New shirts y’all art by Cass Jones.
I need one for my collection… a Tony. He will complete my set.
I wish that my self worth wasn’t so closely related to recent events. That a thousand yeses followed by a no would add up the same way no matter where the no was placed, but the noes seem to weigh more the closer temporally they seem to sit. I mean that whole line of thinking has so many fucking embedded reasons that make it make sense for almost all occasions. Still its no good to be daunted by such things. Not to say that I shouldn’t take no for an answer or whatever stupid “push forward” crap you want to coin, its just that momentum is hard to keep up when you haven’t had a single target in a bit. It is all spread out between remote possibilities each less likely than the last. You want to believe in one of them, even if its still a horrible shot in the dark. Did they all start this way> Did they all feel this hopeless at the start of things? No they bloody well didn’t.
I guess it does bother me now that I am looking through old pictures that there are so few of me and my ex lovers. Some I literally spent years with and have just a handful of snap shots from weddings to prove that we ever were in the same spot. It isn’t about the memories not being enough, but more just about the kind of mentality of, at the time, wanting pictures of that sort to be taken, To want to be sentimental the first go around rather than wanting more of them now. But the ones with only a few are not nearly as painful as the ones void of any visual proof.
It could be a good thing, it could be about living in the moment and no recognizing the value they would latter hold in building a map of my past, but in a world where everyone has a camera it seems to smell of disregard and absentmindedness. A person who at the time would rather not think about the possibility of missing them being by my side, of being by their side.
That can’t be true. I spend much too much time telling stories and recounting and writing down the details, both emotional and otherwise, of moments I have shared with women for that to be true, I mean it is almost an obsession or a type of personal therapy, but it would just be nice to have a frozen image to go along with the pages of recounted events, or the simple list. I look at my list now and some of the faces attached to names in chronological order get a little fuzzy at the top. That worries me.
Its surprising how many relationships are assumed to be sexual. The whole subtext thing. You see in in fan fiction, in parody, in gossip, in your own narcissistic and twisted mind where every scrap of attention and every nice gesture festers and ferments into a liquid that gets you drunk on assumed self importance. I am suspicious of nice really. In the back of my head I worry about what that nice can mean, but I never show it. Can’t let them know I am on to them. They want something obviously, no one is nice for no reason.
I’ll tell you a thing. I am not me simply when it is convenient. My feelings are anything but that as well. I could take every hesitation every pause as a slight, but where oh where would that get me? The slow death I promised myself. I wish I was as rough and tumble as I pretended. It would be a great trick to have.
10 Things I Hate About You’s heavy-handed girl power themes were one small step for preteen feminism, one giant leap for furthering angry man-hating feminist archetypes as parody. I can’t say I’m not here for Julia Stiles’ character, but it feels like her comebacks were written with the safety net of reading as punchlines to the uncritical, apolitical viewer (me in fifth grade, et al). The angry man-hating feminist archetype is a totally valid thing, but in teen movie context it looks like a caricature, and it’s supposed to look like a caricature (zoom in on boys laughing/rolling their eyes/high-fiving every time she speaks in class. I tend to see that as highlighting their buffoonery, but doesn’t that same context invalidate her to other buffoons?). I guess it’s unrealistic to expect a movie not to try to dilute their content to cater to a wider audience, but I would rather see the boy Bianca likes celebrating angry girl bands instead of complaining that he has to “sit around and listen to chicks who can’t play their instruments.” Nah, Bianca, you can do better.
But this ignores the character arch of Mr. Verona and Mr. James. Both of their jobs in the narrative is to first be a man unworthy who seeks to control their intended targets and then be swept up in the reality of the other person. The idea that all masculinity, and more overtly teenage masculinity is an affectation and something to be cast aside. The whole plot hinges on characters developing and dealing with these issues, aka our heroes, or wallowing in social constructs personified by Joey. If either of the male leads was worthy or even acceptable at the start of the narrative it becomes about women realizing their value system is wrong and adapting to a man that already exists rather than two groups of two individuals who make compromises on both ends in an effort to find happiness. This scene functions to prove they know nothing about women and allow their naive approach to women to be valid, because they literally don’t know better. The movie is about that change in perspective.
