A House Divided

Nice little video outlining some things I did and did not know about Christianity. Over 33,000 denominations worldwide, oh my!

Television taunts me

I really wish I had the ability to mindlessly tune out to television programs like I used to. At one time, the infotainment washed right over me and lulled me to sleep since I was too tired to think about what it all meant after a long day of physical work. In recent years, I can't help but think about the messages that are broadcast to us at all hours of the day, available whenever we want to consume them.

A channel called TruTV is on right now. I question its integrity first because they've allowed Jesse Ventura have a show called Conspiracy Theory or some such thing, warning of the gubmint's endgame of implanting RFID chips in all of us. Granted, we live in a what's rapidly approaching a police state (I don't think that claim is too far off) and it would be darn easy for officials to look into our private lives with the sharing of information that goes on between agencies and telecommunication companies, or the ease the internet provides in snooping on others. I got sick of the white surburbanite hysteria of the RFID, Real ID (or whatever) a while ago because those alarmed by it tend to completely ignore other issues that affect more aspects of humanity--capitalism and consequently climate change come to mind. Speaking of whitey outcry, that brings me to why I am currently annoyed.

It's 1980 in McKinney, Texas, a place where the men are free to be good ol' boys and completely ignore any emotional sissy-stuff that might lure out some latent homosexuality. But we all know that won't happen. And the women, well, from what I gathered from putting up with this show for about ten minutes, they're repressed. They're repressed, church-going, baby-spitting repressed, but they'll smile broadly and tell you everything is how they wanted it. And then cook you a nice dinner you don't even deserve, but they wouldn't tell you that--just eat the food. And like it.

I digress. Anyway, this Candace Montgomery was charged for killing her friend using an axe and then going back to Vacation Bible School (apparently you can get away with calling it VBS around where I live, yeesh) as an instructor literally hours after having done this.

Oh the panicked McKinney-ians(?) at the thought of this nice church woman who baked cookies and wrapped xmas presents and had her other church friends in tow typically--surely not her!

This is a murder by the book special, ooo! Meaning some slim-hipped aging writer by trade, female mind you, is looking to capitalize off of someone's death and someone else's loss, and I'm sure there are quite a few of those someone else's. Anywho, she needs to sell books, and she is going to narrate this tale of tragedy. And what does make it so tragic?

It's tragic because this woman died in a horrific way. It's tragic Candace felt compelled to follow through with something so heinous. To add on top of it, it's tragic that the media yet again allowed headline after headline about the little white woman who didn't! who couldn't! She was a God-fearing Methodist for chrissakes, and that's just not what white women of that socio-economic class do.

Naturally, my next question is then who does it? Who would you, Mr. or Mrs. McKinney of Texas, expect to exact such violence on one of "your own"? Hmm. I'll get back to you on that.

While the lady-writer was narrating, she made mention of the fact that fellow suburbanite moms were worried about being threatened or that *gasp* they could be driven to do the same! Enter Sarah Haskins to clear some of this up.



So once again we find it's almost impossible to fathom that a woman could harbor such psychotic elements in her being, especially if she's small and white. On the flipside, watch out 'cause we're all gonna snap--it's a matter of hours for folks such as myself. Will society ever figure out we're all different types of individuals, not tropes, and start regarding us as such? I'm guessing no, considering the "reliable" media sources many base their truths off of anymore.

Seriously, they couldn't have had one more bland looking fat white dude on there proclaiming Candace's virtues, and their absolute shock in finding out she could follow through with it. I think this clearly shows the attitude towards women in the south around 30 years ago (that view being that they are obviously not human like men are), and I'm guessing that's not changed much, or if the gender roles even have.

