Puppies: The spice of life

Sometimes happiness is a walk on the beach and a puppy. That's exactly what happened yesterday. I spent part of the afternoon walking on the beach with a good friend. This walk followed an exceptionally long and fulfilling bout of Mortal Kombat vs. DC on her family's Xbox console. I now want to own an Xbox (up yours Wii!), but that's another story.

I had never been to the beach during the winter. It felt like an entirely new, alien landscape. The play of light off of the snow made the water seem more blue. There were tons more shells on the shore since there weren't any people collecting them as happens when it's warmer out. The snow crunched like the top of creme brule when you stepped on it. It was beautiful. The stroll was made all the more enjoyable when a 12 week old border collie appeared, trotting between us. She began to leap, joyfully, when she came upon us. We, naturally, began to pet her, only to hear the most extraordinary Scottish accent shout, “Don' letter jomp on yuh! Push 'er doun!” (Trans: Don't let her jump on you. Push her down.)

Turns out, he was really a nice architect who lived in the area and worked out of his house. Once we pushed her down, the dog, (Kayle was her name), pranced inquisitively at our side, looking up at us curiously from time to time and inspecting shells and sea weed along the way. That's when we learned she was 12 months old; terribly intelligent for her age. She was born of working stock in Vermont who still herd sheep.

She'll probably be a hard working dog like her parents.

Coincidence? I think not.

I made a wonderful inter-textual connection today! It goes as follows:

Last week, I started reading the graphic novel, Watchmen. It's pretty amazing in spite, if not because, of how depressing it is. Either way, I recommend it. Point is, on page 10 chapter 6, it is revealed that the initial motivation behind the vigilante Rorschach's career was the murder of a young girl, Kitty Genovese.

Here's the connection:

The film Boondock Saints begins with a priest's homely, honoring the death of one Kitty Genovese, on the one-year anniversary of her death. This event, though it doesn't actually take place in the movie, lays the foundation for what later is the motivation of the film's vigilantes, the McManus brothers, i.e. the Boondock Saints. The film poses on of the same questions as the comic: Who watches the watchmen? Who's right is it to administer justice.

Is it a coincidence that writer-director Troy Duffy unseen but ever present character shares her name with an identical character in More and Gibbons' Watchmen? I thought not. So, I did some google-ing. It didn't take much searching.

As it turns out, Kitty Genovese was a real person who was killed in 1964 under similar circumstances alluded to in both the comic and the movie, though the year and location of her death as well as her age are altered in Duffy's film while the comic almost certainly is referring to the exact same death. Now that my ear and eye are more aware of her presence and the symbolic nature of her murder, I think she'll be popping up everywhere, like a rare word you learn the meaning of for the first time.

There's just another addition to my random fact arsenal/ cult fandom encyclopedia.

Where did you go (my lovely)?

If I were a Peanuts character, I would undoubtedly be Frieda. It's not because I'm a “chatter box” or play baseball or because I get thirty valentines each year. None of these things are true of me. But I do have naturally curly hair, or at least I used to.

Normally, the mop of brown hair on my head, varying from shoulder to shoulder blade length, is composed of tight, corkscrew curls. My friends (and even people I don't know that well) take great joy in “boinging” my curls. I, too, from time to time, have enjoyed stretching them out to their full length before letting go and watching them spring back to their length somewhere between my shoulder and shoulder blade.

Every now and then, I like to straighten it, just for the heck of it. This will usually happen in the winter when there's less of a chance of humidity ruining the hour and a half of work that goes into straightening my hair. In general, it freaks people out when they see me with straight hair and they're not expecting it. My favorite reaction to my non-curly hair happened earlier this week when a friend of mine, after greeting hello contorted her face in confusion before uttering, disgusted, “What the hell?” As she explained, the space around my face didn't match.

Normally, once my hair gets wet, any suggestion of straightness disappears and my hair reverts to its natural state. This time, however, my curls haven't returned. This past week I used a new flat iron that I had never used before. I washed my hair a day later and it stayed straight. I've been washing my hair for the past four days and still nothing. I'm starting to get anxious. Where have my curls gone? I want them back.

