Caution: sexually explicit lyrics (remove children from the vicinity of this post)

Oh, he treats me with respect, He says he loves me all the time,
He calls me 15 times a day, He likes to make sure that im fine,
You know I've never met a man, Whose made me feel quite so secure,
He's not like all them other boys, They're all so dumb and immature.

There's just one thing, That's getting in the way,
When we go up to bed your just no good,
its such a shame!
I look into your eyes, I want to get to know you,
And then you make this noise, and its apparently its all over

Its not fair, And i think your really mean,
I think your really mean, I think your really mean.

Oh your supposed to care, But you never make me scream, You never make me scream,

Oh it's not fair, And it's really not ok, It's really not ok, It's really not ok,

Oh your supposed to care, But all you do is take, Yeah, all you do is take.

I lay here in this wet patch in the middle of the bed,
i'm feeling pretty damn hard done by i spent ages giving head.

Then i remember all the nice things that you've ever said to me,
maybe i'm just over reacting maybe your the one for me.

There's just one thing, That's getting in the way,
When we go up to bed your just no good,
its such a shame!
I look into your eyes, I want to get to know you,
And then you make this noise, and its apparently its all over

Its not fair, And i think your really mean,
I think your really mean, I think your really mean.

Oh your supposed to care, But you never make me scream, You never make me scream,

Oh it's not fair, And it's really not ok, It's really not ok, It's really not ok,

Oh your supposed to care, But all you do is take, Yeah, all you do is take.

I am finding so many female songwriters writing sexually explicit lyrics, these days (see my earlier post on Lady Gaga). The question (apart from whether women are really sexually liberated these days) is whether these are parallelisms with other things and they do not just talk about sex. So, although this song is clearly a 'spaghetti western ode to the premature', when Lily sings "you're supposed to care, but all you do is take" perhaps she means something more. Perhaps? Perhaps, men who 'never make you scream' are also egotistical idiots?

If this reading is correct, it really takes away all the sexual liberation bit from women and is thus deeply unfeministic. I remember when I saw 'y tu mama tambien' when I realized that this sexually liberated woman was only willing to have a threesome with those guys because she had cancer and was dieing, I became so upset. I mean, can women never be sexually liberated for the hell of it? Does there always need to be some other hidden, deep reason for their liberatedness? I sure hope not...

Nurse vs Hero (=Lost?)

I am hooked on Lost, have I mentioned that?

D/a and her man got me totally addicted and now I am on four a day (episodes that is). I want to write about this series properly at some point, but now is not the time. Now is the time to just make a minor comment about Jack.

If you know anything at all about the series in question, this is Jack. Jack is this doctor guy, who is very good and heroic. Basically he goes around and saves people. He even tells them so in advance: 'I am going to save you' he said to a poor guy that died half an episode later (which is an unfortunate example, since he often succeeds). In the flashbacks that the series makes, we also see that he has even saved his wife, she was his patient, who he saved and then married. How appropriate, don't you find? Anyway, let me get to the point, instead of digressing cynically.

Men like Jack, a.k.a. the 'hero' types, remind me of another familiar female stereotype: the nurse. Apparently, a lot of women suffer from the 'nurse syndrome', that is women who are always on the lookout for someone to save. The interesting thing about this female version of the 'man-hero' is the way of salvation: a woman nurtures and cares for, while a man simply saves. The female stereotype requires time and commitment, while the male one simply requires heroic behaviour, usually in a flash. I think this is a telling difference between the sexes, a difference that is so self-explanatory that I do not need to expand on it here any longer, I think.

People

People have various lives. Sometimes they are in procession, you live a life for some years then it's over and another one begins. Some other times, we have a lot of lives at once. One where we work, one with the people we love, one with our parents and so on and so forth. It is interesting when our various lives intertwine, it is interesting when people from one life come in another one, it is interesting to see how that works out.

I can tell the people that are important to me, if they come from one of my lives and they fit in all of them. If they come into this new life, like parachutists but they don't look alien there, they look as if they fit.

People were walking the streets of Belfast this weekend and they were my friends. And they fit and that made me happy.

Insecure

Can insecurities ever leave us? What does it mean to grow up and be wise?

