Movie: One for the Money

I should admit first off that I came to this movie prejudiced. In the first place, I love the book series this is based on. It's one of the few series that I read faithfully that doesn't involved vampires, werewolves or magic. Secondly, I love Katherine Heigl. Love. And I wouldn't kick Jason O'Mara out of bed for eating crackers either, so really I went in expecting to experience the movie equivalent of a love-fest. All love, all the time.

So you've been warned. This movie would have had to *try* deliberately to piss me off. It didn't. Take all the gushing with a grain of salt.

Okay.

The movie revolves around Stephanie Plum, a Jersey girl from the Burg. Stephanie lost her job as a lingerie buyer six months ago and has managed to just not mention that fact to her family until she can't hide it any longer. Mostly because her car is repossessed in front of their house while she's there for dinner. Her mothers solution to the problem is to get Stephanie married, again. Stephanie, having tried marriage once and not liked it, mostly because her husband was a cheating dick, is looking for a job.

Her grandmother suggests asking her cousin Vinnie, saying that he has a filing job available at his bail bonds business. Stephanie, desperate, shows up to find out that the filing job is non-existent. The only job available is that of bounty hunter. Connie, Vinnie's office manager, offers Stephanie a high-value skip: Joe Morelli.

Vinnie doesn't want to give Stephanie the job, seeing as how she is completely unqualified for it, but she blackmails him into it. In the movie it's bout a chatty manicurist she knows who moonlights as a dominatrix. I think it's funnier in the book because the details are left mostly to the imagination. In the book all that's mentioned is that it was something about Vinnie and a duck. Whichever way you slice it, Vinnie gives Stephanie the job rather than have his mob-boss father in law find out about his sexual indiscretions.

Aside from the $50,000 bounty (significantly raised for the movie from the 1994 book price bounty of a percentage of the $10,000 bond), Stephanie has a more personally satisfying reason for wanting to catch Morelli. Morelli is the boy that Stephanie lost her virginity to, behind the counter of the Tasty Pastry she worked at in high school. He then failed to call and wrote dirty, though flattering, things about her on bathroom walls. In what Stephanie and her entire family insist was an 'accident', she ran him over with her father's Buick, breaking his leg in three places.

Morelli survived to become a vice cop, now accused of murder.

In the course of trying to track Morelli down, Stephanie becomes aware of a series of murders that remove any witnesses to his supposed crime. She also proceeds to get herself way in over her head, attract the attention of a murderous rapist and get shot at and nearly killed multiple times. There's violence in the books and the movie (more on that in a bit), but that's not the point of them. You don't come away from them remembering the bloodshed. At heart they are comedies with some romance and some mystery/drama. You come away remembering how hard you laughed.

Here's the thing. Stephanie is awesome. She does some incredibly stupid things; see, getting into a MMA style boxing ring with above mentioned rapist, after she's been warned that he has some 'anger issues' towards women, as an example. And she doesn't have the first clue about being a recovery agent in the beginning, but she's willing to learn. She takes up with Ranger, a truly bad-ass recovery agent, in order to learn how to do her new job to the best of her abilities.

In a world where it would be easier, more accepted and even expected for her to get remarried and start popping out kids, Stephanie is determined to stay self-sufficient. Just her and Rex, her pet hamster. With maybe some Ranger (more on Ranger in a bit) and Morelli thrown in on the sides. Stephanie is determined to live her life the way she sees fit and not fall into the, as she sees it, trap that has claimed her mother and her sister.

Now then. Quibbles.

The violence: I'm not really sure why, maybe because they wanted it to be more heavily a comedy than anything else, but the movie downplayed the violence from the book. Not so much the out and out violence, since there's not a whole lot of that on the pages, but more the implications of it. Lula (a hooker who helps Stephanie by speaking when no one else will tell her the truth), gets beat up in the movie and dumped in front of Stephanie's apartment. In the book, Lula is beaten, raped in an incredibly violent manner, and tied to the fire escape outside of Stephanie's window. None of that happens on the page. You get the aftermath, with Stephanie horrified and rushing to help this woman who has become her friend. The details of the attack are never given, nothing is ever done to glorify or linger over it. Everything is skillfully implied enough that you understand just how bad the attack was without having an exact picture painted for you.

