Hurricane, mindsets, zombies... oh wait, not those

Before the storm hit, I bought several pounds of blackberries on sale. I've been baking with them since then: buckle and muffins. (When I'm stressed, I cook. One of my housemates cleaned. The other bought loads of beer. Our house is pretty awesome.) During the storm, we played Scrabble. We still have water, power, internet; we're not in the flood zone; the grocery store around the corner is open. We are very lucky.

However - the larger picture is a bit more grim. The subways are full of seawater, multiple neighborhoods are flooded, 80 houses burned up in Queens from a fire, the Con Ed building in Manhattan exploded, most of lower Manhattan is without power, and the parks are full of downed trees.

Everything has just... stopped. I know that can't be true, but it seems that way. It all feels strange and eerie - like when you almost get into a car accident. You're okay, but you're suddenly aware how easy it would be for things to go very wrong. You realize how vulnerable you actually are.

You start to do the side-eye thing when you go out. Zombies? Are you there? No? Good.

I think the one thing that all New Yorkers have in common - the lucky ones, I mean, who are complaining about things like spotty internet service - is that we experienced the storm together in the same way. We spent hours inside, waiting for the wind to get bad, getting bored and antsy, but for once we couldn't leave. Time stretched out and took on a new shape - we wasted hours and hours. There was nowhere we could go - no bar, no bodega. We all had to cook for ourselves, and not order takeout. (Not that I do anyway. I'm a egg-on-toast, frozen soup kind of girl.)

And, despite joking about it, we all started to imagine things together. When you're buying emergency water and batteries, you have to imagine what it would be like to need them. We all read about the storm together - saw the worst, the fires and floods, and realized it could have happened to us. We had to spend days on end with our housemates or loved ones, and really share our space and time. (If things at home had been tense before, they were sure as hell a lot more tense now.) For New Yorkers who don't mind sharing their homes with near-strangers, this storm made some incompatibilities difficult to ignore.

And now, even though the storm is over, life isn't going to be back to normal for a while. Many buildings are destroyed - businesses, homes. People are waiting in long lines to charge their phones in the outlets at all-night ATMs. My friend Josh walked 20+ blocks north, in Manhattan, to find places with electricity. My brother is sleeping on someone's couch on the Upper East Side, and is fighting gridlock to take an old black car to work. There are downed trees everywhere. I saw pictures of my friends Josh and Jesse, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the lights were out all over Manhattan. Everyone had to be out by the time the sun went down, and it got too dark to see.

I think that the storm gave us each a lot of time to think about our lives, our living situations, our choices, and ourselves. When the lights went out in the city, I think a very primal sort of evaluation took place for many people. If you can't count on civilization to function flawlessly, what can you count on? What do you have? What people can you count on to be there? If there are no people, what do you have left? (Spoiler alert - the answer is not "nothing".)

This is the kind of thinking that people did a lot more often back in the olden days, I bet. Nowadays, we push back our fear of the unknown with electric lights and order. Nobody wants to think about how, in the end, we have little control over forces like weather, disasters, sickness, the feelings of others. In the dark, we are very small. And when we're afraid, we're more likely to start thinking we're helpless.

But! Luckily! This is not actually true.

...At least until we turn into zombies. But until then, everybody has a center of resolve and grit inside themselves that, when tapped into, can take the place of that helplessness. We all decide how to approach life, and the world. You can either approach it from a place of reactiveness, fear, helplessness, self-pity - or from a place of discipline, action, compassion, and optimism.

A healthy helping of cheerful graveyard humor helps, too.

Sometimes you have to be a bit Polar Bear Club about it, I think - just jump right into that icy water, yelling and laughing. Now is a good time to read Kurt Vonnegut.

My secret beef with "When Harry Met Sally"

"I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ephron and Rob Reiner originally planned an ending where Harry and Sally remained friends, which they felt was the “true ending”; only later did they bow to the expectations of genre."

Why 'When Harry Met Sally' Is Bad for Ladies

In this life, there are things you love, and things you dislike, and things you must dislike secretly. This is not out of shame, but practicality and grace. Everyone else loves these things, and they will want you to explain why you don't, but you should not try.

