15 | July | 2010 | Tiny Cat Pants

Really not feeling anything on the internet today. I’m trying to finish up Elizabeth Spelman’s Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World, which I would not recommend purchasing, but is worth checking out from your library. I’ve just finished a part on apologies, which I am mulling over, hard, about how there is a way in which apologizing puts the onus back on the wronged person and, often, allows the greater society to feel like things have been righted, and that you are a butt-hole if you don’t accept the apology.

She also has a really interesting moment where she talks about how people who’ve been in prison in our country for, say, two years, are seen by our broader society as being tainted by the experience or made, by that experience, to be, using her theme, beyond repair. But how we love, love, love these triumphant stories in which someone was in a concentration camp for, say, two years and emerges again whole and triumphant (even if it takes some years for this to be so). And how, in fact, the broader culture almost doesn’t trust or sees as tragedy (or comedy, I guess in some cases) when neither circumstances are true.

I’m not really doing her argument justice, but I think one of the things that she’s trying to get at is actually something I deeply agree with–we try very hard to cram lives into tidy narratives. We are, at heart, story-tellers. It’s not an inherently bad impulse. Hell, I love to tell stories myself.

But it always requires you to hold onto the realization that your telling a story, a version of the truth, or else it moves from storytelling into lying.

I don’t know. I’ve just been mulling it over. Considering that I’m in the middle of acting on a compulsion I feel in myself that I don’t wholly understand to trap myself with people who could not make it clearer that they don’t even really like me this weekend, it may resonate more strongly for me than it would for others.

In other words, I suspect it might be a stupid book, but I’m thinking hard about it.

So, my feet don’t want to work any more and I had way too much sun and I still don’t feel comfortable talking about work here, but I still have to say this: I ended up behind the “Employees Only” barrier at Hatch Show Print. And I could have wept for joy. I saw two employees mulling over whether they liked what was happening on their test run of a poster for Paul McCartney.

I saw tall walls full of type and print blocks and way back there were stairs that seemed barely weighty enough to even land on the ground.

Well, fuck it. Between this paragraph and the last, my dad came in and I was telling him about my awesome afternoon and I was trying to tell him how sore I was from standing in crappy dress shoes all afternoon and he said “I am you father. It’s not the shoes.” Really? There’s an out of shape you can be that just affects your feet? And that’s more plausible than you wore the wrong shoes?

And then he went in and proclaimed that there was mold on the toilet. Which I just cleaned last weekend, so that must be some hella mold. Yes, mold the color of dirty cat footprints.

Seriously, I have been awake an hour and I am already, apparently, a dirty, fat, liar.

It just fucking pisses me off.

And he’s trying to get the Butcher a boat. Which I can only assume means the trip to Arizona was worse than I heard. Because I should get a motherfucking pony for this shit this morning. Seriously, it’s like his default is ridiculously mean and undermining.