Maternal pride
My mother was raised as a Latin Mass Catholic, and has historically appeared to be uptight about a wide range of sexual topics. (In the past, she's said some things that I perceived as homophobic, but then again, she's said a few things that might pass as 'heterophobic' also.) She told me two things that are really pride-inspiring this week.The first: anti-marriage activists came to her door. Well, they're actually just anti-marriage for SOME people. But they came around, all frothed up, and my mother made the mistake of answering. They went on an anti-gay rant. To which my mother replied, "God must love gays, because he made so many of them." They did not like this, and left in a huff.
Mom: 1
Small minded freaks: 0.
The second: she watched the debates, and thinks Biden is lame for believing that marriage should be limited to hetero couples, just as the small minded freaks do.
Mom: 1
Biden: *yawn*
'Such a pleasant surprise.
Labels: conformity, culture
posted by Arlene (Beth)8:30 PM
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Insomnia and Returning from the Dead.
I have looked exhausted lately, largely from an unusually severe, multi-day bout of insomnia.
Only some of this insomnia is induced by Peet's products. I swear. Peet's soy chai induces the tastiest insomnia anywhere!
But I don't look as bad as I do in this photo. (And I hope not to for about 60 more years.) This was an outtake from photos Steven took of me participating in the San Francisco Zombie Mob (eatbrains.com), which is how I spent my Saturday afternoon. Yes, I was a zombie, a member of the undead, and I wandered through downtown SF with about 350 of my closest undead friends, crying out for fresh brains.
It is terribly... liberating. We are told to look "nice," to dress tidily and modestly, not to stand out, not to make noise, not to be weird (as if I have ever listened to that), and suddenly we get to set all of those silly rules aside and roam, dripping blood, to maul our happy (and clearly marked) victims whose silly drama in their futile resistance matches our own silly drama in mauling them.
It is delightful, in so many happy ways.
Special highlights: an early victim, looking so innocent with his (empty) paper coffee cup, milling about, waiting to be mauled... The victim with an armful of balloon animals, and the fabulous faux-horror facial expressions he made as we converted him to one of our kind... The group in Chinatown that attempted to fight the zombies off with toy swords... And the best part, the absolute best part, was the meeting of the two zombie groups on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. Oh, the sound!! The happy, happy, happy sound! We took up the entire block. It was truly beautiful.
Tourists loved it. Tour bus operators loved it. Passersby faked screams and ran away, smiling. Non-participants feigned attempting to defend their storefronts from us. The people who couldn't deal with it were also a riot: there is something so inherently ridiculous in pretending not to see hundreds of passing zombies and making tight-lipped little frowny faces of disapproval and scurrying off. The people who demanded rational explanations were just as funny. Must everything have a rational explanation? I've seen television: I know people are willing to suspend rational thought for vast periods of time.
Flickr is filled with pictures tagged "eatbrains08," many of which contain gloriously ghastly images of me. My favorite video of the zombie march so far is Zombie March, August 16, 2008, by protestshooter.com (YouTube.com). I'll post a link to Steven's photo/video montage when he has it posted.
I posted a small set of images to, yes, of all places, Facebook: Oh, the horror! Zombies roam the Streets of San Francisco!: photos by Steven, cropped and posted by me. (You can view these without a Facebook login.)
The event was delightful, and I believe I've recruited many people to participate next time, when it will be even more gory and grand.
Zombie Beauty Tips:
-a clay and avocado mask turns you a truly alarming shade of gray-green, and leaves your skin soft and pleasantly scented. Be sure to put some on your lips: zombies have dead-looking lips.
-that dark eye makeup that you regret buying, the nearly black one with red glitter in it, is PERFECT for making your eyes look sunken-in. If you have an eye-shadow primer, use that to ensure that it doesn't wipe off unintentionally.
-cheap, nasty lip gloss makes good blood-substitutes, despite the nasty bubblegum scent. Smear some down the side of your face, and onto your shirt.
-clothes that don't fit well, which can be hacked at with dull scissors without any regret, looks best on zombies. I'm sure you have some around.
-rely on other, organized zombies for high quality, washable blood.
-grimace!Labels: beyond the norm, conformity, event, festivals
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:41 PM
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Technology is someone else's friend? One of my girlfriends observed that I have this Apple phone, which she announced was much more advanced than her phone. She remarked that the phone is "high tech" for me.
This girlfriend has never seen me sitting on the floor with one of my computer cases open, installing daughter boards, sound cards, or memory, or setting the jumpers on sound cards. Or editing digital photos and writing HTML. Or using power tools. Or playing video games (actually, she's seen this, and I was good at them while she was watching.)
What I think she really means, in a round about way, is that I don't buy in to the standard gadgetry set that defines modern life. More specifically, I suspect what she actually wanted to point out was that I don't drive a car.
