Aug/Sept Reading Report

Coop- Michael Perry.  I read this one slowly.  I think I might actually have started it back in June.  It's terrific.  Part of the reason I found it so moving is that he is also a former fundamentalist (he was a "real" fundie, though).  So we have a lot in common.  But Coop isn't about his fundamentalist upbringing, although that comes up fairly often.  It's about a year of his life, living on a farm and raising chickens and pigs and a couple of kids, plus various building projects, like the chicken coop of the title.  I'm not normally a fan of nature writing--even though Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has been recommended to me at least a dozen times, I've never been able to get past the first chapter because she just seems so smug. Her writing is so beautiful and polished that it seems like showing off.  One suspects that I am jealous, yes?  But every time Perry started to veer in that direction, he'd make some sort of snarky, wiseass comment and pull it back.  I remember at one point thinking it was like reading a teddy bear, albeit a teddy bear with a snide sense of humor. When I finished reading this back in mid-August, I was going to devote an entire post to it, but now I can't remember what it was going to be about.  I think mainly I was impressed at his lack of anger at his upbringing.  I'm not exactly dripping with rage, but I think I'm far more resentful of the ways my religious upbringing warped my brain than he is (it's possible that is because he's male, so it wasn't quite as restrictive for him? although since my upbringing wasn't precisely fundamentalist-- again, this link-- it wasn't anywhere near as strict as his).  There's one moment toward the end where he mentions a rebellious phase he went through in his twenties, so maybe he just doesn't talk about it much.  Anywho.  Highly recommended. 

Turn of the Screw - Henry James.  This is a ghost story in about 115 pages.  You'd think it would have taken me an afternoon to read it.  But I had forgotten what it's like to read James.  It's like trying to walk through jello.  I didn't really get absorbed in it until about the last 20 pages, so it took several weeks to read.  It's a classic, and I think a lot of people read it in high school, but I never had.  If you don't mind lingering over sentences that unfold slowly in your head, almost blooming there, then by all means, read it.  But I think most modern readers (me!) will find themselves impatient with his style.  I wanted to read it because Crusie used it as the basis for her most recent novel........

Maybe This Time - Jennifer Crusie.  This has been out for a month or so, and I've been studiously avoiding reading reviews so I wouldn't read any spoilers.  But I did notice that it hadn't been getting universally glowing reviews.  So finally I sat down to read it last night, finished it today, then went back and read some of the reviews out there.  First of all, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Couldn't put it down.  It's based (see above) on the Turn of the Screw, so it is a ghost story that takes place in a big creepy house with some really creepy demented characters, both human and ghosts.  The setup:  Andie Miller goes to see her ex-husband North one last time before accepting her boyfriend's proposal.  North asks her as a personal favor to spend a month taking care of his wards-- two kids of whom he has guardianship after a cousin died-- and offers to pay her ten thousand dollars to do it.  The kids live in a rotting mansion in southern Ohio that a reclusive millionaire-type had moved over from England.  Andie arrives there to find that the house is haunted and the ghosts are tormenting the children.

The reviews often complain that the romance is neglected for the ghost story, which surprised me.  That would not have occurred to me-- it's clear right from the start that there is still a lot of chemistry between Andie and North and that they are going to end up together at the end.  Although they aren't together for the first half of the book, they think about each other so often and there are so many flashbacks to their brief marriage that it didn't seem to me that that part of the story was being neglected.  I did feel at one point that Crusie was waiting too long to bring North down to the haunted house, but I wasn't by any means disappointed at the lack of romance, as apparently many were.

There were also some complaints that Crusie didn't do the ghosts "right"-- as if there were a right and a wrong way to write about the paranormal.  I'm not a big fan of paranormal anything--I've read a few that were OK, but generally it's a turnoff for me.  So maybe that's why her version of ghosts didn't bother me at all--I haven't read enough other paranormal books to know how you're "supposed" to write a ghost.  I thought she handled that aspect of it pretty well, with a good mix of characters who were believers and skeptics, and a believable amount of wondering, is this really happening?  Even though I'm pretty skeptical about that type of writing, I thought within the context of the story she really made it work.

But there were definitely some problems.  It's fun to see cameos of favorite characters from previous books, but I think you have to make it work in the current book without reference to the other books.  And I don't think she did that.  She brings in Gabe McKenna from Fast Women and (presumably) Simon from Faking It to play fairly minor roles, so their characters aren't fleshed out at all.  I thought in both cases the role would have been better played by one of the many characters who is already in the novel--for example, when Gabe and North are searching the house, even while I was reading it I thought it should have been North's brother Sullivan who was with him.  It would have made much more sense, and would have cut out a superfluous character.

Oddly, the thing that bugged me the most wasn't mentioned by anyone else-- at one point, North gets a concussion, and he is up in the bathroom puking his guts out, while Andie just doesn't seem to care.  She totally ignores him while she wanders around doing other things.  What??  Even if she wasn't in love with him, it's just basic human decency to take care of someone when they're sick.  And it seemed especially harsh since he had just been pretty considerate of her when she was similarly ill.

Which I think ended up being what worked for me the least--Andie.  She was terrific with Alice, the younger of the two children she was trying to help.  But she's rude and dismissive of her mother at the beginning-- which you figure must mean that her mom is horrible, but it turns out that her mom is actually pretty cool.  and she's rude and dismissive to her boyfriend who becomes her ex-boyfriend halfway through-- her breakup with him is so abrupt and unfeeling that I just felt sorry for the guy.  (although I didn't blame her for being mad that he showed up after she asked him not to).  and when Kelly, a reporter, is possessed by a promiscuous ghost and sleeps with half the men in the house, Andie blows it off because she decides Kelly would have slept with them anyway.  and then she leaves North vomiting all alone upstairs after he's been injured.  She just seemed mean-spirited sometimes.

On the other hand, one of the things other reviewers mentioned most often as a bad thing-- Andie's "neglect" of Carter, the older of the two children-- didn't bother me that much.  For one thing, I have a son who is not particularly talkative, and if he wants to withdraw, the worst thing you can do is to try and talk him out of it.  You have to kind of go with it until he's ready to communicate.  Since Carter was actually in danger, maybe that doesn't apply here, but still, I think it made me more sympathetic to how Andie handled him than some others were.  But for another thing, I thought Crusie did a pretty good job of showing that Andie became aware of how wounded Carter is as the story progresses, and that paralleled the way she became aware of how North had been wounded.  It became part of the growth of the heroine. 

Overall, I enjoyed it.  It kept me completely absorbed all the way till the end.  There is plenty of Crusie's trademark humor.  And although Andie will never be my favorite Crusie heroine, she had enough good moments to balance out the bad. It's a good, fun read.  Recommended.

so many books, so little time

Oh, there are so many things I want to read right now I can hardly stand it.  I was determined not to read Maybe this Time (Crusie's new one) until I finished reading Turn of the Screw, which took forever because I just couldn't get into it.  Had totally forgotten about reading James.  But i did finally finish it a couple of days ago, and now MTT is sitting on my bedside table as my reward for finishing the presentation I have to do this week (Thursday).  Then I just found out that a new Tiffany Aching is coming out!!  (Pratchett's YA series).  Our whole family has enjoyed those-- we listen to them on audiobooks on road trips and they are hilariously lovable.  And since I just discovered Joanna Bourne recently, I have another one of her older ones waiting, plus The Help, and one that is called something like the Guernsey potato peel society or something, and 3 or 4 more just sitting.... and waiting.... for me.... to have time to read them.

On the plus side, the stuff I'm reading for class is actually pretty good.  I adore shakespeare, especially now that we're on our third one and I'm starting to get used to his language and style again.  As You Like It for this week.  And Pauline Hopkins, an African American novelist from the turn of the century (19th/20th), who is entirely new to me and who is the subject of the presentation I have to do on Thurs.  And Kafka's Metamorphosis for tues.  It just makes you wish you were in grad school, doesn't it??

sign me happy happy happy.
AB

GS: the dead horse again

you will be able to tell, perhaps, that I am ambivalent about posting this.  It was written yesterday morning about events that happened a week ago and have been simmering in my brain ever since, and I'm pre-dating it by two days so I hope it will disappear.  I can't tell you how much I wish I never brought this up.   but I did, so I'm finishing it up, and since I never manage to get everything I want to say across in the first try, there might  even be another one.  I hate feeling stupid.  (so, one might reasonably ask, why the hell did I go back to school? because let me tell you, it is one non-stop stupid party.)

Yesterday, our theory professor told us about our first paper, which she wants in two parts.  She does not want them elegantly connected into one paper, she wants two distinct parts.  I was reminded of that (for absolutely no reason) while I was trying to type this out, so in that spirit, here are a bunch of disconnected bits that all revolve around the same basic idea.  

