Indeed

Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
--Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot"

Why I am Cool #2

I knew the answer to yesterday's final Jeopardy question. The category was "20th century theatre." I bet $1 million in my head. And the answer was "Waiting for Godot." I so doubled up.

Fashion as Weapon

After WWI in Germany, there was a period of hyper inflation which caused a wool skirt priced at 14 marks during the war to cost 240 million marks by 1923. So many men had died during this bloodiest of wars that there was an incredible shortage of marriageable men. During this time of incredible poverty and despair, fashion came to play an important role. One German newspaper article entitled "Fashion as Weapon" said the following:

"Whenever the fight for daily bread becomes especially hard, when the selection of clothes becomes critically restricted, fashion types evolve that can only be understood if one views them as 'weapons.' In general, a woman does not want to desced from a higher to a lower social class. It is a fate that threatens her more than ever before in the terrible crisis we are having to live through right now. She does not want to commit gender suicide by becoming an unmarried victim, a fate that is caused by the decrease in men who are interested and able to marry. So fashion becomes a powerful means to show one's personal charm in the best light, even to heighten it, while perhaps risking that 'one's essence' may sometimes get lost behind a dazzling fashionable appearance."

This article was written in the 1920s, and if it weren't for the poverty aspect, it would still be incredibly applicable today. At least in Charleston. Most women here want to get married, and they use fashion as a weapon, for sure. And the result -- you have thousands of blonde, tanning-salon girls who go around looking the same in their Abercrombie clothes and Gucci purses, competing for the rich, Mount Pleasant jocks who will buy them diamond earrings. And beyond that you discover the ultimate truth -- that these girls for whom fashion is a weapon have also managed to lose, behind their "dazzling fashionable appearance" what the author called, "one's essence." Because they may be in with the times, but these times just make them look vapid and shallow. Perhaps I'd rather be out with the times then.

Mental Illness

I was talking to Carter last night about something which has stayed with me till this morning. What if people who have "mental illnesses" are actually people who are aware of a different reality? What if they have a heightened sensory perception which allows them to experience, "sense" as it were, the facets of life which we have conditioned ourselves out of believing? By that I mean that normal people have dubbed "psychotic" people as abnormal for seeing or feeling things that normal people do not see or feel. What if the things abnormal people see are just as real? How do we know that what they experience -- ESP, ghosts, spirits, nature talking -- is not real? Carter said that it was because majority rules -- 99% of people don't experience it, so it's not real. But 99% of people didn't believe that the earth was round until Galileo Galilei, and 99% of people didn't believe humans could walk on the moon until the late 1960s... and, and, and... yet those things happened. So why not think of people with mental illnesses as people who are aware of a world of which we are not? Why maintain the stereotypes and attempt to explain everything through the study of chemical imbalance? Surely scientists are the first to admit that what we know is only the tiniest fraction of what is knowable. Many of these questions are rhetorical, of course... but my main question remains. Is mental illness just a fabrication of the "normal" mind?

Now Reading

Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich. by Irene Guenther.

You should read it, too!

P.S.

My friend John is engaged to be married. News came the day after the previous post. Inspite of my happiness for him, and the knoweldge that he will live a full and happy life with his soon to be wife, I just wanted to point out that John is 21. This, aside from being great news (because I really do believe that they will be happily married) just serves as further proof of what I was just saying. So. Yeah.

Great Balls of Fire

May I just say, I think the day just hit me, when I realized that I am starting to live in an adult world. And may I also just say, the hints were not so subtle. My roommate just bought a house. Her very own, with her very own money. She's 24. And my highschool sweetheart called me the other day to tell me that he is getting married. He's 22. All my other friends are working full-time jobs, starting to be financially secure, building little nest eggs for "the future." Goddamn.
And here I am, close to 23 years old and still in school (albeit graduate school); soon to be back living in a dorm, not working full-time, certainly not buying a house, and nowhere close to even considering the possibility of marriage. And for my birthday, while grownups go to dinner, I'm going to a Lynard Skynard concert to scream my lungs out to a group of leathery-skinned, raggedy-old hippies. Peter Pan syndrome? Perhaps.
It's not that I don't want to grow up. No, wait. Maybe it's just that. I don't want to grow up. I remember being a child and saying to mysef that old people were boring and I never wanted to be an adult. Because old people don't know how to have fun. I also remember the moment that I stopped considering myself a child.
I was riding my bike in our house in Turin. We lived in a sort of gated community, and I would always go up to the gate and say hello to the guard and help him push the buttons to open the gate so that they cars could get in and out. And when you are a child in Italy, you don't have to address adults with the formal "you," but when you are no longer a child, you are expected to be respectful towards adults by using the formal "you" ("lei" versus "tu"). So I was riding my bike up there, I must have been thirteen or so, and I stopped and panicked, because I didn't know how to address the guard. So instead of going there, I turned around and went back. I just thought about what it meant that I now belonged to a different social world, with rules that I was expected to follow, and customs I was meant to uphold. That's how I knew I was no longer a child. And it just made me sad.
And now, I'm close to that point where I'm no longer a girl, but becoming a woman. And that is even worse. Because all "girls just wanna have fun," and most women just want to get by. Adults settle. They buy houses, they get married, they raise families, they build financial security... they grow roots and bear fruit. And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that I think most adults grow roots in places where they are not given room to grow. They cultivate bonsai trees instead of California redwoods. And I like feeling like I'm a little seed, still "blowing with the wind," looking for that soil which will allow me to grow into a full-fledged human.
Okay. All of these TERRIBLE analogies and musical references aside (you can sigh relief now, I said it first) -- I don't want to grow up. And everyone around me is doing just that. And it scares me because I don't know whether I should get with the times or just "keep on keeping on."

Pre-Coffee Thursday

I'm at work. I've been here for 10 minutes. Nobody emailed me, so I feel my pre-coffee, even-more-undiluted-than-usual-urge to communicate with the world. And today this urge translates into the very rarest of communiques -- a movie review.

Yesterday my friends and I watched "War of Lords". It probably hasn't come out anywhere yet except English speaking countries. In any case, the movie was... without spoiling it for anyone... exceptional. Mais pourquois, you ask? Because in spite of being full of the usual Hollywood crap (which alas, is a lot of why I watch) it was able to relay an underlying truth about the world. As fantastic as it was (and I mean that in the literal sense), it was also realistic. Realistic to the point of depression, maybe... but certainly at least realistic to the point of awareness. It was a new cinematographic spin on a very old story... and I must say I recommend it to the general populace, and especially to the American one, which is slightly less acquainted, overall, to international afairs.

Why am I Cool?

Because I own one of these. Game on.

Looking Up

Today I'm getting my super fancy ACL brace. I will finally be able to play sports again.
The weather is beautiful, sun is shining - 80 degrees. And hopefully I'm getting my new phone today, too. Life is good.