What's that you say? You want me to forgo my usual blog post about the bizarre antics I got up to this week, and instead treat you to an excessively long commentary on literary fairy tale tropes? And here I thought you had no interest in what I do. Well, if you insist...
In reading The Pleasures of Children's Literature (Nodelman and Reimer) for one of my classes, I came across some interesting ideas on fairytales. Nodelman and Reimer observe that there are 9 fairytales that most university students polled know by heart:
Cinderella
Snow White
Beauty and the Beast
The Three Little Pigs
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Hansel and Gretel
Jack and the Beanstalk
Little Red Riding Hood
and Sleeping Beauty
Of these tales, Disney has commandeered and re-written most of them (either as feature-length films, or as small episodes starring Mickey Mouse). Disney is so pervasive in our culture, that generally, the versions of fairytales that we know are, in fact, the Disney versions, and not the original folktales, most of which originated in the 1700's. Now, many of these fairytales (especially the ones involving princesses) have often been criticized for their inaccurate portrayal of romance and relationships*.
From the tender age of 3 or so, children are taught that every girl is a beautiful princess and every man is a handsome prince who must dash into a lady's life at some point in time and sweep her off her feet. Thus, children, girls especially, are easily instilled with highly unrealistic expectations for their romantic lives, and are encouraged to pander to the gender and class stereotyping that they will live out for the rest of their lives. And so on.
In this scenario, we must assume that children are incapable of telling fantasy from reality. Well, let's give them a bit more credit than that. On the one hand, one might not believe something is true just because a storybook portrays it as such. But what if you read 2 dozen storybooks that all seem to preach the same thing? These poor misinformed children grow up to be delusional romantic hopefuls, fighting to preserve gender lines, waiting either to be swept off their feet by a handsome, oddly silent young prince much taken by the lady's looks, or to find beautiful, sweet young ladies who will swoon for the first person who cuts through a thorn bush for them. Also, that there isn't much more to life than this interaction.
I once worked with a woman who had been so badly victimized by this delusion that she had to spend most of my lunch hour explaining to me that fairy tales don't come true and there are no stars to wish on, etcetera. Being witness to (though not the direct victim of) some very nasty relationships, and having heard about many more, I had, in fact, deduced that fairy tales aren't really true:
that there isn't necessarily someone for everyone,
that men are human too and will not spend the rest of their lives throwing roses at you,
that some men do happen to be horrific assholes,
that even the most loveable of men are not necessarily knights in shining armour,
that the people who love you most are also the ones who can hurt you the most,
that anyone--absolutely anyone--is capable of cheating on their beloved, given the right circumstances,
that the man who will sweep you off your feet solely based on the redness of your lips is the type of man who may also paste 2-foot blow-ups of your face to his ceiling and follow after you picking up your used tissues in the hopes of cloning you, or, in the very least, the type of man who will dump you when he figures out that those red lips rub off at the end of the day because they come out of a tube of compressed animal fat and dye
and, most importantly, that there is life before, during, after, and outside of the pursuit for prince charming.**
The long and short of my comment here is that those damned fairytales are the culprits behind the pained disillusionment of our nation. Or are they?
First of all, as Nodelman and Reimer point out, the values that most people associate with fairytales--and even the idea of a fairytale ending--were manufactured by Disney and reflect the values of upper-middle-class American culture of the 1930's and 40's. They were also marketed towards children. In actuality, the original folktales were meant to be enjoyed by everyone, and were often rather gruesome. One of the original versions of Sleeping Beauty has our good old prince charming raping the sleeping lady, who is impregnated and gives birth to twins. It is only when one of the twins climbs over the bedclothes and sucks the spindle splinter out of the princess's finger that Sleeping Beauty wakes up, to find herself an abandoned single mother of twins. It is unlikely that anyone reading this story would be tricked into thinking that all men are well-behaved knights in shining armour.
Similarly, most 'child-friendly' versions of Cinderella skip the part where the ugly stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try to fit the slipper. Now, there are a lot of things going on here and I'm going to do the bad thing and oversimplify it all: we could easily take this imagery as a commentary on the painful (and fruitless) lengths that women go to in order to get a man. It might also be a commentary on early plastic surgery. Who knows.
Oh, and another thing: you know those evil step mothers who marry rich and screw up sweet young princess's lives? In the original tales, those weren't step mothers. They were birth-mothers. When the Grimm brothers started transcribing folktales, they were thoroughly disturbed at the idea of a real mother enslaving her daughter, or throwing her daughter out of the house to go find a house made of gingerbread, or sending an old woodcutter to cut her daughter's heart out to prove that she was dead. So the original stories addressed the fact that not all families are big, happy families. Some families are royally screwed up. Some mothers just don't have those motherly instincts. Etcetera.
So next time you want to blame your misguided notion of a cliche fairytale ending for your latest romantic let-down, don't blame the folkstories. Go for the more current cliche, and blame Disney. Always blame Disney.
*of course, the problems with the Disney Princess tales reach much deeper than the difficulties North Americans have with dating expectations, but I'll keep this light and fairly sweet for now.
