Rants!

One might assume that after, what, 7 years of college and with a majority of those classes involving a bit of writing, that one would finally grasp the idea that waiting to the last minute to write a paper is generally not a pleasant experience. Furthermore, one might assume that if this person did have a long paper to write, his/her free time would perhaps be better spent working on the paper rather than: sleeping 10 hours, checking email impetuously every 10 minutes, writing a post on a worn-out blog about said procrastination, considering purchasing the Firefly DVD set on Amazon.com that has since dropped in price, checking the status of 401K plan for future retirement in the summer of 2048, aimlessly following silly links of people doing silly things on Digg, and …

Alright, I suppose I should buckle-down and do some work; also, need to not think about presentation to class about said non-written paper for tomorrow. Will figure something out on ride over: thinking, magic trick, or “man trapped in invisible box” routine may be sufficient.

(Need also to remember to slap self on face for sounding too much like Bridget Jones on blog post.)

Alright, that was stupid. I just came back from a long day of work and class; it was 9pm; and there was no food in the house except for a plastic bucket-like thing filled with pistachios. I think it’s easy to see where this is going. Yeah, I just ate about 5 pounds of pistachios in one sitting. I tell ya, it’s breaking apart the shells that gets me. Since you have to work a little to get to that tasty center, it all seems like a healthy cycle of toil and reward, toil and reward.

Not helping; Ugh, I think I’m going to be sick. Cancel all my appointments!

(What do you mean I don’t have any?)

My friend Anja (I’m just going to use her name and hope she doesn’t mind) said something that kind of threw me off-balance the other day. She began by relating how “surprised she is that there isn’t more general misogyny in the world.” Apparently, she has this sort of antipathy towards her own sex, a hatred towards women, which I don’t quite fully understand yet. I suppose she can get away with making such an assertion, because, well, she’s a girl. To this, she started to elaborate some, and I was bit shocked at what she said. The general assertion she was making wasn’t by itself groundbreaking, or pertaining to thoughts I hadn’t perhaps on occasion entertained myself, but it was the fact that it was being said out-loud, on Westminster Street, with the occasional finger literally pointing at passersby as walking hypotheticals that made me blush. — And if the melanin in my skin didn’t abscond manifestations of all shades of “blush,” the world might have seen it as well.

Thus, she began her little treatise, speaking out-loud unabashedly, inviting some very nasty looks and head-turns. We continued to walk together down the highly trafficked street, like Morpheus speaking to a Neo in a simulated Matrixed world. Apparently Anja is a bit old-fashioned, and is quite critical of how her sex has evolved within the last couple of decades. To her, she claims women have digressed into something she is ashamed to call her own. They are (or so she claims) the “lowest denominator of a Russian nested doll,” the matroyoshka, suggesting a stripping off of every last bit of modest decency, with nothing remaining but a tiny little caricature of assumed worth. I listened, impressed by her imagery and eloquence (though a little wary of the blanket generalizations), and it wasn’t long before she pointed to a 35 year-old plastic Corporate Barbie, smoking outside, wearing shapely office-attire, low-cut reveling top, a gray tight skirt-short, with heels comically high, to which she branched into a new [paragraph] on the “working-woman.”

In short, to Anja, the full-time woman-professional that strives to be at par with her male contemporaries, filing reports, attending meetings, firing people, is a digression. This is of course ironic since Anja is herself a professional, though she will rub this nuance off as unimportant, — not germane to the issue, — and to me, frankly confusing. She takes umbrage not at the women who needs to work to support herself and her family, but the independent woman, the woman that needs “only herself, a one-bedroom apartment, a man-hating cat, a good wine-bottle opener, and a sufficient enough quantity of ice-cream in the freezer to last through one complete disk of Sex and the City.” I nervously laughed through most of this: it seemed to be almost borderline “hate,” which the Christian side of me tends to abjure like the plague. How can anyone be against “woman’s rights” when it seems so fundamental to the equality of existence. There is no way I could be in support of anything like inequality for women, or support any suggestion towards disenfranchisement — just seems too unethical. But to hear this from a girl, no less, and girl that is being so vocal and passionate about her ethos, which seemed long-thought and pressurized in her head to finally erupt into such a mountain of vitriol, was too much for my meek and humble self to quietly bare — in a public venue no less.