Young people are insecure, they're constantly afraid that they are not liked enough, that they will never be appreciated for what they are. But then we grow up and (at least in theory) we get more used to ourselves, we like us, we think we're cool, we don't rely on others to tell us what we're worth.

But there are always these people that make our knees shake, these people whose opinion of us is so important. Funnily and interestingly enough, these people are often part of our families, the one place where love should be taken for granted.

Usually it is mothers, overcritical ones especially, that do the trick: you can be cool, happy about yourself, self-accepting etc and then the overcritical mother comes along and destroys every inch of self-confidence you have painfully built over the years.

Some other times it is siblings and your complex relationship with them. I have no siblings, but from what I hear they can be a pain, too :-)

And then there are fathers. Being a Greek female only child, my relationship with my father is complex. I love him and all, but I am not so sure that I love him love him. I love him because I have to, but our relationship ranges from polite indifference to profound lack of understanding, to deep affection. To put it bluntly, I usually think that he does not understand me at all. He does not know where I am coming from, he does not understand my choices, he'd rather I was a bit more normal and like other girls my age. But there are also some times, very few, I can think of three in my life, that we talk and I recognize something in his voice, something that tells me that this guy is not just this polite guy my mum is married to. Something that tells me that he is my dad.

Loud music saves souls

What is it that makes my heart crave for loud music in times of turmoil? I want to block my thoughts and what better way to do it than listen to whatever I feel like loudly? I like to dance, clubs are cathartic. Chemical brothers overload. I dance at home, frantically, my neighbors must hate me, I am sure. But I do not care. I cannot sing, so I must dance. I want to go to all the rave festivals this summers. I want to go to Glastonbury and sleep in the mud. I want my eardrums to hurt from the loud beats. I want to dance.

New music does not move me (just like a movie). I need my old stuff, the things I know, the things I love, only they make me happy. Especially repetitive, house-y tracks that stroke my soul. Repetitive music strokes the soul. Oh, I am so poetic, aren't I? So, true to the spirit of this post here is some classic, beloved Chemical Brothers, that will never ever let me down.

Semantics

Listening to the Nouvelle Vague cover of the Tuxedomoon classic, I am thinking of words and their meaning.

In a Manner of speaking, I just want to say
That I could never forget the way
You told me everything, By saying nothing

In a manner of speaking, I don't understand
How love in silence becomes reprimand
But the way that i feel about you, Is beyond words

Oh give me the words, Give me the words
That tell me nothing
Give me the words, Give me the words
That tell me everything

In a manner of speaking, Semantics won't do
In this life that we live we only make do
And the way that we feel, Might have to be sacrificed

So in a manner of speaking, I just want to say
That just like you I should find a way
To tell you everything, By saying nothing.

Oh give me the words Give me the words
That tell me nothing
Give me the words Give me the words
That tell me everything



I was thinking of the meaning of words and how fluid it is, how much it depends on who you say what to, when. While this is clearly true about big words like 'love', 'friends' etc it works also with seemingly factual words like 'white' and 'sweet'. Even more disturbingly so this is the same with entire conversations. Some time ago I saw an old friend with whom we don't really have much in common anymore. I had a good time with her and we talked about important things. But the feeling I got afterwards was so empty and void. This surprised me because I thought that the bad thing would have been if we didn't talk about 'serious' stuff and horsed around instead. However, I had this dodgy feeling that although we had a 'deep' conversation, this was still not enough and in the end not illustrative at all about our relationship. I had never felt before that this was possible. For me people fell into two categories: people I talk shit to and people I talk serious stuff with. The former are my friends the latter are my acquaintances. This time I felt that the topic of a conversation does not define a relationship and to put it differently, the words you use do not define a relationship. You might say more or less with someone, use heavy words or light ones, but they don't necessarily mean what you say. The act of conveying meaning is much more complex that just choice of words. This is exciting but also deeply upsetting. How will I get my message across if I cannot even rely on choice of words for it? There must be some other conventional way of people to do that.

