Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1.  Toy Story 5 | Official Trailer | In Theaters June 19 (February 20) Part of me is like "why are they making another Toy Story movie" but also part of me is like "I'm going to watch it."

2. How the devil was disguised in the SBC and Paul Pressler's Conservative Resurgence (May 6, via) "By 1998, I had been so convinced of the rightness of the religious right and the conservative movement that when news of the Clinton-Lewinsky abuse case broke, I thought the leaders who spoke against Clinton and sought his impeachment actually cared about the immorality of it all." This is so real.

Add this to the "it was all fake" pile of evidence. All that talk about submitting your life to Jesus, every part of your life, every decision, even your thoughts, sitting in prayer and listening to God, willing to do whatever God wanted, no matter the cost, killing your sinful and selfish nature- and meanwhile, the leaders at the top are lying, sexually abusing people, and chasing political power.

Maybe this is the case any time you have religious people who totally believe "I have to do whatever God says, no matter how hard it is"- we are extremely vulnerable to any leader who comes along and claims "this is what God wants." Especially when they frame it as "I'm just simply telling you what the bible says- if you question or disagree with me, you're disagreeing with God" which I've heard so many times.

What to do about this? I guess if you're a religious person who believes "I have to do whatever God says, no matter how hard it is," you need to maintain some amount of independence, like "I'm going to use my own brain and only believe 'this is what God says' if there is a good reason *that makes sense to me*." You run the risk that you might refuse to obey something that turned out to be a valid command from God, but I think it's better to err on that side, rather than be manipulated by leaders who can claim anything is "what God said" and our feeble human minds aren't supposed to understand the reasons and that's why faith is so important.

3.  How terrible is this family? Family therapist takes on THE PARENT TRAP (May 22, 28-minute video) Yessss, I watched "The Parent Trap" on Disney channel so many times back in the day. 

"There's emotional realism in this film, which the actors kind of like, concoct out of thin air. ... there's no emotional realism in this premise. And everyone's just kind of like, well, your dad and I had a fight, so we got divorced, and we each took a kid, and then they're never gonna see each other. And I as a parent am not gonna see my other child. Ever."

"And apparently there are many adults in both of these adults' lives who know this and are cool with it."

4. Ancestral Genomes (May 29) From xkcd.

5. A cancer vaccine made just for you. mRNA is back and it's fighting melanoma (June 1) This is great news! Sounds like it's still being tested, but hopefully soon it will be widely available.

6. Enhanced Games claim ‘we changed the world’ but only one record broken and three clean athletes win (May 25) "While the vast majority of the 42 competing sprinters, swimmers and weightlifters were taking banned substances such as testosterone, EPO and anabolic steroids, three athletes who were competing clean also won."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Donald Trump’s Horribly Broken Propaganda Film (May 31, 31-minute video) "It's rare to see a bit of art that literally should not exist, that is, in and of itself, morally wrong." Oh good, Big Joel watched "Melania" so the rest of us don't have to.

2. Justice Department says it will abide by court order pausing its 'anti-weaponization' fund (June 1) "A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia last week temporarily blocked the creation of the anti-weaponization fund after a lawsuit from Democracy Forward and others."

3. One by one, U.S. civil rights agency dismantles tools to fight discrimination (June 1) "Protecting U.S. workers from unlawful discrimination — already a hard task — could become significantly harder if the government no longer has that data within arm's reach, Gilbride says."

4. Federal judge ends Kennedy Center name change, bars two-year closure plans for now (May 30) "'Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it,' Cooper, an Obama appointee, wrote of the federal law establishing the Kennedy Center in his 94-page opinion."

5. Immigrant detainees sue over 'horrific' conditions at Texas ICE facility (May 30) "'No human being should ever have to go through this,' Angye said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations representing the detainees. 'I have already experienced torture in my home country of Cameroon and I never thought I would experience such severely violent treatment by guards here in the United States of America.'"

6. CA Gov Candidate Tom Steyer Calls Out Dems Capitulating On Trans People: "I'm Totally In Favor Of Trans Athletes" (May 28) "Steyer responded with a full-throated defense of transgender youth—and, specifically, of transgender athletes."

Also from Erin in the Morning: New York State Budget Released: $0 For Transgender Care Access (May 29) "'As the Trump administration continues to pose an existential threat to the transgender community, we are profoundly disappointed that the FY2027 New York State budget invests zero state dollars to support access to the health care many transgender, gender non-conforming, nonbinary, and intersex people rely on to live in their bodies with dignity and health -- a complete failure to meet the moment,' said Allie Bohm, NYCLU senior policy counsel about the lack of passage."

I can't stop thinking about Monsters University

Dean Hardscrabble in the door lab in "Monsters University." Image source.

[content note: spoilers for the 2013 Pixar movie "Monsters University"]

"Monsters University" is a prequel to "Monsters, Inc." It follows Mike Wazowski's time as a student at Monsters University, studying to be a scarer. He has big dreams and confidence, but other monsters are always telling him he can never really be a scarer, because he's not that scary.

In the universe of these movies, doors in the human world can be accessed from the monster world- in the monster world, a replica of the door is built, and it is attached to a docking station that powers it. Once it is powered, opening the door- from either the human side or the monster side- will allow you to walk right through from one world into the other. Typically these doors are closet doors in children's bedrooms. Monsters go into kids' rooms to scare them and harvest their screams, which create electricity for the monster world.

The scene I want to talk about is the big climax of the movie, when Mike gets discouraged and runs away, going through a door into the human world in order to prove that he *is* scary enough. But this door leads to a cabin at a camp, and Mike is in a room full of children- which he was not expecting. They laugh at him because he is not scary.

Another monster, Sully, comes through this door later, to find Mike. But then, the monsters on the monster world side of the door turn off the power from the docking station- this way, the door will no longer allow anyone to cross between the human and monster worlds. Mike and Sully are stranded in the human world. And what's worse, now a group of human police officers are coming to investigate what is going on in the cabin.

Mike and Sully come up with a plan to do spooky things in the dark cabin when the group of police is in there- making strange sounds, scratching the walls, etc- building up the tension but not letting the people see them yet, until finally Sully jumps up and roars at them, and they all scream and this powers the door, and Mike and Sully are able to get back to the monster world.

And so I can't stop thinking about this.

Wait, stop the presses, so "Monsters University" shows us that it's possible to power a door between the human and monster worlds, from the human side???? !!!!!! This is huge! This means it's theoretically possible for terrified humans to open doors into the monster world, without any monsters even being involved or aware of it at all.

Imagine human who's terrified because they're in life-threatening danger. They're being chased by a murderer, they're on a sinking ship with no way to escape, etc etc. And then- okay I guess they have to scream for this to work- so they scream and open a door and run through it, and suddenly they're in the monster world. Oh my goodness, that would be so fascinating! Suddenly the thing they were scared of is far away, they're not in danger any more, but they're lost in this really weird place. 

Maybe they're thinking, wait, did I die and this is heaven? (Or hell?????)

How long would it take for them to discover the existence of monsters? How would they get back to the human world? And what would it be like to cope with the trauma of the terrifying experience they just escaped, while also trying to navigate this bizarre new world?

Has anyone written a fanfic about this? I need it!

This is such a huge, significant change to the "Monsters, Inc" worldbuilding. The opening of the doors is *not* entirely controlled on the monster side. !!! I feel like this has incredibly significant implications, which the monsters really should be concerned about, seeing as how they're actually terrified of people, and they believe that being touched by a human child is deadly for a monster. Isn't it, like, a problem that there could be any number of terrified humans accidentally bumbling their way into the monster world?

