Middlesex is such an interesting book--its open line, reminds me of the worderful line that opened Ahab's Wife.
From Middlesex "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkable smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan in August of 1974."

(you could say everything else in the book leads up to understanding that introductory sentence)

I don't know that i agree that language is patriarcial, but i do think it is often inadiquate to describe feeling.

i think there are very few times that you feel true joy, or complete happiness, there are often co-mingling of emotions. and that to the mixture varies to much from human being to human being to ever have enough words to describe specifically one one person is feeling.

the book is filled with wonder words.. (and it fails, too, and talks about long handled wooded spatulas for pushing and retreiving bread from a stone oven, not of peels--but the ommission of the specific word was glaring only because of the detail paid to so many other words!


my other obsession