Thursday, October 9, 2008

Boys don't cry

Just saw Boys Don't Cry for the first time. I'd been avoiding it for a long time since the only thing anyone seemed to say about it was that it was "really good" and "really heavy/depressing/sad". So I thought, I'd wait til the right time. Well, apparently it was tonight, after my free Chan (that's the Chinese version of Zen) meditation class at the monastery down the block. See, in Berkeley you can say things like that: "I'm just gonna run to the monastery, I'll be right back." In Oakland it's the liquor store. Anyway Heather, my roomie, has HBO and it was 10 o'clock and I'd been just yesterday asking my coworker Steve if he could recommend any really good movies and when he started listing comedies I even said "it doesn't have to be funny, it just has to be really good."

So it was the right time.

Especially considering my whole circle of friends is almost all dykes here.

What I'm surprised at is how much the movie is about class. No one ever really talks about that. Well, maybe if they ever get beyond the "really depressing" part of the commentary, but I never thought to ask because I thought the depressing thing was that this cross-dressing woman got killed because of her ways. I didn't know how much it was just as much because she was in a really poor and depressed community out in Nebraska.

The movie makes me scared of & hateful of men in general, but more it makes me scared of poverty and ignorance. It even made me reconsider my partying ways and romanticization of poverty/white trash culture. Not that I know much about it. What I do know is that I made many friends out here in Oakland who come from a white trash background, who pump their chests and brag/joke about it when I hang out with them. But these are all people who have gotten out, who have educated themselves, who were eager to leave that environment. I am so sheltered, it's really easy for me to misunderstand the reality and the complexity of such a background. Of course there are people in there who love, people who hurt, people who have just as much capacity and potential as people from different backgrounds. The difference seems to be that they have so much more baggage, so much more drama, so much more volatility in their lives. This, of course, I base all on a movie.

* * *

This morning, Jack, the son of my neighbors from upstairs, was waiting to leave for school. He's 7 and he's adopted. His biological mother is in prison and his father's whereabouts is unknown. It was a gorgeous sunny Berkeley morning, and he was waiting for Heather to take him to school on Walk & Roll day, where kids only bike or walk to school. Heather was trying to fix the chin strap for her helmet and Jack and I were standing on the porch. "Did you ever touch this?" he asked, pointing to the potted cactus that stands on a little table on the porch. Underneath it is an ashtray filled with my cigarette butts. First I thought he meant the butts, then I realized he meant the cactus. No, I said, I know what they feel like.

* * *

The movie made me crave a cigarette the whole time I was watching. The actors must have smoked a pack each. You know how it is with watching people smoke-- even if you don't smoke it makes you feel like having one. But, as I said, the movie also made me disgusted with that lifestyle, the easy rapport of beer and cigarettes and pot around the clock. So I thought about abstaining, but when I started writing this blog I stepped outside for a pall mall nonetheless. When I got done I put it out in the little ashtray. Just as I was stashing the ashtray under the little table, I leaned with my other hand, the one with which I was holding the laptop and my cup of water, against the cactus by mistake. It was not heavily enough to make me cry out or drop the computer or anything. But I felt the sting of the thorns. Just for a moment, I felt the sting.

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