Where are the Disney MEN?

I apologize once again for my long absences, voracious readers. Sometimes time gets away from me, and I find that suddenly it's been months since ____. Lately there's also been lots of distracting things going on in real life, so even when I do think of exciting things I want to post about, I end up just stashing them in my juicy brain storage places, and there they molder sometimes. Like my post on the dreaded "Friendzone" and some surrounding issues, or my post on The Feminine Mystique and its relevance to my generation. (Both of which I still fully intend to write.)

Either way, I thought today I would write about the thought that struck me the other day, which was this:
Where are all the Disney men?

Disney is my childhood, and as a feminist, I've spent way too much time thinking about Disney, their princesses/other female protagonists, and how it relates to the way that women are treated and perceived by our culture. But the other day, someone posted on Facebook (my blogs come from this way too often lately), yet another of the squijillion covers of "Let It Go" from Frozen.

Even if you've never seen this movie and know literally nothing about it, you know every word to that song, and it fills you with fury.

Which is absurd, because the best songs in the entire movie are OBVIOUSLY

"Reindeer Are Better Than People," and "No Heat Experience."

This cover, though, was a genderbend. For those of you who live in a hole, this means that they changed the characters sex to the opposite one, in this case being a male Elsa prince thing with generic vocals to make the radio rock world proud.

But this got me thinking. Where are all the really good male Disney leads?? The actual men that we want to see portrayed as a positive representation of what men are like, or are supposed to be like (as in the case of all the princesses). I wracked my brains while washing dishes at work that day, and all I could come up with was Tarzan and Aladdin. And maybe Jim Hawkins. Is Treasure Planet Disney? I doubt it, but I love that movie.

Yes, I suppose you could argue that there's also Peter Pan and Pinocchio, but Peter is a gigantic prick and Pinochio is irrelevant to everyone. Honest John and his cat sidekick are the best part of that entire movie. 

Someday, I'll have a friend to dress up like this with me.

One of the things that struck me was that all of the male characters that immediately jumped to my mind for awesome, sympathetic, admirable, animated men were almost exclusively non-Disney, like Cale from Titan AE, or Dimitri from Anastasia (I'm sure it's a total coincidence that they also have almost the exact same character design.)

My point here--as I frolic gleefully away from it--is that we have this ridiculous double standard presented, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone question it. No one is upset that Prince Charming has even less personality than Cinderella, the most saintly, plain-whitebread-toast woman you can imagine. We spent so much time complaining about what Disney is doing to little girls and then praising characters like Belle and Mulan and Merida that I don't know if it ever occurs to anyone to ask what it does to our boys.

Shang!

Captain Lee Shang from Mulan. There's another genuinely admirable, multi-faceted Disney man. He's overtly masculine, and yet still works with and for a strong, smart woman without being threatened by her, and he learns to adjust his culturally skewed notions of what women can and can not/should and should not do.

Interrupted thought over.

There's this Ted Talk that I think is very connected to this. It's about marginalizing men in the pursuit of feminism, which is just stupid for everyone. "Women's issues" are not just relevant to women. These issues are people issues, problems that we as a society and as species experience. Presenting weak, stupid, disproportionate women as idealized princesses is a serious problem, but I think making men irrelevant is also a very real problem. Boys are given the choice between choosing bad male role models, or weak, practically nonexistent ones. There's a whole set of gender expectations that little kids are being poisoned with, and that's exactly where we don't want to propagate the centuries of repression and violence. 

Not every girl wants to be a sylph-like damsel, so why can't we remember that not every boy wants to be a shining prince, or a cartoon animal?

Racist Comments

Let's talk about race, shall we? I have the fun experience of being a white female, which puts me in an interesting position somewhere between historically privileged and historically disenfranchised, and I'm also a noisily opinionated creature, which is unrelated to those things.

Someone on Facebook a while ago made the ignorant, painfully stupid comment that you can't be racist against white people, because apparently she understands neither the literal definition racism, or what constitutes a race, and since then I've been contemplating posting my two cents about racism and its place in the world that exists right now. Of course, I may not be the best person to talk about racism, simply because I don't get it. This has nothing to do with the fact that I am a white member of the middle class. I've experienced my share of bigotry, either firsthand or by proxy with people I'm close to. I don't get racism because I'm not a cave-dwelling douche. It makes no sense, and it has no place in a modern, global society. Hate people for something valid, guys, like something they can choose.

