Day 13: 21,694 Words and Stop Trying to Interpellate Me!

Great motivation from the chat this morning. Thanks everyone for supplying the first several hundred words of my writing today. I introduced a character I think you will recognize:

He was quite possibly the douchiest looking man she had ever seen in her life, and that was saying something. His carefully coiffed salt and pepper hair swept back from a face that bore an expression she could only describe as decades old adolescent ennui on steroids. The sheer arrogance of his face made her want to punch it repeatedly. He also had that really annoying facial hair, contrived to look like two days without shaving, but in fact involved daily, if not twice daily interactions with a specific type of clipper. He wore an expensive tailored suit, ill matched with a t-shirt he must have had made himself, because it was so stupid looking. It was black, with a red lobster in the centre, and the word ‘ascend’ lettered onto the lobster.

When she finally did notice him, mostly because he kept asking her in a bored drawl if she wanted to know what his shirt meant, she delivered a stomach curdling glare, and ignored him. She most decidedly did NOT want to know what his t-shirt meant. Unfortunately, the clueless rube to her right politely accepted the offer, much to the dismay of everyone else at the table. The lobster shirt guy launched into an inarticulate diatribe about the evils of feminism and how the deterioration of the world was the direct result of ‘an overdose of femininity’. Annalise was already very familiar with Western gender norms, and most definitely did NOT want a lesson in patriarchal values. When she said as much, lobster shirt guy looked stricken and called her a witch.

“You say, ‘Well, there’s no such thing as witches,’” he said, which made no sense, because she had said no such thing. “But they exist, yeah, they do. They do exist. They just don’t exist the way you think they exist. They certainly exist. You may say well dragons don’t exist. It’s, like, yes they do — the category predator and the category dragon are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists. What exists is not obvious.” A few of the others at her table had the audacity to look interested. He then began to explain the lobster on his shirt and she realized with a sinking feeling that he was one of those asshole clinical psychologists who used evolutionary psychology as a means of justifying the continued reproduction of class, race, and gender privileges. She decided that she, and the other gape-mouthed buffoons at her table, had heard enough.

She launched into her own (very articulate) diatribe about hegemony, and how nothing that he said was interesting, or new, or revolutionary. “No wonder you like predators so much! As a white, middle-aged, heterosexual man, you are at the apex of the food chain, and all of your bullsh*t ideas are just ways of justifying and upholding your own unearned privilege.” At which point, the man accused her of sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. She thought that wasn’t a bad idea, it might guarantee certain death for all of them, but at least he would stop talking.

“Stop trying to interpellate me,” she said calmly, which she knew he would find really annoying, mostly because as a woman, she was supposed to be out of control with emotion, but also because he wasn’t even an Althusserian scholar. He stared at her with abject horror, and she knew she had just had another successful interaction with a man. 

We also finally learn what the title of Gordon's dissertation is.

“I have a doctorate in Medieval Studies,” he said testily. “My dissertation is entitled The Devil Within: Interpellation, the rise of the Ego in Bubonic Plague era Europe, and the unfair demonization of rats who had nothing to do with spreading the disease.” he added, as though this were relevant information. “I have some copies there if you want to read it,” he concluded, pointing to a stack of papers on the floor. She glanced at the title page, and noted the man’s name. Gordon Toodie.

Although Annalise had grave doubts about his medical qualifications, she had to admit that he had a point about the rats.