Okay, it's been three weeks since New Year's and I've been getting along pretty well without the detested word "relationship." Pretty well. I've decided that most of the stuff one would use the word "relationship" to speak of probably shouldn't be talked about that much anyway. And just now I found this quote in an article someone sent me:
"The new joylessness: Talk with someone in their 20s about marriage and
they bring in the word "work" in the first three minutes. I didn't
think like that when I was with a man for seven years in my 20s, and I
don't recall that my friends did either. This "work" goes along with
the ubiquitous use of the word "relationship" in the romantic sphere, a
word first used for a sexual connection in 1944, according to the OED;
before that it was only used in a business context. And now that the
patriarchy's gone, everything isn't pleasure, as radical theorists
imagined, but business."
Another word of Covenant College campus that's been bothering me lately is "platonic" used in reference to friendships. It just seems to be an excuse, tip-toeing around the issue of sexual attraction which is either avoided altogether or degraded to something from a teen magazine. I don't know that I can suggest any kind of remedy for this, being Northern European and Presbyterian and all. Also, I'm tired of hearing girls saying that they think of guys as their brothers and not anything more. I mean, I was okay with the friend thing, but "brother"? Are they really sure they want to go that far? I spent two weeks over Christmas hanging out with my brothers and I would say that the percentage of girls who think of any guy not related to them as I think of my brothers is miniscule to none.
It just seems to me that so often words are used to defend ourselves from reality instead of to better communicate with each other. It's strange. I feel like I just read something about this in George Orwell's 1984, but I can't find the quote right now.
Friday night I decided to venture off with a few friends to the Free Film Club movie night some UTC program (or someone, I'm not sure of the details there) has set up at the Barking Legs Theatre over by New City and Yum-Yum's. I'd seen this place from the outside before; it's hard to miss. They have neon green legs hanging down from the roof and inside they have them coming out of the walls. The actual "theater" was a big room with theater-style chairs at one end, a large, black, shiny floor, and a screen at the other end. One thing I found amusing during the film was that the screen was reflected in the shiny floor. Anyway, there were only four rows of seats and not enough people to fill half of them. The film we watched was horror and the atmosphere was relaxed. I like going to movie theaters where I feel like I can yell at the screen if I want to. This may be a great flaw in me. Perhaps I am not taking the theater experience seriously enough (I haven't decided where I fall in the clapping vs. not clapping in the movie theater debate, but I think I like the interaction). The film we saw was called Carnival of Souls, one of those you-cheated-death-now-death-is-out-to-get-you horror flicks. Charming.
Yeah, so as Emily mentioned, I found this article about high schoolers who claim to be lesbians in the Washington Post yesterday. It's called Partway Gay. It was the title that caught my attention because I've had some quite interesting discussions on the whole subject of the degrees of homosexuality.
This article describes lesbianism as a sort of trend among 16 to 23-year-old women, but it isn't the old seventies kind of lesbianism, it's a "oh, hmm, I'll try this for a while" kind of thing. These are mainly girls who like to keep their options open. There are a lot of quotes saying things like, "I like women only right now, but who knows where I'll be in 25 years." and "If something happened to my relationship with Julie, I could see myself with a boy again. There are some days I notice I'm thinking girls are pretty, and other days I'm thinking there are a lot of good-looking guys at this school."
This isn't such a new thing. I remember a high school near where I grew up where I heared a good number of the girls classified themselves as "bisexual." Hope's first reaction to this idea was that the girls are exhibitionists, trying really hard to get guys' attention. Now I think that is the case for many of the girls, but I think some are doing it because they are attracted to girls and they want to see what this means. One girl explains, "Girls understand how girls think. You can tell a girl, 'I think I'm falling in love with you' and she'll listen. A boy will slough that off, or run away." I think a lot of the reason these girls want to date girls is that they need to be understood and they are beginning to realize that boys are very different from girls.
What fascinates me most, though, about this whole thing is not how new it is, but how old it is. Towards the end of the article, the author brings up the idea of "passionate friendships." Girls at this age do become very close. They are often very physically (but not sexually) affectionate. They are also verbally affectionate. I think it is a need for young women to have these close, and yes, passionate friendships with other young women. The funny thing is, this hasn't been a popular idea for a while, as far as I know. This hearkens back to the Victorian era when women had "bosom friends" and called each other "dearheart." Now that lesbianism is becoming popular the girl have found an outlet for this natural passion. It's really quite sad. It's almost as if young women have been forbidden to have non-sexual friendships.
