(Blah) day today

Whee! for not enough sleep.

I haven't been talking to my stepdad yet, but Mom liked Adam. Except she said the weirdest thing: he reminds her of Moroney. I mean, that's not a bad thing, my parents liked Moroney, but Adam is NOTHING like him. I have this thing, every single guy I date is completely and utterly different from the others. If I meet a dude who's too much like one of my exes, I'm like "didn't I break upwith you already?" and then I run away. Far away. Not because I have any real animosity towards them, but just because I fear falling into a pattern. Patterns are icky and I refuse to have a "type."

So we went to see Madagascar, and what can I say...it really wasn't good. There were some funny parts, like the monkeys talking about flinging poo, but most of the jokes were replayed ad nauseum and when the credits started rolling I was still waiting for some kind of plot to come into play. Blah.

It was, however, interesting to watch the movie from a vegan perspective. There are quite a few movies (Ice Age being, in my opinion, the best) that address the carnivore conundrum, i.e. making friends with the person who's supposed to be your food. I know that Keith, for one, objects to my referring to non-human animals as "people" even though he's a tofu head too. But, preferred terminology aside, I couldn't help but think that this movie has probaby been used by McDonald's or BK to sell cheeseburgers. Which is kind of disturbing because it's about someone finding out that their food has a face and a personality.

But anyway, I always watch this kind of film with curiosity to see how they treat the subject and how they resolve it. Ice Age didn't really ever resolve it, but they left the topic hanging in kind of a melancholy way, quietly acknowledging the impenetrability of certain moral issues. But Madagascar completely copped out, becoming in the end an advertisement for pesco-vegetarianism (a misnomer, in my opinion: if you eat fish you can qualify for the "tofu head" title but you're not a vegetarian) by giving every animal in the film a personality EXCEPT the fish. Kind of like Dreamworks' badly-written response to Pixar's absolutely wonderful yet predictably over-merchandised Finding Nemo. It reminds me of a book I read a couple of years ago called "The Sexual Politics of Meat" and I wish I could remember the author's name, but she talks about something called the "Absent referrant," and how ignoring the individuality of a living thing is a psychological mechanism that allows human beings to justify both meat eating and rape. Really interesting book, I highly recommend it although it's not exactly light reading.