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Bunch of pics documenting MJ's vitiligo. I wish he'd been more open about it.
He looks so sad here:
His eyes were so big and round, he always looked like anime to me, moreso as things went awry with his nose.
I am not kidding, my comment thread habit is bad. Things I found which made me seethe today included many moral absolutists (the Zimbardo link, if you must know, was from the comments to a Jezebel story about Lynndie England) and a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "sociopath." Although one person did obliquely point out that it might have taken a sociopath to resist the peer pressure in favor of torture at Abu Ghraib. I took some massive personality test once and scored in the lower end of the sociopath range -- basically it means I'm not swayed by peer pressure and/or fear of social stigma. It doesn't mean I'm going to kill anybody and does, ironically, mean that I might be the one who doesn't kill people when everybody else is doing it. In fact, if you want me not to do something, please tell me that everyone is doing it -- I will immediately be wary and dubious. I *really* hate it in any of these *Fail threads when someone (and invariably someone does this) says, "If five people in a thread are saying you're wrong, maybe you ought to listen!" That's a shitty argument when it's used against queer housewives and it's still shitty used against racists. "We're loud and have you outnumbered" just doesn't stand up to critical inquiry.
Another thing I hate, and this hate isn't going away soon, I HATE IT when this happens: someone explains what *privilege is, which, generally, I have no argument with. It's kind of like "we're so loud and have you so outnumbered that we don't even have to shout or mention it anymore, you're fucked." Anyhow that's not the part I hate. The part I hate is then, where I think the really interesting discussion lies, there's no discussion! It is just stated, therefore, if you are a decent human being, then you should immediately undertake to examine and unpack and deconstruct all your privileges. Preferably in a corner where someone who lacks the same privileges can shout at you and deny that they are shouting.
Kind of a leap, isn't it? And the assumption that we all want to be decent human beings and that we all define decent human beings the same way -- holy crap. I mean yeah, maybe you do need to STFU and examine your soul but I must say, I got quite a bit of that in my Catholic upbringing and it doesn't warm my heart to hear the same arbitrary rules for niceness and decency in a different context.
Anyhow, ramble, gah, internet, I need to make a batch of chili before we go to puppy kindergarten.
Exhibit A: Anderson Cooper Remembers Going to Studio 54 When He Was 10 With Michael Jackson
Question: How many ways can the comments be stupid, ignorant and infuriating? Answer: How many comments are there? Subtract one-tenth of that number. Seriously. Ranging from the mildly stupid (someone who has read two pages of comments in order to comment that there are much more important stories out there) to the ignorant (every single person who applies modern values to the 80s or whatever, including no knowledge of drinking laws then, with the added self-righteousness along the lines of "but they shouldn't have been drinking or allowed into clubs at that age ANYHOW") to the searingly infuriating (to paraphrase: "well that explains EVERYTHING about Anderson Cooper, Nancy boy"), and yet I have only begun to scratch the surface! and that wasn't even a sentence.
(I haven't mentioned all the people who are just jealous of AC, or hate AC because he is on the teevee and and I'm not even an Anderson Cooper fan. Or the eighty other moronic comments people make.) I can't even read comments at Jezebel any more. I want to read more about the Warnings controversy in fandom (I'm not in any fandom but I'm fascinated by this mostly-female community and what it says about life and online information aggregation today.) but I can't because I have next to zero tolerance for people I fundamentally disagree with. Did I always feel this way? Does it have something to do with coming off of cymbalta? Is it being 51 years old? Who the hell knows but I am starting to feel outdated.
I just need not to read comment threads. It's a time suck and it only makes me into more of a misanthrope than I was already. And I'm sorry -- I know that some of my readers still like replying to things with "This!" but it annoys the hell out of me. "This"? Not "Yes!" or "I agree!" ? just "This!"? What does that mean? "I totally agree but don't want to go out on a limb with any description of how I agree"? Which part did you agree with? The whole thing? Every word? Okay, okay, nobody asked me but IF THEY DID, I would ask that people try to expand a trifle on how they agree with something, even if it's only "especially this part [insert cut and paste]."
