Query

Is there anything more beautiful in the world than full moonlight on fresh snow?

*sigh*

A Jot

So, I do still have thoughts about good old WAH. Actually, it's a thought, a final little thought, and unlike Eldredge I will put it in terms of my personal experience rather than that of all women in all places and all times forever (modernist!). One of my favorite lines from this book is, "You'd have to admit that a Christian woman is...tired." I relate to this so much, in fact it's probably what I related to most in the entire book, in speaking not just of Christian women but of many women's experience. But for me, the reason behind it is this: I am really, really stupid when it comes to letting anyone help me with anything ever. A lot of times I find myself carrying a lot of burdens (in terms of workload, chores, busyness, whatever) but I would never dream of sharing this with someone and asking for help. I either think, Oh, I can handle this on my own, or I somehow expect the other people around me to know that I need this kind of help (the latter I find most infuriating). Then I get a bee in my butt because I'm supposedly handling so much and no one is stepping up to help me or even really taking notice. Clearly, if the people surrounding me were truly caring and supportive, their telepathy would kick in to circumvent this. So I get a chip in my shoulder and take up even more of the burden to justify my new position as martyr: "Well, fine, I guess I'll just handle this too since nobody else seems to be willing to do anything. Not that they would do it as well as I would anyway. I guess I just have to do everything around here. That's fine, that's the way it always ends up, isn't it? In the end, you're alone, just you against the world. Well, fine, I don't need anybody anyway."

In terms of general competancies, I feel like I've proven myself pretty well. I know that I know how to mow the lawn, hang a picture, fix the toilet, check the oil in my car, teach someone how to ride a bike, fix most problems with an average printer, and even how to build a fire without starter fluid and how to build a shelter in the woods out of found materials. (Yeah girl scouts!) So I feel like there is no doubt that I am able to do these things. So I guess my hope is that I would not be threatened if someone (man or woman) were to offer to do them for me? Sometimes, like most humans, I want to be big and strong and save the day and do the thing and show that I've got what it takes; and sometimes, like most humans, I just want someone else who's willing to take care of me. If I could let them. We'll see.

So my conclusion is that yes, women are tired, and I would chalk some of that up to the passivity of men and I applaud old John boy for encouraging them to take initiative and be actively looking for ways to help others, but I would also say that people like me, particularly women like me, need to learn to be able to ask for help.

Phew, that it is, I promise. (I think.) Seriously, I am so tired of talking and writing and thinking about this book. But, wait, now people might actually start reading these posts and want to object to what I've said and then I'll have to defend it and we'll have to discuss...crap. Oh well. But at least you, oh internet universe, will not have to put up with more typings on this subject matter from me. Unless somebody makes some really good point and I need to clarify my position. Or if somebody makes a really bad point and I want to anonymously make fun of them. Or if I just feel like it. So don't think of it as a promise, think of it as a highly conditional statement that makes no guarantees about future events.

But, before I close the door on Wild at Heart, I thought some of you might like a fair, enlightened evaluation of the book and its effects from someone who was not me, so I have provided you with a link below to a helpful and informative article from "a good source for Christian news." Enjoy, my little scallops... :-)

http://larknews.com/february_2005/secondary.php?page=3

Yours captivatingly,
S.

Deeper into the Wild

The next installment in a continuing saga...shorter too, I think.

I think one of the biggest…not problems, but questions that I had about this book is why this whole idea about adventure and fairy tales and rescues should be what determines our standards for men and women. Where do these ideals come from? I don’t think of fairy tales as the archetypes of humanity, but rather the inventions of a time very close to ours that romanticizes the way that things used to be. I don’t know that there was ever a time when gallant men rode around on horses rescuing beautiful women. We romanticize old battles, the idea of chivalry, but we don’t have any idea of what these things actually used to be like. So I would agree that these stories have a powerful influence in our culture (after all, I am a writing major, and far be it from me to belittle the power of narrative) but I feel that these stories are not based in any kind of historical truth, that there’s no way we can return to this kind of lifestyle because there is no “there” to return to.

