Offensively Neutral

I can admit that I am living in Crazy-town right now, in the penthouse of Female Insanity Towers, but truly, I think I got a seriously disrespectful email today. ANY email that comes three weeks later is probably not very cool, and when you add in inane bullshit about the weather, which is, seriously, just offensively f***ing neutral, that puts it over the edge. And you don't lie to a New Englander about Dunkin Donuts. You just don't. It's not cool. And you will get punched in the face, and then set on fire.

I am incandescent with rage right now. Like, wrath on a f***ing Homeric f***ing scale.

I think I might pass on the light fiction altogether tonight, and go straight to the Iliad. Screw distraction, I want spears piercing through jawbones to bit into the bloodied ground as gobbets of flesh go flying. That, or getting wasted off drinks that random men are buying, but my single ladies are all out of town at the moment, so various media will have to do (but, if there is bloodshed on Lost, I will not be complaining).

Much like Mr. Annoying Bastard's email, however, I need to say that, while it doesn't elicit the same pyromaniacal yearnings in me, I find George Eliot's Middlemarch to be stupendously offensively neutral. I read it again this weekend, hoping at 28 I would see what I did not, could not, at 14 - why the hell it is so famous - but I just don't get it. It's boring. The narrator is annoying. The story is one of absolutely nothing happening, punctuated by moments where disbelief has to be hoisted with a crane to be suspended. And one of the things I love most about Pride and Prejudice (one of the books I love most) is that it is a story where "the most that happens is that a lady changes her mind, and a gentleman his manners" (apologies to whoever wrote the intro to the edition I have, because I am sure I mangled that). But there the characters are funny, and believable, and seem like they could be modern people, they just happen to be living in another century and country. These damn Middlemarchers, on the other hand, feel like if they even could be real people, everything about them - minds & manners - is completely, wholly tied to their place and time. And Dorothea and Ladislaw make me want to strangle them with their own guts.

Of course, I went online to do a little research, see if I could figure out why the hell this book is so famous, and lo and behold, who loved it? Virginia Woolf. Another person who sets my teeth on edge. She's also another one I keep meaning to take another stab at - but I think I might try and ease into it: I just picked up The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron, who I obv. love, and I'm hoping if I can get invested in the woman as a character in a novel, it might give me more understanding when it comes to the woman as author...or more interest anyways. Let's just pray that there is a nice, horrid man who did not fall all over himself when she reached out, because he was all beige and short and should have been totally into her, who was just freaking RUDE in a letter. Because then Virginia will be my sister in spirit as she is in name. Or I will come to my senses and realize I am being nuts for no reason. Either way.