(But why should anyone care how I feel about "This!" especially since I am (really!) going to try to read fewer comment threads? No reason.)
No more comment threads. See how long that works. Wish me luck!
In other news, I am enjoying TCM's Salute to Directors Month when I remember to check it out.
Yeah, that's all I got. No, wait, in discontinuation syndrome news, I had a terrible mood swing at approximately 4:48 PM on Sunday and it didn't go away until sometime Monday. After the mood swing, all the dogs started barking about some dog bullshit and I got instantly angry. It was like an atomic mushroom cloud, it ignited in my chest, narrowed to go up my brainstem and neck and then flowered in my brain. Interestingly enough, due to what I have been learning about the mind and emotions, this seemingly overwrought metaphor is not that far off from what actually happens when nerves and adrenaline and so forth interact. (If you are worried, I didn't act on my sudden emotion, no animals were harmed, etc. etc.)
Lyric was cranky over the weekend -- her adult teeth are coming in and it looks very painful to me. You know how in werewolf movies when the guy transforms and his jaw expands and the fangs come out? Isn't he usually howling in agony when this occurs? It strikes me that teething for a doggie must be like that only in slow motion. Anyhow, she was barking at nothing (I think she was part of the chorus that set me off Sunday) and barking at random dogs and we were dreading taking her to puppy kindergarden but after an hour of structured interaction with her handler (TDO) and the other puppies, she was much calmed down. A reminder that my intuitions about how to deal with bad moods are pretty off base. Or that the solutions to some things are counterintuitive.
Speaking of counterintuitive, I am still struggling with -- how can I describe it? -- the doctrine? the unspoken rules? the SPOKEN rules? of discussions online regarding privilege and -isms. Obviously (read my LJ) I really can't participate in any forum where personal anecdotes and metaphors and analogies and wisecracks are considered problematic. (Also I am increasingly irritated by the euphemism "problematic.") Some might say that my participation is not necessary so I should STFU. Oh yeah, that's another thing I LOVE, telling people who are often well-meaning and also often in marginalized groups who have struggled to find their voices to STFU. Other things that I don't like: when someone asks a question about privilege and the reply is an extremely clipped "Google it!" Dear Kids of Today: Google can't do everything. Don't believe me? GOOGLE IT. Another thing: Someone who doesn't "get it" on the first go-round but is trying might get it next week or something, why do you assume that people at the beginning of learning something are doomed to be "crappy allies anyhow." Also when did any movement for change become so marvelous that it could throw out slightly-less-than perfect allies? Man that has ALWAYS turned out well, amiright? I also don't like it when people say DIAF. (It stands for Die In A Fire.) Maybe "die in a fire" is "go to hell" for atheists. Granted, most of these things I hate tend to occur towards the end of long, thoughtful comment threads but -- come ON already. Die in a fire? Oh it's hyperbole. Carry on then?
Heath Ledger is fucking amazing. He's not even there, it's just The Joker. I could take out everything that didn't have Heath Ledger in it and watch what's left over and it would be so great.* I wish the whole movie had been about The Joker instead of stupid Bruce Wayne. Does anybody besides Alfred give a damn about Bruce Wayne? Come on, you didn't. You weren't going "Oh boy! More Bruce Wayne! More Bat Ears!" No. You were like, "man this makes no sense, do what now? where is the Joker? OH THERE HE IS YAY!"
Ledger takes this overwrought role, this character that we think we know, this comic book villain, this -- I mean have you seen Jack Nicholson as the Joker recently? Have you rewatched that? Holy crap, I loved that movie at the time but it has not aged well. So Ledger takes this daunting character and makes something completely original and yet true to "The Joker" out of it. The rage and the pop culture references and the demented sense of humor and the homicidal tendencies and the Joker's slashy love for Batman, he throws it all in and it's new! It's iconic! And through it all, Ledger's Joker has this visceral joy in his work. Watch him with his head out the window of the cop car, drunk on destruction and smoke and velocity. God, he's just terrific.
