The self is always and inevitably deficient

Dr. Ealy's lecture about Celestina left me really thinking about life and what makes it worth living. The story of the young couple who falls in love at first makes one want to be so happy and excited. What can be better than a love story centered around a young couple when you know its going to be filled with lust and longing? Dr. Ealy brought up rather interesting point of how love can never completely fulfill one's longings. This brings to light a darker side to this love story that leads to both parts of the young couple's death. It is true when a person falls in love they fall in love with an ideal image of the other person. They see them much as Calisto saw Melibea. Their image of their love made their partner seem etheral and almost too perfect to be true. Yet, this image does not exist, and when the person comes to terms with this it brings in a sense of melancholy and a sense of unfulfillment.

Through out his entire lecture I wanted to scream this isn't true this isn't true, but it is. I wonder though is it such a bad thing to know that you love the other person more than the other person loves you? While it is some what unfulfilling it should leave a person knowing that they have the capability to go above and beyond material reciprocation with their feelings. I guess how I see it is that it isn't really love unless you can care for some one more than they care for you. It shows a sort of selfless abandon that I feel has to go hand in hand with love. With love comes vulnerability and uncertainty, and yes pain goes right there with it. How can you appreciate the good if you have no other moments in life to let you know that this is in fact a good moment? Cliche, I know, but it is so true.

It also causes you to appreciate the moment you are in because you only ever have that moment and you don't get it back. So, why waste your time thinking about some unhappy memory of the past or planning every step of your future. The present is already history when you decide to recognize it.

I have to disagree with Dr. Ealy on his point about how Celestina helped to free women from the constraints of social expectations. Yes, she was able to help young girls experience sex on their own terms first, but she would patch them back up to be violently possessed by a man they don't want to be with. In a way it seems as though she is just assisting in an inevitable contracted rape. It sickened me when I read how she had sold the same girl to a man as a virgin. It had to have been so painful each time she was sewn back together and then ripped back open. This violence makes me cringe. Why give them just a small taste of freedom and sex that is willing when she will only put them right back where they belong? She is just as much a part of keeping women under control as the men are. The difference is she knows the violence that each girl is going to be subjected to. I just don't see how this is freeing them of patriarchal society.

Requiem For a Dream

I apologize for the tardiness of this entry, but every time I sat down to write I was at a complete loss of words when it came to my reaction about this movie. I just didn't know where to begin or even how to phrase my thoughts coherently. I will admit the strongest emotion that this movie produced in me was fear. I am so afraid for my friends I have watched tumble through severe addictions. I am afraid that one day the wanting of the drug and how it makes them feel will just consume them and I will lose them forever. I am afraid for my friends who have gone through addiction and recovery and how they get up every morning and keep living clean. It terrifies me in every way shape or form.

I also found myself feeling somewhat embarassed too. I have always thought that I was pretty well informed and aware of addiction and its severity. This movie left me realizing how ignorant I truly am. Addiction is not singular to drugs addiction can be present with anything, and somehow that fact just does not stick into my mind. It just was never made relevant or real to me. For me addiction was what rap stars rapped about and what my friends went through the circle never passed beyond that. I just felt completely ashamed for believing that this didn't go beyond just my small scope.

I still can't get the ending sex scene out of my head. It horrifies me and disgusts me. Yet, I know going to such extents for drugs is not uncommon. It makes my stomach turn because I know for a fact that my friends put themselves through similar things to get what they needed to get high. I have a hard time looking them in the eye right now. I just have that scene playing in the back of my head and I just don't ever want to imagine them being so desperate that they would be willing to do whatever it would take just to get high.

Harry left me feeling sick to my stomach. He wanted so much, yet he could never define exactly what he wanted. Love was part of it but everything else was so vague and it left me feeling overwhelmed and I was just watching. What he must have felt being so uncertain of what he wanted must have just driven to so many points of desperation.

I honestly think that this movie should be a required to be seen by every student. We try so hard to protect people from the bad and the ugly and it just leads to more bad and more hurt. We let the romanticization of addiction continue because we don't want to hear about anything else. We don't want to feel the pain that comes with it. Getting high is just a novelty act on occasion with friends to relieve tension. So many people actually believe this. Yes, this movie is rough to watch, but we don't always deserve a happy ending. Sometimes I feel as though a happy ending is nothing more than false security. It gives hope when in some cases there really isn't any. The truth is important and it shouldn't be sugar coated by a Disney saturated version of it. Things like addiction shouldn't be left to song and dance and the romanticized happy ending because most of the time it just isn't there

Push Continued

I have this book at the back of my mind all weekend and it has bothered me so much. I just can't help but think how horrible it was for her to be sexually abused by both her mother and her father. It also just sickens me to think about when she would discuss orgrasming when her father was raping her. I just couldn't imagine ever at any point how she must feel when that happens. She talks about it and it makes sense that she loves and hates the feeling at the same time and then it also doesn't make sense. I don't know how she will ever be in a relationship where she won't be haunted by what her father did. I could never even fathom how she could get live with someone else with those memories. I just don't see her ever having a successful relationship when everything in her life that would have been the basis of her understanding relationships was so twisted and abusive. I don't know how she could ever be in a relationship where she would feel safe. This bothers me on so many levels. I can't even go into everything I am feeling about it. Just reading what happened to her haunts me I wouldn't even want to think about living with it.

