Pensive

A Grief Interlude

~ LobaBlanca ~ Leave a comment

It seems so strange to interrupt an ongoing tribute to a now deceased famous person who affected my life significantly…to talk about recent deaths of similarly significant celebrities. And yet here I am, writing this post rather than writing one of my Cravenous reviews as I continue to make my way (very slowly) through Wes Craven’s oeuvre.

There have been several deaths recently within the celebrity circuit. It’s rather alarming, actually, how many famous people have departed the realm in the past month or so

CSI: Catherine Still Incompetent?

~ LobaBlanca ~ 2 Comments

Visitors to the lair know that when I’m devoted to a show, I’m in it to win it until the very end. I’ll even follow you into continued “seasons” in book form if I’m really into you (which reminds me: I need to finish the “eighth season” of Deep Space Nine before I completely forget the first three books from the run). It’s no surprise, then, that I have continued to watch the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation through every bump and dip the show has seen in recent years. And, even though I confess to no surprise from the announcement earlier this year that CBS had cancelled the series after 15 years, I still felt a pang of loss. This show has meant a great deal to me for myriad reasons

Rant Me the Serenity…

~ LobaBlanca ~ Leave a comment

Talk about much ado about nothing. I relaunch the blog after so much time and effort to rebuild my online lair and then…nothing. Pfft. Fizzle. A couple of Flashback Fridays, some book reviews, some PhotoShop trickery…but no meat. Just sides.

I want more. Truth is, though, that I feel sometimes like there are so many variables against “more.” My job has evolved into something far more consistently all-consuming than before, which means that by the end of the day, there’s not much intellectual energy left. I mean, come on now, I’m practically running on fumes all the time anyway…now, I’ve reached the point where by the end of the day, I simply can’t brain anymore.

Please don’t make me brain anymore.

Seriously, though, I work out my focus all day long, trying to keep multiple projects on track, on time, on budget, on fleek. I come home and I got nothin’ left. The jam jar is empty and all that’s left is the dried-out jam crust around the lid. No one wants that.

The other problem (beyond my tendency to make really disgusting analogies) is that I’ve lost my indignant fire. In my Angry BloggerTM Days, I had no dearth of anger for fueling myriad rants. I’m old now, and I see the futility of ranting. Not to say that I don’t still go on rants…but they’re usually about things meant to incite wrath from the geek community. I’m really good at that.

Ranting about things that matter IRL though? Ranting just deepens the divide. I’m more into (or I’m more into trying to be more into) seeking solutions. Trying to find the problem and fix it. Trying to find answers to questions that I’m quite frankly tired of asking and tired of watching everyone in charge ignore simply because the answers aren’t…simple.

The problem is that this path isn’t easily packaged into a navel-gazing blog blurb. And this path shouldn’t be easily packaged or reduced or simplified. It’s a path of thorns and brambles. A path abandoned for too long because choosing this path requires serious work, and who wants to do that? It’s way more fun to keep ignoring this path and taking the easier one that solves nothing but lets us all be utter cockwombles from the anonymous comfort of our Internet-trolling couches.

[Loba Tangent: In other news, my British friends have taught me the word cockwomble, and I now try to fit it in whenever I can. Because cockwomble.]

So that’s where I’m at. I’m still here, pacing the lair, trying to figure it all out. I’m still writing blog posts. I’ve got a couple saved as drafts (which I couldn’t do before I repaired things, so progress!!). If it makes you all feel any better, I’m not just ignoring the lair. I haven’t even really been reading all that much lately either. Again, jam crust.

And just so I don’t leave you all with that disgusting image in your head, have this. Uzo Aduba is one of my new favorite people in the entirety of the universe. If you don’t know why, then get thee to a Netflix account and stream the hell out of Orange is the New Black. Hers is one of the most captivating characters from what is one of the most delightfully diverse, female-centric shows ever (a shame, though, that we can only get diversity behind bars).

uzo

The Man of My Dreams

~ LobaBlanca ~ Leave a comment

It would have to take something big to finally pull me out of the morass of work in which I’ve been trapped all summer. Something bigger than book reviews or navel gazing or even the insanity of the current political landscape (a landscape I’m already tired of looking at, and we’ve still got more than a year to go).

No, it had to be larger than that. It had to be something personally moving…something so important to me that, no matter how many evenings and stolen moments throughout the days that I have stockpile to write this, it will be done. It’s the least I can do for the man who played such an integral role in my conversion to the tried-and-true horror apostle I am today.

