Heroes

January 26, 2014

I have a lot to say, unfortunately I had to replace our cable modem and our wifi router in the past month and it’s totally thrown me off of my game.  (Phones? Fine. Tablets? Fine. Laptop? Nope.)  I may (almost) be ready to start blogging again – post moving mayhem and the strange malaise I was fighting for the past couple of months.  Important things have been happening in pop culture and I have been conspicuously absent in my commentary.  (Mostly because I have a career that has nothing to do with my pop culture obsession, but partly because of some health issues and my need to be outside whenever possible since moving home.)

 

Anyway, firstly: The Bloggess followed me on twitter.  I have yet to actually say anything to her about this, because I am scared to say anything in case it’s some strange mistake or she actually doesn’t like me.  I know I owe it all to Samara (who is a doppelgänger to her cat) but it didn’t stop me from sitting bolt upright in bed and gasping when it happened. Not the coolest response ever, but she’s one of my heroes so I’m not remotely ashamed about this.  If you are not reading her blog or haven’t read her book you really need to.  She’s funny, gracious, and restores my faith in humanity.

 

Speaking of heroes – Spencer and I went to a reading by Margaret Atwood this fall and I managed to not lose the power of speech. (Oh, Al Franken, if I could time travel, the speech I had prepared…)  Thankfully, listening to the people around us, everyone was fairly in awe of her and had concerns about being able to string together coherent sentences.  I managed to tell her that Cat’s Eye changed my life as a young woman in college, and Spencer told her that we had Habitation as a reading at our wedding.  He had done a sketch of her while she was reading and had her sign it – I had her sign her newest book and my folio edition of The Handmaid’s Tale.  She was funny and brilliant, of course.  (She is also on Twitter.)

 

Last, but not least, I need to talk about Mindy Kaling.  If you are not watching The Mindy Project you should be.  I only wish that this show had been on when I was in high school or college because the character of Dr. Mindy Lahiri is one of the most positive female role models I have ever seen on television.  There’s a lot that could be said here about race or body image, but this goes beyond that.  As a self-proclaimed sass mouth I identify with Dr. Lahiri (and Kaling).  Smart women in a professional setting have to fight twice as hard to be taken seriously, and our exuberance and smallest personality flaws are blown up to clownish proportions by the people around us.  Dr. Lahiri makes it clear:  you can be a smart, funny, capable woman and still be occasionally shallow, care about “boys,”  and want to wear cute sweaters.  I grew up with my mouth getting me in trouble for saying things that would generate no more than an eye roll if they came out of a man.  Sometimes I’m scared that the NSA actually sold my livejournal entries from the early 2000s to a team of Hollywood writers, or maybe just Kaling, but more than that I take comfort in knowing that I am not alone. My experience in my 20s was normal and this personal development trajectory was not something I was experiencing alone (and that I wasn’t the only one who figured out how to have sex without letting my boyfriend see me naked with the clever use of shadow and light).  (Mindy also wrote a book and it is great.)

 

So, 2014: more writing, more adventuring, more reflection, more.

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