"Women are meant to be loved, not understood" - let kids be kids, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Alice-in-Wonderland-wetness

Hey blog readers :)

I have to say, this is getting quite boring for me, blogging down the mundanities (is that a word? Like I care) of my day-to-day "depression" stories - I have to snicker when I refer to my sundry moods as such. Still, blogging about stuff does get it out somewhat, and I'll take being an open person over having a bunch of closed pages in my heart that need a reader. I don't much like closing off - not that being open is easy. But it's better. Words are charged with energy. They take up energy out of your being, when they're left unsaid. I don't believe in throwing out globs of energy (I am lacking a more effective metaphor to get the point across) to fill the air with more unwanted and negative vibrations. Poor oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen particles, having to rinse out all that rubbish and pollution and crazy ENERGY. A moment of silence for you guys... aaaaaand it's gone :D Still, my heart doesn't have much storage space for silent resentment, sadness, anger, and all their associates. Hear that, you mofos? This heart doesn't have room for you guys anymore. I am kicking you out. Over the past months, I've done a good job at consciously barring the way of negative thoughts into my mind. But my heart has been having other ideas all this time, like some ADD kid who won't sit still and keeps right on buzzing despite everyone being annoyed (that's me, btw. When I was a kid, you literally had to root me to the spot or else I would keep running around and falling over my own shadow. My mother used to liken sitting me down for dinner to driving a rivet into the wall that refused to fit). Whatever way, you guys, I'm relatively calm now, so no more limp-blue discourse on meaninglessness and things of the sort. I do believe things can get rather meaningless from time to time, but that's a part of life. I'm making peace with it. Not everything is full of action and excitement and novelty. Sometimes life is just boring. And that's okay. All things considered, it's a nice feeling, being bored. Some people won't ever have that privilege. I am blessed with the unlikely gift of boredom. Among other things. I don't understand why I'm so lucky. But thank you God. My life is amazing. I'm just being a brat about some things. And I guess as long as I understand that, and appreciate things, and see the truth for what it is, I'm good. On a final note, being bored, as with many seemingly unpleasant things, has its plus-side. The Turkish telenovella industry, for one, has capitalized remarkably upon the daily drudgery that Middle Eastern housewives have to go through, waiting for their husbands all day to come home, and with their kids at school. The Smartphone people understand the value of boredom, too. Excessive boredom is a very twenty-first-century thing, I believe. From the stories of my family members and my older-generation friends, I am led to believe that what we're experiencing nowadays, us kids and more grown-up people alike, is the most significant Boredom Epidemic in the scope of this crazy contraption called "Human Life on Earth".

People used to have fun in those days. Kids could be kids. This might sound weird coming from me, seeing how I'm eighteen years old, but back when I was a kid, if you were bored, you went outside to play in the fucking grass with other kids. We kicked a ball around, we rough-housed, we caught frogs and let them go. I used to run with dirt on my jeans and blood on my scraped knees from having fallen upside down off the monkey bars - a slightly disturbing thing to say, I'll wager (zomg), but my point is, things were real, goddamit. I feel sorry for the little kids these days, who are growing up with iPads and cellphones and missing out on the joys of being young and not caring about that stuff and laughing at the grown-ups for being so stupid. I'm not too sure if this is a problem with European little kids, as I haven't met too many of those in my stay here in the Czech Republic (which is unfortunate, because I think kids are so much more interesting than grown-ups. I am not a paedophile - isn't it sad how I feel I need to justify myself for saying something as simple as "I like kids"? Societal lingo has become too twisted like that, for people to take anything cleanly), but I can tell you it is an alarming problem with Middle Eastern little kids. Every other five-year-old in Lebanon has some form of technological device that they can't possibly need or understand and appreciate how to use. There's a direct proportionality between this growing acquaintanceship of Kids and Technology and an increase in child arrogance and talking back to parents. I wish I could conduct research on this, for the love of God. I guess I shouldn't be telling anyone how to parent their child, but I'll say that I appreciate those "old-fashioned" parents who insist that their kids be kids. Your kids will remember that, and cherish you for it. Don't burden your young ones with this information overload we all seem to be suffering from lately. Let kids be kids. Every chance in which they're allowed to be kids is precious. Because God knows we can't be forever young. So please, let them live. But then again, if everybody's doing it, that becomes the normal way of life, and then your kids are going to get pissy about you not letting them go with the flow. Ah, I am so outdated. Le resigned sigh.

You know what's another result of this Boredom Epidemic gripping our restless brains (which weren't, by the way, quite so restless even a few years ago. We've lived in a time in which little kids with nothing wrong with them are getting medicated for "anxiety" and attention-span-related problems. What a crazy, small-minded world we live in)? Authors know we've gotten bored, and stupid. We've gotten so bored that things (I didn't say books, just... things) like Fifty Shades of Grey register as smash-hit literature to people of our century. Yep, I have to say something about this book (they're actually a series of three books, but I've only gotten through the first eighty-something pages of the first one, so I won't talk about the other two). This won't be a book review or analysis - I don't want to scare you away with a simile - ooh, scratch that, onomatopoeia always does the trick ;) ("joke" intended for understanding by literature nerds only).

