Or, Stuff I Hate. Although "hate" is really too strong a word for most, if not ALL the things on this list. "Irritate" is sometimes too weak a word. However, they can all be lumped together under the general heading of "Negative Reactons" be they thinking bad thoughts, cursing, hitting, or even just rolling my eyes. These've been building up for the past couple weeks, and while I've been meaning to blog them all out, I'm sure you can guess that the only reason I'm finally putting them to word processor is the fact that I'm back-stage at Arsenic & Old Lace again.
So, without further ado, here are Things I React Negatively To:
1) Personalized Liscene Plates. They bug the piss out of me. I don't know what it is, but whenever I see one, it just pisses me off. Or, rather, it irritates the hell out of me. Of course the degree of irritation varies from plate to plate. Now, I'm all for personalized liscense plates IN THEORY, but people just use them to say stupid things. I mean, you can only have up to 7 letters on a liscense plate, yet there's all these people who try to cram in words and phrases that are FAAAAAAR beyond 7 letters, and the result just looks so damn stupid that it's annoying.
Like today, there was a car I was driving behind that said "RLST8 4U". And I was all, "that's fugging stupid". First of all, it's spells HORRENDOUSLY! If you can't spell it right, DON'T SPELL IT AT ALL! Like Kris's Kanine Klean-up (KKK, go figure . . .), mispellings are not cool! They're dumb! Kind of like how in Final Fantasy XI, people want to name their characters after characters in previous FF games. After "Sephiroth", there's "Sefiroth", "Sephrot", "Zefiroth", and any other idiotic way you can come up with to spell a word that sounds remotely like the original name. Second, advertising your job through your liscense plate is just plain annoying. And third, I was stuck behind this van for 5+ miles due to traffic, and had to look at the stupid plate the whole way, which probably contributed to my dislike of it.
There's also this old guy I see driving around all the time (Actually, I've seen the car twice, but still), who's liscense plate says "Da Ja Vu".
. . .
It's Deja Vu, old man, get it right or don't put it on your damn liscense plate.
My friend Tabby had a personalized plate that said "Duberry" on it, which isn't so bad because it's a whole word, and it's spelled right, and has personal meaning to her b/c it was a nickname of her's in high school. Plates like that are fine. There was also a plate I saw that said "AerynSn", which is the slightly abbreviated form of Aeryn Sun, the main female character on Farscape, and since Farscape is so damn cool, skipping the "u" in order to put a character on your liscense plate is forgivable.
So, let that be a lesson to you all: Personalized Liscense Plates are horribly stupid, unless they're spelled correctly, or I happen to think they're cool.
2) Those abortion protesters outside Planned Parenthood every saturday morning. They sicken me. I have to drive by there on my way to and from the Red Cross, and every time I do, I want to puke. It's not their message I have a problem with, it's the posters of dead, decomposing babies they plaster up on the wall that I have a problem with. It's horrifying. Not only do I object because forcing anyone driving on Dodge that time of day to view rotting corpses is apalling (seriously, that kind of stuff can't even be shown on television, yet they think they can shove it down people's throats as part of free speech), but also because ABORTION ISN'T ABOUT KILLING BABIES AND LEAVING THEM TO ROT! Abortions are the terminations of embryos, small clusters of cells that have the POTENTIAL to become babies. Actualy slaughter of infants is, as far as I know, illegal in this country.
Now, this abortion debate is a huge one, I know. There are soooooo many things to consider. First of all, and the biggest is: "At what point is it considered killing an actual person?" Well, to answer that, you'd have to define what makes a person a person, and then find out at what stage of development those traits emerge. Do reasoning and self awareness, and higher brain functions make a person a person? Well, if that were so, then it would still be legal to murder children as old as a year or two, since thier brains are still developing at that age, and, really, are about as intelligent and self aware as many animals.
But killing a 1 year old is murder, right? Well, if dogs and pigs, and cats, and other animals are just as mentally aware as a 1 year old infant, why are they killed? Pigs are killed for food, and they're some of the most intelligent animals on the earth.
