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shadowkatMade it to the gym today, first time without a personal trainer appointment to motivate me.
Progress. Did my homework assignments, rode the bike for a bit, then bought some stuff at Park Natural for a yogurt and fruit smoothie and headed home. Ankle is getting much better.
Could actually run to and from the subway this week. Yay. For those who don't know or are new to flist? I severly sprained my ankle six months ago and up until about May, was using a cane.
Hired the PT to help me get back into shape and to aid in the prevention of future sprains.
It means cutting back on other things, such as travel plans, but is definitely worth it.
Also finished my re-watch of Buffy S6 today, which I'm debating writing a lengthy meta on.
Watched the DVD commentary on Season 6 by the writers as well. Was pleasantly surprised by it.
I think the writers did hit all the marks they wanted to hit more or less thematically and characterwise. They also summed up in their commentary the reason I became so obsessed and fannish about Spike.
What follows is an extremely personal meta on Buffy S6. I am leaving it open to the public for now. Not sure if this is a good idea or not, since it is rather personal. Keep in mind as or if you read that this is my view of the series, and my view of things. I'm am absolutely certain that it will differ from everyone elses. Since we are unique and don't see things through the same lense.
I don't think I've ever gotten that fannish over a character or a tv series in my life, before or since Buffy, as I did here. And the reason is something about it - resonated with me.
Whenever I state this for some reason that bewilders me to no end, some people assume that I date and love bad-boys in real life. One guy even accused me of it. Which, was not only offensive, patronizing, sexist, and hypocritical (the guy admitted to Lilah fantasies and Faith fantasies, and had dated quite a few bad girls in his time), but also presumptious - he did not know me or who I dated. I did not share that information with him. Note - do not assume you know someone else's background unless they tell you and even then, you probably don't know it. I'll have you all know that the men I've dated do not resemble Spike in the least. Actually they come closest to resembling Xander (or as close as a real person can to a fictional character - which is what 5%, people are unique and defy categorization, when we do it, we make assumptions about them and generalizations which make us look idiotic.)
The reason I became fascinated with Spike is the duality, the mass of contradictions in the character. This is what the writers said about the character - which sums up my own views: Here's a guy who fights so hard to be this tough dude, cool, powerful, in control and happy with who he is, but when he falls in love - he has a poet's heart. He can't be bad and he can't be good - so he is forced in to this gray ambigious territory. He's also Buffy's counter-part. He represents the dark side of her power, the part of her that scares her. The slayer side. He's the violence inside her, the passion, the fire, and the power. It scares and draws her at the same time. When he attacks/attempts to rape her - it is a twisted perversion of his own complicated desires as well as hers, and the outcome of their abusive relationship.
The other character - I fell hard for, is Buffy, and it is because her story from metaphorical angle felt real to me, it still does. The feeling of wondering why I'm here, what my purpose is? Going through the motions? Does anyone care? And the rage - at the world, at oneself, at one's friends. From my pov, Buffy is suffering from a type of post-traumatic stress disorder - although I'm not sure it is wise or accurate to lable what she is feeling, any more than I think many of us can lable what we feel.
The problem with attaching lables like clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder to how we feel - is that it provides others with a way to generalize about us, to demean how we feel, to provide us with pop-psychology or solutions that work for them but not for us. We try to identify with or understand each other - I think - by labeling, by hunting a common frame of reference. I suffered from "clinical depression" and these are the symptoms - lets see if we can fit your symptoms into mine. But what if they don't fit? Actually they can't. We are unique. Our bodies are unique. Sure there may be similarities, but there are also many differences. And try as we might, we do not have the same frame of reference.
When I watched Buffy, when I watch Buffy S6, I always half-way see it through the lense of September/October 2001-May 2002 - just after the world trade center collasped and I found out that there was an insane conspiracy hatched by my boss at my company, where I had worked really hard at, to get rid of me or make my life hell until I resigned. Some of my closest friends at that company knew about it, but did not tell me. He'd bullied them into cooperating. Neither event made any sense to me whatsoever. They stood outside of my logical framework. I could not figure them out. And I felt this overwhelming sense of futility, rage, anger, and depression. I looked at the world, which the day before had been pristine and pretty and full of hope, and was now, hell. I'd come off of this amazing year - 2000 and most of 2001 - the world was my oyster, everything, I thought, was going my way, I was dating, I had a lot of new and close friends, I was planning a trip to Thailand that spring for my birthday. And suddenly, without any warning, the rug was pulled out from beneath me and within the space of two months, it all melted away. Gone.
