the legends are true!

Lately I’ve been starting to admit to myself that I am not very comfortable with my Jewishness. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyze exactly why that is, as opposed to just ignoring the nagging feeling like I usually do. And as I’ve started to open up this inner dialogue, I think life has been throwing me more food for thought.

Today in my Asian Religions class we get our review sheets for our exam next week. As I settle into my seat, the woman next to me taps my arm. “I’ll do this half and you do the other and we’ll email each other the answers and we will help each other study.” I’m a bit taken aback, because this woman has never spoken to me before. But I won’t turn down a study buddy. We split up the questions a bit more evenly, so that we’re both answering an equal amount about Hinduism and Buddhism. She taps on her notebook for me to write down my email address, and as I do, her eyes widen.”

“You’re Jewish?” Her tone has a hint of surprise and her facial expression is one I can’t quite place.

 ”Well, sort of…emphasis on the ‘ish’…” I stare at my own handwriting. 

“You must be,” she says decisively. “‘Man’ last names are always Jewish.”

“Well my last name is actually Austrian,” I begin, and let out a small breath. Next comes the usual explanation. “My family is partly Jewish, but also Russian Orthodox Christian. More Jewish culturally speaking. But we practice some of both.”

“Ah!” She nods in satisfaction. “Orthodox is closer to Islam.”

I turn my head back to the whiteboard, onto which our prof is desperately trying to project a film from an ancient VHS. 

 This is not an unusual scenario for me. Yet somehow whenever someone assumes my religious upbringing has been Jewish, I always have to correct them in the same way. Clarify that I’m only partly Jewish, almost as if I’m excusing myself. That growing up I went to church. That despite my “incriminating” last name, I’ve been baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith. I have this weird, knee-jerk denial of my Jewishness. And I think a lot of it stems from how I’ve always felt torn between two communities and never fully accepted by either. 

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We don’t know entirely why cats purr, but we do know when they do it. Most commonly we hear them purr when they are happy and content, but sadly, they are also known to do so when afraid, sick, or dying. 

I found out on Saturday that Mister Cat, my tabby, has stomach cancer. He’d been acting really off lately. He stopped asking eating and asking to be fed. His water bowl stayed full. He was lethargic and appeared dazed all the time. He used to sleep in bed with me every night until morning, when he’d wake me up in the sweetest and most obnoxious way - rubbing his face in mine, nipping my neck and cheeks and meowing that it was time to get up and feed him. He stopped doing that. In fact, two nights ago he didn’t even sleep in my bed at all. Once a very vocal cat, Mister stopped meowing. He started sleeping alone, on the bathmat or the corner of the loveseat. He used to cuddle and rub up against my face or my boobs (the cheeky little pervert) and then he just stopped begging for attention. I thought that maybe he was having hairball issues. But when I noticed his shallow breathing, I freaked out. The vet confirmed what I feared but sort of already knew - cancer.

Seven months ago, my cat Lilly died. I found out she was sick right around spring semester finals. She died the day before my last final. She’d been my confidant, my support. I’d lived in the same house as her for twelve years, since she picked me from her Brooklyn shelter cage. And then, suddenly, she was sick. I cried like I’ve never cried in my life when I heard about the diagnosis. I screamed and moaned and wailed. I felt like it was somehow my fault, for not being there, for moving out that year to go to a state college, for insisting on renewing her shots - which happened to be what catalysted the growth of her cancer, a ticking time bomb planted in her by bad rabies vaccine when she was a kitten. And after she died, I sobbed into my pillow at night, purging little saline puddles. But I had Mister by me. His purr was the music I fell asleep to. He never judged me. And despite not having been my cat from the start (my friend asked me to take him in after her stepdad wanted him of of the house) he gave me all the love he could.

I wondered if it was my fault; if maybe, had I come a week earlier, there would have been something I could have done. But apparently, cats don’t show signs of serious illness until it’s too late. They hide it, unlike many other animals. So oftentimes tragedy feels extremely sudden, despite the fact that they’ve actually been sick for a long time. 

Right now I’m trying to make him feel less pain. I’ve been giving him steroids and antibiotics twice a day, and he’s started eating and using the litterbox again, if only a little. Last night he even slept in my bed, and right now he’s by my pillow. I know that it’s not good to have a sick cat in your bed. My parents have given me hour-long speeches about bio-energy and the aura of the sick and all that. But right now I really don’t care. He wants to be near me. He knows he’s dying, and he knows that I know, and he’s still sharing himself with me. He’s not hiding all the time now. He doesn’t flinch and leave when I come near. There’s at least a shred of him still there, that beautiful, abundant personality that could always make me smile, no matter the shitstorm. 

