When I quote others to better express myself.
… I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean- except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.
J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
November really has pounced on me, in another ten days, or so, I’m trying my best to veer away from a countdown, I’ll be twenty five years old. I don’t usually make a big deal out of the years stacking up against me, the difference is often so negligible I blissfully ignore it. I keep saying a person is only as old as they think they are. I don’t feel old, but a whole twenty five years is overwhelming, I feel unworthy.
A child is born to the world every minute but my own world feels like a giant tote bag tilted precariously on its head by a rummaging old woman searching for an elusive amex card. I have more friends but fighting for space in the crowd feels lonelier. I read less but I profess to know more. I have so much to be grateful for but I want more. I concur with Bertrand Russell in that, ‘To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness’, but I haven’t had the epiphany to sit comfortably and contentedly with my present set of sullied circumstances and smile through it which is a direct contradiction to everything I’ve been telling myself these past months.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life,
Is bound in shallows and in miseries;
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current as it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Brutus in Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
The past few days I’ve been disinclined towards blogging. I’ve met such wonderful people through blogging but now that blogging is not my only link to the great minds of the blogging world, I’m somewhat adverse to blogging. In his childhood memoirs, Words, Sartre remarks that each time he writes a book, he feels it’s better than the last then he gets ready to disown it. He claims it to be a familiar experience for all writers. I’m not a writer, too much expectation attached to that one, I prefer language practitioner simply for its bafflement inducing potential. I haven’t thought about my blog as better than anything else I’ve done, I haven’t done enough to make such a comparison, but I am wishing this blog away. I’m writing this in an effort to understand why.
I don’t like using my blog as an angstologist, if I did, I’d be at about two hundred posts already. There, I’m starting to feel better about blogging already.
Don’t flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is no difference between being raped
and going head first through a windshield
except that afterward you are afraid
not of cars
but half the human race.
Marge Piercy
Watching the afternoon dwindle away from my bedroom window the other day, Cousin Flighty and I spoke about, politics (the kind generated from a girls high school), plans for the future (the December holiday), how I should be getting married soon so that she can get a new wardrobe and then back to the less significant parts of school, studying for exams. She left me aghast with this, ‘My timetable’s going to rape me.’
In my other life, y’know the much neglected non-blogging one, I’m meant to be putting a microscope to the way my carefully selected pocket of society manipulates language to serve its own nefarious ends since there exists a close relationship between the historically and socially determined circumstances in which a community lives and the language it uses. Basically, the society we live in is reflected in the language we use. So rape, it would seem then, is so much a part of this society, so much a norm, so passively accepted, that the word has now taken on another shade of meaning. Cousin Flighty insists everybody is using it, ‘We don’t mean rape like rape but like we mean it’s really bad.’ Zapiro’s infamous cartoon showed Jacob Zuma about to rape the justice system. Surely there’s something insidiously amiss in a society where rape is so passively accepted in public discourse and used with such indiscriminate aplomb. Is it bound to raise awareness of rape as a crime, as an injustice, as oppression?