Ma Ingalls Would Have Whupped My Ass…

“Old Yeller” was on TCM and I watched it. Why? Because I am very stupid and because I apparently enjoy crying like a little bitch. WTF is wrong with me? I can’t watch “Meerkat Manor” because too many of those little creatures die – offscreen! I can’t watch the commercials for the ASPCA with the Sarah McLachlan song, because I will be upset for hours. So, what do I do? Yeah, I watch the King of Animal-Pull-Your-Heart-Out-Through-Your-Tear Ducts movies. I am the dumb.

I became aware, while watching, that I never would have made it had I been unlucky enough to be born on the Frontier in the mid-1800’s. I mean really, I moan around the office if I have a hangnail. I stay in bed all day if I have a headache. Good Lord, I eat Vicodin like they’re M&M’s if I have cramps. There’s no freakin’ way I could survive as one of those prairie wives. They farmed and cooked and cleaned and milked cows and raised annoying children and slaughtered their own meat. I have a cleaning lady for my one-bedroom apartment and I can’t even touch raw poultry without gagging. They stitched wounds with horsetail hairs and no anesthesia, people! I get dizzy and weak if I look at a bleeding papercut. It seems like they birthed a baby and then got up an hour later and made supper for their husbands. Crimeny! Sometimes I come home from my temperature-controlled, desk job and I’m too tired to cook anything other than microwave popcorn.

I’ll admit it, I’m a wuss. I’m a huge, giant, wussy baby. However, I don’t know too many women in my circle of acquaintances, co-workers or friends who would be able to survive in that kind of environment. I realize that we’ve grown up with modern amenities and we would have adapted (some of us better than others) had we been born and raised during that time-period. I understand that it’s all relative and that 150 years from now, people will look back at our generation and think, “Thank Godopus that I didn’t grow up then! I read on the Googlenets that they had to prepare food instead of just swallowing a pill and they had to WALK to get around rather than just tell their hovercraft to move to the left.” I’m sure our ways will seem rough to them. Although honestly, I can’t imagine how lazy future generations would have to be to think loading a dishwasher is taxing or that pressing “start” (*ahem*) on a crockpot is a lot of work. So, yeah, as much as I sometimes whine that life is tough, it’s good to be able to look at things in perspective and realize just how good I have it.

So, to sum up –

1) Prairie life was hard, ya’ll.
2)“Old Yeller” is an emotional nightmare for me.
3) I TOTALLY wished that Arliss (the maddening 6 year old in the movie) had been bitten by Old Yeller and then Travis would have had to shoot his irritating ass.

Admit it, you would have traded Arliss’ life for Yeller’s, too…