resurrected resentment

Disclaimer: Most of my best friends are women; indeed during various periods of my life, I have harbored a deep suspicion of men and boys.

So, discerning audience, you should be able to guess what comes next.

On my bus ride home today, I realized that I now harbor much more antipathy towards pre-teen/teen girls than I do towards boys their same age. The trigger, two pretty girls, in trendy-punky clothes, harassing a boy sitting next to them. Like two little twin hyenas, they poked him and chanted his name over and over again, punctuating their chorus with variations on the theme of, "I'm touching you, aren't you afraid to get a disease," and "I touched you! I'm going to get a disease" all concluding resoundingly with "get off the bus, why don't you just get off the bus!" Elijah (or "Lie-jah!" as I heard it over and over again) never responded to their taunting. Palm cradling cheek, he turned his face away from them. There seemed to be nothing particularly wrong with Elijah, no outward sign of why he would be the object of ridicule. It seemed as simple as his tormentors needed entertainment and this game was suitable for the time it took us to get all the way through Beverly Hills.

Indeed, taunting him seemed just a form of interaction between them--a triangulation not dissimilar to the one Sedgwick identified for how men converse and bond with one another over the body of a hypersexualized woman.

Talking about it later with Michael, he suggested what we were both thinking: I should have put them on blast if only to prevent Elijah from blowing up the bus we were all on. School shootings are never so simple, so easily traceable to a particular event, but it seemed a sort of encapsulation of the kind of petty, isolating tactics that girls employ with such ease and apparent delight: their capacity to create norms by transforming their vulnerable classmates into outliers and their vicious enforcement of the norms they have created in order to solidify their own social positions.

I remember feeling vaguely this way towards the conventionally pretty girls my own age who I saw setting norms that I couldn't or wouldn't meet. I was reminded of it when speaking to a friend of a friend's daughter the other day--fashionably dressed, long silky blonde hair, and verbally distinguishing herself from her "bookish" classmates--but was surprised to find that I didn't condescend to her the way I would have in middle school, when I routinely torqued deep envy into a sense of being better than those whose lives I craved. Since high school, I've had a critical mass of people corroborating my having fit in somehow. Being accepted, even cherished, by just a few smoothes out old resentments.

But I reserve the right to be wary of tween girls.

THE LISTS

to do class: Read Poetics. Plan midterm. Write JM recommendation. Write Aristotle lecture.
done! Planned midterm.

to do work: Write intro section of article. Revise c1--give to ps advisor.
done! Wrote outline of intro section. Revised c1.

to do life: Clean the oil stain on my garage space. Pay down debt (currently $3,430). Procure dog.
done! not a thing. In fact, does the oil stain get worse if I don't clean up the cola and let it set for another day? Aiiieee, this oil stain is some kind of trouble!

to do blitz: sarah, marilyn, giulia, irmary, mariana, marinn, katie
done! journal editor man, claudia

Currently listening compulsively to Peaches (triple bypass at the double a triple x) and "this is why I'm hot."
Watched Axis of Evil Comedy Tour dvd. Main complaint: they played the best jokes on fresh air already. Final rating: meh.