Never Walked In High Heels

People often ask why I do not join a community built for cripples (actually they say “individuals with physical limitations” but the stigma is still the same). I have trouble finding friends who also have physical disabilities and when possible, usually find it best to look at a person not for what he can or cannot do, but rather, who he is or isn’t. In this way, disabilities are the last thing that enter into my mind when examining the qualities of a particular individual. Many I speak to often find this point frustrating, occasionally to the point of hypocrisy. For me, it is simply, life.

I was never raised to be disabled. Growing up, my family did everything to keep me out of an extremely flawed special education system. Even today, the United Nations report that only three percent of all people with physical disabilities in the world are able to read. (http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=18) Among women, that goes down to just one percent. This means that out of four hundred disabled women in the world, only one of them is literate. If this shocks you, I’m not surprised. It is shocking. Our world is blissfully unaware of what living conditions are like world wide for people with disabilities.

Recently I saw a report from the mayor of London analyzing the learning conditions of persons with in a city some consider the world’s capital. The title alluded to the idea that people with physical limitations almost live in a different city than London. Being unable to use a form of mass transit such as the London Underground and unable to access many of the neighborhood shops on any high street, people who have any sort of physical limitation know a very different London than those who are able bodied. Transportation is slower, stores with narrow aisles a bigger challenge, invasive even, and the looks from people on the street will often send individuals back inside their houses in order to avoid hostile environments.

But being disabled does not stop with environmental issues. As in any civil rights battle, the problem is steeper and more complex than one would care to imagine. When I was growing up I heard over and over again, “Be patient with yourself” and “take it slow.” Now why I would ever want to slow down when it took me and hour and a half to get dressed that morning is beyond me. However, taking it slow often gets transformed into setting lower goals for individuals with disabilities. It means taking it easy rather than slowly chipping away at a complex algebra problem. Some things, particularly in education cannot be rushed but more often than not the goal post for disabled individuals is removed entirely so that a substandard type of performance becomes acceptable lessening the amount of homework problems, showing the student that he should only have to read the Cliff Notes rather than the whole book, or even insisting that a book is too difficult for a student to read are all common occurrences for someone who was raised to think of himself as physically disabled and therefore expected to take no initiative in his own life. Thus, more often than not, the great schism which faces individuals with physical limitations is not the level of access in their environment but it is their submission to a type of institutionalization which works for societies comfort rather than the students good.

As has been the case with civil rights issues in the past, this false education and insistence that individuals with disabilities are helpless is more detrimental than any staircase or missing form of public transit. It is through the educational system that individuals with disabilities are still often given different books, different classes, different teachers, and different expectations which causes the schism between the fully able bodied world and the disabled world to continue year after year after year. By insisting that the disabled world is somehow separate (nobody said anything about equal) from the way fully able bodied people live their lives means that there will always innately be that division between different people. Inevitably by keeping any population separated, society ensures that they are marginalized. The mayor of London is right, living in London with a physical disability means living in an entirely different city than Londoners who are able to get about without much thought. Perhaps this is why I am so impatient when well meaning individuals tell me to take it slow. It takes me so long to get to my destination in the first place, if I were to take it slow I fear that my world would stop altogether.

Those Who Used to “Teach”

It is often said that those who cannot do, teach. And as some members of my family would like to add, those who cannot teach go into education. But embarking on conservatory training I discovered that there are teachers who cannot do and teachers who can no longer do. Both often make splendid teachers. The teachers who have given up there own performing careers due to age or ailment are often times the most giving of their time and the most insistent on perfection, creating a rare combination of encouragement and admirable standards. All too quickly the image of ancient ballet teachers hobbling on canes comes to mind. People who have seen performance for what it is as well have seen their own careers dissolve through circumstances beyond their control and have thus rededicated themselves to improving other individual’s forms rather than other individuals chances to get into the industry.

