In the meanwhile, I will take a break and look at some pictures of Mark Strong to cheer myself up.
Ah, well. Acceptance is part of growing up, right?
So on FB I posted a question on my wall--"name me the last heroic fantasy you read where there were black people in it."
Ungrammatical, perhaps, but you know what I mean.
And the responses? Sweet green-eyed bespectacled hermaphrodite Christ.
El Cid, for the love of God. Because, you know, Moors. Because Moors are North African.
And yes, I shit you not, the Lord of the Rings was mentioned
First of all, El CId is not a fantasy. El Cid was a real guy, who did real things. He was a hero to both Christians and Muslims, and fought alongside both in 11th century Spain. The Muslims of North Africa, to which I guess Moors refers, were not homogenously black--they were Berber, and they resisted Islam for a good long time. Many of them were also Christians, and Jewish. Having said that, there are plenty of Muslims who are black--check out Bilal al-Habashi, for a hero's story.
You can't say Africa and have it mean monolithically black--Africa is far less homogenously populated than Europe. There are dozens of peoples, all of whom have thier own culture and language and histories, and if you think it's just one big Tarzan jungle sparely populated by rude natives who wear lionskins and wave spears around when they're not shooting machine guns--then you're a privileged idiot.
Shut your mouth and open your ears; and learn.
And then things have been happening which are kind of a downer. Mom's Alzheimer is (of course) getting worse, not better. Christmas was a trial and a half.
Things seem to be a bit better right now--fingers crossed.
Money is less of a worry than it has been--it's never not a worry, but there are degrees of worry, yeah?
I tried, I tried (kind of) hard, but I just got tired of feeling angry. So--here's the article; go read it; then come back.
http://feministing.com/2012/11/14/a-woma
A lot of my fine, well-meaning friends are linking to pieces about this on Facebook. I wasn't going to. But the Feministing piece took me over the edge.
May I ask, why is everyone sounding so SHOCKED and APPALLED?
Are you surprised, nice people? Did you think this wasn't ever going to happen in a country where there are nice white educated folks who speak English? That we'd skim the edge of outrageous legalities regarding abortion but never in fact pass the pale? (Ha, you Irish historians, see what I did there?) Did you think that women dying from pregnancy didn't happen anymore, that it was a tragic footnote in medical history, but really, what could one expect from the Middle Ages/the Renaissance/the Frontier/China/Sub-Saharan Africa/those darn Moozlims? Isn't it quaint and cute and feminist that the Aztecs accorded a woman the same status as a battle-slain warrior if she died in childbirth? But hell, this is the Western World of the 21st century, and women just don't die from pregnancy complications anymore! Ya goddamn whiners, pregnancy is merely uncomfortable, and you ladies should just get over yourselves. After all, women have been having babies for millenia, and doing just fine!
Bullshit. If you think that's true, you are dangerously naive and/or ignorant.
- Current Mood:
bouncy
For a few moments it does make me wonder about being a writer--I mean, one can write and write and write, but then one MUST send out one's work for publication. I know it may mark me as a mean bitch to say it's just not the same to post one's own stories up online. If there wasn't that striving for peer review, as it were, I could post up all kinds of crap and never think twice about it. But, no, I must submit all kinds of crap, and think much, much more than twice about it.
Now I just gotta bear down and FOCUS.
- Current Mood:
determined
The writing has been astonishingly difficult. It's been crushingly slow going, and I'm kind of surprised at how surprised I am. Did I think it was gonna be easy?
Well, yeah, I kinda did.
I didn't think about how difficutl it would be to get into the head of a male humanoid who was created by scientists, funded by corporations, solely for the sake of combat, with an up-bringing and mindset completely different from any that I had ever imagined. I didn't think about how he would view humans as being 'others.' I didn't think about how, far from the boot camp hell we've all heard stories about, his experience of the military would be a familial, tribal one rather than anything else.
So yeah.
Difficult.
- Current Mood:
tired
- Current Mood:
exhausted
