The Desert Mermaid

I've mostly been quiet on the way the internet is eating itself over this whole Guy Says He Hates Women, Shoots Up Women, And Then We Have To Convince People That Misogyny Might Be A Problem thing, because I felt I had nothing useful to add. But then gwalla pointed me to this excellent article, which makes a lot of good points. I'm not going to go over what he's saying because, y'know, he already wrote the article, but there is one small, stupid, petty thing right in the title that I realized has bothered me for years, which is a tiny symptom of the whole big mess, and as long as we're confessing things I want to get it off my chest.

Why the hell does everyone imply that Mario is saving the princess solely so that he can bang her?

Look, I get it. This is the internet. Rule 34, off-color jokes, Grimdark Mario, I-Can't-Unsee-It searches on DeviantArt. But here's the thing: I grew up with Mario. I was introduced to him as a kid--hell, Super Mario Bros. came out the same year I did. And while he doesn't talk much, he's got a pretty definite personality and characterization. And part of that characterization is that he is a Good Guy. Not a Nice Guy--I'm not talking about the term that disparages the very disparageable group of dudes mentioned in the above article. He's not just WAITING for the princess to notice how great he is. He is a fucking GOOD GUY. He is thrown into this world that has just been taken over by hostile dragons; the princess has been kidnapped and her subjects are suffering. This is bad.

So he goes to save her. Not because she's hot and he might get see her naked, but just because it's the right thing to do. Hell, he probably isn't even doing it for the completely nonmetaphorical and quite literal cake. He's doing it because somebody's gotta save the kingdom.*

So call me silly, but he's always been kind of my hero for that.

And so it pains me to think that something I saw as heroic--yes, it's a silly story, but it's still heroic--read to other people as doing something with a selfish ulterior motive.

I guess it's because we often project aspects of ourselves onto characters, and it's annoying when you're projecting the unselfish motives onto a character and somebody else projects a baser image. And because I rather like rescue narratives but get frustrated by how often the rescuee is considered a prize rather than a person being, y'know, RESCUED. I'd like to disentangle those two ideals. And for me, starting this game as a naive little kid, Mario was a good place to start.


BONUS THOUGHTS: It occurs to me that I also have an image of Princess Peach that is slightly skewed from the normal perception of her as a Dumbass In Distress, due largely to a couple of factors. One, of course, is the greatest game in the world, Super Mario RPG, wherein she DOES start out as a Dumbass In Distress but then joins your party to wallop everyone with parasols and frying pans. The other is the Super Mario Adventures comic by Kentaro Takekuma (the one that ran in Nintendo Power back in the day). If you can track this comic down, DO IT. It is weird and funny and colorful and action-packed, and also possibly where the Marioverse's obsession with cake started, and more to the point Princess Peach/Toadstool is kind of a badass in it. She does get captured--while LEADING AN ARMY to battle Bowser. And she winds up ninja-ing her way out of prison, dressing as Luigi to rescue Mario (don't ask), and obliterating Wendy O. Koopa's tower in the process. Also, she's the one who uses the cape power-up. It ... may have colored my perception of her a bit.


*And also because he seems to be having a really good time despite the peril. You probably know my alternate theory, which actually seems to fit the whole franchise's tone better, is that Bowser, at least, and possibly everyone else, thinks that the princess-saving obstacle courses are just another form of weekend recreation with his buddies, like the tennis and golf and go-kart racing they do on other weekends. One weekend they're at the racetrack; the next one the game is Capture-The-Princess. Bowser isn't so much a villain as he is a game designer. I strongly suspect Mario enjoys these weekends, too. And Peach never seems particularly put out by them, either. Maybe they all just think it's a super-fun elaborate game.

(Also, when Mario stomps on Goombas or whatever they don't die, they just teleport to the Goomba-Reinflation Center. That's why Bowser doesn't just flatten Mario by sending a hundred thousand Goombas at him at once. There are only about 50-100 Goombas total in the Koopa Kingdom. I HAVE THOUGHT THIS THROUGH.)

