Sara Reine, Author at Egregious - Page 27 of 44

movie reviews

Christmas Inheritance (2017) ***

2023-12-20 /

Hallmark-style Christmas romances are probably best framed in that way, rather than actually summarizing the plot. This is one of those genres where predictability is considered a feature rather than a bug. I tell you it’s a Hallmark-style small town Christmas romance where an heiress visits her dad’s hometown and falls for an artist/innkeeper, you can imagine every beat.

All of the expected occurs. The movie stands on its marks when it’s supposed to, and there are no major disappointments. Indeed, this is the rare small town romance that acknowledges unhoused people. Usually small town romances seem to happen in a fantasy land with no relation to reality. This one peeked into reality long enough to say, “Maybe we treat everyone like humans who exist in our idyllic small town?” and I appreciated it.

Otherwise there is really nothing to be said about this. It’s a Hallmark-style movie about a Hallmark-style heiress and they live Happily Ever After. It helped me realize I definitely prefer Christmas romance movies that have an emphasis on the com, though. My personal taste is for louder comedy. Or any comedy. This was a pretty sedate romance.

I really liked this hero, though. Dudeface is a normal looking- and acting-dude on the outside, but he’s a deranged little Christmas weirdo and the actor doesn’t seem to realize it in the portrayal. It’s objectively hilarious to get sad about your ex and listen to “Silent Night” loudly in the office. He sits around sadly drawing Christmas stuff, like reindeer. He’s kind of a little defensive shit when he learns the heroine kept a secret, but it feels appropriate to this man’s emotional coping level. When someone is angrily drawing kitschy Santa Clauses… I don’t know man. That’s weird. I love weird. The Hallmarky dedication to a Christmas theme has entered such surrealist territory that I had to get on board.

His main appeal to the heroine is that he’s really caring toward his community, and I love a nurturing hero. Plus, our heroine gave a really good performance that seemed naive but sincere, rather than spoiled, so they were a cute match.

It’s important to note that Andie MacDowell accidentally brings smoldering lesbian bakery energy to the kitchen with Clarke from The 100. Of late, Andie MacDowell has taken up the career of a working actor, and she appears in all sorts of commercial projects to do a professional, sexy job, looking hotter than I’ve ever seen her, and it’s actually possible there’s no chemistry between them but I’m just feeling gay for Andie MacDowell.

As I always say, a movie is queer cinema if it gives me queer feelings, but again: our heroine is Clarke from The 100 (pronounced “The Hundred”), who is a bisexual icon. Just because Clarke (both the heroine and actress have a name too) is only in a wispy brief love triangle with two men in this movie doesn’t erase the fact I know Clarke wanted to scissor Andie MacDowell the whole time. Bakery milf/heiress energy? Anyone on board with me? No? Just me, as usual? Okay, cool.

Anyway, I’ve been watching so much Christmas romance lately that I feel comfortable saying this is a mid movie in the genre, no matter how often it lets me see Clarke’s muscular thighs and Clarke’s generous rack and think about Clarke ~baking ~cookies with Milfy MacDowell.

If you wanna see a woman transform her environment with kindness, pop over to Last Holiday. If you want small town, watch Single All the Way because it’s gay and it has Jennifer Coolidge. If you want bisexual heroine energy, try Christmas With You. If you wanna see Andie McDowell, google.

(image credit: Netflix)

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Sara Reine

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My bff caffeine, Indian folk metal, hello darkness my old friend

2023-12-20 /

If you’re in America, did you know the CDC says you should be masking again?

Broad rejection of masking, to me, feels like I am living in an entire country of people who don’t wanna wear a condom because “it feels better bare, baby” and “I’m clean, I don’t got nothing, look at me.” As if you cannot spread many, many STIs without visible symptoms and as if feeling good during this social interaction is more important than avoiding life-threatening illness.

When I’m plowing your wife, I use a dental dam and gloves, and when you go out to visit family this winter, wear masks. Don’t spread gross stuff. That’s a public health message from your friendly neighborhood dirtbag.

~

It feels “right” to be cutting myself off of caffeine over the course of the longest nights of the year. I’m so much slower and less productive. Taking this week to curtail myself really highlights how much of 2023 has been a flurry of creativity mostly because I’ve been abusing caffeine. I’m bummed to go a week without barfing out drawings and crochet, but I need this. Everyone needs breaks.

