Houston is Filthy

Mr. Lindsey said I don’t have to write about Offred anymore, so I won’t.  She’s really whiny and has terrible, if any, foresight and I don’t much care for her. Besides, Ofglen is the badass. Make the book about her Margaret. Rewrite.

I’ll write highly inappropriate haikus about food instead. This technically is an “in-class reading” as outlined by the blog directions on the AP Literature website. There’s a creepy plastic dinosaur on the website as well, it’s quirky enough to satisfy even the most stringent of counter-culture hipsters.

After some light “Googling” I’ve identified what is recognized as “sitophilia”, or a sexual attraction to food, after reading the opening line to a horribly abrasive website, “When a Hamburger is…More than Just a Piece of Meat…” I personally like to call it “the Houston Jimmies”; that’s gross. But this blog is not about judging people based on their sexual preferences, it’s about judging people who have no couth about it.

This really requires context because I’d hate for the Dallas Independent School District to get a bee in its bonnet about a subtly sexual blog post. It’s like God; you would think it would have better things to do than listen to some man pray that his cat makes it out of surgery, but there you go. One small, insignificant post about sex and you’re dead. DEAD. SEX. Let the game begin. Ok, context.

In class, Mr. Lindsey forced us to read overtly sexual and pseudo-artistic haikus about food that were written by overworked people in Houston; that little smoky, humid hub of Texas being the breeding grounds of those who cultivate depravity. I can’t breathe in Houston. The fog is thick, but the thinly veiled attraction to foodstuff is thicker still. Some people are really artsy too; they like to use the word “kissed” instead of “touched”. Oh, let’s read on. Something to the tune of “The outreach of an ancient Mayan world kissed my lips,” says a lonely, lonely woman who thought it would be exotic to sprinkle chili powder in her hot chocolate. There was someone else who talked about “popping peas” and “juicy cherries”; uncomfortable on their own, but sexual dynamite if you unify those two ideas. This is so wrong. Mr. Lindsey said it’s because there’s nothing to do in Houston but have sex with your food. Clearly.

Anyways, here are my attempts to stand on the shoulders of nasty giants.


 “Zebra Cakes”
Unwrapped Zebra Cakes
Undressing Little Debbie
Gonna “get some stripes”

The box literally says “Get some stripes.” And it has a zebra on there that is wearing round sunglass frames with square lenses. I’d fire the artistic director if I was Debbie. She probably inherited the company when she was little, and now she’s the CEO. She’s Big Debbie. She’s a big girl. Yes, a big girl…

(I’m from Houston. I have the disease.)

“Popcorn”
Pop pop pop pop pop
Pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
Pop pop pop pop pop

Now, I would classify this as Dada poetry really. It’s genius.



“Sliced Ham”
Lounges thick like slabs
Lies like meaty, pink tongues
Let’s taste these ‘tasters’

“Metaphysical Brownie”
Brownies nice and rich
Speak proud to my forlorn soul
I am so artsy

Offred is a Cry-Baby with Repetitive Tendencies

“Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn’t afford to lose you.”

In  Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale protagonist Offred reflects upon her past and the transition from an earlier civilization to the workings of a birthing dystopia that is oppressive to women. This reflection serves a multitude of purposes with respect to unveiling the mechanics of dystopia and the tendencies of the people engulfed by them and by exploiting a new perspective on the relationship the Offred and her, now obsolete, husband Luke. Even during the transition period in society she feels that she is his property, exacerbated by the denial of money to women in Gilead’s early period. This not only establishes and foreshadows her role as society’s literal property, but also questions whether her loyalty to Luke is that based on love or on fear. There is generally a semblance of love inherent to the sentiment “I couldn’t afford to lose you,” but in this new dystopia one must recognize that Offred literally cannot afford to lose Luke, socially she cannot be independent. This creates a master and subject type relationship. Like the underlying bond that endears a child to its mother, Offred is incapable and being so is completely dependent on Luke; this power balance with Offred is surfaced later in the narrative by her relationship with the Commander; it is a loyalty of fear and consequence.

