And how was YOUR weekend?

We had First Blood on Saturday morning.

I think that he got down from bed in the morning and then tried to climb back up, but toppled backwards onto the corner of the bedside table. That’s my theory, anyway. I just woke up to a loud thud and Owl bursting into tears. PH, who usually spends the last hour or two of the night voluntarily exiled to the couch, came dashing up the stairs.

He seemed fine, at first, until I moved my arm and realized that it was COVERED WITH BLOOD. And there was blood down the back of his pyjamas. AND ALL OVER THE BACK OF HIS HEAD.

It takes a scalp wound a surprising amount of time to stop bleeding. 

Owl has given himself some fantastic shiners before, but this is the first real bloody wound he has ever inflicted upon himself.

I was mostly just concerned with staunching the blood and wondering if he needed stitches. PH was concerned about concussion. So there I was, frantically trying to guesstimate the size of the head wound while PH went “can you count to ten, Owl? Count with me. One… two…”

Meanwhile Owl, who had already forgotten all about it (hopefully because he is a baby with a goldfish memory, not because of the head wound) kept trying to play and starting to fuss when we tried to hold him still to examine the HOLE IN HIS HEAD.

Thankfully, it DID stop bleeding… eventually… and doesn’t appear to need any stitches. It’s quite small, actually, only a few millimeters wide, but for the rest of the morning he left little blood splotches on his changing pad, his coat, his shirt, MY ARM…

Also, that same day he successfully counted to 15, so there doesn’t appear to be brain damage.

But I have to take Owl to daycare tomorrow and I’m going to have to show them the head wound.  I feel like a terrible parent.

Oh, and he also has The Diaper Rash Of Death.

I’m so tired. Is it the weekend yet?

 

A Little Child Should Seriously Lead Us

Tags

bad days, forgiveness, love, motherhood, parenthood, patience, toddlers

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. No real reason for it. I mean, yes, I had started the morning at 5 am when a little hand smacked me excitedly and a tiny voice announced insistantly (and proudly) “PEE! PEE! PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! PEE!” until I eventually mumbled,

“Didjoupee?”

“Yes!”

“Goo’feryou. Thanksfor tellin’ me.”

I rolled over. The same small hand grabbed my nipple, and the teeny voice said “mush? MUSH? PEASE?” and a needle-teethed lamprey re-attached itself to my breast at a bizarre angle.

It was my usual start to the day.

If anything, it was a slightly better start than some other mornings, because after forty five minutes of:

• sitting on my head
• running around the room
• trying to open the door to the dog’s crate
• demanding help to get back up on the bed with me
• and insisting on “mush” whenever I tried to roll over

…Owl actually went back to sleep and I got an extra half hour shut eye.

But I still woke up with a big black cloud over my head. I blame the rain, because there was a lot of it, and I really didn’t want to walk in it.

Every morning I offer Owl the chance to choose his footwear and coat for the day.

It usually goes like this:

“Go get your shoes.”

“No!”

“Do you want to go for our walk?”

“…Yes.”

“Then you need to put on either your boots or your shoes.”

This simple logic always convinces him and he grabs one pair or the other. We have the same conversation over his coat.

“Which coat do you want to wear?”

He invariable chooses his raincoat, but then resists when I try to put it on him.

“Okay, we’ll stay in,” I always say, and start to hang up his coat. This makes him change his mind instantly and he cooperatively holds out his arms for the coat. Then we leash the dog and go outside for our walk.

 

Today, though, it was pissing rain, I was running a little late due to the sleep-in, and I was not loving the idea of trying to convince the dog to poop in the rain while Owl soaked his pants in the puddles.

Everything went wonky today.

I told Owl to get his boots. He didn’t budge. I set out his boots and he said “no.”

“Well, pick either your shoes or your boots,” I said, laying out the options for him. He stared at them and dithered and dithered while the time and my patience began to run out. So I made an executive decision.

“Okay, you’re wearing your boots.”

“NO!”

“Yes.”

“NOOOOOOOOO!”

I pulled his boots on him against his will while he flailed and wailed. When I finished he sat on the floor crying and pulling desperately at his boots. Within seconds he had them off again. Rather than re-enter that battle, I moved on to coats.

“Which coat to you want to wear?”

“SOOS!”

“Owl, which coat?”

“SOOS!!”

