Implausibly long hair, plausibly don't care

Upon re-reading yesterday’s post, I realized that it may be considered embarrassing for a grown-up lady professional to be measuring her achievements relative to Disney princesses. I don’t seem like the type of 28-year-old who you would expect to have a closet Disney princess attachment. I didn’t have the early signs: never really liked Lisa Frank, wasn’t a fourteen-year-old who insisted on having glitter pens and replacing standard tittles with hearts, etc.  Even now, my interests include sarcasm, college football, and manliness contests.

But I am not going to apologize for liking Disney princesses. And I do NOT want to hear how they are anti-feminist.  I do not want to hear it because in a world where women’s stories are marginalized and treated as less important, the Disney princess is in fact prioritized as the central character whose existence and actions motivate the whole of the narrative and who play an extremely positive role of simultaneous dynamic change and stabilization/civilization within the context of the film.  In other words, even when a different character is in charge of decapitating the villain, it's the princess who is making the good things happen.

Look, folks, I have an English degree and a fondness for pop culture. I once wrote a 30-page paper on feminine agency and power in Clueless. You don’t want to tangle.  Leave me my princesses.

The Princess in Her Tower

Often when I’m at work, I’m just dying to get home. I’ll think about all of the things I need and want to get done at home and just know that if I didn’t have to be at work today, I could be so productive and pleasant, like Rapunzel in Tangled : cook, clean the whole house, paint some oil paintings, exercise, run a bunch of errands, and accomplish ten million useful and enlightening things.* Notably, I don’t dream all that big: I just want to be not in the office. I am actually daydreaming about doing the housework that Rapunzel is daydreaming about NOT doing.

But of course, the truth is that as soon as I get home at the end of the day, I have a lot more in common with Sleeping Beauty when it comes to personal productivity around the house. I share both her need to a ton of sleep (hey, sleep is good for you!) and also her sort of dumb tendency to just wander around and touch objects in the house for no apparent reason. She had the excuse of being enchanted (I think? someone back me up here) but I have the excuse of being tired after work and forgetting why . Of course, Husband and I have cleverly proofed our house to not have any fatal spinning wheels around the house, or spinning wheels of any kind. It’s best to be cautious.

And I also share some unfortunate tendencies with one Petite Sirene: instead of getting anything done, or learning an instrument such that I could jam with the band, I often find myself endlessly online shopping or browsing Pinterest. Which is obviously the equivalent of what Ariel was doing in her room full of random stuff she had collected: if that’s not a low-tech, undersea Pinboard, then I’m the Queen of the Atlantic. But of course, I’ve never made the same mistake Ariel did: I always read the fine print, always assume provisions in a contract will come back to bite me, and I never sign deals with sea witches. (You learn that day one of Contracts class.) Plus, I have to think she made a bad decision on giving up the ability to breathe both above-water and underwater: anyone with gills AND lungs would make an amazing Navy SEAL.

The truth is that if I can’t even muster the energy to clean the house, I really wouldn’t be up for, I don’t know, undergoing rigorous military training from Donny Osmond in order to defeat a large-scale invasion by one of the greatest military commanders in history. So I suppose it’s good my tower is just an office, that I can leave WHENEVER I WANT SERIOUSLY UM I JUST NEED TO SEND A FEW MORE E-MAILS, ahem, and that I’m not actually a fictional princess. Not least because if I had the power to iceify things and some expletive deleted had tried to kill Sassy and take our throne, I would put that expletive deleted’s whole kingdom (including his jerkwad, sociopathic-tendency-creating brothers) into a state of permanent popsicle. If someone tried to kill my only family, I don’t think I’d just let it go.

But just in case I am ever called to be such a princess, I took a highly scientific quiz to see which Disney princess I’m most like, because that’s a productive thing for a licensed attorney to do. And I got…. BELLE!  Who is my favorite anyway!  So I guess I’m downright regal after all - I forgot that constantly reading stuff to the detriment of real life counts as princessy if you throw some musical numbers in around it. Which, of course, I always do.



*I have never even aspired to be like Snow White. Think about it: her job was to keep house for SEVEN DUDES. I remember what Husband’s college apartment looked like, and he only shared it with two other dudes, and he and one of the other dudes were fairly clean. Snow White was living with SEVEN guys, all of whom had extremely dirty jobs, and bizarrely fixed emotional states which were extremely disparate (which could lead to fighting in the house) and do I also recall atrocious table manners?  I seem to.  #nothankyou