Loving Women

I came across this photo of a painting on my Fb feed.   I don't know what makes them send these my way, but—it just stopped me in my tracks.  There's nothing prurient in it; it is so very loving, I have no words. 

Damn!

This morning, a strange song unexpectedly popped into my memory.  I had seen it being performed live, but then forgotten it for ages.  It is Sophie B. Hawkins, singing 'Damn!  I wish I was your lover'.

The meaning of the lyrics is somewhat disguised, but I expect that Hawkins explained the meaning of the lyrics to someone, perhaps while on a talk show somewhere. 

Someone, on Reddit—take it for what it's worth; being on Reddit is no guarantee of reliability—explains that the song is about a woman friend whom the singer is wanting to remove from an abusive relationship.  I'll look after you so sweetly, the song says, you'll feel good and whole again. 

How often I've watched someone from a distance, and felt that strong protective instinct, to take her away from someone who hurts her.  But you cannot say the words of the song, however much you may want to, unless you're in love with the victim.  A lot of women could convince themselves that they are in love with the victim, and that could lead to even more pain. 

The girl I used to observe, who regularly wore bruises—quite openly, something I couldn't figure out; perhaps a cry for help?—let's call her Kelly, was quite pretty.  But I didn't want to approach her.  I wasn't seeing anyone, but something prevented me from talking to her.  Looking back, I think I wasn't confident that I could keep her safe, and happy.  I think I was a little too old to assume I could pull it off.

I guess I could have made myself fall in love with her.  That's an interesting possibility.  But I guess I was a bit more cynical back then; you got to see all sorts of unhappy things while you attended graduate school. 

Another thing you pick up very soon in grad school is that nothing is as easy as it looks.  After a while, you look at everything as if it were an impenetrable maze in which someone is trying to get you lost.  Suspicious.  These days, I could walk into some disaster with my eyes wide open, but not back then. 

But I still think, I wonder whether Kelly is safe and happy.  She won't be with the same guy, or perhaps she is, and has a prosthetic arm.  She was so pretty, and when she smiled, which was rarely, she totally glowed!

Damn.

Kay

Voyager

I just re-read a portion of Voyager.  Guys, I felt like crying; it was so sad.  Not the whole thing; there were emotional parts, which were very emotional, and in between them, I guess I was typing fast to hurry the story along.  If I could have kept up that level of emotional intensity (of the emotional parts) throughout, that would have been a completely different piece of writing. 

There are several people that Helen loves in this story:

Cass Hutchinson, the chief administrator of the ship, whose idea it was to resuscitate Helen from the hibernation array.  She was more a great admirer of Helen than the other way round, but Helen did love Cass.  Cass was the grandmother of Summer Levi.

Melanie Arnaud, who becomes Helen's partner, the Captain of Cutter Alpha.

Lena and Summer, two teenagers whom Helen loves, and who adore Helen.

Daisy Warren, Alison's daughter-in-law, and Lena's mother. 

Sheila Connors, and Yvonne, Jennifer and Madeline Connors.  Yvonne (Vonnie), Jennifer and Maddie Connors, are clones of Sheila.  All of them have very strong feelings for Helen, and Helen, in turn, loves these women. 

Lucy, a dropout woman, who befriends and supports Helen while she was living with the Dropouts in their camp. 

Megan Barrows, the child of Lieutenant Peter Barrows, the original EVA specialist.  Helen loves Megan like crazy, and so do Lena, Marissa, Maya, Diane, and Athene.

When I'm describing the interaction between Helen and these women, the narrative naturally becomes intimate, and emotional.  All the characters are generally innocent to the point of being naïve, reflecting the naivete of the author (me) at the time I wrote the story. 

Kay

Helen is Depicted as an All-Rounder

Something I'm proud of is that I was into numerous things growing up—but I was never a violinist!—and when I invented Helen Nordstrom, I wanted her to have just as diverse talents and interests as I did, and a few more.  I had three years of Calculus, so Helen had the same, in college.  She also had physics and computer science and art.  (But I had chemistry!)

There is a story I wrote, in which there is a murder, and Helen is asked, by her Dean, to take over the Calculus class of the dead teacher.  I have no memory of what drove me to write this story, none whatever; but I read it over the weekend, and again I'm stunned at how well I had written it.  This is frustrating; I'm in the process of unpublishing all my stories from D2D (the successor to Smashwords), so when I wax poetic about any of my stories, there will be nowhere you can get them from!  Well, I'm working on the problem. 

To continue: Helen does take over the calculus 2 class.  Unlike in many schools, in Helen's school (Westfield College, an entirely fictitious institution), the curriculum of calculus 2 includes a variety of topics, including convergence of series.  (Wait; you know, those topics are never mentioned in the story.)

In the story, three of the students are caught, trying to burn the wallet of the dead teacher, but there is no evidence that those kids are responsible for the actual murder.  (Robbing  a corpse is still a crime.)

The other students turn on the three who were caught (who are allowed to finish out the semester), except for one girl student, Angie, from New Jersey, who helps Helen deal with the class.

Kay

Violin Pieces

This is a fragment of a blogpost I put in the sister blog (Don't Wait For the Movie) recently. 

When I wrote the Helen stories, I had her playing my favorite pieces, naturally.  I had listened to recordings of these pieces for years and years, but I hadn't seen them being played!  I recently watched a famous violinist play one of these pieces, and I was startled at how different her playing style actuall was, from how I had imagined it.  And now that I think of it, many of the violinists play that way; that is, they sway to the music, as though they were dancing.

I'm not sure whether this is a modern thing; pop singers, of course, use their entire bodies to make their performance more exciting, so it could be that classical musicians follow suit.  Come to think of it, the musicians I used to watch on YouTube were usually foreign: German, or Japanese, and they kept their bodies relatively still. 

When I described Helen playing, I described her as being relatively still.  I don't think I really like this dancing about, though it is the expected thing these days. 

Well, I'm no violinist, I want to make that perfectly clear, so my descriptions of musical performances are from the point of view of an outsider!

I wish you all a wonderful new year!

Kay Hemlock Brown