Some People Are Worth Melting For

This week, on Facebook, I shared two links about the Disney movie, Frozen. I have been obsessed with this movie since the first time I saw it in theaters (okay, probably since I saw the first commercial for it) and have listened to the soundtrack about five times a day since. So, when AfterEllen sent out a request that someone write about what a gay girl can get from the movie Frozen, I jumped at the chance. Actually, three of my fellow AfterEllen writers chimed in and said, “Valerie should probably take this one” before I even read the email. I’m not exactly quiet about the things I love.

So, the first link I shared on Facebook about Frozen this week was that very post, “What a gay girl can get out of Frozen“: http://bit.ly/1m1JDwY

In this post, I say that Elsa’s magic can be a comparison for homosexuality. Something that came naturally to her as a child, that she was taught was something she should be ashamed of, spent most of her life being afraid of, and didn’t feel truly free until she accepted. My ultimate point was that this princess-turned-queen is finally a role model that queer children can look up to without a male love interest (or a love interest at all!) to throw off her relatability.

The second link I shared on Facebook this week was another post about Frozen. This blogger, “A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman”, mostly agreed with all my points – she also sees that Elsa’s powers could be a metaphor for homosexuality…but she sees this as a bad thing. In fact, she thinks it’s a direct result of that mysterious “Gay Agenda” that super-conservative homophobes seem to have a hard copy of but forgot to share with the actual LGBT community.

Well, my mother – who has been way more supportive of me than I could have ever imagined – sent me an email that made my heart grow three hundred sizes. The body of the email was simply, “Okay, that bitch pissed off Mama.  I had to make a few comments – see attached.”

I, thankfully, got her permission to post her comments on my blog. So, here is the Well-Behaved Mormon Woman‘s post, with my own mother’s running commentary in red. I took out all the links to clips and songs from the movie the author of the original post included (despite disagreeing with their message?) and the formatting might be a little different from the original format. But remember, Well-Behaved Mormon Woman is the majority of the below, my mother’s comments are included in red.

2014 Grammys

I watched the Grammys in lieu of writing a blog post tonight, so I’ll share the songs/artists I would have chosen to win all the awards.

Best new artist: Lorde

Best new song by someone I should probably be paying more attention to: Follow Your Arrow, Kacey Musgraves

(I couldn’t find a proper video of her performance, but it’s probably better without the lampshade dress anyway.)

Most meaningful song: Same Love, Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis featuring Mary Lambert

Best live performance: P!nk, literally anything she performs

Best song: All Too Well, Taylor Swift

Best album: The Blessed Unrest, Sara Bareilles

I hope those of you who watched enjoyed the performances. There are some truly amazing talents out there.

Cousinly Love

Today, I did not have the energy – physical or emotional – do anything I had planned to do with my Saturday. I, instead, had every intention of staying in bed until Sunday, and hope my mood would change. Then my cousin texted me.

He lives in New Jersey now, and was driving into Manhattan for a bit, and wanted to know if I wanted to see a movie with him. And at that moment, I was so sure, that him asking me to hang out was the only thing that could have gotten me out of bed today.

And I’m so glad I did. We didn’t even do anything spectacular or mind-blowing. We just hung out. We had a few drinks, grabbed dinner, went to see a movie. The movie wasn’t even anything to write home about. We saw Ride Along, and it was funny and all, but it was kind of just like paying to sit somewhere different from where we had been sitting previously. But it was just nice to be with him. He’s eleven months younger than me, so we’ve been best friends for as long as I can remember. He’s always been able to make me laugh, and he gives amazing hugs.

And today, I really needed to laugh, and I really needed an amazing hug.

I love it when the universe throws out a life preserver when it can see that you’re starting to sink.

Eyes Wide Open

Today, I noticed a lot of things.

I take the same route, more or less, from home to work to home again every weekday. I go on autopilot. More often than not, I have headphones in, am deep in the labyrinth of my thoughts, and paying zero attention to where I’m going. Whatever automatic safety system I have inside me keeps me from falling down stairs or getting hit by a car, and I barely have to think about it, and suddenly I’m home.

