"And I like the whole truth"

 I've been humming this same phrase all day and I couldn't find the lyrics to it.  The song is We Build Bridges by Liz Durrett.  The reason I couldn't find it was because I was looking for "we burn bridges, don't we?"

 

Drove out to Waltham today for a bone density scan to 'celebrate' ten years of menopause.  Listened to a bunch of this will be my undoing, which was the third time "the master's tools" quote came up as many weeks.  I haven't yet read What we talk about when we talk about rape, but I intend to and the author is speaking at PSB at the end of the month and I checked to see if I could attend part of "Interrogating Self-Care: Bodies, personhood & movements in tumultuous times."  All these things seem to be orbitting around some point I  can't quite identify (and yeah, I typed "point I can't pinpoint" first) but maybe if I keep trying I'll get there.

 

Sometimes I wish I could just do childcare and administrative support and general housework for the revolution(I know there are bazillions of revolutions), that it was easy to find a way to use the skills I enjoy using in support of work I believe in.  Step by step, and person by person for the moment I guess.

 

I've been poking around the internet, trying to find our next set of plates (since the bird plates I bought eversolong ago at TJ Maxx are finally getting to the point where's there is an undeniable amount of chipping and general attrition. And there's a whole internal debate about adultness and waiting for the next house or waiting until I really need it, and relying on whatever fortunes random department and reseller stores provide me (at least half of my silverware and 90% of my current bowls and plates come from TJ Maxx, the other 10% from China Fair).

 

I still have the handmedown dressers I got from my parents that I got at some point post-college.  (I also have a handmedown hutch, but that's awesome, and my grandfather's roll-top desk, but that's also awesome), our side table is a cracked magazine table that my grandmother used to own but was languishing in my parents basement.   None of our beds have matching nightstands, 90% of our bookshelves came from Staples, etc.  And I don't know if I think it's a marker of success, a marker of money or a marker of adulthood to have nice things

 

I talked briefly to Bespoke yesterday and we identified The Good Place a common cultural vocabulary, and then I spent the rest of the day with all these leviathan-like thoughts slowly emerging from the depths and then retreating before I could actually get a good idea of their shape.  Roughly it went - In the Good Place, much is made of everyone's class and their awareness of it, even if in the actual Good Place  class doesn't seem to exist.

 

Do I identify with Eleanor because I'm supposed to, that's what the TV show is designed to do, give me the illusion of personal growth by creating a situation where I feel kinship with the protagonist? Is this more complicated feelings about my own class background (which is always going to be privileged, though often less so than the people I surrounded myself with) (fuck you college)?  *a bunch of transitional thoughts about Eleanor and the role alcohol plays in the show since I feel like it is often used to signify pre-death trashiness*  FFS do I feel like I have to perform a lower class because I was/am a drunk?  Is recovering alcoholic the classy way to say drunk? Is my belief that for me, once a drunk always a drunk is true, somehow based in my feeling of being lower-class?

 

And I hope I'm not talking in some fucked up Iggy Azalea appropriative way, just that I sometimes feel like the only person I know who didn't come from someplace fancy, (three out of three partners went to fancy highschool one way or another and at least one of my crushes did) or didn't manage to get their act enough together to make the absurdly high salaries Cambervillian life demands.  But maybe it is appropriative to want to have this scrappy narrative of climbing out of the very same gutter I half chose to inhabit, half was inevitably led my trauma and my genes?  Especially when what I did was class jump by marrying?

 

For all that I have a lot of feelings about how Eleanor interacts with the world, there's a Chidi quote that also feels a little bit like it was the phrase I've been looking for my whole life, so I'll leave you with that.  

 

Here's the thing about me. You know the sound a fork makes in the garbage disposal? That's the sound my brain makes. All the time.