The Prisoner

I've been watching this 1960s British show via Netflix; I didn't realize its popularity in popular culture. Wikipedia names one of its major themes as "individualism versus collectivism"--ugh, this makes the entire concept of "collectivism" sound as if it's purely negative in nature. In fact, the only time I've seen that term wielded is when it's used in a pejorative sense by libertarians and other internet riff-raff (and oh yeah! Ayn Rand, woo hoo). I've only seen six of the 17 episodes so far, but I've got to say that the large floating white balloon-balls that menace the protagonist and a few other characters when they think nonconforming thoughts, the unnecessary raging at women the protagonist indulges in, and the other ridiculous details thrown in to make the time period seem more futuristic have been distracting from the allegorical meaning. I know it's there, but what I want to know now is if it really is making a political statement, then what kind? I'm guessing I shouldn't be too optimistic.

Hello?

Anybody out there? Just thought I'd give out my new Delicious handle in case any one wants to swap sites over there. It's http://delicious.com/kariflack30. Happy networking, blogging, or whatever else you do online!

Keeping Up

I'm frustrated. With my house, with my education, with finals, with the holiday coming up...it's that time of year I guess! is the easy way to simplify all my frustrations into one neat lump.

I am a clutter freak. I can't help it. All of my adult life, I've never been able to have everything in its prescribed, best spot to hide it from visitors. There was one time I came close, but that part of my life is long gone and now I live in a nest of clutter--books, boxes, miscellaneous crap from past Christmases I will never use but hang on to because maybe I can regift them or just maybe I will eventually plant that box of tulips my aunt-in-law gave me, or I'll get around to displaying that electric stone fountain my boss gave me two years ago for the "secret Santa" gift exchange. If there's one thing I'm nostalgic for from my youth, it's ignoring the commercial aspects of Christmas completely.

Sometimes I take a hippie-ish stance about my education and chalk it up to the state wanting nothing more than to turn out mindless zombies that will never question the status quo. I recently saw a quote on Exiled by a commenter (man can the comments section there be more of a cesspool than anything) that basically said if we ignore the people who question authority, we are dead. I have had a few classes where my somewhat "radical" ideas were treated as laughable (especially writing my Shakespeare paper on his anti-Semitism and racism--but oh no, we are to see that he was actually writing against motifs that already occurred in society in a much more nuanced sense--whatever, I guess I do not give Shakespeare that much credit (blasphemy, I'm sure, coming from an English major)), but I've also had classes where I've written some pretty out-there stuff and my professors approved. Mostly, my leanings toward wanting to write off US education as worthless come from personal frustration. I feel like an utter loser most of the time for not figuring out what I should do with my life sooner, and finishing an undergrad degree at the age of 30. I've been back to school since I was 26, going here and there, not really knowing what to do. Now that I have, I just want to get it done and act like most normal 30 year olds--you know, doing the 9 to 5 (but I know it will be more hours than that for me, and for that, I will be grateful to have those "extra" hours occupy my time).

So here I sit, not working on the paper I have due tomorrow evening, ruminating on all the things I want to change in my life. But why do I feel this need? There is the sense of overwhelming dread I can't shake, and that I assume will be lessened if I just keep up with how things are supposed to be--a spotless house, finishing my work early, and adopting a more "normal" sleep schedule. I don't know why I can't just accept things the way they are; yes, I am a procrastinator, but I get the work done for my classes, with flying colors typically. (Usually I need to panic first and talk myself down from telling myself over and over, "You'll never get this finished on time!") I'm motivated to clean my house when C helps me out, and he's been the one keeping up with it lately. And why shouldn't he? But why shouldn't I? In all honesty, I view my lack of domestic skills as a political statement--really--but I'm still terribly frustrated that I worry about keeping it up. One reason is that if my mom was to visit right now, she would go absolutely apeshit and start scrubbing, dusting, sweeping, the whole nine yards. If I was to visit her house right now, it would be spotless and the scent of bread would meet me at the doorway. But then she would go into a diatribe not a half-hour after I got there about having to do all the work to keep things the way she does...I do not want to be that woman (I don't want to be my mom! what would she say?). Perhaps I should finally acclimate myself to my organized mess and realize that it's not the worst thing in the world, but worrying myself over appearances is futile and most likely just really unhealthy.

