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I like kids' movies a lot. Mostly because I'm somewhat childish and easily enthralled by simple stories of good versus evil. I like to think that I can still see the world through a child's perspective and I really like children's movie's because I think they carry that magic of childhood that you can sometimes forget.

I think some children's movie do a good job of reminding us that life isn't just a joke for kids. In Journalism last year I remember someone was talking about stress management for kindergartners and someone's response was, "they're kindergartners. What do they have to be stressed about?" But when you're in kindergarten your world is just as dynamic as it is when you're in high school. Maybe you don't have to worry about college apps or standardized tests yet but that doesn't mean you don't have social and emotional issues you have to work out. In my head I equate middle school with literal hell and I know many other people who feel the same way. But I think now that we're out of middle we tend to laugh at the problems and emotions of middle schoolers. We say they don't have real problems and brush them off as whiny preteens but I would rather eat a shoe than go back and have my middle school problems again. That's why I like movies like Coraline, Inside Out, and ParaNorman. Because they kinda remind me to get off of my high horse.

I'm also a fan of the classic unlikely-hero-saves-the-day kind of children's movie. The movies with the deep morals about believing in yourself or following your heart or whatnot. I mostly like these because I'm kinda sappy and I dig all that inspirational crap. Like I even wrote one of my essays about Kung Fu Panda and how it affects my life. I love character development. And while often times a clean cut dichotomy of good and evil doesn't lend itself to a lot of personal growth and discovery for characters, I think it works out in kids' movies anyways. Like in Kung Fu Panda. Each movie Po goes on a whole emotional journey and even if the movie is meant to be comedic and lighthearted, you really see him grow into himself. (I also love to read into things that aren't that deep.) In Whitney Houston's Cinderella, the best Cinderella movie ever made, we see Cinderella come into herself. And we see the same of Manolo in Book of Life. 

Barbie: Princess Charm School and High School Musical, to Kubo and the Two Strings and Charlotte's Web, I think there's a lot about kids' movies that if often overlooked and underappreciated. And while I like a lot of children's movies I do not support movies like Hoodwinked because they are just objectively bad.

Fear

Fear is a natural response to being put in danger. When our safety is threatened we get anxious, our hearts beat faster, our stomachs start to hurt. Everyone has different fears for different reasons and some are reasonable and some aren't.

When I'm anxious while walking to my car at night in the dark, it's because I've been trained to see danger in that situation. Whenever we're anxious it's because we know that a situation has the potential to be just fine but it also has the potential to be dangerous, or at least we think it does. Sometimes the danger is physical danger (I am anxious about that knife being so close to the edge of the table because it could fall and hurt me/someone) or it could be a social "danger" (I'm anxious to get on this stage and sing because I might embarrass myself and no one will like me). I have OCD which like other anxiety disorders is characterized by seeing danger where it's not (every anxiety disorder is different for example OCD means you do compulsions based around the fear or the obsession).

I'm afraid of geese which is reasonable because geese attack people and are dangerous. I'm also afraid of boats which is not reasonable because there's no way a boat can hurt me.  There are also things that are dangerous and can hurt me that I'm not afraid of. I'm not afraid of fire but fire can hurt me. But is fire something that I should be afraid of? Is it stupid or arrogant to not be afraid of something that can hurt you? What is the level of danger that makes something a reasonable fear? Maybe I'm not afraid of fire because I know it won't hurt me unless I touch it and I know I am in control of whether or not I touch it. Also, if I ever touched it I could easily remove myself from the situation. But if I were in a house fire I think it would be natural for me to be afraid of fire.

I think whether a fear is rational or not also depends on your reaction to it. If I was afraid of clowns and so I didn't go to any haunted houses, people would think that was normal. But if I'm afraid of walking to my car in the dark and so I refuse to do so, people may think that was a bit more unreasonable. But  there's a larger possibility for danger in the latter than the former. So why is that one more unreasonable? OCD is based on doing unreasonable things because of a fear. It's labeled as OCD once it significantly interferes with your life and this partially explains it. It takes no effort to not go to a haunted house whereas I have to go out of my way to make sure I never have to walk in the dark.

I'm not really sure where this was going I kinda just wanted to say what I was thinking about.

