catch-up post
I have been le lazy over spring break. Since I wasn't doing anything remotely interesting, I didn't update my LJ and haven't been reading my flist, either. =/
Mostly over break I babysat my mom. She's still not totally mobile and has needed a lot of help. Wednesday I had to take her to a doctor's appt in town and Friday I had to drive her an hour to get the staples taken out of her knee. That was freaky. This really tall Native American guy with long hair and a feather earring was the one taking them out, and all I could think was, OMG IT'S BILLY BLACK. -_-
After that went down, we ate lunch at the Salty Iguana (Mexican, if you couldn't figure that out). It was delicioso.
I've been watching lots of sports. KU played Friday and Sunday, and won both. :D It was great, too, because the games were in Tulsa and a TON of KU fans went down, and you could hear the Rock Chalk Jayhawk chant at the end of both games. Looooove it. And there was tennis on this weekend! Sadly, Rafa lost the final to Djokovic. =/ But at least Federer went out in the semis.
The semifinals were on Saturday, during which we started firing missiles on Libya, which of course meant that the news kept cutting in with updates that told absolutely nothing, and someone on Twitter decided to unfollow me for being unconcerned, and chose to TELL me she was unfollowing, so I was like, uh, why? And I received a very sanctimonious lecture on how I'm an example of this country's inability to focus on really important things and a disregard for the people fighting and dying in wars. After I responded to that saying I was very much up to date on the issues, she proceeded to compare my tweet to the use of the N word in pre-Civil Rights America. Yeah, spittake. I was so furious. But since she couldn't seem to grasp how her remarks were really fucking insulting, I just gave up and blocked her.
Honestly, I don't know why I was so upset about it. I know that I'm a well-informed citizen with plenty of empathy for people in dire situations at home and around the world, but there's something about being insulted that makes me want to fight back until I receive a full apology. I suppose that's not terribly unusual.
But I found out yesterday that while my sun sign is in Gemini, my moon sign - which represents the inner self - is Pisces. Which means that on the inside I am very empathetic and also hypersensitive. Hypersensitivity is NOT good in combination with a Gemini's natural self-absorbtion and insecurity. So I think that's why I have a hard time brushing off insults. It's ALWAYS personal to me.
Anyhoo.
Now I'm back at school, VERY exhausted because I was up late finishing a book, and afterward was so dissatisfied with it that I made the mistake of getting back on the computer to find more comments from the twitterbitch mentioned above (before I blocked her).
And now, the post about the book I wanted to make last night. The book was A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson, which I found absolutely delightful - until the end. The main plot is that a girl in Edwardian England is kept from every opportunity by her pompous and antiquated father - not allowed to attend university and eventually taken from her ballet lessons, which is her one outlet.
She ends up running off with a ballet company to the Amazon, where she meets an English expatriate, they fall in love, yada yada yada. And all through the book, we keep hearing of what promise this girl has as a ballerina, even though her training has been stunted.
But at the very end, she ends up back in England with the expatriate, who returns to his home estate which was basically stolen from him by his now dead half-brother, and they live happily ever after with lots of babies and no ballet dancing.
And I had that WTF moment that a lot of people seemed to have with Breaking Dawn, although that never bothered me and I will soon explain why. In this book, I just didn't understand it. She wanted to dance. It was her only escape, and she loved it and dreamed of dancing these starring roles - and again and again, the opportunities seemed to arise, but never went anywhere. And though the man was conscious of not wanting to take her from a rewarding career, that never went anywhere, either.
I guess my problem is less that she settled down to have babies and more that this whole other option was built up and then discarded.
And that's why it was different for me with Breaking Dawn, because Bella was never built up as anything else. She had no extraordinary talent as a human and no aspirations other than to become a vampire and spend forever with Edward - which she got to do, so in my book, that character reached her full potential. Whether or not she should have had more potential is another issue that many people seem to get hung up on, but frankly, I find it irrelevant. There were never any illusions about what Bella Swan was - and if people didn't like her in Twilight, I can't fathom why they kept reading.
And frankly, I'd rather see an ordinary character to go on to have a relatively ordinary life than see an extraordinary character built up only to fall to an ordinary life *coughHermioneGrangercough*.
And I know, I know, settling down and having babies is a totally valid option for women if that's what they choose to do. I never contest that. It bores me a little, but that alone won't throw me off. It's more an issue of character development. If you build a character up to be one thing and then have her fall far short of that, and then frame it as a triumph, you've done your heroine and your readers a disservice. Now, if you frame it as a tragedy or a disappointment, that's another thing entirely - but I don't see that often.
Anyway, just writery thoughts on that. As much as I'm annoyed that the book didn't live up to its promise, it's something I take with me when I work on my own stories.
