I have been all obsessed with light yellow and lemons these days. This contributes largely to the Build a Happier Maggie program, which works in tandem with Keep The Caffeine Flowing coalition. The former has kept me on a strict diet of Bela Fleck albums, real food* and of course taking time to notice yellow things. I have decided that every day this week I will wear somewhere on my person at least one yellow thing, in the spirit of hue appreciation. It’s spring! There’s no need to be stressed about the horrifying amounts of work to do! Or massacres on college campuses! Or how shockingly bad the Aqua Teen movie was!
Weirdly I am not the only one thinking this. About yellow, I mean.
*Last night in particular, with this sauce. Next time: more carrots, tomato sauce not paste, possibly thyme. But as it was I found it spine-warmingly lovely, pretty much exactly what I wanted.
Or was it complaining you wanted?
1. Oh my God. I am an Aqua Teen fan, but I really cannot recommend the movie version. The opening sequence was brilliant, and the first few minutes were golden if only for the fact that I heard about them from a friend saying, “It’s after they’re in Egypt, a little while after they start speaking English.” The rest of the movie was kind of like a regular episode of Aqua Teen except way too long (you know that with a Dada gibberish show like that you can only stick to one thing SO LONG before it starts demanding real explanation), incredibly and needlessly violent (I have not seen as many organs and organic-matter explosions since that one scene in the Meaning of Life, and I’m kind of surprised I didn’t have nightmares,) and disturbingly reminiscent of a porn film. Really. It’s like they took the id of a hormonal 13-year-old boy and made a movie out of it. The worst part was that I was all hyped into thinking it was going to be awesome, so I was let down AND made to endure psychologic assault.
2. I find it vaguely sexist, or showist, or something, that Wikipedia objects to the plot synopsis of the Gilmore Girls as being ‘unencyclopedic,’ yet there are countless pages on Star Trek, an extensive branch devoted to all things Monty Python, a catalog of every episode of Mythbusters, and so on.
3. I need to do laundry. I can’t keep up with dishes. It’s too nice to be inside studying. And so on.
SOME THOUGHTS ON SEXUALITY AND A GREAT STORY
I was thinking some about the first time I ever encountered homosexuality. It was when I was like 5. There was some protest going on on TV, and I remember seeing the women marching and carrying signs. What are they doing? Mom said: they want to be able to marry other women. And I remember thinking, oh. They can’t? They should be able to I think, it makes sense. To marry your best friend. I’d marry Jennifer. (Given the demand of quick! time to get married now! at age five, and really only knowing that marriage = being with someone forever).
Since then my encounters with non-straight people have always amounted to a non-issue. This seems like a strange thing to say, particularly because I am bringing it up in this weird stilted kind of way, but I was thinking about it because something about derogatory children’s rhymes in my Folklore class came up the other day, and of course then we had this big discussion about how ugh that’s so GAY is not really specific to children in this culture, and what that means, but also how in usage it’s really more about the sound of the word and the way it has been used more than calling something homosexual really, and so on. And suddenly it became this huge Issue. We had some people trying really hard not to put there own two cents in about where they stood on the sexuality debate, crossing arms and frowning. And at the same time we had people trying a little too hard to be open and YES YES I’M TOTALLY COOL WITH THAT MM HMM which seemed just as ingenue. I’m not saying it should be ignored, I’m just saying that while I’m down with where I stand on the Kinsey scale I’m not going to let it dictate my entire existence. There is so much more to life than What Goes In Which Orifice.
A professor told this story last week:
I was much younger and probably arguably much stupider at the time and I was living with some friends in some apartment…and I was going to cook something…I think I was just heating up oil for french fries or something, so I put the pan on with the oil and i cranked up the gas on the oven…and in the midst of this I noticed that someone was trying to steal my bike, and it was a cheap bike… and in retrospect I probably should’ve just let him have it…but so I took off running after him and then eventually I got my bike back, and as I was coming back I was doing what people so rarely do which is to say I was looking inside my own house, through the window…and as I was doing that the first thing I thought “I don’t remember starting that fire.”
“I don’t remember starting that fire.” Is such a wonderful sentence and I’ve been thinking about it all day, to the point where I had to stop myself from saying it in the next class.