I am pretty sure that a recent confession on Twitter that, despite its utter stupidity and its complete failure to have anything to do with the games and that Mini-Amelia spent vast amounts of time constructing a much better universe for the characters to play in that actually REFLECTED the spirit of the franchise and thus she could not be bothered to care about the movie's idiocy, I am completely incapable of hating the Super Mario Bros. movie, somehow contributed to Bob Hoskins' death. I have this suspicion that one day not long ago, I confessed that I just love it for no good goddamn reason, and he felt a sudden shiver down his back and had some sort of post-traumatic flashback to that horrible experience, and then he gasped and aspirated a potato chip and it gave him pneumonia and he died. So sorry about that.

I have no idea how I managed to kill H.R. Giger today, though. But I'm sorry about that, too.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star indisputably takes the prize for the most pointless use of the 3DS motion sensor.

I wonder how complicated it was to program those holographic stickers, anyway.

Took my sister to get her cast upgraded yesterday. So far she’s been making do with a splint—a plastery chunk under an ace bandage and a bunch of athletic tape. Which was all fine and dandy, but lacked a certain je ne sais quoi, which in this case means “giant cybertronic anime-character boot.” The doctors had to correct that.

So first we went into the Chamber Of Getting Your Cast Removed. There was a nice lady in the next berth over, patiently waiting to get her dainty wrist cast off. She smiled slightly at my sister and me as we came in, then watched uncertainly as a nurse wrestled with the splint.

NURSE: Sometimes—oof!—these come right—ARGH—off, and other times …
MY SISTER: THIS IS MY PAIN FACE.
NURSE: How did you (dammit!) break your ankle?
MY SISTER: I was riding my bike, and OH GOD OW.
ME: You know, that actually works as part of the story and an interjection of intense pain!
NURSE: *standing up* I’m gonna get the saw.

While she was hunting that down, a familiar voice in the hallway made me glance up. There was Dad, just wrapping up his semimonthly meeting with the ortho guys where they get together and discuss all possible senses of the phrase “pain in the ass.”

ME: Hi, Dad!
NURSES and DOCTORS: Oh, this is your dad? Blah blah nice to meet you my name is Dr. Hammersmash and this is Nurse Blackandecker blah blah …
MY SISTER: … Ow?
EVERYONE: How did this happen?
MY SISTER: I don’t care anymore.
NURSE: Right, yes, saw.
X-RAY TECH: Let me do that, all for my good buddy, your dad.

The X-ray guy found the saw—a little round one that sounded like a particularly angry dentist’s drill.

X-RAY GUY: I’m going in! Cover me!
NURSES: We got your back!
SAW: GREEEEAAAARRR
DAD and the OTHER DOCTORS: Blah blah medical blah blah important doctors blah blah how did it happen?
MY SISTER: OW GODDAMN
NICE LADY WITH THE WRIST CAST: *look of panic-stricken fight-or-flight*
MY SISTER’S CAST: BLAM
X-RAY GUY: Ta-da!
EVERYONE: HOORAY!
*Pythonesque pause*
SOME DOCTOR: So.
DAD: Yes.
MY SISTER: Ow.
X-RAY GUY: X-rays?
DOCTORS: X-rays!
DAD: X-rays!
NURSE: X-rays!
MY SISTER: X-OHGODOW-rays!

So they all trooped off to X-ray her. They gestured to me to come along.

I looked at the traumatized lady with the broken wrist. She was the only other person left in the room.

ME: … Anyway, how are you?

Fortunately, a nurse came back a moment later, so I could leave without feeling like I was abandoning the nice lady to a dark pit of bleak, lonely despair. My sister got her x-rays and had her stitches removed from the incision. Then they fitted her with a Walking Boot You Are Not Supposed To Walk In.

NURSE: How’s that?
MY SISTER: It’s … a little bit … big?
NURSE: It might be somewhat … large … yes …
ME: Oh, for crying out loud. It’s Kuribo’s Shoe.

