Agony...

[ceebeegee]

I did something weird to my neck and back a few nights ago--I think I slept on it wrong--and it's gotten worse ever since, to the point that drying my hair this morning was difficult to impossible.  Very stiff and painful--last night it was literally tingling.  As pathetic as this sounds, it's difficult even to eat an apple right now (as indeed I am trying to do).  All I can say is, this had better clear up before Saturday and softball!

I was at Columbia yesterday trying to talk to an administrator and an assistant overheard me and was asking me about myself.  I was telling him besides my student life, I'm an actor "who happens to be going for her master's in history" and he commented on how disparate the two activities were.  I said actually one can inform the other and was telling him about dramaturgy and he was unfamiliar with the term so I had to explain it.  I made the mistake of citing Mad Men as a show that would require a dramaturg.  HUGE mistake.  He went off on a literal tirade--five minutes long--about how much he disliked the show, how every time he'd watched it there were all these egregious fashion errors, and anachronistic haircuts and I don't know what all.  Matthew Weiner is notoriously fanatical about his research so this seems unlikely but whatever--I don't care if someone doesn't like a show I like, just don't force me to listen for five bleepin' minutes while you take over the conversation and go off to a complete stranger.  Don't hold forth.  I don't care that much and I have things to do.  People who ignore unspoken conversational signals--like looking away awkwardly while someone speaks for five minutes, not letting in a word edgewise--really, really irritate me, because I'm finally forced to say awkwardly "uh, okay--I actually need to leave now..."  It wasn't quite mansplaining, but there has to be a word for men who force their opinions on women, because this isn't the first time this has happened.

On further Mad matters, I read this rather hysterical post on TWoP:

I needed a boost after losing all the respect I ever had for Joan with the revelation that her "independence" was bought at such a price. People revile her husband for those few minutes on the floor (and he was wrong, of course) but now I'm angry at her much more. We've had a variety of crimes on this show, but Joan's the only one who's deliberately taken lives, not once but twice. YMMV, but all the conga scenes in the world won't make me warm up to her again. I think her tears at the end were for all the chances she'd thrown away and might never get another shot at.

So--"those few minutes" of rape is bad ("of course"), but abortion is worse?  Are you nuts?  Way to mouthe the appropriate line about rape while tearing into women who might actually need to deal with the results thereof.  Maybe Joan's tears were because even though her worthless fiance threw her down and raped her in her own office, she was still essentially boxed into marrying him, because of the extreme social pressure on women to conform during that period.  I love this show but there are some very misogynistic fans out there--the Betty-hatred is really depressing.  I practically breathed fire reading one post addressing the Don-Betty breakup, saying "they were equally at fault."  All I can say is, if you equate Don's many, many sins in that marriage--pathological cheating, including when she was pregnant, abandonment, invasion of privacy (the psychologist in Season 1), emotional cruelty (his telling her she looked desperate when she wore the bikini, his insulting her, his gaslighting her) and let's not forget--putting your wife and children's entire existence at risk because you're not who you say you are--with Betty's coldness (and hey, remember how not-cold she was in Season 1?  Before she realized how horrible her husband was treating her?), you're seeing what you want to see.  But on the other hand, it's Betty's fault--she's female.