What makes me angry about what happened to her is that the hospital let Precious go back into that abusive household when she was pregnant the first time. If I was a nurse and was given that information I would have called social services immediately in order to get Precious and the baby into a safe home where they would be able to live abuse free. Social Services was created to protect children like Precious and still they did nothing. It just infuriates me. It was as though what happened to her was too horrible for anyone to want to deal with it just because they didn't want to have to hear about it. I kept thinking in my head through out the book what is wrong with people that they don't notice that this girl needs help? I can understand Precious being angry she has every right to be considering all of this happened to her. There were so many resources available for other people to take the initiative to remove her from the situation she was in and no one would help her. NO ONE... This just makes me sick to my stomach. I don't understand how people could stand idly by and think nothing of what was going on. Granted being confronted with a situation like that isn't easy to stomach, but life isn't easy and help to someone in need should not be denied. I just don't get it.... I really just don't get it...

Push

Getting through this book took more sittings then I thought it would. It was technically a "quick read" but it was rough to get through. Every time I thought something wonderful was going to happen for Precious a memory from her childhood would come up. It just kept hitting me that there really was no escape for her from everything that had happened to her. She was going to always be reminded. I can only wonder how difficult it was for her to see her children and be a mother to them knowing that they were the product of rape. She mentions it a few times but she never dwells on it when it comes to Abdul. She truly wants Abdul to have a life that was nothing like hers. Its as though she doesn't want to think about Abdul as the product of rape so she can make sure to provide everything to him that she wasn't. If she could only remember the rape then I don't think she would have been able to be as a good a mother to him as she was.



That's another thing that gets to me. She tries to hard to be separated from the fact that she was raped and sexually abused by both parents and then at the same time she uses it as what defines who she has become. It's the idea of duality at the same time. She hurts and refuses to hurt. Its this that helps her to work hard to become someone else and not suffer the same fate of her mother and father. Precious wants so much to live a life that will be so completely different from the life she had previously lived.



What I don't get however is how when she is finally given a tool to help her sort through her emotional problems she immediately pushes it away. She is so sceptical of the counselor Ms. Weiss. She believes the only reason she is being helped is so the government can take her off of welfare and support. Granted this may have been part of the reason a counselor was supplied to her, but it could have been an opportunity for Precious to begin to openly discuss what had happened to her. She had already made the huge step in writing about what had happened to her in her journal. The counselor even asked her if she wanted to read aloud from her journal in order to easier discuss what had happened to her as a child.

The counselor was a bit of a idiot to not recognize that Precious's mother was also part of the sexual abuse that she had experienced as a child. Precious was so against wanting to have any interaction with her mother at that point. I do agree with how the counselor went about confronting Precious's mother with what happened, but it doesn't seem as though she gave Precious any tools that would help her deal with what she was hearing. Precious needed help in order to sort through what she had gone through and the counselor was only telling her to talk and write about it. She didn't at any point try to teach Precious to recognize that what had happened to her was not right,

No one at any point of the book made an attempt to help Precious realize that the color of your skin did not make you any better than anyone else. She was being helped in every other department but no one wanted to help her with her self confidence. Rather they influenced her to be angry about her position as a poor black woman. Everything was about her needing to be white and skinny. This truly bothered me. I know that there is a disperity between the poor black and white percentage, but the way she was being instructed about race was not conducive to her feeling as though she can succeed. Everything was about how the white man was trying to take everything away from her and that she needed to be white to be pretty and successful. This just bothers me so much.

There is so much more to say and at the moment I just can't put it into words... I am going to let the book sink in a bit more and write more later.

Continued

I have always found the songs by Nirvana to be the most convincing and true when it comes to referring to pain. Kurt Cobain was going through so much and his lyrics truly expressed the turmoil he was going through due to the pain his life was causing him. There isn't the shallow thoughts of just being broken hearted instead there is the raw emotion produced by true suffering. The fight he was having with his drug addiction and the lack of control he had over his life can be clearly heard in his lyrics. He doesn't dilute them with cliche thoughts or ideas. Instead he says it how it is. That is what draws me to his music. It isn't pretty. The emotions are dumbed down either. Despite Nirvana becoming widely popular the music did not conform to the social expectations of what music was supposed to be about.

I love the Eamon song and the Frankee song. When those songs were released it was one of the few times I actually listened to the radio. They just entertain me so much, and at the same time they left me feeling like some one was finally singing about the angry parts of a break up. For so long that was left to Alanis Morisette and it ended when she faded out of the spot light. I love how both songs remind people that break ups aren't just sad. These songs really bring out the ugly as well and I blast them every time I hear them. Nothing is left to the imagination in this song it goes from blow jobs to telling the girl and guy fuck you. It's great. Nothing nice or pretty about it.

