it bites

Yesterday was my first experience ever of the Horror That Is The Dental Hygienist. It's not the jets of cold on sensitive teeth, or the nasty little scraping noises, or even the bleeding gums. It's the depressing realisation that we have reached an acme of human cultural decadence where we've basically re-created those little birds that hop around inside the mouths of giant carnivores, picking their teeth. I spent the whole hour in the chair fighting the urge to close my mouth suddenly on a crunchy mouthful of feathers.

I can find no logical reason for the fact that I not only went around for most of yesterday with A.A. Milne poetry circling my brain, but alternated it randomly with compulsive femino-Marxist analyses of same. That James James Morrisson Morrisson, where does he get off refusing to let his mother go down to the end of the town alone? This is clearly a deeply patriarchal expression both of (a) male assumption of power over females, since the authority rests with him even though he's three years old, and (b) a misogynistic view of a threateningly unbridled female sexuality which assumes that unsupervised women will doll themselves up and rush off to dodgy social areas ("the end of the town", so marginal) for unspecified high jinks. Also, "golden gown"? "drove to the end of the town"? An obvious expression of bourgeoise elitism, reinforced by the approval of the Royal Family, no less! The complete disappearance of the poor woman is a characteristic punishment reasserting male control and re-affirming the dangerous otherness of the have-nots who reside outside the acceptable confines of bourgeoise society. So there.

In other news, yesterday I celebrated the end of the semester (yay!) and the fact that I didn't actually eat the dental hygienist by sallying forth and randomly buying self-congratulatory boots. Winter may now do its worst, I'm prepared.