A particular conservatory instructor comes to mind. He is an individual who was well known in his day as an incredible Shakespearean actor when, after a stage fighting accident during one summer, lost the use of his left arm. That was the only extent of his injury, however it was permanent and as a result of having a single limb immobilized had to give up his craft.

Sometimes I sit in the back of his class listening to him lecture or give advice to those of us performing and I often wonder what he thinks when he examines me in his studio. An injury, which from my perspective seems extraordinarily small (although I’m sure from his point of view, it was anything but negligible) ended his career decades ago and here I am more bound in my body than he is now despite his age, embarking on a professional acting career with the insistence that disability and physical condition does not matter. He, unlike some of my tutors never offers me a detrimental word or insists that I despair regarding my impending doom as a starving artist. His standards are set as high for me as anyone else and he insists that I can be trained.

I look at him lead the class in warm ups and articulation exercises and more often than not, I am struck by the constant reminder of my ultimate goals of being in art. I dream of a world where having an “imperfect body” or being seen as more representative of the human condition. I have a vision of a world where people take as little notice of physical differences as most people do different races and the insistence of segregating the disabled because they are different is labeled as “hateful” as racism or homophobia, and I believe that it is art, particularly acting which will help our society reach these goals as it normalizes differences and forces our world to look at situations and people which many would otherwise not run into living within their own suburban plan. I want to create art and act in pieces that reiterate over and over that losing the use of a single appendage is hardly reason to bow out of the industry and take up teaching as a consolation career when one is regarded some great tragedy occurs.

I sit in his class daily and come to the conclusion that I would hope if the same injury happened to my teacher today, he would keep acting, even in the face of adversity and insist that he belonged on the stage and his talent did not disintegrate as a result of losing the use of a single appendage. I want to help create the world in which he never had to quit due to an accident that was merely an unfortunate circumstance. I can’t help but wonder if, after the accident, he too yearned for a world where art could incorporate the realities of life.

It is a situation as old as politics and nearly as contrived. We see the Romans crying out first for Caesar, then Brutus, and finally Marc Antony. All are supposed to be the leaders who’ll save the day, the individual who is better at his job than his own predecessor, causing public excitement and all sorts of long-winded speeches in support for the new hero that has never served in public office. What is it about the unknown leader that allows us to view them as the all blame pin cushion? There is an ongoing myth that if the right person was elected, all of the issues surrounding the region, country, or the world would be solved and life would finally be blissful.

We really think that whoever this new leader is comes from our mindset and is able to see the world precisely how we see it. Ultimately, of course, this is a form of vanity in and of itself. Every individual on the face of the earth has this idea in the back of his or her mind that no one else can rightly see the world the same way that they does. In this way, politics is the ultimate form of vanity. We are able to project our world how we see it onto the face of someone who is running for office and then fill in a ballot assuming that this guy will agree with us and that he will be able to fix problem X, rewrite issue Y, and balance budget Z in order to solve everything. Thereby ending our need to feel guilty about those less fortunate, to make the world better ourselves, and to challenge our position in order to test what we really believe.

Of course in the forefront of our mind, we know that not everyone agrees the individual, so we accept and deny this respectively. The leaders with no track record who have done little in office except run for election allow us to have room to dream and a clean sheet whereon to project our new view. We believe in these projections and therefore are able to vote with a clear conscience, insisting that this time it will be different.

Like everything else, once the work starts it all changes. One by one that person who we handed our wish list to make the world a better place begins crossing out items we cannot afford and dropping pages that he chooses to ignore for a number of reasons. Once he begins to take action, we are then able to judge him by those actions and as always, they fall short of our expectations. He didn’t run the country the way I would do it. She didn’t help the type of people I would have helped. So we begin to look again, thinking that this time, for this election, we found the perfect guy for the job.