Ramirez (the rapist, murderous, thug), calls Stephanie once in the movie, threatening her. In the book, he stalks her. There's a great deal of difference between the feeling of relief you get at the end of the movie with regards to Benicio being taken out and at the end of the book because the book makes him so much more threatening.

So I think they could have done more with those aspects, done them well and not lost the comedic flavor of the movie. But that's just me.

And then there's Ranger. Oh, Ranger. Ranger, in the books, is a recovery agent/bounty hunter who is ex-if I told you what I did I'd have to kill you, and is starting up his own security firm. The man has lived. He's been around and seen a lot of stuff. Done a lot too. The actor that they chose for him is handsome enough, though I admit to having pictured Ranger as darker in skin tone than Daniel Sunjata, but I accept him as a 'Ranger' in the looks department. My issue is that he just looks too young! Did Ranger join the military when he was ten? That's the only way he could have done all the things he's possibly done, since he can't talk about them, and be as young as he looks in the movie.

And there wasn't enough of him. Ranger is the other love interest in the books. Stephanie is torn between Ranger and Morelli, it's part of where the romantic tension comes from, though why none of them have realized that many of their problems could be solved with a threesome, I don't know.. There was plenty of Morelli, and I do love the character, but there was not enough Ranger.

Morelli...let's face it, O'Mara doesn't really scream 'Italian' in the looks department. But I'm willing to ignore that in favor of it being O'Mara. Like I said, I'm totally biased on this movie.

Ranger! *waves her Ranger flag* Morelli! *waves Morelli flag in her other hand*

Picture randomly found on the internet. I didn't make it and I can't find who made it to give them credit.

I couldn't choose between them either. But I'm smart enough to suggest the threesome. :D

I'm giving it a 4 out of 5, for lack of Ranger and not managing to walk the line with the violence that Evanovich does in the books. I know it's been getting bad reviews in the press, but whatever. The rating system is based on *my* enjoyment of the movie. And I enjoyed it.

There's no way they're not doing it on purpose

Peter: I felt the same way about Mrs. Fitzgerald, my Algebra teacher.

Neal: Thus your life long fascination with numbers.

Peter: And smart, leggy brunettes.

Me: *blinks rapidly**chorfles**nearly spits out milk*

Oh, White Collar. You're in a gay off with Suits, aren't you?

For those who don't know, both Peter's wife El and Neal are smart, leggy brunettes. *waggles eyebrows suggestively*

Seemingly Random Question

Let's play a little game. There's a point to this, really, but before I talk about the point I want to run this little test.

It's really simple. All you have to do is describe Jesus to me. The first things that come to your mind. Not just physically, but personality traits, anything.

Go.

Dear self:

Stop reading BNF's tweets and thinking that they're talking about you in a bad way. And even if they are, who gives a shit?

If you annoy them or they don't like what you write, then they can fuck off and just not read your stuff.

Other people like it. Just because they're them doesn't mean shit. And they're probably not talking about you in the first place.

Also, you're going through caffeine withdrawals which are making you cranky and depressive. So, you know, huge grain of salt to your responses to things.

Faith Pt 1

Lewis does two chapters on faith so we're just going to follow his example.

"Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief—accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people—at least it used to puzzle me—is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue."

So why would faith be considered a virtue?

Lewis goes on to ask the question in this way: "what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."

I disagree with Lewis' word choice here, inability to believe something does not make one 'not very clever', especially if the evidence is not at all as clear cut as some would like us to believe. But he does hit on why you can consider faith a virtue in my opinion.

Here's the bottom line, as far as I am concerned with regard to the 'evidence' of any religious group: you choose to believe it or not. There are *always* arguments against and different explanations for *anything* that has been recorded as a religious event or miracle. We may not fully understand these reasons yet but they are always there. So an inability to believe that an account written down 6,000, 4,000 or 2,000 years ago is utterly factually correct given the authors limited knowledge does not make a person dull or stupid. I take 'scientific' proof of any religion to be ridiculous. You will never prove anything that way. Not ever.