I've definitely had serious antipathy for several black people, and hispanic people, and asians, and lots of white people, but it had literally NOTHING to do with the color of their skin. Because that's literally the dumbest reason I can think of to hate someone. Even hating them for their clothing is more valid, because it's within their control and actually says something about their personality and preferences, even if that's still a superficial, weak reason to be prejudiced against someone.

I used to hear a lot of kids in my high school talking about slavery and Jim Crow laws with a chip on their shoulder. Does that seem stupid to anyone else? These kids were raised in a world where they didn't even experience anything remotely like that. Don't bitch at me about how your ancestors were enslaved by my ancestors, black kids. First of all, my ancestors were mostly in Sweden eating herring and not partaking in the "West Indies" slave trading (stupid Columbus, ruining terminology for the rest of time. "Look, it's not Europe! I must have gotten to India by now."). Second, Africans sold Africans to Europeans; selling prisoners of war and criminals and debtors as slaves is a time-honored tradition that every culture ever has participated in. Humans have been enslaving each other as long as they've lived in groups large enough to have enemies. Which brings me to my third point. Slavery is not a race issue anymore. If we're going to talk about slavery, why not concern yourselves with the slavery and human rights violations going on right now, you stupid people?

There is literally no reason to be racist anymore. It used to stem from the kind of fear and supremacist feelings that people have when encountering something alien to themselves. They aren't like us, therefore we immediately make this into an us and them polerization, and we have to win. But we are no longer surprised or frighted by people with different skin colors. Our maps no longer end with sea serpents and question marks. We know what's in our world, we know who lives here and what they look like. No, not every people group is intimately connected to every other, but in a time when you can talk to people on the other side of the planet instantaneously, how in the world can we still be dividing along the lines of race? That's just stupid.

So is hyphenating races, by the way. You shouldn't call yourself "African American" unless you are actually from both continents. If you immigrated, cool. The country/landmass your people come from has very little to do with your race except as Darwinian cause. White people shouldn't run around demanding to be called European Americans. And what would you call people from South America in that situation? What about the Brazilians descended from the Portuguese? Being the same color as the people of a place doesn't make you from there. If your people came from there and went somewhere else, you are not from there. It's so much absurdity.

My Day, or Five Reasons to Become a Mechanic

Hello, audience. Believe it, or not, I've actually started several posts that kind of miscarried and never made it to finished and posted. Maybe someday they'll see the light of day, but today, I decided to share some thoughts stemming from my day.

In addition to getting up and working eight hours before noon, I got to take my car to the mechanic for some routine maintenance before I take a road trip next week. Isn't that just the best? Is there anything better than taking your car to a dubious stranger so that they can demand obscene amounts of money? It's probably my favorite thing.

I came to the conclusion today that I should become a mechanic. Screw my artistic aspirations and the apprenticeship I'm pursuing. Tattoos are clearly the wrong business, and here are five reasons why.

1. Appearing competent
When you work in a field like auto-repair, you have the comforting knowledge that 90% of your customers are completely ignorant. You tell them that a mischievous gnome has ripped holes in their car's mass air intake, and they'll probably nod sagely (so as to avoid looking incompetent or uneducated) and thank you for your attention to detail. And this is without even having to do any actual work to prove your ability. You could probably accomplish the exact same appearance of expertise simply by putting an oil-stained rag in your pocket and speaking authoritatively while standing in the office of a garage.

You can tell he's experienced by the way he's trying to use a wrench 

on a  tire attached to nothing. And he has coveralls!

2. Charging for your presence
The accepted term for this is "labor," but as far as I know these fees require no actual labor. Glancing over a car long enough to say, "Your front tires exploded and the hood is folded in half," counts as an inspection and therefore ground for labor costs. You can spend an hour in the same room as a car and it qualifies as billable time.