**I have, on several occasions, tried to explain to people that I don't assume I'm going to get married. Until the moment when you actually are, in fact, married, there's always a chance that you never will be. You may never find someone worth dating. If you find someone worth dating, you might not find him/her worth marrying. If you do find him/her worth marrying, he/she might not feel the same way about you. And even if you do feel the same way, there's the off chance one of you will get hit by a bus on the way to the altar. In which case, I will buy myself a nice big house and fill it with cats and very brightly painted furniture, and open a charming little bookstore cafe called Patchwork--or maybe The Silver Spoon-- which will be open at the strangest of times and sell the most interesting of pastries and caffeinated beverages, and I will lead a fascinatingly eccentric life, and finance it with the books I will have been getting published during the whole frustrating dating/courtship/engagement/roadkill romance (of course, one might hope that I would do all this even with a husband in tow). Even after explaining all this, most people I talk to about it come away from the conversation with the assumption that I don't want to get married. Or, conversely, that my self-esteem is so low that I think no one wants me. Now, is that what I said? Is it?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan Days 5 and 6.
Here is the next installation of the increasingly inaccurately titled 7 Days of Hell. It would seem that only Wednesdays are actually hell for me. I'm writing this on a Wednesday, and thinking about what happened last Wednesday, and forget that the days in the middle were only so-so and involved nothing worse than hopeless church initiatives and tourquoise hair dye. But here it is!
Sunday. Sunday, people found out my dog died and were mad I hadn't told them earlier and then I was mad at them for being mad at me and I may have slapped someone. It was only on the thigh, though, so it barely counts. I am now part of the Visioning Board at church, which means that all the organizational problems that the church has that I usually laugh quietly to myself about are now suddenly my problem. For instance, the problem that the two areas that the church identified as most important are Christian Education and outreach programs. Guess which areas are the ones no one has time to volunteer for? That's right. CE had the Dickens of the time getting teachers for its classes, and now our great Thanksgiving Banquet outreach is probably getting canned because no one wants to coordinate it.
I first became aware of all these problems on Wednesday, 7 hours after Kaitie died, and had been hard-put not to explain to our pastor that there really is no hope and we should give up trying to coordinate anything because, while everyone likes to experience our programs and celebrate the fact that we have them, no one wants to run them, and the people who can be guilted into running them do 80% of the church work already. On Sunday I met up with the pastor and told him we should do Thanksgiving in January. He accepted it as a fall-back plan. I decided that my work here was done. It wasn't. But that's enough church business for one post.
Sunday I got several urgent phone calls from my boss asking me to go to the store and unlock it so that someone could come pick up their wedding order. I was going past a shopper's drug mart on the way to the store when I realized the only thing worth accomplishing today was to change the colour of my hair. I did my bakery duty and spent the rest of the day making random patches of my hair turquoise. Immediately afterwards, I remembered that I actually rather like having my hair be a normal colour. Though turquoise does make me happy. I am divided
Which is worse: having to try to comfort someone, or having to accept comfort from someone else? When someone's pet dies, you apologize for it, because that's the right thing to do, even though it was clearly not your fault. What does the aggrieved individual say to that? Have some free kibble? I phone around to see who wants Kaitie's old dog food, and end up getting to spend some time with the two most precocious little girls I have ever met (as well as their mother). They have a pomeranian who eats Kaitie's brand of food. We talked about racism and Shakespeare and dry British humour, and the misconceptions that people hold about pomeranians. I got a free meal and some chocolate cake out of the bargain, too.
Monday, I used my hair to turn several white towels green, then signed up for Judo classes, paid for them, and realized I am always busy in the evenings, and will never go to them. I went home and played with melted chocolate instead, and tried to write something coherent for Creative Writing. I had to read something aloud in class last week. It was meaningless gobbledegook that was supposed to emulate Cormick McCarthy's writing style. I was told I sound wittily ironic, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, being witty and ironic does not help me think up any actual story line. I can be witty and ironic for several pages without saying anything at all. And our first assignment is due next week. Yikes.
Sunday. Sunday, people found out my dog died and were mad I hadn't told them earlier and then I was mad at them for being mad at me and I may have slapped someone. It was only on the thigh, though, so it barely counts. I am now part of the Visioning Board at church, which means that all the organizational problems that the church has that I usually laugh quietly to myself about are now suddenly my problem. For instance, the problem that the two areas that the church identified as most important are Christian Education and outreach programs. Guess which areas are the ones no one has time to volunteer for? That's right. CE had the Dickens of the time getting teachers for its classes, and now our great Thanksgiving Banquet outreach is probably getting canned because no one wants to coordinate it.
I first became aware of all these problems on Wednesday, 7 hours after Kaitie died, and had been hard-put not to explain to our pastor that there really is no hope and we should give up trying to coordinate anything because, while everyone likes to experience our programs and celebrate the fact that we have them, no one wants to run them, and the people who can be guilted into running them do 80% of the church work already. On Sunday I met up with the pastor and told him we should do Thanksgiving in January. He accepted it as a fall-back plan. I decided that my work here was done. It wasn't. But that's enough church business for one post.
Sunday I got several urgent phone calls from my boss asking me to go to the store and unlock it so that someone could come pick up their wedding order. I was going past a shopper's drug mart on the way to the store when I realized the only thing worth accomplishing today was to change the colour of my hair. I did my bakery duty and spent the rest of the day making random patches of my hair turquoise. Immediately afterwards, I remembered that I actually rather like having my hair be a normal colour. Though turquoise does make me happy. I am divided
Which is worse: having to try to comfort someone, or having to accept comfort from someone else? When someone's pet dies, you apologize for it, because that's the right thing to do, even though it was clearly not your fault. What does the aggrieved individual say to that? Have some free kibble? I phone around to see who wants Kaitie's old dog food, and end up getting to spend some time with the two most precocious little girls I have ever met (as well as their mother). They have a pomeranian who eats Kaitie's brand of food. We talked about racism and Shakespeare and dry British humour, and the misconceptions that people hold about pomeranians. I got a free meal and some chocolate cake out of the bargain, too.
