http://www.oursuperadventure.com/comic/21st-february-2017/
(In case you’re wondering, though, my cat sounds like he’s full of doves, not bees, so I assume he’s potentially less explosive.)
Category Archives: it is a silly place
Oh, Pinterest!
Wait, I thought that was “developpé,” not “cheesy taco pasta?”
That must be what they call it in Spaghetti technique…
Bizarre Choreography Advice from a Dream
Today was the third straight day that I woke up at 7, did a few things, decided to read for a few, and promptly zonked out for two hours. Considering that I can usually only nap if I’ve been awake for two days straight that’s bizarre enough.
However, today’s nap featured a dream in which BG offered the following advice for creating dances:
- Make sure the floor is clean. (Okay, that’s not so weird.)
- If you’re choreographing a dance for your little sister, use a combination of dish soap and Windex so she can see the reflection of her arm in the floor, but only if it’s a wooden floor (…oookay).
- Never leave rotting fruit on top of the piano unless you’re using it as part of the choreography. (Wat.I mean, obvs, but WAT. Also, why?!)
- And even then, only bananas.
I wish I could remember more of it.
It was all so sincere! BG in the dream was totally offering this in the vein of choreographic mentorship, as if these were basic questions central to the art of choreography that any budding choreographer might encounter.
…And yet, at the same time, it was all so bizarre(1).
All of this suggests that my unconscious mind is, at present, deeply concerned with matters of choreography and cleanliness (which, yes, but I didn’t need weird choreographic cleaning advice from a dream to figure that out).
So, in short, remember:
Never leave rotting fruit on top of the piano unless you’re using it as part of the choreography. And even then, only bananas.
- I should probably admit that this dream also involved a “pee machine,” which was a kind of elaborate Japanese urinal-and-holding tank that was supposed to allow people of any sex to pee modestly at outdoor festivals (apparently Dream Japan has never heard of the standard Port-o-Potty). In fact, it was so badly designed that even a bog-standard cismale with no intersex stuff going on would wind up pissing all over everything within the area of a meter and a half. Oy to the vey. I was cleaning that, too. I spritzed it with bleach, which caused crackling noises, which caused me to say, “I love chemical reactions!” What. The. Hell.
Hmm
I’m curious about a thing.
Every time I walk into a brick-and-mortar dance shop, people assume I’m a professional(1). Occasionally, this even lands me a Professional Dancer Discount (not gonna argue with that).
- A professional dancer, that is. Not, like, a sex worker or a hit man (though, let’s be honest: those both seem like career paths for which years of ballet training might be a reasonable form of preparation).
This makes me curious. Is it because I’m an adult buying dance stuff for myself (as opposed to buying dance stuff for a child). Is it because I’m a guy? Is there possibly some other reason?
Adult dance peeps: does this happen to you? If so, any thoughts about why?
It’s Taimz for Crazy Taimz
As of today, my schedule officially begins its trek through the land of:
This means rehearsals that end at 10:30 on Monday nights, a whole lotta class(1), extra conditioning for an upcoming audition, Dance Team, preparation for our annual Meeting With The Accountant, and work on the next iteration of the website for D’s business*.
- This is different than a Whole Latte class, in which baristas would presumably learn the art of making ethically-sourced organic coffee drinks, or perhaps simply how to make an entire latte and not just part of one(2).
- If you forget the milk, for example, it’s just coffee!
In the interest of retaining some shred of sanity, I’m keeping Modern Mondays off the calendar until March, at least. My primary studio just added modern on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, so I’ll be doing at least one of those, depending.
I’m trying to keep Tuesday unscheduled, but since tomorrow is the first class, I’m going to go.
For the time being, on Mondays, it makes more sense to take an evening ballet class instead of a morning modern class. That keeps my mornings free for goofing off on the Innertubes household stuff and groups all the dance things into a nice block from 2:45 — 10:30. (There’s a dinner break in there, don’t worry.)
This is one of the things I’m trying to do differently this year. Instead of saying, “Oh, cool, I only have three things on the schedule for Mondays!”, I’m accounting for things like transit time and the fact that I don’t change gears well, so it’s foolish to assume I’ll get even one task done if I have a couple of hours between engagements.
