Wednesday, January 07, 2009

you can't spell "carpal tunnel" without "crap"

I do not want to type much these days. Ouch. I think I should use the school's physical therapy. You know how your hand cramps and it zings all the way to your elbow and it stiffens and you can hardly hold a pen? Yeah, like that. I'm also just feeling general blog exhaustion. I don't know why, because I'm not writing much these days and I'm not even reading much. Maybe if I make my peace with short, content-less posts, I will be able to keep blogging. If your hands hurt as much as mine does, I'd rather conserve movement for academic writing and knitting and cooking. Maybe I'll blog only a few times a week until this heals. It did the last time. Please heal.

I was going to weigh in on this debate, but it is exhausted and it exhausts me. Suffice it to say, I agree with Phoebe for reasons deriving from theoretical agreement and personal experience, notwithstanding my own complicated feelings towards the beauty industrial complex and my own body image.

Instead, I'll just say that I express my deepest sympathy to Miss Self-Important for her roommate woes. I always wonder about dudes like this. How do they survive? What did they expect would happen when they moved out of their parents' house? Were they raised by wolves or sickeningly indulgent mothers? I know plenty of people who grew up with housekeepers who still know how to cook and clean, and plenty of people who grew up lower-income who can't, so even class privilege or lack of necessity is no excuse. I grew up with three brothers. The youngest older brother is a total slob (ew, and we have but one bathroom upstairs), but at least he can cook. And he could clean, if he bothered to. My parents seem astounded at my cooking and baking abilities. I was not raised to cook or clean much (I was told to do homework instead and was thrown out of the kitchen and excused from many chores). I didn't really move out till 22, when I went to law school. My mom still tried to pack me food every weekend. Still, I learned how to cook and clean. What is this dude's excuse, other than male privilege? I just don't get it. I guess I am blessed with a partner like TD, who can cook, clean and fix stuff, like every person who does not live with their mother should be able to, and he cooks for me all the time.

Still, roommates. Even with my love-goggles I can say that there are more benefits to living alone than cohabitating too soon, with anyone (even/especially if you love them). I actually live in one of the highest rent cities in the country, which is why I never eat out. I mean, I live three miles from school in technically the gritty city next door to the liberal college town (just on the border though, so it's a couple miles away from actual bodies-in-the-lake part). Still, past roommate experiences have taught me that it is better to suffer the high rent alone in a tiny apartment (although my current apartment is quite spacious for one person) and trek it to school or work than to live with roommates you hate. Even if you don't hate your roommate, problems and awkwardness and boundary issues will necessarily ensue. I was really close friends with a girl until we moved in together. After we moved out a scant number of months later, I didn't see her or talk to her, and it was kind of both of our faults--we send occasional emails, we talk about coffee, but we have never actually met up--and we used to hang out really regularly, until we moved in together.

She would come into my bedroom and wake me up at midnight or 1 am to talk for hours about her boyfriend or general friend problems (I have insomnia and take sleep when I can get it and she didn't get why I was angry at being woken up), but would complain that I was encroaching on her life if I stayed at home when she had friends over, or when I became friends with her friends--originally at her insistence! She tried to set me up with a guy, which didn't work, but complained when the schedule of contrived group meetings for us to get to know one another became "too much" for her to deal with, since she didn't like to get too close to people and see them socially so often. I work from home, so things got so tense she would stay at school till midnight to avoid coming home. She was one of those enviro-sanctimonialists who would get so preachy about recycling and composting everything that I wanted to burn trashcans of paper on our porch. She talked openly in front of my boyfriend and me about her desire to keep her own boyfriend of 8 months at arms length to limit him to a schedule of once a week, after she had seen her other girl friends for a night of clubbing (so say Saturday late night till Sunday), and only one phone call a week (she got freaked out if he called more than that, and wondered what was wrong) yet she knew in her heart that she wanted to marry him and was upset if he didn't acknowledge their relationship to others. I could only hope that my boyfriend didn't think her view of relationships was what I wanted, which fortunately he didn't. Still, because of this, I am thinking that we should go have coffee and reconnect, but I wonder if the awkwardness of not having talked or seen each other since we've lived together will come up. It probably will. Ah, well.