I would agree that in the past men had a more clearly defined role, perhaps even a more active role in some sense, but I don’t think it was a more adventurous role by any means. I think for the greater part of history, the mass of men and women have lived very mundane lives, caught up in mundane tasks of day to day labor, family and finances. So why should we pursue these kind of ideals when they are not based in or really functional in our actual lives? Why do we have these desires in the first place? I don’t think their burnished on every man and woman’s heart, spanning time and place. I think they have far more to do with Western culture than with God or our original design, so perhaps E. is right when speaking to how we ought to deal with them, but I really have to question his assessment of their source. But this is also part of a more general, nitpicky kind of problem that I had with E’s language throughout the book. He speaks so generally and so certainly about how this is always true for every man and woman, and after a while, this overbearing confidence gets really obnoxious, like “Hey buddy, have you asked every single man or woman whether this is the case?” But maybe that’s just me…

The other thing that I found really…interesting is E’s out of hand dismissal of how much gender roles are shaped by society and how much they are biological. To quote his book: “Permit me to bypass the entire nature vs. nurture ‘is gender really built in?’ debate with one simple observation: Men and women are made in the image of God as men or as women…Gender simply must be at the level of the soul, in the deep and everlasting places within us.” Is it just me, or are there about four million unexamined presuppositions in that “one simple observation?” It seems as though Eldredge would deny that there is any difference in genders that is derived sociologically rather than spiritually. I really have a problem with that. I think in recent years there has been so much debate about all of these and so many pushes towards thinking that a lot of gender is sociological that it is in a way popular or cool to declare that one thinks that there are really no integral differences between the genders beyond the physical. And because of that popularity, I would feel a lot more comfortable saying that I think that gender is basically a construction, but I don’t want to do that just to be in conformity to popular notions.

On the other hand, I am really not comfortable with making an assertion like “women tend to be nurturing, while men tend to be aggressive.” (this just as an example of the other camp, not exactly of what E. is saying). So I am really not sure where I fall in the whole nature vs. nurture debate, but I feel like it’s pretty evasive and unfair to just avoid the entire thing, to dismiss it even, particularly if you then go on to make lots of statements about the way that every man or every woman is or what they want, just seems to set you square on some very shaky ideological ground. I think that there are definitely patterns in gender roles, that men tend to be one way or women tend to be one way, but I just don’t think it ever makes demographical sense to start talking about the way that all people are. I also think that there are differences between men and woman that are deeper than merely physical, but I don’t know that I would be comfortable to start pointing out exactly what differences those are, even among my own social group, let alone for all men and women. I think that E. needs to avail himself of what my A.P. American History teacher called “the merits of ‘many’.”

I also have trouble saying that men ought to acquiesce to, or even actively pursue living the way that their natural, “God-given” inclinations would lead them. I have lots of natural inclinations that I am pretty sure that I should just leave alone. For example, I am naturally inclined to be greedy, I am naturally inclined to put other people down so I can get ahead, I am naturally inclined to be neurotic. I don’t think that being naturally inclined towards something necessarily disqualifies something as a guidepost towards how we were meant to live, but I certainly don’t think that that alone would merit some inclination to be declared God-given and noble.

Are you'ns tired of this already? Because believe it or not, I think I have enough thoughts for one more post. So children, which would you rather have, a great lapse in posting or vacuous posts or an inundation of legnthy and semi-thoughtful work? You buttered your bread...

S.

Oh So Wild

Brace yourselves for a very long post...the first thing that I have for you tonight is another installment on the continuing saga of Me and My Wallet. So, I returned the call to the good folks at Chipotle and asked that my wallet be sent to my school address because I figured whatever shipping mode they employed would be too slow to get it back to me by the time I left for school. But my mom really didn't want to go to the DMV to secure a new driver's license for me to use to get on the plane back to school, so she called them, asked if the wallet still had my driver's license (it did) and asked that they ship it to Houston when she found that they were planning to overnight it. So all that Saturday, we sat about the house, waiting for the wallet to show up, which it never did. So I had to go through the complex process of using alternate forms of ID at the airport, and I still have no wallet, since we had to wait until it got to Houston and then have my mom ship it to me at school! I will be glad as a turnip to have that thing back though, come to find it comes in mighty handy.

So, at long, long last, this post is the first in a series of reflections I am writing about Wild at Heart. The series thing is simply because I have too gosh darn much to say, so I thought I would make it a little easier by breaking it down. And hence, installment one:

“Every man was once a boy. And every little boy has dreams, big dreams: dreams of being the hero, of beating the bad guys, of doing daring feats and rescuing the damsel in distress.” Or so sayeth John Eldredge, recently acclaimed for his book Wild at Heart. For those of you who don’t run with the evangelical crowd, this book is a runaway bestseller in Christian bookstores across the nation; a book which attempts to address the deepest desires of a man’s heart, the very core of masculinity. I think those of you who read this blog know that I was attempting to delve into this book simply because it is such a phenomenon in evangelicalism, and if everybody is talking about something, I have a yen to know what it is and why. Furthermore, my friends and I argue about or at least jokingly reference this book pretty consistently, and as someone has astutely pointed out to me, it’s not such a good idea to do this with a book you haven’t read. Fair enough. Furthermore, I have a personal interest in this whole idea of gender roles and what they are and what they mean and how we live them out. So, for all of these reasons, I set myself to the task of digging into this most excellent book to try to discern what this kooky guy is trying to say.