                Offred’s sentiments also explain the psychological conventions of a dystopian society; binding people to each other and, as a biological consequence of dependence, can then manipulate the coherence of homogenous ideas. It is sensible that with the mandated removal of a person, or more appropriately a woman, from their freedoms to purchase goods, to access goods outside of necessity, a dependency is inflicted. So people are unified obviously through fear, not a fear of being ostracized but rather a fear of a loss of comradery. It is the manner with which Gilead manipulates fear in order to usher women gradually into oppression that is unsettling. If the society had simply rescinded independence immediately, uprising  would have been commonplace. However, a gradual change is easier to miss; though even the denial of Offred’s credit card arouses emotional response. Regardless of whether Offred was afraid of Luke leaving her, to wilt in a society that neither respected her nor let her alone, or simply just afraid of the law, she was afraid of an unidentifiable and formless something. The gender gap that was taken advantage of during the birth of Gilead created a shifted alliance between husband and wife, and though Luke had no part in implementing such laws, one can’t help but think that there was a slight “at least it isn’t me, it’s not men,” sentiment that drove him to be less aggressive about the changes in the first place. Offred is the one who is manipulated, always, and in her fear she clung to the object of her oppression, as she continues to do now with the Commander.

What Booker T. Washington High School Has Done for Me

As much as I like to think that Booker T. Washington is my own personal hell, complete with flighty people that have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their lives, people who think that Andrew Lloyd Weber is just going to pop into the classrooms pointing fingers going "I want you, and you, and you!"... as much as I think that, I don't want to be a cynic, because cynics are absolutely no fun and because Booker T. Washington has given me valuable gifts that I haven't realized I've gotten until this year. Maybe unfortunately not until the end of this year. I want to be a neuroscientist, and at least in the visual sense I've been taught by my art teachers to view objects objectively, to problem solve with the eyes by breaking down what we know into forms and shapes. This is also appropriate in science. A problem needs to be solved, a pathway needs to be found, without all of the complexities of chemical equations. You take the raw forms of what you know and what you don't know and you look at something objectively. It gets too complicated otherwise, likewise when trying to draw a landscape or a portrait. So I guess Booker T. Washington taught me to problem solve, they say that creative people are the most valuable in a laboratory. But I like to think that I was at least born with a tinge of creativity, but everyone is born with a sense of composition--a little house with a stick figure and a sun in the corner. I guess I was taught to expand on that, which is valuable in its on right, though I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it. I plan to major in neuroscience in college, go on to medical school and get an M.D./PhD in neuroscience and neurosurgery. I don't want to listen to people talk on a couch, I just want to cut their head open and save their lives. I think I owe it to people to share my knowledge with them, otherwise learning anything is just pointless. I always say that I wish I went somewhere like SEM or TAG, but I love the people at Booker T. Maybe all of them, even. That would be something nice to put in my speech, because in these final days of senior year I've realized that I've grown up with these people, even the ones that I absolutely despise. They have had an amazing influence on my personality and they've seen me in my most vulnerable moments, as I have them. I wouldn't want it any other way. I think the people who leave Booker T. deciding that they don't want to pursue art, get just as much out of it as the ones that do.

In Fine (The End)

The close of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, in which protagonist Offred is ushered into the ambiguity of a fatal darkness or an invigorating light, parallels the novel’s continuing theme of ambiguity regarding one’s place in society regarding the future wills and needs of surrounding characters. The reader is left unsatisfied as Offred climbs into a black van with a big white eye painted on the side, unsatisfied with the unknown. There is no absolute closure but rather an ending note of suspense not unlike the continual and everlasting precipice that Offred cannot help but teeter along with every action she takes, or rather does not choose to take. She is in no way entitled to a future by her society, and by the novel’s close, neither is the reader.

