Swim, swim, swim for your life!
Some people swim to Antarctica or across the English Channel.
I swim to a different dimension….
Never mind that the entire time I am swimming I am traversing a space of water that is 25 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, over and over again, to my heart’s content, in a lap lane at my local YMCA.
Granted, I do not do this for hours on end; thirty minutes of continuous swimming is about enough for me. I get a good workout, I retreat from the real world, and I have imaginary in-depth conversations with all sorts of people both real and imaginary. Yes, I am a forty-five year old woman with imaginary friends. What can I say?
Although, really, ultimately, it is probably all those made up conversations I have with real people that require more imagination. I mean, I have to figure out what that real person, whom I know, is going to say, how he or she is going to respond to what I say or do not say. Because, conceivably, someone could respond any number of ways to something I might say. Thus, there are a lot of possible permutations to the same basic conversations. And I can play out a lot of them in thirty minutes.
I have many amazing, intense discussions as I am swimming. Sometimes I am cussing out some boneheaded asshole about his or her egregious error of thought, word, or deed. Other times I am debating someone about the war in Iraq, the merits of the IB program at my children’s high school, or whether parking should be free from eight to ten in the morning so people can run in and out of Starbucks or the dry cleaners or the bank or all three without having to pay a quarter. Or I could be flirting or chatting up some possible – or impossible! – beau. Discussing politics, religion, the meaning of life, the plot of a book or recent film, or just kvetching about daily life. Sometimes I worry about my children or making ends meet. Or the state of my health or love life (or lack thereof).
I worry about a lot of things.
Just the other morning I was fretting about what would happen if I were attacked by a black bear. According to the news, the black bear population in Pennsylvania is on the rise. The recent flurry of black bear sightings in surrounding populated areas is disconcerting. I am already worried enough about cars running red lights and deer leaping out of the woods right into my car. I don’t need to add black bears into that mix. I am not sure how I would react, really, if I came face to face with a black bear in my day to day existence in the Pittsburgh area. I came very close to a black bear last summer up in Georgian Bay, Canada, but that is kind of in the wilderness. Sort of. I mean, relatively speaking. It is still vivid in my mind. First the bear lumbered across the beach of a nearby island, then later it paraded right outside our cabin, and ultimately a few hours later swam right in front of our kayaks and up onto the shore of the next island over. I was sure from that moment on that I was going to run into a black bear every time I went back and forth between the main cabin and my sleeping cabin. I would brace myself and set out with a purpose and run like the dickens and then quickly open and shut the door behind me. Whew! Made it.
I am not even sure what you are supposed to do if you run into a black bear. I don’t think they are carnivorous, or aggressive hunters. I think they eat berries and grubs and stuff. Well, OK, maybe they are carnivorous. I think they eat grubs and maybe fish and probably just about anything they find – cornflakes, beer, leftover meatloaf, cornstarch. But I don’t think they go out of their way to kill people and eat them. Although they might attack people if provoked. Or startled by some insane woman running between two cabins in the middle of the night.
Are you supposed to stand still? Curl up into a little ball and play dead? Jump up and down and make a lot of noise? Beat on pots and pans that you just happen to be carrying with you? Or run like hell in the complete opposite direction? Climb a tree? I have no idea. I am pretty sure I know what I would do. I would probably either faint dead away or run screaming pell mell in the complete opposite direction.
I don’t want to be mauled by a black bear.
I have seen that documentary Grizzly Man.
Thinking about black bears makes me swim faster. Yet I have seen a black bear swim, and they can swim really fast. I was amazed. I am sure a black bear could swim faster than me. I am but one of a legion of middle aged people at the Y trying to swim away in relative vain from middle aged flab and the effects of gravity.
I turn my thoughts to the film I watched the night before. Daughters of the Sun. It was a foreign film I stumbled across at my local public library. With my children away for the summer, it is time for me to watch all those chick flicks, foreign films, independent films, and documentaries at the bottom of my Netflix queue. For six weeks, my films can rise to the top and not be usurped by the likes of 300, Beowulf, The Longest Yard, Full Metal Alchemist, Saw IV, and Cowboy Bebop. While I was awaiting that first crop of grown up movies to arrive, I decided to pick out a movie from the library and splurge, watching a DVD on my laptop computer, in bed, in the dark.
