It’s no secret I like the bad guys. Or that I like Loki, the villain from Marvel’s “Thor” and “The Avengers.”

Loki is pretty much custom-designed for me to go gaga over him. Tall, pale, lanky, highly intelligent, and snarky, with long dark hair, striking eyes, and a tragic/complicated backstory, he’s basically Ealasaid catnip. And don’t get me started on his gorgeous outfits (the horns aside. Even I can’t entirely take them seriously). I mean, look at this Pinterest board I made and tell me you don’t see a pattern.

Anyway! Let us consider Loki’s history: (MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR THOR, IN CASE YOU STILL HAVEN’T SEEN IT EVEN THOUGH IT’S BEEN OUT FOR A YEAR)

Born to the king of the Frost Giants, he was abandoned at birth because he was a runt. Odin found him and took him in after defeating the Frost Giants in battle, and raised him as his own. Unfortunately, Odin already had a son: Thor. Since Thor was older, he was first in line for the throne, and since he had a larger-than-life personality while his brother was quiet and thoughtful, he dominated in a major way. So Loki grows up in his brother’s shadow, being taught to hate and fear the Frost Giants as monsters, and not knowing he is a Frost Giant.

Young Loki didn’t even have any friends of his own that we saw, just his brother’s — and they are mostly cruel to him in the offhand, dismissive way a lot of people are to younger siblings of themselves and their friends.

Even after Thor fucked up enormously and was banished to Earth, Odin gave him another chance, even sending the incredibly powerful Mjolnir after him with a spell to lock it in place until someone “worthy” came along to claim it. Loki’s face when Odin tosses Mjolnir into the portal says it all, really:

Heartbreak, folks. There it is.

By the time Loki finally learns his true parentage, he’s already too broken to hear Odin’s reasoning for not telling him (“you are my son. I wanted to protect you.”). His interpretation of Odin’s reasoning is, as he puts it, “So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me?”

All his actions after that come primarily from a desire to prove himself to be “a worthy son.” Of course, he wouldn’t be a tragic villain if he chose a smart course of action or were successful, so he basically tries to engineer the genocide of the Frost Giants. When he fails and Odin not only doesn’t forgive him but shows absolutely zero compassion for what Loki was trying to do, Loki basically tries to kill himself by throwing himself into space.

By the time he shows up in “The Avengers,” (MOAR SPOILERS AHOY) he is completely ’round the bend, so tangled up in his own conception of himself as the unloved and wronged should-be king that he can’t bring himself to see reason. There are glimpses here and there of reason — when Thor tries to convince him to turn off the Tesseract portal, he says it’s impossible, not that he won’t do it. When Thor says they could do it together, showing that he still loves his brother and wants to work with him, Loki stabs him — but in both exchanges there is a moment where he pauses. In that pause is pretty much everything you need to know about Loki. On some level, he knows the stories he tells himself and has built his identity upon are bullshit, but he won’t admit it.

Tom Hiddleston, the brilliant young actor who plays Loki, talks a lot about his own compassion for the character, about how Loki’s horrible destructiveness comes out of his misery and longing:

He’s like any of the villains in human history, you know, it all comes down to his lack of self-esteem. Anyone who’s trying tot ake over, to get people beneath them, is usually lacking in self-love. Outside Loki, I can judge him and call him the nutter that he is, but inside him I have compassion for the fact he’s just another lost soul.
-Tom Hiddleston

To have compassion for a character is no different from having compassion for another human being.
-Tom Hiddleston

Interviewer: You’ve been in the midset of this character for a while now, with Thor 2 coming up, right? Is that weird?
Hiddleston: It’s kinda weird, ’cause he’s so… sad. I just want to make it alright for him.
-Interview here

Given how much of “Thor” Loki spends either crying or with tears in his eyes (and consider yourselves blessed I am only putting one .gif here out of the many many I could), I think “sad” is a good way to describe him.

Poor kid. He just needs a hug.

