What you define as attractive

I'm just going to come out and say that I love a guy in drag.

I don't know if it started with Tim Curry, or if there was some other beginning to my fascination with transvestites, but I do know that when I see Eddie Izzard strutting his stuff, I love it. Those sky-high heels, the skirts and leggings. So sexy.

I also appreciate the androgyny of people like David Bowie and Annie Lennox, though I don't quite find it as appealing as Bowie in full on Jareth clothes.

Bowie has never really shied away from the use of makeup, though, and I think that's one of his appeals. He's also pretty gorgeous. So is Eddie.

I was sad when Eddie started wearing menswear more often. I mean, I'm glad for him that he continues to wear what he likes when he likes it, and he doesn't care what anyone says, but his blue eyes just cry out for liner and mascara, and why shouldn't he obey that call?

I'm not really into the whole RuPaul Drag Race, though. I think that what those people do is incredible, and that having men live out loud in their preferred choice of clothing is helping other men turn to their own predilections, and that's a wonderful thing.

I am, however, a straight woman, and when it comes to romantic entanglements, I like straight men. Straight men who aren't afraid to wear women's underwear under their trousers. I envision a relationship where my guy and I go lingerie shopping together, for each other.

I don't know why I am this way. I mean, assuming that this way isn't normal, although it must be...I don't see how it's not normal. Clothes are clothes, and for some reason, most clothes have gender associated with them. Women wear frills and soft lines. Men wear military cuts. It's the way of the world.

Yeah, whatever. I know what I like. I like the military cuts. I just like silk and frills underneath it.

And another semester ends...

In Community College, each semester is like a whole school year. You do a lot of concentrated learning in a very short amount of time, and you get sort of the same feeling of sadness/happiness that you used to get at the end of a primary school year.

But before I break out the Alice Cooper, I just want to reflect on what a great semester this was.

Firstly, my teacher was totally weird, and not in a "mad scientist Vincent Price" kind of way, but in a "Is he a student or a teacher?" kind of way. I'm serious, the first day I walked in, I saw him fiddling with the lights and almost told him to stop because only teachers could do that. I also had to learn to choose with caution which blouses to wear on lab days because he was so socially inept, he hadn't yet learned how to look down a woman's shirt without getting caught. I usually wear a camisole under my shirts anyway, but the look on his face when I'd catch him was priceless. The funny thing is that I think he also admired my intellect because when I would explain about something to my lab partners, he would stand close, and then when I was done, he'd say, "Wow, you are really learning this."

(I have HUGE breasts, so I'm used to both women and men looking down my blouse, and yeah it should bother me, but I think I've gotten to the point where it's just anatomy and I don't care any more. I mean, I seriously look down women's blouses myself, and have been prone to check out a man's butt a time or twenty, I think the trick is to do it with subtletey.)

(I mean, if you want to know how magnificent my rack is, I almost caused an accident once when I was at a strip mall and opened my hoodie to show my friend my new tankini top. It's there. You can't not look. The best thing to do is look and get it out of your system.)

Secondly, I loved lab. I read a blog the other day where someone was talking about how they were glad they never had to dissect anything, and I was like, "ooohhhh...but...but..."

The only thing we dissected was fruit in this class, but we did look at real skeletons that bothered a few people (both the males and the females).

I feel like I'm finally moving on to the stuff that will actually pertain to my major. I mean, math pertained to my major, but only in a roundabout way. This is my first actual science class, and I am so glad that this is what I have to look forward to the next two years. It is so fun to me, and challenging. I think I've finally arrived.

Now if I can just get accepted to the first school of my choice.

Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

I'm just going to come out and say that while this book is brilliant and unpredictable, it just wasn't my thing. And that's odd because I'm all about the fantasy genre. I support this book, I am glad this book was made, I think the author must be wonderful, but through the book, I just kept waiting for the end. After my questions were answered, "Who is Karou?" "What is Karou?" "What are the teeth for?", I lost interest. Those were the only things keeping me going, and then I was like, "Okay, good times. Thanks. Off to the fourth Green Rider book for me." It was very odd, because I feel that I really am part of the intended audience for this book, but we can't all like everything. There have been plenty of things that I've seen or read or heard where I've said, "This is a masterpiece, but I really don't care to see any more."

