher or book that you understood what was meant, 3) applied yourself to internalising it and 4) planned to continue on and make mathematics a part of your daily life. Then yes, it’s a basic notation.
But if you don’t fit that profile, it might as well be magical runes to you, mightn’t it?
Then I read further and the author casually mentions Ck, a notation and concept that was introduced to me in a course that was about half last-year BS (not BA, mind, BS, more rigorous degree) math students and about half graduate students. Oh yes. Basic. Moving on to Algebraic curves, there’s another basic notion, C(K). You’ll get bonus points from me if you can tell me the core difference between Ck and C(K). The last paragraph of this part looks mightily suspicious, like it was ripped from a textbook somewhere.
And the history of curves… dude. This part is full of half-assed shit. But whatever.
Moving on to more interesting topics than the criticism of the supercilious writing of one author by another equally supercilious one, let’s talk about how the Marquis de L’Hospital stole Bernoulli’s work! The great betrayal of one mathematician by another, scintillating accounts of how all of integral calculus was… all right, fine, it was early intellectual theft and L’Hospital got away with it because he was an aristocrat, so it was also the rich taking advantage of the poor. What else is new?
What about the Witch of Agnesi? The Witch of Agnesi, the curve yx2 = a2(a – y). It looks witchy, doesn’t it? The name arises from an interesting and quite disturbing story of repressed homosexuality and horrific murder.
Maria Agnesi, a young, disaffected woman who was the only daughter of Baron Ludmillio Agnesi, had learned to speak Italian, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew by the time she was eleven. This unnerving display of intelligence frightened her father, and he forbade her to learn anything else. Higher knowledge was restricted from her, and she was locked in her room when it was discovered that she was secretly visiting the family library at nights and learning mathematics and physics.
She escaped from the prison her family had caged her in and fled the Agnesi estate and Italy entirely, disguising herself as a man and travelling to England. Here she caught the eye of a beautiful young noblewoman, who did not know that Maria was cross-dressing, and the two began a whirlwind romance that ended in marriage and, that night, shock and horror on the part of the noblewoman when she discovered that Maria was not, in fact, a man. Maria persuaded her to keep quiet and try and give the marriage a go, but in the end, the noblewoman was not able to persuade herself that Maria was the one for her. She fell in love with a nobleman and began to have an affair with him.
Unable to catch the eye of the woman she loved, Agnesi’s life went down the drain, and she once again had to flee when her wife’s paramour found out about her, this time right ahead of the hangman’s noose and charges of homosexuality and impersonating a man. She fled to Prussia, and it was here she first killed. About to be raped, she stabbed a man in his neck and he died. She carved the last equation she had learned before she left home, yx2 = a2(a – y), into his chest. She then began a murderous killing spree that spread across Prussia and Flanders, always carving that equation into the bodies of her victims. This equation, which looked mystical to people not in the know about math, and the knowledge that she was a woman (and of course in those times any woman capable of killing so many fine, superior men must by definition be in league with the Devil) inspired people to start calling her a witch.
When she was finally captured, she gave her name as Maria Agnesi and her last words before she was burned to death were “yx2 = a2(a – y).” She was actually silenced by an arrow to the throat because people thought she was calling on the Devil, and thus was spared the pain of burning to death. Ever since, the equation has been called, “the Witch of Agnesi.” Interesting, ne?
Actually, that’s pretty much entirely bullshit, except that she was called Maria Agnesi and she did learn all those languages. But in fact it’s called the Witch of Agnesi because the book that Agnesi wrote, Instituzioni Analitiche, was mistranslated: versiera (the versed sine curve) was mistranslated as “wife of the devil”, or witch (avversiera being the actual word for wife of the devil).
My story was more interesting. Or at least more fun to write. Anyway, I don’t really have much to say on curves except this. Curves are pretty. I like curves. Curves are my friends. My thoughts meander around crookedly just like they do!
Oh, and how many of you peeps understood that Wikipedia article? Honestly?
12 May 2008
Sunday Scribblings: Telephones
Telephones. That’s the prompt for this Sunday’s Scribbling. I suppose there are three things that I think about when I hear the word. I might as well tell you about them.
The first is magic. Telephones are magical. They can take your voice and instantaneously transmit it to the other side of the world, as clearly as if you were standing next to the person on the other end of the line. Obviously, this can only be attributed to magic. I’m sure that someone somewhere could explain to me (very probably in a condescending tone that would get on my nerves) that really telephones work by sending out electrical impulses that are received by the other end or what have you. I don’t know how they actually work, as you see. I think it’s magic. Because even if it were little electrical impulses and suchlike, how the hell do all the wires stay connected and the impulses all go the right places and furthermore, how do they travel that fast, and even further, how can they replicate my voice? I mean, they’re little electrical impulses. They don’t have vocal cords!
Oh, and mobile phones and internet telephony? You know, where it goes out over the wireless? How come that doesn’t get misdirected ever? Or does it? Do we send out signals in expanding spheres so that maybe sometime, some hundreds of years from now, archaeologists of the future will do their research into the more eclectic areas of our ancient culture by taking spaceships out a few hundred radio-years and tuning in with signal interceptors? I wonder if they’ll be able to reconstruct my social security number from the signals my mobile gave out when I pushed the buttons to enter it into the substitute-teaching network.