Word is that Hiddleston has been contracted for a bunch more movies as Loki, so even if Loki isn’t the main villain, he’ll at least be around. Thank goodness. I mean, look at this gif and tell me dude isn’t plotting his revenge:

I can’t wait.

In the meantime, the dude has a HUGE fandom on Tumblr. Come hang out!

That’s right. Loki. From “Thor” and “The Avengers.”

I mean, the Avengers movies are so friggin’ awesome already (they are, for the record: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America, Thor, and Marvel’s The Avengers”) and then he comes along and is all “O Hai, I haz a sad backstory and want to rule the world. Also, I wear sexy clothes and have long dark hair” and my inner fangirl is like, “OH MY GOD YES PLZ”

So now my Tumblr and my dashboard are full of  Loki and Tim Hiddleston (the awesome fellow who  plays him) and my ability to think coherently about anything else has been compromised.

Of course, you know the answer to that issue: fanly essays!

In the meantime, however, pity me. I won’t be able to watch either “Thor” or “The Avengers” again for HOURS AND HOURS AUGH.

If you don’t want to be exposed to strong opinions, mild incoherence, and occasional cussing, don’t read this. Okay? Okay.

So, one of my aunts posted a link to this article recently over on Facebook. I posted a reply, and the ensuing discussion made me start typing a comment that turned into a rant, which I realized was not really about the article at hand and so am posting over here.

The article is called “Ten Things I Want to Tell Teenage Girls,” and most of the items are pretty good. Here are some of the bullet points, with the commentary snipped:

• 6. Never let a man make you feel weak or inferior because you are an emotional being.
• 9. Don’t play coy or stupid or helpless to get attention.
• 10.  You are beautiful.  You are enough.

Amazing! (Although let’s set aside the inherent sexism of number 6. All humans are capable of being emotional beings, not just teenage girls, and all kinds of people will make you feel weak or inferior for being emotional, not just men. Hell, pretty much all of the folks who’ve done it to me have been women. But that’s not the point of the rant at hand.) (As a further aside, the only person who ever told me the opposite of 9 was also a woman, but again. Different rant. Just remember, a boy who can’t handle it if you’re better than him at something is a boy who isn’t worth dating. End of story.)

The one that got to me was the first one:

1. If you choose to wear shirts that show off your boobs, you will attract boys.  To be more specific, you will attract the kind of boys that like to look down girls’ shirts.  If you want to date a guy who likes to look at other girls’ boobs and chase skirts, then great job; keep it up.  If you don’t want to date a guy who ogles at the breasts of other women, then maybe you should stop offering your own breasts up for the ogling.  All attention is not equal.  You think you want attention, but you don’t.  You want respect.  All attention is not equal.

I replied to the Facebook post

I dig ‘em all except the top one, which (while it means well) is a little too reminiscent of the “cover yourself that you do not tempt the men!” attitude of many fundamentalist sects. That shit puts my back up. I mean, I don’t have to show any real skin to attract guys who just want to look at boobs. Telling me to cover up so I attract nicer guys is useless. And pretty blame-the-victim-y for my tastes.

My aunt replied that it wasn’t blame-the-victim-y, that clothes are meant to give an impression and you should dress properly (she included guys who sag their jeans in this, which I appreciated). I disagree with the first part, though: it’s blame-the-victim-y to say “well, if you didn’t want to get your car stolen, you shouldn’t have parked it there,” and it’s blame-the-victim-y to say “well, if you didn’t want a boyfriend who ogles other girls’ tits, you shouldn’t have offered him your tits to look at,” which is pretty much exactly what the article says.

That said, it’s definitely true that clothes give an impression, I’m the last person who’ll argue that. I drafted this on my lunch break from work, wearing nice leather shoes (polished over the weekend) and a nice linen blazer to dress up my jeans-and-tshirt ensemble (huzzah for lax Silicon Valley dress culture!). I carefully evaluate my clothing choices for different situations.