Thus, while I seem to have once again stacked a lot onto my plate, I’m trying to be sensible about how I approach it.
The thing I’ve learned about pursuing dance seriously is that you’re either up to your eyeballs in alligators—wait, let’s call them crocodiles because it will be funnier later—or you’re on break. The challenge is learning to Arrange Your Crocodiles In A Linear Array. Which is to say:
Get your crocs in a row! (Shamelessly ganked from Chris Booth over at Expatior)
Arranging my waterfauna is really not my forté, but I’m learning. Sort of.
The frenzy of class and rehearsal is worth it to have the chance to make art and do the thing that it feels like I was made to do(3).
- The cat disagrees. He believes I was made to serve as a cat bed and play-bot.
I fully expect to arrive home exhausted at 11 PM tonight. Needless to say, I’m glad Tuesday isn’t Killer Class day.
If it was, I’d make it work. It would be worth it.
Right now I feel weirdly like my dreams are rushing towards me at terminal velocity.
All things considered, that’s a pretty cool feeling.
Though, really—ask me again in March how I feel about my schedule 😉
Here’s a detailed explanation of how my current schedule happened:
Things No One Ever Told Me, Part 1
But first, Cabrogal over at Neurodrooling turned me on to this really insightful post(1) about how maybe there’s a different lens through which we could possibly view bipolar, which hooked in rather directly to a lot of other stuff D and I have been talking about a lot lately.
- Potential content warning: it deals with with the with the idea that perhaps mental illness isn’t really even the right model. Some readers might feel like this invalidates their struggle, and that is a totally okay way to feel. There was definitely a time not too long ago when I would’ve felt that way. If you’re there right now, you might want to skip this particular link for now.
Okay, moving right along.
I’ve been at this adulting thing for a while. I’m slowly getting, like, less bad at it—much more slowly, I am forced to admit, than I expected, and also more slowly in some ways than seems to be typical.
I’m pretty pretty sure that’s okay, though.
We all live in our own timelines and on our own time scales. I come from a family of people who mostly live a really long time and often seem to take a while to figure things out. I’m also pretty sure that dealing with some major trauma (or, more accurately, not dealing with it for a long time) set the clock on the process of reaching a kind of functional maturity back by ten years or so for me. For a long time, I was stuck being 14 and severely traumatized.
Yesterday I wrote a G+ post about how I’ve learned to deal with D’s dietary preferences. Backstory on this: historically, he has been pretty into Southern “comfort foods”and sweets and not at all into veggies, and since I can’t eat that way and stay healthy and I’m morally opposed to cooking two separate meals all the time, I’ve had to find a middle way.
The analogy that came to mind was that our life together isn’t a tandem bike ride; it’s just a regular bike ride. Sometimes I get up the hills faster than he does because I like climbing on the bike. That’s okay. He still gets up the hills at his own pace, and I am okay waiting for him at the top(2).
- In real life, I used to do a lot of riding ahead, then descending back to my friends, then riding ahead, until I figured out that too much of that makes you look like an annoying show-off.
Sometimes we even take a different route, either because he doesn’t feel like climbing or just for fun. That’s okay, too. At the end of the day, he rides his bike and I ride mine. I can influence the route we ride, but can’t ride his bike for him, and the funny thing is that we both enjoy the ride more when I don’t try to ride his bike for him.
Anyway, I’m slowly realizing that same analogy applies to other things, like adulting.
Just because I like to climb out of the saddle, that doesn’t mean you have to. (Does help, though, if your hubs are actually in the middle of your wheels o_O’)
Maybe I’m not getting up the climbs as fast as other people—hell, tons of people my age have responsible, well-established careers—but I’m still on the road, pedaling along.
I’m way behind the group I started with because an asshole threw a stick into my spokes early on, and I had to scrape myself off the tarmac, and then I got lost for a while when looking for a shop to help me fix my wheel.