Okay, onto the rest. Karou is an excellent character, capable of taking care of herself and living her own life, which she does. She was raised by Chimeras, who are part human, part animal, and she enters their world through a doorway that works as a portal between the worlds. Her "family" deals in wishes and teeth, and it's every bit as weird as it sounds.

Karou currently lives in Prague in her own apartment, and she's been pretty much "on her own" her whole life (typical YA heroine, but that's to be expected), and visits the otherworld pretty frequently. She often goes to barter for teeth in other countries, which she uses the portal to get in and out of. Even though she has blue hair (a wish, not a natural thing), is well-traveled and knows many languages (more wishes, not a natural aptitude), she's not an annoying person.

Conflict of course comes, and I won't spoil the book for anyone, but Karou must bear the conflict and find out all of the answers to her questions: who is she? What is she? What are the teeth for?

It really was an excellent book, but there was a lot that didn't hold me. I guess that since I'm no longer a teenager, someone living on their own at a young age doesn't really appeal to me, nor does being an art student, staying out really late, having an ex-boyfriend to prank, or going to an uber-cool restaurant for goulash. If I were a teenager, I'd probably have been eating it all up, but as a single thirty-something with a career and responsibilities, Karou's life seems empty and sad to me. When the action started, though, I was really riveted. But then I got to the end, with a very clear cliffhanger, and I was able to shrug and put it away and move onto other books.

Darcy V. Lizzy: Who is the Rudest of them all?

When people on the internet discuss Pride and Prejudice, they almost always talk about how horrible Darcy is to Lizzy, and how it teaches girls to think that men who treat them badly really secretly like them after all. Is this true, though? Let's look it over.

The first time we meet Mr. Darcy, we find him to be a rude person, and very little in the book changes our minds. He is horrible to Lizzy, and ever afterwards he is too, isn't he?

Well...no...

And he wasn't really all that rude to her in the first place, either.

Okay, sure, in her hearing, he called her "tolerable" and said she wasn't handsome enough to tempt, plus, she had clearly been passed over by other men, so, you know. Darcy just doesn't dance with women like that. Clearly she must be deficient.

This was a horrible thing to do to anyone. It was mean spirited, and a comment better made around the family fireplace, not in public.

What was Darcy's motivation in speaking about Elizabeth that way? I mean, it's really odd, isn't it, that he was calculatedly trying to offend someone? Couldn't he have just been indifferent? What happened?

I'll tell you what happened. When he walked into the party (like he was walking onto a yacht), people immediately began talking about his yearly income, his estate, who he was, etc. And remember the opening line of the book? How it's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife? And regardless of the sentiments of either, he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of the daughter(s) in the neighborhood?

Well, this is what happens when Darcy shows up to the party (he had one eye in the mirror and he watched himself walk by). All of the families start talking over his fortune and property without any regards to the man who holds those things (and then all the girls dreamed that they'd be his partner, they'd be his partner). Darcy ends up getting mad, and then he gets spiteful. I'm not saying he reacted well, but I am saying that I understand where he's coming from. Rather than have people scrape and fawn over him for his fortune, he'd rather have them hate him for who he (thinks he) is. (He's so vain, he probably thought the party was about him...)

In fact, if there is one woman he is rude to throughout the whole of the book, it's Miss Bingley. When Lizzy stays at Netherfield while Jane is convalescing, Miss Bingley sits next to Darcy while he writes to his sister, and every remark she makes, he contradicts. She says he writes quickly. Darcy says that she's mistaken. She says she'd hate to write letters of business, and he agrees that she'd do it badly. When she asks him to compare his sister to her in height, he compares her to Lizzy. When they begin talking about what accomplishments are, and Caroline rattles off some absurd list that even she herself can't live up to, Darcy includes Lizzy amongst the accomplished by complimenting her reading of books.

