Echidne says:

Blogging (a horrible word, like having hot potatoes in your mouth) is just like doing the dishes.  You do them, then they get dirtied again, as if you never had done the work in the first place.

I feel like this, too, every time whenever

– yet another person alights on my blog and immediately informs me of what I “should do”;

– I’m told that I’m expected to respect every woman’s choices for some mysterious reason that nobody ever reveals to me;

– I get accused of things some other feminists and Liberals supposedly said and did (curiously, there are never any links provided to those things);

– I get informed that the way I write is not up to the commenter’s standards;

– very aggressive people whose blogs I never visited tell me angrily that I offend them with my aggression. It would be very easy for such people not to read a blog they find offensive, yet they always choose to take a more difficult route of trying to reform me;

– people inform me in very apologetic and careful tones that they don’t agree with every word I have ever written. As if I ever expressed a wish for people to agree with everything I say.

I experience all of these things a lot more often than I do dish-washing.

I’m always late to every fashionable bit of popular entertainment. You have to tie me up and hold me down to get me watch a Hollywood movie. This was pretty much what happened to me on the delayed flight from London that lasted 10,5 hours. I forgot to charge my Kindle, so the battery had died. As a result, I had to watch three movies in a row to make the time pass by faster.

The first movie was The Ides of March which had absolutely zero plot. It was supposed to be a political drama about presidential elections. You’ve got to try really hard to make a movie on this topic bland and boring. The makers of the movie forgot that the real presidential elections in this country are always fascinating, so you have got to make a film rendering of them at least half as entertaining.

Then, I watched Albert Nobbs. Again, there is almost no plot to speak of but Glenn Close is amazing. Which is no surprise because she is always amazing. I consider her to be the only talented actress in the US.

After that, in a complete fit of desperation, I watched The Devil Wears Prada. OK, I know but I recognized the movie from how everybody was swooning over it back at Yale when it first came out. Even the most book-hating colleagues from among my fellow grad schoolers bought the book the movie was based on. And Meryl Streep was in it. She is good.

The movie horrified me, people. I knew sexism existed but I hadn’t seen such a naked, in-your-face version of it for a very long time. The main idea of the movie is that successful, powerful, beautiful women all have miserable personal lives. And the only way to be happy in your personal life is to be a badly dressed, dowdy, whiny idiot who sacrifices her career for some useless and unattractive guy who is insanely jealous of every bit of success you might enjoy. “Let’s all drop whatever we are doing, find some sore loser, and start feeding his ego by being as unkempt and unsuccessful as he is!” the movie happily proclaims.

So my endeavor to overcome my prejudice against Hollywood movies failed in its entirety.