Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

Otherwise known as how I'm turning 41 this June. Yes, 41. Forty-one. The big 4 - 1. Ol' One and forty.

Aside from finally remembering how to spell 'forty', I've come to the unpleasant understanding that despite how I'm well on my way to decrepitude (occasionally feeling every second of it; believe me), I still almost constantly feel as completely unprepared for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as my kid, who is seven. Hell, sometimes I feel he's way more together than I'll ever be.

Anyone else feel like that, out there in the blogosphere? Like a total fraud who is going to be discovered for the completely green, soaking-behind-the-ears newbie to life in general that she actually is? At least sometimes?

Of course, I also get to add to it the small but sad daily reminders that I'm no longer 20-something and cute but 40-something and matronly. It certainly doesn't help that I live in a small city where the average age is something like 24, because of the big community college and huge university, each with their multitude of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed boys and girls running around. All of them so cute and vital and young enough to be my offspring.

And yet in my heart of hearts I feel like I've barely made it to 18, which is at least the legal drinking age in Montreal. If I felt like drinking, but I don't have the same tolerance I used to.

This week's Entertainment Weekly (it's my husband's subscription, I swear!) had an article about the Wizard of Oz movie prequel, which I didn't really care about but read part of anyway because procrastination is my friend I was bored. I didn't actually finish the article (TL;Not going to watch the movie), but I did come across something that made me go O_O.

According to the article (which I can't link to, so you'll have to take my word for it), even though it was legal for Disney to create Oz the Great and Powerful, because the original novel by L. Frank Baum was published in 1900 and therefore is in the public domain, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owns the copyright for the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film based on the book and apparently sent lawyers to the prequel movie set to make sure that Disney didn't actually copy anything from the film. Okay, sure. Not unreasonable. Except that one of the things MGM's lawyers wanted to make certain Disney didn't copy was the shade of green of the Wicked Witch's skin. [Emphasis mine because WTF?]

Roughly four and a half shades darker than Kermit.

That particular fact was so WTF-ish for me that I've been thinking about it for several days. And while yes, I can sort of vaguely understand the concept behind why MGM would worry about something like that, what I still can't understand is the point.

( Follow the legal shade of yellow brick road )

Any of you guys out there seen This Week's Cover from Entertainment Weekly magazine?

(And I'm sorry to be so North America-centric with this, my international Flisties, but this is one of the most popular magazines in North America, which is one of the reasons I'm so mad.)

I'm not talking about the Vampire Diaries, though if that floats your boat that's cool. I'm talking about the wee little article title down at the bottom: "Meet the Shippers: TV's Weirdest Fans".

Yeah. That.

As you can imagine I read the article with a certain amount of trepidation, being that it was essentially about me and pretty much everyone I know online. (Though naturally they had the nomenclature a little incorrect, since Slashers aren't "Slash Shippers" as in the article, we're just Slashers, thanks.) But surprisingly, given the title, it was pretty good. I could've done with more acknowledgement of slashers, especially given how the article mostly discussed how the (het) shippers influenced plots of television shows (albeit grudgingly on the part of some producers, apparently) and it would've been nice to see that slashers have had influence beyond Gabrielle and Xena. After all, I'm pretty sure the leads of The Sentinel played the 'bromance' up for the slash fans, and I know for sure that before TPTB decided to bite the hands that fed them with Stargate: Universe, they actually gave a nod to the Jack/Daniel fans once.

But overall, not a bad article. Which made the title that much more maddening and, not to put too fine a point on it, mean. So I decided to write them a letter about it. I'm sure it won't get printed, so I figured I'd put it here, too.

( I thought I was pretty nice about it, really )

As many of you may remember, such is the social whirlwind that is my life that I'm occasionally plagued with messages from people I've never heard of. This hasn't happened via my phone for awhile (the email doppelganger in New York is having quite the academic career however, considering how many university mailing lists she seems to have signed me up for), but I was reminded of how particularly dumb some of the local young men can be with this morning's thankfully brief conversation:

::Phone rings; I pick up::

Me: Hello? ::Silence:: Hello?

Random guy who thinks he knows me: You motherfucker! (He sounded pretty happy, so maybe that's just how he greets his really good friends.)

Me: You have the wrong number, dude!

Random guy who thinks he knows me: ::Hangs up::

I can only hope that he hung up so quickly out of deep embarrassment that he was so rude to a total stranger, but an apology would have been nice. At least my son didn't pick up the phone, especially as he was expecting a call about a play date.

What is it with College Station guys? This is the second time that a male with my city's area code has made an ass of himself by calling me by accident (the previous young man refused to believe that I wasn't his girlfriend), then not even being nice enough to apologize before they hung up.

I suppose I could always call this guy back and demand an apology; I do have his number. Heh.

