I can’t get a chainsaw started, so I cut wood by hand. It’s more fun.
What women may not have in upper-body strength, we more than make up for in toughness, intelligence and perseverance. Can you see men trying to live with what we put up with every day? Please.
It’s fascinating to see Pfirsich and Cäcilie coming from two different tangents (can you come from a tangent?) and never quite intersecting.
Pfirsich understands so much, but here he just does NOT get it.
and equally, she doesn’t get it either. He is being perfectly proper according to his lights, but she may find it more offensive than the catcalls and hooting that she might’ve heard from the boys, in the last page. She can expect and deal with that (slap down, repeatedly), but politeness? It robs her of retaliation and ammo at the same time.
Just as poisonous, in its way.
Teka Lynn: Not only is he a guy, he’s a guy from another era. My favorite Robert Frost poem is A Missive Missile, especially for its last lines:
Far as we aim our signs to reach,
Far as we often make them reach,
Across the soul-from-soul abyss,
There is an aeon-limit set
Beyond which they are doomed to miss.
They cannot reach as far as this.
hswoolve: It’s a trap, and always has been — “There, there, don’t worry your pretty little head” — but so many men didn’t recognize what it was for, either. No wonder their feelings have so often been hurt: “But I was being so NICE! What does she WANT?”
At a previous job, we had a manager straight out of the 1950′s complete with “dearie” and “honey”.
I’d have to regularly threaten him with calling a lawyer to get him to treat me as an equal, and to back off from the patronizing. In his defense, he didn’t even realize he was doing it, or that someone would be offended. Everyone else just ignored it or treated it with “oh, he’s just that way.”
hswoolve: He wasn’t from the South? Some of those folks call everybody “honey.” Or was he just doing it to the girls?