Free to Be… You and Me

Free to Be… You and Me, brainchild of actress Marlo Thomas, started as a record album and was later made into a TV special. Its timeless message was of tolerance, acceptance, self-esteem, and self-actualization—told in a quintessentially 70s way. I remember being all of six or seven years old and going to the school library to watch this. We were enthralled. It harkens back to (forgive the cliché) a much simpler time, and while definitely the product of an earthy, warm-fuzzy, touchy-feely era, it still resonates over thirty years later. Sure, it’s classic Ms. magazine and second-wave feminism, but compare the sincere optimism of Free to Be… to the Just say no mantra of the neocon 80s. That’s when we really began instilling paranoia in children. Every stranger became a child molester, “the gays” were out to give everyone AIDS, and if you smoked a joint you’d be doing crack in the gutter before you knew it. And no one must ever see your “bathing suit” parts!

If anything, popular 1970s child-rearing was about saying yes, or at least maybe. And I may be biased, but I think we children of the 70s turned out pretty good.

We need stuff like this again. Plus, the soundtrack seriously rocked out.

Opening credits

Sisters and Brothers

Parents are People

And something we should all remember: It’s Alright To Cry

Inertia

I haven’t gotten much of anything done this past week. My lassitude is surprising, given how active I usually am. I’m wondering if the head cold I’m just now getting over was in fact a flu. I don’t recall any fever or chills, so I doubt it. Still, it did knock me out.

However, that doesn’t quite explain why I’ve been so uninterested in my usual activities. I’m not depressed… just bored. I haven’t been to the gym in almost two weeks, and that’s quite upsetting to me. Granted, I was way too sick to go this past weekend, and as I’ve mentioned here before, I can never find a good time to go in the week. But after only a week away from the gym, I start getting puffy in the gut. That’s how old and pathetic I am. I’ll force myself to go tomorrow after I get the laundry done.

It’s hardly doom and gloom, though, and there were two bright spots: I got a paper back in my AmLit course—an A, though that wasn’t much of a surprise. What’s pleasing is that this was the first paper I wrote for this prof, and I know now she’s very receptive to my ideas; further, she said my writing itself was “splendid.” Today I got that Modern Drama test back—the one for which I had all that lit-crit to read, and didn’t finish—and got a very surprising 9 out of 10. ph34r my br1ll14nc3.

This post doesn’t even deserve to be considered a Minutiaeroll, but I have to post something so that you, my fans, know I’m still around. It’s not so much a question of keeping my traffic up, as I’m still getting lots of it.

Oh yeah: my quit smoking journal post is getting spam comments that link to bedding and linen websites. What the fuck? I’ve deleted them, but what’s weird is that the comments are relevant to my post. I’m sure that the bots are smart enough now to do stuff like that.

I’ve got something like seven draft posts in the pipeline; I hope I’ll be inspired enough to finish some of them this weekend.