I really love dogs and cats. I also really love elephants. I saw this really cool video of this pianist named Paul Barton, and he was playing piano for elephants at this elephant sanctuary in Thailand. It was beautiful and I could tell the elephants really loved it. I also really love armadillos. I saw a couple of them during my morning walks trudging across the road with their heavy armored shells. One of them slowly crossed the street to get to the other side, and the other time I saw one he was darting through people’s bushes as I was walking. I guess he wanted to avoid me because he must have suspected I was chasing him, which I wasn’t. I also really, really love bunnies! Every morning on my walk I would see these rabbits sitting on the lawns, quietly eating their grass in peace. When I walked past them, they would run away, probably as a defense mechanism since I am bigger than them and thus could potentially be a predator (then again, I’m a vegetarian, so I wouldn’t eat bunnies anyway.) Every time I was having a crummy morning, I would drive past this abandoned yard, and through the fence I would see a bunny sitting with its ears nestled on the sides of its head, nestled in the grass, quiet as can be, its large black eyes peering at me innocently. Of course, they’re not always great when it comes to people’s gardens because they eat people’s plants. One time I was visiting the garden of this lady who grew these incredibly beautiful iris flowers, and I saw a baby bunny scampering around in the garden. I went “AWWWW HOW CUTE!” and she was (jokingly…but also probably not jokingly) like, “Where’s my shotgun? Those things eat my plants.” There was one time a couple of year ago, I was really depressed at my job and often ate lunch alone in my car, and one day I saw a rabbit eating grass outside of my car window, and I wrote a poem about the bunny and the squirrel that joined it in eating grass. As I wrote the poem, I cried tears of appreciation. I was in a really dark place and seeing this bunny reminded me to have appreciation for those little moments in life that I take for granted.
Category: Uncategorized
Movie Review: My Old Ass
A few weeks ago, I came home from work craving a movie. I hadn’t been to a movie theater since the start of the pandemic, and I was wondering when I would ever feel comfortable enough to go back into a crowded theater. Normally I wait until the movie is streaming and no longer in theaters to watch it, but for some reason I was just really wanting to go to see a movie in the theaters. because I hadn’t gone in a long time and really missed going. Of course, I wanted to be safe and wear an N95 mask to the theater since I assumed it was going to be crowded. I figured I would go by myself, but then I told my parents, and we ended up seeing a film together. It was a huge benefit because we went to the 4:20 showing of this movie called My Old Ass, and the theater wasn’t crowded at all. There were only two other people who showed up for My Old Ass, so we pretty much had the theater to ourselves. I was kind of nervous since my family is still observing COVID-19 protocols, but it worked out fine and we still made sure to wear our face masks.
The minute I walked into the theater, I realized I had forgotten my earplugs, which was a bummer because I forgot how loud the surround sound is in the movie theater. The Gladiator II trailer was playing, and it was LOUD. I had to cover my ears during the trailer. But at the same time, I forgot how happy I was going to a theater to see a movie. It took a few years before I was comfortable enough to go back into a movie theater because I wasn’t sure about the transmission of COVID-19, but again, it was a huge benefit that there was almost no one in the theater except for a few other people. Some other trailers that showed were Conclave, which stars Stanley Tucci and Ralph Fiennes, Wicked with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and A Real Pain which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin (I love comedy-drama movies, so I really want to see it. Also, I love Jesse and Kieran’s acting, and I loved Kieran’s acting in the show Succession. The trailer also looked really good.)
If you haven’t seen My Old Ass, it’s a science-fiction comedy drama starring Canadian actress Maisy Stella as Elliott, an 18-year-old girl who plans to move out of her boring hometown and go to university in Toronto. At the beginning, we see her celebrating her 18th birthday with her friends Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks). They ride a boat on water, with Elliott steering the boat wrong and bumping into stuff most of the time. Elliott gets off the boat and goes into a bakery where this cute girl named Chelsea works, and even though Elliott is nervous to talk to Chelsea, Ruthie and Ro encourage her to do so since Elliott might not see this girl again when she goes to college. Also, it’s her 18th birthday, so hooking up with this cute girl is the best present ever. Meanwhile, Elliott’s parents and two brothers are sitting at the kitchen table while the birthday cake they made for Elliott sits lonely at the center of the table with an 18th birthday candle in the middle. Elliott continues to hang out with her friends, and in the evening, they go on a camping trip and try a mixture of psychedelic mushrooms. Ruthie and Ro start tripping out and dancing around the forest, and Elliott thinks she is tripping out, too, when a 39-year-old version of future Elliott (played by Aubrey Plaza) appears. However, the older version of Elliott (known henceforth by Elliott as My Old Ass) is really there. Elliott has all sorts of questions for My Old Ass, and even asks the hilarious question, “Can I touch My Old Ass? What does it feel like?” However, My Old Ass has gone through some serious life experiences, and she isn’t about to bullshit Elliott about what to do with her life. Elliott thinks that in her 30s, she’ll still be partying and having fun, but My Old Ass looks back with regret at a lot of things she did in her youth, and she’s come back to Elliott in hopes that Elliott will get to change and not make decisions or do things she regrets.
