When I planned my blog for this week I had no idea that we were approaching the 200th anniversary of Pride & Prejudice (bad me) so plans changed today when I was enlightened about the fact that my favorite book/movie/YouTube series is 200 years old (of course the movies and YouTube series aren't turning 200 but the book that made it all happen is). Like millions of females around the world, Pride and Prejudice's story line sucked me in. I mean, who wouldn't want some ubber rich man with a house like Pemberley to fall in love with them? And here is where my blog turns into a thought provoking, yet probably rage inducing one sided discussion.
Jane Austen is one of my favorite authors and I have all of her books, both on my Nook and in paperback. But something that took me a long time to discover (I can be a slow learner when I don't want to see something) was that Jane Austen has screwed both men and women over. Women are waiting for Mr. Darcy to come into their lives while men are trying to overcome the battle with Mr. Darcy's image for the attention of women. As a woman, I won't lie, I have a romantic vision in my head of what my perfect husband should be and a lot of those characteristics include things that relate to Darcy (I personally prefer Matthew Macfadyen to Colin Firth but that's neither here nor there). Granted, I (nor any other woman, I would presume) don't want a man to tell me that he fell in love with me in spite of my family's fortunes but other than his snootiness, Mr. Darcy is kind of the perfect man. He falls in love with Lizzie despite all his insecurities about her and literally saves her family from that century's doom by paying for her sister's wedding to his arch nemesis.
That's definitely perfect man material... it also gives false hope to all women that every man they find will be just like the fictional character. So thank you Ms. Austen for giving modern writers the idea of creating unattainable men with Darcy and your other male leads... and thank you for giving us men like Wickham so we know who to avoid. Now if only we could figure out how to create our own Darcys in our own real life stories. And for those that are looking for a modern adaption of Pride & Prejudice that stays new and fresh... I present the Lizzy Bennet Diaries:
Hey everyone, I think it's safe to say that I had a blogging fail this month without even realizing it, as I just saw that I haven't posted on here since Jan. 1. For those that follow the blog for updates on me, sorry about that. Like usual, life has been extremely busy but there's not much to write home about as we're just gearing up for Triple Crown season at work and I've also been doing my communication internship at Three Chimneys. The internship involves a lot of press releases and research but I'm loving it. I'm currently only working one day a week there but if it gets especially busy, I may go to two days a week later in the season. I also signed up for a 5k a few weeks ago but have run into a problem in my training. I thought that I'd be fine with 7 weeks left since I haven't gone the ~3 miles yet in training but now we're down to 5 weeks with the same problem. So I'm beefing up my workout playlist tonight and booking it around the track (or on the treadmill in my case right now) in the coming weeks with a no holds barred approach. I'm blaming most of my problem on a mental block so my goal is to get over that, which isn't as simple as it sounds. And for my last bit of info... I have officially joined the cat lady club (I can hear my friends laughing now). In a move that I had been thinking of for a few weeks, I went to the shelter on Friday (with a friend that didn't plan on getting a cat when we went there but did) and brought home a 3yo female that looks a lot like my dad's cat. She's quite a bit nicer than my dad's cat (my mom will be glad to hear that) and is almost dog like and overall is pretty cool. And from all the comments I got about her from other racing people, it sounds like I'm not the only one in this club. So without farther ado, here's Bella (although, she usually does not have that expression, haha).