(Or you could try, but then you will wind up in a fruitless Bermuda Triangle of a conversation about why you don't like the Beatles, with someone who loves the Beatles, and you will feel like a jerk.)

Anyway. One of my secret "dislikes" is the movie "When Harry Met Sally". Now, everyone I've met who's seen this movie has loved it. I don't blame them! It's got love, New York, banter, sandwiches, a happy ending. Which is great! I love these things! I am a huge fan of dorky happy things. I say "Yes!" out loud when characters do something I agree with, in order to encourage them. I should like this movie.

But. In between the heartwarming funny bits, it creeped me out a little. Watching it always made me feel a little weird. But I could never put my finger on why, until this recent essay in Splitsider came out, and I went "Yes! Yes!" at my screen, to cheer on the writer.

This scene, with its excess of romance that doesn’t fit the previous storyline and its dialogue that doesn’t match the emotional meaning, is the scene in which the tension between the film’s two goals is most felt. Intellectual examination of friendship between men and women has to this point played out realistically; here intellectual examination gets too cocky, listens to music while walking in the dark, and gets mugged and stabbed to death by happily-ever-after romance. Though — is it happily ever after? If love meant having to be trapped in a talking head with a man who subtly ridiculed my careful planning of our wedding cake, I would probably end up divorced.

It's not that I think the movie's MISOGYNIST, DUM DUM DUMMM (trumpets, flaming sword, etc), so much as I find it to be... blind. What creeped me out was the discord between how the movie portrayed the relationship (charming! perfect! meant to be!) and how the relationship actually seemed to me (controlling! flawed! manipulative!)

He’s self-absorbed — rather than participating in a conversational give-and-take with Sally, he speaks in long monologues better suited to stand-up. His logorrhea minimizes the space given to Sally’s character development and takes up any time that could have been used to show us Sally’s other men friends (thereby proving Harry’s point about their absence!).

The film really, really likes Harry. It thinks he's funny and smart and pretty much awesome. But I always thought Harry was kind of an arrogant, self-absorbed jerk. And I thought Sally was a bit of a pushover for putting up with him the whole time. But the movie kept playing their interactions out like it was the perfect love story.

The climatic New Year’s Eve scene is super problematic. On one hand, hello. It’s romantic. It’s witty. It’s a legendary scene that spawned a clichéd horde of copycats. On the other hand, it is Harry listing Sally’s faults, which are now acceptable only because they are man-approved. It is Sally’s final loss of agency, where her completely justified protestations of “I hate you, Harry. I really hate you,” must actually mean “I love you,” because the man who has caused her so much emotional anguish has impulsively decided that he’s romantically in love with her.

It's like the first time you meet a new couple, and they obviously love each other, but something's a bit off. They're joking with you, and you're joking with them, but the guy keeps stepping on his girlfriend's words, or making sarcastic remarks about her judgment or clothes or taste, and she laughs like it's normal. With every remark, you keep waiting for her to pull back, to get mad, but it never happens. Your friends say, "Aren't they such a great couple?" and you realize you're the only one that thinks the scales are unbalanced.

Perhaps most importantly, Harry is absolutely horrible to Sally. He is the worst. He more or less tells Sally that he only had sex with her because she was so pathetic. Throughout the film he doesn’t listen to Sally and is dismissive of her, and when he goes too far he apologizes but doesn’t actually change. When Sally tries to break this cycle, he aggressively invades her space with “cute” phone messages. Even when Sally directly tells him to stop, that she is not his consolation prize, he won’t leave her alone. In a determination bordering on harassment, Harry tracks Sally down on New Years Eve to express the basic sentiment that his feelings are more legitimate than hers.

And sorry, this is supposed to be a love story?

But really, the problem I have isn't that "Harry is a jerk", the problem is "Harry is a jerk but gets to be a hero, Sally is a woman but has to be a prop." It's like she's not an actual person, but an embodiment of Woman Who Needs Love, and Who Will Put Up With Shit. I remember watching this when I was much younger, horrified, secretly thinking, "This is love? This is what love is going to be like? He makes fun of me, he sleeps with me, he leaves me, and when he decides he wants me, I'm complete all of a sudden?"

