Sunday, July 15, 2007

a random series of events

since i haven't posted much by way of a real update in the last several weeks. not that i'm making promises about this post, either. ;-)
  • went and saw the new harry potter yesterday. i won't give anything away, but i will say that i enjoyed it much more than the previous movie, which i thought incredibly tedious. there was some tedium this time as well, but also more mystery, and a little darker. it also was the first time that i actually *wished* i had read the book (haven't read any of them) because there were a few references that didn't make sense. a couple times we went 'huh?' but just let it go.

    incidentally we saw the movie on a digital projection screen (for those of you nearby, oakridge mall) and WOW the picture quality was amazing. the screen is normal size but none of that occasional blurring, popping, or any kind of film distortion at all.

  • started seeing a chiropractor. yes for the first time ever. i've always thought of being double-jointed a nice perk, but apparently the official term is hypermobility and if you extend that mobility a little too far, it can kinda mess you up. well, i extended my shoulder and wrist too far a few weeks ago (lugging around stuff in boston, then holding a baby in the same position for about 90 minutes straight). oops.

    as someone who's always done their own cracking, the visit was a little odd. but good of course, since she was able to get to a few places i never have. and naturally, learned about a few ways i've been accidentally making things worse. oops part deux.

  • june was a bit of a writing dry spell, which i deplored, but i appear to be on the upswing. i mention this because the response i had to one piece kind of surprised me. i'm on this fab fab list called writerspark (if you like writing, i highly encourage you to join) whose main purpose is to send out a series of writing prompts each week. people send in their responses, critique...it's a fairly low-volume list these days due to people like me, who mostly lurk and hoard the prompts for later.

    well the other day one came in that just grabbed me:
    “It was the kind of promise…”
    Compose a piece of reasonable length that begins with or that includes the phrase above.
    immediately, in popped a little scene: mildly seductive banter (from me! can you believe it?) with two people in a coffee shop. but more to my upcoming point, it was a first person narrative where the actors were only identified as "i" and "she".

    now i would think, if a woman (that's me) wrote this, that people would assume this was a girl-on-girl encounter. apparently not. almost everyone i got feedback from assumed that "i" was a man. this in turn makes me wonder (assume?) that my readers were all straight. because i have a hard time believing that someone queer, reading my post, would make the same assumptions. i also would add, i think anyone who knows *me* would assume it was girl-on-girl action. because you know that's how i roll. ;-) anyway, it was an enlightening, if accidental, exercise in interpretation.
that's all for now. hope y'all are having a good weekend!

2 comments:

Dharma said...

Straight assumption everywhere. sigh.

heather said...

to be honest, sometimes i forget about that. which is why when the first commenter said, 'well obviously the first person is a man, so...' it startled the hell out of me.