People of faith *choose* to have faith. Yes, there's something about the human mind that wants to believe in things. I think it's tied into our imagination and sense of curiosity and wonder. We need there to be meaning to our existence. We need there to be something after death which is a place that we cannot explore or understand with just our minds as we are now.

So you choose to have faith and then you choose what to have faith in. And then you choose to continue to have faith. Faith is a stance that you take. And this is true whether we're talking about having faith in a god or faith in the laws of nature.

You can *know* that something is true, but believing in it takes a little more effort. For example, floating on water. As a child, you know that you can float on water if you lay out on your back because you have been told this and you have seen other people doing it. But there is always that point when it's you being leaned back (learning to swim) where panic wants to set in because part of you is not entirely convinced that the water is going to hold you up.

That's where you make the choice. You can either believe that the water will hold you up if you are still, or you can not believe it and panic. Your panic makes the water fail to hold you up, reinforcing your reason for panicking. :) Conversely, if you choose to believe and be calm, the water will hold you up and reinforce your choice to believe.


That's how faith works and that's why it can be counted as a virtue. Faith is not simply something that one has any more than patience or charity. You train yourself and are trained by the people around you to have those things. But in all of that you are making the choice. Virtues are things that we all think that we should have because they make us better people and make society work better. The downside of that is that we don't have them naturally, though they do tend to make society work more smoothly. We have to work at them. We have to train ourselves to them.


That's faith.


I have an issue with conflating faith with a 'moral good', of course. There's the implication in that way of thinking that people who lack faith are somehow morally corrupt or more likely to commit crimes. Which is not true, of course. But this helps me to see where the idea came from when atheism was emerging from the shadows that atheists were godless people who would rape and steal and murder without a seconds thought because people who had been raised in this mindset had a hard time understanding that people could be good without this particular virtue.

Actual Lunch Time Conversation

Discussion goes from how much menstrual cramps suck to how it's still preferable to having to sit on your junk every day. From there:

Me: They're just so *ugly*. (in re: penises. Because they are. Don't lie. They're not aesthetically pleasing and you know it.)

G: I know! All dangly and wrinkled...ugh. So much better having everything on the inside.

Me: It's a design flaw. I know the Bible has that whole thing about God noticing Adam was lonely and giving him a girlfriend, but really, it's God correcting the problems in the first release. We're Human 2.0.

G: *laughs*

Me: The first time Adam got kicked by the...the freaking *horse* or tripped over something. God went... "Hmmm....that's going to be a problem. We'll fix it and release a new version."

This all being accompanied by much laughter and hand gestures as we mime flipping the penis inside out and tucking it inside. Because we're five and we had the lunch room to ourselves. Ten minutes later a guy came in and couldn't understand why we were having so much fun. :D

Book: Sabriel by Garth Nix

So back on my 2011 Books listing post, Sol asked if I'd ever read any Garth Nix, which I had not. Heather turned around and recommended Sabriel to me and agreed to my demands that she *finally* read Jane Eyre in return. How anyone can live as long as she has, love books as much as she does and not have already read Jane Eyre is incomprehensible to me.

Anyway...so I picked up Sabriel. I think it goes without saying that I finished it a while ago but I've been busy so I'm just getting around to posting. We had one of our women at work literally stand up and walk out on her job on Monday so it's been fun. :)

Right. On to the book!

The main character is a young woman named Sabriel, daughter of Abhorsen. She has been raised, since she was about four years old in the land of Ancelstierre at a boarding school that seems to be set along British boarding school lines. Ancelstierre is the more modern of the two countries in the book, the second being known as the Old Kingdom. Ancelstierre is a place of growing technology while the Old Kingdom, separated from Ancelstierre by the Wall, is a place of magic. The two forces do not get along. Magic won't work too far into Ancelstierre and too close to the Wall or inside of the Old Kingdom technology stops working properly.

The book opens with Sabriel being visited by a magical construct sent from her father, bringing the tools of his trade to her. Abhorsen is a necromancer, but one who lays the dead to rest rather than raises them. So someone who uses potentially dark magic in order to combat darker magic. He has sent his bells, which are used to control the dead in various ways, and his sword to Sabriel, essentially passing on the torch to her.