I couched my objections for the time, (I mean, where to start?) and then begged first for a little more elaboration. According to Anja, you cannot find a women in the current time — or a least one worth commitment: your only recourse is to turn to fiction. To her, the model of true feminine grace and modesty are sealed forever in centuries past: the 18th, the 19th, century. The heroines of Jane Austen’s pen: Elinor Dashwood, Lizzy Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland, and Anne Eliot. Women today, she claims, have stained that sacred veil of purity that was once their most precious garment. Holding the self-low, in terms of virginity and feminine modesty, have turned Sarah Jessica Parker into the modern day heroine, and “what kind of life is that really?” she questioned: women in their mid-to-late thirties, unmarried, going out and glorifying their own promiscuity in the name of female independence; it is a “rebellion against natural gender roles that have sustained human life for 200,000 years.” This is when she took an angry and rather vocally harsh turn towards homosexuality, particularly against what she called “post-” lesbianism, which I should mention is quite dangerous to do in the middle of Providence and all — but again, she’s a girl. While she doesn’t take aim at homosexuals in general, she objects to the winked approval of lesbianism, and the high-esteem it has attained as a highly sexualized, and desirable practice. This, she claims, the curtain-approval and sealing of homosexuality as a purely normal and natural occurrence, that needs to be embraced and open as such, has attracted many otherwise straight women to lesbianism purely as a surrogate to men — who are now unneeded as the gender divide collapses.

“What has equality brought us,” she asks, rhetorically. “Voting, equitable wages” was my immediate response. To my disbelief, she actually attacked “voting” as something that has only perpetuated the problem: “Hillary Clinton” was her one-name response to it — which I found a bit weak and unconvincing. I mean, really, how is Hillary Clinton and her large pool of her supporters really perpetuating this new kind of implosive feminism? Anja claims that women have given up too much in exchange for too little: a pawning of their gentle femininity, to gain an illusory promise, that has yet to realized. The chivalry of the past, lasting fulfilling marriages, and a life of motherhood has been traded in for an insatiable appetite for power and independence that gives birth to bastard children, and second-divorces. The once prized domestic skills of the woman cast off like chains of bondage, when in truth, they were the pillars of a noble home. Anja suggests that men look at her, and other women, cheaply: grouping all women into the homogeneous batter of stereotype; that instead of seeing a life-long companion, and a mother, they see a 3-month fling, and a night of off-the-books fun.

After all this, I didn’t really quite know where to stand, or how to respond. Her plea was doleful, her face in mourning, and the arguments at times were convincing. I hope she’s wrong.

(This is the last despondent political post of the year, I promise.)

Is it me, or has this been the longest presidential campaign season ever? What’s worse, it’s just the primaries! We’re only preparing for the real thing. It’s primer! The heavy white ugly gelatinous stuff you cover you house with before you paint. Sandpapering the deck before you stain it. Gesso! It’s all tedium.

If any good thing can be said about this primary season, it is that it has served to disillusion me to the whole process—like Dorothy unveiling “The Wizard”. The process is broken. The American Pride-O-meter is starting to look like our automobile’s fuel gauge. Families can’t talk about American foreign policy without wanting to beat each other up; the presidency has never been spoken-of before with so much ridicule. We all have strong positions on specific matters, but none of it really leaves dinning room chatter, or blog posts—none of it is actually implemented. We can talk till we’re blue in the face about how stupid the Iraq war is, but, we’re still going to be in Iraq. I’m not an advocate for despondency—nor can that ever be a cure. But like any real problem, the first step—before any treatment can be prescribed–is admitting one has a problem.

The first problem is, of course, the media. The parade that has become the presidential primary campaign is nothing short of nauseating. It’s float after float, in a short repetitious route of the same few people. Hilliary, then Obama, then Hillary again, oh no, it’s that loony McCain, appearing on the cover of Time as some newfound hero. Then you read the article, and discover that you’ve discovered nothing new. We are guilted into being “informed” people, chasing an illusory high of current events—which is perhaps one of the most brilliant and subtle commercial techniques of all time. News is a product. We often equate reading a magazine, or the daily newspaper as something akin to eating our daily vegetables, or getting our daily dose of fiber. But really, this does not deserve a pat on the back. The more we consume it, the more we are hurting the process. It is a gossip triangle we can only get caught in — ultimately offering nothing of true value, other than consuming our time, and grasping our subliminal attention to the Ford Wrangler on the top of Mount Green-Room separating the 4-page story of Obama and his lifelong suspicious church-affair with Reverend Wright.

The news manufactures news. Don’t you ever find it suspicious that every day the daily newspaper is exactly the same size? That every week, Time magazine has a new “fascinating” cover article. I don’t know about you, but sometimes, an empty inbox is a happy inbox. It tells me: “nothing to see down here, best just go enjoy your life.”