Unwrite Your Life!

Hello, blog babies!

Upon reflection, I have realized that my last post, though earnest, was a bit of a downer.  So I figure maybe it’s time for an upper--or, at least, a post that wouldn’t sound weird if you read the whole thing in an up-at-the-end valley-girl accent.

How do I think I might accomplish this?  By listing things, of course!

At any given time, I have lists floating around in my head.  Sometimes I write them down, but usually I don’t.  Basically, I prefer to keep my entire life-schedule memorized at all times, thereby eliminating the need for a planner--or written down lists.

I’m usually surprisingly good at doing this.  Or, let me rephrase--I’m surprisingly well organized compared to a lot of other people, considering that I never write anything down.

It’s not a foolproof system, obviously.  For some reason, even if I can remember 15 different meetings/work times/classes for weeks on end, even when the times change (and in the jobs I’ve worked, they changed quite a bit,) I cannot seem to remember more than two grocery items at a time.

But, alas, there comes a time in a young man’s life when she must admit that owning a planner is maybe the adult thing to do.  So...I don’t know...I guess I’ll get one of those sometime...maybe.

In the meantime, I’m going to write down some of my life-lists right! here!

Right now, my three working lists are: Things I Seriously Need to Do in the Next Few Weeks, Things I Want to Do Sometime Before I Die, and Things I Would Do if I Got the Novel Published and/or Won the Lottery Despite Never Buying Lottery Tickets.

Kthxherewego.

Things I Seriously Need to Do in the Next Few Weeks:

-Trade in my car!  I’m actually working on this one.  This very Saturday, I have plans to see some cars.  I love Cherie (the 2001 Hyundai Elantra I’ve been driving for 3 years and yes, I named her, and yes, she has a gender, shut up,) but she’s getting on in years.  I can’t even drive her to work without experiencing a paralyzing-death-fear anytime I hear a sound I cannot immediately place.  And, um, not a huge deal or anything, but I’m sort of moving to Seattle in a few weeks?  Yeah, that’s a thing.  And Cherie is not gonna survive that trek.  So, sadly, I must put her to pasture and start anew.

speaking of Seattle...

-Find a new place to live!  I could write SEVERAL paragraphs on this one, but it takes up about half of my waking thought already, so I’m gonna breeze right past it instead.

-Find a new job!  Basically, I’ve been going on indeed.com and searching “creative writer.”  I’ve found a few good ones, several more mediocre ones, and ones that at least sound better than how I get my money now.  So...yay?  I’m also halfway signed up with a tutoring service.  Yay for my SAT scores getting me paid!!!

-Buy a new computer!  Seriously.  Seriously.  I’m on Momsy’s right now.  It’s burning my fingers.  My own personal computer has been incapable of turning on for three months.

-Really, really, figure out what I can leave behind, and start packing all of it.  I’ve got way too much stuff.  It can’t all come with me.  I’ve already donated a mess load of stuff--mostly things that have been in storage for 5+ years--the kind of stuff I didn’t want to take to college with me but just couldn’t quite part with yet.  I’ve parted with a lot of it now, but I still have almost a whole box of Buffy magazine cutouts.  It kind of looks like I’m a Buffy-obsessed serial killer.  (Which surprises no one, I’m sure.)

Alright.  This is getting a little long, so let’s break it into parts, shall we?  We shall!

Here concludes part one.  Part two will, of course, be--”Things I Want to Do Sometime Before I Die.”

Night night, blog babies.

That Old Friend, Shame

(Warning: this is a long post, and it has no pictures.)

Today,  I read something that brought me right back to my teen years in a way few things can.  I say “few things can” because I have spent a lot of emotional and intellectual energy repressing this part of my life.  I don’t like to think about it, because even after all this time, and even though I have come to love and respect myself in a way I couldn’t then, a few things still have unmitigated power to reduce me.

I should clarify: by “teen years” I specifically mean the years that I was 12 and 13.  Mostly, I mean the year I was 12, aka 6th grade, but I dealt with a lot of emotional fallout the next year, too.  Specifically, I mean my suicide attempt when I was 13.  (This is a big bomb to drop in a throwaway sentence, but believe me when I say that it is a separate story, which bears mentioning here because it is a part of my emotional landscape.  Everything has a context, and this is a part of mine.)

