Kameron Hurley

Equilibrium

How come I’d never heard of this movie? It’s worth it for the gun kata alone! Wheeee! It’s like Gattaca meets the Matrix, with Christian Bale! I mean really, how could you go wrong? Or Maybe Harrison Bergeron meets the Matrix meets Gattaca meets Christian Bale.

Anyway, it plays with old themes, but they’re old ideas I enjoy: classic SF dystopia. What happens when you try and make everyone the same? What happens when we all look the same, feel the same… or don’t feel at all?

What it does do, however, is fall into a lot of old traps. This “new” and “revolutionary” society is still based on the nuclear family structure. Babies are still made and raised the same way, which seems a little silly when you remember that these folks aren’t supposed to have feelings. Why raise your children? Out of a sense of duty to the state?

I’m always amused to find that the future looks a whole lot like the 1950s.

There are also only about 4 women in the future, apparently. Seriously, check out all the group scenes. I made the assumption, early on, that women and men were segregated. Turns out that wasn’t the case, the filmmakers were just too lazy to find a reasonable number of women extras.

It also falls into an old trap that I’m trying to break in my own work. A totalitarian society is overthrown by… killing its leader. We just need to destroy the head and blow up the prozac plants and then people will be free!

Well, you know, fighting the Man with the same hatred and violence the Man uses against you… isn’t all that revolutionary. You get another cycle of hate and violence. A small group of people chooses to “liberate” many through an act of violence.

Can’t we think up different ways to build new societies? How effective is it, really, to kill a dictator and magically remake a country? Look at South America. Africa. Iraq. The US has been killing dictators for years, and it’s made a hell of a mess. You don’t just slaughter a dictator and expect things you change. It’s a lot tougher than that. It’s changing people. It’s finding new ideas. And you can’t do that with a bullet.

Killing people is easy. Real change is hard.

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Slog, slog, slow

I think doing back-to-back chapters of Rhys-and-Nyx-expositing-over-tea to Nyx-and-Khos-expositing-over-beer is going to be just a little exhausting.

Time to break and re-group.

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Building a(n) Different Alternative Femininity

Sometimes what I suspect I’m doing – the way I live my life, what I write – is building an alternate version of femininity.

I was at the coffeeshop today working on Black Desert, and at the the next table over three skinny, blond 14-year-old girls were drinking waters and frappuchinos, gossiping about boys and discussing the total calorie count on the container of fruit they were sharing.

And as I was sitting there, the old despair started welling up in me again. That certain knowledge that I never have and never will look like that or live like that. I spent my pre-teen and teen years trying to conform to that mold, and it didn’t work. The problem with having one dominant femininity is that not only does everyone start looking and acting the same, but you’ve got this vast majority of women who – even with the help of loads of plastic surgery, strict diet control, and abstaining from all things non-trivial – will never, ever conform to that mold, no matter how hard they try. And they’ll spend their lives hating themselves for it.

Note that I’m not about complacency. I’m not about giving up and hiding under your couch and eating bon bons for the rest of your life. I love watching succeed, find power. But most people can’t get there by reaching for the 21st century American ideal of “femininity,” or skinny blond bauble in heels. It’s an incredibly transitory ideal (as all of them are). You can hit it from 16-35 if you’re genetically blessed or spend loads of time and money on it, and then you’re pretty fucked or very rich (and even the very rich will only get another 10 years out of it).

We have no Amazon ideal. We have no Tough Matron ideal. We have hot Britney. And when Britney has kids and loses her teen popsicle image and goes wacky and has real problems like most folks from her end of town, she’s nothing. That’s all of us: we’re nothing. No worth; not worth looking at, not worth noticing.

Youth and beauty have always been sought out and valorized, but there are alternative role models, alternative ways to find strength. When did we stop worshipping heros and start worshipping youth? In fact, real strength can often be found only outside of our narrowly-defined version of femininity. Young, thin and air-headed only gets you so far. “Hot,” if used in tandem with “smart” can get you called a bitch or send you right to the top… so long as you have the strength and financial ability to maintain it.

So what about all of us who’ll never be blond, thin, and believe youth should be left happily behind along with bad sex and credit card debt? Cause honestly, there’s very little I miss about being young. Perhaps I miss being invincible, but the bad sex and credit card debt? Yeah, that I could do without. I much prefer life on the downside of 25.