That’s okay, too. I’m back on the road now; the one I want to ride. And, honestly, if it hadn’t been for for the asshole who broke my wheel, I don’t know that I would’ve ridden my own road. Having lived through something that really shattered my whole life early on has made me both unable and unwilling to struggle through a life that doesn’t fit(3).
- No judgment implied, by the way, towards the folks out there doing exactly that. Sometimes you have to live the wrong life in order to get to the right place—just like road work happens and sometimes you have to take some crazy-ass detour to reach a treasured destination. I admire people who have the strength to do that.
Anyway, so yeah. I feel like I’m learning things now that, in retrospect, should have been obvious—things maybe other people learned way earlier.
One of them is that being a grown-ass married adult doesn’t stop you from developing intense and enduring crushes on people you admire.
Not that I subscribe to the philosophy which dictates that marriage should make you blind or you’re doing it wrong. Honestly, part of being human is admiring other people—ideally, people who are worthy of admiration, and not giant self-aggrandizing dicks. Sometimes those people will also be hot and kind and insufficiently whatever-it-is-that-prevents-crushes-for-you(4).
- For me, it’s a certain flavor of authority: I have never had a crush on a boss or an academic teacher or advisor; that feels too much like crushing on a parent. It’s like, “Squick, and also, no.”
Sometimes, you will develop an uncomfortable and enduring crush on someone with whom pursuing a relationship would be a Bad Idea For Reasons even if you were single, or if you were poly and sure they were fine with poly relationships.
Sometimes, regardless of your best efforts, you will go on crushing on said Amazing Person no matter what. It will be weird, but you’ll stick it out, because regardless of the fact that the person in question “makes (your) heart kinda flutter; makes (your) eyes kinda blur,” it it is really good to have them in your life anyway.
…Even though it’s gonna feel a lot like this sometimes.
Nobody ever told me that, so I’m passing it along.
It is also possible that living with such a crush might sometimes be as wildly uncomfortable as, say, crushing on your best friend or lab partner or Lofty McPerfecthair was in high school.
Part of you might still desperately want to lay your absurd crush at their feet in hope of (chaste) validation; in hope that they will say, “No, if things were different, we would totally happen, and it would would be awesome because you’re amazing and also really hot.”
Part of you might desperately hope they never find out, because it would wreck you at least a little bit if they were like, “LolWut?” and a lot if they were like, “Yeah, um, this feels too weird. I’m outies,” and even more if they told all the cool kids your peers or colleagues about you and your ridiculous crush(5).
- Which, of course, leads to the feeling best identified as, “If s/he ever finds out, I’ll never be able to set foot in the coffee shop/studio/office/chemistry lab again! I will have to move. TO ANOTHER PLANET.“
So you endure, trying to figure out how to make yourself stop having a crush, because it would totally be super weird for everyone involved if Awesome McDreamyface ever learned The Awful Truth(6).
- By the way, this is powerfully amplified by the conditions of dance and circus arts, wherein we interact at close quarters in our fancy underwear and touch each-other a lot. Perversely, these exact conditions, coupled with the inevitable admiration and hero worship involved in doing difficult things with other humans, all but guarantee that dance and cirque are first-rate Crush Incubators.
Nobody told me that, either.
Like many socially-challenged people, I’ve learned a great deal about How to Human from fiction.
In fiction, though, conflicts kind of have to resolve. Nobody(7), to my knowledge, actually writes about the poor, happily-coupled schmuck who goes on having an awkward crush and never speaking of it and not even being a total creeper about it(8).
- Maybe I should? This seems like a topic that Anne Tyler might handle well, so maybe I should just send her an anonymous note suggesting it?
- Creepers be like: “I punched him in the face because he never should have said that purple isn’t your color! He doesn’t deserve you! You deserve someone better!!!” *suffers in deafening silence* “Also I made you this scarf. I knitted it from from my own hair.” Silently, to self: …Which I have shorn, mourning the great love between us that can never be. Oh, why will you never see how much I love you?!