Here is the piece I read, for anyone who is interested:
http://rookiemag.com/2012/02/other-girls/

The author primarily talks about the awful psychological effects of racism, and the experience of being categorized a racial “other.”  Especially the experience for a kid or teenager.  Of course, I am white, so I have never been forced to go through this.  But I understood and empathized with everything she said; I kept thinking “god, I know what you mean.”  Why?  Because when I was a teenager, I was overweight.  Still am, in fact.

I don’t like to talk about it.  I don’t think it’s anybody else’s business.  And I’m not done being ashamed about it.  I’ve known other fat girls (and fat men and fat women and fat anything) who own it, but that will never be me.  I can, on occasion, be totally comfortable with my body--but I never totally banish that last layer of shame.

It was at its worst when I was 12, which is kind of funny now, because looking back, I know that I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.  But shame isn’t about truth.  It’s about perception and emotion.  And, oh boy, it’s about paranoia.  That Iago voice in your head telling you that you will never be good enough, that no one will ever love you.  Shame is the thing that answers that voice when you find something about yourself that, you think, proves Iago right.

I have one perfect moment of shame that will forever be tattooed on the walls of my head.  One time, in sixth grade, I walked to the front of a classroom to turn in my homework, and I heard the two boys who sat behind me giggling together.  I don’t remember if I asked my friend what they were talking about, or if she told me spontaneously, but I do remember exactly what she told me they’d said.  One had turned to the other and said, “Look at the fat in her butt jiggling when she walks.  Jiggle, jiggle.”  The other laughed, extensively.

Wait, let me backtrack--at first, I did not remember EXACTLY what they’d said.  I remembered the words “butt” and “jiggling.”  I’d forgotten the word “fat,” until I thought it over again.  I’d suppressed the word.  And then I remembered.  The weapon of the word “fat.”  The word I have obsessively avoided for most of my life.  The word that can make me feel like I am somehow worse than everyone else.  Somehow less than nothing.

Like I said before, I will never be a fat girl who owns it.  I will never be someone who names her blog “A Fabulous Fat Girl Takes Manhattan!”*  I love the woman who does that, but I will never be her.  I don’t have her courage.

*(Ahem--as far as I know, this is not a real blog, but one I invented on the spot.  If it is a real blog, I promise I did not mean to step on any intellectual property toes.)

I ended up “telling” on those boys.  And, like these things often do, it ended up biting me in the ass.  I informed a counselor, who checked the story with the several students who’d heard them.  The boys were pulled into an office for a scolding, and the worse offender was sent home for the day.  Somehow, this resulted in the following rumor: “Sara got [Boy 1] suspended for five days because she’s a bitch!”

A--Not true.  Kid was back the next day, yet the rumor persisted for weeks.  As in, random people came up to me weeks later and asked, “Aren’t you the one who got [Boy 1] suspended?”

B--Really?  I got him suspended with, what, the power of my mind?  I get that we were all 12, but did NONE of these kids think, for even a second, that you can’t actually just decide to get someone suspended and then do it?  Did NO ONE say “okay, but, actually, what was the reason they gave for suspending him? Because ‘Sara said so’ is not a real thing?  Guys?”  Apparently not, because for weeks after, I was plagued by dirty looks from every single one of his popular friends.  And an occasional audible muttering of “bitch” from Boy 2.

Of course, I was immune to that by then.  I crossed my arms and rolled my eyes and bought even more black clothes.  But deep down, I felt deeply, violently threatened.

And I got the message.  I had developed breasts and hips a little too early, and as someone with hips might be, I wasn’t stick-skinny.  And that gave boys the right to sexually harass me.  And if I had the gall to challenge that right, I was a bitch, and their friends would make sure I knew it.

I got the message, but every day, I do my best to ignore it.  I think, on the feminist side, I succeed.  I get in shout-you-down fights with men twice my size or age, and I don’t back down.  I paste feminist links on facebook, and I tell anyone who will listen that I will never be a housewife, and that women need to be paid the same as men or we don’t get to call ourselves civilized anymore.  I define myself however I damn well please, and I ignore anyone who tries to tell me what to do.  (Except my mother, but she mostly just tells me to do my share of the dishes and to follow my dreams.)  And I never, ever let anyone walk me to my car, because I will not live my life in fear.

But I don’t succeed in every way I could.  Despite my ardent feminist fire, I let myself hate my body.  I hear those boys giggling in my memory and it tears me down.  I see anyone look at me sideways and it tears me down.  For years and years and years, I wore the baggiest clothes possible because I just wanted my body to disappear completely.  I didn’t want anyone to have the faintest clue what it looked like.  And I succeeded there--I looked way fucking worse than I should have.

