On the topic of truelad.com:

"Did you know 'women can be lads too'? i don't know about you, but that information totally takes away everything problematic with the term for me. i've not been worrying my pretty little head about it since. next week on bigoted logic: defining black people as 'honorary whites'!" (Rosie Tuplin, my intelli-feminist paramour, 2010)

So I haven't really been around here much for a while. Could offer explanations but won't; nevertheless, if I were to they would definitely be of the positive kind. I may not have been writing here very much recently but I have been writing a lot elsewhere ,- "I draw on anything for inspiration: a piece of paper, a fond memory, the walls in a train station." I am sun-drunk and have been running around and playing lots, as is the summer custom, but I am also in a phase of overt academic activity too. This means that my time is divided between the library (or other place of study), various drinking holes and my bed at a ratio of roughly 3:3:1. I love it. I get such a kick out of reading up on something that interests me and making headway with an idea, it's better than any drug could ever be.

Anyway I thought I would stop by and post this because on my cycle into Uni, I was thinking and I tend to try and get my thoughts out these days and into the relatively stable medium of words because if you don't tie down an idea to a signifier of SOME sort then it risks floating away into abstract oblivion, and I don't like to think of those poor lost little thoughts drifting off into the universe of the never actualised, the land of might-have-could-have-what-if-but-didn't.

I am thinking a lot, at the moment, about theories of modernisation - particularly post-modernism (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson for those who are interested - recommendations always appreciated with love&kisses) and the constrictions on the individual that accompany the present state of western society (Capitalist, late capitalist, consumerist, post-industrial... you get the gist). Specifically, at the moment I'm concerned with the means individuals find to transcend the "cage" of these constrictive societies, and to pinpoint even further, the ways in which such transcendence (or the desire for it) is portrayed in contemporary literature.

So, for men in the land of the fictional, apparently, it's violence. Violence is what gets you out of your cage; it's through violence that you lay claim to the identity that our secular-anonymous-sterile-technologised-void world takes from you, or so the literature seems to think. Then there's sex. "The only time you feel like you're really alive." Another potential avenue for transcending the cage of individual subjective experience, which is presumably open to both men and women. Yet there are intimations that neither of these experiences are capable of subverting the prison of the normal, of providing us with meaning in a world in which "meaning itself" has ceased to hold meaning. I have completely wondered away from my point into the realm of cloudy, rusty, transient thoughts that I have not yet realised (this time in the land of might-have-could-have-what-if-still-might) and am at risk of getting lost amongst them so I will firmly march myself back on track and give voice to the thought that I felt deserved words in the first place:

So how do we, women, get out of this cage? Why don't we want the violence and the blood and the gore and the paradigmatic sexual experience? I'm not saying that we should, rather simply observing that we don't, really, to the same degree; and it interests me why. How are we getting our kicks?

One suggestion is that it is through motherhood that we derive meaning for our selves. I can understand this, to some degree. To be able to give birth, to create life, is one of the greatest gifts that our lives have been granted - the ability of life itself to continue, to propogate. I think that having children is probably one of the greatest things you can do in life, and one day (in the very very distant future) I hope that I am willing and able to do so. But somehow I can't accept this idea that my life, as a woman, can only derive meaning from what it can potentially give rise to. This idea, of deriving meaning only from what I could potentially contain, calls into my mind the idea of chinese boxes, Russian dolls, each having worth based only on what it contains, again and again in some kind of infinite regress. And of course, an infinite regress doesn't provide adequate support for believing any proposition to be true. and I dream of being something other than a vessel

I'm still not quite sure why at first, I was so unenthusiastic about the Buddhism module I am studying. Perhaps it was due to a reluctance to accept something that did not superficially match the expectations I had of it - alls I know is that after the first weeks session I felt a violent opposition to continuing studies in this area. Thankfully I got over that rapidly, and it's now something I find incredibly interesting. The lecturer really knows his stuff as well which is always helpful, and I like his teaching style - lots of talking but in an animated, everyone-get-involved-in-discussion sort of way, and not too many pointless group activities which generally just give me cause for distraction.

I'm glad I made the spur of the moment decision to change from Philosophy of Language to Philosophy of Religion - I find the latter far more interesting, and of course it complements my Buddhism module quite nicely. These are areas I have always had an incomplete and vague interest in, and now my immaterial thoughts are being structured, drawn together and made coherent. I feel like I'm finally (after only a year and a half!) knuckling down and getting stuck into my uni work. I really sincerely hope I can keep this up - I feel like I'm on the verge of a personal breakthrough, both academically in terms of my approach to my work, physically in terms of building up my fitness levels and getting into shape, and finally emotionally, by sorting through and hopefully putting to rest thoughts and memories that have followed me round for years now. (The only thing that worries me is that I know I have felt this way in the past)

In my creative writing, I'm focusing a lot on fairy tales, and the idea of myth and stories embedded in the collective psyche - for me this is entwined with ideas of femininity, or perhaps more specifically my own femininity, something I have grappled with over the last few years. Being a girl - woman? - is one of the most essential and important characteristics I have; it is absolutely integral and important to how I perceive the world. But it is also something I take issue with in that I struggle, sometimes, to define what exactly femininity is. It seems wrong to me that it should be well applied make up, long and flowing or short and perky hair - doe eyed glances, beautiful clothes, even bouncy breasts. These things are all feminine, but they are hardly sufficient in themselves to constitute femininity. But what route do we go down otherwise? Simply experiencing the world as a woman, from the feminine? It is too simple to say that we are merely passive victims of a patriarchal society - we are not always passive in our own subjugation. These are complicated questions and ones which bother me, and are important to my own understanding of my gender and therefore myself.

Been looking into housing co ops as well - I find the idea of a deviation from the traditional nuclear family household intriguing, especially in a world where "marriage breakdowns" and "unconventional relationships" are rapidly becoming far more normal. Coupled with a way of living that challenges the existing, exploitative capitalist system of mortgage slavery and lonely, seperate existences and I become more and more inclined to think that perhaps there are viable alternatives to the majority status quo. I have come to the conclusion over the last few years that it is so very nearly impossible to change the direction of society as a whole that ones energy is better directed elsewhere - short of living in some kind of Hobbesian state of nature (which is logistically pretty much impossible anyway) it's not possible to escape the system. Living on the bottom rung does not constitute escaping. However, the only ethical way I can see to live in this society is to exist within it without supporting it or propogating it's values any more than is necessary, and using the resources gained from this to create a space within it in which one can live in harmony with ones values. How feasible this is, remains to be seen