But anyway, like I said, phones are magic, without a doubt.
The second thing that I always think about when I actually think about phones, actually stop to consider them, is how much they’ve changed. I remember when mobile phones were these huge things as big as a couple of cucumbers stuck together. I’m 23, but I have a good memory. They were the thing back then, these giant mobile phones, and the coolest people in the movies had them. You knew they were cool because they had these high-tech phones. But today? Someone with a phone like that would be laughed at! These days, mobiles are as big as a couple of sheets of paper stuck together. And the things they can do! I have an iPhone, and it’s like having an extremely small laptop. Incredible. I wonder what those people with huge mobiles in the late eighties and early nineties would have said if they had seen it.
And the last thing about phones that always strikes me is this: Why are so many people married to them?! It’s like mobiles are the most important thing on earth. So many times I’ve been talking to someone and their phone rings and it’s “Oh, excuse me, I have to take this now.” What is that all about? If that happened in a personal conversation, it’d be considered so rude. You’re talking to your friend and suddenly another friend comes up and taps her on the shoulder, and they have a conversation between themselves, before the other friend leaves without so much as a hello. It’d be so rude. But it’s okay if it happens on a phone, because everyone seems to understand that phone calls must be taken. And I’ve gotten into cars with people, only to have to turn around and drive back fifteen minutes later because they forgot their phones. Because, you know, a person wouldn’t survive three hours without a phone.
But even despite this fanatical devotion that phones inspire in some people, I really have to say that I like them very much. They give me something to ignore that won't have its feelings hurt when I do. And they’re magic. You have to love magic.
The first is magic. Telephones are magical. They can take your voice and instantaneously transmit it to the other side of the world, as clearly as if you were standing next to the person on the other end of the line. Obviously, this can only be attributed to magic. I’m sure that someone somewhere could explain to me (very probably in a condescending tone that would get on my nerves) that really telephones work by sending out electrical impulses that are received by the other end or what have you. I don’t know how they actually work, as you see. I think it’s magic. Because even if it were little electrical impulses and suchlike, how the hell do all the wires stay connected and the impulses all go the right places and furthermore, how do they travel that fast, and even further, how can they replicate my voice? I mean, they’re little electrical impulses. They don’t have vocal cords!
Oh, and mobile phones and internet telephony? You know, where it goes out over the wireless? How come that doesn’t get misdirected ever? Or does it? Do we send out signals in expanding spheres so that maybe sometime, some hundreds of years from now, archaeologists of the future will do their research into the more eclectic areas of our ancient culture by taking spaceships out a few hundred radio-years and tuning in with signal interceptors? I wonder if they’ll be able to reconstruct my social security number from the signals my mobile gave out when I pushed the buttons to enter it into the substitute-teaching network.
But anyway, like I said, phones are magic, without a doubt.
The second thing that I always think about when I actually think about phones, actually stop to consider them, is how much they’ve changed. I remember when mobile phones were these huge things as big as a couple of cucumbers stuck together. I’m 23, but I have a good memory. They were the thing back then, these giant mobile phones, and the coolest people in the movies had them. You knew they were cool because they had these high-tech phones. But today? Someone with a phone like that would be laughed at! These days, mobiles are as big as a couple of sheets of paper stuck together. And the things they can do! I have an iPhone, and it’s like having an extremely small laptop. Incredible. I wonder what those people with huge mobiles in the late eighties and early nineties would have said if they had seen it.
And the last thing about phones that always strikes me is this: Why are so many people married to them?! It’s like mobiles are the most important thing on earth. So many times I’ve been talking to someone and their phone rings and it’s “Oh, excuse me, I have to take this now.” What is that all about? If that happened in a personal conversation, it’d be considered so rude. You’re talking to your friend and suddenly another friend comes up and taps her on the shoulder, and they have a conversation between themselves, before the other friend leaves without so much as a hello. It’d be so rude. But it’s okay if it happens on a phone, because everyone seems to understand that phone calls must be taken. And I’ve gotten into cars with people, only to have to turn around and drive back fifteen minutes later because they forgot their phones. Because, you know, a person wouldn’t survive three hours without a phone.
But even despite this fanatical devotion that phones inspire in some people, I really have to say that I like them very much. They give me something to ignore that won't have its feelings hurt when I do. And they’re magic. You have to love magic.
10 May 2008
The Rorschach Dust Cloud
Ok. Maybe I'm juvenile (actually, I know I am, but I consider it as one of my best traits) but... does anyone else look at this Dust Cloud and see something other than a dark tower?
It's the Dark Tower in Scorpius, a cosmic dust cloud formed by things that I don't understand and can't explain. Dark tower. It's not a dark tower!
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Cosmic Penis!
It totally is! I swear! This is not just in my dirty mind!
It's the Dark Tower in Scorpius, a cosmic dust cloud formed by things that I don't understand and can't explain. Dark tower. It's not a dark tower!
