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shadowkat1. Watched the documentary Happy by award-winning filmmaker Roko Belic. And cried through most of it. It's a moving film. The filmmakers basically travel around the world to determine how various cultures handle happiness and what makes humans, generally speaking, happy.
It didn't exactly tell me anything I didn't already know - which is that community, ability to give to others, and having close relations with family and friends makes most people happy. Extrinsic items such as material goods, economic success, popularity and image don't really make you happy over the long-term. Physical activity and doing things you enjoy - creates dopamine in the brain - also providing happiness and longevity.
What I did not know...or learned from the film was:
* Mother Teresa's first center for the dying and the infirm is in Calcutta and you can volunteer and serve there.
* Okinawa Japan has the happiest community and the longest living. People live to well over a hundred and are happy. They don't have a lot - no tv, no internet, just farming, a small band, friends, nice weather, none of the material or technological advantages we do.
* Japan - the most technologically advanced - the main island, and city Toyko has the highest rate of suicide and is the least happy. It's working people to death. After the war,
people were told to devote themselves to economic growth and prosperity - to rebuild. Now, people are dying at young ages of heart attacks and spend 120-180 hours a week working. Spend little to no time with their families. Lots on cell phones and traveling. They've even come up with a word for it.
* Denmark is considered another one of the happiest places to live - it has communal or co-housing, where people live in small communities, sharing chores, cooking, play time. They take care of each other. Also there is paid health care and education for everyone.
* Big events - good ones and really bad ones - are not as important in regards to happiness as "flow" or finding small things to make you happy each day. They did a story about a former beauty queen who was run over by a truck, lost her looks, and her husband...but managed somehow to bounce back and find things to feel grateful for, and now works with others to help them. Her story is really moving.
At the end the film - stated that people who do the following two things on a daily or weekly basis tend to be happier than people who don't:
1. List five things to be grateful for.
2. Ordinary and random acts of kindness - whether it is paying someone's parking meter, holding a door open for them, shoveling a driveway, etc.
So, in keeping with that theme:
Five things to be grateful for -
1. Pears and cinnamin
2. Ability to walk without pain and now quickly, after six months of intense pain
3. A really good massage therapist and physical therapist
4. A caring church
5. Trains.
2. Had a bit of an epithany today. I realized two things. One why I fell in love with a tv show, to the degree that I wrote over 400 pages of meta on it, sought out others, and fell into a fandom. And two, why I fought with myself over it the entire way, made fun of my love and hated myself for loving it.
The TV Series was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it was the first television series that I'd seen which had a girl hero. She was "girly". Small, pretty, blond, a former cheerleader, was in some respective ultra-feminine. Even her name was "girly". And the majority of the villains she fought were "uber-masculain monsters" or "the male view of what women should be" and she fought them off with a phallic stake, turning them into dust.
Note this wasn't like Xenia or Farscape, who had female heroines - but they were more masculain in aspect. Strong jawed. Tough. Tall. Not gentle. Buffy was the gentle warrior, well at least at first at any rate. She was the iconic feminine hero, not a "female" hero, but a "girl" who was a hero. (And here I was watching, me, who didn't like "girly" girls and had long ago rejected that type of heroine, I preferred the more square-jawed heroines - like Aeryn Sun or Xenia. But...I fell in love with Buffy. Because it spoke to that part of me, I wanted to shove aside.)
And I became obsessed with Spike and his journey, because it is the journey of the wounded male, Parsizal, who is at war with his feminine side, who has attempted to remove it, considers it disgusting and wars with every woman he meets, attempting to destroy them, unless of course they are sick and insane and childlike. In an attempt to deal with mother issues. A perfect metaphor for our society.
But in Buffy...he falls in love with a girl. And through that "love", is able to reconnect with that feminine side of himself, the side he thought was weak, because society told him it was weak. We watch him increasingly become reconnected to the feminine side of himself,
discover that the side he believed was weak was actually one of his greatest strengths - until he journeys to a cavern and fights to re-obtain it (his soul). And in order to reconnect with that side of himself - he has to have the masculain side weakened (the chip).