1.  Can I just clarify (again) that I consider myself a feminist.  I vote feminist, for one thing. I argue as a feminist-- being in class the last month has reminded me how often I do.  But having been outside of academia for 25 years, I have to say that academic feminism makes me wonder.  In part, because I feel betrayed by it.  by the time I had a family and a job and a busy life and was faced by a number of difficult decisions about what my priorities were, feminism was very little help to me.  Life is complicated.  You can't always have it be all about me, me, me.  I got tired of going around all the time being enraged about situations that weren't bugging anybody else.  But that's what it seemed like my feminist background was telling me--because of male domination of women for the past millennium or two, you deserve to have everything your way, and if the men in your life have to pay the price for it, well, they deserve it.  I just got tired of it.  I live in the gray area.  There are no black and whites here. So even though I still consider myself a feminist, I find myself rolling my eyes at a lot of feminist rhetoric. 

2.  My literary theory class is a three hour seminar that meets once a week.  we're spending a week on each of the major groups of theories.  So last week, we talked about feminism (which is now officially feminisms, plural, because there are so many different kinds).  The debate is far too complex for me to even begin to summarize it here.  At the heart of it is "essentialism" vs. "constructionism" --which is the old nature vs. nurture issue dressed up in academic language.  If you're an essentialist, you believe there is something "essential" or elemental or built-in or fundamental about being male or female; if you're a constructionist, you believe that gender identities are constructed by the culture, there is nothing, no character trait, no behavior, that is inherently male or female.  (and put like that, constructionism sounds pretty reasonable, now that I type it out.  Maybe I should just bag this whole thing.)  It doesn't take long to realize that in an academic arena, it is important to be constructionist.  There is a long history of misogynist or just plain old misguided theories about women and "their place" that make it important in the academic world to be constructionist-- so important that our professor had a note of dread in her voice when she noted that one author we read exhibited a "creeping sense of essentialism."  I get that.  In an academic environment, I can probably even go along with it.

3.  The problem is, I don't really believe that.  Or at the very least, I'm only willing to accept it as a tentative conclusion.  I don't believe that there is some universal way of being female, but I do believe that women are different than men in ways that go beyond cultural conditioning.  (and that is not to say that I define being female only as a way of being different than male, as if being male were the gold standard and being female just a variation of it.)(See?  there's all these hidden arguments going on all the time.)  I feel some kind of affinity for other women that I don't feel for men.  The fact that I can't list exactly what it is that is essential about it doesn't mean I don't experience that. You can't bully me into not having my experiences, my perceptions.  I've learned that one-- that's what growing up fundamentalist and figuring out how to leave it will do for you.  (and yes, I do realize that my perceptions are created by the culture, the hegemony, whatever you want to call it.)(we did marxism this week.)

4. but here's the thing:  none of us, essentialist or constructionist, can prove their point.  None of us can get outside of our culture, outside of our way of thinking, and say for sure that they are Right.  Even when we're interpreting other cultures, we're still doing it from inside our own.  It seems to me that these stands, these positions, have more to do with an agenda than they do with anything relevant to what's going on in my life.  In other words, I've discovered that I don't really care about the essentialist vs. constructionist argument because there's no way to really know.  Even though I've been participating in it (in the early posts on this topic, without really knowing it) in this blog. 

5.  But here are a couple of small points that we talked about in class last week.  One:  our professor said that contemporary feminism, or 3rd wave feminism, or neo-feminism, or whatever you want to call it, is not about opposing masculine power, it's about opposing a particular type of power which requires the denigration of others.  YES. That is exactly what I think of when I think of my own brand of feminism.  It sounds a lot like what Starhawk called "power over" back in the 80s (as opposed to "power from within"). But then she (our prof) talked about the search for an androgynous ideal--which is where I start to roll my eyes, because so often feminists define the androgynous ideal as male.  (which is what I was trying to get at in this post, but maybe not very well). I'm not interested in being male.  I think I am more comfortable with what our professor called French feminism-- which comes down to believing that life and experience are "irreducibly heterogeneous"-- a term I love. (is that the difference? women's brains are irreducibly heterogeneous, while men's are monolithic? hmmmm.) Every time I've made a statement like that in this blog, I've discovered within a week or less that it was a dumb thing to say, so take that with about a pound of salt, please.  I'm just riffing.

magic abounds

Two or three years ago, I realized I had lost my magic.  I don't know how else to describe it, and that doesn't do a very good job.  I mean that inner sense of me-ness, the knowledge that at my core is a deep well of something that is different than anyone else, that makes me who I am.  The thing is, I never had very much of that sense.  It was always overlaid with a lot of other burdens, the burdens of trying to please a parent who was never pleased, the effort to fit a round peg (me) into the square hole of my religious training (which unfortunately worked just well enough that it took me decades to figure out that I really, really didn't fit). 

But even with all that layered over the top, there was-- up until about ten years ago-- always an inner part of me that I treasured.  I would feel it at certain moments with friends and family, or while writing, or reading a really good book, or sometimes when I was looking up at the stars on a night with no moon.  I've been thinking about what happened, how I let it get killed off.  And I think it comes down to a misunderstanding about what love means.  I grew up in that Christian tradition that honors self-sacrifice above all else.  Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends, right?  An acronym that floated around often in my childhood and in my head:  Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last = JOY.  Not kidding.  Somehow I took that too seriously.  Once I had kids and a spouse with a career that seemed more important than anything I was doing, the demands on me became endless, more than I could possibly do. Infinite sacrifice seemed required.  I think I self-sacrificed myself to death.  It was much easier to figure out what everyone else wanted from me than it was to figure out what I really needed.  So I took the course of least resistance, what seemed like the easiest way at the time, and kept doing what everyone else wanted until there was nothing left of me.

Not consciously, of course.  I'm not quite that pathetic.  You could have caught me at any number of times during the period of my deadness telling friends or family that they needed to take care of themselves, that you can't be a good mom if there's nothing there to mother with, that God didn't mean for us to be doormats.  But I was so clueless about what I needed, and then when I started to figure it out, I was so reluctant to do anything about it (because of the demands it would make on the people I love), that it was very nearly too late by the time I realized I had to change.

Ack.  this post was going to be about how happy I am that my mojo, my magic, is coming back, not an extended journey into the boring-ness of my past.  But maybe I needed to put this into words.  The thing is, when I first started figuring out how to take care of myself, it felt selfish.  It felt mean and hard-hearted to put my own needs ahead of what other people needed.  But I was dying, or at least slowly going insane.  I had to change.  I don't think I would ever have been able to get past the guilt of putting my own needs before others' if it weren't for that-- a selfish mom, I finally realized, was better than a mom who was locked up in a nuthouse somewhere.  Or dead from suicide (which I never actually planned, but there were a few moments where it entered the realm of possibility, which scared the shit out of me).  Pema Chodron says that tonglen, which is the Buddhist practice of infinitely returning good for evil, is an intermediate practice-- not for beginners-- because you have to have a sense of when it becomes self-destructive (since she's buddhist, I'm sure she didn't use the term self-destructive--the whole no-self thing, you know-- but it's been awhile since I read that, and that's what I remember about it). 

Now, three years later, the odd but welcome outcome of my learned selfishness, my determination to get my own needs taken care of, is the return of my magic. Now I get it.  Now I understand that it's not being selfish, it's just being yourself.  If you give away too much of yourself, you become something other than who you are-- for the theist part of me, I could even phrase this, "you become something other than the person God created you to be."

Ha.  Now I know why I needed to type this out:  because I was about to give in on something very important to me (before the person even asked) because it seemed like to much to ask. and I didn't even realize it.

an aside

So I sat down to post this morning with no idea where I was going, but a bunch of things to say after my classes yesterday.  But then I got distracted.  Blogger has "stats" now.  From your "dashboard" (which is what they call the main menu), you can access statistics about your blog.  how many people have looked at each page, what page they came from, what they searched for when they found you, etc.  OMG.  It's amazing.  It turns out that my blog gets a lot more traffic than I realized.  Not that it gets a lot-- less than 50 page views last week-- but STILL.  If you had asked me, I would have said less than a dozen.  Sometimes I'm not sure if it gets any.  And the most popular page on my blog?  this one.  From Jan 2008, which got 5 pageviews last week.  Go figure.  So now I can't remember what I was going to post about and if I'm going to have time to do the treadmill, I've got to run.  (ha)

Oh, great, one more way to waste time on the internet.  Like I needed that.

GS: let me try this again

I've mentioned before that being a mom doesn't come easily to me.  At work or around other adults, I often find myself being maternal-- keeping track of people, or trying to help, or taking care of things.  But toddlers?  pre-schoolers? infants?  I just don't have the patience.  I did not feel a huge wave of maternal bliss the first time I held my daughter in my arms.  I felt a wave of terror, of complete and utter inadequacy.  I did not cherish The Baby Days.  I was utterly and completely relieved to leave my daughter four hours a day with a wonderful woman running an in-home daycare so that I could keep my job on a part-time basis.  The older she got, the more I enjoyed her.  Her teenage years had their definite moments of angst, but I'd take a teenager any day over an infant.  Heck, I'd take a whole house full of teenagers over an infant.

