Taking a page from rax:

To buy sooner rather than later:
New SSHD for eee
Glasses (closeup and distance)
Digital Hygrometer/Therm. for Tokai's tank
Printer paper and Ink or professional business card printing 250 cards on order from vistaprint
Updated shade + finial + bulb adapter for restored antique lamp from great-grandmother K-Mart, of all places!
Sheets for my bed
Notary Public Exam Fee

Video games to buy eventually:
Wario DIY Wii
Replacement Pokewalker for the one I lost at the farmer's mkt
Pokemon Black or White?
Okami Wii/DS?
Fire Emblem Gamecube/Wii/GBA?
Gamecube controller for wii

Other stuff to buy eventually:
Silicon Dawn tarot 2x
An apartment
New modular bed+awesome futon mattress of awesome
Mac Webcam xBox Live webcam works natively in Mac for $10. Awesome.
Butterfly Socks

To find:
DS Charger Yeah it was in my DS case ...

To sew:
Dog coat + Hem B.'s jeans
Doll clothes
Baby hat for B. and L.
Bike basket
Redo world's worst-diagrammed crossstitch
Winter hat pack items
Mending

To list on ebay/craigslist:
Freaking model horse collection argh just break into your own storage unit by remembering that your parents' good intentions will never actually lead them to put aside the time to do things they said he would do with you
Spare piano (don't ask); remember shipping deal w/local piano movers Report craiglist scam to craigslist

To write:
Absinthe Writeup
TY notes to people for whom I have petsitted, for asking for a review
WWIA notes digitization
WWIA chap 5
WWIA chap 6
Email replies to friends
Write 3rd stanza Tesla in Love, don't worry about 1st stanza rewrite yet
Writeup and Submit Sumptuary to GURPS company
Movie/Book writeups: Philadelphia Story
Movie/Book writeups: all the crap I read this spring in the hospital (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Winter Triptych, Bird Friendly Building Design, Washington: A Life, Sex on 6 Legs, Jack Reacher novels, Sew-What Pattern Free Bags, Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother, Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Animals Make us Human, A Fair Maiden, Goon Squad, America: You Sexy Bitch, Off the Cuff, One Man's Garden, At Home)
Ulysses writeup one good book
Gecko article
Revise sword in the hand
write up sword in the hand
post sword in the hand
Review of Dog Stars
Peachberry pie, 3-tomato eggplant parmesan, and stirfry recipe writeup + carrot-saffron risotto and sweet potato soup
Salty Mango Lassi Ice Cream recipe writeup + photo to flickr, LJ
Writeup of MWPAI exhibits

To read:
Finish Hare w/Amber Eyes
Restart Ulysses
Find public-domain bilingual copy of Brothers Dostovesky, read once Ulysses is done

To website:
Catification writeup + submission
Website design - doesn't have to be fancy, check pininterest re: color schemes
Addon website for Paws & Claws petsitting
Twitter design - should mirror website
LJ design - should mirror website - embed?
Upload final foxes video to Youtube, Flickr
Upload historical local house photos to Flickr in new set, email url to historic preservation people
Upload baby shower photos to Flickr, email url to C & B
1 hr Help mom with photo upload/CD burn
Upload B. bd party photos to Flickr, email URL to Bethany
Get Genderplayful setup with winter hat pack items
Email butter lady for mom
Fish photos, drop off camera to process scan in photos, upload to Flickr
Upload cat show photos to flickr
KeePassX

To design:
Business cards for Paws & Claws petsitting

To post:
Business cards for Paws & Claws
Return ASL DVD to library, get ASL book instead

Games:
Take Go books out of the library again, but this time one at a time
Continue playing through chapter-end book questions on Goban
Play Glitch again, determine if I still want my acct. there This game looks awesomer than ever; too bad it's too slow and keeps crashing my browser.

Jobs:
Notary Public Exam
MCPHS? list pro and con, talk with Peg J.
Check w/BMC CDO
IDG Copy Editor Framingham
Cooking vegan shit in Boston
Call back NH library though chances of hiring are slim since budget did not pass Yeah they hired people already
Catsitting gig 13th-Oct 1
Syracuse Public TV
Check out Peace Corps as a committment for various mental health and dietary reasons I don't think this would be a good idea for me at this time; something to keep in mind for future.
Sub. teaching
Hamilton Editing Position
Spring farm cares

Places to volunteer:
Call back zoo Docent Orientation Oct 14th
Call Boston zoos re: volunteer program http://www.zoonewengland.org/page.aspx?pid=242 apply for Keeper Aide when I am in the area
Get back in touch with BMC gender activism people - try emailing admissions again; get in touch with Wellesley & Holyoke alums
to this end call Rachel D. in Albany

Other things to apply to:
Financial aid for NBSS
Application for NBSS for spring 2013 pres. carpentry program
Tufts summer school session again should I again find myself in Somerville
Clarion 2013
Traditional Building Master's Deg. class at Boston Architectural College

Music:
Perform Für Elise for A. and B. while they are here This didn't get done
Finish composing "TimesNR" in Wario DIY & output to interwebs
Relearn Moonlight Sonata
Call Tina re: piano/organ lesson swap for vegan food? Left email for B.
Fix iTunes (Japanese & Russian transcription error correction, add correct composers for Holst & other classical for sort error correction. Upload entire CD library. Transfer cassettes not avail. on Amazon to MP3. Otherwise buy slowly w/change off of Amazon MP3. Sync iPod to use at gym.)

