This American Life was all about testosterone this week, and while it sounded interesting, I have to confess I only listened to the first ten minutes or so. I'm trying to get a dissertation chapter finished by Monday or Tuesday, and the radio voices were too distracting today. In those first ten or fifteen minutes, though, one of the show's producers admitted that his initial interest in doing a show on testosterone can be traced back, in one of those goofy overextended first-causes kind of ways, to reading The Women's Room in middle school. It's a seminal seventies-feminist novel, one that he correctly called "extremely polemical", and one that is pretty much all about how men are the enemy of both women and progress. And it kind of freaked him out, he was saying, reading that book (which he'd picked up because the cover, with the word "women" scrawled in lipstick across the front, had led him to expect it would have racy bits) just when he was starting to have all those teenage-boy feelings about girls.
The thing is, I read that book around the same time in my life, and for much the same reasons. (It does, for the record, have racy bits, but not many of them.) It's still one of my favorite books, I guess, in that I re-read it pretty often, but it's also really depressing. It's also an archetype of sorts, a good representative of the whole subgenre of seventies-feminist novels (of which I've read really more than is good for me). They've all got a kind of loose pattern, of oppression and liberation and then the realization that men are still the enemy.
Which probably goes some way towards explaining why I'm fond of contemporary chick-lit books. They're goofy and fluffy and stereotyped too, and they also work off of the basic premise that most men suck, but at least they generally incorporate the idea that good men do exist. In the seventies feminist novel, the heroine always finds a good partner only to have the rug pulled out from under her when her good partner turns out to be another sexist asshole in disguise. In today's chick-lit books, the heroine often has hysterical weepy moments of suspecting that her partner is secretly a sexist asshole, but the guy comes through in the end and proves her suspicions unfounded. I'm a whole lot happier to be living in a time where contemporary women's literature can grant happy romantic endings to its heroines.
But we're all going to die. There are giant snails in the country now, they're as big as your hand and they can give you meningitis.
To quote briefly from the article: "In 1966, a Miami boy smuggled three Giant African Land Snails into the country. His grandmother eventually released them into a garden, and in seven years there were more than 18,000 of them. The eradication program took 10 years, according to the USDA." And now there are unknown numbers of Giant African Land Snails in Wisconsin.
Be at ease, gentlemen, and take your leisure. That which we have long sought, at every time, through every season, in every corner of this earth sits on my desk before me. So cease your tireless vigil and return, at long last, to your loved ones who have missed you. Look in wonder upon our modern world. Buy an iPod. Our long travail is ended, and peace is upon us.
I made my discovery last night, but doubted. Surely I had been mistaken, distracted by ill temper and fatigue. As the day drew on, though, I began to doubt my own misgivings. What if it had been here all along, mere steps from city office, hiding in the plainest sight? I could not chance missing it, and tonight I returned. I tell you now what your very soul must long to hear: The coffee sold at the Seven-Eleven store on Market at Third, San Francisco, when poured upon the very stroke of midnight, is simply the most wretched brew ever concocted.
Upon my first visit, I purchased the vanilla-nut variety. This required some soul searching. I will be the first to advocate for vanilla in any endeavor it chooses to pursue, and its collaboration with coffee is particularly worthy. The New England winter would have claimed long ago were it not for the kind staffers at Dunkin' Donuts on Eliot Street, ever available with their french vanilla blend. Exuberance.
The nut, however, is something of a wild card. I was never partial to Dunkin's hazlenut. In fact, when edibles are commonly offered in nutted and non-nutted versions, I nearly always prefer my snack nut-free. However, each morning, when I stop at Noah's for my bagel, I am sure to leave with a large Chelsea, which, as Noah's own menu attests, consists of "lightly roasted coffee beans flavored with vanilla and hazelnut essence." My decision had been made before I ever entered the store. I flavored the beverage with three "irish creme" non-dairy creamers and was on my way.
On my way to misery. The coffee tasted bad, leaving a memory within the mouth not unlike one of soapy paint. As the liquid passed through my tubes, I began to feel hollow and nervous, as if I had inadvertendly doomed several innocents to a nasty death and had nothing to do but wait. And I waited. And I drank coffee while I waited.
I had purchased this coffee, and I required it to keep myself awake. And so I allowed 24 ounces of the putrid stuff to pass my lips and circulate within me. By the end I was retching and dry heaving upon the floor, crying aloud for mercy in the form of unconciousness or an earthquake worth reprinting the almanac for. The beast left me ravaged, sprawled like a drunkard in my chair as I finished the last of it. Within me the caffeine did battle with the exhaustion of my ordeal. It was three hours before I moved, and only then because I thought I might vomit.
You know by now that I returned this midnight. I thought I might change my fate by pouring irish creme coffee with vanilla nut creamer. I have been wrong before, but this error may be the most shaming. Pray for me.