You get the idea.  June Cleaver I am not.  There are a number of consequences of this:  for one thing, I am enormously proud of myself for sticking it out.  It didn't come naturally to me, but I kept at it because it was more important to me than anything else ever had been.  I still remember the day when my daughter was 3 and we were sitting in the cab of the little Nissan pickup I drove back then, and we looked at each other and it was like we really saw each other for the first time.  I remember giving this little nod and thinking, Okay, then.  I can do this.  We're all right.  I don't take credit for the amazing person she has turned out to be (she is now 20, and she has done that all by herself), but I do take some credit for not screwing it up. (I'm leaving my son out of this for now since he is still at home and just turned 13, but he is a similarly awesome kid). 

So on the first day of class of "Progressive Voices" (Four American Women Writers of the Progressive Era), when the professor had us go around the room and each introduce ourselves and tell "something interesting" about ourselves, the only thing that came to mind was my kids.  My kids are far and away the most interesting thing about me. This is the bare truth.  I am by nature an observer.  I am not interesting.  I watch people and I think about them.  I don't do crafts or hobbies or sports, I haven't had an interesting career, I don't have any big accomplishments in my life to brag about.  Except that I survived my kids' childhoods (I'm still surviving my son's, of course, but he's out of the bitty kid stage, anyway).  (And honest to pete, it didn't occur to me until the next day that the fact that I've had a blog for seven years would be something interesting.  Never crossed my mind.)

But you can imagine the reaction that I got in a roomful of students in a feminist literary criticism class when I said that the most interesting thing about me is my kids.  It just isn't done.  We're women, hear us roar.  We don't find our fulfillment in other people, we find it in ourselves and our own accomplishments.  And on the one hand, I get that.  I've been a feminist for practically my entire life (I should write a post about my childhood moments of feminism someday).  I took a class in feminist literary criticism in 1983 before any of the other students in this class were even born.  But on the other hand, it pissed me off.  I could almost see their eyes rolling, their inward groans of embarrassment for me, the immediate conclusions that were jumped to with eager leaps.  But you know, I'm not embarrassed that I'm proud I've turned myself into a good mom.  I suppose I could have gone into a long-winded explanation of what I meant when I said the most interesting thing about me is my kids, but damn it, I shouldn't have to.

This isn't done yet.  Just more of the continuing conversation.

GS: textbook case

I don't know why I post about some of this stuff because if you don't already think I'm nuts, this will do it.  But what else am I going to post about?  This was my week.

It's been about three years since I first decided to go back to school.  I started with classes at our community college, then last fall, I started driving the two+ hours to get down to UTown and our state university.  In mid-October, I had to write the first paper I'd written in 24 years.  I remember the night before it was due, I was staring at the complete chaos on my desk, notes and papers and a stack of books, and my laptop and who knows what else, and thinking, "I just can't do this anymore.  It's not possible for my brain to function at this level.  I'm going to have to drop out."  and on and on.  I did get it done (by about 2 a.m., if memory serves, which wouldn't be a problem since I'm kind of a night owl anyway, except that then I have to be able to do that drive the next day).  And then I waited with dread to get it back and see how badly I had done.  I was so freaked out about it that--I'm not kidding-- when the prof handed our papers back, I grabbed mine, stuffed it straight into my backpack, drove two+ hours home, and made my spouse look at it first.  I was so terrified they were going to kick me out for being an idiot.  But of course I did fine, so I persevered and now here I am in the master's program.

And I'm doing it again.  It's completely neurotic.  I can reason with myself and rationalize and try to have some sense that I am a functioning adult human being, but it's all for naught, because Monday night I just lost it.  I had a big presentation to do on Tuesday (so not only the intimidation of being a grad student for the first time in decades, but also major fear of public speaking), and I came unglued.  By the time my poor spouse got home, I was standing at the stove cooking dinner and crying.  Not hysterical sobbing, but just a continuous, uncontrollable stream of tears down my face.  I knew it was going to be horrible, and that someone was going to have to pull me aside and tell me that oops, they had made a mistake and I really am not capable of this level of work and please go home.   Poor dh looks at me and says, "what in the world are you doing cooking dinner when you have a big project due tomorrow?"  and I wailed, "Well, I'm going to get kicked out of grad school tomorrow anyway, so I figured I might as wellllllll....."

To his credit, he did not roll his eyes and laugh.  Because I deserved it.  I pulled myself together and got my notes done, and the presentation was fine.  Far from perfect, but it got done, and it seemed to be fairly well received, and I'm sure I didn't fail.  Fortunately for me, I had a partner who was great.

But the point is that it is just mystifying to me how I can let myself get into that state.  It's completely irrational. I mean, even if it was horrible, there's no way I would get kicked out of grad school on the basis of that one assignment.  That's just silly.  But in the moment, I am totally immersed in the feeling of panic and misery and despair.

And believe it or not, the topic of the presentation was psychoanalytic theory.  So we were talking about neuroses.  About how Freud saw the id--the unconscious--as this mass of seething socially unacceptable sexual desires and urges that result in neuroses and compulsive behavior.  And Lacan's version is that whatever we can't speak, whatever we can't understand through the language that creates our consciousness, enters the unconscious and then is acted out outside our conscious control.  So not only am I freaking out about my ability to handle the academics of the assignment, I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, crap, this is me.  I'm a nutcase."

and it just might be true.  be thankful you don't have to live with me.

GS: reading and reading

So this week I have been reading Saussure and Derrida (for last Tuesday's theory class) and now Freud, Lacan and Rzepka (for this coming Tuesday's class) and it is making me nuts.  especially Derrida and Lacan.  If I were just reading for pleasure, it would be kind of fun (for a page or two) to see what they do with language-- not what they say about language, which is also interesting -- but to watch how they express themselves in language.  I'm reading them in translation, of course, but still it is evident that they enjoy playing with words.  But I'm not reading them for pleasure, I'm trying to understand them, and it's enough to drive you nuts.  You have to suspend resolution of a thought sometimes for several paragraphs of densely written explication of ideas using words you've never heard ("neurax" doesn't even come up when you google it-- neuraxis, but not neurax, except as the name of software that predicts the outcome of horse races, and I swear I did not make that up.)

But anyway.  These guys talk about how we create our consciousness through language-- which makes sense to me on most levels, because how can you think about things for which you have no words? (but makes me wonder exactly how Buddhist meditation, which is beyond/beneath/outside words, fits in.).  And how would you even begin to think about something that isn't defined in your language, except to first try to articulate it?  we can't know anything outside of what language allows us to know, and thus we and our culture are created by what we can say/speak.  We can't find a place of outside of our culture from which to be objective about anything.  That all makes sense to me.  But it strikes me as odd that they somehow think that because they question every bit of common sense knowledge that you've ever taken for granted, that they have done that-- placed themselves outside of culture and are therefore able to make these pronouncements from a position of authority and objectivity.  They never outright claim to be doing that, of course, but the manner in which they state their observations certainly makes it sound like that's what they're doing.  it amuses me.  And of course it goes without saying that they are horribly sexist, but they (like all of us) are products of their time-- which is exactly the point.

late night thoughts in the morning

One of my most distinct memories of high school is sitting in physics class my senior year and listening to the teacher try to explain that light is both a wave and a particle-- meaning light seems to travel both in continuous waves and also in little discrete packets.  I must have seemed like a complete dolt.  I kept questioning him about it.  How could it be both?  I think I finally ended with, "That's just Not Right."  But now, 30 years later, I totally get that, because it seems like half the stuff in my life is both a wave and a particle.  Belief and unbelief, content and anxious, determined and stymied.  And in more esoteric realms, as well.  Does the fact that I can't list 10 universal moral truths mean that there is no such thing as a universal sense of what is right and what is wrong (that gets interpreted differently in every culture)?  Does the fact that I can't list 10 traits that every woman has mean that there is no Eternal Feminine out there that gets interpreted in infinitely various ways?  (sorry to go all new-agey on you there with the eternal feminine, but I'm just thinking out loud here)(or typing out loud? or thinking-to-type?).  Why can't both be true?  particle and wave, wave and particle.

And yesterday I was sitting in class listening to the professor do a quick rundown of the shift during the 20th century from a metaphysical mindset to a post-modern mindset-- the metaphysical mindset being the one where there is some sort of absolute (whether God or a Platonic ideal or some sort of secular humanist ideal of human nature) outside of existence that we can use as a touchstone, a guide, a place of origin; the post-modern mindset of course doesn't believe that there is anything outside of what we know, that everything we know is dependent on other things we know (Saussure!  Derrida!).  So we understand cow-ness in relationship to (and in opposition to) horse-ness and dog-ness and tree-ness and everything else that we know.  And I find myself thinking, why can't both be true?  Why can't there be something out there, some infinitely spacious ground of universal being, that's so vast that it has little or nothing to do with determining the reality of our little lives?  and otoh, if what's out there is so huge that our little reality isn't something that he/she/it would even begin to notice, what's the point in considering the possibility of its existence? I don't know, but it doesn't seem all that clear to me that either side can claim certainty here. I want to say why can't God both exist and not exist, but that might be pushing the boundaries of the absurd to the point where they break.  Although sometimes I think that's what these theory people are all about.