I felt disillusioned with the world. Everything was contradictory. None of it made any sense.
It was if someone had took what I thought was true and what I thought was my life, and turned it inside out. I lost may way, got lost in the dark wood. Then I turned on this tv show that I'd been enjoying for the past five years and there it was - how I felt. I've never identified that closely with a character...not the way I did with Buffy in S6 of that series.
It was like Spike and Buffy were two sides of me. It was personal. Visceral. And hard to explain.
Today when I rewatched the episodes Normal Again through Grave, I remembered those emotions.
Didn't feel them. Or if I did, differently.
What drives me crazy at times in fandoms or any discourse, is people assume others share the same frame of reference. They make generalizations about things such as rape, domestic violence, racism, depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder - or try to make things fit into narrow or broad definitions, labeling something that often defies labling. It's like we think everything in the world can fit into these nice neat little drawers - that one used to find in libraries, carefully indexed. I remember when I worked at a library reference company in the 1990s - the indexers there used to make me laugh with their endless arguments over whether to index an article about a dead deer on the side of the road under the word road kill, deer, hit and run, or hunting accident. There were more terms. But I can't remember them all. And in law school, the endless arguments we used to have over what could legally be considered "rape" or "murder" and what was legally considered "sexual assault", "attempted rape", and "involuntary manslaughter", as well as whether the perpetuator was competent or capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, plus were there mitigating factors.
And oh god, the year and a half I spent working with domestic violence victims and people who had been sexually abused, raped, or molested. As well as those who perpetuated these crimes.
And those imprisioned for them.
What I've learned is you cannot put people in neat little boxes. You can't even put our actions in neat little boxes. You can't index them. You can't organize them in a database with tags for later review. And when you do so, you demean it. Or in some cases give more weight, more power to the crime than it deserves. We are complicated organisms. Why can't we see that? Why do we insist on painting things in such simplistic terms? Like a small child might with fingerpaints...although to be fair the child's painting is probably more wild and chaotic and harder to easily describe.
I think we do it to understand that which falls outside of our experience, our frame of reference. Why someone hurts us. Why someone does something horrible one day, so horrible it defies description, then the next something amazing. I think the organization, the labling, is a way to make sense of the world. To make it comforting. Safe. To provide boundaries, signs, markers, and paths and roads, to establish an end zone.
Defining things...makes them less scarey. Easier to handle.
What hit me about Buffy is it is a show that doesn't define. In the sixth season it did not define the bad guys clearly. The characters who saved the world in prior seasons, were their own worst enemies in this one. Life was the big bad. The writers state on the DVD - that it was about being disillusioned. This feeling that everything...is not what you thought it was.
There's this wonderful line in Normal Again, stated by Michael Warren who plays the doctor in Buffy's hallucination of a mental institution. He states - but after your sister arrived, inconsistencies happened in your world. It was no longer simple and clear cut. You were no longer fighting obvious evils such as vampires, gods, and demons - but rather three pathetic boys. The demons weren't evil or as evil as some of the humans.
I get that. This realization suddenly that the bad guys and the good guys are not definable.
They aren't simple. That your best friend, someone you've known forever, can and will stomp on you, betray you, and hurt you in a way you could not imagine or ever would have thought possible. That your mother or granny, could die one night in their sleep unexpectedly.
Or the boss that you trusted, could at the worst time possible, decide he hates you and make your work life a living hell.
Life is not for wimps. It can be wonderful. The final song that season, Full of Grace - or the prayer, states it well...where there is darkness light, where their is misery, joy, and only by dying, eternal life. Life - the song seems to say, exists in the contradictions.
We are contradictions. We hate and love at the same time. We want vengeance and forgiveness.
We ache and feel joy. At the end of Grave, Buffy cries tears of joy - relieved she's alive, at the beginning she and Giles laugh at her rundown of the things that she's experienced that year, the things she felt ashamed of, that were insurmountable, that were so painful.
And the laughter frees her, if only for a moment.
The problems still exist. They haven't gone away. As have the contradictions. Life is not something that has a beginning, a middle and a end - even though that is how we think of it.
It is continuous even after we ourselves are gone. It rumbles on and circles in on itself.
Undefinable. Beyond our comprehension. A tale told by an idiot floating yards and yards beyond us in the sky, weaving our individual stories, linking them, like bits of yarn in his/her multi-colored tapestery, that rolls in a puddle at his/her feet to go on until he/she runs out of yarn.
