Which?

I could have done a 'Wordless Wednesday': I was just at the grocery store and I passed a big display of bags of popcorn. There was kettle corn, which we don't like because it's too sweet, and aged cheddar popcorn, which we like but I didn't buy it, and then there was BACON RANCH popcorn. And at the bottom of the bag it says "ALL NATURAL". And I HAD a camera, because I was just at school to watch Eve's class perform their mini-plays (in Eve's she was a speeding, red-light flouting, car-stealing maniac who then mouths off to a policeman, and she was a little too convincing for comfort if you ask me), and as I walked past the display I thought I should really take a picture of the popcorn and then blog it with the caption 'there is nothing natural about this'. But I didn't. Here's a picture, if you really need one.

Eve being a delinquent:

I thought of doing an "I Wonder Wednesday". You know what I wonder? When a female character on a tv show is heterosexual, and has sex with men often and happily, but then meets another female character and falls in love with her and has sex with her, when they break up, why is the female character just "gay now"? Why wouldn't they be considered bisexual? This happened with Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Callie Torres on Grey's Anatomy. Both characters are initially presented as heterosexual - Willow is in love with her best friend Xander and later has a serious boyfriend, and Callie is - well, I don't want to say 'easy', but let's just say she is in firm control of her own sexuality, not that everyone in the freaking hospital doesn't seem to have way too much time and energy for sex in the on-call room, considering they're all supposed to be working punishing hours wherein they're, you know, responsible for PEOPLE'S LIVES. Anyway. In both cases, these women meet another female character and become overwhelmed by her charisma/intelligence/magic specialness, and end up having sex with her. Fine. Good. I'm pretty much solidly hetero, but I've looked on certain women as lust objects - when I met a friend of my husband's from when he went to school at the Ontario Science Centre, this woman with an electrifying presence and really cool hair, and she introduced herself and I went to do the same, I actually forgot my name for a second. 

But then, in both cases, when the relationship with the game-changing woman ends, both women are now just... gay. Forever and ever. I have no problem with gay characters, obviously, but is this realistic? I don't know a lot of gay people really well, admittedly, so maybe what I've read and assumed for years is wrong - that most people either know they're gay fairly early in life or know that they don't feel about the opposite sex the way they're expected to, and if they do date the opposite sex it's usually just in an effort to appear 'normal'. Is this totally wrong? Or is it that tv show producers think that we're ready to accept gay characters but not bisexual ones? Because I don't understand why the character would not just now be considered bisexual. I mean, it's a tv show, everyone's so goddamned good-looking anyway, does one really have to choose? 

Or maybe a "What I'm Reading Wednesday". I just finished Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood. It was actually quite good, but I have trouble reading Margaret Atwood these days without all my Margaret Atwood-related baggage coming to bear. When I was interviewing for my job at the audio publisher where I used to work, I mentioned her as one of my favourite authors, and my boss (who was, bear in mind, a little insane and kind of an ass) told me she was a complete and total bitch, and provided a supporting anecdote. Then I saw a few interviews with her around the time she was publicizing Oryx and Crake, and she just seemed so smug about the fact that she'd figured out that the environment was in trouble, like she thought she was the first and only one, and she went on and on about how bananas are becoming extinct, and then there was the whole thing about her not wanting it to be called science fiction, when, Dude, it's totally science fiction, and not the best dystopic science fiction book I've ever read (although I did quite like The Year of the Flood), and ANYWAY, I saw Moral Disorder in the library and thought I should read it since I read everything she wrote for years but then hadn't read anything lately. And then there was the jacket copy. "...her breathtaking and deeply personal new book of fiction". Um? What's so deeply personal about it. It's good, but it's quite similar to many of her other books from what I can see. It's about relationships, being a woman in the modern world, being a mother/sister/daughter, plus there's a horse. Maybe Margaret Atwood has a horse? Also, it's billed a 'a series of inter-related stories, which seems to be the New Thing in publishing. But, much like The Juliet Stories, to me it just reads like a novel. Okay, it skips around in time - many, many novels do this. It still tells the story of one woman's life, from childhood to old age. I guess that it's possible that each story can be read as a whole in a way that some book chapters couldn't - is that supposed to be the big draw? I recently read A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which is just presented as a novel - THAT, to me, reads more like a series of inter-related stories. Each chapter begins from a different point of view, and it took several paragraphs to figure out which character from the previous chapters was now front and centre. I really liked it (although reviewers on Goodreads seemed deeply divided). My husband thinks I'm being too hard on Margaret Atwood. It's true, I do hold silly grudges for perplexingly long period of time. I've had The Blind Assassin on my shelf for years. Maybe I should try to read it. Without prejudice.

There you go. Waffly Wednesday.