“I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice; had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay I have listened to so many amazing research topics in the…
I am in Portugal, alone, attending a conference and spending my birthday week in style. I have to add, that I miss Petit Joel like crazy (did I just type this for real) but I enjoy every second here in Porto. What an amazing, beautiful…
I tucked in my son for the night and realized again how quickly he changes. He goes in and out of the bed at night by himself to use the bathroom and is able to switch on the lights. But he could not do these things about a month ago. Kindergarten will start in September which is another huge, new chapter in his little life. He looks forward to it, without fear but rather excitement; I learn so much from him almost on a daily basis. My baby is not a baby anymore and grows up too quickly. Do I raise him in a good way? Am I a good mom? Can I raise him in a way to fight stereotypes later? The other day he told me what he wants to be when he grows up. He switches from pilot to doctor to astronaut (all fine with me, ha!) and I basically tell him he can do and be anything he wants to do and be.
If you followed my blog for a while you know that I love to listen to playground talk. I don’t really engage but I listen. [I always carry my moleskin notebook with me to get my thoughts on paper, especially stuff like this because it initiated this blog post]. So two mom’s spoke about how they hate it when their sons bring up any interests in let’s say “feminine things”. “This is not good for my son and he most certainly will not become a hairdresser or use makeup. He wants to use my makeup all the time. I think he is so weird because he wants to use my nail polish,” one mom says and I am inhaling and exhaling deeply. Don’t ever tell your son he is weird just because he wants to use your nail polish! Why not just raise my son to be a kind, a gentlemen and a confident person who is free enough to follow their dreams? Whatever they might be.
I want to share a couple of things that work for me in this never-ending struggle or battle to educate and raise my son. We mothers signed up for this challenge when we got pregnant and nobody warned us. [Even if someone would have told me how difficult it will be sometimes, I would not have believed it since I know and will make everything better and different, duh!] This is one approach how I educate and raise my son: I let him cry if he wants to. I never tell him that he should not cry because he is a boy, or “only girls cry” and BS like this. I don’t want to raise a robot. He has feelings. He can cry. I also want to be his role model and I see and feel how he observes me. Questioning things, asking, researching, he wants to know what is going on. I can see how a certain type of behavior like heavy smoking and drinking, domestic violence etc. within a family can really mess these little people up.
Further, I think another important point is to just let him be himself. I let him chose what color he wants and won’t buy blue toothbrushes for him just because. The last time we bought new ones he wanted a yellow glittery one. Cool! It just always amazes me when I buy clothes for him and there is this teeny tiny boy’s section in the story with colors like grey, blue, brown or black and then five floors of girl’s stuff; which is usually a plethora of clothing from the standard (annoying) princess dress to a Carrie Bradshaw outfit for five year-olds. I want my son to follow his interests, I don’t want to put too many limits, within reason. If he wants to play with dolls and his girlfriends at the daycare one day, cool!. Who says boys have to play with trucks, lego and clay only? I never want to reinforce gender stereotypes. For some reason I also think that whenever he plays with girls he communicates differently. Different in a problem-solving kind of way. I encourage friendships with girls. [Must be a women-thing, I reckon]. Also, I think it is important to never use the word “girl” as an insult. [Or use “grab them by the pussy”]
I also teach him to take care of himself and others. He has certain little chores that need to be done. We clean together, do laundry, wash dishes, cook, go shopping. My son observes that there is a certain type of routine which is not a bad thing. The house can look like a mess when he plays but he cleans up when it is time to go to bed. We have a lot of elderly people in our neighborhood and my son observes how I talk to them and help them occasionally. He loves to take care of the neighbors cat when they were on vacation because I taught him. And now that he is “older” we can work together and he can help me with little tasks. I show him how I fold the laundry and he tries to fold his. So cute.
I was not too good at teaching him that “no means no” in the beginning but I learned along the way and he respect me. This is the key I reckon. He knows the power of the word “no” and he mostly complies. One last point I want to add is reading. I love reading and so does he. I read to him almost every night and most certainly not only “boy-books” but also German “princess stories” like Rapunzel, and Snow White. I don’t want him to think that women need to be saved either. Being a mother and raising a child is not f*****easy. Far from it.
