Hell in high heels

“I don’t know how to cook the chicken! I don’t know what to do! People are arriving in an hour! It was a stupid idea to have people over! I should never have done this! This was your dumb idea!”

Gray streets of Brussels flashed by. I quietly listened and took in the information. Gradually, a picture started to form in my head. Eric, a man who believed that meals were not real meals if they did not contain protein of a formerly alive kind, had bought chicken to make for dinner but did not know how to cook it. I had been a vegetarian since I was eight. Clearly, I didn’t know how to cook chicken, either. I was pretty sure this had been his initiative, not mine. But that’s not what I said.

“There is absolutely no need to worry. It’s all going to be completely fine. I can make the chicken when I arrive. Couldn’t be easier. What else do you have in the fridge? Have you prepared anything?” I asked.

Dessert, the answer came back, a little calmer this time. If I felt exasperation, I didn’t let the feeling live for more than a nanosecond. Patience, reassurance, and love were what I knew I should give, and that’s what I expressed.

“Amazing,” I chirpily said into the phone. “I love it when you make that. Okay. Don’t worry about the rest. I will figure something out to go with the chicken and make some sides when I arrive. I have pesto with me. We can do something with that. So delicious.”

His mood shifted: I could almost hear it lift. He was totally calm now. The panic had gone. His voice was slower; it had gone back to a cadence that suggested a more relaxed, happy state of mind.

“Are you good? Sorry you had that scare,” I continued, bringing my task to a secure conclusion. “I will be there very shortly.”

He muttered acquiescence, possibly thanks. “I can’t wait to see you,” I finished, and pressed the button to end the call.

I put the phone back in my lap, my shoulders dropped, and I breathed out, letting go of some of the anxiety I had been suppressing and feeling relief that I had contained the situation. In my head, I hadn’t even arrived at the part of how I was going to cook this dinner. I had absolutely no idea what to do with raw chicken, the very fleshy peachy vision of which was enough to make my stomach turn. But that wasn’t the point. The point was rather getting my boyfriend to feel good, calm, and collected again. What was important—I had known immediately upon picking up the phone—was conveying that the situation was under control to him, even if it wasn’t yet. The concrete cooking activity ahead was truly secondary.

I looked at my mother. She smiled. That’s when I remember her saying it: “You are an excellent man manager. You handled that brilliantly. I couldn’t be more impressed.”

Man manager, I repeated back to myself after she said it. I turned my body in the passenger seat toward her. I had never heard the term, and I had no conscious idea it was something I should be striving toward, let alone something I had been performing. But I felt the glow of the compliment, and some kind of a shift in her words, a complicity, perhaps even a new form of respect.

We moved on to discuss ways to cook chicken and what to do with the pesto. She told me about timing and oven temperatures, and even how I should handle the chicken to cut it. My mother incidentally also didn’t eat meat, for health reasons, but she had learned how to prepare it and cook it to make the stomachs of the people around her happy.

As unremarkable as it may sound, I never forgot the pesto chicken man manager exchange between my mother and me. Today, it’s clear to me that this is the first time I can pinpoint the emotional labor I performed, as a part of my gender and to the benefit of a man, explicitly being acknowledged and elevated.”]

It was invented by one person for a specific purpose - to have a universalizable way of establishing historical dates, rather than having to deal with dynastically based date systems. And it was a really good idea. This is not surprising, since Bede is basically the father of Historiography. He also is the guy who gave us the notion of Primary Sources. Bede is amazing.

When a guy revolutionizes the entire way calendaring is done, he has the right to set his zero point wherever he pleases.

People have pointed out that one problem with CE notation is that it presents itself as neutral when it is exactly the same system as AD. What exactly is "common" about this era? The zero point doesn't become neutral just by effacing its source.

(Also BCE is nonsense. Just use negative numbers)

It makes sense for scholarly tradition to not want to be tied to a specific religion. But scholarly tradition is very enthusiastic about being tied to earlier scholarly tradition. The convention of AD was established by a scholar for a scholarly purpose. We know his name. We know what he was doing, and why, and how. And he was doing it better than anybody else. That is worth honoring.

Rather than pretending that it's a neutral system, acknowledge that it's not. It's not some naturally occurring "common era," it's the system developed by Bede, centered around dates that were important to him personally (but which he intended to be universally applicable).

I have been informed that Bede notation may in fact have been first devised by Dionysus the Humble of Scythia to calculate the date of Easter more accurately. But my broader point stands.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.