I used to drink caffeine heavily to be productive, but I’m talking about “before I had kids.” I had to quit while pregnant both times (which was awful) and I didn’t love the caffeine in my milk when I was breastfeeding. Plus I’m really sensitive to it anyway; usually after a few days of slamming too much caffeine, I don’t sleep *at all* and I’m not productive anymore.

This year I cracked the fact that if I’m not sleeping on caffeine, it’s because I’m deficient elsewhere (iron, the B-complex of vitamins, magnesium) so I’ve been abusing the heck out of it, to beautiful results.

But everything doesn’t grow all the time. The echeveria in my windowsill has been drooping because her florets always face the line of the sun, and the sun has been sweeping just over the horizon. So her florets are basically sitting on the shelf. She drops the leaves that she can’t support with winter sunlight. Even my winter cacti have kinda said “fuck it” to flowering right now.

Everyone’s asleep. I should sleep too. Humans aren’t meant to be “on” and growing all the time.

~

Yesterday YouTube recommended this delightful song to me. It’s self-identified as Indian folk metal, and the screamed chorus of “de dana dan” is so catchy. It means “bring the beatdown.” It’s pronounced like “die, danadan DIE, danadan DIE” in the song, which means it sounds about right for the message in English too. The whole song is about kicking the crap out of abusers, which I think is a beautiful, wholesome message that clearly transcends language barriers, although the multilingual performance is excellent.

~

It’s fun seeing how the diet industry has about-faced to insist upon the medicalization of fatness. This article from NPR about Oprah and Weight Watchers is full of the exact same diet industry nonsense I’ve seen my entire life. We’ve always seized upon the HOT NEW THING and claimed that someone can sell us the solution to the problem.

Here we are claiming that it was wrong to blame everyone’s willpower (okay) but now it’s right to treat it just like a disease and use medication (um). WW is saying, “omg we were so bad and naughty about our old diet industry bullshit but we know better now and won’t do it again uwu <3” while…doing the diet industry thing.

At this point, after a life of eating disorders, decades of unfortunately studying dietetics for ways to punish myself and rationalize that punishment, and maintaining a personality that is 50/50 fatphobic and fatloving (based on how mentally healthy I am at the moment), the actual problem seems obvious to me: Society is a fucking mess, we drive a lot and don’t move a ton, it’s easy to eat calorically dense foods, and stressed-out people are gonna eat more. Society keeps us perpetually stressed without relief.

Of course WW wants to sell a solution to something it literally cannot solve. So I guess nothing has changed here. I shrug and wait for the diet industry to change again. Fat, carbs, salt, semaglutide, shaking your butt with an old timey machine wearing high heels, god only knows. A healthy human is a happy human and our society isn’t happy.

~

Threats of a Tarantino Trek movie have been haunting the community for a while. Variety describes a pitch for a violent, bloody movie with swear words.

Tarantino is one of those directors I think is *so interesting* that I was actually kinda vibing on the idea. You never know who’s a proper trek nerd! But this description sounds bad frankly. I’m sad we didn’t get it. lmao. I love interestingly bad things!

My ethos with adaptations/additions/sequels to things I loved is that nothing can ruin the original. They can fuck around all they want, and I can just hide in the wholesome comforts of Star Trek IV if I don’t like it.

~

On Twitter, Master Replicas announced a coming Moopsy plush. AhhhhHHHHH!

~

Once border battles hurt the rich white people, the rich white people thrash on the ground and whine. “What about US?” (The New Yorker)

~

Meanwhile AJE reports that Sri Lankan tourism is improving after a crisis. I have super mixed feelings about tourism as an industry since realizing how destructive/predatory tourism tends to be, but it’s also the main income for a lotta places at this point. So I guess I’m just watching and scratching my head for now.

~

I’m a little behind on news I wanted to share. China’s had a really awful earthquake. This is an older update from AJE (like a day or so ago), but I don’t have a more recent article to link offhand.

~

Psyche always has good reads. This one is relevant to the season: “At what point does the Santa myth become a harmful deception?”

I was wounded enough learning my parents were messing with me that I originally planned to keep no secrets from my kids. We weren’t gonna do the Santa thing. Then I had little kids. I realized babies don’t care, and toddlers/preschoolers have no differentiation between reality and fantasy. Santa’s like Batman to them.

So we just chugged along doing Santa until Moonlight said “I know Santa isn’t real” and now Sunshine knows, and has told me he knows, but also has such a loose relationship with reality that he doesn’t seem to care. God, what a vibe.