Most mornings I would have dealt with the shoe issue and then revisited the coats afterwards. But for some reason, today, my patience was still upstairs in bed, cuddled under the duvet.

“Okay, fine, no walk today.”

I put the dog out in the yard while a horrified and protesting wail went up behind me. Owl spent a couple of minutes throwing his “soos” at me, but quickly allowed himself to be distracted by his toys while I took a moment of deep breathing.

Skipping the walk put us back on schedule for time, if Owl didn’t dawdle too much on our walk to the car. I contemplated just carrying him to the car, but that didn’t seem fair – he should get at least part of his walk. I brought the dog in, put on Owl’s “soos” (pick your battles) and he cooperatively chose his raincoat and put it on without a fuss.

When he saw that we were leaving the dog behind, though, he realized that he had missed the morning walk, and that we were now headed right to school. He immediately began to whine.

“Nooooo! Da! Wa? Mama!!”

“Well, we couldn’t go on our walk because you wouldn’t leave your boots on and you wouldn’t pick your coat,” I snapped. “That’s what happens.”

I waited irritably and self-righteously for the tantrum. To my surprise, he just held up his arms and said “up!”

So I picked him up, and when his face was level with mine he studied me carefully. Then, gently, with a little smile, he leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the lips. Then he let me carry him out of the house, to the car, and into his car seat without a single complaint.

My son is 24 pounds and 30 inches tall, and he is a bigger person than I am. 

Go take a nap, Mama.

Why We Don’t Want Our Son To Think He’s Smart.

Tags

10 thousand hours, child rearing, children, effort, intelligence, IQ, parenting, problem solving, self esteem, success, work

My new boss made us all go to a sort of business seminar thingy, which was a little weird because it was run by Scientologists. But I heard something there that really struck home with me:

The coach said that you need to put in 10,000 hours of work before you become truly expert at something.

Now, I’m sure there’s nothing magic about that particular number. I Googled it and the author of Outliers, who made this claim, bases this on examples of people who got famous after doing something a LOT, including the Beatles who logged 10,000 hours of playing time between 1960 and 1964, and Bill Gates, who logged around 10,000 hours of programming time as a kid. What the number does do is give a general bookmark, a rule-of-thumb, which helps to define “A WHOLE LOTTA TIME”.

10,000 hours. That’s 9 hours a day for 3 years, or 3 hours a day for 10 years, or 1 hour a day for TWENTY SEVEN YEARS.

Not just to become good at something. To become GREAT at something. 

It sounds impossible, but that also explains why there are so few true experts in any particular given field.

Then again, Mozart probably hit 10,000 hours of music playing before age 10, and Sidney Crosby, who used to shoot pucks at the washing machine in his parents’ basement before he even learned to skate, probably hit 10,000 hours of hockey before his teens.

I haven’t logged that many hours in dog training, yet, but I’ve probably logged about 5,000 if my estimates are close to accurate. So I’m half expert. I’ve certainly done enough to become competent.

The 10,000 hour rule makes sense to me and is actually quite liberating. Obviously, one needs an aptitude to do really well, but even if you do have an aptitude, you still need to practice.

The problem is that we don’t tend to grow up with this mindset, especially if we were considered “smart” as kids.

The western world places a lot of weight on innate ability. We think that either we have a gift for music, or writing, or art, or math… or we don’t. We test our pre-schoolers for genius, and weed out the “gifted” from the average kids long before their brains are even close to mature.

In fact, many kids who test as gifted at age 3 average out by the time they’re 6, and many kids who test as normal at age 3 end up re-testing as gifted later on.

But by then it’s too late – the gifted programs are already filled.

Why do they spend so much time talking about how to challenge the smart kids, instead of teaching kids how to meet a challenge?

More and more research is coming out showing that telling our kids that they are smart may actually be damaging their self-esteem and chances in life.

While that sounds ridiculous to start, those of you who DID grow up being “smart” may already be nodding your heads.

When you are a “smart” child, school is easy. You are told that it is easy because you are so “smart”. So what happens when something is suddenly challenging?

Research is beginning to show that those of us who believed that our success in school was due to our innate intelligence actually give up faster and feel worse about ourselves than people who believed that life is something you have to work at.

Researchers gave a class of average children an easy aptitude test. In private, they told half of the kids “You did really well, you must be very smart”. They told the other half, “You did really well, you must have worked very hard.”