GS: one week down

A bit of housekeeping: I'm going to try using GS in the subject line to denote posts that are solely devoted to grad school and literary studies. I know those topics don't interest some of you and that way you can tell at a glance if it's one of those.
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Every time I sit down to type a post, I wonder how in the world I'm going to be able to organize the swirl of thoughts in my head into something coherent enough for someone else to understand. Which is why my posts frequently begin with some sort of caveat about how I'm not sure how to say this, I don't know if I'm going to be able to do this, how the hell am I going to make this work, or whatever. But it occurred to me today that exactly that dilemma is what it means to be a writer. Duh. Of course I have to figure out how to put it into words. that's the whole point. So, no more apologies on that score. But that's exactly what I'm thinking right now.

I really wish I had never brought up the whole theory issue (which is mostly in these posts), because I'm going to end up having to eat a lot of crow. Even though I know it's a complex issue, I had no idea exactly how complex, or how quickly it would come up. It's ludicrous of me to think that I can have something relevant to say after having been out of the academic world for 25 years. But I did bring it up, and I stated my uninformed opinion rather strongly, and so now I'm feeling honor bound to keep slogging away at this.  It will help me figure out what I think to type it out, anyway.

So maybe if I tell you the story of my first week you will get the idea.  I'll skip over the Shakespeare class for right now, even though it looks like it will be a lot of fun, because it's pretty straightforward.  The issues that have my brain locked up come from the other two classes.  One is Intro to Graduate Studies, which is, for the most part, a theory class.  The other is "Progressive Women," about four American women writers from the early twentieth century, which will have a pretty strong feminist component, and I hope some exposure to other theories as well.

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OK, I got that far (above) last Friday, but then got bogged down trying to explain what I wanted to say.  Then today I had my theory class again (it only meets once a week), and realized that it's just silly for me to try and say anything intelligent about it at this point.  I just don't know enough.  I will say -- for one thing-- that the posts that I've already written about feminism seem to be in response to a version of feminism that is now out of date.  In other words, I've been responding to the feminist literary criticism professor I had in 1982, not to the state of feminist thought now.  So there's my first little bit of crow, and I'm sure there's more to come.

just a note

I'm working on a post about the first week of class, which got me so tangled up in knots that it may not get posted until after the 2nd week.  But thought I would throw out a random observation in the meantime.  Many a feminist would be willing to battle to the death over their assertion that it is just as important to read Uncle Tom's Cabin as it is to read The Scarlet Letter (they were published a mere two years apart, by the way--1852 and 1850, respectively).  According to them, to "privilege" Scarlet Letter, written by an educated white male, over Uncle Tom's Cabin, written in sentimental style by a woman, is to pander to sexist criteria of what is culturally important.  But many of those same feminists would rather have their fingernails pulled out one at a time than read a romance novel, which would seem to be the Uncle Tom's Cabin equivalent of our era (at least in some ways, not the least of which is that Cabin outsold every other book published at the time except the Bible). Strikes me as a bit hypocritical.

I'm completely buried in trying to read Saussure and Derrida.  I understand each of the individual words, and usually I can puzzle out what any particular sentence is saying, but I have absolutely no idea what it means.  Which I suppose is appropriate to the nature of the topic-- would that be the diachronic nature of language?  You understand each word, each unit of language, in relationship to the words immediately surrounding it, but haven't got a clue about the overall meaning.  or maybe that just proves I don't get it.

Diet- the four letter word

A couple of years ago when I first realized that I was terminally bored, there wasn't much I could do about it. It was the middle of my daughter's senior year in high school and we had several college visits planned, plus various other things, that meant I couldn't commit to a job or anything else.  So I decided the one thing that I could do would be to work on getting in shape.  Which was something almost completely different for me-- other than a brief stint with aerobics in my twenties, I've been almost entirely sedentary my entire life.  Due to lucky genetics, when I was younger I still managed to be in pretty good shape, but the older I got, the less genetics counted, and the more pasty-looking and pathetic I became.  I didn't exactly know what to do about it-- I'm a couch potato, a geek, a nerd, a booklover.  I don't do exercise. 

Or at least I didn't.  Because I had to do something, and that was the only thing I could think of that was manageable at the time and that felt like enough of a change.  I was clear on one thing:  it wasn't going to be about losing weight.  And it hasn't been.  I'm in much better shape, and my clothes fit better and I look better, but I weigh pretty much exactly the same as I did when I started. In fact, there have even been a couple of times in the midst of this that I've gained weight. 

What I started with was the treadmill.  I got some good music for my iPod and I just started making myself do it three or four times a week. On the days I didn't do the treadmill, I tried to do something else-- either go for a walk, or do yoga or stretching or something.  Always with the iPod going-- that turned out to be the trick for me:  having music I enjoyed listening to so I didn't really think that much about what my body was doing.  At first I had to drag myself to do it, but before long I was almost(not quite) looking forward to it. 

And then I even started looking for ways to make it more challenging.  I started doing ab work on some of the off days-- which was a challenge, because anything that pulls on my neck leads to migraines, and it took awhile to find a set of ab exercises that doesn't put any strain on the neck.  Then about a year ago, I added free weights while I was on the treadmill.  Nothing fancy (a year later, I'm still using 3 lb weights, just more repetitions), but it was enough that I could tell a definite difference when I would go to lift something.  And a funny thing happened.  It turned out that actually being stronger physically made me feel stronger emotionally, too.  It's been a good thing for me.  I find that I miss my routine when we're out of town and I can't do it.

But, as I said before, it has been unrelated to my weight, and I haven't changed my eating habits at all.  In fact,  they've gotten considerably worse.  I guess I've been using the exercise as an excuse to eat more, and more unhealthy stuff.  Then this summer started.  It has been stressful, to say the least.  My dad's illness, the intensive class I was auditing during the month of June, all the travel (three trips via plane!  that's more than I usually do in a year! plus all the driving to UTown, and a trip to Seattle to help my daughter move in to an apartment), and being in charge of a week-long family reunion in mid-July-- I've been stressed.  Although I was still exercising, I wasn't taking very good care of myself otherwise.  About halfway through the family reunion, I noticed that I was just stuffing food in my mouth.  All day long.  I'm not sure why that was helping me manage the stress (or even if it really was), but once I noticed it, I could watch myself do it.  All day long. 

and predictably enough, my weight ballooned.  I don't weigh myself-- I hate to obsess about the number-- so I'm not sure how much I actually gained, but when the pictures came back from the family reunion, I was shocked.  How did I let it get that bad?  I looked like the Michelin man. 

So.  I know from previous experience that I can't diet.  That would be another post, but since it's a topic that bores me, I probably won't write it.  I've stepped up the exercise a little, and I'm just trying to not overeat. And to make healthier food choices.  It's working pretty well so far-- I finally did weigh myself last week and I'm already back down to the same weight I've been for several years now.  But I wouldn't mind seeing if I can ditch ten pounds or so.  I still wouldn't even be back to the weight I was before my now-13-year-old son was born, but I would probably feel better.

This was actually going to go in a different direction when I started, but maybe I will save that post for tomorrow because this one has already gone on too long.

abeyance

This summer has been full of opposites, some of them real, some that exist only in my head.  Three days with my dad, then three days with my mom.  A morning spent at the Christian camp I used to attend as a kid, experiencing in a brief period some of both the best and the worst of the religion of my childhood:  best-- that soaring sense of joy and community that comes with corporate worship; worst-- the slick, overprocessed packaging of something that was never meant to be smooth and glossy.  A fun, relaxing week spent with my conservative, religious extended family, followed shortly by a fun, relaxing week with my husband's secular, more sophisticated family (with my family, we made it through about a six-pack and a half of Mike's Hard Lemonade in the entire week.  With my husband's family, every day my brother-in-law would start making the gin and tonics about 4:50-- or as my husband says of his brother's work, GIN and tonics).  My dad proving once again that he only sees what he wants to see when he looks at me; my husband heading straight for the computer when I told him there was a new blog post I wanted him to read sometime in the next few days.  My dad's terminal illness; the wedding of some dear friends' daughter, whom we've known since she was 3, and the beginning of her new married life.

It's been very nearly dizzying at times.  All summer I've been rocking back and forth between the two poles I talked about earlier this year, the poles of belief and disbelief, of some sort of loosely interpreted theism versus atheism tempered by spiritual awareness.  but cheery-o (thank god for cheery-o) said something in an e-mail that has helped me out here.  I don't even remember exactly how she phrased it, but it made me realize that whichever pole I'm occupying at any particular moment, the underlying impulse is the same.  The impulse to experience .......... oh, yuck, I'm trying to think how to say this without sounding pious and I can't figure out how to do that so I'm just plunging ahead anyway. The impulse to open myself to experience, the desire to find something outside myself that resonates with what is authentic within me.  I guess I'm back to what I've been saying all along, which is just that I'm trying to learn how to experience the spiritual side of who I am without needing an intellectual explanation of what it means, of what the dogma surrounding it "should" be, without needing definitions and a catechism to explain it all.