Now let's address some possible objections against what I'm saying here:

Objection 1: It's not like *any* human door can open into the monster world. There has to be a duplicate door created by the monsters, in the monster world, along with the technology which connects them. Most doors in the human world are *not* connected in this way. So no, you're not going to get situations where humans are opening a monster-connected door without realizing it.

Okay, yeah, it's not just *any* door that would work. But, apparently most closet doors in children's bedrooms are connected to the monster world in this way. It's extremely plausible to imagine a situation in the human world where someone runs to hide in a bedroom closet- home break-in, domestic violence, tornado warning, or any number of other terrifying situations.

So yeah, if you say "this wouldn't happen because most human-world doors aren't set up to connect to the monster world"- well, still, some of them are, and it could totally happen with those ones.

Objection 2: It's not that fear *in general* or screams *in general* power the doors. It has to be, specifically, fear in a situation which involves a monster. It has to be a scream of a person who sees a monster. So no, you couldn't have people scared of something completely unrelated to monsters, and accidentally opening doors into the monster world as a result.

Hmm, maybe there's something to this objection. In "Monsters, Inc" and "Monsters University", we see plenty of scenes of people screaming and this energy being collected and used by monsters- but the people are not really in any actual danger. Monsters never ever touch people, because monsters genuinely believe that it is deadly for a monster to do so.

The whole "monster in the closet" thing is not so much about actual danger but a normal phase that children go through, trying to make sense of their emotions about what they don't know and can't control about the world. And there is a scene in "Monsters, Inc" where a monster says that a child is no longer scared of him- children naturally grow out of this phase- and therefore that child's door is no longer useful for the monsters.

So maybe it's not exactly *fear* that is useful for power in the monster world. Maybe it's that specific kind of feeling, it's not fear exactly, it's the sort of thing where you can look back at it later and laugh at yourself because it's obvious there was no actual danger. The feeling that makes people enjoy horror movies and roller coasters. The tension that builds and then releases.

Maybe a door into the monster world *can't* help a human escape an actual life-threatening situation, because it isn't powered by that kind of fear.

But also, in the "Monsters University" scene with the police in the cabin, they genuinely were scared, right? They weren't just having fun and/or working through normal childhood emotions. So maybe this distinction between different kinds of fear (?) doesn't actually matter for powering the doors.

Hmm.

To what extent is the "life-threatening situation" fear the same feeling as the "watching a horror movie" fear though? Hmm. That's a question. Is it the same feeling? It's like... when we watch movies, we *want* that kind of feeling, it's exciting, even though we definitely would NOT want to be in the dangerous situations the movie characters are in. Watching it is fun, but if it was happening in the real world, it would be terrible. Is that the feeling that powers the monster world?

Hmm, then maybe people consensually being scared in a haunted house could accidentally enter the monster world. Rather than people running from actual life-threatening danger. 

Hmm.

Or does it only work if there are literal monsters there?

Hmm.

I still need a fanfic about this though.

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Related:

Celia and Mike's Baby 

"Elemental": a movie about immigration, culture, and giving up the life your parents built for you 

Buzz Lightyear and the Years We Lost to Covid 

The Privilege and Complicity of Fix-It Felix Jr 

Team Rocket Should Get Real Jobs

Blogaround

Links not related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Pixar-Inspired Robot Lamp Is the First Apple Intelligence Device I Really Want (February 7) Ah yes, I remember seeing this lamp in "Toy Story."

2. The Racist Cisgender Nonsense of Emilia Perez (February 1) 2-hour-19-minute video from Jessie Gender.

3. He’d Die for You. But Will He Do the Dishes? (February 10) "One of the most bizarre arguments defending men being in authority over women is the idea that one day, he may have to take a bullet for you."

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Links related to the orange antichrist:

1. This Is How Evangelicals Defended Hitler in 1935 (2016 ~ This link was posted in a comment by Matthew James Longstaff.) Many Christians back then supported Hitler- and Christians now need to know this and learn from this history.

When I learned about the Holocaust in middle school, I don't remember learning anything about how Christians in general responded to the Nazis. (I remember hearing about individual Christians who heroically helped Jews hide or escape.) There was one time, one of my classmates asked the teacher what Hitler's religion was, and she said "he was a Christian," and I thought to myself "he wasn't a real Christian," because obviously, look at all the terrible things he did, murdering 6 million people, it's so obvious that's not what a "real" Christian would do. And I didn't think any more of it.

But, no, it wasn't like German Christians supported Nazism because they just didn't care about their Christian identity at all and therefore didn't put any thought into the question "what does Christianity have to say about this?" It's so much worse than that- they really made arguments, based in their Christian beliefs, about why supporting Hitler was the right thing to do. We need to learn from this. We need to know what their arguments were, to make sure we're not making those same arguments now. We need to learn from the way they used Christianity to justify horrific atrocities, so that we don't do the same thing.

2. Trump And 'Don't Say Gay' Come For The National Center For Missing And Exploited Children (February 8) "But like everything else spending-related right now, the executive branch is saying it may not disburse whatever money NCMEC is by law supposed to receive, unless the organization throws gay and transgender children under the bus."

3. “People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True. (January 31)

4. "Comparison is the way we know the world" (2023, via) "We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible."

5. Kanye West is selling $20 T-shirts with swastikas (February 10) WTF!

6. Trump's ban on gender-affirming care for young people puts hospitals in a bind (February 10) "After months waiting for an appointment at the gender-affirming care clinic at VCU Health in Richmond, Willow had one on the calendar on Jan. 29. President Trump's executive order limiting transgender health care for youth came out in the afternoon of Jan. 28."

Here's something I don't quite understand- if you have an insight or a link that explains it, leave a comment. I've heard trans people and allies make the argument that the same medical care that is provided to trans kids for gender-affirming reasons is also sometimes provided to cis kids. To ban this care for trans children but not cis children is discrimination on the basis of gender or gender identity- which is not legal.

This strikes me as not a very good argument, but maybe there's something I'm missing? I feel like, if you're talking to someone who doesn't believe being trans is even a real thing, they could just say, "When puberty blockers, for example, are given to cis kids, that's because there's an actual good reason- this happens when a cis kid starts puberty way way too early. Obviously in that case, it makes sense to use puberty blockers to delay puberty to a more normal timeline. That's a good reason to use puberty blockers. But for trans kids, we're talking about completely normal and healthy kids, going through puberty on a normal schedule, and then you want to use puberty blockers to change that? There's no good reason for this- being trans isn't a real thing. All medical procedures and drugs come with risks- so, you should use them if you have a good reason, but if you don't have a good reason, then you shouldn't, because of the risks."

Like, I feel like the situation is not "under this ban, this medical care can be given to cis kids but not trans kids- this is clearly discrimination." It's not *about* being trans or cis- when a trans kid gets treatment, vs a cis kid getting the same treatment, it's a completely different situation. It would happen for completely different reasons. It's not about denying them care simply for being trans, it's about whether there's a good enough reason for them to get this care, and in the eyes of the Republicans making these laws, one's feelings about one's gender is not a good enough reason.

I mean, maybe the pro-trans argument here is that the government shouldn't be in the business of judging what is or isn't a "good enough reason" for receiving medical care? Maybe that's the key? (Oh hey, I also feel that way about abortion.)

