Sendhil Ramamurthy plays Dr. Mohinder Suresh on Heroes. I have a big squishy weak spot for hot indian boys and he hits that spot, hard. Whenever the kid and I watch the TV show together, the kid spends the commercial breaks teasing me about my love of the hot doctor and how I want to have a hundred of his babies and I spend the rest of the show making heavy sighs like a 15 year old in lust.

This is Mercedes, the rebel maid, from Pan’s Labyrinth. She makes me happy that same sex marriage is now legal in Spain. At first I thought her brother was awesome (being a hot guy fighting the good fight against the fascists) but Mercedes is the real hero of the story.

This is Clive Owen playing Max in the movie Bent. For a movie about the treatment of gays by the Nazis, it is a hard movie to watch, but it does have the best no sex sex scene in the history of movies (that is if watching two guys makes you happy and I am lecherous enough that it does, thank you very much).

Rachel Weiss as Tessa Quayle in the Constant Gardner. I love her fearlessness and generosity.

I am, as most of you know, not the kind of girl generally struck mute the stupid actions of misogynist boys. There’s enough pissed off righteousness in me to call out egregious actions for the benefit of any other girl in a 1000 yard radius, But lately I have found myself unable to call out a certain behavior that pisses me off to no end- the Look Up.

The Look Up is when a boy takes that 30 second long look at you starting with your legs and ending at your tits. They never, ever look you in the eyes until they’ve finished their examination and decided that you are a fuckable object. Maybe you guys think this is flattering, but it’s creepy.

This always happens when I am minding my own business, like standing in line at the grocery store. It happened the other day when I was walking to the end of my driveway (shared with all the other apartments) to meet a friend who was having a hard time finding my building. The guy literally blocked my path so he could get his full mental porn image before I could go on with my business.

You boys may think that this is basically harmless, I should feel flattered to get the attention, maybe just write it off as a socially awkward moment with a guy who has no idea how to get a girl. But that is not how it feels on the receiving end.

The Look Up makes me (me of all fucking people) feel like a powerless hunk of meat. Calling out a boy who is yelling stupid things on the side of the street is easy, but telling someone to stop looking at you is different. Without saying a single word these boys put you in your place and keep you there until they are finished. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t looking for attention, or that you are trying to do other things, or that never in a million years would the boy who is doing the looking get to see you naked. It doesn’t matter that you are just trying to buy groceries for dinner with your kid standing right next to you. You have no choice but to let the guy take a full mental image of you. It feels like you’ve been turned into wank-fodder against your choice.

And what the hell can you do against someone who is “just” looking at you. Someone who is willing to block your path or corner you in a spot that you can’t leave while they take their visual fill has already demonstrated that you don’t matter and calling them on their behavior feels more dangerous than telling the stupid cat caller that he’s an ass.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t notice attractive people. I do that all the time. But I have never interrupted someone else’s day so that I could get my visual kicks. I have never impeded someone’s movement. A Look Up involves making sure the person you are looking at knows that they are being looked at and can’t escape it. That is not flattering, it’s just one of the thousand ways woman are treated as objects instead of people.

First- I know I have become a ghost of a writer, but people keep dying and life has been so hard this past year that I feel like a walking bruise. Imagine if you used a peach for batting practice, that’s me. Putting words down in this state can be dangerous, I loose the snark and let out a little bit of stuff that is more personal than I should.

But like I said, people keep dying. In the last few days it’s been both my grandmother and Jerry Falwell. The first left me sobbing like a baby at my work for an entire afternoon on Monday. The second, I am almost ashamed to say, made me smile. For anyone keeping track, that means 5 people in my life have died in the last year- not including Falwell of course. While that is not on the scale of the Virginia Tech shootings or the Iraq War, it’s a bit much for a girl to deal with. And since it has always been the rule of threes when it comes to deaths in my life, I am wondering who not so lucky number six is going to be and how the hell I am going to deal with it.