A couple of things My Old Ass tells Elliott to do is 1. to spend more time with her family before she leaves for Toronto and 2. to avoid a guy named Chad. When I first saw the trailer, I didn’t know what to expect. Who was Chad? Was he a bad guy? I came in cold not knowing who Chad was. Elliott promises to obey My Old Ass, and she doesn’t think she will fall in love with anyone else because she successfully asked Chelsea out and they are in a relationship with each other. However, Elliott goes to swim in the lake one day and encounters a young guy named Chad. Chad seems friendly enough, but Elliott remembers that My Old Ass told her to avoid Chad. Elliott tries to dodge Chad, but she can’t seem to avoid him, and she finds herself falling in love with him. Elliott remains conflicted: should she avoid Chad or disobey My Old Ass and have sex with him? Chad is a nice and respectful young man, and honestly, at first, I wondered why My Old Ass told Elliott to not fall in love with him. Was he a cheater? Was he a jerk? These were all questions I asked myself as the film went on. Elliott gradually falls more and more in love with Chad, and even though she is in love at first with Chelsea, she starts hanging out with Chad more often. Elliott also starts to spend more time with her family even though she doesn’t want to at first. Elliott gets a rude awakening when she finds out that her family’s farm is being sold and no one told her about it. Elliott asks her parents and siblings why no one told her, and they tell her that they didn’t think she would care about the farm getting sold because she was always talking about how she wanted to leave her hometown. However, Elliott has many childhood memories of the farm and doesn’t want it to be sold. She starts to confide her problems and worries to Chad, and he listens and supports her. Elliott later tells him that she is bisexual, but Chad accepts her for who she is, and they end up having sex. Elliott tries to contact My Old Ass for a while, but My Old Ass doesn’t reappear much during the middle of the movie. Elliott isn’t able to get ahold of her, but then later on My Old Ass finds out that Elliott had sex with Chad, and she is very upset. Elliott asks her why she didn’t want her to sleep with Chad, but My Old Ass doesn’t want to tell her why. But Elliott persists in knowing what happened to Chad, and finally My Old Ass tells her that she didn’t want Elliott to fall in love with Chad because Chad in the future ended up getting killed in a car crash. My Old Ass is still recovering from the grief of losing Chad, and she doesn’t want 18-year-old Elliott to go through the same thing. Chad is able to see My Old Ass and meets her, and instead of continuing to tell Elliott to avoid Chad so that she wouldn’t risk losing him, My Old Ass tells Elliott to do what she wants and to enjoy her time with Chad because she sees that Elliott is truly happy to be with Chad. By the time the movie was over, I was crying and blowing my nose in several tissuesI think I resonated with this movie so much because I saw myself in Elliott in some ways. I resonated with her wanting to leave her hometown to go to college somewhere else because when I was in high school, I was so determined to leave my hometown and go out of state for college. I thought I was going to be happier leaving the South for the East Coast, and whenever someone at school or at home annoyed me, I just smugly said, “Well, in [x] months, I’ll be out of here!” But during my first year, I realized how hard it was to live so far away from home without the constant presence of my family. I took my parents’ presence for granted, and when I left for college, I cried pretty much every day because I missed them. At the end of the school year, I was so relieved to come back home for the summer because I was going to spend it with my family. I know this sounds corny, but it’s true: you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Also, after reflecting on the movie, I realized that it was teaching me an important lesson: you cannot change the past, but you can focus on the present and the future. Even though future Elliott wanted to change her past, she couldn’t. 18-year-old Elliott was going to make mistakes and do stuff that 39-year-old Elliott was going to regret, and she had to accept that. Even though 39-year-old Elliott told 18-year-old Elliott to avoid Chad, she could not. She wanted to try and shield 18-year-old Elliott from the pain of losing a loved one, but she couldn’t undo what she did in the past or make Chad live forever. She had to let 18-year-old Elliott be 18-year-old Elliott. However, through the course of the movie, 18-year-old Elliott learns that she can’t take her family or the people in her life for granted. As I’ve been reading a lot about life and death in Buddhism, it’s made me appreciate the fact that my parents gave me life. Without my parents, I would not be here, and that’s just a fact that I eventually had to come to. And it’s scary to realize, but the reality is that I want to enjoy being with them now because at some point, like me and everyone else, they will pass away. Going through grief is going to hurt like a motherfucker, but I am going to have to go through it like everyone else, so I want to cherish these people in my life while I have them.
Do I need time?
Yes. I love having time to do things. I even just appreciate that I got to get some exercise in, because I’m trying to take better care of my health. I don’t want to take time for granted anymore, because everything is so fast paced and it’s easy for me to be impatient. This impatience has shown up in so many areas of my life, especially when it comes to making big decisions like whether I should get married and have children or start dating. I was really impatient to get married, and when I didn’t achieve that milestone, I thought something was wrong with me. But I’m honestly glad I have this time to myself to be single because I am getting to know more about who I am and what I want most in life. I tend to want to read books really fast, but now I want myself to appreciate slowing down and reading a book. When I check my phone, I’m always so impatient for people to text me back and when I’m dealing with uncomfortable experiences such as uncertainty and loneliness and anxiety, I tend to self-soothe by picking up my phone and doing random Internet searches, like “am I asexual quiz” or “is there something wrong with me?” or “why does so-and-so hate me?” and scrolling through my YouTube feed, through long videos I want to watch but don’t have the attention-span for. That’s why I’m trying to read a book before bed instead of looking at my phone. It is really tempting for me to go to sleep to ASMR videos, but I think for some reason, I’ve noticed when I check my phone, I tend to get more anxious and start to worry, “Did so-and-so text me back yet?” or “Did Sally (I’m going to put in a fake name for a hypothetical person instead of so-and-so because the latter sounds really vague) think that GIF I sent about Hump Day was funny enough? Should I send a follow-up GIF?” (Side note: I really stink at sending GIFs, so my messages often can come off as robotic and unemotional. I have a phone, and yet I am really bad with texting lingo.) When I read a book, it forces my brain to process information, to think, to understand another perspective that is different from my own, and to get in touch with myself by providing me with that space for self-reflection. I am still chugging through Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and because I’m so used to checking my phone now, I start to get antsy after a few paragraphs. But I also need to realize that I’m not going to perfectly understand everything Dickens is saying right from the get-go. A lot of times I will tell myself, I’d better enjoy this alone time before I get married and have kids, but I’m even wondering if I’m wanting to get married and have kids because all of my friends seem so happy on the outside because they are married with kids. Even if I wind up in a romantic relationship with someone, I still want to pursue my hobbies and interests and still be independent. Maybe this time is great for me because I need space to think about what I really want out of life instead of only thinking about what I should do. When I delve into the world of Dickens’s 19th century London, I encounter characters who are going through far-worse shit than I am. These people are going through poverty, illness and several other problems, while I am out here whining about work and not fitting in with others. My problems seem so petty compared to what the characters in the books I read go through. I really love fiction because I can delve into another person’s world and travel to places without paying for a plane ticket or having to plan for a trip. I do want to travel the world someday, but I am glad for now that I have books to give me that space to escape. I can travel to 19th century London, I can travel on many adventures in America with a British woman who has a shopping addiction (thank you, Sophie Kinsella) and I can travel to a reclusive cabin in 19th century Massachusetts and have a dialogue with Emily Dickinson about life and death through reading her poems.
I’m glad I also had this time to think about what career I wanted to pursue. I still love playing music, but my reasons for continuing it are different because my dreams aren’t as ego-driven as they once were in my early 20s. I wanted to get a prestigious music opportunity to boost my ego, not because I genuinely cared about music, and I remember complaining whenever I had to go to my day jobs, thinking, “Ugh, this isn’t my career! Why am I at this job paying off my student loans?!? I could be playing Don Juan with a top orchestra right now?” But looking back, that ego-driven mindset was the very reason I needed to get a swift kick in the booty from Life to teach me how to be humbler and not think that being a classical cellist made me better than a barista serving venti vanilla sweet cream cold brews at their local Starbucks (I had a really nice customer with that order, and she had it a very specific way. She taught me the value of patience, that’s for darn sure.) Also, I fucking paid off my student loans, which is a pretty huge accomplishment. Even though I didn’t get to play with the professional orchestras, I needed to gain some sort of work experience after college, because 1. I couldn’t afford graduate school, 2. I couldn’t afford to keep lying in bed going down the YouTube rabbit hole and concocting ways to end my jaded cynical 22-year-old life and 3. interest on student loans is a muthafucka and was just going to keep going up until I paid that shit off. I also am glad I had this time through my 20s to do things I love, like writing on this blog and just writing a lot in general. I knew as a kid I wanted to be a writer, but I have always done it as a hobby. After college, I wondered if I should pursue music professionally, and even though it was hard to go through all the rejection, disappointment and other complicated emotional experiences of being a classical musician, I had to build character and become a stronger person. What this whole experience has taught me is that resilience and character take time and patience to build. And also, same with self-confidence. It takes patience and hard work to believe in your capabilities and know the value you can bring to relationships, work and other areas of life. I needed time to also develop spiritual strength through practicing Buddhism. Practicing Buddhism helped me develop a strong foundation for my life, and I am still developing that foundation, but I feel a lot happier with myself and more comfortable being my authentic self. When I was pursuing the music career, I felt I had to be this pretentious person who knew everything, but what I have learned over the years is that, well, you’re human and you’re not going to know everything. You’re just not. And learning that has taken me many years and it’s still a lesson I need to internalize.
