Sleep Aid

I didn’t participate in Namoblopomo or whatever it’s called because I knew I would be “out of the office” for several days while my parents were visiting and also because I DO NOT FOLLOW! I AM NOT A JOINER! Heh, strong words that actually mean, I AM LAZY. But this prize for participation made me sorry that I didn’t join in (scroll down to the second image…I like the first one too!). But all this just reminded me of something a person I did not like wrote in my best friend’s high school yearbook (did you follow that? there was a person who I didn’t like who wrote in another…never mind). She wrote, “be a leader, not a follower.” Astute. And a phrase that my BFF and I toss around to annoy one another. Can you imagine a crappier thing to write in someone’s yearbook? She totally sucked. But the point here is actually, I would have liked to participate, if only for the love of that painting. But I didn’t. So there.

So anyway, I was talking to a friend about, of all things, Shakespeare the other day. I’m a big fan. So much so, that I had actually intended to go to graduate school to study him, because what’s more original than that? But alas, time and money were against me and although I was accepted into the ranks of even higher learning, I did not go. But now, when I cannot sleep, which is often, I work on my dissertation in my head. I have two, one for Chaucer, had I studied medieval literature, and one for Shakespeare. The Chaucer was to be titled “Chaucer the Feminist” and the Shakespeare one was something like “Shakespeare hates the Drama Queens.” Chaucer is, despite what we know about the general treatment of women in his time, pretty darn good in writing strong, smart female characters while Shakespeare, who also was more likely than not, feministically challenged, wrote strong, smart, comedic female characters, but the women in his dramas all pretty much…well…a lot of them just die. For really crappy reasons. Seriously, who the heck dies for love? Sure we all SAY we would, but really? Nah. And my very favorite example of the crappy Shakespearian death scene for a woman goes to Desdemona, not only is she killed by Othello in a jealous rage, she comes back from the brink of “not quite dead yet” to say “Oh hey, no, he didn’t do this to me. It was all my fault.” And yet the same writer created the sharp and clever Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing and the fiery Katherina of The Taming of the Shrew. What the heck was going on there?

Anyway, that’s how I fall asleep. Now it’s probably how you fall asleep too, thinking about Shakespeare and Chaucer.