Daughters of the Sun caught my eye because it said it was a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival and was the “Iranian version of Boys Don’t Cry.” Well, it was an Iranian film all right, but it was nothing like Boys Don’t Cry. Yes, granted, the protagonist of the film was a girl trying to pass as a boy, but that is where all comparison stops. The film opens with the heroine getting her head shaved by her father and then being sent out into the world dressed as a boy to go become an apprentice at some Persian rug-making sweat shop so she/he could then send all of her paltry earnings home to support her large, impoverished family. I suppose her father thought being a boy meant she was going to be treated better or something, I am not sure. She/he is the only boy in the sweat shop, a boy who can weave ornate Persian rugs better than any of the other girls (and wouldn’t that raise your suspicions just a little?), but she/he is a prisoner in the hovel factory and is constantly getting beaten by the cruel, sadistic Persian rug master who does no work and has a broken arm and a beautiful horse that runs free through the marshlands of Iran. I wasn’t quite sure how the horse fit into the plot. Foreign films are often harder to follow than Hollywood fair, aside from the fact that they are in a foreign language and you have to read the subtitles which takes more effort than I sometimes have late at night after a long day at work. Maybe the horse was a symbol. For freedom or something. Anyway, a girl dressed as a boy in a factory full of oppressed girls. You can easily imagine what is going to happen next. One of the girls falls in love with the “boy.” She/he does not reciprocate the affection of the poor clueless girl but rather breaks her heart by saying “he” cannot marry her. The girl is crushed, of course, because this means she must now marry an evil 60 year old man who is her cousin. She/he (who maintains her shaved head throughout the film and apparently never changes out of her boy clothes or bathes or pees or has her period) dances around at night in somebody’s skirt, all alone in the abandoned Persian rug hovel factory where she is imprisoned. At the end of the film, after a rather severe and unwarranted beating from the evil man whose arm is still broken, she/he sets the rug factory ablaze in a burst of rebellion and dances off into the purple and pink Iranian sunrise with a skirt and shaved head, going Lord knows where, but at least she is free.
Me. I didn’t see how this was anything like Boys Don’t Cry. For one thing, the girl did not want to be a boy like Brandon Teena did. She was forced to be a boy so she could go work at a Persian rug sweat shop and make more money than a girl and send it home to her starving family and sick mother, who dies eventually anyway. Brandon Teena wanted to be a boy. For all intents and purposes, Brandon Teena was a boy. There were no issues about sexuality or gender identity in Daughters of the Sun. This film was more about the oppression of women in Iran. And the amazing level of poverty. I don’t think I could ever in good conscience buy a Persian rug, knowing that it might have been made in a Persian rug sweatshop hovel factory by girls and boys who work ungodly hours weaving, weaving, weaving and being beaten and hardly making any money at all and the money that is made goes to cruel, evil men who do no work and beat their workers.
I squint up at the clock on the wall, through my fogged up swim goggles. Oh, my goodness, it is eight o’clock already! Where did that time go? I must get out and shower and change and get my little booty butt to work.
My swim to another dimension is done for the day….
I swim to a different dimension….
Never mind that the entire time I am swimming I am traversing a space of water that is 25 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, over and over again, to my heart’s content, in a lap lane at my local YMCA.
Granted, I do not do this for hours on end; thirty minutes of continuous swimming is about enough for me. I get a good workout, I retreat from the real world, and I have imaginary in-depth conversations with all sorts of people both real and imaginary. Yes, I am a forty-five year old woman with imaginary friends. What can I say?
Although, really, ultimately, it is probably all those made up conversations I have with real people that require more imagination. I mean, I have to figure out what that real person, whom I know, is going to say, how he or she is going to respond to what I say or do not say. Because, conceivably, someone could respond any number of ways to something I might say. Thus, there are a lot of possible permutations to the same basic conversations. And I can play out a lot of them in thirty minutes.
I have many amazing, intense discussions as I am swimming. Sometimes I am cussing out some boneheaded asshole about his or her egregious error of thought, word, or deed. Other times I am debating someone about the war in Iraq, the merits of the IB program at my children’s high school, or whether parking should be free from eight to ten in the morning so people can run in and out of Starbucks or the dry cleaners or the bank or all three without having to pay a quarter. Or I could be flirting or chatting up some possible – or impossible! – beau. Discussing politics, religion, the meaning of life, the plot of a book or recent film, or just kvetching about daily life. Sometimes I worry about my children or making ends meet. Or the state of my health or love life (or lack thereof).
I worry about a lot of things.
Just the other morning I was fretting about what would happen if I were attacked by a black bear. According to the news, the black bear population in Pennsylvania is on the rise. The recent flurry of black bear sightings in surrounding populated areas is disconcerting. I am already worried enough about cars running red lights and deer leaping out of the woods right into my car. I don’t need to add black bears into that mix. I am not sure how I would react, really, if I came face to face with a black bear in my day to day existence in the Pittsburgh area. I came very close to a black bear last summer up in Georgian Bay, Canada, but that is kind of in the wilderness. Sort of. I mean, relatively speaking. It is still vivid in my mind. First the bear lumbered across the beach of a nearby island, then later it paraded right outside our cabin, and ultimately a few hours later swam right in front of our kayaks and up onto the shore of the next island over. I was sure from that moment on that I was going to run into a black bear every time I went back and forth between the main cabin and my sleeping cabin. I would brace myself and set out with a purpose and run like the dickens and then quickly open and shut the door behind me. Whew! Made it.
