Why yes, this is a typical Sunday

You know you're an upperclassman English/philosophy student when your Sunday consists of reading a book called Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, three acts of The Taming of the Shrew, and then the first 25 pages of The German Ideology. That last one would be by Marx, by the way, if you're not up on your nineteenth century continental works. Which I recommend y'all should work on, if you're not.

I'm actually not super keen on Marx, for a few reasons, not the least of which being that his journals (The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, specifically) are kind of a pain to read because there's a lot about Hegel and I don't know Hegel very well. But I've read the Manifesto and the EPM and now I'm on to The German Ideology and soon I'll be rounding out my basic introduction to Marxist theory with Capital. I'm either going to start hating him soon, or become a Communist. Only time will tell.

I am liking Gender, though. I didn't so much at first because I was distracted and the first chapter was all about defining terms, but once I got into the second chapter I started getting into it. The second chapter was all about Berdache - individuals in Native tribes (not all, because each nation is very different, but many) who were born one gender, but for any number of reasons became another. It was mostly focusing on the fact that the people in the tribes often treated Berdache as their own gender, using words that don't have an English equivalent because we don't think in those terms. If you translate them, they work out to be, like, 'is and is not male and female' and the like. It's really interesting because we do, in the western tradition, treat gender as dichotomous, and then act like that's The Way It Is, when all sorts of other cultures have at the very least a third option and determine gender by standards other than genitalia.

The book also spends some time criticising old school anthropology, which is always fun to read.

In other news, Annie and I are challenging ourselves to write/draw more (write in my case, draw in hers) by doing a 200 theme challenge. We found a few different theme challenges on the internet, pulled out the stupid ones (like 'love' and 'sorrow') and combined the awesome ones (like 'syringe' and 'as near as snow') into a big list to try to trigger more creativity. So far I've done Viridian and Insomnia. Viridian got a better piece, in my opinion, a bit of vaguely dystopian sci-fi, but at least I feel productive.

And, as a final non-sequitur, my left wrist has hurt off and on for a few weeks now. I think I might finally suck it up and go to the campus clinic because it's driving me crazy.