The race is never over. We think by stuffing a ballot in a box we have done our civic duty, but that is actually all we do, we simply pass our social responsibilities on to a person who we know full well will turn into our personal scapegoat. If we think that shaping the world by casting a vote for the ideal man is the pinnacle of fixing the world’s problems and the national equivalent of carrying in the messiah, than we are gravely mistaken on what the world truly needs. The hope of an unknown leader gives us the illusion that we are able to change the world by electing the guy who absolutely agrees with everything that we would do ourselves and seeks to enact our exact plan(s) into action. However, we brush the dirt off of our hands after casting the ballot.

My hands were trembling as I opened the letter. It explained to me that the railroad company involved was not at fault for my complaint; rather they listed it as an “unfortunate incident.” This term unfortunate kept cropping up as I read the letter further. It was unfortunate that I felt dissatisfied; it was unfortunate that things had not turned out better. However, there is nothing to be done. It was merely an unfortunate incident that could have happened anywhere and pointed the finger at no one.

In corporate situations both in the United States and the United Kingdom there seems to be a lack of willingness to apologize. Everything is either unfortunate or a mistake, but not worthy of a true apology. We as a society have seemed to forget that words on their most basic level actually mean something or perhaps we haven’t forgotten it at all. Perhaps the unwillingness to admit fault or wrongdoing is specifically because words mean something and if one company would say “it was our fault” a precedence would be set; meaning that the company itself was fallible and able to take responsibility for it’s own actions.

An unfortunate incident means that there is no one to point the finger at. There is nobody at fault in the situation. It’s a phrase that has been no doubt concocted by corporate lawyers seeking to make their client’s companies able to run as smoothly and unobtrusively as possible. But sometimes responsibility actually needs to be taken, and here is the area where the corporate lawyers would prefer to never acknowledge it’s own existence.

Corporate avoidance is what occurs when lawyers and representatives call an error an unfortunate incident, meaning that companies and corporations are above laws which individuals are subjected to. If there is ongoing discrimination within a particular department of a corporation, particularly when dealing with the public, it is routinely ignored, stating that the event was an abnormality and however advantageous and unfavorable said occurrence may have been, it is not to be ceased or rectified. Worse still, by refusal to take any action or responsibility to ensure that the customer will never be treated the same way again means that such behavior is encouraged within a corporation or a business. If an individual discriminated against his fellow man by refusing to allow someone with a physical disability onto a train, he would be called a bigot and a corporations policy did likewise, not only would the event be named as something culpable rather than discriminatory, arrogant or wrong.

For a corporation to refuse to take responsibility for it’s own behavior means that nobody who works for that company needs to feel guilty. Every single one of the lawyers who term the error as being an unfortunate incident can sleep at night knowing that no one will end up in jail and their legal team will calmly and quietly sweep the issue under the rug without further question.

If this is a world where unfortunate incidences occur rather than mistakes or wrongdoings, we are looking at a world where there are no legal checks in our system to make sure that companies and corporations treat individuals as fairly as individuals used to treat each other. Such a world means that there is no way for an individual to even begin to challenge a corporation which is unjustly jeopardizing his home, family, or life. 

The year is more than three quarters of the way finished and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in the world. As a challenge to myself I have decided as a new years resolution back in January that I would go an entire year without watching a single news update. As a result, it would not be too much to say that from my point of view, the entire world has changed. I find that as a result of not listening to the news I have much more love to give and many more experiences that I cannot help but think of whenever I enter a pub and hear the men arguing back and forth.

The people who are directly in front of me in my life, I am able to look at and think of more often. I am no longer interested in what their argument is and how I can persuade them to agree with me. I watch people as they talk to me and become concerned with their news and their lives, realizing that what the media constantly puts on as being crucial doesn’t matter so much as examining the lives of the people directly in front of me and seeing what exactly needs to be done to improve our own condition. The most important people in the world are not the ones with the power that live in big houses and have three different secretaries, rather they are the individuals who go out of their way to show me love and are able to experience life in tandem with me.

