Scholarly Woes

-- Alternatively titled, "Why I Should Just Get a Job Installing Posh Lightbulbs and Chastise the Customers on their Embarassing Ethnocentrism" --

It turns out that social theory is not my favorite class. While I do find it mildy interesting that in some East Asian cultures it is not only acceptable for a woman to marry her mother's younger brother (that would be her uncle, to those of you as excited about kinship diagrams as I am), or her mother's brother's son (her cousin. see, isn't this fun?), but actually preferable, I don't really find it all that surprising. Different people do different things, that's all there is to it. It all seems so screamingly obvious to me that I don't see the need for all the monstrous anthologies and academic analysis, and I certainly don't think it's worth paying $600 to hear such revelations. But then I watch the news and hear some politician or preacher claim to have a handle on what is "natural" and what is "unnatural" about what people want to marry whom and how they organize their families, and I realize that some people just don't get it. That only angers me more, though, as I feel it should be these ignorant asshats that have to spend their Friday nights writing term papers on the complexities of sex versus gender in modern kinship theory, not me.

In the good news department I got my posh lightbulbs in the mail! I'm using the word 'posh' because my French-Canadian friend who was finishing her Master's degree at the same place I was doing my field school just wrote me an email today. She's now a real life archaeologist and gets PAID to do archaeology in Ireland! Imagine! She liked using the word 'posh' and placed it front of nearly every noun possible, and it was one of our favorite words among the field school students. Now it's in my head and I'm going to use it, dammit.

Anyway, my posh lightbulbs are posh because they're the supercool spiraling energy-saving kind. I had to order them over the internet, because I can't just have normal 60w lights in the places I live. No no no, I have to have 75w dimmable, or 100w 3-way and they just don't sell those kinds of ultraposh lights in the hardware stores 'round these parts. I was a little wary of ordering them this way, as the last time I tried to I spent a great deal of money ('a great deal of money' in Sara's world is about fifty bucks) only to find out that they didn't fit in my decidely unposh, $10 Kmart lamps. Not only did I have to throw those posh bulbs away, but when I moved both of the unposh lamps broke and had to be tossed as well. But victory was mine, finally! The bulbs fit, barely, and I even washed the glass covers on the light fixtures so the new posh glow from the new posh bulbs wouldn't be marred by the presence of an alarming amount of dead bugs.

Update: During another vain attempt to read one of the articles integral to my papers, I was reminded of a story. Last year, or the year before that, there were some measures on the ballot regarding gay marriage (whether for it against it, I don't remember). As we drove past a gigantic billboard that read, "ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN. brought to you by the Church of Latter Day Saints," my dad snorted and said, "Oh like they're ones to talk!" [note: see "Mormons, polygamy."]