Friday QuoteDay

"Don’t be ‘a writer.’ Be writing."

— William Faulkner, American novelist

 

Weekly Flâneur: Self

Image of a hand, pen, paper and cup. Click to enlarge.

Tools of survival. 

Random Starbucks, somewhere in London.

Bad Writing Habits #1

Internet Research.

Research starts out as a productive necessity. It somehow takes a wrong turn on the Interwebs Super Highway and 3 hours later I'm 5 tabs deep into Wikipedia and Cracked links. If I open YouTube, I'm done.

(I would like to lie and say that my writing has improved this sad week without Internet, but I love my readers too much for that. Only socially acceptable little white lies for y'all! Also, two Time Warner Cable trucks and two weeks later, still no working Internet. If you ever wanted to guest blog on FitC, email me now. My poor, sad blog is desperate for loving posts and beautiful images, and I'll happily schedule both during the brief times I bum WiFi from friends and strangers.)

My Apologies

Poor FitC has had a rough couple of weeks, eh?

First, I caught some sort of plague that knocked me out for a week, followed by the big Blogger Combustion of 2011, and now? Casa de Chaos, my current residence, has been without Internet access for an obscene amount of time. (Bless the WiFi of dear Mr. B for this post.) Forget the rapture; being without my only addiction (Internet Forever!) has been a personal apocalypse!

Bear with me, y'all, and know that I will not abandon you. So don't abandon me.  Deal?

Friday QuoteDay

“Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” 

—  Zora Neale Hurston, American author during the Harlem Renaissance

Weekly Flâneur: Shining

Bikes, boats, and beautiful buildings in Amsterdam. Click to enlarge.

Let's shine together. 

Canal in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Beauty and the Beast

Three things:

1.) Y'all know I would never willingly spill a drink.
2.) Why, yes, I am 30 years old.
3.) It took longer to add the stupid URL after I scanned it then it did to draw it. (Drawing time: Exactly 8 minutes, the time it took my microwave vegetarian lasagna to heat.)

Blogger Bummers

As you may have noticed, FitC's platform Blogger has been on the fritz for a couple of days now. A few posts disappeared, but since I was out of commission most of the week, there wasn't much to miss.

Blogger Buzz has this to say:

"Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.  We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring."

Hopefully all is well again, and FitC will be back in top form next week. Overall, Blogger has been good to me, and I will continue to use and support it.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled David Bowie lust:

Friday QuoteDay

“When a man gives his opinion he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion she’s a bitch.” 

— Bette Davis, American actress

Weekly Flâneur: Waiting

Image of a pigeon soaking up the sun. Click to enlarge.

Pigeons and people really do have much in common.

Empty chairs and lone pigeon, Covent Garden, London.

In Sickness and In Hell

The best friend to the American cold and flu.

DayQuil, nausea and sinus pressure mean little to no blog productivity. Sorry, friends.

FitC will resume its normal ramblings when I can breath again. Weekly Flâneur and Friday QuoteDay are a-go, but until the fever dreams revel something interesting, I'm on sick leave.

Here's David Bowie talking/singing to a 5-year-old. I love you all.

Friday QuoteDay

“People are uncomfortable with sexuality that’s not for male consumption.”

— Erykah Badu, recording artist, record producer, actress

Hello, Sunshine

Ready for the sun?

Heart-shaped aviator sunglasses, resting on my trusty notebook. Tricks of my trade.

With?

A glass of wine reflected in the lens.

Hell yeah. 

To Have and To Hold

I sleep too late, eat too little, and drink too much tea. I never remember to pay my bills on time and I'm fairly hopeless in the kitchen. When it comes to returning phone calls and emails I get ridiculously distracted and put it off for an embarrassing amount of time. If I'm not reading something online, I'm looking for something to read, and if I'm not reading online I'm reading a book or magazine or anything else that falls in front of me. I am incredibly self-centered, and have a hard time remembering birthdays. I have grandiose plans that never fully come to fruition, and am prone to running off to London when they do.

