somethin' gotta give, parents or the kids, it won't be the kids.

[intertribal]

Holla.  Day after Thanksgiving, I'm back at school after spending the holiday with Kim's family in Queens.  We saw Twilight.  Twilight was pretty special.  It was like a TV movie with really bad make-up and acting.  In addition to, of course, being a vampire movie that completely lacked in scares (except the bad relationship kind) - but I've already written about how much it bothers me when vampires or whatever are romanticized (here they're virtually invulnerable) and humans are depicted as being stupid and weak and only attractive because they're so fragile.  Also, I don't think I was previously aware of how classist Twilight is.  Get this: she gets to choose between a) the vampire, who drives a fancy sports car, lives in a glass mansion, listens to classical music, whose vampire!father is a doctor, and is obviously very white, and b) the werewolf, who doesn't seem to have his own car but whose disabled father drives an old pick-up, lives on a reservation, and is Native American.  Guess who she chooses.  By the last book she has her own sports car.  And is a vampire.  WHAT IS THIS. 

This song has been my obsession lately. I heard it at the end of an AMV and it's like... been the last twenty songs I've listened to.

"Children of the Korn" - Korn (feat. Ice Cube)

Pretty crazy, right?  But for one, I associate it with Nebraska, and for two... I don't know.  I'm really into Korn right now?  It's so strange, because I first became aware of them in middle school, but only as a favorite band of a certain guy someone on my friends' list was into... he got so uncool later, dating the head cheerleader and all.  I always thought Korn was too "heavy metal" for me.  

Actually, the other thing is that Ilium is turning into a very anti-elders manifesto.  Ironically my own parents were amazing parents.

Comments

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah, it'd get tedious. but then, if you think the afterlife is eternal anyway, then what's the big deal?

oh yeah, i doubt that sort of work has conscious class themes. lol. ok to have characters choose fortune in what sense? my mom chose fortune. :D

my mom was explaining to me on thanksgiving how it was her aunt ree who taught her to eat "everything you can" with potato chips instead of utensils, and to put miracle whip on grilled cheese sandwiches. i tried to explain that these were not cooking skills terribly valued by my classmates, but then i gave up, because i don't really want her to feel bad about it, and she's the sort of person who would... i never make stuff for thanksgiving potlucks, because i grew up on boxed stuffing and cranberry sauce from a can, and...i don't know. i brought wine.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

My mom told me once that she had a nightmare where she was in what she perceived to be heaven, and she was wandering through empty space for eternity - and it was like the worst nightmare she ever had, and had to go crying to her mother (she was a kid). She thinks eternity is the worst thing in the world.

Well, people choose fortune all the time - of course some people in your writing would choose fortune. I don't believe that you should use your characters to champion your beliefs in the sense that, you know, the good characters have your beliefs, the bad characters have beliefs you don't agree with, etc., etc. I think you should just write about real people, and let the story carry your "point".

I didn't grow up with thanksgiving, but in Nebraska it used to be a big deal, with everything from scratch and with original or family recipes. Not so much anymore now that... well, I'm never there, and my cousin (who was always really into cooking) is constantly ill. Apparently the turkey had to be cooked at our house this year because my uncle could not get his oven open again after it self-cleaned. What's funny is I have a feeling the male Hostetlers do something totally different from the female Hostetlers... my mother had me when she was 40, my uncle had his son in his mid-20s, who had his son in his mid-20s... and I bet my cousin once removed will be like his father and grandfather, while I probably won't get married for a while.

Which is fine with me, because the men have been getting successively dumber and less successful.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

hm. why should eternity be so frightening?

oh, yeah, i definitely agree about writing. i just wasn't sure that's what you were saying...

i definitely associate making thanksgiving food from scratch with more middle-class family traditions. with like abbey's family, and most American reedies, etc. or maybe farmers, like my great grandma. but my mom is the only one in my immediate family who cooks, and she hates cooking and grew up eating spam and shit, so...i didn't really realize that you could make cranberry sauce and stuffing from scratch until i was older. but the turkey has to be 'from scratch' regardless. and she did make some pies herself.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Because it never ends, and never really changes? I think it sounds pretty bad. I'm against gratuitous death, but as Stephen King says, "sometimes death is better".

So what class does that mean you see your family in?

I guess I would consider the Hostetlers middle-class, even though our incomes don't say it... I think we've had these convos before. A lot of Hostetler practices are very "steeped in (glorious) tradition", caught in the past... even my cousins are SCA re-enactors, and my uncle studies turn-of-the-century English literature...

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i guess i didn't assume that it had to be never-changing. it doesn't seem so bad if there's still change.

fuck if i know. my dad's family i think is 'higher class' in general than my mom's (you have to remember my dad married a girl who worked for him), and she mostly raised me, but if you go back too many generations, they're all poor irish. it's only been in the last couple generations that anyone in my family has gotten rich, and none of them i know of are part of the 'educated elite' (hm...i just realized that the only family i regularly associate with is on my mother's side--this doesn't hold true for my dad's...all my uncles and second cousins and the like that i hardly know. my mother's side is also more 'provincial' or whatever), and neither of my parents finished any sort of college. when i was little, things were much more modest, now everything is pretentious, because i guess that's what people whose entire life goal has been "financial independence" (or, for my mom, the perfect home/stability) with severe guilt issues about dropping out of college do when they actually get money. really, i don't know. there are elements of different classes in my family's tastes, occupations, incomes, etc. overall maybe we average out to middle class, or upper middle class...i don't really know. i meant the comment to be about my mother and cooking more than like my entire family. thanksgiving is usually me, my parents, ralph, and grandma T. ralph goes to two thanksgivings because he has his mom's too, and i don't get the impression they're terribly rich, and my dad's done his best to like block her out of his memory. grandma t used to bring a pie but now she's senile.