But long story short, do I need time? Yes, I still need time to live my life and deepen my relationships with people and do stuff that I love to do before I leave this planet for good and go on to my next lifetime.
Movie Review: Blindspotting
On Monday, I came back from a trip and watched a movie called Blindspotting. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a comedy-drama starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. Honestly, I didn’t read that many reviews about this movie before watching it. I just saw the trailer a couple of years ago and thought it looked pretty good. I also really love Daveed Diggs in Hamilton (the version on Disney +. I still have yet to see the original live Broadway version) and blackish. In Hamilton he plays Thomas Jefferson, and his performance (along with of course Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance as Alexander Hamilton) blew me away. And in the popular TV show Blackish, he played Rainbow Johnson’s brother, Johan. To be honest, I only knew a couple of the actors in the movie, one being Daveed and the other being Utkarsh Ambudkar, who plays a character named Donald in the first Pitch Perfect movie.
The film Blindspotting is an important film to watch because it tackles a lot of uncomfortable subject matter, namely police brutality. At the beginning of the movie, Collin is driving a movers’ truck for his job at night, and he stops when he sees a young Black man running across the street. Collin sees a white police officer yelling at the young Black man to freeze and watches in horror as the officer shoots and kills the young Black man. He looks in horror at the atrocity this officer committed, and the office turns to look at him. Of course, Collin is fearing for his life at this point because he is a Black man living in America, and even though the place he grew up in, Oakland, is predominantly Black, it’s not isolated from the rest of America, which has a long history of racism that is very much still alive. The last scene was pretty powerful, when Collin and Miles go into the empty house to help people move, and they find a picture of the white officer who killed the Black man earlier in the film. Collin goes upstairs and finds the officer in his room, and he gets out his pistol and holds it up to the officer, reciting a freestyle rap about how white American society often views Black men like him (Collin) as threatening and menacing, but that in the moment that Collin saw the officer kill that young Black man that one evening, he realized that the officer was a monster for killing another human being simply because he was Black. It is a really powerful scene, and after Collin recites the spoken word, the officer starts crying and has to reflect on what he did to the young black man. At first, the officer is only focused on not getting shot and killed by Collin, but Collin gets this man to reflect on his actions and realize that the young Black man that the officer killed was a human being just like he was and that he had no right whatsoever to rob another human being of life simply because of the color of his skin.
As a Black person, this scene brought up a lot of feelings for me because I thought about the killing of a Black man named George Floyd in 2020, and how confused, hurt, angry, and hopeless I felt about being Black in America. Like, why are my people getting killed?!? Why?!? I think chanting about my grief really helped because when I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist mantra , I am affirming and reaffirming over and over that my life has inherent dignity, and that no one can take it away from me, no matter how people treat me. After chanting about how I could take action in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remembered how writing, and especially writing poetry, was a medium for me to express myself. When I was going through a dark time in high school, I wrote poetry about my depression and my struggles with self-hatred, and writing helped me get out all the pain I had bottled up and couldn’t communicate with people. I was unsure and lost when trying to process my grief in the wake of the killings of so many Black people in America, so I wrote a poem after reading an article about the murder of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT living in Louisville, Kentucky. After reading the article, I was shaken to my core, especially since I was the same age as Breonna when she was killed. I wrote a poem called “Breonna Taylor is 26” and it was a space for me to honor the inherent dignity of Breonna Taylor’s life and speak out against police brutality. After writing the poem, it made me realize that I could use art not just for my personal enjoyment, but to also speak about issues that I was passionate about.
The movie also makes some subtle commentaries, such as who gets to use the N-word or not. Each day that Collin and Miles go into the office, they are greeted by Val, who is Collin’s ex-girlfriend. Val broke up with Collin after he started a fire outside of a bar, but up until that point, I didn’t know the full story of what went down. There is a scene where a South Asian guy named Rin (who is played by Utkarsh Ambudkar) is going to the office with Tin, a Black friend of his, and when Rin sees Collin walking into the office, he recounts the whole story about how a drunk white guy ordered a scorpion bowl that was on fire, and he took it outside to show everyone. While recounting the story, Rin refers to Collin as the N-word (the version with an “a” at the end. I don’t feel comfortable saying the actual word) and he stops and has to correct himself when Tin reminds him that he can only use the N-word around him. Rin calls Collin a “dude” instead of the N-word. It made me think of the movie Dope, which takes place in Inglewood, California. The main character, Malcolm, is African American, and his two friends, Jib and Diggy, are respectively Latino and Black. In the film, there is a scene in which Malcolm, Jib and Diggy argue with this white guy named Will over whether white people get to say the n-word. Will thinks he should be able to use it, but Diggy slaps him for saying it, and then Jib, who is Latino, says the word. Will asks why Jib can use the word since he doesn’t look Black, and Jib says that he gets to use the word because he found out on an ancestry site that he is 14 percent African. Honestly, I don’t know where I personally stand on the use of the N-word, but I personally don’t like using the word because of its long history as a pejorative term. The debate about who gets to use the N-word or not is a long discourse that has spanned for many years, mostly in debates about cultural appropriation. In Blindspotting, there is a scene in which Collin and Miles go to a party in a gentrified neighborhood of Oakland, and Collin is one of a handful of Black people at the party. Most of the party guests are white, and while the host of the party is white, he tries to act cool by dropping in some African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to communicate with people at the party. Miles is at this party thinking, What is going on?!? Miles is wearing a T-shirt that jokes about killing hipsters, poking fun at the gentrification of Oakland. One of the Black guests at the party thinks that Miles, who is white, is pretending to act Black, not knowing that Miles grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood and was never pretending to be Black. Miles gets angry at the guy and beats him up, and then shoots a gun when the guest tells him to leave. Collin is embarrassed by Miles’s behavior, and he shouts at Miles that because Miles is white, he wasn’t going to get arrested, but because Collin is Black, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot a gun like that without repercussions. It made me think of when, in the fall of 2014, this 12-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun and a white police officer shot and killed him. I remember being in college when I heard about this, and in a class, I was taking on African American history, I and many other students, as well as the professor, were grieving. However, I was studying with a classmate in my Spanish class in our dorm, and she made a comment about Tamir Rice’s murder. She laughed nervously and said something along the lines of “Well, the kid had a gun, so of course he was going to get shot.” I really didn’t know how to feel about what she said and felt pretty confused and frustrated after the conversation. Collin calls Miles the N-word (with an “a” at the end, not a hard “r” version) and asks Miles angrily why he let Collin call him that epithet, but Miles never called him the N-word. Miles gets exasperated and tells Collin “Fuck you,” and refuses to call Collin the N-word even after Collin goads him into saying it. When Ashley, Miles’s partner, bandages up Miles after the fight, she says that Collin and Miles were acting like [N words] and Miles asks her to stop calling him the N-word because he realizes that even though he grew up in a low-income Black neighborhood for his entire life, he is still white and can get away with a lot of the things that his Black friend, Collin, can’t do, like keeping a gun on himself for protection.