There are other good performances in it, I guess. I am not unhappy when the film is Gordon-centric; Gary Oldman is pleasing to me but not miraculous or anything. Morgan Freeman has some moments, esp. with the would-be blackmailer. Michael Caine could phone it in and still be the rockingest Alfred ever. I am perhaps overfond of Maggie Gyllenhaal, she has a great Carole Lombardish femme swagger and she is very spunky in (SPOILER) the thankless role of doomed vengence bait. Oh I also love William Fichtner's cameo in the bank heist in the beginning. But seriously. If you take out Heath Ledger, this is a pretty crappy movie. The terror-vigilante-torture-ticking time bomb scenario themes are puerile and and and God, after Heath's last scene, do yourself a favor and stop watching, it is all downhill from there.
*I DVR-ed it so I am maybe going to do that, try watching it again and fastforward through every scene that doesn't have Heath Ledger or, of course, Tiny Lister in it, and see if it as incredibly awesome as I think it will be.
I have been feeling steadily better since my last post. I am still having DREAMS! instead of dreams, but they are much less intrusive into non-dreaming space, and not so dreadful.
Today I have been hounded by Too Many Emotions, which is exhausting, to the point where I actually longed for the anhedonic, flat-affected, emotion-free mood of a few months ago. Well, I just longed for it for a moment. Then I had more Emotions.
At one point, TDO asked me for something and I got up from the computer and got it for her and she asked me what I was feeling, and -- just starting from like five seconds before her request and going to the moment when I joined her and she inquired as to my mood, I had somewhere between 20 and a metric fuckload of emotions. Yay? Twenty is better than none? I guess? This will sort itself out with time, I believe. I already feel a lot better, no lie. And I know intellectually that this is just my brain and my mind readjusting to no longer being unnaturally capped.
Tone
I have been reading the pages and pages of comments, the outpouring of comments to someone (I don't know her at all) posting about rape culture here. Readers of this page today will not be surprised if I reveal that I have many emotions when I read this. I feel as though most of my emotions are not appropriate -- certainly not for there -- but maybe even for here, if I am to be unfriends-locked. It is my temperament, my tendency, my self even to not self-censor and so my impulse to do so makes me wonder WTF. And that comes along with (surprise!) more emotions. I would like to talk about all this stuff with people but I don't want to hurt anyone or trigger anyone or offend or whatever so ... gah I don't like this. I find myself making the tone agrument WITH myself and end up saying nothing.
And -- and maybe this is just me -- but if I never read another person agreeing with something by staying only "THIS!", it will be too soon. Jesus Christ, use a thesauraus or something. Oops there's that tone of mine which I think? I should? curb?
Night
Something I learned in the rape culture comments was that lots of women go to great lengths not to be alone outside after dark, even, to give an example I read, not parking a block or two away from their front door. Is this really that common? And then I realized that when people go to "Take Back the Night" demonstrations, that it isn't meant, as I thought, metaphorically. I -- I don't -- I can't -- I really have no words about this that are even slightly politically correct. But, okay, i will take off the censor for one second. No. Wait. What the hell kind of revolution is it where we are supposed to beg/plead/educate our "oppressors" into giving us something we can just TAKE? JUST FUCKING TAKE IT. Why are you listening to your mother, your father, your brothers, your stupid fucking culture, your woman-hating religion and giving in like that? Get mace. Get a knife. Get one of those heavy flashlights that you can use to cosh someone. Carry a whistle. Take lessons in self-defense. Do. Whatever. It. Takes. But don't volunteer to lock yourself in the house. Don't let the goddamned Taliban reside in your brain. And don't wait around for men to hand you your rights, TAKE THEM. God DAMN it.
And with that, I now go back to my amazing Technicolor emotion festival!
I have stopped using various addictive substances in my life, the most common that come to mind are alcohol and nicotine. So far, stopping Cymbalta has been the worst, hands down. YMMV, but holy crap, this sucks. I thought I was "done" after 8 days clean -- surely the worst of it was over -- but I felt like absolute shit yesterday. Today, so far, I feel not so bad but yesterday really shook me. Physical pain, all my joints (ALL!) achy or worse, the feeling like I could burst into tears at any second, dizziness, tremors, exhaustion, despair... WTF.
