What Am I Made For?
by R.E. Slater
These are the little lives
our once lives
which are becoming meaningful
as we imagine meaning
seeking our meaning
against those who won't
or can't
give it to us
giving us false meaning
harming meaning
demeaning meaning
suffocating meaning
we are drowning
are learning to fight the currents
overwhelming us
overcoming us
refusing to give up
because of who we are
and what we can do
sometimes feebly
perhaps in anger
refusing the lies we are told
about ourselves
and the rot which
comes with those lies
childhood is hard
growing up is confusing
our ideas
my ideas
never die
unless we let them
they are the bastions
we have lived within
which must come down
so that we become the persons
who we must become
are becoming
striving to make our worlds better
as we can
where we can
just by being me
RE Slater
August 26, 2023
@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved
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Leaving Childhood
by R.E. Slater
At some point a child will leave their "Age of Innocence" and enter a their own "World of Reality"; most likely this transition will be marked by sadness and pain, grief and sorrow, spurred forward by a deeper realization of the kind of world that they are finally coming to see for what it is.
It is the first of many moments of existential crisis. When thinking back I remember many... some felt the earth move underneath both my feet and soul. Others when watching mom work so hard or dad being exhausted in his youth trying to keep up with the demands of his mom, family, and several jobs. Or my own when seeing the world through the eyes of my brothers.
Childhood by-and-by teaches young children ways to grow-up under ofttimes less-than-ideal circumstances. For some, they come to realize that the only "stable thing" they might depend upon is their own approach to difficulty when not ignoring those moments while searching for more reasonable responses to what can seem as personally harming or upsetting events.
For those children like myself who grew up in moderately dysfunctional families we learn to manage such moments when practicing various outcomes. Perhaps anger, indifference, steeled emotional barriers to dim the poisoned darts piercing our souls; or, bring joy to significant others via performance in studies, sports, chores, obedience, etc. Each action an exploration to the onion-like layers lying across our little beings struggling to survive and understand over the long years of shaming, guilt, manipulation, gut-wrenching labelling and demeaning, from our peers and older adults of all kinds.
Sometimes children manage to overcome that which strives to overcome our little souls. And at other times we simply cannot and grow up to burying ourselves in a bottle, or drugs, addictions, or anger. Some refuse to submit by trying to find a way out, or in. To find people who might show us better attitudes and behaviours for approaching life's many challenges. Perhaps through brief moments of serenity, in nature, in afamily home, in mentored situations, etcetera... where we might re-gather ourselves to try again... perhaps this time more successfully than last time.
As caring parents with deep pasts as these we may try to spare our little ones these "awakening" moments for as long as we can... some by easing their children into it through wide readings across a variety of childhood books, perspectival nursery rhymes, thoughtful songs, or a mosaic of life-experiences as best we can undertake them.
Other parents, having fewer choices or opportunities living in the harsher climes and realities can not. There, bitterness, regret, anger, guilt, and a host of life-changing emotions cruelly come into our children's lives to which we are helpless to protect, shield, or explain. Here, we seek shelter in the arms of others stronger than ourselves wherein our children might find respite and better ways to surmount daily challenges.
My own awakenings consisted of a series of childhood moments and events which I have attempted to remember and characterise through my poems and writings, in various church ministries, participation in community civil actions, environmental groups, or in snowmobiling, sports, hunting, and for a time, parenting... (actually, parenting never stops; it's a life-long blessing which is as difficult as it is fun)
At one point in my childhood - I do not know when - I remember attending to the gravesides of innumerable loved ones and unknown relatives - that at some point it had become a normalized event much like going to church.
At first I didn't understand, and then later, it seemed like every-other-week-or-month we were back at the family plots as my grandpa and grandma's loved ones passed away one-by-one until finally they did themselves. Upon my grandma's death it effectively closed the final pages of a very long and heavy tome recounting our earlier farming pioneers and their descendents over a 150 year period. The morning of grandma's death felt like the closing of an era never to be recovered again.
These loved ones and named stranger all were dutifully remembered by my aged grandma whose farmhouse was next to our own home. She daily rehearsed to my little attenuating ears the long assemblages of my relatives and their relatives over the eons. Which explained the many graveside funerals of my blooded heritage as they lived-and-died in their flesh-and-blood legacies.
This kind of bloodline retelling of my "homesteading" descendents might be more fully described through the beloved author, Wendell Berry's, own childhood legacies to which he has dutifully remembered and reflected upon through a number of autobiographical portraits of his own descendents as children who grew up to pick up the traces of their moms and dads cares and burdens.
And thus it is with the Barbie movie played and directed by Margot Robbie along with a host of talented actors. I came to the film not knowing what to expect and left saddened and wizened by the heavy weight children must everywhere bear as we parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, and neighbors, try each-in-our-own-way to ease their "existential burden" as best we can by our own caretake of those little lives who come to us for a time where we might lead by relationship, example, and wisdom.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
August 26, 2023
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"Coming of Age" Movies
Or even Castaway (when a grown up adult suddenly finds himself terribly alone).
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“Hi, my name is Billie, and I’m going to play a song that I made up with this guitar,” the singer says as the video begins, which shows footage from Billie Eilish's childhood interspersed with footage of sold-out shows from around the globe in the last year.
Billie Eilish - What Was I Made For?
(Live from Lollapalooza Chicago 2023)
I used to float, now I just fall downI used to know but I'm not sure nowWhat I was made forWhat was I made for?
Takin' a drive, I was an idealLooked so alive, turns out I'm not realJust something you paid forWhat was I made for?