Monday, I used my hair to turn several white towels green, then signed up for Judo classes, paid for them, and realized I am always busy in the evenings, and will never go to them. I went home and played with melted chocolate instead, and tried to write something coherent for Creative Writing. I had to read something aloud in class last week. It was meaningless gobbledegook that was supposed to emulate Cormick McCarthy's writing style. I was told I sound wittily ironic, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, being witty and ironic does not help me think up any actual story line. I can be witty and ironic for several pages without saying anything at all. And our first assignment is due next week. Yikes.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan Days 3 and 4
Friday. Alright, Friday wasn't bad. I got a call from the bank saying they believed I was in school and I could try to get the proof of enrolment to them next week. I worked and work is work and people are people and most people are pretty happy when they're in a bakery, unless of course they didn't get ribbon on their cupcakes and want your manager to be there so they can put her through the wringer but instead all they have is you and so they decide to defy the stereotypes of customers being pure evil, and are quite reasonable instead. Things were so-so.
In fact, Friday was kind of amusing. I went to the gym in the afternoon, something I generally detest because afternoons mean hoardes of fairly buff people in the 20-something Male category, and that's intimidating. I prefer early mornings, when most of the people there are only just awak enough to concentrate on keeping their heart rates in a certain zone and maybe watch the morning news. But on this particular Friday, I discovered the joys of eavesdropping on desperate men trying to hit on athletic women. This guy spent most of his workout telling a 90-pound asian woman what it was like to be a kickboxing instructor with arms so strong that people hurt their legs when they try to kick you and you block them. When she remained unimpressed, he started trying to make her feel bad for being unable to bench press more than 120 pounds. No one should ever feel bad for being unable to lift more than they weigh. I started following them around the weight lifting room, doing whatever excercise was 2 machines over from them so that I could surreptitiously listen to the man make a fool of himself.
Saturday. I had managed to snap my bike chain while biking down Osborne the week before, and Dad had very kindly fixed it for me Saturday morning. When I hopped on the bike to ride it to work, I found that the chain guard was coming off, and was at such an angle that the bike made an impressivly loud chainsaw-like sound when I pedalled. The pedals also vibrated, which was actually quite pleasant. I felt like I was getting a foot massage on the way to work. Work was work. When I biked home, the chain guard became quite unruly and finally exploded off of the bike, doing its best to stab a street kid in the foot as it went out in a blaze of evil junkyard bike glory. I then managed to get bike chain grease all over my hands, and had to wipe them on the only piece of paper in my purse. It happened to be my proof of enrolment request form that I still had not managed to get through Student Central. No matter, that form wasn't going to see its destination for several days anyway.
That evening, I met up with some of my friends and discovered that Wednesday had been a particularly awful day for most people. This is a public service announcement. Watch out for Wednesdays.
In fact, Friday was kind of amusing. I went to the gym in the afternoon, something I generally detest because afternoons mean hoardes of fairly buff people in the 20-something Male category, and that's intimidating. I prefer early mornings, when most of the people there are only just awak enough to concentrate on keeping their heart rates in a certain zone and maybe watch the morning news. But on this particular Friday, I discovered the joys of eavesdropping on desperate men trying to hit on athletic women. This guy spent most of his workout telling a 90-pound asian woman what it was like to be a kickboxing instructor with arms so strong that people hurt their legs when they try to kick you and you block them. When she remained unimpressed, he started trying to make her feel bad for being unable to bench press more than 120 pounds. No one should ever feel bad for being unable to lift more than they weigh. I started following them around the weight lifting room, doing whatever excercise was 2 machines over from them so that I could surreptitiously listen to the man make a fool of himself.
Saturday. I had managed to snap my bike chain while biking down Osborne the week before, and Dad had very kindly fixed it for me Saturday morning. When I hopped on the bike to ride it to work, I found that the chain guard was coming off, and was at such an angle that the bike made an impressivly loud chainsaw-like sound when I pedalled. The pedals also vibrated, which was actually quite pleasant. I felt like I was getting a foot massage on the way to work. Work was work. When I biked home, the chain guard became quite unruly and finally exploded off of the bike, doing its best to stab a street kid in the foot as it went out in a blaze of evil junkyard bike glory. I then managed to get bike chain grease all over my hands, and had to wipe them on the only piece of paper in my purse. It happened to be my proof of enrolment request form that I still had not managed to get through Student Central. No matter, that form wasn't going to see its destination for several days anyway.
That evening, I met up with some of my friends and discovered that Wednesday had been a particularly awful day for most people. This is a public service announcement. Watch out for Wednesdays.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The past 7 days: brought to you by Satan
The past 7 days: Brought to you by Satan
Hello everyone! Get ready for the next Series: several rants on how awful the last 7 days have been. Here are days 1 and 2.
It began last Wednesday morning, when I awoke to find my dog in the process of dying by the back door. Details are sad and unnecessary, but she looked in pretty rough shape. It was my day off, and I was up at 7am mostly because I had to do the Community Garden Food Bank delivery. I was severely uninterested in leaving poor Kaitie to drive out to St. Boniface to deliver an 50 pink tomatoes and 12 rubbery carrots to a foodbank that was about to receive a tidal wave of leftovers from Winnipeg Harvest anyway, but Karen had been doing it every single week of the summer so I couldn’t exactly cop out on the one day she asked me to do it for her.