                The novel is rounded out by a final epilogue of historical notes that read like a transcript of a college symposia on Gileadean history, hundreds of years following the discovery of Offred’s tale. While these notes do not provide all of the answers they do however provide context regarding Offred’s life that not even she was able to fully access during her time as a Handmaid. Most notable of such information is the fate of her daughter; the anthropologist dictating the historical notes states that the children of the women who were to become Handmaids were adopted by foster families of a higher social status (likely, then, never to play the role of a Handmaid). It is interesting that this is the point in the novel, the point at which Offred sees the photo of her daughter and can only speculate as to how her fate will proceed, that Offred becomes significantly emotionally weakened, entirely passive, and faulted. Again, the society is coaxing complacency by only revealing so much, so little information, the rest lost to an ironically un-blissful ignorance. The Red Center must tell the Handmaids to wish their children dead or dying, knowing full well that they never can and they never will.

                The fractured loyalties of Nick present a complex network of motives in retrospect to his actions in the novel. This is the downfall of a first-person narrative such as the Handmaid’s Tale. The reader only knows what Nick does as it immediately relates to Offred, and the view of his true character is obscured by Offred’s favorative bias. When it is revealed by the historical notes that Nick is both a Rebel and an Eye, it creates again a fear of the unknown, a fear of who to confide in. When Ofglen acts overtly to reveal that she belongs to a resistance, Offred is hesitant to oblige; however, divulges everything to Nick. This portrays Offred as an incredibly fickle and emotionally-driven character. While clearly Offred was able to escape the society in some respect, it is nauseating to think that Nick’s manipulation of her confidentiality may have led to her downfall.

                The ability of the anthropologists to add humor to their lecture on Gilead reveals that they have become so disconnected from this almost mythical past that they, much like the reader, can view the society objectively through a lens. 

This Can't Be Right

“I know this can’t be right, but I think it anyway. Everything they taught us at the Red Center, everything I’ve resisted, comes flooding in. I don’t want pain.”

In Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale, protagonist Offred releases this sentiment after learning that her partner, and to her knowledge her only affiliation with the underground Mayday Rebels, Ofglen has hanged herself in the preservation of secrecy regarding her organization. While Offred’s relief and gratitude are remotely understandable, recognizing her fear that Ofglen may have revealed what little part she has had in the rebellion, if really any part at all, they are also seemingly selfish. This again provides a circumstance in the novel in which passive Offred is dictated by her inability to be anything but a pawn dictated by the actions of others, as well as shows her readiness to worship the false idols of Moira and her Mother crafted by her memory rather than those that have expressed an actual activeness within the story. Offred remarks that “everything [she has] resisted comes flooding in.” providing an immediate shift in attitude promoted by the wake of a fear far greater than the society itself could ever orchestrate, the fear of her own capability. It is telling of the ways in which dystopian society is formulated, with fear as the real primary control. Offred resisted the teachings of the Red Center, if only mentally, she was trained there, locked up there, persecuted there; yet the systematic routine of formality and restrained even is no match for inherent and self-propagated fear, not even necessarily as punishment but rather as a consequence of interpersonal conflict. This is evident because of the events that compose the retelling of Offred’s morning prior to Ofglen’s suicide. Offred witnesses the hanging of three women and the slaughter of a man wrongfully accused of rape, convicted and killed. Offred is first under the impression that the man has committed a crime, she has a false understanding of it, and thus she is greater in her rage; but once she knows he is a rebel, her rage evolves to fear because such a fear is much closer to her own activities and relationships and is therefore more personal. The underground has been defeated, unseen heroes are exposed. And the will of Ofglen to kill herself on her own conviction is a greater stabilizer, or a better mechanism that controls Offred’s will to repent and to comply. It seems as though the controlling factors must be so much more personal, even self-invented and it becomes Offred’s own paranoia that cripples her. She relinquishes herself to others, keeping with her duties and with the consistent passiveness that is witness in her character throughout the novel. At times like these, she becomes her own enemy when she cannot afford to have one. Her wavering instability and her lack of foresight lead her to create an environment of fear and of secrecy that consumes her better than the confines of society’s oppressive regime.

