[The Pilgrim has come to the profound realization that nothing sold at Wal*Mart was ever designed to flatter the female body.]
The Pilgrim is a friendly and generally cheerful person, accommodating with a streak of conflict avoidance, a woman with a positive father-figure in her childhood and considerable comfort with her own heterosexuality -- someone who likes and values men, frequently preferring their company to women's. The Pilgrim is also a card-carrying feminist who, by virtue of her Ms. subscription frequently receives mail from Gloria Steinem, occasionally quotes Andrea Dworkin and seriously ponders giving money to NOW.
Generally speaking, these aspects of my personality are far from mutually exclusive; at times, I've worried that I've "gone soft" in my feminist principles, especially in light of the first flowering of feminist awareness in some of my friends and colleagues. There are, however, occasional occasions where I'm caught off guard by the force of my own convictions, like the time last summer when I very nearly bit the heads off a team of young presenters whose representation of "Christian feminism" got stuck on the more esoteric aspects of Mary Daly, leaving yet another generation of seminarians with the hazy sense that the two attributes are either irreconcilable or, at best, pretty damn silly. (The presenters, God bless them, took the clenched-teeth points-in-the-guise-of-questions assault -- and the subsequent apology -- with reasonably good humor.)
A more recent encounter occurred this week, amidst a Q&A time following a panel discussion in which matters of sex, faith and gender roles had been discussed with eminently good sense. The commentator, a young-ish gentleman who by virtue of his Ph.D. in psychology speaks on "Sex in Seminary," suggested that the sexual revolution had been entirely detrimental to women, and that Americans would do well to go back to the time of "our grandparents," where "gentlemen" treated women "as they ought to be treated."
Over the course of the roughly 2-minute statement, the Pilgrim went from "twitchy" to "minor conniption." The panel promptly moved on; rightly so, since none of the audience was present to hear either the commentator or an apopleptic Pilgrim. If, however, I had had my wits about me and occasion to speak, this is rather like something I might have said:
"You'll forgive me, sir, if I will take you back to my grandMOTHERS' days -- you see, I never knew my grandfathers, and neither did either my mom or my dad. Let us dwell for a moment on my paternal grandmother -- may she rest in peace: She was born the oldest daughter -- an illegitimate child -- on a small-ish farm. As such, she was put to work, placed in charge of the younger children, and basically treated as a servant. Despite her showing great intellectual promise, her step-father forced her to leave school after the mandatory four years of elementary education. She was a pretty young woman, but no one saw fit to protect her against the sexual harassment she experienced from the older men in the community. When she was 16, she ran away to the big city, where a man more than twice her age with an education and an exciting career took advantage of her. When she found herself pregnant, he shipped her back home to her family -- who, of course, heaped disdain upon her and her bastard, my dad. She never inherited any piece of the farm on which she had spent most of her life working; she died in her 80s, still bitter about the deprivation she had suffered."
"My maternal grandmother had an equally hard, if perhaps less adventurous life: She married a young man on the verge of being shipped off to war. He met his daughter, my mother, a few times before he was killed, leaving his wife without insurance or provision. She instead had to shack up with two of her sisters, an aunt, and a few other female relatives under pathetic circumstances. She had to send her daughter, my mother, to school, but only just long enough until she could earn a living, having completed the mandatory 8 years of schooling."
"You'll forgive me for not being impressed with this vision of how women "ought to be treated." From what I can discern, in those days, women were treated as economic resources, kept on even less education than their male counterparts, exploited sexually without recourse, and left to fend for themselves when they were least prepared to do so. I do not know quite what a "gentleman" -- as opposed to a good man -- is supposed to be, but it appears to me that the "gentlemen" of my grandmothers' generation were no worse and certainly no better than the "boys" of today. There appears to me to be, in fact, no better time to be a woman than today, and it seems to me that we owe this in large part to the good men and women who actively worked as part of the second wave feminist movement."
This, perhaps, is rather like something I might have said to the gentleman in question. But I didn't and the moment passed, and by the time the talk was over, he had disappeared into the night, and here's an unsatisfying ending to an unsatisfying story.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Monday, October 23, 2006
Me talk English some day.
[The Pilgrim is unsure whether being greeted by a faculty member with the words: "You look like a woman!" is a good or a bad thing. The primary question that springs to mind is: "... and at other times?!"]