~

Tor shares the trailer for Daniel Kaluuya’s directorial debut. I didn’t know he was interested in stuff behind the camera! You’ll often see this with TV show actors whose contracts restrict them from acting in competing projects. They take up the directorial lens to expand their skills and further their career. I don’t think I see it in movies as much, but good for Kaluuya! I’m excited to see what his eye is like.

~

BookRiot reports on legislative action to fight the sweep of book bans.

~

The Jiggly Wiggly Space Tiggly has an amazing look at Uranus. No pun intended, but always accepted. (Engadget)

(I don’t like James Webb so I don’t call the telescope by his name.)

~

Here’s an awesome article from Ars Technica about worm-murdering fungi.

When it senses a live worm, it will trap its victim and consume it alive—pure nightmare fuel. …Led by molecular biologist Hung-Che Lin, the research team discovered that the fungus synthesizes a sort of worm adhesive and additional trapping proteins to get ahold of its meal. It then produces enzymes that break down the worm so it can start feasting.

Recently I also learned that fungi can foment ice formation, so I’m just kinda more in love with the mycelial world than ever.

~

Variety is happy to share the news that actor Kate Micucci is cancer-free.

~

Amazon has acquired the rights to WH40k movies and TV, and I am so used to seeing it stylized as 40k that it took me a minute to figure out what the title was saying. 40,000 what now?

Henry Cavill is known to be a nerd. Reddit apocrypha says he cared a lot more about The Witcher’s canon than the show’s team, which is where that schism came from, allegedly. He is signed on to executive produce WH40k.

WH40k in itself is such a criticism of massive systems like, say, corporate feudalists like Amazon, that I guess I’m just hoping for a pleasingly aesthetic interpretation more than a biting one. I’m sure they’ll just revel in the juicy violence.

(The 40k in WH40k comes from sacrificing 40,000 people every day to an empire’s machine. Certain types of fans miss the nuances of this metaphor a lot.)

~

Oof I really haven’t posted in a couple days. Did I even celebrate Chile rejecting a conservative constitution? (AJE)

~

I have hundreds of articles to catch up on, so I’ll probably be back again soon. Happy Wednesday! I hope you’re unproductive!

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Sara Reine

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Progressing on Dwarrow stuff for ATTBTM

2023-12-19 /

I spent a while yesterday working on nachīga, the language the Dwarrow use in my gothic fantasy novel. *Most* the work this new draft of the novel requires is actually on the Dwarrow, not the Àlvare, who are actually quite well developed.

(I call dwarves Dwarrow for two reasons: Tolkien liked calling them Dwarrow, and also because “dwarf” means a lot of different things in English, including certain species of animals and a human skeletal disorder. Differentiating concepts linguistically should be done thoughtfully in fantasy, imo.)

There’s so much work done on my Dwarrow that it’s easy for me to forget I’m missing some significant pieces. The Dwarrow were the first part of worldbuilding I did on this book, in fact. I wrote out this manifesto for the idea of how a society consciously aware of corruption and hierarchy might structure itself to prevent these things from growing.

And that came about from thinking about Dwarf Fortress honestly – because in worldbuilding games, we take it for granted that we (the player/king/god) must provide every life form in our societies with food, housing, and medicine. But this is not the case in America and we find the idea revolting. We tell cultural stories about how unhoused people or those who are visibly ill are at fault for these qualities, villainizing the disfigured rather than the beautiful housed rulers who decided it’s okay some humans live this way.

So I’ve got this weird manifesto about the society, I have maps, I have a lot of functional questions answered (levels of technology? applications of it? sanitation? fantasy mass transit?). But I actually didn’t do one of the most important parts of worldbuilding, which is the language itself for nachīga!

It wasn’t essential to understand nachīga in the first draft. I wanted time spent with the elves to feel alienating, hostile, and foreign, so I integrated a lot of conlang words initially in order to distance readers from these hoity-toity fair folk. Meanwhile, Dwarrow were supposed to feel like a homecoming: wrapped in a big blanket of warm acceptance. I used common names for things to make it easier to follow and feel more familiar.

A long time ago, years now, I created the Àlvare language-first. Every value I wanted for my elves, I put into the language. Being excessively elaborate. Deliberately obscure. Musical. Information-dense. Curated. So you can see why it would then feel weird coming “backwards” for my Dwarrow to finally arrive at the point where I need to design a language reflecting values/etc that have been elaborated on elsewhere. It’s a distillation rather than a foundation.