After work this evening, a coworker was headed my way, so we took the train together and we were chatting. I ended up getting really overheated (the crowded train car was blasting hot air and I was bundled up for the below-zero windchill) which tends to made me dizzy. After my coworker got off the train, my body went into full-on shut-down mode. When I get dizzy and nauseous like that, as weird as it sounds, I have to focus on reality. I have to keep myself acutely aware of the physical world. It’s like mind over matter. If I can concentrate on the way the subway pole feels under my hand, the socks on my feet, the ad on the wall, I can usually win the fight against the blackness that comes with losing consciousness.

As soon as I exited the subway car at my stop, the relative coolness of the subway platform almost immediately revived me. When I stepped above ground, the cold wind whipped away the last of my unease. But the acute awareness was still with me.

So today, I noticed a lot of things. Things I had never noticed before, things I might not have noticed on another day.

I saw a woman using a payphone. Which is weird enough, since who even does that anymore, but weirder still was that I had never seen that payphone before. It wasn’t a big tall booth like they usually are in the city, it was just a little phone on a pole, maybe five feet tall. On a corner I walk by every time I leave the apartment. That I had never seen before. Blew my mind.

I noticed that the Christmas decorations that hang between the telephone wires on my street are still up.

I saw a man open one of those newspaper dispensers and pull a large shopping bag out of it. Either he had put it there for safekeeping or there was some kind of shady deal going on. He removed it and walked on in a fluid motion, I really don’t think I would have noticed if my senses weren’t on high alert.

I realized that there’s a bank three blocks away from my apartment. If you had asked me where the nearest bank was, I would have sent you to the intersection five blocks away. Hopefully you would have been more observant than me and seen the bright orange ATM vestibule on your way. (In my defense, it’s like Alma bank or something I’ve never heard of. Okay, that’s not much of a defense.)

While I was getting my mail, I noticed that the people in Apartment 5 have the same last name. I would imagine they’re sisters, since I saw a girl getting the mail/going into that apartment once, and she looked rather young to be married. But who knows, maybe it’s just a youthful lesbian couple.

All of these things are totally random and knowing them won’t actually have an effect on my life whatsoever, but it was…well, eye-opening, for back of a letter word. How many other things am I missing because I’m zoning out while I walk? Should I be paying more attention, or are these things just a waste of brainspace? Has that mini payphone really always been there? And what on EARTH was in that man’s bag?

Strangers Aren’t Always Strange

“Don’t talk to strangers.”

They tell you that as soon as you’re big enough to toddle off on your own. Don’t wander off, don’t go anywhere with anyone you don’t know, and DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS.

Then you graduate college. You wander off to a new city, go to work in a place with a bunch of people you don’t know, and LIVE WITH TOTAL STRANGERS. Live with them! In your home where you sleep!

Okay maybe this isn’t how it works everywhere. Maybe it’s uniquely New York. But sometimes I’ll be telling someone about the girls I lived with my first year out of college, and how two of them I think I saw three times each the year I lived there and that I definitely couldn’t pick them out of a lineup, and realize that it’s actually kind of a really weird thing. It didn’t feel all that weird at the time – and honestly, doesn’t feel weird now. But I feel like it should feel weird. It kind of goes against everything they taught us.

For example, in September, my roommate of three years (a friend from undergrad, not a stranger) moved out to live with her boyfriend, and a stranger moved in. She was a friend of a friend of a friend, so I had it on somewhat good authority that she wasn’t a serial killer, but I had spent all of five minutes in her presence, when she came to see the apartment, before we were living together. (Insert lesbian U-Hauling joke here.)

ALSO she came equipped with a part-time-live-in boyfriend! They could have tag-team serial killed me!

But in New York, when you need someone to split the rent, you kind of take it on their word that they’re not going to cannibalize you or start dealing black market organs from your common living space. Sometimes it might not work out, but sometimes you find yourself feeling awfully lucky that the universe decided to cross your paths.

Five months ago, I didn’t know my roommate from a whole in the wall. Last night, I spent the evening drinking wine with her and feeling so totally comfortable it was as though we’d known each other for years. But with the added bonus of having endless options of conversation topics, since we haven’t had all that many chances to sit down and get to know each other one on one.

So maybe living with total strangers is totally strange. But maybe totally strange isn’t all that bad.

Besides, everyone’s a stranger ’til they’re not.