Furthermore, not watching the news ended all hopes of there ever being any sort of justifiable television watching. The news is the appropriate form of procrastination when one really stops to think about it. It’s the pretense of being actively concerned with the world and hoping to reshape it combined with a sense of false charity that allows an individual to feel good about himself and remaining educated while still sitting on the couch all day transfixed with what the news reporter is saying.

And finally as a result of not watching the news, I worry less; or at the very least, I worry about different things. I realize that the over hyped and manufactured fantasies that scroll across the bottom of one’s television screen are just another turn in the cycle of history. And while technology, products and quite possibly the fashionable length of hem lines differ from generation to generation, the major debates do not. What is the role of the government in the life of the individual? How can we remain safe, protected, and free? What needs to be done to make the world better and what is being done to provide fewer amenities to those who actually need more?

I think with three quarters of the year already passed and myself blissfully unaware of what exactly has gone on in the news, I am forced to realize that the media hysteria which is masterfully fashioned as some sort of guerilla psychology is simply a form of socially acceptable attempts to change the world. Changing the world has never been something that is particularly well thought of or thought out within the drawing rooms of society. Talking about altering the world might be popular, but actually doing so and evading peoples’ minds and attitudes in order to see a necessary revolution is undoubtedly frowned upon. And so the people who watch the news are able to start off repetitively that which reporters have said with a twinkle in their eye, hoping that the rest of America will earn their trust and see current events from their own point of view rather than actually going forward and discovering how to improve conditions and make changes themselves. 

I have learned in recent years that there are many hazards of not having a diamond ring. However, this was one that I never expected.

I was in a coffee shop the other day when a young man asked if he could sit next to me. Instantly suspicious, I stupidly nodded even though my past judgment has told me that individuals who wish to sit next to me usually want to talk to me, and such individuals who want to talk to me usually prevent me at the very least from getting my work done. However, this particular man illustrated that not only would he hold me back from work, but I would proceed to a conversation which even my best etiquette teachers would be at an absolute loss to navigate. The young man proceeded to tell me his name and states that he has been abducted to the planet Zorbon, and what I am actually seeing is his hologram android.

At first I think, he must be joking in order to seem more bizarre than he actually is, and then he proceeds to tell me that he is serious, using his laptop to pull up star charts, databases, and other information regarding the great planet of Zorbon which, forgive me if I’m mistaken, seems as if no one on earth has ever heard of.

This of course is not the first time I have found myself in a conversation which made me question whether or not I had slipped into an alternate universe. I seem to attract weirdos from every tribe, nation, and planet. This is a gene I am convinced that I have inherited from my father. My father has the remarkable ability to attract cult leaders, religious fanatics and shall we say, oddities of all sorts. Evidently during their early dating lives, these convergent flocks would hound my mother and father; making it impossible for them to go on a simple date. So I seem to have inherited this gene and although it seems to be recessive in most people, I have a pheromone that somehow attracts very bizarre people.

On the whole, I think that I am pretty tolerant of different individuals’ world views. My own views are fierce in their own right, which may be as strange to some as hailing from Zorbon. Among my friends, there are many Jews, Catholics, Hindu’s, Muslims, basically an entire diversified population which would make the BBC diversity department howl with envy. However, there is only so much a woman can take and being introduced to a hologram android is pushing the limits. The only appropriate response I could garner was, “Buddy, you’re bloody insane.”

I’m not exactly sure what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe being from the planet Zorbon is supposed to be particularly sexy. Perhaps in the style of, I’ll let you see my hologram if you let me see yours. But in my book, this is not a particularly pleasant way to start a romance let alone a conversation.

I have often been told in my life to be kind and tolerant to everyone and to love them exactly as they are, giving every guy a chance before I reject him as a potential suitor. These days, coffee shops are the place to meet your soulmate; and so I do my best to smile and look inviting, even when I’m only there to get a little work done. I don’t know if these rules of dating extend to people who have been abducted and replaced by androids, but after about fifteen minutes of supposed conversation, I found it best to take my work and make an exit.

