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Sep. 30th, 2009 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaIt was B's 21st birthday yesterday, so, naturally, she went out and got drunk.
I don't drink, for a number of different reasons: the biggest one is that I just plain hate the taste of alcohol, but I also actually find the entire idea of drunkenness a little creepy, like, you are deliberately putting yourself into a state where you no longer make the same decisions you would normally make - you are, at least to some extent, a different person. It weirds me out, idk. Plus it doesn't really seem like it's worth it: B tends to characterize it to me as something to do for fun, but A) I have always managed to have fun enough to make me happy without alcohol (M, K, Ka, J, and Q also do not drink, generally speaking), B) it seems to only actually be fun as long as you're drunk, given the number of times B has bemoaned all the drunk-dials she made/stupid things she did, and C) the amount of pain and vomit that follows seems like quite a bit more unpleasantness than any power of alcohol to enhance fun can outweigh.
(NB: All of this applies much more to binge drinking, college-party-type drinking, than going out with friends for a few drinks on a Friday or having a cold beer on a hot afternoon. I'm not, like, morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol in general, or anything like that.)
Anyway, the point is: I feel like a terrible person, but I'm kind of evilly enjoying watching her suffer through her hangover. (I know, worst friend ever. /o\)
I also kind of enjoyed that she was gone last night, because it meant I had control of the TV; I watched a couple episodes of SVU, and then an episode of HawthoRNe that I think I must have missed the first time around. I've come to really love HawthoRNe: I love the predominance of relationships between women, and between characters of color (and, pleasingly often, both at once!); I think I may be developing a girlcrush on Jada Pinkett Smith - and Suleka Mathew, for that matter; and I'm pleased deep in my nerdy soul to be seeing Colonel McQueen from Space: Above & Beyond again. 24 can be fun to watch sometimes, but there are so many things about it that annoy me if I let them; it's nice to have him be on something else. I haven't gotten to watch as many episodes as I'd like to, but I've very much enjoyed all of the ones that I've seen, so.
Also: an awkward conversation with Br. My World Lit textbooks are used, and there are lots of little notes written in them; some are funny, some are stupid, but they're all fun to look at. She was browsing through one volume, and caught sight of a note next to Gilgamesh's lament for Enkidu, that had marked off several lines ("O Enkidu, my brother, you were the axe at my side, my hand's strength, the sword in my belt, the shield before me, a glorious robe, my fairest ornament ...") and labeled them "homoerotic". She found this irritating, and went off into a more general gripe about how people are always taking friendships/close relationships between men and turning them into 'ships, citing Sam/Dean and Frodo/Sam as examples, and asking me why people could not leave these relationships "pure".
As always, I said something relatively non-confrontational about how different people read things different ways, and no reading was necessarily more or less valid than any other, and have been pondering both of the stronger responses I would like to have given ever since. ^^
The milder of the two is mostly technical. I feel like the note was more literal than Br thought; calling somebody "the sword in [your] belt" actually really is kind of an erotic image. I think it's entirely possible that the student who had this book before me was genuinely told by their professor that the lines in question lent themselves to a homoerotic interpretation (unlike another student, who, when confronted with a line about Achilles longing for Patroclus's manhood after his death in the Iliad, wrote, "SKETCH!"), and was making a note of it. Of course, it's certainly also possible that they were isolating lines to reference in their next Gilgamesh/Enkidu first-time hurt/comfort fic. :D So who really knows.
The stronger objection is more directly about the content of her gripe. To say that a relationship, particularly a friendship between men, is good and "pure" (I keep putting that in quotes because she actually did use that word) until you drag it down by adding sex to it is ... I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. It reminds me of that gripe of fpb's that was on F_W back in the day, about how people were sullying the beautiful circle of male friendship that was MWPP with the horror of slash, cheapening something as transcendingly noble as men who are good friends by taking the b- off the bromance. Obviously, it's okay to dislike a ship, to not like slash very much or not like het very much or whatever it is - it's personal taste, it can't really be categorized as wrong, as incorrect. I think what bothers me about Br's gripe is that the way she phrased it moves the issue into, or at least toward, the realm of moral judgment, with her on the side of people who are capable of appreciating the beauty of strong, platonic male friendship, and people who ship things like Frodo/Sam on the side of the poor, lust-driven plebes who can't leave well enough alone and get all carried away with that wacky subtext crap.
