I'd say I was sorry for the long silence...

[jaunthie]

...but it was a very busy week last week, and my jaw was very sore for most of it. Any posting I would have made would have been pretty cranky. So I'm not really sorry to have not posted my crankiness.


The jaw is healing up nicely, with the exception of the bruised jaw muscle on the right side of my face. Evidently that muscle got pretty badly bruised, because it's still sore and a bit swollen, and I still can't open my mouth as far as usual. Not to mention it's still painful to chew for long periods, so I'm still pretty constrained about what I can eat. I'm looking forward to when it doesn't hurt to chew. In the meantime, I'm still eating the fresh peas from my garden, hurting or not, because they're just too yummy. I'm very cranky about having to miss the rest of strawberry season (can't have anything with small seeds for another 6-8 weeks, darn it!). On the plus side, apparently I've been doing an excellent job of keeping the holes-where-my-wisdom-teeth-used-to-be clean. The dental surgeon was very impressed when I went in for my follow-up on Friday. The sutures have dissolved as they're supposed to, and the salt-water rinses have been very effective. I now have a freaky-looking syringe to help flush out the surgery sites, which is just fine and easy to use and all as long as I remember to use WARM salt water. Cold salt water is not pleasant.

Also, I have discovered that having all four of my wisdom teeth removed at once is considered "hard-core" by just about everyone I've talked to. Apparently the usual thing is to have two out at one time, and then the other two. To which I shrug and say "Um, wow, didn't know that." It wasn't even mentioned as an option to me, and I can't imagine wanting to deal with this twice. Maybe it's a lot easier when it's just your two lower or your two upper, but I can't imagine it being so much better that it would be worth having to deal with the hassle over two seperate times. I think I'm glad my dentist didn't mention the option.



As I mentioned earlier, I had a whole stack o' DVDs lent to me by various friends to keep me entertained after the wisdom-teeth removal. One of these discs was "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", which I had never seen, and which was an amazingly fun good time of a women-buddy movie. It's Lorelei and Dorothy together against the world, in a number of exotic locales and situations. They each have their own strengths and weaknessess, and they look out for each other constantly. It's great. It's also just not that common, either on TV or in the movies as far as I can tell: the women-adventurers buddy movie. Lots of guys doing that, but women? The only show I can think of that featured women in the adventurers-buddy mode is Xena, Warrior Princess, and the classic example of a modern "female buddy" movie is Thelma and Louise - which while wonderful isn't quite the same thing. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both women are quite well aware of each other's "shortcomings" and try to help the other one with them, but in a casual, friendly, occasionally snarky kind of way, not in the "important women's message of the week" Oxygen kind of way.

This lack was even more forcefully brought home to me during my orgy of watching Season One of The Wild, Wild West, a show I have always loved but never had the chance to see all the episodes of. It's campy fun and features one of the best chemistry buddy pairs in TV history: James West and Artemus Gordon. (Note to readers: if all you know of The Wild Wild West is that absolutely horrible craptastic remake with Will Smith, Kevin Kline, and Kenneth Branagh all wasting their considerable talents, you absolutely do not know The Wild Wild West. Ping me and I'll lend you my discs of Season One - or better yet, arrange a marathon with you.) Gosh, I'd forgotten just how much I loved that show! But I correctly remembered that a lot of what really drove the show was the chemistry and caring between the two lead characters (well, okay, that and the silly over-the-top plots and the amazingly athletic fight scenes and the fun of watching Ross Martin turn himself in the the most unbelievable set of characters). On the show, Jim and Artie are friends and equals, with differing but complementary skill sets, and you just know that even when they're sniping at each other (which they do on a fairly regular basis) that it's friendly, and that they've always got each other's backs. (There's also a nice balance between Jim bailing Artie out from mortal danger, and Artie bailing Jim out from mortal danger, not to mention the bailing themselves both out of mortal danger. Balance is important here.) You just don't see that much between female characters on most TV shows or movies I can think of. Chemistry between actors, of course, is one of those lucky things you can try to cast for and hope for the best. When you get it, a lot of the caring will come from the actors as well as the script. But a lot of it is scriptable, in that you start with two strong characters with complementary skills and write situations where they each regularly have each other's backs. That kind of watching out for each other and building each other up in a casual, friendly, occasionally snarky way is pretty common in real life (in my experience at least) - but I can't think of a lot of it on TV or in the movies. (Of course I don't watch a lot of either, so maybe I'm just missing the obvious.) And I think it should be. I would love to see more of it. Of course I would also love to see more campy fun genre shows, so maybe I'm just completely out of tune with the rest of the world. But I do think there's something important missing, something I'd like to see a whole lot more of.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the "Mo" Test (named, I believe, for a character in Dykes to Watch Out For who coined it). She would only go to movies where a) there were at least two named female characters, b) they had a conversation or otherwise interacted during the film, and c) their interactions with each other did not largely revolve around the male characters or relationships with men.

It is truly disturbing how few movies pass. Even most of the "strong woman character" films people think of, there's one strong woman character set against an ensemble of men. The most common movies that pass the "Mo" Test as stated seem to involve an adult and a youth in a mother/daughter or parent/teacher sort of relationship (e.g. McGonagal and Hermione in the Potter series).

[hiker-chick.livejournal.com]

*You're* the one. I knew someone had mentioned that to me. ;-)

[jaunthie.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an excellent test, except I would also add to c) that their interactions with each other did not largely revolve around relationships with men and/or their children. In other words, I'm not sure I'm buying the mother/child part, either, at least not if it's dominating the whole character. There is more to womenhood than mommydom. ;-)