what i'm searching for / a way in

you paraphrasing me: we need feminists like we need doctors and policemen, or, you paraphrasing me: we need feminists to be doctors and policepeople? because i definitely don't think one has to be feminist to be a doctor or a police.woman. at any rate, what i mean is simply that, like in all other domains, we need some people to be unhappy and to feel repressed and to say very very loudly, this needs to be changed and explain to the rest of us why. because the rest of us are often more or less happy with how life works. sure, we have our complaints and our passing convictions and it's not like we're against progress or anything.... we just have other things on our mind? but we need feminists like we need. well, i was going to say like we needed martin luther king jr., but maybe that's a bit extreme. i'm just saying, we need people to be unhappy with the world but still attached enough to it to want to incite change. i just. don't really want to be one of them. not in such a way that it defines me.

but, okay. what does it mean to believe in humanity jessica? does it simply mean that there's one overarching thing that makes us human, besides the scientific categorization? well, i don't believe that god created us. i believe that we're mostly good, but not necessarily all born good. i guess i'm thinking of things in probability. and things that go beyond that... that we have emotions? --but do animals? that we have an ethical code? --but isn't this just an emergent quality of society life? that we have a unique form of communication? --yeah, maybe. but that's sort of a depressing definition of humanity and probably not at all what you mean. if i were to change it, say, a reaching out for others. maybe that would match better. i don't know. i'll think about this, jess.

what book was this? sigh. i guess we did find the boys we were pining for in high school. though, this is interesting: we were pining for the same boy, weren't we? the same idea of a boy, at least. and we found such different ones, but still right. at the end of last semester i found a newly bought emily dickinson book on will's shelf.

sigh sigh sigh. and my esthetics paper is not going well.

the title is from a margaret atwood poem, but. misquoted i think.