I’ve spent much of the past year dealing with my body.  I started dieting and exercising.  The exercise was wonderful--I ran a mile for the first time in a decade.  Apart from the day I got into college, it was my proudest moment ever.  And it made me feel good about my body, which was new.  I felt powerful.  I had crazy new leg muscles, and I could do that weird crow yoga pose that had once seemed literally impossible (in spite of the fact that I watched other people do it.)  These were good things.

The diet has been less wonderful.  Far more effective, of course--exercise makes you feel great, but you won’t lose weight if you end up eating what you burned.  But as effective as it is, dieting isn’t the best thing for mental health.  I’ve lost a whole crap ton of weight, but not always in the best ways.

I had a friend once who said, “Sometimes the best feeling in the world is going to bed with your stomach growling.  It’s like you’ve won.”

I know two things about that: it’s one of the most fucked-up things I’ve ever heard, and it’s completely fucking true.

Exercise made me feel physically powerful.  But dieting made me feel powerful in another way.  I felt like I had so much control.  The need to eat is second only to the need to breathe, so if you can control that, then you are completely your own master.  Or, at least, that’s how it feels.

And, in a way, it feels like you’re meeting the challenge.  And, somehow, throwing it in the challenger’s face.  You CAN be that beautiful woman on the TV/magazine/billboard ad.  Because you can decide not to eat, and that will MAKE you that woman.  So fuck everybody!

It’s fucked up.  It’s massively fucked up.  It’s wrong and it’s harmful, and NOBODY should ever want anybody to feel that way.  We shouldn’t be ashamed of our bodies.  We should be ashamed of the forces that make us ashamed.

We should be ashamed of a culture that allowed two boys to get to sixth grade without ever telling them they could not talk about another human being like that, and we should be fucking ashamed of making a 12-year-old girl feel like their dipshit idiocy was on her.

But the truth is, we aren’t.  We keep on making fat jokes.  We keep on making fat jokes about PEOPLE WHO AREN’T FAT.  We talk about women’s bodies like somehow it’s our business.  Like somehow they fucking OWE it to us never to age, never to gain weight, never to have “frumpy” hair.  And if anyone tries to call us on it, we claim long and loud that they’re “asking for it.”

“She’s the one who’s fat, so she’s asking for it.”

“She decided to become a celebrity, so she’s asking for it.”

“She wanted to run for President, so she’s asking for it.”

Over a year ago, an 11-year-old was gang-raped in an abandoned house in a small town.  People spent weeks after that proclaiming that she had been “asking for it.”  An 11-year-old.  Up against more than a dozen adult men.  And the people who didn’t blame the girl?  Blamed her mother.

Her mother.  Not her father, or both parents.  Not the people who heard noises and did nothing.  Not the more than a dozen ADULT MEN WHO RAPED A CHILD, ONE AFTER ANOTHER.  Her mother.  Or the girl herself.

Here’s what it is: I am a feminist, and I am ashamed of my body.  I am angry and self-serving and I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks about me, but I am ashamed of my body.  I am an adult, and self-sufficient, and white, and privileged, and confident, and I have never been raped.  But I am so, so ashamed of my body.

I can only imagine how everyone else feels.

This is Not the Poster You're Looking For

From time to time, every single person on this planet is irrational.  For most people, their irrationality presents itself in their belief systems.  Some of these belief systems are religious, and some are cultural.  Christians believe a woman once gave birth without ever having had sex, even though we know that’s not how reproduction works.  And if anyone told them it was happening again, they probably wouldn’t believe that--because, obviously, something like that can only ever happen once.  Jews believe a dude parted a sea by telling it to part, and they believe that a miracle is when oil lasts longer than it should.  Children believe a fat guy can fit down their chimneys, and adults believe it’s somehow kind to convince children of this lie, only to break their hearts with the truth later.  People, from time to time, are irrational.

I don’t blame them.  I’d like it if people were irrational less often, and I’d like it if they guided their irrationality with kindness, or any semblance of a true moral code, but I don’t blame them for holding to their beliefs.

Mainly because I kind of believe in aliens.

Alright, let me qualify: I don’t entirely believe in aliens.  I believe that the universe is so incredibly vast that it’s stupid to assume this is the only planet with life on it, and I believe that wherever there is life, there is also the possibility for intelligent life.  And I believe that people lie.  Governments, companies, people on the street, people in your homes.  People lie.

So, in short, I believe that maybe things have happened on this planet and people have lied about them.

