All the Horrible Girliness

It's been muggy here, and I use the air conditioning more than I'd like. With gas prices and electric bill prices, I feel like a rich person when the air conditioning is on. And when The Bug wakes me in the middle of the night, and I shiver in his room because the house is kept cold enough to make snuggling under blankets viable, I feel like an impossibly rich person. Like that bad guy in Tank Girl who has an actual fountain in his office, when the world is in a drought. Like Saddam Hussein, with the man-made lakes for his sons to speedboat in.

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My dad, and people like him, get mad when they read about decadence. They hear about Middle Eastern royalty, their huge personal planes that cost millions and millions. Their spoiled children, who contribute nothing. If they died, no one would mourn them but, maybe, Lindsay Lohan.

People hate that, and maybe they think those rich people don't deserve to live. Maybe we think that way because of Robin Hood, as if the poor are more deserving. As if communism ever worked. It's the right way to think, though, the good way. But then I can't help but think about the rest of the population, the people who would think the way we live is ugly and decadent. Articles in magazines about shopping the perimeter of the grocery store in order to eat healthy must look ridiculous to someone who barters for fish and rice in a market, or stands in line for bread, or who gets a ration of meat only once a year, like in North Korea. Poring over which $20 bottle of shampoo to use is equally ridiculous, as is keeping the air conditioner on colder than it needs to be just because I like being under blankets when I sleep, or because the computer makes it hot in my room.

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I read this article in Esquire written by a soldier who did a tour in Iraq. There were these freshly killed bodies blocking a road, and while they were doing cleanup or whatever, this woman with a child needed to pass by. There was no other way to get where she was going, so they had to wave her through. She glanced at the bodies, but kept moving. It didn't even seem to phase her. And I think, if I were that woman, walking through a war-torn shithole of a neighborhood with my Bug, and I heard that another woman in America spent her Sunday morning having pancakes dipped in chocolate sauce, wearing an outfit that cost enough to feed an Iraqi family for a month, I'd think maybe Americans needed a reality check, too.

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It's become clear to me recently how imporant language is. That happens when you spend a year with someone who can't speak your language, and your full-time job is to take care of that person. Is he hot? Cold? In pain? Who knows? It's all guesswork. You go between begging him to learn to walk and talk, and begging God to make the time stop.

posted by Samus @ 1:28 PM