New Additions

Eamon Thomas, Born October 25, 2011.

On Mermaids

When you have a three year old girl, you find yourself re-watching a lot of movies you haven’t seen in a while, especially Disney. I saw The Little Mermaid when it first came out, in 1989 (I was seven) and liked it, though even then I was aware that it was intended more for girls than boys. Watching it again now, with an adult perspective, I’ve figured out why – and it’s more than just Disney’s incessant and slightly irritating marketing of the “Princess” concept.

The release of The Little Mermaid marked the beginning of what’s been called the Disney Renaissance, a series of films in which the study broke out of the slump it had been in since the seventies. The renaissance continued with Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. How long the streak continued depends on your opinion of movies like Mulan, Pocahontas, Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the core of the period is those first four films. The torch was largely passed to Pixar after Tarzan, and Disney started making stuff like Dinosaur and The Emperor's New Groove, meh.



Anybody else think she looks like
Kristen Stewart?

  Of the four, the best is arguably either Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, but an informal poll of women in my life indicates that The Little Mermaid had the most long-term influence. It’s that influence that I want to explore here.  There is a considerable amount of analytical writing on the Disney oeuvre available online, and much of it takes a negative view of the films' influence, a prime example is this piece by Chey on Helium.com.  While I agree that early exposure to these cultural artifacts has an effect, I disagree with the view that these effects must be negative, and in se reinforce the "patriarchal myth".  The Little Mermaid’s power rests in buried psychosexual messages that ultimately provide a positive guide for adolescent girls’ development. To start with, the central event of the movie – Ariel’s transformation from mermaid to human – is a clear metaphor for sexual awakening. The important conflict is how that awakening is handled by Ariel and by those around her. It’s become a common game to spot supposed subliminal sexual messages buried in the frames of Disney movies – like the famous tower on Triton’s palace, or the dust that swirls around Simba in The Lion King. I’m not interested in such facile pastimes. Instead, I want to go deeper, and discuss symbolic and even archetypal characters and objects that give The Little Mermaid its intense hold on the imagination.



Generations

A piece on pbs.org (here) asks whether the economic destruction wrought by the profligacy of the last decade has created a new lost generation.  Unemployment among twenty-somethings is up, marriages are being delayed, and a huge number of young people are opting to live with their parents after leaving school.  Aside from the rather dubious designation of the "lost generation" (wasn't Hemingway a member of the last Lost Generation?), the piece hits a nerve with me.  Our twenties are when we define ourselves; we're away from the influence of our parents, and its time to decide what we're going to be and whether we're going to be great at it.

Places, and why we miss them

Anyone who's actually reading this may already know that we're expecting our second child. A boy. He's due at the end of October, but if he's anything like his sister, he'll come at the beginning of October. He'll be born here, in Phoenix.

The Curse of Coolness

It's been nearly a year since my last post. Thank god no one's actually reading this, or there'd be some disappointment going around. I promised stories from suicide row in my last post, and I'll get to that later on, along with the various comings and goings of life in general, and what's been happening these last eleven months. Big news: kid number two on the way! But that's also for another post.

What I want to talk about today is the problem of being cool. I was never cool in the sense that I was popular, or sought after, or a trend-setter. But I have, for a long time, tried to cultivate coolness. Ironic detachment. The ability to remain unruffled, and unmoved. And I'm realizing how much I missed in the process. How much we all miss, because our culture pushes cool to the point that I believe its hobbling the whole society.

I'll tell you what brings this up. In the last couple of months I've become a fan of Roger Ebert's website, especially his Great Movie essays, which are a biweekly feature. You can get the complete list here . Anyway, tonight I read his essay on Franco Zeferelli's Romeo & Juliet and thought "I bet Netflix has that available for streaming". Sure enough, they do.

My parachute's attached to a crazy person!

So, its been two months since my last post. Like I said, not good at this blogging thing yet. But since then, I've gotten a job!

A job! A job! O yes a job has he!

Does it pay what my old job did? No, it pays half.

Does it have perks? No.

Does it have a sweet commute? No the commute sucks hairy retarded monkey ass.

Am I happier with it than I ever was with my old job? Yes, and I'll tell you why.

My job title is Research Assistant. The study I'm working on aims to find out how to better treat people who are suicidal in an emergency room. (Or, as the docs perfer to call it, Emergency Department, it has more than one room.) So my job is to scan the charts as they come in to determine if any of the patients may be suicidal. Sometimes easy, the chart says "Suicidal". Sometimes hard, the chart says "extremity laceration", and then buried deep within, "patient slashed wrists with rusty box cutter and is now squeezing his wounds" - might want to have put that up front.

If I find out that you are suicidal, I'm going to try to find out if you're homeless, really drunk, or in jail. If you are none of those things, I'm gonna come talk to you and try to get you to enroll in my study.

Note please that I did not list crazy, slightly drunk, slightly high, a total prick, or stupid as reasons for which I will not talk to you. As a result, some of these conversations are quite interesting. My favorite so far is the guy who very loudly answered all of my questions...except i wasn't talking to him. I was talking to the guy in the next bed over. Schizophrenics are fun.

I imagine that this will be ripe for blog posts in future. (Being careful to avoid specifics, of course, in order to try and dodge HIPPAA procecution). Check back soon for more "Tales from Suicide Row".

ps. There actually is a row of beds called suicide row in the hospital, when all of them have suicidal patients in them, its called a straight flush.

Once more into the breach

So, it's been one year, one month, and one week since I stopped being employed. Here's how it went down:

I had been working as writer for a security company in New York, with offices all around the Northeast. I was writing training materials, proposals, correspondance, stuff like that, and was moving into some independent business analysis and process improvement stuff too. Sweetums (the wife) matched her residency in Phoenix, AZ. (More about the totally messed up residency matching system in later posts.) So we're gonna have to move.

Long story short, I was told that I could continue to telecommute, since I didn't really have to physically be in the office to do what I did. I even took a voluntary pay cut to make the arrangement more palatable to the higher-ups. Two weeks later I get a call from my boss. On my 5th wedding anniversary. And the day we're closing on our first house.

"We're going to have to find another way to pay you."

Fine, contract work. I'll put together bids on specific projects. I'll work with my boss to find the right rates. No problem. I'll still make what I need, right? Not so much.

Didn't get a response to a single bid. Not one. It was like I just dropped them into a hole.

So I don't know what to call that. Did I get fired? Not really, certainly not for cause. I guess it was kind of like getting laid off...right? Ultimately, what really ground my gears was the cowardice of it all. I worked with you people for five years! I spoke with you every day on the phone! And you (and I'm thinking of one Senior VP in particular here, the guy who I'm pretty sure made the decision to pull the plug) didn't have the courtesy to just say "no", you're done?

WTF?

Since then, I've been in contact with the old folks at my home office, and I've got no beef with them. I decided a long time ago that there was no point in finding out the full nitty gritty of what happened in corporate, or who decided that my ass was expendable. It'll only make me mad. Er. And I'm tired of being mad.

Anyway. That's how that happened.

Peace.