For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that’s taken me on what I have affectionately dubbed a gay marriage tour of America. Really pleased to share the results of those efforts in this new video today, which combines my love of Shakespeare with my love of love.
Some of you who’ve been following my work may recognize the concept from an earlier episode of I Didn’t Write This featuring Sonnet 116. It’s one of my very favorite poems, and I’ve always felt it related particularly well to the subject of marriage equality. I don’t write literary analysis papers anymore, but this was just as fun to make (and required about the same amount of all-nighters!). For the record, I love writing literary analysis papers.
There’s a lot of focus within proper documentaries on what did we learn here?Because this video was more a celebration of love and literature than a documentary, I didn’t spend too much time exploring that in the video itself. But for the sake of this tumblr post, I can tell you what I learned.
I asked every couple we visited the same handful of questions –
– How did you first meet? – Tell me about your first kiss. – Do you believe in love at first sight? – How did you know this was the right person for you, forever? – What’s your favorite thing about your partner? – What advice would you give to other couples who want a lasting, healthy relationship?
The specific love stories attached to each couple were wildly diverse, ranging from angrily rejected first proposals that consisted of “Well, we can get married if you want to…” to high school friends who reconnected years later after coming out, to your classic boy meets boy at a bar on a night when he didn’t want to go out at all. But after the specifics fell aside, I started to hear the same things over and over: We don’t believe in love at first sight. It’s hard to know that this is the right person for you, forever – the main factor is time. It takes time to see how you weather the arguments, the hard times, the tiny daily annoyances.
Communication and humor and patience are the most important things for a lasting, healthy relationship.
The couples I met confirmed something that I’ve long felt to be true – that the sweeping, epic love stories you see in movies aren’t the full story, that true love arrives during the tiny mundane moments between the movie moments of your life.It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. I heard stories of break ups and reconnections, long distance and uncertainty. Some of these love stories came with complications – broken hearts and responsibilities tied to past decisions. What they all had in common was that they weathered these storms and grew together.
I don’t believe in soul mates being born; I believe in people who fall in love slowly and become each other’s soul mates through time spent together, growing up and growing wiser.
Anyway. That’s what I learned. I wish there was room to put that all into this video as well, but hey, that’s what tumblr essays are for! Particular thanks goes to all the couples featured in this video, especially the seven couples who I had the privilege of meeting in person. They exist in real life, which I think makes their love stories particularly extraordinary and epic and grand.
Also shoutout to YouTube’s Field Day Initiative, which gave me the opportunity to take on this project. Check out other videos on their channel here.
Your recommendation seems to imply no gore, but still, I have issues with suspense, so I’m still unsure.
Slightly spoiler-y description of the film’s treatment of such elements after a cut.
Things I recalled seeing that might qualify as akin to gore, or that might make someone who is very sensitive feel squeamish:
Very early on, I think someone has a bloody abrasion on their hand.
[ETA: Oh, right. I forgot to mention Erin’s cameo: In the first shot, you see a not-that-scary-looking limp hand lying on the floor, extending through an open doorway.]
Someone unwraps a blood-stained bandage from her forearm, revealing what looks like a bad scrape/abrasion (though I think it’s supposed to be a zombie bite?) about the size of a silver dollar.
At one point someone (briefly) gets a nosebleed.
At one point a character aims a handgun at another character.
And that’s it.
I had an intense emotional reaction to watching the film, but it wasn’t due to gore or suspense, but rather to the writing and acting and editing, operating mostly at the level of subtext. It was painful, but it was the good kind of pain.
Maybe get a second opinion from someone else who’s seen it?
I can’t find a source link for the chart, but the drawings were the work of BugGuide user Lynette, who also wrote a useful (and illustrated) discussion of spider eye arrangements.
The Venus-Jupiter conjunction in the morning sky these last few days has been out of control.
Yep. I keep seeing it on my way to work, and every time I have to look twice to be sure it isn’t just a couple of planes approaching the airport. I think it’s on Thursday night that it’ll be Venus, Jupiter, and Mars forming a neat little triangle?