Church Camp

I've run out of meaningful things to talk about on this blog so I figure I'll talk about my experiences. Many summers of my life I spent time at church camp. As someone with religious parents, I’ve been to a variety of different types of church camp. The one I went to for most of my younger years was the outdoorsy, “connecting the Word of God with the World of God” type. Later years were focused less on team building and nature-y things and more on moral discussions and pop/rock church music. I never made that many friends because I was pretty shy most of my life but that just gave me a better position from which to watch all of the summer unfold. And I feel it’s only right to share the lessons I learned.

In elementary school one summer we did a rock climbing thing. There were these kids who for our purposes we will refer to as George and Elroy. We all went on a trip to some cliffs in Wisconsin after spending time learning how to climb safely and correctly. George and Elroy were competing for the affections of a gal named Jane, because what is summer camp without romance and drama? Jane had made it clear that she was only interested in George but Elroy wouldn’t back off. Everything George did, Elroy tried to best him. In Wisconsin, we were climbing one day casually with George and Elroy in a race to the top. They seemed to be neck and neck until suddenly George and several others started jumping back down. Elroy laughed and continued and it was almost cartoonish the way things played out. He dragged himself all the way up and pulled himself right into a hornet's nest. So if your friends all jump off a cliff, you should probably jump too.

In 9th grade, I went to a little weekend retreat where I had so many great experiences that I was just rearing to go the next year. We were put into small groups for Bible-related activities and discussions about leadership and listened to religious seminars. One day, we had a nice Christian sex-ed talk. We joined with a couple small groups and filed into a small lecture hall. As we were all sitting down, each of us was handed a bookmark. The one I received had a picture of a smiling young gal and said “I can make people happy without taking my clothes off.” As a young impressionable girl whose mind is filled only with sex as an attempt to please others, this changed my world. I felt so enlightened every time I looked at that bookmark.  We spent a lot of time doing role plays. How to tell your boyfriend that you don’t want to have sex. How to tell your mother when you walk in on your dad sleeping with the neighbor. We did a fun little voting game about when it’s okay to have sex or not. I learned a lot that day, like there aren’t that many different ways to say “no sex is safe sex” and church leaders don't like to acknowledge that gay sex exists. But the takeaway they made sure we left with was: If you think you’re a STUD, you’ll lose the U and you’ll just have STD.

There’s lots to learn at church camp about all different things and I think whether or not I enjoyed all those years of camp, I certainly grew from them. These are just two stories that I happened to think of but that have no real connection to each other. They’re just some of the great things I learned in my youth. (If anyone's interested I have many more stories and lessons available to those who ask including but not limited to things around solicitation, frogs, and the scientific method.)

One of the Guys

Jordan was my neighbor since I could remember. He was in fourth grade when I was in kindergarten but that’s my only reference for how old he might have been. We had played together forever and I loved him. He taught me that you could get gum by peeling away the stems of this plant and chewing on the insides. He put worms down the back of my swimsuit and then showed me how if you cut them in half then the top half grows a new body. He tried to skateboard off of his roof and also tried to jump from his garage roof onto a slip’n’slide waiting below in the yard. He told the worst jokes ever like “Why was the watermelon different from the cantaloupe? Because the cantaloupe was orange.” He was my best friend.

He was older than me and bigger than me and I was always struggling to keep up. He had friends his age and I was just a little girl who his parents probably made him humor. But I think I held my own alright. When he was the only one who could climb our tree, I taught myself how to. When he wanted to play football in the yard, I tackled right back. Over my dead body was I going to let anyone beat me. No matter how much bigger or stronger or taller. And certainly not a boy.

His family moved away when I was in first grade and then I was left alone to play with kids my own age. My new best friend was a girl and we were the biggest, strongest, and tallest in our class. We were faster than all the boys at recess and our chain was unbreakable when we played red rover. But still the boys didn't share the balls with us. Of course some days were jungle gym days and other days we all played tag or red rover as a class, but every other day the boys played with balls and the girls played make-believe games. Don't get me wrong I loved make-believe games but sometimes you're just more in the mood for kickball.

