Robyn’s Blog

Vernon, Florida.  I thought I’d seen the best movie ever after witnessing the genius of Gates of Heaven, but no.  Vernon, Florida managed to do so.   There’s a lot I want to talk about, but I’m going to start with the guy who was holding the turtle, but called it a gopher.  The animal was harmless, he liked sandy ground, and various other characteristics of a gopher.  It was a gopher, not a turtle.  Obviously.

This man unknowingly brought up the question of what constitutes what something is?  If the animal is acting like a gopher, isn’t it a gopher?  How do we define something, or someone for that matter?  If we have all the characteristics of one thing, it seems to me that we are that thing.  If one was raised by a wolf, they would be a wolf.  Not a human.

This brings me to an involved discussion that I was having with someone this weekend on this weird condition where a baby is born with really, really small male anatomy, and they are missing some of the genes of a male, so they just cut off the male parts and raise the baby as a girl. 

This blew my mind.

So this baby, who is really a guy missing some chromosomes, is raised to think that they are a girl, and they think they are a girl, and they look like a girl, but they are not.  Or are they, because they think they are?  I don’t understand how this works.  This old guy, who is just innocently talking about a turtle/gopher, is really bringing up the question of what it is that constitutes someone’s identity.

I think the question of identity was also brought up later in the film where a man was talking about diamonds and rain.  He wad that “after a rain, you see those drops in the woods and it’s almost more beautiful than the diamond.”  We like diamonds, because they are diamonds (well actually, I don’t like diamonds, but whatever most people do).  But what about the fact that a lot of times other things that cost nothing at all, like raindrops, are more beautiful, and more special.  But because they aren’t diamonds, most people wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars to see rain drops.  And it’s for no more of a reason than the fact that it’s a raindrop, and not a diamond.  This man (I think it’s the turkey man, who I could also talk about for ages) recognizes the fact that it’s not what something is, it’s not what it’s called…a rain drop might as well be a diamond if it is as beautiful as one.  A turtle might as well be a gopher if it is acting like one.

This is totally irrelevant but I have to throw in this quote from the movie, just because it’s awesome.

“He said, ‘that’ll be the last thing I ever do, is shoot myself.’ Which it was.”