Exercise:
Go to the gym everyday. Use the time to listen to new music and relax. You don't have to prove any damn thing and if someone tries to make you guilty for spending time on yourself screw it.

Health:
Call foodstamps people and say your father is withholding necessary application info from you out of, apparently, sheer and total personal incompetence. Ask for next steps. Don't be embarrassed; It's not your fault the information has been withheld. Remember that getting rid of food insecurity and into food security will help you. You deserve to eat healthily. Read this article as many times as you need to to make the call.

Consult lawyer (K.?) to ask about statute of limitations on ENT doctor in Indiana who pumped me full of allergens after hospitalization Email K. again Look up stuff K advised me to

Call dojo that offers 1st month free + women's discounts to sit in on a muy tai or taichi class 6 pm beginner's class today Save up $ to restart martial arts

Call Alicia for Coffee

Pin down Brenda and mom for cat show times on 16th Sept. Hahaaa this is so not going to be decided until day of, but I try.

Call P. tomorrow re: catsitting 3 pm appt Sun done

Call D.K. re: fixing broken earrings Call Goldmine or Wilcox's jewelers & get rates Bring earring by, get estimate. Pick up fixed earrings

File:
Remaining stuff in filing cabinet.
Remaining email update list.
Combine buystuff email and personal email
Get new addresses for friends; update in Address book. Sync AB with iPod.
Sync AB with Google
Sync email list between private + personal email addresses.
Update all the accounts.
Stop Serbian hacker

Money:
List all accts in Manilia setup
List all accts in Mint
Balance checkbook + savings accts
Begin paying back remaining interest-bearing debts - call if necessary DONE
Begin paying back personal debts

Gender:
Tarot from Orion?
Consult self re: pronouns at end of year?

So back in the early summer of 2010, I posted about an Upstate NY film fest I'd have liked to host, but since I'd just moved and nobody else seemed interested-- and one of the only reasons I personally spend time watching movies, anime, or TV is in order to share and discuss the movie's ideas and art with other people who I think might enjoy, hate, or be disturbed and intrigued by them, to share insights and debate and conversation with friends--I let the idea drop.

But I'm here now, in upstate NY, and it's cold, and library movie rental is cheap. Still no friends to discuss movies with in person, unfortunately, but maybe people have watched or will watch these movies on their own and want to discuss them.

So, a review of Frozen River, from 2008. This movie opens with a shot of snow, and trees, and more snow, and some decrepit buildings and the sky a steely shade of grey. I thought, "it's like looking out my window." A sense of place is really strong in this movie, and what the place--Massina, NY, a real town--says almost more than the people in it is "hope passed through here on the way to a better place." Ray, a woman whose life has treated her hard, works in the dollar store and lives in a trailer park like the one my school bus used to pass through; Lila, a Mohawk whose legal job options in the movie appear to be stuck somewhere between "answering phones in the Tribal offices" or "stamping people's bingo cards" lives in a trailer without heat, and needs more money in order to get her child back from her mother-in-law, who took him after Lila's husband died.

The two women are desperate--for Ray, a promised promotion to full-time employment hasn't come for two years, and her husband has run off with the down-payment for their new trailer, which she was going to get just in time for Christmas. For Lila she's been living with the personal and political--both inter-Tribal and extra-Tribal--implications of her husband's death during that smuggling run ever since; people suspect her of running the border or make it clear they resent her for her husband's death every time she leaves her trailer. She spends a lot of time in there.

In a very real way, this movie is about absence--absence of industry, absence of men (we never see Ray's husband or any memento of Lila's husband in the film, but the absence of both men is a presence throughout, and the grown men in the rest of the movie are all incidental), absence of money.

The two women meet--Lila co-opted Ray's second car, the one Ray's husband drove off in, and Ray follows Lila home, unsure if she's doing it for news of her husband but sure about needing the car back--and abrade; they're both too stubborn and too strong and too hurt. They don't converse for the first few meetings so much as aggress at each other in sentences. Lila knows where Ray can make money, but has no car. Ray has a car.