Phew. Now that I've got that off my chest: shower time!
I don't drink, for a number of different reasons: the biggest one is that I just plain hate the taste of alcohol, but I also actually find the entire idea of drunkenness a little creepy, like, you are deliberately putting yourself into a state where you no longer make the same decisions you would normally make - you are, at least to some extent, a different person. It weirds me out, idk. Plus it doesn't really seem like it's worth it: B tends to characterize it to me as something to do for fun, but A) I have always managed to have fun enough to make me happy without alcohol (M, K, Ka, J, and Q also do not drink, generally speaking), B) it seems to only actually be fun as long as you're drunk, given the number of times B has bemoaned all the drunk-dials she made/stupid things she did, and C) the amount of pain and vomit that follows seems like quite a bit more unpleasantness than any power of alcohol to enhance fun can outweigh.
(NB: All of this applies much more to binge drinking, college-party-type drinking, than going out with friends for a few drinks on a Friday or having a cold beer on a hot afternoon. I'm not, like, morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol in general, or anything like that.)
Anyway, the point is: I feel like a terrible person, but I'm kind of evilly enjoying watching her suffer through her hangover. (I know, worst friend ever. /o\)
I also kind of enjoyed that she was gone last night, because it meant I had control of the TV; I watched a couple episodes of SVU, and then an episode of HawthoRNe that I think I must have missed the first time around. I've come to really love HawthoRNe: I love the predominance of relationships between women, and between characters of color (and, pleasingly often, both at once!); I think I may be developing a girlcrush on Jada Pinkett Smith - and Suleka Mathew, for that matter; and I'm pleased deep in my nerdy soul to be seeing Colonel McQueen from Space: Above & Beyond again. 24 can be fun to watch sometimes, but there are so many things about it that annoy me if I let them; it's nice to have him be on something else. I haven't gotten to watch as many episodes as I'd like to, but I've very much enjoyed all of the ones that I've seen, so.
Also: an awkward conversation with Br. My World Lit textbooks are used, and there are lots of little notes written in them; some are funny, some are stupid, but they're all fun to look at. She was browsing through one volume, and caught sight of a note next to Gilgamesh's lament for Enkidu, that had marked off several lines ("O Enkidu, my brother, you were the axe at my side, my hand's strength, the sword in my belt, the shield before me, a glorious robe, my fairest ornament ...") and labeled them "homoerotic". She found this irritating, and went off into a more general gripe about how people are always taking friendships/close relationships between men and turning them into 'ships, citing Sam/Dean and Frodo/Sam as examples, and asking me why people could not leave these relationships "pure".
As always, I said something relatively non-confrontational about how different people read things different ways, and no reading was necessarily more or less valid than any other, and have been pondering both of the stronger responses I would like to have given ever since. ^^
The milder of the two is mostly technical. I feel like the note was more literal than Br thought; calling somebody "the sword in [your] belt" actually really is kind of an erotic image. I think it's entirely possible that the student who had this book before me was genuinely told by their professor that the lines in question lent themselves to a homoerotic interpretation (unlike another student, who, when confronted with a line about Achilles longing for Patroclus's manhood after his death in the Iliad, wrote, "SKETCH!"), and was making a note of it. Of course, it's certainly also possible that they were isolating lines to reference in their next Gilgamesh/Enkidu first-time hurt/comfort fic. :D So who really knows.
The stronger objection is more directly about the content of her gripe. To say that a relationship, particularly a friendship between men, is good and "pure" (I keep putting that in quotes because she actually did use that word) until you drag it down by adding sex to it is ... I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. It reminds me of that gripe of fpb's that was on F_W back in the day, about how people were sullying the beautiful circle of male friendship that was MWPP with the horror of slash, cheapening something as transcendingly noble as men who are good friends by taking the b- off the bromance. Obviously, it's okay to dislike a ship, to not like slash very much or not like het very much or whatever it is - it's personal taste, it can't really be categorized as wrong, as incorrect. I think what bothers me about Br's gripe is that the way she phrased it moves the issue into, or at least toward, the realm of moral judgment, with her on the side of people who are capable of appreciating the beauty of strong, platonic male friendship, and people who ship things like Frodo/Sam on the side of the poor, lust-driven plebes who can't leave well enough alone and get all carried away with that wacky subtext crap.
Phew. Now that I've got that off my chest: shower time!
