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...