Now, right away I came up against an interesting problem: I am not a man. Shocking, I know, but definitely kind of sticky when I am reading a book by a man, for a man, about men’s issues. Again and again I come up against my own ignorance: these are my perceptions, these are things that I’ve observed as I look at and talk to men. So many times I find myself looking at one of Eldredge’s observations and thinking, “Well, this is what I think about it, but I don’t really know” or “This is also true for me, but perhaps for a man they feel this or think this in some elevated or intense way?” So I guess I just want to state from the beginning that I acknowledge my own ignorance and the limitedness of my experience. And I welcome feedback, especially from guys, as to whether or not the things I am saying, or the things that Eldredge says are true. Because, at least I like to idealistically think, I really want to know what is “true” here, not just hear myself talk.

Okay, with all of the preliminaries out of the way, here we go…

This may sound ridiculously basic, but I think E. really has his finger on something just by pointing out that there seems to be a problem with American men. What kind of problem? I could point out the incredible statistics about absentee fathers and husbands or violent crime, or I could just point out about four gazillion couch potatoes, workaholics, road ragers, or weekend fishermen that seem to characterize the American male. I do not in any way agree with E’s allegation that the women’s movement has in some way demanded the feminization of men, but I think that it has introduced an extremely strong element of confusion into what it means to be a man today. If the message to girls is “You can be anything you want to be,” I think the message to guys has, through silence, turned into “We don’t know what the heck you’re going to be.” In the light of the old elephant in the room syndrome, just to stand up and say, “Hey, this isn’t right!” is the first step that must be taken before anything can be done. And I guess you could say that there’s no problem with anomie, that this allows everyone the freedom to choose whatever they want to be, but I think that anyone, in light of this lack of clear leadership, would just slump passively into…whatever. People don’t have freedom to choose when there are no clear options.

Another of the elements of E’s argument is the idea that all men desire an adventure to participate in, something to challenge them. But at the same time, they resist entering into this adventure because their deepest fear is that they will be proved inadequate, that they will be shown to not be enough for their calling. This is an interesting argument because I think I would say that there are many people, both men and women, who desire to do something larger, particularly in the domestic suburban setting, in a dead-end job that they hate, with a home life that is tense and too busy. And I think that this whole idea of impostership is really endemic to most Westerners, that they have a fear that they will someday be unmasked, that their achievements will be proved fraudulent. So I guess this would be one area where I felt really inadequate to evaluate whether this is simply a human desire, since it seems obvious to me that anyone would want to ride bareback on a beach rather than stare at the gray walls of their cubicle for one more day. But I said to myself, maybe this is something that men want particularly strongly, stronger than women could possibly dream, not being men themselves. So I guess I will leave you to arbitrate whether or not E. was right on this point.

I think that E. may have his finger on something with this whole idea of adventure, but I also think he seems to have presented adventure as an alternative to responsibility, or more particularly duty. He seems to have an idea that duty or moral responsibility is something that men are saddled with, or that the church treats these things as the chief end of man, to borrow from the catechism when really it is to follow these deep desires in their hearts to run off and be William Wallace. I am personally of the opinion that fulfilling his duty, living according to his obligations and sticking to his word are some of the most important things that a man can do. A word that I found conspicuously absent from E’s book is the word “honor,” an omission I found puzzling, since I would rank it extremely high in a list of “things a man ought to be.” Maybe the word is too obscure to be of much use to contemporary men, but to me it seems to be a fairly essential idea to me, one that is eschewed in favor of the pursuit of one’s adventures and dreams. To me this seems like it could easily be used as license, not to become men, but to remain as boys, preoccupied with doing what makes them excited or happy rather than what they see around them that needs to be done, that needs to be taken care of.

