I Don't Really Know What I Was Doing Here But This Sort Of Ended Up Being A Love Letter To All My Girlfriends, So There We Are Then.

This post has been making the rounds on my Facebook newsfeed again, and I am too mentally exhausted after finals week to tear it apart once more, so here is my copy/pasted reaction from the first time this bullshit appeared on my laptop screen.





"I've been seeing this sort of thing waaaay too many times on my newsfeed. No. Just NO. PEOPLE can be fake. PEOPLE can be petty, competitive, jealous and prone to gossip. Starting "useless drama with you" is not a trait that is exclusive to girls. "Having fun" is not something only guys are capable of doing.
See, being male does not automatically make guys ideal friendship material. And ladies, having a female friend does not mean she is going to, at some point, attempt to steal your man or bitch about you when your back is turned. If you can't get along with a particular girl, have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you can't get along as individuals? Being a guy or a girl has nothing to do with it. The kind of friend you are depends on the kind of person you are. Whether or not you have a vagina is irrelevant".

I feel bad for girls who insist on cutting other girls out of their friendship circles, I really do. It's sad enough that we're all in our 20s and some of us still hold on to the prevailing nonsense that vagina-owners are inherently catty, petty, manipulative drama-mongerers who make for horrible friends, as opposed to guys, who just eliminate all need to deal with ~drama and who will apparently never diss you behind your back or any of the other supposedly bitchy stuff that lady people get up to.

Now, I must admit that I haven't had much experience with having very close friends who are guys. I hang out with a fair few of them, and I'd like to think I'm socially adept enough to carry on interesting, intelligent conversations with males within my social circle (and also make penis jokes when the situation calls for it) , but I've never had a guy friend on the level of the ultimate confidante supremo, or anything like that. This may change in the future, but for now I don't feel like I am missing out on much. Largely because I have enough experience with people in general to know that the trait of being a flaming asshole or a raging disgusting piece of shit is not something that is exclusively based on gender. People can be shitbags. If a person is being an insufferable shitbag to you, what you do is you call them out on their bullshit, attempt a reconciliation, and then cut them out of your life if they keep being a shitbag. What you DON'T do is take one person's shitbaggery and apply that as a given as far as an entire group of people is concerned; in this case, other girls. You're cutting down your pool of potential friendships by half the world's population. Now why would you do that?

Because I love my girlfriends. I don't necessarily have dozens of them, but the ones I do have, I consider precious to me (and I should really, really work harder at keeping in touch with them). My girlfriends are like little reflections of different aspects of my own personality, while also being fully-realized and wonderful people in their own right. I love having girlfriends, and I just love making friends with girls and women in general (god, does this make me sound creepy? I hope it doesn't). I don't have a Sex & The City-esque clique of girlfriends though - very few of them actually know each other, and I tend to hang out with them on a one-on-one basis more than anything.

But still. I love having lunch with them. I love texting them until I run out of credit. I love the slow and steady accumulation of inside jokes and references over the years. I love getting mail from them. I love making mixed CDs for them (and receiving some, too). I love swapping books with them. I love going to the movies with them. I love to let them paint my toenails. I love going to gigs with them. I love when they trust me enough to share their deepest fears and insecurities and desires and dreams. I love the doodled birthday cards they made for me when we were 15. I love when they show up at my house with gifts or letters or handmade things for no other reason than because they felt like giving me stuff. I love when they tag me on social networking sites when they've found something they think will make me laugh, or something that reminded them of me. I love quoting Mean Girls with them. I love making horrible, bad, very not good puns with them. I love when they tell me about a song that I just have to listen to because it will change my life.

I love when they start watching a new TV show because I kept harping on about it to them. I love having Skype dates with the ones who are too far away. I love when they remember things I probably told them months or years ago. I love endless hours of conversation about anything and everything, because all the things we talk about are great things. I also love the pauses and natural silences in conversations, because they are never awkward. I love when they come to me for help, or advice, or to confide, or simply ask for my opinion on nail polish shades or whether they should read Jane Austen before they start watching any of the adaptations. I love when they listen, and counsel, and comfort, and make time for me. I love when we giggle for no other reason than because we felt giggly. I love when they feel the need to update me when they've seen a hot waiter in a restaurant at lunch that day. I LOVE MSN CONVERSATIONS THAT TAKE PLACE ENTIRELY IN CAPS LOCK.