Before this, though, we learn that Darcy has been admiring Lizzy. Most especially, her eyes. He even admits this to Caroline Bingley, and when she asks if he's going to propose, he puts her down again for supposing that admiration leads to love and love to marriage. Still, Caroline hopes Darcy will come to her side of things, which makes her comment after Lizzy tries to disabuse their notions of what true accomplishment is, that Lizzy is the type to put other women down to make herself look better. Then Darcy responds rather ironically about how he doesn't like any of the games women play, and Caroline can only be dissatisfied with his response because he sees right through her.

At the party where Darcy begins admiring Lizzy's eyes, Charlotte Lucas, Lizzy's BFF, comments on how he looks at her quite often, and Lizzy decides that it has to be that he sees a flaw, not her "fine eyes." Then she calls him on his eavesdropping and staring with her question about whether she acquitted herself to Col. Forster well. It was a teasing and cute thing to do, and I think Darcy may have taken it as flirting. I really think that if Wickham had not come to town, Lizzy would start seeing things through Charlotte's eyes, but she was already more than half prejudiced against him at that point, and Wickham's story about Darcy throwing him over sends Lizzy back firmly in the "Darcy is Scum" category she was in before.

Lizzy's reaction to Wickham's news is her undoing. She takes the word of a total stranger over a man she had spent a lot of time in company with, who may be proud, but is certainly honorable. She has spent so long saying unkind things about Darcy that she willingly hops on the bandwagon and continues to say unkind things, only now they're also untrue things.

After the Netherfield Ball, which was admittedly a disaster for the Bennet family, Darcy taps the last nail into his own coffin by removing the Bingleys from Netherfield for the winter, and Lizzy is happy to see him go, though she hurts for Jane.

In Kent, when Lizzy visits the new Mrs. Collins (Charlotte Lucas, as was), Charlotte continues to be convinced that Darcy is after Lizzy, and says that his visiting the area so quickly must be because Lizzy is also in town. Lizzy again shakes this off and is rude to Darcy again by putting him down to Col. Fitzwilliam. Lizzy attacks him with her comment, "I do not play this instrument as well as I would like, but I have thought that was my fault for not taking the time to practise." Darcy's response, "You have employed your time much better...no one admitted to the pleasure of hearing you could ever think anything wanting." is almost desperate. Surely if she just talked to him, she'd see that he can acquit himself in public well, if she can only get past his shyness. I shudder to think how much crueler Lizzy could have been had Lady Catherine not interrupted them.

Then there's Col. Fitzwilliam. He is surprised that Lizzy and Darcy are not close friends. He has heard a lot about Lizzy. He's clearly there to look Lizzy over and tell Darcy what he thinks. If only he could have shut up about Jane and Bingley, things might have turned out differently.

When Darcy proposes the first time, he insults Lizzy without meaning to. Indeed, he is convinced that Lizzy has been expecting his proposal, and if she ever took Charlotte's cautions seriously, she may have expected it. But that first meeting was something she could never get over, he hurt her vanity, and therefore he could never change to a kind, caring person in her eyes.

Incidentally, I loved this scene in the Kiera Knightly version, because she obviously got turned on by their battle of wits. It is so easy to see Lizzy as an intellectual lacking an outlet for her intelligence. Her heated argument with Darcy may very well be the first she's been able to have out loud in her life. I don't really think much of Knightly, other than to think that she needs to eat a damn sandwich already, and stop sucking her cheeks in my GOD woman, but I did love that scene.

Anyway, it's not until Lizzy goes full-frontal attack that Darcy finally stops holding back and full on lets her know that her mother and younger sisters and yes, even her father, are just horrible, horrible people. And they are. The fact that Darcy could even get past Lydia and Mrs. Bennet to see Lizzy at all is wonderful.

In the end, Darcy feels so badly about what he said (despite the fact that it was the truth) that he writes Lizzy a letter--an item that she could produce at any time to make people think they are engaged (writing letters was proof of engagement back then. See: Sensibility, Sense and)-- in order to apologize (slightly) and to make her understand how things really stood between him and Wickham. To Lizzy's credit, she HATES herself after reading the letter, but she still can't forgive him. Not for Jane and Bingley.

