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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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SHPF seeks GWMBB
If you haven't been to tomatonation.com, go there now and worship someone who can write better than you can and is funnier than you'll ever be--on paper at least. I was just there, and was reading the entry about personal ads, and was reminded of the time I tried to write my own personal ad. Yes, I know I live with someone. But I was really looking at the whole thing as a kind of writing exercise. I knew I was in trouble when the first thing that came out was: "Man-loving feminist with an extreme love of molecular biology seeks..." or "I am tough, funny, cynical, driven..." or "You must love Hemingway's writing but hate his politics. You must have a college degree and never have been a member of a fraternity..." You get the idea. The things that were popping out of my head were so far from the things that I've read in personal ads that I really began to question my own sanity. I mean, are there that many men out there who need to be clued into the fact that putting "No Fat Chicks" in their ads is going to turn away all decent women? I remember once my grandmother put an ad in a newspaper and got several letters. I read quite a few of them, and the one that impressed me the most was from a university professor (or so he claimed--though I was much less cynical about such things at the time) who wrote an elegant-sounding letter on yellow legal pad paper. When I pointed out to my grandmother that I liked the letter and, by extension, the person who wrote the letter, her response was, "Well, did you read it? He's black." As in, "don't you see the inherent wrongness here?" Okay, so my grandmother is prejudiced. I guess I hadn't any inkling of this before. See, we're hispanic and I grew up in a neighborhood where there was one white family and my brothers and I were friendly with the children of this white family, but our parents didn't know each other. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, my grandmother's life has been insulated to the point where she doesn't know any black people (and scarcely any white people who don't relate to her in some capitalistic'ly (that's probably not even a word) prescribed/proscribed way) so what she's taken in in regards to "black people" is what she sees on teevee. And black people get the same end of the stick that hispanics get on teevee. They're fools on teevee. They're hated on teevee and feared, too. On teevee, they need help like those boys on "Diff'rent Strokes." On teevee, they're the darker faces (on the continuum of dark faces) on the news that commit all them nasty crimes. And so on. So, what I'm trying to say is: when you read those personal ads, you really should be scanning for prejudices. You really should be a woman who should wonder why a man has to put a personal ad in a paper and why he feels the need to explain that he doesn't want what he doesn't want. This requires more thought and more time. Soon.
More lies:
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