7 Quick Takes Friday!

It’s Friday! It’s Friday AND the Ogre has finally managed to catch up enough with his writing, grading, class-prepping, and general professorial preoccupations to join us for a family day at the beach on Sunday!

I’m super excited. I love the beach. Also, I’m scary pale and need some color.

So this morning I clicked on my blog, noticed I had two new followers and thought, “huh. That’s odd. Usually I don’t get new followers when I put up stupid posts about my neurotic pregnancy dreams.” So I visited my stat-counter and found an unfamiliar blog linking to my site with the ominous post title “Feminists are sissies?”

Oh no, self, thought I to myself, I don’t think we can handle another foray into “Hate-the-Fundie” land. Should we or shouldn’t we?

But of course, because all my various selves have no self-control whatsoever, I immediately clicked on the link and read the post.

It was, without a doubt, the pleasantest surprise I have had in a long time.

I feel fine stealing her picture since she stole mine first…don’t worry! She cleared it with me on Twitter!

This, my friends, is Caroline, a British blogger whose blog you will definitely want to follow. First, she’s British, which means her grammar and writing are impeccable and she uses these great turns of phrase that make me want to single-handedly rejuvenate the abyss that is American English. She’s also brilliant, witty, and an Anglican convert. But most importantly, she likes my shirt!

The post she wrote about it was awesome. Here’s the last paragraph, which actually made me jump out of my chair and do an awkward little fist-pumping victory dance.

Why did Calah Alexander attract so much hate? Because she dared to go against and question a feminist mantra and by doing so demonstrated that she is stronger than others who (for perfectly legitimate reasons) have decided not to have more children. Anyone who cannot cope with a humorous slogan on a t-shirt that has a grain of truth and challenges a deeply cherished orthodoxy and is so moved to incite and spew tirades of loathing and spite, is not as tolerant and pro freedom of choice as they would claim. Anyone who feels so defensive as to chuck indiscriminate hatred and wish violence upon a total stranger because they disagree with a point of view is a bigot. Why have they reacted so strongly? Because they feel ‘judged’.

All of which proves that Calah was right all along. They really are sissies.

You can read the rest here. You should also spend some time looking at her blog. Great writing.

I get the same shameful feeling reading Caroline’s blog that I get when I read The Anchoress, though. It’s that “my grammar is atrocious, my sentence structures are unsophisticated and childish, my rhetorical devices are sloppy and poorly chosen, and Dr. Crider would be ashamed of me” sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hate that feeling. I really need to work on my writing. It’s fallen so far since my university days, when I used to expound ~~eloquently~~ ~~somewhat eloquently~~ adequately on symbolism and scansion in Richard Wilbur’s poetry.

Maybe that will be my post-partum recovery time project.

I’m 99.9% certain that I’ll spend my post-partum phase doing the same thing I do every time I have a newborn…watching old episodes of Doctor Who with a zombie-like expression on my face while my mobile children destroy the house around me.

I treasure that time so.

This kid currently has a dirty diaper and I don’t want to change it. Every time he needs a new diaper, he comes and pulls on me and says “di-di”. Then I say, “oh, do you need a new diaper?” and he nods. Then I grab a diaper and the wipes and he promptly gets a wicked grin on his face and runs as fast as his short legs can carry him (which is surprisingly fast) to some hiding place that is terribly inconvenient to try and get him out of.

When I finally manage to pin him down on his back, he spends the whole diaper-change kicking me ferociously while laughing.

Why? Why? Why?

Probably for the same reason he decided to do this while I was writing these quick takes: