I thought about this last night, as I curled up on the couch with Eli for a marathon MSNBC hand wringing session on the huge flat screen TV I bought a few years ago so the guy I was dating could watch sports or other crazy shit when he came over. I remember wondering how somebody could stay so happily glued to the television, waiting for something interesting to happen. These days, I'm happy I don't have to compromise.
Even Eli rolls his eyes at me. He sighs audibly as I perk up each time "Breaking News" flashes across the screen, knowing full well it's the same stuff that keeps on breaking. He got to me yesterday, so I decided to flip to something different, something light and refreshing. Madame Secretary. Guest starring Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, and Madeleine Albright. Sprinkled with some white nationalism and nuclear threats and a whole bunch of women's issues and, of course, faint glimmers of hope that decency will prevail and we will all live happily ever after. Well done, at once uplifting and depressing.
I felt wistful. Sort of the way I felt when I watched my friend rub her husband's earlobes the other day while he drank water to quash his hiccups. I'd be perfectly content, if only I knew this thing we are witnessing every day were nothing more than a hiccup.
What struck me most about the episode -- which ended with an inspiring speech warning of the difference between nationalism and patriotism -- was the woman piece. There's the obvious one, of course -- Tea Leoni's character: beautiful, brilliant, ambitious, powerful, and married to a fabulously handsome and brilliant and sensitive man (that's just not fair). And there were the more subtle ones, about how we all wrestle with our inner contradictions and try to define ourselves in a world so filled with possibilities and barriers. I loved the mix of tension and comprehension between a very young woman and a much older woman, how the accidents of birth and moments in history and and the passage of time put our dreams and ambitions on a rocky continuum. I loved Tea Leoni's confusion, how her competency at work dissolved into blithering idiocy when her daughter lay in a hospital bed, how this superstar on the grand stage could come up with nothing better than more pillows for her immobilized child.
It made me think about all the twists and turns in my own life -- blissfully less extreme -- and how dangerous it is to think about us women as one monolithic group. At worst, as victims, or an angry mob. At best, as a threat to the old guard, those women who don't shut up, who refuse to know their place.
We have our struggles, but, like everybody else, we persist the best we can. Must persist, really, no matter where we end up on our own continuum of dreams, if we are to get rid of this hiccup.
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