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December 30, 2007

Strangers with Pleasant Personalities

It has taken me a very long time to recognize certain things about the way I was raised to view certain social interactions, a view rooted in the "mind your own goddamn business" ethos of the southwest. It was made clear to me, from a very early age and by most of the adults whose examples I witnessed, that when you had to talk to strangers, the conversations should be as neutral and as brief as possible. You shouldn't be flat-out rude, but you also shouldn't make chit-chat with the guy who takes your order at some bakery/bagel/sandwich chain, because he might then feel it appropriate to tell you, with genuine kindness and your best interest at heart, that the sandwich you just ordered has more calories than any other item on the menu. You shouldn't act like you're actually interested in the thoughts and opinions of the person helping you find a book at some bookstore, because then they might stick around and continue to talk to you when you just want to find your book, buy it, and get the hell out of the store. The only exceptions to this rule are if you are trying to spread the gospel; in that case, you should use these mini-moments of niceness as an opportunity to ask the other person what they know about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and invite them to church.

Actually maybe that's another reason I used to try to keep conversations with strangers to a minimum: I didn't want to do anything that might invite them to proselytize me. (One more way my religious upbringing screwed up my ability to play well with others.)

But my friend C has no such problem. I have known her for about a year and a half, and hanging out with her has been a revelation, largely because she is so charming, friendly and open: I continue to be astonished at easily she enters into conversations with complete strangers, conversations that, although often very brief, are nonetheless enjoyable to all who participate in and hear them--up to a point.

C used to tend bar. (I so prefer the locution "tend bar" to "be a bartender." It just sounds cooler.) She learned certain things about how to be pleasant enough to people that they wanted to tip her, but not so pleasant that they figured she'd be going home with them at the end of the night. I don't want to make it sound calculated: she has developed a genuine habit of being cheerful, friendly, and polite when she meets people. Which is why the guy at the sandwich shop told her, "That sandwich you just ordered, it's my favorite. I used to eat one almost every day. But then I decided to look it up and see, like, how many calories it has and stuff, and it turns out it's got 1100 calories. It's got more calories than anything else we sell. They're really not good for you."

"I'm so glad you told me that," she said, smiling. "Because even though I don't look it, I'm actually morbidly obese. So it's good to know that sandwich is not helping my problem."

I'm probably not doing the scene justice; it was actually very funny. And she managed not to make the guy feel bad for what was kind of a faux pas. I was really impressed that she made this kid feel so at ease that he would tell her something like that, and then even more impressed that she didn't say anything that embarrassed him, even though he'd said something that was in some small way a reproach to her.

Occasionally--not often, but occasionally--people don't realize when the small, pleasant interaction has come to an end, and that's when I get annoyed, especially because I'm the slightly-more-standoffish friend of the really gregarious girl everyone wants to talk to. My annoyance does not stem from jealousy, however, but from boredom. It's not all that often that these brief conversations with strangers as interesting as the conversation C and I could have on our own, and my old "mind your own goddamn business" training comes back and makes me wish these people would realize that just because C is being really nice to them, it doesn't mean they're interesting.

Among the worst people for this are bartenders and waiters on slow nights. Now, I'm not saying all bartenders or waiters are boring; C and I had a favorite bar and one reason we loved it was that we loved the bartender--she was such a lovely person, and she'd talk to us without hovering. The same went for the wait staff. I loved pretty much everyone at that restaurant. The food was good, but the service was fantastic.

But there were also a couple of bars we had to stop going to because the bartenders were SO BORING and didn't know when to go away, leave us alone and wash glasses.

Saturday night we had an experience at a bar with another of those truly lovely bartenders, a really friendly, good-natured person who is good at his job because he likes it and vice versa. He made good drinks and good conversation. We stayed at the bar much longer than we planned to, and the main reason was the bartender.

Now, in my standard fashion, I have not yet arrived at what is for me the ultimate point I want to make, the reason I started this entry, but my preamble has become extremely long. So I will end here and pick this thread up again in a day (or a week) or two.

Posted by Holly at 7:40 PM | Comments (3)

December 27, 2007

One More Way Global Warming Screws Everything Up

Yesterday I tried to go somewhere--Chicago, to be exact. I have this really great trip planned that includes visiting an old friend I haven't seen in years, going to dinner with a few new friends I haven't seen in months, hanging with Saviour Onassis and his new man, hitting some museums, etc.

But I was denied, and the weather was the problem. Oh, it was lovely where I was and it was lovely in Chicago. The problem was Detroit. And Detroit was not, as you might suspect if you don't live in this part of the globe, hit by a blizzard. No, it was hit by warm weather, and that led to fog.

It had snowed recently, you see, and then it warmed way up, and all that snow started to melt, and turned into dense vapor over night, and left a thick fog the next morning. It took forever to burn off, and countless flights in and out of Detroit were canceled.

I don't know if that's the same phenomenon that triggered the dense fogs around London that all caused so many flights to be canceled, but it's something that's going to happen more often. And everyone--almost everyone--can see in their own lives negative consequences of global warming. Even my family full of Mormon Republicans, those exemplars of denial, those trained from birth to make choices with devastating long-term consequences, can see that we've really screwed things up and have to make some changes--or rather, someone else has to make some changes. China, India--what do those people need cars for? They do so well with bikes and rickshaws! Who told them they could desire, manufacture, sell, buy and drive cars? It's THEIR fault.

I realize, of course, there's a little irony in complaining about the effects of global warming on air travel, and one of the few consolations I found was that there were that many fewer airplanes flying around the sky yesterday, that people got squeezed onto already full flights so that every last seat was taken. I don't expect anyone--including me--to stop living their lives in the world that exists and go build a cabin on the bank of some pond, because for one thing, there aren't ponds enough to accommodate all of us. But doing what you can to minimize or offset your production of CO2 and other gross gases on a day-to-day basis; voting (it's almost 2008!) for leaders (as opposed to the spawn of satan currently in the white house) who really will do something about global warming; these are things we MUST do so that we can, from time to time as necessary, get on a plane, and have reasonable expectations that we'll get where we want to go.

I'm headed back to the airport later today, and I am trying to be hopeful that I'll get where I'm going. DTW is open and flights are moving in and out of it, but I use a small regional airport and flights in and out of here are still backed up. So we'll see.

Posted by Holly at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

December 24, 2007

Someone Else's Argument About How Porn Skews Our Expectations of Sex

As one my recent entries should make clear, in many regards I'm often a fan of explicit depictions of sex: I can appreciate them for their artistic and erotic value. But I'm not a fan of most porn, either in theory or in practice, because I find most of it joyless, predictable and exploitative.

Within the corner of the Blogosphere concerned with sex and gender, there are only five bloggers who haven't already commented on the infamous Details blog piece from the summer asking if it's OK for men to demand anal sex from women. As I'm one of those five, I should probably get that duty out of the way before the year ends. I'll do it, however, by seconding everything Twisty Faster says about it in her critique. Twisty argues that the phenomenon "is an escalation of porn culture," which seems likely enough to me. And in this piece from The Guardian UK, Marina Hyde makes the same argument about another way men are showing contempt for women during sex: they apparently feel entitled to ejaculate on a woman's face, without asking, on the first date.

I especially like this statement from Hyde: "porn is screwing up sex. Not sex in relationships, but the kind of casual sex in which it would be nice to think people could indulge in a mutually enjoyable, non-exploitative fashion." From what I hear from young women in the dating trenches, I think that's right, and it's no doubt one more reason educated, successful women who have aquired an appropriate sense of their own worth and what they deserve in a relationship are more likely to have orgasms during sex than their less educated female counterparts, and one more reason feminists have the most rewarding sex lives.