Then they offered the kids to take another, more challenging test.

Interestingly, the “smart” kids almost always turned down the opportunity. Having already achieved a “smart” label they didn’t want to risk failing and no longer looking smart.

The “hard working” kids, on the other hand, almost always accepted the challenge, because they wanted to keep looking like hard workers.

Even more interestingly, the “hard working” kids persisted at difficult questions longer than the “smart” kids, and when asked later on which was their favourite puzzle, usually chose the most difficult one.

“Smart” kids gave up very easily, saying “I guess I’m not good at this one” and when asked which puzzle was the best, chose the one they found easiest.

If any of you “smart” kids out there weren’t nodding your heads in recognition at the beginning, I bet you are now.

I recognize myself in these studies, so does my friend The Farm Fairy, and PH is a perfect example of the “smart” effect.

PH is a genius.

He was accepted by Mensa when we were still in University and they told him that he was probably the 16th smartest person in the province.

But he did not get good grades in University.

He had never had to work before.

his parents say he began recognizing words at 18 months old

Even though his parents held him to very high standards, PH coasted through the public school system.

He never had to exert himself in order to achieve a good grade.

Even when his own mother was his English teacher, and marking him as strictly as she could, she was forced to give him the English award, after taking his work to her fellow teachers and saying “my son has the top grade in the class…” they looked through his work and agreed  – she had to do what no teacher ever wants to have to do with their child – put him at the top of the class.

PH is smarter than 99.9% of the people he walks past on the street, and when you’re that smart, you don’t have to try very hard to do better than the others.

The problem is that when you are told again and again that you are innately more gifted than other people, and your success is put down to that (even if it’s true), it changes how you approach problems.

When you suddenly come up against something that is difficult, you think, “uh oh. My innate abilities don’t seem to be helping me with this one,” and you give up because you don’t have any other tools in your mental toolbox. Either you’re brilliant at something, or you aren’t.

So PH holds himself to ridiculously high standards.

He loves curling and did very well in junior leagues as a kid. But when he rejoined a curling league a couple of years ago he came home every Tuesday night in a foul mood, because he hadn’t thrown as well as he expected.

He hasn’t played softball in years, but if he joins a charity softball event, he curses himself for every missed hit.

When he finds himself in the vicinity of a piano, he lays his hands on the keys and beautiful music floats into the air. After a few minutes he hits a wrong note and curses, and stops – he used to be able to play that piece perfectly.

I took longer – I was reading by age 3, though

I got off a little luckier in life than PH did.

…First of all, I’m not as smart.

I was a bright kid with an aptitude for English – I remember that in the IOWA exams I scored well into the 90th percentile for language, and people are still impressed that I can spell chrysanthemum off the top of my head. But I’m no genius.

Secondly, I was in private schooling up until grade 8. Every year my teacher would be impressed with me for a week or two, and then would start raising his/her standards. It wasn’t good enough for me to be better than the other kids. I had to be better than myself if I wanted a good grade.

I remember getting a D (the lowest grade I had EVER received by a country mile) on a test that I hadn’t bothered to study for, because I knew the book inside out. I am willing to bet you money that it was still better average, but my teacher knew that I hadn’t put a drop of effort into it, and she wasn’t afraid to give me a D to shake me up a bit.

So I did have to work at school, up until we moved back to Canada and I got put into the public school system. The teachers there were too busy, too jaded, and had too many kids who couldn’t read at all to bother with trying to demand higher excellence from me. They were just pleased that they didn’t have to worry about me.

I coasted the rest of the way.

Nevertheless, before I moved North, my demanding private school teachers taught me how to take notes, how to study, how to write a difficult test, and how to meet deadlines.

I did fine in University… with a lot of hard work.

But generally, I have always given up easily. When I try something, and fail, I think “I can’t do it” and that is it. I place a lot of my value as a person on my intelligence, and when I start feeling stupid, I get really depressed. I fear failure. Failure is my enemy.

…just like those “smart” kids who declined the more challenging test.

I should have the 10,000 hour rule stapled to my brain.

I have always wanted to be an author, but when I sit down to write, I start thinking about how much my writing sucks (if you think I’m hard on Stephenie Meyer, you should hear me critique myself…) and the page stays blank.

