7-18-00 Woman's Nature

 7-18-00 Tu 3:30 PM

This journal wasn't in my backpack today. I subbed at Pio Pico. A first-grade class. They called at ten to eight this morning. I showered, dressed, and typed for fifteen minutes before Rochelle dropped me off at eight thirty. I taught a few lessons and read the day's news. It was all ho-hum, except that when I finished the paper, I wanted to write in here, but when I unzipped my backpack, this notebook wasn't there. It pissed me off to have forgotten it--a visceral sense of loss that common sense told me to get over--so I read Miller's pornographic ravings amid the innocence of the first-grade children. Mailer's commentary is like locker room intellectualism. You'd think I might appreciate that, but it comes across as not thought through to any depth. It's almost as bad as my writing. He writes about Henry and June as mutually parasitic narcissists, but it's hard to buy Mailer as an authority on the subject except as a narcissist himself. He seems guilty of the same problems he identifies in Miller: the subject matter is too big, to nebulous, to nail down coherently. I did, however, find noteworthy Mailer's assertion that Miller saw women as incapable of having characters as large as men's, which he footnotes with the idea that women's nature is nature itself. Chauvinistic maybe, but with a ring of truth to it, perhaps.    Hmm?   Once I'd finished Mailer's chapter alleging Miller's narcissism, I took out Farewell, My Lovely, and read a few chapters of "The Finger Man." After class, Principal Armstrong, the guy I want to talk to about Pitch, was at the school, but I knew they were having a staff meeting after school, so I decided I'd just introduce myself. I told him my name, and then I backed away and stumbled over a kid because I wasn't looking where I was going. That couldn't have helped my cause. I walked home. Now I'm sitting on the couch in my undershorts. The Angels are on. So are the Dodgers. After I'm done here, I guess we've got to go to the pet store to get more stuff for the puppy we're adopting. She thinks I have money coming out of my ass. Then I have to type a third-person page. Then I have to go teach at LA High.