Tornado Warning

One TV silently playing overhead while I ran at the gym on Friday evening announced in big red letters on the screen "MANHATTAN TORNADO WARNING" and depicted dark clouds hovering over Central Park. On one hand, this is nothing new: as Denise has written much about since she moved into the community in which I grew up, tornado warnings happen. On the other hand, Manhattan has a fuckload of tall buildings. Once when I was a wee lass, the tornado siren went off while I was giving a summer book report at the special booth in the library. We dashed for the basement. Manhattan has neither tornado sirens nor basements. OK, it has buildings with basements, but it seems less appealing to go down to the basement in a skyscraper. I don't know why, but I suspect it has to do with my fear of being buried alive if 50 stories collapsed on top on it.

The weather was clearly reflecting the storms raging in my mind. (Maybe I am replacing Storm from X-Men.) Right before I departed for the gym, I read an article forwarded by Pam about three women in Britain who do their best to live as though it were still the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s because they believe the eras were "a time when life was simpler" (1940s), "a much more moral time and there was a real camaraderie between people" (1930s), and "the reality of the world today, with all the violence, greed and materialism" (1950s). I don't care if they want to live very domestic lives. If that makes them happy, awesome for them. (I wish I could find my niche in life!) What put me into an internal funnel cloud was the literal whitewashing of what life was like for most people in those eras. Sure, life was simpler if you were white, Christian, middle-class and above, and content with strict gender roles. For anyone who did not fall into all of those categories, life may have been simpler due to lack of options, but it certainly was not better. And it was more moral was racism was considered acceptable? Maybe we haven't fixed our problems, but I certainly am glad I don't live in a time when public anti-Semetism was cool. Yeesh.

Anyway, another TV in the gym temporarily distracted me from my intellectual tornado of rants and worries when I noticed that Thelma and Louise was on. Damn, that is one excellent film. It came out in 1991, and pretty much nothing else has portrayed women gaining strength and finding themselves as powerfully since then. It makes me nostalgic for the early '90s. Things were so much more feminist then. I'm going to just wear torn jeans and flannel and pretend it's still those times... Ha ha,