You know, when you just hear the title, not knowing anything about the content of the book, what do you see? In my case, I saw a psychologically riveting novel about a generic dark theme having the potential to keep my attention for a few days, and maybe even touch me in some way. I think it had something to do with the word "grey". So when one of my friends raved to me about this book, and encouraged my buying it, I was glad somebody had given me the permission to see what all the commotion is about. Then, when I got to the duty-free shop of the Beirut airport, I hesitated in front of the stack of Fifty Shades of Greys. I vaguely felt that something about this book would not be enjoyable. My Uranus intuition was right - drat. This book, by the way, is being marketed as an erotic novel, a point I'll come back to. I bought the book, thinking it would be a nice read for the airplane and the metro stations in Praha. Let me tell you now, that if you are a woman in the way I define a woman to be, you will find nothing erotic or sophisticated about this book at all. I think the lady just ripped off Twilight and made it into some absurb porn thing. Well, I don't want to be too severe on the lady, she's gotten enough flack already. Before I forget, I read this review of the book in which a husband mentioned that since his wife read this book, their sex life improved dramatically, and that he has been encouraging his wife to read more erotic novels from that time. Can I just say that you, sir, have pinpointed something very frustrating about women that gets at me from time to time - but myself being a woman, I haven't necessarily figured that thing out >.< Oh, and good man. H'm, now I've got myself chewing on that idea - part of me would like to know what is it about women that makes us such frustrating creatures, to one another and to men, as I am a fan of the fair sex in a more-than-contemplative way. But I think Oscar Wilde had it right when he said, "Women are meant to be loved, not understood". Quite so. And it gets mighty hard to understand their fixation with something as sordid as Fifty Shades.

Can I ruin the plot? The main character is a girl, Anastasia Steele, who gets fucked over and over again by a multi-billionaire sex-god "dominant" guy, Christian Grey (that's what all the greyness is about). The lack of character development, not to mention the high-school-level writing style, are dismaying aspects of the novel, to be sure. But here's what really bothered me about this "book": it is so antifeminist. The thing that first jumped out at me was how fixated on external appearances, and how insecure, Ana Steele is. I perked up when my friend told me Ana is a literature major - projection, I suppose. But you know, she's so clueless, not just about literature, but about things in general. But the real problem with this book, aside from it making women look hare-brained, is how something as unhealthy and abnormal as Ana's obsession with Christian (why did the author have to choose this name, of all names? Some crazy trying-to-be-avant-garde thing? Or is that giving her too much credit?) is made to look normal, and even desirable (hence the label of the novel as "erotic"). The girl doesn't know a thing about the guy, except that he is sexy as fuck, and a billionaire at age twenty-seven, and stylish, and an accomplished pianist, and a well-read fellow. But damn it, those are surface-level things. Yes, even "intelligence" is a surface-level thing, when it comes down to looking for a lover. Man, she "falls in love" with this pretty, shiny exterior, but on the inside, he's just some crazy fucker who keeps gasping all the time and wanting to hit her. He just didn't do it for me, sex-appeal wise. I'm not against bondage, so don't read me wrong. But I think if a woman wants to be totally dominated by a man, and go into an agreement like the one Ana goes into (and she does go into an official agreement, mind you, with paperwork, lawyers, and all), then she should make sure the chosen man is a man in more than just anatomy. Dude, she doesn't even check to see what the agreement is all about before signing the paper - she's just so overcome by his hotness that she signs on the spot, without asking questions. She makes us seem like gold-digging weaklings who can't take care of ourselves. I think the authoress isn't smart enough to project such an idea intentionally. And that's what's so dangerous about books like this one - it projects the unconscious message that women have been programmed to accept as our "truth" from the days of our girlhood. But women, you can choose what you put into your brain. Awareness of the implications of such books is a must. Also, my mind immediately jumps to the fifteen-year-old girls who might read this book. Is this really the message we ought to be projecting to our young women? We already have such few positive role models to take lessons from. And no, this book isn't "making an artistic statement" (what a hackneyed phrase) by being so "avant-garde". This book isn't arthouse, it's very commercial stuff, so bottom line is: girls are going to read this, and be influenced by it, and be seduced by the falsity it preaches. Chicas, Christian Grey isn't real, for the love of God - such a guy isn't human. Real men are so few, and far between. If you're going to fall in love with someone, fall in love with a man, who is strong and makes you feel and won't let you disrespect the purity of sex even if you wanted to. And you don't need a man. That's the crucial thing to remember from all this. Not one of you needs a man to feel complete. Sure, we're women, and we desire men. But don't be fooled by this idea that you're not powerful. And, out of sympathy for the fellas, can I just say that it's not fair to them when you put such an impossible standard like Christian Grey for them to try to achieve. Dear guys, a lot of us women complain how you guys want and expect the impossible from us. But actually, you guys are a lot more forgiving and fair when it comes to accepting us as we are. I haven't yet had a boyfriend who expected me to be Pamela Anderson. It's not like I've dated perfect angels who never upset me. But at least they didn't try to lift me up to some unachievable standard. I think what guys understand about us, that we don't necessarily understand about them, is that real people are beautiful. Men and women are beautiful because of their imperfections, because they've seen and experienced and lived. I don't want the perfect man, or the perfect woman. That's boring. Darkness, and light, and all the interesting shades of color between those extremes - those are things worth exploring, rather than the multiple shades of some fake Christian Grey. Can I just add one more thing? This novel reads like a fanfiction written by a teenager, so don't waste your fifteen bucks on it. If you're really curious, borrow it from a friend or a library. But please, buy candy or something with the money. Go out to the movies. Rent a porno and masturbate. I'm not dissing you fanfiction writers out there - I have Alice in Wonderland fanfiction tucked in the back of my wardrobe. Yes, I've gone there. But to publish that? I think that's a piece of writing the world should be spared of. Oh, and guys, maybe we do need you just a bit - we love you guys.

So, if you've managed to read through that all, you don't get a prize, but this is over for now, so smile :D I've enjoyed writing this, and it was a good way to kill boredom. I can't worry about whether this bores you to tears, or makes you cry, or whatnot. This is one of those posts that I wrote and posted for me, so I'm glad.

Have a pleasant Wednesday night, and God bless you.

Signed, your friendly Water Bearer.