Lots of fun getting into nachīga, though. Once I’ve determined rules for phonology and grammar and stuff, I use a software called Vulgarlang to produce my vocabulary. I go from “scratching my head over rules and IPA symbols” to “1500 vocabulary words in the dictionary” in a few minutes. It’s *really* satisfying.

Since I spent so much time doing thoughtful worldbuilding stuff yesterday, I think today I should write cartoon dragon p0rn.

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Sara Reine

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Five Christmas Romcoms Worth A Watch

2023-12-17 /

I like to spend the whole period between Halloween and Christmas watching Christmas movies. It’s not about great cinema; it’s about vibes.

If you’re into vibe maintenance, you know what I’m talking about. You need the soundscape, the background colors, the ~mood~ that you can only get from a couple of people with really nice teeth falling in love adjacent to Christmas lights.

Keeping a movie going on the TV is cozier than putting up a fake fireplace (slightly) but you can’t necessarily give a movie more attention than a fake fireplace. It’s time to wrap presents. Your cat is on the wrapping paper. The kids want to open another bottle of sparkling cider. You’re wondering if you can fit in the closet with the presents, without cats or kids.

Right now you’re not keeping up with elaborate plots. Rewatching movies every year means you don’t have to. You always know when the good parts of When Harry Met Sally come around. If you miss it this year, you’ll see it next year.

So when I put something new on my rewatch list, it has to be special. It has to endure revisiting every 12 months, but only being revisited with as much attention as Swiss has cheese. It has to be predictable enough that I don’t get too caught up in worrying over the characters’ drama. I appreciate good needle drops. I want over-decorated Christmas sets whenever possible.

I found a few movies worth adding to the yearly rewatch list, so here’s my suggestions for a few you may or may not have in rotation.

5. Single All the Way

If you like the traditional Hallmark-style romance, you might appreciate this version that features a male couple. The simple fantasy of an accepting family in a cute town with affordable real estate prices should belong to all sexual orientations.

From Christmas photo shoots, to excessive sweater-wearing, and Jennifer Coolidge over-directing a very dramatic Christmas play, Single All the Way has all the pretty things you could possibly want to ignore on your television.

4. Four Christmases

I think people skipped this once because it was advertised as a Vince Vaughn movie, and I bet you know what I mean when I say that. Bringing up Four Christmases in conversation made people say, “Isn’t that the one where the kid beats up Vince Vaughn?” and the fact I have to say “yeah, sorry, that’s the one” isn’t starting this recommendation off on the best foot.

But that’s a pretty brief part of the movie, which is in service of drawing a picture about messy families – like the Vince Vaughn version of the cousins in My Big Fat Greek Wedding getting into trouble. It’s part of the process wherein Reese Witherspoon realizes she wants to have a family with Vince Vaughn. Their relationship is adorably nontraditional for holiday romances. I think long-time committed couples will especially appreciate how these two keep it fresh.

It’s not the most vibey suggestion, but the central couple is so cute I have to recommend it. And I bet it’s not one of your favorites yet.

3. What Happens Later

This is the first year that What Happens Later has been eligible for watching, much less existing or rewatching, but I immediately gave it a position of honor on my mental shelf of Holiday Rewatches. Meg Ryan might be my favorite 90s/00s romcom darling, and my wifemommy is just as good as ever.

Contemplative and moody, What Happens Later is a slow-paced conversation between two very charming actors enjoying one another’s company immensely. Although it gets sad here and there, it’s mostly a magical look at love later in life between sweet goofball Meg Ryan and a caustic bag of luggage played by David Duchovny.

I read the stage play this was based upon before seeing the movie, and Meg Ryan did a wonderful job tweaking it just a bit to make the story warmer, but no less theatrical. This one will flow nicely in tone between more well-worn classics.

2. Falling for Christmas

Hear me out. Even if you like the Hallmarky Christmas movie subgenre, you might not love the idea of watching Lindsay Lohan; I know there were times in her life where she wasn’t delivering her best performances. But this woman is perfect in this movie. She is every corny pink-drenched atom of clueless heiress turned flannel stepmommy that you could ever possibly want.

