UbuntuCat

Even when we had a car, my wife and I still took the bus. There was a time when I used the car for work, and she took the bus to work; and then she used the car for school, and I took the bus to work. And even on the weekends, sometimes it was better to take the bus than to try to find parking. Now that we don’t have a car, we are almost completely reliant on the bus and walking.

Taking the bus in past years was at times painful (and I don’t just mean some of the crazy/smelly people on the bus). There were times when my wife would be waiting at the bus stop for forty minutes in the rain or I would be waiting for fifty minutes in the cold. You had no idea when the bus would come. Sometimes you’d have just missed it. Sometimes it would be coming just as you arrived. Other times you would just wait and wait and wait.

Enter Nextbus, a wonder of the internet and the only reason I have added web access to my mobile phone. Even though it’s not 100% accurate, Nextbus has changed my travel life. I know exactly when the next bus will arrive. If it’s coming in forty-five minutes, I know to seek an alternate route or just walk. If one bus is coming only five or ten minutes after the previous bus, I know it will not be crowded. My wait times for buses have significantly decreased. Now that it’s the rainy season in San Francisco, I’m especially grateful for Nextbus. I just wish there were more Nextbus displays at bus stops so I wouldn’t have to use my cell phone to check for the next arrival (a minor annoyance at best).

I always read film reviews. Sometimes I read them beforehand to try to gauge whether I want to see the film or not. Other times, I go into the film blindly and then read the reviews afterwards to see if they would have helped me to decide on whether to see it or not. In the case of Persepolis, I was glad to have gone in to the viewing “blindly.”

The user (not professional) reviews seemed to be a battle of variations of “I’m Iranian, and this makes America think worse of Iran” and “I’m Iranian, and this seems to be a pretty accurate picture of what it was like.” As always, with something that purports to be autobiographical, it was attacked as twisting history or being inaccurate in this or that way.

As someone who knows very little about Iran apart from 1980s US propaganda that generally portrayed all non-Israeli Middle-Eastern countries as windy deserts full of dark-skinned, angry, violent terrorist types (yes, I’m that American); I found it to portray (accurately or not) Iran and Iranians rather positively. More importantly, I don’t think the narrative of the film (I haven’t read the graphic novels yet, so I can’t comment on any difference there) in any way tries to put in a master narrative that says “This is what really happened.” The story is clearly told in its entirety from the point of view of the protagonist. When recounting her experiences in both Europe and Iran, she is honest about the limits of her perception. Either way, it portrays (accurately or inaccurately) Iran as a beautiful country that has gone through a lot of strife, with most people just trying to get by while governmental powers, both within and without, screw them over.

If I had any criticism of the film, it wouldn’t be of the film itself but of the protagonist—much as we sympathize with her because she is the main character, she is still a brat, in the end. She comes from privilege. Her parents and grandmother are a godly model of love to her, way beyond what she deserves. When she ends up destitute in Vienna, it appears to be fully her own fault, so it’s a little difficult to feel sorry for her… same with just about every “tragic” situation in the movie that doesn’t involve someone dying.

The brat can be cute and funny sometimes, though.

I fully expect the “stop being so politically correct” comments to come pouring in for this, but I’ve always been bothered by the phrase That’s so gay.

I’ve heard it from even my most liberal friends—friends who fully embrace equal rights for gays and lesbians. It is part of our culture. I even said it myself for a number of years. Its offensiveness is only tangential, but it is still existent… existent enough that I find ways to avoid it (and still feel good about being able to express myself—don’t worry!). After all, That’s so gay really just means That’s so stupid or That’s so undesirable to do. Whereas the word gay used to be associated with happiness, it is now in everyday speech associated with the undesirable, the stupid, and the uncool. In the end, people who use the phrase are probably not likely to start yelling faggot! and dyke! or to start beating up gay people for being gay, but I just don’t see why we need to create (reinforce?) negative associations with the word gay. If you mean That’s so stupid or I don’t want to do that, then say “That’s so stupid” or “I don’t want to do that.” It’s completely unnecessary to say “That’s so gay.”

This is an entirely different phenomenon from the association of black with bad or yellow with cowardly. There simply exists no other simple word for the black market other than the black market, no other word for blackmail than blackmail. The only thing that seems artificial in the English language’s use of the word black is in application to skin color. All the supposedly “black” people I’ve met are various shades of tan or brown. I’m supposedly “yellow” for being Asian, and I’ve often heard people refer to Asians as “olive-colored,” but for the life of me I don’t see how my skin tone is either tint. Since Malcolm X took it for granted that what he then called Negroes (as was the popular label of the time) were, in fact, “black,” he took offense to the association of the word black with that which is negative. I view it as quite the other way around—it was probably already part of the English language to associate black with the negative and then a logical extension for racists to then attach the “black” label to overall darker-skinned individuals. The fact is that even white people are not white (with the exception of albinos), and that in the United States it was court decisions that had to decide whether or not Arab-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans qualified as “white”—ultimately deciding the societal worth (and not really the race) of those individuals.

What we’re seeing now with the word gay is the opposite. It is now firmly entrenched in popular usage to have gay mean “attracted to the same sex” with only a vestigial connotation of happiness. There’s absolutely no reason to start or continue to associate it with the generally negative (the stupid, the undesirable).

The worst part about the phrase That’s so gay is, however, not its pervasiveness so much as its subtlety. Unlike blatant slurs like faggot, That’s so gay is very difficult to counter without appearing oversensitive or “politically correct,” and the explanation of why it might be harmful is quite lengthy (see how long I’ve been writing about it so far?), so most people just let it go.

I just hope the day doesn’t come that people start saying That’s so Asian to describe that which is undesirable.

Further reading
That’s so gay!
That’s So Gay!
‘That’s so gay’ prompts a lawsuit
What is the lamest reason for giving up on Ubuntu/Linux you’ve ever heard?