i probably would. i think people overestimate how much money the "middle" class has, and then everybody gets to be "middle" class, even if it's upper or lower middle class. but then, it's partly defined by education and other things...which makes class really weird and amorphous. it's also different if you try to define it based on wealth rather than income.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'll put it this way: i'm sure if i went to thanksgiving dinner with my dad's family on the coast, they would have traditional recipes, food made from scratch, etc. but my dad can't cook. and so.

also i think my mother is insane and has the emotional maturity of a 16-year-old.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how Thanksgiving food is defining class.

why do you think this?

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

many things define class. it's great (j/k).

because certain tastes have more prestige, and the higher the class, the more prestigious their practices. it's way more complicated than that, but still. when it comes to food, though, the working class eats total shit in the contemporary US, because it's fast/cheap, and it shows...in terms of obesity, etc.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

the thing is, I'd argue my cousins eat total shit most of the year, except on holidays. my mother eats crackers and cheese and microwave dinners most of the year.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm not saying anybody eats that well most of the year. there's a factor of laziness, especially when you live alone, and even well-off professionals don't have time to cook for themselves regularly. nor am i saying your family is the same class as abbey's or something. but like, the people i think of as working class are people like Josie...in the midwest, they live in trailer parks and shitty apartments and cheap land by highways and airports. crackers and cheese are good food, man. they aren't drenched in grease or over-processed. cheap/fast food, to me, is...grocery store brand, bulk food, fast food, energy drinks, etc. what used to be emblematic of the working class was staple starches: potatoes, beans, rice, bread. but i don't think that's as true of the contemporary US. anyway, it's a continuum, a correlation, etc. as everything is w/ socioeconomics.

i mean, it's not just thanksgiving food, either. it's the same thing with people who can afford to constantly buy organic, fair trade or local, etc. and the fact that wealthy people aren't the demographic with an obesity problem (another way class has changed, because the wealthy used to be the ones who could afford to eat well enough to have a little fat, and it was attractive--now it's ugly), because healthy food (even healthier frozen food) is more expensive.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

well yeah, I know. my cousins live near an airport, though. they have no education, narrowly missed dropping out of high school, went into the military, my cousin's wife had a child out of wedlock that she gave up for adoption...

My mom and uncle are solidly middle-class, though, as am I in many ways. I'm just saying I think that our family's an interesting mix of shifting social classes. Then of course there's my dad's family... they were big names in Pekacangan, their little village, but in Jakarta, my dad and his brother were "kampung people" - basically, village trash (like the Thaksin supporters in the article you posted earlier), in comparison to my dad's aristocratic Jakartan friends. Which resulted in crazy awkwardness that I wasn't aware of until this summer, watching my uncle squirm when he was around my dad's friends. And there it ties in really explicitly with ethnicity and skin color and how Chinese you look.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

sorry, i started writing before i read your other comment about why you wrote "why do you think this." but yeah, that's pretty lower middle class or working class ish sounding. that's as specific as i'll be about class, haha. it also sounds a lot like my mom's brother's family. they live in north carolina.

yeah, and i think for some reason (probably my own family) i get along best with people who don't solidly fit into one class or another, even if it's just a difference btwn. income and education level. and i don't know how provincial-ness gets included in ideas of socioeconomic class, though it certainly should be... haha, well, the same thing happens in China, i'm pretty sure. my roomie had a hell of a time trying to find sunblock that wouldn't whiten your skin...

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

yeah, I get along best with those people too.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

(because there's the old association of light skin and wealth, plus the stereotypical Han ethnicity, plus various (fucked up) Western influences, plus North-South rivalry, plus weird things like good face shapes, wherever that fits in)

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I feel like that old association is freaking everywhere.

even vampire movies.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

yeah, probably everywhere there was a class of people who had to work out in the sun, and a class who was too wealthy to have to do that. my suspicion is that this is also how it became beautiful to have long nails, but i dunno.

aren't there vampires who aren't deathly pale? but hey...you know who else is pale? dead people. no oxygenated blood flowing!

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

that is the irony of vampires, isn't it.

Well, Blade isn't deathly pale. He's my favorite vampire. But he's also the only black vampire. Vampires used to be more corpsey than they are now - Dracula was written by Stoker as decomposing, Nosferatu of course was basically a cadaver. Bela Lugosi started making them pretty, Anne Rice really sealed the deal.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

decomposing, mmm. they'd be way scarier that way.

Re: also

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Also, I said "why do you think this" in response to your comment about your mother having the emotional maturity of a 16-year-old.

Re: also

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

oh...just because she really needs everything to be centered around her, because she doesn't trust anyone to genuinely care about her. she has little/no sympathy/empathy, even for her friends, and she's suspicious about money. she adores you if you pay attention to her and tell her she's wonderful, and she hates you if you say things that aren't so nice to hear.