It's just that I've seen this argument mentioned ("this is discrimination based on gender because they're not banning this health care for cis kids") but I don't think I've ever seen it clearly explained. Feel free to leave a comment if you know something I don't~

7. Three migrants win temporary block from potential transfer to Guantanamo (February 10) "'Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison,' Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the Immigrants' Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement."

"Elemental": a movie about immigration, culture, and giving up the life your parents built for you

Ember (fire girl) and Wade (water boy). Image source.

Well I'm late to the party on this, but I just saw the 2023 Pixar movie "Elemental" and I LOVED IT. !!!!! Why didn't anyone tell me this was a movie about immigration and cultural differences? I would have watched it much sooner! I knew it was a "forbidden love" sort of story between a fire character and water character, but it's more than that.

Here's an overview of the movie: In the beginning scenes, 2 fire people leave Fireland and immigrate to Element City. ("Fire people" are basically anthropomorphized flames walking around.) Element City is very much NOT built for fire people. There's water flowing and dripping in lots of public places (probably the city was designed for water people). These immigrants built a little shop which sells things to other fire people, and over time more fire people moved to their section of the city. Their daughter, Ember, works in the shop, and her father says she will take over the shop when she's ready.

Then Ember meets Wade, a water person, and they get to know each other and eventually fall in love. Wade is more naive and idealistic than Ember- he is ready to go against all the societal norms so they can be together. For Ember, it's not the simple. She doesn't have the same privileged background that Wade does. Her parents worked hard and sacrificed so much to come to Element City and build a life for themselves and for her, and she feels she can't reject all of that just because she has feelings for Wade.

I was very impressed with how this movie portrayed the sense of being out of place, of standing out in a foreign environment, of being constantly inconvenienced by societal structures which everyone else feels are normal. When Ember goes into the city, and when she goes to Wade's home to meet his family, there are no other fire people there, and she very much stands out. She always carries an umbrella with her, and whips it out many times to protect herself from water being splashed around, while all the water people aren't bothered at all by getting wet- it's a constant inconvenience for her, that other people don't even notice. Even Wade, who accompanies her and wants to help her, fits in so well and is so comfortable in that environment, so he can't *truly* understand what she's going through. 

I have experienced a lot of this, as a white person living in China. As a white person visiting my Chinese husband's family. And also, from the other side of it- bringing my husband to meet my family in the US.

Another theme in the movie is about how cute ideas like "follow your heart" land extremely differently for someone from a privileged, majority-culture background vs an immigrant/minority background. Both Ember and Wade come from families where "elements don't mix", but when Wade decides to challenge this ideology, it's very different than if Ember was challenging it. In Ember's case, her parents have sacrificed so much, and lived through constant discrimination from water people, and worked so hard keeping their little shop going... the idea that she can just turn her back on all of that, just because she loves a water guy? She can't.

My experience with this is that I grew up in an evangelical culture which admired missionaries. We were all so impressed by Americans who were "called by God" to give up everything and go live in some scary poor country. We talked about this "calling" like it could just strike anyone, out of the blue, you're a normal Christian and then one day you're praying and you hear God saying "goooo to Chinaaaaa" and then you have to give up everything and go.

So I was always in this ideology where it was seen as heroic to give up your whole culture and lifestyle for God. We believed our lives didn't really belong to ourselves, but to God, and we should be totally willing to "surrender all."

When I moved to China, it wasn't as a missionary, and it wasn't because "God called me", but it was still very much influenced by this Christian missions ideology. Viewing my lifestyle and culture as something that can easily be sacrificed, something that is not truly mine.

At some point, I realized that the only reason I felt so okay with giving up these things was because I was so privileged- I had always taken for granted that I would have them. I had worked hard, sure, but never with the threat of "if I don't work hard enough, I won't be able to have that kind of [normal white American college-educated] life."

As an example (which I wrote about here: Privilege and "Putting God First"): When I was in college, I was very involved with bible study groups and other Christian activities. I dedicated a LOT of my time to them. And all of us in those groups would always talk about how bible study was more important than the other things in our lives, like homework. About how we needed to get our priorities right, and put God first. Following God was a higher priority than doing well in our classes.

I was only able to think that way because my entire life, I had always taken for granted that I would go to college. There was never any possibility that I wouldn't go to college. And so, it was easy to act like it didn't matter, like "yeah I'd totally give this up for God." To act like I didn't value it. 

I knew other students who were the first people in their families to go to college. And I knew international students whose parents had spent a lot of money to send them to school in the US. Do you think they were walking around talking about how doing well in school didn't *really* matter, and all that mattered was devotion to God?

And from a parent's perspective, how does it feel if you've worked so hard to give your child a good life, and then the child decides they don't want that life at all? Like it's something they can give up so easily? This can go in several different ways, depending on how privileged you are. If the child wants to do something different than what the parent wanted, but it would still work out okay, then the parent should hopefully accept that. But if the child decides they want to go back to the kind of difficult, dangerous life that the parent worked so hard to escape from, well that's not so good.

So I really enjoyed "Elemental," because it showed the experience of being an immigrant and feeling out-of-place in a foreign environment. And how the typical Disney-movie message of "be yourself, follow your heart, don't be limited by your parents' expectations" can play out very differently depending on how privileged your family background is.

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Related:

On Marriage as an Immigrant in China

Privilege and "Putting God First" 

Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China 

Runaway Radical: Radical Christian Missions 

"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" is About Being an Immigrant

The Privilege and Complicity of Fix-It Felix Jr

Zootopia, an Adorable Disney Cartoon about Systemic Racism 

Buzz Lightyear and the Years We Lost to Covid

Blogaround

1. How (Not) To Do Autism Awareness Month (March 1) "I think most people know at this point that autism exists and a few basic traits, and would go 'Oh yeah, I support autistic people' in April, but months later when someone you work with is 'weird' and communicates more directly and bluntly than others, do you just go with it or do you assume they’re being rude to people and complain to someone?"

2. "Complete" Manhood and The Desirability of Becoming Human in Bicentennial Man (1999) (March 7) "I cannot stress this enough. They had the opportunity, right here, to fashion 'Can Andrew open a bank account?' into a central plot point about the legal recognition of his personhood, and the movie just... breezes past it. Andrew gets a bank account and nobody tries to stop him and it's fine."

3. Tom Hanks Mad He Didn't Learn About The Tulsa Massacre In School, And He's Right (March 8) "And it made me mad. It made me mad that somebody had somehow made an editorial process of what was appropriate for us to learn about our own American history."

4. Farewell, OnlySky (March 7, via) Sad to hear that atheist blogging site OnlySky is shutting down.

5. Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants. (March 7) "Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you."

6. Therapist Reacts to WALL-E (January 10) "I understand that on paper, that sounds ridiculous and kind of stupid. And yet, I kid you not, I think this is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen on film." 29-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

7. This tweet:

Jesus teaching only in parabolas pic.twitter.com/b8Yty5VTVx

— Scott Barber (@thescottbarber) March 13, 2024

8. And this song, if you're into Phil Joel/ Newsboys songs from the year 2000 (I know I am!)

9. At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest (March 13) Oh ChatGPT.

Blogaround

Hi readers, my blogging has been very slow recently because I have a bunch of things going on. My next post on "The Great Sex Rescue" will be delayed too. Don't worry, I'll try to get back on track soon.