Ladies and gentlemen, I present the Cosmic Penis!
It totally is! I swear! This is not just in my dirty mind!
04 May 2008
Sunday Scribblings: Family
I’ve decided to start up Sunday Scribbling again. Good practice. It’ll flesh out my blog. I might not make it every time, but hey, it never hurts to try. The prompt this week is Family. What does the word family bring up for you?
Not a good question to ask me, because if you’re asking about the word as it pertains to most of my relatives that are not in my nuclear family, the answer is “my lunch.” Harsh, but honest. I could go into details, but there’s this thing called “family loyalty.”
I have large amounts of this, possibly too large. I never talk about the things that have gone seriously wrong in my family to outsiders. I sometimes don’t talk about some of the things that have gone wrong even with people in my family, out of respect for the cohesion of the family unit. Why break people’s trust with old wrongs when everyone’s fairly happy as is? I keep a close lid on problems in my immediate family.
It’s mostly the same with my extended family, only this is out of respect for my parents. The people in question are their brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces, so it seems discourteous to my parents to spread around dirty laundry about their siblings while they’re still living. Except that I will brush the snow off the tip of the iceberg and say that women are very well suited to be mathematicians, Uncle, thank you very much, and how dare you tell your daughter that she’s only good for making more children to bring into the church?
However, I don’t have problems boasting about my immediate family, and I don’t have problems talking about my dead relatives. I decided that since I boast about my family on a regular basis, today I’ll tell you about the dead relatives instead. I have three relatives that have died, a shockingly small number when you consider that my mum comes from a family of four and my dad from a family of six, and each of their married siblings (which number includes all but one) has a minimum of two children, usually three or four, and one aunt has seven. So to tell you about my dead relatives, which is not the same thing as my dead family.
There was my cousin, Sean. He died in a car accident when he was sixteen, some years ago. I only met him once before then, and I was a young child. I don’t have a very good memory of him. This is what I remember: He smiled, and I thought he looked kind. I also remember I was too young to go to the funeral. I would have been happy to consider him family, I think.
There was my grandfather, Orville. He died some years ago as well. He was the most awesome grandfather ever, even though biologically speaking he wasn’t my grandfather. He was the second husband of my mother’s mother, and he loved her so obviously that… well, it was kind of painful to see the disparity in the levels of affection. He was one of those marvellous people that you always remember for the rest of your life. I have nothing but the best to say of him. I remember that he never raised hand or voice to anyone, he always listened when I talked to him and took me seriously, he always knew how to make things better, and he knew how to make zillions of interesting things like Möbius strips and cooty catchers. I wrote letters to him when he moved and I drew pictures of the animals from Bambi for him and he always wrote back and said what he particularly liked about the drawings. I could keep on in this vein for pages and pages and not finish singing his praises. He was the best grandpa ever. He was family.
And then there was the other grandfather, whose name I don’t remember and whose face I have forgotten. That bastard died not so many years ago, and good riddance to him. I moderate my language out of courtesy to those reading this, and suffice it to say there was no worth in him, no good thing about him, and that if I had my way, he would not have died the relatively peaceful way that he did. Even though he didn’t actually stop breathing all that many years ago, he was dead to me long before that; specifically, when he fled the state right ahead of the police. And no, the crime wasn’t anything to do with me, but it was to do with those close to me, and it cannot be forgiven, not if I were Jesus himself. Especially not when I keep finding out about more and more ways that he blackened this earth with his presence in recent years, all just as horrible as that. This man, though related to me, was never family. I will not have him called that.
I realise I haven’t fully answered the question in the prompt (I’ve just told you about some of my family, brought up by the question), but then, I will never be able to. The word family brings up too many things to ever be properly explained. Family is security. Family is trust. Family is pride. Family is pain. Family is joy, success, value. I could tell you many things that family is not, as well, but principally, blood relation is not equivalent to family. You are not born with your family, you choose your family. It might take many years before you realise it, and people often choose their blood relations as family, but everyone chooses their family.
You choose what the word means for you. It’s not a given.
Not a good question to ask me, because if you’re asking about the word as it pertains to most of my relatives that are not in my nuclear family, the answer is “my lunch.” Harsh, but honest. I could go into details, but there’s this thing called “family loyalty.”
I have large amounts of this, possibly too large. I never talk about the things that have gone seriously wrong in my family to outsiders. I sometimes don’t talk about some of the things that have gone wrong even with people in my family, out of respect for the cohesion of the family unit. Why break people’s trust with old wrongs when everyone’s fairly happy as is? I keep a close lid on problems in my immediate family.
It’s mostly the same with my extended family, only this is out of respect for my parents. The people in question are their brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces, so it seems discourteous to my parents to spread around dirty laundry about their siblings while they’re still living. Except that I will brush the snow off the tip of the iceberg and say that women are very well suited to be mathematicians, Uncle, thank you very much, and how dare you tell your daughter that she’s only good for making more children to bring into the church?