I'm wondering if maybe this is what Keats meant when he talked about negative capability:  "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."   (googled that)  I had forgotten about it until it came up in briefly in one of the classes I took last fall.  Unfortunately, it was an idea he didn't develop much, it is only mentioned briefly in a letter to his brother.  Interesting, yes?  I think of it as being in abeyance, suspended between thoughts.  Waiting for the chord to resolve, and trying to learn not to need it to resolve.  Living in the moment without reference to past or future (Tolle).  Or to put it in Buddhist terms, learning to shut off my monkey mind and just sit with whatever comes up.

not sure where I'm going with this, just rambling.  I start classes next week, so it seemed like a good moment to look back over the summer.

It Starts. (aka Orientation)

I'm sitting in the atrium of the student center at the university, having just gone through the one-hour orientation session the English Department held for incoming master's students.  I'm trying to remember what kind of orientation we had the last time I did this, and since I've already admitted how old I am, I will even confess that it was in 1983.  But I can't remember.  It was too long ago.

I do remember a woman named Mary from that program.  She was probably in her early forties--younger than I am now--but to me at age 22, fresh out of undergrad, she was ancient.  The ink was barely dry on her divorce.  She had a couple of teenage kids.  And she was so, so excited to be in graduate school.  It was the kind of excitement of someone who has been given a Get Out of Jail Free card and is looking about in wonder and amazement that all of this has been here all along, while she was slaving through whatever it was she had done before.

We were not fans of Mary, those of us who were young and smugly, unknowingly arrogant about where we were going and what we were doing (even if we weren't exactly sure what that was).  Even though she was older than us, she seemed naive and backward in a way that made us uncomfortable to be associated with her.  She asked breathless questions. She could often be found after class talking earnestly to the professor about who knows what.  If the professor assigned a 5-7 page paper, she wrote 18 and handed it in bound in a formal report cover.  If we were supposed to read Tom Jones, she read Joseph Andrews, too, "for perspective." The rest of us were still thoroughly of the undergrad mindset where one does the least amount of work possible to achieve the desired grade.  We had Things To Do.  We were Busy and Active and Involved. She seemed, honestly, a little pathetic.

You can probably already guess where this is headed, because oh, yes, I have become Mary.  (Except that I will never write a paper that's longer than it's supposed to be.  Not my thing.)(oh, yeah, and I'm still married.)  It's a funny feeling.  I want to tell them that even though I don't know the buzzwords that let everyone know that you are in with the cool crowd, I am a smart person.  I am not a complete loser.  I have raised children, I have filed my own taxes, I have owned a home (three of them), I have held jobs and made money and been a productive member of society.  But I know it's useless, because I remember how I looked at Mary.  There is nothing she could have done that would have convinced me that she was One of Us.

OK.  so now that I've gotten that out of my system.  I should also say:  it's not so bad.  I don't mean to whine.  I'm not here to socialize.  I can just keep my head down and do my work and get it done.  Oh, wait, I forgot where I live.  That should have been "get 'er done."  *smirk*

So.  orientation.  It was, for the most part, a description of the timeline we should (ideally) follow if we plan to complete the MA in two years-- which I would like to do.  So it was useful.  A little intimidating, but useful. I'm not planning on setting the world on fire or coming up with any original insights that will recalibrate my field of study, I'm planning on finding a topic that interests me and researching the heck out of it and writing it up.  (get 'er done, right?).   So sticking with the timeline would actually be a good thing.  Now I just have to find a topic.

to speak or not to speak

And if your first thought on reading the last two posts was, "Oh, poor thing, she is going to get crucified in graduate school," all I can say is: the same thought has occurred to me.  But I do know how to keep my mouth shut.  Sometimes it's not a choice-- if I open my mouth to speak in class, chances are good to excellent that I will draw a complete blank on what I was going to say, or fumble it so badly that I make no sense, which tends to make one very wary about speaking up in public.  But sometimes it's a decision you make to protect yourself.  The chances of me turning the tide on this issue as a lone graduate student at a somewhat obscure university in the northern rockies are slim to none, so what's the point of making myself look like an idiot?  And besides, I do understand the shock value of raising this point with kids who are 20 years old and have never thought about gender issues in any serious way before.  I can't exactly say I think it's a bad idea.

mum's the word, I guess.

But it brings up the whole issue of "speaking your truth," as they call it.  I'm really bad at this, by the way.  A therapist pointed this out to me years ago (I should keep a count of how often that phrase appears in this blog) in marriage counseling.  I have a really hard time just saying what I'm thinking or feeling, let alone wanting or needing.  She called this "reporting out."  You have to say what's in your head, "report" it to your partner, because they can't read your mind.  Those of us who are introverts and are used to thinking, thinking, thinking a million miles a minute without telling anyone anything have a hard time switching gears and realizing that sometimes for the sake of the person/people you're with, you just need to say what you're thinking.

A corollary of this is a core belief that my opinions don't matter.  I could easily try to pin this on my fundamentalist upbringing (where ignoring your own perceptions about life and the world is so much taken for granted that it might as well have been something they put in the water), but mainly I think it has to do with your personality.  Some people are just born thinking that their opinions matter.  Even when they're well aware that it's just an opinion and that other people might disagree, they have no problem believing that it's important for other people to know what they think.  That would not be me.  I have this blog where I type out my little two cents, but one of the main reasons why there are so few posts from the last couple of years is that it's so hard for me to believe that it matters if I say what I think.  And if you got me in person and tried to talk about any of this stuff, it would be like pulling teeth.

Is this going anywhere?  It doesn't appear to be, but in fact, there was a point I wanted to make when I sat down to edit this post, besides telling you all sorts of random things about my brain that you didn't want to know.  Which was:  a couple of years ago, I heard a poet in a panel discussion say something to the effect that our perceptions are the only thing we have that is truly our own (excuse plural/singular problem but that's the way I want to say it).  The thought floored me for some reason.  It comes to mind frequently.  And to loop this back up to the place where this post started (see, I told you it was going somewhere), it gives me an enormous sense of empowerment to know that a) my perceptions are MINE, dammit, and you can't take that away from me, and b) I can CHOOSE when I want to share those perceptions and when I don't.  I can choose to share my difference of opinion with my husband because I love him and even though we might disagree in the short term, for the long term health of our relationship, he needs to know how I feel.  I can choose NOT to share my opinions in a classroom setting because a) I know I'm not going to change the professor's mind, b) even though I disagree, I do understand the issue and I don't need to have it re-argued for the umpteenth time, and c) I don't want to look like an idiot.

Apologies for all the a)s, b)s, and even a c) this time.  I got on a roll there.

in which aunt BeaN beats a dead horse

I actually woke up thinking about this this a.m., so I'm going to type it out so I can get it out of my head.  But I'm having a really hard time figuring out how to make my point.

So.  Try this.  Let's say you tell a group of older women that women in their twenties are more attractive to men than women in their fifties.  You lay out the biological reasons why this is (supposedly) true:  women in their twenties are potential producers of children, so on average they are more attractive because their ability to attract men ensures the survival of the species.  After most of your group of older women cringe inwardly and think, "Oh, God, I know, I know" (kidding), there are the following reactions.  One goes out and gets plastic surgery and starves herself into oblivion and manages to look ten or fifteen years younger than she is.  One goes out and finds a dozen gorgeous 50-year-olds and a dozen unattractive 25-year-olds, lines them up, and says, "SEE? It's not true."  Another takes the opposite tack and searches (to the ends of the earth) for the five men on the planet who think older women are more attractive than younger women. (kidding!  kidding!)  One finds a 50-year-old woman who is having a baby and says, "See?  Your point about the biology is wrong."  But one of them says, "So what?   Maybe it's true, but I'm happier now than I was when I was 25, I take better care of myself, and I like the way I look.  Big deal."  And she ignores the whole thing and walks out.

So which one has done the most to subvert the cultural bias about women's attractiveness?  The last one, of course.  At the very least, she's the happiest and most content of the lot.  The others are all consciously or unconsciously shoring up the idea that it matters whether or not older or younger women are more attractive.  And that's how this argument (the one from the previous post) feels to me.  We feminists, when we argue so vociferously that there is no biological basis for the cultural differences between the genders, are unconsciously shoring up the idea that those differences are important, that it matters that men are (or are not) stronger or taller than women beyond the bare statement of the fact.  OK, so (usually) men are stronger than women.  That has no bearing on anything outside of a situation where physical strength makes a difference.  Like when I need help to lift a cooler full of drinks and ice into the back of my car. :-)

???  let me know what you think.  I'm pretty sure there's a hole in my logic here somewhere but it's escaping me at the moment.

in which Aunt BeaN tries to dig herself out of a hole

I'm a middle-of-the-road sort of liberal, but I live in one of the most conservative areas of the conservative heartland.  An area where if you're even willing to have the word liberal used in your general vicinity, folks are pretty sure you're plotting with the United Nations to take over the world.  Around here, it is more common than not to be anti-government, anti-Democrat and especially anti-Obama, anti-choice, pro-gun and whatever other similar adjectives you can think of to string along there (though not necessarily Republican-- there was a lot of support for Ron Paul around here during the last election).  I've lived here for 18 years.  I have a lot of experience with being a liberal who lives in the midst of conservatives.  We moved here from an area that was drowning in universities-- I heard once that the town where we lived had the second highest per capita number of PhDs in the country.  So we were in the middle of the sort of academic liberalism that thrives in that kind of community, and we were part of it.  But when you move out of that environment and into the hinterlands, you discover that a lot of the stuff that makes complete sense in an academic environment doesn't make any sense at all to those who haven't been indoctrinated to think that way.  (Although I detest many of the things that Ann Coulter says, she has a point about liberal academia that I don't think you get while you're in the midst of it, because you're so caught up in how right it is, how things should be.  Or at least I was.  I guess I shouldn't speak for anybody else.)