Posted by Holly at 2:26 PM | Comments (6)

One More Way Our Current Approach to Living Is Killing Biodiversity

Ethanol sucks. I don't know who came up with this idea but it sucks. Something that is added to fossil fuel but doesn't really wean us from it sucks. It requires all this fuel in the first place to produce it, and it makes everything else more expensive, particularly feed for livestock, which is one more reason to be a vegetarian (which I'm still not) or at least eat less meat (which I do). The answer is not a replacement for fossil fuel in the things we already use, but completely different forms of energy. That's all old information.

But here's a bit real news: the rush to grow corn for ethanol is raising beer prices in the US, because farmers are no longer growing hops, an ingredient used in brewing beer, while our crappy dollar (one more reason the Bush administration is the WORST leadership this country has EVER seen) makes importing hops prohibitively expensive.

As it happens I don't like hops, which is quite bitter. I HATE hoppy beers. Took me a long time to figure out what it was in certain beers that made them unpalatable to me: turns out it's lots of hops. But it's used in most beers; in some, the taste isn't pronounced, and those are the beers I like. I really like dark beers and brewed beverages--I like something that tastes like you're drinking a glass of heavy bread, Guinness being my favorite, what I usually drink when someplace has it on tap. But I almost never buy it in bottles to put in my fridge--for that, I prefer to pick up a six pack of some specialty beer from a microbrewery.

I don't drink a lot of beer, so it's not like I'm worrying about the effect this development will have on my wallet. But I don't want microbreweries to go out of business. And this whole thing just sucks. There's no reason to grow so much corn, most of it roundup ready and genetically modified.

Posted by Holly at 10:04 AM | Comments (1)

December 21, 2007

Movies About Men, For Women

In his comment to my entry about why I like the sex scene in Latter Days, MohoHawaii noted that he “always thought that there should be a larger market for romance stories that cross the gender divide. The straight female audience is largely untapped as consumers of male-male love stories. This is a potentially huge market, since there are 10 to 20 times as many straight women as there are gay men.”

For whatever reason, I’ve been an enthusiastic part of that market since even before I officially reached adulthood. One of my very first entries on this blog was about my movie-watching habits in the 1980s. I decided as a college freshman that I’d see pretty much any movie back for a “revival” (which was important back in the days before you could easily rent or buy a copy of a movie, making revival houses unnecessary) or anything that was a “classic.” This decision was facilitated by the fact that UA’s student union had a HUGE movie theater in it, and it showed only second-run movies or revivals, for a mere buck-fifty. As I’ve mentioned, the first movie I went to see there was A Clockwork Orange, which I walked out of; the second movie I went to see was La Cage aux Folles, which I loved and my roommate hated.

I made a habit of dragging roommates to movies I really wanted to see, which is how, as a junior, I persuaded my 17-year-old sister (yes, I roomed with my sister--I actually roomed with all three of my sisters at one point or another) to see both Risky Business (had that dreadful R-rating, though in the early 80s ratings weren’t quite such a big deal in the church) and Another Country, which was rated a mere PG but was all about homosexuality at some British public school.

I’m not sure how many teenage Mormon females would be so enthusiastic about a mannered art film exploring the difficulties of conducting a gay love affair at boys' boarding school, difficulties exacerbated because one boy had just hung himself after being caught en flagrante by a headmaster. But my sister and I LOVED it. And really, it’s not so very remarkable that we loved it, because it was an interesting script and beautifully cast, emphasis on beautiful: it featured the very young Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Cary Elwes in their earliest starring roles.

I’ve talked to gay men who shrug when I mention that movie and say, “Oh, it was OK.” I watched it a few years ago when it came out on dvd; it wasn’t as good as I remembered, but I still liked it. And I think I liked it for one of the reasons I liked Latter Days, and that’s the fact that women were not depicted as adversaries in that movie.

Of course, in Another Country, women are not really depicted at all: they don’t really exist. Rupert Everett’s character has a mother we see once or twice; Colin Firth’s character has a girlfriend we never see. But for the most part, women are irrelevant in that movie.

Compare that to something like Maurice, where women are cast in role of adversary or impediment, not very intelligent or worthy ones, either; rather, they are the temptation or social crutch one character succumbs to, leaving the other broken-hearted and alone with his unspeakable, unshakable desires.

Or think of Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which a gay character comes home and crawls into bed. His wife wakes and begins to kiss and caress him, attempting to initiate sex. Furious at having to deny himself what he really wants and engage in sex he doesn’t enjoy, the man makes the sex absolutely brutal, so vicious and violent that by the time he rolls off his wife, she’s wounded and weeping.

Or think of Total Eclipse, a fairly crappy movie hardly anyone saw, where Paul Verlaine is unwilling to commit to a relationship with Arthur Rimbaud (Leo DiCaprio), because “he loves his wife’s body.” But loving his wife’s body doesn’t stop him from becoming so annoyed at the way she’s intellectually inferior to his male lover on the side that he sets her hair on fire.

Or think of Sordid Lives, which has some really lackluster performances (the lead, for example) but some really great ones--it’s how I became a Beth Grant fan. OK, a lot of the female characters in that movie are very sympathetic. But there’s also the dreadful female psychiatrist who’s trying to make Brother Boy straight by forcing him to look at her genitals.

Or think of Wilde, or of Oscar Wilde’s life. Wilde liked his wife, Constance; he felt fondness and affection for her, and doted on her when she was first pregnant. But she didn’t provide the kind of companionship he really wanted. After Wilde meets Robbie Ross, Constance becomes a mere bit player in his life. After Wilde meets Bosie, she’s essentially written out of the action. Wilde’s actions destroy both himself AND his wife, but foremost in his concerns is always Bosie, the person he was in love with, not the person he married.

Or think of Angels in America, and the way Harper is a not-that-bright, not-that-appealing (not-that-believable), depressed, neurotic hindrance that Joe must escape in order to become a more authentic person.

I could go on and on. And the point is not to say that there’s anything necessarily wrong with these movies, because I believe they’re depicting real phenomena. I have no problem believing, for instance, that in England during the time surrounding the Great War, for a gay man who fell in love at university, it was really upsetting, confusing and humiliating when the guy you were in love with--and who claimed to love you back--spurned you in order to marry a woman, which is the story in Maurice. I managed to enjoy the movie perfectly well, even though women were depicted primarily as adversaries as obstacles; it’s just that Maurice is by no means my favorite Merchant Ivory film or favorite Forster novel. (That would be A Room with a View, on both counts.)

Then compare all these movies--one in which women are irrelevant, a bunch in which women are the nasty plot complication--to Latter Days, where women are friends, roommates, mentors, mothers (and not nearly as nasty as the patriarchs), co-workers and even employers, but never discarded spouses or lovers.

Think of it in terms of my all-time favorite gay/transgendered movie: Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The only woman Hedwig has to reject is herself, the person Hansel became in order to please the first husband. After Tommy encounters Hedwig’s angry inch and freaks out, then tries to make it all better by saying, “But I love you,” Hedwig replies, angry and hurt, “Then love the front of me.” It means something very different when an unhappily/incompletely transgendered biological man says that to another man than if a straight woman says it to a gay man.

In Emily Pearson’s essay "Irreconcilable Differences," about her mixed orientation marriage, she notes that watching the play about their marriage by her ex-husband, Steve Fales, felt like “being dismembered by an ice pick.” She also writes about reading a review of the play in which the reviewer noted that

As important as his relationship with his wife is to his story--and as much as his desire to respect her privacy may be commendable--it’s disconcerting how completely she disappears from his ‘Confessions’ between courtship and divorce.”