I am unable to wash my hair, there is way too much of it for me to handle. When I went away to college, the major worry of my parents was not that I wouldn’t be able to keep my grades high or wouldn’t have the self-discipline to attend class, no; it was the daily task of taking care of my hair and other minute personal details. At one point I even seriously debated on shaving my head and wearing a wig at all times. However, whenever I visited a wig shop I realized that nobody else’s hair, natural or synthetic, no matter how easy it was to take care of, would ever be my own. For me, I always thought of my hair as my signature. Some women get into shoes, other women handbags. Mine was like Sampson; my hair, a symbol of strength and health; regardless of it throwing me into utter dependence.

It was either fate or providence that when I moved away to college, there was a hair salon directly across the street that was having their grand opening that first week. For four years I visited those hair dressers, talking about my problems and my potential love interests as they washed my hair and pinned it in such a way that it inevitably looked lovely, but also stayed out of my face. And then a week after I graduated, the owner declared bankruptcy and the studio closed.

At university there was a stark contrast between the students and professors always insisting on reading and having intellectual debates and those in any sort of vocational industry. It often turned into outright snobbery. And while the turnover rate of the people employed by a single salon is shockingly high. Often at my own school, people would think that the cosmetologists or other individuals who insisted on going into vocational school rather than receiving a full liberal arts degree were somehow inferior. They couldn’t stick to a single curriculum, they were fickle, gave up easily and that’s why their lives lead them to cosmetology school rather than a prestigious intellectual education such as our own.

Here’s what elitists like liberal arts students miss, and it’s taken me several years, as well as another salon I love equally to bring me to this conclusion. The services of hairdressers and cosmetologists changes as many lives and helps as many people during a time of need as any doctor or psychiatrist. My quality of life is literally improved by individuals who insist that I am taken care of and go out in public in my best possible style.

Many hairdressers and cosmetologists actually spend their weekends in funeral homes attempting to present the dead in a state of great beauty during funeral processions. It’s so that those in mourning can look at the faces of their loved ones now gone and have a permanent final memory of them looking peaceful, serene, and beautiful. Another hairdresser in London spends her Saturdays working with individuals going through chemotherapy; fitting wigs and trimming them into a style that suits each individual patient so that they will not be saddled with embarrassment regarding their hair loss. And as for me, the ability to have my hair out of my face whenever I want, is priceless, as I would otherwise be miserably fighting the constant battle of keeping hair out of my eyes. It also means with an up-do, people take me seriously as a professional, because with my hair up in a bun or braid, I no longer look like I am twelve years old or mentally incompetent. Therefore, strangers actually treat me with more respect, directness when I have my hair styled in a way that flatters me.

Its easy to dismiss the beauty industry and those in it as encouraging vanity. A kind of reverse arrogance sets in assuming that either those involved are also shallow and self serving. But beauty has its value and serves a purpose, that is: to teach us all we are to be valued, not only for how we look, be who we are and what we can do for others as well.

Growing up with a physical disability, I always found myself on the cusp of the cutting edge of technology. This meant that back in 1994, I was trying to master skills needed for a voice-activated computer and using Adobe Photoshop 3.0. Not only is buying such technology exorbitantly expensive, but more often than not it fails miserably. And so buying new technology was always a gamble for my family. Would it function the way it promised? Would it be worth the expense? Would the whole thing end up in the trash heap?

Technology works best when it allows the user to have the most basic item of daily living replaced. Moreover, technology works best when implemented seamlessly, replacing itself quietly and the function it was designed to improve. It feels like you have been using the item your entire life.

