Sunday, June 13, 2004

Fluff



This post is fluff if written by female bloggers (or goddesses) and it disqualifies the blog from being regarded as a Serious Political Blog. That's why I have to include it every once and a while. I shiver at the idea of Serious Political Blogging. Or Serious Anything, really. We all take ourselves far too seriously.

I just got up after having slept sixteen hours nonstop. Didn't even get into my pyjamas before I conked out. Why? It had something to do with lots of nectar and the world's largest chocolate ice cream cake with hot fudge sauce and whipped cream all over it. I used the whipped cream to write haikus on the tabletop about the pleasures of chocolate ice cream, and someone else ate the haikus. That's really awful, and I was so shocked that I had to go to bed.

The day had started badly enough. I slammed the phone down on someone who wanted me to write ten letters on behalf of leukemia sufferers and then to distribute them in my neighborhood so that for weeks afterwards people would run away when they see me coming. And then the self-recriminations started: How could I slam the phone down on all those suffering people? What sort of a monster am I? (Well, I know that one, but you know the idea behind the guilt.) Will I now get leukemia as a punishment?

This was so horrible that any counterargument from my Better Self (like the fact that I have already done this thing and know the consequences and that the majority of my so-called disposable income already goes to charity and that nine out of ten phone calls I get are like that one, and I always say yes) were drowned out. I was too upset to even do the laundry or the vacuuming, and the hours to nectar time seemed far too long. And then I started feeling guilty about not doing the laundry and the vacuuming just because I was upset and so it went on and on.

But of course this isn't about politics or sociology, no. The begging calls and letters are totally unrelated to the fact that we won't have the government support medical research and the poor adequately. And my guilt has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I have been carefully brought up to think that good women are charitable and kind and just love doing laundry and vacuuming and saving all the children in the world. Even when their compassion well is running dry and all they can dream about is chocolate ice cream. Even then it's just about some idiotic personal drivel fluff about some things that everybody faces bravely and courageously on their own and never utters to anybody else. Now, something about John Kerry and his motorbike, that would be real blog politics!