So, now, let me rephrase.  I do not actually believe in aliens, or in anything mystical, or in anything greater than what I can see with my own eyes.  But I want to believe.

I guess you could ask me why I’d want to believe in aliens over god, but then you’d be missing the point.  The point is that belief does not come to me naturally.  So you ask me to believe in god, to start up cold, to look in the face of evil done in the name of religion and to pretend it doesn’t matter because god is real, well...I can’t.  I can’t believe in an altruistic all-powerful being when children starve to death every day, but the Catholic hierarchy sees fit to scream at some nuns for being more concerned with helping the poor than demonizing gays and women who have sex.  I can’t ignore the evils of religion, and I can’t believe in something with absolutely no proof.

But I can maybe believe in the possibility of aliens.  Nobody started a war over aliens.  Aliens don’t hate gays.  Aliens don’t care about abortion.  Aliens don’t care about you, one way or the other, except for curiosity’s sake.  Sure, people claim that aliens have captured them in the night and raped and/or performed surgery on them, but I don’t believe those accounts.  And even if I did, that would be a lesser evil to behold than most.

And maybe aliens could represent something a little greater than myself.  Maybe if aliens exist, other things exist, too.  Maybe there are more things in this universe than dreamt of in my philosophy.  Like weird little gray men who want to know what makes us work.  I can go with that.

A lot of this belief--or semi-belief--can be represented by one simple poster.  Here it is, hanging over Agent Fox Mulder’s desk.

I love that poster.  It’s beautiful.  I love that whole desk.  It’s not dissimilar to mine---covered, graffitied almost, by the evidence of its owner’s passions.  And that shining symbol at its center--I want to believe.  I want to believe in endless possibility.  I want to believe we are not alone.  I want to believe that humanity’s struggle might gain meaning, not oblivion, from a universal context.

I doesn’t mean I do believe.  Only that I want to.

So when I thought I’d found that poster at an open-air market in the middle of my college campus a few years ago, I thought it was kismet.  I’d scoured the internet for years looking for that thing, only to find message board after message board telling me that the only one that ever existed was the one on set and that it was lost to the sands of time (which here means: a private collection) years ago.

Of course, when I looked at it a little more closely, I realized it wasn’t the right poster.  You can see a little string coming away from the little saucer, the quality of the picture isn’t clear enough, the trees aren’t high enough.  I felt a little deflated.  And then I bought it anyway.

It’s not the right poster.  It’s a cheap imitation.  But I decided it didn’t matter.  The poster is only a metaphor, anyway.  It stands in for the real thing.  The real thing is somewhere I can’t touch.  I’ve only heard of it in whispers, and I have no real evidence that it even exists.  Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.  I can’t ever know for sure.

But I want to believe.

A Brief History of the Written Word

“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.

            That is the tale; the rest is detail.”

—American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Here’s a fact: I started writing stories when I was about five years old.  I wrote a story for school—in Kindergarten or first grade, I can’t be sure.  I wrote it and illustrated it, and my teacher laminated the cover and bound the pages together with plastic rings, and she had me read it to the class.  I can’t remember how I felt about reading it aloud, but I’d guess I didn’t like it much.  It’s not that I have a problem speaking in front of other people; I’ve voluntarily performed in a number of plays.  No, the problem I have is with my own words.  When I write something, for the most part, I like to pretend it has nothing to do with me.  It’s an illusion that shatters the moment you start reading aloud.

Like I said, I don’t remember for sure how I felt about reading it.  But I do remember how I felt about the thing itself.  When that teacher first told me she was going to “publish” my little story, I walked into a different world.  At five years old, I felt that I had done the most grown up thing you could ever do: write a book.

At 23, I feel more or less the same.  I wrote a book, and it’s kind of freaking me out.  I haven’t sent it to a publisher, or even an agent.  Until two weeks ago, mine were the only eyes ever laid on it.  But it’s a book, and it has a plot, characters, chapters, an ending.  The thing itself is finished.  Also, one other person has read it now.  And she didn’t tell me it was the worst thing ever.  So, you know.  It’s been a weird week.

If somebody went back in time and told my earlier selves what their first novel would be about, I think they’d be concerned.  Not surprised, exactly, but concerned.  So what’s it about, you ask?  Well, sir.  Indeed.  Um.  Okay.  Let’s go with…an impoverished teenage girl in southeast Missouri who deals drugs.  I’d say recreationally, but that would be flippant.

Like I said, I don’t think younger Sara would have problem believing you if you told her.  But she would probably wonder a great deal about the intervening years to come.