'Cause I, II don't know how to feelBut I wanna tryI don't know how to feelBut someday, I mightSomeday, I might
When did it end? All the enjoymentI'm sad again, don't tell my boyfriendIt's not what he's made forWhat was I made for?
'Cause I, 'cause II don't know how to feelBut I wanna tryI don't know how to feelBut someday I mightSomeday I might
Think I forgot how to be happySomething I'm not, but something I can beSomething I wait forSomething I'm made forSomething I'm made for
Billie Eilish - What Was I Made For?
(Official Music Video)
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Barbie Ending Explained:
The End of Barbie Was Inevitable
POSTED: JUL 28, 2023 5:44 PM
It’s time for a Barbiesplainer. Plus, are there any post-credits scenes in the Margot Robbie movie?
Let's make this simple: Do you want to know if there’s a post-credits scene in Barbie? We’ll tell you right here: There are no post-credits or mid-credits scenes in the film.
That said, the credits do feature a fun tribute of sorts to the history of the Barbie doll, so you might want to stick around for that!
Full spoilers for Barbie follow...
10:19
Barbie Ending Explained
By the near-end of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Barbie (Margot Robbie) has gone flat-footed; traversed land, sea, the great outdoors, and outer space — to the real world and back; been arrested twice; dismantled Ken’s (Ryan Gosling) cowboy patriarchy and restored the idyllic matriarchy of Barbieland. And still, she’s left staring back into the internal void of self-doubt, feeling unworthy, ugly, and unfulfilled. Welcome to sentience, Barbie.
For a movie that works within a fever dream of internal logic — “just feel it,” the ghost of Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), tells Barbie-as-audience-proxy in the second-to-last scene — Barbie is grounded in humanism (and, yes, unapologetic feminism) that was inevitably leading to the choice Barbie is given at the end of the film the second she asked if anyone else had thoughts about dying during the co-ed rager in the first 10 minutes.
Barbie Movie Character Posters
In the conclusion, Barbie and Ruth have a heart-to-heart in the same empty James Turrell-esque set (Barbieland’s collective unconscious, if you will) where the Kens staged “I’m Just Ken.” It’s their grand reunion after Barbie escapes Mattel HQ and the dimwitted horde of all-male execs, headed by Will Ferrell, who chased her into the liminal space of a hallway. Opening a door to a sun-lit kitchen, she finds Ruth sitting serenely at the table. (“There’s a rumor that her ghost lives on the 17th floor,” whispers Ferrell toward the end of the film. Notably, Handler died in 2002 at 85.) After her adventure, feeling unsure about who she is anymore, Barbie is presented with the options of staying in Barbieland or entering the real world as a human, with all their flaws, anxieties, and cellulite.
For Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie,” the first of the Barbies named after Handler’s own daughter Barbara, it’s like a creation meeting their benevolent god and asking why they were ever born. Ruth appeals to Barbie with her personal story, including passing mentions of her double mastectomy and tax evasion — both of which are true to life. Handler had breast cancer in the ’70s and was indicted with four other Mattel execs for manipulating sales records to influence the company’s stock prices between 1971-1973.
Though this is certainly a “wait, what?” moment, it wouldn’t serve the film’s story to try and explain it further. The point is, as Ruth says, that living as a human, and especially a woman, is a messy, complicated affair, doubling down on the Cognitive Dissonance of Modern Women monologue America Ferrera’s executive assistant Gloria gives the Barbies to break the spell of Ken. (It’s worth mentioning the greatness of that whole sequence of baiting Kens to mansplain Photoshop, The Godfather, Stephen Malkmus, etc., leading to an acoustic guitar circle of Kens singing Kendom’s on-the-nose national anthem, Matchbox Twenty’s 1996 rock radio hit “Push,” on the beach. How do the Barbies and Kens know these cultural references? Just don’t think about it.)
After spending so much of the movie fretting over the fact that she had never wanted anything to change, Barbie has seen and experienced too much to ever accept life as she knew it, a never-ending string of the best day ever. Even Ken, after reading about dudes and horses and war and “brewski beers,” has learned something new about himself and the world he lives in: The patriarchy stinks and his identity is more than just following around Barbie like a puppy. “Maybe it’s Barbie, and it’s Ken,” Robbie tells Gosling right before he goes down the Barbie Dream House’s pink circular slide shouting in self-enlightenment, “Ken is meeeee!”
Barbie’s existential crisis was instigated by the fact that Gloria, Barbie’s owner, has been going through her own struggles as her daughter Sasha grows up. She copes by drawing Depression Barbie — which manifests into an ad for a doll that scrolls Instagram for seven hours a day and continuously rewatches BBC’s Pride and Prejudice — and Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie. This has forever altered Barbie’s brain chemistry, but all she needs is the confidence boost from Ruth to take the leap forward into a new life where, yeah, she’ll probably still be catcalled, feel bad sometimes, get cellulite, and eventually die. But it’ll all be because of her own decisions, and there will also be the small joys to be found outside of a once-pristine existence.
She’s realized that not every day we spend alive is amazing, not every night is girls’ night. It’s full of mundane tasks and appointments, like going to the gynecologist, as Barbie does in the last scene — which is another leap of logic in itself. Earlier in the film, Barbie says that neither she nor Ken have genitals. Does a doll choosing to become human suddenly grant her a digestive and reproductive system? Can the ghost of a doll inventor even do that? Once again, it’s best not to think about it too much. At the end of the day, it’s a surrealist extended toy commercial. Just feel it.
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