Now finals are coming and I’m a hot mess. I’m running out of money (partly because of how much I had to pay for Mister’s x-rays and bloodwork), I’m behind on both bills and schoolwork. I have bandages all over the fingers on my right hand because I have to force feed Mister his medicine and he’s bitten me hard enough to draw blood. Now I leave for class and wonder what I’ll find when I come home. I don’t know if I’m going to have to put him down, or if he’ll die on his own. I don’t want him to suffer. Lilly died in front of my parents, on a Mickey Mouse pillow she’d slept on since she was a kitten. They threw out all her things. They constantly forget that she’s dead. When I come home to visit them, I swear that I see her. I think I’ll turn a corner and jump because I see a shadow and am afraid of “stepping on her tail.” If it comes to it, I’ll sit there as they put Mister down.  I almost just want him to check out on his own. Partly because I’m afraid of watching him die. 

I had to shoot my final for film class on Saturday. Four very good friends helped me out, one being the friend who gave me Mister in the first place. She made it there in time for the vet to talk to us about the bloodwork, medication, and the bleak prognosis. Megan nodded solemnly and said that Mister had a good life; she was just sad that I couldn’t have as much time with him as she did. 

At first I thought that taking Mister to the vet bright before shooting my final had been a really stupid idea. I worried that I’d be a mess, bursting into tears at random moments in front of my friends and possibly random strangers. But luckily, filming proved to be an amazing distraction. I have the greatest friends in the world. And I was my usual self, deflecting with humor - my biggest coping mechanism. I deal with shit by pointing out how ridiculous it is. I am snarky, sarcastic, and often utterly nonchalant. It’s just how I stay sane. But I have been meaning to write about this with complete, painful openness, which is where this post is coming from. I know I’ll get through this. I know that I’m strong. But it’s just not fair, and right now that’s all I can think.

Seriously.

I’m rewatching it on television right now for the first time in several years. I had it on VHS and used to watch it all the time. I loved Christina Ricci as a kid, ever since I first saw her in Casper. I think I remember my parents not particularly liking the movie. I always thought it had to with with how disobedient the girls were and how useless (or evil) all the authority figures were. Now I have a whole new reason that they might have disliked it. 

Now that I think of it, it makes so much sense. Like when the other girls that Beth (Christina Ricci) meets are talking about impressing boys and she doesn’t look particularly interested. Her immediate fascination with the boyish Jody (Anna Chlumsky). Their playful teasing of one another. The way the girls idolize Molly Morgan, a local legend and badass bitch. Their undying loyalty towards one another. And how the whole thing kind of plays out like the story of a society trying to keep apart two star-crossed lovers. 

Beth: Jody is my friend. And you can keep us apart but nothing you say will ever change the way I feel about her. Ever! 

And apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. If you need a little contextual proof, watch this clip from the 5:00 min mark onward. 

The first thread I saw on the IMDB page also asked about the lesbian subtext. And predictably, people jumped up left and right to deny it and ask why people have to “make something into more than it is,” and why they can’t just “leave stuff alone” and “why does everything have to be gay? Can’t two girls have a close friendship without being called lesbians?”

The answer? OF COURSE THEY CAN. No one is delegitimizing platonic cis-female friendships. It’s not like lesbians and bisexuals are out to eat the pussies of all their straight female friends. That’s not the way it works. But the question is, why does the suggestion bother people so much? Why are people offended when someone points out what they perceive as homosexual subtext? Why is it a problem? It’s an interpretation. Over and over again I see people moaning and groaning over how people “make” everything gay. So is there some kind of limit to the amount of homosexuality which you can stomach in mainstream media? Are people only allowed to read into character relationships from a heteronormative standpoint? (And fuck you, spellcheck. Heteronormative IS a word, and obviously it’s what you are.) The worst is when these people preface their complaints with “I have no problem with gay people, but…” and then proceed to say some shit about how they’re tired of EVERYONE making EVERYTHING GAY. It’s like there’s some sort of panic button going off in their minds when there’s too much gay in the atmosphere. “Straitus quo being challenged! Abort! Abort!” 

The argument I continually see being made with regards to kid’s movies is that the person has “no problem with homosexuality, but children’s films should have nothing to do with sex.” Newsflash: they don’t. Why is it okay for a kids’ movie to ship a straight romance, but when something homosexual (or homoromantic) is so much as implied, it immediately means sex? Romantic ≠ Sexual. If it’s okay for Aladdin to have a crush on Jasmine immediately after meeting her, why is it wrong for Tulio and Miguel to be in a committed relationship? 