The Domesticated Nerd Girl recently made a post about her love of drawing, and how she gets discouraged when genius doesn’t flow instantly from her pencil.

We had to wait until our thirties to discover it, but we’re learning – that (shock and surprise) talent takes effort and time.

So PH and I don’t want Owl to be “smart”. We want him to be “hard working”.

So far, it could go either way. Owl IS hardworking. He loves a challenge, whether it’s the daily failure of trying to put on his own shoes (on the wrong foot and backwards) or the challenge of climbing every piece of furniture, every chair, and every rock he can find.

But people are already starting to tell us that he’s smart.

Mind you, parents are always told that.

But Daycare Lady says he focuses longer than the other kids his age (19 months), and is starting to outdo the two year olds on counting, identifying objects and so on.

Maybe he is smart, but his chance of success in life is much more closely tied to his love of the challenge.

So we try really hard to not tell Owl that he’s smart.

Oh, it happens occasionally, because somehow “congratulations, you did it through hard work and determination and not through innate ability!” doesn’t slide off the tongue as easily.  But we’re really trying not to overdo it.

We’ll raise him on the 10,000 hour rule, instead.

And meanwhile, if I want to become the famous author I’ve always wanted to be, I’ve got to log more writing time, otherwise I’ll be eighty before it happens, if I live that long.

In Which Carol Takes Fiction Way Too Seriously

Tags

children, empathy, love, motherhood, movie scenes, movies, pain, parenthood, Sophie's choice, tears

So, there we are, having a nice evening together watching a documentary on Hollywood and the way it has presented the Holocaust. We found it on Netflix, which has a wealth of fascinating documentaries which we are slowly going through, because we are GIANT DORKS.

Anyway, we’re watching and it’s all well and good until they go and spring this on me:

A scene from Sophie’s Choice. Specifically, THE scene from Sophie’s Choice.

YES. THAT SCENE. Come on, even people like me, who have never seen Sophie’s Choice, have an idea about what her choice is. I wish to all things holy I still only had a vague idea.

I didn’t know details. Friends had told me not to watch the movie, and I listened to them. And then they went and sprang it on me anyway and now I feel like I can never get my brain clean again.

Have you ever watched a movie scene like that? Something that makes you wish with your whole heart and soul that you could do a complete Eternal Sunlight Of The Spotless Mind on yourself so you would no longer have that memory adding pain to your existence?

When I was a kid, most of those moments were to do with death and gore:

The dead body from Stand By Me, who shocked me with his open eyes.

A tv movie about Jack The Ripper, which only showed blood-spattered walls and a vomiting policeman, but which played on my imagination with all of the sinister genius of Hitchcock.

A shot of a dead soldier from the Gulf War, burned beyond recognition, who haunted me (especially in dark stairwells, where my imagination always placed him walking up behind me) for years afterwards.

Thankfully, I am getting better about my dead body phobia. I went through the Catacombs in Paris (terrified, but I did it). I only shudder slightly when I open the freezer at work. PH still can’t convince me to attend a Bodies exhibition, but that movie last night did spring a charred body in a crematorium oven and while I screamed, it did not haunt me.

But there is another kind of scene that has always tended to bother me, and that usually has to do with the death or a parent or the death of a parent’s child. You’d think it would be the death of animals, and it’s true that I will cry over Old Yeller far more than I will cry over Jack Dawson, and that the inevitable death of a German Shepherd is often the most bothersome scene in your standard thriller movie. But my real soft spot is children.

There’s something about the parent-child bond which has always triggered my emotions strongly.

I consider the parent-child relationship to be the “romance” of children’s literature, and I will weep over a child’s reunion with his parent in a way that I rarely do in adult romances.

I sobbed when I watched Juno and heard the words “would you like to meet your son?”

I burst into tears reading a For Better of For Worse compendium, when April is drowning and John is reaching for his daughter and thinks “if I do one more thing in life, please let me do this”.

Tears like that – they’re good. They’re healing.

But there are other scenes…

Like the scene from The Pianist, where the woman sobs over a baby she accidentally smothered when hiding from the Nazis. That one tormented me, and came flooding back years later when Owl was a newborn Babby.

Like the part of Schindler’s List (the book, not the movie) where a baby is dashed against a wall.