When he does reconnect with that side - it's not easy, he fights it.
Buffy was the first series that I'd seen that literally and figuratively drove a stake through the phrase : "Don't be such a girl."
School Hard is a marvelous episode. Because Spike pokes fun at Buffy's girliness, but she and her mother drive him off.
You know something is out of wack with our world...when both gender's indiscriminately use the word "girl" as an insult. This ingrained need to reject the female side, see it as weak, emotional, unworthy, when nothing could be further from the truth. What I loved about Buffy is it ...pointed that out over and over and over again in multiple ways. And after Buffy, other series followed suit...not many but enough here and there, such as Grey's Anatomy and Scandal and The Good Wife and Veronica Mars and Sleepy Hollow.
It didn't exactly tell me anything I didn't already know - which is that community, ability to give to others, and having close relations with family and friends makes most people happy. Extrinsic items such as material goods, economic success, popularity and image don't really make you happy over the long-term. Physical activity and doing things you enjoy - creates dopamine in the brain - also providing happiness and longevity.
What I did not know...or learned from the film was:
* Mother Teresa's first center for the dying and the infirm is in Calcutta and you can volunteer and serve there.
* Okinawa Japan has the happiest community and the longest living. People live to well over a hundred and are happy. They don't have a lot - no tv, no internet, just farming, a small band, friends, nice weather, none of the material or technological advantages we do.
* Japan - the most technologically advanced - the main island, and city Toyko has the highest rate of suicide and is the least happy. It's working people to death. After the war,
people were told to devote themselves to economic growth and prosperity - to rebuild. Now, people are dying at young ages of heart attacks and spend 120-180 hours a week working. Spend little to no time with their families. Lots on cell phones and traveling. They've even come up with a word for it.
* Denmark is considered another one of the happiest places to live - it has communal or co-housing, where people live in small communities, sharing chores, cooking, play time. They take care of each other. Also there is paid health care and education for everyone.
* Big events - good ones and really bad ones - are not as important in regards to happiness as "flow" or finding small things to make you happy each day. They did a story about a former beauty queen who was run over by a truck, lost her looks, and her husband...but managed somehow to bounce back and find things to feel grateful for, and now works with others to help them. Her story is really moving.
At the end the film - stated that people who do the following two things on a daily or weekly basis tend to be happier than people who don't:
1. List five things to be grateful for.
2. Ordinary and random acts of kindness - whether it is paying someone's parking meter, holding a door open for them, shoveling a driveway, etc.
So, in keeping with that theme:
Five things to be grateful for -
1. Pears and cinnamin
2. Ability to walk without pain and now quickly, after six months of intense pain
3. A really good massage therapist and physical therapist
4. A caring church
5. Trains.
2. Had a bit of an epithany today. I realized two things. One why I fell in love with a tv show, to the degree that I wrote over 400 pages of meta on it, sought out others, and fell into a fandom. And two, why I fought with myself over it the entire way, made fun of my love and hated myself for loving it.
The TV Series was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it was the first television series that I'd seen which had a girl hero. She was "girly". Small, pretty, blond, a former cheerleader, was in some respective ultra-feminine. Even her name was "girly". And the majority of the villains she fought were "uber-masculain monsters" or "the male view of what women should be" and she fought them off with a phallic stake, turning them into dust.
Note this wasn't like Xenia or Farscape, who had female heroines - but they were more masculain in aspect. Strong jawed. Tough. Tall. Not gentle. Buffy was the gentle warrior, well at least at first at any rate. She was the iconic feminine hero, not a "female" hero, but a "girl" who was a hero. (And here I was watching, me, who didn't like "girly" girls and had long ago rejected that type of heroine, I preferred the more square-jawed heroines - like Aeryn Sun or Xenia. But...I fell in love with Buffy. Because it spoke to that part of me, I wanted to shove aside.)