By rejecting the possibility of gay subtext in mainstream media, including kids’ movies, people are marking homosexuality and homoromanticism as dirty things, consciously or unconsciously. Like it or not, many queer individuals have felt their orientation from an early age. Not seeing queer relationships as children isn’t going to prevent kids from being queer. It’s just going to delay them from having healthy attitudes and understandings of their orientations. 

TL;DR: The bottom line is that Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain is a great, girl-positive coming of age story. That happens to have heaps of lesbian subtext.  

greytaliesin:

Okay guys. Rubbing hands together and pulling some of my own art to serve as a visual of sorts here. Whitewashing, as most of you know, is taking a character of color and depicting them as white or with light skin. It’s a controversial issue—and for very good reason. PoC are concerned about their reputation in media, and whitewashing PoC characters in fandom is naturally a subject that rubs people the wrong way—as it should. (To put it in a less nicety nice way, whitewashing needs to fucking stop.) Intentional or unintentional, painting PoC as light-skinned is damaging at the very least, and yet another expression in our society that PoC are somehow undesirable. 

One of the protests that I often see in dubious cases of whitewashing is that “but skin tones change under different lighting”—and they do. But the thing is, the hues and values change, not their overall skin tone. First off—some basic color vocab. The hue is the variety of a color. Is it reddish? Is it bluish? Hues are created by mixing base colors. The value of a color is how light or dark it is—taking a hue and then adding white or black to make it darker or lighter. We’re going to investigate painting different skin tones—and how light changes dark skin tones.

 Let’s take a look. I’ve pulled colors in each of these screenshots from the highlights on their faces, the mid tone, the shadows under their cheekbones, and the shadow in the darkest parts of their faces. Here’s Isabela.

Notice how her highlights stay a mid range brown—it goes rosy or sandy, but the values are similar. Now let’s look at Merrill, whose lighter skin changes even more drastically:

Merrill gets the benefit here of being in very bright outdoor light, of course (I don’t have a screenshot of Bela in a similar light, but: her highlights will not ever be as light as Merrill’s are. 

Giruvegan and Isabela volunteered to demonstrate two skin tones in similar lighting situation—directional light and the same tone/intensity (a golden-ish light that’s soft, and not very intense). Gir has very pale skin, Isabela has tan skin. Notice how though their midtones and shadow tones can look similar when pulled from the painting with an eyedropper, her highlights never come to be quite as light as his—and her midtones are darker, even in similar lighting.

Now let’s look at two characters with a similar skin tone, under slightly different lighting. I didn’t have any current examples of dramatically different lighting, so these are a bit close. Esin’s skin is a medium brown with olive tones.

In harsher lighting, notice that the shadows change more than the highlights do. Also notice that his skin is cool-toned, while hers is warm-toned. The cool or warm tone of a character’s (or person’s) skin is important to keep in mind. 

Now here are two more characters with different skin tones in similar, slightly darker lighting—darker lighting on fair skin will make it look dark, right? Taliesin has light skin, Esin has dusky olive skin. 

Taliesin’s tones are still obviously different than Esin’s, but they’re in the same value range. It’s the hues here that are showing their skin tones. 

Now let’s put the tones to the test in grayscale, where it can be harder to depict the difference in skin tones, right?

Wrong. Even in monochrome painting, Gir’s skin is still visibly lighter than Isabela’s. His midtones are much lighter than hers, and her highlights aren’t as bright as his. Esin and Isabela have similar skin tones, and therefore have similar midtones in greyscale—toned or tinted lighting is in the hue of a color, not so much the value.

Your midtones are what we’re looking at here. It’s true that in bright sunlight, highlights will be lighter. But they’ll still be in the same color family as their original tones—for Isabela, a golden brown. Here’s what happens when we whitewash (albeit quickly and crudely) Iz—

(I get it, she looks like a creepy ghost, but that’s my hasty photoshop job, hopefully in a real painting she’d be shaded a bit more in-depth). What’s happened here is that we’ve given Bela the same midtones as Gir, who is, well. White. Hence, white washing. 

The bottom line is yes—the appearance of skin does change under light, but dark skin takes light differently than pale skin. Characters with dark skin under no light on earth or elsewhere come to have the same midtones as characters with light skin. 

