Married, And Married, And Married Again
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Gini and me, what with all of my travelling and Gini’s horrid case of hoof-and-mouth and many other intangibles. And we haven’t had the time to really connect, just to cuddle in bed and feel that comfort and talk.
Which we did. And then we got married all over again.
It’s rare. But in times of stress, Gini and I tend to recite new vows – not often, maybe once every couple of years. But during a particularly tender time we’ll look each other in the eyes and make new promises and feel all of that old tension shedding away like a snake skin.
You will never know what we promise to each other. But you will know that we’ll come away as newlyweds again, and starting anew doesn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve done before. It means that no matter what kind of a patina life loads onto our relationship, the tiniest of scratches and we’re right back on our wedding day, holding hands and feeling that this is the best choice either of us have ever made.
I love you, my bride. You’re still everything I’d ever hoped for, and more.
Weird Comfort Watching
So yesterday, I questioned whether people would rewatch the Hunger Games movie, since it had all that, you know, traumatic children death in it.
Then Fargo came on HBO and I was all like, “Oooh, let’s watch it again.”
Yes, I know, in the end it features a murderer stuffing another criminal into a woodchipper. But despite all the horror, Marge Gunderson still manages to retain her humanity, love, and good will, so when she settles into the bed with her husband and his three-cent stamp, it feels like a hug.
So I ask you: what’s your bizarre comfort watching, and why? Sure, anyone can watch Galaxy Quest or Tangled a zillion times – it’s all silly comedy that ends well. But what do you watch when you’re stressed that comforts you for reasons others might not understand?
The Consolation Challenge: Four Minutes Or Less, And Your Pizza's Free!
Congratulations go to David Steffen, whose flash fiction story got rejected by PodCastle in a blistering five minutes yesterday. As David said, “I had not even finished updating the entry in my submissions spreadsheet before it got rejected.” The email confirms it: submission at 8:57 a.m., response at 9:02 a.m.
You know what that means: free pizza!
If you will recall my consolation challenge, I had promised to buy a consolation pizza for any author who got rejected more quickly than my previous record of twenty-nine minutes. As David said, “What better way to wipe up my tears than with a delicious pizza?” Here, you see David eating his pain, complete with manuscript, ham, black olives, and extra cheese.
I should note that in both cases, the rejection came from blisteringly fast rejectioneer Ann Leckie – so if you’re looking to maximize your hopes of a free pizza, submit to either PodCastle or Giganotosaurus, both of which are fine markets to be published in or to be rapidly ejected from.
In any case, the timer has been adjusted, and to win a pizza you must now be rejected in four minutes or under. The rules are here. Should you be rejected in four minutes or under, I will buy you pizza – a pizza that will take longer to arrive than your rejection did.
Best of luck, writers!
The Hunger Games: A One-View Wonder?
So the Hunger Games exploded at the box office this weekend as fans took the theaters by storm.
My question is, how popular will this movie be in the long run?
I mean, I liked the film, but it’s PTSD in a can. There’s no escapism in this, the way there is in Twilight – Katniss is being destroyed psychologically scene-by-scene, constantly in danger of dying, all in nervous-quiver shakycam. I might take a friend to talk it over with them after the film, but I can’t possibly imagine going back to watch it repeatedly for any kind of comfort. It’s like being kicked in the balls in high precision.
So I mean, it’s a well-done movie. But will people want to go back? Will they want this threatening thing sitting on their DVD shelf, just waiting to relive trauma all over again? Or is there some unknown comfort/pleasure to be had from this movie where teens will relive it over and over?
I mean, scorn Twilight as much as you want, but at its core it’s a dreamy romance. Hunger Games is straight-up horror – not action film, fucking horror. So how many times do we want to see it?
If Trayvon Martin Had Worn A Nice Suit, He'd Be Alive Today (Or At Least Be Shot By Someone Less Important)
So a kid’s been shot for the crime of carrying Skittles. And of course, the media is raising the important question: did Trayvon Martin bring his death upon himself by wearing a thuggish, threatening hoodie?
Blame is, of course, important to assign. If a woman’s been raped, the most critical piece of evidence we can gather is what clothing she was wearing, so that we can know whether she was asking for an assault. So it’s kind of nice to see the symmetry here, as Trayvon’s dress code is questioned to see if he deserved to be gunned down for the crime of walking through the wrong neighborhood.
Remember: it’s all about the impression you present. I mean after all, if I was walking down a dark alleyway dressed in a thousand-dollar suit, I’d just be asking to be mugged, wouldn’t I?
…except that never actually, you know, seems to happen. I mean, Wall Street bankers get mugged on occasion, often in nice suits, and there’s never a big media question over whether they deserved to be knifed for wearing very fine clothing. Occasionally, they might be questioned for their intellect for being in Those Neighborhoods, but nobody actually tells people with fine suits that they should have known better than to go out in that garb.
In fact, if a nice rich-looking person does get assaulted, there’s often a hue and cry about how unsafe the streets have gotten that they can’t wander around at will. Their clothing choices are never in question. It’s other people who are at fault.
Make no mistake: any time you see someone being chastised for wearing the wrong clothing, they’ve slummed out. Wearing a hoodie? God, you look like a poor kid. Wearing skimpy clothing? You look like a slut. There you are, a perfectly nice person, and you went out of your way to make yourself appear like someone who doesn’t deserve to have the protections that “real” society should have! No wonder someone shot or raped you! You purposely and knowingly discarded your protective identity!
How foolish you were.
The not-so-subliminal signal, of course, is that if you act like a criminal and/or slut, you have only yourself to blame if you get treated like one. Even if the outfit you wear – say, a hoodie – is something that millions of quote-unquote lower-class people wear, only of which a few mug people. But since we all know that the lower-class are mainly criminals (or at least we mainly interact with them as though they were criminals), the hoodie becomes the outfit of the criminal.
It’s really, really dickish and churlish to have the #OWS people harassing people in fine suits on the assumption they might be part of the bankers who almost destroyed America’s financial system! That’s okay to get upset about. But if a kid gets shot and killed because his low-class outfit threatened someone, well, maybe he should have known better.
The larger message is, of course, is that the lower class doesn’t really deserve to be protected. If something bad happens to them, we should first look for the reasons why they had it coming. They were in a bad neighborhood, they were probably not working very hard, they were almost certainly in some way responsible for their predicament. ‘Cause you know, when a rich white kid vanishes on vacation and it hits the headlines everywhere, the first thing we do is start analyzing their history of teenaged drinking and sexuality in an attempt to unearth all the reasons why they might have stupidly caused their own kidnapping and/or murder…
…wait, we don’t? We agonize unquestioningly about how such a lovely young thing could have been stolen from us?
How shocking.
The message isn’t subtle, but it’s there. The whole Trayvon pushback is an attempt to get people to go, “Well, if he wore a nicer outfit, he probably wouldn’t have been killed!” Which probably has an ounce of truth in it…. but it’s kind of like telling people that if they don’t go outside then they won’t choke on the cancerous gases emanating from factory smokestacks next door. While wearing a hoodie might have saved one life, concentrating on the hoodie ignores the toxic class politics in play here.
The problem is that there’s this constant, subliminal signal that the wrong sort of people aren’t deserving of everyday protections. If they get killed, it’s their fault. We don’t really need to get involved.
That’s the core problem. That’s what got brought to cold light when Trayvon got shot.
That’s what we actually need to fix.