Like many latin women, my hair has always been a contentious issue; it manages to encompass all issues of race and gender dynamics within our culture. I hated my hair as a child. Neither I nor my parents quite knew how to manage it as it was an odd combination of my mother's thick wavy hair and my father's fine straight hair. Many a weekend was dedicated to hot blow dryers and giant painful rollers like so many others of my ilk. My grandmother always said I looked “greñado”, i.e. “a complete mess” in puertorrican. Only once I was in the final stages of high school did I really figure out how to manage it and realize that I actually loved it. It's become a huge part of my look, my image, my ideology of self. And it's gone. Well, on vacation. I hope. Right now it feels like I'm wearing someone else's hair on my head, like there's some random guest staying with me and I'm waiting for the usual tenant to come back.

Wherever you are, if you can hear me, Curls, come back to me.

Oops!

The best plans are often times the ones that go wrong. Take penicillin, for example. Or even better, cheese. Had it not been for some careless oversight, two of the greatest contributions to humanity would never exist.

This evening followed the schedule of one such failed plan.

The plan was simple. Shower, do some reading, straighten my hair while I watched Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe. Simple.

How wrong I was.

I did get to shower. Thank goodness. Not a moment passed that I returned to my room that one of my friends knocked on my door. I answered and found her practically glowing with satisfaction at the new coat she had bought and was now wearing. I invited her in to share the tale of her shopping quest.

Over the next three hours we were joined by two other friends and had amazing conversations. They ranged from the most inane and hilarious of topic to the most serious and down right heavy. I still ended up straightening my hair but I nixed the readings for class. I can do those tomorrow.

The point is, the evening couldn't have been better or more fulfilling if I had planned it to be so.

Thank you Chance and Mishap. You two sure know what you're doing.

We find our hero near Camelot...

Yesterday I learned (confirmed rather) that I have the aesthetic of an old man. This was revealed at the first meeting of my Legends of Arthur class. First, let me say I was really worried this would be a class filled with high level nerds, the geekdom of which I would never dare to challenge or reach. Thus, it had the potential to be really wonderful or extremely awful. Little did I know, I would end up looking (possibly being) the biggest dweeb there.
After passing around the syllabus and taking attendance, the professor (a monumentally cool Canadian woman) asked us all what we could remember as our first exposure to the Arthurian myths and legends. A few different sources were mentioned. When she called on me, I told her that my first exposure to the legend was through Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. “Thank you for reminding me of Prince Valiant!” she exclaimed. Apparently, in all her years of teaching the course, no one had ever mentioned Prince Valiant before. (Here's where I become an old man): Prince Valiant is how her father was exposed to the legends as a child growing up in the 1930's.
Maybe I should just buy a sweater vest and call it a day.

Not exactly Jimminy Cricket

Recently I said to a friend

“I think that in the soul of every 20-something woman there is a pubescent boy. Mine is named Frank.”

For a long time, the little sprite inside me that made me love comic books and find words like gaelic funny (because it's gay and lick at the same time!) remained nameless. As ethereal and mischievous as Ariel in Shakespeare's The Tempest, it has been with me since around the time I turned sixteen. Around the time I began to become a woman this little creature hatched from its shell like a deformed velociraptor, the most deadly and awesome of all baby dinosaurs. I didn't realize it at the time, but all the work I put into trying to appear normal feminine during middle school and my freshman year of high school, all that repression was actually sustaining the heat of incubation for my little Jurassic time bomb. I hid him as well as I could, but it's kind of hard to keep a velociraptor under wraps.

Like a little guardian angel, or Hell banished fallen angel, he's there for all the testosterone ridden, angst filled, sex spoofed moments in my life. Every time I watch Boondock Saints or The Punisher, he's there. Every time I rock out to misogynist music, he's there. Every time DC comics publishes a new Batman graphic novel, he's there. Every time I decide not to shower for a couple of days, he's there. He's the inspiration for every Mortal Kombat reference I've ever made. Every time I utter the words, “That's what she said,” he gets bonus points; he's saving them up to mail in for a new dirt bike.

Little known fact: Every time a “Your mom” joke is told, an inner teenage boy gets his wings.

It was this past semester that I finally named him. After watching Donnie Darko for the first time that I realized that Frank had always been his name, I just didn't know it. I realized this after seeing Frank's Halloween costume and thaught, “That's totally something that my Frank would wear.”

In addition to taking part in all the teenage boy things I do, he also tells me to do things. This summer, he's telling me to go see Death Race, starring his favorite actor/seedy Brit, Jason Statham. I must admit, that request may be one I don't grant, simply because of budget issues. I've told him to settle down, but he just turned up his Marshal Mathers LP.