And that's life.
Mostly over break I babysat my mom. She's still not totally mobile and has needed a lot of help. Wednesday I had to take her to a doctor's appt in town and Friday I had to drive her an hour to get the staples taken out of her knee. That was freaky. This really tall Native American guy with long hair and a feather earring was the one taking them out, and all I could think was, OMG IT'S BILLY BLACK. -_-
After that went down, we ate lunch at the Salty Iguana (Mexican, if you couldn't figure that out). It was delicioso.
I've been watching lots of sports. KU played Friday and Sunday, and won both. :D It was great, too, because the games were in Tulsa and a TON of KU fans went down, and you could hear the Rock Chalk Jayhawk chant at the end of both games. Looooove it. And there was tennis on this weekend! Sadly, Rafa lost the final to Djokovic. =/ But at least Federer went out in the semis.
The semifinals were on Saturday, during which we started firing missiles on Libya, which of course meant that the news kept cutting in with updates that told absolutely nothing, and someone on Twitter decided to unfollow me for being unconcerned, and chose to TELL me she was unfollowing, so I was like, uh, why? And I received a very sanctimonious lecture on how I'm an example of this country's inability to focus on really important things and a disregard for the people fighting and dying in wars. After I responded to that saying I was very much up to date on the issues, she proceeded to compare my tweet to the use of the N word in pre-Civil Rights America. Yeah, spittake. I was so furious. But since she couldn't seem to grasp how her remarks were really fucking insulting, I just gave up and blocked her.
Honestly, I don't know why I was so upset about it. I know that I'm a well-informed citizen with plenty of empathy for people in dire situations at home and around the world, but there's something about being insulted that makes me want to fight back until I receive a full apology. I suppose that's not terribly unusual.
But I found out yesterday that while my sun sign is in Gemini, my moon sign - which represents the inner self - is Pisces. Which means that on the inside I am very empathetic and also hypersensitive. Hypersensitivity is NOT good in combination with a Gemini's natural self-absorbtion and insecurity. So I think that's why I have a hard time brushing off insults. It's ALWAYS personal to me.
Anyhoo.
Now I'm back at school, VERY exhausted because I was up late finishing a book, and afterward was so dissatisfied with it that I made the mistake of getting back on the computer to find more comments from the twitterbitch mentioned above (before I blocked her).
And now, the post about the book I wanted to make last night. The book was A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson, which I found absolutely delightful - until the end. The main plot is that a girl in Edwardian England is kept from every opportunity by her pompous and antiquated father - not allowed to attend university and eventually taken from her ballet lessons, which is her one outlet.
She ends up running off with a ballet company to the Amazon, where she meets an English expatriate, they fall in love, yada yada yada. And all through the book, we keep hearing of what promise this girl has as a ballerina, even though her training has been stunted.
But at the very end, she ends up back in England with the expatriate, who returns to his home estate which was basically stolen from him by his now dead half-brother, and they live happily ever after with lots of babies and no ballet dancing.
And I had that WTF moment that a lot of people seemed to have with Breaking Dawn, although that never bothered me and I will soon explain why. In this book, I just didn't understand it. She wanted to dance. It was her only escape, and she loved it and dreamed of dancing these starring roles - and again and again, the opportunities seemed to arise, but never went anywhere. And though the man was conscious of not wanting to take her from a rewarding career, that never went anywhere, either.
I guess my problem is less that she settled down to have babies and more that this whole other option was built up and then discarded.
And that's why it was different for me with Breaking Dawn, because Bella was never built up as anything else. She had no extraordinary talent as a human and no aspirations other than to become a vampire and spend forever with Edward - which she got to do, so in my book, that character reached her full potential. Whether or not she should have had more potential is another issue that many people seem to get hung up on, but frankly, I find it irrelevant. There were never any illusions about what Bella Swan was - and if people didn't like her in Twilight, I can't fathom why they kept reading.
And frankly, I'd rather see an ordinary character to go on to have a relatively ordinary life than see an extraordinary character built up only to fall to an ordinary life *coughHermioneGrangercough*.
And I know, I know, settling down and having babies is a totally valid option for women if that's what they choose to do. I never contest that. It bores me a little, but that alone won't throw me off. It's more an issue of character development. If you build a character up to be one thing and then have her fall far short of that, and then frame it as a triumph, you've done your heroine and your readers a disservice. Now, if you frame it as a tragedy or a disappointment, that's another thing entirely - but I don't see that often.
Anyway, just writery thoughts on that. As much as I'm annoyed that the book didn't live up to its promise, it's something I take with me when I work on my own stories.
And that's life.