I love being stuck in traffic jams with them and having nothing to do but shoot the shit for over an hour. I love when we can pick up exactly where we left off, even if our last conversation happened a year and a half ago. I love seeing them accomplish things. I love seeing them happy, and I love it even more when they want to share that with me. I love that we allow each other to have our own spaces, to drift there and back, and to have other girlfriends, without resenting each other or growing jealous or resorting to any of the stereotypical crap that gets attached to female-female friendships.

I love the mutual respect, the genuine affection, and the fact that we have yet to really tire of each others' company. I love that they become my life-cheerleaders. And I love that they make the time and space in their lives so that I can fit somewhere in there, tucked away among family and school and jobs and boyfriends and a million other things they have going on in their day-to-day existence. And I love that they have all, and I mean ALL - the ones who have lasted for years, the ones that come and go, the casual ones, the intense ones, the ones I've already lost, the ones that exist only on the Internet (hell, the ones that happen in the comments sections of all our blogs, because I consider you all friends) - have  in their own big or small ways, made me who I am. I am nothing if not a wondrously messy human patchwork of all of them, all of you.


If all that sounds like I might as well be in a relationship with my lady pals, well then, you're not too far off the mark. Maintaining a friendship is hard work you guys, if that person is worth it, you had better be ready to put in some effort (something I have not been very good at since leaving secondary school, and I have been trying to make a concerted effort to change that). And this really applies to friendships all over the board, regardless of gender ; you're not really expecting anything in return for being someone's friend (or at least I would hope so). Ideally, you're not hoping to get a promotion out of them, or free stuff, or anything like that. They're not your ticket to not-dying-alone, or eternal companionship, or validation (they can help you get there though). You work at being friends and staying friends because you value these people as human beings and you want to make room for them in your life. Because they make it better. Because they make you better. And that's rare and wonderful. And if you're one of those people who insist on not allowing other girls to occupy that kind of space in your life, well then. You really have no idea what you're missing out on.

"My Heart Is Gold, My Feet Are Light"

We're only a couple of weeks into January, but I think I may have just found one of my favourite songs of the year already. Phosphorescent's new jam is a 6-minute long swirling haven of synth and violin and Johnny Cash references and you will never want it to end, ever. I don't know when I'm going to able to take this track off repeat, and I don't even care right now.





See, the cage, it called. I said, “Come on in”
I will not open myself up this way again
Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
I will not lay like this for days now upon end
You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
To be acknowledge by some touch from his gnarled hands
You see, the cage, it called. I said, “Come on in”
I will not open myself up this way again

A lot of the songs we listen to are about love ; looking for love, yearning for love, waiting for love, falling in love, falling out of love, being in love. But I can't pretend that I've had a whole lot of experience with romantic love (I'm a late...blossomer. Yeah that's it), so for now I'll just have to live vicariously through musicians and their chord progressions and synth machines. And songs like Zula make me wonder if it's even worth leaving yourself vulnerable to such a devastatingly beautiful emotion, when love also has the potential to break you apart in ways I can't even begin to fathom, personally. But if pain like that leads human beings to be able to create songs like this? Holy shit, you guys. Holy shit.

The Hobbit (2012) : An Alphabetized List of All My Feelings, Which Are Many.

relatively SPOILER-FREE, but I can't promise anything, so tread with caution!

Let's get one thing out of the way here ; was it even necessary that these movies be made? Forget the fact that it's now a trilogy, when one well-executed film may have been perfectly serviceable. Was it necessary to make The Hobbit at all? Is this a thing the world needs? To the casual viewer, this whole project probably reeks of self-indulgence and bloated excess. But I cannot be objective about this film. I really and truly cannot. Because I am very decidedly not a casual viewer. I'm one of those people who find the extended boxset DVDs of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be too short. In the case of The Hobbit, I would have been perfectly happy if Peter Jackson had chosen to include all five thousand goddamn verses of Over the Misty Mountains. I am one of that generation of teenage girls who had a poster of Orlando Bloom on her bedroom wall when she was 13. Oh yeah. I went there. If you were 13 years old at around the same time I was, and did not have a crush on the utter lushness that was the Orlando Bloom of 10 years ago, then you :

a. are a lying liar who LIES
b. genuinely and unfortunately missed out on all this floppy-haired pretty :




I mean come on. You know your tweenager ass would have been ALL OVER THAT. Loving Orlando Bloom was a crucial element in the formative years of an entire generation of lady people, yo.