I arrived at the church, unlocked the door, and realized that the alarm pass code I had previously memorized had readily evaporated into the oblivion of my subconscious mind. I hurriedly began to phone everyone in my phone book who might know the code, but half a minute later the alarm began to blare. I went and sat on the basement floor and cried angrily to myself until the alarm stopped sounding, then phoned the alarm company. I’ve done this several times, but seeing as I don’t actually have a security code, there’s nothing the company itself can actually do for me. So I had to start phoning trustees. I only remembered who 2 of them were, and one was already gone to work. I finally got it sorted out, and went and deposited the vegetables of little consequence in the basement of the food bank.
Traffic was a nightmare. When I got home, Kaitie was clearly about to die. I phoned the vet to see if I could move her appointment up. I could not. In the spirit of a university student who has forgotten what school is like, I had chosen to leave all my homework to do on my day off. So I sat there stroking my corpse-like pet and tried to finish reading The Dangerous Book for Boys**. I got about halfway through it, and the vet called to say I could bring Kaitie in early. I ran down the street to enlist the help of my friend in loading Kaitie into the car.
By the time we got Kaitie onto the vet’s table, she was barely breathing and seemingly unaware of anything going on around her. I expected the vet to come in, take one look at her, and tell me she wasn’t going to make it. Instead, he examined her for about 15 minutes, and then told me he didn’t think she was going to make it. While he was explaining this to me, she stopped breathing entirely. Surprise! The vet became horribly awkward and kept on apologizing for my loss and telling me how much everything would be.
I know that nothing is free in this town, and I don’t expect it to be, but I still found it rather amusing that I was charged $60 for a check-up that ended in diagnosing my dog as dead. Had I chosen not to move her appointment up at all, she would have died on our kitchen floor before I got her to her appointment and I could have done the diagnosis myself. But I’m being uncharitable. The vet did a good job, and I was just glad I didn’t have to decide to euthanize her.
Anyways. I went home, logged on to the university Blackboard site, and found out that my sadistic ecocriticism professor had assigned us 125 pages of literary criticism to read. And 33 pages of it was written by John Locke. Have you ever tried to read John Locke? Dear God.
I wasn’t much in the mood to read it, so I did that fun thing where you read the first sentence of every paragraph and go to school and are still the only one who can comment on any of the reading because none of your classmates have done it either.
Then there was Thursday. The only bad thing that happened with Thursday was I found a letter at the bottom of our letter basket that I had chosen not to open when it arrived several weeks before. The letter told me that I owed the bank $10,000 and had until September 15 to prove I was still in school or they’d start charging interest. It was September 16. By the time I found the letter, the bank was closed. I knew there was no way I was going to get a proof of enrolment to them before October because the university has decided it would be a great idea to require proof of enrolment forms be handled by Student Central, which handles all the business of new university students and has an hour-long waiting line for most of September, and is also only open from 8 until 4. All I had to do was hand in that damn form and give them 7.50 and I had to stand in line for an hour? Every time I asked them if there was an alternative, they gave me a new and equally unhelpful answer. So I phoned the bank and left them a message promising I was still in school. Then I made curried carrot soup with the food bank carrots I had deemed too ugly to give to charity. I decided the soup was a tribute to Kaitie. Eating soup can be an emotional affair.
**a book that gets away with being remarkably sexist and heteronormative by being designed to look like it was made in the 1940’s, so’s no one will realize it was written in 2006 by men who should know better, and published by a company that should know EVEN better. All the same, there are some pretty wicked paper planes in this book. And it tells you how to make batteries. I am divided on how I feel about this book.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Eyes in a potatoe!
Thursday, I had my first Children's Literature class, and the professor was showing us pictures so we could discuss how we knew they were related to childhood or children. She showed us this picture that someone from her friend's grade one class drew. I have fallen in love with this picture, it is such a strange, hilarious, insane thing. I copied it down, and I have recreated it here, word for word, potato-claws and all, for your viewing pleasure:
Thursday, September 9, 2010
The repercussions of war
Remember how I got really angry at Virgin Mobile and attacked them with hate mail, hate blog posts, hate facebook messages, and hate phone messages? Well, that's very surprising, since I haven't publicized how far-reaching my attack on Virgin Mobile was. However, I did do all those things--I wrote them emails, I posted my criticisms in a variety of online locations, and I ranted about it so much, my dad ended up phoning them and sitting on hold for 20 minutes just so he could tell them how disappointed I was with their company.
Broadcasting an enraged diatribe on the shortcomings of a multinational company is all fun and games up until about a week after the heated outburst, when my emotions have leveled off and I've forgotten why I was angry in the first place and I would prefer to forget that I had a Mr. Hyde moment with my ex-telephone company. The fun ended there with Virgin Mobile, because it was at this point--when I was in this level-headed, Dr. Jekel state, feeling as placid as a mirror-like pond of still water, that Virgin Mobile chose to respond to my email tirades.
Of course, having forgotten why I was angry in the first place, I could not understand what Virgin Mobile could possibly be apologizing for, so I quietly hid their email in a corner of my inbox and continued to pretend that I've always been as calm and collected as I am now.
