"oh my love i have been betrayed -- by the war raging inside of me"

[hermionesviolin]

I seem to always forget that there are lyrics in between the first and last lines of this chorus.

Oh, my love, I have been betrayed
by the thoughts I think,
by the words I say
Oh, my love, I have been deceived
by the war raging inside of me.

What is up with my feeling queasy like every morning recently?  Today I didn't eat anything until after I went to the gym -- at which point I (slowly) ate a blueberry bagel -- and yet I was still feeling queasy come lunchtime.  (Last week it would go away by the time I'd walked to the T in the morning.)  I got french fries and a banana for lunch -- and then bumped into Nicki, who wasn't feeling well either and was going to get fro-yo, which idea I decided to adopt as well.
    Lack of sleep + emotional stress = ftw.  (mjules said, "I hope everything turns out as okay as it can, and in the meantime I wish you peace."  Exactly.)  And no, I don't want to talk about it.  I'll be fine, it's just a sucky situation which nothing can really be done about.

I'm not good at keeping secrets.  I only share with people I trust are safe (and I don't think my trust has been misplaced yet), but that is not necessarily everyone else's expectation when they trust me with things.  This is probably something I should work on.

In better news, Prof.B's MiddleEast trip seems to be fine.  (Multiple cooks in the kitchen and all, so I worried that stuff had gotten dropped, but we seem okay.)  And today wasn't wholly unproductive.  (I did work stuff and also did my writeup of The Curiosity of Chance.  I private-posted a placeholder entry last night, but it's public now that it's finished.)

I was up so so late last night.  I would have crashed sooner tonight, but tonight was the HIMYM season finale (this week will likely be slow enough that I could easily watch it streaming online, but I like watching stuff right when it airs anyway).

***

elliptical, interval program:
1mi @ 11:17min
2mi @ 22:48min
2.61mi @ 30min

***

On CNN this morning, Ed Rollins, Republican strategist, said that Bush's talk about appeasement at the Knesset was a bad idea, and that Obama used it well -- pushed Hillary's WVa win off the front page.  I hadn't thought of it that way before.
    John Roberts asked him about Tom Davis' statements about the Republican party (link via jennyo), and he basically said he agreed.  I'm so used to this sense of the Republican party as a dominant force, that it's sort of weird to hear major GOP people saying this stuff.

***

the_red_shoes talked about "Wilde writing REALLY WEIRDLY about Jesus" and she then posted:

His miracles seem to me as exquisite as the coming of Spring, and quite as natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing that such was the charm of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls in anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot their pain: or that as he passed by on the highway of life people who had seen nothing of life's mysteries saw them clearly, and others who had been deaf to every voice but that of Pleasure heard for the first time the voice of Love and found it as "musical as is Apollo's lute": or that evil passions fled at his approach, and men whose dull imaginative lives had been but a mode of death rose as it were from the grave when he called them: or that when he taught on the hillside the multitude forgot their hunger and thirst and the cares of this world, and that to his friends who listened to him as he sat at meat the coarse food seemed delicate, and the water had the taste of good wine, and the whole house became full of the odour and sweetness of nard.

Is it bad that I'm really quite fond of that?  (I've never read De Profundis, so all I'm saying is that I like that excerpt.)

***

I have no real interest in seeing the Prince Caspian movie, though I've been reading other people's reviews of it (thus far, Sharon hated it, Mari and Carolyn loved it).  I saw a review on friendsfriends (kben) which I enjoyed:

I just got back from seeing Prince Caspian.

Peter and Caspian? So gay for each other.

Oh, and there was a battle. That is not in the book. Actually, most of the movie is not in the book. Because how interesting is a movie about a prince on the lam in the forest?

Actually, that sounds like it could be fun. Especially if it still has the part where Peter and Caspian are gay boyfriends.

And with his fancy accent, I kept hoping for, "My name is Prince Caspian. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

***

I've been reading posts about Supernatural (a show I saw a minute or two of once and which fandom I only peripherally follow) recently -- the ones responding to trollprincess' "Bitchwach" posts about the use of certain gendered insults in the three seasons of the show.
The argument that resonates with me most is the frustration that it's expected that this behavior is just "boys being boys."  cereta wrote:

I mean, seriously, is this it? Do we expect so little of men? This, by the way, is an area where I think men who get it should be really pissed off. God, if society expected nothing better of me than to be an overgrown kid who casually threw around derogatory words for people different from me, I'd be pissed off all the time. But seriously: are we never going to say, "No, this isn't acceptable. No, you don't get to behave like this and not get called on it. No, you shouldn't do this, and if you do it, I'm going to choose not to be around you."?