What I mean to say is that the LOTR films were a huge, huge influence in my life during that transition from childhood to adolescence (along with Harry Potter) and I generally have a MASSIVE emotional attachment to Peter Jackson's Middle Earth, as many people do. But the Lord of the Rings films were lightning in a bottle ; every element of it seemed to come together seamlessly, as if fated. Ten years, countless re-watches and endless oceans of tears later, there's still not a single character or snippet of dialogue or camera shot or piece of music that I would change or cut. And to expect the same magic from The Hobbit trilogy would be asking too much, so I don't. Which is why I am all too ready to acknowledge this movie's flaws, and there are many flaws.

Um, flaws. And stuff. 

a. It's a tall order to turn a 280 page children's book into a sprawling 3-movie epic, and these films run the very real risk of making everything seem - to quote Bilbo Baggins himself - like "butter spread over too much bread". The writers are essentially working in reverse here - while in LOTR it was about ruthlessly cutting shit out of Tolkien's rambling narrative in order to create a strong, cohesive triple-serving of AWESOMENESS, in this case it's about padding up a very simple plot to make sure all 3 hours of screen time feel like it has a purpose. And it doesn't always succeed. The Hobbit suffers a little in terms of flow and pacing ;  a lot of it felt like a series of vignettes woven together as opposed to a seamless progression of plot. And I do have my lingering doubts about how the rest of the book (barely 180 pages of it left!) is going to be spread out over another 6+ hours, even including Tolkien's additional historical material that Jackson is adding on to the original story.

b. I did not see the film in the very controversial 48 frames per second format, so I can't comment on that. I will say, however, that the CGI was a bit overdone in this one. The all-digital orcs and wargs tended to look fake as opposed to menacing. And frankly, Azog the Defiler would have made for much more genuinely frightening nightmare fuel material had he been a dude in makeup rather than an all-digital creation.



I think about the stuff that really scared me in the LOTR trilogy ; the Ringwraiths, for example. What was frightening about them was my knowledge that there were real people under those cloaks. There was a sense of solid, formidable, threatening WEIGHT. It's the kind of presence that the all-CGI representation of Azog can't quite convey ; he's a little too lightweight on the eye to really be as legitimately threatening as his character is meant to be.

c. There were a couple of scenes that dragged a little too much for my liking. While the very long scene of the dwarves arriving at Bilbo's house was a joy to behold, the White Council bit at Rivendell started testing my patience. It was just a bunch of old people waffling on and on about the events that would eventually lead to everything that happens in LOTR. While I appreciate the effort to make links and parallels to the trilogy, I really could have done with someone cutting this scene to about half its current length.

d. Now I love Howard Shore, but the music in this one felt a little too lazy and recycled. As much as I enjoy hearing familiar pieces of music from LOTR again (I'm pretty sure Peter Jackson knows that we all dissolve into a collective mass of weeping mush every time we hear this melody played in any form) I really do wish The Hobbit could have been given its own, full-fledged sonic identity. It's no accident that the best piece in the whole film is one of the only originally composed pieces that is unique to THIS movie, and what a piece of music it is. 


But it's not all complaints! Here is some good shit about the movie.

