I'm losing motivation to study or practice faster than you can say "Johann Sebastian Bach." Suddenly I understand people who drop out one semester short of getting their degree. Yes, it's been a hell of a lot of hard work juggling school and work and social life, yes, the journey was interesting, yes, I still want this but ... god. What indescribable bliss it would be to just walk away and say screw it. This must be why people are willing to give up the dream so close to completion. It's hard to believe I thought getting a degree was going to change my life.
On the other hand, I believe abstractly that it will. It has already, to be honest. I didn't come this far to stop now, but I am going through a serious case of the Don't Wannas. I don't want to study History, I don't want to take my take-home test until Monday night, I don't want to practice at all so I haven't been, and how will this end in anything but stress and humiliation? I need hardly add that I'm eating like a crazed weasel and have gained a lot of weight. I'm also following the travails of several friends who are taking the GRE and writing personal statements, and I wish to categorically state that I will never, ever pursue a degree in English Literature at the undergraduate level much less go on to grad school. I don't want to read the books they need to recognise just to pass the GRE, much less actually study them in class. I hereby renounce my dream of being Lucy Huntzinger, PhD.
Still, I am less stressed than I was. I can tell. I'm sleeping well. Hawaii helped. Enjoy this lovely photo of Trish and I and the Waikiki sunset. Marvel at the fact that we have heard more than once that we look like mother and daughter. I don't get that. I mean, sure, I'm older than she is, I could technically be her mother if I'd had a child at age 18, but there's the small matter of not looking anything alike. It's very weird.
Maybe it's the incipient snark factor that makes us look like relatives.
So yeah, it's Friday night and I haven't studied or practiced. Instead, I've been reading Lynn Peril's book, Pink Think, subtitled "How to become a woman in many uneasy lessons", which is causing me to remember in exquisite detail how irritating and oppressive it was to grow up female in the middle of last century. If you happen to have been born after 1972 you won't believe just how much pressure there was to be submissive, self-sacrificing, dainty, and unopinionated, nor how often we were advised to keep our intelligence, interests, and desire to have exciting lives carefully hidden from the men we hoped to "capture" as boyfriends and husbands lest they feel useless, unmasculine, or turned off by our unnatural and by definition unfeminine ways. I don't mean the boys I knew felt this way about us. I imagine they were too busy learning to avoid being sissies or something. This book clarifies the pervasive attitude of teaching females how to be women and is packed with examples from books, magazines, movies, and Lynn's own life. It's a great read.
I particularly like her entry on fatty fiction, books designed to convince fat girls they'd always be losers if they didn't drop some weight, and how it was essentially a moral failing on their part that made them fat. I remember being simultaneously fascinated with and horrified by those books in junior high. Every single one I read rewarded the girl who stopped eating like a healthy teenager and started scrupulously paying attention to makeup and housework with some cypher of a neighbor boy suddenly noticing her at a party or the fellow she'd had a crush on asking her out at last. I wasn't fat, I've got photos to prove it, but I was a little plumper than everyone around me thought I ought to be. It was practically a guarantee I'd never get asked to a dance or have a boyfriend, and I'd certainly never be in the popular crowd. I knew those books were right, in a way, but I passionately hated them for the real message: thin and hooked up was the only measure of success for women.
Advice columns and teen magazines of my youth? Bite me. I'm fat and I'm a success by several objective standards, including your definition of the pinnacle of womanhood: marriage. I'm not a product of your proselytizing marianismo, though. I was born a feminist. I also opted not to have children, I consider myself the equal of any man, and I never hide my light under a bushel. Can't handle me? Bugger off, then. I am thrilled with what I've done with my intelligence, my undainty, unsubmissive, exciting life, and you? You got it all wrong with your poisonous, pious instructions on how girls should limit themselves.
Lynn's book is excellent. Go buy it.
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