Victorian times

Sometimes I get really angry that I am a woman. I can't go pee in the woods with out exposing my bottom and the risk of getting my shoes wet. I am incapacitated for a day with extreme stomach pain once a month and gush out great quantities of thick blood after that for a week becoming anemic. I have had a human being grow inside of me and stretch me out and leave me scarred. I have to spend more than 50euros to get a contraption to hold my chest fat in place just so I can run with out pain. When my house is messy I am terrified people will see and judge me because society places all the responsibility on me as the woman to keep things neat even thou there are two adults in the house. I cannot cut my hair short because a shaved head would probably kill my mother, even thou they are ever so comfortable. People judge me more on appearance, something I have very little in control over, more than they judge me on intelligence and ability. I have to maintain my looks, it is considered my duty to my husband even thou a person has relatively little they can do to halt the ravages of age.

When ever I have these thoughts I try to remember I have so much more freedoms than women used to. I can wear comfortable pants, I can vote and I do not need my husbands permission to make simple decisions and legally I have the same rights as a man. If I cannot remember these things I read a Victorian novel, like Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells. Then I remember how lucky I truly am. This story is about a smart biology student named Ann Veronica who wants her human rights. She is in her early 20's she is smart and does well in her college classes. Yet she has to live with her father and ask permission to go to costume balls with her friends and can't even get a good answer as to why she cannot go. As a result she runs away to London hoping to get a job and freedom. Unfortunately neither is to be had for a woman of her times. She was never educated in the sexual politics between men and women and accepts a “loan” from an older man that is not considered a loan by him and he practically tries to rape her and she apologies for punching him ion the jaw and feels guilty for it. In one part she gets in a heated exchange with her male teacher. He is against votes for women, more or less, but mostly just enjoys the argument. She accuses all of mankind as treating women as a joke and not giving them any freedoms and that he, her teacher, could never understand the confinement until he tries to run in petticoats.

Reading this book made me appreciate comfortable foot wear, pants, the vote, and having full legal freedoms just like a man. I truly hate the Victorian era and it is a great contrast in its attitudes to mine. I wonder how women can faint with out the aid of corsets? I think it does not happen.

Something Unsettling is Happening to Me...

I may be losing my ability to read. I don't mean that I can't read any sentence placed in front of me, I can, very quickly and read it out too. I am very literate still. My problem is in passages exceeding a paragraph lenght, if we define a paragraph as a passage of three or more sentences that go together. It starts feeling like the information travels through a fog to reach the relevant part of my brain for interpretation and absorption.

This has been going on for about a week now. At first I thought it was just the book I was reading, A Sudden Wild Magic, by Diana Wynne Jones. She is one of my favourite authors and writes young adult fiction so it should be an easy read but wrong. I have a lot of trouble keeping it straight in my head. I have trouble separating the characters and remembering where I am in the plot. Sometimes she is rather hard to follow because of her tendency to jump from one location to another, but not with out warning, so I figured that it was just the book. It was not. Last night I was reading my father's blog. Yes my about 65 year old father not only knows what a blog is but writes one. It is in Finnish and about personal theology (vs serious academic theology) and faith. I struggled to read it and the comments tacked to the end by readers, many very long. This morning I tried to read some friends personal blogs in English and ran into the same problem.

I hope this is only temporary. I really enjoy the printed word. I do not read as much as I did when I was a teenager due to some heavy debts to the local library along with an unfair charge of ruining a book that was already water damaged when I checked it out. I want to read more. I think the last books I actually finished was The Silent Planet and Till We have Faces, A Myth Retold both by C.S. Lewis along with The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashian. That was almost a year ago and then about a half year before that I read a book about the history of the evolution creation struggle written by some philosopher, it was very interesting and I learned a lot and right before that, actually a matter of hours, I finished a mystery novel called Raven Mocker. That is definitely not counting all the books I started and never finished. I may lack resolve and I am definitely that girl who in high school would read all night because she lived in the book she was reading and regardless of her slowness in reading would happily read Les Miserables (is that what it is called, I read it in Finnish and it is called Kurjat) by Victor Hugo for light summer reading.