#62

Hey!

I just felt like typing something right now. I haven't exactly been on top of my stuff for this past week. Last Saturday we had a kind of collective birthday/cocktail party. It was very icy outside and I was wearing Converse (smart, I know) and walking really carefully. Then on one of the few areas where there was no ice aka on some stairs to the subway, I stepped sideways on my ankle and something snapped. We were headed out and I - obviously - didn't stop to do anything about it until about 4 hours later when we got back home. By then I had a fist-sized bruise on the outside of my ankle and it was swollen to about twice the normal width.

I tend to get quite a lot of minor ankle injuries because of the 6 years of track and field I did a while back. I snapped tendons left and right - which means that while I might be more likely to injure myself on the ankles, the injuries will rarely result in torn ligaments or tendons because they're stretched from before. But yeah, I've been wearing a support bandage on the bad ankle for most of last week. Then on Tuesday I noticed I'd caught a cold, so I've been doubly indisposed. Ugh.

Luckily this week was kind of our unofficial winter holiday - we don't actually get one at Uni levels of education, except for Christmas - so I didn't have to try to internalise new information at school except for about 2 hours on Wednesday, ha. Also I don't have a lot to do when it comes to our current group assignments so all I'll have to do is take care of an old, overdue thing that's just my own.

I started watching The 100 on Netflix yesterday evening, and I'm about half an hour away from the end of season 1. Thank Jeebus I can continue to the second season my loyal streaming site, and I don't have to wait for months until it appears on Netflix... Eh. I'll get over my slight moral aversion to watching series illegally at some point I guess. Next plan is to watch Agent Carter on Hulu, maybe, because I believe certain TV networks also count Hulu views as legitimate views on shows that I couldn't legitimately watch yet. Eh.

I'm also going to get the Fifty shades series into my hands, so I can make sure my arguments about Christian Grey & Anastasia Steele's abuser/victim relationship are legitimate. Don't get me wrong now, BDSM is a-ok to me (I also like reading fiction that includes elements of it, except I have some criteria when it comes to quality and character archetypes) but Fifty shades is just abuse cloaked as responsible BDSM practice and even romance, for fuck's sake. Whatever, there are plenty of reasonable sources who take apart the entire series for it's horrendous misrepresentation of BDSM not to mention romanticising and idealising a toxic relationship that seems to mirror, for a majority of the time, very closely what an emotionally manipulative abuser does to their victim. Seriously, it's so cringe-worthy. I feel bad. But I'm still going to read them so that any of my arguments can't be "refuted" (in the defenders' minds) as ill-informed. Again, as with any other problematic media, I'm not telling anyone to boycott anything they enjoy - go see the movie, buy the books, whatever floats your goat.

What I want is a media-critical stance where consumers a. are informed enough to recognise problems when they see them or b. they are suspicious enough to do research about things they are interested in. Boo-hoo, it's harder to enjoy things that way. But it's also the only way to be an actually responsible media consumer.

Anyway, that's enough ranting for now, seriously. I'm going to go back to watching the season 1 finale of The 100.

Bye!