someday my prince will come

I have ranted about this to some of you before, but I am having a horrid bout of insomnia, and Tim has been doing an essay series on animated Disney films, and so I figure the time has come to once again complain about princesses.

Now. To be clear. I have nothing against actual princesses. In fact, I still harbor a pathetic fantasy (and it has been previously documented multiple times) that I will somehow end up as the Princess of Sweden. What gets me about princesses is the commercialization of the concept of "princess." And, again, let me be clear- it's not that I'm against little girls pretending to be princesses- I played at being a princess innumerable times myself. It's the qualities that are somehow assigned to being a princess that I can't stand.

I shall start at the beginning.

When I was 15, I spent a summer babysitting for Rebecca and Ellen, my step cousin Diane's two little girls. At the time Rebecca was 4 and Ellen was about 2 1/2, the sorts of ages where you can't really expect them to play on their own without getting in fights. They had this game called "Pretty Pretty Princess," wherein each player was a colored princess token, and you took turns spinning the dial, and moving your token, and if you landed on a space with a crown, you got a crown.



There were crowns- or, I should say, tiaras,- necklaces, bracelets, rings, and (clip-on) earrings, and the object of the game- the ENTIRE OBJECT- was to collect all five kinds of jewelry and thereby become a pretty, pretty princess. As I recall, there wasn't even a way to LOSE jewelry if you did something wrong, you could only acquire jewelry, and thus the game was always over very fast and we always had to play many, many rounds.

Pretty Pretty Princess was bad, and incredibly boring, but it was nothing compared to this wretched video game Natalie and Alec had when I babysat for them in college. To give them credit, they only played it for a couple years, until Alec became obsessed with dinosaurs and was no longer willing to do whatever Natalie wanted. But until then, there were many interminable afternoons during which you could find me in an Evanston basement, one kid on my lap and one by my side, playing Barbie Princess Bride:



The whole basis behind Barbie Princess Bride was that Princess Barbie was in love with Prince Ken, and one must assume that he was in love with her, because he goes off in a boat on a Long Voyage, and Barbie stays home and plans their wedding. There is absolutely no indication that Ken is aware he will be getting married when he returns, but no matter, because oh! Planning a wedding with Princess Barbie is such fun! When you plan a wedding with Barbie, you get to:


1. Deliver wedding invitations to all the woodland creatures! What is it about being a princess that seems to require one has woodland creature friends? Is it some sort of royal gene?


2. Decorate the wedding cake, using decorations plucked from the garden of her helpful butterfly fairy friend! (Really.) The ingredients that go into the baking of the cake included butter, sugar, flour, harmony, and the gift of giving (really).


3. Sing an incredibly unfeminist song to the swans! The lyrics of said song included "For all times I'll be here waiting for you/ for all times I'll be here, your heart is close to mine/ Still I can't believe that love has come and walked into our lives/ For all times I'll be here waiting, waiting for your heart." Ignoring the gramatically incorrect use of the word "times," doesn't a princess have anything better to do all day than moon about singing mopey songs to swans?

4. You get the idea of the game design, yes? I shan't bore you with any more pictures, then. Next you get to fish important things out of a well, after a boy dropped them down there while "polishing things for the wedding." For how can there possibly be a wedding without the candlestick and the goblet?!?!

5. Design the wedding dress! If I recall, you didn't get to really DESIGN it- it is the same poofy princess shape no matter what- but you do get to decorate it, because apparently the life of a princess is largely concerned with decorating things. This sequence is the most fun, because you can pretend to be the fairies from Sleeping Beauty and switch the gown from blue to pink to blue to pink. Or, if you are me circa 7 years ago, you can let Natalie do it all because holy god, this game is boring.

6. Hurry ever so much faster because Ken's face gets clearer in the magic mirror, which presumably means he is getting closer, and whatever shall we do if the wedding is not ready when Ken gets home? That might give him a chance to run away.

7. Patronizingly check in on the musicians, then "help them play the right music" by reorganizing their sheets of music.

8. Omnisciently "navigate" Prince Ken's boat home through such ocean-going terrors as wind, sea monsters, islands, and dolphins.

9. And finally (and this is the game that was truly the bane of my existence), you get to pathetically toss coins into a fountain and make wishes about how soon Prince Ken will come home. This was the worst part of the whole thing because the design of the game was bad enough that where you clicked was not necessarily where the coin would go, and thus you had to compensate, and neither Natalie nor Alec ever really got the hang of it, so I'd always have two extremely frustrated kids on my hands while I clicked away at the damn thing so that the stupid fluttery butterfly fairy would shut up about it.

Anyway. Sorry for the Barbie Princess Bride tangent, but it truly embodies all that bugs me about commercialized princesses these days. For, you see, Barbie's entire life revolves around Ken and her wedding. Pretty Pretty Princess was dumb, yes, but it was also a game for 3 and 4 year olds, and there was a fairly simple goal to it, but Barbie Princess Bride makes a huge to-do about how Barbie won't really be happy until she has a giant fairytale wedding to The Man Of Her Dreams, surrounded by adorable forrest creatures. Should we really be teaching our impressionable little girls that getting married is the most important thing ever? I mean sure, getting married is great and all. I hope to get married myself one day. But hey- maybe we will make fewer girls completely miserable if we don't dwell on it in such an utterly magnified way when their brains are so maleable?