True, I credit Poltergeist as being the first modern horror film I ever saw all the way through. That was my gateway film, so to speak. But if I were credit one genre director as being most responsible for completely converting me to the Church of Horror, it would have to be Wes Craven.

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I give John Carpenter full dues for the brilliance that is Halloween. And I attribute the state of the horror genre as I knew and loved it growing up to a particular set of directors/writers who ruled the horror landscape throughout the 80s: Craven, Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Tobe Hooper, and Sean Cunningham (with honorable mention to Clive Barker for the glory that is Pinhead).

These men understood the visceral nature of fear and they harnessed that to full unadulterated effect through some of the genre’s most unsettling movies. They were the fathers of evisceration and unrest, pushing the boundaries of, at the time, a mostly staid genre into territories that even they found too disturbing to explore…which is what pushed them to explore them in the first place. Craven himself stated that The Last House on the Left was one of his movies that he could never go back and re-watch because of how horrific it was to him.

And then came Freddy Krueger. As much as I love Michael Myers and Pinhead and Jason, Freddy was my first horror villain. I actually first met him through the fourth Elm Street movie The Dream Master, which was not one of Craven’s films. However, I loved Freddy from the very first flick of his silver-knived hand right down to his inimitably painful puns. He was horror kitsch of the killer variety, compelling and charismatic and amusingly unique even among the high-caliber villainous company he was keeping at the time. I needed to know everything about him.

I was not anticipating the Freddy Krueger I met in the first film. Craven’s original 1984 movie was disturbing in the ugliest of realistic ways (strange to say of a killer who is himself dead and offs his victims in their nightmares). This character came from the mind of someone who understood that true fear resided in the deepest, darkest, most depraved corners of ourselves. We create the worst fears, whether through our own thoughts or our own deeds. No matter how much I love the campy, “lovable” Freddy of later films, my allegiance will always rest in the gloved hand of that original Krueger. He was only on screen for 7 minutes that first movie…less time than even the Wicked Witch of the West got in The Wizard of Oz…but oh, those 7 minutes.

Thankfully, Craven did return for The New Nightmare, one of my other favorite Freddy films. Additionally, New Nightmare was one of the earliest examples, that I can remember, of that meta take on film-making that blurs reality and fiction into a tasty melange of horror savoriness that I clearly find addictive.

And then there’s Scream. True, Craven didn’t write it and he almost didn’t direct it. But thank the horror deities that he did. Talk about meta savoriness. I have written about this film and franchise many times here at the lair. Two of my Ladies of Horror May-hem come from this film (two other Ladies come from Elm Street). The original film works so well in part because of its clear respect for and indebtedness to the time during which Craven and that previously mentioned collection of amazingly demented directors ruled the horror genre. And while the series holistically was never as solid as the first film, Craven did his best to make it as solidly scary as he could with what Williamson gave him.

Of course, these are only the movies that often rise to the top of any discussion of Craven’s contributions to the horror genre. Let’s not forget, he also gave us The Hills Have Eyes; Deadly Friend, which includes one of my all-time favorite character deaths ever; Shocker (I still refer to Mitch Pileggi as “Horace Pinker”); The People Under the Stairs, which gave me a whole new outlook on Twin Peaks and turned so many traditional horror tropes upside down and inside out in ways that I don’t think many appreciated at the time; Red Eye (sure, I’d like to find flying even more traumatizing!); and The Serpent and the Rainbow, which ranks still as one of my favorite “zombie” movies.

Craven was sharp, well-read, curious, creative, kind, and witty, and he made my horror-loving adolescence ironically brighter from all the darkness he brought to the genre. I have mourned his death every day since I learned he was with us no more. He left behind a brilliant legacy, but his time with us was still far too short.

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LobaBlerch

~ LobaBlanca

It’s been a while, hasn’t it, denizens? Not a while since I paid any love to the lair. I’ve been banging on about books and beers and strange ephemera from my youth that once (and forever) made me happy. But it’s been a while since I wrote something navel-gazey, eh? What better day to change that then the auspicious 11th birthday of my bloginations?

One of my favorite online stops every now and again is The Oatmeal. Funny, dorky, irreverent, and grammar sticklers.