I am v. v. lucky that I don't have job I have to get dressed to go to, and that my real job -- taking care of the dogs and the house -- can endure for quite a long time with me doing the absolute minimum. I don't know how I could have done this otherwise. This has made me feel frail, which -- yuck.
I did more research on Cymbalta Withdrawal yesterday, The pharmaceutical companies, rage-makingly, don't call it "withdrawal," even though it is obviously that. They call it "discontinuation syndrome."
I will pause while you eyeroll. OK. If you want to research it, google both "withdrawal" and "discontinuation syndrome."
Anyhow, man. I feel rather shaky today but I don't have the ticking time bomb of an explosion of tears in my chest. My hands are shaky, but not so you could see it from across the room. It has been sobering (ha!) to find out that this could take a lot longer than I hoped.
ALSO: THE DREAMS. They are so effing vivid. Just now I woke up and the last thing I'd done in my dream was put on a lot of eye makeup and it was so hard to shake that I automatically didn't rub my eyes because I didn't want to smudge the makeup. Gah.
Rinse, repeat.
Not everyone who stops taking Cymbalta will have this experience, but it has been so bad! Just something to keep in mind. I have been, and still am grateful for the invention of anti-depressants. I don't even mind being a guinea pig on the frontiers of brain altering chemicals -- ha, yeah, no. But this sandbagged me and I am angry about that.
DAY TEN: Still experiencing discontinuation syndrome but the good days are outnumbering the bad days. More on this story as it develops.
(In the meantime I am only thinking that one day Carvett would be laid low by a serious, serious depression, so bad that he willingly underwent shock therapy, and that he said afterward it helped him.)
And Bergman said it was because he had "anxiety in the calves," so he saw a psychiatrist. And the doctor had done no good with that -- Bergman described and mimed his bouts of what we would call today "restless leg syndrome," and then Cavett said he'd had it too, and they both shared a smile at the inexplicable torment of it. Anyhow, Bergman wound up, the doctor told him that he was completely sane and healthy and free of neurosis.
Then Bibi Andersson came out. And kind of hilariously, she said that wasn't at all what the doctor had said. He had told the director that he was entirely held together by a vast web of neuroses, but if Bergman was cured of them, he would no longer be able to produce his marvelous art. Bergman was very charming to his beautiful star, he said if she said so, it must be true but he remembered it the way he'd told it.
Neuroses, that's the word people used, they said they were neurotic or someone was neurotic. Only outliers had "serious clinical depression," or anything that rose to the serious level of "mental illness."
It was all so strange, a world where the shared understanding of the human brain was so different than now. And in 50 years, so much of what we say now will be archaic, barely understandable, vintage, naive. 50? 20.
I am reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook online, and finding it so nourishing, about the sexes, and politics, and mental illness. I thought the commentary of the women reading it and talking about it together would be great, but I find it alienating, as if they are reading an entirely other book than the one which is touching me so deeply, and seems so honest. And they're younger than me and I feel it, not in a "get off my lawn" way but ... I don't know. The novel was written decades ago, and the gulf between the language Lessing is using, and modern sensibilties -- it's so vast.
It is very odd to see attitudes and feelings from the past (which I remember) critiqued by young people whose grasp of those times is via media and a modern lens. I want to shake some of the young women in the margins and tell them they have no idea what the past was like, and their progressive lens is no more distorting or revealing than any other.
Anyhow, that's what I'm thinking about lately, I don't know if I am explaining it clearly. Words we think are so basic, "mental" "illness" "sex" "love" "masculine" "feminine," man, they're not, they're a collective hunch, always changing. But that's unchanging, too, that generations redefine reality and words and then their descendants do it over again, and at bottom we're still all human beings and not that far removed from each other and different eras as we'd like to think.
So man, anyhow, next time you have an attack of RLS, take comfort that it tormented Ingmar Bergman too, and probably guys in Alexander's army and, hell, cavemen. Probably there were people somewhere who thought RLS was ghosts, or a curse, and really, who am I to say it isn't?
