Eccentric Flower:199902/this makes nine
From Eccentric Flower
«February 1999 «Eccentric Flower
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twenty-three february this makes nine Today's third postcard. Like the other two, it consists of three unrelated, random items. To do it any other way would have completely gone against my sense of symmetry. - - - There appears to be some debate raging on one of the journal lists about profanity. I'm not on any of these lists, but I pick up the spoor. Kymm wrote an entry with some choice bits from the debate. Kymm has been known to use four-letter words in her prose on a regular basis. She also condemned the practice of replacing some letters in the swear words with asterisks - she said it was "precious." I try not to curse here. When I do, I use the asterisks (assuming I can remember to). As I wrote her, there are three reasons I do this, in order of increasing importance: 1. This is tied a little bit into gender issues. I assume that my boy side is the one that wants to curse. (Yes, I know that's an oversimplified, stereotypical dichotomy. Wanna make somethin' of it?) 2. I don't curse all that much in real life. I believe that cursing is taking the easy way out. I am much likelier to use fifty words to tell a human, precisely and nastily, all of the ways in which they are a broken rung on the evolutionary ladder - and, in the end, for the extra work, it will be more devastating than if I'd opted for the short Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. I curse mostly at inanimate objects. No point wasting good words on a light fixture. 3. (foremost) I believe in Miss Manners' idea that successive shocks lose their effect. She points out that the virtue of being completely demure is that on the rare occasion when one really needs a strong word, it has maximum surprise and impact. And if you don't agree, go f**k yourself. Ahem. [adjusts hair, looks other way] - - - I have gotten more, and faster, email on the codependence postcard than anything else I've ever written about. Really. I've been deluged. And I'm not complaining - the more mail the better - but it continues to surprise me which topics hit the right buttons and which don't. Even more amazingly, given my argumentative friends, everyone seems to be in consensus. Everyone. That never happens. The general opinion is that while women may suffer physical abuse more often than men, due to size and strength, the willingness to suffer emotional abuse isn't gender-linked. There are plenty of women who refuse to be abused that way; there are plenty of men who sit there and take it. Frankly, I'm happy to go along with vox populi on this one. I would have been distressed had everyone said, "Yes, women allow themselves to be victimized more often." I find the verdict reassuring, in an odd way. I suppose I want us to be democratic about our weaknesses. - - - I've written a lot of email in the last three days. Some of it is the usual bilge water, but some of it is good stuff - if I do say so myself. I don't keep my sent mail for longer than a few days, unless I think I'll need it for legal or other reasons later (i.e. publisher letters, etc). There's no way I could - there is only so much hard drive space in the world. I realized wistfully tonight that the age of "Collected Letters of ____" is over. If, heaven help me, someone ever wants to collect my correspondence, they will find virtually nothing after age twenty-five. The flip side of that is that I sometimes write more mail in a day than I used to write in a year. So is the flow of ideas now worth the absence of memory later? Obviously I disagree at least partially, or I wouldn't be keeping a journal. And this is not writing on water - there are backups of these files, unlike my email.
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