So anyway.  The point I'm trying to make here is that there are things that have become commonplace to say among feminists/liberals that just don't play in the rest of the world.  And when you say them, you leave yourself wide open for a Glenn Beck follower or an Ann Coulter devotee to make mincemeat out of you.  and I think this is one of them.  If you say "There is no biological basis for gender differences," all they have to do is point out that women have wombs and men have Y chromosomes, and many physical characteristics (like strength and height and muscle mass) have definite bell curves that tend toward one gender or the other--all of which are things that are going to have an effect on behavior.  Not to mention the fairly well documented evidence for what happens when you pump lab rats full of testosterone or estrogen, each of which is more prominent in one gender or the other.

So if you want to say that "the genetic state of being male (or female) has so many infinitely different ways of being expressed in any individual person's life that there's really no point in trying to define a set of biologically based gender traits," you've made a good, valid observation and one that is worth thinking about.  Your conservative friend might disagree with you but you could have a really interesting conversation about it.  But that's a different thing than saying that gender traits have no basis in biology.

Does that make sense?  I'm honestly not sure about this issue, and I am fascinated by it.  Let me know what you think.  You can always comment anonymously, or you can e-mail me or call if you don't feel comfortable posting.  I think there is going to be a follow-up to this sometime in the next couple of days because I didn't say everything I started out wanting to say, but I think this is all for now.

feminism, the ongoing adventures

So I wrote those posts about feminism* earlier this year, and then wasn't happy with them because they didn't seem like quite what I wanted to say, but I never really figured out how to fix them, so I just moved on.  But on one of my many trips this summer, it occurred to me that the problem I was having was that I wanted to write one post about feminism and have it say everything I wanted to say.  In hindsight, that is silly, because it's a huge, complex topic with many different ways that it impacts my life and the way I think.  It has to be an ongoing conversation, and it will be, not the least because I'm taking two classes this fall that will involve feminist literary criticism.  So I decided to put those posts back in place (two of them had been moved), create a label for posts on feminism, and turn it into an ongoing discussion.

But I hadn't gotten around to either doing that or saying that when the issue of gender morality turned up on LucyMarch.com today.  I plunged in and stated my case badly and probably in a way that was offensive to some, so I'm feeling the need to say more.  So .... I'm working on the next installment in the conversation, which is just one more of what is sure to be many.  it should be up later tonight or tomorrow.

and a postscript, as long as I'm talking about blognews.  At one point I had decided to move literary stuff-- including my grad school adventures-- to another blog.  But over the summer, I've decided that I don't have the energy to manage two blogs, so I bagged that idea.  Plus there wouldn't be much left over to post about here, since I'm betting that being in school this fall is going to take up most of my energy.  So just in case you caught that post (which is now deleted), NEVER MIND.

* and btw, when you click on one of the labels, you get the posts that have been tagged with that label in reverse order (in other words, most recent first).  So if you want to read them in order, you have to start at the bottom and read up, so to speak.  I've tried to figure out how to change this, but according to blogger's help center, there's no way around this at present.

functional what?

Cheery-O has a fascinating post up right now about "functional atheism."  It's a Parker Palmer phrase.  He uses functional atheism to describe someone who says all the right things about believing in God, but then acts as if God doesn't exist.  In other words, s/he might acknowledge publicly that God is in control, but then acts as if nothing will happen if we don't do it ourselves.  I may not have described that very well.

So he's using the word "functional" to describe someone's actual beliefs as displayed in the way they act, rather than what they say they believe.  Which then, of course, got me thinking about what my own "functional" beliefs would be.  If you didn't have access to any of my stated beliefs, but you just followed me around for a few days (sadly for you, the main thing it would be is boring), if you were watching my walk and not my talk, how would you then describe my beliefs?  and let me tell you, that is one scary train of thought.  I would go on to describe what you might see, but it's a little too embarrassing.  It's worth thinking about, though.

in which I wallow, but only for a moment

As I've said about a gazillion times, we've been out of town or out of internet-range or just dadgum busy a lot this summer.  So I haven't been keeping up with some of the things on the web that I usually check on a regular basis.  I had skimmed through enough a couple of days ago to realize that there had been quite a-- um, well for lack of a better word-- brouhaha in the one blog community I read daily, but I didn't have time to read through the comments, and I hadn't really figured out what happened.  So this morning I sat down and spent a couple of hours reading through a whole bunch of posts.  The stuff from this week was so interesting that I never even made it to last week when I was actually out of town.

One of the things that fascinates me most is how this group of women (and it is mostly women, though there are a few brave guys that occasionally post) are all engaging exactly the same issues that I've been working through myself.  On the one hand, this is comforting (I'm not alone), and it is also encouraging (I hope it is indicative of a sea change that's going on in a far broader context of how women see themselves and the world).  There are probably a couple dozen that post regularly, and another couple dozen that post occasionally, and who knows how many more who read but never post-- that's at least a couple hundred women who are out there thinking about this stuff.  Watching all those interactions is what has me hooked on reading this blog.  Lucy, the owner of the blog, is amazing, funny, and wise, but it is the community of responses in all their amplifications, disagreements, asides, snickers, and differing perspectives that is what really makes it worth reading.  And it astonishes me how often the issues expressed are almost exactly the same things I've been thinking about, too.  If I didn't already believe in some sort of collective unconscious, this would probably do it.

But on the other hand, in terms of my own blog, it is discouraging.  Because I have this very strong feeling of "What's the point?" now about several of the posts I've been meaning to write.  When we got back from vacation last weekend, I actually sat down and made a list of half a dozen posts I'd thought up while I was sitting at the beach and watching the waves roll, and only one of them hasn't been covered in some way over at that community.  And of course, since there is an entire community of women built up over there, they've said it far better, more eloquently, more wittily, and with more perspective than I will ever have.  I don't think it's jealousy--I'm familiar with that one, and this doesn't feel like that.  I just feel discouraged.

Which is odd.  I'm trying to sort through this and figure out why I should keep going.  I mean, I'm probably not going to quit, because I've had a blog for almost seven years now, so obviously there is something about it that works for me.  But it's hard for me to expect anyone to want to read it.  If it's just derivative, just re-hashing the same old things that someone else is doing better, then what's the point?  I can't tell you how many times over the past six months I've thought about closing down this blog and starting another one that nobody knows about so I can be boring and derivative and no one will have to know or be bothered about it.  Which is SO bizarre.  I mean, what would be the point of THAT?  Just blogging to the universe, with no one to read it?

And when I had that thought, I sat there practically with my jaw hanging open and realized-- is that what this does for me?  is it a substitute for prayer?  I'm spilling my guts out there and hoping that God gets it?  Oh. My. Gosh.

Well, OK, that is original.  Nobody said that over there.  lol.  ok, now I'm cracking myself up.

AB
I turned off comments on this post because the last thing I want is for my poor readers to feel compelled to boost my sagging ego.

OK, I picked a bad day to link.  I will fix it to a better one sometime soon..  Hope no one was offended by the inanity.

climbing out of the victim rut

This post has been bouncing around in my head on and off for months now.  I haven't written it yet because there are so many things to say that I just don't even know where to start.  But a couple of nights ago I stood in line at Baskin Robbins behind a woman who was picking up a birthday cake and I watched her react in the classic victim mode, so I thought that would at least be a place to start.

I've been in therapy for many years, but other than a "checkup" appointment last fall, I haven't really been in therapy for years now--probably at least five or six, and if you don't count marriage counseling, it's been more like ten.  But I've had several wonderful, wise therapists over the years and their words bounce around in my head all the time.  One therapist years ago pointed out to me that I often react like a victim in situations where I really am not a victim.  So, something happens that I perceive as negative or not in my favor, and instead of doing something about it, I (essentially) pout.  I go into Mute Outrage mode.  Inside I'm thinking, "You shouldn't treat me like that, that's not fair, that's not right, you are a mean person," but on the outside I'm doing nothing and saying nothing.  I'm not proud of this, believe me.  But I'm not going to be able to say what I want to say if I don't 'fess up here.

