This is where I’m supposed to convince you that you’re not wasting your time. It’s slightly unfair, because most likely the only reason you’re reading this section is to put off whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing right now. But to help you justify your own decisions, I’ll answer the usual questions. What right do I have to call myself “domestic,” or “a hermit”?
- Spent rainy weekends trapped alone in a house with screaming infants, vomiting toddlers, clever seven year-olds with questions and a German Shepherd with bladder problems.
- Vacuumed fish food out of toy bins, retrieved globs of toilet paper from wet places and am still picking up other people’s dirty socks off the floor.
- Crossed Lego-strewn floors barefoot in the dark.
I had dignity, once. I graduated with honors in the humanities from Stanford University (Class of ’92). A four-year fellowship for a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Rutgers sounded like a good offer, so I took it. Then there ensued a dark time when it became clear that I had to choose between Christian faith and an academic career. The sort of people who are now throwing families with five children onto the street for declining to bake a cake were already ensconced in the Academy. That was back in the days when you had to possess a university ID just to find out what books the library was holding in its stacks. Never mind getting permission to read them.
And then God raised up Google and Amazon. Now from my humdrum corner I have access to more texts than the most eminent professor of yesteryear ever dreamed of reading. Search engines rummage for me through basements of Paris booksellers. They retrieve volumes in quarto that were forgotten ninety years ago and have been waiting through a world war and three generations for me to cut their pages and, at last, give them their due. And those are just the ones that are not yet scanned.
This is the sort of thing I like to fritter away time on when normal women are tittering over Fifty Shades of Grey. Page two of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer was for me the very end of all attempts to engage with postmodern popular entertainment. If there was ever a moment when you caught yourself thinking that suicide would be a respectable alternative to Desperate Housewives, you’re in good company here.
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