“Not to shit on anyone’s riff here, but let me just see if I grasp this concept, ok? You’re suggesting that we take some fucking parking shuttles, and reinforce them with some aluminum siding, and then just head on over to the gun store and watch our good friend Andy play some cowboy movie jump-on-the-covered-wagon bullshit. Then, we’re gonna drive across a ruined city, through a welcome committee of a few hundred thousand dead cannibals, all so that we can sail off into the sunset on this fucking asshole’s boat?”
***
“I’m in love with a zombie, can’t keep his hands off me. I think he’s looking at me, but he’s looking right through me. You think you’re so cool, boy. Blood rushing through my veins now. Do you want me for body? Do you want me for my brain?”
Zombie – Natalia Kills
Fuel – Metallica
Run Out – Memory Tapes
Hard Times – Patrick Wolf
Starlings – Elbow
Moonshake – Can
Shh – Frou Frou
This is Hardcore – Pulp
Let Your Soul Guide Your Heart – Rodney Hunter featuring Diana Lueger
Let’s Escape Together – Beat Crusaders
Yes. I KNOW there are crucial differences between the Infected and Zombies. If you have prepared an irritated lecture for me, save it for another day.
The ice outside looks like whale blubber. Nobody is cleaning it up, because that’s something that people in civilized countries do, and it’s not like we can have anyone forgetting where it is they live. It would be vastly unpatriotic, etc. I don’t have any ambitions to prevent myself from falling again, I just hope I’ll avoid breaking any bones this winter. I have written, and rewritten, a play that, much like Paula from “40 Year Old Virgin,” haunts my dreams. I have murdered many shots. I need a break, you guys. And so do you. Continue reading “Beautiful People, the “beauty won’t save the world, but it will come pretty damn close” edition”
In reading this excellent essay on the importance of lady friendships, I was surprised by some of the responses. While I think it’s perfectly valid for a woman to articulate why it is that she doesn’t have many women friends, some of the conclusions that were drawn in the comments struck me as downright depressing.
This one, by Alex, stuck out at me quite a bit:
I have been fortunate to meet some women… who are the “odd ones out” like me, and as it happens, they’ve all been in the jeans and sneakers, roughhousing, strongly opinioned [sic] category.
You know, maybe I’m just jaded at this point, but I really don’t like the implication that strongly opinionated women all abide by a certain dress code. No. Really. It comes up again, and again, and it’s fucking bullshit.
See what I just did there, huh? Huh? I expressed an opinion! A strong one! While showing off a pair of high-heeled boots in my banner! It can be done.
I can relate to just about anyone who says that they can run into problems with women who judge them as “not feminine enough” or whatever. I hardly ever leave the house without eyeliner, but guess what, I get it too! All the time! Other women have told me that I’m “cold” and “unfeminine” because I don’t go into a moral panic over abortion, because I’m not looking to get married, hell, some have felt the need to tell me that I don’t wear skirts often enough.
I can relate, but I do not extrapolate such incidents onto fellow women in general. People who harass me about stupid crap, I write off as assholes. I similarly write off people who will tell me that I am not tough enough, not rough enough, for their love, or friendship, or whatever. Look, some jackass told me I ought to take my boots and GTFO the other day. I am not going to rush out to make a person like that love me. I’d take a fine-ass pair of boots over some idiot any day of the week.
I’m not going to accuse someone of internalized misogyny just because they admit to having a tough time making friends with women, but I can’t deny that certain generalizations do piss me off, and rightfully so. None of my female friends fit into some neat little category. I would like to imagine that I don’t fit into a neat little category either. I cry a lot, for example. I can spend an inordinate amount of time talking about Orlando Bloom. I also like shiny fast cars and whiskey.
Dwight is confused and distressed right now
So why hasn’t my head exploded following a crisis of identity? Could it be because…stereotypes are mostly crap?
Friendship among women is important. Friendship is important in general, but women, I think, face extra pressure to compete with each other, being as we are on a lower rung socially, for the most part. It’s not coincidence that “chicks before dicks” evolved in response to “bros before hos.”
Let’s face it, we don’t generalize about men like we do about women. We don’t accuse men of “performing masculinity,” because it’s not as if we have this iron-clad definition of masculinity to begin with. What does it involve? Grunting a lot? Solving physics equations? Making that money? Being hairy? “Tackling drunk bitches”? Starting wars? Men are human beings, goddamit, you can’t pigeonhole them like that! That’s sexist! And wrong!
Women, on the other hand, are held to a pretty strict standard, and the crappy thing is, you can’t win. Anyone can come along and judge you as too feminine, or not feminine enough, and they do. All the time.
So hey, if you don’t want to be friends with me, don’t be friends with me. I’m not hard up for friends, luckily enough. Just don’t tell me it’s because I “perform femininity” or some crap like that. Tell me it’s because my sense of humour is ridiculous. Tell me it’s because I sketch you out. Tell me it’s because I have way too much to prove, or way too little, or because you think I am a jackass, or because you generally can’t abide by people who listen to Alla Pugacheva in the shower and pretentiously insert The Brothers Karamazov into virtually every argument they make (except for this one, though I bet I could, if I thought about it hard enough). That would be fair, no?
He makes me sit there, as it’s nearing 5 a.m. in Kiev, and write. He’s not here. He’ll be on a plane to New York soon. But his hand is on my shoulder, and I’m writing.
“I threw your army tags into the water. A thousand years later, archeologists will dig that shit right up, and they’ll wonder about it. A remark will be made in an interview. A young, ambitious sort of writer will get a hold of the interview while checking the news on a night she can’t sleep (people will still have insomnia a thousand years later, how else will they get their best ideas?), and end up writing a novel about the identity of the man whose name is on the tags. It will be all wrong. But epic.”
“Well, Jim, I’ve got some bad news…”
Natalia A. 