Now I feel I must state that I am neither advocating nor endorsing any kind of lesbianism. I'm just noting that this is an interesting trend, especially that something so new and "liberated" hearkens quite clearly back to an era so old-fashioned and "prudish."
Yes, I finally got around to putting a picture of a pirate queen on my blog. It was only a matter of time. Both the pictures on here right now are by my favorite illustrator, Trina Schart Hyman. She's best known for her Caldecott-winning book St. George and the Dragon. You can find out pretty much all that she has illustrated on this nifty little list.
Right then, hyphens. Dr. Hesselink says they are going out. Now I realize that the English language and its punctuation is growing and changing, but still, can we not protest? Anyway, I think the hyphen in "pre-eminent" really needs to be there. I don't care if we're behind the times.
I keep being captured by words lately and having to go look them up in any available dictionary. We learned the word for "wrong" (or a word for "wrong" or something, that's not the point) in French the other day. It's "tort," and it just started me thinking about words like "extort" and "contort" and "torture" and the meaning of "tort" that has to do with twisting and bending and that made me think of C. S. Lewis's Ransom books and the whole idea of evil being "bent." I don't know if there's really any connection, but it's fun to think about.
I found this very fun quote on CNN.com tonight and thought it would be an interesting way to break the silence that I have had on my blog:
"Chile, one of Latin America's most socially conservative nations, began showing a more exhibitionist bent last year when over 3,000 people turned up on the same street to be photographed naked on a cold winter morning.
"You never used to see this kind of thing, people looked down on it. I think Chileans are coming out of the closet," said 23-year-old Fiona Ceballos after kissing her boyfriend."
Yesterday I finished About a Boy, to my immense satisfaction (it was on the "to read someday" list and I actually read it!). I don't really feel like discussing book versus movie (I think there's been quite enough of that kind of discussion lately). I love both for what they are, however similar or different they may be. The book is set in 1993 and 1994 and it reminded me how far outside of mainstream culture I was at that time. I'm really not sure what to think about what it's saying. I'd like to think I agree with what it has to say about dependence (not co-dependence, mind you, ordinary, healthy, human dependence on other humans--two people is not enough and all that). But then Marcus (for those who haven't seen the movie . . . see the movie) uses this picture of acrobats forming a human pyramid by balancing on each other, "It doesn't really matter who they are, does it, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else." I don't like to think of my friends as just people helping me balance. There's a reason I need each one of them, unique to who they are. Right? I liked the evolution of Will; he goes from being Mr. Cool "I-Can't-Sing-Songs-And-Mean-Them" to a vulnerable, uncertain, stepping in the right direction, freshly-hatched chick (the book's metaphor). He loses his cynical shell and is forced to be genuine. The thing is, as he is changing into what Marcus is at the beginning, Marcus is changing into Will. At the end (and if you don't like to know the end of books before you read them, well then you probably shouldn't have read this far) Marcus is a scowling, cynical teenager who thinks all grown-ups are stupid and the world was made for him. Hornby writes, "Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance . . . and Marcus had lost himself." What does this mean, "lost himself?" Is that not the ultimate disaster? But besides these messages pulled out at the end, I really enjoyed this book. I definately recommend listening to Badly Drawn Boy while reading it.
Normally I shy away from New Year's Resolutions like a . . . well, I can't come up with an appropriate simile so please imagine a nice one for yourselves, but this year I decided to be brave, or stupid. I decide to resolve to make a genuine effort to exorcise a word from my vocabulary. The offending word in question is "relationship." I don't like this word, I haven't liked it for a long time, but I thought it was just something I had to live with, like lumpy cream of wheat in the Great Hall. I was inspired recently by a post on . . . somewhere by someone, I can't remember details, but it said that the word relationship was annoying and had only come to have its present meaning in the last ten or twenty years. And I thought, "Aha! There is a way to gain freedom from this vague and ubiquitous word!" So I've decided to try it. So far, it's been very hard, but I've pulled through. I don't think relationships should be discussed that often anyway and I don't plan to engage in that pastime much in the coming year. The way I see it, if God was so keen on us discussing "relationships," he would have given us the proper vocabulary with which to do it.