Despite all this, Mr. B loves me and together we are building a life. Come July, you'll find me in an off-white dress, barefoot in the grass. My announcement today, my blog friends, is this: We are getting married.

There will be no giving away of the bride, because I am my own to give. In truth, I lose nothing. The partnership we have built is one of deliberate jumping -- we did not fall in love, but trusted each other enough to grasp our hands and jump. We flew instead of fell, and we've been testing our wings ever since.

There will be no declaration of obedience, from either of us. I am my own person with my own whims and heart to obey, as is he. We'll compromise and choose, we'll take each step and fall with understanding and love.

It deeply saddens me how simple it is for us to declare we are going to be married because we have the state-approved combination of genitalia. Whether the person who Mr. B is inside -- a person of laughter, charisma, care, and unconditional love -- came to me in the form of a man or a woman, I would still love everything just the same. The right to marry the person you love should not be limited to gender or sexual orientation. I firmly believe that and will ally myself in the fight for equal marriage until we are all free to love openly and legally.

Flâneur in the City won't be turning into a wedding or bride blog; I've learned I haven't the knack for weddings. What interests me the most is starting a new phase in life with my partner by my side. The planning and preparation for the wedding day isn't as important as the life we have together.

You and I may never toast a drink together, dear reader, but I'm proud to share this news with you. Let's keep walking together, shall we?

As for me and Mr. B, we're halfway over the bridge. We'll cross into the new land united; fingers woven together, footfall in rhythm, partners side-by-side.

Weekly Flâneur: Fast and Furious

Image of traffic with Underground sign on a rainy night in London. Click to enlarge.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

-- Marie Howe 

Westminster Abbey keeps watch over the rush of traffic, London.

The Real World: Homophobia City

Sit down, kiddos, Memaw Natalie is going to tell a story.

Once upon a time there was no World Wide Web. There was an Internet, but it was a tiny web; among its users the incredibly smart, the incredibly geeky, and the incredibly rich. Like most new technologies, early accessibility always for the smart (who invent it), the geeky (who can build it) and the rich (who needn't be smart nor creative, just wealthy enough to purchase the tools to convince people they are both. See for example: Family, Kardashian). So when young Natty was around age 14, the Internet was something spoken of but not yet seen in my household. Since I did not have the Interwebs, I did not have the pleasure of knowing much beyond the media of my time. And since I lived in the Bible Belt, my exposure to some aspects of the world were a bit lacking. For example? The first time I saw two men kiss was on MTV.

Even though we joke about MTV not showing music videos, the channel has been slowly weeding out the music for the past 20 years, and large chunks of time in the '90s were devoted to marathons of every season of The Real World.

The Real World is the original reality show; MTV could not afford to hire actors but wanted a soap opera. So they filmed a soap opera-ish show with camera-willing volunteers. The volunteers are called cast members, and use their real names. It's now a formulaic relic of reality television: seven strangers live together and are filmed. That's the hook. No surviving islands or eating bugs or being from Jersey Shore. Just the hi-jinks of seven people wanting to be on television.
 
For some, myself included, those early seasons were my first look into the strange world of twenty-something-hood. Reality TV provided one of my first encounters with beautiful men kissing on The Real World: Miami. It dispelled some myths I had of what gay men could look like (Village People clones) and caused a bit of perplexing thought as to what body part went where in the love making. (I had long since pieced together the hows of heterosexual intercourse, thanks to a copy of The Joy of Sex studied at a friend's sleepover and 6th grade gossip.) Both of these things were beneficial: I had not yet shaken my Bible Belt upbringing in regard to homosexuality, and following the storyline of a beautiful gay man, cast member Dan, dating in Miami during marathon MTV viewings added to the start of that shaking.

Dan looks a bit bored with all this. (Dan from RW: Miami, official MTV.com photo.)