I think we all know where this is going, right? Sabriel rushes over the Wall (well through, technically, she has a passport and everything so she doesn't have to try and sneak past the army guarding the Wall from the Ancelstierre side or anything) to find her father and try to save him before he's too long in Death for her to bring back. He's not really dead, see, not yet because necromancers can 'step over' into Death, separating their spirits from their bodies for a time. Of course, too long separated from his body and he'll be truly dead.

Sabriel goes back to the country of her birth, finding it over run with the dead and worse things, all signs of a Greater Dead rising. This is a powerful spirit that is trying to claw its way back into life, one of the things that Abhorsen worked to stop.

*handwave* Plot things I don't want to give away...yadda...Sabriel runs all over the place trying to find her father, meets a cat who I adore named Mogget. Well, sort of a cat.Whatever. Mogget is awesome. Saves a handsome young man named Touchstone who then follows her around as a servant/bodyguard/annoying but helpful dogsbody.

Action, adventure, romance, ancient secrets and surprising revelations! All the good stuff.

Now, it's a YA fantasy novel and that's rather obvious in the writing style and the content. There's nothing extremely violent, no graphic anything, really though there are one or two hints to characters having romantic and/or sexual feelings towards one another and a mention of two unknown characters having sex. YA, back in the day before YA became the hot new thing.

Which is just my opinion of it of course. I find it funny, looking for a picture of the cover I stumbled over a couple of other reviews and people are calling it all Dark and Gory and Intense. I...thought it was fun and kind of fluffy. Not that dark, not gory and not all that intense. Clearly, the people who find it Dark and Intense have not read what I have read. I think it comes from being a horror/fantasy/dark things fan in the first place. After a while, you either have to be really dark or really skilled in order to wig me out. Very few people manage that. Stephen King has ceased to wig me out, okay? Dean Koontz *never* wigged me out. I've only ever failed to complete one book due to ick factor and that was American Psycho. And even then it was less the ick and more that it was unnecessarily and gratuitously violent.

So YMMV and you've been warned. It may be darker than I think of it.

The pacing of the story isn't bad, though it does get off to a slow start. It definitely picks up about a quarter of the way through, once the adventure has really started.

There are enough hints at the backgrounds and interplay of the characters to get you interested in them. They could have been explored more fully but not without making the book longer or extending it into more books. It is part of a trilogy but from reading the blurbs for the other two they don't focus on Sabriel or Touchstone.

Over all I enjoyed the book quite a lot and am planning on reading the second book in the series at some point as well. It's in my theoretical To Be Read pile, along with so very many other books!

4/5

Religious Courts

Random, not fully formed thought:

Before all else, not an expert. Not anything even remotely like one. I have a little knowledge, so that makes me dangerous. Fair warning.

In the first place, do they not realize that even if shariah law were to be admitted as a valid legal course in the US that no one is going to force them to go to a shariah court if they have a problem with a Muslim? Even if we, *gasp* elected a Muslim as president, that president could not then turn around and say, 'Right, we're changing things up. Shariah for all and everyone start praying toward Mecca. Allahu ackbar.' *eyes the people who think that will happen*

And I do realize that there are likely people out there who would force other Muslims to use a version of the shariah court system, or something that they would claim as such, in order to perpetuate control and abuse. Do I need to spell out that that's wrong? Or that the court system of the U.S. can be abused and/or circumvented as well?

Also, yes, shariah is not a monolithic thing. Shariah is interpretive, or at least that's my understanding of it and there are definitely some places/people around who interpret it at it's most controlling and oppressive. The same though can be said for many legal systems historically and even in modern times.

That's neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this random thought.


The people who are always so angry about the idea of shariah law coming into the US, do they not realize that other religions already in the states have their own religious laws and court systems?

Jews have the beit din, Catholic's have canon law and even Christian religions that don't necessarily have a laid out judicial system per say have the system of elders and a council that people can go through to resolve disputes. No, none of these things are exactly like the other but it's the same principle. A religious legal system designed to deal with religious/life issues.

Right then. Random thought inflicted upon the world. Back to work!

The Library, Circa 2012

I think this'll probably be something of a yearly thing, pics of the library since a good, true library is a living, changing entity. :)

On to the pics!