But, in my continuing effort to be fair and balanced, I think the other thing in E’s book that is really useful is his urging that men be able to acknowledge their own woundedness. I think it has been a great injustice to men that they have been taught that in order to be men they need to just “suck it up,” deny or forget or ignore whatever has bothered or truly hurt them in favor of being seen as a tough or macho man. I feel that this is not good for anyone, that to suppress feeling of pain turns them into anger or withdrawal. Why is it that uncontrolled rage is not condemned as unmanly when so many other displays of emotion are? This is important too because I think that in order to overcome woundedness, the wound must be acknowledged and dealt with or no growth will come of it; it will become not just a scar, but a burden. I think it takes infinitely more courage to acknowledge one’s wounds and deal with them than to just stuff them and move on, so I do applaud E. for encouraging men to move forward in this area.

Okay, okay, enough all ready! Until next time, my wild little friends...

S.

"Is this a kissing book?"

So chums, as you might have guessed I am lounging in the comfort of my humble abode, watching good old Princess Bride. I miss all of you because I am watching it alone and...no one gets me. Except my friends. Oh, teen angst. I love this movie a great deal. Why am I able to watch it again and again, and still love it just as much each time? Eldridge would say that it is because it captures the true deep desires of my heart which I long to enact in the realm of actual life. I am not so sure.

Gasp, is she finally going to talk about Wild at Heart tonight? No, no, it would be cute to write about it while watching a movie like Princess Bride, but I am too unfocused and it is a bit too late to embark on this epic post. The reason that I am posting is to tell you that *more gasping* Chipotle called today to say that they have my wallet! Oh happy day! I wonder if my moneys are still in there? If they aren't I guess we'll know that those Chipotle employees are up to no good. So, now the question has become, how on earth, where on earth did they manage to find the wallet?

Another question which has long plagued me, why does Buttercup leave Wesley outside the Fire Swamp?

A Puzzling Whodunit

I have been mostably sick all day. I am much confused as to the cause. Maybe it's that darned egg-nog rearing its ugly head again. I thought originally it was the combined effect of my dad's cats and Hope's family's cats causing my allergies to act up and what not. Scratchy throat, sneezing, coughing, that kind of thing was all it was at first, for a couple of days. All seems innocuously cat related, doesn't it. But then, the day that we were leaving, I started to feel worse, stuffy nose, dizzy, achy and the like, which has continued all day today. So I generally acted like a lump and layed around and watched stupid sitcoms on TV and took an obscenely long nap. This is all very funny because mostly I am just telling myself that it's all psychosomatic and if I would just get up and get going, I would be fine. But then I go off and sleep for many hours, is this proof of some actual ailment?

So, I just got back last night from our trip to Omaha which was pretty crazy. I was supposed to spend one night and an afternoon with my friends, but the night that I was staying over at Hope's house, the driving rain changed into driving snow which lasted into the next day. The roads were too bad for me to get back to my Dad's house across town for New Year's Eve so I was with my friends for an extra night for a marathon knock-down-drag-out-down-and-dirty game of Apples to Apples (and I am oh so proud to report that yours truly emerged victorious from the fray). Those of you from Western New York might not think this unusual at all, but it doesn't really happen in Omaha all that often that there is so much snow that you can't get around, so that was interesting. Eddius had a hotel room because he's allergic to cats (like yours truly) and so me, Hope, Francis, and Eddius crashed there for New Year's Eve.

We wanted a little bite to eat so we headed on over to the old Chipotle for some chow. So there I was, I just ordered a drink, I took out my wallet, paid with a 20 cause that's all I had, put the change back and then suddenly, by the end of the evening, the wallet was gone. Let me clarify: my wallet is at least an inch thick, the restaurant was so small that we could see basically the entire place from where we sat. Only a few people came in after us. I was certain that I had the wallet when I went in and certain that I did not have it when I came out. We duly interrogated all the Chipotle employees, but they insisted that they had not seen hide nor hair of my wallet. So where the heck did it go? I had thought it was with me in my purse the whole time, which was only an hour or so, I wasn't bumped into by any dubious strangers, there was no opportunity at which the stupid thing could have been taken, so I really don't know what happened. My charismatic upbringing leads me to believe that dark spiritual forces have interfered with my financial well-being by snatching the wallet. But I don't buy it. I just cannot for the life of me figure out what happened. I canceled my check card so the greatest loss I suffered was forty bucks and all of my Australian money, which is the loss that I am most upset about, except for the loss of the wallet itself which was real leather and cute. So this was the most bizarre, non-serendipitous thing which happened the entire trip. And that, dear friends, is the only story you're going to hear tonight.

Mazel Tov,
S.