Closed System Continued

Sometimes being self-contained is not as great as it should be. Nobody can bring me down, but sometimes it would be nice if there were someone to pull me back up when I bring myself down.

Today's Headline: The UN Finally Does Something about Darfur!

Two years later, the UN voted to impose sanctions—prohibited travel outside Sudan and froze international bank accounts—on four of those most responsible for the 100,000+ dead and 2,000,000 refugees in Darfur, Sudan. For two years, government-sponsored militia in Darfur have been going from village to village, raping women, killing men, burning homes. Meanwhile, the United States was arguing with the rest of the United Nations about whether to take the responsible parties to the International Criminal Court or to create a temporary tribunal.
Two years!!!
I'm glad someone is finally doing something, but this is one of those things that make me lose all faith in humanity.

Making the Grade

Today I ran across an article (actually, it is more like a series of "authority" quotes) discussing whether men would "still" prefer an A- woman (wonderfully described by Dave Cronin—whoever that is—as a BabyTron 5000 Birthing Machine Housewife) to an A+ woman, "the total package".
Has anyone else noticed that "the total package", described as "Brains. Looks. Mommy potential. Earning potential.", would have to be one of those rare superwomen? She'd have to survive on four hours of sleep or less in order to clean, cook, take care of the children, work in a demanding full-time job, sleep with her husband, exercise, do her hair, shop, and have an active social life. I know a few women who have actually succeeded in becoming this ideal A+ wife, but they all did it with drugs—no joke.
I'm not saying that all wives should be stay-at-home mothers, just that I think all these enlightened men and women need to realize what they are asking for. I particularly liked what Michele Weiner-Davis said, except that this passage is a little unfair because it is directed only at men who want "the total package" when it should also address all the future-suicidal women who believe that the only way to be truly self-fulfilled is to be "the total package":

"Do men still prefer the A- woman? Heck, no. Now a man prefers an A+ woman who does it all: She burns the world down professionally; she's his personal siren; she's Martha Stewart on the home front; she's the perfect mother to his children and the primary homemaker. And never mind that she has her plate full with several full-time jobs, he still wants to be the center of her universe.
Now, it's not that men won't pitch in. Millions of men are reasonable and dedicated husbands. They're loving and thoughtful. But for some reason, they still consider themselves to be "helping" with the dishes or "babysitting" the kids. Why don't women "help" with dishes or "babysit" their kids? Because those are "women's jobs" that are, it seems, beneath husbands at face value.
This is why so many women feel as if they're burning the candle at both ends. They truly want to be an A+, but they've learned a physics lesson the hard way: You simply can't be in two places at once. Men need to get real. If they want an A+ woman, they need to make the grade themselves."

I was going to offer some sort of brilliant solution to the double-shift problem, but I cannot remember what I was going to say. I think I'm going to go sunbathe now.

The Organization of My Mind ≤ The Organization of My Desk and the Surrounding Floorspace

Someone has put together a list of 59 Things Guys Should Never Do Past 30 (some of them, in my opinion, should not be attempted by guys under 30 either, but at least I would not find them quite so weird). Actually, I guess it is a book. Oh, the things I wish I had thought of first.

In other news, there is no news. The government is stalled, people are dying, blah, blah, blah.

Ways to make my life interesting enough for me to be truly literary:

• Live on the streets of San Francisco for eight months
• Acquire a brilliant, abusive boyfriend
• Join a gang
• Snap, be committed, go through electric shock treatments, get better
• Become addicted to some glamorous upper, like coke, not a depressant like alcohol or marijuana because it would make me fat, and climb up from rock bottom in a miraculous recovery
• Marry a gypsy
• Find out I am really a gypsy named Elisabeta
  
• Develop a pretty disease, like consumption, and publicly waste away in a serene setting
• Get an exotic lover
• Have an exotic baby
• Attempt suicide a few times
• Make my own clothes out of thrift-store finds and glitter
• Run away to Europe and walk around Córdoba bare-legged until someone takes me in
• Hang around Richmond until I have witnessed a few murders
• Cry in public places without my nose running
• Take care of my brother and sister after my parents suddenly die
• Grow ten inches, be discovered as a model, discover the dark fashion underworld, find out that quitting it is harder than I thought
• Sprout wings
• Pose for an up-and-coming artist who is obsessed with me
• Work as an au pair for the rich and famous, get into all sorts of scrapes with employers and yard guys alike
• Travel to México and perfect my Spanish with a laborer named Juan or Carlos
• Stop eating
• Build a beach hut near Capitola and live as a wild woman
• Wander the streets of old Savannah late at night in a white lacy dress
• Wash up on a private Greek beach disoriented and amnesiatic
  

"Sittin' on the dock of the bay, watchin' the tide roll away…"

"The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
"I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
"From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Shoot. Replace "poet" with "author", "Gee" with "Bee", and "lady crew champion" with "reporter", and you've got my exact situation. Esther and I are even the same age.
Here I was, listening to the rain and thinking I was original, only to find that my life has been written before. To critical aclaim, no less. I am just an intertextual speck.
Now, on page 120, Esther is starting a novel. Ooo, shock me again.
Again, shoot.
I'd better stay away from gas ovens.

Closed System

I was not raised to need or to be needed.
I am the reason I laugh and I am the reason I cry.
I expect laissez-faire love.
Your ego is not my responsibility.
So why, at my computer late at night,
do I write of dependent bliss
and smile with hopeless anticipation?

Double-Standard

Sometimes I feel like strong woman is an oxymoron. We cannot be honest without being witchy. When a man makes a direct, polite, honest request, no one attaches any other meaning to it. Women are somehow hateful when they are direct.
It's not just that, but this whole marriage/motherhood thing is very confusing. I could never manipulate some poor sop into marrying me, but I could never be fake-delicate either. And how could I balance changing the world and raising my children?