And just recently, a scene from a documentary on Hiroshima (yes, I know, I should probably stop watching war documentaries) where a woman retells the death of her child, and how she wasn’t brave enough to stay with her as she died. That scene broke both PH and me, and for days afterwards one of us would shout “OH, NO! THAT SCENE IS IN MY HEAD” and the other would come swooping in with a distraction as quickly as possible.

Well. I thought that Hiroshima scene was the ultimate in empathetic suffering. For a bit I felt as though my heart could never be whole again. That kind of scene tortures me in a way that a hundred charred soldiers never could. But thankfully time is kind, and the memory has faded a bit.

And then they went and sprang that AWFUL SCENE FROM SOPHIE’S CHOICE on me.

Guys, I know it sounds stupid, because it’s just a movie and it’s fiction, but I am in a lot of mental anguish right now. I can’t really explain why I find it SO BAD. I can’t blame motherhood, either, because I know it would have hurt me every bit as much if I had seen this years ago.

I keep alternately suffering the unspeakable horror of the moral dilemma, the unendurable guilt of the choice, and the heartbroken and terrified betrayal of the child as she is given to death and carried from the person whom we trust above all others to cherish and protect us – Mother.

To try and keep myself from falling into the mother’s place and then the child’s again and again and again, I read last night until I started falling asleep over my book (which NEVER happens). I spent all night dreaming up reunions between mother and child in which I was both the overjoyed mother and the unforgiving and traumatised daughter. I spent hours of dream time trying to inject a dog with morphine who, in my dream, was the little girl – I needed to numb her pain.

The pain of it is messing up my mind.

In driving between dog training appointments today, I ended up on the wrong road – and have NO MEMORY of how I got there. I WAS on the correct road, but I must have turned right at a stop light and continued up a totally different street COMPLETELY UNAWARE OF WHAT I HAD DONE. I didn’t realize my mistake for a good 2 kilometres, and how the mistake even happened will forever be a mystery. I can see making a wrong turn, but how do you make a completely unnecessary turn and not even know about it?

Then, during the appointment, I was supposed to go out, get something from my car, and then knock and ring the doorbell, to help accustom the dog to people coming and going from the house. I just walked right back in again, with no knock. I had totally forgotten the purpose of my being outside at all.

When I got home and reported all of this, PH took away my right to drive for the day. He’s a little concerned about me.

I’m pretty my reaction to the scene is not normal, otherwise there would be big disclaimers on the scene warning people not to operate heavy machinery after watching.

I mean, it’s a famous scene and it won Streep an Oscar, but when I google it, it is casually mentioned as a powerful and moving scene by people who rate the movie highly and “love” it. It is a powerful scene. Streep deserved her award. But I wish the movie had never been made, because then I wouldn’t be hurting so much right now.

I told you that PH has been trying to convince me to go to the Bodies exhibition in Vegas on our summer vacation, and my attitude has been HELL NO. But if I could wipe my mind clean of that scene… if Meryl Streep’s words and if that little girl’s scream of hurt and fear could be wiped from my brain… I would attend that exhibition joyfully.

What movie scene has affected you the most? What’s your achilles heel?

Self-Esteem Does Not Run Rampant In Our Household

Me: “So apparently Helper Lady was going on to Daycare Lady about what a great husband she thinks you are.”

PH: “What? Why?”

Me: “Do you mean why were they talking about you, or why does she think you’re a great husband?”

PH: “Both.”

Me: “No idea. Daycare Lady was just like “Helper Lady was telling me what a great husband she thinks PH is!” and I was like “he is, but how does she know that?” and Daycare Lady said “well, of course PH is a very nice man, and Helper Lady is very intuitive. She says she can see how well cared for and happy you are and that he is clearly a good husband to you.”

PH: “Yeah! Don’t you forget it, either!”

Me: “I know you’re a great husband! Otherwise your nickname on my blog would be “Needs Improvement Husband” or “Somewhat Acceptable Husband” instead of “Perfect Husband”.

PH: “You should change my name.”

*Helper Lady apparently also commented on the fact that I am “beautiful because she doesn’t wear makeup”. I take this to mean that she admires my inner strength at being brave enough to walk around with a unibrow and dog blood on my cheek every day. 

 

Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 – How Can I Describe Meyer’s Writing?