Anyway here are some links:

1. The TRUTH About Woody’s Holster | Toy Story Pixar Film Theory (January 14) Asking the real questions: Why does Woody have a holster but no gun?

2. Submission Saved My Marriage! The Tragic Irony of Christian Complementarianism (July 15) "Let the reader understand the irony of this statement. The wife initiated submission in her marriage, but the husband is praised for his leadership. The greatest racket of conservative white evangelism is that the husband is praised for being a 'leader' when he responds with love to his wife’s submission."

3. Joe Biden Used One Weird Trick To Cancel Student Debt For Me And 804,000 Other Americans (July 19) "The loan adjustment was announced last year, and will provide debt relief to borrowers who were, to put it bluntly, ripped off by incompetent or downright fraudulent mismanagement of the government’s Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program."

4. Do Women Make Men Do Things? Part 1 (June 1) "This was one of the most common justifications of male leadership I remember hearing growing up in church. If men see women leading worship or music, or teaching Sunday school, they will not want to participate. They will sit back and not act, and won’t take the role they are supposed to have in the church. Because women caused it."

Blogaround

1. Spam bloggers get (April 27) "Some of the e-mails try to sound personal, but it’s really obvious that they are bot operations."

2. BMW Hits a Rocky Road, Apologizes for Ice Cream ‘Discrimination’ (April 21) I posted a link related to this in a previous blogaround, but I just found out that Sixth Tone also wrote about it, and Sixth Tone is definitely a better source for Chinese news.

I have one criticism of this article, though- it keeps using the word "foreigners" when what it actually means is "white people." And honestly this happens all the damn time in China and it annoys me SO MUCH. Chinese people never call me a white person (白人), they call me a foreigner (外国人) ALL THE TIME. Because I'm white! Like if that's the reason- and it affects every interaction I have with Chinese people- why can't we just say it? But anyway, nothing I can do about that, so I try not to get mad about it.

Chinese internet users are mad because BMW gave ice cream to "foreigners" right after they told Chinese people that there was no ice cream available- do you think that would have happened if these "foreigners" were, say, Indian? Korean? African American? Chinese American? (Actually, ethnic Chinese aren't generally seen as "foreigners", regardless of their actual citizenship...) If a non-white "foreigner" had showed up, would they have gotten the ice cream? I would say it's much less likely. No, this is about whiteness, so let's call it whiteness. (For more on that, see: Well I have to blog about this "don't touch foreigners" nonsense because I'm white in China.)

Another article also from Sixth Tone: A Female Comedian Gets Praised and Slut-Shamed for STI Set (April 14) About how difficult it is to get the HPV vaccine in China.

A third article from Sixth Tone: Illegal Gym Construction Leaves 240 Families Homeless in Harbin (May 4) "More than 240 families living in a 31-story building in China’s northeastern city of Harbin were evacuated Sunday after a tenant demolished most of the load-bearing walls on the third floor."

3. Cryptocurrencies II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (April 24) "The throughline in all three companies I've talked about tonight is them confidently presenting a veneer of expertise, even as beneath the surface, they were a complete shit show."

4. Gusteau’s BIG Secret Revealed | Ratatouille Pixar Film Theory (April 27) "When you're watching 'Ratatouille', has it ever bothered you that, if not for the unbelievable discovery that Remy can control Linguini with his hair, then the plot could never happen?"

5. The Light Bulb Sudoku (2021) 42-minute sudoku solve video. This is really cool- similar logic to a sudoku with A LOT of thermos and thinking about how many degrees of freedom each one has.

6. Texas Senate passes bill requiring public school classrooms to display Ten Commandments (April 22) Ugh, tell me you've never read the bible without telling me you've never read the bible. This is such a bad idea. It's like, some politicians want to pressure people into being more Christian or something, so they try to brainstorm things that seem like good symbols of being Christian, and hey the 10 Commandments sounds like it would fit that description. It's not about actually caring what the 10 Commandments are and following them... I would warn these politicians to pay particular attention to the 3rd commandment (depending on how you number them), "you shall not misuse the name of the Lord." Yeah, using God as an excuse to make laws restricting other people's rights- that's what "misusing the name of the Lord" means.

Blogaround

1. Meet China’s High Heels King (February 24) Wow, I am really impressed about how this man actually understands how unworkable a lot of high-heeled shoes are, learning it through actual experience. And impressed at how well he's able to run and jump in heels.

2. Can pastors please stop salivating over women’s bodies in sermons? A response to Jonathan Pokluda’s objectification of the ‘perfect’ woman (February 24) "Women deserve better than to go to church and hear all that stops our pastors from having sex with total strangers is a Bible memory passage. We’re all for Bible memory, but we’re also for marriage vows, faithfulness and holding Christian men to at least the same moral standard as your average non-Christian husband at your local Applebee’s." PREACH!

3. Wall-E – Paradise Regained? Reflections on the Garden of Eden and Man’s Labor (January 23) "The movie causes us to ask, what do we think our future will be like? Wall-E, the movie, depicts a world that Man has destroyed through lack of stewardship, and in which they are relegated to living away from their home with technology serving their every need. At first sight, it may seem as though they live in a kind of paradise. Though they have been taken from the earth, they now live a life of pleasure. Is this heaven? Is this what some people, including many Christians conceptualize heaven to be like? No work, being served, just relaxing all the time?"

4. The Origins of the Parable of the Sower (and Other Seedy Riddles) (February 22) "This is not the parable you would tell if you were calling people to action, because it presents a deterministic view of humanity. ... However, at the meta-narrative level, this parable makes perfect sense if it is aimed at Mark’s community—especially those discouraged by a lack of success in their preaching and missionary work."

And another one from the same blog: Did Jezebel Murder Naboth? A Reassessment of Israel’s Most Notorious Queen (January 15) "This is not meant literally; we are not supposed to understand that anyone will actually be eaten by dogs and birds. Rather, such wording constitutes a curse of non-burial; telling someone that their corpse will be consumed by animals implies a shameful death and legacy. Such curses were 'a standard part of treaty and covenent formulas throughout the ancient Near East' (Cronauer, p. 26), and there are many examples outside the Bible."

5. 'Then' (February 28) "Whenever some people start talking about revival, other people will start quoting Isaiah 58." As they should. (This is another post from the Slacktivist about the Asbury revival. All of his posts on it have been extremely good.)

Blogaround

1. Home invasion: Mastodon's Eternal September begins (November 9) "Like when you're sitting in a quiet carriage softly chatting with a couple of friends and then an entire platform of football fans get on at Jolimont Station after their team lost. They don't usually catch trains and don't know the protocol. They assume everyone on the train was at the game or at least follows football. They crowd the doors and complain about the seat configuration."

2. Chinese Sailor Returns Home After Circumnavigating the Arctic (November 15) "The 54-year-old man journeyed for 17 months on a solar-powered yacht to raise awareness of climate change."

3. How Many Trans People Does The New York Times Believe There Should Be? (November 15) "Once trans people enter the picture, though, institutions like the Times are eager to reimagine the remaining limitations of modern science and the inherent chance of side effects that come with any medical treatment as invalidating flaws."

4. Eight billion of us: What does that mean? (November 16) 

5. One True Ace Pairing: Toy Story 4 (2019) "A traditional romance movie might have one person make a grand gesture of sacrifice to be with the other, because movies teach us that nothing is more important in life than finding love. But many of us would agree that it is not, and sometimes, even if you’ve met the right person, the circumstances aren’t right for you to be together. But in Toy Story 4, Woody and Bo have cared for each other for a long time, but the circumstances were finally right for them, and I find that just so darn romantic."