So, if it's not the degree of mental advancement, then is it the potential? Destroying an embryo is wrong because it has the POTENTIAL to become a person? Well, sperm have the POTENTIAL of becoming a person, and it's not illegal to jack off into a tissue and throw it away (although for some strict religious types, I guess it is). Sperm are body cells, an embryo is just a slightly advanced version of sperm. It's not even developed enough to have a brain to BE aware.
So it can't really be potential either. Hell, with medicine these days, in the next 10 years, a strand of hair that comes off in your comb will have the potential to become a fully fledged human being.
Is it the fact that it simply LOOKS like a person? This is the one I'm inclined to agree with. The stage of pregnancy where an abortion stops being legal is when the embryo is adnvanced enough to start looking something like a baby. It still doesn't have a fully formed brain, but it *looks* like a baby. And this is what pisses me off. We only care about things that LOOK like us? Hell, this is why slavery persisted for so many years: because black people LOOKED different, so they were assumed to BE different/not human. Isn't that sick?
So, am I FOR or AGAINST abortion? Well, that's a stupid question. I'm not going to be FOR termination of pregnancies. It's more a question of the circumstances in which they are, or are not allowed. Personally, I think that pregnancy and motherhood are a responsibility. Safe sex is a responsibility. If a girl has sex, she needs to be aware of the consequences and deal with them. If she gets pregnant, she should have the baby. Sure, not all young mothers are equipped, financially or otherwise, to raise an infant. In those cases, the baby can always be put up for adoption. I do think that, however, if the mother's life is in danger, that pregnancies should be able to be legally terminated.
Those're my own thought on the subject. Anyway, I just strongly object to people blowing the issue out of proportion and showing such horrible pictures in public. Frankly, I'm surprised it's legal. If it was a picture of two people making love, it'd be torn down as pornography. But, no, rotting baby corpses are just fine and dandy, apperantly . . .
Which brings me to:
3) Violence is more appropriate than sex. Wow, american culture is fucked up that it's more appropriate to watch someone getting hurt than it is to watch someone getting pleasure, when hate is more appropriate than intimacy. Fucking culture.
4) People who say that the movie "Shortbus" is porn. No, it's not. Porn is about watching people have sex to sexually excite the viewer. This is not in any way, shape, or form, the intention of the movie "Shorbus". Yes, there is graphic, uncencored sex in "Shortbus". Yes, you do see ejaculations in "Shortbus." But for every sexual encounter in the movie, the characters have a variety of reasons for entering into those encounters, and those reasons are shown to the audience and explored.
The sex in this movie is not always about getting off. In fact, very RARELY is the sex in this movie initiated because the characters want to get off. I think that the uncencored-ness of the movie really helped in this.
In most main-stream movie love scenes, the private parts are always carefully kept off-screen by camera angles or conveniently placed objects, always suggesting that you're watching something artificial. The fact that everything was out in the open in "Shortbus", made the whole movie seem more like you were watching real people in a real situation. It didn't look choreographed like those cencored love scenes look. In fact, there was one sexual encounter in the movie that WAS cencored like oh-so-many usual sex scenes, and it DETRACTED from the movie because I was quite noticably withdrawn from my immersion in the story.
But yeah, it's a good movie. It's not just about watching money shots. Go see it. Except that it's not playing in Omaha any more ; ;
Bahhh, I think I have to go onstage soon. I need to think of what the other things that I react negatively to are, anyway. I've gone off on several tangents, and now my brain isn't working like it was 30 min ago. Good thing there are 2 more shows this weekend, both of which I have time backstage to finish!
Eric 11/17/2006 08:31:00 PM
Comments:
Not to spark any sort of a debate or anything, it's just that the whole "When is it a baby, when is it not?" debate has gotten so convoluted, I made up a rule of thumb that works for me. It doesn't really answer the question, but it works in a practical sense. My rule of thumb: by the time you know you know you are pregnant (or you got someone pregnant), it's probably a baby.
I'm not even saying when is it right or wrong to have an abortion, I'm just tired of all the semantic arguing about when is it a baby or just a fetus. If infant euthenasia gains ground (the Dutch gov't is currently considering legalizing it), the next question will be, when is it a baby or just an infant. Then what, baby or toddler, toddler or child, child or adolescent? I'm not claiming slippery slope, I'm just hopefully illustrating how repugnant the debate is in the first place.
