War! What Is It Good for?

I was not very efficient yesterday. It’s OK. It happens. We can’t always go go go every minute of every day. I wanted to be done quilting, and I’m not. I need to go buy binding today though. I’m done with the outlining and I started the background stuff. I don’t expect it to take very long…

She has eyeballs! So I’m gonna finish that today and go get the binding fabric. Which means now I have to finish the other drawing. The drawing that has not fully coalesced in my head. The drawing that needs to come from somewhere difficult. Sigh. OK. So I need to find mental space for that. In between starting school and trying to finish up the bedroom and sending the boychild back to college. Hmmmm. OK. Yeah.

Drawing sounds nice actually. Sitting on the deck with some tea or wine and drawing. Music playing while the neighbor kids scream their tiny little guts out (oh wait). Turning the music up and making sure it has lots of swear words in it (I don’t actually do that…I just think about doing it.). Getting out the flamethrower…oh wait. Also not appropriate.

Right now I’m sitting here, reveling in the bird sounds, the sound of faraway dogs barking, the sound of my pool needing to have the filter cleaned. Aargh.

OK, I did some stitches around the hand, in between some of the buttonhole spiky bits. And lazy daisies in purple…still filling those in.

And then I went to book club to discuss a book I didn’t finish. And they forgot to bring my food. It was interesting though…I think of war as a distinctly male thing…even when we’re talking about the queens in the past who have started wars, I kind of think their upbringing was distinctly male in some ways, to make sure they would react that way if needed, or maybe they weren’t really allowed to make decisions without approval by all these men around them. Or they were raised to be leaders of a country and that meant they should automatically consider war, no matter what. Or they are just anomalies.

I have this picture in my head of a world run by women where the first thing we do is NOT bomb the shit out of people. And maybe that’s just my age showing, because the younger members of the book club were arguing that it is not just a male thing, that women want war all the time too (I don’t know any of these women…but I don’t know a lot of men who want war either…product of my choice in friends I think.). I also blame religion for wars personally, or at least for this feeling that something needs to be other and other needs to be bad. But maybe that’s just human nature, a leftover of the brain aiming for survival. I think of wars as being pissing matches, this power against that power, and that feels very masculine to me, very testosterone-driven. If I were male, would I feel more warlike? Maybe not. I know men who aren’t. Did women-run societies run toward war? See the queens might have been in charge, but those weren’t female-run societies in the long run. So you do what you need to do to survive?

Anyway. As we sit here on the West Coast with two male dumbasses waving their peni at each other and us in the middle, it’s hard for me not to associate war and powermongering with a certain type of person.

Honestly though, that’s not helping me get through what I want to get through today. So I’ll think about my assumptions and maybe read some stuff and try to keep an open mind. While I build a bomb shelter in the backyard. That’s a drawing right there. Aack! Don’t have time for all this in my head…OK. I liked. I just went and bought a book on war and gender. Light reading for the back-to-school set.

Now let’s go back in time to 2004, when the girlchild was only 7, and consider the fact that she is now 20…

And she’s still always hanging out with dogs…miss that kid.