The Old Familiar Problems, Just More…Absurd. June 9, 2009

I just really don’t know what to do with guys sometimes.  They’re kind of retarded.  If you don’t count that whole staying-home-with-the-kids thing, The Lawyer was really the only one I’ve been with who wasn’t completely clueless about life.  Long story (actually following) short, The Jerk is back and he’s writing me letters!  I mean, seriously!  At least I have good sense about me now, unlike I did, oh, a year ago.

He’s been IMing me like crazy lately, and it all revolves around some problems he’s been having (has had) with his wife (yup) and trying to decide what career he wants.  I swear, the guy changes his mind everyday.  Apparently, according to him, he’s past thinking about the “what if” of our relationship and has just learned to accept it.  Good, because I decided that a while ago.  Actually being with someone normal and compassionate can do that to a person.  But I think he’s been fighting with his wife most of the time, and so I guess he needs someone to talk to.  And now he’s writing letters, apparently trying revive that time in our lives when we were writing each other letters and felt really connected.  But I don’t feel really connected anymore, and writing him a letter just seems absurd to me.  I mean, granted, I am talking to him, and I’m not ignoring him or what not.  It’s not that I’m complaining about this, and I’m certainly not confused about what is going on.  I’m observing the fucked-upness of this situation.

He IMed me the other night to urge me to write him back.  He feels comfortable writing to me because I “know his soul.”  Which is true, I guess, in a way, because back in the day we did really understand each other in some strange way.  But it’s gone now.  Absolutely gone.  I can’t write to him like I did then, nor do I want to.  When I read his letter, I was reading it from a very unattached point of view.

I think what I feel is very sorry for him.  I knew that he was making a bad decision, but it wasn’t mine to make.  I feel sorry that he is so lost and unhappy and that he is having problems with the wife he hasn’t even been married to for a year yet.  I also feel kind of annoyed that when I talk to him on IM, he won’t let me get anything in, he just keeps talking and talking and talking about himself and the same problems.  He wants to feel like someone cares about him, I guess, and he probably thinks that person is me.  But it’s not.  I’ll listen to him when he IMs, but I’m not going to coddle him or write him passionate letters revealing my soul.  Perhaps I’ll write him a polite letter because we are friends, but I’m only doing that because I can now and it doesn’t hurt me anymore.  I wouldn’t be doing this if there was still some kind of emotional attachment there still.  I think we could’ve been happy together before everything went to shit, but then again, I don’t think things were supposed to not go to shit.  This is the kind of person he is, and I would not have been happy with that long term.  He wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, and I was not having that.  Apparently he’s still trying.  What he doesn’t realize is that I’ve been with someone who treated me far better than he ever did.  Sometimes I want to shove that in his face, but of course I won’t.

But anyway, boys are kinda dumb.  No commitments for me until I’m older and have found my place in life.  Not before then.  For now, I’ll just have fun with boys, which is apparently something I can actually do!  Life outside of Evangelical Institution is freaking awesome.  I never knew what I was capable of until now.  I know that sounds completely, um, retarded for me to be saying out loud, but I guess I just don’t really care because I’m having fun after years of practically being a nun.  And because of the fact that this blog has been super boring and depressing for the past few months, here are some fun anecdotes for you, who no longer reads this blog.

Last weekend, I went to a party with some people from my roommate’s school, and one of the guys there was flirting with me, which I noticed, and I did a little flirting back.  Nothing with any intentions, just fun.  When we started talking again, some other girl he knew was like “OMG!  You have that date tomorrow night!  What are you going to DO?”  And then that flirting died.  Then, later on in the evening, as I progressed through the jungle juice, I met a literature master’s person at local university.  We were talking about literature (of course) and about how it’s nice to finally talk to someone who isn’t trying to become a doctor.  We ended up exchanging phone numbers, and then my roommate was practically pushing me out the door to go to the Donut Dinette because that’s what he had been planning on doing after drinking.  Well, lit guy texted me while we were walking there and was pretty coherent in the first one, but it went downhill from there.  I should have known (because I was still coherent enough to be talking about my research area and getting annoyed when he kept saying “you have to do the dance” in reference to hoop-jumping in academia) that all people who attend local university are RETARDED.  This has been my general experience while living here.  I have neighbors who went/go there (retarded), and I know other people who did.  They’re retarded.  So when his texts started getting incoherent, I realized the error of my ways.