I am, however, sick to fucking death of women being told not to “show off” their tits. I have news for you: lots of us tit-havers can only not show them off by dressing in bulky, often male, clothing. Here are some photos of me not “showing off” my boobs:

I’m on the left in the last one, dressed up for a Halloween party where I was mistaken for a man. In the next-to-last-one where I’m kicking ass, you sure as shit can tell I have boobs, but I would HOPE that wearing a compression bra under a thick, heavy gi counts as not showing off.

Of those three shots, the only one where I’m not wearing a top layer made for men is the middle one (yay for womens’ Aikido gi!).

I’m pretty sure that what most folks mean by “don’t show off yer tits” is “don’t wear stuff like this”:

But even just wearing normal clothing makes my breasts really, really obvious.

And yes, that’s Bruce Campbell in the last one there. :) I couldn’t resist.

Anyway: I can’t hide ‘em unless I dress like a sack of potatoes — and then I get the pleasure of being told (exclusively by women, by the way. Can we say “crabs in a bucket“?) that I should dress nicer if I want boys to like me, or that the clothes I’m wearing make me look fat.  (One of these days I am going to write a whole rant on how it’s almost always women giving skull-fuckingly appalling sexist bullshit advice to me.)

Plus, in a more general sense, when I hear “don’t show off yer tits,” it’s usually followed by “unless you want to get catcalled/harassed/assumed to be stupid/raped.” How many times have we heard “but what was she wearing?” during discussions of rape/harassment? How many times has this kind of thing been phrased in ways to imply that if you don’t wear the kind of clothes the author thinks you should, you obviously want bad shit to happen to you? How many times has the discussion of women needing to cover up revolved around them needing to protect themselves from animalistic men? TOO MANY FUCKING TIMES.

And it doesn’t even work. Check out this comment one of my cousins posted shortly after mine:

Over all it is a decent article, I agree with Ealasaid about Point 1 though. My thing is that I heard an article on NPR a few years back about how bad the catcalling was getting in Egypt. The interviewer asked one of the men why he was harassing women on the street (though put more tactfully than I just did) and his reasoning revolved around these two points:

1) He thinks they “like” it, it’s complimentary and
2) He wants to know what they’re hiding under that burqa (seriously, he said that: What are they hiding under there?)!

So jerks are going to be jerks no matter what you where. A better point would be to remember to dress appropriately for the situation and to remember what kind of image you /want/ to project.

It’s hard to get further from “showing off yer tits” than wearing a burqa. And yet, women in burqa get harassed and raped all the time. Telling women dressed in ordinary clothing that the way men treat them is because of their clothes is blaming the victim.

I mean, go back and look at the offending paragraph that started all of this: “If you don’t want to date a guy who ogles at the breasts of other women, then maybe you should stop offering your own breasts up for the ogling.” How about “If you don’t want to date a guy who ogles at the breasts of other women, then maybe you should date a boy who doesn’t ogle at the breasts of other women“?! DUH!

I am really fucking goddamn sick of this bullshit and the shitweasels who say it.

No, I don’t consider my dear aunt to be a shitweasel. It’s just, it’s like when a kid who sits behind you in class flicks your ear all day. If some other random person flicks your ear, even gently, even by accident, you’re gonna go off on them.

Here’s what I would like to see people say:

Pretty much no matter what you wear, you will attract people.  Some of those folks will be good people, and some will be jerks. Learn to tell the difference, to tell who respects you and who does’t. Don’t be afraid to tell the latter to piss off, there are lots of people out there who won’t treat you like crap.

Different clothes are appropriate for different situations. School is school, work is work, and parties are parties. Learn which clothes are appropriate where, and don’t cross the streams. Clothes communicate as clearly as words do. Are you at school to learn? Then dress like it. Are you at work to do a job? Then dress like it! For parties, just about anything goes, and it’s fun to mix things up there. Do be ready to elbow assholes in the guts and yell for the bouncer/adult/whoever if you have to. Just cos you look hot doesn’t mean you have to put up with guys being fucktards.

Is that so much to ask?

Comments Policy: Just as a reminder, this is my blog, and you do not have a First Amendment right to post here. If I don’t want to post your comment, I won’t. Don’t like it? Get yer own blog.