There is a pretty intense scene in which Sean, who is Ashley and Miles’s son, finds Miles’s handgun and plays around with it out of curiosity. Ashley, Miles and Collin are afraid that Sean is going to accidentally shoot himself, and after they take the gun from Sean, Ashley yells at Miles and Collin to leave her house because of the harm they put Sean in by keeping a handgun around the house. Even though Miles thought he was using it to protect his family from crime, he didn’t realize that his son could find the gun. It made me think of this commercial I saw about gun safety that the Ad Council did as part of their End Family Fire campaign. The campaign launched in order to encourage safe gun storage and prevent “family fire,” which, according to the Ad Council, is defined as “a shooting caused by someone having access to a gun from the home when they shouldn’t have it.” Honestly, the ads are all pretty terrifying, but that’s because the misuse of firearms by family members is a terrifying reality. One ad that stuck with me was one in which a little boy asks his father if he can play with the firearm that he found in their household, and the father thinks his son is joking about wanting to play with the firearm. It shows the little boy sneaking into his dad’s drawer and finding his firearm, and then the next shot shows that the boy is no longer there, and the father is reflecting on what could have gone differently if he had locked up the gun so that his son wouldn’t find it. It was a pretty chilling ad, and it gave me nightmares, but honestly, I needed to know about this issue because I didn’t really know much about gun safety before. I think that’s why the scene in Blindspotting with Sean handling Miles’s handgun out of curiosity was such a chilling and painful scene because it showed that even though Miles got the gun for protection, no one probably told him that his child could potentially get his hands on it even if Miles thought that he kept the handgun in a place where his son couldn’t find it. His partner, Ashley, didn’t even know that Miles had a handgun, so when she finds Sean seated on the floor, playing with the gun, it is heartbreaking and makes Ashley feel that Miles betrayed her trust because she wasn’t honest with him about having a gun around the house.
Even though Blindspotting is a serious drama, it also has some tender lighthearted moments. There is a hilarious scene in which Miles, who is white, tries to sell a bunch of flatirons to a Black hair salon owner. He does so in a very convincing and hilarious way and speaks about the flatirons in a free verse spoken word form. I love the look that Miles gives the hairdresser when she tells him that she won’t take the flatirons off his hands unless she knows the price he is selling them for. I don’t know how to describe the look he gives her, it’s just that he seems so determined to convince this woman how good quality these flatirons are, like he’s saying to her “Oh woman, it is ON. Bring it.” He continues to rap about how incredible the flatirons are (he got them from Collin’s mom, Nancy) and he is trying to sell them for money so he can send his son, Sean, to a better school and so that he can get his friend, Collin, out of probation. The whole scene is funny because this Black female hairdresser isn’t expecting this white guy to come up in her shop and talk to her about flatirons with such boldness, so Miles coming up and so confidently trying to sell her curling irons in front of a bunch of Black women getting their hair done. He literally gets on a soapbox to freestyle about flatirons and natural hair, and I was ALL FOR IT.
Weird Dreams part 2
October 17, 2024: had a crazy dream that I was sitting at a table with this girl named Maddison Hansen and another blonde girl from high school, and we were talking about our shoe sizes. I told them I was a size 12 in shoe size, and they were like “Oh my gosh. That’s huge.” (In real life, when I was in college one time, I told this one girl I wore a size 9 in boots, and she just exclaimed, “Oh my.” I am short so having big feet is an interesting quirk of mine. Like one of my math teachers from middle school said about this one other short girl in the class who had big feet: “You’re a mighty mouse that has big feet.”) Somehow the table Maddison, the other girl from high school and I sat at was on astroturf/ fake grass and it sloped to where if I moved back so much as an inch, I could fall backward and fall off this little hill. I joked with the girls that I act my shoe size and not my age (I think this is because I was listening to “Kiss” by the artist Prince, and there is one lyric where he says, “Act your age, mama/ Not your shoe size/ Then maybe we can do the twirl.” Also, in sixth grade there was this one time where a guy named Tony got called out in class for goofing off, and our social studies teacher asked him, “Sir, what is your shoe size?” And he replied, “It’s six.” The teacher then told him, in front of the class, “Act your age and not your shoe size.” The whole class looked at each other and was like, “Man, that was COLD.”) I was also at this boarding school and my dad had me pack some black pepper in a little baggie and I tried to hide it from our teacher (she looked like Janelle Monae) and the teacher saw me keep the bag of pepper under the desk and asked, “What are you hiding?” in a snotty sort of high-pitched voice, and I sheepishly showed her the black pepper.
“You know you couldn’t take that with you on the plane,” she said. “Why did you bring it?”
“Ummmm…I wanted to put it on my food?”
“Oh, do you know the menu for the week?” she snobbishly asked.
“Ummmm..” I tried to remember what was on the menu, but I couldn’t.
“So, you don’t remember what was on the menu?” she huffed. She continued to condescend to me.
Before she could patronize me any further, I woke up and shrieked, “Argh, no!”
Before that I was talking with these two girls (one of them was a girl named Hannah who was in my English class during senior year of high school) and one of the girls looked like Jojo Siwa (just her face and blonde hair) and we were going to miss each other, so we sang some songs together. I think they were leaving school.
Daily prompt
Something most people don’t know about me is that I am asexual. It’s also timely that I’m publishing this because it’s Asexual Awareness Week from October 20-26th this year. An asexual person is someone who experiences little to no sexual attraction. In high school, I didn’t really know much about asexuality. I didn’t know about it really until the summer before entering college. I took a pre-college seminar on Western classics at a local university, and one evening, in my dorm, I was talking with these two other participants (I will name them Morgan and Jade to protect their privacy) and Jade said she was asexual. She said that she had told a guy at her high school about being asexual and he made fun of her and joked that she was a plant.
“I can kind of relate,” I said. “Guys ask me out on dates and I just wouldn’t be interested.”
“You would be aromantic,” Morgan and Jade told me.