They start running immigrants across the border. They lose their families, a little--Lila passes up a job someone finds for her, and Ray lies to her eldest son about what she's doing. They start to become friends, even as they're not sure how to do that. It seems neither of them has had a friend for a very long time.

There's a subplot where Ray's eldest son, left alone with popcorn to eat and a kid brother who wants nothing except an unattainable $15 Hot Wheels track for Christmas, wondering where his dad is and when his mom is going to get home (and starting to be suspicious about her lies about the dollar store promotion), scams elderly Tribal members for their credit cards in a mix of altruism for his brother, resentment toward his parents' absence, and racism toward Mohawks (his mother described her first meeting with Lila to him in less-than-glowing terms, and hasn't been home much since, so he has no idea why his mother seems to slowly make a path from resentment to a sort of mute understanding, and his complex mix of emotions reflects very real and unfortunate regional political infighting between upstate NY tribal peoples and politicians whose main constituents are all broke and resentful white people. Charlie McDermott plays the boy. I think he's the finest actor in this movie; you can watch McDermott's character knowing he's crossed a moral line and then justifying it to himself with the desperate need for self-justification of someone who's doing something seriously wrong for the first time, and paper over all of that with the factor that it's fun for him to impersonating somebody else's voice and life over the phone and get away with it, and show the fact that he's still naive enough as a teenager to show that he's having fun transgressing with the impersonation, a pleasure an adult might not allow themselves to acknowledge or take from the moral transgression. There's a scene with a blowtorch and Ray--the second one--which I think is beautiful. I love how the actor wears the clothing his character has--it's ten years out of date of cool, and he knows it, but ten years out of date is only five years out of date where he lives, and he pretends it's cool anyway and almost succeeds in making it so via conviction.

So much of this movie takes place inside the interior of a car that it becomes a stand-in for the personal interiors that are this movie's true driving force; you can feel the cold leaching through the windows and battling the heating system in the car and it becomes metaphor. When Ray gets out and runs, when the ice sags way--everything in this movie is too tired to crack--under that first wheel, it's almost like freedom.

This is not, despite everything, an ultimately depressing film, rather the reverse. Recommended.

Edit: I've just reserved the next 2 films I wanted to watch in this series, Canadian Bacon and October Country, on hold at the library, so if people want to pick them up and then watch and chat, you can.

Have any of you ever read anything you liked by self-described "feminist brown person" Teresa Jusino? I just read a review of the controversial movie Sucker Punch by her on tor.com, and am so incandescent with the idea that her work passes for smart feminist pop-culture SF critique that I am not going to link to the review, and am considering just not reading any more of her work, ever, which is sad, because I *really* like reading smart feminist pop-culture SF critique, and want to support the cultural critique work of feminists and/or people of color in general. She's written some things about the Wheedonverse, which I haven't read because I don't really understand the love for Wheedon's shows (sorry, lotusbiosm), even after having given one of them a shot (Dollhouse) a while back to see what all the controversy was about, and decide for myself.

I really hope that someone can point me toward something she's written that's balanced, and well-thought-out, because I really don't want to lump her and her work in with the work of, say, Piers Anthony, but right now I'm leaning toward giving her work the same label I give Anthony's, which is "this work presents disturbing scenarios and then tries to argue that the presentation of those disturbing scenarios is edgy, empowering, funny, or important, without really offering anything to back up that assertion other than the author's own feelings about that work, stripped of any context other than a self-referential one. Automatic do-not-read."
I really don't want to put her on my automatic do-not-read list, because honestly I found at least some of her smaller points (mostly about attractive people in attractive clothing not being automatically exploitative when presented) somewhat compelling, but the larger ones...oh, god.


I agree that sometimes disturbing scenarios need to be presented in art, and that sometimes the *exploration* of those scenarios can be biting and necessary social commentary. But there is a huge difference between presentation of those scenarios, exploration of those scenarios (whether in a group media setting or in one's own thoughts), and exploitation of those presentations.

For instance, this is the paragraph from Jusino's review of Sucker Punch that literally made me gasp in horror [warning: rape/sexual assault triggers]:

Why Sucker Punch Isn’t Exploitative, Misogynistic, or Any Other Word Thrown Around Without Context In Feminist Discourse

Another criticism of Sucker Punch is that it is misogynistic and exploitative simply because it shows women being raped and objectified. I hate to break it to those critics, but...rape happen and women are objectified in real life. Be angry when it happens then. The objectification and sexual abuse in Sucker Punch need to be there, because these are the obstacles these young women are overcoming. What’s more, they aren’t shown outright, but through metaphors, which takes yet another step away from being exploitative and sensationalistic. By making sex “dancing” and a corrupt mental institution into a burlesque hall/brothel, Snyder is being the opposite of exploitative. He isn’t showing for the sake of showing, as many films do. Rather, he’s making a situation clear while attempting to not take advantage of his young actresses.