A few minutes ago, my darling husband started talking to me from where he was reading Entertainment Weekly in the bedroom. He wanted to let me know about a new show on SyFy about The X-Men super-powered crime fighters called Alphas, because apparently Callum Keith Rennie is going to be in it (it looks like he'll be a reoccurring character, which most likely means he'll be a villain, because that's how SyFy rolls).

I asked Dom how many characters were in it and he said five. Then I said that without reading the article I could tell him how the team would look:

The leader would be a white male
There would be two other white guys on the team
There would be one black guy
There would be one woman, possibly of Asian descent

Turns out I was wrong--the female team member was played by a an American of Middle Eastern descent. The magazine had also made a mistake in that the cast has six members, not five, which naturally means there can be another female. She's white, of course.

I was surprised, though, to see that the Professor X analog of the team is a Dr. Rosen, because as far as I know that's a Jewish name and I'd been thinking that the Dr. Zimmerman of Sanctuary was just a fluke. Then again they're both doctors, right? You wouldn't want, say, the Bad-Ass sniper dude to be Jewish. Because then you'd have to set the show in Israel.

Much as I honestly applaud SyFy for being brave enough to have a character who, based on her last name, could possibly be Muslim (not to mention how nice it is to see Jewish surnames), I still think there's a big damn problem when I can guess the ethnic and gender makeup of the cast almost exactly based exclusively on knowing that it's an action show and the number of team members.

And while the last nails in the coffin of my love for SyFy were brutally hammered when they chose to cancel SGA for the horrendously racist and misogynistic casting and character choices of Stargate: Universe, I will say that I know they're not the only network that constantly uses these kind of ratios for their action teams. I don't want to keep picking on SyFy, but Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: SG-1 were perfect examples of this. So is Hawai'i 5-0. There's always a bit of leeway as to the background of the female character if you already have a male PoC on the team, and if you have a team of three than the woman will most likely be the PoC as well. SyFy (sorry, SyFy! But seriously, you keep asking for it) did this with Being Human; I'm afraid I don't know about the cast from the original UK production.

Actually, I do want to pick on SyFy. After reading the cast descriptions for Alphas, it turns out that (of course!) the Really Strong Guy is black, the Sniper Dude (God forbid he not be a dude!) is named Cameron Hicks--seriously, does SyFy ration names or something? Or is the constant repetition some kind of in-joke?--the female character I mentioned earlier is described as 'a pretty girl in her twenties' (emphasis mine). The other woman is--OMG I SO CALLED IT!--basically a super-sexy, manipulative bitch (springwoof: she's a charmer, but ours is cooler). The youngest guy on the team is not quite the technopath I thought he'd be, but he still does shit with radio, television and cell-phone frequencies. He also seems to have an Autism Spectrum Disorder by the way he's described, but I'll bet the producers didn't want to out-and-out say so in order to not have to deal with anything approaching a real Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Way to go with the originality, SyFy! You keep pushing those boundaries, you edgy, outside-the-box, imagining greater network, you! ::golf clap::

I know I'm not the only one on LJ who's gotten more than a little bored and sick of this. It's not just the predictability, it's the fact that it's all so damn predictable. Why can't a team of five have four women and one man, with a female leader? Why do most of the characters in pretty much any show ever on a major network have to be white? It's tiring and it's sad and it's gotten to the point where looking at the new shows advertised on TV or in my husband's Entertainment Weekly is just discouraging.

I'm sure that at least some of the new network shows promised this fall will be as fantastic as the glossy photo ads and the previews claim, but I'm voting with my eyes and I'm not going to watch any of them. The stories may be different, but the faces are way too much the same.

I'll bet you didn't know this, but we human beings are so busy trying to earn money that we've forgotten all our dreams. All of 'em. It's true. Just ask the dolphins.

( Not to mention that dolphins eat squid; they don't make friends with them. )

What is this thing with fanfiction and nicknames?

Am I the only one who's noticed this? There seems to be a particular sub-genre of romantic fanfiction (I'd say especially among the Slash writers, but I honestly don't read enough Het to know) where the ones in lurve give each other unbearably cutesy and generally humiliating nicknames that they then proceed to use casually all over the place.

I don't know about you, but if someone started calling me after a cartoon character I'd probably be pissed rather than charmed. And if they then proceeded to call me by that nickname in front of, say, the chief Muckity-Muck I nominally report to, I might consider ending the relationship. At least if it wasn't an accident.

My own mother's done this, actually. I've had a family nickname that she gave me when I was a baby which she has never, ever stopped using. I'm actually very fond of it and most of the time find it really sweet. Except for the one time my then-boyfriend heard her using it with me and started using it himself. That wasn't sweet; that actually kind of freaked me the fuck out. It's possible that I would have felt differently at the time if I hadn't already decided at least subconsciously that I had to deep-six the guy sooner rather than later, but even now when I think of my (very) adored husband using my mother's nickname it still makes me shudder rather than smile. So it's very hard to imagine two other adults being willing to hear endearment nicknames in public, even if they're fictional adults.