Throughout early elementary school I watched my female friends' soccer skills get ignored only for the boys' to be praised. I watched as I (objectively the most athletic girl in my class at the time) was never good enough to play with the boys at recess. I watched as other girls got teased for wearing pink and painting our nails and having sleepovers and being "girly girls". If my handwriting was neat then I was "too girly." Even playing board games at indoor recess, no one took us seriously. If a girl won then it was a fluke or we were cheating. If a boy won it was because he was good. Because if you're a girl, you're automatically bad at Risk.

I was already what one might call a tomboy but all of this pushed me to be as traditionally boyish as I could. I did everything to be "not like other girls." I was going to be smarter and stronger and better than every boy and they would have to acknowledge me then. I was going to prove that I was just as good. I was going to make the boys treat me like one of them.

By fourth and fifth grade I was mean. I did my best to intimidate every boy in my class because I thought it would earn me some respect. We got teased for playing "girly" games, making dolls out of erasers, talking during recess. We got kicked out of foursquare games and we weren't allowed to play this stupid building game in indoor recess. So I kicked shins, talked back to people, to show that I wasn't buying their superiority crap. I was smarter I earned a place at the top that gifted class but I still wasn't good enough.

In middle school, with all girls, it was like a breath of fresh air. I got the respect that I earned. If I was smart then people acknowledged that, if I was athletic, if I was fun. For once in my life I didn't have anything to prove. I was as successful as I pushed myself to be and there were no boys to tell me I wasn't worth as much.

Then I got to Uni. After 9 years of playing softball, the boys still didn't trust me to catch and throw in Ultimate Ball. For the record, I'm good at Ultimate Ball. In PE I got ignored. In class I got talked over. And I watched this happen to all of my friends as well. In any math or science class you can bet the person that people ask for help is gonna be a boy. Because you can't trust a girl to know anything. The "good" team in sports, plenty of boys and shockingly, there are less girls. Because girls can't play sports. The kids who are laughing and rolling their eyes as girls talk in class discussions are the boys. Because god forbid a girl have something valuable to say. Even in my friendships with boys I was defensive and scared. Because what if people thought I was just some boy-crazy slut? How I dress, how I act, what I do all seem to be check boxes on a scorecard for if I'm as good as the boys or not.

I'm sick of playing this game. I'm tired of running this never-ending race that I can never win to prove that I'm something I'm not. I don't care anymore if I make it to "one of the guys." My success is because of me and because I pushed myself and it's valid with or without the boys' stamp of approval. My intelligence, my athleticism, my character is not measured on the boys' scale. And I don't have to be as good as the boys. I'm better.

What the Future Holds

Thinking about college and what I want to do with my life is a lot of stress. Sometimes I just want to go to a small college,  double major in art and animation, and then move to Portland and have a my dream job at Laika Studios. I’d have a nice little apartment and a dog and just live life doing what I love. Too bad I can’t do that.

What I care most about in the world, though, is children. I care about making sure that children are safe and happy, and that all children have equal opportunities through equal education. I want kids to have schools that are safe and comfortable places. I care about there being up-to-date curricula and testing that are meant to help kids succeed. I care that schools are adequately funded so that kids can get a good education regardless of their family’s income. I care that schools are places where students are respected and respect each other. And most importantly, I care that students come out of schools well-educated and able to access all different things. I want the sky to be the limit.

Too often, though, public schools crumble because funding only goes to the schools in rich neighborhoods. Girls don’t feel safe or welcome in their own schools because of rampant sexism and sexual harassment. Kids experience constant institutionalized racism and the school to prison pipeline is going strong. All these things are so important to me to change and it seems like so much to do and I’m really just a kid. I know when I go into the world I’m going to be the girl that no one takes seriously, the black girl that is too angry about nothing, and the girl who’s always trying to make something out of nothing. And all of that seems really scary.

It seems scary for there to be so much to fix in the world and at times it seems like there’s no chance of ever just being happy. Because there are always going to be people who are treated unjustly and not given the same respect, rights, and opportunities as their more privileged peers. And as long as that’s happening, it seems so irresponsible of me to run off to Laika.