They sent her home with it, but the darn thing was too big, and anyway it’s hard to stomp spinies when you aren’t supposed to put weight on your boot that was made for walking. So she went back today and got the delicate, ladies’ model of GIANT BOOT. She says it feels much less unmanageable, which is good, because she’s got to have it on for four weeks.

Though I still think we should’ve kept the first one. You never know when you’re going to have to punt a spiny, after all.

Okay, I see why the packet said not to start pumpkin seeds indoors. Aside from questions of whether they transplant well, it is not reliably warm outside yet, what with the wild oscillations between 80- and 50-degree F weather, and the goddamn squash and pumpkin vines are taking over the kitchen. This is what I get for looking at the seed packet and thinking, "I've got some I won't use. Let's do some SCIENCE!"

Also, the garden has fallen prey to banditry. Not in the form of birds, raccoons, bugs, or even the accursed mollusca, but rather in the form of Vintner Dad, who in the space of a week stole all my dirt and broke my shovel. It was a nice new hobbit-sized shovel Mom had bought just for me, since my trying to work with the giant-ass spades in the workshop would be ludicrous. He did replace both items, but it has made gardening a bit trickier when the stuff I think is there isn't.*

But it looks like the garden will actually grow! The radishes are flourishing, the chard has sprouted, the strawberry has bloomed, and the calendulas have begun their bid for world domination.** I'm hoping the beans are next to sprout.

This has been your latest dispatch from the Victory Garden. Tune in next time to find out how the squashes do!


*Although it was almost worth it just to find the dirt wasn't the same stuff I'm using, because how often do you get to yell "This ain't no chickenshit! What the hell is this bullshit?" and mean it literally?

**I made the mistake of planting a few calendulas last year, and didn't get to them all before they FUCKING EXPLODED. Darn things are rivaling the dandelions for sheer proliferation.

So since I was going there straight from work, I arrived at Barnes and Noble some time before the rest of the book club. This was handy, because it gave me time to head to the café and get a sandwich. I still had some time, though, so I also went to the AV section to see if they had the DVD I was planning to get my brother for his birthday which was last month but whatever. They did not have it, so I threaded my way through racks of LEGOs and puzzles and shit to meet with the book nerds.

After the meeting, I went back to the café and got a lemon bar for when I got home. I stuck it in my bag and turned to leave—and saw, on one of the islands of toys, a plush Yoshi that was too dang cute to pass up.

So I picked him up and brought him past the lap desks and the bookends, and looking at the Nook accessories it occurred to me that I have been needing a new mousepad, since the bacterial civilization that is doubtless growing on the one I have can’t be far from rising up and slaying me. Perhaps there was one here!

“Say,” I said to the information lady. “Would you happen to have mousepads here?”

The lady gave me the exasperated look all great minds adopt after dealing with idiots all day—a look that said There Are No Dumb Questions, Just Incredibly Stupid People. “No,” she said with exaggerated patience. “This is a book store.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “I figured it was worth a shot.”

Then I went up front, paid for my plush Yoshi,* stuck it in the bag next to my lemon bar, and went on my merry way, chuckling a little at my own naïveté. Looking for mousepads! In a bookstore! What was I thinking?

The lemon bar was delicious, by the way.


*Although that took some doing. There was no tag, and the lady up front was apparently from some alternate dimension where smokery Jersey accents exist but Nintendo does not. She somehow became convinced that the plush toy was made by a company she called “Super Mary-o,” but the website she used to look up the price kept telling her Super Mary-o was not a toy but a game, which was just weird, if you asked her.

Man, this was a stupid weekend. Missed work yesterday because Heather, the World’s Nicest Person, was in town—which I’d have been gleeful about, except that she was in town for one of her mom’s concerts, and invited us along. Now, I love me a symphony, but her mom plays in the Orchestra at Temple Square, which meant the concert was at the Tabernacle, which is a building that drains all the joy out of life.