Fast forward some 15 odd years later, and we have The Real World: Las Vegas. While inexplicably pretending RW: Las Vegas didn't already happen back in 2002, the new RW kids stay at posh Hard Rock hotel and dine at such elegant establishments as the Pink Taco.

Adulthood

Via Better Book Titles:  

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz.

But you do get to eat ice cream and potato chips for dinner, so there's that. 

 

Hammer it Home, Hollywood: A Feminist Look at Thor

AKA: Hottie with a hammer.

First and foremost: I enjoyed this movie.

Please keep that in mind as you read these words. One can like something and still critique it. But since this is the Internet, home of trolls and newbies to critical thinking, I feel it necessary to state right from the start that it was a fine, entertaining, enjoyable movie. I am not personally insulting anyone who enjoyed this movie, because I myself enjoyed it. Also necessary: I'm only talking about the movie, not the comic books.

While there may be other problematic elements to the film (race, mythology, an abundance of vaguely British accents for Norse gods), this is only focusing on the characters through a feminist lens. And if I've missed something in that respect, please join in and comment.

It's spoiler free. If you've seen the trailer, you know the plot. All the action mentioned below can be gleaned from the trailer. But if you're the type that doesn't want to know anything about at all about a film before seeing it, I suggest you step away now.

Shall we then?

All images via Marvel.com.

Awesome: The character Lady Sif, played by Jaimie Alexander, is an equal member of Thor's inner band of warriors.

Flaw: Lady Sif was the first to fall down in the first battle.

Redemption: Luckily, this is a minor flaw. Lady Sif is an equal member of Thor's inner band of warriors. She is the only warrior to hit a major Big Bad other than Thor. Lady Sif is also the speaker, and one could assume, de facto leader of group when Thor is on earth. When introduced, the companions of Thor are called Lady Sif and the Three Warriors.

(Click READ MORE below for the rest of this article.)

Long Overdue

Times Square, via The New York Times.

It's a strange feeling to sit in the exact same place, nearly ten years later, and see online that there is breaking news regarding Sept. 11, 2001.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was 20 years old and living at my parents' house in an interim of my life. Now? May 1, 2011, I am 30 years old, and staying at my parents' home, affectionately called Casa de Chaos, as I prepare for the next race to begin.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was late for ballet class. I danced every Tuesday and Thursday morning, from 9 until noon, but on that particular morning I was more concerned about writing an email to the person I was dating at the time. So, dressed in my standard ballet outfit -- rose coloured tights, black leotard, hair in a tight bun -- I curled up in my old armchair with my clunky laptop balanced on my knees and an open news tab to check celebrity gossip. That's where I saw the news the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.

Tonight, the country road is quiet, the night is chilly, the house is still. I'm the only one awake, curled up in my sweatpants on an old green armchair, my laptop on perched knees. It's not the same laptop, my current much-loved Macbook replaced the clunky HP that rested under fingers that morning, but the room, the quiet, the sound of clicking keys and an open news tab are all here.

The news of Osama bin Laden's death has caused cheering in the streets in New York City and in front of the White House. London slumbers, but come morning the news will break; the 2005 tube attacks will certainly be on the collective mind.

For years, the US has been marred in wars that have no victory. There has been no V-Day, no justice nor resolve for the attacks on Sept. 11. What there has been is the needless, horrific Iraq war, the US divided into absolutes of "us" vs. "them" (with the "them" ranging from stranger to neighbor, colleague, family) by a hateful climate that penetrated every aspect of media, and a political movement that sought to use fear to manipulate the voting public.

Cheering in the streets is the one thing we haven't been able to do yet.

It's an emotional night, and one that will lead to questions in the morning. What happens next? What will the complications and retaliations be? Will something worse come along?
We can't know tonight. For now, some will cheer, some will sleep, some will shrug and could care less, some will cry.

For me, I'll shift the weight off my knees, turn off the television. Publish these words. And remember this muddled quote: "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great satisfaction."