During a recent perusal, I ran across the section The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances. True, I don’t really run all that much. Sometimes, if I have an abundance of energy, I’ll bring it down a few notches with a jaunty jog here and there, but mostly I walk. A lot. Uphill, downhill, on paths, on trails, in cities, in the woods, wherever. I love to walk. The longer and more strenuous the walk? The more I’m going to dig in. I don’t take glucosamine every morning for nothing, dammit.

But why? The unglamorous reason is that I started walking four years ago as a means to outpace having to deal with my mom’s death. I dealt with it some, mostly through blogging here, but when the edges got too sharp and the feelings got too raw? I moved on. If I just plugged in my earbuds and kept moving, then I could focus on the music, on the pace, on the sweat and exhaustion, on the physical pain and not the deeper hurt. Basically, I tried to walk away from dealing with it all, not accepting that it was chained to my ankle and following right along with me.

But that’s a whole other story.

Funny thing (and I’m always one for gallows humor), is that when I started to resurface from the fog of my self-enforced avoidance through exercise…I really liked the physical me I came back to. I’d “avoided” myself down 50 pounds and up several metabolic notches. I had a reduced appetite and increased energy. I was toned and muscular and for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to run away from the reflection in the mirror.

Thus bringing me back to the Oatmeal post on running. Bet you thought I’d forgotten that, didn’t you? Some of the post made me laugh and some of it passed right over me without any response. One panel, though. One panel punched me right in the solar plexus:

running_5theblerch4

“I grew up a fat kid.”

When I was in the safety of my own world (as any good introvert will tell you, we all have two worlds: the outside one in which we have to live, and the inside one in which we choose to live), my weight wasn’t an issue. It never stopped me from battling Cobra Commander and Destro or using my proton pack to fight ghosts or calling for K.I.T.T. before the bad guys found my hiding spot. I could be anyone, do anything in the confines of our yard…although, looking back, I would love to have known what the neighbors thought of my strange antics, swinging from tree limbs, running and rolling and ducking and dodging, none of them able to see the fantastic adventures my imagination was creating for me.

Outside of my own world? I was fat. And others made a point of informing me that I was fat, as if somehow this truth eluded me without constant reminding. Because somehow having to shop in the boys’ husky section for jeans or the women’s plus-sized section for school clothes when I was 11 wasn’t enough.

[Loba Tangent: Don’t cry for me, Argentina. Yes, kids bullied me for being fat. The sad truth, though, is that when someone else came along, even lower on the popularity food chain than me, I didn’t step up and defend them. Instead, I reveled in the feeling of finally giving back some of what I’d been taking all those years. Kick a dog too much and sometimes the wrong person ends up losing a hand when the dog finally bites back. I bear the weight of that truth even now, because introspection is deservedly cruel sometimes.]

I’ve tried since my teens to tame my weight, but almost always in that half-assed, “miracle diet,” snap-my-fingers-and-it’s-done-right? way. You know what that approach gets you? A boatload of disappointment and discouragement. Intellectually, I understood that being healthy was more important than being skinny, and that being healthy was a commitment (that I obviously wasn’t ready to make).

But the part of me conditioned by years of fat-shaming and societal demands to fit into one generic mold, regardless of the multitude of body shapes women should have, had left me convinced that I was never going to be attractive as long as I had a double chin or my thighs rubbed together when I walked or I had bingo wings

Unleashing the Writer: Doppelg

~ lobablanca

Funny what we find while cleaning.

Seems as though I have let all my e-mail accounts fall into various levels of disarray. I finally have my work account relatively under control (I consider being able to see all my messages in one window without having to scroll as “under control”), so I’ve turned to trying to organize my primary personal account. While tackling my Drafts folder (a far easier task than either the Inbox or Sent folders), I found the following snippet of…I’m not really sure. I remember the inspiration for this piece: a waitress at a restaurant near my office. She honestly looked nothing like my mother minus her hands, which I couldn’t stop staring at as she cleared our dishes. The time stamp on the draft message this was saved in marks this as more than a year old. I’m not sure what I was going to do with this or even if I had planned to write more. It feels both finished and lacking.

Somehow, that seems…exactly right for this particular topic.

A stranger has my mother

Personal Aesthetic

~ lobablanca

The woman who taught us how to apply theatrical makeup for our high school play one year chose me for the “old age” portion of our lesson. She told me the lines that formed around my eyes when I winked provided her an “easy template.” She also let her 4-year-old daughter run around the classroom wearing a greasy chicken bucket on her head. I should have taken her words in that context. A 16-year-old kid already equipped with low self-esteem doesn’t understand context.