Of course, if you told her what I’ve told you, you wouldn’t really be telling her the novel.  You’d be telling her a sentence, and it would suffice to stand for over 98,000 words.  There was a girl, and she sold drugs.  And there was a girl who wrote about her for a number of years, until she came up with this finished thing, and then, finally, she had to stop.

There was a girl, and she sold drugs.  You read that sentence, and it stands for the novel.  You read the novel, and it stands for something else.  We try to tell a story under the story, and we hope nobody throws rocks at our heads for the effort.

I wrote a story when I was five, and I wrote a lot of stories after that.  I don’t know the number.  I can tell you it’s well more than ten.  I’m feeling weird about this last one.  It’s longer than the others, and I spent more time on it.

It’s a stupid old cliché, but here it is: I feel exposed.  I’m a very private person, usually.  But I just sent what feels like my life’s work out to what feels like the whole universe and it makes me feel a little raw.  On edge.  Every once in a while, I’ll remember a name, or a sentence, and I’ll wish I spent more time editing.  And then I’ll take a breath and try to remember that you can’t edit forever.  I’ll try to remember that I mostly hate Kubrick, who edited everything for fifty thousand years, so there’s no point editing that long.  At a certain point, you push eject and you walk away.  Email it to everyone you know and wonder if you’ll ever get any money out of it.

There was a girl, and she wrote this thing.  I don’t know if I can tell it any better than that.

The Picture Page

Today has been a big chore day.  I spent the morning sweeping and mopping the kitchen, and came to an important conclusion: I can’t have dogs.  At least not long-haired ones.  And the only dog I want is an Alaskan Husky…so yeah.  No dogs.

Why?  TOO MUCH HAIR!  Every time I thought I was done getting the hair, there was more.  Both our (mainly my mom’s) dogs are long-haired, and they shed CONSTANTLY, regardless of temperature or season.  I know they’re doing it deliberately.  They just like shedding.  They like watching me clean it up, I think.  Okay, it is also possible that they simply have so much hair it doesn’t matter if they shed a whole bunch of it even in winter.  Maybe.  I prefer to think they’ve chosen this particular path.  Especially the little one.  He’s out to get me, any way he can.

But anyway, since I’ve been cleaning all day, and also mentally organizing the room I’m going to move into while a guy fixes the water-damaged corner that has so far prevented said move, I decided that my post today would be pictures.  A lot of my cat.  Some of my breakfast.  All with captions.  So, here we go.

This is Hershey, in her famous broken-neck-Exorcist pose.

Again.  I actually took four of these.  I am endlessly fascinated with her ability to do this.  Apparently cats are so stretchy because their skin is loose.  I'm not kidding.  And neither is wikipedia.

Then she figured out what I was doing and switched to cute instead of creepy.  Fact: all cats are capable of judging how cute they look at any given moment.  For proof of this, I suggest you go check out youtube.

When I’m at the computer, she likes to twirl around my legs for about an hour.  Then she settles down for a snooze on my laptop bag.  There’s a pillow about four feet away.  I have no idea why she goes for the bag instead, but when she doesn’t, the little dog does.  Provided he can’t find any shoes to sleep on instead.

And then sometimes she follows me into the kitchen…and just flops down on her side, like this.  Looking at me.  Pawing the air.  Mewling pitifully.  I have no idea what she’s trying to tell me.

Here’s the little dog, Chester.  Hips splayed.  Which, apparently, he finds comfortable.  I imagine that right now, he is plotting his next escape attempt, in his ongoing struggle against…being a pet.  I am not fond of him.

Typical breakfast for me.  One piece of toast, two veggie sausages, an egg.  The egg on the toast thing is called eggy in the basket in England (thank you, Miranda and V for Vendetta.)  I’m big on protein early in the morning.  Or I am now.  Round about…three months ago, I was big on sleeping early in the morning.  Ah, college.  By the way, that’s the laptop bag the animals like to sleep on.  Clearly far superior to a pillow.  And a dog bed.  And the couch.

For about a week, we had crumpets.  Love me a crumpet.  Delicious.  And we had peaches from like…a farm or something.  Also delicious.

This ends the picture post.  There will probably be more.  I have a new goal of writing at least two blog posts a week, and pictures are way easier than thinking about stuff, so…yeah.

Also, I’m thinking about occasionally signing off with a few-sentences-long recap of a dream I’ve had, so here it goes:

I was in some sort of complex composed entirely out of indoor-playground-style tunnels, with a couple of large, fishbowl rooms connecting them.  My job was to traverse the tunnels and find stuff.  Gold or people.  Or possibly a person made of gold.  Definitely an action-dream.