I saw that Mars was in there too when I checked the SkySafari app, and I think I (barely) spotted it in the already-brightening sky with my naked eyes a few days ago. I’ll have to get up a little earlier when it’s still dark enough to see it better at some point over the next few days. And if I’m doing that I might as well dust off my telescope, right? :-)
If you do things that others know about, you will attract a lot of criticism.
People will think you’re wrong a lot. Sometimes you will actually be wrong; sometimes you won’t be.
Sometimes people will be vicious. Sometimes people will try to hurt you as badly as they possibly can.
No matter how well you do things, there will be people who are disgusted by what you do and think you’re a terrible person.
No matter how politically neutral the thing you do is, people will attack it for political reasons. (Either a specific reason, or they’ll say it’s frivolous and that you should be fighting global warming or poverty or something instead.)
If you charge money for what you do, people will be outraged (including people who would never work for free.)
No matter how much you charge, people will angrily tell you that it’s too much.
Even if you work for free, people will be angry with you for addressing some things but not others. Or for not giving them what they want fast enough.
No matter how well you consider other sides, someone will angrily accuse you of censorship or refusing to listen.
And so on and so on. No matter what you do, there are people who will be angry and disgusted by it. There will be people who will hate you. There will be people who try to hurt you to make you stop. This happens to absolutely everyone who does things that a lot of other people know about. It is possible to live with that.
A note about criticism – it’s important to be open to criticism, because sometimes you will be wrong. In order to be truly open to criticism, you have to get past the desire to appease everyone who is mad at you. If you try to please everyone, what ends up happening is that you end up deferring to whoever is the loudest and meanest. Listening to criticism in a good way means you have to be selective — and it also usually means disengaging from jerks.
You don’t have to be perfect to do things that matter. If only perfect people could do things, nothing would ever get done. Everyone who has every done anything has also been flawed in a serious way. Because that’s how people are.
It’s also important to remember that you don’t owe the world a heckler’s veto. There will always be people who don’t like you or your work. That doesn’t mean you have to stop. It doesn’t mean you have to engage with them. It just means that you’re being noticed, and that some people don’t like what they’re seeing.
tl;dr If you do things that people notice, some people who notice will be mean to you and try to convince you that you are terrible. That happens to everyone who does things. It doesn’t mean you’re terrible. It means you’re visible. Being open to criticism doesn’t mean giving the world a heckler’s veto. It’s ok to do things even if you’re imperfect and sometimes people are angry at you.
*paints several lines of this in gold on own body*
100 Years Ago In Polar History: Shackleton gives the order to abandon ship
Then came a fateful day — Wednesday, October 27. The position was lat. 69 degrees 5’ S., long. 51 degrees 30’ W. The
temperature was — 8.5 degrees Fahr., a gentle southerly breeze was blowing and the sun shone in a clear sky.
“After long months of ceaseless anxiety and strain, after times when hope beat high and times when the outlook was
black indeed, the end of the ‘Endurance’ has come. But though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is
crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted, we are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task
that lies before us. The task is to reach land with all the members of the Expedition. It is hard to write what I feel.
To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the ‘Endurance’ I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires.
Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at
the very outset of her career.”
I’m certainly not an anti-fan. I enjoyed Pan’s Labyrinth and Pacific Rim very much, though I didn’t feel like immediately watching either one a second time. I haven’t seen any of the other movies he’s directed.
I’m both drawn to and slightly repelled by his approach to horror. I think I get what he’s doing and why, and it works for me, but I can only process it in small doses. But with that said, I very much respect that he uses horrific elements in pursuit of a coherent and unique artistic vision. It’s not at all like shock/torture/gore/slasher porn, which is something I actively avoid. I kind of feel like it’s a disservice that that stuff gets lumped together with something like Crimson Peak. The trailers before the movie were kind of hard for me to get through, such that it was a definite relief when the teaser for The Force Awakens came up, just so I could catch my breath.