I didn’t think much about it after that. Honestly, I didn’t even think my asexuality was an issue. I walked around the world thinking it was perfectly normal to not want sex or think about sex. In ninth grade I joined my high school’s GSA club (back then, we called it Gay-Straight Alliance, but I did more research and found out that it’s actually called Gender & Sexuality Alliance. Which I think is better because it’s much more inclusive) and I didn’t think I was doing anything out of the ordinary. I just really loved being part of GSA. The people around me were dating and talking about sex, but it just totally went over my head. I assumed I just wasn’t ready yet or was just a late bloomer, but then I got to college, and I still didn’t experience this intrinsic desire to have sex with anyone. In my freshman year of college, I found out that a student ran an asexuality awareness club on campus, and I was pretty interested (this was before I started realizing I was probably asexual) but I didn’t think much of it. Then I went to someone’s dorm room and saw a flag hanging on her wall. It had four stripes: one purple, one black, one grey and the other white. I asked her about it because I only knew about the rainbow LGBT flag.
“Oh, yeah, I’m asexual.”
“What does ‘asexual’ mean?”
“An asexual is someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction,” she told me.
We ended up talking more about it. And then the next year, I started to wonder if I was really just default straight or if I was another orientation altogether. In high school, I assumed I was straight, then I thought, Wait I care a lot about the LGBT community and get offended when people make homophobic comments. Maybe I’m not straight. Maybe I’m bisexual. Of course, knowing what I know now, there are plenty of straight people who are allies of the LGBTQ+ community. In my sophomore year of college, I started learning about asexuality and in the fall of 2013, I found a site called AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network.) However, back then I didn’t know a lot of other asexual people of color other than some bloggers on the Internet and on the AVEN forum. And then I went to my first Asexuality Awareness club meeting in my junior year of college (2015) and because I was so hyperaware of my Blackness, I wondered, Wait, do I belong in the asexual community? Can I be Black and asexual? I had really terrible low self-esteem already, so dealing with this internal conflict, wrestling with my asexuality and Blackness, made me feel pretty awful about myself. I also didn’t know any asexual people in the faith community I was in, so again, I thought, Maybe I’m default straight again. Then I listened to a podcast I really love, and the person being interviewed mentioned she is asexual, and I thought, Wow, I’m not alone. I went to a Buddhist conference for members of the LGBTQIA+ community and allies, and after chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo a lot I realized that I could fully embrace myself as I was. I could be my authentic self. I didn’t have to change my sexual orientation for someone else. I could fully embrace being ace. Recently, I started reading a book by Angela Chen called Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Even though I couldn’t relate to every single ace person’s experience in the book, especially since I’ve never had sex, I found it really affirming because there still isn’t a ton of information about asexuality. These past few weeks I’ve been scrounging the Internet, looking for someone to bestow upon me the asexuality label, to tell me whether I deserved to call myself asexual or not. However, after seeing therapy and doing a lot of self-reflection and my own research, I’m learning that it’s ok for me to be ace, and if I choose another sexual orientation down the line or have sex at some point, it doesn’t invalidate my experiences as an asexual person. Honestly, it’s still a journey of accepting myself, but I’m going to still work through this journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance in the best way I can.
And with that, I’m going to eat some hypothetical cake since I don’t have any slices at the moment in my fridge. I did have some vegan cake last week, though, and it was DELISH.
Movie Review: Fancy Dance
Last week, I finished a movie called Fancy Dance. I really loved the Indigenous actress, Lily Gladstone, in the film Killers of the Flower Moon, so when I saw the trailer for this movie, which you can find on Apple TV, I was so excited. In Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily plays a woman named Mollie Burkhart, who in real life was married to a white man named Ernest Burkhart. Ernest and his uncle plotted the murders of several wealthy Indigenous people who live in Osage County in Oklahoma. Ernest is a chauffeur for Mollie, and he falls in love with her. They marry and have a child together. But Mollie finds out that members of her family and members of the Osage Nation are being murdered at alarming rates in the most gruesome disturbing ways, and Ernest also poisons her under the guise that she needs insulin shots for her diabetes. I had to pause the film a few times because I didn’t know about the Osage Murders and hadn’t read the book Killers of the Flower Moon beforehand, so the film was really harrowing to watch, and each time I saw an Indigenous person get brutally murdered in the film, I would start crying. I finally was able to finish the film, but it stuck with me for a very long time, and thinking about the movie still gives me goosebumps, as it was intended to do because watching intergenerational racial trauma on screen depicted in the most realistic way is never easy to stomach, especially if your high school history textbooks never went into depth about this dark part of American history.
On Tuesday of last week, it was Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and I wanted to watch a movie that had Indigenous actors in it. Even though Killers of the Flower Moon blew me away, I don’t have the stomach to watch it again unfortunately, so that’s why I was really glad to have heard about Fancy Dance. The trailer was amazing, and thankfully I was able to watch it on Apple TV. Honestly, after watching the movie, it reminds me that we need more Indigenous voices in Hollywood. Lily Gladstone is going to pave the way for many more Indigenous actors and actresses to produce and star in movies where Indigenous people’s experiences are represented authentically and accurately. I haven’t seen a lot of movies with representation of LGBTQ+ Indigenous people, so it was actually really cool that Jax (Lily Gladstone’s character) was able to be her queer self in Fancy Dance. There is a scene where she goes to a strip club and meets with one of the strippers who works there named Sapphire, and Sapphire and her make love with each other. Lily Gladstone in real life identifies as queer and goes by she/ they pronouns. She explained in an article on Salon that in a lot of Native languages they don’t have gendered pronouns, and while growing up on a Blackfeet reservation people were more accepting of gender fluidity than outside of the community. I don’t know a lot about the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people of Indigenous tribes, but as someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community and loves anything LGBTQIA+, reading this article about Lily’s pronouns was very affirming. Growing up, I didn’t know a lot of other queer people of color until I got to college, and I also didn’t know much about the LGBTQIA+ terminology and diverse sexual orientations and genders until I got to college, which was, for the most part, an affirming environment for LGBTQIA+ people (I only say “most part” because I only know my own experience. I can’t speak for the experiences of other queer students of color who attended the college.)
It was an incredible film, and Lily Gladstone was also one of the producers of the film. She plays the protagonist in the movie, named Jax. Jax is searching for her missing sister, Tawi, and because her sister is missing, Jax is letting her niece, Roki, stay with her until they find Tawi. Roki wants to participate in the upcoming powwow to honor her mother, who participated in the powwow. However, child protective services barges into Jax’s house and takes Roki away because Tawi is gone and did drugs when Roki was staying with her, and they don’t think Jax is a suitable guardian for Roki. Roki ends up staying with her grandfather, Frank, and her step-grandmother, and she doesn’t enjoy it. One night at dinner, Jax asks if she can take Roki to the powwow in Oklahoma City, but Frank and his wife don’t want her to do that because they don’t want to get in trouble with child protective services. However, Jax sneaks out and has Roki come with her so they can travel to the powwow together. JJ, who is Jax’s brother, is trying to help Jax find her missing sister, but Frank and his wife have issued a search warrant to find Roki. When Roki goes into a gas station to get some snacks, she sees on the TV screen her and Jax’s face, and the reporters accusing Jax of kidnapping Roki. Roki and Jax continue to travel to the powwow, doing their best to stay undercover.