My paper, oh geez. I have to pretty much rewrite a ten page draft, and I haven't made any progress as of yet. I have about, oh, 20 hours? Yeesh. I am so sick of Paradise Lost, however, that I could pull my hair out, or chainsmoke a pack of cigarettes. Most of the bewilderment and frustration with that comes from discussing how Eve is a heroic character in class, thanks to Barbara Lewalski's treatment and massive scholarly work on the subject. And the woman is a feminist, augh. I wrote what I thought was an acceptable draft, citing Virginia Woolf and de Beauvoir among others to lay out my case for Eve being a victim of a patriarchal-minded poet. My reasoning for doing this was because when I laid out some basic feminist principles in interpreting some other pieces we read (on other papers I handed in this semester), my prof left comments like my writing was really illuminating, as if he hadn't given a thought to these perspectives before. So, I figured I would lay out the bare bones of why I feel like I do toward this piece, and why Milton is a flat-out misogynist. I was taught one should always write toward their audience, and if my audience is feminist-tarded, hey, I guess I'll start from the beginning. But I went even a little further than that, taking up a page to explain what new criticism is (and why it's largely irrelevant anymore) and how I will employ feminist theory with my reading of the piece. I don't think my prof appreciated it though, because when we had our little required conference about the paper, he asked me about twenty times if I understood what he was talking about when he relayed to me what he wants to see in my revised paper. Could be that he was a little insulted I wrote that in the way I did, assuming he knew little to nothing of what I was talking about (which I did kind of approach it that way). Or perhaps he's a little sexist too, because he really thinks that when Eve accepts her subordinate position to Adam she's acting as the first "Evenic" (I think that's the term Lewalski coined) hero in being the first one ever to willingly subjugate herself in the name of "mankind." This is the second time I've read Paradise Lost under this prof, and this is the second time I've almost gone mad from hearing this interpretation. It should come as no surprise that this reading invites sexist comments from the more unenlightened when the feminist-leaning women in the class speak up about its falsity. Anyway, his repeated questioning ("do you understand what I'm saying?") could be a carry-over from his view on Milton--according to this prof, Milton was a radical because he believed that women should be the heads of household when the male is not the most intelligent one of the pair (how benevolent, yeah) and he advocated for divorce. But really, the divorce thing was about his own desires, not because he gave more than two shits for women's rights, from what I've read. And I mean, Paradise Lost, hellllooo! He sets Eve up to be a parallel for Satan (unadulterated evil) with no real underlying sense of character or morality, even in terms of secular beliefs.

As far as the upcoming holiday goes, bah humbug! Oh I don't care. I will be happy to see family and friends whom I haven't seen in a while (and meeting some internet friends, yay!) But the whole consumerist aspect of the holiday really brings me down, along with this idea that one (typically, the gender-stereotyped woman--at least, that's who I see in all the ads preparing for the big day) has to create this warm, glowing atmosphere of holiday cheer that seems almost impossible to attain. This seems to be a more dangerous attempt at recreating the nonexistent past of yuletide and Christmas caroling, cookie making and gift wrapping, than my nostalgic wish to be able to ignore it completely (because that's just what we did). I say nonexistent because, was any of it ever really that great? I term this as dangerous because whenever people start yearning for the "good ole days" en masse it usually ends up hurting a population of people--I'm thinking particularly about talking heads like Glenn Beck who curses the last 100 years of US history because of civil rights advancements, and helps convince certain people that we were better off when blacks, gays, women, and the disabled were even more discriminated against than they are now. The way I see it, though, is that we all get hurt by these sentimental longings for that perfect Christmas that exists more fully in our minds than in Christmases past. We're supposed to be on the lookout for that exceptional gift (which was probably not even needed in the first place) for that special someone, no matter what the financial cost is. We go further and further into debt to create that elusive feeling, oftentimes not noticing how we are going personally bankrupt in the process. I think it's also foolish to try to relegate this idea that we should "be good" this time of year--why don't we focus on this year 'round (as cliche as that sounds)? I think the holiday itself fosters an amount of cynicism that says there's always Christmas coming up so that you can clean up your act and be a decent human being.