I’ve also watched enough holiday romances by now to realize that chemistry between the leads is entirely optional. These two are actually into each other somewhat. And despite dealing with the usual budgetary issues that Netflix holiday romances tangle with, they manage to get some good song moments, too. At some point you realize the movie has gone from silly-garish to an actual aesthetic, and it feels like you were transported onto a hot cocoa mix box logo when you weren’t paying attention. I love this one.

1. Last Holiday

Queen Latifah stars in an inspirational romance about celebrating life through grief. Sounds corny put that way? I’ve never met a movie that made me feel such a genuine outpouring of emotion. Queen Latifah absolutely destroys my soul with a beautiful performance, and the story is such heartfelt Christmas magic. Last Holiday is a great balance between my stylized platonic ideal of a Christmas movie and a flick that actually has stuff to say on a spiritual level. I *went places* watching this.

The subplot I always think about is Queen Latifah with the woman who’s having an affair. Our heroine isn’t nice confronting this woman when the opportunity arises, but she’s extremely *kind*, and the blunt honesty transforms her life. I can’t describe how the bumps along that bit spoke to me, and that was just one of many very lovely moments packed into this.

I’m convinced Last Holiday is the king of all Christmas romcoms. Somehow it totally flew under my radar until this year, and now I don’t want to live without it. I have to put it at the top of this list in case Last Holiday hasn’t graced your life yet. But maybe you already love this one too! I was surprised when I started talking about it and had folks coming out of the woodwork with superlatives.

What kind of movies are your perpetual holiday rewatches?

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Sara Reine

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Principles of exercise, mental rest, and imperfectionism

2023-12-17 /

I’ve mentioned before that I see what traffic goes where on this site, so I know that people *generally* don’t read the posts I don’t link on social media, and I almost never link SRF posts. Nonetheless, I enjoy the effect of dailyish blogging. For one thing, my sibling often still reads it, and Rory’s basically the only audience I ever care about, period. It’s a nice way to bring up news articles I might forget to discuss. I prefer not to be super-duper verbal irl. It’s always been easier to communicate like this.

Also, just writing informally like this each day is good for me. It feels very good in terms of my writing skills, which feels weird to say, given that I have written so many millions of words that it isn’t worth counting. I am now so deeply sunken into nonverbal hobbies like crochet that I can go hours barely even *thinking* words, much less trying to form a coherent message out of them.

I suspect that doing link round-ups with little life updates is giving me more or less the benefits of journaling. I also journal. But that’s almost all doodles (and 50% of those doodles are penises and boobies) so YES, it’s just good to be writing each day in some format.

If I were motivated, I would try to flog all my friends into starting blogs and tell them how good it feels to stay in the practice of casual writing. Epistolary relationship with the void? But tbh I just want everyone to start blogs so I can follow them there and spend less time on social media. 2005 internet, I still miss you, forever.

~

My kids put together a couple of gingerbread houses today. My family is the opposite of perfectionist. For us it’s like, we keep at it for a few minutes while the experience is novel and we’re enjoying the Christmas vibes, but then we’re putting these barely-decorated gingerbread monstrosities on the shelf and eating the candy. God knows when we’ll remember to throw out the dusty carcasses of cat-licked half-decorated desiccated gingerbread houses.

We’re weird disasters together so I feel VERY holidays right now.

~

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will return to flight tomorrow after over a year grounded (Engadget)

~

In Surreal Portraits, Rafael Silveira Plunges Into the Mysteries of the Human Psyche (Colossal)

~

Olly is going to Sweden for Eurovision 2024! Is this the year I care about Eurovision?? (Variety)

~

Julia Roberts has opinions about her characters post-movie, shared with Entertainment Weekly. I have not gotten an impression that Roberts is actually fond of romcoms so I’m not surprised these are a little odd. Anna “maintained her waist size.” Mmm.

~

The FDA is investigating whether lead in applesauce pouches was deliberately added (NPR)

Yikes.

~

Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Nawaf has passed away at the age of 86. This isn’t an area of world politics I know much about. Here is Al Jazeera’s roundup of statements from other world leaders, and NPR’s obituary has some more information about his career from an American perspective.

~
Pakistan is using artificial rain to fight pollution. (AJE) It’s interesting to hear about geoengineering remedies for such issues, but it sounds like areas of effect are limited, and I gotta wonder what happens once all those air contaminants are in the water supply.

~

The Marginalian has a fascinating read comparing principles of exercise to writing. I think about this all the time! Actually, I compare principles of exercise to just about everything all the time.