Tags

adjectives, adverbs, books, characterization, characters, criticism, description, Harry Potter, jk rowling, literary criticism, literature, reviews, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, writing

Remember how I talked about cramming the universe into a teaspoon when it came to comparing J K Rowling with Stephenie Meyer? Well, when I actually started on discussing the writing, I discovered that I had to split it into two. This is the second half of round 3. The reason it took so long was that it was STILL getting out of hand. Therefore, there will also be a Round 5. It’ll probably stop there. Probably.

In this round, we will look more closely at the way these two ladies write – specifically, their use of description and their ability to create unique characters… or the lack thereof.

(A note about spoilers: I will keep Harry Potter spoilers to a minimum, only letting go the kind of information that you could pick up from your standard movie trailer and have probably picked up on already, unless you live in a world without other people. Twilight spoilers, on the other hand, abound, because I can’t “spoil” Twilight any more than I can “spoil” a compost heap.)

This

Tags

babies, language, living in the now, motherhood, parenthood, speech, thought, toddlers

Owl and I are taking our evening bath. He’s a little overtired, on account of taking an unusually early nap that day. In order to calm him down I hold him on my arms and lay him on his back, with my chin resting gently on his head and my arms around his scrawny little chest. We breathe deeply together for a while, and Owl seems to become fascinated with this new view of the shower head and the shower caddy above us.

Owl: Deesh? *points upwards*

Me: What do you see?

Owl: Deesh. O? P? Q? Deesh!

Me: I don’t know what deesh is. I see the shower head, and the caddy, and the soap bottles, and my razor, and the loofah, and the wall, and the shower curtain…

Owl: Deesh! DEESH! Up? A… B… C… I… J… Deesh? *points again*

Me: Tell me more.

Owl: O… P… Q… Esh… Deesh? WOW! Yeah. Deesh? Up? UP! Deesh!

Me: What’s “deesh?” Do you mean “this”?

Owl: Yeah.

Me: Do you mean “what’s this?”

Owl: No.

Me: You don’t mean “what’s this?”

Owl: No.

Me: Just “this?” Only “this?”

Owl: Yeah. Yeah. Deesh.

Me: Only this.

Owl: Deesh.

He heaves a contended sigh and we lay there snuggled together, staring upwards, and thinking about Only This. 

 

Happy Hunger Games: And May The Irony Be Ever In Your Favour.

Tags

books, critique, humans, irony, literature, movie reviews, movies, reflection, reviews, sheep, the hunger games, violence

PH and I FINALLY got to see The Hunger Games! It took us a while to find a sitter, but my friend Pug Mama saved the day and took Owl for the afternoon yesterday.

You all know how excited I have been to see this movie. I was practically bouncing with anticipation as we waited for the movie to start.

So, now I’ve seen it.

I’m not sure what I think.

Overall, it was good. Really. I mean, the book is pure action, so it’s hard to mess up. The best thing was that they didn’t just turn it into a pure action thriller. They actually put soul into the movie.

• The Reaping and the death of Rue were both excellently done. Very moving.

• The plot is pretty much all there, and they actually added some behind-the-scenes stuff that you don’t get to see in the book, because the book is told in the first person. That was pretty cool. Seneca Crane, for example, was a much bigger character than in the book (and I LOVED how they handled his, er, final scene).

• Several scenes were PERFECTLY set up for Catching Fire. Just watching them, PH and I were exchanging meaningful looks, knowing how these scenes would be reflected in the next movie and come to take on new meaning
  based on subsequent events.

• Things LOOKED right (well, except the Cornucopia, which was bizarre). You know things are done well when you recognize the character right off, and I recognized almost everyone).

I only have three serious complaints.

I mean, yes, there were small things, peas in the mattress so to speak, like Haymitch being far too pleasant (“If only Heath Ledger were still alive…” says PH), Peeta’s eyes being the wrong colour, the deletion of certain important lines (“Stay alive” being one of them) and so on. But those little niggling details will always be present in any movie adaption of a book.

No, there are only three real problems with the movie. The odd thing is, while the touches I was missing were small, they really affect how I feel about the movie. These two differences make the difference between “yeah, that was pretty good” and “OH YEAH I’M WATCHING THIS OVER AND OVER”.

Complaint 1: The PG effect.

You weren't planning on seeing anything in this movie, were you?

I was somewhat prepared for this. I knew it was listed as PG13, so I figured they’d HAVE to tone it down.

In fact, I thought they’d totally alter Cato’s death, so I was surprised that they showed as much of it as they did.