Like, good shit, you guys.


a. Martin Freeman is pretty much the best hobbit to have ever hobbited. Hands down.  He does what he does best - cranky, homely guy who just wants to be left alone to enjoy a cup of tea and keeps being reluctantly dragged into having adventures by strange people who befriend him against his will - and is PERFECT at it. His comic timing is as impeccable as always - the audience in my cinema spent more time laughing at the facial expressions he was making in the background than any of the actual jokes happening in the foreground. But what he also brings is some surprisingly heavy duty dramatic acting chops (not so suprising if you have already had the bittersweet privilege of being reduced to tears by Mr. Freeman's turn as Dr. John Watson in THAT EPISODE of BBC Sherlock, bless him). He brings heart, and warmth and humour to a role which could have almost been too easy and routine for him. Whatever happens in the next two installments of this seemingly ill-advised trilogy, the role of Bilbo Baggins is safe in the hands of this guy.

b.  Thorin Motherfucking Oakenshield, played by a longtime but low profile favourite of mine, Richard Armitage. Now, book-Thorin is a grumpy, rude, cantankerous, greedy old git who is far too in love with the sound of his own voice. So I understand and applaud the decision to make movie-Thorin much younger (and much hotter) and a sort of flawed tragic-heroic figure. Movie-Thorin is noble, regal, proud to a fault and quietly dignified; he inspires a kind of I-will-follow-him-into-death loyalty among his fellow dwarves rather than simply demanding it. He's also given a very detailed backstory, involving the fall of his kingdom Erebor at the hands (claws?) of the dragon Smaug, and his existence as an exiled prince. His main motivation is not just to retrieve his family's treasure but to reclaim his throne and give his people a home, so he also carries the burden of responsibility and pain and loss and grief and anger. It's a very smart decision, narrative and characterization-wise ; you get a movie -Thorin who is much more admirable, sympathetic and bad ass than book-Thorin.




This also raise the stakes within The Hobbit ; the fate of the world does not hang in the balance here, as it does in LOTR. The Hobbit is literally just about a bunch of dwarves who want to go kill a dragon and get their gold back. That's all. That's it. The attention lavished upon movie-Thorin's backstory and the tragedy of the kingdom of Erebor gives both his character and the journey itself a greater depth and meaning that they would not really have had otherwise. And taking Thorin's character arc into consideration, I believe there will be MUCH more emotional resonance and payoff by the time we get to the third and last film, and I'm personally very much looking forward to that.

(Quite frankly I'm thinking about a whole bunch of other stuff I'd rather be doing on a pool table with you right now, Richard. Also, bitches love cardigans. Good sartorial call, man. )
 I'm also glad that the fabulous and underrated Richard Armitage (What intensity! What broodish brooding! What a loin-melting voice! What brain-mushing beauty! Most nom-worthy of all cravat-wearers!) is finally due to get some big-time exposure and success, as he so richly deserves. Thorin Oakenshield probably won't win him any Oscars but LORD it better make some bigshot casting people sit up and pay attention, because this guy OWNS everything about this character. 


c. The Riddles in the Dark sequence was pretty much worth the entire price of admission. It was funny and sad and tense and completely, utterly compelling in all the best ways. I probably wouldn't complain if the whole movie had just been three hours of Bilbo and Gollum tossing riddles at each other in that cave. And speaking of Gollum, who do I have to punch in the face to get Andy Serkis some kind of international award for being an awesome human being? The guy is a bleeding treasure of our age.




d. This is more of a neutral observation, but differentiating all 12 dwarves from each other (with the exception of Thorin because he is just so MAJESTIC) is pretty much impossible at this stage.  They are all rowdy and lovable as a whole, but pretty much indistinguishable as individuals. Kili, Fili and Bofur have enough screen time to establish some semblance of separate identities, but it will probably take at least one more movie to really get to know them all. The rest of the company are currently just a mesh of beard and leather and interchangeable one-liners to me at this point. Also, the decision to make some dwarves more prominent and/or likable over others will also eventually serve its purpose (you don't think I see what you're doing here, Jackson?) in the third film, in which [spoilers.highlight to read] EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL DIE [end spoilers].





e. A few friends have complained about the lack of emotional payoff in this movie ; that any real emotional resonance did not genuinely come through until the last 20-30 minutes of the film, and even then it felt mechanical and scripted rather than earned. I think Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage deserve a lot more props for what they brought to those scenes in terms of emotional resonance, because they had a relationship dynamic arc to work through (in regards to Thorin and Bilbo) and they made it as sincere and believable as possible. I think what we all mean by "emotional resonance" is something along the lines of "THIS MOVIE DID NOT MAKE ME CRY A BATH TUB OF TEARS". Which, again, is probably a detrimental side effect of comparing this to the LOTR films. But it's so hard not to, when nearly everything about The Hobbit feels so much like a super-cranked up exercise in nostalgia ; the same music, the same characters returning, snippets of dialogue and scenes that parallel things that have already come before.