Come to think of it, “Making peace with yourself; learning to go on being friends happily in spite of The Most Awkward Crush,” probably is a valid resolution, so maybe I’ve just missed that book, but if it’s out there I haven’t heard of it. Maybe if I’d read more in the “Written Rom-Coms” or “Touching Stories of Friendship” genres, I’d have encountered this idea earlier.
Anyway, I’m filing this with Things That Don’t Automatigally Fix Themselves When You Turn 18 (0r 21, or when you graduate from university, or possibly ever). If I come up with a solution, I’ll let you know. If you have any suggestions, please please please for the love of of all that is holy feel free to leave them in the comments. If you’ve had similar experiences and want to to leave those in the comments, that’s awesome too (even if you, too, are right this very moment in the throes of The Most Awkward Crush and haven’t the faintest idea how to deal).
The other one that’s grinding my gears right now is the thing about being afraid that the other kids in your class project group your colleagues, with whom you’re working on a group project dance that you’ve choreographed, secretly would rather do something else and wish you would stop bothering them and are only working with you because your English teacher is forcing them to out of pity.
I kept feeling weird about inviting dancers to work on my piece, and then feeling weird again when trying to schedule rehearsals—like I was imposing upon them or something.
I finally figured out, as a by-product of realizing that I was afraid that no one would come if I threw a party, that I am still convinced in some level that people just kind of tolerate me because they have to, but aren’t willing to tell me.
Basically, it seems that I’m still convinced that, once people realize how much I suck, it will be just like middle and high school again. No one will want to hang out with me or participate in my projects, because I don’t really know How To Human.
I think, though, that maybe grown people—some grown people, anyway—figure out how to get along with the socially awkward weirdos of the world and how to be more comfortable with their own Inner Weirdos. And I hope that they learn to say no instead of agreeing to work on the project and then fervently hoping they really won’t have to.
So after the difficult and awkward Nobody Told Me That…,there’s this one. Nobody told me that I’d still feel just as certain of rejection now as I did in middle school. The upside of this one is that I think I know how to approach it, now.
For me, the best way to deal with something scary is to run right towards it. Sometimes I can’t yet, but I think I’m ready to run straight towards this piece of of this problem. The work I’m trying do as (I guess?) an artist isn’t going to get done any other way. It doesn’t matter how great my ideas are if they stay locked in my head as I sit here doing doing the equivalent of waiting for Prince Charming to trip over me and decide to marry me on the spot(9).
- My inner cynic is picturing Prince Charming saying,”Well, now we’re lying here on the ground together, so I guess we had better get married, because people will talk.”
Given my past and the fact that I’m both shy and still a little fragile in the self-worth department, I’m not going to say Go Out There And Grab Your Dreams By The Balls!
… Because, let’s be honest, that’s not what I’m doing at all.
Nope, instead, here’s what I’m trying, and maybe what I recommend if you’ve got big dreams and you’re afraid they’re gonna kick you in the face, hard:
Get out there use binoculars to spy on your dreams. And then when you start to get a feel for their habits, maybe get a little closer. Then a little closer still.
And then kind of follow them around, so you maybe just seem like a particularly persistent tumbleweed or some other part of of their normal environment.
And then integrate yourself into the herd of dreams, and over time get a little closer and a little closer until you’re standing around next to your dream, pretending to graze (because you definitely don’t want it to suspect anything).
And then eventually lean on your dream and later maybe skritch that one spot right behind its ears, to make friends.
And then sort of wriggle yourself up on its back a little, like you’re just another dream and just cuddling.
And then when it doesn’t even worry about that, just kinda slide up and throw a leg over, and hope that it’ll just just be just be like, “Oh, no problem.”
And then stay up there and ride.
Then if you do fall off and get kicked hard in the face, it’s 100% cool to lie there and lick your wounds for a while.
I guess what I’m saying is that, even where dreams are concerned, you’ll get up the hill when you get up the hill.
And that’s okay.
Technique: Hypermobility, Proprioception, and Balances
Third in a series of posts on the details of technique that focuses primarily on steps and aspects of dance that I’m struggling with. Take it with a grain of salt.
