Soda-Pop, minus Pony-Boy

Of all adolescent eating habits, I enjoy having a soda for breakfast most. On Saturday morning I popped open a Hansen's soda slightly before ten and settled with my laptop on the couch. My main squeeze, upon entering the living room, gave me a look to communicate his disapproval.

I held up my soda in defence and announced obtusely "Soda for breakfast."

My main squeeze, always more agile with the rejoiners in the morning than I, replied, "And diabetes for dinner."

And yet I still maintain that there is something awfully refreshing about drinking something cold, carbonated and distinctly sugary from an aluminum can before you are fully awake. But then I think a can of spray cheese and a Edwardian novel is the perfect evening.

Fine and Dandy

There is nothing that I like better than a little recreational sexism. You may argue that there is no such thing as recreational sexism, that each slightly sexist joke is a reflection of an evil corroded soul full of bad anti-suffrage inclinations. Come on folks, being sexist can be good clean fun.

Sure, I like voting, and being allowed to wear pants and to sue people and not having my ribs broken to fit into a corset. Empowerment is all very good and dandy. I relish the idea of independent young ladies and wives with separate checking accounts. However, I also like not having to carry heavy things, yell at mean waiters, and know remotely about plumbing.

This small prejudice of mine came up the other day at work, when a dog at the office bit the mail carrier. My initial shock was of course that a friendly dog would do such a thing (my own dog being far too lazy to undertake such a hunt), but my second shock came as I realized that our mail carrier was a woman. It had never occurred to me that dogs bit ladies.

I’m feeling a bit tired today, but I had intended to rail on further about the joys of not feeling bad about yourself when you have to ask for help replacing a windshield wiper, reveal that you are crap at BBQ-ing, or do not know about pouring beer in an appropriate fashion. I’ll just assume that you get the picture and skip to the thrilling conclusion.

The unfortunate thing is, although I partake of the joys of sexism, I do not return the favor of female stereotypes. I’m not a very good cook, I rarely offer a suave social presence and I often have a wretched coif. And so here is my paradox: I’m not very maternal, but I’d sure like to retain that status so that no one thinks of asking me to screw in some light bulbs…or join the draft.

Probably a dog calendar

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and thus I have devoted no small amount of time to tidying my house. It's not like I have a spectacularly messy house (and I have lived in some spectacularly messy apartments, so I know the difference) but the house does seem to accumulate clutter very easily.

When I was younger I used to adore clutter, and would spend hours arranging my various clutter items on shelves. However, somewhere between here and there I got a bit more OCD about things, but because my clutter-gathering habits haven't changed, I now find myself with an alarming amount of crap stacked on every flat surface and an insatiable urge to tidy.

I will make this brief, because the vacuum is rebelling and I feel a little guilty pawing away at my computer while my indentured co-cleaner attempts

to fathom the mechanical innards, but I had a few random thoughts of note during the process.

Firstly I would like to voice my concern over buying furniture. Our house is filled with a variety of second hand and loaner items, the crown jewel of which is my rickety plaid loveseat. When I look around at the menagerie I wonder how a person could undertake the creative and fiscal responsibility of buying a set of furniture. I may be a lady, but charge me not with choosing a motif for my house.

My second point is in regards to photos on display. As any internet savvy procrastinator does, I rarely manage to print photos out physically. As a result of this coupled with an alarming lack of photogenic tendencies, our house is devoid of any pictures of the occupants together. And though I do think that pictures add to a certain quaintness, I think this might be nice. I don't want to look at me. Yetch. And I feel silly buying a frame to put myself in for my own looking enjoyment. So back to framing pictures ripped off of calendars.

Cheesy chips with stealth

When I was driving home, I planned on blogging about my discomfort with the gobs of pop culture references in novels these days. The concept was already in my mind, since I had gulped down a new release for nefarious purposes over the weekend and was been rendered unable to shut up about the topic since. But now, having been molified by a burrito dinner, I don't feel quite the need for such carrying on. Furthermore, I suspect that it might have come off a little hoity-toity, especially since I was, with careful phrasing to spare my feelings, told just yesterday evening by the the sole reader of this blog that I was being pretentious.

And here I'll stand my ground: though it may seem pretentious to want a little purity in the novel, or to write a blog post about how people should never reference YouTube in an attempt to ground a story [the internet, as its sole determining feature is intangibility, should be ignored as a method of defining characters or space, and here I'll stop as I'm sprouting undergraduate bullshit], but I am not pretentious.

Worshiping the novel is a not a symptom of snobbery, though it can be a reaction to it. As a note of interest, worshiping the novel also does not mean that you recycle, love the homeless, and eat hummus with the cat that you've named Chaucer. And so, because I love lists and I love talking about myself, I offer to you the list of reasons that I can talk relentlessly about the allure of literature without being pretentious:

• I have on occasion been forced to wipe my cheesy fingers on my socks while secretly eating cheesy-chips at work
• I have a messenger bag that I'm too embarrassed to use it in cities where I know even one person.
• I have lately been accused of loving sitcoms.
• I have lately affirmed that accusation by ordered one on netflixs.
• I once ate McDonalds while very drunk in London (a classically American move).
• I am whole-heartedly a spaz-ish person and pretension requires a certain poise.

