(no subject)

I am all frustrated with myself this morning and do not know why!

Well, that is not true. I know why. I am annoyed at myself for not being the perfect communicator every minute of every day - I screw up! Maybe I hurt friends and family with my slips! They haven't said so, but they might not, because they are hurt! It is bad. Also, I haven't done much cooking this week, clearly this makes me a horrible person.

Yes, thank you, spiky green shoulder monkeys. We all needed that dose of irrationality in our day.

On the other hand, I am doing much better because you see, I am not curled up in a ball somewhere sobbing my heart out over this. Instead I'm doing laundry and writing up an entry and hanging out with the puppy (and the grown up Nelly dog - wow, are they ever noisy). And actually, I feel pretty good. I mean, sure, frustration, but on the other hand I feel light and happy and effervescent. The sun's finally come out, everything's green and dramatic after several days of rain, and it's warm enough not to freeze in bare feet in the grass without being at all hot.

I have no idea if this is helped along by the medication, or by the fact that things are actually going really good or what. But I'm here! Doing stuff! Not huddled up under my blankets with a confused cat purring on my feet! So that's a good thing.

And I've got stuff I want to write about and right this moment I actually feel like I can! It's a good thing. I'll work on that in a bit, once I'm further on the laundry.

(Speaking of laundry - Look, new icons~! for the first time in. Um. Two years, I think?)

...The things we come to believe.

No, no, I got to say, a fictional narrative about war is not "of necessity" populated only by men. Women live through wars too. They fight in them, they spy in them, they nurse the sick, wounded, and dying, they staff operations posts, they run the phones, they take their turns behind anti-aircraft guns or on public safety details, they make the bombs and guns and ships and planes, they do the immense work of farming, they hold the fortress or take refuge in the subway. War is not something that happens solely to men.

That a narrative is about a war does not mean that it cannot have women for characters. Women don't stop existing when a war's on. They don't keep existing but somehow do so in a box off to the side, where there's no war. A war narrative that does not contain women is not truer and more authentic than one that does. It's true that war tends to be culturally constructed as a male enterprise, one in which the only possible role women can have is as far off motivation/potential prize but that's not the historical or present reality.

A book or television show or movie about war with no women in it is not telling the whole truth.