(veejane talks about masculinity and social class.  I hadn't seen people attributing the misogynistic language to the characters' working class background, but as I said, I'm not actually in this fandom at all, and it's definitely a connection I can easily plausibly see people making -- and honestly probably one I've fallen into myself in other contexts.)

Comments

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I think I must suck, because honestly re: SPN wank? I don't care.

*ducks*

Yes, this makes me a bad feminist and Lord knows I am not going to post such in my own journal because I don't want to host the ensuing convo, but this really doesn't bother me. What bothers me in SPN is the way all the black people get offed as does anyone even remotely coded as queer. Dean saying bitch and slut and skank and ho? Does not bother me at all. Perhaps this is because I am a potty mouth and use such words at regular intervals myself. Perhaps this is because I see these words as largely genderless in this century--like asshole or fuckface or bastard. Perhaps this is because I think Dean lacks a vocabulary to properly insult "women" (demons) he doesn't like (often for very good reasons).

Does this mean I don't like Ruby? No. I really enjoyed her character. I liked Bella as well. And Jo and Ellen (<3) and Sarah and Jess and flashback!Mary and every female on the freaking show except for Cassie (which I think is largely due to the actress rather than the conception of the character).

/flawedness

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I expect were I watching the show I wouldn't notice the gendered insults, but I found it thought-provoking to have it pointed out that this use of language implies that being feminine/female or being promiscuous is an inherently bad thing, is something that is taken for granted as being insulting. -- In skimming trollprincess' Bitchwatch posts, I see she was actually tallying Dean's insults aimed at women, but I feel like one of the meta posts I read talked about insulting men by calling them "bitches" or whatever. But maybe I was just misreading stuff because I was assuming the demons/villains were mostly male, which I guess in S3 at least is definitively not the case.

Honestly, I find myself frustrated with most of the options for insults, because they almost all have problematic implications. One can easily argue that nobody thinks of those implications anymore (call someone a "bastard," and it barely even registers that technically you're questioning whether they were legitimately born in wedlock or not), though I have mixed feelings about that argument.

And yeah, I've heard complaints about SPN's treatments of race before (though since I don't watch the show I haven't actually read much of the meta on that). I don't think I'd seen anything about queer characters on SPN (if asked, I'd probably have just assumed there weren't any) but again, not my fandom, so my exposure to discussion is limited. Though I do remember the explosion of complaints in anticipation of there being prominent female characters in S3, because zomg it will break up/take attention away from the boys. Oh fandom, how you are made of fail sometimes. (The people I actually know and like who watch the show I believe were excited about the prospect of prominent female characters and evaluated the characters on their own merits rather than being all "ew, girls, you're messing with my Wincest" or whatever.)

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I feel like I'm sort of in a weird place with this whole issue, because I absolutely agree that it sucks mightly that most of the insults and derogatory phrases we have in this language are either gendered female or suggest male homosexuality, as if those are the two absolute worst states of being. And even in this sentence, sucks is probably a derivation of cock-sucker. Language is really important; the words we use *mean* something even if we aren't aware of how we're using them. (For example, it took me a really long time to realize that saying you'd been gypped was a racial slur and now that I do I don't use that word.) So I'm not suggesting that people are wrong to bring up these issues or even be disturbed by them. Just that I'm not.

Like I said in my earlier comment, for me, bitch is not really a gendered word (although yes, I know that's a tautology because it *is*). Also, I think that the show is based on a couple of premises, one that you mention in your post. Sam and Dean are blue collar and their language is in some ways a class issue. I think it is also a function of the nature of the horror show. In much horror, the perversion of the female is the ultimate terror. Taking a mom or a wife or a maiden and making them evil, corrupting them (often this involves sexual promiscuity, or the hint of such, ala Stoker's Dracula), is the height of horror. And this is a horror show. That sometimes plays around with the genre and sometimes is steadfastly in teh grooves. Most of the "women" Dean insults are actually demons; in a very literal way, according to his thinking, they are bitches or sluts or skanks--the perversion of what the presumably good women whose bodies they are now wearing once were. Of course, that creates a Madonna/Whore complex for the whole show that is also problematic. LOL

So I don't think Dean is misogynistic; I think he uses that language when talking to demons because these aren't people. He calls Bela a bitch quite a bitch and she's a human but I'm not sure what other insult her could have called her that wasn't gendered. Asshole, I guess. I don't know.

Maybe this really should bother me.

And you wre not wrong in your skimming. Bitch is aimed at dudes from time to time.