Progress. Did my homework assignments, rode the bike for a bit, then bought some stuff at Park Natural for a yogurt and fruit smoothie and headed home. Ankle is getting much better.
Could actually run to and from the subway this week. Yay. For those who don't know or are new to flist? I severly sprained my ankle six months ago and up until about May, was using a cane.
Hired the PT to help me get back into shape and to aid in the prevention of future sprains.
It means cutting back on other things, such as travel plans, but is definitely worth it.
Also finished my re-watch of Buffy S6 today, which I'm debating writing a lengthy meta on.
Watched the DVD commentary on Season 6 by the writers as well. Was pleasantly surprised by it.
I think the writers did hit all the marks they wanted to hit more or less thematically and characterwise. They also summed up in their commentary the reason I became so obsessed and fannish about Spike.
What follows is an extremely personal meta on Buffy S6. I am leaving it open to the public for now. Not sure if this is a good idea or not, since it is rather personal. Keep in mind as or if you read that this is my view of the series, and my view of things. I'm am absolutely certain that it will differ from everyone elses. Since we are unique and don't see things through the same lense.
I don't think I've ever gotten that fannish over a character or a tv series in my life, before or since Buffy, as I did here. And the reason is something about it - resonated with me.
Whenever I state this for some reason that bewilders me to no end, some people assume that I date and love bad-boys in real life. One guy even accused me of it. Which, was not only offensive, patronizing, sexist, and hypocritical (the guy admitted to Lilah fantasies and Faith fantasies, and had dated quite a few bad girls in his time), but also presumptious - he did not know me or who I dated. I did not share that information with him. Note - do not assume you know someone else's background unless they tell you and even then, you probably don't know it. I'll have you all know that the men I've dated do not resemble Spike in the least. Actually they come closest to resembling Xander (or as close as a real person can to a fictional character - which is what 5%, people are unique and defy categorization, when we do it, we make assumptions about them and generalizations which make us look idiotic.)
The reason I became fascinated with Spike is the duality, the mass of contradictions in the character. This is what the writers said about the character - which sums up my own views: Here's a guy who fights so hard to be this tough dude, cool, powerful, in control and happy with who he is, but when he falls in love - he has a poet's heart. He can't be bad and he can't be good - so he is forced in to this gray ambigious territory. He's also Buffy's counter-part. He represents the dark side of her power, the part of her that scares her. The slayer side. He's the violence inside her, the passion, the fire, and the power. It scares and draws her at the same time. When he attacks/attempts to rape her - it is a twisted perversion of his own complicated desires as well as hers, and the outcome of their abusive relationship.
The other character - I fell hard for, is Buffy, and it is because her story from metaphorical angle felt real to me, it still does. The feeling of wondering why I'm here, what my purpose is? Going through the motions? Does anyone care? And the rage - at the world, at oneself, at one's friends. From my pov, Buffy is suffering from a type of post-traumatic stress disorder - although I'm not sure it is wise or accurate to lable what she is feeling, any more than I think many of us can lable what we feel.
The problem with attaching lables like clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder to how we feel - is that it provides others with a way to generalize about us, to demean how we feel, to provide us with pop-psychology or solutions that work for them but not for us. We try to identify with or understand each other - I think - by labeling, by hunting a common frame of reference. I suffered from "clinical depression" and these are the symptoms - lets see if we can fit your symptoms into mine. But what if they don't fit? Actually they can't. We are unique. Our bodies are unique. Sure there may be similarities, but there are also many differences. And try as we might, we do not have the same frame of reference.
When I watched Buffy, when I watch Buffy S6, I always half-way see it through the lense of September/October 2001-May 2002 - just after the world trade center collasped and I found out that there was an insane conspiracy hatched by my boss at my company, where I had worked really hard at, to get rid of me or make my life hell until I resigned. Some of my closest friends at that company knew about it, but did not tell me. He'd bullied them into cooperating. Neither event made any sense to me whatsoever. They stood outside of my logical framework. I could not figure them out. And I felt this overwhelming sense of futility, rage, anger, and depression. I looked at the world, which the day before had been pristine and pretty and full of hope, and was now, hell. I'd come off of this amazing year - 2000 and most of 2001 - the world was my oyster, everything, I thought, was going my way, I was dating, I had a lot of new and close friends, I was planning a trip to Thailand that spring for my birthday. And suddenly, without any warning, the rug was pulled out from beneath me and within the space of two months, it all melted away. Gone.
I felt disillusioned with the world. Everything was contradictory. None of it made any sense.
