Okay. Here We Go.

Well hell. This entry's been tugging at me and I haven't wanted to write it and I'll probably back away from it before it's done... But still. I can't sit here peacefully drinking coffee with this entry banging against the inside of my poor skull.

So. Okay. Here we go.

Thursday late afternoon I was goofing around, trying to finish up the week's work for my World Lit class, trying to get in my ten weekly discussion board postings, trying to think of one more quasi-profound thing to say about Allende's The House of the Spirits, magic realism, the coup in Chile, feudal classism, universal themes of blah blah blah. Because mostly what I do for the discussion  boards of my three classes is goof around. I mean, what I call goofing around. Because I feel like I'm kind of writing on cruise control. Or, like, with one eye shut, one hand messing with the radio, and the other hand sometimes steering, sometimes texting. I mean, writing punchy, pivotal, provocative, quasi-profound paragraphs (depending heavily on my best friend Alliteration Smith), is what I do. What I rilly-rilly like to do. (I blame blogging.) And while I tone it waaaay down for World Lit, sometimes when I'm writing for my Soci or WS class, I find myself muttering in apparent relish, "Who's gonna fight with me, who's gonna fight with me?"

Though, tangent, no one wants to fight with me. No one wants to play. There was that one guy who wrote me that rebuttal or whatever, the only guy in the class, and my instructor is all saying that we can't respond to a rebuttal of our posting and so I didn't. Even though it bugged me. Even though the thing that both bugged me and boggled my mind was the fact that a whole handful of women in the class flooded to the post and congratulated the guy. It made me think. It made me go back and see that each and every time this guy posts something (and he's no rocket scientist; I mean, he's no ME), the same little harem of women jump onto his post, gushing, "Good job!" "Great post!" "I wish I could write like you do!"  And it made me think: Hmmm. How freaking SOCIALIZED women must be to provide men with a flood of flipping APPROVAL. In this Soci class we're supposed to make one post and then respond at length to one more post. We're NOT supposed to do all this "Great job, good work" crap. And the only person in the class who gets this dumb validation is the one man. Hmmm.

Anyway. /Tangent.

In my World Lit class we are supposed to be very interactive on the discussion board. And sometimes I think it gets waaaay toooooo interactive, but that's probably just my misanthropy and elitism coming through. And anyway, I had pretty much said all I could say for the first week's reading of The House of the Spirits. I knew that if I said much more, I was going to start mentioning severed body parts and spoil the severed-body-parts ending for the rest of the class. Soooo... I had one more post to get in for the week , I had to go pick up 2/3 of my  kids real' fast, so in response to a post about, idk, the universal theme of poverty and why-oh-why the peasants couldn't just get their peasant act together without Esteban brutalizing and raping them... sigh, the person making the post seeming to support the tyranny necessary to get those bad, lazy peasants working... I closed one eye, messed with my iTunes, texted Trinity, and posted:

"This thread kind of reminds me of my mother's [lack of] perception regarding the current poverty in which I live.

I grew up in Danville, one of the wealthiest suburbs of San Francisco (and therefore one of the wealthiest suburbs in the world). My mother has no frame of reference for poverty. She cannot seem to grasp the concept of raising three children on an annual income of $10, 226. She cannot conceive of living in a rotting, roachy trailer with holes in the floor, used clothing, thrift store furniture and appliances, food stamps. She cannot imagine how we live without vacations or a clothes dryer; it's all completely foreign to her.

She says stuff like, "I would never live like that!" "I wouldn't put up with that!" And, "I would just leave!" And it boggles my mind that she thinks this is somehow a choice, that there are options.

I've learned not to bring up the topic of my life here with the kids. My mother likes to say, "Well, you should be grateful that you don't live in Africa!" Like that's my frame of reference. Things could be so much worse! I could live in Africa! (Why didn't I think of that?)

I think that if there was a book my mother could read, a piece of literature detailing the reality of living in ********, Texas, in a dilapidated trailer, raising three kids, struggling to escape the sucking vacuum of poverty, my mother would somehow get it. Like a universal theme. Like I finally understood the Biafra War and the coup in Chile. That's what I think literature can do. It can reach people, grab them by their humanity, make them understand."

See, I was tired. It'd been a long hot day. Otherwise I wouldn't have used the words "stuff," or "roachy," or the term, "sucking vacuum of poverty." (Though, heh, I love saying "sucking vacuum of poverty.") But anyway, minutes following this posting, I got this response:

Hang on. I can't post her response. It would be wrong. Even by my fluid standards.

It was from that very, very kind woman who emailed me. The email that made me nearly cry. And she emails me frequently and is always invariably friendly and funny and kind, even though, even via email communication, it is apparent to me that she is one of those people who cares way too much what other people think. One of those people who doesn't want to make anyone mad. In her discussion board postings she apologizes when she thinks her opinion has offended someone. She doubts herself. She puts herself down. And, heh, I certainly recognize what cripples her, and I want to say to her, as I frequently want to say to myself, "Who cares! Don't worry about what these other people think! Stand up for yourself! You're NOT wrong! You're smart and you work wicked hard and most of these people are fools and so STAND UP FOR YOURSELF."

But actually what I want to do, what I have to keep myself from doing, is to stand up FOR her. Because that's what superheros slayers warrior princesses people like me, people suffering from, barely overcoming, the same pathologies that she has, want to do.

Her reply dealt with the fact that she is a victim of rape. She said that my post made her want to come out about it as she never has before. How she has always blamed herself, thought she must surely have had some kind of choice or option to avoid the rape, that it was her fault.

She wrote about it at length and I was all, "Whoa." Because isn't it odd, what stirs us to exorcise ourselves, free ourselves of bad secrets? For this woman, the unlikely forum was a World Lit class discussion board. Reading her reply, car keys and cell in my hand, rushing to pick up the kids, I had to pause and post back real' quick that I was in awe of her bravery in making the post, that although I did not know her in anything but an online sense, her honesty and emotional openness  moved me, blah blah.

The odd thing, is that in a class of mostly women who LOVE to post on the discussion board (I have no doubt, that if they could, they would be posting cat pics, recipes, horoscopes,  movie reviews, funny kid anecdotes, and romantic advice*), NO ONE responded further. It became an official DEAD THREAD on the discussion board.

And what's up with THAT?

You know, statistically, in this large class of mostly women, she cannot be the only woman who has been victimized by rape, and by this I mean that she and flipping I cannot be the only ones in this large class to have been sexually assaulted... So why is the class, and by this I mean ME FREAKING TOO, making, albeit passively, her feel that she is alone in this?

When she CAN'T be the only one!

And sure I felt like posting back. I composed post after post in my poor head. But every-single-thing I wanted to say... seemed wrong. Really wrong. So wrong that it made me look at myself, question myself, question the part of me that basically wanted to convey that sure I've been raped; haven't most women been raped? Pretty much everyone I know has been raped or sexually assaulted. And hey, I'm cool with the fact that it happened to me, I mean, I'm fine, it hasn't affected me, it's just one of those things, one of those things that happens once or three or five times to most women and you just deal with it.

Wow. Seriously? Is that what I seriously think? Feel? That it's... NORMAL?

Is that what I'm saying? That rape and/or sexual assault is simply part of being a woman?

This entry is getting way too long and I know that one of the first rules of blogging is Keep It Short.

I guess I could continue this in another entry... Though, well, what's the point? And I've got lots of class work to do and stuff... Eh.

* I know, I know... I'm being horribly sexist.