Another hot day in Barcelona sightseeing. Wanderlust. No clue about fashion but my Lois Vuitton is usually next to me while traveling. After a long conversation with a very good friend of mine on fashion and why fashion blogs are so popular I had a…
“Wherever you go, there you are.” I felt this urge for Wanderlust [wan·der·lust, wändərˌləst/, noun, a strong desire to travel], this zest for something new strongly in early January when I actually came back to Canada from Germany. What I missed was sun, warmth and since…
I just finished binge-watching The Handmaid’s Tale and I am in awe. This incredibly awesome show is based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same title. The Handmaid’s Tale was the first Atwood-novel I read and loved (I actually read it twice); however, I could not get too comfortable with most of her other books based on dystopian worlds even though they are mysteriously compelling. I love how somewhat satisfying other dystopian movies like The Hunger Games and also I am Legend or The Matrix were.
Especially, looking at society today it makes sense to watch some of the most ominous parts that seem so perilously depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. Sadly, it just doesn’t seem so dystopian to me after all anymore which makes these type of movies or series somewhat scary or frightening. (“Trump’s pussy grabbing Presidency” somehow strangely comes to mind) It all seems like it is not based in a so-far-away future. And of course everyone wants to go to Canada in the end. Go figure.
I literally binge-watched ten episodes in two days and was horrified most of the time about the depiction of America under totalitarian rule (hm) in episode one, combined with a devastating mix of a lot of suffering and torn-apart families. Initially, the society in the US seems to be just normal, but then there is military everywhere patrolling the streets; women start to lose their jobs without further explanation and shortly after have no access to bank accounts anymore and are hunted while their kids are taken away from them. The main protagonist is June (Elizabeth Moss). She tries to flee a country that seems to suffer from a fertility crisis among other problems, together with her husband and daughter. Their destination is Canada but they won’t make it. The husband stays back at the car as military approaches and June plus daughter run into the woods to hide. They hear two/three gun shots and get caught shortly after. June’s daughter is taken away from her (made my mom-heart so sad) and she is taken to Gilead, which is a military operated nightmare prison under strict fundamentalist rule. (Scary how real everything seemed!) What happened to June’s husband and daughter? No spoilers!
June is now stripped of identity, given color-coordinated clothing by class (red for the handmaids), given a new name (Offred), and transformed into a slave-handmaid with just one value: to bear children. From now on her life is lived in this prison of obedience, prayers, institutionalized rape, abuse and lots of terror; however, it is all for the “greater puritanical good” as master and leader tell the handmaid’s constantly. In short, living in Gilead means: no democracy, men own women, the Bible is seen as a governing text that is sweetly manipulated and bent and public hanging and stoning is okay again.
I had a lot of mixed feelings watching The Handmaid’s Tale. My emotions and reactions went from sad, watery eyes, jaw dropping, nervous chocolate eating, tea drinking to nail biting and red wine. There is however a lot of criticism about this show. I don’t care much about these reviews and interpretations. All I see is that the book has been written in 1985 but it just rings very true today. Truer maybe this year, than last year which makes this show very real and neither too far-fetched nor too dystopian. The Handmaid’s Tale could almost be seen as a relevant, important warning that leaves a queasy feeling in the stomach. Most haunting for me was that it seems one cannot really escape this world. Even worse, it is all created by humans.
I sign off and clean my kitchen now. And do a pile of laundry. Where have I been for the last two days? But it was so worth it.
So a couple of days ago I bought a bottle of good Portuguese wine since I will be going to a conference in Portugal soon and need to figure out beforehand how the wine situation is. The person at the register asked me for my…
I cleaned my kitchen cabinets this morning to just get an overview on what I have hoarded. The fridge, freezers and storage cabinets are full with stuff and I still end up going to the store to buy more. Well, I actually realized that I…
(I need those arm bracelets ASAP!)
