Is there such a thing as "inchoate rage burnout?" 'Cause I think I've managed to attain it. This weekend and the blogroll have offered me ample opportunity to vent my spleen on all manner of subjects, both political and personal, such as:
1. When it's appropriate to be pissy about the dead: short answer, maybe you could wait until the corpse is underground, or incinerated, or has had its head safely encased in liquid nitrogen at the behest of its wacky greedy relatives--you know, when it ISN'T STILL FRESH.
2. Oral sex is still sex, it's just that you're substituting one orifice for another. And also, if you're giving and not receiving, and you aren't in a mutually loving relationship, well, here's a news flash: blowjobs don't empower the chick doing the sucking. Unless of course you're charging for them. And even then, you're still just a warm, moist substitute for someone's hand and a porno mag. Congrats! You're the new face of feminism--though you might want to wipe your chin before you have your empowerment parade.
3. Hyperbole is your friend. Your sadly misunderstood friend, as this reader email makes apparent:
I am shocked. I typed in Jo's Jos's Circus to find a web-site and this crap pops up. Are you crazy? My two year old loves Jo Jo. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the show or Disney for that matter. It's people like you that make this world such a crazy place. If you don't like it, guess what, this is America and you have the right to change the channel just like I have the right to watch it with my child. Humans are not born with fear, we as parents put it in them so your child will thank you in the future for his phobia of clowns. What a sick individual you are!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep, "Disgusted Mother," my hatred of an insipid Disney Channel show has led to my hiding under my child's bed at night in a clown suit, waiting to put the Fear of Clowns into my toddler. Dear God. I post on things political and academic, and the lion's share of hate mail I get is from crazy women who don't quite grok the concept of exaggeration in humor. Unless of course her comment was ironic, satirical and hyperbolic, in which case--never mind.
But even in the face of rampant classlessness and idiocy on the part of my fellow man I can't seem to summon the inner incandescent ire that fuels the keyboard. This rage trigger failure, plus my usual post-Hayes Barton mommies detox (wherein I am reminded that I'm too over-educated and under-funded for the idle rich set, too conservative for the hipper than thou pseudo-intellectual set, too bourgeosie-and-lovin'-it for the trendoid art-house set, and too geeky for everyone else except not geeky enough for actual geeks), have burned me right on out.
At least my visit to the hairdresser was moderately successful. I have hopefully kissed that whole Rod Stewart-esque poofy-topped head phase goodbye (note to self: your hair has A LOT of body. When it's short, it grows up, THEN out). Of course, I was going for "insousciant flippy 'do," and I'm stuck somewhere at "post-Rod Stewart, mildly That Girl winged helmet of Nike." Ah well, hair grows.
And rage has a tendency to return.
Excellent, if blunt (i.e., NSFW: language), column on Point No. 2 here.
Posted by: Lex at June 7, 2004 01:26 PM"wherein I am reminded that I'm too over-educated and under-funded for the idle rich set, too conservative for the hipper than thou pseudo-intellectual set, too bourgeosie-and-lovin'-it for the trendoid art-house set, and too geeky for everyone else except not geeky enough for actual geeks"
Maybe that's why I read your blog faithfully... :-)
Posted by: kyrielle at June 7, 2004 02:58 PMYeah, I don't fit in either. And sometimes I like it that I don't. On Sundays it makes me kinda sad.
Hublet and I are dreading - and will perhaps avoid - rejoining our class next year.
That said, your hair looked very nice on Sunday.
Women celebrate being attractive to men. Perhaps blowjobs are today's reassurance; I can't make much of the modern teen male. Maybe modern teen females can't, either. Being-attractive-to may now have to take an obvious form, owing to otherwise protective teen-male coloration.
Beauty contests are, for example, run by women for women, to celebrate their attractiveness to men. Men don't watch them. In fact, they mock them by entering pigs, given a chance. (``So far from finding women attractive, we think of them only for their barnyard use.'')
The classical problem was how a woman makes clear to a man that she's satisfied with him. Maybe that doesn't come up until marriage.
Erving Goffman on the sexual moan :
``4. The sexual moan. This subvocal tracking of the course of sexually climatic experience is a display available to both sexes, but said to be increasingly fashionable [written 1981] for females - amongst whom, of course, the sound tracing can be strategically employed to delineate an ideal development in the marked absence of anything like the real thing.'' ``Response Cries'' _Forms of Talk_ p.106
Stanley Cavell, relating it to modern male skepticism (``how do I _know_ ...'') has the modern woman's task as restoring the world to the male, in Cleopatra's theatricalizing of herself to Antony. ``Cleopatra's theater - to show her sense that in playing her last in Egypt, in refusing to be cast as ``an Egyptian puppet [to] be shown / In Rome'' (V, ii, 207-208) she is not avoiding her theatricalization - her story will publically be burlesqued and debased in Rome with or without her - but rather producing, as if in competition, her own theater, womaning herself, queening, divining, childing, mothering, nursing, enacting, creating herself. The return of the world after its abandonment of Antony (the ``solution'' to the skeptical state) has required the theatricalization of the world. It has to be _presented_ to him.'' _Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare_ p.31