Then a few days later, the guy that I’ve been hooking up with calls me to invite me to another party.  We meet outside of the apartment and Hook Up Guy says, “so I hear that you were talking to Date Boy the other night.  He said he was flirting with you and then someone mentioned that he had a date and then you and your roommate started talking about it.”  Inwardly recognizing the hilarity of this situation (where Hook Up Guy is asking me if I was flirting with another guy) I just said, yeah sure.  So we walk into the party, and apparently Do the Dance Guy is there too.  So I’m like, crap, because I know that Hook Up Guy is going to want to hook up tonight, but Do the Dance Guy is going to be trying to do the same thing.  Awkward.  And Do the Dance Guy came through on this prediction.  He sees me come in and walks over and it begins.  He says “I’m so glad you’re here!  I didn’t think I would see you again!”  (I don’t think there’s  anything I hate more than guys who need to chill out initially and just back off a little).  Also, he starts asking me the exact same questions he did the other night, even including the phrase “you have to do the dance.”  At this point I’m still sober, so I’m not liking condescending questions like, “There’s been a lot of work done in that field; what are you doing to do to be original?”  Oh, so doing POSTCOLONIALISM on RUSHDIE at Retarded U.  is going to make you so original???  Ugh.  So I just start flirting a lot with Hook Up Guy and Do the Dance Guy gets the picture and starts getting kinda sulky.  Meanwhile, me and Date Guy are totally cool.  We were beer pong partners and gave the other guys a run for their money.  We didn’t win, alas.  Then on the way home, Hook Up Guy asks me if he’s really the one I wanted to come home with.  This might make me an asshole, but I find all of this completely amusing.  The end.

Fucking Moron March 8, 2008

Last week, this article appeared in the Washington Post.  The blogosphere has been going nuts about it, and rightly so, because it’s absolutely appalling.  It was written by Charlotte Allen, and after the uproar about her awful article, WaPo said that it was meant to be satiric.  It was most definitely NOT satiric.  I read the article a day or two after it came out, and I sent an email to Ms. Allen.  Granted, my little undergraduate mind can’t compare to a Harvard and Stanford grad, but I’m sure she was surprised to hear such vehement anger from an Evangelical Institution student, if she’s ever heard of the place.  Well, turns out she actually emailed me back, and here’s the exchange:

Ms. Allen,

This is a response to your article entitled “We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can We Get?” in the online version of the Sunday, March 2nd edition of the Washington Post.

My first question is: is this a serious article or some kind of satiric piece on the idea that women are naturally worth less than men because of their scientifically-proven smaller brains?  If it is the latter, I am not picking up the cues from your writing.  I’m going to assume that you, a woman, actually mean every word of what you say.

I think you’re writing from the premise that women are essentially sentimental and are constantly consuming books and entertainment that is worth less than what men consume.  Since this is one of your assumptions, how can you possibly admit that you admire a woman such as Elizabeth I, who, according to you is naturally dumber than the men she was commanding?  These “outliers” you talk about were actually part of their culture, not monastics who could create their own reality by separating themselves from their peers and culture and pretending to be a man.  I think you need to look into your literary history a little more, especially when you talk about Richardson, who happened to be a man writing a sentimental piece which was read by men in clubs who cried over it.  Don’t forget Dickens, who was also a man writing sentimental novels.  And who said that sentimentality has to be a bad thing?  Harriet Beecher Stowe got the United States to understand what slavery was like and she humanized the bodies being bought and sold.  She also created huge social and pragmatic change.