I just...I don't even hardly know how to react to that.No, wait, I do. Sentence-level analysis powers, go!

What is this movie saying about rape and sexual assault, according to Jusino's paragraph above?

1.) We cannot be angry about or debate the value of fictional portrayals of rape or sexual assault, we can only be angry when those things happen in real life (apparently rape culture is created out of thin air! Who knew?)

2.) Fictional objectification and sexual abuse need to be present in this movie because objectification and sexual abuse are the obstacles the fictional characters are overcoming in this particular movie. My reaction to that rationale is twofold:
- It's a fictional world--as Jusino says, a movie. The filmmakers could have picked any obstacles for these women characters to overcome, but these filmmakers picked sexual assault. Why pick that? Just because it was a really, really hard obstacle for your fictional women to overcome? Just so they could fight really hard, so the audience had a high stake in the well-being of these fictional characters--oh, wait. We're not supposed to get angry about or too invested in fictional rapes and assaults, because they're not real rapes or assaults. Well...scratch the idea of audience investment or character development.
- Can you imagine this sentence being used to rationalize or justify rape or sexual assault in real life?: "Women need men to put them in their place, because all women should learn their place in the world." Woman: "It's just an obstacle women must learn to overcome," or, "Queers just need to use their sexualities the way God intended, because the only real relationship is with someone of the opposite sex." Queer person in religious therapy: "My sexuality is just an obstacle I must learn to overcome."

[sarcasm] Why, I'm sure I'd never hear that in real life. That would never happen. I've never ever seen the rationale or threat of corrective rape deployed against anyone as an actual real-life control tactic anywhere in the real world. No, I'm sure that nobody would ever use those sentences to justify rape or sexual assault or coercion in real life. Sexuality and the free exercise thereof is only viewed as an obstacle to be overcome via rape in fictional settings. [/sarcasm]

3.) What’s more, they aren’t shown outright, but through metaphors, which takes yet another step away from being exploitative and sensationalistic. By making sex “dancing” and a corrupt mental institution into a burlesque hall/brothel, Snyder is being the opposite of exploitative. He isn’t showing for the sake of showing, as many films do. Rather, he’s making a situation clear while attempting to not take advantage of his young actresses.

- I fail to see how not showing acts of rape or sexual exploitation, but instead implying that those acts take place off-camera, clarifies the status of those acts to the viewers of the film. Indeed, most of the internet debate I have seen about this movie is centered on the questions, "do you think the main character killed her sister, given that the bullet impact happened offscreen? Do you think the main characters were raped, given that any such actions would have taken place offscreen?"

- Death or sex metaphors are automatically less exploitative and sensationalistic than actual onscreen death or sex act equivalents would be? OMG, I'd better raise Henry Reed from the dead right now to tell him that nobody ever understood that Naming of the Parts was about death and sex, because he couched the whole poem in those utterly opaque military metaphors!

- It's "Show and Tell" time, People in Real Life Class: remember, first you show something, and then you talk more about the thing you showed in some way, so we can see why it's interesting or important to you. Toby? A turtle? And you've made this youtube video of it eating? That's very interesting; thanks, Toby. Senator Green? A bill we should all vote for? Which this chart says will bring about world peace? Well, you've all given us something to think about, Senator. Thank you. Director Zak Snyder? A movie featuring off-screen rape of a woman character? ... Well, is there anything you have to say about rape or women? No, Mr. Snyder, showing it again isn't going to get your point across. No, Zak, showing it again with robot dinosaur burlesque Nazi laser guns isn't going to tell me what you were thinking about women or rape the first time. No, Zac. The class will not guess if it really happened since you never really showed us the pictures. No, we will not guess if it was really all an ether-dream or not. Sit *down,* Mr. Snyder. Do you want me to call you down to the principal's office? ... thank you, Zac. Please see me after class.

- I got thrush again, I'm pretty sure. Dammit.

- Article summarizing the increased use of pork as a demonstration/weapon against Muslims in America.

This is the second time in a month I've come across a discussion of "forbidden food as deliberate act of sabotage." I'm thinking this is going to become more and more common for minorities of all stripes and types. I wonder how long it will be until someone dies of allergens slipped deliberately into their food as an act of retaliation (if it hasn't already happened. Feel free to write about this idea).

- I watched the movie "Cars." Pixar can make me care about cars. Pixar is awesome.

- rm and sovay, this is for you: The stop-motion animation geniuses the Brothers Quay are shooting a film at Philadelphia's Mutter Museum ("the museum of medical oddities," one of the most creepy and awesome museums on the planet).

I am probably the last person to hear about this, but there is a film adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur's "Women Without Men!" It looks really good from the trailer, but then it's also based on a great book.

Sadly the closest it looks like it will be showing to IN is in Chicago. :(

Women Without Men Film Website