mercy mercy me (the ecology) (alternatively: it's raining men)
02.12.04 @ 3:47 p.m.
Well, yet again I'm i a computer lab, and this time I fancy I'm going to stay even though if I leave now I could still catch the 4 o'clock bus home. I don't really want to be home so much anymore. Not Eugene-home. I'm getting really sick of Ena and Bonnie. I think perhaps I'm arrogant and think that I control the house, and with both of them there, I feel awkward and outnumbered. Which, you know, sucks. I'm also kind of sick of feeling like the foreigner in my own house. I got home sometime around noon and Ena and Bonnie were, well, I guess they were arguing but it was in Mandarin, so I had no idea what was going on. It feels odd to walk through a room where people are having a private conversation but they just carry on because they know you can't understand.
It begins to bring out the over-paranoid side of my personality.
So yeah. Home sucks 'cause I've started spending all my time in my room and resenting everyone. They can all fuck off.
Meanwhile. I am taking fascinating classes, though I violently exclude Economics from that statement, because that bored me almost all the way to DEATH this afternoon. The economics of labor supply can just die. And my professor with the cocky "Economics majors make like six times more money than you STUPID STUPID JOURNALISTS and oh yeah anyone else that might be in here," I hate him, too.
Speaking of majors (and hating this keyboard which sticks and makes me slam down on the keys to get anything written), I went to the English office today. Aggh. So to become a journalism premajor I didn't have to do anything more than fill out the little form. This is possibly because I was a premajor and they don't waste time on those they intend to weed out. I have never before been weeded out of a program and am a little distressed by the whole situation, but I've gone over that before. For English, though, I got a whole stack of papers and was told to come back during Dr. Something's office hours and have an advising chat with him. Fuck. Human interaction. I'm not tremendously good with that. But I guess it makes it good that I didn't put this off until next week like I was very tempted to do. And it's a relief to look through the requirements and see that I've already got a bunch of them done. By having taken both the Shakespeare courses, I've nailed an explicit requirement AND a lower division elective. Go me.
And if I'm leaving letters out of words, I blame this keyboard, and if I'm accidentally using quotation marks where I want apostrophes, then I blame this annoyingly blurry screen. Where the fuck's the sharpness control? This is why I generally dislike comptuer labs. That, and the unclean feeling you get from the keyboards.
Meanwhile, two paragraphs ago I intended to start talking about my Classics course but got deflected. Today was pretty fantastic. We talked about Symposium, which is basically Plato's big treatise on male-male sexuality. There is one reference to female homosexuality in the midst of Aristophanes' speech on love. And that one is pretty damn awesome. About halfway down on this page you can read it. It's the whole "Origin of Love" bit from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. That made me happy. And it's just rather beautiful, except where it suggests that all heterosexuals are basically adulterers. But that makes sense in a world of arranged marriage. When men choose love in the Greek world, they choose an eromenos, a boyfriend. And there are a lot of conventions for that. An older man (which is to say an adult, a man old enough to grow a proper beard) is praised for dauntless pursuit of a young boy (who would be beardless), doing outrageous things like sleeping on the boy's doorstep and so on. Not gifts, though, or at least not expensive gifts. It's very Emily Post, there, full of etiquette. Expensive gifts suggest prostitution. The boy is encouraged to resist the older man, to basically play hard to get. The relationship was supposedly only condoned when it was clear that the boy did not simply lust after the man but admired his virtue and wisdom. In return for gratification of his desires, the man, the lover, would teach and mentor his boyfriend. Awww. There was much viewing of ancient art featuring many an erect penis and men twined together. Always face to face, interestingly enough, suggesting that sex was, uh, friction between the legs rather than the modern idea. ANYWAY.
Masculine men weren't considered attractive to women, not that men seemed particularly interested in attracting women and those that did were thought a bit suspicious. I mean, it's all well and good to ensure the continuation of the state, but women weren't intelligent enough to inspire intellectual love, in the Greek view. Women were good for lust, but a man wants to show his wisdom by placing his desires in someone honorable and worthy. Women didn't gain honor. Women were born with a set amount of honor and could only lose it by behaving badly. Men gained honor on the battlefield. But my original point was, we heard a story from the professor about Zeus capturing Eros and asking him why he made it so hard for him to have the ladies he wanted. Zeus had to pursue everyone, resorting to disguise and transformation. Why, asked Zeus, can't you make someone fall in love with me? Hey, Eros said, it's not my fault. You're pretty damn scary. If you want people to fall in love with you, you'll have to grow your hair long, tie it with ribbons, wear purple robes, and bind your feet with golden sandals. Basically, you need to pretty yourself up. Zeus was not happy with this, as he is the epitome of all that is masculine. He was not going to go all effeminate even if that is what the ladies (and a fair amount of the lads) liked. Fine, he said. Just make it easier for me to catch them, then.
It's worth noting that the Father of the Gods, this epitome of all that is manly, did have at least one boyfriend. He abducted Ganymede, possibly as an eagle, I'm not sure. But Zeus did fall in love with at least one boy.
This all reminds me of Othello. Back in the day when I was in Professor Awesome's class, we spent quite a bit of time talking about homosocial bonding. Oh yeah, and Coriolanus. The man-love was all over those. The idea in Shakespeare and in ancient Greece is that the bond between men is something almost holy. Women seem unworthy and frankly can't understand men as well as other men do. The hypothesis from Shakespeare was that women make men weak, and a strong man, a masculine man, rejects women so far as to even have his sexual relationships and emotional attachments with other men.
Possibly the greatest thing that came up today was the hypothesis that the fiercest army that could ever be assembled would be made up entirely of homosexual male couples. (My prof suggests that such an army existed in Thebes, but I can't remember exactly.) There are two ideas about this. One, the weaker, is that men would fight better because they would be trying to impress their lovers. I suppose this would be more on the passive, 'boyfriend' (eromenos) side of things. (The older 'lover' is the erasthes.) The other is that Love is a bond stronger than anything else, stronger than familial bonds. Men would fight harder to protect their lover or boyfriend. And if a lover or boyfriend fell in battle, gods help you when it comes to the outraged vengence. This is very different from how Americans think, no?
Well, I'm here 'til five now, because it's currently 4:40. I guess that was all a bit long winded, but I thought it was completely awesome. Very engaging.
The only other things I have to say are...
... I went to the gym yesterday and worked out for half an hour. Right now my knees really hurt from the exercise bikes amongst several other wussy little physical complaints. I didn't notice until just now that I somehow bruised the small of my back. I'm a mess.
... Ena and I had a very dignified, controlled argument about the trash and the compost, because I think it's pretty gross that she and Bonnie just leave the bag outside the back door and our landlord subsequently keeps taking it out to the can, which is like ten yards away, you fucking pansies. Just take the goddamn trash all the way to the can, is it that hard? Tonight I think I'll sort out the recycling because, I dunno, these girls are just THICK. They don't know how to take care of a house and it frustrates.
... I watched two Monkees episodes today . Now anyone who asks "Whatever happened to the Monkees?" can fuck off. Gee, I'm all angry and agressive again.
... My last Classics essay, which I thought was scattered and ended up arguing a point contrary to it's thesis (and conveniently ignored several of Penelope's motives) got a 14.5 out of 15. Go me.
... Ryan Adams was cancelled but Martha and I are going to see the Strokes in April. So that's pretty cool. There is an opportunity to see Jet and the Vines together, but I'm not certain I can afford it at this point. I wonder what the deciding deadline is.
... I want to go home and sleep, and yet don't. I better leave the lab soon if I want to catch the 5 o'clock bus.
Previously
fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05