Not fables, but gory stuff

I won't pretend that I don't enjoy some moralizing literature every once and a while. There is certainly something to be said about books where the willful sinners get the dramatic and allegorical death and the simply foolish ones mostly commit suicide or sacrifice themselves for the betterment of society.

I once suggested to a friend back in my english-ing days that we should amass all of the books about English girls who are awfully fond of nature as a metaphor for their loose morals and then die in childbirth, usually cursing their own weakness and asking for the nature-baby to be baptized. I wanted to try and get 70s and 80s movie adaptations for these novels and compare them (all of them tend to have dramatic hair and lots of saxiphone), perferrably in a marathon format.

Currently I am reading Far From the Maddening Crowd which I chose based on the name, thinking that perhaps it would contain excellent passages on how annoying people are that I could use while cursing people on the freeway. It is actually about some sassy young farm chica who is pursued by three men/metaphors. Thus far the able-bodied, prudent, and wise shepherd is pitted against the sulky and obsessive baron and the flippant soldier for the love of the fickle damsel.

Being a bit of a sap for shepherds I'm pulling for him, but I'm not entirely sure he'll pull it off. The solider is a classic rendition of 18th century, smooth-talking, first-name-callin' sleeze, so I'm not worried about him. He's already damned himself by impregnating a servant and then running off briefly to become a professor of gymnastics. However, the old fellow does pose a threat. 18th Century writers love to put the sassy young woman with the sulky rich fellow, when they aren't setting them up for a martyrs death against a backdrop of smooth jazz.

Me and my personal shredder

I sometimes find that I can't summon the appropriate emotions for certain occasions. I worried about this during my flurry of wedding-induced panic attacks; I was worried, yes, but I wasn't have nearly as many deep thoughts as I suspected the occasion warranted. I wasn't looking up to see dove's flying, and I wasn't subconsciously weaving bread dough into love-knots and I couldn't make my mind equate rings with dramatic symbols of unity. And for someone whose mind has been so warped by a stiff liberal education that I think Thomas the Tank Engine is a symbol of industrialization, this was a very low point.

I was considering this emotional stagnation at my sister's high school graduation over the weekend. I was sitting with my family in the summer sunshine, shading my eyes with a free program as the wind blew majestically (read: coldly) through the millions of balloon bouquets on the field. The kids were marching in time to the band, and the outfits that I remember as stifling seemed regal from afar, but even sandwiched between the tears of my older sister and mother I was sort of thinking: what crap.

Obviously I was not thinking "what crap" at my little sister, of whom I am very fond. I was directing my malice instead toward the do-gooders making speeches all about the unity of 2009, kindergarten besties, and the scary ledge of adulthood on which they all stood. I was wondering whether these kids (alright, these girls) could really muster this much emotion and hyperbole over graduation.

It's not as though I wasn't nervous about high school ending, I spent many weeks prior to leaving for college being upset that I couldn't get a clear mental picture of what my life would be like so that I could worry properly about it. I packed consciously for my dorm room (gargoyle bookends, personal shredder). But I didn't bath myself in happiness on the day of graduation and embrace the world anew. In fact what I remember worrying about most is how stupid I looked in my mortarboard and taking it off directly following the ceremony, photo-ops be damned (sadly I worried about the same thing at my college graduation and pushed nervously at it to the point that it fell off my head as I was jostled crossing the stage).

So I'm not sure if I envy or mock you, high school girls with real emotions at the ceremony. On one hand I wish that I was moved to tears by the idea of closing epochs and the exchange of friendship necklaces. But on the other hand (surely the more evil one) I wanted to take each of those girls by their Hawaiian lei and shake them until they realized that in a few years the majority of their high school classmates would become a reason to switch lines at the Walmart to avoid awkward conversation.

Embarassingly long, embarassing in general

I wrote this about a year ago to antagonize my sister and thought better of posting it. But the re-awakened Twilight vigor surrounding the second movie trailer has been reminding me of everything I hate in the world. So here you are:

At first I hated Twilight mostly for the entertainment factor. A few deprecating comments about the series would turn a mundane conversation with one of my sisters into a pleasant shouting match. One well-placed snip about the Twilight jack-o-lantern on the front porch would rankle even my mother’s pleasant demeanor. Later, as I read about riots in Hot Topics (who knew anything could counterbalance the sludge of apathy and fishnet tights in a Hot Topic?) around the U.S. during the Twilight publicity tour, I started to hate Twilight because it made people slightly more obnoxious.

I won’t have people saying that I’m a literary snob (as my sisters already have) and that I rail against all trendy books because popular things are inherently stupid. You skeptics should know better. I gobble up the refuse of popular culture. I grew up on books with raised-print titles and bikini chicks riding dragons on the cover. As an intellectual I have already earned my sell-out stripes; whether I got them in getting lost in London last year after standing in line for HP and the DH, or that time that I admitted to actually liking Memoirs of a Geisha is debatable.