I was floored. The reviewer had, in one sentence, summed up my entire marriage. I had completely disappeared between our courtship and divorce. Just as my mother, and every other straight woman I knew who had married a gay man, had completely disappeared between courtship and divorce.

I recognize the need for gay men to tell the truth of their stories. I applaud the effort. But I cannot applaud the perpetuation of stories in which the plot is designed from the get-go for women to be adversaries, impediments, that which must be abandoned in order for the man’s real story to unfold. And that is what happens when we act like mixed-orientation marriages are examples of brave, courageous, admirable choices on the part of the men who pursue them. They’re not. They might be understandable choices, and some gay men might make a better go of it than others. I'm not saying they should be forbidden or punished. (From what I've seen, in most cases, the marriage itself and the dreadful aftermath are usually punishment enough.) But they’re not something we should admire--they’re not, in other words, something we should make “politically correct.”*

So I think that’s one reason I like Latter Days more than any gay Mormon man I’ve ever met likes it: it doesn’t denigrate women or women's sexuality. It doesn’t treat straight women as maddening manacles or millstones preventing the main characters’ happiness, or as unfortunate but unavoidable casualties along the course of the main characters’ voyages of discovery. It doesn’t even turn women into irrelevancies the main characters need not worry about. It treats them as people, entitled to respect and esteem, and invested in very real and respectable ways in the main characters’ well-being.

So if someone wants to tap into the potential audience straight women could be for romances about gay men, I think all of that is important to keep in mind.

*That, by the way, is Ben Christensen’s current way of trying to defend the whole business of mixed-orientation marriages: he marvels that his critics somehow missed the fact that he asked, "Why then is it not politically correct for a gay man to venture into what is usually considered the exclusive territory of straight men--to marry a woman and have a family--if that’s what he chooses to do?"

I didn't miss the question; I spent 7000 words explaining why it's not politically correct, but I'll provide the short answer here: because most marriages between gay men and straight women privilege male well-being at the cost of female well-being. I also noted, "Christensen demands not only the continued right of gay men to marry straight women, but approbation and approval for doing so, and he has received even that." He's not brave enough to do what he wants regardless of what other people think of him; he wants everyone to approve him, and he becomes petulant when they don't.

On his blog, he recently asked if I or other like me would "accuse a woman expressing her right to marry another woman of having an overblown sense of entitlement? No; Holly has said as much. Why then the double standard? Why are some choices more politically correct than others?"

Jesus Christ, why are some people so much poorer at clear reasoning than others?

Some choices are more politically correct than others because some choices are more beneficial to society and individuals, while others are more harmful. Most mixed-orientation marriages are dreadful failures that bring misery and heartache to those involved, including spouses and the children these marriages produce.

Gee? Why wouldn't society offer such marriages its most enthusiastic endorsement? Well, you can only note that for a really long time, the Mormon church did.

That, Ben, is why your choice is less "politically correct" than others. Ain't no double standard there--just the simple awareness that it is unethical for society to promote choices in which the cost of one person's happiness/ comfort/ convenience/ pleasure come at the cost of someone else's suffering. Your marriage might be one of the few exceptions--you and FoxyJ might live your entire lives pleased as punch with your arrangement--but for most people who end up in them, marriages like yours are unnecessary, unmitigated disasters. Because most people in and out of such marriages can see that, they find your defense of mixed-orientation marriages--not just mixed marriages themselves, but your entire defense of them--not only politically incorrect, but naive, foolish and pitiable. Is that really so hard to see?

So Ben, there's no double standard in the fact that people like me are ardent supporters of the right to marry for two people who are fervently in love and who have a clear understanding of what they're offering each other in a marriage, regardless of gender, but aren't so big on the idea of sexually naive dudes blind to their own privilege saying, "I want what everyone else has, just because. Why doesn't everyone approve of me when I do whatever I want?"

You might as well argue that there should be no double-standard about drinking: if it’s OK for adults to drink, why isn’t it OK for 14-year-olds to drink? If it’s OK for a 30-year-old guy to drink four whiskey and sodas during a Friday night at a bar with his friends, why isn’t it politically correct for a 30-year-old pregnant woman to drink three cosmos that same Friday night? Why the double standard? Gee, could it have something to do with the fact that one course of action is far more likely to cause harm than another?

But since someone probably will argue that there should be no law prohibiting teenagers from buying alcohol, or else argue that all drinking should be politically incorrect, let me illustrate the problems with Ben's logic in another example involving marriage. In some states a 16-year-old can marry provided s/he has parental consent; in other states, second cousins can marry. So why shouldn't it be politically correct to marry your 16-year-old second cousin if that's what you choose to do? Why is that any different from marrying your 21-year-old fourth-cousin-once-removed, especially if she's not done with college? She's still younger than average, and you're still related. So why the double standard?

In other words, Ben, just get over the fact that people don't always approve of what you do, and live your live according to your own convictions and preferences, or else make choices that will more easily win you respect.

Posted by Holly at 8:18 PM | Comments (6)

December 19, 2007

Maybe It Really Was Two Minutes In Heaven

Episode 18 of VM, which I discussed yesterday, opens with Veronica making out with Deputy Leo (whose reappearance near the end of season 3 is a much needed bright spot) before her front door. He wonders why he’s never been invited in and wants, he says, “to get a really good, long look at your bedroom ceiling.”

“Wow! College girls must be easy,” she replies.

The focus of the scene is the talking, not the kissing. There’s no dramatic music, nothing unusual in the camera shot. You understand, from everything in the scene itself, that these two people like each other, but you also understand that Leo likes Veronica a lot more than she likes him. I thought Deputy Leo was a great character and was sorry Veronica wasn’t nicer to him. But the show doesn’t intend for them to have incredible chemistry, and they don’t. The show does intend for Veronica and Duncan to have incredible chemistry, and they still don’t.

The show intends for Veronica and Logan to have incredible chemistry, and they do. And it makes sense that they do. Because as they work together on things like finding out who stole the money at the poker game, what’s going on with the various witnesses who claim to have seen Lynn Echolls jump off the bridge or ride away in a van, who is using the credit cards of Logan’s supposedly dead mother, they come to see one another’s virtues and vulnerabilities.

The kiss signifies something complicated and wonderful: they’ve discovered they have an emotional connection. As they acknowledge this emotional connection, it allows for an embodied attraction. (I use that slightly odd phrase because I think it covers more than calling the attraction merely “physical,” as opposed to some other sort, like “emotional” or “intellectual.” Emotions and thoughts are not just emotional and intellectual, they are embodied, and can cause physiological changes, including alterations in blood pressure, pulse, expression, posture, digestion, etc; and embodiment includes things like the way we carry ourselves, what our voices sound like, and how we adorn or decorate our bodies.) Admitting and acting on that attraction allows their emotional connection to deepen. And lust is part of every aspect of the embodied attraction and connection.