3. Innumerable reasons for fees
Cars, as you may or may not ("Meyer may not") know, are a complex, interdependent system, so that one problem may stem from many underlying issues, or the other way around (one underlying issue causing many problems, for those who couldn't quite keep up.), so there are a thousand different things that could be wrong, and each one of them is a reason to charge more. Because time is money. So the more theoretical time you might spend on a thing, or the more complex it is, the more you charge. See how that works? Potential time for a repair + actual amount of time spent on a repair + between two and four times the costs of parts + number of things that could potentially have been wrong = total bill.
So, if, for example, you could have spent eight hours on a repair, and you actually spent three, the part costs fifteen dollars, the problem was loosely connected to the exhaust system, and the moon is waning, you would charge the soul of their firstborn and two months wages. Simple, right?

4. No necessity to do actual work
Especially when you run your own place of business (this isn't limited to mechanics), there are often underlings of a lower pay grade whose sole existence is to perform grunge work, so when one is a mechanic and hired to fix an automobile, one's primary job is to stand in the office and explain to bewildered (soon to be penniless) customers what exactly is wrong with their car, and how that gnome seems to have expanded his activities to the throttle body and the transmission, at which point the appropriate thing to do is show them a neatly outlines list of the things that need/might need/might actually be done in order to correct this problem. Of course, including the expected costs of parts and labor -_-

5. Ensuring future employment
If you recall, as I hope all of you without crippling short term memory loss would, I mentioned in #3 that cars are delicate, interconnected systems that all build on one another to create a two ton metal box for you to give rides to drunken friends, and many, many different things can go wrong within that complex machinery. A common practice that has recently gotten a lot of attention is slightly tweaking a few things in that mess of systems so that cars run less than optimally.

Yes. There are mechanics that break cars so that you have to come back and pay them some more to look at your car and say knowledgeable things.

If you think about it, it's a brilliant way to make money (assuming you don't have any qualms about stealing or ruining people's lives, but, really, who does these days?). What more effective job guarantee could there be? It's like a homicide detective going out and murdering people on the slow weeks.

I feel like there's a show about that...

Anyway, the only conclusion I can come to here is that I should become a mechanic and make money hand over fist. I've done work on my car, and it's pretty easy stuff if you know what to look for.

And that tiny fact-- "as long as you know what to look for"-- is the basis of the entire trade. As long as you know something someone else doesn't, you can make them pay through the nose for that ignorance, right?

More From the Service Industry

Hello, ever-present internet! I'm not dead, despite my absurd absence this year. Things have just been busy and exhausting and lazy and lots other things that really come down to "Rachel hasn't been blogging, because she does that sometimes." Though since I finally got a new job (and quit my old one), my schedule has been totally different, which is often the result of switching from primarily evening and night work to early morning and mid afternoon work, but I'm still adjusting to it.

Bonus: the worthless scourge that is Daylight Savings (saving no one daylight since 1930) has had no power over me. Taking one puny hour from my life cannot control me when I've been getting up at four in the morning rather than going to bed then!

Anyway, I thought I'd take a few minutes to blather online about a few of the things that have been floating around in my head that make me go, "hey, I should write a post about that," but then, as you may have noticed the past few months, I never do. I also have like three or four snarky list posts floating amongst my mental debris (by which I mean safely saved in note form on my phone, because I can't remember that kind of thing), but they'll wait for a different day.

So at my new job (I now work at a coffee/bagel shop rather than a pizza place), we have these surveys that all the cashiers are supposed to tell the customers about so that they can tell Corporate how satisfied, or dissatisfied, they were with the service, and now as added incentive, everytime someone mentions an employee by  name in their surveys, that person gets a sticker on this chart in the back, and as if stickers weren't reward enough, after so many stickers, you get free stuff.

Though, I'm at a distinct disadvantage there, since I don't take orders right now. I just make them and bring them out to people, so even though I now get a name tag (at my old job, we were all faceless drones), I don't really interact with customers enough to be memorable.

My thought today, though, was that there should be customer review surveys for the employees. I had a huge group the other day (from a well- known Christian organization, no less *coughcoughHCJB*), and they were super messy, rearranged all of my tables, and then just left everything there, and it was super annoying and inconvenient, so I was thinking how unfair it is that customers get to treat us in the service industry like crap and then complain about the service, and all we can really do is bitch about how awful they were back in the kitchen.