ETA: I tweaked the title a bit, as really the rant is less about the author of the original article and more about me being really pissed off. Note to self: let rants sit for more than 12 hours before reviewing and publishing.

This is a post-apocalyptic tale about what happens after an enormous nuclear war, and it initially seemed like there was a lot of research and realism in it, but it pretty quickly turned into the kind of story where everyone is Christian and a side effect of nuclear radiation makes your face show who you really are inside (ie, good = pretty, evil = ugly and scary).

Plus, the central conflict is between a young girl with the power to bring plants back from the dead and a shapeshifting baddies who may or may not be Satan, along with his recruited army of evil men who love looting and pillaging and war.

I have reached a point where that kind of thing both irritates and bores me. And yet, I couldn’t put the damn book down. The heroine is a well-rounded Chosen One, and I liked her. The rag-tag group of good guys who help and protect her are all believable people, and I liked them, too. So what’s my problem? I guess it bugged me to see people I liked railroaded into a plot that was such a mishmash of good sci-fi and cheesy-as-shit fantasy. 80% of my brain loved it. 20% of my brain was kind of disgusted by the twee simplicity of it.

All the “shoulds” went away. No more “I should go to Aikido, even though the  mat will be cold and I’m fried from work and my fibro is acting up so it will hurt.” No more “I should clean the apartment, even though what I really want to do is read a book.” No more “I should do holiday cards, even though what I really want to do is watch TV with Nate.” No more “I should be blogging every week, even though I can’t really think of much to write about and would rather play Borderlands on my XBox.” No more “I should go be social, even though the thought of being around people makes me want to bite someone.”

Admittedly, my inner Puritan was appalled (and still is), and has a whole list of things I didn’t do that is so long I am obviously the worst person in the world. Idle hands, etc.

But. I am coming out of the misery season way faster than I remember doing in past years. It’s not even January yet and my motivation is returning! I do kind of wish I’d done all those shoulds, but that’s okay. Maybe I will feel more up to them next winter. Maybe I won’t! Either way, that’s okay.

I’m actually kind of excited to get back to all those activities I’ve been letting fall by the wayside, and that feels a million times better than I would with a longass list of shoulds hanging over my head, or being exhausted from forcing myself to do them instead of sleeping more and just chilling out. Hell, I even have a handful of blog entry ideas!

Plus, I have finished a hell of a lot of missions in Borderlands. My sniper is level 62 now, and closing in on 63. Hell yeah!

This was really driven home for me recently when I was reading through the archives of In Good Company, a collection of stories about depression and anxiety. In one of them, Goddess Leonie’s, there is this passage:

My love, the Simple Sage,

took me to the cafe

to stage a Perfect Mother intervention.

He took out a notebook

and a pen.

“Write down for me what you need to do everyday. What you want to do everyday.”

And so I began.

“Meditate.

Take care of Starry.

Write three pages.

Cook three wholesome meals a day.

Made out of organic food that I gardened.

Do gardening. Have a very large organic vege patch and fruit tree patch.

Read to Starry. Give her as much eye contact as possible.

Do 30 minutes of yoga.

Spend time with the dogs.

Watch no TV.

Make art.

Spend time talking to Chris.

Work and reply to emails and do my business.

Go to sleep early.”

We exchanged lists.

His read:

“Be a good dad and partner.

Be happy.”

“Wow,”

he said to me.

“No wonder you feel so overwhelmed. It’s too much Leonie. Just go easy on yourself.”

“How is that even possible?”

I asked.

“Leonie, I’ve loved you for ten years. And what I know about you? All you really need to do is love me, love your daughter and make art.”

That’s what makes you happy.

In all the time I’ve known you,

you haven’t gardened everyday, you haven’t meditated,

you haven’t done all that stuff everyday.

And you like watching TV, for pete’s sake!

You’re so hard on yourself.

You feel so guilty.

What would life look like if you were easy on yourself?”