The end result of all this is that
1) I now know that someone actually reads my rants
2) I know that this reader is in fact the company the rant is aimed at
and therefore,
3) I now must live with two constant fears: the fear that someone from Virgin Mobile will recognize me as That Girl*, and that my uncontrollable ranting will some day burst fourth against another, equally helpless customer service representative from another organization.
This is why it took me 57 minutes to find wall hooks at Canadian Tire on Tuesday. After 15 minutes of searching for the wall hooks and finding broom hooks, industrial-strength metal pulleys, bike hooks, and gate hooks instead, I was frustrated and tempted to ask one of the extremely busy shop people for help. But then I was suddenly afraid. What if I'm secretly not finished being angry and large corporations yet? What if I am unwittingly gearing up to pour fourth a tirade of criticisms on the next Canadian Tire employee whom I come across? What if I inexplicably tell that woman with the nametag over there that she's dressed up to look like a drug dealer and her company doesn't respect her at all? What will happen then?
I spent 42 minutes wandering around the store, trying to decide whether I could get away with hanging my house coat on a broom clip instead. By the time I had someone direct me to the wall hook aisle, I had convinced myself that broom clips were too useful to pass up, which is why all of my hairbrushes now clip onto my wall. I'm actually rather ecstatic about this. The moral of this story is that paranoia breeds inspiration.
*Virgin Mobile has set up camp at my school, so I spend a lot of time counting the floor tiles and humming to myself when I walk through the halls, as if my rant was so infamous that it was picked out of the sea of Virgin Mobile hate mail and pinned to a great wall map of Winnipeg beside my facebook photo with the words Watch Out For This Girl scrawled in red beneath the image. I'm nothing if not self-absorbed.
Broadcasting an enraged diatribe on the shortcomings of a multinational company is all fun and games up until about a week after the heated outburst, when my emotions have leveled off and I've forgotten why I was angry in the first place and I would prefer to forget that I had a Mr. Hyde moment with my ex-telephone company. The fun ended there with Virgin Mobile, because it was at this point--when I was in this level-headed, Dr. Jekel state, feeling as placid as a mirror-like pond of still water, that Virgin Mobile chose to respond to my email tirades.
Of course, having forgotten why I was angry in the first place, I could not understand what Virgin Mobile could possibly be apologizing for, so I quietly hid their email in a corner of my inbox and continued to pretend that I've always been as calm and collected as I am now.
The end result of all this is that
1) I now know that someone actually reads my rants
2) I know that this reader is in fact the company the rant is aimed at
and therefore,
3) I now must live with two constant fears: the fear that someone from Virgin Mobile will recognize me as That Girl*, and that my uncontrollable ranting will some day burst fourth against another, equally helpless customer service representative from another organization.
This is why it took me 57 minutes to find wall hooks at Canadian Tire on Tuesday. After 15 minutes of searching for the wall hooks and finding broom hooks, industrial-strength metal pulleys, bike hooks, and gate hooks instead, I was frustrated and tempted to ask one of the extremely busy shop people for help. But then I was suddenly afraid. What if I'm secretly not finished being angry and large corporations yet? What if I am unwittingly gearing up to pour fourth a tirade of criticisms on the next Canadian Tire employee whom I come across? What if I inexplicably tell that woman with the nametag over there that she's dressed up to look like a drug dealer and her company doesn't respect her at all? What will happen then?
I spent 42 minutes wandering around the store, trying to decide whether I could get away with hanging my house coat on a broom clip instead. By the time I had someone direct me to the wall hook aisle, I had convinced myself that broom clips were too useful to pass up, which is why all of my hairbrushes now clip onto my wall. I'm actually rather ecstatic about this. The moral of this story is that paranoia breeds inspiration.
*Virgin Mobile has set up camp at my school, so I spend a lot of time counting the floor tiles and humming to myself when I walk through the halls, as if my rant was so infamous that it was picked out of the sea of Virgin Mobile hate mail and pinned to a great wall map of Winnipeg beside my facebook photo with the words Watch Out For This Girl scrawled in red beneath the image. I'm nothing if not self-absorbed.
Curmudgeon in training
Sometimes I think about those in-training tshirts. You know, the ones that are adorned with horrifying phrases that do not bode well for the future. Things like "MILF in training" or "Diva in training" or "Cougar in training" or "Zombie in training". Some day, there will be a Diva MILF Cougar Zombie army running around the streets and we'll only have ourselves to blame for it--they did give us ample warning that they were training for it, after all. But this is all besides the point. The point is, it's high time that someone makes a "Heinous Old Curmudgeon in Training" t-shirt, so that I would have something to wear.
People often mistake me for a nice person because I only swear at them quietly to myself, only use phrases like "If you don't stop talking I will kick a puppy in the face" in the privacy of my own mind, and even when I am at my surliest, I am still easily tricked into bending to the whims of young children.
Miranda and Clementine are two little girls who live down my street. They adore me, and therefore I cannot stand them. The only person they adore more than me is my dog. They get me and my dog mixed up frequently, which is unsurprising, since Kaitie and I are similar in many ways: We both eat random crap we find on the ground and on ourselves*, we both wander around the house pretending to be from another species**, and we both view Miranda and Clementine with an equal amount of indifference bordering on disdain.
My average interaction with the girls will go like this:
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Me: I'm Amy.
Clementine: Kaitie Kaitie Kaitie!
Miranda: Can I walk your dog?
Me: Not today.
Clementine: I'm touching Amy's tail!
Miranda: Can I go with you?
Me: No.
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Miranda: My mom says its okay.
Me: No she doesn't.