Monster of the Week

On Monday, I set the alarm for 8:00am.  I went to bed around 11pm the night before, so it wasn’t unreasonable to think I might be able to get up early.  I didn’t, of course.  At 8am, I picked up my phone and set the alarm back by an hour.  At 9am, I did the same thing.  I ended up finally accepting the inevitable around 10:30.  Considering my unemployment, I don’t see this as a total failure on my part.

But ignoring my insurmountable laziness for a moment, let me mention what happened between 8 and 9am on Monday: I had a dream.  A ridiculous, adventure-filled dream with a fully conceived and executed plot.  I have these a lot.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I write stories all the time, so my subconscious has figured out that the best way to get a message to me is through clear literary devices.

Whatever it is, I like it.  It definitely beats stress dreams about being forced to attend a public high school, which I continued to have throughout high school and college until they evolved into dreams where I had to go back to high school because I hadn’t finished it properly.  And sometimes they were just dreams about not being able to find my campus housing, and through the laws of dream logic, that meant I lost my placement in campus housing, and had to live in various basements or on rooftops.  (I think these were all money-stress dreams.  Originally they were about not being able to afford private school, then, indirectly, not being able to afford a place to live.  Influenced, I’m sure, by an article I read more than four years ago about an NYU student who couldn’t afford housing, so he lived in the college library basement and kept all his belongings in his backpack.  I think the article said he had a sleeping bag too, so I have no idea how he fit everything in there, but maybe he hid the sleeping bag somewhere else?  And maybe since he lived in a library, he didn’t own any books?  So it was just clothes in there?  Anyway, the article ended by saying that someone had figured out what he was doing, and since it was bound to attract attention [maybe that wasn't the article's given reason, but, yeah, alright, I’m cynical,] they gave him a full scholarship.  I think the article was supposed to make you feel Damn Good about how Damn Philanthropic Americans Are, but clearly it just terrified me.  All I could think about was whether or not I would have gotten away with it for as long as he did, which I think was about two months.  Either they clean their libraries during the day, or that kid was living in one filthy place.)

So, my point?  My point is this dream.  It was weird.  Full sound and Technicolor, though that’s not unusual for me.  I’ve heard of people dreaming in black and white, or at least remembering it that way, but I never have.  My dreams are colorful, usually more intensely colorful than I consider everyday life.  In this one, the ground was red.  Very, very red.  And there were yellow trees everywhere.

It starts in the center of some weird, twisting, labyrinthine, German-expressionist painting of a castle.  In the science laboratory at the center.  I’m just kind of hanging out, looking at all the experimental glass shapes, when there’s a kind of explosion, and the ground shakes.  I run to the door, and from there, I can see into this ballroom, where a huge party is going on.  I just sort of know, the way you do in dreams, that the whole town is there, celebrating this woman, the scientist who owns the castle.  (I know, right?  Even my dreams are feminist.  What up.)

Then this guy shows up.  I’m going to call him Jess, because he’s actually a real person from my life but I have no idea if he’d like me to write about him showing up in my dreams.  And I couldn’t be bothered to ask, so I’ll just give him a codename.  Jess.  Anyway, the Jess in my dream bares a far greater resemblance to a movie hero than the Jess in real life.  Partly because he has magical powers.  He can make stuff float.  It’s not really full-on telekinesis, because all they do is float and not really move anywhere, but it’s still cool.  I don’t remember what he floated in the dream, but I know he did it.

Anyway, he has shown up to tell me that there is evil afoot, of course.  And I have to stop it, because I have special powers too.  And mine are more useful and action-oriented than his.  Apparently I can fly and spit out acid-venom.  Like my fucking spittle causes shit to melt.  Yeah, that’s how awesome my action-dreams are.  Way better than the stress-school-homeless dreams, right?

So, we spend a lot of time flying around.  I keep out-flying him accidentally, because since he can just float stuff (including himself, clearly) but he can’t really direct it, I go a lot faster than him.  Which is awesome.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a flying dream, and my flying dreams before have mostly been stuff like flying over Olive and other streets that I actually know in real life, and have no desire to see from an aerial view.  But in this dream, I’m flying over a fucking acid-trip-esque fairyland with crazy gothic castles and yellow trees.  So slightly more interesting than suburbia.