It was if someone had took what I thought was true and what I thought was my life, and turned it inside out. I lost may way, got lost in the dark wood. Then I turned on this tv show that I'd been enjoying for the past five years and there it was - how I felt. I've never identified that closely with a character...not the way I did with Buffy in S6 of that series.
It was like Spike and Buffy were two sides of me. It was personal. Visceral. And hard to explain.
Today when I rewatched the episodes Normal Again through Grave, I remembered those emotions.
Didn't feel them. Or if I did, differently.
What drives me crazy at times in fandoms or any discourse, is people assume others share the same frame of reference. They make generalizations about things such as rape, domestic violence, racism, depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder - or try to make things fit into narrow or broad definitions, labeling something that often defies labling. It's like we think everything in the world can fit into these nice neat little drawers - that one used to find in libraries, carefully indexed. I remember when I worked at a library reference company in the 1990s - the indexers there used to make me laugh with their endless arguments over whether to index an article about a dead deer on the side of the road under the word road kill, deer, hit and run, or hunting accident. There were more terms. But I can't remember them all. And in law school, the endless arguments we used to have over what could legally be considered "rape" or "murder" and what was legally considered "sexual assault", "attempted rape", and "involuntary manslaughter", as well as whether the perpetuator was competent or capable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, plus were there mitigating factors.
And oh god, the year and a half I spent working with domestic violence victims and people who had been sexually abused, raped, or molested. As well as those who perpetuated these crimes.
And those imprisioned for them.
What I've learned is you cannot put people in neat little boxes. You can't even put our actions in neat little boxes. You can't index them. You can't organize them in a database with tags for later review. And when you do so, you demean it. Or in some cases give more weight, more power to the crime than it deserves. We are complicated organisms. Why can't we see that? Why do we insist on painting things in such simplistic terms? Like a small child might with fingerpaints...although to be fair the child's painting is probably more wild and chaotic and harder to easily describe.
I think we do it to understand that which falls outside of our experience, our frame of reference. Why someone hurts us. Why someone does something horrible one day, so horrible it defies description, then the next something amazing. I think the organization, the labling, is a way to make sense of the world. To make it comforting. Safe. To provide boundaries, signs, markers, and paths and roads, to establish an end zone.
Defining things...makes them less scarey. Easier to handle.
What hit me about Buffy is it is a show that doesn't define. In the sixth season it did not define the bad guys clearly. The characters who saved the world in prior seasons, were their own worst enemies in this one. Life was the big bad. The writers state on the DVD - that it was about being disillusioned. This feeling that everything...is not what you thought it was.
There's this wonderful line in Normal Again, stated by Michael Warren who plays the doctor in Buffy's hallucination of a mental institution. He states - but after your sister arrived, inconsistencies happened in your world. It was no longer simple and clear cut. You were no longer fighting obvious evils such as vampires, gods, and demons - but rather three pathetic boys. The demons weren't evil or as evil as some of the humans.
I get that. This realization suddenly that the bad guys and the good guys are not definable.
They aren't simple. That your best friend, someone you've known forever, can and will stomp on you, betray you, and hurt you in a way you could not imagine or ever would have thought possible. That your mother or granny, could die one night in their sleep unexpectedly.
Or the boss that you trusted, could at the worst time possible, decide he hates you and make your work life a living hell.
Life is not for wimps. It can be wonderful. The final song that season, Full of Grace - or the prayer, states it well...where there is darkness light, where their is misery, joy, and only by dying, eternal life. Life - the song seems to say, exists in the contradictions.
We are contradictions. We hate and love at the same time. We want vengeance and forgiveness.
We ache and feel joy. At the end of Grave, Buffy cries tears of joy - relieved she's alive, at the beginning she and Giles laugh at her rundown of the things that she's experienced that year, the things she felt ashamed of, that were insurmountable, that were so painful.
And the laughter frees her, if only for a moment.
The problems still exist. They haven't gone away. As have the contradictions. Life is not something that has a beginning, a middle and a end - even though that is how we think of it.
It is continuous even after we ourselves are gone. It rumbles on and circles in on itself.
Undefinable. Beyond our comprehension. A tale told by an idiot floating yards and yards beyond us in the sky, weaving our individual stories, linking them, like bits of yarn in his/her multi-colored tapestery, that rolls in a puddle at his/her feet to go on until he/she runs out of yarn.
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Date: 2009-08-24 03:49 pm (UTC)I also agree that life and people are messy and complicated and that's what is so great about Buffy. The show and characters are too and there is no one way to think or feel about them. Heck, every time I do a rewatch my feelings and thoughts can change.