However, I don’t have problems boasting about my immediate family, and I don’t have problems talking about my dead relatives. I decided that since I boast about my family on a regular basis, today I’ll tell you about the dead relatives instead. I have three relatives that have died, a shockingly small number when you consider that my mum comes from a family of four and my dad from a family of six, and each of their married siblings (which number includes all but one) has a minimum of two children, usually three or four, and one aunt has seven. So to tell you about my dead relatives, which is not the same thing as my dead family.
There was my cousin, Sean. He died in a car accident when he was sixteen, some years ago. I only met him once before then, and I was a young child. I don’t have a very good memory of him. This is what I remember: He smiled, and I thought he looked kind. I also remember I was too young to go to the funeral. I would have been happy to consider him family, I think.
There was my grandfather, Orville. He died some years ago as well. He was the most awesome grandfather ever, even though biologically speaking he wasn’t my grandfather. He was the second husband of my mother’s mother, and he loved her so obviously that… well, it was kind of painful to see the disparity in the levels of affection. He was one of those marvellous people that you always remember for the rest of your life. I have nothing but the best to say of him. I remember that he never raised hand or voice to anyone, he always listened when I talked to him and took me seriously, he always knew how to make things better, and he knew how to make zillions of interesting things like Möbius strips and cooty catchers. I wrote letters to him when he moved and I drew pictures of the animals from Bambi for him and he always wrote back and said what he particularly liked about the drawings. I could keep on in this vein for pages and pages and not finish singing his praises. He was the best grandpa ever. He was family.
And then there was the other grandfather, whose name I don’t remember and whose face I have forgotten. That bastard died not so many years ago, and good riddance to him. I moderate my language out of courtesy to those reading this, and suffice it to say there was no worth in him, no good thing about him, and that if I had my way, he would not have died the relatively peaceful way that he did. Even though he didn’t actually stop breathing all that many years ago, he was dead to me long before that; specifically, when he fled the state right ahead of the police. And no, the crime wasn’t anything to do with me, but it was to do with those close to me, and it cannot be forgiven, not if I were Jesus himself. Especially not when I keep finding out about more and more ways that he blackened this earth with his presence in recent years, all just as horrible as that. This man, though related to me, was never family. I will not have him called that.
I realise I haven’t fully answered the question in the prompt (I’ve just told you about some of my family, brought up by the question), but then, I will never be able to. The word family brings up too many things to ever be properly explained. Family is security. Family is trust. Family is pride. Family is pain. Family is joy, success, value. I could tell you many things that family is not, as well, but principally, blood relation is not equivalent to family. You are not born with your family, you choose your family. It might take many years before you realise it, and people often choose their blood relations as family, but everyone chooses their family.
You choose what the word means for you. It’s not a given.
02 May 2008
Jane Eyre: A Cure For All Ills
I’m back to posting on my sadly neglected blog. Yay! Do people still read it?
I was supposed to post about Kristin’s visit to California before I did anything else, but I haven’t got words for how awesome that was yet. I’d give details, but I find when I try to write about it, my vocabulary becomes restricted to the superlatives-only section of the dictionary. Awesome. Fantastic. Life-changing, even. Hyperbole, you say? Hello! She came all the way to California, from Norway, to visit me (and my sister, but me is the part of it that I’m focused on), someone who’s always been told she was second-rate and further, had “friends” that would not bother to drive two miles to see her all through childhood and university (seriously, I always had to go to them, never them to me, ever. No one even asked if they could come over). It’s quite reasonable for me to be without words to describe the event of someone travelling 5,300 miles to see me.
So I’m writing about other things for which I have got the words. Jane Eyre!
A few days ago, I watched the 2006 BBC production of Jayne Eyre. This being the first time I watched it I was on the edge of my seat. I always am with films I haven’t seen before. But this was Jane Eyre, so it was a thousand times worse. Can you tell that I love period films yet? No? Go look at my list of favourite books, realise that there’s films only of the Victorian ones, and come back. I have to say that Jane Eyre didn’t beat out my all-time favourite miniseries, North and South, but it drew level with Pride and Prejudice, which is only a nose behind.
Anyway, I was going to tell you how it went.
I came home that day (which was Thursday, 28 April, 2008, if you wanted to know) feeling quite miserable because I’d just had to substitute for a classroom full of verminous creatures; ceramics was the subject. Every one thought they were making beautiful clay figures, but in fact, they were making ugly clay blobs. Too harsh, I should be more supportive, especially given my own experience? Well, I didn’t tell them their blobs were ugly. (I didn’t say any of them were pretty, either, though, because the last time I did that with this class another student smashed the blob of the student that I complimented on the floor. I told you they were verminous creatures.) And then, in fifth period, they started throwing clay at the walls.
Here’s the embarrassing thing: I didn’t catch them at it. I didn’t even notice the clay on the walls (it was about eight to twelve feet up on the wall) until sixth period students pointed it out to me. I heard fifth period slinging it about, but it was always behind my back, and I never saw anyone moving suspiciously, and no one looked guilty. And they never threw clay when I’ve subbed before, so I didn’t know what the noise was. And you really couldn’t expect me to think of looking for thrown clay because… well, because I would never think of throwing clay in the first place. Why would anyone do that? It’s so much more fun to make it into ugly blobs.
