Overextended Metaphor
You know how when you have to sit on someone’s couch and it looks really dirty you at first lower yourself gingerly, touching as little of the fabric as possible, meanwhile plotting a quick escape, but soon your muscles begin to ache from supporting yourself, and then too you feel like all the germs are crawling all over you anyway so you might as well just sit back and relax, and as soon as one or two tense limbs slacken you feel so much better that any doubts you had about embracing the couch’s dirty comfort are dispelled for good, and finally you allow yourself to sink in fully and it’s such a relief and your body, tired of struggling, its pain turned to numbness, begs you never to stand up again? That’s how depressive episodes begin, at least for me.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Dean Kathleen McCartney of the Harvard Ed School: “Education Lost in Hubbub of Campaigning.“
It’s pretty pathetic that such a basic statement needs so badly to be made so often. The gratitude of this post’s title is sincere, though I wish it didn’t have to be.
Btw, the ads tailored to readers of this article provide a nice study in tragic irony:
Idk
“If the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same thing.” -Pascal, Pensees 693
Srsly Gaiz…
I’m always more surprised than I should be at how much of an Event it is to go out in public as a young woman.
Of course there are always the catcalls and Hey Babys (which usually make me feel crappy). Then too there are the nicer compliments: “You look lovely in that dress, if you don’t mind my saying so” (which usually make me feel better). There are the men–often construction workers aware of their reputations, I think–that put on big friendly smiles and say only “Good morning, Miss” as if to reassure me of their good intentions (which engenders overwhelming gratitude and relief on my part). There are the guys that catch themselves about to walk through a door before me, leap backwards in horror at the prospect, and do penance by bowing and apologizing profusely as they hold the door for my apparently royal procession (all of which usually just stresses me out). Then today I was walking home from the library with some books, and as I adjusted them in my arms a passerby offered to help me carry them. He was biking in the exact opposite direction from the one in which I was headed. That just confused me. If I had taken up his offer, would he really have escorted me all the way home? Was he counting on my refusing, being incredibly generous, planning to force his way into my home and rape me, or just sort of vaguely thinking he might get something out of the deal without being either a saint or a criminal?
That’s the annoying part. I don’t actually want to think about all that. But sometimes as I walk down the street I feel like I’m in some kind of video game–things are constantly flying at me, some good, some bad, and all my brainpower is devoted to making split-second decisions about how to react. “How does he mean that? What’s he really thinking? If I’m too nice, he’ll think I’m interested. If I’m too brusque and he’s actually a nice guy, I’d feel bad. On the other hand, if I’m brusque and he’s an asshole, he might start calling me a bitch and throwing shit at me like that other guy did [really]. So should I just be nice? Or does that look slutty? Oh, yeah, and is it because I look slutty that he’s talking to me in the first place? No, I’m just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. So it’s not my fault, right?” Then there’s the postgame analysis: “Was I too nice? Too mean? What’s he saying to his friend as I walk away?”
Sometimes all this really bothers me–makes me feel like shit. Sometimes it doesn’t (like today), but even then it’s annoying to realize that the nice long walk I just took allowed me almost no time for contemplation or listening to music or gazing at scenery because I was so constantly caught up in reflections like those detailed above. That’s not what I want occupying my brain. Even niceness can be intrusive when all I want is to be left alone. Srsly Gaiz, as my fellow cute-creatures-to-look-at, the LOLcats, would say. There are thoughts in this head, and you are intruding upon them. That’s true no matter how nice you are.
Meta-Blog
“You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.” -Sam Beckett, who never fails me
Geography
I keep having dreams in which either I don’t know where I am (literally–geographically) or I am unconsciously trying to deny the reality of space. In the dreams some friend will invite me to something and I’ll say sure I’ll be there in a few minutes before realizing that I’m not even on the same continent as the place to which I referred as if it was right down the street (what street?). Or I’ll be driving for an hour away from wherever my home is and then be surprised that I can’t get back home in five minutes. Et cetera.
I have no words these days, but here are someone else’s.
“They looked alike, but no more than others do.” -Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Rilke on, well, the topics below:
“Why don’t you think of Him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting His birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If He is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede Him, so that He can choose Himself out of fullness and superabundance?–Must not He be the last one, so that He can include everything in Himself, and what meaning would we have if He whom we are longing for has already existed? . . . Perhaps He needs this very anguish of yours in order to begin; these very days of your transition are perhaps the time when everything in you is working at Him, as you once worked at Him in your childhood, breathlessly. Be patient and without bitterness, and realize that the least we can do is to make coming into existence no more difficult for Him than the earth does for spring when it wants to come.”
“This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.”
“If we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them.”
“Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.”
Another Reason to Love Rilke
“And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.” Letters to a Young Poet, 1903
Read my friend’s blog.
She’s teaching in Palestine for the next three months.
Expensive gas would be more worth it if the schools poor people were driving their kids to actually did anything for those kids.
John McCain: “It’s Time for Education Reform“
It’s vague and a little inconsistent, and it’s by someone I really don’t want to be president for purposes of attacking someone I really do want to be president, and maybe it’s hypocrisy and probably it’ll never be followed through upon no matter who’s president, but it’s still an important article even if all it does is remind people of a sorely neglected issue.
The new Batman movie is indeed excellent.
You know those flashes of fantasy you get while driving at 60mph or higher–the urge simply to go straight when the road curves or the thought of not braking when the light turns red? That’s what it’s about, except more so.
Phi Beta Kappa on Elitism?
A former Yale professor holds forth on “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” in the Phi Beta Kappa magazine.
Some excerpts:
“You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?”
“Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.”
“Students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them.”
“The purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money.”
Now, I don’t agree with everything this guy says. I was an English major at Yale who was clearly never destined for a position of great power in politics or business or any institution other than a liberal arts college (yes, Yale can still function as such a thing to those of its students who desire it), and I never felt out of place or inadequate in my soul-selling aspirations.
But much of the article rings eerily true. I was a top student at Yale, a essay-prize winner and Phi Beta Kappa member, and although I did manage to defy my professors’ expectations “radically” enough to choose a career in high school teaching over one in higher education, I had to get my M.Ed. at Harvard, had to become one of those “leaders of tomorrow” by teaching the most underserved students I could find, have to assume that I’m still destined for a Ph.D. and a more or less distinguished academic career someday, even if it’s “only” in the field of education. And certainly Harvard taught me “to say ‘in Boston’ when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.” And to field the inevitable questions: “Why did you come to Harvard if you’re just going to teach?” and “You went to Yale and now you’re a teacher? What happened?” and “What made you decide to be a teacher?” (Would I be asked what made me decide to be an i-banker if that had been my choice? I’ve never been asked what made me decide I was heterosexual.) And yes, the questions come from inside my head as well as from without–even though what I’m doing is far, pitifully far, from revolutionary. And yes, I am terrified of failure.
The New York Times ran an article recently on “The Snare of Privilege.” The author wondered whether a privileged upbringing was no longer an advantage in politics, anti-intellectual and anti-elite as the average good old Amurrcin voter is these days. I thought that was a preposterous suggestion: in politics, privilege is still a privilege. Outside of politics, though…?