I find it helpful to write things out in an effort to get a grip on them. These aren’t so much instructions (though if they work for you, awesome!) as observations.
I’ve written a bit before about the often-ridiculous relationship between hypermobility, proprioception, and one’s extremities. In this post, I’ll take a closer look at that relationship—and especially on how it pertains to balances (rather than to balancés).
Remember this shot by Mas? At this angle of articulation, my wrist doesn’t even really feel bent.
To sum things up, proprioception(1) is the vastly under-celebrated sixth sense that tells us, among other things, where in space our body parts are relative to one-another. It depends in part on stretch receptors that hang out in the muscles and joint capsules.
- Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article explaining what proprioception does, why it’s important, and how it works.
Hypermobility, meanwhile, is a catch-all term for conditions in which one’s connective tissues are more elastic than average. In dance, this is both a blessing (see: Woot! Extensions!) and a curse (see: OMG WHERE EVEN IS MY BODY RIGHT NOW?!).
This, of course, makes perfect sense if you think about it. Dance demands both a huge range of motion and highly-developed proprioceptive faculties. Hypermobility enhances range of motion(2), but it reduces proprioception(3).
Moar behind the cut, because this is really long!
The Badger Cabinet Problem, Episode 01: Possible Solutions?
D installed new cabinets in our kitchen some while before I arrived in his life.
He bought them as a lot, rather than having them custom-built, because he’s the frugal kind of person who does that kind of thing and makes it work (I love that about him).
Anyway, I think our cabinets were originally intended for a more typically-sized and -laid out kitchen. This led to one significant problem: a deep, inaccessible well in a corner where two cabinets should connect, but don’t.
Well, there’s your problem. (Also, full disclosure: the weird, sugary pink lemonade mix belongs to D, but I am the one who drinks the nasty instant coffee.)
I’ve dealt with the problem, thus far, by shoving things I rarely use into that deep, dark well.
This is all (ahem) well and good until I actually do need to use them. Then, it’s a giant pain in the neck to pull everything out of the near end of the cabinet so I can fish around in the far end, hoping against hope that nothing with big, sharp teeth is hiding in there(1).
- Okay, it’s fairly unlikely that there are, say, badgers living in my cabinets, but there’s still something I instinctively dislike about shoving my arms into dark hidey-holes.
Yarrr. Here be badgers.
On the other hand, if anyone needs a secure place to stash the One Ring for a few decades, my Badger Cabinet is probably a good choice.
Anyway, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a better way to manage the Badger Cabinet, and I think I’ve finally figured something out thanks to a really expensive sliding spice rack.
Denis would almost certainly murder me if I spent nearly $80 on a sliding spice rack right now, or even $45 on the single-tier version that holds “large containers,” but he almost certainly(2) won’t murder me if I buy some appropriately-sized plastic or metal bins and some of those stick-on felt slidey feet, as long as I don’t spend too much money.
- I say almost certainly because D doesn’t understand my desire to organize things into easily-removable units. He has no problem with removing 15,000,000 individual small items in order to access one large item, probably because HE NEVER PUTS ANYTHING AWAY, EVER(3). /me stomps off in a huff
- Seriously, this is true. You should see his work bench
But he makes up for it by his many other excellent qualities, like knowing how to do plumbing and already owning a Fancy Stand Mixer so I didn’t have to buy one ^.-
One set of bins could go up front, so rather than removing a bazillion individual bottles of miscellaneous oils, tins of baking powder, bags of baking soda (I have discovered that you can buy baking soda, which I use both for cooking and cleaning, in 2-pound bags), I’ll just have to remove a few bins.
The slidey feet will make it easier to get the the bins in the back out.
Et violà—no more sticking my poor, naked arms into potentially badger-infested dark holes.
I will have to measure our fancy stand mixer to confirm this, but it might even be possible to move the Fancy Stand Mixer (which currently lives atop the fridge, where I can’t reach it for fear of dropping it on my own head; that thing is heavy) to the cabinet, where I could potentially wrestle it free without risking cranial injury. Then I could actually use said Fancy Stand Mixer.