The one I think about most is overload: You need to push past your normal limits in order to grow. I personally think of it as “training to 120% of what you need to do.” If you’re Beyonce and wanna look Beyonce-sharp at Beychella, you can’t just rehearse for Beychella. You commit to an overall training plan that will make you physically capable of doing a performance 120% the size of Beychella, so Beychella is effortless.

I think this 120% preparation principle probably applies to a few areas in life. I wouldn’t describe it as “overload” in regards to writing though. What I usually do is write at least 120% of the words that actually get published. For all the functional, useful words I write, I also write off in other directions to condition myself. (Fanfic, poetry, essays, movie reviews, etcetera.)

Another useful principle is specificity: In order to get better at writing novels, you just gotta write novels. It’s also more granular than that. You get better at writing urban fantasy by writing UF. You get better writing close POV writing close POV. And if you *only* write those things, your skills are not *entirely* transferable; you will need to get specific to learn about writing romance if you’re coming from a thrillers-specific background.

But I would argue the Principle of Rest is actually most important, and it’s the principle I’ve taken everywhere to extremely healing results. When you exercise (especially as you age) (and especially if you do high-stress stuff like heavy compound lifts), you need to rest in a very deliberate way. You can’t just keep running around willy nilly if you’re training for a marathon. You have to make sure you’re sleeping a lot, drinking a lot of water, doing light exercises to keep comfortable, and sometimes you don’t train at all. Sometimes between marathons, you might need to take off months! (I think I heard a marathoner gasp somewhere just when I typed it. But I said what I said.)

The same thing goes with creativity. You can’t push-push-push, even when it feels great. You must consciously, deliberately rest from that kind of creative activity. You need things that help you turn off entirely. And you need stuff that refills your cup.

If you’re a writer, you don’t need to do ice bath plunges out of a hot tub. What you might need is a week away from words occasionally. Stop writing and go for a bunch of walks. Take extra time to nap. Watch a bunch of trashy junk tv. Draw penises in your journal.

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Sara Reine

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Christmas With You (2022) *****

2023-12-16 /

I have to give five stars to a movie that makes me goofy-smile while watching it, hands clapped to my cheeks, happily rocking in my chair. This did it for me, and it’s not exclusively because I’ve been in love with Aimee Garcia since she was on Lucifer.

This is a pretty standard Christmas romcom, so the tropes can really tell you what you need to know: heroine falls for the hero’s family, celebrity falls in love with small town guy, pop star collaborating with songwriter.

I always like to say how it’s about execution rather than idea, and the execution here just works for me on all the levels. This is a very standard Christmas romance done simply and competently, in the best possible way.

The director (who is a woman!) Gabriela Tagliavini did a beautiful, emotional, heartfelt job making this movie. The casting is all on-point. Lots of great performances. Lovely music. Warm, pretty cinematography. Open adoration for Latino culture. The story checks every single box I want checked in a Christmas romcom superlatively.

Heck: even the Gen Zers are given fantasy fulfillment in this one. A 14-going-on-15 year old girl precipitates the meet cute between our H&h when the pop star notices Kiddo’s TikTok cover of her song. I love it.

Heroine Aimee Garcia’s performance admittedly carries the movie. She’s so open and charismatic and you can see her character’s thoughts all over her face. This girl is *working*. The fact I feel Freddie Prinze Jr doesn’t meet her level is, I think, because he’s actually just playing the meek smalltown single Daddy so well. He sorta provided a more “real” performance in She’s All That relative to the stylized approach of the movie too; the more grounded approach here just kinda got a little outshined by all the pink sparklies and the pop star (as you would expect). They don’t have especially hot chemistry, but they are very warm and friendly, and I find that to be wholly appropriate for the holiday genre.

I don’t really have anything to analyze here; this is exactly the kind of thing that lets me turn off and just relax and enjoy myself all the way.

~

Fun fact: Aimee Garcia is a vampire. Freddie Prinze Jr is 47, and he looks about 47. I assumed this was a weird unremarked-upon age gap romance because Aimee Garcia surely had to be twenty years his junior. Nope! The woman is 45 years old. Since goddamn when? Twenty years from now? Can you believe I got through 400 words of review without talking about her ass in those leather pants? Wait, shit. Goddammit.

(image credit: Netflix)

Comment

Sara Reine

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sara is a [redacted] woman

2023-12-16 /

You know, I always had a really weird relationship with gender. I am assigned female at birth; this matches my self-image (mostly) and how I present to the world (nowadays), but the lattermost thing was…not always the case.