These people want each other, and the kiss makes it clear. OK, it’s a pretty tame kiss in a lot of ways: it’s just a first kiss, and just first base, and they’re juniors in high school, and while Veronica isn’t a virgin in that she was roofied and raped while unconscious, she’s never had consensual sex she remembers, so she could be considered a kind of psychological virgin. But there are little things, aside from the camera work and soundtrack, that show how passionate this kiss is. One gesture I particularly love is when Logan slides his hand down to the small of Veronica’s back and stops there for a moment: he knows that according to the protocol of a first date, his hand can’t venture any farther down, but it then allows him to slide his hand back up along her spine--not too far up, mind you--but this time, his hand is under her shirt. The kiss continues a moment longer, before they break apart and stare at each other, alarmed, excited and confused. There’s an awkward disengagement from the embrace, then Veronica goes to her car and shrugs at Logan before she gets in and drives away. Days later, after an inconsequential conversation about something else, Veronica will think to herself, “All right-y, Logan. We’ll just skip over the two minutes in heaven we had. You want to pretend it never happened? No argument here. My lips, for all intents and purposes, are sealed,” but there’s virtually no talking involved in this kiss. And it wasn’t two minutes in heaven: it was closer to a minute.

I acknowledged Monday that I could watch a fairly explicit, completely naked sex scene I enjoyed and admired, and still not get worked up, because the sex wasn’t about me. Whereas this kiss I’ve just described is, as I’ve already acknowledged, pretty tame. And yet, as I imagine my account of the details make clear, watching it is a complete turn-on. This is because the kiss replicates both my experience and my fantasies in really lovely ways. The kiss is a nice, accurate representation of what I have been taught to consider the early stages of how you act when you want to deepen not feelings of friendship, nor admiration or respect or esteem (though I think things develop more nicely when you feel all those things), but feelings of lust. And I have found, that just as turned out to be the case with Veronica and Logan, lust can make you feel more kindness, affection, respect and tenderness for the person with whom you explore it.

I grew up being told, flat-out, “Lust is evil.” We had countless lessons on it in every venue the church could provide. Lust is evil. Love is pure and virtuous, and completely unconnected to lust, which is evil. Lust is an evil feeling, and the actions that proceed from it are, from start to finish, evil. Never mind that, more than just about any other branch of Christianity, Mormonism is obsessed with sex, scorning and condemning celibacy as abnormal and insisting everyone get married, while the big whoop-de-doo reward of Mormon heaven is that you get to have sex for all eternity, which you wouldn’t find much of a prize if you didn’t have an active enough libido to experience lust to some degree and with some frequency. In Mormon culture and doctrine, you get married, you have sex, but somehow, you’re supposed to do it without feeling lust, feeling only this other, pure desire for children or SOMETHING that is divorced from anything erotic or bodily--again, ironic, since Mormons claim to love bodies, and insist that God has a body.

I don’t believe lust is evil, any more than hunger or illness or being incredibly, incredibly cold, or even buoyant good health, all of which can also prompt people to commit evil acts. (I think people get up to mischief sometimes when they’re feeling REALLY good.) I believe that the Mormon church’s vilification of lust is evil, and one more reason that Utah is the most depressed state in the nation.

All right. I have to run off to meet a student now and I’m going to be late. But I’m still moving towards my final point, and I promise to get there eventually. Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Holly at 1:45 PM | Comments (3)

December 18, 2007

The Lead-Up to Two Minutes In Heaven

Warning! This entry contains spoilers! If you A) haven’t seen seasons I or III of Veronica Mars and B) intend to watch them some day and C) are upset by spoilers (I’m not), then read at your own risk.

If you look at the calendar on my blog, it shows that I took a full week off from blogging, Sunday December 9 through Saturday December 15. I completely missed National Blog Posting Every Day Month or whatever November is called; I was traveling and away from home for over half the month, and much of the time I was gone I didn’t have reliable internet access, so there was just no way I could have done that gig.

I decided, however, that I’d compensate by posting every single day for a week or ten days in December, and I thought December 5 through 15 would be ideal as those days (even though that’s actually 11 days). But I got distracted on December 8, and what distracted me was a sweater I started last spring and really want to finish before 2008 rolls around, and Veronica Mars.

Several weeks ago I got this coupon from Borders offering me 40% of an dvd boxed set. It occurred to me that I had never gotten around to watching Season III of Veronica Mars, and while I’d heard it sucked, I wanted to see the magnitude of suckage for myself. So I bought the boxed set, took it home, forgot about it for a while, and then decided what the hell, I should watch it. (Especially since I had this sweater I wanted to finish up, and I like to knit while I watch tv and vice versa. It’s a good way to make tv time productive, and to keep me from getting bored with rows of stockinette stitch.)

And the season sucked. It really, really sucked. The over-arching story lines providing continuity from episode to episode sucked; the plots of individual episodes often sucked; the character development sucked. OK, there were plenty of great performances: from the first moments of the show I really enjoyed seeing both Kristen Bell and Enrico Colantoni on screen, and I especially liked them together. But great performances can’t compensate for a crappy script.

And OK, there was still plenty of witty, intelligent, sparkling dialogue, but if I wanted to watch something with lively banter but ludicrous, unbelievable plots driven awkwardly along by stupid contrivances and the most inane inexplicable choices on the parts of the main characters, I would have made it through more than four episodes of The Golden Girls--or wait, was it Gilmore Girls? I swear I can hardly tell those two shows apart: they both feature some excessively close (to the point of being kind of grossly claustrophobic) relationship between a mother and daughter living in some insular, retiring (retirement?) community; they both have characters who are obsessed with sex and money in very cliched, banal ways; and they both require you to suspend entirely not only your disbelief but your rational wits and any knowledge you might have about human beings actually behave--though one about the old ladies sharing an apartment isn’t quite so bad on that front as the one about the 30-something single mom in New England.

But I digress.

So, VM3 sucked, and one of the worst things about it was who Veronica was with when the season ended. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t with Logan, it’s that Piz, the replacement boyfriend, was SO BORING that he made Duncan (who was so boring that he was kicked off the show as a way to placate the show’s fans, because they quite rightly HATED Duncan) seem like Fourth of July fireworks. Someone in casting or production of that show has a thing for bland boys.... I was trying to figure out who Piz would be in the Buffyverse. He wouldn’t be Riley, because Riley is at least hot, and Marc Blucas could convincingly deliver a comedic line like, “You’re in the thrall of the dark lord!” from the “Buffy vs. Dracula” episode. (I have a beef with Riley haters. I think there’s a reason Marc Blucas is the only one from the show, aside from SMG, to garner many roles in feature films, and the reason has to do with the fact that he’s talented, tall, attractive and affable.) He certainly wouldn’t be Xander, the romantic underdog, because although Xander is discussed as this kind of hapless schlub, he’s really funny, pretty insightful, and quite attractive too. Piz wouldn’t even be disposable love interests Scott Hope or Parker Abrams. Instead, he’d be Graham, Riley’s emotionless and forgettable sidekick in the Initiative.

And there are other reasons why it sucked, which I may develop into a paper someday, because they have to do with the ways teenagers do and don’t interact with adults, which is part of what I analyze in teen tv. But I won’t discuss that here. Instead, I’ll tell you that I kept watching it, a bit compulsively, wondering how it could possibly get worse, only to find out. Suffice it to say, that it sucked so bad, that I had to mitigate the nasty feeling of needing a shower it left me with, and the best way I could think of to do that was to watch Season 1 yet again.

And VM1 is still fabulous. That first season is so vastly superior to virtually all other television I’ve ever seen that I can forgive the crappy follow-ups. I especially like the Logan story--but then, who doesn’t?

Of course I HATED Logan Echolls the first few episodes--couldn’t understand why the show was subjecting me to this vile, vile character. At the end of the sixth episode, he walks into a closet full of belts and selects one, tests its strength. I thought, “Great! He’s going to hang himself! I will no longer have to watch this dreadful person fuck up everyone else’s life!” But turns out he was just choosing the belt his father would beat the crap out of him with, and that it was someone else in the Echolls family would who commit suicide.