Anyway, as previously mentioned, the clay was stuck to the walls (because clay sticks to walls when it’s thrown hard enough, in case you didn’t know) from the eight foot height to about twelve feet and it took me forever to clean it off after the creatures left. Forever. I was tired and pissed and miserable.
And then I watched Jane Eyre with my sister, Jess. I swear, Jane Eyre could cure a person with cancer. All right, maybe not, but it lifted me right out of my funk.
I was continually squashing my sister. I was equally continually bouncing on my seat after the manner of an insane bus passenger or a small child that needs to use the water closet. The course of the movie went thusly:
It starts. I feel a kinship to the poor kid, punished by being put in the red room she hates. My funk from work gets worse as I see what happens to the child. We move along in the story and then! She comes to Thornfield. Yay! Everything’s looking up and then! Mr Rochester almost runs over her and then! What will happen next?! I probably look like I haven’t peed in a century by this time. Everything happens as it must: Mr Rochester falls in love, and Miss Eyre also. Of course I intrinsically know Mr Rochester will propose to Miss Eyre. I might as well just wait for it to happen. But all the same, I keep rooting for him to tell her he loves her, and he keeps not doing it, and I get this huge “AUGH!” feeling every time he fails to tell her. This happens without pause through the entire first disc and twenty minutes into the second disc, and then we get to the scene where Miss Eyre is in the garden with Mr Rochester.
She says she’ll advertise immediately, he tells her she won’t; he already found her a place. “As his WIFE!” I tell her for him, but she doesn’t hear. She remarks that Ireland is a long way from him. I have to pause the disc so I can make noises. “Heeeeehehehehe! Aaawwww! A long way from hiiiiim! Hmmmmhmmm, awwwwww!” Then he goes on about friends, so I have to remind him that she is really obviously in love with him, and ask him why he has to torture her like that. He doesn’t pay attention, the bastard. Then she says “I love Thornfield!” Like, hello! She’s telling him! Bouncing on the edge of my seat sadly makes no difference in the pace of the film, but soon enough we get to, “You will not leave me, Jane!” This necessitates more pausing so that I can make even more noises: “D’aaaaw! Bloooooobo! Eeeeee!” Finally! Yes! All right! He’s gonna do it!
Mr Rochester proposed to Miss Eyre. That was the point where I started making baby noises. I sounded like an infant. Jess mentioned that she could envision exactly how the conversation where my husband proposes to me will go.
Future Husband: I offer you my hand, my heart, and all my possessions.
Me: GOO!
And then when he kisses me, I’ll walk two fingers along his shoulder and croon, “Wooo-dee-doooo!”
Yes. It is a fact: I’m hopeless when watching these sorts of films. But I enjoy love stories so much that I don’t care!
I just watched it for a second time, by the way, which is why you’re reading this post. Upon this second watching I noticed something that I didn’t particularly note the first time: Mr Rochester is, of people in films that I’ve seen, the man who actually looks the most impassioned when he kisses his girl. He just presses his lips to hers, like he has to touch her, like he has to let her know he was serious that he loves her. His mouth is very nearly closed. It’s not like he’s trying to eat her face off, as I’ve seen other heroes in other films do.
I’m going to digress here to say I’ve always thought face-eating kisses really gross-looking. I have to say ‘gross-looking’ because I’ve never been kissed and thus have no basis to talk about feeling gross-looking—yes, you read that right, ‘never been kissed,’ at 23 years of age. ‘Ye gods! How did that happen?’ I hear you say? Very easily: I never went out with someone I wanted to kiss. I have met a couple, but neither of them showed any signs of wanting to kiss me. So sad. Anyway, back to the original digression… Perhaps I find face-eating kisses to be gross-looking because I associate them with pubescent creatures in high school hallways, but in any case, I just think they’re nasty. Maybe they’re absolutely fabulous things to experience, but when you see a fourteen year old drooling on a thirteen year old, it kind of puts you off your food, never mind that kind of kissing.
Any rate, Mr Rochester kisses very romantically, to my way of thinking. I’ll nominate him for MTV’s Best Kiss any day.
And now that I’ve blogged your attention span away, I’ll quite raving about Jane Eyre. Except to say that you must watch it. Even you types that find such things boring. Rochester almost gets burnt up twice! That’s gotta be enough excitement for you. Watch it.
I was supposed to post about Kristin’s visit to California before I did anything else, but I haven’t got words for how awesome that was yet. I’d give details, but I find when I try to write about it, my vocabulary becomes restricted to the superlatives-only section of the dictionary. Awesome. Fantastic. Life-changing, even. Hyperbole, you say? Hello! She came all the way to California, from Norway, to visit me (and my sister, but me is the part of it that I’m focused on), someone who’s always been told she was second-rate and further, had “friends” that would not bother to drive two miles to see her all through childhood and university (seriously, I always had to go to them, never them to me, ever. No one even asked if they could come over). It’s quite reasonable for me to be without words to describe the event of someone travelling 5,300 miles to see me.