First set of shelves, the ones that cover the whole wall. If you're very observant you'll notice that in the center row a lot has changed. For one, all my LKH books are gone. I have removed that particular boil from my life. So, yay! In addition, my Stephen King books are slowly leaving. I've realized that once I read them I don't feel the need to ever read them again. So I'm giving them to SBW at work who is a huge Stephen King fan whose late husband accidentally sold her entire collection right before he passed away.

Second shelves, beside the tv. I can't tell you how strangely good it feels to see the books rearranged. They're so pretty!

Under the tv. One of my hopes is that eventually when I've gotten rid of the books that I don't want that there will be room on the shelves for all my ghost and paganism books.

First closet, DVDs. It's really hard to get a picture of all the dvd's on that first shelf. It's so long and the closet is so narrow.

Moar dvd's in the first closet. This is also the comic book closet, but I didn't take pictures of the comics boxes this time. There's nothing much to see since everything is neatly stored in its box.

Shelf to the left of my bed.

Representative sampling of the books under the bed. I've got the first 52 volumes of the original Nancy Drew books under there, some Star Trek books, some Doctor Who books, a pop-up Stephen King book and manga. The manga that goes under there are series that are complete (like Inu-Yasha) or single volumes that I've read (like Romantic Illusions). I, again, have hopes of one day getting them all back on the shelves but for the time being this is the way it is.

Bookshelf at the foot of the bed.

Second closet, more dvds.

Second closet, the rest of the dvds. :D

And the final bookshelf with a little of the non-fiction there on the first row behind the row of manga and then, you know, manga. Also, Murdock is there because I couldn't leave him out.

Manga Review: Black Sun

This is one of those manga that keeps coming up in rec lists for BDSM themed manga, but one that I had been unable to find until a friend pointed me to Akadot. So I bought it, especially since I'd been seeing how much everyone loved it for so very, very long.

Right. Well.

First off, I found the art to be uneven. Meaning, sometimes it was very pretty and other times, especially when Leonard was in his Crusader helmet I hated it. Especially his face. It became the cliche shojo face of doom.

The storyline was predictable and nothing special. Admittedly, I will happily read the trope of captive falling in love with captor all the live long day, assuming that the story is well done. And this wasn't. Heck, I can even read a mildly well done plot if the sex is really gorgeous or well done. This wasn't. And that's one of the things that people kept saying, that the sex scenes were so explicit, so 'hot'. These people have clearly not been reading the things that I have been reading if they think those scenes were a) well done or b) explicit and hot.

And there were random things that completely threw me out of the story. The slip of the author, or perhaps the translator into calling Jamal, 'Jamal-sama'. Last time I checked Muslims in, well, let's face it, any time period at all in the Middle East, didn't use the honorific 'sama'. And the freaking mitten things that they apparently use on captives hands.What the hell are those? What? That's how much they bugged me, or maybe that just shows how little the story dragged me into it.

Everyone in this story felt like a cardboard cutout. Nothing special. Nothing to draw the reader in and make us care about the characters' lives. It's unsuccessful as a story and it's unsuccessful as pwp.

The single best part of the manga was the little side story at the end with one of the other characters' pet panther.

A second volume as just been released and I will definitely not be getting it.

2 out of 5

If you're looking for a *good* manga with BDSM themes, gorgeous artwork, and a well put together and thought out storyline with fleshed out characters, allow me to point you to the Finder series. My love of which has nothing to do with the hot mob boss trope. Nope. Not one little bit.

Matriarchy

I was reading an article on the Mosuo people of China that was linked on FB by Muslim Feminists, or is it referred to as Metis' Muslim Feminists group? Either way. So while, upon further reading, the Mosuo are not strictly a matriarchy it did get me thinking.

What would a matriarchy be like, really? There wouldn't suddenly be a lack of murder or theft or rape, I think, because people will do bad things in any society. I don't think that it would solve all the world problems, as I once did.

Would a matriarchy just be exchanging one kind of inequality for another? Not that women would do things the exact same way as men have done them only with women at the top of the food chain, which is the common sci-fi/fantasy trope when the author wants to have a Shocking!alien society. But if you're ruling based on, well, anything really, but we're doing gender here specifically, then there's always going to be a sex that is subjugated to one degree or another.