And it wasn’t as bad as some movies, like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, where people manage to stab and kill their enemies without getting so much as a drop of blood on their swords (I’m sorry, but when find yourself taming down C.S. Lewis, you have toned things down too much). But this was the frigging HUNGER GAMES, man.

Now, I’m no lover of blood and gore. I don’t watch horror or even thriller movies. I even avoid your standard action flick. But sometimes, when they tone down bloody moments in book, the impact of the scene is lessened.

This happened with The Golden Compass. They took an awesome coming-of-age story and tried to aim it at the under-10 set and it didn’t work. If they had left in the blood, the betrayal, and the sexual overtones, they would have had a better movie and more income.

Well, The Hunger Games wasn’t that bad. But in their attempt to keep it PG13, they blurred out a lot of the action. They did the jiggly-camera thing CONSTANTLY during action sequences, so you couldn’t really see WHAT was going on, and I found it highly annoying. I came to watch a movie, not to get seasick. I realize you don’t want the 13 year olds to see too much, but I object to the fact that I don’t get to see what’s going on either.

Complaint 2: The Peeta Complication

I wasn’t wholly satisfied with the whole Peeta romance thing. I’m not sure that they did a good job in conveying how conflicted Katniss is about Peeta:

1. He saved her life.
2. She promised her sister she would do her best to win.
3. Winning means that Peeta has to die.
4. Which means she might have to kill him.

Exactly how am I supposed to work a thank-you in there? Somehow it just won’t seem as sincere if I’m trying to slit his throat.

And she can’t figure out Peeta’s game. On the one hand, he announces his big love for her, holds her hand and so on. He wants to train together. He compliments her.

On the other hand, he’s the one who convinces Haymitch to actually make an effort and give them some help. He is the one who demands to hear strategy, who closets himself with Haymitch and comes out with an act to charm the cameras.

He hasn’t accepted his death. He is already fighting hard to stay alive…. Which…means kind Peeta Mellark, the boy who gave me the bread, is fighting hard to kill me.

So then she thinks she has started playing his game, too – acting for the cameras, playing up the show. But is it just a show?

And speaking of shows…

Complaint 3: Self-Awareness, Or Lack Thereof

How despicable we must seem to you.

Now, for this, I would love to hear from people who have watched the movie but have not read the books, because I may be underestimating people.

The movie-makers did a good job of portraying the emotions of the movie, the general awfulness of being thrown into an arena to fight for your life while people cheered, and the sickness of the popularity of The Games. They kept in all kinds of important minute details (by the way, I loved the touch of dressing the Avoxes like mimes).

But there were a couple of potential finishing touches that they seemed to shy away from…

When you read The Hunger Games, and its sequel, Catching Fire, there are certain recurring (I would even say near-constant) themes whenever Katniss has to interact with people from The Capitol, and when she is in the midst of The Games.

Your average person from The Capitol has no idea what it is like to be Katniss. Their decadent life is so far removed from her life of hardship and struggle that they completely lack the ability to empathize with her. They simply don’t realize or think about how much her life must suck.

While you do have evil tyrants like President Snow around, your average person from The Capitol is simply thoughtless.

What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?

Katniss’s prep team is a perfect example.

They are portrayed as kindly, friendly people who genuinely care about Katniss. And yet they are constantly saying thoughtless little things that show how little they understand Katniss’s situation.

It’s hard to hate my prep team. They’re such total idiots.

And then there are characters like Effie Trinket – almost admirable in many ways, but with that Capitol taint on them.

Effie takes both of us by the hand and, with actual tears in her eyes, wishes us well. Thanks us for being the best tributes it has ever been her privilege to sponsor. And then, because it’s Effie and she’s apparently required by law to say something awful, she adds “I wouldn’t be surprised if I got promoted to a decent district next year!” Then she kisses us each on the cheek and hurries out, overcome with either the emotional parting or the possible improvement of her fortunes.

Much of that is eradicated from the movie. Oh, you see the cheering crowds in the Caesar Flickerman audience. You see Effie’s cheerful “Happy Hunger Games!” and you are certainly aware of the fact that this is being treated like a big show. But at any point (and tell me, those of you who haven’t read the books) do you realize that WE are The Capitol?