This blog post is kind of all over the place because I’m not sure what my point really is. How can you spend your life helping other people but also making sure that you can do the things that make you happy? I never feel more alive than when I’m talking about or working on injustice in schools or working with kids and yet I’m also not too great at handling the stress that comes with that either. Once could even argue that I don’t really have the right to be stressed because I’m not the one in the worst position. I disagree with that personally. Someone else always has it worse than you but that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to feel what you feel. It’d be a job that’s endlessly frustrating but also so important. But art makes me happy. So do I put my happiness on hold to follow my passion? Or do I ignore my passion in attempt to be happy?

Honestly those questions are dumb, though, because I can always do both.

Not Skinny

I find myself thinking a lot about what it means to be Not Skinny. I never am sure where I fit on the range from skinny to fat, only that I’m not skinny. I joke around about it a lot but my weight is one of the things I’m most uncomfortable with about myself. Every fitness testing  I dread height and weight because I know I’ll weigh too much for my height.  I’ll have to know my BMI isn’t what I want it to be. I stand there on the scale fearing that the person behind me in line will accidently look in and see the number on the scale. I know in my mind that it wouldn’t matter- even if it did happen, no one would care. But that doesn’t make me less ashamed as I wait for the teacher to record my weight.

I don’t know why exactly I’m so embarrassed. I spend hours going through Instagram and I see plenty of women who are Not Skinny and they have nothing to be ashamed of just like I have nothing to be ashamed of. A body is a body and people shouldn’t be made to feel bad for how theirs looks. I constantly see other women being praised for being “thick” and I feel that I could fit into that category myself. But thicker thighs and some kind of ass don’t make me feel better about my stomach rolls and love handles.

I find myself getting annoyed as I write this. I think I’m shallow to be honest. Why do I care if other people find my body attractive? I know I shouldn’t but I do. I often think things that contradict what I actually believe. In my heart I truly believe that if I were just smaller, if I took up less space then maybe people would like me more. This is crap and I know that I definitely wouldn’t like someone less for being Not Skinny. But it’s hard to convince yourself of that in the moment where you take up the most space on the couch or when you go out to a restaurant and see that everyone else is eating so little.

I’m questioning whether I actually want to write this or whether I’d rather start again and try to throw something together because this is too personal for me. Maybe it would be better to write about anything but body image issues but it’s tiring to censor myself so I’m just trusting that no one will mock me and that someone else will understand.

Getting to Know Me

I don’t know what to write. What is important enough to write an essay about and yet unimportant enough to share with a whole class or people you aren’t close with? I’ve been asking myself this for the past week as I’ve been trying and failing to write a satisfactory blog post. They say to write about something you care about but doing so is also to invite judgement. How do you write something that means something to you without seeming pretentious or fake-deep or trying too hard? The answer is you don’t. So why try?

I think I’m so used to being ashamed of the things I like that I end up being too afraid to actually enjoy them. As much as people say “be yourself” and “don’t worry what others think of you,” I think that’s something that significantly contrasts with our culture and society. We are taught to be ashamed of certain aspects of our life but to have no shame in other places. I think it’s very natural for people to have a hard time shaking fears that they will be judged for who they are and what they like.

At this point in my life, I’m pretty comfortable in who I am. I think. I love sharks and art and the 1975 Wonder Woman TV show. I sing a lot and watch the same four movies over and over and I dance really badly. I still won't really sing around other people because I'm afraid of sounding bad and making a fool of myself. I’m not exactly sure what I'm afraid would happen if someone didn't like my singing. There's some idea in my head that people wouldn't want to be friends with me if they heard. But that really makes no sense because I really doubt that people choose their friends based on their singing abilities. Sharks I love endlessly and shamelessly and I don't think I could be embarrassed over it if I tried. Art is a personal thing for me and so to openly share my art with others makes me feel vulnerable still but I think I've gotten past the shame. I know I have a ways to go before I'm unafraid to like what I like and want what I want but god knows I'm more secure than I was in middle school so overall I’m proud of myself. And maybe people do judge me for my dancing, but I try my best not to care.

Nonfiction Writing

We Hate Macon

Being one of two black girls in an English class that's reading a book about race and appropriation is an experience that I wouldn't say is particularly enjoyable. It's all too commonplace here at Uni though- being one of few or the only black person in a class. What makes it even less fun is that because I am mixed, white people often choose to forget that I am not any less of a black woman for that. Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach discusses the gray lines of white ally-ship, which can be a difficult conversation.