I remember throwing my first punch and how amazing it felt. All of a sudden you realize that this big clunky body that you thought was worthless by virtue of its so-not-hotness is actually *good* for something. You channel 200 lbs of strength into knocking over a 200 lb punching bag, and for the first time in your life, you feel strong. You have worth. Worth not measured by the width of your ass.

If fact, there were all sorts of things my body was good at. I just never had the courage to give it a try. If I wasn’t worth looking at, what kind of worth did I really have, as a bag of flesh and blood? Oh, sure, I had a brain. My dad always told me I was the sort of girl guys married, not the sort of girl they fucked around with. Problem was, I didn’t really want to get married. And I had a real problem with my worth as a person being decided by what it was guys wanted or didn’t want from me.

How about the world? How about, what can I, physically and mentally, as a whole person, give to the world? What am I worth to myself? What can my body, my mind, do for *me*? …. Besides attracting or repelling a bed partner?

And when I sit down to write I write about women whose sense of self-worth is defined by what they know, what they’ve done. Asses and breasts and hips and legs are tools, body parts, stuff you trade off and shuffle around, shit that gets you from here to there. It’s not who you are. It’s not what drives you.

In my world, you look for a friend and/or bed partner based on what they are, what they can do, strength and reliability and skills and flat-out usefulness. Beauty is lovely. Beauty is fun to look at. Beauty can stop your heart. But it’s a passing thing, candy, no more permanent than its component parts.

I build worlds where strong, scary women build and control the world. That’s not to say that there’s not a place for other kinds of women, for men of all stripes, in those worlds, but the people running the show have a different set of values. There’s no cult of youth and beauty there. There’s no 24-hour news channel. There’s no roadside advertising. There’s nobody in your face telling you to measure your worth by the width of your ass.

Thick or thin, doesn’t matter out there…. question is, when the shit hits the fan, will you stand and fight, or cower and die?

That’s the real question out there, the only one that matters.

And with those kinds of odds, nobody gives a shit about how many calories are in their goddamn fruit cup.

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Med Expenses Paid Last Year:

$2620.73

This is the amount I actually paid out of my own pocket, not how much I was charged or what I still owe. As of last count, I owe about $1700 more, $700 of which has been tied up with my insurance company and which they should hopefully pay.

If we counted how much insurance paid, the number is easily twice that. Easily.

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Writing

Seriously needs to happen tonight. I’m behind 5500 words again. Blast.

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A Train Wreck of a Day

God, today was awful.

It has to do with a lot of stuff, including the fact that my health insurance doesn’t work and I have to run around the office begging for money. Then there were loud coworkers, fighting down hysterical responses, being asked to get coffee for one of the IT guys (it was an innocent request, it just brought up my lingering animosity toward being a useless secretary), first official meeting with a new supervisor in a new department. It was a poor to terrible performance during our Zumba class (I move like a stone; the only part I felt confident with was when we punched). It was waiting too long for meds at the pharmacy. It was being overbudget on fun money for the month. It was not enough workouts. It was moving departments. It culminated in me spending an hour waiting for an apartment showing… in front of the WRONG apartment complex. By the time I called the guy a second time and sorted out that I was in front of the wrong place, he’d gone home, and I felt so stricken and stupid – it was so much the perfect end to a perfectly shitty day – that I just walked home and cried the whole way.

It’s change. It’s terror that I can’t actually hack it on my own now, after getting sick. It’s terror that in fact, I am crazy and incompetent, and once I’m on my own, that will become abundantly clear. I have a lot of really fantastic stuff going for me right now, and now I have to bring it, and after failing to fucking find the right apartment complex absolutely killed me tonight. Look at the level of my incompetence! I can’t even show up to an apartment showing! What if being sick has permanently fried my brain? What if I can’t make it?

I hate relying on health insurance to live, and relying on an employer for health insurance. I hate being so crazy-busy that my brain just… stops. That I can find the right apartment place, circle the block and *stand outside the wrong apartment a block away because they look alike for an hour.* I should have, at the very least, re-called after half an hour. I should have – duh! – seen that I was now standing in front of a complex that was in the middle of a street, not a corner lot like the one I passed while doing a loop around it. What the hell? How did I not see that? I just stood there like a sheep, like my brain saw it, and clicked and all reasoning power turned off.

And this is who needs to hack it. This is the one who’s corp copywriter, building sales projects, has a three book contract, and lives or dies by how well she can calculate her insulin/food/exercise percentages four times a day each and every day. And, of course, that’s the rub, isn’t it?