Seriously, guys, a friendly customer or a good tip can totally make someone's day. I go out of my way to pre-bus tables and leave at least 25% tips whenever I go out to eat.

Anyway, there should be a system where service people get to review their customers, and then the good ones can get discounts or something, and we can unnecessarily inconvenience or charge the people who suck, because there should be consequences for being a dick to people just because they're paid to take your money in exchange for bringing you goods or services.

The fact that you are the customer doesn't make you better, or entitle you to being an inconsiderate cur.

On Interviews

Hello, audience. I'm going to talk, yet again, about being an adult. I seem to do this every couple of months, but that's okay. Few enough people read this blog that I feel entitled to talk about whatever I please. If you want to read other things, read other blogs. It's really that simple.

Actually, that pretty much describes my philosophy toward most things about myself--I'm abrasive. Get over it, embrace it, or move along. No one is making you interact with me.

Anyway, the subtext here is that there is no greater farce than adult life. It's so much BS that even I have to cringe a little inside, and that is speaking as a confirmed bullshitter. Adult life is based almost entirely on lying all of the time to almost everyone. Intimate relationships are set apart in adult life, because those are the people you either lie less to, or lie about different things.

At least when we were teenagers, everyone knew everyone was lying about who they were and how they were doing and whatnot, and it was not encouraged. As a child, there's this ringing chorus of "be yourself! Trust people! Be honest about who you are and what you believe!" and then you get out of school.

Suddenly it's all dating people because you're supposed to be in a relationship, and trying to get a job.

To be honest here, theoretical readers, I haven't had that many job interviews. I've had enough, though, to know that they're all about both interviewer and interviewed pretending they want to be there.

You walk in, and (after making you wait long enough that you know you're at their mercy) the interviewer shakes your hand and introduces themselves, a name which you promptly forget, because you were busy wondering if your handshake was firm enough, or if you smiled when you said it was nice to meet them, or if they notice that your pants are still kind of wrinkly, or wishing you had brushed your teeth before you left.

After they sit you down and start "trying to get to know you" the real pretense starts. You have to convince them that you're worth hiring, which they have probably already decided based on your initial application, and they spend the entire time pretending to be interested in hiring you.

It's like a date, where you both try and convince someone that you're exactly what they're looking for, even though you're lying through your teeth, and so are they. "Quick! Pretend you're way smarter, funnier, more competent, more attractive, more outgoing, and more dedicated and hardworking than you have ever actually been."

Because for some reason, we think that is a good basis for any kind of relationship. Especially when the chances are that they decided whether or not they wanted you in all of three minutes.

And the answer is usually no.

This basically defines adult life. There's this demand that you seem totally together all the time, regardless of whether or not you are; it doesn't matter if you're a broke alcoholic and all of your relationships are crumbling as long as you can seem like you're a successful human being.

Maybe this is one of those "fake it 'til you make it" things (a favorite saying of my mother's), but mostly it just seems like total crap. Does this ever help anyone? I mean really. Did I just miss the day where they handed out grown-up starter kits full of instruction booklets about how all of this makes sense?

Rambling About Goals and stuff.

Hello, audience. Here's my first post for 2014, though since I haven't been especially good about posting regularly ever, I wouldn't read too much into it. It honestly just occurred to me that it's New Years day, so expect no lofty resolutions from me. I don't have plans for a regular posting schedule, or anything like that. I do intend to do more writing in the near future, but I'll have to be a little (or a lot) more disciplined about everything.

Damn you, Discipline! You and The Pendulum can just go away, and I'll keep wasting a lot of time.

 This game may or may not have eaten nearly half a day since I bought it like three days ago...

Actually, discipline is closely related to the thing I was actually intending to muse on. (Publicly musing seems dangerous, and yet it's one of my best ways to think.) My older brother was in town "for Christmas" (he actually arrived on the 26th), and something he said to me while he was here was that "you are either moving toward a goal, or moving away from it." Or something quite similar to that, anyway, and I've been thinking about that idea.

I have several goals, some of them more nebulous than I'd like to admit, and I am (despite what seems to be popular opinion,) actively pursuing at least some of them.

Admittedly, the one I'm moving toward most actively is moving into an apartment, followed by finding a different job, but those either don't seem to count, or seem depressingly impotent.

