About the toughness of women, I recently read a book that was about the life of a typical t-shirt.... how the cotton is grown in Texas, then shipped to China where it is made into a t-shirt in some gigantic sweatshop, then shipped back to this country, etc., etc. Eventually it is discarded and sent to Africa, where it is resold and gets a whole second life of wear. The book got into the history of the textile industry to some degree, and it talked about how over the last 200 years of industrial cloth production, textile factory owners preferred women workers to men partly because they were better able to handle the tough repetitive physical conditions and the drudgery. The men tended to just give up, or to rebel. Plus, they were not as skilled with the fine motor skills. The ideal workers were women who had children or other people who depended on those women for their survival. Those women would endure just about anything in order to bring home a paycheck. Another type of worker that was preferable to men was children, before child labor laws, because they were docile and nimble, cheap, and expendable.
Something About Mary had a lot of funny parts. It was interesting how much of the humor involved people with physical or mental disabilities. One of my favorite parts in the movie is the short section with the murderous hitchhiker who is going on in his loony way about his idea for a "Seven Minute Abs" program, and he gets all riled up when Ted suggests that someone might come up with a "Six Minute Abs," and he's saying stuff like "7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea?"
Meat cookies? What are you talking about?
I didn't write yesterday because I was at a weekend "Men's Retreat." I have been going to this weekly gathering of guys for some months now, where a bunch of men get together one morning each week, and talk about what's going on in their lives. It's related to a church we go to off and on. Anyway, each year they have a "retreat" where they get together someplace and spend a couple of days talking even more, especially about "deep" spiritual and emotional things. That's the idea anyway. Probably sounds like a pretty accurate description of "hell" to you, and it kind of sounded like that to me, too, but I thought it would be interesting and different to give it a try. Why not? And it was interesting and different, and both good and bad. I just got back from it, so it's going to take awhile to process it all. It was held at a monastery in New Hampshire, a place with monks living in in, who have given up all claim to private possessions and are now living in this community for the rest of their lives. When they -- and we joined them -- for meals, they eat it total silence, no speaking. But most of the time it was just the guys from the men's group, together, together, together. It is very unnatural for me to be in a group as much as I was, and it felt good when night came, and I got to be alone again. From listening to these other guys talk, the guys in my men's group, I realized that most guys go through life from childhood to the present with all kinds of plans and intelligent approaches and systematic schemes for trying to get where they want to be. Not me, boy. I've just floated along from one thing to the next, like a baby crawling around on the forest floor.
--edward
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