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I've
been thinking about
relationships.
Relationships mostly
between men and women,
and how miserably
mismatched the people
in my family seem to
have been. I can write
about this.
My grandparents on the
French side: 64
year-old man marrying a
42-year-old
woman—so late
starting a family that
my mother’s
friends laughed at her
because they thought her papa was her grand’père. Maman was
not much of a cook. The
highest complement her
husband would give was eh bien, c’est pas mal.
My Ozark grandpa
marrying a woman that
he had absolutely no
attraction to
physically because
before he left for
France and the Great
War, his sweetheart had
turned him down. But my
granny was educated and
smart. With his brawn
and her brain, they got
through the Depression.
She couldn’t cook
either.
My father concocting
post-war scenario my
mother bitterly
described as bringing
home a sexy French babe
as a wife, to show her
off. It's true she
was pretty much of a
looker, but ultimately
the marriage did not
end well.
My brother’s
short and only
marriage, to an Asian
immigrant with a
pre-pubescent daughter,
during which as a
licensed contractor he
renovated her hair
salon, gratis, setting her up in business. When he played Beethoven for her, she threw a fit, eventually calling the cops because he refused to turn it down (I mean, it’s
Beethoven right?)
Nobody else much comes
to mind. Maybe my
daughter-in-law's
parents? They're so
resolutely plain, he
short and bald, quite
younger and rather
dull; she tall and
physically might say a
bit doomed in the
marriage marketplace.
Wanting a son, and when
he got a daughter
first, uses the arrival
of the son to punish
the daughter. Somehow
leaving her with the
bad taste of coming in
second on everything.
As the filling in the
sandwich between two
brothers, I can feel
her pain. I mean her
brother is a nice
enough guy. I sat next
to him the other day
just randomly, at the
Grandson's high
school graduation.
He's funny and
serious, a good
conversationalist but
in no way is he somehow
inherently superior to
her. At least neither
of them are
Trumper's like
their
parents…yet, it
turns out her mom has
quietly, without any
fuss, come back over
from the Donald side.
She apparently has her
limits.
Think I mentioned this
last month. There's
an inherant misogyny in
our world that just
seems like it comes up
out of the ground and
threatens to snare us
all like blackberry
vines.
Which brings me to this
show YOU which I just
finished watching. It
recently dropped the
last season so I
revisited it to do an
overall postmortem.
Man, is that show a
study on how to offload
toxicity, or at least
make the attempt.
I'll admit I was on
board from the
beginning. I thought
okay, this is a kinky
guy and much like
Dexter, he ends up
being an anti-hero.
Maybe it's a side
effect of taking breaks
from a show that you
risk a change of
perspective. I had a
lot of other fish to
fry, or shows to watch
if you will, but the
last couple months
maybe a loss of focus
or perhaps the
limitations on getting
to see my current
favorite Canadian show
free by virtually
checking it out of my
local library, (but
only six a month?!
Seriously?) Also, CT
scans will spoil your
afternoon. So I landed
on YOU after a
relatively long hiatus.
It also could be a combination of my physical pain and YOU’s visual battery. As I was working my way through those last two seasons, my personal issues were problematic. Sitting comfortably and just enjoying something on a screen was… lots of fits and starts, go get the pain pill, go heat up the bed buddy, or just give up and walk around, which seemed to help. C’mon!
Dude! where are my
cordless vision
goggles?! Sometimes
I would turn it off in
mid episode and revisit
the next day. Or the
middle of the night.
And as the episodes
reliably continued to
have an absurd level of
violence, my internal
default setting was to
cheer him on. WTAF.
Spoiler alert! as the
latter half of the
final season proceeds
with a small group of
women targeting him for
takedown, I observe
myself nitpicking:
either I don't like
the actresses or I find
them unattractive as
characters. One has a
nose ring with serious
continuity issues:
it's heart shaped
and from one shot to
the next, it keeps
shifting. In real life,
I'm sure that would
happen but come on
editors! Seriously
distracting. Not sure
that's what you
were after in the
scene. Roll credits and
I feel as though
I’m genuinely
sorry to see him get
caught and punished,
yet during my
post-mortem, what do I
find but an interview
in which the actor
describes that final
showdown as by turns
demoralizing,
exhausting,
paralyzing—he
says he felt his lines
coming out against his will.
Now who’s reached his limit?
Thinkin’ about
Bette Davis. I dug up a
free stream of ALL
ABOUT EVE. Pretty cool,
especially the
cinematography. I know
this was 1951, but of
all the Oscar
nominations, none were won by women. An old article points out that Anne Baxter refused to be classified in the Supporting category, so effectively the vote was split between the diva and her protegee. As we used to say at our consciousness raising sessions: I
don’t get my
validation from [fill
in the blank] I
don’t think those
actresses lost any
sleep over it, but it
does speak to
cat-fighting as a
female pastime.
And here of course we
have the Graham Platner
kerfuffle. This podcast
guy that I generally
find has thoughtful,
considerate,
interesting opinions,
yet he jumps on the
controversy with what
to me feels like an
artificial nod to
feminism. Why am I not
on his side? I mean, other than the fact that I positively loath Susan Collins.
Dunno.
Time for Tylenol.
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