But then you realize what a thorough asshole his dad his, and there’s the whole thing with his mother’s suicide, Logan’s conviction that she’s not really dead and his request that Veronica help him track her down because he needs to know she’s all right. By the time he realizes that his mother really did kill herself and collapses, heartbroken and sobbing, into Veronica’s arms, I wasn’t sure I liked this character, but I at least felt compassion for him and saw him as complex and human.

And then, there’s Episode 18, “Weapons of Class Destruction,” where Logan, all knight-in-puka-shells-ish, comes to rescue Veronica when the creepy camo-wearing, fertilizer-buying weirdo gets in her car and instructs her to drive to the Camelot Motel, all of which Logan overhears because she was on the phone with him when the guy got in the car. He punches the guy really hard in the face several times, and, upon discovering that the guy is an undercover FBI agent, still refuses to trust him, delivering the memorable line, "Dream on, Jump Street. I’m not leaving you alone with her.”

A few moments later, Veronica walks out of the motel room after talking to the FBI dude. Logan leans against the wall, asks “Are you OK?” She murmurs “Mm-hmm,” then kisses him quickly on the lips to say thanks before shaking her head and walking away--because after all, until a few weeks earlier, she LOATHED this guy so much she could barely stand to be near him.

And Logan grabs her arm, pulls her around to face him, and the two of them make out on the balcony of this seedy hotel while the music swells and the camera pulls away and circles around them in this sweeping romantic gesture. The very first time I saw it and half the times I’ve seen it since then, I stood up and clapped and shrieked in delight, because it was really sexy and completely unexpected and absolutely earned and ever so, ever so RIGHT. (Yes, the scene plays on all sorts of stereotypes and predictable fantasies. It's still a surprise, and it still works.)

Now, believe it or not, the point I want to make about this wonderful heterosexual kiss is related to what I wrote yesterday about a really moving gay sex scene. But once again I’ve already written a lot, and I don’t want this entry to be so long no one takes the time to read it in any detail. (I know what blog-readers sometimes do with really long entries, because I’m a blog reader myself and I occasionally do it too: we skim.) So you’ll have to check back again later for the continuation of this argument.

Posted by Holly at 10:37 AM | Comments (4)

December 17, 2007

Latter Gay Gaze

My friend Troy hates the movie Latter Days--just hates it. A year or two ago at Sunstone when he and I were hanging out, I mentioned that I liked it; he countered that he despised it. “What do you think is so bad?” I asked.

“You mean, besides the script, the plot, the acting and the direction?” he replied.

I didn’t respond, except to shrug. Yes, the movie has problems. There are elements of the script that really bug me. There are elements to the plot I find predictable and cliched. There are performances I find really weak.

But I still like it. I liked it enough to buy a copy for myself and to give a copy as a gift to someone else. I liked it well enough to listen to the commentary.

One major reason I like it is that as far as I’m concerned, it’s about the only movie I’ve ever seen to get a mission right--I would argue it gives a more accurate depiction of a mission even than God’s Army, which I found thoroughly annoying and lame. (Don’t ask me why, because I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that they make the new guy lug his suitcase around while they go tracting, which I’m fairly certain would never happen; that the main character goes back to BYU, dates and MARRIES his English TA while she's still his teacher (a BYU alum can correct me if I'm wrong, but I rather suspect the administration wouldn't be cool with that) and that the movie ends with her bringing him a cup of tea and sitting down at his feet to adore him; and that Richard Dutcher, who was about 40, plays a missionary of about 30 who dies quietly in his sleep from an inoperable brain tumor with no suffering or puking his guts out or whatever, so much so that no one even knows he's sick. I hate on principle all movies where people die quietly in their sleep from inoperable brain tumors. Anyway, aside from all that, I found the movie so vacuous and forgettable that I can’t remember what happened, and so can’t really tell you why I hated it in detail, though I think the reasons I’ve already listed constitute solid ground.)

But back to Latter Days. I like it for moments. There’s a moment where one elder grabs another and says, “I’m going to hit you, elder, and it’s going to hurt.” Pretty much. I liked it for Steve Sandvoss, the guy who plays the gay missionary--he has a sweetness and a decency I found both sympathetic and genuine, and it reminded me of the elders I liked best on my mission--some were really good young men.

But the thing I like best about it is the sex scene.

It’s not just that both actors are young, hot and well-muscled, so that the viewer is treated to some really nice views of beautiful male asses. It’s that the actors go for it. There’s a moment (one of those moments I like it for) when, after a hurried disrobing, they embrace and then positively fling themselves together onto the bed. It’s passionate, hot, and tender.

And after the sex, the guys sit naked on the bed and stroke each other and talk. The experienced guy in the equation says to the recently deflowered, soon-to-be-excommunicated elder, “I thought you’d be more reticent.” (Which is another reason I like it--reticent is a good word that people are reticent about using.) Rebecca, whom I try not to resent for deleting her entire blog, once wrote an entry about how watching these two guys make sweet love somehow brought tears to her eyes. I feel the same way.

I don’t always like sex scenes. A lot of them feel contrived, staged and manipulative (which isn’t surprising, since they are) and if I’m not emotionally invested in the relationship between the characters, I don’t really care about seeing them get it on. That’s one main reason I don’t care much for porn: aside from a sort of anthropological or informational interest--oh, so that’s how this industry works; that’s what the audience for this stuff expects; huh, I hadn’t known that particular activity was really part of the repertoire--I often find it fairly boring, which isn’t surprising since for the most part it’s designed to be emotionally vacuous.

But I love this sex scene. I could watch it over and over and not feel bored or dirty or cheap--or, for that matter, particularly aroused, since it’s a sex scene that has no room for me or any woman. I can’t imagine what I’d do in that scene; it sparks no fantasy; and so it doesn’t turn me on. (And I know all that because I did just watch it over and over, with the commentary on and off, so that I'd be accurate when I discussed it now.)

I remember reading a Dan Savage (whose most recent book is reviewed here) column in which someone asked him why straight men were turned on by lesbian porn, but straight women weren’t turned on by gay male porn, since in both cases what was depicted were scenes in which same-sex participants found ways to pleasure one another. He reasoned that in lesbian porn, men could always assume that they’d be welcome, and certainly there would be plenty of orifices into which a penis could be inserted, which, after all, is still what most people in our heteronormative world consider “sex.” Whereas in gay male sex, there are already accommodating orifices for any penis present, so any additional orifice is superfluous, and women therefore have a harder time creating a fantasy in which they’d be welcomed into the scene.

Savage’s argument about the possible welcomeness of a penis in a lesbian relationship is supported in part by this passage from Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King, about the early stages of her first lesbian love affair:

Taking turns making love to each other satisfied our need to experience total aggression and total passivity with no fear of settling permanently into either condition. It’s something heterosexual lovers would like to do but can’t. I always felt silly whenever I got on top of Ralph, but when Bres’s thighs were locked in the vise of my elbows, I really was in charge; yet when we changed places and she did the doing, I could let down my guard and wallow in the submission without worrying that she would get “the wrong idea.”

I had to admit I missed being fucked. Bres, who had slept with a man out of curiosity, said she liked it, too. We did our best with what we had but finger-fucking is inadequate even when you do it with someone you love. There is another problem for two women unless both of you are nail-biters, and neither of us was. Bres enjoyed it more than I did because she did not associate it with dates and fraternity boys, but every time she went inside me I could hear Faysie babbling, “I mean, it’s okay because we’re pinned!”

We had a few wistful discussions about getting a dildo but they were not sold openly then. Undoubtedly they were covertly available if you knew where to look, but we didn’t, and in any case, no Mississippi resident would have had the strength to embark on the search. Considering what we had to go through to buy hooch, God only knows what buying a dildo would have involved.