Though she is a journalist who writes for New York magazine, she is only referred to once as a writer and she never speaks about her articles. Meanwhile, Jess, who writes for the same magazine, constantly mentions his job and talks about his pieces. In fact, it’s a source of great humor (“I’m a writer, I know dialogue, and that was particularly harsh”) and attraction (Marie quoting his line). While Jess is defined by his successful career, Sally is only allowed to be defined by her unsuccessful relationships. Her lack of agency in the film as a whole is mirrored by Harry’s dismissive description of her career choice: “writing about things that happen to other people.”

Eeeesh. I guess it reminds me of experiences I've had with some guys who have a similar movie reel playing in their heads. A few times in my life, a guy has thought that he and I are in a romantic movie, even though we're not seriously involved, or involved at all, just because we banter and joke. To these guys, we've hit all the hallmarks of a rom-com, and therefore romance must be in the offing. These guys get a bit wounded and belligerent when I gently turn them down, but they don't want to listen. They want to be listened to. They tend to talk over me, rather than listening to me. They don't ask how I feel about things. And if things go far enough, the guy can become entitled and aggressive.

And the scariest thing isn't the guy himself - usually they're sweet at heart. But I have a scary, sinking feeling that if I just went along with it, if I played along with the romantic reel, if I didn't push back, if I didn't call them on their BS (the way I expect to be called on mine), if I didn't speak up about what I wanted, if I seemed not to want anything much - they would never notice. They would think everything was fine. And so, they would never really know me at all.

ANYWAY! I don't HATE the movie. But it does get on my nerves a bit. There's actually a really nice paragraph at the end of the article about its redeeming qualities.

"Teenage Girls Haven't Been Living, They've Been Performing" - Metafilter

Metafilter has a better comment section that most websites - as in, the chances of your blood pressure spiking are only 1/3, instead of a guarantee.

This small collection of articles from across the web is about teenage girls, the internet, and the instinct to self-brand. Basically, in this digital day and age, teenage girls have become their own PR companies. They photoshop photos of themselves; they track the number of "likes" on their pictures.

This is tricky. It's hard to talk about, because the easy response is, "...but the girls WANT to go wild! They like it! That's just how teenage girls are - shallow! Look at them, reveling in their power."

...And, maybe. But wouldn't it be great if it wasn't the only kind of power available to a teenage girl? Which means the flip side of that "power" coin is "pressure"...

The crux of the problem for this girl, let's call her Susie, is that she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side, there is the crushing pressure to be sexually desirable. She is aware of this pressure even before she caves to it, and at a much younger age than adults would like to believe. Why do you think we cake make-up on toddlers, sell push-up bras to 9-year-olds, or suggest that tweens get bikini waxes? We are preparing them for what we know is coming. They are smarter than we think and they know these tricks and tips are not for their benefit, but for the benefit of people who look at them.

On the other side, Susie knows that she loses the desirability game if she caves to the desires she has inspired. Though "sexual capital" isn't a phrase she will run across until her gender studies classes 10 years later, Susie intuitively understands that she loses hers if people think she's too accessible... The wiggle room between the rock and the hard place-that sweet spot between being wanted and being respected-is all but non-existent.

From What a Gross Facebook Page Tells Us About a Woman’s Need to Be Desired

"Ending Rape Illiteracy"

Jessica Valenti, of Feministing, in her article for The Nation:

To too many people, “rape” and “rape victim” are not accurate descriptors but political shorthand—the product of an overblown, politically correct interpretation of sex. As Tennessee Senator Douglas Henry said in 2008, “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

If you’re married, you’ve contractually agreed to be available for sex whether or not you want to. If you’re a woman of color, you must be a liar. If you don’t have as much money as your attacker, you’re just looking for a payday. If you’re in college, you shouldn’t want to ruin your poor young rapist’s life. If you’re a sex worker, it wasn’t rape it was just “theft of services.” If you said yes at first but changed your mind, tough luck. If you’ve had sex before, you must say yes to everyone. If you were drinking you should have known better. If you were wearing a short skirt what did you expect?

The definition of who is a rape victim has been whittled down by racism, misogyny, classism and the pervasive wink-wink-nudge-nudge belief that all women really want to be forced anyway. The assumption is that women are, by default, desirous of sex unless they explicitly state otherwise. And women don’t just have to prove that we said no, but that we screamed it.