Fascinating and Annoying

Fascinating: I took a walk on Friday at the Berkeley Marina. It was a lovely day, but a bit windy and the wind always makes my nose run. So about 3/4 mile around the mile walk, my sniffling ceases to be an effective way of keeping the snot safely contained. In that moment, I remembered that I have felt a kleenex in my jeans pocket early. I fish it out, give a good blow, then thank the gods for my good fortune.

Then, my mind thinks back to why I have the kleenex. I have the kleenex because I had been wearing the same jeans the week before at my therapist's office. I had taken the kleenex because I was crying. I was crying because I was talking about the aforementioned drinking and my depression.

I guess we never know what paths will lead us to gratitude.

Annoying: There are two items in this one, but they both came up last night while watching television. First on Cold Case, the old murder they were trying to solve was of a woman who had gotten involved with a con man. The con man targeted women who had signed up for a video dating service and tended to be older, fatter and less conventionally attractive. The woman in this case could have been me at different times in my life. Always reading a romance novel, a little self-conscious, glasses.

There were a couple of things that annoyed me here: 1) the portrayal of single women and of fat women as desperate (the woman who was killed had agreed to stay with the con man and murder his future victims...interestingly, the sidebar is that when she was killed the con man couldn't get over the loss and killed himself...), and 2) the portrayal of women who read romance novels as fat/ugly, single, and deluded.*

The next annoying thing came on Without a Trace. The story was about a social worker who disappears. I didn't watch the whole thing, I admit, mostly because I was tired. But most of the annoyances came at the very beginning anyway. The social worker in the case was, of course, a Child Protective Services worker and the first scene portrayed the removal of a child from the home (in the most dramatic, awful way imaginable). But then, to top it off, the worker is portrayed as a white man. Now this is not to say that there aren't white men working in CPS, but they are among the more rare of the line workers available. As much as I disliked the show Judging Amy and the actess Tyne Daly, at least her characterization of a social worder on the show was a bit more believable than most.

*Just an aside about romance novels: They are, consistently, the most popular genres of on the market. In 2002, romance accounted for 34.6% of all popular fiction sales compared to 24.1% for general fiction and 23.1% for mystery, detective and suspense combined. A lot of women (and some men) are reading this stuff.