And so things may have ended, had not Lizzy gone to Darbyshire with her aunt and uncle. Suddenly, Lizzy is on the defensive, and she fully expects Darcy to be on the offensive. After all, that's what she'd do. When her aunt points out how fine Darcy acts, Lizzy admits to being bewildered by it herself, and is surprised at how kindly Darcy treats her family and finally starts to see that Darcy is maybe a very kind person that she misjudged. Yes, after the letter, she still viewed him antagonistically.

Seriously, if anything, this books shows boys that if a girl doesn't like him, all he has to do is roll over and play the good boy until she finally decides that maybe he isn't so bad after all.

Oh, and he has to bail her sister out of jail and find his future brother-in-law (a guy who slept with his sister and then split) a really good job.

So, taken on the whole, Lizzy is really the antagonist to Darcy. Unfortunately, Darcy is so lost in his own little selfish world that he misses a lot that happens between him and her. It's sort of a classic case of "Same Planet, Different Worlds".

What draws us to Darcy, then? Why do we like him so much?

I wish I knew.

Choosing Battles

As you can imagine, living with my mom is difficult. It is mostly difficult for me, because I have been going through therapy and attempting to better myself, and my mom is somewhat of a teenager in a sixty-year-old woman's body. Sometimes she's more like a five-year-old.

Our relationship issues stem from the fact that my mom was a) abused as a child, b) married to an abusive alcoholic, and c) a divorced single mother. Since she was abused, she never really had a childhood, and when she married my dad, an alcoholic, though functioning, still an alcoholic, she had no time to really understand who she was. She went from her parental home to her married home, and then she had my brother, and like a lot of women, she lost herself along the way. Then she got divorced, and like a lot of moms, she suddenly realized how much of her life was spent living as someone she wasn't, but then she didn't know who she was, so she looked to me for companionship and support, like a lot of single divorced mothers do.

Then you have my issues. I was a) abused as a child, b) subsequently raised by a single mother from age 11 on, and c) pretty much responsible for everything that went on at home starting after school up until 6:00. I was basically that independent person who knew who she was because I had to be. As the years have gone on since my graduation from high school until now, when I am in my early thirties and finally going to college for the first time, I have started changing and growing each year, and while I am not perfect, I rely on things like criticism and praise for how to adjust myself to my surroundings.

Since my mom was the youngest in her family with both a brother and a sister, she had a unique role in her family that I did not. While her brother would step up and be the "father" figure, her sister would be the "mother" figure. My mom, by default, was still the "baby" of the family, and I think this is where we get our conflicts from. I have been "the adult" for so long, I don't really remember much of my childhood, but I do remember never being able to relate to children and always gravitating towards the adults. I could carry on a perfectly lucid conversation with one of my teachers about the pros and cons of X subject, but when it came to my actual peers, I found them to be directionless and superficial. What I missed out on was that I was allowed to be like that! And I never got it! My friends got to go home and watch TV. I got to go home and make dinner and do the laundry and clean the kitchen.

Well, now here we are, living together. Again. And I feel like she hasn't changed. She still comes home feeling tired, which she says over and over again like she's the only one who's tired, she galumphs across the apartment and complains when the neighbor's TV is on loud enough that we can hear it (hint: the walls are paper thin. Everyone can hear it.), and then she nitpicks at me like she has no bad habits. But if I say something like, "Can you stop slamming the door when you come home?" she jumps back with, "You do it too!" despite the fact that I close the door with my hand on the lock, and then I lock it. I never slam the door. The other night, she stepped on the cat--full-on stepped on him--and started screaming, making everything worse. Now, she was screaming at the cat, saying she was sorry, but we all know that animals don't respond to words, they respond to voice. I said, "Mom, stop screaming!" really calmly, but punctuated. By that time, my cat was in my bedroom, fight or flight clearly etched on his face, and I still didn't know if she had hurt him. His tail was bristled, and he looked so confused. Were we punishing him? Was he in trouble? What was going on? My mom's reaction was, "Why not, you scream all the time!"

