I am in a bad dream

my brain splits
nerves are
burnt, numb

body sinks with every step
slow going
Jason's not chasing me

chopped nerves like a jellyfish
If I put it back in my head
it will make sense

dark seeps in
my brain
floats beside me

I am in a bad dream

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Chicks

So it seems to me that the situation for women hasn't changed much in the last three hundred years. This biggest difference is that we are no longer considered property of our fathers/husbands; we have legal autonomy. Still, with the all the pro-choice judges leaving the Sup Court and Roe v. Wade about to get overturned, our rights are going to be put second to the rights of a cluster of cells, because it's a "person," or will be soon. Nevermind that women are already people, and deserve to be respected and loved.

We have more career opportunities now, but it occurs to me that the real benefits for women in the workforce haven't really been realized yet, because men haven't really picked up the slack at home. Career women are constantly complaining about "balancing work and family," and you never hear a peep out of the men. Seems to me that these men need to grow a pair and start helping out around the house.

Also, women still bear the burden for bad marriages and relationships. If a man cheats, it's because he wasn't getting enough at home, or because his woman just wasnt' that pretty anymore. Or it could be becuase she's not fawning over him all the time, telling him he's great, or taking care of him as if he were a baby, because she has her own children to worry about. This was a commonly held view in the past, but it persists today--in addition to worrying about their careers, young women worry about relationships--how to get one, how to keep one, how to keep their men happy. I've rarely heard a young woman note that he wasn't making her happy, and that she decided to cut him loose. Instead, women are dragged into an increasing number of compromises and concessions, all because the men in their lives cannot give as much as they get.

I have recently been in such a relationship. I have been living with a man that is handsome, smart, and has money, but is very immature, impatient, spoiled, and demanding. He has serious health problems that land him in the hospital every now and then--and I have gone and spent nights with him there. I also stayed in the relationship while he was very depressed and suffering from an addiction that almost cost him his career. I tried to smooth over misunderstandings with his family, who are very intrusive and have extremely outdated ideas about how relationships work, particularly his mother, who rationalizes her son's behavior because she herself has been in a marriage with a philanderer for thirty years. When my friends graduated from college and scattered throughout the city, I made friends with his friends, and spent more time with them. I tried to balance my schoolwork, housework, and my own ambitions, and impossible feat really becuase the housework was always the first to be neglected, especially since i was supposed to do ALL of it. I stayed through the phase when he didn't want to have sex, and got used to it. Later, when he wanted to have sex and I didn't, I tried to draw a happy medium. I paid half the rent. I learned to love his cat. I basically turned my world upside-down for him, and last night he told met hat he "didn't feel the same way anymore" and offered to crash at his friend's apartment.

I see now that I basically let myself get dragged into a relationship from another century. The woman made all the compromises, optimistically hoping that her latest change would keep him happy, but in the end he decided he didn't love her and discarded her, having made no significant changes himself. I wonder how many other women are in the same situations as I, and I wonder why we're so stupid as to let it happen.

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The Frustrations of Udolpho

If you’ve read my blog before you know I love eighteenth-century British lit, and right now I’m doing my best to acquaint myself with “the canon” of eighteenth-century stuff, so that I can look like I know what I’m talking about. The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, is supposed to be one of the more important Gothic novels written (the Janeites among you might recognize that Catherine Morland is obsessed with Udolpho in Northanger Abbey). So, having read The Castle of Otranto, I figured I might as well try to read the other important Gothic novel, and acquaint myself with Ms. Radcliffe’s work.

Oy.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is 700 pages long, and the heroine Emily doesn’t see the Castle of Udolpho until the reader is 200 pages into the story! Before that is a slow-moving, serpentine trek through the mountains, where familial bonds are established, a death in the family occurs, a romance ensues, and Ms. Radcliffe goes into raptures describing sunsets over peaks and pines. I feel like this book is going to be one of those works that I’m going to feel proud about chugging through; whenever someone mentions Udolpho, I’ll start yelling “I’ll read that!” and the person who mentioned it will get all sheepish, because they didn’t actually read it. No one does. Only I am stupid enough to try.

The scholarly intro to my edition makes a point of saying that all of Radcliffe’s digressions into scenic rapture constitute an attempt to write a text that is “painterly.” Furthermore, the scholar contends that these digressions are a deliberate attempt on Radcliffe’s part to free the text from the usual narrative demands of plot and characterization, and as such makes Udolpho an avant-garde, work like that of Virginia Woolf, et al. Well la-di-da.

I do not know anyone that reads Virginia Woolf for fun—well, no one that’s not pursuing a PhD, anyway. Still, modern “avant-garde” stuff is inaccessible to the public but contemporary enough to maintain some credibility with young people that have hipster intellectual pretensions. At least that is the sitch today. If Ms. Radcliffe was trying to be experimental in her day and now her works are considered annoying but obligatory artifacts of literary history, I wonder how today’s “groundbreaking” writers will be treated two hundred years from now. I mean, 700 pages? Sheesh.

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I Heart this Anti-Scientology Film

It's low-budget, and not that well-done, but if the Scientology folks are really trying to wipe it off the net, why not link to it? Here ya go.

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