attitudes

After that enthusiastic last paragraph of my previous post, I feel more than a little annoyed to report that the empowered feeling lasted less than 24 hours.

In an older book, Alice Schwarzer described her dream of a utopian society: one where a woman can walk by herself after dark and not shudder at every noise. I hear her on that one. We're very far away from that.

I visited friends on Saturday afternoon and took the train back at 10pm. By the time I was on my train, it was dark, and my compartment was nearly empty. I hoped it would stay that way, but was disappointed: with about 45 minutes left to go, two obviously drunk young men got on the train and sat down close to me. Their conversation was loud and though I tried to concentrate on my book, I couldn't help but listen.

Last weekend I went up to a town called Blenheim, which is about four hour's drive from where I live (or seven hours on a damn train because our tracks s*ck so much that they bend if it's hot and the trains derail. I learned that one the hard way), to visit my big sister and brother up there for her fiancé's birthday party. It was a great weekend, and so good to see everyone up there, but a couple of things stood out to me that really bothered me about my sister’s relationship. She does everything. She does all the cooking, the cleaning, and the laundry, washes the cars, feeds the animals, takes him his lunch in her lunch break, writes to his family for him etc. Don’t get me wrong, he is a really good guy, he loves her and they have a nice relationship, but she does everything. I didn’t really know how to bring this up with my sister because I really did not want to be that member of the family who points out such things when everything seems to be going along nicely for them, but I have such strong feelings on these things that it took a lot of strength for me to sit back and watch this.