So this woman right in front of me in line is picking up a birthday cake.  It was kinda late, about 8:30 or 9 p.m., and I was there with six kids who just wanted ice cream cones.  It was busy, as Baskin Robbins always is on summer nights, and we'd been standing in line for about 10 minutes-- not a terribly long time, but long enough that no one was anxious to prolong the experience.  So she asks for her birthday cake, and the guy at the counter, who turns out to be the manager on duty although he couldn't have been any older than 25, goes back to get it.  The cake had been made, but it hadn't been decorated.  The woman purses her lips, and says, "Well, I need to have it decorated," and the guy apologizes but explains that the person who does the decorating has already left for the day and there was no one there to decorate it.  The woman purses her lips again and does a sort of silent fume thing.  The guy tries to make a joke about how there is no way she would want him to decorate it since it would be a disaster.  Then the woman turns to me, and says furiously, "It was supposed to be ready. I called them yesterday and ordered a decorated cake."  I kind of half-smiled at her helplessly, because there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, and I wasn't sure exactly how she expected me to respond.  The manager is still standing there with the cake in his hand, waiting for her to decide what to do.  She kind of huffs and says something again about how it was supposed to be decorated, and then turns back to me again.  I wondered what she expected me to do?  Was I supposed to take up the fight for her?  join her in her outrage?  There was no way I was going to walk out of there in support of her when I have six kids with me who still want their ice cream and I don't know her from Adam.  So she gets this really disgusted look on her face, and spits out, "It's not much of a birthday cake if it's not decorated!" but she gets out her credit card and pays, muttering under her breath the whole time, then takes the cake and practically stomps out the door.

So in my head I'm thinking, OK, this is great practice.  She went right into Mute Outrage mode, but it's not me, so I can think about what I could have done differently without being emotionally involved in it.  The therapist in my head says what you should do is calmly and clearly state what you want/need, without backing off.  Calmly and clearly is the key-- so you're not being a bitch, you're just stating the way you see the situation and what would make it OK for you.  So, she could have said (politely), "I ordered a decorated cake.  This cake is not decorated.  I expect a discount."  Or she could have said (politely), "This is not what I ordered, so I'm not going to buy it," and left without it.  If she was experienced at this, of course, or if it never occurred to her to go into victim mode, she could have taken advantage of the situation and demanded the cake for free, but I'm never going to be able to pull that off--that would have involved making a huge fuss and holding up the line for another ten minutes while she argued it out with the manager.  I'm not interested in that kind of response, although I can understand why some people go there.

But it wasn't until I was driving around today that another possibility occurred to me, which is the one that immediately made the most sense.  She could have just let it go.  She could have realized that getting your cake decorated is a small thing, paid for the cake, picked up a tube of decorator frosting at the grocery store and done it herself.  Or if she needed it right then, she could have chopped up a couple of candy bars and sprinkled them over, or some M&Ms, or crushed up Oreos.  Or she could have just showed up with an undecorated cake.  The thing is, when you are habituated to respond as a victim as I seem to be, you get a little paranoid.  If something happens that doesn't go your way, you think you're being mistreated.  But sometimes there's not a problem.  Sometimes it's just life and it's no big deal.

I think it's a little embarrassing that I'm only learning this at age 49 (because yes I did turn 49 a couple of weeks ago). But you know, I'm pretty sure that the woman with the birthday cake was at least a year or two older than me, so at least I'm not alone.  There's more to say about this topic, but that's all for now.

AB
p.s. obviously the manager could have responded differently (and more helpfully), but that's besides the point for this discussion-- you can't change the other person, right?  you can only change how you respond.  and just for the record-- he couldn't discount the amount of the decorations because apparently if you buy the cake, having birthday greetings written on it is free.

the caffeine addict

I have migraines.  I wrote about that quite a bit in my first blog, because that was back in the days when I was having "chronic" migraines (which, if I remember right, is defined as 15 or more migraine days per month, and I had months with 20-24.  Ugh.  It was awful).  I'm not sure why they were so bad back then, but I'm grateful those days are over.  I think it might have just been exhaustion-- I enjoy my children more and more as they get older, and the early days were, shall we say, not pretty.  I was definitely not one of those moms who treasured the baby days.  Give me a houseful of teenagers any day.  Wait, I'm getting off topic here.

So anyway.  For awhile, I was so grateful not to be having "chronic" migraines that I didn't mind that I was still having 8-10 a month.  But a couple of years ago, I got tired of even that and decided I had to do something, so I got off caffeine.  I've written about this before, so I won't go into detail here, but it was an unpleasant experience.  For awhile, I couldn't really tell if it had made a difference, because getting off caffeine (of course) resulted in having quite a few more, and more severe, migraines than I was having before.  But after I'd been off for a few months, I started to notice that although I was still having migraines, they were less frequent and much less severe.  In fact, by the time I'd been off a year, I was down to 5-6 days per month, and those were usually easily handled with a maxalt and half a percocet.  I still had migraines, but they were no longer debilitating.

But the thing is, I really miss coffee.  And iced coffee and lattes, and mochas, and frappucinos.  And Diet Dr. Pepper and iced tea.  And I never did give up chocolate, although I try not to eat it very often.  So I've been somewhat careless about the whole caffeine thing, I admit.  It was difficult to take it very seriously, because I was still having migraines, for one thing, and because there was never a direct correlation between ingesting caffeine and having headaches.  I would not have caffeine for a week or so, and then have some, and nothing would happen.  It didn't really seem to make much difference.

This summer I've been travelling a lot, and that's when it's hardest to avoid caffeine.  But since it didn't seem to make that much difference, I wasn't too worried.  By the time I returned from the second trip in early July, I had had caffeine every day for about ten days.  And-- I shouldn't have been surprised-- I was having headaches almost every day again.  Not too terribly severe, but bad enough.  So when I got back on a Sunday, I decided I had to get strict about it again, and by Wednesday, I was in bed all day.  It was that bad.

After two weeks of no caffeine at all (and no headaches), I had some on Sunday. And once I'd had some I figured it didn't matter if I had more, so I actually had, um....., well......, quite a bit.  Monday I was fine, but today I woke up with a migraine-- a fairly bad one, that has not responded well to the usual meds.

So.  It's finally occurring to me that I really can't have caffeine.  I'm slow.  It should have been obvious.  I hate it.  I want to whine and complain.  Everyone else can have caffeine, why can't I?  But there it is.  Grow up, AB.  thank goodness Diet Dr Pepper comes in Caffeine Free.

Reading Report - July 2010

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (which will be shelved in the SciFi/Fantasy section, although it is neither in any traditional sense).  I don't remember when I first became aware of Gaiman-- I know when I first saw Good Omens, the novel he co-write with Terry Pratchett, that I knew who Pratchett was but all I knew about Gaiman was that he wrote Sandman, the landmark comic from the 90s.  Then a couple of years ago I read Stardust after loving the movie made from it, and last summer I read and enjoyed Neverwhere.  So last fall I ordered American Gods, but I didn't get around to reading it until I picked it up to take with me on vacation last week.  It's the story of a man the reader knows only as Shadow, who finishes his three-year stint in prison just a few days after his beloved wife is killed in a car accident.  He takes a job working for a man known as Wednesday, and what follows is the complicated, many-layered story of Wednesday's efforts to unite the old gods, the gods immigrants brought with them from the old country, in a fight against the new gods, the gods of commercialism and television and high speed travel.  It's a brilliant idea, and Gaiman carries it off well.  Shadow works perfectly as the touchstone, the moral centerpiece of the whole thing. He doesn't really understand what's going on (nor does the reader until near the end), but he maintains his integrity in a way that is both stoic and warmhearted.  He is utterly endearing. Four stars out of five-- it would be five except that occasionally the story nearly collapses under the weight of its portentousness (is that a word?).  (defintion of portentous, kyped from yourdictionary.com: ominous; arousing awe or amazement; marvelous; ponderous or pompous; self-important which is pretty much exactly what I want but in noun form).

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.  I've read it before, I'll read it again.  Pride and Prejudice is still my favorite, but this one is a close second.  How can you rate a classic?  It's off the scale.

Last Exit to Normal by Michael B. Harmon (YA).  I found this one while poking around on Amazon and looking for something for my son to read instead of re-reading Harry Potter for the fourth or fifth time.  Last Exit is probably a bit old for him, but it sounded so intriguing that I ordered it for myself.  It's about a 17-year-old kid named Ben whose life imploded four years ago when his dad announced that he was gay and his mom moved out.  Ben has acted out by smoking (cigarettes and pot), drinking, and generally becoming a troubled teen.  When the story opens, Ben, his dad Paul, and his dad's boyfriend Edward are in the process of moving back to Rough Butte, Montana, Edward's hometown.  I could quibble a bit about his depiction of a small town in Montana (since I live in one, too).  And Harmon makes Ben into such an interesting, terrific kid that it's difficult to understand sometimes why his dad is so mad at him (a question a teen reading this would probably not ask since adult anger probably always seems inexplicable).  But those are small things.  This is one fascinating story.  It would be a great book to throw to a bunch of intelligent, opinionated teenagers and just sit back and listen to them hash it out.  All kinds of issues are raised about parenting, responsibility, homophobia, loyalty, and friendship.  If I were a teenager reading it, I'm sure I would think it was one of the best books I'd ever read.  But as an adult, and particularly as a mom, it was so frustrating that none of the adults in Ben's life would step up to the plate and take care of him.  Good grief.  I could go on and on here-- and I probably will because this book will show up in at least one other post-- but I guess I'll stop for now.  It occurred to me that the author probably still relates more strongly to the teens in his stories than the adults, or maybe he just tells the story that way because he is writing for teens.  But I would have loved to know what was going on in the minds of Paul and Edward (who is in some ways the most interesting character in the book), not to mention his mom, who barely appears.  Four stars.

and on the plane:  My Lord and Spymaster by Joanna Bourne (historical romance).  I loved Bourne's first novel, The Spymaster's Lady, and I thought this one would be either a sequel or something similar.  But although they share a couple of minor characters, this one is quite different.  Jess Whitby is the daughter of a shipping magnate who has been imprisoned because the authorities think he is the infamous spy who goes by the name of Cinq.  Jess is determined to find out who Cinq really is to clear her father's name (and save his life).  It perfectly filled the bill of keeping me absorbed on the plane, but I didn't like it nearly as well as Spymaster's Lady.  The hero has almost no personality beyond the fact--which is brought up (ark) again and again -- that he is instantly and constantly aroused in the heroine's presence.  But Jess is fascinating, and the most interesting part of the book is her backstory, which is revealed bit by bit as the novel progresses.  Three stars.

a note on ratings:  I used to do stars, then I stopped doing reading reports at all for awhile.  When I started back up, I switched to grades (A to F), but I'm going back to stars.  It just feels too uncomfortable to give grades to published authors who are way better writers than me, no matter how I feel about their books.