Alanis Morisette I must say is in a league all by herself. Her music says everything and is the ultimate pay back to the guy that hurt her. She wanted to make sure that the guy knew just how much he hurt her and she wanted to humiliate him as much as he had humiliated her. It also brings into play all the cliche things that are said in a relationship that can make a person so happy and then in the end feel like nothing more than a slap in the face. She just keeps reminding guy that nothing he did is excusable. She like Kurt Cobain and Eamon do not censor the anger and hurt in anyway and it is just awesome. I am not going to lie this CD is definitely a constant in all of my playlists. Its angry and its devastating. Everyone can say they felt this way at some point in their life.

and so I've tried, everything but suicide but yes, its crossed my mind, but I'm fine (Gnarls Barkley, Just a Thought)

Alright, before I even get started I have to share this song with everyone. It is one of the more twisted songs I know and I thought it was appropriate after our last few classes concerning torture porn and now about music... That being said here is the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkCMqZ2RoA

I must say during the Taylor Swift song all I wanted to do was gouge my eyes out. I am sorry I know that having a hidden love for someone can be a bit painful but this girl acts as though its the end of the world. If we changed the guitar from acoustic to electric and made her sound a little more whiny and then slapped on some smudgy black eyeliner we would have a new female emo artist to follow... This song is so unbelievably typical 11-14 year old pop music when love is usually nothing more than a passing fancy. Unrequited love and unreturned love can be painful but at some point you need to move on before your love turns into some sort of obsessive sensation. I don't know I just can't take the girl seriously. She grew up in a small town and she is an attractive, skinny blonde she is the stereotypical hot chick and she doesn't seem to have much depth to me. So, I shouldn't be surprised by the lack of anything real in her song. I may be wrong about her, but how she portrays herself is just enough to make me want to dye my hair Wednesday Adams black and refuse to wear pink for the rest of my life. I guess I am just over the whole whiny girl broken hearted song that has flooded the radios. What gets me though is that people take this as how you should feel or react to a broken heart... Urgh. Running to class I will write more after

Beautiful Boy

When I first started reading Beautiful Boy by David Sheff I thought it was going to be another cliche book about drug addiction and the pain it causes everyone and everything, and for the first 50 or so pages I thought I was right. After that however I was pleasantly surprised to see that David Sheff was doing his best to present what he and his family went through with his son Nic and his various drug addictions.

I really liked how David brought in Nic's half brother and sister to the story. The amount of pain and anguish Nic caused I thought was best seen in Jasper and Daisy. They are so young and have only the slightest grasp of what Nic is going through and yet their pain is so adult. It astonished me what those two went through at such young ages and I am truly intrigued to see how those two will address drugs and alcohol when they reach the age where it becomes prevalent. Through out the book David kept returning to Jasper and Daisy and how they were handling the situation and it was their story and reactions that I held on to the most. I was devastated for both Jasper and Daisy when Nic stole from them. I couldn't imagine what it felt like to have someone whom they admired and trusted so much violate some of their most important boundaries.

What David went through as a father also really stuck me. He tried everything possible to help Nic and every attempt he made failed. At some point I would have given up, but some how he managed to find more strength and more resources to fight back. Yet, despite my admiration for him I recognize how his son's addiction began to consume and pollute his life. He was becoming so detached from everything going on around him and he was refusing to recognize that his son's addiction was not something to pity his son for. At times I would get so frustrated when he would say things like "poor Nic". I wanted to scream at him that his son did this to himself. He was the catalyst to his own addiction. I just wish that David could have figured out so much earlier on in order to save himself from much of the pain and suffering he had put himself through. Yet, at the same time I can somewhat understand his desire to help and try to save his son.

It amazes me that the government isn't doing more in the research of how to treat an addiction to meth. It is becoming more and more of a prevalent drug in areas across the US and yet no one is making a valiant effort in trying to prevent and treat its addiction. It's as though it is some taboo topic that no one can talk about.

I found myself agreeing the David when he said he didn't know how to talk to other people about what was going on with his son. Society makes it so difficult for people who are family members of a drug addict to openly talk about it and get support. There is this whole idea that in some shape or form the family is responsible for their loved one's addiction. This idea drives me crazy. Everyone deserves support when going through some sort of crisis regardless of what it is. I was so angry that one of the few outlets that David had was AA meetings. It made me even angrier that there was nothing Jasper and Daisy. No one wants to talk about it, yet its happening all over to all sorts of people. Why is that some issues are made to be more important than others? Sorry for my rant but it doesn't make sense to me. David, Jasper and Daisy deserve all the support and help they need in order to aid them in moving through this difficult point in their life. They shouldn't have to keep their pain a secret because their loved one is doing drugs. It just irks me that some forms of pain are perfectly acceptable in society while others are not.