Wow. Reading that was like a slap upside the head. My own list of what I want to do every day looks something like this:

• Get 9 hours of sleep
• Feed the cat
• Morning ablutions
• Do sitting meditation and daily spiritual work
• Do some Shiva Nata
• Do my Morning Pages
• Take my medication
• Eat a healthy (organic, homemade) breakfast
• Pack a healthy (organic, homemade) lunch
• Tend my container garden
• Go to work
• Go to Aikido (or do some other form of exercise like weightlift or go for a long walk)
• Eat a healthy (organic, homemade) dinner
• Get some bookbinding done, or other work for The Book Roadie
• Clean the apartment
• Spend time with Nate
• Spend time with friends
• Read
• Post stuff to Twitter
• Go to bed early

So really, it’s no surprise that I feel like I never get enough done.

What would life look like if I were easy on myself? What would my “do every day” list look like?

• Do one kind thing for myself
• Do one kind thing for someone else
• Be present for a moment

The Solstice is coming, a new year is about to start. It’s a time for leaving darkness behind and stepping into light. Can I take the second set and let it be my daily “did I?” checklist instead of the first?

I choose to spend my money where I feel comfortable doing so. I do not feel comfortable supporting companies whose behavior I find appalling. I no longer shop at a long list of places (including Target, Best Buy, and Urban Outfitters) because of their policies. I can’t bring myself to reward shitty behavior. I’d rather buy fewer things from companies I respect than more things from a company whose policies I find abhorrent.

…

I have no illusions about affecting Amazon by taking my money elsewhere. It’s more about me being able to sleep well at night. I feel better when I support businesses that don’t do things I think are horrible. I recognize that it’s impossible for me to buy ONLY from COMPLETELY ethical sources, but I’m not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend I don’t know things when they fall into my lap like this.

As an addendum, an Amazon employee who was part of the conversation said that Jeff Bezos takes customer concerns seriously and that I should write him a letter. I’m planning to do just that.

Please note: I’m not saying you shouldn’t shop at any of these places. We all vote with our money, and you can vote as you like. I won’t harangue folks who patronize these organizations/businesses any more than I harangue my friends and family who vote for politicians I think are horrible (I do reserve the right to jump up and down and yell that said politicians are misogynist douchecanoes, idiots, etc., mind you. I just try to do it on my own internet space rather than the comments section of other people’s).

Y’all have the right to see things differently than I do.

OK? OK.

An alphabetical list of places I don’t shop, and why

• Amazon
• Turned consumers into spies and local retailers into showrooms.
• Anti-labor and general creepiness.
• During a dispute over ebook pricing, refused to sell any books, physical included, from Macmillan.
• Best Buy
• Gave money to anti-choice politician
• Curves
• CEO supports pro-life causes
• Emphasis on weight loss and appearance rather than fitness.
• Salvation Army
• Anti-gay, to the point of campaigning against decriminalizing consensual sex between gay men in New Zealand, wtf.
• Target
• Gave money to anti-choice politician, then went back on tentative agreements with LGBT orgs to right the wrong and regain its pro-LGBT stance (among other anti-gay leanings from the higher-ups)
• Allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions they find morally unacceptable. (This may have changed, I haven’t been able to confirm.)
• Urban Outfitters (includes Anthropologie and Free People)
• Sells sexist bullshit.
• Steals from indie artists.
• Engages in anti-gay fuckery.
• WalMart
• The list is too long to include here. Starts with them pulling a shirt saying “Someday a woman will be president!” from their stores years ago because it “violated their family values policy” (no joke, I wrote them a USPS letter to complain, and they wrote me back with that “explanation”), and continues through sexism, anti-labor practices, anti-community practices, and more. See WalMartWatch for a long long list.

So! I shall cheer myself up with a Things I Love list. Take that, chronic health problems!