As for other foreign objects, we never used them.

Candles melt/ Carrots are tough/ Bottles can hurt you/ Might as well muff.

But countering the male fantasy of the “Hey, all these chicks would want me!” scenario, King also offers this insight, gleaned after her lesbian love affair ends and she goes back to heterosexual sex for a while:

After the third fuck, while drinking my fifth boiler-maker, I started crying. Most people are not in a position to realize it, but there is nothing sadder than being with one sex when you want to be with the other. I wanted Bres, but I wanted femaleness also. The sight of this naked man filled me with tearing pain; his hairy chest, his curveless trunk with no discernable waistline and the navel up so high, the tight flat nothingness of his buttocks, seemed like a mutation of the species.

Now, I really am going somewhere with this; I didn’t just set myself the academic exercise of analyzing a couple depictions of gay sex. But I have written enough for today, so you’ll have to come back later to read the rest of what I’m getting at.

Posted by Holly at 11:11 AM | Comments (6)

December 16, 2007

My New Action Figure

Today is the birthday of my two favorite writers: Jane Austen and... ME!

You may well roll your eyes and think I'm arrogant for announcing that I'm my own favorite writer, but one of the many reasons I love Saviour Onassis is for the way he taught me to value my own talents. Someday I will tell the story of how Saviour Onassis convinced me that I should always say I am my own favorite artist, but in the meantime I will tell you the story of one of the coolest presents I have received this birthday, namely, this:

That's right, it's a Jane Austen action figure! I have wanted one ever since I read an entry on Robyn's blog about how she got one from her father. My dad usually leaves gift buying to my mother, so I knew not to expect anything from that quarter, but mercifully one of my sisters obliged me.... (Actually my siblings have been really good to me this year--I got all kinds of stuff! But that's going to be another post, I hope--I have so many things I've been meaning to blog about.) You can see the box in front of some flowers a friend sent me--I love getting flowers but it's just not something most people send. (Including me, now that I think about it.) You can also see my cat checking out a bit of the greenery--there's something about these particular bits of foliage that freak her out.

Here's Jane out of the box and not quite in action, in front of my (alphabetized) copies of her work:

I had a very early Barbie as a little girl, one that had I never played with it or taken it out of the box, would be worth thousands today. But I was four or so when I got it--of course I took it out of the box and played with it, though I never did intentionally destructive things like draw on it or cut its hair. It occurred to me after I ripped the box of this action figure open that maybe I was supposed to just leave it in its box, but I wanted to handle the figure.

Turns out this version of Jane is wielding a quill like a weapon.

She's also kind of hot... I don't know if the real Jane was this curvy, but I do know Regency fabric didn't drape on the body the way this doll is depicted.

Anyway. What I would like from you is a birthday greeting, whenever you happen to read this message. I don't care if it's a week or two or three from now, please say hi! In fact, I will accept birthday wishes on this message up until December 15, 2008.

Cheers!

Posted by Holly at 11:59 AM | Comments (13)

December 8, 2007

Every Inch of Snow Plus Every Inch of Driveway

Thursday morning I woke up, rolled over, stretched, then asked myself, "Good grief! Why on earth are my arms and shoulders so incredibly sore?"

Then I got out of bed, opened the blinds, looked out the window and remembered: on Wednesday I shoveled a foot of heavy, wet snow from my entire driveway, as well as the sidewalk in front of my house, up to my front door and off my front steps. When I got done, my driveway looked like this:

Which constitutes, I think, a reasonably good job of clearing the snow.

Last year I mentioned that during a period of particularly heavy snowfall, I had shoveled my driveway upwards of three times a day. This prompted a comment providing a link to an entry on someone else's blog about how stupid it is to shovel snow before it stops snowing, after which someone posted a comment on how there is no good reason to shovel the driveway three times in one day.

This all transpired at a really busy time in my life, when I was scarcely managing to blog at all, so I didn't respond. And while I didn't lose any sleep over the matter, I admit I have thought of that comment with resentment a time or two throughout the past year.

Because the fact of the matter is, as this Arizona native learned once after following what is cavalierly touted as the only sensible way to approach snow removal, i.e, waiting until the snow stops entirely before you try to remove it, there are a fucking hell of a lot of excellent reasons to shovel one's driveway three times in one day. They include not only every last goddamn inch of heavy snow you have to heft, but every inch of snow you have to heft the shovel over, as well as every single inch of driveway and sidewalk you have to clear, and every single minute you have to spend outside in nasty, nasty temperatures.

The thing is, snow looks all powdery and light, and when you pick it up to make a snowball, it is. But when it's on the ground, particularly when it's on concrete that has recently been retaining some heat so that the bottom couple of inches closet to that concrete melt a little and get soggy, then one foot of snow is PRETTY DAMN HEAVY. Whereas three feet of snow is SO GODDAMN FUCKING HEAVY it's impossible--yes, impossible--for someone like me to lift it. Not only that, but even if I COULD lift a shovel full of three feet of snow, I couldn't lift it high enough--clear up past my waist--to clear a three-foot high drift of snow, which, after a few shovel-fuls, would become shoulder-high, so that I'd have to lift the snow as high as my head.

I can't get out of my garage if there are three feet of snow in my driveway. But even if there's only a foot of snow there and I can drive over it if I want to without clearing it first, I have learned from doing exactly that, that's not a good idea either. First of all, packed snow gets really slippery. Furthermore, one day of warmer temperatures, so that the snow turns first to water and then to ice overnight when the temperature drops back down, is all it takes to turn your entire driveway into something it's unsafe to walk or drive on--particularly when you factor in drainage from gutters. If shoveling three feet of snow sucks, chipping eight inches of solid ice off the top of your driveway REALLY SUCKS.

So as I have learned the hard way, it is best to follow the example of my neighbors who have lived here for decades and to shovel the snow before it gets so deep it's unmanageable, even if that happens three times in one day.

(I would also note that unless you have one that is brand new and ultra high-powered, even snow blowers have problems with three feet of snow. The only thing that easily clears three feet of snow from a driveway is a snow plow, but that can do a lot of damage to plants, lawns, and even the driveway itself. Mercifully the one year we got FIVE feet of snow in one storm my neighbor was driving a snow plow for extra cash, and he cleared my driveway for me, free of charge and with the utmost care. Otherwise, I would have been snowed in for several days.)

p.s. Yes, it's not just my arms and shoulders but the entire subject that's a sore spot. Don't give me advice on this topic unless you personally have shoveled your way out of three feet of snow in the past year.

Posted by Holly at 11:48 AM | Comments (9)

December 7, 2007

The Best Time to Call a Do-Over

I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so very upset by JGW's story about his friend’s threatened suicide--not that I think I had the wrong response; quite the contrary. I was just a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction. It’s true that I’m often a big cry baby and that religious despair in particular upsets me, but I’m not always so tender-hearted that I can’t stop weeping over the suffering of some unnamed stranger. (Though I admit it has happened before. And something else that made me cry today is this, on MohoHawaii.) I know part of it is that I’m deeply worried about my friend R and her husband (as I mentioned yesterday, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house), who has been sedated into oblivion since Saturday (and will be for weeks to come), and who had spinal surgery yesterday so doctors could determine the extent of and hopefully repair his injuries. But I’ve also just been feeling more theologically and apocalyptically vulnerable lately, because I recently witnessed one of the signs of the end of days: my father acknowledged the reality of global warming.

