| Monday Morning, Chez CB |
[Dec. 1st, 2008|07:57 am] |
An event I can only greet with the most heartfelt of 'mehs'. This cold, or virus, or bug, or whatever it is, is kicking my ass: I worked for an hour yesterday before lying down and whimpering for a good long while. Lying down and whimpering doesn't sound all that bad now, actually.
However, whimpering is not on the To-Do list. (Whimper is, however, one of those words that becomes ridiculous with repetition: whimper, whimper, whimper, and suddenly you've got a mental image of a middle aged British detective who is neither particularly insightful nor canny yet still, through Sheer Dogged Application of Logic catches the bad guy every time.)
(Which is rather silly, for most crimes are not, at their core, logical events.)
As an aside, it was the heady mixture of a Lock Up marathon (and yes, someday I'll write about why I loathe that show and yet find myself compelled to watch it) and China Mievelle's Perdido Street Station that got me thinking about the relationship between correction officers and language: they function in an environment of time distorted, and words change there. Prison poetry and the jailhouse lawyer phenomenon: the freshman-in-college oppression awakening, hung on an incomplete framework that goes no further...taken in context is one thing, entire, but then, when the shift's done and you come home -- the people you're surrounded with have only the same language tools to use: how to reconcile a speech pattern that might mean one thing in one setting with something entirely different in another?
The emphasis on respect, in CO families.
Funny thing, that, and clearly the thought process is impeded this morning. But we'll come back to that: language, more than anything, is the key to understanding a people.
Well, language and the set of archetypes a culture claims. (Anyone who has proper training in anthropology can commence wincing now, for verily, we're getting into yet another Area Cindy Knows Very Little About) But it seeems to me that archetypes need to change with time: the roles that were so vital once in a society can be irrelevant tomorrow.
Housewives used to wear keys, you know. To safeguard the family's treasures, of whatever type: the spice box, the store house. That archetype of housewife as guardian, I think it is gone. She still has keys, but now they go to the minivan. She has become the symbol of facilitating other people's dreams, ensuring other people's role within the larger team. A vicarious virtue at best.
Clearly, that's enough of that. Onward, upward, forward. Work to be done, y'all. |
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| Comments: |
Good lord. I have a copy of Perdido Street Station in the house somewhere. I can see the cover in my head. I haven't read any of those books in years.
I think the image of the wife with her keys and the officer with his keys is an interesting dichotomy. | |
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