Sick

My mouth is dry: I cannot breathe from my nose and I keep it open all the time. My eyes are painful and glassy, I feel I have a fever. My nose os blocked, I cannot breathe at all. The worst thing from all this is that I cannot taste anything. I cannot smell anything either, but not being able to taste anything is worse. I make a sandwich, and I know what it has inside. I know it has cheese and ham and that the bread is focaccia. I eat it and all I feel is that it's hot. I feel the texture of the bread and the cheese and the ham in my mouth as I chew. But I cannot remember the taste. All of a sudden I remember the scene in the Matrix:



In the scene, he betrays the resistance just so that he can eat again a steak and enjoy it and have his brain be brainwashed that it's a steak, instead of the 'real' porridge they eat in Nebuchadnezzar. "Ignorance is bliss" he says.

I feel sick today and I feel awful. I feel that my sense will never come back, I feel that I will never understand what I'm eating again. I feel desperate. But I know this is not real, and that soon focaccia bread will taste again like focaccia bread. And I will be sick no more.

Quizas, quizas, quizas

Perhaps I needed a bit of holidays to love my blog again and look forward to writing to it. Sometimes I feel good about my texts, now I don't necessarily do, but I do enjoy the urge to write that I feel.

I saw Watchmen the other day, and I was so disappointed. It was so mediocre because it was painfully literal, there were no layers whatsoever, no hidden meanings, nothing. The ultimate 'what you see is what you get': a bunch of "deeply flawed" superheroes and their views on how the world should be saved (or not). There were a lot of clever details, tongue in cheek sex-scenes between tormented superheroes who can only get it on if they're wearing their costumes, but in general the whole thing was such a disappointment. I love futuristic, dystopian movies or books (I'm reading 'handmaid's tale' now and I am really enjoying it-will write about it soon) but watchmen was just infuriatingly plain and uninspiring.

And then last night I saw 'changeling' which was again painfully mediocre. Clint kicks ass, that's true, he's a good director and all, but the story was so fragmented, going from a woman's personal drama, to a story about how corrupt LAPD was, to a female version of 'one flew over cuckoo's nest' (hence the casting of Jolie-cf. oscar for girl, interrupted) to a whodunit, finally to a movie about the rise of the serial-killers in America. The connection between all these subplots was so loose, so accidental, relying too much on Jolie and her beautiful face (actually just her enormous, red lips) that it made me fall asleep. Take-home message for directors everywhere: when you're making a movie, choose ONE story, and perhaps you'll do well. Ah, and if you want your viewers to sympathize with your heroine, who is a tormented mother, don't choose the most overexposed woman on the planet: she evokes no sympathetic sentiments to anyone.

This brings us to the 'perhaps' in the title: mediocre movies are so painful. It's better if they suck, at least this makes them interesting. Ah, the pain to sit through mediocrity, never again...

Convergence/Narcissism

It always amazes me the sameness of couples. They all look alike, as if they're participating in incestuous illegal unions. When they are younger, they dress alike, a goth with a goth, a raver with a raver. Middle aged tacky men with sleezy hair with middle aged tacky women with pink suitcases. When couples get older they look even more spookily alike, not just like two people who are similar but essentially two people who grew to become the same. You start off like a normal person and then you become a tartan-loving woman, with a tartan-loving man, part of a tartan-loving pair, that makes people sick.

People often say this is inevitable, some even say it's good if couples look like each other: it seems they're compatible.

I think such human traits,this morbing longing for sameness only unveils a tendency towards narcissism: I love you because you look like me, sort of thing.

Is this true and are people truly incapable of liking (and appreciating and loving) anything that looks remotely different to themselves? Who can appreciate being different these days?

The music

TV sucks. I know I've been watching too much of it and I constantly write about it. I know I love 'friends' and quote them all the time ('love me, define me' still works...) and I love House (or at least I used to before I got a bit too tired of it) and all other crap that I watch in the evenings to unwind.

But today I had the TV closed, and had the music on for a while and things just seemed different. Maybe it's also because I had Greek music on, something that I don't usually do. The day was beautiful, sunny, perhaps the first proper good day of spring, the windows were open, the music was on and I was making a tomato sauce from all the left-over tomatoes in the fridge that I didn't want to throw away. And then it hit me, TV sucks, it only stops you from thinking, clouding emotions like panadol clouds the pain of migraine. And then it hit me again, aren't we supposed to know this, about TV? I mean we know it sucks, but we watch it. Even clever people like me (!) watch it and hate to close it. What does this mean, is it because we're insecure and lonely?

I would sit here and write about this, but I have to go and watch the rest of 'friends'.