I think about that woman and her bucket-wearing child every now and then, usually when I’m washing my face in the evenings or applying eye liner in the mornings. I’ll wink and watch the lines feather away, arrow fletchings along my skin. I’ve gained new lines since those “easy template” days…lines that curl upward and join the creases that undulate along my forehead or loop across my nose. If I crinkle my brow and wrinkle my nose in just the right way, I can form ridges like a Bajoran. I’ve practiced this move several times.

I notice the lines. I rub them with SPF lotion (for I am pale and freckled and love the sun). I clean them with face wash. I sometimes run my fingers along them. Every now and then, I confess that I try to smooth them away, revealing for fleeting moments that younger me, only now with a perpetually shocked lift of her brow.

Better to look shockingly young than dour and old!

And yet. I like my lines. They tell me stories. They mark my worries, my thoughts, my moods, my years. They remind me parenthetically that I love to laugh, that whole flocks of glee have marched across my skin. They map summer journeys and connect the dots that sunshine left behind.

And yet.

These lines tell you nothing. They are my prologue to the story I know. They tell you nothing of my joys or my sorrows. They don’t tell you who I have lost or who I have found. They don’t teach you anything about me deeper than those superficial creases.

These all seem like obvious statements, logical sentiments.

And yet.

Your body does not define you. Your body is not beautiful. It is not ugly. It is a shell for the beauty or ugliness you choose to cultivate within.

You are you. Make that mean what you want it to mean.

TL;DR

~ LobaBlanca

I give this my vote for one of the ugliest acronyms in the indecipherable sea of txtspk brevity: “Too Long; Didn’t Read.”

The first time I ever saw it was in regard to an article that was, admittedly, longer than one typically has time to absorb during work-day downtime. However, recently I’ve been seeing it with more and more frequency, sometimes in reference to pieces that dare to be more than the length of a tweet. And that greatly bothers me.

I’m old-school in a lot of ways when it comes to words. I see beauty in words the way many see beauty in a Van Gogh or a sunset. Words unlock my imagination in ways that no amount of CGI manipulation ever will. Want to not hear a sound from me for an entire day? Place a stack of books on one side of me and a fresh supply of coffee on the other. You’ll forget I’m even there. The best part? I’ll forget I’m there, too, because I’ll be in myriad other locations and times…wherever those beautiful words lead me.

Sometimes, I feel as though I am a dying breed…that I’m the awkward, bloated blog post in the room full of fit tweets, all silently judging me for not shedding my verbal lumpiness and joining them in their snappy bon mot runs every day because I’m too busy gorging myself on wordiness.

Other times, however, I feel as though I am succumbing to the wordless void. It’s so easy. Open up your social media account. I’ll bet one of the first things to pop up in your feed is going to be a photo or a video posted by one of your friends

Throw Your Hands Up At Me

~ lobablanca

All the voters who are Independent? Your ranks just grew by one last week.

That’s right, last week, I changed my party affiliation. No more Donkey Blue for me, at least not for the time being. For the now, however, I felt it was something that I needed to do. While the ideals of the Democratic Party are still the ideals that closely match my own, the truth is that it’s all lip service. They talk a good game about hope and change and moving forward…which, I suppose, is at least a more uplifting message than the one of divisiveness and exclusion that the Republican Party has embraced of late.

Ultimately, however, it’s the Democrats who prove more disappointing. See, I actually want to see all those wonderful promises come to fruition. I want equality for all, whether it’s for civil unions or equal pay or a college degree. I want women to continue to have the right to choose what happens to our bodies, whether it be through the provision of birth control or abortions. I might not believe in either or I might believe in both…doesn’t matter. I want the choice to be available. I want universal healthcare (not the muddled joke of Obamacare, which was doctored by the insurance companies who’ve helped make a mess of the system in the first place). I want decent public education, affordable higher education…I might not like kids, but I know that an educated youth becomes a knowledgeable and inventive workforce and might even give us a qualified leader or two.

Obviously, we’re in a bit of a shortage on that front.

I want all these things, and for years I have bought into the delusion that the Democrats were going to make good on all their promises.

The only thing that I have learned, however, is that Democrats and Republicans are alike in one significant way: They will make perfectly crafted promises as a means of keeping us in line. Promises addressing key party platform issues like Equal Pay, Abortion Rights, Freedom of Religion, Taxed Enough Already…these all become nothing more than leashes used by the politicians to keep their constituents at heel.