It is hard to describe the Tabernacle, largely because there isn’t much to describe: I’m not sure how it manages this, but it is somehow offensively bland. It contains one admittedly cool two-story pipe organ lit by neon stage lights, several acres of fake ivy that I assume was supposed to be decorative, and two floors of relentlessly uncomfortable wooden benches. It is hard to properly enjoy the legendary acoustics of the place when you can’t feel your legs. Even Heather’s family can’t stop it from depressing the hell out of me.

That alone wouldn’t make for such a lousy weekend, but in the last couple of days I have also:

• Made my manager angry because I had not squared missing work like I thought I had,
• Incurred the much more problematic wrath of my digestive tract,
• Unleashed one of my patented 30-Second Total Meltdowns at work,
• Had New Stove #3 break,
• Suddenly and inexplicably pissed off a patron I was chatting amiably with,
• Fail to do my Torn World duties,
• Run over my foot with a book truck, and
• Heard no fewer than three of Dad’s My Glorious Mac Is Better Than Your Stupid Ugly PC speeches.*

I do not like this list, so I will make another. All the good things that are going on the last few days:

• Super Mario Galaxy 2, which may not contain the Rosalina Waltz** but is still super fun.
• The weather. It is grey and cold and rainy and windy. This kind of weather makes me very, very happy, especially when the leaves are still red and orange.
• I did get to see Heather again!
• John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars. I hereby wish to restate my proposal to John Scalzi that he be my best friend forever.
• My stories’ dialogue. The Scalzi Effect is at work—I am writing much snappier dialogue myself now!
• I am a tortoiseshell again! I’ll take a picture tomorrow when I’m less depressed.
• Right at the end of work, just as we were closing, I heard a patron mention that she was from Kenya. “Wewe ni Mkenya!” I said. “Ni ńchi nzuri!”*** She almost fell over. “We’ll have to talk next time I’m here,” she said, because my scary manager was chasing everyone away by then. I always like being able to use my language skills.
• I got to talk to my brother tonight.  The conversation, as always, went straight to Batman.

Really, not so bad a weekend. But lousy stuff tends to eclipse happy stuff, and I’ve been having a stressful few months, so I’m still a little bummed out this evening. Perhaps this week will be better!


*As my brother notes, converts are the worst. I swear that within an hour of buying his first Mac Dad was an insufferable Macass. It is nice that he likes his computer, but I am tired of having that tied with “And your computer feeds kittens to puppies!”

**Anybody know where I can get a file of this song? It’s from the first Galaxy game—the music played on Rosalina’s spaceship.

***“You’re Kenyan! It’s a good country!” Yes, I am not a big Kiswahili conversationalist, but I made my point.  My point was: “Kenya! Yay!”

I think I’m getting better at New Super Mario Bros. Wii! I feel a lot better now. After eighteen years playing Super Mario World, I can pretty much beat the whole thing with my eyes closed, so I take it for granted that I am a Mario whiz. It was a bit of a blow to the ego to play another Mario game and SUCK at it. But now that is behind me.

I'm chucking the next helpless Toad into boiling lava, though. Little bastards need to use their own legs. Their blue- and yellow-spotted pals can do it! Why can't they?

---

Got a battlefield promotion on Sunday, following the executive decision of the one coworker who showed up to work. Sundays are ridiculous at the library, and one person handling everything going on in circulation is Unacceptable.

Which is why, when I came in just as we opened, she informed me that I was now qualified to work circulation.

So I wound up leaving the books to sit on their carts in favor of answering patron questions. Given that this is October, the questions were mostly along the lines of “DO YOU HAVE CHUCKY?” and “DO YOU HAVE FREDDY KRUEGER?”,* although I did get to bond with one patron over how awesome Star Trek TNG is. Still, I am afraid to work circulation at Christmas time. (“DO YOU HAVE SANTA?”)

My manager is hinting that this will look even better when they promote me, which she thinks will happen as soon as the Liberry acquires some money. I am not holding my breath, but it was fun to learn some of the new system.

---

Went to The Mall today. You know you’re turning into a grownup when the acquisition of bras, underpants, and pajamas is almost as exciting as acquiring Super Mario Galaxy 2.