There are two layers to The Games. The first is the primary purpose of the Games – to instil fear and despair into the districts, while also giving them something to dream about – the hope of winning The Games.

But to the people in the Capitol, it’s just a great reality TV show. They don’t think of the kids going into the arena as being real human beings. They don’t wonder how it would feel to be ripped from your family and thrown to your near-certain death for the entertainment of others. Even when they are moved to tears by Katniss’s protection of her sister, or Peeta’s star-crossed lover act, they don’t really register that these are real people.

I think the movie could have riffed on that more than they did. We see people in Districts 11 and 12 watching the Games, but they are watching straight footage – the same thing we see on the big screen. And yet, in the book, The Hunger Games is clearly a TV show, with narration, editing, and “highlights”. They could have shown us the SHOW – not the Caesar Flickerman show, but the actual Hunger Games show. They could have dressed it up to look like Survivor.

Playing Survivor is so much like being a contestant on the Hunger Games, at times I find it hard to believe that author Suzanne Collins hasn’t been a Survivor contestant herself. – Stephen Fishbach, Survivor Finalist.

And they could have shown the people in The Capitol, sitting around, watching children die while they munched popcorn.

Just like us.

Our society is only a step or two away from that of Panem’s Capitol, and Suzanne Collins isn’t gentle in trying to get that across to us. The way that Katniss looks at the Capitol – well, isn’t that how many third world countries look at us?

See how we fret over a few extra pounds, while children starve to death in the same countries that provide us with our morning breakfast cereal?

See how we put ourselves into survival situations for the hope of a million dollars, when people everywhere are living that situation for the hope of… well… survival?

They say the average child has seen 8,000 murders on television before finishing elementary school. By age 18, that number has increased to 200,000.

We can say “oh, yeah, but they aren’t REAL murders. It’s acting. We don’t sit and watch real people die for our entertainment.” And that’s true. But our society is tame by historical standards, as Suzanne Collins once again points out with all of the subtlety of a sledge hammer.

Don’t most Capitol characters sport Roman names? What were the Gladiators, but tributes forced to fight for their lives while people cheered?

Human beings are naturally bloodthirsty. I don’t like it, but it’s true.

So, someone wrote a book commenting on it. Then we took that book and turned it into a movie, and we all turned up in droves, excited to watch children die.

How those tributes would despise us.

Do you know what have seen in stores? A small book with glossy colour pages.   It’s a Tribute Guide.

Each page has a picture of one of the tributes, and their name, age, district etc. Even sicker, it openly addresses itself to “Citizens of Panem”.

So here’s the movie company, promoting their movie, marketing it to us as though we were those Capitol fans, excited for the 74th annual Hunger Games. And there’s no finger pointing, no attempt to make us feel ashamed.
Why would there be? Suggest that we are sick to buy their merchandise, or to see their movie? That would be craziness, surely. So they don’t.

They don’t try to hold up a mirror to us, to make us ask ourselves “are these Capitol people really all that different from us?”

Of course they don’t.

They are like The Capitol themselves, selling sensationalism, selling death, even as they tone down the gore and blur the death scenes, so that parents can feel better about bringing their children in to join the fun.

But I wish they had. It sounds ironic, but that would have made me feel a lot better about the whole thing.

Even as I wish that the movie had been bloodier.

Emerald City Comicon – OH, MY! (Or, In Which Owl Meets George Takei)

Tags

artists, comicon, comics, Dinosaur Comics, emerald city comicon, george takei, memes, Questionable Content, seattle, Something Positive, star trek, The oatmeal

PH and I drove to Seattle for Emerald City Comicon. We’ve been looking forward to it for months, ever since we found out that George Takei, a bunch of PH’s favourite web comic artists, Christopher Lloyd, and a bunch of great voice talents would be there.

My only disappointment was that Journey Quest didn’t seem to be making an appearance. Then Christopher Lloyd dropped out and I was more diappointed.

Nevertheless, the lure of George Takei was strong, and PH and I haven’t had a trip to Seattle since Owl was born. We went to stay in our usual motel, a sleazy inn with rates to match, but with the added benefit of in-room private Jacuzzis in some of the rooms. Carol Heaven. Probably also Chlamydia Heaven, but so far I’ve been lucky.

In preparation for meeting George Takei, I ordered a special onesie for Owl. After all, you don’t get to meet a Meme Hero every day.

I'm going to meet who, now?