When I was home for Thanksgiving we were talking about how ridiculously hot it was in Mesa this past year, where one of my sisters lives--it was 90 F on Halloween, and 80 as the end of November neared. “Well, it’s just gonna get hotter,” Dad said. “What with global warming, plus all those air conditioners running night and day, even in winter, and all that asphalt and concrete to soak up the heat and keep it hot all night.”

I stared at him. He’s right, of course, but it’s precisely the kind of statement he dismissed when I made it seven or eight years ago.

I have always hated the story of Noah and the Ark--really, really hated it. I was very young--three or four or so--when I first heard it via flannel board in junior Sunday school, and the pictures of all these normal looking people lying around dead everywhere while Noah rode off in his ark absolutely horrified me. God had KILLED them? Killed ALL of them? Because they’d done something BAD? What on earth could they have done that was so awful that god, who supposedly loved everyone, would kill everyone? Did they bonk their baby sister on the head with a wiffle ball bat? Wet their best frilly panties just before Church? Spill a whole bowl of Count Chocula on the living room rug?

I wasn’t one of those little kids who was crazy about animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. Animals were just fine, sort of, as long as they didn’t eat you or bite you or charge you or jump on you or knock you down or lick you or give you ringworm or fleas or any sort of parasite or cooties or germs. (I was one of those kids who liked being clean.) But at some point in adulthood I started to like animals, and I started to feel really AWFUL about the ways we hurt and hunt and kill them. In particular I started to feel bad about the way we treat monkeys. I am really bothered by the fact that so few monkeys and great apes exist today, that we’ve hunted them and destroyed their habitats and done experiments on them or made them into pets until they’re on the brink of extinction. I don’t want to hang out with them, but I want them to live unmolested and happy in their own corner of the world.

In particular, I want orangutans to be just fine. As I now like animals, I support a lot of organizations that work to protect them, and these organizations are always sending me calendars featuring twelve glossy photos of animals either looking majestic and wild or else doing something cute. One of my favorites shows a baby orangutan crouching on the ground, looking really unhappy and holding a piece of wood over his head to keep the rain off his face--it’s unbelievably adorable! I showed it to a friend, who said, “He thinks he’s people.”

“No,” I said. “He just thinks it’s better not to get pelted in the face with cold rain if at all possible.”

Now, you’re probably wondering what all these things have to do with each other, so I’ll tell you, though it will take a while to explain it all.

Monday I read this article about the discovery of a previously undocumented colony of 800 orangutans in Borneo. People who lived by the orangutans knew they were there, but conservationists and scientists didn’t. It’s a big deal. But the peat swamp where these apes live is already slated for destruction so that palm kernel oil plantations can be created, so even if no one just goes out and slaughters the orangutans, they’re probably going to die. Plus turning a peat swamp into farmland releases tons of CO2 into the air, because peat swamps are carbon sinks. It’s all really, really bad.

Then I read another article about how global warming is causing expansion of the tropics, which is changing weather patterns in ways that are going to fuck things up for billions of people, plants and animals. Things are looking especially grim for Australia, where shifts in wind currents are beginning to push storms further south, which means that rain will fall on the open sea where it’s not so necessary, rather than on Australia, which is a pretty dry continent to begin with.

And as I was driving home from having my teeth cleaned that afternoon, I thought, OK, the story of Noah and the ark is A) utterly impossible and B) didn’t happen because it’s C) a myth, but if it WERE possible, would several thousand years ago really have been the best time to call a do-over? Wouldn’t NOW be a better time to pick a few carriers of really good genes for every species and send them off to safety while killing everyone else? (Actually I’d advocate saving all the animals, not just one reproducing set. They'd need a head start before the next go-round of humanity vs. everything else.) Wouldn't the time to do it be right now, before we kill off most of the animals the mythical Noah would have wanted to save? Right now, before we fuck up the climate so badly that all but a few areas of the planet are uninhabitable?

But then I remembered that I don’t really like theologies or world views that treat most of humanity as either A) expendable or B) a mistake, so I decided the whole “flood the earth and kill almost everyone” thing is never really a good idea.

To be continued.

Posted by Holly at 9:39 AM | Comments (1)

December 6, 2007

I’m Glad I Didn’t Tell That Joke, Because It’s Still Not Funny

It’s 4:30 a.m., I’ve been crying for hours and the medication I took to combat my insomnia isn’t working, so my judgment isn’t the best. This entry is overwrought and earnest and I hope it’s not too annoying but it’s one of those things I have to post because it really matters right now. I just I hope I don’t sound too ridiculous and unproofread later.

Monday during an appointment to have my teeth cleaned I picked up the newspaper to read while I waited for my dentist (whom I love--he’s both a good dentist and a very nice man) to check my teeth after the hygienist cleaned them, and read an item about how South Dakota (who knew?) is the least depressed state in the country, while Utah is the most depressed. (There are also only six states in which people commit suicide more readily than in Utah.) I laughed. “Of course it’s Utah,” I said aloud to no one in particular, shaking my head. I wrote down the details of the study in the notebook I always carry with me so I could find a link to it later, thinking I would write a glib, funny blog entry about how appropriate it is that Utah is not only the most depressed but the most depressing state in the country, filled as it is with miserable Mormons.

And then yesterday I read this account on Young Stranger of a young man’s desire to kill himself because he is both gay and Mormon, and I lost all enthusiasm for mocking the misery an actual human being experiences when his life is in conflict with his religion.

I’m going to do that incredibly maudlin 80s thing and quote a Smiths song, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” which always makes me weep when I think seriously about the lyrics:

You should know
time’s tide will smother
and I will too
when you laugh about people who feel so
very lonely
their only desire is to die
well I’m afraid
it doesn’t make me smile
I wish I could laugh
but that joke isn’t funny anymore
it’s too close to home
and it’s too near the bone
more than you’ll ever know

The main reason I didn’t blog much in November was because I was traveling, and one of the things I traveled to was a conference, where I presented a paper on religious trauma, in which I finally found a way to make damnation intelligible to a secular audience. I’m not going to go into the details of that now, because if one wants to publish one’s scholarly work in journals one doesn’t explain it on the web. But suffice it to say, believing you are damned really, really sucks, and although it is outside the range of many people’s experience, it is not outside the experience of people who are devout Mormons and desire nothing so much as to live a virtuous, spiritually meaningful life sanctioned by god’s approval, but who feel that, for whatever reason, something about their core self or primary identity or most cherished concept of human ethics and responsibility or whatever somehow prohibits or violates true virtue and is beyond god’s approval.

I felt that. I felt it about my mission. I felt that my impulse to let people choose their own paths, to say sincerely “That’s a perfectly acceptable choice,” when they said, “I want to be an ethical person according to these principles and beliefs, and I don’t feel I really want or need to be Mormon to a good person,” put me outside the realm of god’s love.

It sucked.

But this suicide thing..... It reminds me of Puritanism, for which I felt a profound affinity when I finally studied it in grad school. I’m not the only person to write about the similarities between Puritans and Mormons, which go beyond a certain sexual reticence--after all, the 19th century form of New England Puritanism was Congregationalism, with which Joseph Smith was extremely familiar, and one of my favorite elements of Mormonism, the emphasis of careful reading of texts and of writing a journal in order to turn one’s life into a text to be read for evidence of god’s workings upon the soul, was inherited straight from the Puritans.