I can only assume that next she will poop unicorns and rainbows.
a. they were alll wearing so much makeup, not just Spock. It was a festival of guyliner and pancake.
b. it's a million times more gay and misogynist than I remembered, also the plot was INSANE.
c. the special effects were pretty damned good, considering.
d. It stirred ancient memories of when it aired the first time and I watched it in my jammies on the big console black and white TV in the living room and it was my favorite, favorite, favorite thing in the whole world, so,
e. I still love it, almost against my will.
f. I always knew Shatner was going to get fat, I don't know how, but I did. He was very pretty back then, before all the jokes and self-parody and TJ Hooker.
and ....
g. I can't wait to see the new one, the trailers have me ridiculously psyched.
Then I get totally boggled that I live in a world where the previous paragraph mostly makes sense. I can watch a show I missed on my laptop? in HD? For someone who still remembers the first time her family "rented" a "video" (it was Purple Rain) and the MARVEL of it -- and then taping shows! and re-watching them!... that I can click on a Firefox tab and then watch Kings -- BOGGLE. I live in an age of technological wonders.
Then I took Lyric to visit at TDO's office, and she was fawned upon and played with by numerous co-workers. She is all legs at this point, twice as big as the last time she was at the office, and still adorable. (P.S.: If I show TDO that people are clamoring for more pictures, mebbe she will upload the latest batch.)
After that, I had a lovely nap with Cyclone. I fell asleep holding his front paws and when I woke up almost an hour later, I was still holding them.
It was beautiful today, did I mention that? In the low 70s and sunny. After the nap w/ doggie, I motored to the store and got hot dogs and buns (both on sale!) and half-price Easter chocolate kisses. Kid sitting in the front of the store was selling these charity donation scratch-off tickets for a dollar and you got a free reusable Earth Day shopping bag. So I was totally in, because I am a sucker for reusable shopping bags. When I scratched off my ticket, I learned that I won a free bottle of shampoo! Score!
TDO got home early, too, so she cranked up the grill for our first deck-grilled dinner of 2009: Hot dogs on toasted buns with chocolate kisses for dessert. Insanely cheap, and delicious. Now we're watching Ladies' #1 Detective Agency on HBO and lounging around reading (I got Octavia Butler's Kindred out of the library and I'm loving it, although it is very scary).
It's FRIDAY! It's still warm out! I am happy.
ETA: P.S. I think the first line of the book may be helpful for some who don't see any intersection between the issues of trans folk and LGB people: "At the very heart of the homosexual condition is conflict about gender."
Here is David Bowie, lip-syncing live on Soul Train. "Golden Years" came out the year I graduated from high school. Man, he was the mostest.
Also, I am still not in menopause. My period is totally random but I still have it, god damn it.
Also also who the hell knows where a mood comes from if one's hormones are totally random and one is stressed out by events beyond one's control anyhow.
Also also also Cyclone is a very good doggie and if you are feeling blue, he will gladly be all, "I understand you are stressed and I empathize" while you pet and massage him for a half hour. Doggie commiseration is a good thing. (The puppy is awesome, but I do like adult doggies. I like that they are a little bit greasy and that they smell like adults. I like the edge a creature gets once it is sexually mature, the smell and everything. I love the puppy but she's like a living peep or something.)
Also also also also Dax is going to turn 11 in June or July. We have had puppies before but due to tragedy, no old dogs. He's the oldest dog we have ever had. Stupid mortality.
MAN, I FEEL LIKE ASS. I thought I had a cold coming on but maybe it's just my period/missing a pill/stress. OR ALL FOUR! People talk about hot flashes but what about cold flashes? The older I get, the easier it is for me to get what my mom would call "a chill," like I get too cold and then it takes forever to warm up again. What's that about? Jesus, I need a bunch of old lady sweaters or something. God damn it, I am cranky today, it's like everything I should have felt cranky about for the last week is suddenly triggering every cranky nerve. At once.
