"manic pixie dream girl"

Just now, for the first time I can remember, I came across the phrase "manic pixie dream girl." I wasn't sure whether the writer had extemporaneously come up with that striking sequence of words, but I googled it, and sure enough, it had already been a negative comment on a genre of fictional characters who are presented less as authentic portrayals of real human beings than as objects used to to inspire and/or gratify male protagonists.

I'm not sure whether I had already thought of Zooey Deschanel, 

 

an actress whose characters tend to be cuter than a basket full of puppies, before I read that definition of "manic pixie dream girl," but as soon as I read it, I googled manic pixie dream girl zooey deschanel, and sure enough, I found an interview in which Ms Deschanel rejected the label of manic pixie dream girl, with the exception of the character she played in 500 Days of Summer, who, she admitted was a manic pixie dream girl. 

Apart from that one performance, Ms Deschanel argued that the characters she had portrayed had been 3-dimensional and authentic, adding that she was a woman, not a girl.

As soon as I read those excerpts from that interview, I thought, "Yeah! That's entirely right! You tell 'em, Ms Deschanel!"

But to be completely honest, I'm not sure whether I'm completely convinced by what Ms Deschanel said, or whether I'm agreeing with her in part because I want her to like me.

I also have to wonder whether, and to what extent, I have been a manic pixie dream boy in the imaginations of others, and whether I may still be such now, as an old man who may be suffering from the onset of arthritis (don't worry, I have excellent medical care, and we're looking into just what exactly these new joint pains are). So perhaps I feel protective toward women who are magic pixie dream girls in the imaginations of others, in part, because I don't want people to treat me as a person without agency simply because I may have inspired thoughts which have little or nothing to do with who I actually am.

Fantasies are okay. Fantasies are a normal, healthy part of life. But it's also good to acknowledge the depth and seriousness which other actual, real people possess. 

Even really, really, really cute people.

Solar Power and the Environment

The environment -- you know: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the birds in the skies, the fish in the seas, the plants we eat, the cute furry animals some of us eat -- the environment. Or to put it another way: our home. Or to put it in a much more precise way: the stuff we need in order to live. 

 

Just now, in an online group devoted to discussing solar power, a lively discussion had broken out when someone appeared and claimed that rooftop solar was not as good an investment as the S&P 500. Vigorous advocates of rooftop solar responded, saying that the stock market did not always go up, so that you'd have to find an investment with a guaranteed return in order to make a sensible comparison. Someone pointed out that the price of electricity had been going up, and that this had been left out of the comparison to the S&P. 

I didn't carefully read every single word of every comment in that discussion. I stopped reading after a while, after having seen not a single word about the environment. Not one single comment to the effect of: I put a value of X on spewing less poison into the air and water. Not one single comment to the effect of: if we all kill ourselves, money will be worthless. 

An entire conversation about solar power, entirely missing the actual point of it. Or what used to be the point, before greedy human pigs figured they could save a lot of money with solar. They've figured out that solar power is actually not a Chinese hoax, but they still haven't figured out that life does not entirely boil down to how much money they have.

And this means that there will be a lot of people who favor solar power because the economic advantages of it have become obvious enough that they can see the payoff for themselves personally, but who still are not quite bright enough -- despite all of the terrifying weather, despite all of the scientists and government agencies screaming their heads off about it full-time -- to have grasped that if we do not implement a bit of togetherness, and make changes including solar and many other things, we are all going to die. But they think they are smarter than anyone else if they have a lot of money. And a lot of us who should know better also believe that anyone who has more money than we do is smarter than we are, because that's the sort of simple-minded thinking which has become so pervasive since the days of that grotesquely overrated simpleton, Adam Smith, who assured each of us that if we just concentrate on the amount of currency we personally own, the Invisible Hand will take care of everything else.

If you're making economic calculations, and you assign no worth to the environment, you're not merely calculating inaccurately. You're entirely missing the point of any human calculation.

Solar In My Neighborhood

I live in an extremely progressive, environmentally-concscious neighborhood, full of Teslas and Bolts and many other EV's, and yet, they still have us screwed pretty bad when it comes to energy. It does not look like this around here:

 

My next-door neighbor has a solar roof, but I can walk east for more than a half-mile before I see one more house with solar panels. I can walk almost as far to the west before I see more solar panels: the branch of Chase bank next to a strip mall there has solar panels covering its entire roof, north, south, east and west. 

I keep meaning to go in there and ask someone about the solar panels. Because we live in one of those areas where there are all sorts of restrictions about what sort of solar set-up you can have, and I had assumed that literally covering your roof with solar panels was illegal in this city.

Maybe this is just an example of businesses tending not to put up with some of the crap that utilities succeed in shoving down homeowners' throats. Or maybe the fact that most of the roofs around here are not yet covered with solar panels, south, north, east and west, is an illustration of people not knowing their rights. I myself don't actually know whether what Chase is doing there is different than what any of us could be doing. And I know more about solar power than most people do.

There's a local group which wants to take our fair city away from the utility and run our power ourselves. I keep meaning to go to one of their meetings. If all of the neighborhoods in this town had roofs like those in the picture above, we could export a lot of electricity, undercut the prices of that utility, get others to join us, and put that utility and their coal-fired plants out of business. 

I'm good at daydreaming. Top-notch.

I keep meaning to look into these Biden-administration solar incentives, to see whether I could actually go solar myself right now, despite my low income. 

I keep meaning to actually do something.

Well, I write one of these posts on green energy now and then. Maybe I've actually encouraged someone somewhere else to actually do something.