So, yeah, I fly through the trees.  And there are fairies there, although they’re kind of ugly for fairies—just kind of weird-looking, vibrant colors, oddly shaped bodies, not super pleasant to look at.  Anyway, the fairies remind me that I have shit to do, so I can’t just float around.

So I go find Jess again.  And we have to go back into the castle, through some small red tunnels that, even in my subconscious, seriously challenge my claustrophobia.  But then we find this big, dark chamber, kind of circular, which, actually, now that I’m thinking about it, my subconscious definitely stole from Stargate.  Wow.  Even my subconscious is a slacker.

And somehow Jess figures out from the chamber what we have to do, and then the ground shakes again, and suddenly we’re in a tunnel leading outside, and Jess tells me that I’m the only one with the power to stop it, and that he’s going to go back inside to either cause a distraction or die heroically.  Seriously, those are is options.

So I go outside, and I discover this giant spaceship about to take off.  Not to make the situation seem any less serious, or anything, but it looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.  It’s got the traditional spaceship disk-shape at the top, but under that is this large, yellow-and-orange spiral thing that kind of looks like a spring, and kind of moves like one too.

And inside the spaceship, which is open at the top, is the mad scientist woman.  Only now I can see that she’s clearly also a witch and, to top it off, an alien.  Her face is oblong and green, with a sucker thing coming out of the mouth, and her hair is somewhere between Bride of Frankenstein and Queen Elizabeth I (in that one where she’s really bald, so it’s a wig—in fact, the worst wig ever made.)

And then I know, the way you do in dreams, of course, that she made me.  That I woke up in the lab because I was made there, and that somehow, because of that, I’ve helped cause this whole thing to happen.  And, because she made me, I can destroy her.  Because dream logic!  So I fly up overhead and spit acid into her face, and watch it melt away.  Kind of gruesome, but very cartoon-y, so not all that traumatic.

And then all the townspeople come out and applaud, because the ground has stopped shaking.  And I float over them for awhile, glorifying in my triumph.

And, before I can find out if Jess died heroically or not, I wake up.  And then go back to sleep for another hour and a half.  Because who gets up at 9am if they don’t have a job?  Crazy people, that’s who.

Charmed—A Review

So, as an unemployed person who has now sent out a grand total of TWO job applications, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Netflix.  Specifically, I’ve been watching Charmed.  I used to watch it on Sunday nights with Mom, in the very post-Shannen Doherty days, but I never bothered to put much effort into it before.  I was quite biased against it, you see.  I have long been a devotee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I rather felt that shows like Charmed gave Buffy a bad name—shows that were frivolous and girly-girly, shows that used magic as a prop instead of a metaphor.  I was, and still am, convinced that Buffy was the greatest show of all time, and that Charmed was one of the reasons it was not universally recognized as such—people saw a show about vampires and magic and thought it would be, at best, campy, and at worst, stupid.

I still don’t think I was wrong, but I was probably wrong to blame Charmed.  People believe what they believe, and always have.  Charmed is no more to blame than Twilight—it may not have been quite as serious as Buffy, but it certainly had nothing to do with the vast majority of people dismissing it without a second glance.  Most likely, people who thought shows about magic were unworthy of consideration as serious fare avoided Charmed as well as Buffy.

That being said, Charmed was not perfect.  It was no Buffy.  Like every single show on air today, it had one fatal flaw: it was not written by Joss Whedon.  Alas, the shows that have fallen into such disgrace—untouched by his terrible genius, most have been found wanting, even disastrous (by a jury of mainly me, and probably everyone who still goes on that forum Whedonverse.)  A select few shows have managed to rise above this stunning handicap—Doctor Who, Veronica Mars, Star Trek.  Of course, the first two (Doctor Who in its current incarnation, that is) have openly admitted to Whedon influences.  Star Trek, of course, was robbed even of influence, owing to an unfortunate time-space-continuum issue (chronologically existing in the pre-Buffy era, that is.)

Still, despite not-being-Buffy, Charmed had a thing.  It was pretty damn entertaining and, really, what else can you ask for?  Plus, it did have one thing that Buffy often did not—the end of each episode tended to leave the viewer with a feeling of hope, instead of soul-crushing despair and torment.

So, in that same spirit of hope-not-crushing-despair, I offer up a review of two episodes: “Out of Sight” (season 1) and “She’s a Man, Baby, a Man” (season 2.)

Let’s begin with “Out of Sight.”

