Ms. Mid-Thirties Female Narrator

I come to you live from theatre rehearsal where, having run out of things to put in Virtual Stage Manager and exhausted my capacity for listening to discussion of Iphigenia 2.0 (self-sacrifice! valor! Amanda Bynes' latest celebrity crush!), I have decided to run some characterization exercises*.

The dead eyes and boisterous smile just scream "The secret ingredient is arsenic!"

After intense research, or at least an intense reading of one very interesting article called What Happened to Rosie? that can claim the honor of inspiring this plot, I've boiled down the characteristics of the typical 1950's housewife to these:

• Pressured to be cheerful, helpful, and eternally submissive wives to their more powerful husbands.
• At the same time, must be motherly and caring towards her children, yet matronly in her control of the household; at least until the Ultimate Authority, her husband, comes home.
• Feels isolated in her home and assumes that no other housewives she knows, friend or foe, feel the same way; instead, imagines that she is alone in questioning if there is something more to life than what she has.
• Occasionally is able to convince herself that the most important duty is being a mother and a runner of a household when things are going well, but there is always a pervasive doubt.
• Feels an almost automatic disgust for 'free' women who get to do whatever they want, but this is ingrained by society and strengthened by jealousy; secretly she knows that is something she desires.
• When not working around the house, she immerses herself in TV and radio in order to distract herself from the inane nature of the tasks she is completing.

 The problem, now, is bringing this into a modern context. Luckily for me and the rest of my uterus-possessing and female-identifying cohorts, many of the societal pressures that existed in the 1950's have been phased out or identified as taboo. But in some cases the pressures merely morphed into something else; but I won't get into a feminist rant here. I want to keep at least some readers.

Any readers, really.

So I won't continue my analysis here, at least not yet. I do have to figure out what balance of wittiness and actual studiousness the blogosphere (still a word? am I aging myself? seventeen is the new thirty) will tolerate before a riot. I'm thinking pictures. I should probably add more pictures of crazy-eyed housewives on the brink of creating a live-action reenactment of The Shining.

Eye-catching! 

I'm going to go play League of Legends and contemplate why writing blog posts like this one take precedence over the three essays I should be working on. And I'm going to try not to think about why League of Legends usurps them all.

Nerdily yours,

Abby

*I'm still not sure what type of entries this blog will have in store for you readers. Reader. I think there's about one of you. You can expect excerpts of my writing, anecdotes about my day, and writing mishaps I run into. I think the most fraught month will be November, as I will try, once again, to complete National Novel Writing Month; I will probably use this space as a place to tear apart the art of writing and lament my sanity**.

** I have decided upon asterisks. I like the look. It just screams 'whimsy'.