So I’m writing about other things for which I have got the words. Jane Eyre!
A few days ago, I watched the 2006 BBC production of Jayne Eyre. This being the first time I watched it I was on the edge of my seat. I always am with films I haven’t seen before. But this was Jane Eyre, so it was a thousand times worse. Can you tell that I love period films yet? No? Go look at my list of favourite books, realise that there’s films only of the Victorian ones, and come back. I have to say that Jane Eyre didn’t beat out my all-time favourite miniseries, North and South, but it drew level with Pride and Prejudice, which is only a nose behind.
Anyway, I was going to tell you how it went.
I came home that day (which was Thursday, 28 April, 2008, if you wanted to know) feeling quite miserable because I’d just had to substitute for a classroom full of verminous creatures; ceramics was the subject. Every one thought they were making beautiful clay figures, but in fact, they were making ugly clay blobs. Too harsh, I should be more supportive, especially given my own experience? Well, I didn’t tell them their blobs were ugly. (I didn’t say any of them were pretty, either, though, because the last time I did that with this class another student smashed the blob of the student that I complimented on the floor. I told you they were verminous creatures.) And then, in fifth period, they started throwing clay at the walls.
Here’s the embarrassing thing: I didn’t catch them at it. I didn’t even notice the clay on the walls (it was about eight to twelve feet up on the wall) until sixth period students pointed it out to me. I heard fifth period slinging it about, but it was always behind my back, and I never saw anyone moving suspiciously, and no one looked guilty. And they never threw clay when I’ve subbed before, so I didn’t know what the noise was. And you really couldn’t expect me to think of looking for thrown clay because… well, because I would never think of throwing clay in the first place. Why would anyone do that? It’s so much more fun to make it into ugly blobs.
Anyway, as previously mentioned, the clay was stuck to the walls (because clay sticks to walls when it’s thrown hard enough, in case you didn’t know) from the eight foot height to about twelve feet and it took me forever to clean it off after the creatures left. Forever. I was tired and pissed and miserable.
And then I watched Jane Eyre with my sister, Jess. I swear, Jane Eyre could cure a person with cancer. All right, maybe not, but it lifted me right out of my funk.
I was continually squashing my sister. I was equally continually bouncing on my seat after the manner of an insane bus passenger or a small child that needs to use the water closet. The course of the movie went thusly:
It starts. I feel a kinship to the poor kid, punished by being put in the red room she hates. My funk from work gets worse as I see what happens to the child. We move along in the story and then! She comes to Thornfield. Yay! Everything’s looking up and then! Mr Rochester almost runs over her and then! What will happen next?! I probably look like I haven’t peed in a century by this time. Everything happens as it must: Mr Rochester falls in love, and Miss Eyre also. Of course I intrinsically know Mr Rochester will propose to Miss Eyre. I might as well just wait for it to happen. But all the same, I keep rooting for him to tell her he loves her, and he keeps not doing it, and I get this huge “AUGH!” feeling every time he fails to tell her. This happens without pause through the entire first disc and twenty minutes into the second disc, and then we get to the scene where Miss Eyre is in the garden with Mr Rochester.
She says she’ll advertise immediately, he tells her she won’t; he already found her a place. “As his WIFE!” I tell her for him, but she doesn’t hear. She remarks that Ireland is a long way from him. I have to pause the disc so I can make noises. “Heeeeehehehehe! Aaawwww! A long way from hiiiiim! Hmmmmhmmm, awwwwww!” Then he goes on about friends, so I have to remind him that she is really obviously in love with him, and ask him why he has to torture her like that. He doesn’t pay attention, the bastard. Then she says “I love Thornfield!” Like, hello! She’s telling him! Bouncing on the edge of my seat sadly makes no difference in the pace of the film, but soon enough we get to, “You will not leave me, Jane!” This necessitates more pausing so that I can make even more noises: “D’aaaaw! Bloooooobo! Eeeeee!” Finally! Yes! All right! He’s gonna do it!
Mr Rochester proposed to Miss Eyre. That was the point where I started making baby noises. I sounded like an infant. Jess mentioned that she could envision exactly how the conversation where my husband proposes to me will go.
Future Husband: I offer you my hand, my heart, and all my possessions.
Me: GOO!
And then when he kisses me, I’ll walk two fingers along his shoulder and croon, “Wooo-dee-doooo!”
Yes. It is a fact: I’m hopeless when watching these sorts of films. But I enjoy love stories so much that I don’t care!
I just watched it for a second time, by the way, which is why you’re reading this post. Upon this second watching I noticed something that I didn’t particularly note the first time: Mr Rochester is, of people in films that I’ve seen, the man who actually looks the most impassioned when he kisses his girl. He just presses his lips to hers, like he has to touch her, like he has to let her know he was serious that he loves her. His mouth is very nearly closed. It’s not like he’s trying to eat her face off, as I’ve seen other heroes in other films do.