Progress

A good thing happened today.  I spent the day with my dad and his wife at the hospital and I learned something I needed to know.  For years now, I've had as little to do with my dad as possible.  There were a couple of years back in my mid-thirties when I literally wasn't speaking to him.  It wasn't because I was mad at him, although I was, it was because I needed a break.  He's so intense, and being around him was so difficult for me, that it would take days to recover my equilibrium after spending time with him.  I just wanted some time off.  I kept up with him through my mom and my sisters (this was before my parents divorced), but I didn't see him or speak to him for a couple of years.

But even once we were back in touch, I never spent more than a day or two around him.  We'd have dinner with him, or we'd be at some big family gathering. Once or twice we spent the night at his new house once he remarried.  I'd be around him just long enough to realize, "Yup, he's still the same old guy he's always been," and then I'd be glad I didn't have to be around him much anymore.  Times have changed now.  His wife needs our support, no matter how I feel about him.  So the visit I made here earlier this month, and now this one, are the first times in a dozen years I've been around him for any length of time.  And I'm discovering that I'm stronger than I think. I've grown up a lot.  Which is such a relief, because I'm frickin' 48 years old.  Thank GOD.

There was that moment yesterday, which was indeed painful.  It cut right through to the core of the little girl I once was, confused and hopeful and trying to please, but just never quite getting him to see me.  But today, I spent the entire day with him, and even though he's still the same guy, he still makes cracks about women that are borderline offensive, he still looks at me and sees someone who is not even remotely related to how I see myself-- even though all of that is still true, it was OK.  I sat there with them, and we chatted between the blood draws, or sat and read, or watched Wimbledon, and I was fine.  I could handle it.  I wasn't terrified that he would somehow be able to undermine who I am, which I think is what used to scare me to death about him.  He was such a strong person, and had such an influence over me, and the way he saw me and saw the world were not at all how I saw things. It seemed like the "real" me was erased whenever I spent time with him.  But he can't do that anymore, because there's too much of who I am for him to erase now.  Ha. I guess I have my own columnar self now.

Cuteness is as cuteness does

One of the things I disliked about growing up in the south is the cute thing.  There are many ways that women can be in the South, but one of the favorites is cute, in a way that would be entirely unacceptable if you lived in, say, New York City or Seattle.  Southerners love perky women, adorable women.  And they probably wouldn't use the word "women" in this context, but I'm so used to it that I can't imagine a different way to say it.  Maybe gals.  I remember the first time I moved out of the south, it was such a relief to be able to dump the whole cute thing.  I suppose everyone has their cute moments, but generally speaking, I am not cute.  I am definitely not perky.  In my natural state, I'm kind of grumpy and prickly.  And I'm not talking about looks here.  Although being physically adorable helps, cuteness is a State of Mind.

My dad has always loved women--ladies, gals-- who were cute and perky.  The cynical side of me wants to add: women who catered to him, buttered him up, flirted with him and teased with him.  He also liked women who were "tiny."  It was the adjective he used most often to describe women whom he found attractive.  But my mom, my sisters and I are not tiny.  We are not huge, and none of us is really overweight, but we are relatively tall-- all four of us within an inch of  5'7"-- and we are not reed thin.  We were never described as tiny.

My dad's second wife is tiny. She is funny, lovely both within and without, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a laugh that you can hear from the other side of the house.  I don't in any way mean to criticize her; her generosity of spirit and her utter zest for life come through in everything she does.  But she is about 5'2" and can't weight any more than 105 soaking weight.  She is tiny, and cute, and at times you could even call her perky.  She comes by it honestly; she is a naturally extroverted, bubbly person.  And my dad finally has what he always wanted.  He said to me today, "She gets her hair up in a ponytail and gets in her Jeep [convertible], and she's the cutest thing in town."

And on the one hand, while part of me can get angry about the absurdity of a man who is 78 years old who still wants his wife to be "the cutest thing in town," another part of me has to admit it hurts.  I'll even admit to being jealous.  I wish to hell I could say that I'm beyond all that, I have my own self-esteem, it doesn't matter what he thinks, but it would only be partially true.  All those years that I tried and tried to please him, tried to twist and mold myself into being the kind of woman that he would admire.  I didn't always know exactly what it was that would do it, but I tried.  And it turns out all he wanted was something my sisters and I could/can never be.  Someone tiny and cute and adorable.  Someone not us.  He is happy with her.  He was not happy with us.

I can rage about it and I can be mad about how unfair it is, but I can't change it.  And after I let myself feel the anger and the jealousy and the unfairness of it, I just have to let it go.  I've been in therapy, I've read Oprah Magazine and plenty of self-help books.  I know how this works.  He is who he is.  It is far too late to change him.  He is happy with his cute, adorable wife, whom I love very much.  And I'm so, so glad that pleasing my dad is no longer high on my priority list.

So I'm feeling the pain and letting it go.  Wish me luck.

I typed out my last two weeks so you could see why I haven't posted, but then I thought:  new low.  Not doing it.  So I highlighted it and backspaced (remember when you whited things out?) and you'll just have to trust me, I have had no time.  And now, I'm about to leave and go South for another week.  Then when I get back, I'll have one week to finish up plans for a week-long family reunion involving 35-ish people that will be here (although we're having it at a conference center so I don't have to cook!  yay!), and then a few days after that, we're heading to the east coast for a week with my husband's family.

So I guess I'm on hiatus until August.  See you then.

I just got back from a 6 day jaunt to the land of my youth.  It started out a couple of months ago as a chance to see my younger sister's kids, including my nephew who just graduated from high school, while she and her husband went off to celebrate their 25th anniversary.  Then my dad got sick, and the trip got extended to include a side trip to visit him for a couple of days.  Which ended up including a trip back to the Christian camp where I was either a camper or a summer staff member from the time I was 13 until I was 20.  It was exhausting and exhilarating and amazing and........ exhausting.  I just got off the treadmill (which included 25 minutes at 7% incline, which I only do when I really need to work off some steam) where I decided it was like being on a rollercoaster with a steamroller drum attached, so you are utterly flattened by the time you swoop through the nadir and start climbing back up, then you pop back up like a cartoon character and get ready for the next run.  Plenty of fodder for posts in there, but I don't know how much time I'll have to think it through in the next few days since I am now way behind in the class I'm auditing and will have the quite the time getting caught up.

A couple of brief impressions, though.  my almost-18-yr-old nephew was amazing.  Of course I didn't tell him any of the cartloads of past shit I could have if he was going to understand all of the implications of what was going on, and he is thankfully exactly like every other 18-year-old and didn't really want to know.  But he was utterly supportive in his own completely unknowing way.  We spent about 24 hours at my younger sister's house, then about 24 hours with my dad, then 24 hours with my older sister, then another 24 hours with my dad, and then drove back to my younger sister's house for the last day (I told you it was wild!).  After the first stretch at my dad's house, which was difficult to say the least, I got in the car and my nephew ran back in to get something he had forgotten.  by the time he came back out, I had the stereo blasting Sleigh Bells as loud as I could without blowing the speakers on my sister's car, and he took it right in stride.  When i told him I needed a dairy queen (because sometimes a blizzard is just what you have to have), he just laughed, got out the tomtom, and found me one.  How amazing is that?  How do you even find a dairy queen on a tomtom?  What would we do without these kids who know how to run all our technology?  He was so awesome.  I didn't get to see my younger sister on this trip because of the way our flights worked out, but she and her husband were there in the way they have raised him.

And my older sister, who is also amazing, who when I was sinking down into a mire of loss and regret and self-pity, reached in a hand and pulled me out in a matter of about twenty minutes with a late night conversation after we finally got all the kids in bed.  I'm so lucky to have the people I have in my life.

wow, that sounds really melodramatic, doesn't it?  Really, from the exterior, it was a very calm, lovely trip.  I'm pretty sure that other than my brief meltdown with my sister, I handled it pretty well.  But I'm going to be dealing with the fallout for awhile, I think.