But I'm not sure I agree with my dear brother. The essence of that thought is definitely something I agree with, and it seems a little nit-picky (ewwwww....nits.) to bother disagreeing at all, but I do. Goals are not always something you can actively pursue; sometimes there's a time for such things, or sometimes goals don't always have clear paths to pursue.

This sounds a little defensive, now that I say it out loud (or in print), and I don't deny that I could definitely be working harder on most of my goals, but it's something I think is still true.

There seems to be this trend, especially in my generation--I don't know about you older or younger people, but I suspect that it's also prevalent--that you are supposed to have a Direction, and a Plan. People begin asking about such things literally the second you graduate high school, and they always disapprove if you don't have an answer, because if you don't have a mission for your life, the expectation is that you will hop into the grooves worn by previous generations and go to college, get married, reproduce, and do something professional in fields you tested well in during school. Usually in that order.

God forbid you don't have a distinct list of goals, complete with dates, deadlines, and color codes. Because the people that don't have a Plan grow up to be losers. You don't want to be a loser, do you?

Not that I can say much in answer to that mentality. I'm an artist.

Some people I've known have a clear idea of what they want to accomplish with their lives, and they're doing what they think is necessary to making those things happen, like getting the pertinent degrees and certifications and suchlike, and in some ways I definitely envy that, but I don't think it's necessary. People say all the time that life is a journey, and it's about the journey, and other variations on that idea, but it seems like no one treats it that way. Experiencing life as a series of shaping events and experiences is seen as short-sighted and lazy even as people post inspirational photo-manipulations and quotes on their social networking pages saying just that.

But only if you have a defined destination. We don't want tourists or explorers.

I think this falls into the same category of "no winning" as the housewife dilemma. For those who don't know what I mean, even after years of women being allowed to work and have careers, there is still this idea that if you have a career, you hate your kids, or are selfish for having your own life and not having kids, but on the other side, if you choose not to have a career, and stay home with those same children, you're wasting your potential, and it's seen as a total cop out of having your own life.

The difficulty with these situations, I think, is that they're both not true, and people are forcing their presumptions on someone else, and demanding that other people make the same choice for the reasons they would, when that is impossible.

Not everyone has to do the same thing. It's okay to do and think and be different. We don't have to hate people for that.

Another thing that people say and don't do...I think the internet is going to call everyone on their hypocrisy someday.

I hope I'm not online that day.

Just a few words, since they're needed elsewhere

Hello, audience. I thought I'd pop back in to remind everyone that my blog isn't dead, or anything. I've just been all over the place. Halloween was kind of insane for me, and since then I've been doing NaNoWriMo.

For those who are somehow unaware, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where those of us who harbor illusions/aspirations of writing novels go to be forced into accountability and put words on the page. The goal is 50,000 words in thirty days, and it's utterly insane.

Which is why this post is going to be short. I have work in a few hours and several hundred words to write before that. I don't know how anyone who has school or work full time even does this, but somehow they do.

That's the awesome thing about NaNoWriMo, though. It's this awesome way to force yourself to create. I know November is also Make Art Every Day Month, and I find that amazing too. I'd love to participate in both, but I think it would probably kill me. It makes me kind of sad, though, that I need to force myself to do things that I love to do. The creator in me hangs her head in shame that the joy and accomplishment I find in creating well isn't enough for me to force aside the demands of my fairly undemanding daily life to make.

More and more the past few weeks, I'm finding that passion isn't enough; desire isn't enough; enjoyment isn't enough. I put those things aside to do other things that matter less to me, because somehow that makes sense. The only thing that makes this happen in discipline.

And that sucks.

I'm not an especially disciplined individual. I find it difficult to make myself do things that I don't feel like doing, which, yes, is a common problem. Discipline doesn't come easily to anyone.

My sister said once that self-discipline is just parenting yourself. You have to override the mental whining child, and just go to bed, or get our of bed, or eat this or not that, or clean your house, or whatever it is that needs done that you don't want to do.

I bribe myself shamelessly most of the time. Not so much with my novel, because thankfully that little graph showing me how on track my word count is makes a really good incentive system for me. I want to hit my word count even if I don't want to write.

And speaking of which, I should really shut up and do that.