So, after it was all over and I was able to determine that Chekhov was fine, just scared, I said to my mom very calmly, "It really isn't very nice when you tell me that. It really had no bearing on the situation at hand."

My mom's response?

Oh, come on.

Guess.

"Why not? You correct me all the time."

And scene.

Later, after she realized that I really was never going to talk to her again, she came into my room and started apologizing and saying things like, "I'm such a horrible person! I'm such a horrible mother!" I told her to stop, and I introduced the idea of using "I" statements. "Try saying, 'Heidi, I don't like it when you don't shut the kitchen drawers all the way.'" "Heidi, stop leaving the kitchen drawers open," she echoed. I said, "No, you have to make it an "I" statement. I don't like it when you do X." "But that makes me sound selfish!" she exclaimed. I told her it wasn't. "It puts the burden on you. Rather than me doing something wrong, you are taking responsibility for the action, as though you are asking me to do something normal people wouldn't do. Try to say it again: 'Heidi, I don't like it when you leave the kitchen drawers open.'" "Heidi, I would like it if you would stop leaving the kitchen drawers open because ABC..." "Okay, you're not getting this." "I guess I'm not. See? I can't even communicate. I'm a terrible person!" "You need to tell me that you want me to do something. You need to say that you have a need that you would like me to fulfill."

And I realized after analyzing all of that, that my mom can't tell me when she has a need. She's as emotionally stunted as any abused child. We learn to quiet our needs and wants from an early age. Saying you don't like something earns you a punishment. Exhibiting any sense of self earns punishment. Sometimes just moving earns punishment.

The issue is, if I want to continue down a healthy road, I can't be a crutch for my mom to lean against, but that was the role I was cast in when I was a kid, and even ever since then, even after I declared my independence, she was still used to me taking care of her. But now that we live together, I have to fight really hard to not be that person, because I'm there all the time (when I'm not at school or work or kick-punch class, etc.) and I'm available for her.

This is getting a little hairy, and I'm not sure if I can keep on like this, but I don't really have an alternative right now, except maybe a different roommate, and then I'd have to have two bathrooms.

Anyway, it's something to think about.

This is too cool

Seriously, so much of my childhood is right here. We had a Lego castle, though not that one, I owned Popples and my brother had a spaceman Cabbage Patch Doll. I read the heck out of Babysitter's Club books, my brother played the heck out of Pac Man (I have never been good at video games), and we had several Play-Dough toys, including that flower one. My brother's favorite was the barber shop. I had a McDonalds one that I loved. Garbage Pail Kids? Check. Fun Dip? Check. Hammer pants? For my bro, not for me, thank you. And I watched Saved By The Bell religiously. We didn't have a Magna Doodle and weren't allowed to have Quick (or Kool-Aid) (thanks, Mom) (pout), but The California Raisin's Christmas Special actually took a place just slightly higher in our hearts than Charlie Brown did.

Yes, this is pretty much my childhood. It was rad.

When you have nothing to talk about...

Fake it?

I am tired. Like, taaaaaaahhhhhhhrd tired. My allergies are going crazy thanks to this wonderful SoCal weather of being hot one day and freezing the next. My cat has taken up sleeping next to my leg, and I eventually move away from him because he's really hot, and then he adjusts back against my leg and this goes on until I am off the bed. I read another YA novel that wasn't my cup of tea, but it was a very good book, well constructed and all that. But it took time away from the fourth Green Rider book, and let's face it, I love those books. I'm going to see my nieces in two months, and I'm really excited about that. It will be the baby's first birthday, which will be great, but I'm not really looking forward to leaving my cat home alone. I just hate doing that to my pets. Plus, pet sitters are really expensive. I paid off a credit card, and the company is still taking a payment out every month so I have to call them and shut that off. I have finals in a week. I have a test tomorrow.

I'm just really tired.

See how a rundown of real-world problems makes you seem like a whiner? This is why you say you're "fine" when someone asks you.