A Prayer

Dear Universe,

Please help me find the perfect chair for my dissertation.  And please help me find that chair tomorrow.  I would like to take my qualifying exam some time before my sixth fucking year of graduate school.  I'd like someone to acknowledge the work I've done all year long, and I would like not be screwed by my ex-dissertation chair's realization that she cannot chair my project.  Why did it take her a year and a half to figure that out?  Well, maybe it had something to do with her not talking to me about my project more than three times.  I know I'm lucky to have gotten out of a rotten relationship where the professor cancelled meetings without telling me.  Where she didn't give me feedback on my writing.  Where she was having "a busy career."  But, Universe, I'm still fucking pissed off.  And I'm going to be even more angry if this means that I can't take my exams before summer. 

And while I'm asking for things, Universe, please send me a sexy man who can make me laugh, who is smart and smart-assed.  Please keep the fucked up ones who love their mothers too much.  Please keep the ones who make me wait and wait and wait and wait and Jesus-christ wait.  Please keep the religious ones who want babies.  If he's tall, dark, and handsome, I won't complain that it's cliched.  I swear.  Please send someone fun and interesting.  Someone who is willing to try new things.  Someone who is not scared and not scary.  A good kisser.  Willing to be playful in bed.  Willing to go to bed.  Please.  I deserve it very very much. 

Thanks.

Women who reproduce or not should not live in South Dakota and now......Florida!

Stolen courtesy of the wonderful Bitch :

For girls' own good,, of course.

Doctors and nurses at abortion clinics, hospitals or even counseling agencies would have to report underage pregnancies within 24 hours of knowing about such a pregnancy or risk losing their state license.
....
When asked about the bill's effect on girls' ability to get abortions, both Storms and Baxley said the bill is intended to target sexual abuse of minors.

But Baxley added, "It doesn't make me unhappy that a few more children may live."

That pregnancy is evidence of a crime, missy. And if you try to hide or get rid of the evidence, you're a criminal too. Your body belongs to the state.

My two cents: For my students out there, I'd say, if pregnancy is the ultimate sign of "woman," then it's also proof that woman means "bad," just as our narrator in The Woman Warrior suggests.  And maybe I'd add something about our continued obsession with childhood innocence as the supposed division between "girl" and "woman" and suggest we reread Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper" from Songs of Innocence.  Or we could read the fabulous Sharon Olds's "The One Girl at the Boys' Party."  In fact, let's do that.

Oscar Who?

In the past, I've had or attended big Oscars' hooplas, enjoying the pageantry and blatant celebration of my current favorite art form.  But just yesterday I was attempting to explain my disregard for this years' Oscars to my roommate.  I hypothesized that the Oscars are out (You are in, or you are out); not that they're meaningless--they always have and haven't been, and they'll continue on in that crass commercial vein despite the Indi genre craze.  But they're no longer fun.  Troy Patterson on slate.com claims they've jumped the shark because the race is so overexposed that there's no doubt that Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson, and the Sunshine gang are going to win.  I guess the commercialism demands exposure, a damning maneuver in a show whose entertainment value is measured by surprise and spectacle.  And I think my personal problem with this year's show is some small subset of this issue.  I've seen a lot of the movies that are in contention, and I even enjoyed many of them.  But I hate the politicking that attends all the rumor and speculation about the winners. 

Take, for example, The Departed.  I was surprised that I liked the movie as much as I did.  I liked all the visual jokes, I was taken in by the big surprise (though I can see that I shouldn't have been), and I wasn't totally annoyed by Jack Nicholson's performance.  The excessive displays of masculine power made sense in the father-son economies that the film imbricates.  All of these things--the jokes and the Jack--were extremely obvious.  They weren't the subtle mark of an innovative filmmaker, assuming that innovation is generally subtle.  Yet it was nice to see it done--the camera's motion makes me think that all other filmmakers were too lazy to get their cameras off the ground.  And Mark Wahlberg!  But wait, does everyone like Wahlberg's performance because he plays the bulldog with such aplomb, or do they like it because of the surprise at the end?  It was another surprise that on reflection is almost too obvious.  Personally, I think the lover-psychiatrist, whose vengeance merely takes the form of a social snub, should have been the one to pull the trigger.  In a movie about masculinity, a who's your daddy now, bitch! approach from a woman's point of view would have been much more shocking and satisfying. 

So there you go.  Everyone thinks that this is Scorsese's year, yet everyone also agrees that this is not the movie that deserves the Oscar.  So my question is, who wants to spend three or more hours watching someone win awards in this manner?  Give it to him because we fucked up before?  Frankly, I think that if Scorcese wins it this year for making such a joke of a movie, the joke will be on the academy.  He was making fun of his audience as much as he was making fun of political machines in this movie.  But for a show that may have jumped the shark, a Scorses win might be fully appropriate.  

Meme

Happy Mardi Gras!

 Laissez les bonnes temps rouler!!

It's times like these that I miss my family most.  No one celebrates (in)significant holidays like my family.  Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day (when it comes during Lent and falls on a Friday, my mother will actually still cook corned beef and cabbage), New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the Day After Christmas, Thanksgiving, Good Friday, (the Holies Thursday and Saturday and Ash Wednesday are required but each member is cleared for attending his or her own church), Easter, Halloween, and 8 or 9 required birthday parties, Mother's Day, and Father's Day.  This is a list of all required family gatherings for those lucky enough to live within two hours of my mother.  Technically, Labor Day, Halloween, Valentine's Day/President's Day, and Memorial Day double as birthday parties.  And with grandkids, most of us share birthday parties.  For each kid, First Communion and Confirmation and Wedding(s) are also compulsory.

You better believe that stringent rules attend each of these holidays.  I think it's pretty funny that my 47 year old sister's biggest family problem is that she would like to celebrate her own birthday with her friends at her house and without sharing with her father.  But because it's Labor Day, she has to go to The Lake (my parents' abode).  Her second biggest problem is that she wants to host Thanksgiving at her house rather than our mother's.  Does she want to skip the holiday?  Nope.  Has the world ended because my parents won't host Turkey Day this year?  Hell yes. 

So when I moved away, a lot of my weekend commitments freed up.  And when it comes to the big holidays and Holy Days this has been a godsend.  I've become extremely sensitive to the little power struggles between my siblings and my mother, and the stress kills me.  (It took approximately six weeks to prepare for, suffer through, and recover from Christmas "vacation.")  I can also do without the birthdays though I don't know why.  I used to LOVE birthdays and still enjoy when my birthday is spread out over the entire month of December.

But I miss those little holidays.  I miss Mardi Gras masks and beads and purple and gold and green.  I was always so tickled by the mix of pagan carnival and Catholic ritual.  More than any other holiday though, I ended up missing the Fourth the most.  Maybe because it's the most relaxed and least religious (I think there's still a mass involved there or at least a blessing of the pets or something, but I'm not sure I remember) I like it the best.  The Fourth involves great amounts of drinking, barbequeing, sparklers (we get to use them in GA but we have to buy them in SC or something. Those degenerates have slot machines and fireworks on the border), swimming, water boarding, boating, floating (I'm the best at floating).  Occasional skinny dipping. 

This sounds much like Labor and Memorial Day plus fireworks, but I swear it's better.  GA sucks throughout August and the first two weeks of September.  Labor Day can sometimes turn cold or something; it's not always a Lake day.  But the Fourth is the kind of day when I'm glad that my mother has instituted such strict traditions involving alcohol.  For whatever reason, my friends don't quite understand the importance of the little holiday, their holy insignificance. 

So in honor of all the family traditions, I've poured myself one drink and another.  Here's to all the insignificant holidays!