Voting is now somewhat belatedly open for the Diarist Awards, so go forth and cast your ballot. The weighty responsibilities of a panel member are now lifted from my shoulders! Whew! So I'm sure that I'll now be writing lots of riveting things here.
Any day now.
Yeah.
This weekend was fun in a way that left me actually physically tired, though probably mostly because I have been hiding out at my house a lot lately, growing soft and pasty and unaccustomed to lots of activity. Friday was for errands, as I went to fetch my laptop from the laptop fixers to the tune of, ouch, almost three hundred bucks, sorry bank account; went on a big huge oh-my-god-everything-we-eat-is-on-sale grocery run; cleaned our filthy pit of a house; and made food for the snow bunny party.
Saturday I picked up Kethrai, who honored me by coming down to Boston just for the party, and we headed over to the Garment District, where we both came away with big hauls from Buck-a-Pound and made a quick and very restrained, if I do say so myself, tour of the vintage goodies upstairs, where I learned once again that I am not Katherine Hepburn or Carole Lombard or any of those elegant Golden Age ladies. Sigh.
Did I mention our big hauls? Really really big? Yes, so maybe it was not the best idea for me to lead us slodging through the extremely wet, heavy snow, a mile or so to Agent C's house where the party was to take place, afterward. Ow, and also, damp. But we made it, and Kethrai never even clocked me over the head with twenty pounds of soggy thrift, not even after the four hundredth time I said "We're almost there!" Then we prepared for the party, and had the party, which was lovely, and the snow made for great scenery once you were not in it, and many people came, and there was sausage everywhere, and at one point I was trapped in the kitchen for several minutes because there were SO MANY PEOPLE, and I invented a new cocktail: shake equal parts brandy and creme de cacao over ice, pour, and top with seltzer. Call it the Transparent Alexander, if you please.
This morning, a series of events which are unimportant now left me thinking how much of a letdown it is sometimes that with social awareness, one loses the ability to get up a really good self-righteous, unreasonable tantrum. Suppose, for example, that one wanted to have a good stomping session on the theme of "Men! Bah! Why don't they understand things?" But no, you can't do that, because Emergency Total System Lockdown occurs, and the next thing you know you are all "this is a communication problem between two individuals, different socialization, work together to reach a compromise, blah blah" and then, boom, you're totally out of steam. What fun is that?
But then I started thinking that it would be really funny if all us bleeding-hearts adopt "differently socialized" as our univeral put-down. "Quit being so differently socialized!" "Well, if you're going to be differently socialized about it..." "She is such a Person of Different Socialization (or 'PDS' for short)." Not only would it be hilarious, but it would make all the hardline right-wingers pop a blood vessel because it is so ridiculous that it can't be made fun of. Just like they are always doing to us, those effing PDSs!
Posted by hilatron at March 15, 2005 10:41 AM | TrackBackI prefer the terms "abnormally" or "degeneratively" socialized, myself. But then, I'm not as nice as you!
Posted by: Auntie Jean at March 15, 2005 06:21 PMYou're right, turning our normal excuse for someone's behavior into an insult is ingenious. I adore you, probably because we have been Similarly Socialized.
Posted by: ev at March 16, 2005 03:58 PM