Well, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a little lighter. On to the paper...

Nathale

There is still some of the clear-eyed innocence left, even though Nathale is 80 years old. Or, at least, that's what she reports as her age. I think she might be younger.

Dell stuck his hands deeper in the pockets of his second-hand, thrift store "designer" sweatshirt. "Five dollars, and you that thing is usually forty on the rack, if you're lucky," he bragged to Jessica. She nodded back with the infamous, crooked half-smile she inherited from her Irish grandfather. Basically, she didn't care and continued sipping on the Australian-imported ale that was at least $2.50 a bottle retail, as Del recalled. He looked longingly at his Coors that sat on the ground and in that moment gave up on hand warmth for a sip.

Jessica got up for a smoke. She leaned on her husband's coupe as to not get smoke in her dad's face, although he had become accustomed to smoking cigars in the last few years. "You know, I was looking through grandma and grandpa's old pictures and the years have not been kind to them. They look worn out in all of them," she remarked as cigarette smoke escaped her lungs.

"Depression, wars, and six kids will do that to people," Del stated flatly without looking up. "How old do you think your grandma was in that picture, the one taken on their wedding day?" Craig interjected. "I didn't think she could have been any more than fifteen."

Jessica experienced a brief moment of panic at the thought of being married so young. She thought back to what she was doing at fifteen. Going to the zoo with boys and dragging main street and "illegally" smoking filled her time when she wasn't at school all those years ago. She puffed harder at the Marlboro Ultra Light that was currently staining her fingers.

Del scratched his chin and figured some numbers, silently. "I bet she was fourteen. I remember when I had to ask permission to marry Linda that Nathale was not happy. Your grandfather was more than ready to have Linda out the door, so to speak. Maybe she has some bad memories of those early days." He killed the bottle of Coors. Jessica inhaled deeply and involuntarily shuddered out of sorrow for her grandmother. Apparently a woman just didn't take off too often in those days. Would I be here if she would have acted in her own defense against ... she squinted down the brick street her parents' house sits on ... against what has clouded her eyes over the years? The truth was that she didn't care either way about being here or not; however, there was no point in worrying about it now.

My four-year-old nephew, Ian, came out to the driveway with an old, beat up football. He bumbled and tumbled with that thing that is twice the size of his head and dad somehow got a hold of it. "This is your Uncle Chuck's football," he said quietly while picking at the flecked hide. He tossed it to me and I turned it over to look at the bar code. I guess they did have those in the early '80s, I thought and laughed to myself. "Let's play football!" Ian excitedly requested, spitting out most of the syllables through his silver-capped front teeth.

It was yet another instance where Charles was referred to in the present tense. I think it's mostly for Nathale's sake. Her one boy she couldn't admit to losing. Her one son she refused to take out of her will. Maybe one day she will finally see his small grave marker, but I doubt it. Maybe he resides in the still clear blue spots left in her eyes.

But I was supposed to react that way!

Exiled Online is one of my favorite sites, like, ever. The writers are oftentimes assholes and have a somewhat sexist slant to some of their articles, much like the one I just read regarding Sylvia Plath's husband (oh yeah!), Ted Hughes (link). Although, I found this to be pure poetry:

"Promiscuity was the norm, for men and women. I remember when I saw Hughes read his own verse, at the Center for Fine Arts in San Francisco. This was when Crow had come out and Hughes was as close to a rock star as any poet was going to get, so there was a big crowd, excited, way better looking than the typical poetry crowd. Hughes came to the stage, bigger and more impressive than I’d expected-he had that ex-RAF look that I thought only existed in movies-and before he could get started, this hippie guy stood up and screamed toward somebody several rows back, 'You are still my wife, Karen! You are STILL MY WIFE!' His target audience, shall we say, was this tall dark-haired gypsy-looking woman who flipped him off and laughed at him while he ranted. Tough crowd, is what I’m saying here, and not always the guys who won. Martyred virgins…you didn’t see too many of those. If Sylvia took that road, it was because she wanted to. I ‘spec’ poor ol’ Ted had very little idea what was going on; that’s what usually happens when you play straight man to a suicidal drama queen."