This makes me think I should apologize in advance to my son, whom I've been calling 'Pumpkin' since I stopped calling him 'Piglet' (he was a big nurser) or 'Mummified Alien Baby' (he was very skinny when he was born, and had a habit of leaving one eye cracked open when he was falling asleep. I swear he looked like a relic from Area 51). This name is so much a part of how I think of him that I've had a pumpkin tattooed on my arm, and I'm sure I use it with him in public all the time. Right now it makes him happy, but I have a feeling that he won't be so thrilled when he's brought his date home for the weekend and I say something like, 'so where did you and my little Pumpkin meet?' at the dinner table. Of course I will probably still be calling him 'Baby' when he's 45, so maybe he'll just get used to it.

But art shouldn't necessarily imitate life. And, in my fandom at the very least, it seems highly unlikely that a well-trained, disciplined and battle-hardened Marine would refer to his lover with a saccharine nickname in front of anyone else. Or even give his lover a saccharine nickname at all, honestly.

"Snookums! I'm running out of ammo!" Can you imagine?

I use the word 'almost' almost a million times in three hundred pages. I swear. Everything is 'almost'. 'Almost painfully'; 'almost laughed'; 'almost screamed'. Almost, almost, almost. Except when I use 'nearly'.

Jesus Christ. It's like I can't commit to anything. It's almost enough to make me want to cry. Nearly.

Okay, back to editing. Only 94 pages to go! Almost!

Does it count as stalking if the idiot in question thinks he's calling someone else?

Last Thursday night, while I was trying to get to sleep early because I had a fever, some moron with the same area code called my cell phone twice. The second time he left a slurring message asking, where are you, Baby? Then he sent a text message saying, 'why dont u pick up?'

I was a little fed up at this point, so I called him back and when he answered I told him he had the wrong number. Our conversation went something very much like this, though I don't remember exactly:

Me: Hi. I'm not your girlfriend. You've called the wrong number three times.

Drunken Idiot: No I didn't.

Me: Yes you did! I'm not your girlfriend! I have no idea who you are! I'm sorry.

Drunken Idiot: ::click::

Yes, he hung up on me. Whether out of embarrassment or misdirected rage I cannot say, but I was comfortably certain I'd never hear from him again.

Not so.

About five minutes ago I just got another text message: 'wat up?' from the same local number.

I called him back, but got voice mail. Interestingly enough, the guy sounds just as drunk in his answering message as he did when I was speaking to him, so maybe I misjudged him and he's genuinely stupid and/or astonishingly unobservant even when sober. The message I left lacked a certain amount of grace or charm I have to admit, but I did tell him in no uncertain terms that I'm not his girlfriend, my number is X and I didn't know what he thought he was dialing but I really am not his girlfriend--I have a husband and a son and everything. And there was no point in sending messages to this number because I wouldn't respond. Because I'm not his girlfriend.

I hope he gets the point. If he does it again, I'm seriously considering either calling him back or texting him that I want to break up. That seems unfair to his actual girlfriend, though, who might actually love him dearly and find his occasional inability to dial endearing.

Or maybe she's pissed off at him because he never calls her anymore. Which would be because he's calling me.

My doctor's office, where both my son and I are followed by the same doctor, has apparently implemented a new thing where patients are informed of normal test results via sealed postcards.

So far, so good. I can see how a few thirty-five cent stamps are worth the saved time for a phone call, especially as the nurses almost never give 'personal' information such as test results to voice mail or to other family to pass on. (I use quotes because while I can definitely understand that there are some situations where you might not want other family members to know a test result, I do think the doctor's office is able to use either their own judgment based on A) the kind of test and B) if the patient has already told them she doesn't mind learning about test results from voice mail.)

As it happens, I got a pap smear and my little boy got his standard test for Iron deficiency anemia within a week of each other, and I'd already been called and informed that everything was normal with me. So when I got a little sealed postcard addressed to my son, I happily--and not unreasonably, I think--figured that I was going to find out that my son's iron levels are fine.

Except that on the inside of the card, in the blank space for the test results, 'Pap Smear' was written in warm, precise handwriting.

My favourite part--other than being able to tell my doctor's assistant how happy I was to learn that my son was safe from cervical cancer--was that the front of the card has a picture of a tree and the words, 'because we care'.

Not enough to make sure the test matches the patient, apparently, but I'm sure it's the thought that counts.

P.S.: The nurse called back and apologized, and my son is indeed fine, which rocks. But still, sometimes that place makes my eyes roll so hard one day they'll just fall right out of my head.