Life and Death in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

"In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Did Luke hope?"

This excerpt from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, in which protagonist Offred has been removed from a "normal" life and flung into a dystopia in which she is forced to have sex for the sole purpose of procreation, presents a parallel to the way in which Offred treats, or has been trained to treat, those from her past (her husband Luke, her daughter, and her friend Moira). By suggesting the paradox of a corpse, a lifeless and unmoving body, hoping for something she introduces the idea that Luke may be both dead and alive completely relative to her perspective and her choice. She illuminates the disturbing condition of the ignorance that society has thrust upon her; all she has now is a pervaded and misinformed personal rationality--if a corpse can hope than Luke can hope, but Offred only knows that there is an undefinable and unreachable "if". The reader realizes that Offred invests a concrete comfort in these thoughts and it is both saddening and frightful to know that the only thing that Offred carries from her past life is an abstraction, and metaphor, and conditionals; all she can do is hope.
She alludes to a semblance of camaraderie with Luke, or her abstraction of him; he is both dead and alive and so is she, lost to society's regime and an inability to define herself. And she has an inability define Luke and an inability to define death. Offred remarks earlier in the novel that in her previous life she felt alive and that her feeling of vivacity was worth the risk of death and of death's implications. The analyzed quote makes it seem as if this is why Luke can waver fluidly between those two worlds, or why anyone from her past can make that transition. The Aunts, in training, told Offred that it is easier to imagine these figures as dead, to suppress any hope that they may be alive. But for Offred, such states exist simultaneously; and her hope is the only thing, for her, that strengthens the world in which her lover, her daughter, and her friends reside. Her difficulty is in choosing; which would she rather hope?

Lions and Serpents and Angels and Lambs

So we did this activity in my English class where our teacher set up a co-ordinate system with the intent of identifying our personalities through a type of self- analysis. The horizontal axis took a measure of our violence or our passiveness; how inclined we were to react to a specific situation with physical force. The icon of violence, fittingly, was a lion while that of passiveness was a lamb. The vertical axis took a measure of our honesty or deceptiveness; how inclined we were to lie in situations that maybe demanded virtuosity. The icon of deception was a serpent and that of honesty an angel. And so we had to evaluate which quadrant we belonged to.
            I am a serpent lamb, a venomous lamb. I decided that I’m more inclined to lie. Not necessarily about cheating or anything of considerable importance, but rather I form false alliances and put on an act for people in order to save face. The same person who could trust me and confide in me can meet their secrets spilled out into the ears of others. It’s all just ammunition to me. But there were others in this group, so ironically I was comforted by the comrades who were just as deceptive. I am also a lamb; not that I wouldn’t react with violence if I could, maybe. I’m just too small. I found it easy to admit these things to myself, to accept them, but I can’t help but feel a guilt that accompanies that acceptance because I know that I’m using it as a justification for my personality. I would see the Angelic Lambs and think “How deluded, they can admit nothing to themselves. They don’t know who they are.” Without ever stopping to understand that those people do exist in the world and maybe they know exactly who they are.

            I found it interesting the people who classified themselves just as I would classify them, how an outside observer sees them and some people who perhaps thought better or worse of themselves than they should have. Maybe who you think you are is who you really are, but I would assume that if one thought it hard enough one would also become it.

            I didn’t find it hard to classify myself at all; I knew exactly who I was. I know exactly who I am. I didn’t have to think “Am I more violent than the average person?” No. Am I a bitch? Maybe. Probably. Yes. In the course from the “maybe” to the “yes” I inadvertently considered how others see me, or how I am expected to be. I would like to think that I knew in that moment that I was a Venomous Lamb and I was proud of it. I was proud of my ability to be passive and deceptive, as if I was mistaking cruelty for cunning. I think once that role is made for me, I assume it. I always say “I’m just going to start being a giant ass to people, who cares? Screw ‘em.” But I never am and I never do.