This was originally going to be a post with a question of what you guys thought a matriarchal society would be like but as I've typed and thought about it in my own clumsy way I've realized that I don't think it matters. Either way you go on this someone is going to be on the bottom of the pyramid.

So the goal shouldn't be to make a patriarchal society into or more like a matriarchy but to make a society where gender doesn't matter. Where everyone is equal.

Though I think that this is one of those things that is a good goal to work toward but I don't think will ever actually happen. It goes so hard against our nature to categorize and rank things.

Hope

"Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a con­tinual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do."

Hope, in the Christian sense of the term according to Lewis, does not mean that we leave the world as it is because we're busy thinking and hoping for the next world and Something Better. The people who do the most good in this world are also, he says, those who think the most of the next. They are looking forward to the next world, to meeting their creator and having Him look at them and know everything that they've done in life and they're working to try and be 'worthy'.

Not that any of them think that they can earn their salvation, mind. Just that they don't want to be in front of God and have Him say, 'And what did you do with what I gave you?' and not have an answer except for, 'Wait to die and be with You.' The scenario brings to mind so many examples from the Bible, including the parable of the talents. God has given us things, including the entire world, and expects us to be good stewards of it. He expects us to improve things. He expects us to do something with what He's loaned us and that's why those who think the most of the world to come do the most here.

In theory.

In practice, I think that there are a great many people at least in modern times who don't think this way. They've, according to Lewis' view (and I happen to agree with him at least in the sense that I think this is the only point of view in this area that has it doing any good), misunderstood the point of thinking on the next world. They think that it means that they shouldn't care at all for the things of this world because they are transitory and God is going to wipe it all out and bring it back in perfected form anyway so it doesn't matter. But it *does*, because we're not just spirit which is what the next world is concerned with but flesh and we have been given custody of the physical realm for a time. Not to neglect and abuse it but to work with and to show God that we understand what a gift we've been given.

Lewis seems to think that the neglect of the world is due to Christians ceasing to think of the next and perhaps is some cases this is so. But I maintain that there are too many who neglect this world because they think too much on the next.

I'm having a moment of deep confusion

Someone explain to me what the point of the Crucifixion was again?

I mean I know that the line is that Christ had to die because he was a perfect man so that his sacrifice could somehow count for us but I honestly find myself going, 'But WHY?' right now.

If everyone is responsible for their own sins and for accepting and relying on God's mercy and forgiveness then what was the purpose of the Crucifixion? Why was all the blood necessary?

Charity

Short chapter!

"`Charity' now means simply what used to be called `alms'—that is, giving to the poor. Originally it had a much wider meaning. Charity means `Love, in the Christian sense'. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people."

So this is what Lewis is talking about in this chapter. Not charity in the sense of giving people money or food or other material items, though those are also very important but Charity in the sense of being charitable. In the sense of treating everyone in a kind and decent manner even if you don't like them personally.

"We `like' or are `fond of' some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural `liking' is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous."

Sort of tangential: Have you ever had someone that you liked on sight or disliked on sight? I have, on both fronts. I wonder why that is. What part of their body language or speech triggers that reaction in us?

It's obviously much easier to be charitable towards people that we like. We're more likely to look with kind eyes on their actions or to forgive them for some mistake or slight. We're more likely to defend them against their detractors and to say things that raise their standing. Because we like them and we want good things for them. But what Lewis is saying is that a Christian should do all of those things even for the people they don't like.

More than that, that they should take care especially to do those things for those that they don't like.

"The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you `love' your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his `gratitude', you will probably be disappointed."

I think Lewis is saying that we sort of train our emotions in this sense. Spend time acting as though you like someone and eventually you will genuinely like them.

I know for a fact that this is not universally true however. Sure, sometimes you might find yourself seeing the good in that person and growing to like them but you are just as likely to find more and more things that you *don't* like about them and your dislike of them will grow. That being said, in many instances acting as though you like someone and treating them that was will still make your life easier. As long as everyone is acting polite and friendly things tend to run smoother and it makes a better environment. Usually. So I'm all for acting charitably toward *most* people even if you don't like them. I have to add that caveat because, well, I'm not ready to just generalise like that. I'm certainly not capable of pretending to like *everyone* I dislike.