February 5 update.
Hello again. I'm trying to push myself to write more regularly, so here I am. There's been a flu or something else going around lately, and I caught it after posting the last update. So I was stuck in bed for a few days and recovering for a few days after that.
Still been just reading, mostly. Keeping my Tekken fresh. Starting to look for work; I think I just need the social activity, honestly. Sitting at home is dull, and online interaction only goes so far.
Been struggling with the cat. He constantly begs to go outside, then tries to hop the fence when we take him out. Which I wouldn't mind, but then he runs the risk of getting hit by a car. Which I do mind. The problem is that I find the constant meowing disruptive. I lack the ability to tune it out, and my room is placed such that I don't really get to get away from it. It makes me wish I had my own place, but that's just not an option right now.
As far as what I've been reading: some polemic, some history, some philosophy. More Postman, but other things as well. Küng's Great Christian Thinkers. Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. Henry's Culture Against Man. Nancy Fraser. Descartes. Seneca. Probably reading more at once than I can fully take in, but it is what it is. I'm trying to give myself the time and space to think about things.
I'm trying to figure out how much I want to ruminate on Solanas' manifesto. I don't want to trivialize it or dismiss it out of hand. I don't really subscribe to it either. I certainly think she misses the mark on a lot of things. I do not find the support of eugenic ideas positive or useful.
I'm not even sure it's something one should or can approve or reject. I don't want to laugh at it or pick it apart. It's an angry, unworkable dream. It's an obstinate refusal of the mainstream attitudes about gender, though I feel her inversion of those attitudes, by remaining stuck in a chauvinist mode of thought, fails to refute them.
I think that she is correct in calling for a rejection of masculinity by all; that doing so is essential to move us forward. I would like to think that her redefinition of male as female, of female as male, her intent to confound and exchange them, her usage of rhetoric of man as biologically deficient (a type of rhetoric often used to deplore women)... I would like to think she is using that as a technique to undermine both categories. To render them both meaningless.
But mostly I just feel sad for her. I feel sad for my mother (and I'm curious to know what she would or perhaps did make of this). I feel sad for myself. None of us asked for gender. None of us gain from it. None of us are made whole by it.