The Chase

Betty Draper in Mad Men 

When it comes to Mad Men, Betty Draper Francis is certainly not an ideal parent. She's like Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, or even Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a woman-child who is in serious need of some classes on parenting (Slapping a child for cutting her hair is not the way to go, Bets). She's a terrible mother, and her usual parenting pattern is to scold, say "Don't do that!" to daughter Sally, and act completely clueless about why her daughter is the way she is. However, Betty did deliver one piece of fantastic motherly advice to Sally (which is probably something I'll save for my unborn daughter):

"You don't kiss boys. Boys kiss you." Betty to Sally Draper, Mad Men Season 3, Episode 8 "Souvenir"

Sometimes I wish I had a (Google) translator for things my mother tells me. All those times in high school when she told me not to be friendly towards boys, she meant something else.

 Google, can you translate my mother for me?

Actually, can you translate the opposite sex for me instead?

What she really meant and was unable to articulate is that the good ones will go after you to prove their worth and the bad ones will weed themselves out so please be an ice queen. This also loosely parallels a sidetrack conversation I had with one of my undergrad film profs like a zillion years ago (okay, it was two years ago): all the directors, the legends, the good ones (i.e. Martin Scorsese) will last and have a fruitful lifelong career and all the other bad ones will weed themselves out. It's like saying, "If you're a bad egg, you'll eventually disappear. Poof."

(here I go again, wearing my Carrie Bradshaw hat)
So should all modern women forgo the notion that since both sexes are equal, they should be allowed to initiate plans or make the first move, just so they won't be taken for granted and get treated like crap? Do we all have to resort to the feminine stereotype of playing the waiting damsel just so all of us hetero-females won't be treated as some guy's second best (and not his number one)?

Taylor Swift as a waiting damsel in "Love Story"

I've had guy friends who would bitch and moan (yea boys do bitch, especially manboys) about how they feel the pressure of having to make the first move and it's always so hard when girls don't lend them a hand. At the same time, they are disinterested in perfectly decent female specimens when these girls do show interest in them and "lend a hand." Make up your mind. You can't have the chase and want the other party to do the work for your lazy ass. Those two things are mutually exclusive, boys. Get your act together. It's not rocket science.

The chase is such a mind game. It's basically playing "catch me if you can." I understand why it's there but I don't like it at all.

Catch Me If You Can (2002)

borrowed words

Whenever I find interesting quotes that resonate with me, I jot them down into a notebook (that's it up there). It's like a diary - perhaps just as sensational to read, but a whole lot less embarrassing to revisit because it's mostly filled with borrowed words. These are a couple of my favorites this year, many of which have a very feminist undertone (haha). Enjoy!

Peggy Olson - Mad Men Season 3

film / television

"You're smooth. And charming. You turn it on like hot water from the faucet. But I've had measles once. Now I'm immune." -Linda Gilman, June Bride (1948)

"You're like an old coat that's hanging in his closet. Every time he reaches in, there you are. Don't be there once." -Desk Set (1957)

"The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings." -Kathleen Kelly, You've Got Mail (1998)

"You have set up a way of life that basically makes it impossible for you to have any kind of human connection. And now this woman comes along and somehow runs the gauntlet of your ridiculous life choice and comes out on the other end smiling just so you can call her 'casual'? I need to grow up? You’re a 12-year-old." -Natalie, Up in the Air (2009)

"I don't wanna make a career out of being there so you can kick me when you fail." -Peggy, Mad Men Season 3, Episode 13 "Shut the Door. Have a Seat."

Richard Burton

people

"He always thought that he had to do something about endangered species, forgetting that he himself was an endangered species the way he drank." -Billy Wilder on William Holden in Billy Wilder Speaks (2006)

side note: William Holden was an alcoholic. He drank too much and died from a blow to the head from a night stand.

"I'm not sure if it's a function of advancing age or just the times we're living in, but it's almost impossible for me to find complete external validation in any one thought, desire, instinct, or vision anymore." -John Mayer

"I feel like a discarded floppy disk." -moi

courtesy of Ms. Amanda

"He wanted the milk without the cow." -Amanda

"One of these days I will wake up - which I think I have done already - and realize to myself that I really do love. I find it very difficult to allow my whole life to rest on the existence of another creature. I find it equally difficult, because of my innate arrogance, to believe in the idea of love. There is no such thing, I say to myself. There is lust, of course, and usage, and jealousy, and desire and spent powers, but no such thing as the idiocy of love. Who invented that concept? I have wracked my shabby brains and can find no answer." -Richard Burton in a letter to Elizabeth Taylor

"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love." -Leo Tolstoy

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder/yonder." -Amanda

 books / plays

"He is collecting pleasures and pains, gathered from his relationships with ballerinas and librarians, decent females without the right pheromones, and nut-balls. He is like a child learning what is too hot to touch, and he hopes all this experience will coalesce into a philosophy of life, or at least a philosophy of relationships, that will transform itself into instinct." -Shopgirl

"[Y]ou neither think nor talk like the man I could bind myself to. As soon as your fear was over - and it was not fear for what threatened me but for what might happen to you - when the whole thing was past, as far as you were concerned it was exactly as if nothing at all had happened. Exactly as before, I was your little skylark, your doll, which you would in the future treat with doubly gentle care because it was so brittle and fragile." -Nora, A Doll's House

"I got to know you. You cured me of you." -Emma, One Day