Some more thoughts

It's interesting how big "personal" news can make you stop caring so much about what some person with strange opinions and a keyboard thinks.

I got to thinking last night: my friend and her family are going to need more caring and nurturing for a while now that their "patriarch," the person they looked to for advice and kind words and a knowledge of the family history, is gone.

And it occurred to me: I wonder if some people who call themselves "feminists" would decry the idea of nurturing people who are (at most) friends and (at least) acquaintances. But you know? I don't care if being kind and nurturing is seen as being "feminist" or not. Because it's HUMAN. And being human trumps being whatever else a person might aspire to be.

Another thought: I think part of the reason the article angered me was because I interpreted it as the author saying, "You must deny a part of who you are in order to conform to some societal role." And I went through eight years in the public-school system - in a public-school system that had more than its share of "mean girls," even for the more-innocent-than-now 1970s. And I realized at some point along the way that I would NEVER be popular, I would NEVER be anything other than a target of scorn/humiliation/shunning/whatever they wanted to do that week from those girls - even if I somehow got a part-time job and earned enough money to buy Jordache jeans (my parents, wisely, would not spend $50 of late-70s dollars on designer jeans for a girl who was still in the progress of reaching her full adult height) and if I acted dumb* about math and science, and if I talked back to the teachers, and if I threw away all my stuffed animals and put up posters of the current popstars instead of the posters of National Parks I had up in my room...

So I decided, on some level, "screw it." I realized I could be miserable at school being teased and shunned, and reasonably happy at home and on weekends being myself, or I could be even MORE miserable by pretending to be someone I was not - or worse, try leading a double life, being a "cool girl" at school but still having a stuffed Snoopy on my bed at home.

(* I read somewhere that supposedly girls do this because they think it attracts boys. Do "boys" (or men) really go for that? Do guys REALLY want someone more stupid than them, or at least who pretends? I find that hard to believe. While I can see being an arrogant pedant being off-putting, I think I'd find it equally off-putting to be around someone who giggles and acts like a ditz.)

So anyway.

(Someone on another blog did suggest the outside possibility that the person in question wrote the blogpost as trolling/chumming the water - either to get more readers, or to be able to get a lot of knitters/bakers/Hello Kitty fans unhappy, and then be able to post a "HA ha. Knitters U got punkd. U sure R stupid" post. Which would make me think even less of the person in question.)