6. Missing a Permission Slip (2017) [content note: descriptions of masturbating and sex toys] Here's a really interesting asexual perspective on masturbating.

Blogaround

Blood moon total lunar eclipse. Photo taken in Hong Kong. Image source.

1. 11/4 Flashback: Except Steve (November 4) "'Steve' has emerged as a central figure in American theology."

2. The Hardest Sudoku Of Them All: Simon Vs Phistomefel Live (2021) A 2-hour-15-minute sudoku solve video (which was livestreamed). This is incredible.

3. Does Lightyear Prove Wall-E Never Happened? | Pixar Film Theory (November 5) I love this! The Super Carlin Brothers have taken the Pixar theory so incredibly far that now they are asking questions like, "Could this be the reference to the next in-universe Pixar movie to be released? If that's the case, then what would that actually mean? Like, does that suggest that 'Wall-E' never happened on the Pixar timeline?" Completely bizarre questions that only make sense if you've bought into the "Pixar theory" ideology and followed it so many levels deep- but treated like these are the obvious concerns that come up when anyone just simply watches Pixar movies. I love it SO MUCH. I've said before that the Pixar theory is EXACTLY LIKE biblical apologetics. I very much do not believe in the Pixar theory, but it's fascinating seeing how far they can take it- how far away they get from the actual stories told by the actual movies.

The Super Carlin Brothers have taken the Pixar Theory and have gone soooo far off the deep end, and I am here for it.

4. Why Americans living abroad are a voting bloc with untapped political potential (November 6) YES! Very good article! All of this is very true. "That's part of why overseas citizens' turnout is so low, because they don't have that logistical support, and they're on their own with figuring out how and when to vote."

5. How Your Church Can Help With the Housing Crisis (posted November 6) These are good ideas, and in general this should be a role that churches take on. But also, I want to say, this isn't like just a simple "we have extra space so we can let people live here" and you don't put any more thought into it than that. Being a landlord is an actual job. And for people with low income, who are just 1 unexpected expense from disaster, as the landlord you also get pulled into those disasters. Before you become a landlord, you have to educate yourself about how it works, and have a realistic plan about what to do if there are problems. When you get people dependent on you because you provide their housing, it's immoral to stop providing that- even though you're within your rights to evict them- even though you lose money if you let your tenants not pay rent.

So, count the cost.

And yes, the writer of that blog post points out these issues: "It almost goes without saying that congregate living of this nature is going to result in chaos or conflict on some level. As a housing case manager, I came to expect this. Many in the church might not be prepared to deal with the soap operas that result from this kind of living. But isn’t that what the church is called to do—assisting those in need, and helping them to live better lives? To address this, the church could assign a particular deacon to work with the families who live on church property."

Yes, churches should definitely use their extra space to help people who can't afford housing. That's what Jesus wants us to do. But don't do it in a naive way. Do it in an educated way. Count the cost first.

6. The origins of circumcision: Was it a mark of slavery? (July 20) "First, people don’t normally submit to such procedures without coercion. Not initially."

7. In China, Millions of Women Never Learned to Read. Can TikTok Help? (November 4) "'They say it never occurred to them that they could read and write in their lifetimes,' Liu says. 'That’s when it hits me that what I’m doing is truly meaningful.'"

8. Amazing photos of the last Blood Moon lunar eclipse of 2022 (gallery) (November 8) This was so incredible. Here in China, the total eclipse began at 6:18 pm. The moon was rising- I talked to family in the US, and they were able to see the first part of the eclipse but then the moon set for them. Anyway, I saw it, showed it to my kid, it was so incredible.

And if you want to see the 1-hour-43-minute stream of the entire thing: WATCH LIVE: ‘Blood moon’ total lunar eclipse in Asia (November 8)

9. Oh my goodness, this entire thread is SO GOOD:

Purity culture ≠ asexuality.
PURITY CULTURE ≠ ASEXUALITY.

Purity culture is where asexual teens camouflage and asexual adults are increasingly exposed. 🧵🪡

— Ellen Huang (Ell) ♠️🐇🍀☂️ (@nocturnalxlight) November 10, 2022

My favorite part is: "Purity culture emphasizes a virginity-to-consummated-marriage pipeline without preparing anyone for anything."

Blogaround

October 23-29, 2022 is Ace Week! Awesome! Image source.

1. The 2022 Ace Community Survey is now open! Go take the survey! Even if you aren't asexual, it still helps if you take it :)

2. The Unending Lies of Matt Walsh (October 21) Jessie Gender's 4-hour-long video responding to Matt Walsh's "What is a Woman?" documentary. And, wow, Jessie's video is extremely good. Matt Walsh has a lot of disgusting things to say about trans people and about women, and frankly he creeps me out. 

I remember years ago, when I first became aware of Walsh's blog... and it read to me like, take a Christian belief and then take it to such an extreme that it becomes heartless and shockingly offensive. I don't view him that way any more, though- I don't see anything Christian in it; I just see hate. 

Did he change and move farther from the Christianity I knew? Or did I change and can no longer imagine a Christianity compatible with that much hate?

3. Texas Woman Nearly Loses Her Life After Doctors Can't Legally Perform an Abortion: 'Their Hands Were Tied' (October 18) [content note: miscarriage, medical trauma, anti-choice politics] "'It was just so frustrating to be dealing with something so traumatic, and then just gamble with the outcome of Amanda's life unnecessarily,' says Josh."

4. Netflix & AI Discrimination (June 4) "Here’s why Netflix’s response is laughable.  I completely believe that Netflix’s algorithm is not based on race, gender, ethnicity, or orientation. I believe that they only use a member’s viewing history. But that doesn’t make it any better?"

5. Equality vs equity: An overanalysis (February 13) "Of all my complaints about this meme, my most significant is about its choice of words. On the surface level, the meme is educating us about the distinction between 'equality' and 'equity'. However, outside of the meme, that is not how the words are used."

6. I didn’t want a baby (June 27) This writer talks about her feelings about her abortion- how she felt various conflicting emotions, including sadness. 

I think this is a really important story to tell, because I feel like, in pro-choice discussions, it's like you have to say abortion is a great thing, and if you say it's a hard decision or something, then supposedly that cedes ground to "pro-life" people because they're going to jump on that and say "see, it's a HARD DECISION, that's why we need to force women to have unnecessary ultrasounds and a 24-hour waiting period and yell at them from the sidewalk, because they can't just make a HARD DECISION by themselves."

I'm pro-choice. But that doesn't mean I have to believe "abortion is always great and awesome" or whatever. I don't really think abortion is a good thing. (I think the medical technology that allows doctors to perform abortions in a safe way is a good thing! Laws that ensure that people have access to abortion care are a good thing!!!) But you know what else is also not a good thing? Pregnancy. Like, oh GEEZ, pregnancy is THE WORST. I did a whole pregnancy, and I hated it. But it was worth it for me because now I have a perfect child. But DAMNNN obviously no one should have to go through all that if they don't want to. And obviously the pregnant person is the only one who has full knowledge of the situation and is able to weigh the options and make the decision that is right for their situation.

