This past Sunday, we were given two exceptional portraits of women who have done the best they can in the situations they’re handed, and still fall far short of satisfied. Joan now owns 5% of the company she started out filing papers for, and Cersei is the Queen Regent of the entire kingdom. But neither can make peace with how they’ve gotten there, nor do they necesarrily want to. All they can do is cope.

How, exactly, Joan is going to move forward is, as of yet, a mystery. But Cersei struck her bargain before the story of Game of Thrones ever even began, when she married King Robert, and it’s evident that she has not dealt with it well. All that seems to keep her going is her relationship with Jaime, her (often painful) love for her children, and wine. As someone who has read all the currently published novels in A Song of Ice and Fire, I can tell you with confidence that it only gets worse from here. As someone who isn’t Matthew Weiner, I have no idea where Joan is going, but I can’t say I’d be surprised if we see the same kind of evil break though her surface more often as Mad Men continues.

But framing that decline as stemming from the sex-for-power bargains that these characters made is limiting, and unfair. In “Blackwater,” we were given what I think is Cersei’s most revealing line yet: “When we were young, Jaime and I, we looked so much alike even our father couldn’t tell us apart. I could never understand why they treated us differently.” There’s a whole lifetime of subjugation behind these women, and the fact that she says this to Sansa only reveals even more. There are shades of Joan’s early interactions with Peggy here, of one woman preparing another to follow in her footsteps, to learn her place and make the best she can of it. The difference, of course, is that Peggy has the luxury to blow it off, to make her own path; Sansa has no such luck.

And so, while both these shows are often focused on the kinds of women that are created under the pressures of a sexist society, Mad Men is a series about change. We’re never given a sense that things are changing in big ways for the women of Westeros the way we know that things began to shift in the America of the 1960s. That’s what will be most interesting to me about the connection between these two characters, I think. Cersei is confident that the next generation will suffer the same as she did, but Joan can already see things getting better for people born just a few years later, and I can’t think that won’t make it sting all the worse.

photos from china in the fall of 2011 (II)

What I did not know about traveling with an unfamiliar acquaintance before agreeing to do so was how quickly I could be rubbed raw by lack of communication. There was the surface level of only speaking in a language secondary to the both of us, the reasons for which I’m still unsure about; I know he was born and raised in Tokyo, but he attended college in the States, and it was generally agreed upon that the Chinese-only language pledge of our program was suspended for the midterm break. But beyond that, we seemed to disagree on the purpose of tourism as a whole, and did not know each other well enough to land on a compromise.

When I sat down on a bench in some historic Suzhou garden, I pretended to be tying my shoe, because my travel partner didn’t seem to understand the value of sitting still. As far as I was concerned, you could appreciate the flower arrangements and the rock formations just as well without having to speed-walk from one to the other, and besides, my feet hurt. I didn’t want to tell him my feet hurt, because I did not know him, and I don’t like admitting weakness, however minor, to strangers. So I tied my shoelace in a single loose knot, walked until it came undone, then sat down again to tie it slowly and purposefully, looking out across the water and wishing I had just gone alone, so I could lean against the wall and listen the little girl ask her mom for bread to throw to the fish and point out the big foreigner with the silly hair.

photos from china in the fall of 2011 (I)

We were in a city we did not know, led only by the recommendation of one of our trip chaperones. The club was called True Love, the flashing lights were everywhere and obnoxious, and the dancers were unexpected in their presence on what we assumed to be simply a dancefloor, but unsurprising in the content of their performance. The first act was a sub-Britney Spears bit of chair choreography, girls in minimal amounts of beat-up faux leather writhing to what sounded like an Eastern European remix of a Lady Gaga track. But when they left the stage, a noticably older woman came out; if the DJ announced what she was about to do, it came too fast for my barely proficient and not-so-barely drunk ears to understand, but when an assistant came out with a pair of pencil-width snakes in a plastic petstore terrarium, I began to get an inkling.

I could feel the small clutch of my American classmates begin to tense as a single unit when she held the first one, wriggling in her fingers, up above her mouth, pausing for just a moment before lowering it into her throat, a sword swallower with living props. This was a geek show, and judging by the applause, the crowd was loving it. I stared on as she took down the other snake, then what looked to be a millipede with gigantism. Next, an assistant brought out a lizard, something like a small iguana; this one she only took in her mouth to its neck, and then, torso and tail of the thing swinging wildly at her front, she began to dance. It was jerky, and short-lived, clearly just killing time before the climax of the show. The heads of three huge snakes all shoved into her cheeks, bodies a tangle reaching down to the floor, and still she twirled in place to the music with enough conviction to garner my respect; her neck must have been terrifically strong.

