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Mon Jun 5th, 2017
 | 09:46 pm
Did nothing today, which should probably count as a Gratitude: didn't need to do anything today. Did walk to the coffee shop that, it turns out, only has meals on weekends, and then to the coffee shop that has a limited range of sandwiches. Walking being something I've done little of in the last two years, it's a nostalgic return to an earlier self, and I'd like to keep on doing it. Of course, in the current damp June, the twinges will recur.
If I'd got farther into Winterson's Written on the Body I'd have discovered that the narrator's sex is not stated. I assumed it was female because why wouldn't I, and abandoned it after a few pages because it seemed so much in that Lesbian genre of 'let me tell you how I'm helplessly in love with this woman who is fickle/ perverse/ distant/ ambivalent/ straight-up Bad News.' Sita, Nightwood, and possibly that triangle with Marie-Claire Blais which I read too long ago to remember. Thing being, do heterosexual women write like this about their torturing love affairs with no-good men? No names come to mind: the trope is common enough, alas, but a whole book devoted to the affair and nothing else?
And also, obsessive love is dull. Not as dull as jealousy (is why I'm amazed anyone can get through Proust) but pretty damned dull nonetheless. Yes, I've been obsessively in love. It was adolescent and melodramatic and not something I'd ever give the details of to anybody.
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![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/11690011/1379663) | | From: |  mvrdrk |
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| Date: | June 6th, 2017 02:39 am (UTC) |
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But adolescent and melodramatic is perfectly age appropriate for a limited range of ages! I'm happy I'm well past that now. yup .... same ... ahahaha! A *limited* range of ages. Adolescence. Which should not extend into one's thirties. | | From: | mvrdrk |
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| Date: | June 6th, 2017 06:32 am (UTC) |
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Shhhh! Don't let the kids know that! I love do nothing days! They're certainly things to be grateful for.
"It was adolescent and melodramatic and not something I'd ever give the details of to anybody." - I cringe (and at least don't want to cry and die a little any more) when I think about my far and thankfully distant youth and am so glad that I am so far removed from that.
It was part of my learning curve.
And as has often been pointed out, there was no Internet- or very little- when we were being so embarrassing, which is one blessing at least. I didn't know Proust was about jealousy. I've never attempted to read it/him, and probably won't get around to it.
Great about the walking; it's something I enjoy myself, but I'm in purdah, nearly, until this heat eases some more. It's not about jealousy per se, but it's full of jealous men who assume their wives and lovers will be getting it off with anyone, male or female, who comes their way, and ohh does it get tired fast. One of the men is the narrator, as unlikable a self-absorbed little git as can be imagined.
Our heat is not like your heat except when it is, and I expect the warmth will make walking easier when the temps reach the dizzying heights of 25 and 30: which is about when Toronto starts issuing heat alerts. Obsessive love - unpleasant to remember in yourself, and not exactly pleasant to encounter in someone else either.
(I had this messy break-up in my teenage years. Let's just say it gave me a permanent twitch about emotional blackmail, and specifically about anyone claiming he was going to kill himself because I'd broken up with him and it was all my fault.) Oh lord, yes. Embarrassing enough in oneself but terrifying in someone else. *Especially* if they pull the high drama thing and threaten self-harm. Passion is seriously over-rated. |
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