a word about popular culture...

against the advice of "he who must be gratuitously footnoted and only occasionally obeyed", i am going to publish this post.

here's the deal, i have noticed a particular set of social ills that i fear must be addressed if we, as a civilized society, are going to achieve any progress beyond the ipod and aluminum foil. this is almost as important as the rant about why expansion teams aren't real and it's companion rant regarding the designated hitter. however, be advised that this rant may indeed hit a bit more close to home for all of you loyal blue-platters, because it's got nothing to do with major league sports at all. no, this time it's personal. this time, it's about porn.

that's right. i said it. porn. the pernicious evil that stalks and sours our minds. and i'm not just talking about "adult entertainment". it will be addressed, don't worry, but the side of porn about which i am most concerned is the emotional porn that hollywood churns out with wild abandon, the kind of porn you can take your little sister to watch and not feel like a perv. i'm not talking about movies like "naked nurses in space", etc. no, i'm talking about movies like "shakespeare in love" (oh, it hurt to write that. such a great movie...), "the notebook", and "notting hill".

here's my problem with porn, emotional or other wise. it's not real. it's fantasy. but there are people who know that on one level (like the level of "i'm sitting in this movie and watching this happen on a screen with fantastically good looking people who i also see on the cover of "people" and "us weekly" while i'm buying milk and toilet paper at the grocery") who fail to compute it on other levels. for example, i've heard not just one or two or three or even four of my nearest and dearest comment after watching such drivel (it's very, very good drivel, albeit very, very dangerous drivel) as "the notebook" or "garden state", "i wish a boy would love me like that..." in a wistful tone with misty, glossed over eyes. and that's when i realized that i had come face to face with emotional porn junkies. women who had bought into the lie that hollywood has created-- the perfect relationship.

you know the one i'm talking about. it goes something like this on the big screen:

boy meets girl, or girl meets boy.
boy and girl hook up.
boy and or girl cheats, dies, is maimed in some horrible accident, finds out they are switched at birth, knocks someone up or gets knocked up after a wild night of partying, etc.
boy and or girl makes sobbing confession, after which all is forgiven.
boy and girl ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after with no consequences, couples' counseling, or attachment issues.

and it goes something like this on the small screen, i.e.lifetime (television for women) movies...

girl is born into some kind of either very disturbingly normal or very disturbingly disfunctional family.
girl runs off to the big city/college/new town/career prospect to escape family or to hide that she's preggers.
girl meets extremely handsome man who seems too good to be true.
girl figures out that extremely handsome man IS too good to be true. she marries him anyway, has his child (who gets switched at birth, or needs a kidney, or almost dies in some bizarre way), and just before she gets put in the chipper shredder/sold off to pay mr. wonderful's gambling debts in sri lanka/has to be impregnated with alien spawn in some kind of twilight-zoney twist, she meets the less-handsome, but ever so normal and sweet and complying yard man/secret agent who's been trying to arrest her husband for 20 years/slightly retarded janitor at the hospital where her and mr. wonderful's child is being hidden.
girl is swept off her feet by mr. normal.
mr. wonderful gets sucked into the chipper-shredder in a freak accident/is finally eliminated for his sri lankan gambling debts by the sri lankan mafia/falls off his boat with frolicking with his mistress in key west and is eaten by sharks.
girl is free to marry mr. normal.
they live happily ever after in the nut hut ward of the hospital...or something like that.

i'd like to take a brief moment to point out that the likelihood of any of the scenarios actually taking place in real life is slim to none, people. i mean like one in maybe 8 billion. and there are only 6.5 billion people on the planet. thank God most of them can't get lifetime on their tv's. thank God most of the don't have tv's...but i do wish they had access to decent healthcare... Different rant...focus, must focus...

ok, so the evil that emotional porn does is this: it dumbs down relationships. it makes people doubt the authenticity of their individual experiences. it makes people feel kind of chicken-fingered (got that little adjective from esteban the boobarian) and helpless when their scenarios don't match up to the ones they see on screen, even though they know in some part of their heads that it's "not real". people on screen are always saying the perfect thing in situations, or wearing the perfect thing at events, or being the perfect hostess/ladyfriend/mother/sister/daughter/etc. and some how, we get caught up in that. we get caught up in thinking that our bodies, lives, careers, and relationships should some how match up to the screen plays that flood our minds. and sometimes, that is very destructive.

now, i'm not saying that movies are bad, or that made for tv movies are bad. not in and of themselves, anyway. i'm just saying that when we are presented with the pictures of seeming perfection on a day to day basis the way we seem to be in 2005 post 9-11 american society, we need to remind ourselves that it really is just a movie. and that our lives are really, really real, and there is not point at which we get a "take 2" on scene 5. and the way we do it, although it's broken, messy, scary, and sometimes painful, and even though our make-up slides right off at the very moment we don't want it to, it's ok. it's more than ok--it's real and it's beautiful.

that's really all i wanted to say.

thanks for reading, folks. see you soon. this time tomorrow, i will be neck-deep in the little blanco river. hooooooooray. and baby nels will be baptized on sunday. double hoooooray. i got him the best book ever. i can't wait to read it to him. life is good.

mil besos--r