I wasn't sure this was a reasonable thing to suspect, but then I got an e-mail from another girlfriend which (1) welcomed me to the current century and (2) suggested that I would next buy a car. This message was from someone who does not own a computer, and who has never assembled or modified one. Someone who reformatted a memory card full of vacation photos in her camera while traveling because she didn't know what 'reformat' meant. Meanwhile, cars, if this isn't obvious, are stunningly inefficient machines whose internal combustion engine design has changed relatively little since invented and applied to vehicles in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Cars are also conceptually back-asswards for urban dwellers: it makes no sense to haul a sub 200-pound person around in a 1.5 ton plus box, which needs to be stored during most of its useful life.
There are useful applications to the car, obviously: freight hauling, for example, and traveling in areas or times of day that are not served by sensible transit (such as electric train, light rail, or hybrid bus). But considering the amount of cost and energy it takes to manufacture, maintain, and operate a car, let alone the pollution it generates in operation and when disposed of, the car is a really poorly designed tool for most applications. The motor vehicle industry spends several billion dollars annually NOT pointing this out, so I don't think it's possible to convey any of this to the car-hugging members of my social set.
I'm not sure if any of the aforementioned conversations should change the answers I give when my computer assistance is requested. It's tempting to make a fuss over it, though.Labels: conformity
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:00 PM
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Conformity, culture and food. Part of the reason I always informally interrogate people about what they ate for dinner as kids is that I'm interested in the influences that lead people to choose the foods they do. Americans on the whole are having a lot of health problems (like that amazing 50% cardiovascular disease rate) based on the foods they choose, and I've been very interested in how much people think about what they choose eat, and what attachments they have to specific foods. I'm also interested in culture-specific foods, since many of the foods I love now are not from my own ethnic background.
Something I am figuring out is that there is an idea of what "normal" is that our fiercely conformist culture relies on when making these decisions. I have always known people who were pressured in their youth to take up some habit (smoking, drinking really cheap crappy beer) because their peers did it, and it was the "normal" thing to do. I have always known that advertising has a huge influence, and that otherwise reasonable people I know will go out and buy something that looks stupid on them because an ad-filled clothing magazine says that it is the "normal" and fashionable thing to wear.
But I don't think I've really understood how wanting to be normal affects how people make food choices.
*
When my father had a massive heart attack and required a triple bypass, I was certain that he would take his doctor's horror at his description of his pre-bypass diet as a sign that something wasn't right. He was given some instruction on the subject, which he wasn't especially interested in. I bought my dad a bunch of books by Dean Ornish on how you can restore your heart's health through dietary changes. However, I should have known from reading the old alt.food.fat-free newsgroups that my father wasn't going to be interested. He didn't want to eat for heart health - he wanted to eat the diet he considered to be normal, to show that he had recovered. Changing his diet would make him feel more like a patient, or someone who was recovering from a life threatening condition - and even if that were true, that wasn't "normal." (Unfortunately, having heart attacks in one's 40s is "normal" on my father's side of the family.)
My father, who is prone to going on a fad diet every year or so, even went on the horrifically high cholesterol Atkins diet a few years ago! He eventually decided that it was unbalanced. (Duh.) But even when he went on it, he thought that was a "normal" thing to do, health consequences be damned.
I have friends who go on fad diets routinely, but I've never really thought of those seriously. Fad diets don't work in the long-term. All diets that reduce your caloric intake enough can make you lose weight, but if they aren't healthy enough to use on an ongoing basis, the weight loss will fail when people return to their old habits. I've always thought of fad diets as forms of temporary insanity on the part of my friends, rather than culturally-influenced food decisions. But they are out there, and there are new ones coming out all the time!
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I may have mentioned that a friend of mine said he doesn't eat any rice other than white rice (of which there are many types, of course), because he is Chinese, and that's what Chinese people eat. Even though that's not exclusively true - not here in SF, where there are Chinese people in every type of restaurant, eating things that are only "normal" in parts of the world quite remote from eastern China where he was born - he remains certain about the bounds of "normal" rice eating practice.
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I also may have mentioned that I told a girlfriend at work about how one of my sisters-in-law was going to make me and Steven a lovely veggie primavera pasta dinner, and my girlfriend said, "Oh, is that in again?"
(Can you imagine? Deciding on whether or not to eat home-cooked food on whether or not it is "in?")
*
Watching my father choose his meals post-bypass, it's plain he was being influenced by his own idea of normal diets, and by trends and fads that were popular (and conventional, and "normal" for the time). Since I've never really cared what people around me were eating - since my own tastes are spicier, hotter, and more veg-oriented than most of my relatives and peer group - I haven't really thought about the desire to be "normal" in dining choices. But it's there as an influence. I might start asking about that in my food interviews.Labels: conformity, food choices, normal
posted by Arlene (Beth)10:00 PM