So I saw Wonder Woman the other day even though superhero movies are not my thing at all. Or to pay $ 20 for a movie. In addition, whenever a movie is announced to be two-hour and twenty one minutes long my derriere tells me, “please just don’t!” However, insane world-wide box-office projections, reviews, announcements and the question if women can even have superpowers in the first place made me drag myself to the movie theater at 10 am on a Tuesday morning.
The opening scene: A hot Diana (Gal Gadot) walks into the Louvre (is she an employee?) after she received a suitcase from Bruce Wayne (hot) who is interested in the story of an old photograph that was in the package. I didn’t know what is going on at all since I never read the comic-book or know anything about Wonder Woman at all but this is, in hindsight, not important. After I got really comfortable in my seat and the movie theater cleaning person in a tank-top disappeared, the real good stuff began. A fantastically animated ancient Greek mythology origin story kept me in awe for a while and I want to thank my friend Dat for introducing me to it all. I love how they combined and added this to the movie since I believe that mythology has a huge tradition in human history. Don’t we all just want to be part of things? Or something? Or rather nothing?
The story continues by getting to know Diana as this cute little girl who lives on an island in paradise that is inhabited solely by Amazonian women who try to copy Gal Gadots’s great accent. I thought Russian, initially. I kind of loved this island from the start. The place is protected from the evil darkness of mankind (from men?) and apparently also from bad weather. Always blue sky, sunshine and beautiful beaches. [Most certainly they did not make this movie in Canada then!] Also, there is no male person. Instead there is peace, harmony (there is the occasional fight but it gets all sorted out), no beer and pants and stuff all over the place; in other words: no trouble!
Diana sees all the other Amazonian women train ever day for hours and she is eager to practice herself. However, her mom Hippolyta (Connie Nielson, also hot!) is smothering and protecting her like there is no tomorrow. There is also Antiope (Robin Wright, h** – I know it gets annoying, but this movie might have turned me into a lesbian for realz!) who secretly teaches Diana how to fight. Diana grows older and of course danger is just around the corner. Steve Trevor (Chris Pine, also kinda hot) crashes with a German fighter plane (right up my alley, I reckon) through the secure force shield of this awesome island and crashes into the ocean. He cannot unbuckle his seatbelt and Diana frees him. (Duh!) Shortly after, the Amazons have to battle the evil Germans who try to find Steve Trevor in a pretty awesome 300-style beach battle. The Amazons want to kill Steve Trevor immediately but Diana decides to leave with him after she saw his penis in a jacuzzi. He assured her that it is above average; then again, she has never seen a penis before, duh again!
Steve told her that this War to End All Wars is happening right now and just outside this protective awesome island bubble. The big question is now if she will let all these killings and destructions happen while she is going back to the jacuzzi with Steve? Most likely not; this would make a pretty horrible and boring movie, right? Diana and Steve leave the awesome island on a boat and head toward the western front so Diana can find Ares (the God of War) and end the war on earth forever. Not too much attention is paid to the mass murdering when they initially arrived in London but the main concern was that she gets dressed appropriately in “normal” clothes since she cannot walk around like this:
Sword and shield missing.
I think that the filmmakers found a perfect balance between Diana’s beauty, strengths, naïveté and her brilliance and to figure out how mankind can be so evil and create such a huge destruction. To add, the little romance between Diana and Steve transformed this movie only into the PGR 13 category. [Damn, I expected to see more!] In the movie, men are depicted overall like walking erections whenever they see Diana which is kind of annoying. There are some guys who don’t seem to be attracted to her so they are probably gay. (The Scottish dude?) Sometimes the truth hurts. I don’t want to spoil any more of the movie so go and watch it to figure out for yourself. Go early in the morning if you have kids and are fortunate to drop them off at daycare to see this movie in peace. Buy some popcorn. Even at 10 am. It is definitely worth it.
My son and I had been sick with pneumonia a couple of weeks ago and I started this little project of decluttering his room. We spent a lot of time inside since he had a high fever and the weather here in Canada was/is way…