Lovely. However, some of us egoistic American women are angry for pretty good reasons. I NEVER LIKED PLATH SO MUCH OKAY?????

Operation Bipartisan Hummus

3/17

I find something some members of my family participate in morally repugnant.

… all kidding and criticism I’ve previously made against the Christian right conservative wing of America aside … (But all of those words as adjectives of a big mishmashed group of blankity blank should just not intermingle anyway. ANYWAY)

Briefly: I have an aunt who is a devout Christian zealot. She came to Jesus in her late twenties/early 30s. She believes every one should share these ideals. To give myself just as harsh judgment, I’m a control freak who thinks the world would run oh so much better if it would just succumb to all of my demands.

Well really, only sometimes. But I think that is normal.

So today I got up early on my spring break and drove a few hours to have lunch with my Auntie, because she has been asking me to come down and I do like spending time with her. Usually we end up having a good time.

We were going to go shopping (we need all kinds of new house shit—we are moving, pitching the ancient not to mention the things we’ve used and had since our first marriages—you just don’t need the same crappy spatula, frying pans, wall hangings, etc, you’ve had for ten years) but I ended up going with my parents. Kind of lame, sure, but C stayed behind and worked his ass of packing shit up. Hey, I do my share plus he has more time off, so there. Hey, isn’t it ridiculous that I feel I have to answer to why I shopped instead of helping my hub. Everything was on sale, okay? But I did get to shop where the really rich white people go, yay.

On the ride to the restaurant, Christian soft rock blared in her minivan. She honestly just likes listening to it, really; she doesn’t want to brainwash anyone. We carried on what seemed to be a normal conversation, but it did revolve around my grandparents, which is normal. My grandparents are pretty much a couple of pissed off old folks and frankly I don’t think they like my aunt for whatever reasons. For example, they haven’t been eating properly; they haven’t even kept food in the house while remaining pretty much reclusive most of the time. They do get out to gamble, however, so I’m sure they stock up then.

Out of good will, my aunt went and bought them groceries to keep in the house. She got a bunch of deli stuff, ready to eat salads and meats and stuff. I could eat like that three days out of the week I think. They were happy to get the food, but pissed that she took the money to pay for it (which was only $100) out of their account. They are probably both a little unstable and they don’t like something about her. Kind of a fucked up thing to feel for your offspring, I guess, but I couldn’t vouch for that. My mom said she never really felt loved by them, and I think she’s moved on quite nicely from that revelation, relatively speaking.

To cut to what it is I have a problem with, my aunt and her husband are missionaries. Yeesh. Their groups go and build churches (in Haiti and soon, possibly, Jamaica) that are half regular church and half outdoor covering so that they can preach to them the gospel before going into the covered church that serves as a health clinic. Yes, they indoctrinate before they medicate! Isn’t it a wonder that people get pissed off about this business and kill missionaries (I’m not saying assassins' reasons are noble, however, duh).

And this is normal, respected behavior in their clique.

I’m rusty on all my bible skills, but I’m sure that’s wrong even in their book.

Why not form some multireligious council, and if the people in an impoverished country really do need outside medical help, build a fucking hospital and set up a stand with multi denominational information. Not forced on anyone. Yeah, that won’t happen. This, the here and now, seems to be an expected result after fucking with so many of these countries. Might as well try to pseudo-heal it.

Other bubbles have started to leak recently. I hope American arch-conservatism is next; it gives me the heebie jeebies.

