Flaming

I flamed someone today.

And I'm not particularly proud of it.

The worse part about it is that I did it on someone else's blog where I shouldn't have. And I'm very sorry about that.

Everyone has people who rub them the wrong way and this woman just seems to do it for me.

(Come to think of it, I have been running into more of them as I get older... I wonder why that is. Is it that I do not suffer fools as easily as I used to or that I'm just becoming more of the misanthrope I was born to be?)
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I will fully admit that my family is basically lower class. My dad was a construction laborer and my mom trained as a beautician but never worked at it after she got married, she was a stay-at-home mom. All four of us kids went to college but neither of them did. My mother's father was a farmer and a machinist and my dad's dad was a tug boat captain, a tattoo artist, a reformed alcoholic and a gambler. Can you say white trash?

We lived in a small town and didn't have a lot of things other kids had because my parents didn't believe in credit cards. We never got an allowance and we started working at things like paper routes and baby sitting as soon as we hit about 11 or 12 for our own money. We got by but always I knew there were others that had it better, had more, and I wanted that too.

I was jealous of my cousins whose dad worked at the college and who got to do things there. My one cousin who was my age got to be in plays there and became a Singing Angel. (Considering I can't carry a tune in a bucket, that shouldn't have made me jealous but it was the opportunity I guess.)

And I knew that there were things I didn't understand because of my disability and still don't understand--like philosophy and some poetry and even some fiction. I could probably read Camus' The Stranger 18 times and still not get it. I just reread a short story by James Joyce posted on a friend's website and didn't get it. Comprehension is still a problem.
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Why did I just go into all that?

Because it all leads into why I flamed this woman.

You see, I knew who she was. I knew that she is a retired Spanish professor and that she comes from a scholarly family and that her husband was a chair at Oberlin and her children went to prestigious schools and that she can be quite arrogant about her background. I believe the word I used when I apologized to my friend whose blog it was is sanctimonious.

Basically, to me it appears as if she has/had all the advantages I never did... or her kids did. And she treated me as though I was as dumb as a box of rocks. I was thrown back into being that poor white trash kid who couldn't read and didn't understand and would spend the rest of her life working retail. (Maybe I collect books to prove to myself I'm not dumb any more.)

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I had written a comment about a short piece by Eliot about a man who was embarrassed by a woman he was with who was laughing too loud. The piece was called Hysteria. My comment which was prompted by the book I had just read that had the lamentable title of Scandalous Lovers but was actually a really excellent historical novel set in 1880's England talked about the lunacy laws at the time where men could put their womenfolk in an asylum for things like hysteria (I was thinking of laughing hysterically in this case) and the women could never get out--end of story.

Now our esteemed Spanish prof (with whom I have had both bad and good experiences while at work at the college) corrected me rather pedantically that hysteria comes from the womb--don't you know hysterectomy? Ah-duh! Yes, I know that. It was given an essentially female name but today the word doesn't apply just to women and disorders of the womb as it didn't back then.

There had earlier been discussions about how people will understand what you write and maybe this was just such a case. But she had gone from being coy in a comment before to being snotty here and I'd had enough. I'd come really close to true flaming before with her but this time I just let it rip.

Maybe I should have overlooked it because I know she is old. We had this discussion about my brother-in-law's mother this past weekend but my brother-in-law's new wife who is a lawyer put it rather succinctly: she's an adult, she should know better.

And so should I.

So Pinky is sorry for that, at least... I admit when I've screwed up...