Date: 2005-01-11
To: Addendum
Miles today: 0.0

If you managed to read all of yesterday¢s entry and have STILL come back for more (theory sluts, all of you), here are a few extra thoughts:Yesterday¢s extended quotation from ¢Wanderlust¢ was written, as I said, by Rebecca Solnit, who is a brilliant, largely self-guided essayist and theorist. I loved Wanderlust and am currently working my way through her ¢As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Gender, Landscape, and Art.¢(For those of you out there who are theory-minded, these books are so good you¢ll salivate. I¢m serious. I would totally bear this woman¢s children. But, um, as you may have gathered from her subtitles, perhaps likely to appeal only to a select crowd. Mea culpa.)I said yesterday ¢ and maintain ¢ that we don¢t think to analyze what is most present in our lives. Or most of us don¢t. Case in point: when my friend Nathalie first told me she was focusing on Food Studies within our shared academic major, I thought she was joking. Like, as though food couldn¢t possibly comprise a discipline deep enough for more than an hour¢s solid thought. And this from a gender studies major! You¢d think I of all people should have been acutely sensitive to the phenomenon of people assuming that what I studied was either a big joke, a leftist intellectual feminazi anti-male conspiracy, or both. Actual conversation with my grandmother a year ago: Her: ¢So what are you majoring in?¢ Me: ¢Gender studies.¢ (Pause) Her: ¢Oh. So do you want to, like, ¢¦.work with children, or something?¢It is Nat, by the way, who gets credit for the word ¢zielpunkt,¢ which I¢ve been wanting to use ever since it showed up in her blog last August. Her, I should add, highly entertaining blog. www.azurenath.blogspot.com. I don¢t think she¢d mind my posting the link here.In any case, rants about cultural specificity notwithstanding and no matter how you theorize it all, I¢m still an upper-middle-class white girl from a chichi-yet-liberal New England suburb. I went to Girl Scout camp for ten years, for crying out loud. Not to mention that my Buddhist parents used to take my brother and me to Concord every Patriot¢s Day* after the marathon was over for a sort of Transcendentalpalooza: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Walden, The Old Manse, the Old North Bridge, and my dad waxing philosophical about Eastern philosophy as informed by the American Transcendalist movement, or vice versa, I forget, because I was more interested in the cheap tin pennywhistles our parents bought us from the gift shop. Sam would bash his pennywhistle on the bridge railing beyond all recognition (and that¢s the Shot Heard Round the World, let me tell you) and then whine when it wouldn¢t blow a note and I wouldn¢t trade with him either. Every year, no joke. Kid never learned. I mean, this is what I grew up with, and Emerson kind of pisses me off sometimes, but then so do my parents (it¢s entirely mutual, I should add) and, you know, we laugh about it later. *(Patriot¢s Day: No, you¢ve never heard of it. It¢s a Massachusetts-only holiday. Also the annual date of the Boston Marathon. I was totally put out when I moved out of state for college and I no longer got a three-day weekend in April.)All of which is to say that it is not necessarily the world¢s biggest stretch of the imagination to see how a background like mine could be conducive to a bizarrely masochistic enthusiasm for the prospect of six months of extreme physical duress, all out in glorious Nature. (That¢s Emerson¢s capital N, not mine. He¢s definitely on probation right now, though.). So I¢ve got my sociocultural justification. It¢s my dad¢s fault. What¢s YOUR excuse?