I think one of the most painful scenes of the film was when Roki overhears Jax telling JJ that Roki’s mom isn’t going to be at the powwow. Roki thinks that her mother is going to be at the powwow, but JJ ends up searching for Tawi and one evening finds Tawi’s corpse in a lake. While they are traveling to the powwow, Roki stops to go into the gas station, and the cashier recognizes her from the photos on the TV showing Roki and Jax. Earlier in the movie, Roki takes a lady’s purse, which has a gun in it, and in the scene where the cashier recognizes her and is about to call the cops, she aims the gun at the cashier, threatening to shoot him if he calls the police on her and Jax. Jax is outside, wondering why Roki is taking so long, when suddenly she hears a loud gunshot from inside the gas station store. She rushes into the store and finds Roki holding the shotgun and shaking with the impact after she fired the gun, and the cashier face down in a pool of blood. Jax calls 911 to send the paramedics over (Roki had shot the man in the shoulder) and Jax and Roki both run through the cornfields to escape the police. When Jax tells Roki to come with her, Roki stays behind. When Jax asks her why she doesn’t want to come with her, Roki tells her that she overheard Jax telling JJ that Tawi (Roki’s mom) wasn’t going to be at the powwow, and it really hurt that Jax lied to her because up until then, Roki placed all of her trust in Jax. Now that she knows the truth, she feels she cannot trust Jax anymore and runs away towards the oncoming police sirens.
There are some rare moments of shared tender joy between Roki and Jax in the film. Roki gets her first period (she calls it her first moon) and not having any menstrual products, Jax cuts up one of the diapers in the lady’s bag and has Roki use it as a sanitary pad. They celebrate by going to a diner, and Jax lets Roki order whatever she wants. Roki orders strawberry pancakes, crepes, waffles and other breakfast dishes, and enjoys them. When Roki and Jax are leaving, a cop interrogates them about their whereabouts and has Roki come into his police car to ask her a few questions. I seriously thought that they were going to get caught, but Roki gives an anonymous name, and the police looks her up in the system and says that Roki and Jax are cleared and can go. While they are driving, Roki admits to Jax that her menstrual blood accidentally stained the seat of the policeman’s car, and they both laugh about it.
**This is a total digression, but I remember when I got my period at 13; I wasn’t super excited. Instead, I was pretty moody. I don’t even know how I could have vegan chocolate cake on my period that day, because normally if I eat desserts or consume sugar on my period, I get terrible menstrual cramps. It’s a bummer but until I go see a gynecologist about any underlying causes of period pain, I need to be mindful of how much sugar I eat on my period. I often take it for granted that I have a period now that I’m much older, but after reflecting on the scene where Roki gets her period, I remember how significant my first period was, not just for me but for my family. I was becoming a young woman, and my body was going through these new changes. I wasn’t just throwing up when I got the flu. I was throwing up whenever I was on my period because my cramps were so bad, and I would often need to miss school, work or my SGI Buddhist activities because I was in such terrible pain. I remember when I watched this ad from Hello Flo, and this teen girl is jealous because all her friends were getting their periods and she hadn’t yet. The girl puts ruby-red nail polish on a sanitary pad and shows it to her friends to prove she got her period. The mom finds the pad and even though she knows that the daughter is lying about being on her period, she plays along with it and tells the daughter she is throwing her a “first moon party” that celebrates her first period. The daughter is embarrassed when her grandpa and other people start to arrive to the first moon party, and the mom invents games for people like “Pin the Pad on the Period” and has period themed foods, like a period-red fondue fountain where people can dip their marshmallows in period-red fondue. The daughter tells her mom to stop it, but the mom shows her daughter that she got her a period starter kit and lets her daughter know that she knew about her putting nail polish on the sanitary pad. It’s a cute commercial, and it actually made me appreciate having a period. Even though it’s not fun and it’s painful, as I learn more about periods and reproductive health, I think it’s pretty cool that my body has this interesting function. Whether I’m going to have babies or not, I don’t know, but I’m just going to let my body do its thing for the time being until I hit menopause. **
My Weird Dream, part 1
A few days ago: my mom, dad and I were supposed to have a dentist appointment, but I was trying to help Thomas Barrow from Downton Abbey find a bottle of white wine for an upcoming event (if you haven’t seen Downton Abbey, Thomas Barrow is one of the characters in the show who works on the staff at the estate. He is played by an actor named Robert James-Collier.) I said I would help Thomas, and we went up different floors to find the wine. I hadn’t told my dad I was helping Thomas Barrow find the wine. Finally, Thomas found a bottle of wine after we searched for it for a long time.
“Thank goodness,” I said. “Wait, where did you find the wine?”
“The wine cellar is on floor 2 in room 1,” he said.
“Thank you! Can we stay in touch?”
“Sure!”
I wrote my name down on a napkin, but it was barely legible, so I wrote it down with a pen. After thinking about the dream, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to stay in touch with Thomas Barrow or with the actor who played him. I think in the dream, I wanted to stay in touch with Thomas Barrow.
Then my mom, dad and I got to the dentist’s office, and we were waiting for the dentist to arrive, but I had time to kill, and I promised a friend I would come to they’s baby shower (I use the pronouns they because the friend in my dream uses “they/ them” pronouns.) When I arrived, the baby shower was a small gathering with three or so of they’s friends, and they were far along in their pregnancy. Their friends were touching their belly because the fetus was kicking a lot, and so I got super excited.
“Ooh, can I feel it kicking, too?!?” I squealed.
“Yeah!” the friend said, letting me touch they’s belly. I placed a hand on they’s belly, and the fetus was kicking like crazy, and I went, “Oh my gosh, that is so cool.” The shower was in an empty art classroom, and my dad was parked outside. I told the friend I had to leave because I had a dentist appointment, and they understood, so I hugged they and left.
Then I was in a college dorm with some friends, and the actor Elliot Page was in the dorm. I wanted to stay in touch with him, so we exchanged numbers.
“I really love your memoir, Pageboy!” I gushed.
“Thank you,” Elliot said, giving me a bashful look.
“Stay in touch!” we told each other, and we said our good-byes.
Then in my dorm room, I found these two creepy-looking Chucky dolls (I haven’t seen the movies, and I don’t plan too because as a kid I often got scared every time I encountered a Chucky poster at Blockbuster or at the movie theater. They still scare the living shit out of me. I was at the library, and I saw some DVD copies of the recent Child’s Play remake, and it gave me the shivers because it looked really creepy. No offense to any fans of Child’s Play out there.) I really didn’t want to keep them, so I asked my parents if I could give them away.
