Friday Hodge Podge: Dreams, Peace, Quaker Worship, Chapstick Lesbians, and TV Shows
Posted by Sappho on October 9th, 2009 filed in Dreams, Music, News and Commentary, Quaker Practice, TV
Dream: I’m in a room filled with Greeks and Turks, and I’m to sing Greek songs and dance. I wear a long dress that I purchased at a Greek festival. But I’m handed a page that has, not lyrics in Greek and music, as I expected, but translations of lyrics in English, and I find I’m to sit on a tall stool and read them as poetry, next to a man far better at poetry reading than I am.
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Joel woke me in the wee hours of the morning to give me the news that Obama’s been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And, of course, half of me was thinking, yay, they’re rewarding him for exactly the reasons I voted for him, and the other half was thinking, so soon? It seems they’ve rewarded the prize for hope. He’s quite good at hope.
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From my Facebook feed: Dance Party Erupts During Quaker Meeting for Worship:
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TV shows that Joel and I have watched recently.
House, Epic Fail episode: So, they’ve still got Andre Braugher on the cast as House’s shrink, after House has left the hospital. Not sure how long he’ll be part of a show, given that he’s going to be on the air in Men of a Certain Age in a few months, but it’s still good to see more of him. I read a review from someone else who complained about House becoming such a good cook in such a short time; is there anything (other than not being a jerk) that he isn’t good at? Watching the show, though, I actually think his cooking skill is realistic; what we see is that, by being really obsessive about cooking and hiring his own personal cooking tutor, he manages to be good enough to really impress his best friend and one of the people working for him who already see him as a genius. Yes, that’s probably a realistic bar to reach with obsessive practice, even in a fairly short time.
Jekyl: A short series, just two DVDs from Netflix, of a modern Jekyl/Hyde story. The most interesting part is its take on just what the driving force behind Hyde actually is, and the double-edged nature of love.
Walking with Prehistoric Beasts: Joel’s been renting this whole series, Walking With Dinosaurs, the prequel series, and this last, which is a sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, and takes you as far as early humans in a major ice age. A related link, though it has nothing to do with the show, is this BBC article speculating about why Neanderthals became extinct.
Coupling: Joel says he heard about this British series on Twitter as “like Friends, but with sex.” Lots of sex, experienced by a set of three male friends and three female friends, who rehash it all afterwards, often with sharp differences between the female friend analysis and the male friend analysis. It is, of course, comedy.
Other, totally unrelated links:
Virus discovery called breakthrough in fight against chronic fatigue syndrome.
Bond (the blogger formerly known as Daisy Bond) continues her reflections on being butch in Confidence, Not Caveats: Butch, Femme, And Tearing Down Stereotypes.
… Once in awhile one will hear a statement as simple and shameless as “I’m femme,” or “I’m butch,” but more often, it seems to me, such sentences are so swamped with stipulations they’re barely legible. I hear things like “I guess I lean more to the butch-ish side of the spectrum of things, but — I mean — I’m just me, I don’t necessarily do all the stereotypical butch things…” I hear things like, “I hate labels but I guess if I have to choose, I would be more femme, but you know, sometimes I wear jeans, and I know how to change my own oil, so I’m not sure, I guess my attitude is butch because I’m outspoken…” Many of the videos here are great examples of this….
As I read this, and thought about why I’m one of those who tends to describe my level of masculinity/femininity in sentences filled with stipulations, I suddenly realized why. It’s because the straight world doesn’t really have a term I feel comfortable with, that says, without caveats, where I am on the spectrum. The lesbian world does: chapstick lesbian. Chapstick lesbian is pretty much exactly what I feel like, in terms of gender identity, enough that I don’t need to think of caveats about how I generally go around in hiking boots and no make up, but did wear green nail polish for a couple of weeks a few months ago, and have been known to crochet lace. It fits, except for the part where I’ve been married to a man for twenty-one years. But there isn’t really a straight equivalent, a sort of female inverted positive version of “metrosexual.” Instead, there are lots of words for various styles of femininity – vamp, girl next door, Earth mother – many of which say just where you are on the Madonna/whore continuum – ingenue, femme fatale – but not nearly as good words as the GLBT world has to apply to the masculine/feminine continuum. And those words that do describe some form of not-quite-traditionally-feminine are either really negative – mannish, unladylike – or else, for the one positive word – tomboy – imply a little girl. Even the phrases that people use feel wrong; either you describe yourself in a way that suggests a lack – not very feminine – or in a way that suggests that all other women are lacking – one of the guys, not one of those high maintenance feminine women. Butch and femme don’t do that; that Bond calls herself butch doesn’t suggest that either she or her femme girl friend is broken. And, though I’m closer to traditionally feminine in gender identity and presentation than it sounds like Bond is, I’d feel much more fitted to “chapstick lesbian” than any of the straight word choices I’m offered.
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Social networking question of the day: Do you avoid old flames on social networks, or seek them out? If you avoid them, just how old flamey do people need to be, before you hesitate to friend them? I’m seeing, again, right there and in principle available for friending, people who range everywhere from “had one date where we didn’t do anything physical, and were purely platonic friends for years after that” to “had repeated hot sex.” I’m pretty sure that avoiding people all the way at the “had one date” end of the continuum is taking caution farther than I care to, but somewhere along the line, I worry, might a friend request raise eyebrows that I’m looking for something else? (It should be understood, here, that not unsettling my own or other people’s marriages is a priority.)