Waiting For That Rocket

Okay. It should come as no shock to anyone that has ever had a conversation with me longer than five minutes that I have very, very strong feelings about a lot of things. One of my push button issues is veterans’ rights/veterans’ affairs. In addition to the fact our veterans should never, ever have to fight for housing, medical care, jobs, or anything really, because they spent more than enough time fighting for us. In addition to it just being the right thing, it’s especially a sensitive topic because of my Old Man. I know I’ve addressed in the past how my Old Man is my hero. And it’s for oh so many reasons – not the least of which (perhaps chief of which) is that this man is everything a man should be – smart, compassionate, hardworking, loving, kind. Okay. I’ll stop waxing poetic about my Old Man. But because of him, because of the way he and my mom raised me, and perhaps because I’m one of the biggest empaths I know, I often get so, so, SO militant about veterans’ affairs. Read More…

Newsflash (not really): I have opinions. I know, I know. It’s a shock. I’m so reserved about them. But here’s the thing when it comes to me and my opinions. I recognize that not everyone sees their world in the same way. We’ve all had experiences that have shaped what we see and how we see it. Even though my brothers and I were brought up in the same household with the same values, we don’t necessarily have the same opinions about everything. But the difference is that we’re not douchebags about it. Read More…

Today there was a(nother) shooting at Fort Hood. As I walked in the door tonight I found myself (internally) railing on people who try and deny PTSD is a real and valid … “thing.” The men and women I know who are or have been in the military don’t wake up one day saying, “I wonder what I’m going to do today. I know…” The people responsible for shootings (in general, military in particular) reach a point they feel that’s their only viable option.

Not excusing – in ANY way shape or form – pursuing said option. I think it’s abhorrent and reprehensible. Hurting and killing someone because you’re hurting is never, ever the right answer. While I understand where the need to lash out at something outside your head and heart comes from, there’s really just no way to justify having that something be a living being (animal or human).

For the same reasons it’s cheaper to provide contraception than it is to provide care after the fact, if we can provide our veterans and servicemen and -women with the mental healthcare they need when they get
home that will help prevent such atrocious crimes from happening again. I worry about my friends. I worry about my friends’ families. We worry enough about them when they’re on the front lines. We shouldn’t have to worry about them after they come home.

It’s incredible how deep my thoughts can go in the course of a thirty yard walk.

… To inspire one to get back on the blogging horse. And boy am I filled with it this morning.

I’d written about one of my transformative books on here before – The Giver – but frankly I’m too pissed to look for it on a mobile device so I’m going to assume if you’re so inspired to you’ll go back and look for it. If not, no harm no foul.

Okay. So The Giver. It’s incredible. A dystopian YA novel before dystopian YA novels were an official thing. There’s a utopian society where the community members entrust their feelings and memories to one person, the Giver. The book revolves around the coming of age of Jonas and his classmates as they graduate from the classroom to apprenticeships and on to the careers and roles they will live, breathe and die in for the next sixty years.

The Giver is a literary hipster – dystopian before it was cool to be dystopian.

So far so good, right? Nothing that wouldn’t be what I love. Again, I’ve probably read it dozens of times and I’ve gotten something different out of it every single time.

Enter Hollywood stage right. They’ve gotten their sticky fingers into it and appear to have, fairly promptly, kill some of the most salient and important aspects of the book. Killed them. Killed them dead.

If you haven’t read it, but plan on it, this may be a good time to stop reading this post. Thar be spoilers ahead.

The very first, and likely the biggest, thing that pissed me off: the movie is shot in color. Presumably, if you’re still reading, you’ve read the book so you know that one of the identifiers that pushes the Giver to select Jonas as his successor is that in a world of black, white, and gray Jonas starts seeing flashes of color. This is a huge plot device/fact that should have factored into the movie. After all, think about seeing the red coat on top of the pile in Schindler’s List. A flash of color in a sea of grayscale. Frankly, just thinking about it is getting me a little verklempt.

The are also action sequences in the trailer. Which, while the book isn’t without action in the memories the Giver gives or the world he and Jonas live in, there’s not really any reason that a laser shooting hover scooter thingymabob should feature in the movie, and especially not in the trailer. Because it’s not something that’s a priority.

