This is a demonstrable fact, witness the ride home today (under gorgeous bluebird skies): I was content for an hour to stare ahead, thinking of essentially nothing. No intrusions, beyond the level of “owtch, that’s a headwind” or “my front tire makes cool sounds at 25 mph”. This why having a job at it intellectually challenging is good.

The pendulum has certainly swung the other way. Riding, or more usually running and to a lesser extent climbing, during college was the great and vital escape, as in those days it took multiple hits with a sledgehammer to move the brain switch to “off”. And I am certain that things will change again, most likely when I get my act together and go to grad school next year. Gotta enjoy the fitness and limited-work-time while it is.

On the note of intellectual fulfillment, I’d like to highlight one of the more obscure links off to your right I Blame the Patriarchy. I’ll put the quotations before the drivel:

“My vigil has been a long and fruitless one. No epiphany hath forecome. Whenever I turn on the TV I might as well be bending over and pointing at a sign on my ass: “Behold another receptacle for patriarchy’s indoctrinatory videographed ejaculations.””

and

“…TCM [Turner Classic Movies] is a sort of chronology, an historical record of the misogynist antecedency of modern patriarchal thought, a reference manual to the canonized idols, saints, and gods of 21st century oppression.”

First, this is funny. I Blame… has some consistently great writing, managing to be amusing and insightful without the net disease (I call it The Rolling Stone syndrome) of substituting humor, irony, and a wink-wink knowhow for substance and earnestness. Good stuff, and a personally important counterpoint to yet another debate about tread psi and gearing.

Second, misogyny is an important subject. Halfways through my time in college, I read a lady named Judith Butler, and life has never been the same. Behind her convoluted and challenging Gender Trouble is an idea that is so elegant I find it hard to articulate: that the ordering of life into us and them does a fundamental violence to one’s experience of the world. There is a pernicious inaccuracy to any such “binary” (trying to avoid philosophy words), and the process invariably creeps into other parts of one’s life.

(Yes, these trading cards are so nerdyawesome, it makes me want to read Hegel. It’s worth noting the Tracey Emin’s card features mad cleavage, reminiscent of almost every concert program pic of Ani DiFranco.))

Example: viewing the “inherent difference” between genders ignores how complex the category itself is. Categories do not exist, there are only those things which we choose to make examples.
So, I try to explain to a student two days ago that by singing Ludacris’s “Shake Your Money Maker” he snot only disrespects herself, but everyone else (in the room and in her life). A bit of a hard sell, given how inadequate my above summary of Butler’s wider implications is. It is something some people grasp, while others (thinking of my students again) have never been taught how their own hate and disparagement will poison their own lives.

It is rightfully uncomfortable for men to read things like the quotations I lifted today. The term “feminazi” comes to mind; but just as Hitler should point to the evil inside you, so to should feminism. Culture, and anything in it, only exists because it is a part of you, you a part of it. (Why, I think, W is so disheartening for me.)

If you have a particularly strong stomach, dig up the noted Seven Wives for Seven Brothers; along with Meet the Parents one of the most asinine and uncharitable movies I’ve ever seen. If you’re not moved to nausea by this one, you may be in need of some soul searching.

You cannot do anything well, until you know. The unexamined life is not one worth living. Ergo, read something new today.