That or else I could move the Fancy Stand Mixer to the spot on the countertop where the SodaStream and several cookbooks currently live, then move those guys into the cabinet above or onto the top of the fridge.
I could even move all the random junk that lives in the large cabinet under the flatware drawer up into the Badger Cabinet and then use it to store things like the bread machine (also currently inaccessible due to its precarious perch atop the fridge) and possibly some of my loaf pans, cupcake molds, and so forth.
There’s also a Badger Cabinet on my stove. Right now, it holds all the muffin tins, loaf pans, and so forth, but they’re not very well organized. (Okay, really, they’re barely organized at all.) I have some plans to improve that situation; the challenge is finding the right parts. I’m thinking a combination of slim tension rods and some kind of heat-resistant shelf could work.
So there we have it. A possible solution for the Problem of the Badger Cabinet. I’ll check back in once I try implementing one of my possible solutions.
Oh, G-d, Y’all.
In which Ballet Theater of Indiana identifies “The Nine Insufferable People You Meet Auditioning.”
Got to “the intimidation stretcher” and just about died. Yup, that’s me (though it’s usually unintentional, like, “Welp, not sure what to do with myself right now,def don’t want to make eye contact with with strangers, soooooooo… *attaches leg to head*”).
Sorry about that.
I should get back to homemakering now.
A Case for Un-Educational Viewing
I have occasionally been one of those annoying idiots who think to themselves, “Should I ever have kids, they’ll only rarely watch TV, and when they do it will be educational.”
This morning, I realized that I’ve been a giant (if mostly internal) hypocrite about part of that equation.
It’s probably true that any child of mine wouldn’t watch much television. I didn’t as a kid. This was, of course, partly because we had strict rules about it at Mom’s house.
In reality, though, I didn’t watch much TV because I was usually either outside riding horses or bikes, skating, skiing, hiking, climbing, and just plain running around or was off at ballet class or gymnastics. When I wasn’t doing those things, I was usually reading, writing, or painting. Even when I did watch TV, I was usually drawing at the same time.
In short, I would take sitting around and watching TV as a sort of last-choice option when I didn’t have anything better to do. I’m not really great at enjoying passive entertainment (unless it involves watching horses, dance, or figure skating).
I like going out and doing things and running around, and I’ve noticed that many kids tend to like doing doing those things as well. It’s not that screen time is inherently evil. Rather, there’s a strong probability that any child growing up with me as a parent wouldn’t watch much TV purely because, in short, who’s got time for that?
The world is too full of trees that need to be climbed; of knees that want skinning.
So that’s not the hypocritical bit. It’s the “educational” part that I rather ought to rethink.
Here’s the thing: as kids, my sister and I had a fairly limited selection of videos, and literally none of them were specifically “educational”—and yet I learned a great deal from them.
We subverted Mom’s rules by watching hours and hours of movies at Dad’s, though we also read books aloud every weekend, went to parks and museums, and listened and danced to 20th-century jazz greats like Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus. There were a few wildly inappropriate choices—I vaguely remember some version of Samson & Delilah that was terrible, had terrible music, and struck me as inappropriate, which is saying something, given that my parents pretty clearly regarded kids as Adults, Only Smaller®(1).
- Conversely, I often feel that adults are basically just Kids, Only Bigger®. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. At any rate, I still have no idea what I’m doing as a so-called adult.
To be fair, most of these were seminal 80s coming-of-age movies that Dad bought because he liked them. We had The Explorers(2), The Goonies, The Labyrinth, and The Never-Ending Story(3) at our fingertips and we watched at least one of them just about every weekend(4).
- Curiously, I didn’t like The Explorers the first time I saw it. I think I might have just been too young to “get” it. I was about five, and very into The Rules, and very annoyed at the characters for flouting The Rules and risking Getting In Trouble. Later, it became one of my favorites, except [SPOILER ALERT!] for the icky kissing part. Because ew, gross, kissing, amirite?
