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Why I Couldn’t Blog About Hating Kathleen Parker

Oh my god, people? Can I just complain, for a minute? Because I am exhausted. And that is why I didn’t blog last Wednesday. Because! I took a whirlwind trip to Chicago over the weekend. I had a really, really awesome idea, which is that I was going to fly back from Chicago on Monday morning on a 6 am flight and then go straight to work. That was a really awesome idea, wasn’t it? And since I just started my new job and I didn’t want to be taking a zillion days off three weeks in, that’s what I did. Then we found out that my dude had to go straight to court from the airport, which meant he couldn’t drop me off at work, which meant that I was riding public transit from GODDAMN BALTIMORE at 9 in the morning after getting basically zero sleep. I slept all the way from Greenbelt to L’Enfant Plaza. My dude goes on his way, is so tired that he almost falls asleep at the wheel and dies, and therefore drives home instead of to court so he doesn’t end up dead. THEN. I find out that my friend who is coming into town THE NEXT DAY can no longer stay with the friend she was going to stay with, and needs to stay with me. Which: I love my friend! But! I am WRECKED with exhaustion and also, did I mention? My house looks like it has been ransacked by really, really dirty marauders who are looking for something and also don’t know how to do the dishes. And it is a million degrees and we have no air conditioning. So I think, if I don’t clean my house and buy an air conditioner, my friend is going to never speak to me again. So after work, me and dude head to the home depot to buy an air conditioning unit for our house. Remember, I have still not been home from my 6 am flight to public transit which took me straight to work. After 2 hours’ sleep. And I CRASH big time on the way to the store. So I am like a zombie in the home depot, and me and dude are both REALLY REALLY HOT because it is like 98 degrees outside and 150% humidity, and it’s like, you know when you go to the grocery store and you are hungry so you end up spending a ton of money on food? We were so hot that we bought the biggest air conditioner we could find.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Getting it into the car was fun. We were yelling at each other and I thought I was going to die of exhaustion. He kept giving me instructions that I firmly did not understand because my brain had stopped functioning. And I was dizzy because, hello, dehydration? We are lucky I did not drop the air conditioner on a fundamental body part. But we get it in, and as we’re driving home in the cool of the car’s air-conditioning our senses start to come to us. Is it too big? Is it going to fit? We get home and measure all the damn windows, and OF COURSE it is way too big. Guess what else we did? We threw away the packaging that we had to take it out of in order to get it into the car. Wasn’t that awesome? I am still hoping we can return it.

So we get home and I am like MUST CLEAN. Except then I pass out on the bed for three hours. And then I get up and clean. And stay up too late. The next day I go to work and work a lot. And come home and clean. GUESS WHAT? My friend’s flight gets in at 12:15 am. AT DULLES. Of course, I have to go pick her up, poor thing, because seriously there is NO WAY she can get to my house otherwise that is not taking a cab which will cost a million dollars because DULLES. As you expected, not only is this flight scheduled to be late as balls, it comes in an hour later than scheduled. Great! So now we are finally home, at 2 am, and I am starving, and I shove tortillas in my mouth and go to sleep. But I wake up the next morning feeling great because OH MY GOD MY HOUSE LOOKS AMAZING. I love houseguests for that. Except I am still exhausted, and I still have not gotten more than four or so hours of sleep at a time, and I am a big sleeper, people.

So that is why I couldn’t blog. I wish I could say it had something to do with wedding-ing or lawyer-ing, and sure, those things didn’t help (oh my god the wedding is in three weeks it still has not hit me people), but mostly it was just MY LIFE AND MY HOUSE AND IT BEING REALLY HOT AND STUPID DECISIONS. I am never, ever taking a 6 am flight again. I used to be able to do it. Even catch that early flight and go to work! I am accepting that I am no longer 23. I can not do these things anymore. I have a real job now. I can fly at regular people times.

Speaking of no longer doing things that are stupid, can someone please stop paying Kathleen Parker to write things? Because, look, Kathleen Parker, your MoDo shtick is even worse than when MoDo does it. And that’s saying a lot, because Maureen Dowd writes some of the worst columns ever written. You are not Hunter S. Thompson. Inserting your own weird sexual hang-ups into your columns to explain politics is boring and it makes you look really, really dumb. Because you know who does not care whether Barack Obama is doing things in “feminine” ways? EVERYONE.