Of course, once you climb a mountain, you must make your way back down, and so the woman on stage knelt to the floor, reached her hand into her mouth, and, after a series of overly visible heaving motions, pulled the multilegged bug out of her mouth and held it above her, still moving and alive. The same for the small twin snakes, and so the show ended as if you had simply rewound to the beginning, putting the snakes back in their plastic home, the assistant walking out as the woman danced alone in the center of the club, then exiting.

I still don’t know if it was fake, and if so, how she faked it; my working theory is that the small creatures were simply waiting in her cheeks until the end, and not down her esophagus, as she clearly wanted us to believe. Her tricks were far more succesful than that of the DJ, a dopey man who looked like the Chinese twin of my junior high band teacher; apparently, American guests were not frequent at True Love, and the man called for us to come up and talk to him. After a friend answered and went up to the podium and blurted a few lines of English DJ chatter into the microphone, he gave us a bottle of wine, but when I opened it and took a swig, it was clearly just grape juice. If there was any alcohol in there at all, it was certainly not enough to meet the requirement to legally be labeled “wine,” not in America. But maybe it was in China; I was still new in this country, as evidenced by the fact that we had the wine at all. 

Weeks later, I bought an unfamiliar wine, and when I checked the label, it was less than two percent alcohol by volume. I only realized then that what the DJ had given us could very well have been legitimate. The flights of imagination in which discos in small cities refill empty wine bottles with kool-aid to lure the rare foreign tourist into making an ass of himself were all at once wiped from my head as I finished off the last of the barely-wine in my dorm room. I wondered if that woman would be performing tonight, if she performed every night, how long she’d been doing the snake act. If she’d trained since she was much younger, or if it came to her by accident, a way to stand out among a sea of sexy dancer clones.

I like to assume the snakes are her pets, that they live with her in some cramped apartment, catch the mice and scare off men she tries to take home. The truth is probably more dismal, a closet in her boss’s office he barely checks or a shelf in the basement of True Love, but as long as I don’t know for sure, they’re friends, the snakes and the woman. And I don’t want to know for sure.

The concept of the show was simple enough: there were five single twenty-somethings on a bus, and one single twenty-something outside of said bus, and the latter would go on highly-choreographed, implausible “dates” with each of the former until they found someone they liked enough to offer to take on a second date. Next aired on MTV for four years, and my adolescent brain absorbed enough of it in that time that if you turned an episode on, I could probably tell you who won the second date in each segment within the first minute.

I was never naive enough to believe that the show was remotely close to how actual dating functioned; to say it was a funhouse mirror reflection of real life would be to sully the reputation of funhouse mirrors. But I stuck with the show because once every few episodes, for a segment, the walking caricatures of idiot youth inside the bus would be the same gender as the one outside the bus. It was my only opportunity to see gay people acting gay on tv, much less real life. As far as I knew, the man who lived with my uncle and came to every family event was his roommate.

There were other things around that featured gay characters, certainly; Will & Grace had already been on the air for six years when Next premiered, but I wouldn’t be caught dead watching that fag show, lest someone suspect that I, too, was a fag. But Next was on MTV, and Next wasn’t about being gay. It was about whipped cream fights and slip ‘n’ slides coated in Moroccan massage oil, regardless of the genitalia of anyone involved. It was frivolous, and, in retrospect, at least a little repugnant, but it was universally so, and I don’t know if anything else in my pre-teen years could have provided me with a better foundation for learning not to hate who I was.

If Yahoo Answers Existed During The Month I Had a Hamster When I Was 12

Which is better, hansters or gerbils?
Asked by Robbie in All Categories > Pets > Rodents
my parents told me I could get a small pet but I can’t decide which I want more, a hampster or gerbil. Is one more playful than the other? Is one more expensive or something? Does one smell worse (lol)?

I just got a hampster and he doesn’t like me. Help?
Asked by Robbie in All Categories > Pets > Rodents
I just got a hampster (sp?) and we bought the food and cage and stuff that the petsmart lady told us to, and he seems fine but whenever I try to take him out he hides in his igloo house and won’t leave until I close the cage lid. What can I do to make him like me? I bought a hampsterball and haven’t even been able to use it yet. Should I try to give him treats? What is hampsters’s favorite foods?

thanks for any help

Read More