I am not even sure what you are supposed to do if you run into a black bear. I don’t think they are carnivorous, or aggressive hunters. I think they eat berries and grubs and stuff. Well, OK, maybe they are carnivorous. I think they eat grubs and maybe fish and probably just about anything they find – cornflakes, beer, leftover meatloaf, cornstarch. But I don’t think they go out of their way to kill people and eat them. Although they might attack people if provoked. Or startled by some insane woman running between two cabins in the middle of the night.
Are you supposed to stand still? Curl up into a little ball and play dead? Jump up and down and make a lot of noise? Beat on pots and pans that you just happen to be carrying with you? Or run like hell in the complete opposite direction? Climb a tree? I have no idea. I am pretty sure I know what I would do. I would probably either faint dead away or run screaming pell mell in the complete opposite direction.
I don’t want to be mauled by a black bear.
I have seen that documentary Grizzly Man.
Thinking about black bears makes me swim faster. Yet I have seen a black bear swim, and they can swim really fast. I was amazed. I am sure a black bear could swim faster than me. I am but one of a legion of middle aged people at the Y trying to swim away in relative vain from middle aged flab and the effects of gravity.
I turn my thoughts to the film I watched the night before. Daughters of the Sun. It was a foreign film I stumbled across at my local public library. With my children away for the summer, it is time for me to watch all those chick flicks, foreign films, independent films, and documentaries at the bottom of my Netflix queue. For six weeks, my films can rise to the top and not be usurped by the likes of 300, Beowulf, The Longest Yard, Full Metal Alchemist, Saw IV, and Cowboy Bebop. While I was awaiting that first crop of grown up movies to arrive, I decided to pick out a movie from the library and splurge, watching a DVD on my laptop computer, in bed, in the dark.
Daughters of the Sun caught my eye because it said it was a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival and was the “Iranian version of Boys Don’t Cry.” Well, it was an Iranian film all right, but it was nothing like Boys Don’t Cry. Yes, granted, the protagonist of the film was a girl trying to pass as a boy, but that is where all comparison stops. The film opens with the heroine getting her head shaved by her father and then being sent out into the world dressed as a boy to go become an apprentice at some Persian rug-making sweat shop so she/he could then send all of her paltry earnings home to support her large, impoverished family. I suppose her father thought being a boy meant she was going to be treated better or something, I am not sure. She/he is the only boy in the sweat shop, a boy who can weave ornate Persian rugs better than any of the other girls (and wouldn’t that raise your suspicions just a little?), but she/he is a prisoner in the hovel factory and is constantly getting beaten by the cruel, sadistic Persian rug master who does no work and has a broken arm and a beautiful horse that runs free through the marshlands of Iran. I wasn’t quite sure how the horse fit into the plot. Foreign films are often harder to follow than Hollywood fair, aside from the fact that they are in a foreign language and you have to read the subtitles which takes more effort than I sometimes have late at night after a long day at work. Maybe the horse was a symbol. For freedom or something. Anyway, a girl dressed as a boy in a factory full of oppressed girls. You can easily imagine what is going to happen next. One of the girls falls in love with the “boy.” She/he does not reciprocate the affection of the poor clueless girl but rather breaks her heart by saying “he” cannot marry her. The girl is crushed, of course, because this means she must now marry an evil 60 year old man who is her cousin. She/he (who maintains her shaved head throughout the film and apparently never changes out of her boy clothes or bathes or pees or has her period) dances around at night in somebody’s skirt, all alone in the abandoned Persian rug hovel factory where she is imprisoned. At the end of the film, after a rather severe and unwarranted beating from the evil man whose arm is still broken, she/he sets the rug factory ablaze in a burst of rebellion and dances off into the purple and pink Iranian sunrise with a skirt and shaved head, going Lord knows where, but at least she is free.
Me. I didn’t see how this was anything like Boys Don’t Cry. For one thing, the girl did not want to be a boy like Brandon Teena did. She was forced to be a boy so she could go work at a Persian rug sweat shop and make more money than a girl and send it home to her starving family and sick mother, who dies eventually anyway. Brandon Teena wanted to be a boy. For all intents and purposes, Brandon Teena was a boy. There were no issues about sexuality or gender identity in Daughters of the Sun. This film was more about the oppression of women in Iran. And the amazing level of poverty. I don’t think I could ever in good conscience buy a Persian rug, knowing that it might have been made in a Persian rug sweatshop hovel factory by girls and boys who work ungodly hours weaving, weaving, weaving and being beaten and hardly making any money at all and the money that is made goes to cruel, evil men who do no work and beat their workers.
I squint up at the clock on the wall, through my fogged up swim goggles. Oh, my goodness, it is eight o’clock already! Where did that time go? I must get out and shower and change and get my little booty butt to work.
My swim to another dimension is done for the day….
posted by delta at 1:48 PM
1 Comments:
you made me snort TWICE. good thing i wasn't drinking anything.
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