The last point I have to make is petty, but I’m going to make it anyway: Taylor Swift has billing as more than just an extra in the movie. Her role may be more than flitting through a crowd, but as she doesn’t feature in the trailer – at all – my inclination is to think that she doesn’t actually play a very big active role in the movie.

I would say I’m happy to be proven wrong, because usually I am. I often give movies and books and shows the benefit of the doubt. But this is not something I’m going to give the chance to prove me wrong. I will not give Hollywood ten dollars to watch them decimate one of THE most important books in my life.

/rant

Last night’s insomniac perusal of the Internet brought me across this post. Okay. So. :huffs an angry sigh: 

We’ll start with the fact, and I’ll be up front about this, I’m not that big a fan of Anonymous. When I read and/or hear about an Anonymous DDOS attack it doesn’t strike me as a group fighting for the greater good, but rather a group of nerds  and geeks who are still bitter at the popular kids and wanting to get back at them for every swirly they’d been subjected to over the years.

According to their Wikipedia page, Anonymous is focused on fighting “Internet censorship and control.” These are not horrible things to be focused on. SOPA and PIPA, two bills proposed by the US government in 2011, looked to rein in the freedom of the Internet with the end goal of protecting the profits of massive entertainment and news outlets. In general, the two acts looked to put walls up around the Internet to prevent people from travelling the cyber highways to foreign sites they could download content from before the Powers That Be were ready for said content to be available. That’s a horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE idea. Not protecting the artists – and if the two acts were aimed towards protecting the artists maybe my opinon would be different (or at least more flexible) – but the two acts seemed geared more towards protecting the corporations. And that? That’s a horrible idea.

So, preserving a borderless Internet? That’s a good thing.

However, the methods Anonymous uses are…distasteful to me. To say the least. Their methods are unsavory to the point of bullying. As the first link clearly shows. What could have been a productive start to a conversation, one that actually addressed online misogyny and talked about who is actually creating the rules governing the Internet, ended up as punches thrown back and forth between the feminist crowd and these self-proclaimed Internet police and quickly devolved into a riot of online activists.

Bullying, whether between the Alpha crowd and LGBTQ teens in high school or among the Twitter and other online elite, is unacceptable. And bullying is unquestionably what ends up happening whenever Anonymous rallies its followers against the “feminazis” or any party questioning Anonymous’ goals and methods.

Whether you find yourself on the side of Anonymous or Anonymous’s oposition, hopefully if I’m friends with you we can all agree that bullying is a horrible way to achieve any goal. It didn’t work when we were in the fifth grade, it shouldn’t work as (nominal) adults.

So, here it goes. A friend of mine, a man I was close friends with in college, put up a Lifehack post on the Book of Face about “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” Included on the list are things like “they don’t dwell on the past,” “they don’t fear alone time,” “they don’t waste energy on things they can’t control,” and, really, the list goes on –at least for another nine bullet points.

I have a few points of my own to bring up about this woman’s list of things that “Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.” My first observation is that she is obviously a woman that doesn’t suffer from major (maybe any) mental health issues. If she did, she would recognize that sometimes, when chemicals are misfiring in our brains, we can’t help what we feel.

I’m a fairly bright individual, I recognize that my life is some kind of cushy. I have friends and family that support me, love me, take care of me and yell at me (if that’s what I need). But when I’m in a low spot, it doesn’t matter how often I hear it or how often friends and family say it – I don’t feel it. In fact, I’m incapable of feeling it and certainly don’t feel I deserve it.

She also sets up this list as thirteen dichotomous points thereby not helping anyone, anywhere. “If you feel sorry for yourself, you’re not mentally strong”; “if you’re afraid of being alone, you’re not mentally strong” – you get the point. Here’s the thing with mental health issues, they’re not something a person can will out of existence.

There are enough stigmas associated with mental health issues, do we really have to stigmatize them even further? People don’t choose to be depressed, AD(H)D or suffer anxiety. It’s insulting to imply that if you find yourself doing any of the things on the list (as opposed to not doing them) that you are mentally weak. Because trust me, when I think back to all the times I didn’t commit suicide, didn’t self-harm, didn’t give up – despite how badly I’ve wanted to – I don’t see myself as mentally weak. So far, I’ve successfully beaten it back, and that makes me mentally strong, but feeling the feelings to begin with doesn’t make me weak.