Okay yes, that title is misleading. Technically I was fully unemployed for only a few weeks before the freelance work came along. Also, it has now been about a month and a half since I was laid off and despite my timely reporting, due to an error my former employer made in their tax reporting, I have yet to actually receive unemployment benefits. Capitalism is so fun!
Currently, I am writing you from the road, more specifically Durham, NC where I am kissing my best friend’s baby’s head, enjoying the oppressive humidity, and watching my friend’s dog and my dog, Junebug, negotiate who is actually the more dominant canine. That is after I made a brief stop in my hometown, Pittsburgh, PA where I kissed more babies’ heads and hiked in the country and made embarrassing sounds at sheep and horses who are so magical omg can you even believe them?
I am so happy to be here. By here, I mean on the road again. Despite my obvious money concerns, after my first-ever real breakup with a friend, I needed to go. I needed to see the people I love and who love me, and I needed to have all the big conversations with them that I knew would remind me who I am no matter the job I have, the relationships I’m in, or how imperfectly I do it all.
Strangely, my thoughts keep coming back to Barbie. The movie, I mean. I saw it with a large group of friends and another friend who was visiting me in Tulsa. We all dressed in pink and even stuck around for the Oppenheimer double feature—bless us.
Though Barbie is by no means a perfect film, it is the first movie maybe ever during which almost all of my friends and I laughed and cried, no matter our sex or gender. The weight of expectations that the systems we live in put on all of us is crushing, and I was impressed by how the film was able to portray that with beauty and humor and how it made efforts to be inclusive in ways that I quite frankly was not anticipating.
Dr. Devon Price makes a helpful point though that I’ve been thinking about, especially this week:
The Barbie Movie is confused – and it is confused on purpose, because it can’t actually acknowledge the role that capitalism and white supremacy play in the patriarchal system that it wants to give itself credit for acknowledging. And so the film introduces patriarchy as a force with no agent or system behind it.
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