“I feel boring. I feel like, Why is everything so easy for me? I can’t wait for something crazy to fucking happen to me. Just life. I want someone to fuck me over! Do you know what I mean?” —
Kristen Stewart (via goldenfiddle)
Does anyone remember that episode of friends where Adam Goldberg played Chandler’s crazy roommate, Eddie? And Eddie is slowly getting more and more cartoonishly freakish, and there’s this one moment after he does something totally nuts, and then Eddie leaves, and there’s a beat, and Phoebe says, “Is anyone else really starting to like that guy?” This is how I feel about Kristen Stewart.
Over a year’s worth of work, 192 pages and 64,692 words. Off to the second reader.
This is old - nearly 10 years old! - but I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of research that backs up the hunch that fictional representations of minorities have a positive effect on political positions. This is probably why I should broadly support Glee, even though I find it unwatchable. (In a supportive anecdote, my friend recently said that her tween daughter was discussing with her friend whether any of the members of One Direction were gay, but that this was totally No Big Deal - and this contrasted with her own memories of how her and her friends didn’t want to even consider if members of NKOTB (we’re old) were possibly gay. I have a feeling that shows like Glee have probably had an impact on her daughter’s opinions - or maybe I and my friends have!)
But I also suppose it broadly supports the idea that consuming some (which? who knows!) fiction (both on TV in other forms) can, as practitioners have often suggested, often stand in for the actual experience of interacting with other people. And the benefit of interacting with other people.* While various groups may be socially isolated from one another, whether by economic class or geography or whatever, fiction (once again, broadly speaking to include as many arts as possible - and possibly even our fictional lives on the Internet) allows us a free place to imagine being “other” people or having “other” people in our lives without risking the social disruption actually encountering those other worlds can entail - ie, socially conservative housewives can talk about Glee because of the songs and the fun, and consequently talk about homosexuality, without directly talking about homosexuality and risking the social risk that this would entail in their community.
Of course, it’s a pretty limited political conscience that would stay stuck with fictional forms. Our lives should be socially disrupted, and our politics should, too. So, we can’t stop at the fiction. But having the fiction in our lives is probably doing us good, so we should keep pushing ourselves to have more different other fictions in our life - fictions that include characters who are not us. (The fictions we should be consuming is different from the fiction we should be creating.) This may be obv, but it’s not something I’m always remembering.
*Hence, the consternation - if I’ve read it all correctly - about Girls. For some people of colour, Girls gets so close to their lives but just misses representing it by a sliver - and it’s imagining that other world, that world where Girls blows people’s minds open about these un-represented, amazing lives, that makes Girls sting even as it works. (Just as I wish Glee could be so much more than it is. But maybe this is something I/we will always feel? I dunno.)
(H/T to Langer for the original link, I think.)
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…A photo of me with a “gay biker” spider on my shoulder is one of the top image results.
(Note: do not do this search at work.)
One night, I called Big Jeans, and he was breathing heavy. “I think I’m breaking up with my boyfriend,” he said. “We’ve been dating for twelve years and we can’t stop fighting about every small thing.” I tried to say something, but it was hopeless. I was only seventeen. I didn’t have any reason to believe that what I knew was true. Adults were supposed to know what to do. I made soothing sounds. “I think I need to be with someone,” he said. “Can we meet at Cawthra Park?” If I left the apartment, I wouldn’t be able to get back in until Shiva came back. It was getting colder, but I trusted I would figure something out.
I waited at Cawthra Park, towards the darker back, rubbing my legs with my palms. I waited for twenty-five minutes. I began to feel like an idiot. I looked at the yellow leaves stuck to the concrete benches of the park, and fruitlessly kicked at them. Then Big Jeans’ shadow fell upon me and I looked up at the goateed, smiling face. “I bought some coke,” he said, his words slurring a bit. “Come back to my apartment and we can do it.”
He lived in a cylindrical tower of white brick. The hallways were curved and narrow. Outside of his place, there was a spider plant sprawled across the black-stained carpets. Inside, was a hushed room with brass lanterns, soft brown furniture and over-designed, busy curtains draped along the walls. There was a large white shelf with a blue light shining down on a jumbled mass of plants. Nestled in the plants was a few ragged orchids, and between some rubbery leaves, a cat’s yellow eyes blinked. Big Jeans let me do two lines – we used his old red and white health card to cut the lines – and he made me some peppermint tea, and then, with a CD of Patti Lupone singing “Bring in the Clowns” playing on his stereo, he punched me in the face.
It was a playful punch, but it was still a punch. And then he said, “Let’s wrestle,” and before I could stop him, he had pulled me off the chair and was squashing me onto his scratchy, roughly knotted rug. We didn’t have sex – not that night or any of the nights after – he just wanted to crush me under his bouncery bulk. I had no idea how long it would last. At first, I made moans and gasps as his weight crushed my lungs, and I tried to squirm out of his grip. But when I stopped making sounds, he stopped pushing downward, too. “There,” he said. “That’s it, Champ.”