Caltrops - Cabaret Voltron





	[quote name="The Cheap Zseni Machine"][quote name="FABIO"]and Zseni What on earth is with you gals and your need to write depressing literature? I was going through a stack of old college papers and came across a bunch of writing samples from a creative writing class.[/quote] I didn't answer this at all! Here's my short sexist precis on your question: Women are typically uncomfortable dealing with abstractions - I think this is one of the very real differences between the sexes. Most people lack vision, but women also dislike abstractions, and, furthermore, are encouraged in a wide variety of ways to concentrate on exceptionally "trivial" matters. I have to put "trivial" in quotes because, honestly, ain't no big shit happening anywhere on this monkey planet. But yeah, girls have been encouraged to write those dumb depressing stories for the length of their education. Teachers tell them to "write about what they know" and "be honest" while "using writing to express themselves." Whereas men are more likely to receive technical criticisms rather than these sorts of spurious contextual or rhetorical criticisms. Who knows why? Yet I think there may even be something deeper about the Lifetime special thing that starts much earlier. Example: when I was 5, and I was playing My Little Pony with the girl across the street, and we had all the fucking ponies out and they were playing and whickering and brushing each other and whatever else ponies do, Girl Across The Street was always ready to bring THE SHADOW OF DESPAIR over the pony palace. Some pony would turn evil, or evil ponies would come and screw everything up, or my brother's Hot Wheels would run into the bestest ponies and kill them. Having been an ambitiousless and jovial slouch my whole life, I always wanted to know why this had to happen. I even asked her, straight up: how come the ponies can't just be happy? Can't we just have happy ponies for today? WELL THEY JUST COULDN'T. NO HAPPY PONIES. This pattern was to repeat through many girls across the streets and many types of toys, and would continue once all the toys were put away. Without toys, the girls would play No Happy Ponies with real live human beings: each other, and me. Women and their senseless, innate appetite for drama! I got in a ream of shit in junior high for writing a series of stories in which nothing bad happened. They were about happy people, living simple peaceful lives in gorgeous locales, all lavishly described. The teacher, a woman, was furiously at a loss to cope with the pretty writing which was nevertheless bad writing, because it was jovial and ambitiousless. I came to understand that, you know, plot and all, you can't just write stories in which nothing bad happens. <i>It's dull.</i> The implications of this are still filtering through my system. One of the lessons I learned from that incident I will give to you now: perhaps, Fabs, it's human nature. The one good thing in all the hack philosophy in The Matrix was the bit where Agent Smith says humans lived in the beautiful peaceful wonderful paradise and they <i>hated</i> it. Perhaps women are just acting like humans after all, having nothing better going on in their charming little heads. I'll save the discussion of whether anything better <i>should</i> be going through their charming little heads for another day.[/quote]