OKAY SO I had a coworker who was otherwise a standard clueless Straight White Guy, but this dude loved his wife and he knew her real good. And his wife LOVES shitty grocery store icing. So the first thing she’d always do with any cake is shove her fingers into the corner and scoop off whatever abomination of a flower was on there and eat it off her fingers.
SO THIS DUDE GOES TO THE STORE AND HAS THEM MAKE A WHOLE CAKE OUT OF FROSTING Brings it home to his wife for her birthday She shoves her fingers into it and then they just keep going FROSTING ALL THE WAY DOWN He said the look on her face was the best thing he’d ever seen in his life It gives me hope that even a clueless Straight White Guy knew and loved his wife enough to give her the perfect birthday present cake frosting abomination
And I love to imagine the conversation he had to have with the grocery store bakery.
Bugs Bunny isn’t your conventional trickster god - he doesn’t steal or lie; rather he inflicts on us a societal hubris. He traps us in the rules, conventions and expectations we’ve made. Forcing us to go through the niceties of the barbershop or DMV at the times most inconvenient to us. If we didn’t have these rules - if it was twelve thousand years ago and all we had was a snare and a knife, Bugs would be nothing more than a mortal rabbit. But now we have built so much and he has become a god.
when i was a little kid, i didn’t care for movies. my parents always admonished me for sitting too close to the screen or fidgeting too much, so i turned to books instead. when i was four, i tried to watch the first harry potter movie. i absolutely loved it, but it wasn’t enough for me. i had to get my hands on that book. the teachers at pre-school said it was a horrible idea, but i read the first two books anyway.
then came kindergarten. the teachers scolded my parents for letting me bring novels to school. “she can’t possibly understand them,” they said. so they gave me tests on the books. i made perfect scores on all of them. i preferred books to movies and television; movies didn’t do justice to the stories i loved.
so, they marked me down as a “gifted child.” they tested my IQ and everything. i was the perfect student, in their eyes. i sat in the front and listened to the teachers as intently as i could.
one day after school, i ran up to my mother and hugged her. then, i turned my head and saw my mother walking towards me. i looked up at the woman i had hugged. “you’re not my mother,” i said, astutely.
my mother, a clever woman, thought to have my eyesight tested. turns out, i had horrible vision. somewhere around 20/450. functionally blind without glasses. not ideal for anyone, especially a six year old.
all my life until that point, people thought i must be some sort of brilliant prodigy, eschewing television and movies for more intellectual pursuits, but actually i just couldn’t fucking see lol
This took a different direction than I was expecting.
