Roads to Safe Places

• When there are sex scenes, I'd like to be able to see the difference between rape and sex.  ( Trigger warnings )
• Saying you own someone is not romantic without very specific context requirements. Without those, it's creepy as fuck.
• Even abusive pedophile uncles deserve a trial.
• No, vampires are not just like gay people, fighting for equal rights and all. 
• I can't decide who's ripping off whose cheezy pulp romance story line here, Twilight or Charlaine Harris' opus. What's with the chastity and the really submissive white girls holding out for an abusive domly Mr. Right?
• People are not pets. Repeat after me. Even submissive airheads. People are not pets. ("Sookie hates feeling like she's lost her independence" wtf).
• "As your maker I command you"? Kudos, series, for replacing a physically abusive father figure with a controlling father figure. Hasn't been physically abusive yet if you discount the ~making~, but I suppose we're getting there at some point. EDIT: aaaand physically abusive, too. Awesome.
• So you can cut hair and it behaves like human hair but hymens grow back? Uh-hu...

Maybe I've come down with a series case of the dumb, but I don't get this show. It does bend over backwards to include a whole rainbow of minorities and then still goes out of its way to still make the straight, white, pretty, able-bodied and cisgendered people, usually males, end up in the main character slots and the administrative roles.

It's like watching a compass needle that's made out of the metal that comprises a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, male audience. In this case, it's been shaken up pretty badly by the presence of so many weird and non-white people, but as each episode progresses, you can watch the WACHM main character overcome adversity! I suppose that the show is meant to satirize this fact (or so I hope), but as a satire of other High School TV shows, it does not do a very good job.

Unless "satire" now means "take the storyline you wanted to write, notice that it's stereotypical, slightly exaggerate the stereotypes, let audience, who also doesn't know what "satire" means, think that your show must be a satire of ... well, something. It's clear that they don't mean this, right? That's why it's so exaggerated. Right?

Well, no. A "satire" is more complex than that. It usually focuses on individual shortcomings of the thing it's meant to satirize and exaggerate them with the goal of exposing these shortcomings. I don't see that done very convicingly in that show. If making fun at other High School stereotypes was not their goal, I don't understand what in this series is supposed to do, apart from trying to get more WACHM viewers interested in their local Glee club, because obviously, that's the only target audience that's represented in a mildly respectful way. If that was the intention, well done! And now piss off!

Monday again already? Wow...

Went to see Dead Man's Chest on Friday and although I loved it to bits, I felt a bit guilty for doing so because of all the poor characters who die in the movie.
And I am not talking about potentially tragic main characters dying here, but about the underappreciated millions, all those characters who are just there to die to make things seem more dangerous to the uncaring audience. I know that I used to hate all those Westerns my granddad was watching when I was little because of all the shooting and all the fights, because it was so dangerous and hitting people, shooting and dying are somehow just. not. funny. It is scary to see how little I mind, even though I feel I should. We had a very good time, especially walking back along the deserted banks of the Clyde once more in the dark, and discovering the snails in the dark.

I can't wait to see Superman. I made a list of all his speshul powerz for Crocky, who does not know the movies, and it's unbelievable just how many there are. Ok. Superman. He:

• can fly
• can see through things
• is indestructible
• can shoot laser beams from his eyes
• is super strong
• is allergic to Cryptonite.

Did I forget anything? 

On Saturday, we watched Beloved and I needed most of the rest of Saturday to recover from it. It is a lead weight for sinking moods, but a very, very vivid and enchanting movie, I can't wait to read the book.

Yesterday, I finally fulfilled a promise I had made to myself and baked a cake!
I daresay that the only person who knows what kind of disasterous side-effects that can have is angie_21_237, who has been my partner in crime the day we baked the infamous Cherry Cake which left no cutlery unused and took around five hours in total, excluding baking time. The result of  my latest exploit is a lot sweeter than I had anticipated, which could be due to the fact that we do not have any scales so I had to measure everything using cups. Not the best method, unless you like your shortbread really, really sweet.

I have also fixed the date when our boxes are being picked up by the awesomeness which is the DPD - this Friday and the 24th of July, four days before we leave the country for good. Boy, that is so... soon. And this was it, was a year? Years used to be longer when I was young.

Next to me, Crocky is busy planning the trip we embark on at the end of the week; it seems that there is still nothing new on the western front - all hostels in Skye remain very secretive about whether or not there are beds available, neither reacting to e-mails nor to texts. One of them has a particularly endearing name, it's called Skyewalker. I feel useless; Crocky has been planning the whole trip so far. She has had a busy week organising it, and all I have done is organise... the return of our boxes home. Hm. Not as impressive as a seven-day-Highland-tour.

I have started to dream about moving back to Germany, and all of those dreams were very unpleasant.
Yesterday night, I had just finished counting our boxes and told my father there would be eight, when I went into the living room, only to find out it had turned into my bedroom at home - in which only the odd square centimeter of wallpaper is visible behind all the shelves, which are full of books. Feverishly, I started tearing the huge tomes out of their shelves and heaving them into boxes. In the end, there were hundreds of boxes, and me ambling along between them with a small set of scales, no longer in our cosy flat or my childhood home, but in a huge mansion with a long corridor. The boxes were piled in huge stacks all along it's walls, and then it was suddenly time for the boxes to be collected and I had not weighed more than two of them and then - ... well, then I woke up.
This night it was returning to the absolute chaos I left behind before I left because suddenly, there was no time to tidy up my room. It was terrible. I wonder what it's going to be this night. They are not nightmares, but they make me feel gloomy all morning, a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach. Bwah.

Off now. Hugs to all!