So here's the thing ; as a movie in itself, The Hobbit is fairly decent. It is no Lord of the Rings, and I don't think it ever will be, and it's probably better if you lower your expectations starting right now. Were there flaws? Many. Could it have been a much, much better film? Indisputably. Will I pay to go see the next two movies? Also yes. Will this trilogy own my heart as much as Frodo & co. have? I don't know. That really does remain to be seen. Will I spend the foreseeable future trawling through the Richard Armitage tag on Tumblr and crying over what a fine specimen of male perfection he is? Yes. Yes, that too.



HOW IS YOUR FACE AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS, SIR.


Ultimately I'm just glad to be back in Middle Earth again. And I think this movie was, at its core, made for people like me, ready and willing to have ALL the nostalgia wrung out of my tear ducts once again, ten years on. I don't even care if I'm being emotionally manipulated here, just TAKE ALL MY MONEY, PETER JACKSON. Personally I can't wait for The Desolation of Smaug this December. Until then I'll be dripping snot all over my LOTR  DVD covers as I indulge in yet another all-weekend trilogy marathon. The extended box set versions of course. Followed immediately by the extended cast commentary versions. Because we do it the hardcore way, or we don't do it at all.

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”  - John Waters


If there's one resolution I am going to be bothered to make for the year 2013, it is this : to read more. That's it. Just to read more books. I have fallen into the miserable habit of buying books, not reading them, and then buying more books anyway. The last straw came a couple of weeks ago when I returned from the Big Bad Wolf warehouse sale (bless the people who put that whole shindig together, by the way; it's essentially heaven for sad broke people who like words) with almost forty new paperback tomes and no space left on an already long-suffering shelf.

It's also an unfortunate side effect of being an English major that reading for pleasure just doesn't seem to have any room in my life's routine. I'm already tired and pissed about being told what to read and when to read it. Casual page-turning just isn't my idea of a relaxing time anymore. The minute I have any time to myself, it's straight to the laptop ; scrolling away into the wee hours of the morning until my eyes glaze over and I've been sitting there refreshing Tumblr's home page for half an hour. The Internet is great and everything, but there are things about reading that I miss deeply, and I intend to make more time for the printed word from now on.

It's not just the cliched shit that I miss ; the smell of ink or the sound of pages rubbing together or the texture of leather binding or anything like that. I miss that feeling of getting lost in a book. Being immersed in a time and place. Going back to re-read a phrase or a sentence that particularly struck you, and then rolling those words around in your mouth for a while (not your real mouth, though - more like the...mouth of your mind?). And the really good books, the totally 100%-immersive-experiences ones, they take a while to leave you, don't they? A few days, perhaps. You walk around having breakfast and going to classes and watching TV with that book still hovering somewhere in the periphery of your mind - names and faces and snatches of dialogue and places and smells. That book was a part of your world for however many days or weeks it took you to finish it, and for a while, Middle Earth or 1920's Detroit or post-war Greece or pre-Independence India feels as real to you as the bus stop down the road. And I never want to tear myself away from the pieces of the stories that choose to float around in my consciousness before making their gracious exits. It's a bit like reverse drowning in slow motion. You've been so completely lost in an entirely different place that it will take time to find your feet back in dull old reality. The last time I remember feeling this (which would also correlate with the last time I bothered to read a book at all) was when I sat down to finish The Hobbit for my children's literature module. I spent the entire week feeling as though half my body was still stuck somewhere in the Lonely Mountains, while the other half carried on with mundane everyday things.


I miss this feeling. I miss books. I miss having entire worlds living in my head. I miss reading. Which is why I am going to turn off my computer right after I've published this post, and finish reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. That poor lump of tree pulp has been waiting patiently for me long enough.