Semicolon Theatre Presents: A Reading List Including Reviews Made of Pretension & Boredom

Here is a short list of what I'm reading right now; I've yet to finish any of them and I am at different stages in each (I do finish books, yes). Nevertheless, I feel I am qualified enough to offer a short review for each.



The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault with a foreward by John Raichman

Review: I think a quote from Chomsky can adequately sum up the knowledge I've gained from this book so far: "CHOMSKY: Again, I'm oversimplifying."



Ubik, Phillip K. Dick

Review: To say that the feminine presence in this book is diminutive of what women as people could offer the novel (not to mention the genre itself) really conveys the inanimate stupidity that exists at my core.



The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Review: I officially have a decapitation fetish now; I think I'll lay off this one till spring has sprung a bit more.



Winter in the Blood: The Classic Tale of Indian Life Today, James Welch

Review: Watch closely as an unnamed individual of mixed-blood American Indian heritage tries to help his severely fragmented community find an identity they can collectively thrive in since so much of their culture has been wiped from the annals of history and thousands of their ancestors have been slaughtered (seriously, though, I'm only like ten pages in).

Regarding my revulsion of average old white dudes

Bill. Perhaps he isn't the average old white guy, but he's close. I guess I wouldn't say he's totally average because he tries real hard to be hip, sort of. He wears birkenstocks to class, rain or shine, and some days he ties a navy blue bandanna around his big wrinkly forehead.

The class I have with him is a graduate level course and he was originally supposed to be there only as an interpreter for a Chinese foreign exchange student who was doing an audit of the class. She's not there any more, yet he still attends. He is constantly interrupting the instructor for pretty pathetic reasons, like telling the class what exactly a metaphor or simile is (third, fourth year, and graduate level English students, mind you) and reminding us how Emerson and Whitman were popular for the same themes we are covering now (this is a Native American literature course, so I'm guessing that those two just might have borrowed here and there and maintained their popularity through white privilege, just a shot in the dark).

How disrespectful of him to treat the rest of us as a bunch of know-nothing boobs. In addition to his disruptions, he likes to bring up what "his generation" had to go through. I'm sure he's in his 70s and gets around pretty well; good for him. But what did you do for us? Look where we're at now! You expect me to respect you by virtue of your age/forced military experiences alone? That's like me expecting him to respect me just for menstruating--neither of us have had choices in the matter and it's been a bloody mess.

Bill is a microcosm of the idiocy white, patriarchal America represents to me: bullheaded preaching of an outdated message (what can you do for your country? ad nauseam) and woman, you better be thrilled about the freedoms we've allowed you to have.

I cut him off at every opportunity, and I can't tell if I'm doing it to piss him off or to help preserve the few strands of sanity I have left. To his Emerson comment, I said of course literature as written by white males was popular and that they ripped off oral traditions as heard from members of various native nations. Every time he starts to bring up WWII and whatnot, I start with what we've recently discussed about native cultural memories such as Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears. Maybe's he's getting the hint. While discussing the transient feminine presence in Momaday's House Made of Dawn (because the sporadic female characters represent more than just the physical beings in the story, IMO), the class headed toward the predictable "well she's the Madonna and the whore here!" discourse. I said that some of those behaviors are just inherent in some women (not all as we are individuals too) and that just because women act sexually or aggressively doesn't make them whores; likewise, if they act naively or innocently in some aspects, they're not necessarily angelic virgins either. He turned to me after I said that, with his jowls a-quivering, and barely murmured a "But-". I gave him a sharp, satisfied look and he turned right back around, silent.

Some may say that I'm sexist. I don't think that's possible. I will say I have a prejudice against most white men over the age of 50; that's a fair statement. For me to be sexist, however, is to imply that I have had an equal playing field as most men have had--both academically and in the workplace. As far as we have progressed as a society, American women still can't claim that and it took me a while to admit that to myself. I can give you three times when I've been passed over on promotions because of my sex and at least two professors who judged me based on my sex alone. It gets old. I hope this clears up the why and what for about my disenchantment with old white men.