Also, I don't know about you, but I have never truly been happy with my life, because I cannot commune with woodland creatures. All the cool girls in the Disney movies did it. Snow White, Cinderella (she was the one that really got me- oh, how I wanted tiny mouse friends!), Sleeping Beauty, even Belle and Jasmine and Pocahontas to a certain extent.

Which brings me to Disney and the ridiculous "Disney Princesses" brand name. I don't know if you guys have been much exposed to all this, but I worked at a preschool right when it was first being marketed, and man, the power these few cartoon ladies hold over little girls is terrifying. So today, after reading Tim's Sleeping Beauty essay, I googled Disney Princesses and found The Official Princess Website, which invites you to "explore each enchanting world and collect charms from each princess." Its the same sort of crap that litters Barbie Princess Bride- in Cinderella's world, you help her get dressed for a parade. In Jasmine's world, you help her get dressed for a tea party. You help Snow White get dressed for a Forrest Friends Festival, who bakes "gooseberry pies for everyone" to cheer up Grumpy and helps Dopey pick flowers. You help Pocahontas get dressed for a Wind Celebration. Do you notice a pattern here? The only important thing to do in these girls lives is get dressed- and might I add that I don't know any real women who would just indiscriminately let someone else pick what they were going to wear to a big event?

So, what I gather from all this is that first you must get dressed, and then you must get married. I'm so glad that these are the things on which such powerful corporations as Disney and Mattel have chosen to focus. Really sends a message of independence.

You can also paint a picture, although the things you can do with your brush are very limited. I painted this (click on it, for it's hard to see all the incredible detail with such a small size):



I realize I'm not articulating any of this very well, but it's 5:15 in the morning and I haven't really slept in the last few days (woo!), and so this has turned into what it promised to be: a rant. I'm sorry. But I'm also not. It makes me mad. I guess it's good that girls are using computers and all, but I don't really think they'd be avoiding computers otherwise. Why can't we just resurrect Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego and let them, I don't know, learn something? Are we really still stuck in this age where girls play pretty dressing up games and boys DO things?

In conclusion... I'm going to bed.


P.S. If you are so inclined, you can watch a guy with a cute Liverpudlian accent get frustrated with Barbie Princess Bride here. I owe him a lot for refreshing parts of my memory.

emotional sine waves

This weekend was one of emotional extremes, to put it mildly. It was fun and confusing and exciting and sad, and, in a word, mrrrrrrrg?

I went to Chicago to help Kevin shoot a movie. We ended up only shooting for a day, and I had a lot of time to spend with my friends. But I'll get to that.

On Friday morning I woke up, warm and cozy in Jack's spare room, and stared out the window at the rain for a long time. As I watched the rain began to turn to snow, and by the time I left the house it was flat out snowing. I had been hoping for snow, and I was excited to get it. I had lunch with Matt, Phil, Jack, and Tim at Panera, and then walked to campus for loadout at the cage with Kevin. While I waited around for him I checked the Jacobson's medical blog. That morning Jill, Natalie and Alec's mom, had posted that "With as much certainty as any human can say, [Ken] is very close to the end of his life... We like to think that he can hear us when we are gathered in his room talking, or laughing, or playing music...or when we get close and talk in his ear. While he's with us we can still hold his hand and touch him and let him know how much he is loved." I went for a long walk around the lakefill- I don't like crying in front of people. The weather was miserable, with driving wind blowing the snow into my face and the steely gray waves of the lake crashing against the rocks like something out of a Romantic painting. My jeans were soaked through and my fingers went numb, but it felt good to be outside and able to think. It was the sort of day you might expect someone to die.

Ken died the next morning at 6am, on Natalie's 10th birthday, of complications related to his second stem cell transplant-- namely pneumonia. I had been worried that this would happen all week long, as I read the increasingly worrisome posts on their website. Please don't let him die on Saturday, I thought over and over again, talking to who knows what but some sort of natural force that drives the tide of life and death. Please let Nat have one last birthday with her dad. But when it happened, their family proved once again how amazing they are: they let the day be about Natalie, about celebrating her birthday and not dwelling on the awful event that had ocurred. Nat had her bowling/ice cream/make-up/sleepover party and was surrounded by her friends. I think in the future her birthday will be about celebrating not only her life but her dad's life as well and everything that they meant to each other.