Miranda: I asked her.
Me: She's not even here.
Clementine: poop!
Miranda: I'm going with you.
Me: Goodbye.
At this point I ignore both of them and walk around the corner of the building, never to be seen again. However, yesterday, Miranda and Clementine were determined to join me on my walk. So I went the other way. Unfortunately, the other way lead to the park, which the girls interpreted as me offering to take them to the park. They were overjoyed and told me we were going on the swings. I told them I was not going to the park, I was going around the park and coming right back. By this time we had crossed the street and were in the park grounds, and I noticed that Clementine was barefoot and had clearly wet herself earlier that day.
Somehow, I was cajoled into walking Clementine back to her house, waiting for her to put on shoes and fight with her sister about whether or not she would put on new pants, come out wearing the same pants and her older sister's shoes, walk her back into the park holding hands. And Miranda got to walk Kaitie. I looked like Mother Theresa.
The next thing I know, I'm running around the park pushing Miranda on the swing and keeping Clementine from shoving Kaitie into the garbage cans and the girls are having the time of their lives and I am realizing I'm actually annoyed that Kaitie is along because she's tired and in pain (arthritis) and wants to go home and I haven't gotten to do under-ducks with Miranda yet.
Do you know how hard it is to get two little girls out of a park and back into their front yard again? Of course you do. It's impossible. I believe that there is some alternate dimension where we're all still stuck on jungle gyms, alternating between waiting for little children to stop building castles on the slide so we can go home, and being children ourselves and hiding beneath the slide making icecream cones. Every time someone manages to drag a child out of a sandbox, there's a rift in the space-time continuum***.
So we 'went home'. By that I mean we rolled down the hill 4 times, then rolled down the hill 'for the last time' 4 more times, then Clementine played dead on the ground so I had to zombify her and make her walk home like she was my puppet, and then we had to call over Miranda's best friend Wren to visit Kaitie, and then we stuck dandylions and dead leaves through Kaitie's collar to make a crown for her, and then Clementine had to walk Kaitie, and then Miranda had to walk Kaitie, and then Wren had to walk Kaitie, and then Clementine lay down on the ground again because she couldn't walk Kaitie, and I decided she was being sleeping beauty and Kaitie had to wake her up with a big sloppy dog kiss, and then Clementine had to be carried across the street and then I had to go into their yard with them and spin them on their own plastic merry-go-round until Miranda and Clementine couldn't ignore their mother yelling at them from the kitchen to come inside, and I went home and Dad told me I was such a good person, and reminded me that he'd written down all the spelling mistakes from my earlier blog posts and pasted them to the front door for me.
So now I have to make this t-shirt...
*today I ate a fluff that looked like a chunk of chocolate off of the floor, and licked an unidentified white sauce off of my hand. It was hand lotion.
**I meow frequently, and the vet calls Kaitie the Pig Dog, due to that endearing little snuffling noise she makes all the time.
***Can you tell how little I know about physics here?
People often mistake me for a nice person because I only swear at them quietly to myself, only use phrases like "If you don't stop talking I will kick a puppy in the face" in the privacy of my own mind, and even when I am at my surliest, I am still easily tricked into bending to the whims of young children.
Miranda and Clementine are two little girls who live down my street. They adore me, and therefore I cannot stand them. The only person they adore more than me is my dog. They get me and my dog mixed up frequently, which is unsurprising, since Kaitie and I are similar in many ways: We both eat random crap we find on the ground and on ourselves*, we both wander around the house pretending to be from another species**, and we both view Miranda and Clementine with an equal amount of indifference bordering on disdain.
My average interaction with the girls will go like this:
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Me: I'm Amy.
Clementine: Kaitie Kaitie Kaitie!
Miranda: Can I walk your dog?
Me: Not today.
Clementine: I'm touching Amy's tail!
Miranda: Can I go with you?
Me: No.
Clementine: Hi Kaitie!
Miranda: My mom says its okay.
Me: No she doesn't.
Miranda: I asked her.
Me: She's not even here.
Clementine: poop!
Miranda: I'm going with you.
Me: Goodbye.
At this point I ignore both of them and walk around the corner of the building, never to be seen again. However, yesterday, Miranda and Clementine were determined to join me on my walk. So I went the other way. Unfortunately, the other way lead to the park, which the girls interpreted as me offering to take them to the park. They were overjoyed and told me we were going on the swings. I told them I was not going to the park, I was going around the park and coming right back. By this time we had crossed the street and were in the park grounds, and I noticed that Clementine was barefoot and had clearly wet herself earlier that day.
Somehow, I was cajoled into walking Clementine back to her house, waiting for her to put on shoes and fight with her sister about whether or not she would put on new pants, come out wearing the same pants and her older sister's shoes, walk her back into the park holding hands. And Miranda got to walk Kaitie. I looked like Mother Theresa.
The next thing I know, I'm running around the park pushing Miranda on the swing and keeping Clementine from shoving Kaitie into the garbage cans and the girls are having the time of their lives and I am realizing I'm actually annoyed that Kaitie is along because she's tired and in pain (arthritis) and wants to go home and I haven't gotten to do under-ducks with Miranda yet.
Do you know how hard it is to get two little girls out of a park and back into their front yard again? Of course you do. It's impossible. I believe that there is some alternate dimension where we're all still stuck on jungle gyms, alternating between waiting for little children to stop building castles on the slide so we can go home, and being children ourselves and hiding beneath the slide making icecream cones. Every time someone manages to drag a child out of a sandbox, there's a rift in the space-time continuum***.