“No! You have to sell them on eBay so you can make some money.” (*in real life, I told my parents about the dream, and they told me they would have never made me even go near Chucky and told me that they don’t even like that Chucky stuff because it’s scary.)
“I know a girl who would want them, though.”
I had gone up to the next floor because there was a bleach blonde girl who was really into horror movies and heavy metal and alternative music, and I know she would have loved the Chucky dolls. But my parents told me I needed to make money from selling the dolls, so I kept them in my closet and turned them face-down so that I wouldn’t have to look at them. Then there was apparently a fire in one of the dorms, and so my mom had me check on one of my dorm neighbors to see if she was okay. She was an older woman, and when I asked her if she was ok, she said she was fine. My parents also told me they were going to get vegan ice cream from this ice cream store called Van Leeuwen, but because I was too busy, they went without me. I was pretty sad and felt bad for being too busy. (Side note: if you haven’t tried Van Leeuwen’s vegan ice cream, it is PURE DELICIOUSNESS.)
Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine
When I was 13, I took a spring break trip to Washington, D.C. for a extracurricular program. While eating lunch with these two boys, I heard them talking about this movie called Little Miss Sunshine. I hadn’t seen the movie, and frankly my parents weren’t going to take me, a 12-year-old, to see any R-rated movies anytime soon (then again, I’m sure there were plenty of 12-year-olds watching R-rated movies at the school I went to.) But I decided to rent it from the library because I had always been curious about it. The late Alan Arkin, who plays one of the characters in Little Miss Sunshine, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the movie. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect from the movie since I only saw the trailer a while ago, but it was really good. It also has Paul Dano in it, and Paul is one of my favorite actors. He plays a character in Little Miss Sunshine named Dwayne, who has jet-black hair and has taken a vow of silence until he is admitted into pilot school. He loves philosophy and reads works by a philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche. He also is very cynical in his outlook on life and hates being around his family (although he does love his little sister, Olive, who is played by Abigail Breslin). Olive is a spunky girl who wants to participate in a beauty pageant for Little Miss Sunshine. However, her dad is a super-ambitious guy with really high standards who can’t tolerate failure, so he tells her that they will only take her to the pageant if she is positive that she will win the pageant. Her dad, Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker trying to promote this class about becoming successful, yet the irony is that he is not successful in getting the class to sell well and he falls short of his expectations. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is just doing her best to keep the family together while also making sure that her brother, Frank (Steve Carrell) doesn’t try to commit suicide again after a serious attempt on his life. Frank is gay and a scholar of the French author Marcel Proust, and he attempted suicide because his ex-boyfriend fell in love with someone else who was also a scholar of Proust, and this left Frank feeling like shit. I kind of resonated with what Frank went through because I fell in love with someone who was in a relationship with someone else, and when this person got engaged, I felt my life had no meaning left, so I had to really rebuild my self-esteem after experiencing that painful heartbreak over not being with someone who I thought I really loved.
The family also lives with their foul-mouthed grandfather, Erwin (Alan Arkin), who got evicted from a retirement home after snorting heroin. When I was sitting with those two boys (one of them was named Seth and he was from New Mexico) and they were laughing about the grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, at first, I had no idea what the fuck they were talking about, but then after watching the movie, I was like, “Ohhhh I can see why people really loved the grandfather’s part (and why Alan Arkin won an Oscar for his role).” The grandfather says what he wants and does what he wants and doesn’t care about the consequences. He encourages Olive to enter the pageant because he sees it’s something she really wants to do, and unlike Olive’s dad, he doesn’t care whether she wins or loses, he just wants her to try and have fun, so he prepares her for the pageant. He is pretty homophobic, though, and constantly makes digs at Frank’s sexuality. Edwin also loves reading pornographic magazines, and has Frank go into a convenience store to get pornographic magazines.
One key theme of the movie is failure and being true to oneself. Early on in the movie, there is a scene in which Olive and her family go to a diner on the way to the beauty pageant, and Olive orders ice cream and is super excited to have the ice cream. But her dad explains to her that ice cream will make her gain weight and that if she were a true winner, she would work on losing weight. I was pretty hurt when he made this comment about her, especially since she’s a young girl and is forming her self-image. But I love the part when Olive’s ice cream arrives, and Edwin, Frank and Dwayne joke that if Olive won’t eat the ice cream, they will, and as they start eating the ice cream, Edwin looks at Olive as if to say, Ignore your dad. Eat your ice cream. Finally, Olive can’t take it anymore, and she tells them to not eat all of it. She finally eats her ice cream with delight, and her dad looks disappointed and frustrated that Olive didn’t want to do as he said. I also really love the scene when Edwin (Olive’s grandfather) is helping Olive with her dance routine, and she admits to him that she is worried about winning the pageant and whether she is pretty enough. Edwin tells her to just focus on doing her best, and that the worst she can do is not try. I really like this message because from the limited knowledge I have about children’s beauty pageants, it seems like parents can put a lot of pressure on young girls to fit a certain weight and image. Little Miss Sunshine came out in 2006, waaaay before Instagram and TikTok were around, so I can’t imagine how Olive would feel about herself if she was on social media. I read this book a long time ago called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and in the book, he talks about the impacts of social media and excessive phone use on girls’ mental health and self-esteem. There is one part in the book where he shares a story about an 11-year-old girl who saw all her peers getting Instagram, and even though she was under the minimum age to sign up for an account, she did so anyway, and as she continued to use the site, Instagram’s algorithm bombarded her with all these images of thin women and misleading information about these unhealthy diets, and she began to feel really terrible about herself and her body. Haidt reprinted a drawing she did of her being on her phone and word bubbles with all these nasty things she said about herself and had people say to her encircling her. The girl in the picture is crying as she is absorbing all of these harmful messages that tell her she is ugly, fat, and worthless. I think that’s why I appreciate watching Little Miss Sunshine because the movie shows how, even though Olive struggled with her self-confidence after seeing the other girls perform at the pageant, she ended up doing her own thing and staying true to herself.