I’m going to digress here to say I’ve always thought face-eating kisses really gross-looking. I have to say ‘gross-looking’ because I’ve never been kissed and thus have no basis to talk about feeling gross-looking—yes, you read that right, ‘never been kissed,’ at 23 years of age. ‘Ye gods! How did that happen?’ I hear you say? Very easily: I never went out with someone I wanted to kiss. I have met a couple, but neither of them showed any signs of wanting to kiss me. So sad. Anyway, back to the original digression… Perhaps I find face-eating kisses to be gross-looking because I associate them with pubescent creatures in high school hallways, but in any case, I just think they’re nasty. Maybe they’re absolutely fabulous things to experience, but when you see a fourteen year old drooling on a thirteen year old, it kind of puts you off your food, never mind that kind of kissing.
Any rate, Mr Rochester kisses very romantically, to my way of thinking. I’ll nominate him for MTV’s Best Kiss any day.
And now that I’ve blogged your attention span away, I’ll quite raving about Jane Eyre. Except to say that you must watch it. Even you types that find such things boring. Rochester almost gets burnt up twice! That’s gotta be enough excitement for you. Watch it.
07 March 2008
04 March 2008
Pretty People and Me
You know who they are when you see them. They’re the people that other people look at, that you sometimes ask where they did their hair or got their clothes from, the people who look good and are attractive to the opposite sex (and in some cases the same sex). The pretty people.
My sisters are pretty people. The older has modelled and the younger is going to. And people tell them they’re beautiful, both of them. “You look like a dancer. You have such graceful posture.” “You’re so gorgeous!” “I wish I looked like you.” “You have such a beautiful face.”
And they tell me, too. “Your sister is so beautiful.” “Your sister is so elegant.” “I’ve never seen anyone who dresses as well as your sister. Where does she shop?” “I wish I had your sister’s skin.” “I wish I had your sister’s hair.” “I wish your sister was my teacher.” “Your sister is sexy.” “Your sister is the most beautiful woman in the world.” That last one married the sister in question, though, so it’s possibly a biased statement.
Can I be proud of this? Absolutely. I am happy for my sisters that they are attractive and beautiful. It makes life much easier for them, and it makes them happy when people compliment them.
But sometimes, I can’t help but feel just the tiniest, weeniest pangs of overwhelming jealousy. Because them? They’re beautiful.
Whereas me, the best compliment I ever got from a guy was, “I don’t think you’re fat.”
No, seriously. It was a security guard outside a bank that said it, when he saw me walking to my car, which has a bumper sticker from when I was forty pounds heavier (hard to imagine, I know, but I have been). He meant it, and he looked at me like I was attractive.
That’s honestly the best I ever got. Of the people I’ve dated, few and far between, I never even got a “You look good” or a “That’s a nice dress/hairstyle.” Nothing. Trust me, it would be one of my most precious memories if I had.
Back when I looked like this, that is to say, fourteen or fifteen, I asked a boy out. Yes, I did, go me, I had the courage to do that then. And he didn’t come. I got stood up for a ball game. He was one of my brother’s friends, and when I asked my brother what was wrong with me, why he didn’t come, guess what the answer was? “Well, maybe if you were less heavy, he’d go out with you.”
I look at the photo now, and I do not think I was excessively heavy at the time. In fact, pardon the vanity, I think I was beautiful then.
But also at that time, my nickname in my family was “Fat Robin.” Why did I have to eat so much, why couldn’t I be skinny like my sisters? Lisa, Lisa, the big fat pizza. You eat too much dessert, that’s why you’re fat. You already had enough, you don’t need seconds. He got more because he isn’t fat. Sure, go ahead and eat that, if you really think you can afford the calories. I’m really shocked, Liz, that you eat so much when you look the way you do.
So I ate less. And less, and less, and even less. From the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty, I was starving nearly all the time. And I stayed the same weight, and then, I started gaining weight. And then I got two metabolic disorders diagnosed, but still it’s the same old Liz eats like a pig, that’s why she’s fat. So then I did start eating until I didn’t feel like I was starving, and I gained astronomical amounts of weight.
Now I’m down forty from my heaviest and still losing weight. But I haven’t got insurance, and so I have only one of the meds I need, and thus, if I eat more than about 1200 calories a day, I gain weight. That’s about half of what people my age and height are supposed to require. And I have to eat even less to lose weight.
I’d have to say I’m still not one of the pretty people, and guys certainly aren’t going to be noticing me any time soon.
But come on, Liz. You can’t really be serious that no one ever said you were beautiful? I never said that. Three people have said I’m beautiful. Yeah, I counted.
My older sister has said I’m beautiful. But, since that same older sister has said before that she doesn’t want people to know we’re sisters, because I am 1) too fat, 2) scarred on my face and 3) too unfeminine, adding up to a grand 4) too ugly, I must doubt the sincerity of the statement.
My younger sister has said I’m beautiful. I think she means it, but then again, she says it quite a lot. It almost seems a case of “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in the original affirming sense of protest. Maybe if she didn’t insist that I’m more beautiful than people that look like Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank, I might have an easier time believing. Maybe if she was like my mum, and said “You could be beautiful,” I’d believe. Or maybe my self-doubt is just pathetically all-consuming and I should take what she says at face value.