I don’t believe in idealizing the dead. I hope that when I die my friends and family will say that I could be a serious bitch sometimes who had no tolerance for those who choose ignorance as a lifestyle, that sometimes I was flaky and that I never seem to finish projects, that I was horrible at making money and fabulous at throwing tantrums. Hopefully they will also say that I was always more loyal to people I love than to cute shoes or vodka and that no one else can drown a turkey in a bottle of wine like I could.

So when it comes to Grandma, I will say she was an angry woman. She was a poor single mom from the South raising 3 kids in Detroit by herself in the 1950s. She did a number on her kids, including my mom. I have limited first hand knowledge of that, having seen my Grandma only a few times as an adult. But I know the stories, and I have seen myself what she created. My mother is her bitter, angry, emotional doppelganger and her parenting style is a carbon copy- viscous manipulation might be the phrase one would use. Without having to get too detailed but to give you an example, I once was in a session with my therapist and I was just explaining the what I thought were innocuous details of a childhood event. The therapist made an audible gasp and started stuttering and apologizing to me for what I had been through. She was almost teary eyed and she said that she had never heard anything so awful, and she did child protective services work for years before being in private practice.

While I have all sorts of damage from my mother, I can see my Grandma’s life from a farther distance and I have no direct pain from her. I know it’s all a horrible spiral, but each parent is responsible for how they raise their child and I am working damn hard to break the pattern. Mom could recognize the hurt the Grandma caused her, but not the hurt she caused her own kids. I don’t pretend to be a perfect mom, far from it. I only hope that my greatest skill is in the ability to recognize screw ups and admit them.

I do have some fond memories though from when I was little. My mother, who was an odd, flannel wearing, no make-up, sexist in 70’s braless feminist clothing, couldn’t understand me. I was a frilly pink girl who wanted to wear dresses and patent leather shoes in four foot snow drifts. But Grandma got it. She was the one who introduced me to Sunday afternoons of girly lunches and shopping for pretty shoes, even if it was a trade off for going to church with her in the morning. I also have my genetic ability to fry chicken (or fish for that matter) from Grandma. There may be some dispute as to which Grandma gets to claim my cooking skills. I have been told my cooking skills are Hungarian, which would come from my other Grandma, but neither of them taught me how to cook and my mother thinks all food is made with some form of canned soup, so she didn’t teach me either. I learned to cook early as a form of self-defense. There are only so many nights a week you can eat something made with Lipton golden mushroom soup. Maybe both grandmas can share the genetic claim to cooking skills.

So what the hell does this have to do with Jerry Falwell anyways?

Jerry Falwell was the product of the same kind southern, bootlegging, violent sort of upbringing that my Grandmother was. For those of you who haven’t read it- I would suggest Fox Butterfield’s All God’s Children as a fantastic book on understanding the southern states’ relationship to violence and honor and booze. I think it nails down a lot of the psychology pretty well. My Grandmother didn’t break those patterns, but she didn’t glorify or intensify them either. Jerry Falwell took brutality and wrapped in the book jacket of a bible that I am not sure he read or understood.

Falwell and my Grandmother were both angry people who were sure that someday all their paranoid fantasies would be proven true, but my Grandmother never wished entire populations to suffer horrible deaths. Grandma never inspired people like Eric Rudolf to go out and kill people, but Jerry Falwell did. Grandma never bilked millions of poor people out of money better spent on medicines or mortgages, but Falwell did. Grandma never blamed me, or people like me for the worst act of terrorism to hit American soil or inspire the kind of terrorism we don’t talk about, the home grown Oklahoma City Angry White Guy kind, but Falwell did. My Grandmother may have inspired anger and caused hurt to her family, but she never intentionally set out to be a hatemonger. Grandma may have been an angry woman who could have done much better by her children, but Falwell was an angry man who left this world worse for his being in it. The kindest thing that can be said of his demise is that I hope he receives as much compassion in his death as he has dished out in his life.