Also, you belittle your own academic career when you say that”I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men.“  You don’t think at all that you, as an individual, and not some evolutionary example of femaleness made your own way in your career?  If you think you should make a house a home, then why are you writing articles for the Washington Post?  Why do you even bother with a career at all?  Could you perhaps be using the idea that woman are naturally stupid as an excuse to publish a really awful article?  Even by admitting that there are some feminists who don’t know what the Oprah Winfrey Show is, you admit that there are women out there, despite their mental incapacity, who don’t go for the sentimental and generally stupid.  If you know who Mary Wollstonecraft is, you might understand that sometimes women’s tendency toward the “dim” is because they are trained to be that way by their culture (by articles like yours) even when they could be better.  Your article is actually making more stupid women, not to mention justifying all the misogynistic tendencies of the men who think that women should stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

People have fainted at Hillary rallies, too, and I’m pretty sure the fainting at Obama rallies was because of the heat, not because of Obama worship.  Don’t forget the 10-year-old child who fainted in California when Schwarzenegger was up front.

I support your effort as a woman to write and be heard in a nationally-recognized newspaper.  But, I do not support a poorly researched article which is counterproductive of your efforts and to all women with goals and with brains.

Ms. :

I don’t think you’ve read my article very carefully. We’ve had almost 40 years of movement feminism, indoctrinated at every level of education, so it’s difficult to understand how you can blame the “culture” for women’s acting dim. The culture of dimness has, alas, been created by women themselves.

Charlotte Allen 

I sent her an email back saying that, oh yes, of course she’s right; not only am I stupid, but my uterus is the reason why I can be passed off as hysteric when I have a real concern.  My ovaries secrete stupid hormones all day long.

Oh trust me, I read your article very, very carefully, and I got exactly what you said.  That’s why I was so angry.  “I don’t think you read my article very carefully” is a classic excuse for “I suck as a writer and don’t realize that my words can be interpreted differently than what I intended.”  She says that there’s nothing in the culture that allows women to act this way, but then she goes to say that women “created the culture of dimness.  What the fuck?  In other words, women are stupid.  I read your article carefully.  I can’t say the same for one of my profs, to whom I sent the article.  That particular prof, Dr. P, didn’t get it.  The other prof I sent it to was just as freaked out as I was.

Seriously, google Charlotte Allen and see how crazy this woman is/how pissed off the rest of the world is.

There Are Times When I Think Eugenics Would be a Good Thing March 6, 2008

I hate being in public spaces with stupid people.  Most of the time when I hear people saying moronic things, I want to either slap them across the face or yell at them and tell them never to speak again.  But alas, I am too nice or at least timid to do or say such things, so I just sit there and get angrier and occasionally direct angry faces in the stupid person’s direction.  I’ve been told my stare has powerful qualities, but most of the time the stupid people are too busy spouting off idiocy to notice.

 Evangelical Institution has masses and masses of stupid people.  I was on the campus-run bus line today and overheard two horrible conversations.  One was from a rather fat and ugly guy in glasses with a beard who, as I overheard him saying in a very loud, stupid voice, is a Communications major.  He was talking about how he wants to write a book by the “Common Man.”  According to him, his book would not even be original: he would just take a book by an “educated, learned” person and reinterpret it so that the “Common Man” would understand.  It would be his very own interpretation and he apparently doesn’t care if he is right or if no one agrees with him.  Who needs those educated people, right?  They’re just pompous windbags (much like this stupid person who was speaking) with nothing to say to the common folk.  Why not take some Derrida and make it his own?

The worst thing about the asinine conversations of stupid people is that they always think they need to talk as loud as they possibly can so that everyone in the room/bus/store can hear their brilliance and dedication to higher thought.  I swear that the volume is directly proportionate to the stupidity of the speaker.  You could even chart a z-line which would indicate the level of religiousity of the speaker.  Most stupid people at Evangelical Institution are some kind of major which involves religion.  Bonus points for being in seminary or other graduate institution related to religion.  I would rate the above stupid person among the highest echelons of stupidity based on his volume and the fact that he is applying to Evangelical Institution’s seminary if “nothing else works out.”

Now I must listen to possibly the most stupid professor who was ever given a doctorate degree.