And my best friend has said I’m beautiful. It’s much easier for me to believe what she says, because she says I’m not classically beautiful, but I have a different kind of beauty. Is it pathetic to hope she really thinks that?
But those three people, that’s the extent of those willing to say I’m beautiful. Am I just the slightest bit bitter and defensive about the way I look? You bet your ass I am. Deal with it, is all I can say, because it isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future.
As a nice, polite closer: If anyone who knows me reads this and thinks I’m whining, fuck you too. I let you crap on me for years and years without arguing. You can listen to a little complaining now, or you can go have a seat on Judas’ chair.
My sisters are pretty people. The older has modelled and the younger is going to. And people tell them they’re beautiful, both of them. “You look like a dancer. You have such graceful posture.” “You’re so gorgeous!” “I wish I looked like you.” “You have such a beautiful face.”
And they tell me, too. “Your sister is so beautiful.” “Your sister is so elegant.” “I’ve never seen anyone who dresses as well as your sister. Where does she shop?” “I wish I had your sister’s skin.” “I wish I had your sister’s hair.” “I wish your sister was my teacher.” “Your sister is sexy.” “Your sister is the most beautiful woman in the world.” That last one married the sister in question, though, so it’s possibly a biased statement.
Can I be proud of this? Absolutely. I am happy for my sisters that they are attractive and beautiful. It makes life much easier for them, and it makes them happy when people compliment them.
But sometimes, I can’t help but feel just the tiniest, weeniest pangs of overwhelming jealousy. Because them? They’re beautiful.
Whereas me, the best compliment I ever got from a guy was, “I don’t think you’re fat.”
No, seriously. It was a security guard outside a bank that said it, when he saw me walking to my car, which has a bumper sticker from when I was forty pounds heavier (hard to imagine, I know, but I have been). He meant it, and he looked at me like I was attractive.
That’s honestly the best I ever got. Of the people I’ve dated, few and far between, I never even got a “You look good” or a “That’s a nice dress/hairstyle.” Nothing. Trust me, it would be one of my most precious memories if I had.
Back when I looked like this, that is to say, fourteen or fifteen, I asked a boy out. Yes, I did, go me, I had the courage to do that then. And he didn’t come. I got stood up for a ball game. He was one of my brother’s friends, and when I asked my brother what was wrong with me, why he didn’t come, guess what the answer was? “Well, maybe if you were less heavy, he’d go out with you.”
I look at the photo now, and I do not think I was excessively heavy at the time. In fact, pardon the vanity, I think I was beautiful then.
But also at that time, my nickname in my family was “Fat Robin.” Why did I have to eat so much, why couldn’t I be skinny like my sisters? Lisa, Lisa, the big fat pizza. You eat too much dessert, that’s why you’re fat. You already had enough, you don’t need seconds. He got more because he isn’t fat. Sure, go ahead and eat that, if you really think you can afford the calories. I’m really shocked, Liz, that you eat so much when you look the way you do.
So I ate less. And less, and less, and even less. From the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty, I was starving nearly all the time. And I stayed the same weight, and then, I started gaining weight. And then I got two metabolic disorders diagnosed, but still it’s the same old Liz eats like a pig, that’s why she’s fat. So then I did start eating until I didn’t feel like I was starving, and I gained astronomical amounts of weight.
Now I’m down forty from my heaviest and still losing weight. But I haven’t got insurance, and so I have only one of the meds I need, and thus, if I eat more than about 1200 calories a day, I gain weight. That’s about half of what people my age and height are supposed to require. And I have to eat even less to lose weight.
I’d have to say I’m still not one of the pretty people, and guys certainly aren’t going to be noticing me any time soon.
But come on, Liz. You can’t really be serious that no one ever said you were beautiful? I never said that. Three people have said I’m beautiful. Yeah, I counted.
My older sister has said I’m beautiful. But, since that same older sister has said before that she doesn’t want people to know we’re sisters, because I am 1) too fat, 2) scarred on my face and 3) too unfeminine, adding up to a grand 4) too ugly, I must doubt the sincerity of the statement.
My younger sister has said I’m beautiful. I think she means it, but then again, she says it quite a lot. It almost seems a case of “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in the original affirming sense of protest. Maybe if she didn’t insist that I’m more beautiful than people that look like Helen Hunt and Hilary Swank, I might have an easier time believing. Maybe if she was like my mum, and said “You could be beautiful,” I’d believe. Or maybe my self-doubt is just pathetically all-consuming and I should take what she says at face value.
And my best friend has said I’m beautiful. It’s much easier for me to believe what she says, because she says I’m not classically beautiful, but I have a different kind of beauty. Is it pathetic to hope she really thinks that?
But those three people, that’s the extent of those willing to say I’m beautiful. Am I just the slightest bit bitter and defensive about the way I look? You bet your ass I am. Deal with it, is all I can say, because it isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future.
As a nice, polite closer: If anyone who knows me reads this and thinks I’m whining, fuck you too. I let you crap on me for years and years without arguing. You can listen to a little complaining now, or you can go have a seat on Judas’ chair.
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