selfishly (wonderfully)

I've lost my mind, so I think I am going to rewatch The X Files as god intended, e.g. in two episode bites as originally released in the summer of 1996 on VHS in eight waves and available for rental at your corner video store a short hot walk from home with your visiting cousins in tow, if your parents let you sign out on their account.

I remember in college encountering Milton’s Eve, with her hair that waved “as the Vine curls her tendrils, which impli’d / Subjection,” and Duessa from The Faerie Queene, with “her neather partes misshapen, monstruous.” At eighteen, I didn’t read with cool intellectual distance. I read like I ate—for joy, for sustenance, for fuel to make me into the person I wanted to be. The women in those pages were not recognizably human, just forces to be diminished so they could be controlled. My friends and I did endless feminist analyses, but it didn’t help with the sick feeling. The stories were not for me, and that realization was its own very dismaying, very female coming-of-age. The sense of betrayal, of being thrown out of the text, like being tossed from a boat, was acute. The shock of icy water made it hard to catch my breath.