But the Puritans had a very dark side: The theology required people to imagine damnation if they weren’t up to par, to confront "the imaginative impact of the idea of being loathed and daily victimized by an all-powerful deity” (John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination) and to write about the experience of doing so. No wonder, then, that they were prone to despair, to the point that they killed themselves far more readily than other people. In fact, as I said in my paper,

the frequency with which puritans committed suicide was used by others as evidence that the religion’s adherents weren’t among the saved. It might also help you understand why the Puritans had such a propensity to call people witches, imagining dark rituals in which people celebrated their hatred of a god who hated them. It might also help explain why there aren’t many Puritans around today: the theology was too brutal and punishing to last.

Mormonism is fairly brutal and punishing in its own way, and yet it thrives. It thrives, as does the misery and despair it engenders when someone doesn’t measure up to its rigid demands. It thrives, even as it prompts people to write eloquent suicide notes, eloquent explanations of why suicide is a morally and theologically justifiable choice for a person who is gay/ an artist/ single/ infertile/ whatever.

Myself, I wrote my first (and still unpublished) book as the defense I would offer at the final judgment, explaining why I stood by the ethical choices I made, and I could well imagine the look of revulsion and contempt on god’s face as he rejected my defense and opened a trap door to send me straight to hell.

I don’t still believe in a god who would do that to me--I don’t still believe in any god, really. But you don’t write a text like that if you don’t care A HELL OF A LOT about religion and spirituality and ethics. Which brings me to my next point: Mormonism often punishes most those who invest in it most.

But that goes for religion in general, doesn’t it. I’m thinking of Karen Armstrong, and her amazing admission at the end of Through the Narrow Gate. Unable to to acquiesce quietly to the intellectual helplessness orthodoxy encourages (or to deal with ways the faints caused by her undiagnosed epilepsy are contemptuously dismissed as a moral and spiritual failing), she suffers a breakdown, and after a few months, is forced to admit that the life of a nun is not for her. While waiting for the dispensation that will release her from her vows, she listens one day to the choir sing the prayer of Saint Ignatius, which reads

Take and receive, O Lord, all my liberty; my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have, all that I am, Thou hast given me, and I give it all back to Thee to be governed according to Thy will.

All I ask is Thy grace and Thy love. With these I am rich enough and I do not ask for anything else.

Armstrong details her response to the prayer; she writes

It was the last words that stung. I did want things other than God’s love. I wanted human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind. I probably wouldn’t get them but I wanted them. God’s love should have been enough. It was in one sense everything. But I did ask for other things, and if I stayed I’d be grabbing at little unworthy human satisfactions [and she gives an example, as when sisters fell in love with a cat because they could not devote any affection to another human being].

The prayer left an aching sadness. That perfect self-giving. That image of God as Everything that still couldn’t satisfy me. How could I be happy when I’d rejected Everything?

Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their homosexuality often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their sense that certain human choices outside of Mormonism are entirely valid often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who want human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind in addition to god’s love often feel they have rejected Everything.

And yet we are entitled to human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind, and to be who we are, and I believe that in some fundamental way, rejecting Everything is really the only way to go: because saying that you want those things is a way of saying you are willing to lose your eternal life, to risk damnation. And as the scriptures also tell us, s/he who will save his life shall lose it, and s/he who will lose his life shall find it. And I don’t think that’s a religious truth; I think that’s a spiritual truth, explaining the fact that, as posters in so many adolescent bedrooms have explained, if you let something go and accept that it is not yours to keep, it often comes back to you and stays with you.

But losing your life is not the same as taking your life. Dear god, dear god whom I don’t even believe in but invoke because nothing else has quite the power of that word, please let that young man not take his life. Please let no one else in Mormondom ever take their life because they believe they do not please you.

I don’t know what else to say. My heart aches for Young Stranger’s friend, and I don’t even know him. I have burst into tears at least a dozen times while thinking about him over the past day. I’m up because I’m thinking about him--and about my dear friend R, whose husband has been in the ICU since Saturday and will probably never walk again because, of all things, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house--and I feel hopeless and powerless and utterly betrayed yet again by the spiritual training of my youth, which I still somehow continue to value, because it gave me things I cherish, like my love of autobiography and journal-keeping, or my marvelous sense of self-tied-up-in-place.

Anyway. I should go back to bed. It’s so late it’s early and my judgment is clouded--insomnia and the medication I take to counteract it often do that to me--and when I am fully awake and sober and it’s daylight, I may regret posting this, but what the hell.

Posted by Holly at 4:30 AM | Comments (6)

December 5, 2007

My Pomegranate-Eating Interlude

At the edge of the alley behind Sandra C’s house was a gnarled old pomegranate tree, just on the other side of a barbed wire fence around a big field of hard baked dirt and a few sorry straw-colored weeds that always withered entirely by July. No one ever watered the tree, which didn’t seem to matter much because pomegranate trees do well in the desert, and as no one ever harvested the fruit, we felt at liberty to take it--I suppose we could have been accused of stealing but we never thought of that, because the fruit was so clearly unwanted by anyone else. Sandra, Patrice and I used to ride our bikes into the alley and eat the pomegranates, less because we liked the way they tasted and more because we couldn’t help marveling at what a strange, curious fruit they are, the exterior skin like brittle red boot leather, the interior skin so bitter and parchment-y and dividing the actual flesh of the fruit into strange little compartments. Our mothers could usually tell--and were unhappy--when we’d been eating pomegranates, because the juice produces a bright red stain (more like a dye, actually) impossible to remove from clothing.

And then the tree died or Sandra moved or both, and I stopped eating pomegranates. I can’t say I particularly missed them. After I was grown and did my own shopping, I rarely noticed them in grocery stores, and when I did, I couldn’t imagine buying one: they were so expensive, and why would I pay all that money for fruit that no one used to want? I think a couple of decades passed in which I didn’t eat a single pomegranate.

Ten years or so ago my mother planted a pomegranate tree at the far edge of the back garden. It looks like this:

While I was home she asked me to pick a bunch so she could use them in a center piece for Thanksgiving dinner--she didn’t even plan to use them as food. But as I picked the few remaining intact pieces of fruit (they often split open while still on the tree, and birds and bugs LOVE pomegranates), I thought, why don’t I eat some of these?

So I did. I ate a pomegranate every day for the last few days of my visit.

And I still don’t know if I like the fruit. The flavor is tart and acidic, with a hint of soil--that’s right, I’m saying it tastes a little bit like dirt, though a couple of websites refer to the flavor as “nutty.” And they’re just so messy! There’s no easy way to eat a pomegranate. I found all these websites telling you to cut off the top of the fruit, then score the rind, then soak it in water for at least five minutes (though they don’t say why).... But that’s too much work. I prefer to tear a pomegranate apart with my hands and then bite the fruit like an apple or a pear, albeit it more carefully--you have to watch out for that bright red juice.

I guess I should say that I know I like pomegranates; I just don’t know if I like to eat them or enjoy the taste. But the fruit as an object of contemplation, that I like, along with the mere fact of pomegranates’ existence: they’re interesting and weird and they seem ancient to me in ways that, say, watermelon and strawberries don’t. And that’s not just because pomegranates show up in extremely old myths (six pomegranate seeds are what Persephone ate in the underworld, and the reason why she had to go back for six months out of every year) and strawberries don’t. It’s also the way the rind of the fruit always looked aged and weathered. And I guess if I believed that some being had deliberately created everything in the world (and I don’t believe that), I’d consider pomegranates the kind of fruit you’d invent early on in your fruit-creating career, before you got a lot of practice and learned to make things like strawberries, which are the only fruit that has its seeds on the outside of the flesh.

Anyway. I was glad to have another pomegranate-eating period and figure if I go another decade or two without eating any more, it’s no big deal.

Posted by Holly at 1:10 AM | Comments (2)