I walked up to their house today to see everyone. I was a little concerned that I didn't really belong there, at such a difficult time, because I wasn't family and I couldn't really do anything concrete to help out. I never know what to say about death, because "I'm sorry" feels so unnecessary and insufficient. It seemed, though, that Jill and the kids did want me to come, and I hope I at least gave Jill some time to get things done this morning. At the very least, I passed on a few hugs all the way from Camilla in Norway. The kids and I played Mall Madness, a game that has gotten quite the hi-tech makeover since I was a kid, and went on a nature walk to collect things. We came back with a surprising array of wintery nature: feathers and ivy and twigs and rocks, pine needles and tubers and even a sizeable clump of dirt. We played Alec's "name an animal for every letter" game, and he and I had a nice healthy debate about whether "caviar" qualifies as an animal. I saw new toys, books, clothing... the kids are doing pretty well, all things considered. Alec seemed a lot angrier than he usually is; little things would frustrate him or upset him. He didn't mention his dad at all, except when Natalie brought him up. Nat seems to be absorbing all the changes in her life in her quiet, observant way. She mentioned two or three times how much she missed her dad, and was upset about an autograph book she has that he had never signed, and a present she was making that she hadn't given to him. I told her to make a box where she could keep presents for her dad, and she seemed to like that idea. They both seemed more subdued than usual, although we did have our share of laughs and giggles. I didn't get to talk to Jill very much, unfortunately; she was busy writing an obituary and had a few friends staying with them. She seemed tired and mentioned that the whole thing was very surreal, and it was; it was surreal even for me to be there and think that Ken was no longer around. I can't even imagine how it must feel for them.

So that was the bad part of the weekend.

The good part was the absolute cornucopia of friends I saw, and while I didn't get to spend enough time with any of them, it's always good to see someone for yourself and do a mental check on how they're doing. Besides the obvious Jack, Tim, Kevin, and Matt, I saw (**warning LONG LIST**): KATE (!! she was there visiting Ben, her boyfriend, which was a gigundo surprise), Annie, Kat, Sip, Erik, Jim, Brian Perkinson, Brian Cagle, Pedro, Phil, Leo, Jackie, Nathan (who is coming to the Bay Area for 6 months! hurray!), Ian Bennett, Paul Kruse, Adam Price, Jen Howell, Kevin's friend Sean, Adam Sobel, and probably others that I have forgotten. On Friday night Jack, Tim, Kat, Sip, Annie and I went on an "adventure" that began as a trip to the (infamous) Fish Keg on Howard to be followed by Howard Street bar hopping, and ended up as what I shall now refer to as the "IHOPleaf night," consisting of dinner at IHOP and drinks at the Hopleaf in Andersonville. It was completely fabulous to see Kat and Annie and Sip, because I do not see them often. On Sunday I went to lunch with Kate and Ben and Tim and Sip, and then to see Brokeback Mountain again with Kate and Ben (and yes, it totally holds up upon second-viewing). There wasn't a whole lot of time to actually talk to Kate, but it was nice to see her anyway.

On Sunday night I had dinner with Kevin and Jack, who were both more interested in the Bears game than in any sort of conversation, but what can you do. Jack and I went to Tim's afterward to watch the most recent, most amazing episode of Arrested Development and then Tim and I hung out for two hours talking about movie minutae, which was grand. Sip and Jim came over to say hi and they gave me a ride back to Jack's, and then Jack and I stayed up late talking too. So, like I said, I didn't get to spend nearly enough time with any one person, but it's also a hell of a lot better than not seeing your friends at all. Now I just have to start counting the days until I can see them all again.

The one productive thing about the weekend, in terms of the big picture of my life, was that I realized just how much I frickin' miss film stuff. No one in my day-to-day life could ever be heard saying something like "the tapes were drop-frame but the lab retimed the color bars and we just had to re-online," as I heard Kevin said to me on Thursday when he picked me up. Hearing something like that is like a bizarre breath of fresh air to me, and I started thinking about it, and I think that this is why I don't enjoy Pacific Primary as much as I might: there's nothing challenging for me, but moreover, everyone speaks a different language than I do, the language of Early Childhood. Not that I can only speak Filmspeak, but I'm certainly more fluent in it. It's just nice to kick back and talk shop with Kevin or someone for awhile, nice to discuss film things with Tim and Jack. One of the most jolting things about coming home from Evanston was that now, when I go to a movie with someone, their follow-up commentary usually consists of something like "Well, that was good." There's no outrage at the audacity of a director to use a Vertigo shot, no pretentious theories put forward, not even a word about an out of focus shot or two. I miss that, and I want it back. Is that strange?

Speaking of films, and then I'll actually shut up: I watched Brian Cagle's thesis, Ruthie, which is the film I worked on when we all went to Tennessee. It was pretty awful. I mean, it looked great. The stuff Kevin shot was dead-on exactly what he was going for, and I'm awfully proud of him for it. Cagle shot a few inserts, and they were pretty bad, but hopefully not too noticeable. The bad things about it were, in order of most atrocious: 1) the editing, 2) the sound design, and 3) the acting. Now, I knew the actors weren't great when we were making the damn thing, but I was surprised how bad they came across on screen. And the editing! You'd think someone who'd been in grad school for two and a half years would pick up on at least some sort of editing savvy, but I guess not. I hope it wasn't his final cut, but it definitely was the one he took to Chattanooga to show. He should have had someone else edit it, but oh well.

OK, well, millions of words later, I'm going to bed. Back to work tomorrow? How about I get on a plane and go somewhere again? I have this awful travel bug. Maybe South Africa?

-Cameron