The Day After Thanksgiving
Twas the day after Thanksgiving,
When all through the house,
Erin was smiling,
While cinnamon wafted throughout
Yes, today is the day after Thanksgiving. Erin and co. are happy holiday revelers, so, we had the whole shebang, turkey, stuffing (well, for Erin and her brother) yams, mashed potatoes, and etc. It was, truly, a fun day. It was so fun, and nice (being married and having someone to do this with) I will refrain from my normal holiday banter.
As a result of our sleeping habits of late, we slept in again this morning, though, in my (our) defense, we did not go to bed until closer to 2 a.m. When we finally got up Erin told me it was a pancake morning and I said, “Nope,” and then got up, set up my computer at my desk, and only then did I make her pancakes. On an interesting note, she actually ate more, in the realm of pancake type food (gluten-free of course) than me. I made them for her and not because I was hungry or wanted food.
After the pancakes I showered. And then after the shower (shave, dress) I started working on Alicia Grey. You know, I find it interesting that I make these goals for myself (to see goal visit In Order to Write) and then, like most things in my life, procrastinate. The procrastination this week was, in parts, school and then going shopping with Erin for turkey day. Yesterday I didn’t write (anything of consequence, though I did start a story called The Great Turkey Massacre) because I was in and out of the kitchen, where Erin was more in the kitchen than out until the food was done.
We did watch Live Free or Die Hard the fourth installment of the Die Hard movie franchise. I think that time and distance has allowed Bruce Willis to distance himself just enough from those first three movies that you get a good experience with this third one. Essentially, the movie is about a hacker/terrorist who starts a fire sale to get at the nations bank account information so that he can siphon off billions of dollars and, effectively, destroy the U.S. economy.
The audience follows Bruce Willis’s character as he, first, begins dealing with problems he has with his daughter, second, picks up a hacker to take to Washington D.C., and finally, falls headfirst into the problems terrorists cause when they are trying to erase their trail. Pretty much this equals lots of gunfire and explosions.
What I thought was very interesting about this movie was the distinct lack of swearing. That is not to say that there is no swearing, but, really, this is not a typical movie for Bruce Willis. I semi-expect him to swear up a storm, kill everyone (he does do this), and eventually save the world, or the United States, from the bad guy. I was half expecting them to bring back one of the bad guys from the first three movies, kind of a twist, especially since Bruce Willis’s character is specifically asked to take the hacker from New York City to Washington D.C., but that little plot twist never came to pass, which, really, I am fine with as well.
After all of that fun was finished, I read to Erin some out of a couple of collections of fairy tales I have, especially since I started looking for specific stories, like the one(s) dealing with Snow White, and discovered that my collection of Arabian Nights tales does not include one of the stories I was looking for. This was sad, I will have to find a more comprehensive collection of stories, but I moved on to other things.
The one item, last night, that seemed to really stick out for me, was the Oedipal Complex that we seem to want to read into everything in the world. I said to Erin, “Freud did this world a major disservice by creating this theory,” and the fact that we hinge so many other things off of it makes me really wonder about our society, as a whole. This, to me, is akin to the Flat Earth Society believing that the Earth is flat in the face of seriously overwhelming data to the contrary.
I read, somewhere, that most people who become therapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists, do so because they are trying to fix their own problems. Extend this to Uncle Freud and realize that most of his interpretations for dreams and what they mean came from his own, personal, unique psychosis and you might begin to realize that believing Freud is like believing the Earth is flat or if you sail far enough out into the Atlantic, you will, unavoidably, fall over the edge of the world.
Freud is at world’s end.
What makes all of this pertinent is that an exploration of fairy tales delves into parent/child relationships. Often, a relationship where one individual is too closely attached to another and refuses to give up that object of attachment (e.g. parent not wanting child to get married), in fairy tale culture, in mythology, this relationship and in death.
Of course, this whole course of theory really begins with the Greeks. A Greek tale, traditionally, is one that ends in tragedy. The main players all die. Shakespeare, in Hamlet, and other plays, writes a Greek tragedy. His protagonist and main characters all die in the end because of, often, hubris.
Hubris, for those who don’t know, is pride.
This all comes together, in a sense, when you consider that many fairy tales, not in the oral tradition, are written down to spread moral tales and to help children grow up to be good, upstanding adults. The Grimms edited their stories to make them moralistic and when translated into English, the editing went further to better support the puratinistic elements of the people at the time.
Compare the written fairy tale to the oral tradition, and suddenly, many of these tales take on a more base element to them without the moralistic meaning we like to apply to things. They are, I don’t know, better in the sense that they don’t have implied moral character to them and compete on the basis of enjoyment. This would be like taking Die Hard and converting it into a moral tale; not sure how you would go about doing it, but that’s the relationship. Some tales were told to, literally, bring the genteel down to the level of the peasant… at least verbally.
I can go into an explanation of how this is applicable to my life and what I am trying to accomplish with things, but, you know, I will refrain from a conversation on my writing and fairy tales and how the two fit together so nicely.
Needful to say, Thanksgiving was a very nice day. I got to spend it with my wife, which is always good, and though no serious writing got done, I was able to begin considering aspects to my writing I’d only begun hinting at.
John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West
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