A lot of people want validation that they are indeed Not Racist and are "good white people" or such. Mansbach challenges this idea in saying that white people should be criticizing their whiteness openly as opposed to looking for ways to deny it. But often when discussing the book, I see white people in the class pushing whiteness off of themselves before they criticize whiteness. And this is essentially what made the class dislike Macon.

Macon talked about being “blacker” than the students at the BSU and more radical than John Brown and he had a lot of rhetoric that was intended to separate himself from white people. Being “down for the cause” doesn't take away your white privilege. It doesn't make you no longer a part of the power structure that constantly minimizes and oppresses people of color.

It felt almost as if the non-black majority of the class was reading the book and looking down on Macon for all the wrong reasons. People see him as an extreme (which obviously he is) and criticize based upon that but I think part of Mansbach’s intent was to show that Macon-esque thoughts are not at all uncommon. Few people go around robbing people in cabs and organizing Days of Apology, but it's not uncommon for people to speak about having or wanting to have an “honorary black card” or permission to say the n word because they're somehow different from other non black people and the rest of the white supremacist power structure.

We have a class full of Not Racist, rap listening, liberal non black people. And while there's nothing wrong with being any or all of those things, at times it can feel like an army of less extreme Macons and then the two black girls in the class.

Looking Back through the door

Looking back on Emma Donoghuge's Room is a sad-happy place to be. You see all that Ma and Jack have overcome, all they've accomplished. I thought that there would be no satisfying way to end this book. And yet, Donoghuge pulls through. 

We get to see so much character development from both Ma and Jack all in the final scene where they return to Room. We see how much they've really grown. One definite sign of growth is that Jack finally notices the smell in Room. In the beginning, he was so defensive of Room when Ma said it was stinky. Of course he would never notice a smell if he's lived his whole life surrounded in it.

Similarly, when they go back, Jack is confused because the shed looks too small to be Room. Jack's world grew significantly in his time outside as did he himself. Not only does Room seem physically smaller in comparison to the rest of the world but it seems much smaller in the sense that it would be much more confining. He is finally able to see it as the prison that it was and that Ma always saw it as. 

 And the most striking difference of all is definitely the last words of the book: “the door.” One of the first things you notice when you start reading the book is the anthropomorphization of certain objects and places in Room. It shows that he thinks they are the only ones and that they’re somehow special when actuality there are millions of other beds and rugs and walls. So when he finally calls Door “the door,” it shows massive personal growth. He’s learned about the world and his views expanded and he’s learned to accept that Room isn’t the limits of the universe. And they were finally able to move on.

Nick

In Room Old Nick is an awful but very smart character. All of his actions are thought out and like a true villain, everything he does adds to the gaslighting and abuse rained down on Ma. We see how smart he is with his construction of Room, making everything perfect so there is no way that his prisoner could escape. But what I would say is his greatest victory and most cruel thing he did in a sense was give Ma Jack.

Although Jack would eventually grow to save Ma's life, he also kept her trapped in that room for 5 years, forced her to keep up a facade with Jack to make sure he never found out the truth of the outside world. And possibly worse than that was that she was forced to pretend that she was okay with being in Room and being with Old Nick in order to protect her son.

The emotional burden of having to play into the games of your captor and abuser seems unimaginable and the way Ma deals with it is truly heroic, and in contrast that is what makes Old Nick so horrible.

Jefferson

In my opinion, Jefferson from A Lesson Before Dying is an extremely likable character. Despite the attitude he gives Ms Emma and Reverend Ambrose and his occasional shittiness to Grant, I think you can’t hold it against him. The kid is in an awful situation and through the entire book you can’t help but sympathize with him. But I think the main reason it’s so easy to sympathize with Jefferson is that he represents all of us (black America).

From the beginning we know that Jefferson’s trial isn’t fair and we feel helpless as the only defense they can give for the child is “he’s too stupid to be guilty.” When you try to dehumanize the innocent (or at least who we assume is innocent) that says something about the regard you hold for them. Also, the trial, because he was a black boy, was not ‘innocent until proven guilty’ but ‘guilty unless proven innocent.’ And we see this replicated today, with around 43% of people in jail being black, despite black people making up only approximately 12% of the American population. It shows that race based judicial injustice didn’t end with Jefferson.