So we 'went home'. By that I mean we rolled down the hill 4 times, then rolled down the hill 'for the last time' 4 more times, then Clementine played dead on the ground so I had to zombify her and make her walk home like she was my puppet, and then we had to call over Miranda's best friend Wren to visit Kaitie, and then we stuck dandylions and dead leaves through Kaitie's collar to make a crown for her, and then Clementine had to walk Kaitie, and then Miranda had to walk Kaitie, and then Wren had to walk Kaitie, and then Clementine lay down on the ground again because she couldn't walk Kaitie, and I decided she was being sleeping beauty and Kaitie had to wake her up with a big sloppy dog kiss, and then Clementine had to be carried across the street and then I had to go into their yard with them and spin them on their own plastic merry-go-round until Miranda and Clementine couldn't ignore their mother yelling at them from the kitchen to come inside, and I went home and Dad told me I was such a good person, and reminded me that he'd written down all the spelling mistakes from my earlier blog posts and pasted them to the front door for me.
So now I have to make this t-shirt...
*today I ate a fluff that looked like a chunk of chocolate off of the floor, and licked an unidentified white sauce off of my hand. It was hand lotion.
**I meow frequently, and the vet calls Kaitie the Pig Dog, due to that endearing little snuffling noise she makes all the time.
***Can you tell how little I know about physics here?
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
In which Amy tries to save a life and screws up an argument instead
I was awakened at 6:30 this morning to the sound of someone screaming. Alright, that's not quite true. I was awakened by a full bladder, but when I arrived in the bathroom, I heard the vocal sounds of anguish through the bathroom window.
Every once in a while, late at night or early in the morning, I wake up and hear screaming. Generally, I go out onto my boat deck and see what I can see. I can never see anything, but it usually sounds like it's coming from the next street over so I go back inside and go back to bed (I know, I'm not exactly superman). But today, the sound was definitely coming from my front street. It sounded like someone was getting murdered.
Downstairs, the screaming was louder. I opened the front door. It sounded like it was right outside. I opened the porch door, and there she was, a tiny, distraught woman, folded up in a ball and crying in the middle of the sidewalk about 3 houses down.
I couldn't tell at this point why she was so upset, but, fearing for our collective safety, I glanced around for a weapon or a cellphone and realized that there was nothing in the hallway to serve me*. So, I just went outside, leaving both the front and porch doors wide open in the hopes that this would somehow save me from whatever was out there.
I approached the distraught woman.
Me: "Hun, what's wrong?"
Distraught Woman: "He doesn't love me anymore!"
ah. Alright, not my area of expertise. I persevered.
Me: "Did he hurt you?"
DW: "He hurt me emotionally! He hurt me financially! Oh God!"
I had come out expecting to break up some sort of domestic abuse case**, but instead I was viewing the aftermath of a lover's quarrel. In my experience, heart break is something that strangers can't generally cure. Especially if the broken heart in question belongs to someone wreaking so strongly of so many different substances, it is doubtful she will remember being comforted by anyone in the end. But then, I couldn't leave a woman all alone crying on the pavement outside of our house. So I patted her back and told her it would be okay***.
DW sobbed for a few more minutes and explained to me why he didn't care and how she knew he didn't care and how this made her feel. Then the heart breaker showed up. He came out of a yard 5 houses down to the north of my place. DW and I were crouched on the pavement 3 houses up, south of my place.
I pointed to him "Is that him?"
DW: "YES!"
Me (still trying to see if there is any sort of physical help this woman needs): "Did he throw you out?"
DW: "He threw us all out! He threw everything out! He threw out us!"
And then, DW started yelling at the heart breaker, yelling at the tops of her lungs, "You don't love me, you can't do this, you ****** just leave just leave, he never cared ****** was never there when I needed him", etc etc, speaking half to him and half to me and half to no one in particular. I patted her in a more urgent matter and whispered "sh sh, it will be okay, sh, it'll be fine". By now I had completely abandoned my original goal of comforting DW, and was just trying to get her to shut up.
Heart Breaker got on his bicycle and rode up to us. He stopped three houses away from us. He stopped right beside my front gate.
So, picture this scene, if you will: a woman, in purple leopard print bustier and skinny jeans, crumpled on the sidewalk, sobbing; a sleepy girl with bedhead wearing light blue pajamas covered in little pink turtles that say "slow to bed...early to rise" all over them, crouched on the pavement beside the crying woman; a man, dressed in black, perched on his bicycle like Zorro on Tornado a few meters from the two women. The woman is yelling, the girl is patting the woman's back nervously, and the man is speaking calmly in a low voice that probably won't wake the neighbours. Which one of these people should probably get up and go mind her own business in her nice warm bed?
I stood up.
HB: "Stay the f*** on street, you f****** b***." Was he talking to me? I sat down again.
DW: "You stay on the street, you dirt, you dirt, you treat me like dirt."
I stood up again.
HB: "Don't come near me, you s***!" Who me? I sat down again.
DW: "You don't come near me! You leave me alone! You leave me you don't care you don't care!"
I stood up again, and started walking towards my house and HB.
Me: "Um, I'm just going inside, if that's okay. I was just...making sure she was okay..."
HB: "Yeah, sorry about all this. Go ahead."
And so, I went inside and locked the door, safe in the knowledge that I had once again managed to remain completely useless to the screaming people who live on my street.
