2001-08-03 - 4:26 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: I'm not sure.

The other night while picnicking on McDonald's in the guest suite while the floor people were working downstairs, I mentioned to Poindexter that "The Great Escape" had been shipped from Netflix.

Evie: Is that the movie that 'Chicken Run' is based on?
P: Yep.
Evie: Y'know, I don't think that 'Chicken Run' is really a kid's movie. That was disturbing and upsetting.
P: All children's movies are disturbing and upsetting. Bambi's mom gets shot by a hunter, some lion kills his own brother so he can be the Lion King...
Evie: You're right! That's awful! Are there any movies for kids that are actually appropriate for children?

We started talking about the horribleness of "children's" movies and stories.

"Snow White" has the evil queen hiring a hit man to kill her stepdaughter, then trying to poison her later, not to mention Snow White living with seven men.

"Hansel and Gretel" has two kids being turned out of their house by their evil stepmother, then locked up and nearly baked alive by a witch.

"Little Red Riding Hood"'s grandmother gets eaten by a wolf, and nearly he Little eats Red as well. I've heard the original version of this tale is far more grisly than the kids' version.

"Sleeping Beauty", according to twisted Poindexter, is about necrophilia on the part of the Prince. More realistically, you've got to worry about a fairy gone bad who tries to kill everybody (thank god for the good fairies who turn it into sleep).

"Rapunzel" gets locked in a tower by (again) an evil stepmother.

What *is* it with the evil stepmothers? Most stepmothers I know are decent people, some quite wonderful, actually.

Argh, I never know whether to deal with this sort of thing as a comment in LiveJournal or here in my own journal. Since this is only for a small piece that is not representative of the entire journal entry, and since it is about me and not Jaffo, I pick here.

In Jaffo's Galveston journal, he wrote:

I hate traveling, of course. In my daily life, I can structure things to minimize problems and keep myself comfortable, but strange places really make me feel handicapped. Adjusting to furniture that's too high or too low, climbing in and out of difficult vehicles, and navigating bumpy terrain. I have to move slower and work harder just to achieve a level of functioning I consider normal, and that's a lot of stress.

It's not the struggle itself that bothers me, it's the social cost of making my handicap the center of attention. I'm very self-conscious about it, and trips like this really hurt my pride.

From what I've heard, feeling self-conscious about a disability is fairly common. My grandmother, for instance, was embarrassed by her hearing loss and would pretend she heard things when she didn't rather than explain. When her knees got so bad she couldn't walk very far, she chose not to go out anymore rather than use a wheelchair.

I am occasionally guilty of pretending I understood something when I didn't. This is usually in a situation when someone starts talking to me in the grocery line and doesn't seem all that interested in feedback. If they ask a question I'm forced to ask them to repeat, but if they're just blabbing and I'm going to be gone in 60 seconds, I don't bother getting into it. I smile and nod.

This is laziness, though. Not self-consciousness. I can't remember the last time I was actually self-conscious about it.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped giving a shit. I think this is quite possibly due to the fact that in EVERY SINGLE INTERACTION I have with another human being, I have to deal with it. I have to make sure people are facing me. "I'm sorry, I can't hear very well and need to lipread" is something I say at least once a day if I leave the house. I have to ask them to repeat. I have to ask them to speak loudly or enunciate more (often a nearly futile request -- people who mumble seem incapable of enunciating). Every time I meet someone new I have to expain, "I can't hear very well. I need to lipread." People talk to me on the street and I say "Hold on, I can't hear you from here," as I walk over to them.

In situations with people who know me (friends, neighbors, family, coworkers), I get bossy. I insist on quiet corners in restaurants. I dictate who sits where and make people move into a close circle around me when they're scattered across the room. I badger people who mumble -- "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" -- or, if they absolutely just can't enunciate, ask someone else to "translate". It never stops.

The alternative, you see, would be not to communicate. That's hardly acceptable. :)

Y'know what I wonder though, is if I'm a pain in the ass. If people get tired of having to repeat shit. There are some people whom I know I drive crazy: People who say things off to the side, not directed at any single person, and often sarcastic. I NEVER understand what these people say (because they are not speaking clearly and directly to me) and they HATE having to repeat their sarcastic remarks. But I wonder about everyone else. Given that people still want to spend time with me, I guess they don't think it's too much bother. Plus if they "obey the rules" -- face me, stay close, enunciate -- they find they rarely need to repeat themselves anyway.

CERTAIN PARTIES SHOULD STOP READING NOW. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. ;)

You thought I was gonna start dishing dirt, didn't you. No. This is the last section of the entry (nothing more after this), and it's about doomsday crap. Some people (including me, actually) don't need more things to worry about.

With all this talk of doomsday scenarios, I asked Poindexter why we weren't preparing for Armageddon.

His reply was: "I'd rather improvise if such a disaster were to occur, rather than spending a lot of time and money preparing for something with such a low probability of occurrence."

"Low probability", eh? I hope so.

It probably wouldn't hurt to keep the house well stocked with non-perishable foodstuffs and ammunition. :) There's nothing to do about the lack of a bunker, though, because I'm not willing to give up living in the city. If we move to a house with a basement, that might help a tiny, tiny bit. Blocking out the windows is a way to keep out burglars, anyhow.

But I'm still wondering. Given what John said about the most likely scenarios, I started thinking harder about the biological/nuclear terrorist ones. If the capability exists to do such a thing, why hasn't it happened already? Whatever has prevented it thus far, is that something that will continue to prevent it in the future?

Poindexter pointed out that it probably takes a lot of time and money and sensitive laboratory conditions to build, say, a "smallpox bomb". I mean, how many people do you have to infect in one fell swoop in order for the disease to spread far and wide enough to decimate the population? If it's only a handful of folks, quarantine might help. Poindexter also thinks that martial law would take over sooner than the modeling in the original article suggested.

This kind of thing -- biological or nuclear terrorism -- is an undertaking, with lots of people and money involved, and it's really hard to keep such a thing a secret. Presumably if any person or group has already attempted such an undertaking, it's been squashed before it had a chance to fully develop. "That's what spies are for," Poindexter says. He blames Clinton for the fact that our spies didn't catch that bomb -- which must have taken days to build somewhere nearby or was smuggled over there when they heard the ship was docking -- before it was dropped off at the USS Cole.

But if it's not possible to keep such an undertaking a secret, why don't we hear more about the squashings? When was the last time you heard somebody say "Such-and-such terrorist group was planning to bomb Sioux City, Iowa, but we nipped that in the bud"? Poindexter thinks that it's because it's not the kind of thing the media is investigating, and the military/intelligence folks certainly aren't going to tell.

Well, somebody did manage to bomb the World Trade Center, and then there are always the lunatics here on our home turf who like to bomb buildings with day care centers in them and send bombs in the mail. In Japan, somebody managed to release a toxin on the subways. At least here in the States, if it's really that hard to keep this sort of thing secret, I'd hope that we have enough tattletales to prevent anything from developing on a truly large scale.

Ah well. I'd be interested to hear an argument between rational survivalists and rational unlike-minded individuals to see what kind of points each side makes. I don't know enough to say one way or the other.

previous index next