I’m tired of heeling. So I became Independent. Actually, the state of Maryland calls it “Unaffiliated.” That’s fine. I have to admit, I had a moment of indecision when it was time to click submit and send my changes to the voter registration board. I remember how excited I was to be able to register to vote when I turned 18. I couldn’t wait! It was a bigger deal to me than finally turning 21. I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to be a Democrat. Donkey Blue, through and through.

Bill Clinton was my first. It’s been all downhill since.

Will I still reach a point where I regret changing my affiliation? I don’t know. I did consider the fact that the more moderates, like me, who grow weary of either party and abandon them for Independent or another party alternative means that only the hardcore nutjobs will be left as actual registered Democrats or Republicans. Prophets know what might happen then. Obviously, we’ve seen a small-scale version of this already transpiring, with long-time moderate Republicans being replaced by TEA Party hindrances to the system.

Of course, if more people start leaving the two controlling parties and joining alternatives, we might actually become a country that acknowledges more than just the two hot messes we have now.

We can have many hot messes! And then we’d be Canada 😉

By becoming unaffiliated, I’ve lost my ability to vote in any primaries. Primary season is over this election cycle, so I have time to mull over this fact. Right now, though…now that it’s done? I feel a sense of peace. I’m sure that will change once the politicians from both sides realize that I’ve become a “free agent” and start pelting me with mailings and calls. No worries. That’s why there are shredders and caller ID.

Would I encourage others to become Independent? Only if you’ve reached the same point of disillusionment with your chosen party that I have reached. Even if it’s just for right now, even if it’s just for a little while. Stop toeing the party line for yet another run at a race controlled by empty promises.

The Road to Independents

~ LobaBlanca

Ever since my last post, I’ve been thinking of ways to show that I’m serious (well, that and I took a little time to party for my birthday…priorities and all, you know). I’ve got an idea or two, but I’m letting them soak in for a bit before bouncing them off you all here (the title of this post may or may not be a clue).

However, I thought I’d share something I found recently while sorting through some random Word documents I had on my memory stick. I’m not sure when I wrote this…obviously, it was in 2008 and it was after one of the Clinton/Obama debates, but I’ve no idea which one, and no idea what the “XEROX quote” is all about. I’m sure I could look it up, but meh.

It doesn’t really apply to the now, but I thought it was interesting enough as a flashback to where I was politically four years ago: The disenchantment was beginning, but I still held steadfastly to my hope that something good could happen, if only the right person was elected for the job.

Person.

The 2008 Democratic primaries taught me an important lesson regarding my place in the Democratic agenda: Good enough to pander to for my vote; not good enough to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate because I might do something offensive…like age or cry or have “cankles.”

Of course, had Hillary won, it would have probably been four solid years of uphill battle after uphill battle while she was constantly critiqued and criticized for every decision, both politically and personally (probably mostly personally). At least she got to be Secretary of State. And at times more popular than the president himself. And be the inspiration for a really groovy meme.

And now it’s 2012 and women seem to have become an even greater…what? Mandatory voter demographic to capture? Asset? Threat? Our bodies apparently are incredibly threatening. You know what’s even more threatening? Our minds. It’s time, then, that we started listening more, paying more attention…not to what is being said to us, but what is being said about us, oftentimes without our input and without our consent…what is being valued, judged, ruled, overruled, controlled, and taken from us in a continuing attempt to reduce us to nothing more than…our bodies.

There are many things transpiring in this country that I find worrisome, but the ongoing ramp-up of rhetoric regarding what is ultimately politicians deciding for me what can and cannot be done with and to my own body is definitely of key concern. I’m not talking about the minutia; I’m talking about the overarching message being sent by every politician, from both sides, who thinks that they have the right to speak for women, to determine overall what is best for us rather than letting us decide for ourselves. Can’t stop us from choosing for ourselves? Then just limit our options across the board…you know, to make sure we’re protected from our own attempts at making up our own minds.

Whenever a politician uses rhetoric aimed at a woman’s body as a plank in their party’s respective political platform, they’re simply reiterating one of my steadily growing concerns: that we’re nothing more than something to walk over, to stand on. Use us to reach what you want and then pack us up until the next election cycle.

I’m tired of it. Are you?

We are more than our bodies. Just ask Hillary Clinton. She might answer you if she has a free moment while running the world.

I think one of the most telling moments of last night