I Love

1. The Portland Japanese Garden. I have a ton of photos from it all over my cube in an attempt to trick my brain into thinking I’m not in the dead center of a fluorescent-lit cubicle maze.
2. Aardvark Essentials Potions. They smell amazing and help my skin fight off the winter dryness I so often get. Plus, the unscented base is a friggin’ miracle cream for sensitive skin. I use it any time my skin is broken / upset about something. I think it cut my last tattoo’s healing time in HALF.
3. The Playground. Even though I haven’t been there yet. I have one of the bright orange mugs and it makes me smile every time I see it. Also, Havi is awesome and her blog makes me happy.
4. Mugley Things. Those two are on my desk right now. I’m tempted to buy more.
5. My light box. Seriously, this thing is the BEST THING EVER. I have two so if I forget/run out of time to use it before I leave for work, I can use it once I get in.
6. My little notebook. It’s the only one that didn’t sell from the last batch. Same size as a Moleskine, roughly, but covered in bright red cloth and with a little ribbon bookmark. Plus, well. I made it. I’m really enjoying using it. It makes tracking my aggravating symptoms and medications less depressing.
7. Ibuprofen.

Seven is a good number. Yay for awesome things!

It’s hit again in full force, though, and for once I am sufficiently irritable/tired to really want to just nuke everything from orbit and start fresh.

It’s a weird sensation for someone as dedicated to archiving and packrattery as me — I usually find myself wanting to hang onto my old fan sites, even though I haven’t updated them in about a decade an find their ancient design rather embarrassing. Now that there’s the Internet Wayback Machine, though, my inner archivist is far less clingy.

It’s a lot of work, redoing a site. But given the economic climate, having a spiffy personal site for potential employers to look at is probably a wise idea. Since I started using WordPress, I’ve been increasingly impressed with it, so there’s that, too.

So, yeah. This blog isn’t going anywhere (though I have a feeling my intermittent posting schedule is likely to continue to be erratic as fuck. Subscribe to the RSS if you want to make sure you don’t miss new posts!), but ealasaid.com is in for a major facelift.

My day job is really tying up a lot of my time, both physically (commute + work + commute = about 11hrs/day 5 days/week) and mentally (taking a lot of downtime to recover after work). It’s hard to get enough sleep, hard to fit in the things I like doing, etc. I have a lot of extra-jobular things I want to do, and it’s frustrating to find myself without the energy or time to do them.

But everything is a chance to learn and practice, right? So I’m trying to see this as an opportunity to practice self-care, and to work on staying centered in really stressful situations.

Comedy

I’m also watching really, really funny TV stuff to unwind. My favs currently:

• Community – Oh. My. God. This show just keeps getting more and more meta and awesome and fantastic. It’s delightfully bizarre, and features characters I adore (and adore to loathe). My favorite is (unsurprisingly) Abed Nadir, who is basically a walking version of TV Tropes. He is an expert on all things TV / pop-culture, and a major outsider even in the central group of outcasts/weirdos that make up the main characters. Plus, he’s cute, and makes up half of my favorite bromance of all time: Troy and Abed. I was trying to find a pic to sum them up, but I totally failed, so here they are rapping in Spanish.
• Parks & Recreation – This show is a very, very close second to Community. Every ep, it seems, just gets better and better. The characters are all ridiculous caricatures, but because they’re all like that, it works. The one quasi-normal guy is played by Adam Scott, who is a genius, and even he has a whacko backstory. I love it. Plus, Ron Swanson is the fucking man.
• Party Down – This stars Adam Scott and is my go-to show for making me feel better after a shit day at work. No matter how shitty my job is, it will never be as bad as being on the catering crew the show is about. Never.

NaNoWri…No.

I’m not doing National Novel Writing Month this year.

The last time I had a November where I didn’t write 50,000 words of fiction was in 2000. I was in graduate school. If you’ve heard me gripe about grad school, you know how that went.

So far, this November is superior to that one. It does feel weird, though. The end of the year is supposed to go: Halloween, NaNo, Thanksgiving, NaNo, panicked-prep-for-Christmas, Christmas, New Year. Now I have all this time to get ready for the holidays, I’m sort of at loose ends.

It’s kind of nice.