And I became obsessed with Spike and his journey, because it is the journey of the wounded male, Parsizal, who is at war with his feminine side, who has attempted to remove it, considers it disgusting and wars with every woman he meets, attempting to destroy them, unless of course they are sick and insane and childlike. In an attempt to deal with mother issues. A perfect metaphor for our society.
But in Buffy...he falls in love with a girl. And through that "love", is able to reconnect with that feminine side of himself, the side he thought was weak, because society told him it was weak. We watch him increasingly become reconnected to the feminine side of himself,
discover that the side he believed was weak was actually one of his greatest strengths - until he journeys to a cavern and fights to re-obtain it (his soul). And in order to reconnect with that side of himself - he has to have the masculain side weakened (the chip).
When he does reconnect with that side - it's not easy, he fights it.
Buffy was the first series that I'd seen that literally and figuratively drove a stake through the phrase : "Don't be such a girl."
School Hard is a marvelous episode. Because Spike pokes fun at Buffy's girliness, but she and her mother drive him off.
You know something is out of wack with our world...when both gender's indiscriminately use the word "girl" as an insult. This ingrained need to reject the female side, see it as weak, emotional, unworthy, when nothing could be further from the truth. What I loved about Buffy is it ...pointed that out over and over and over again in multiple ways. And after Buffy, other series followed suit...not many but enough here and there, such as Grey's Anatomy and Scandal and The Good Wife and Veronica Mars and Sleepy Hollow.
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no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 09:57 am (UTC)I like this very much!
You know something is out of wack with our world...when both gender's indiscriminately use the word "girl" as an insult.
One of the best lines in the show is when Giles tells her that she throws 'like a girl' and she corrects him, saying 'like I'm not the Slayer'.
One girl can make all the difference...
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 10:22 pm (UTC)Now everyone around the world knows who she is - but no one knows the names of or cares about the men who shot her.
And she didn't react with violence. She used her voice. She spoke.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 02:40 pm (UTC)In the gift, when she shows up at the very beginning of the episode to save the boy in the alley. The boy states: "But you're just a girl."
And she replies, "yes that's what everyone tells me." Right before dusting the hulking male vampire.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 02:52 pm (UTC)And it just occurred to me, that throughout the series Giles keeps trying to make Buffy more masculain - less emotional, more pragmatic. Yet he fights with himself - his feminine aspect to do it. In S7, Giles is scared and pushes her to be male, pragmatic, but it doesn't work. And his dream in Restless is of a little girl who can't be a hero, until the First sneaks up on him and slices off the top of his head. The Watcher Council is also uber-male, even the women are dressed and act like men - a fitting metaphor for the societal teachings.
The pressure. Which Buffy fights against throughout the series.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 04:06 pm (UTC)Not at all - I'm honoured!
The pressure. Which Buffy fights against throughout the series.
*nods* Even the Shadowmen try to fill her full of more power, and in the end the solution is to share. (Every girl that can stand up, will stand up.)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 12:06 pm (UTC)THIS. Very much. And also everything you say about Spike, who is still one of my greatest loves when it comes to male characters, maybe the greatest.
I love the fact that Buffy is really "just a girl" and that she doesn't become more masculine. I understand the fascination for more masculine women-hero, because of the connection between "girly" and "weak". I'm grateful that Buffy wore pink pants while fighting. She made me more open towards my girly-girl side.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 02:47 pm (UTC)What's interesting was in S7, when she became more male with her speeches and her attitude, she lost her followers and her strength and was defeated, but when she let go of that and reconnected to the feminine side - caring, compassionate, she regained it.
Giles kept pushing her to be more like the masculain aspect, less emotional, less caring, pragmatic, practical. She kept pushing back. And in the end Giles was sidelined.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-10 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-12 04:10 am (UTC)