Also, Grant talks a lot about how Jefferson represents all of his students. His conversations with Antoine about how being a teacher doesn’t really matter, trying to help the kids doesn’t really matter because they’ll grow up to “be the niggers they were born to be.” They talk about a cycle and how Jefferson and Grant and everyone else in their town just fits into the cycle and you can't break it. Jefferson represents the average kid in their town pretty closely.

And symbolically he represents black people as well. The talking about Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson reference how these distant people stand somehow for the people in their town. So if Jefferson too can be a hero then doesn't he stand for the people even more because they know him? If the boy cried out for Joe, will Jefferson cry out  for Jackie, will some other black boy someday cry out for Jefferson?

Cooked and Et

To me, as I was reading As I Lay Dying the most emotionally poignant scene in the book was the scene where Vardaman reacts to his mother’s death. All of the family members are dealing with their grief in their own ways and I can appreciate all of the different ways, but the raw sadness displayed in Vardaman’s chapter really gets to me.

He begins with a sense of loss almost. He stands on the edge of the porch and cries and narrates “I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn't so.” In my head I interpret this scene as a boy being so lost and so confused and so angry that all he can do to make sense of it all is to compare his mother to a dead fish.

He then is so obsessed with the life he can feel in himself and other beings. “The life in him runs under the skin, under my hand, running through the splotches, smelling up into my nose where the sickness is beginning to cry, vomiting the crying, and then I can breathe, vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise. I can smell the life running up from under my hands, up my arms, and then I cart leave the stall.” I read this as the boy is so sad that the fact that he is alive—the fact that the horse is alive—while his fish and his mother aren’t is sickening to him.

He sets loose the horses in a frenzy. So much emotion and anger built up that he was so frantic to pay this doctor back for what he did.

“I am not crying now. I am not anything. Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me. Vardaman. I am not anything. I am quiet. You, Vardaman. I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears,” Vardaman narrates after Cash and Dewey Dell come to him. He says he’s not anything; he feels empty. These couple sentences affected me the most probably. What’s left inside of Vardaman now that his mother is gone and his fury is gone?

His final lines of “Cooked and et. Cooked and et.” refer back to his fish analogy. It’s like he grows to understand over the course of this chapter what his mother’s death means.

I loved Vardaman so much because I felt a sense of emotional urgency in him that most of the others lacked. I felt that I got more emotional development over this one chapter of Vardaman’s than in Anse’s or Darl’s entire story.

Which is Better the Movie or the Book?

I really liked O Brother, Where Art Thou? and most of my friends that had seen it shared the opinion. It was an enjoyable movie and the songs and action were fun and the characters were likable.

When watching O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I saw it as more enjoyable when I viewed it as a stand-alone film as opposed to an adaptation of The Odyssey. The appeal of hero stories to me is definitely the characters and I think that the characters in O Brother, Where Art Thou? are more likable when they aren’t compared to the Odyssean characters. I want to watch the movie because I care about the story because of Everett or Tommy or whoever, not because I'm interested in the retelling of a heroic narrative that I've heard so many times before. The Odyssey wasn’t particularly likable in my opinion because neither Odysseus nor Telemachus were especially likable characters. So when I think of Everett as a version of Odysseus, I care less about his story.

However, I think that if you don't watch the movie as an adaptation of The Odyssey, the plot takes a hit. The movie seems to just be a jumble of events that don't seem to really have any strong connection. However, when you look at them in the context of The Odyssey, you begin to see the parallels and the story seems to come together a bit more. When watching the movie, the sirens, the lotus eaters, the cyclops, etc, all seem so random until you see them as their Odyssean counterparts.

So if possible, I believe that this movie is best seen as a combination of a stand-alone film and as a film adaptation. However, I think this is hard to do. I think either way you watch it, either the plot or the characters take a hit.

Crying

Throughout the entirety of The Odyssey, Odysseus cries all the time. In today’s modern society, masculinity seems to be a very fragile thing. Male friends in a modern context are often called gay or feminizing terms if they are physically affectionate with their male friends or if they show weakness of any sort.

