We picked Antonia up from the friends where she spent the night and zoomed over by some beautiful backroads to the friends where we were supposed to be having dinner.  We knew she was tired, but we figured in the worst case, she would be grumpy, or fall asleep on their sofa.  We did not count on her being so tired she would be physically sick.  We drove home very slowly after that, earlier than expected, and this morning we cancelled today’s social plans so that she could recover.  She has certainly been in one of those zombie-states all day.  I sometimes worry a bit that it really does show a less than normal stamina when a child needs 24 hours to recover for every day spent playing with friends – but that is how it is with her.

Since she was a mess, I let her watch a thing called Bee Movie that she brought back from her last trip to the US.  That was a bad move.  I keep thinking I have seen the dumbest movie imaginable, and I keep being wrong.  Now, I know this is not supposed to be a nature documentary but … male worker bees!?  Big butch ‘pollen jocks’!??  Yeah, those jocks are so smart, they do pollination by taking the pollen out of daisies and putting it on roses!!!  I couldn’t believe it.  (A real pollen jock is mostly interested in taking the pollen home to HER hive, anyway). And it’s a shame that one of the major premises of the movie is that our (male) hero has to choose one job for his whole life.  Because a grade school book on bees would no doubt explain that the jobs bees do are dependent on their age, and every bee eventually does every job, except the queen.  Female bees that is.  Male bees really do have only one job, and it is, as Mike so poetically put it “pollinating the eggs”.  Actually, dearest husband, they “pollinate” the queen, once in her life.  The rest of the time, they just hang out, till winter.  I guess he doesn’t know so much about ‘the birds and the bees’, after all!

So does it really matter?  Does the ever popular “bull” with a bass voice, macho habits and udders matter?  Well, this particular movie was high on a vision of patriarchal society that would make the Flintstones look progressive.  And that vision was based on a lie about nature.  I think it matters.  When you consider that if they had made a bee movie with just the same plot, but adhering to some level of truth about bees, it would have been a pick-up for little girls, instead of a put-down.  And if they just want to make up whatever they want, why use a real species at all?  What’s wrong with stripey pixies or something?

Do I think these people are maliciously promoting a questionable cultural vision at the expense of reality or do I think they’re very, very ignorant and stupid?  Either way it doesn’t look good for them.  Rant over!

Apart from that, I started teaching Antonia to knit, which went nicely.  She spent some time playing with the synth software.  It allowed her to record her voice on multiple tracks, modify it, and construct a nicely post-modernist soundtrack of herself arguing with herself, herself and herself.  It is maybe a little bit amusing the first time you hear it.  ‘Nuff said! She also made a few other little crafty things.