Dear Readers (all six of you), I’m moving my blog. I’m pissed off at blog.com for switching all of my pictures over to a weird cartoony guy holding a sign that says something about exceeding my monthly limit. And I can’t figure out how to fix it.
So you can find me here at my new Wordpress home. A new post awaits you!
And I smiled.
Remember discovering Nietzsche? Remember endlessly quoting Nietzsche? Remember being unabashedly smart and twenty-something and certain that all of the grown-ups were too concerned about the wrong things. Remember quoting Nietzsche to [or about] your parents?
There are so many great Nietzsche quotes like “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule,” and “Fear is the mother of morality,” and “People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.”
So I smiled when I read the Nietzsche quote in Mike’s paper. “Right on time,” I thought, and I penned “love it” in the margin. And I do love it…”The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception. ” It’s a great quote, and I’m glad Mike discovered it.
I’m sure he was, as I was, led to Nietzsche by a super-cool friend, a boy who wears too much black, whose hair is too long or who has too many piercings.
That boy was in my classroom a few years ago, quoting both Nietzsche and Jung and peppering his paper with references to the Superman and the Shadow Self that only I understood. He liked it that way. He liked to feel that he was, as Jane Austen would say, “a cut above the company” in the freshman comp classroom. Mike has this air about him too, as I sure did I back in my Nietzsche-quoting days.
But, I later discovered, Nietzsche was also a bit of a dick. He was terribly brutal in his thoughts about women. He said things like, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent,” and “Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman,” and “For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.”
He was also somewhat xenophobic: “‘Evil men have no songs.’ How is it that the Russians have songs?” and “An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris .”
And clearly anti-religion: “After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.” and “God is a thought who makes crooked all that is straight,” and “In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.”
As I continued to read Mike’s paper, which contained the appropriate amount of 20-year-old philosophizing about what it means to lie and what really constitutes a lie, and what Neitzsche meant, I was brought back to my own 20-year-old brain. And I know that an equally patient freshman comp teacher penned some encouraging comment over my own presumed-brilliant integration of Nietzche into my essay. I strove to impress with my deep thoughts and high brow allusions, and she was probably already well versed enough in Neitzsche to know of his dickishness.
I wonder if she smiled.
I also found this “vampire” article from Oprah.com (yikes, I know) through CNN.com, and it seemed to compliment (or would it be complement, Nina?) my “Girl Talk” post.
Enjoy friends, and I’m guessing that no one really wants to hear my emerging theory of how LOST’s Desmond is, in fact, a Christ figure.
(Little Gwennie actually made this connection when she saw, in a children’s Easter book, a picture of Jesus coming out of the tomb. She said, “Mommy, Jesus came out of the tomb like Desmond came out of the hatch.” First of all…mother. of. year. for letting my four-year-old watch LOST. Second, the lit nerd in me is already textually analyzing LOST and building a mental outline of the similarities between the Desmond/hatch and Jesus/tomb stories. I may even develop a LOST theory based on my findings)
So, because I don’t want to lose my six or so readers, I’ll be back when I write something you’ll want to read.
(UPDATE: Desmond, aka Henry Ian Cusick, WAS Jesus in The Gospel of John the Baptist ! Thanks Anonymous Blue Girl friend!)
At her funeral, the priest described her as someone who had a “difficult time” expressing her love and that she had a “tough life.” He said that she often failed or refused to acknowledge the love of her family, that she hated getting old. And then he said that “the only thing golden about the golden years is your urine.”
My thought during this bleak (and let’s face it, a little disturbing) service was how does a life of 80+ years, three children, eleven grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren end with fewer than 10 people at a service where the priest spoke of urine?
My answer: complete and total focus on the self. In all of the time that I’d know her, I seldom heard Grandma C utter a sentence that didn’t include the words “I” or “me.” And it was never “I want to help you.” It was always that someone was doing something to her or not doing something for her…endless cycles of how she had been wronged or what others weren’t doing right.
She focused almost exclusively on her hardships, as women sometimes do (as our family and cultural examples often instruct as to do) In her 1996 book You Just Don’t Understand, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen points out that men bond with other men through activities and that women bond with other women through “troubles talk.”
It seems that sometimes, we women can lose our sense of balance when it comes to “troubles talk.” We begin to see ourselves as helpless victims (with a capital V) of our issues, our childhood traumas, our badly gone relationships with others. I’m all for processing and counting on girlfriends through difficult times, but how many of these times are truly difficult and how many of these difficulties are imagined or contrived from the darker areas of our minds? Are we maybe paying too much attention to our troubles?
Today, I was working with a friend, Melissa, and she said something that caught my attention. She said, “I lost my three best friends four years ago when I decided to stop badmouthing my husband.” I believe it. When we stop talking about our issues, our troubles, our husbands, sometimes other women don’t know how to deal with us. I know when my best friend Nina went from a somewhat destructive intimate relationship into one in which she was truly valued and happy, it was a little weird. But her newfound sense of calm was palpable and infectious, and I was moved by how, despite her difficult past (not to mention childhood traumas) she was able to fully embrace the peace of her new life.
Nina inspired me to attempt a disengagement from routine “troubles talk.” It was my secret New Year’s Resolution. Now, while I certainly had the need to call a friend after a particularly bad day, for the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve carefully avoiding focusing on and talking about my troubles and concerns. Because to be honest, I’d had it up to here with issues, including my own. I’ve dealt with unavoidable life stress by working out (a lot), reading with my girls, and watching back episodes of LOST. What happened? I’ve spent less time on the phone, I’ve lost 15 pounds, and I’m a little in love with Desmond.
And, sadly, I have had some strange and distressing responses from one or two friends who seem to need me to be, well, unhappy, self-focused, and issue-obsessed. Why? Because they are, and they’re desperately in need of a “change back” to validate themselves. Sorry ladies.
However, above all, what I’ve really noticed is that buds of new relationships between women with whom I share interests and passions, not issues and drama. And I’ve also noticed that in my oldest relationships (with my best friend Nina and my sister-in-law Crse), I’m having a blast. Our conversations are toned with the kind of comradry that comes from years of real love and they’re punctuated with a laughter that is indescribably pure and beautiful.
It’s not easy to give up on drama, and life has seemed a little dull at times over the past couple of months, but I’ve learned to love a more silent phone. The pop-psychologists can keep their self-help books and their self-awarness exercises, and the priests can keep (and really should keep) their insights on urine. For me, the still clear mind that comes from letting go of ego will, I believe, lead me to relationships with other women that are more rich and loving and fun.