Before the advent of the iPod, there were CD’s; and the avenue of music was completely cut off for me. CD’s are impossible for me to handle. They scratch, they become dusty; they became unplayable. Then when the iPod came, requiring no extraneous movements to change songs or albums, it was as if a new art form had finally been seamlessly introduced into my life; opening up doors for not only albums to be played at will, but also songs to be skipped, rewound, and paused, with only the use of a few finger motions.

Considering the technology that is coming out this summer, we are reaching the point where technology can replace a pad of paper and a pen. Someone might argue that computers did this long ago, but it’s not exactly the same thing. A computer is by no means as portable (even the laptop) as a simple notepad. Because of my condition, I have never been able to annotate a book. If I get an idea for writing a poem or an essay while looking at a painting, I have to depend on someone else to take out my moleskin and write it down for me. Those days are quickly ending and oddly enough, at a time in my life when I need clear and functional independence. The only difference is that this time, everyone is starting to buy products such as the ipad thus guaranteeing to the market that it actually works.

For someone who enjoys thinking and reflecting as well as taking notes, this means that a new world of art and thought suddenly becomes open to me. I am able to journal efficiently and probably more importantly, privately. The freedom to record one’s own judgments as well as dreams at moment in which they occur is the most basic individualistic right which is afforded both little girls hoping to write in their diaries and older men recording the world as it passes by them. I have never had this freedom. When I was little, I used to dictate my journal to my father every night before bed. Needless to say, this severely limited the topics of discussion. So often I have walked into a museum to be inspired only to forget what it was I wanted to say hours later when I finally sat down with my laptop in the privacy of my flat.

We can stress that technological advancement means going forward but this is not always the case. Sometimes the best inventions make the simple products we take for granted simply better… so that those who never used them before now has access to them.

We call them Chuggers, which is a combination of “charity” and “muggers.” They are the people who stand on the street wearing matching t-shirts and holding clipboards in an effort to get you to give them money for whatever cause they are currently representing. These people actually are not volunteers; they are outsourced. Turns out some bureaucratic genius came up with the idea of having an agency that will be willing to stand on the street and solicit donations for any cause. One day they might be collecting for starving children in Africa; the next for the Humane Society, and the next day for child refugees in Pakistan, followed that weekend by underprivileged children in India. They are not passionate about any of the issues for which they are soliciting donations. Seeking out alms to protect those in need has now become a conveyor belt of individuals able to change their opening paragraph to suit any charity at will.

Due to my electric wheelchair, for the most part I can successfully avoid Chuggers. They are always on Tottenham Court Road and I am always able to weave in and out of them with great dexterity. Today however I was not so lucky. An overly cheery blonde Chugger got in my way and asked one of the most amusing questions I have heard in a while.

“What are you doing to help children with disabilities?”

She then proceeded to specifically name my disability as what her organization is raising money for. She isn’t seeing my disability and naming it, it truly is what this organization is devoted to. I look at her; the situation is absolutely comic. One would think that I out of all people would receive a get out of jail free card as to avoiding charity markets. After all, they are supposed to be giving money to people like me not demanding it. Today I can’t resist.

“So tell me more about what it’s like to have this disability?” I ask, just testing her knowledge a little more. She is good. She has definitely memorized the pamphlet. The problem is, she is preaching to the choir, considering the fact that I’m sitting right in front of her. I can’t help but press my luck even further.

“Wow that’s awful! How do those kids even begin to cope, what a terrible situation to grow up in.”

She thinks she has me now and offers me a pen and form to write down my bank details. “I’m sorry, I can’t write”.

“You can’t write at all?” She sounds the rare combination of disappointment and surprise. This was not in her training pamphlet when she signed on to be a Chugger. “Why not?” In the UK, Chuggers cannot write down your bank details, you have to do it for them as some sort of legal privacy act. Because I can’t write down mine, she knows she is not getting a donation.

“Because I have a disability”

This explanation has never occurred to her. I have no choice at this point but to shrug my shoulders and drive away.