In this episode, the Halliwell sisters attend a party for a heretofore unseen friend’s young son, also known as this episode’s stock Kid in Distress.  The girls are sitting at a table, having one of their what-else-but-men chats.  Piper (the MAD cute one) is, once again, trying to date Someone Other than Leo, which of course means that they all end up discussing Leo.  Prue, as she is want to do, asserts that “men are different from women.”  Based on what I have seen of the show so far, this is one half of her two-part philosophy, the other half of which is “Being a witch is super hard.”  Phoebe indirectly suggests that not all men are evil, or at least that Leo might not be, and exchanges a look of barely contained sizzling passion with Piper, while Prue stares on in disbelief.

So much sexual tension for a family-friendly show.

Meanwhile, the Kid in Distress, David, is playing a ball game (called Squish the Squash, which I can only assume is the Cute Kid-ism of the episode.)  He chases the ball into some trees and, lured by the sound of a mewling kitten, tosses it back to his friends and runs deeper into the trees.  Because pre-testosterone, boys are allowed to love cute things.

Anyway, Prue runs after him in a vain attempt to make the audience believe the day will be saved long before the credits roll.  Unfortunately, the day is ruined by Prue’s overwhelming incompetence (remember, being a witch is SUPER hard.)

Although she gets there on time, and, in fact, appears to succeed momentarily, she gets flustered and loses it.

Prue exhibits ridiculous incompetence.

Apparently, she was so stunned by the awesomeness of her powers (the previous 18 episodes having not fully convinced her of their awesomeness yet) that she just…sort of…stopped using them.

Thereby allowing Voldemort to continue his pedophilic exploits for another day.

Anyway, then something way more important than the abduction of a child occurs: a reporter sees Prue using her powers!  And not just any reporter either: he happens to be the most cartoonishly evil reporter of all time.  Actually, he is a pretty accurate depiction of how I imagine Every Tabloid Reporter Ever.  Except, inexplicably, the episode seems to suggest he works for a legit news organization.  Rupert Murdoch in training, maybe?

Anyway, while Prue is dealing with the horrors of the print media (seeing as, in the ’90s, people still read things, including newspapers,) Phoebe meets with a guy who was abducted in the same way a few decades ago—an episode which left him blind.  Apparently, Voldemort the Child Abductor is actually a demon who is not only completely uninterested in molesting his abductees, but is also ACTUALLY interested in stealing their eyesight to see people’s auras.  This allows him to kill a well-dressed black man, which I must assume means that the Voldemort-looking demons are racist as well.  Not that I’m surprised.

So, to cut a 45-minute story short…the Halliwells work to save an abducted child whilst also avoiding the Reporter from Hell (whom, seriously, they could easily sue for harassment, but apparently witches just have no patience for working with law enforcement.)  They end up scouring the sewers for the demons, who, being far more helpful than your average demon, manage to kill the obnoxious reporter before succumbing to hissing-acid-death themselves.  Oh, but, downside—Andy the Cop/Prue’s former love interest now knows about magic and stuff.  And then Prue says “Do I have to use my power on you?” to get him to leave, and, honestly, if my opinion of her could have fallen any lower, this would have done it.

Then Voldemort pops in again, and Prue, determined to make me hate her, DROPS THE FREAKING POTION MEANT TO KILL IT.  Fortunately, she isn’t alone this time, so her being terrible at magic and HOLDING STUFF doesn’t get them all killed.  Phoebe hits Voldemort over the head with a pipe, thereby illustrating with her own awesomeness exactly how terrible Prue is, and allowing Prue to magic up the spilled potion into the not-really-a-pedophile-demon’s face.  BOOM, done.  Everybody continues to pretend that Prue’s extreme sucking didn’t just put this kid into a lifetime of therapy, and all the demons’ victims get their eyesight back.  Including the guy Phoebe met earlier, but he turns out to be kind of bald and gap-toothed, and so not nearly handsome enough to be a love interest for her.

And the ladies get on with their incredibly attractive lives.

Mainly these two.  My hatred of Prue prevents me from seeing her as attractive.

And this post has run on far too long, so look for my review of the other episode, “She’s a Man, Baby,” in the near future.

And in closing:

I think the best thing I have discovered about Charmed since I began wasting countless hours watching it has really been Piper.  That is to say the incredible, unstoppable cuteness of Piper.  I mean, just look at that face.

Cuteness incarnate, right there.  Even her name evokes cuteness, man.  Ridiculous.  Like, Willow levels of cute, but without the Willow levels of naiveté.  Ridiculous.

So, join me next time, for more pictures of Piper's cuteness, in "She's a Man, Baby, a Man."