I’m super exhausted right now, and the coming week is going to be nasty, so I don’t know if I’ll get to blog much (or, at least, deeply) over the next several days.

For now, I’ll note that there’s a post by Cherie Priest about panties, and there are plenty of comments there. The post is about Victoria’s Secret going… off in recent years, basically writing off anybody over a size 10 and looking over 25, and generating uncomfortable underwear now to boot. Apparently it wasn’t always that way.

I’m oldish, but I’ve never known this Victoria’s Secret of yore; I only started shopping at malls a few years ago, I realize. There’s so much I don’t know about Western culture, because even though I grew up here, my parents did a damn good job of keeping me isolated from the world—and not in a “keep the girl pure in Vietnamese culture” effort, it was more of a “keep her from knowing an outside world exists so that she always stays with us, no matter how much we abuse her” thing.

Thus it’s all the more amusing that the last movie my parents allowed me to rent under their intense supervision was The Matrix. For reals. To this day I have no idea why they let me do that—although it probably helped that even I didn’t understand what it was about until I saw it.

(Of course, my father beat me afterwards. But only after the movie ended. It is indeed that compelling.)

It makes even less sense considering that up until then, they usually only let me watch the more “family friendly” animated Disney movies with powerful, centralized father figures. To give you some reference, Beauty and the Beast was considered risque, and The Little Mermaid was considered ideal. That scene where Ariel’s father goes into a rage and destroys her carefully collected items was… a bit too much like real life for me. And if you consider the plot of The Little Mermaid, it’s basically that seeking independence is a failed venture without your father’s permission—indeed, Ariel is only able to have a life with her beloved prince because he gave her the permanent legs. If he had chosen not to, she would have been screwed.

He took me to that movie personally and pointed out all these parts.

Whereas Belle in Beauty and the Beast completely controlling her future in the end and actually rescuing a bumbling, somewhat naive father? Yeah, I can see why my parents actually didn’t “let” me know about this movie while I was growing up. I only ever got to see it in college, some years after it was released.

My life: it’s been an adventure, but only the kind of adventure other people enjoy reading about in novels. It’s not something one enjoys when it personally happens.