How many things can you keep in your head? How much can you do until your brain shuts off what it considers non-vital? How much until you just overload and have to shrug everytime you blow a gasket and go, “OK, well, shit, I guess that was one thing too much.”

I hated almost everything about today.

Tomorrow will be better.

I can do this, but I’m scared as hell, and until I prove to myself that I can do all this in the face of… all of this, everything I carry along with me, I’m going to be a little freaky about it all for the next couple of months.

Man, I want it all to come together.

Man, I want to shine.

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The Crazy

I’d never realized what a powerful thing it was to take control of your own emotions and reactions to things. What’s the quote? “Life is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

You can’t go back and change how things went. You can’t change people. You can’t change the past. What you *can* change – right now, this minute – is how you react to those things. How much or how little you allow them to eat you up, consume your life.

It’s hard. It’s fucking unfair, especially when you feel you were in the right, or you were the one abused, or you were the one treated unfairly or fucked over.

Yes, you were.

Now what are you going to do about it?

Because I can’t change other people. I can’t change their reactions to me. I can’t be more loveable. I can’t be more than me. All I can be is the best I can be. The only thing I’m in charge of is my own reactions.

Life is what you do with what’s been done to you.

There’s this bitter, cynical guy at work who comes in every day and every day there’s some new way that he’s been screwed over, that life is unfair, that his life is crap, that it’s not going his way.

In fact, he’s pretty successful, I think. He has a spitfire wife he seems to get along with quite well, two absolutely gorgeous children, a great opportunity with this young company, great health insurance, tons of friends around here and back on the east coast where he’s from. He owns his own house. They have two cars. I’d bet they have an IRA, too. They’re in a good place. His life is in a good place.

But that’s not how he chooses to take it. He comes in and everything is hell, everything is bad, everything is doom and gloom. It’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And you know, though I have some fear and trepadation about losing everything in the back of my mind, I don’t live that reality. I don’t have nightmares all night about losing everything (OK, not usually!). Sure, sometimes I’m afraid I’ll lose things, but what drives me is hope. Hope that I’m building toward something more. Striving to be better. Hope and faith.

I’ve done some terrible things to people the last couple of years, and I’ve had crappy things happen to me, but you know what? Shit happens. You can hate somebody for breaking your heart and scream at them to fix it, or you can fix your own damn heart. You can patch it up yourself. No one’s going to do it for you. You can choose to figure out how to live the life you want – chronic illness and all – or you can lie in bed all day screaming at the unfairness of the universe and sit around feeling sorry for yourself. You can bitch and moan about losing your job and being stuck in Dayton or you can thank your incredible friends for giving you the opportunity to start over in a new town.

You can drive yourself with hate and fear and a deep sense of persecution by God or the Universe or whatever. Or you can say, “OK, this is what I’ve been dealt. Now what the fuck can I do with it?”

I think the thing that pisses me off about it is that it tends to “absolve” others (or the Universe, or whatever), for their actions. It’s like saying, “So what, you were mugged in the street, get over it!” But what’s the alternative? Sitting around waiting for the mugger to apologize and give your money back or watching him strung up for theft?

In this scenerio, whose actions/reactions do you have control over?

You’re damn right I want the assholes to get their just desserts, but when I’m sitting around waiting for that day, on those nights when I’m not out campaigning to get them incarcerated or trying to change gun laws or whatever, what am I doing to take care of myself? How am I looking out for my own emotions? Cause nobody else is, especially not the person or external force that hurt you.

One of the things I hate the most is being dependent on other people. I hate having my well-being so dependent on the actions of someone else.

There’s something incredibly freeing when you stop yourself, when you clutch at all the hurt and pain and say, “This isn’t about that crazy fucked up person who hurt you/fucked up thing that happened to you. This is about how you choose to handle it.”

Some people do things to you that are hurtful because they’re wacky or crazy or completely fucked in the head. And that’s something they have to deal with. What can you do about that? Just run after them, screaming?

So I work hard to let it go. I remind myself that all the stuff that changes is going to change within me, not inside of someone else. I can’t change other people. I can’t change situations. I can’t change screwed up genetics.

But I can change how I deal with it.

I can take control of it now, this moment.

And that’s how I live my life.

That’s how I keep going.

That’s how I succeed even in the face of catastrophic failure.

Fall down seven times. Get up eight.

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Tomorrow

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Cthulu is on Second Base

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Tonight

Collapse. After our second day of video shooting tomorrow, I’m hoping things at work will slow down (ha ha).

Apartment viewing Friday! Yay!

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