Emotions like sadness and fear are seen as feminine and unacceptable for men to experience or display, but in The Odyssey, these emotions are supposed to be humanizing. When Odysseus cries it’s meant to endear him to us readers and show that he really is sad and he really is affected by being kept away from his life and family for so long.

Another instance of Odysseus showing “unmasculine” emotion is when he fears for his life when faced with fighting the horde of suitors. As we discussed in class, this could be a tactic to show the audience that the suitors were a reasonable foe for Odysseus and their slaughter was something to be admired, but still, a male hero being afraid isn’t something we’re too used to in modern contexts. It could be argued that this fear only enhances his masculinity because it makes him brave, in that he was afraid but he conquered his enemies anyways. Also, is it a trial if there is no fear? If he is confident all the time, what kind of hero would he be? There wouldn’t be any triumph; it’d just be an “I told you so” kind of ending.

However, all of these “weak” emotions are balanced out by a stereotypically male penchant for affairs with women and a thirst for blood. But either way, perhaps the gender roles in ancient Greece were different than those we are familiar with today.

Coraline

I love hero stories and I always have. They make you feel hopeful. Heroes show human potential; they prove that survival is possible no matter how poor the circumstances and how high the stakes. They tell you that if you fight hard enough you can make it through, even if you lose things along the way. And regardless of whether or not I think this is a realistic lesson, it still has value in that while you read that story, you believe you can win.

My hero is and has been Coraline Jones from Neil Gaiman's Coraline for a while. Coraline is a girl who after moving into her new home, discovers her other mother on the opposite side of a wall. The other world seems to be a perfect version of her own world where her parents are attentive to her and she has everything that she could wish for. And her other mother gives Coraline the opportunity to stay in this perfect world if she allows for buttons to be sewn into her eyes. Horrified at this proposition, Coraline refuses until the other mother takes her parents and Coraline is forced to the lives of her parents, three other children, and herself.

Neil Gaiman says in the foreword of the tenth anniversary edition of Coraline that he wrote it for his daughter. “Holly liked scary stories,with witches and brave little girls in them” according to Gaiman. I also like stories with witches and brave little girls. I like it so much when children beat adults with little or no help, when they defy the odds and beat the system despite being looked down upon and ignored. And Coraline is perfect because every child knows what it's like to be looked down upon and ignored. Through the entire book, no adult in Coraline’s life ever listens to her. Her parents are too focused on their work to pay attention to her and her neighbors simply don't listen. Even when she tries something as simple as correcting the pronunciation of her name and they don't listen at all. And because she's alone, she gets into a bad situation, but she gets out of it all on her own. She didn't need to rely on any adults to save herself. She could succeed on her own not because of them, but despite them, and that was something I really hung onto as a kid. That I could do it and I didn't need anyone else.

When Coraline is searching for an old well near her home, “It’s supposed to be so deep that if you fall in and look up, you’ll see a sky full of stars in the middle of the day,” the character Wybie says when she finds it. Coraline, as a self-proclaimed explorer, was fascinated by this idea and she wanted to see that sky full of stars. And unfortunately, she found that sky full of stars in the middle of the day in the other world. But one thing that I admire so much about Coraline is that this world was everything she wanted. Everything would've been easier for her had she just accepted the buttons in her eyes  and lived the "perfect" life. But Coraline listened to her intuition and she did what she felt was right, not what was easy.

“This is the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and found herself in darkest danger. Before it was all over Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, and had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face to face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds. This is the story of Coraline, who lost her parents, and found them again, and (more or less) escaped (more or less) unscathed.” This is what Neil Gaiman prefaces his book with and this is a pretty good summary of why the story means so much to me. Coraline was small for her age. She wasn't the biggest or the strongest or the one that anyone would have expected to win, but she still did it. She faced all of those things and still managed to win. Against overwhelming odds, she won. And she more or less escaped more or less unscathed. Everything wasn't perfect when she returned, the story wasn't over, not everything was okay, but as the boy said to her at the end, "It's not all bad, miss. Thou art alive. Thou art still living." Coraline is important to me because she's just a kid. She's just a little girl who was small for her age who found herself in darkest danger. And while her journey sucked, she's alive, she's still living. And for me it's the brave little girls like Coraline who manage to stay alive that make it worth trying when things get hard.