The easiest way to paint skin accurately is to start with the midtone and then add your darks and lights over it instead of starting with your lights and then darkening areas. Starting with midtones gives a good general “feel” of the tone of your skin and is often darker than you might think to go when painting from your head. Look at references—and look at them very closely. Pull color samples. When painting in greyscale, a good trick is to paint your midtones in color and then turn it to black and white. Remember—in black and white, Gir and Bela still had very different skin tones. Sorry I didn’t have examples of intense bright or outdoor light, but it’s still going to work in the same way.

All the lighting in the world won’t make somebody white—the hues you choose to paint with (or in monochrome, the values). 

greytaliesin:

Imagine for a second that you are the only heterosexual person you’ve met; in a world where nearly everyone is homosexual or assumed to be homosexual. You spent a long time worrying that you might be hetero and wondered if everyone around you would judge you if you decided to be open about your heterosexuality. Heterosexual marraige is considered strange, dangerous to society’s values, and something that should be kept private from conversations and workplaces. You don’t talk about your straight hookups at the water cooler, but though your boss says its unprofessional for sexuality to be in the workplace, your coworkers talk about the hot guys and girls they met over the weekend, and have photographs of their same-sex partners up in their cubicles. A number of religions declare that heterosexuality is an affront to nature, condemning the few network shows that have straight people on them—and those few straight people on television are caricatures and stereotypes, loving family members who are obsessed with having children. You’re not like that, so why are all the examples like that?

But you want to be professional and are afraid you may lose your job for being straight. Although there are laws loosely in place, you’ve heard that sometimes excuses are given to circumvent this legislation. You keep quiet and head home to hang out with some buddies to relax.

On TV the news covers a heterosexual pride festival. “I have nothing against straight people,” some of your good friends say all the time, “but man. The ones who are in-your-face about it.”

“Right? Like. I don’t get a gay pride parade,” your other friend counters, “so why should they get straight pride parades? It shouldn’t even matter.”

There are cities where heterosexuality is more common and accepted, but they’re often the butt of jokes from politicians and comedians who take pride in their values and the place of the homosexual family group (which is the norm in society.) But you live in a smaller city or town, and the only heterosexual places to go are somewhat sleazy bars you’re not sure you want to be seen at. You might get a reputation for being straight, and you wouldn’t want that.

So you log online. You find a website—a community, where the majority of people are also heterosexual. Hey, you think, hey, this is kind of cool. Other people like me who aren’t sleazy or… wait, why do all these people thing straight people are sleazy breeders who have sex because they want to have children? Who came up with that?

Isn’t it messed up, someone comments, that someone else decides what’s right or wrong for me to do?

You get fired up. Everyone does. It’s nice to have a safe space and a community where you can safely announce you’re straight. Some people on the website even live close enough to meet up, and even if no one lives close to you. You get a break from the pressures of your office job and your friends who make heterosexuality the butt of their jokes and make comments like “Man, that shit was so fucking straight. So boring and stupid.”

It’s a big site, and there are homosexual people on there too. Some of them think there shouldn’t be a difference and try to work in their communities for heterosexuality to not just be tolerated, but accepted and shielded from bullying and violence. Other homosexual people mean well but sometimes try to speak for straight people on their behalf, getting angry when corrected. Some gay people on the site keep spewing hatred of straight people and some insist “but not all straight people are like that!” despite the fact that the majority that you know have never given you reason to believe otherwise.

This, if you haven’t caught on, is a metaphor. This scenario was given to me once in mediation training while I was working in student housing, albeit without the online community bit and the bit about people invading your safe space. We were then asked what we’d do—if we’d come out as straight, if we’d enter a gay marraige with someone we were good friends with to keep up appearances and try to convince ourselves maybe we were gay, or to have a shot at having a family, to secretly start up heterosexual relationships in the hopes no one caught you, or to do nothing. It’s not easy to think of like this—and this is why having a safe space is so important.

For many queer young people (and queer adults) having a safe online space is a break from the very real prejudices they face in their day to day lives from a society that appears homogenous when it sweeps them under the rug. They are expected to exist but quietly while everyone around them enjoys the privilege of never worrying if someone will judge them, if their parents will disown them, if they or their partner (or their children) will face discrimination, harassment, and outright violence.

If you’re upset that Tumblr is “heterophobic” while you enjoy rarely having to cover up your own sexuality in your day to day life, please think twice on that. It’s not fun to be confronted with your own privilege, but if you do have queer friends who you care about, the most respectful thing you can do for them is not assert that you’re doing nothing wrong but ask them what you’re doing wrong.