- I eventually developed a crush on a character in every last one of these movies: Wolfgang, Data, Jared (because David Bowie, ffs), and Atreyu. Much later I decided that Sarah was pretty cute, too. It’s kind of weird to realize that my penchants for Nerdy Dudes With Glasses and Tough-Pretty Boys In Leather goes back that far, though.
- …Usually while gorging ourselves on soda, chips, and (in my case) gummy worms. Oh, yeah, and ice cream. At Dad’s place, we were all bachelors.
The Explorers taught me (among other things) that persistence and ingenuity can accomplish almost anything. It also taught me one of the greatest Dad Jokes known to humankind, the infamous “Rolls-Canardly Gambit.” I have been known to use this joke on bike rides.
The Goonies (and an entire childhood as The Weird Kid) taught me that it’s okay to be weird, and that sometimes it takes a weirdo who refuses to accept “reality” to solve big problems. Like, you know, saving the town from landgrabbing golf-course mavens and relocating everyone to “Murder City” (it takes a child to save a village?).
The Labyrinth taught me that imagination and reason aren’t enemies; that they can overcome adversity; and that mistakes are no reason to give up.
The Never-Ending Story taught me to believe with conviction in the unbelievable, and never to allow the outside world to crush my imagination. It also spoke to the power of grit in the face of hardship. It taught me that when your heart friend sinks in the Swamps of Sadness, you GTFup and keep pushing forward in his memory.
On the outside, it also kind of taught me that first impressions aren’t everything, since Bastian struck me as an insufferable, whiny git at the outset but grew on me. I think that’s what’s supposed to happen, though, as he learns to believe in himself.
We also watched anime, from which I learned to value stoicism, teamwork, protocol, and even moar grit. And teamwork. And protocol. Because Japan. Also Giant Robots.
Nature shows, red in tooth and claw, imparted important lessons about the distinction between the acts of predation that animals undertake to survive and cruelty, which is largely a human invention—not to mention the fact that suffering and death are parts of life.
Even when I was foru years old, nobody shielded my eyes when the gazelle or the bunny got whacked. I think that probably made me a better person than I might have been. Life is hard, and you have to practice looking at hard things if you’re going to face up to them someday.
We even watched some plain old cartoons, like Thundercats and (for some reason) old reruns of Thundarr the Barbarian(4). They were pretty good at imparting lessons about loyalty, kindness, empathy, and integrity (between awesome battle scenes).
- I’m not sure how this happened. This show was before my time, and yet there it was at some weird hour. Was there a programming exec secretly crushing on Ookla the Mok? Was someone magically beaming it straight into our TV? Was there a timewarp inside our TV (I favor this explanation; the TV was old)? Who knows?
There are any number of intentionally-educational shows that attempt to teach the same lessons I learned from a bunch of 80s fantasy-adventure flicks. Often, they fail: they’re trying so hard that they come across as preachy or even a bit smug. They’re like shredded wheat(5)—good for you (if you don’t have celiac), but tasteless and hard to swallow.
- I keep dying of laughter because Autocorrupt insists that this phrase should be “shredded what,” and I always hear it in my head like, “Shredded whaaaaaaat?”
You know what you get, though, if you iron your shredded wheat into crunchy squares and add a little oil (FAT! NOOOOO!) and salt (OMG! SODIUM! DEADLY!)?
You get Triscuits, which are freaking delicious (and still good for you: I like to eat them for breakfast).
So if I ever have kids, I’m not going to make them only ever watch the video equivalent of Shredded Wheat. In going to introduce them to Triscuits in the form of the 80s movies my Dad showed me, along with 90s classics like … um, are there any? I apparently missed the 90s entirely (sounds about right; I was too busy riding horses, dancing, abs playing the violin). I think The Lion King might make the cut. And, of course, they will know the joys of Harry Potter in both the written and the visual form. And eventually Monty Python, if I play my cards right.
And because it was one of the greatest gifts our Dad gave us, I will read them The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, andThe Lord of the Rings.
Probably none of these things are, in the strictest sense, “educational.”
But what a poor world this would be if all we ever ate was shredded wheat(6).
- Say it with me: “Shredded whaaaaaaaaaaat?!”
danseur ignoble 