Regardless, I’ve earned my right to discuss Twilight.

But until recently I didn’t really feel much reason to. Recently, however, the issue became personal in a way that all of my sisters pre-buying tickets for opening night hadn’t made it personal. All because someone brought up Buffy.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an interview with the director of Twilight in which she was asked how she thought the protagonist of Twilight measured up against the iconic Buffy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The director claimed to have never seen a second of the long-running cult classic and denied any comparison.

For some reason I felt myself becoming irrationally angry.

“Check out the names," I urged anyone who would listen. "Buffy is spelled B-vowel-double consonant-possible vowel. The Twilight chick, Bella, spells her name B-vowel-double consonant-vowel. That’s some seriously plagiaristic bullshit.”

How could someone directing a movie about vampires and teens not explore this staple of angsty vamp mythology? And screw professional thoroughness, what sort person hasn’t heard of Buffy? I didn’t have cable growing up, but I never missed an episode.

As I pondered this throughout the day (and boy can I obsess over things once I get started) I began to realize that there were some distinct similarities between the two works. Both feature a teenage girl as the heroine who happens to be in love with an immortal vampire. However, what is more important is the poignant differences in themes and representation of young-adulthood.

And thus I arrived at my theory (to follow), The Power of Normalcy: Why Buffy is Superior to Twilight in Turning Out Well-Adjusted Teens with Healthy Morals and Good Self Esteem or (the working title) Shut the Hell Up Everyone.

PART ONE: They Have An Episode on Buffy For People Like You

I guess I should start by wheeling out the well-used popular conception of Buffy as a metaphor. Excuse me if I sound a little bored, I’m just used to reciting this every time I trick my boyfriend into watching a few episodes. The basic premise, as paraphrased from Joss Whedon, is that high school is a terrifying place, where many kids feel confined and ostracized by their uniqueness. So he gives us Buffy, a girl who is irreversibly unique, and battles daily against monsters. She eventually falls in love with Angel, a vampire with a soul and drama ensues. The series begins when she arrives at a new high school after being expelled from her previous one, for reasons (and here’s something every teen can sink their teeth into) that weren’t her fault. She eventually falls in love with Angel, a vampire with a soul, violence and drama ensues.

When I attempted to find a metaphor in Twilight for the high school experience, I was appalled by the implications. In many ways the vampire teens of Twilight can be read as the stereotypical popular crowd at any high school. They are mysterious, good looking, well-dressed and their guardians are in the professional class. Bella, a girl indistinguishable from her peers, leads a mundane life until she is saved (literally and metaphorically) by Edward and embraced by his family. It is only after Edward becomes interested in Bella she becomes noted in society and her life is given a purpose. Unsurprisingly, Bella desires to remain with Edward and to eventually become a vampire herself, thereby assimilating into a superior group. Her destiny, and later her identity (in a human vs vampire sense) is dependent on her boyfriend and his pals.

Throughout the series, Buffy maintains an endearing (and prototypically adolescent desire) to be normal. Although she questions her physical superiority because the responsibility it creates separates her from her peers, she recognizes it as integral for her calling. Although Buffy’s individuality in undeniable, the show emphasizes the importance of close relationships with “average” people as a more important factor in her successes. The third season features Faith, a rogue slayer who provides a reflection of what Buffy would have been like without the influence of her friends. Faith believes that her superior position as a slayer places her above rebuke and she seeks companions who she feels are similarly powerful, disdaining the value Buffy places on maintaining normal friendships. At the close of the season when Buffy throws the deceitful Faith off of a building, it provides a message exactly opposite from that of Twilight. Buffy’s power is inherent, but her abilities are increased through her everyday relationships. On the other hand, Bella remains powerless, but at least she has the really popular kids to protect her.

If you are comparing Buffy and Twilight there is no getting around discussing the merits of Angel versus Edward. Not only is there an unavoidable similarity between the two as undead pieces of eye-candy, forever brooding in shadows and scamming on minors, but both have devoted followings. While not denying the complexity and narrative length of these relationships, I would like to bring up a single point. I think that it is important when talking about Buffy/Angel and Edward/Bella to remember who in each pair is responsible for taking the “humanity” of their main-squeeze. Buffy’s sexual assertiveness is the cause of Angel’s loss, but the sacrifice is mutual since she unwittingly loses her companion in the same act. Bella’s humanity is also lost to her as a result of sexual actions; she becomes pregnant with Edward’s child and it is destroying her weaker, human body. Edward, always the deciding factor in Bella’s life, turns her into a vampire not in response to her numerous requests, but because of her innate inferiority. In short, Bella is finally on equal ground with her boyfriend and will never get old and ugly. What a message for the kiddies.

As a matter of trivia, I would like to point out that there is an episode in the first season of Buffy that deals with teenagers who want to become vampires so that they can remain young and beautiful. The real vampires kills these teenagers and plenty of laughs are had at their expense. So as a blanket statement to Twilight kiddies, mom's and the like: stop blathering on about this crap. There was already an episode of Buffy that encompassed the entire 8-billion page plot of Twilight, and that was cerca 2000.