Tuesday evening ramble

Nothing Rush Limbaugh says should surprise us in its disgustingness, but this is just sad.

I wasn't going to link to this, because frankly, it's annoying. It's blah. It's not really worth your time. And not just because I thought Tracy McMillan's HuffPo piece (linked yesterday or over the weekend) was tongue-in-cheek. But there are a couple of unrelated reasons for which I am linking to that response:

(1) I caught up on TV over the weekend, and found that two of my favorite shows--"30 Rock" and "How I Met Your Mother"--offered remarkably unflattering portrayals of single women. Both shows were nonetheless funny, and neither offended or threatened me, perhaps because I don't see myself as the 'spinster' they're mocking. I have yet to show up to work in a sweatsuit, or don a fanny pack, or rename my cat 'Emily Dickinson.' I am not frumpy. In fact, I often marvel at women (or people) who have let themselves go, and quite often, they're married. Now, that's what the dating consultants call a 'limiting preconception'--you're blocking yourself from a committed relationship, because deep inside, you're concerned that you might become one of those frumps. But I'm not. I know lots of quite stylish married women. But I digress. I'm not threatened by either of those episodes, but I find the portrayals to be cheap thoughts. Which is what sitcoms are for.

(2) The very response to TM's piece reminds me of a conversation I recently had over lunch, and another that happened on this blog. Let the thrice-divorced writer go on about what she thinks might be wrong with you if you're not married, and let it go. Who cares? I saw her column as anything but an invitation to get defensive and assert why you're different--why you're a perfectly nice unmarried person. Who the f* cares? There probably are things about me that keep me from a committed relationship (see 'limiting preconceptions' above), and there are plenty of things wrong with people who are in committed relationships. I just don't feel the need to defend/assert myself.

But some people feel the need to defend/assert themselves in the face of other people's life's choices and situations, even when the situation is presented neutrally, i.e., not as a value statement.

My mother is an extreme example of this: I mention, for example, that I don't keep cocktail sauce in my house, she interprets that as "you're telling me I shouldn't keep cocktail sauce in my house!" I'm not even talking about the Palinism of taking a reasonable statement and reducing it to an extreme; this is simpler than that--it's taking anything one says as something they do as a judgment, i.e. a statement that everyone should do it that way.

The thing is, I've found a number of people who are not my mother feeling the need to 'defend' their carnivorism, even when I don't do anything, to my knowledge, to put them on the defensive. Last week, I was having lunch with a coworker at a conference. I was trying to find a sandwich that was vegan or at least vegetarian, so I mentioned, as we commented on the sandwiches available, that I didn't eat meat. My coworker said, "Oh. I eat meat... because I do." It wasn't a strong statement or a particularly defensive one, but I thought it was odd that she said it at all. I guess I was more in the mindframe where her response might have been, "I don't want the turkey because I hate the taste of turkey," so her actual response through me.

Point being, I regularly find myself in situations where it's appropriate to explain (though not assert) my vegetarianism/veganism. I'm having dinner tomorrow night with a friend I've not seen in a while; it looks like we'll go out for Thai, but if not, I'm going to be in a position to talk about being vegan. When I say, "I don't eat meat" or "I don't eat animal products," I don't say it with an unsaid follow-on of "...and neither should you." You know by now that I find "you should" statements annoying and counterproductive.

There is one exception to the above: yesterday, I went to see a very close friend who was hospitalized with pancreatitis. It was gut-level, or maybe heart-level, painful to see this wonderful person so weak and so clobbered by physical pain. For not the first time in my life, I felt that I'd failed a friend by being too unpushy, too hands-off of her life. Then again, I also know that people will do what they will do, and being pushy will rarely get you anywhere unless the person is ready. At this point, my pained friend was ready. It's not as if the symptoms of obesity were ever only academic until now, but at this moment they were more stark than ever. So I told her I would help her give up animal products, and she agreed.

But I digress, again.

My point in all this isn't about animal products; it's about feeling the need to respond. Reading that response to the HuffPo piece makes me shrug; so TM thinks you're a bitch or a slut. Who cares? Unless you perceive some truth in that, whatever "that" means, let it go. So I mention that I don't eat animal products. I didn't say, "I don't eat animal products, therefore I am a better person." In fact, I don't eat animal products, but I verbally abuse my cat every day because she's a whiny little $hit and I don't know how else to deal with her. I'm just sayin'.