Post-colonialist Angst

Rant rant rant rant ranttttttt.

Here goes.

Well first of all, the internet has ruined my life. I mean, really, take zappos. I can spend hours on that site, perusing every goddamn sandal until I think I found the perfect one that will bring bliss to my problematic, picky, post-injury left foot. Or all these fashion blogs which, as a dear friend has put it, are a time-pump (and by the way, I apologize for introducing you to these time consuming monstrosities!). How self absorbed can I be? Even if they are occasionally about empowering women and positive body image blah blah blah, one of them is even a sort of fundraiser, still I can't sleep at night because I run over in my head how exactly to put in words on my BLOG, my own fucking blog, that the other self absorbed bloggers have made me a mouse potato, or whatever you call someone who just sits in front of the computer all evening long and will never finish reading Anna Karenina.
Also, lately I keep saying to myself stuff like: think of the hungry children in Africa. I mean, it's not something I would ever say to a child who doesn't feel like eating the last bite of peas off their plate, because there are few things crueler than forcing food down a child's throat. But these days, I'm having bouts of something like post-colonialist capitalist remorse, thinking more and more of how I consume much more than I need - I've already told you of my love of fatty spreadable food - eating more than will keep me full, because I have a sweet tooth and I'm just used to it that way, or convincing myself I absolutely need another pair of jeans (because in the "world" I "live" in, where different clothes are appropriate for different occasions, I actually do). So DH says, pick a fundraiser, give them 10 dollars a month, and some kids IN AFRICA will have more to eat. No, I say, that doesn't work, it doesn't change anything about the system, that's just a fig leaf for Republicans! (I was pretty pleased with myself with that one…) And he answers: well, it's better than standing in your kitchen with a bowl of rice krispies, talking about it and doing nothing. And that's what I do, of course: NOTHING. Except now I've published it in my blog, and I'm wondering if the fact that I have this place to channel my thoughts into just makes me mull them over even more instead of just going to sleep, it's gonna be 2 am by the time I finish this ghastly post [2:20 and I would love a peanut butter sandwich right now. going to bed...]. Speaking of nothing, I'm very sure that I will bring no change whatsoever to this world, that I will produce nothing of significance to humanity. I have a no less firmer conviction that the world is going to be a shittier place in the future, and if my grandchildren don't actually fight their neighbors for some resource like, oh let's say, WATER, it's because white people will leave it to the grandchildren in Africa to kill each other.
(Girly girl talk coming up. Seriously guys, if you don't feel like reading about menstrual pads and hand laundry, just skip to the next paragraph). I've recently started using non-disposable menstrual pads. In short, they're great. But I guess ideally I should have spent even more money to buy enough of them to last my whole period without having to do the laundry every other day for a week. So I end up hand washing with Tide - which is probably manufactured by one of the most animal-testing, toxic-waste-dumping, baby-killing conglomerates in the world - those cool eco-friendly save the planet and embrace your femininity pads. Point: made myself feel totally lame again. I mean, I can technically sew some more of these pads myself, they even encourage you to. (Girl talk is over...)
However, a) I don't have a sewing machine, and what is more important b) I can do nothing with my bare hands besides bake, and for that to turn out nice I need assistance from some butter (back to the original problem: SATURATED FATS!), and occasionally write unimportant papers on antiquity. Perhaps if I were an artist. dot dot dot.

Now, I kinda owe you an explanation of what it is I want to be when I grow up, which is not necessarily a Classics professor, but a theater director, and how I am trying to move in theatrical circles, but that will have to wait. What I do want to say is that I recently saw a dance piece by Andrea Miller, well what do you know, just go ahead and click on that link and you will see she defines it as a "duet for two men about loss and the vain attempt to save someone who is dying" (the Internet, I tell you. You learn something every day). Chapeau, Ms. Miller, because even without knowing what it's "about", it totally made me cry, and I mean choke down sobs into a kleenex, and I was willing to at least partly attribute that to the music by Arvo Part (which, I found out at the end of the show, is a piece called Fratres, which means Brothers in Latin). But mostly, well, I see a piece like this, something so strong and crystal-clear and WITHOUT WORDS, and I know that if I really could, it is not theatre I would strive to do, but dance.
But I can't. The easy excuse would be to refer you back to my left-foot injury.

Some concluding thoughts: 1. Thanks, mom, for taking us out to shows like this, and mending my clothes and knitting us cool stuff. You are a woman who does things with her hands, including deliciously amazing food, and I admire you.
2. If there is a volunteering path I might actually take, it is to help women who have been sexually attacked. Now, my ex-therapist would probably advise me not to do it, and I seriously do not know if my stomach and heart can take the devastation of these situations, but if ever there was a cause I believed in, an aspect of this shitty world I would want to actively contribute to changing.
3. This might be one of my passing nihilistic fits, though they seem to be recurring more frequently lately. When DH looses faith in his intellectual vocation - which he recently described as a sublimation of the artistic occupation that he can't pursue anymore because of his own physical injury - or in his capacity to make a difference, I say to him: we will bring children to the world and raise them to be good people. That's all very well (minus the anxiety of my children being molested, chronically ill, socially inapt, or just unhappy) but let's just stick to the Art and Vocation parts. So really, even if I were an artist, I'd probably be presenting to a bunch of left-wing white intellectuals and I'm back to square one: I am not going to have any impact on anything. NOTHING is going to change. All this talk about NOTHING, could it be somehow related to the fact that - with the original intent solely to hear DH presenting in class, my very own DH who is, in a way, returning to his intellectual "home" - I spent the day reading Heidegger's What is Metaphysics, and then sitting in a class on the NothingNESS that is revealed to us in ANXIETY?
Hmmmm. Probably not.