Kathleen Parker has learned some big words. But she does not know what they mean. She tells us that “[Obama’s] approach is feminine in a normative sense.” Wait, what? What does that even mean? KATHLEEN PARKER YOUR ARGUMENT SUCKS. Because I think you just admitted that the thing that you are saying Barack Obama is doing is not, in fact, the thing that women do, but the thing that women are supposed to do because that it how women are supposed to act. Which means YOUR ENTIRE ARTICLE IS ABOUT NOTHING. No matter how much you put on your fake “oh but I think women are sooooooo amazing, and hey! Also BETTER than men!” hate, we are never, ever going to believe you that you don’t hate women, because only a woman-hater could write this: “I don’t think that doing things a woman’s way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.”

Can we pause for a second? I hate this. I hate this so much. Dear all women in the world, whether you are Kathleen Parker or not, whether you are fake feminist anti-feminist or whether you are just dumb as rocks, SHUT UP about women being better. One, it is not true. Women are not, in fact, better than men. We are not more enlightened, sweeter, more kind, more compassionate or smarter. We are just, right now, MORE FUCKED, which means we are less likely to do the kind of stupid privileged lacking empathy crap that men do, because we are victims of oppression. That is not a good thing. I will happily give up the shackles of my oppression in exchange for maybe being less of a nice, accommodating, wonderful person. Because oppression sucks. Two, you are NOT HELPING. Every time you open your mouth about how women are sooooooooo awesome and special, you hurt the cause of feminism. Now, if you are Kathleen Parker, maybe this is your intention, assuming you are not merely dumb as rocks. But the rest of you, who do actually care about women and are not trying to screw us all even more so you can get paid more money and be more famous? STOP. (If you need more reading about how women are not more awesome or more special than men, read my manifesto on the subject.)

Here’s what I know about Kathleen Parker. I believe she is an alien. She is an alien experiment sent to earth to carry out a very important task. All the aliens got together and watched conservatives for many, many years. They were baffled by gender inequality. They were like, dude, wtf is this? Why are women treated like crap, regarded as the sex class, don’t serve in government, and generally regarded as human toilets (and toilet-cleaners?) Let us do an experiment! Let us try to see if we can make an anti-feminist in a lab, and see whether humans will be fooled! And then they made Kathleen Parker. Who says this: “While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.”

I can only conclude from that that Kathleen Parker has never, in fact, met any women. Shame on you, Washington Post, for aiding and abetting alien interference with human society.

Although, given the rest of the Post’s contents, there might be more than one experimental alien project being carried out on its pages.

6 Comments

  1. Kathleen wrote:

    good call on KP being an alien; in that same column, she almost outed herself, claiming that she “enjoys the luxury” of seeing the world “without the lens of race”.

    Damn. She’s gonna get called onto the carpet back at Planet Zircon HQ for making such a revelatory only-an-alien-perspective type statement.

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 1:34 pm | Permalink
  2. KMTBerry wrote:

    Wow. My family of origin contained two men, both of them sociopathic. So I have never really questioned the fact that women are better than men-in my life experience from an early age, it was UNQUESTIONABLE.

    But your manifesto has made me question this “fact”, seriously, for the first time! Thanks!

    I think you have changed my underlying assumptions!

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 1:34 pm | Permalink
  3. jaded16 wrote:

    What? Does this mean all aliens aren’t as cute as E.T.? *World Shatters*

    ‘Women are better than men’ is being feminist/pro-woman/remotely tolerable? Where does she learn it? SchoolPalin?

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 4:12 pm | Permalink
  4. Eric Johns wrote:

    Yeah, The Post might actually be entirely run be aliens (with a few humans thrown into the mix to throw off suspicion, of course!) – I wonder when they took over?

    I know it’s a total non-sequitur, but there’s a TB writer in D.C.!? Awesome!

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 5:35 pm | Permalink
  5. Jess wrote:

    Being able to see things without the lens of race doesn’t mean ‘alien’; it means ‘white’. Unless you’re trying to make an argument that white people are aliens, in which case I might be forced to agree with you!

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 5:37 pm | Permalink
  6. Kathleen wrote:

    Jess– my point was that white people are not, of course, able to see things “without the lens of race”: only an alien could pull of this remarkable feat.

    it’s a false claim commonly made by whites of the racist “I’m so not racist!” variety; but if KP *is* an alien, it could be true in her exceptional case 🙂

    Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 5:48 pm | Permalink