We will save your brothers. We will save your cousins. We will drive them home.

February 8, 2010 Progress Notes:

"Stay"

Words today: 500.
Words total: 3300.
Reason for stopping: Tea's gone, and it's late.

Darling du Jour: Georgie looked up at her, at Jane, and his brow creased into three fine canyons over his thick, graying eyebrows. "He was clear across the cab," he replied, slow. One thought, two, stumbled through those canyons like lost horses.

Mean Things: Possession. Bad nutrition. Seeing what you did there. Wendigoes!
Research Roundup: Hades the deity, not the place; etymology of Aidan; medicine, as it's meant in the First Nations parlance. Googling this was sort of an exercise in despair, because so much of what it spit up was either...con artists or outdated and shitty anthropology. Beh. This proves the Internet, like all compilations of knowledge, is only ever going to be as useful as the biases of its society allow it to be.

Books in progress: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The glamour: Groceries. Making that mushroom risotto for the Dayjob potluck tomorrow. Replying to various e-mails, both business and pleasure.

---

This is starting to get long. It had better not get Ideas, because it is for something, and that something has a word limit and an early March deadline. And I am not enamoured of the thought of going through it with an axe on short notice.

All right. Have been staring at this line for too long thinking of what else I'd like to say. That means nothing, and that I should go to bed.

And so softly, I do the dishes, I feed the fishes.

The people, they are talkin' about masculinity, and the notion of the Real Man, and domesticity as it relates to that. Mostly because of the Superbowl ads this year, which I didn't see.

tithenai takes a different tack on it, and is smart about why men she finds attractive do the dishes.

She said the following, which made something go off in my head:

"Men I find attractive do the dishes because dishes need to be done. These men cook. They eat fruit. They make bread. They clean up after themselves, not to impress me, but because they are responsible, autonomous adults. Self-sufficiency, you see, is sexy. Not because it means they'll look after me -- an idea which frankly makes my skin crawl -- but because it means that they don't need me to look after them."

And WHAM. I have realized the disconnect between how Superbowl commercials, pop culture, the world views housework and how I view it with regards to who's doing what when to who.

People who leave dishes piled up in the sink, not seeing it as their problem, aren't, in my world, full adults. If they look at something that to any grownup is obviously a task needing to be done and don't see a task needing to be done, that...er, means they're kind of an idiot. Something is clearly wrong with their perception of the objective world if they can't put together dirty sock on the floor = unsightly and dirty sock on the floor = mine and come up with well, let's stick that in the laundry bag. Either that or they're not capable of sticking it in the laundry bag.

I'm a Batman girl. I like competence.* I find competence exceedingly attractive.***

So any guy who is trying to make me do the dishes all the time or can't handle his half of a household's work is making the argument to me that he is incompetent in some fashion, even if that fashion is just logic or consideration. If he can't handle a dish or a sock, well, sheesh, I can handle that even when I have the flu. It's not even a question of me having to take care of someone, like tithenai mentioned; it's just...really? I can do something without thinking about it and you can't do it at all?

It gets very hard to respect such a person after a very short while.


*Dudes who are applying to this office to date me, take note!**
**No, I joke. I am aware that nobody who reads this LJ is actually applying to this office to date me.
***Okay, it doesn't hurt if you're voiced by Kevin Conroy too.