The talent show scene was the best part of the movie because there is a pivotal moment where Frank and Dwayne tell Sheryl that Olive shouldn’t go onstage to do her act because everyone will laugh at her, and they don’t want Olive to feel bad about herself. When he first arrives at the competition, Dwayne sees the young contestants walk by with their makeup and dresses and he and Frank have to leave to get some fresh air because they think that the pageant is fake and superficial. Sheryl, however, says that they need to let Olive be herself while on stage, especially because her grandfather, who died on the way to the pageant, would have wanted Olive to have fun and do her best rather than drop out at the last minute because she was worried about not winning. When she gets on stage, Olive dances to “Super Freak,” by Rick James, which unnerves the audience. Parents start to leave the auditorium, offended by Olive’s dance routine, which involves a lot of gyrating (I’m pretty sure her grandfather made up the routine) and the lady who runs the pageant tries to kick Olive off the stage, but then Olive’s dad joins her on stage, and then Dwayne, Frank and Sheryl join her in dancing, too. Most of the audience members leave because they are taken aback, but I found it kind of ironic that they found her performance too suggestive because for most of the pageant, these adults are having these little girls wear suggestive costumes and put on a lot of makeup so that they look older than they are. I honestly wonder if the girls who competed against Olive actually had healthy self-esteem, because it’s not easy to be yourself when it seems everyone else around you act more confident than they actually are. I know as a young girl I would often compare myself to my peers and it really took a hit to my self-worth. I think that’s why chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist mantra I chant every day) helped me when I was growing up because instead of comparing myself too much to my peers, I needed to build confidence from within myself. Even as a 30-year-old I still struggle with self-confidence, but I am getting better at recognizing when I struggle with self-doubt or imposter syndrome.
Movie Review: Poor Things
Disclaimer: This film has strong graphic sexual content and gory scenes, and I describe them in great detail in this post.
A few weeks ago, I decided to watch the movie Poor Things. My mom had checked it out at the library, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to sit through it due to the explicit content. I don’t watch a lot of movies with sex scenes, to be honest, and I am squeamish about gore, and the film’s MPAA rating is R for gore, disturbing images and graphic nudity. But when the trailer was released last year, I was pretty excited. I really like the other films from director Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed films like The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite. His most recent one is Kinds of Kindness, but I haven’t seen that one yet. I went ahead and watched the movie because I was curious what all the buzz was about. Also, I read an article that said Emily Stone (I read a few months ago that she prefers to go by her birth name, Emily, instead of Emma) had to actually eat a bunch of custard tarts for her role in the film, because her character, Bella Baxter, eats a bunch of pastries and gets sick afterwards. In reality, Emily really did feel sick after eating all those pastries. I’m sure I would, too. Even if they gave me vegan custard tarts, I would still only eat a couple. Eating too much sugar causes inflammation in my eyes, so I can’t eat a lot of sugar unfortunately. I thought I had to close my eyes during the scene where Bella vomits because I have emetophobia, a fear of vomiting, so I don’t watch a lot of movies with vomit scenes. But it wasn’t that bad, to be honest, and I knew the scene was coming because I had read for any triggers on DoestheDogDie.com.
The parts that freaked me out the most were the scenes where Dr. Godwin Baxter had to perform surgeries. I am squeamish about blood, even though I work in a field where I have to read about (oftentimes) horrific car accidents and look at (sometimes) graphic photos of people’s injuries. But what I think helped me was knowing that these people were actors and that these were all props that looked very realistic. I couldn’t watch the scene where Bella stabs that one corpse’s eyes, though. Bella has a really interesting view on life. Honestly, she made me think a little about Eve from the movie Life Size. Totally different story lines (and wayyyy different MPAA ratings) but like Eve, Bella is navigating life as a human being who has to start from scratch. Eve is a doll who turns into a human after a girl, trying to bring her mom back to life, ends up bringing the doll to life instead of her mom. Eve goes out into the world thinking everything is so bright and colorful, but she also sees the less joyful parts of human life, like people tossing garbage on the street, a lady wearing a real fur coat who gets offended when Eve tells her that “she should love animals and not wear them” and negative grumpy coworkers. In Poor Things, there is one scene where Bella is on a ship, and they pass through a place where people are living in poverty and people are dying. Bella cries and tells a fellow passenger, Harry, that they need to go and save those people. Harry is indifferent to the people’s suffering, however, and tells her that there’s no point in helping them. Bella decides to take Duncan’s money and gives it to a couple of crew members on the ship so they can give it to the people who are suffering, but of course, the crew members are lying when they promise to give the money to the poor. They’re like, “Oh, wow, this girl just gave us money! We can spend it however we want! Forget those poor suffering people!” It upsets Duncan when he finds out and he erupts in a rage, with Bella crying and not understanding why he is so upset.
The scene where Bella learns to masturbate reminded me of The Color Purple. In my sophomore year of college, we read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and there is a scene where a character named Celie, who is a survivor of sexual abuse, meets a woman named Shug Avery. Shug is confident in her sexuality, and she teaches Celie how to masturbate. Bella explores her own body and discovers that she can give herself sexual pleasure, and to be perfectly honest it’s something I really resonated with. I’m going to get rather personal here (and if you think it’s gross, honestly, it’s okay. It is pretty uncomfortable and gross.) I enjoyed masturbation many times in my 20s. In college, I was really struggling with depression and exploring my sexuality felt like freedom, it felt like independence. I was also navigating my asexuality at the time and learning how to embrace not feeling sexual attraction to people. I discovered that my body was MAD powerful, and I literally began to love myself. However, when I read The Color Purple and read about Celie masturbating, I felt uncomfortable, probably because masturbation is an uncomfortable topic for many folks to bring up. When I watched Poor Things, I found myself again tensing up when I saw Bella masturbating, but I guess it’s because there is so much taboo and stigma around talking about or showing people masturbating on cinema. I don’t see a lot of people doing themselves onscreen, I mostly see partnered sex in movie sex scenes. In Poor Things, after Bella gives away Duncan’s gambling money to the crew members on the ship, she and Duncan end up penniless, and when they get to Paris, Bella meets a lady who owns a brothel and invites her to become a sex worker to make money. I admit, the scenes where Bella does sex work made me pretty uncomfortable, especially because the scenes show little to no emotion. The scenes where Bella has to have sex with her clients caused quite a bit of controversy because Bella has the brain of a baby, so she can’t technically provide consent even though she has the body of an adult. I haven’t read enough about the controversy to talk about it, but I thought it was an interesting thing to notice about the movie. Bella ends up making a lot of money from doing sex work, but Duncan wants her to stop because it’s ruining their relationship, and he wants control of her. But Bella is starting to realize her autonomy and that she doesn’t need to depend on Duncan for everything anymore.
There is another scene that stuck with me, and that was the scene where Bella is reading a book on the deck of the ship, and Duncan throws the book overboard. Duncan is very controlling and doesn’t want Bella to learn how to read because he wants her to still remain a naive child who doesn’t know anything other than how to adhere to these rigid norms that society expected for women to follow. Duncan throws the book overboard, but the old lady that Bella befriended on the ship gives her another book to read. Duncan is furious that the lady did this, and he throws that book overboard. If I was in Bella’s position, I would have thrown a fit if Duncan threw my book overboard. I would be upset because what else am I going to do on a ship to pass the time? I love reading and it keeps me entertained and also helps me with my critical thinking skills and writing, so I would be really sad if I was sitting on that lounge chair and Duncan was getting all angry with me about reading a book.
I’m fading and getting tired, but I will write more tomorrow. I’m still marinating some of my thoughts about the movie.
The Arts Are Life 