I remember Dr. Parker's book "Life's Work" also talks about this- many of the women that come to him for abortions have complicated feelings about it. He says it's very normal that a woman knows that having an abortion is the right decision for her, but she still has feelings of caring about her "unborn baby." (But I feel like the pro-choice people on Twitter don't want you to say that, because then "pro-life" people are going to swoop in like "AHA, this is why we need to stop women from having abortions.") Women who have abortions aren't the stereotypes that get thrown around in political debates, like this stereotype of a foolish girl who was talked into it and doesn't know what's going on, or the stereotype of someone who says "it's just a clump of cells."

7. Billy Graham’s apology was a lie (October 25) "Billy Graham visited the Oval Office to talk to the president of the United States about the evil Jewish conspiracy that he believed had a 'stranglehold' on America."

8. One Of The 10 Hardest Puzzles We've Ever Seen (October 24) 1-hour-37-minute sudoku solve video. This is incredible.

9. Biden pushes crackdown on bank ‘junk fees’ that government says will save Americans $3 billion a year (October 27)

10. People of faith, Fox News grifter edition (October 11) "Nobody talks about people of politics, because the idea is inherently stupid. The idea of people of faith is similarly stupid — everybody is a person of faith, in the sense that everybody operates from axiomatic metaphysical priors, except for Richard Dawkins, who is just purely rational and objective all the way down to the last turtle — but of course 'people of faith' not really an idea per se, it’s just some idiotic slogan, meant to make conservative white Christians feel like they’re under some sort of constant massive cultural attack by the godless socialist woke hordes."

11. ‘Do They Even Read the Bible?’ — Why Exposing White Evangelical Hypocrisy is a Dead End (October 25) "But the White evangelical Bible isn’t simply a biblical text that speaks to its readers, it’s a complicated assemblage of social, political, and theological assumptions that determine in advance how that text speaks. The White evangelical Bible speaks for itself only after the reader makes arguments out of biblical allusions and citations that reinforce what the White evangelical already knows to be true." This is SPOT ON.

12. Trump’s Ties to Jerry Falwell Jr. and His Wife’s Creepy Pool Boy Sex Saga Revealed (October 26) [content note: Jerry Falwell Jr.'s sex life] "'I felt guilty,' Granda says in the film. 'I’m like, I know the truth about Jerry. He’s trying to appear like this strongman, but I know him as the cuck in the corner of the room.'"

13. The ace nerd (October 27) "It’s obvious that the nonsexual nerd is not 'for' ace nerds, and the writers are not interested in any real world intersection."

14. An Ace Reading of "When She Loved Me," Exploring the Drawbacks and Affordances of Nonhumanity (2021) "When friends get partners and suddenly disappear from our lives, we're told that we should've expected to be dropped eventually."

Sea Monsters on Land, and My Life With Vaginismus

I'm submitting this to the October 2022 Carnival of Aces (which I am hosting). It's more of a purity/ repression/ vaginismus story than an asexuality story, but this is the story that's on my mind right now, so here it is. I think for those of us who are asexual and grew up in "purity culture" it can sometimes be hard to separate out which of your feelings/thoughts/beliefs come from your own asexuality and which come from being repressed- and the way I wrote this post focuses more on the "repression" aspect of my experience (though I would say that being able to successfully maintain that level of complete ignorance about anything sexual is a possible indication of just being naturally asexual). 

Anyway, here it is, maybe some other asexuals can relate.

---

[content note: it's about vaginismus, which is a medical condition where the vagina won't open]

There's a scene from the 2021 Pixar movie "Luca" that I have some feelings about, since I grew up in purity culture and very strictly repressed myself because I was a "good girl."

Some background about the movie "Luca": Luca is a sea monster who lives in the ocean near a small Italian town. The sea monsters in this story have their own advanced society underwater which is sort of parallel to human society. Luca's mom teaches him that "land monsters" (humans) are dangerous and want to kill sea monsters, and therefore he is forbidden to even THINK of going to the surface. And then there's this scene:

Luca meets another sea monster boy, Alberto, who pulls him out of the water, onto the beach. As Luca flails around, screaming and panicking, Alberto just watches him, and then says, "First time?"

And Luca answers, "Of course it is! I'm a good kid!"

And wow that is relatable. Here's Luca, so extremely repressed and ignorant, who had worked hard his entire life to make sure he stayed ignorant. Totally unaware of what his body can do- when he comes out of the water, his fins and scales transform to look like human hair and skin. So completely shocked and horrified at the idea of being out of the water, and then he's just thrown into it and expected to be able to handle it.

And then there's me... I grew up in this Christian "sexual purity" ideology, where the most important thing about dating and marriage is that you NEED to be a virgin on your wedding day. And more than that- you need to have no experience with anything sexual at all. You shouldn't masturbate. You shouldn't have "lustful thoughts." Repress your sexual feelings completely until your wedding day.

(Same thing with romantic feelings- though I guess there's a little more freedom there, because at least you're allowed to be in love with your partner if you know you're going to marry them.)

I followed the rules about sex. Of course I did! I didn't have sex in high school or college. I didn't even consider it, think about it, imagine it. It was just some abstract faraway threat, looming in the background- I never thought of it as something that could actually be a real thing in my life. Never even considered it.

Never masturbated. Never even considered masturbating. Because, I had heard (from Christian teaching about sex) that masturbating was a sin, and you will probably become "addicted to masturbation" and it's just all bad.

I never thought about my own genitals. It's like they weren't even part of my life at all. The most awareness I had was when I occasionally tried to use tampons- but it was very much "taking a shot in the dark" rather than approaching it with a practical mindset about collecting the information I would need in order to insert the tampon correctly.

Better to just know nothing about your genitals at all. If you think about such things, then that curiosity might lead to *wanting* sex, which might lead to *having* sex, and that would just be the most horrible thing in the world.

For me, the moment I was pulled out of the water like Luca was this one time when I was sick and in the hospital, and the doctor wanted to do a transvaginal ultrasound. I don't know exactly why- I think there was some something that looked like it might be a problem and they just wanted to check it.

Anyway, so... like... ooof... I'm a good girl, right? I just do whatever the doctor tells me to do. And then suddenly the ultrasound technician is asking me why her ultrasound wand won't go into my vagina, as if I'm supposed to know? How would I know anything about that? I'm a good kid!

Like I'm trying to figure out what on earth is even happening here, and she's asking me why doesn't it work, how could I not know this, what about my sex life? And I'm just, beyond shocked, why would I have a sex life???? Why would anyone think I had a sex life???? (I was in my 20's...)

The ignorance you work so hard to maintain your whole life- keeping yourself so pure that you literally know nothing- and then suddenly it's working against you.

The ultrasound technician, completely shocked that I have no experience with putting things in my vagina, and me, completely shocked that someone would assume I had experience with that.

(And a similar thing happened when I eventually did start having sex with my partner- and I was expected to know what the problem was. Suddenly, my purity and ignorance were working against me. I had always been taught that if you know nothing about sex, that guarantees that you will have AMAZING sex. In a shocking twist, that's not true.)

It happened like this for me because I had vaginismus. But even for other pure girls who don't have that specific problem, I can imagine they also get thrown into situations where suddenly their purity and ignorance, which they worked so hard to maintain, are working against them.

[content note: discussion of rape. To skip it, scroll down to the picture of Luca watching his hand transform]

So... I have read blog posts about good pure girls who didn't know anything about their own genitals, until they were raped. Didn't even have the words to describe what had happened, because they had never been taught anything even close to actual useful sex ed.

Like imagine a rapist knowing more about your body than you do. And using that against you.