*in retrospect, there were actually several pointy umbrellas I could have used. Or I could have gotten the hammer-on-a-chain together and brought that with me. Unfortunately, that particular weapon of self-defense does not exist yet, though many friends encourage me to make it. Some day...
**And by 'break up' I mean, call the police and hide somewhere until it's all over.
***Emptier words were never spoken. This is why I hate comforting. 'Comforting' is code for 'tell them all sorts of nice things that no woman in her right mind would ever actually believe'. I used to try to be truthful when comforting people, until I told a heartbroken friend of mine that her idiotic ex was never coming back and that was probably a good thing. While I was right--he didn't, and it was--my friend reprimanded me severely for telling her such a horrible thing, and it sort of ruined her crying session for the day. Ah, emotions. Terrible, irrational things they are. I think I may have missed the chapter on empathy in my Being a Human handbook.
Every once in a while, late at night or early in the morning, I wake up and hear screaming. Generally, I go out onto my boat deck and see what I can see. I can never see anything, but it usually sounds like it's coming from the next street over so I go back inside and go back to bed (I know, I'm not exactly superman). But today, the sound was definitely coming from my front street. It sounded like someone was getting murdered.
Downstairs, the screaming was louder. I opened the front door. It sounded like it was right outside. I opened the porch door, and there she was, a tiny, distraught woman, folded up in a ball and crying in the middle of the sidewalk about 3 houses down.
I couldn't tell at this point why she was so upset, but, fearing for our collective safety, I glanced around for a weapon or a cellphone and realized that there was nothing in the hallway to serve me*. So, I just went outside, leaving both the front and porch doors wide open in the hopes that this would somehow save me from whatever was out there.
I approached the distraught woman.
Me: "Hun, what's wrong?"
Distraught Woman: "He doesn't love me anymore!"
ah. Alright, not my area of expertise. I persevered.
Me: "Did he hurt you?"
DW: "He hurt me emotionally! He hurt me financially! Oh God!"
I had come out expecting to break up some sort of domestic abuse case**, but instead I was viewing the aftermath of a lover's quarrel. In my experience, heart break is something that strangers can't generally cure. Especially if the broken heart in question belongs to someone wreaking so strongly of so many different substances, it is doubtful she will remember being comforted by anyone in the end. But then, I couldn't leave a woman all alone crying on the pavement outside of our house. So I patted her back and told her it would be okay***.
DW sobbed for a few more minutes and explained to me why he didn't care and how she knew he didn't care and how this made her feel. Then the heart breaker showed up. He came out of a yard 5 houses down to the north of my place. DW and I were crouched on the pavement 3 houses up, south of my place.
I pointed to him "Is that him?"
DW: "YES!"
Me (still trying to see if there is any sort of physical help this woman needs): "Did he throw you out?"
DW: "He threw us all out! He threw everything out! He threw out us!"
And then, DW started yelling at the heart breaker, yelling at the tops of her lungs, "You don't love me, you can't do this, you ****** just leave just leave, he never cared ****** was never there when I needed him", etc etc, speaking half to him and half to me and half to no one in particular. I patted her in a more urgent matter and whispered "sh sh, it will be okay, sh, it'll be fine". By now I had completely abandoned my original goal of comforting DW, and was just trying to get her to shut up.
Heart Breaker got on his bicycle and rode up to us. He stopped three houses away from us. He stopped right beside my front gate.
So, picture this scene, if you will: a woman, in purple leopard print bustier and skinny jeans, crumpled on the sidewalk, sobbing; a sleepy girl with bedhead wearing light blue pajamas covered in little pink turtles that say "slow to bed...early to rise" all over them, crouched on the pavement beside the crying woman; a man, dressed in black, perched on his bicycle like Zorro on Tornado a few meters from the two women. The woman is yelling, the girl is patting the woman's back nervously, and the man is speaking calmly in a low voice that probably won't wake the neighbours. Which one of these people should probably get up and go mind her own business in her nice warm bed?
I stood up.
HB: "Stay the f*** on street, you f****** b***." Was he talking to me? I sat down again.
DW: "You stay on the street, you dirt, you dirt, you treat me like dirt."
I stood up again.
HB: "Don't come near me, you s***!" Who me? I sat down again.
DW: "You don't come near me! You leave me alone! You leave me you don't care you don't care!"
I stood up again, and started walking towards my house and HB.
Me: "Um, I'm just going inside, if that's okay. I was just...making sure she was okay..."
HB: "Yeah, sorry about all this. Go ahead."
And so, I went inside and locked the door, safe in the knowledge that I had once again managed to remain completely useless to the screaming people who live on my street.
*in retrospect, there were actually several pointy umbrellas I could have used. Or I could have gotten the hammer-on-a-chain together and brought that with me. Unfortunately, that particular weapon of self-defense does not exist yet, though many friends encourage me to make it. Some day...
**And by 'break up' I mean, call the police and hide somewhere until it's all over.
***Emptier words were never spoken. This is why I hate comforting. 'Comforting' is code for 'tell them all sorts of nice things that no woman in her right mind would ever actually believe'. I used to try to be truthful when comforting people, until I told a heartbroken friend of mine that her idiotic ex was never coming back and that was probably a good thing. While I was right--he didn't, and it was--my friend reprimanded me severely for telling her such a horrible thing, and it sort of ruined her crying session for the day. Ah, emotions. Terrible, irrational things they are. I think I may have missed the chapter on empathy in my Being a Human handbook.
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