My mom is a progressive hippie who likes repairing things and grew up adjacent to ranching, so even though she was like, Princess Diana-beautiful in the 80s/early 90s, and *hella* fashionable, she did not enforce any gender roles on her kids. She let us do whatever. We got Barbies and Hot Wheels in equal measure. In a family without social life, I was basically raised agender. (I consider this to be a gift.)

Self-awareness did not spontaneously develop. For a couple years as a teenager, I was persistently identified as a boy by others because I cut my hair short and wore t-shirts/jeans. Everyone actually thought I looked like Harry Potter. I vividly recall one old man stopping me in a supermarket to call me Harry Potter. I “felt” I was a girl, more like Kaylee on Firefly, and I HATED THIS PERCEPTION.

But then I also spent a long time wondering like, could I be a guy? There are people like me who are guys. Everyone keeps telling me I’m a guy. (I was not sporty enough to ever be called a tomboy.) It would also explain why all these straight boys at school did *not* want anything to do with me. Maybe I was a gay guy barking up the wrong trees? I sat with this idea for a long long time but it just didn’t fit.

My interests are/were more masculine, too. I was consistently the only girl in classes about computers and construction technology and GIS when GIS was new. Boys were *never* attracted to me, even though I was *desperately* attracted to boys (lol). (Funnily, my most serious relationship at the time was with a girl, so…) My longest real job was working in a data center, partially in a facilities capacity.

When I became old enough to buy clothes, I didn’t really know how girls dressed, so I still didn’t know how to gender myself the way I wanted. I had no idea how to make people receive me as a woman. I pieced together an idea of what women are supposed to be like from 00s media and that went as well as you’d expect.

Oh, and somehow I didn’t catch on from this that I was autistic until (checks watch) like last year, at 30-something years old. You’d think that someone who has no ability to form a self-image, no capacity for regulating one’s looks in regards to the social interface of gender, and a strong preference for extremely specific technical classes might realize what’s actually going on here.

Anyway, I had to learn to become a woman, even though I’m afab and indeed (mostly) female. Nowadays I have absorbed transient beauty standards, trained myself in a lot of feminine affectations, and perform femininity regularly enough that I haven’t been identified as male in ages. (Getting GIANT BOOBS from 7 consecutive years of pregnancy/breastfeeding is surely a factor.) I have enjoyed being uniformly subjected to misogyny for a while and that’s uh…validating?

But I actually *do* have a lot of traits that are very masculine, and I still refer to myself as a guy/man/king/etc probably more often than I refer to myself in the feminine. Even I don’t really know where the boundaries are on that. Just, in some contexts, I am a guy. I don’t know! Is it because I grew up with super agender socialization? Or I spent enough time being socially received and regarded as a boy that I just adopted some boy programming, since gender’s a social construct?

Can you even keep up with this? I can’t. lol

What I’m circling toward is that I think the nonbinary identity that mostly Gen Z uses is actually a relief.

It’s a relief because my eldest is nonbinary, pretty much agender, and I truly did not internalize what that meant until my fetus externalized it. And it’s so natural to my child that I can simply relax and exist as myself around them. If I call myself a guy, a king, they don’t even bat an eye. I am Mommy, King of the Family, Just Some Guy, who birthed whole humans out her womb. I don’t have to perform any gender around my family. Turns out I am a very nurturing sweet husband who loves cute things. I want the public to receive me as a woman. It’s okay that all the pieces don’t make sense.

Man/woman as a binary just doesn’t have to be a THING, if you don’t let it. fwiw, if you marry someone who’s bisexual, you can have any gender presentation and he’ll think you’re hot. that’s cool.

(in case anyone is wondering – Please continue calling me she/her, but I also accept they/them or any neopronouns you like. No he/him unless we’re doing something sexy. As far as most anyone is concerned, I am fine being grouped broadly with women, but like…Stevia-sweetened woman. Diet Girl, with some artificial boy flavors.)
(this isn’t news, i’m not coming out, i’m just musing because it’s related to something else I’m writing)

~

The post above is cross-posted from Facebook. One remark I have to add, now having watched Barbie. I always think I’m a woman until I see what society thinks a woman is. Just like, whatever gender Margot Robbie and Scarlett Johansson and Julia Roberts are, I’m not that. I thought I was a woman. Society has consistently begged to differ.

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Sara Reine

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