C---k L-t

Although I very much want standby bert to be Your Global Happy Place, every now and then I just might have to rant about something and today is that day, so I’ll try to keep it brief. There are two words in the English language I can no longer bear to hear side by side and as god is my witness this will be the last time I will type them on the same page together, much less say them out loud if at all possible, and they are: chick and lit. (“Don’t say ‘nest,’ don’t say ‘egg’…”) I don’t know what to say about it, I’m tired of the debate about it (a google search brings up 276,000 pages!), I don’t care what it means, I don’t care what it is, I don’t care if you like it or if you don’t, I don’t care if you think it’s an insult or a compliment, I don’t care if you think I write it or I don’t. My personal feeling is that it’s a box, plain and simple. I want to go back to a time when sentences on a page were called literature. Where the suckiest sentences ever written are called literature (I’m starting to think even “fiction” and “non-fiction” are almost too specific anymore), where actual readers decide what sucks and what doesn’t suck and whether something fits in a box or it doesn’t. Sigh. I promise your global happy place will be back in regular form next time, but for now, and for the love of god, let’s talk about something else. We do have a war going on. (I’m not saying we have to talk about that either, because there are probably nine million google pages where you might get something more profound than my entire opinion on it, which is: “War: It’s bad and wrong.” All I’m saying is, please, let me just get back to talking about Federline in peace.)