Fortunately that didn't happen to me. But I see that I was really vulnerable back then when I didn't know anything.

Luca looks wide-eyed at his hand as it transforms from having fishy scales to human skin. Image source.

And I could keep this Luca-and-sex-ed metaphor going further: Luca meets Alberto, who is very confident and eager to teach Luca about the human world. But the audience can see that Alberto is actually wrong about A LOT of things. Luca has no idea, though, and just totally believes whatever Alberto tells him. Kinda like when you don't give kids any sex ed, they end up learning all kinds of misinformation from bad sources instead.

Obviously I am not saying this is what the movie is "really about" or anything like that. Just that it reminds me of my own experiences in some way.

Because wow, that scene where Luca is pulled out of the water for the first time, and he's completely scandalized by the idea that someone would think he should know what's going on- I've been there.

---

Related:

How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)

On Gynecologists and Angry Turtles

When the Teacher Says, "Don't Look at Your Report Card" 

I Wanna Preach the Good News of Masturbation

On Purity, Asexuality, and Timing 

They said it was about "valuing our bodies." That was a lie.

Celia and Mike's Baby

Celia and Mike Wazowski, from the movie "Monsters, Inc." Image sources here and here.

Celia lay on the bed, with her shirt pulled up to show her big, purple, pregnant belly. She and Mike watched, excited, as the doctor put gel on the ultrasound wand and began to move it around on her.

As the white lines started to pulse and wiggle across the black screen, Mike stared with his eye wide. "It's our baby!" he finally said. "This is amazing!"

"Mikey, I can't even tell what I'm looking at yet," said Celia.

"This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen," Mike answered, still staring at the screen.

"Okay," the doctor began. "The baby has one head. Its body is a round ball shape, like daddy," she said as she nodded toward Mike. The doctor was a red monster with four arms, wearing a white coat. Two of her hands tapped on the computer keyboard, and one hand moved the ultrasound wand across Celia's belly.

"How many eyes?" asked Mike.

"Wait a minute, I'm checking the organs first. Here's the heart- one heart," said the doctor. Celia squinted at the pulsing white blob on the screen.

The doctor continued, "Very good, the heart is healthy. Brain looks good, liver looks good. Your baby has one eye."

Mike and Celia looked at each other, overjoyed. "Oh googly bear," Celia said. Then she turned to the doctor and asked, "How many legs? I feel like it has a lot of legs in there."

"I see..." the doctor said. "Not legs or arms... it has tentacles. See them moving? I think... probably 6 or 8 tentacles... Hard to see exactly how many."

She added more gel to the ultrasound wand and pushed it against Celia's belly again. "No tail," she said. "Ah, I see a ... something on the top of the head ... I can't tell for sure, but it is probably a snake like you have," she said to Celia.

Celia's tentacle-arm came up to touch her snake hair.

"It looks like just one snake," the doctor said. "Sometimes the child is born with one, and then more will grow later."

Celia nodded. "I only had one when I was born," she said.

The doctor pushed the ultrasound wand against Celia's belly again. "And I see two horns on its head." She clicked something on her computer, then laid the ultrasound wand down on her table, and with two of her hands she pulled out paper towels to wipe off Celia's belly. Then she gave Mike and Celia a big smile, and said, "Congratulations, everything looks great."

Mike took Celia's arm and helped her stand up. "Schmoopsie-poo, you are doing so great," he said. "I can't believe how lucky we are. I'm going to be a father!"

Blogaround

1. Lightyear Changes EVERYTHING about the Pixar Theory! (June 24) "But it also means that the entire plot of the movie 'Lightyear' that we see is actually a live-action movie inside of the Pixar universe. Like, within the movie, Buzz Lightyear is being played by a real actor, like in the same way that Chris Evans out here in the real world plays the character of Steve Rogers."

2. New AI-generated horsies (July 22) "How to combine a four-legged horse with a two-legged rooster? Maybe as a three-legged animal."

3. Dutch collector ordered to return Buddha statue (July 20) "For local villagers, the statue is a significant cultural relic that had been at the Puzhao Temple in Sanming, Fujian province, where they could honor and worship it before it was stolen in December 1995, according to the high court."

4. Chinese Paddlefish That Outlived Dinosaurs Now Extinct, IUCN Says (July 22) "'The world’s failure to safeguard sturgeon species is an indictment of governments across the globe, who are failing to sustainably manage their rivers and live up to their commitments to conserve these iconic fish and halt the global loss of nature,' said Arne Ludwig, chair of the IUCN Sturgeon Specialist Group."

5. Next time I fall (July 23) "We can’t get up to present our 'personal testimony' about walking down the gangplank onto Ellis Island, but we can tell about our 'struggle' with sexual purity. And so, in a sense, the personal testimony of every child-convert, once they pass into adolescence and youth group, becomes something akin to that Seinfeld episode about being 'master of your domain.' We don’t have the conversion narrative expected by first-generation converts, and so we start to sound like we’re sharing at a 12-step MA meeting."

6. Woman detained for commemorating tablets to Japanese war criminals (July 25) [content note: genocide]

7. Chinese astronauts enter Tiangong space station's new lab module after dock (July 26) Cool!

Buzz Lightyear and the Years We Lost to Covid

Buzz Lightyear pilots a spaceship, with Sox the cat, Izzy, and 2 other space rangers. Image source.

[content note: spoilers for the movie "Lightyear"]

I recently watched the new Pixar movie "Lightyear" and I loved it. This is, in the Toy Story universe, the movie the fictional character Buzz Lightyear came from, and therefore the inspiration for the toy Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story movies. 

In the movie, Buzz's spaceship is stuck on a mysterious planet, and Buzz blames himself because he was overconfident and refused to accept help from others, and therefore crashed the ship. Buzz is determined to find the correct fuel mixture and do a hyperspeed test run, so that they can then use that fuel to power their spaceship and get everyone off the planet. Every time Buzz does a test run, about 4 minutes pass for Buzz, but on the planet, 4 years pass because of time dilation.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of people on the spaceship settle down on the planet. They build a society and make a life for themselves there. Buzz's best friend, a space ranger named Alisha, gets married, has a son, eventually has a granddaughter, grows old, and eventually dies there, with Buzz popping in to see her every 4 years between his test runs. (Alisha marries a woman- very cool to see this LGBTQ representation!)

Eventually, Buzz meets Alisha's granddaughter, Izzy, and they work together to fight enemy robots and such. There is one scene where Buzz tells Izzy that he regrets that he was never able to finish his mission and get everyone off the planet, and that he failed Alisha and she lost everything because of him. Izzy is shocked that Buzz would say that about Alisha; Izzy says Alisha had a good life. She had family and friends. We shouldn't talk about Alisha like she was a failure, just because she never got off the planet again.

Later Buzz comes to accept this too. There's a scene at the end when Buzz is fighting the villain, Zurg (who is actually a time-traveling version of himself, from the future), and Buzz destroys the hyperspeed fuel, to stop old-Buzz-from-the-future from getting it. Without the fuel, Buzz loses his hope of completing the mission and getting everyone off the planet. But old-Buzz-from-the-future wanted to use the fuel to go back in time and fix his mistake, so that they were never stuck on the planet in the first place, and Buzz no longer wants that. He realizes that the people stuck on the planet made the best of it and had lives that were meaningful, and it would be wrong to undo all that just to get rid of his own guilt over his mistake.

