Prophesy

I believe in self-fulfilling prophecy, but I am still reflecting on how I feel about this article. It's like real-life Good Luck Chuck.*

*Full disclosure: I have never seen, nor ever plan on seeing, Good Luck Chuck.

The sound of pain

I just suddenly became overwhelmed by the sounds around me. I think there are crickets...but it's mostly a high-pitched electronic song, evidence perhaps that we really are in the Matrix? Now that I'm aware of it, it's rather disturbing. I turn things off, but it doesn't go away.

In movies when one stops and contemplates the sounds of the world existing, it always sounds like music. There's a beat, a rhythm, a natural beauty. I guess if you take out the nature, the world sounds like death. I faintly hear crickets. But they are losing the aural battle.

Recognition

Have you ever watched a commercial and recognized an actor from some obscure, long ago work?

Well, I was recently watching this CitiCard commercial and thought, "That looks like the chick who became the third yellow Power Ranger!" I remember her most from an episode in which she discovers that she's a great baseball pitcher and starts playing for the team. That episode made me cringe because her form was so terrible.

Her name is Nakia Burrise, FYI.

Virgins

While I am made just as uncomfortable by the cultural and social implications of Burger King's new Whopper Virgins campaign as its many detractors...my question is, how did they make the Big Macs? They show how they made the Whopper but they don't explain how they took the care to make sure they made the Big Mac comparably to how it would be made in a McDonald's. (Yes, I know, "care" might be the wrong word.)

Tomorrow

Whose table is it?

I am a feminist. And as a feminist, I am going to say something that will offend many other feminists who would have me stripped of my right to say that I am a feminist: I am against abortion. Go ahead. Stone me.

Ready to listen now? Look, I do not support illegalizing abortion. I don't support blowing up abortion clinics. I don't support harassing people who want to get abortions. I don't support the sexist(and at times racist and classist) ideas that lead many to oppose abortion. I oppose abortion because it is too much of a gray area, because I am not entirely convinced that that fetus is not actually a human being. But at the same time, I have no problem with the morning after pill, so what right have I to judge where someone else draws the line?

The reason I bring this up is because of some people's unwillingness to see that not everyone who views abortion as murder is a horrible misogynist, out to control the bodies of women. I do not hold an extreme view of abortion, but I think the vilification of those who do view a fetus as a life tends to become ugly and extreme itself.

Currently, there is a lot of hoopla about Obama's decision to have Rick Warren speak at his inauguration. Pro-choicers are angry because Warren is anti-abortion. Gay activists are angry because Warren has a moral issue with homosexuality.

"By inviting Rick Warren to your inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have a place at your table," Solmonese said in an open letter to Obama that was released by his organization.*

This statement bothers me greatly! Because what's happening is, Obama is trying to invite many different people to his table. He's trying to unite America and this means opening his arms to many different viewpoints. I personally have a problem with a lot of what Warren has said...but I also have a problem with the way some of his words have been taken out of context. But more than that, I have a problem with liberals who feel excluded, who condone excluding their conservative neighbors, instead of inviting them in and saying, "Hey! Meet me, know me, and realize I'm human too." And maybe that's because they don't realize that the evil, evangelical, white, homophobic, misogynistic man is human as well?

Links:

• Obama's inaugural choice sparks outrage
• Make Room for Pro-Life Democrats

The Book of Face

How many Facebook friends do you have? I know some people who keep their friends list pretty tight, friend requesting and only accepting friend requests from those to whom they are actually already close. Some people friend everyone they've ever met or known and even accept requests from people who they don't know. I know people with friend's lists barely in the double digits, and others who are approaching 2,000 friends. I am somewhere in between. As of this sentence, my friend list (as of this moment)numbers 539. I could go through the list and tell you exactly how I know each and every person on my list. But as you can imagine, the number of those people with whom I am actually in regular contact is slim. (I now have 540 friends).

I often find myself feeling awkward when I become privy to the ups and downs of the lives of these 540 "friends." I have witnessed marriages, births, divorces, deaths. I know when relationships end, when friendships go sour, parties go bad, jobs disappear.

What does it mean for all of this information to be available so publicly? I feel I am a voyeur, given access to people's lives, but not necessarily feeling welcome to comment on them. And so I pray for people when it seems appropriate, silently congratulate them, look at their photos, read their blogs...maintain my distance.

Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
-Sherry Turkle

Pillows of Illusion

When I'm Awake, I Drink to Forget the Dreams
Guy #1, leaving: Bye! Sweet dreams.
Girl to guy #2: I hope so, last night I had a really bad dream. What about you?
Guy #2: I had dreams last night. It's my reality that's the problem.

--Hopscotch Cafe

Overheard by: bildita
via Overheard in New York, Dec 4, 2008

War as Life

"We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels."
-Susan Sontag

In case you didn't notice...

Life does not come with an eraser.

Settling

No Life

Stop!

Don't get in the way of your own life. Stop the self-sabotage. Stop the fear, the lack of confidence, the hatred, the anxiety, the laziness, the apathy, the weariness, the sense of entitlement, the ignorance, the procrastination, the excuses.

Stop.

My Playground

There are certain movies that are difficult for me to watch as an adult, despite my immense love for them, because they remind me too much of the childhood dreams that have fallen to the wayside. A League of Their Own is one of those films.

Jimmy Dugan: Taking a little day trip?
Dottie Hinson: No, Bob and I are driving home. To Oregon.
Jimmy Dugan: [long pause] You know, I really thought you were a ballplayer.
Dottie Hinson: Well, you were wrong.
Jimmy Dugan: Was I?
Dottie Hinson: Yeah. It is only a game, Jimmy. It's only a game, and, and, I don't need this. I have Bob; I don't need this. At all.
Jimmy Dugan: I, I gave away five years at the end my career to drink. Five years. And now there isn't anything I wouldn't give to get back any one day of it.
Dottie Hinson: Well, we're different.
Jimmy Dugan: Shit, Dottie, if you want to go back to Oregon and make a hundred babies, great, I'm in no position to tell anyone how to live. But sneaking out like this, quitting, you'll regret it for the rest of your life. Baseball is what gets inside you. It's what lights you up, you can't deny that.
Dottie Hinson: It just got too hard.
Jimmy Dugan: It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.

Happiness

Kiss Series, The Movie Spoiler Edition: L'Ultimo Bacio

"Don't do it!" you yell at the scream. Carlo is 30. He has a beautiful girlfriend who is pregnant with their first child. He has a good job. His friends are going through growing pains...and so is he. And here he is, at a party with a young high school girl, blond, beautiful, crazy about him. He succumbs.

And the kiss is lacking in true emotion or even sensuality. It's just about sex. Not the sexy sex. The sex that happens to fill some proverbial, non-sexual void in one's life that one doesn't yet realize can't be filled by a good looking person who isn't his/her significant other. It's the kind of sex that increases the void.*

*-No vagina jokes.

Actuality

I like theories. For me to say otherwise would be for me to state an utter falsehood and display a complete lack of self-awareness. But life is not theoretical. Life is actual. And the actual almost always presents factors that a theorist couldn't even begin to predict, or in some cases, ever even comprehend.