Another Day of Break

Today turned out to be a really lovely day. I went to minyan in the morning, which was both very nice and sort of frustratingly hilarious all at once (there was some pretty bad gabbayut, that sort of thing), and then came home and had a really good conversation with outofnapkins before she headed out to see some other friends. I had a quiet afternoon at home, called my folks, and then went to a movie with a couple of friends- we saw Avatar. It was a pretty fascinating experience: for one, a surface-level thing- all of the places where the aliens are speaking their own language had Hebrew subtitles and that was it. It made perfect sense, but was this moment of "oh wait- ok, I can do this". The messages of the film were more troubling- there was some good stuff about the environment and the dangers of the combination of the military mindset and large corporations, but there were also these tropes of the Noble Savage, and the White Savior running through the thing in ways that I found rather shocking. I came out of it with this feeling that some of what was happening was a reaction of "well, we can't do this sort of other-ing to people with different color skin, so we'll just do it to aliens instead". Of course it had the big climactic heroic ending with the perfect fairytale "boy gets girl", so I walked away feeling pretty good. I'm glad I had a walk home with the folks I was with, to start to parse things out a little bit.