Anyway, that's the summary, and it makes me think about how the covid-19 pandemic has screwed up my life plans. Well, all over the world, the pandemic has screwed up people's life plans. It's likely that you, reader, also had plans that were totally ruined by the pandemic.

Anyone remember in 2019, when I wrote a blog series called "6 Years Later" about the things I've learned about privilege and culture, as a white American living in China as an immigrant, and how I'm basically ready to be done living in China now? And now look, it's 2022 and I am still in China. I am stuck in China. I've been living in China for 9 years now, and during the pandemic I haven't even left China at all, not even for vacations or anything. (In the Before Times, I went back to the US twice a year.)

(Let me clarify, when I say I'm "stuck in China"- it is definitely possible to leave. I know people who have left China recently. It's just a much more daunting thing when the world has changed so much because of covid, and because it's so difficult to get back into China.)

But during the pandemic, China has been a better place to be than the US. At least during the first 2 years of the pandemic- when we got to March 2022 and the Shanghai lockdown started, Shanghai was very much NOT a good place to be. But before that, from 2020 to early 2022, we were fine. Nobody had covid. We had to wear masks everywhere, and there were some tedious rules about testing or quarantine if you want to travel, but we didn't have to worry that we would actually *get* covid. It was much better than in the US, where something like 1 million people have died of covid.

I wrote in 2019 that I chose to come to China to get out of my comfort zone or whatever, and I gave up a lot of privilege- the privilege of being in the majority culture, being a citizen, a native speaker- but "my life in the US is still there, still available, I can go back any time." Because of the pandemic, that was no longer true in 2020. I had never imagined it wouldn't be true. But yes, in 2020 and 2021, China was a better place to be than the US.

And I've just kind of been, like... waiting it out. I have life goals that I can't make progress on if I'm in China, but I'm not sure if it's too risky to be in the US because of covid, especially because I have a little son.

And now it's been 2 and a half years of this, and this isn't how I wanted my life to go. The planned timeline for my life is now impossible because of this delay.

But just like Alisha and the other residents of the new planet, we just have to accept that this is the world we live in, and do the best we can. We used to live on a planet without covid, and now that world is gone, and that's just... the way it is. Buzz refused to live on the new planet; the only thing he could think about was getting back home- back to normal. And so he missed out.

It's not the life you wanted to have, which is tragic, but after you accept that, you can still have a good life. You just do your best, care about people, love your family, make the world better.

And these 2 and a half years that we've been "stuck in China", I don't think of it as wasted time. We've had a good life here. Our baby has grown into a little boy, and he's doing great. And I feel lucky that our situation during the pandemic hasn't been as bad as a lot of other people's.

We really are working on moving to the US. It's not like in the "Lightyear" movie, where they were stuck on the planet for about 100 years, omg, no I am not going to be stuck in China for that long. It's going to happen soon, really. But these 2 and a half years mean my life plans are already messed up- but we just have to make the best life we can in this world.

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Related:

Homesick 

Culture, Objectivity, God, and the Real Reason I Moved to China

2022 Reader Survey Wrap-Up

Hello readers! Thanks so much to those of you who took my 2022 Reader Survey. I really loved reading all your responses, especially about what kinds of blog posts you have enjoyed on this blog.

I will try to take your feedback into account when choosing topics for future posts. In particular, several responses said they were interested in reading about my faith now (as an ex-evangelical Christian). I also want to write about that. :)

Other topics that people liked: asexuality, purity culture, responses to evangelical ideology, life in China, covid. Yes, I will definitely keep writing about all these. Honestly I'm tired of writing about covid (blah aren't we all), but I realized that people outside of China don't have much awareness of what China's pandemic control efforts look like, in terms of the practical effects on people's lives. So, ya know, the Lord laid it on my heart to blog about it or whatever. (And the Shanghai lockdown was a major historical event so obviously I had to blog about that. But SO GLAD IT'S OVER!) 

One of the questions on the survey asked for your favorite Toy Story movie, because my son has been watching all 4 of them A LOT (especially during lockdown, when his daycare was closed and my husband and I were working from home full-time). So, I would like to recommend 2 other short Toy Story movies to you: "Toy Story That Time Forgot" and "Toy Story of Terror." These are each about 20 minutes long, produced by Pixar, set sometime between "Toy Story 3" and "Toy Story 4." Here are the trailers:

These are both very good. I found the full movies here on Youtube: Toy Story That Time Forgot and Toy Story of Terror. (Not sure if the full movies will be removed from Youtube though, that's why I also linked the trailers here.)

Anyway, thanks for reading, everyone!

Blogaround

1. A Landlord ‘Underestimated’ His Tenants. Now They Could Own the Building. (posted May 6) "'A lot of us didn’t know what harassment meant or what intimidation meant,' said Ms. Waterton, who works for a printing company. 'We didn’t realize that some of the stuff that was happening were tactics to get us to leave.'"

2. The Lightyear Timeline Makes NO Sense | Pixar Film Theory (posted May 6) I LOVE watching the Super Carlin Brothers trying to shove every Pixar movie into "The Pixar Theory." I just love it SO MUCH because it's EXACTLY like biblical apologetics. As Ben Carlin says in the youtube link above, "Because also, don't worry, we're gonna make it work, no matter what they throw at us. That is the game." Wish I could read a Christian apologetics book that was that self-aware and honest.

3. The Grimness of American Individualism (posted April 26) "These were celebrations of the most macabre kind; sheer, unbridled relief at not even having to pretend to give a fuck about other people—little kids, immunocompromised folks, disabled folks, workers in public-facing jobs, just anyone who doesn’t want to get any sicker than they have to be—anymore."

4. The Lost Letters of Saint Paul, and How They Were Lost (posted May 5) [content note: genocide] "Those letters would have been lost when Jewish quarters were burned out. In contrast, no such massacres are known in Corinth, Philippi, Thessaloniki, and the other centers where letters were preserved."

5. So I saw this article at Church Leaders, John Piper Imparts Wisdom From His Five Decades of Ministry and an Article He Wrote Titled ‘Missions and Masturbation’ (posted April 22), with a link to the Desiring God article Piper wrote in 1984, Missions and Masturbation. That was 40 years ago, he would probably not write it exactly the same way now, so I'm not picking on Piper specifically, but I want to say this- It's very clear to me, as I read this article, as an adult, that he was writing about his own personal problems, and claiming that it's the same way for everyone. And how wrong that is.

I'm struck by the fact that, if I had read this when I was a teenager, back when I didn't know anything, didn't know what a clit was or anything, I would have totally viewed it like, this writer is an objective, authoritative, trustworthy Christian role model who teaches us important truths about why masturbation is sinful and dangerous. (And I did read things like this, back then, and I did view them that way.) But now I read it and I'm like... wow... it's so revealing, how immature he is, how he's broadcasting his own personal creepy masturbation issues to the world, claiming that everyone has the same problems he does and that's why masturbation is always bad for everyone, wow he should be so embarrassed about this.

And... Is that how it is? Are the creeps with weird sexual hangups vastly overrepresented among teachers of Christian "sexual purity"? (Specifically, the "weird sexual hangup" we see in this 1984 article is the idea that it's not possible for a man to treat women with respect, if he masturbates regularly.) While people with normal healthy sex lives, who don't follow the church's rules about "don't have sex before marriage" and "don't masturbate", they don't go around talking about it loudly at church, because they know their own personal life is none of your business. 

That's... not good. But it would explain a lot.