Different heads not different hats, eternal head eternal mother, all one head, dilute dilute ok!

At coffee with Jo suddenly. How did that happen? As if the coffeeshop teleports us there, or the way a lot of meerkats all pour out of one hole, look around, are busy & then disappear before you can see what's happened.

Between kid-wrangling and calls from plumbers we babbled madly. What am I? Why this thing? What are we doing? What do you call it? Lookit all the mom-books out there and the hipmama/brainchild dealie doesn't really encompass it and yet, when we say mommyblogging we MEAN something. That no one's describe what that thing is. It has to do with our privilege to some extent and the way we're suprised that we're not exceptions. And you get up and say your think and do your doing, & because you're overflowing the container no one can hear it. Oh, you're not that stereotype? Let me help you make it so. Oh, you're still not? Then we can't hear. We're not one thing with one clear path? Then we're totally invisible.

I froth at the mouth describing the cool entry in Tish G.'s blog about her life & some of its difficulties & realizations. And try to describe to Jo my sudden huge vision of this plant metaphor. "It's like, we're bushy, and low-growing, but way tougher, and then because we've established this huge variable base, er, this whole literary conceit thing is dumb, but i'm seeing this Thing..." She looks at me with one of those deliberate quizzical looks, obscure. "Actually, you are describing that whole thing about rhizomaticness. Deloser and Guitar. It's a theory thing. it's like foucault in practice. " Aaaagh! yes. doh.

"It's like how you could read something by SJ of I,Asshole, or dooce, and know it's them, no matter what she's talking about. It's more than literary style. It's insisting on being that thing that we can't describe. Multiplicity."

"Yes - the annoying thing is when people take one part of their subjectivity and just try to be that, or present themselves as that. And they refuse to be complicated."

We froth some more about that one chick Nykol, who looked so posed to be some kind of conservative pundit darling. "Oh, I'm an exception, i'm just an individual..." (Since when did they start letting women dressed up as women into the conference? Dang!) They all get their comeuppance someday and have a moment of realization, Jo speculates, and realize how wrong they were to diss other people who should be their logical allies. (As Nykol disses Koan. God, that made me hit the roof last night when Grace pointed it out, and thank you Grace for your righteous, skillful smackdown.) I'm not so sanguine about this, and while I believe in realizations and redemption, some people just go on to become more and more heinous jerks and roll power into themselves until they die.

Comments

[Koan Bremner]

Hey, thanks for what you've said here. I've run the gamut of emotions in the last 18 hours or so, but I think my first one was the right one; I'm glad someone proved my point about the bigotry that exists towards people like me out there, and it might as well have been her as anyone else. As a Buddhist, I know that what goes around, comes around - and maybe one day she'll learn that too. But I won't hold my breath. Cheers, Koan

[GraceD]

And I thank you, missy, for referencing Dr. Br$nner's Soap in the title.