The bra ladies sure thought it was. Apparently, there’s not much happening in Braland down in the depths of the department store, so when somebody comes in and purchases their new bright red bra that somehow makes you aware of breast cancer,** it is an event. “She bought the red one!” the ladies kept saying to each other. “I have sold my first red bra!”

I bought it largely because it holds my boobs up, something that my current bras are not doing, but I admit it was also red, which is fun. Who doesn’t like festive underwear?

And who doesn’t like new jammies and Super Mario? I am going to wear the first while playing the second. It is a good night.


*Answer: No. For some reason, people always steal the slasher movies. I checked for Child’s Play, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and every other horror movie they could think of. We theoretically have several copies of each, but given that not one copy of any of them had a due date past 2009, I’m thinking these folks’ll have to get some Netflix.

**I don’t know, perhaps it is a scare tactic: you wear it with a white shirt and people see it and think “MY GOD, WHAT IS WRONG WITH HER BREASTS UNDER THERE? They look like they’re about to explode! Could it be … CANCER?”

Brother’s back. Seems that the job offer he got had some snags or something. Bummer for him, but I’m kinda glad I’ll have company here in the Bat Cave for a little while longer, at least.

Plus, this way we get to go all fangirly over video game trailers together! I have very little interest in watching E3 demos of really unfinished games, because they generally consist of the demonstrators flubbing around saying, “No, really, I know I can’t get this thing to work now, but I swear it’ll be great later!” But give me a few choice shots and suggest a reason I might want to play this game—nostalgia, storyline, whatever—and I am all set. I mean, come on—new Donkey Kong Country would be terrific enough,* but hot damn that there Epic Mickey game looks SMASHING.**

Also, I don’t want to hurry Nintendo, who UNLIKE SOME COMPANIES actually works hard to finish their games before they get released, but I sure hope they don’t delay Skyward Sword. There are only so many times I can run through Twilight Princess, Wind Waker, Minish Cap, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask before it starts to look a little insane. I need more Zelda in my life, by god, and more to the point I need more Midna!*** I mean, she was the first companion in any of the Zelda games you not only didn't hate, but also actively fangirled! You can't take that away from us now!

First things first, though—I suppose I need a Wii. I have decided that if I ever get an agent to even respond in a timely manner take up my script, I can get one. Till then, I’m glad my brother’s around, so I can steal his Wii.


*This return to side-scrollers is a blast. I love me some giant bloated adventure time gaming from the golden days of 64-bit fuckery, but side-scrolling just feels so happy and natural. Plus, the improved nowatimes systems still allow 2D games to periodically BODY SLAM YOUR BRAIN. Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Super Paper Mario.

**Although I am rather disturbed that one of his weapons is, basically, The Dip. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t think Christopher Lloyd dissolving a shoe is one of the most traumatic moments in cinema history. You would have to be a cruel, heartless bastard otherwise.

***Less to the point, I need more mystical indignant chicken people, because they amuse me so. Mostly this is due to my brother’s terrifying theory that these people are actually just bodiless parasites who, upon reaching adulthood, steal the bodies of actual chickens. Come on, think about it—Ooccoo looks like she’s a head on a stalk that’s rooted to a headless chicken, and her son is just a head. It’s logical!

So the trees around here are having themselves a nice little orgy, and my face, as it does every spring, has decided that the only possible response to this is to seal itself off. I’m waiting for the year that I actually manage to pupate. A butterfly may not be my style, but I would make one absolutely adorable fluffy little moth.

For now, though, my face has taken on the same climate as a wetland.* And the swampularity seems to be migrating through my skull, since my brain feels pretty sluggy, too, causing me to make rambly entries like this one, when I’m not lying around reading or giving myself Nintendonitis with Super Mario Galaxy.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: blarg. I love spring, but I wish it agreed with me.


*True story: I was so miserable that I bribed my brother, with Fruity Snacks, to chop the onion for the chili I made today so I wouldn’t exacerbate the problem.