That is Squirrel Girl (obviously, Marvel Comics owns that image)
This is Anna Kendrick. See any differences? Better question: see any similarities?
Female superheroes almost all have the same body type, which is basically the Hollywood actress body type (plus ridiculously inflated breasts, a lot of the time).
So why are they taking about taking one of the very few who doesn’t fit this oversexualized mold and thinwashing her?
I like Anna Kendrick. She’s hilarious on screen and seems like a genuinely good person on and off screen. But she’s 10 years older and 10 dress sizes smaller than Squirrel Girl.
I wouldn’t want her to play a trans character or a non-white character either. There are actual trans actresses and women of color who could play those parts.
There is an actress out there who’s got great comic timing, and who looks just like Squirrel Girl: Shannon Purser, aka Barb from Stranger Things.
That said, Anna Kendrick would make a great Spider-Woman, or even better, (with a little cgi help) Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk. Both characters are witty, smart, complex, and more of her age and size
A while back I talked about how “deserve has nothing to do with it.” Now I want to talk about the opposite. Sometimes, deserve has everything to do with it.
For those of us who were born in relative privilege, we have to deserve the things that we get and that we go for.
We may be handed a lot, being born in a country that’s not war-torn, that has clean water, that has vaccinations. But there are things we have to earn.
I was reading an Onion article called, “find the thing you love most, and do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life.” I have to admit I found it pretty depressing.
But when I look back at when I was younger and had more time and opportunity, I see that I never really took advantage of it.
I never really pursued being a writer when I was young and had the relative freedom to do that. I certainly never pushed myself, writing hard and really studying to improve my skills, when I was young and had so much more time than I do now.
In short, I didn’t deserve to succeed. I didn’t deserve to be a writer.
What that means now is that if I ever want to have even some sideline success with this, is that now I’m going to have to earn it when it’s harder.
I wasted my playthrough on the “easy setting” and now I’m going to slightly harder setting … still not anywhere near the hardest setting … but slightly harder than before.
And so now I’m going to have to prove that I want this more and then I’m willing to be more disciplined than I was as a young man, and do this while still keeping up my work and family responsibilities, even though it’s harder now than it was before.
And I have to be more disciplined and more dedicated than I’ve ever been before. Which is a pretty low bar to leap.
Watching the presidential debates, it occurs to me that Donald Trump either cannot or will not answer the question as asked.
He talks in whatever direction he wants to talk about, rambling on, repeating the same points and going over the same lines again.
When asked about his earlier comment that Hillary didn’t have the presidential “look,” he claimed that he’d said she didn’t have the stamina to be president.
He literally ignored the actual question and his actual (sexist, inappropriate) comment. He pretended it didn’t exist.
Clinton was specific and knowledgeable, going into detail. She went after Trump for being vague. I doubt that will hurt him much, but eventually he’ll have to give some details.
Trump didn’t come off as a mad cartoon like he had in some interviews and soundbites.
But he was evasive, as if he either didn’t know the answers or didn’t want to answer the questions.
And sometimes he outright lied. Like how he repeatedly said he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, when he actually said in 2002 on the Howard Stern Show, this:
But revisionist history is pretty much a part of the Trump game. People are quick to buy that he’s the pro-life candidate, but he only “became” pro-life once it was time to run for office as a Republican. Before that, he was in favor of partial birth abortion being legal:
I don’t want to sound like I’m trashing Republicans in general. I’m not. The GOP presidential field was pretty weak this time, but someone like McCain, Kasich, or even Romney would probably do a good job in the White House.
I know I’ve moved to the left quite a bit since I was younger, but Donald Trump really seems like the worst human being to run for president in my lifetime, maybe longer. I think he’s dangerous in a way that no nominee I’ve ever seen had been.
And it frightens me that so many sane, functional, good, intelligent people disagree.
It really frightens me that he may be leading our country for the next 4 to 8 years.
As I watch MSNBC’s coverage of the Charlotte, NC protests, I see protesters hugging the heavily armed and armored National Guardsmen who had been brought in to push them of the streets in half an hour when the curfew starts.
I am amazed.
When Jesus said to bless those who curse you … this must be what he meant.
Something went wrong the prior night, and violence broke out. The protesters made sure that didn’t happen again. It was clear the police didn’t have enough people’s to control the protests, but the protestors controlled themselves.
The national Guard was called in to enforce the mayor’s curfew.
They came in Humvees, wearing heavy armor and carrying assault rifles straight out of Iraq.
And the protesters responded with hugs.
These protesters are so much better than I am, and so much better than the people they’re proposing against.
All I can do is speak out where I can, and pray for them.
Anger can be righteous, when we are wronged, when somebody we care about is wronged, or when we see injustice carried out.
Anger is a high-energy state. It tends to either dissipate or harden, metastasize, into a lower energy state … like contempt.
Anger is an emotion of engagement. An angry person will push, even fight for change. Angry people are still in dialogue, still in relationship.
When that hardens to contempt, all that goes away. People are written off as incorrigible, as useless, as bad people, as worthless, as less than, as unclean, as other.
As Richard Beck noted in his book Unclean, contempt is the emotion of separation, of dehumanization, the emotion that chokes empathy and hospitality, and justifies all manner of abuses and cruelties.
So fight for your anger. Hold onto our until you are ready to let go and forgive. Don’t let it turn into something vile and cancerous, something that takes settles into your heart until it feels like it belongs there.
But forgive quickly, and give yourself some distance to heal, because there’s another emotion that can take hold, a high energy state even more destructive than contempt:
Hate.
And we can’t let that one in. It’s the worst devil of them all.
