tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275769198590661189.post5784295290115152948..comments2015-10-27T13:42:12.024-07:00Comments on Sincerely, Makenzie Leigh: Forever Single?Makenzie Leighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15414446779980725686noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275769198590661189.post-51078499675362615302014-09-11T21:48:59.086-07:002014-09-11T21:48:59.086-07:00http://profacero.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/joan-did...http://profacero.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/joan-didion-on-self-respect/<br /><br />"Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.<br /><br />I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand..."freqfwe54fhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00952801968507398361noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275769198590661189.post-42699787212856380602014-09-11T21:40:52.976-07:002014-09-11T21:40:52.976-07:00http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Woman-Caitlin-Moran/d...http://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Woman-Caitlin-Moran/dp/0062124293freqfwe54fhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00952801968507398361noreply@blogger.com