For most people, disabilities don’t really have a place. They don’t recognize the problems caused by having a disability until they confront someone who is fully immersed in it. We shuffle our ill and dying into homes where experts can care for them so we don’t have to face the failures of the human body which will inevitably become our own. Worse, in Western culture we seem to like it that way.

But once we get to know someone with that condition, then all of a sudden the charity name disappears entirely. It turns into the condition that “Bob” has, but he’s able to live his life anyway and make us laugh at the local pub. We don’t see the weakness of people we know even when we are standing a few feet away from them. Rather, we see them as an entire being as opposed to fragmentary conditions. This is the difference between raising money for a cause and being passionate about one. This is why I call the people who stand on the corner of Tottenham Court Road Chuggers rather than charity collectors.

As I went down the street after my encounter, I couldn’t help but think of her original question which was actually quite poignant. What am I doing to help disabled children? The best thing for kids with disabilities is to have a society which sees them not as a cause or a victim but as unique individuals capable of racing towards their dreams and being exactly who they want to be. For disabled children, the greatest gift I can give them is not from my bank account but rather, be a successful adult and refuse the easy classification as a victim in need of a specified charity. Although, maybe that’s how the overly cheery Chugger saw me. She didn’t see the disability at all until it impeded her work. Maybe all she saw was the successful adult going down the street who wanted to help in any way they can.

Last night I watched on a whim a film titled, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Which recreates the tale of a modern man who was forced to play it safe in the name of family. But still, given his preternatural instincts, wishes to go out and continue to steal chickens from the coup.

I see the entire movie as a badly needed commentary on masculinity in our current society. I remember once my father saying: “women marry men thinking that they’ll change, men marry women hoping that they never will.” And in truth, both expectations are unrealistic. People do change but maybe not in the areas that we desire to see that change. I remember being woken up by a newly engaged friend of mine one morning in college. She came to my room later than usual and when I enquired about this she explained that she was up all night cleaning her fiancé’s dorm room. I was a bit shocked. She was the most independent young woman that I had met up to that point. Her dream was to go live in huts in Africa, and yet here she was confessing she had lost sleep by doing something her able bodied fiancé could have accomplished entirely by himself.

“Don’t worry, when we get married things will change.” Why would she say that? Why would she insist this when there is evidence to the contrary, that all of a sudden with a wedding band on his finger and a double income in the bank account he would ever change? Right there, still lying in bed in my dorm at the age of twenty, I could see that my father was absolutely right. People will often marry others absolutely convinced that after the wedding, everything will change.

Mr. Fox was by nature a chicken hunter. Simple. People often have in their very nature habits that aren’t particularly pleasant. My friend’s fiancé was not particularly neat. That was a characteristic about him that as far as I see evidence right now, has yet to change. By saying “Oh, he’ll change”, wasn’t my friend ultimately saying, “I would like to change him”? And if you love someone, do you want to change them? Can those two philosophies ever come together? Can you love someone while still wanting to alter any aspect of their character?

Mrs. Fox said it best when later in the movie she admits: “I love you, but I never should have married you.” It is a plague on modern masculinity that we seek to change it in the name of safety and security. Taming the modern man to live under a mortgage and go to the same place of work day after day after day is ultimately conditioning men everywhere to be afraid of freedom. I look at the male friends I have in my area of London. A large percentage of them are single, substantially older, and of course they live on boats or carry out some other form of adventurous life.

I love my friends dearly, even though I have my scuffles with them. The point is I can’t imagine altering any of them a fraction. They are warm and friendly and they carry out there lives for the most part exactly as they intend to. That doesn’t mean not living in safety simply because that isn’t what they want. It means weeks on boats waking up in the wee morning hours because the boat next door is on fire. It means not having a plan and living comfortably with the idea that at any moment life can change. I think about them and all I wish is if their lives unexpectedly change, tragedy or great joy, they aren’t forced to change who they are for any reason. Unless of course, they become more like themselves.