The Pilgrim received an e-mail this morning, a reply to an inquiry sent to a certain East Coast institution of higher education which shall otherwise remain unnamed. The school in question requires those of its applicants for whom English is not a first language to submit TOEFL -- Test of English as a Foreign Language -- scores. While this requirement is far from unusual, the Pilgrim's polite request to waive the exam on the basis of 10 years of higher education at U.S. institutions and in view of GRE scores that ought to reasonably put her English skills on par with those of native-speaking applicants had generally resulted in prompt notes of assent. Not so in this case.
Stripped of identifying characteristics, the letter read as follows:
"Dear Pilgrim,
I am writing in response to your recent message regarding the TOEFL requirement. Let me outline a number of considerations, so that you may fully understand our position.
First, I must tell you that we cannot waive the TOEFL requirement outright nor does a period of study at a U.S. institution exempt you from having to submit an official TOEFL score. Any request for a waiver can be considered only after we have an otherwise complete application in hand for our review. Remember, though, that all applications are reviewed in competition with one another, and most applicants submit all the required materials. Our faculty reviewers expect to have all the information in hand, and to submit an incomplete application is to place your file at a serious disadvantage. I am sure this is not welcome news, but it is better to be realistic than to have false hopes.
The only circumstances under which we will accept a TOEFL that is not coming directly from ETS is if your undergraduate institution will supply a **certified true copy** of the original, official TOEFL. However, I do not know whether they will agree to do this. Some schools simply do not offer this service. If they will not, then you must retake the TOEFL and have an official score sent to [name deleted]. Our application pool is typically quite strong, and weakness in any area can cause your file to be viewed unfavorably. It may be well worth the effort and cost to retake the TOEFL, even if you can get the certified true copy as outlined above.
Sincerely, [name deleted]"
The cost and effort noted are both considerable. After a few panicked hours of conviction that the next public test wasn't offered until after aforementioned institution's application deadline, I've identified a slot in the early weeks of December whose score-transmission will miss the cut-off by only a couple of weeks -- all for the low price of $150 + gas.
As a recent permanent resident of the U.S. of A, I am at this point reasonably free of governmental hassles: I no longer live in fear of deportation, no longer hold my breath when checking my mail, half hoping, half fearing to receive yet another form letter from the Department of Homeland Security. Yet while much has changed, it's the little things that communicate clearly that I retain my "outsider" status. I speak English well enough that acquaintances can dismiss good GRE results by pointing out that I am, after all, a foreigner, unburdened by poor education systems and the terrible handicap of growing up in an environment where English is actually spoken. At the same time, however, I apparently do not speak the language well enough to have a program take those same GRE scores (and the three degrees from assorted bastions of higher education) as evidence of my base-level proficiency.
"It's not personal," I've been told from a number of well-meaning folks this afternoon. "But there was this one student from that one country who flunked out of a Ph.D. program/ought to have been dropped by a Ph.D. program/caused no end of hassle for a Ph.D. program." I'm sure there were and I'm most certainly aware of the struggles faced by foreign natives in the course of American graduate education: Each quarter, I'm tasked with assisting and assessing the work of a student or five whose English proficiency is, at best, marginal. They do not see me as one of their own; my English is too smooth, my accent too difficult to place. Yet neither can I take my place with the native-speakers: No matter how prolific my writing or how proficient my comprehension, that label will never apply to me.
And so, in the long run, I won't take it personally, jump the hurdles, pay the money, take the test, smile politely, say "please" and "thank you," because those are the things that foreigners and non-natives like myself need to be good at. One of these years, someone will actually believe me when I say that I speak this blasted language. One of these years -- just not yet.
The Pilgrim received an e-mail this morning, a reply to an inquiry sent to a certain East Coast institution of higher education which shall otherwise remain unnamed. The school in question requires those of its applicants for whom English is not a first language to submit TOEFL -- Test of English as a Foreign Language -- scores. While this requirement is far from unusual, the Pilgrim's polite request to waive the exam on the basis of 10 years of higher education at U.S. institutions and in view of GRE scores that ought to reasonably put her English skills on par with those of native-speaking applicants had generally resulted in prompt notes of assent. Not so in this case.
Stripped of identifying characteristics, the letter read as follows:
"Dear Pilgrim,
I am writing in response to your recent message regarding the TOEFL requirement. Let me outline a number of considerations, so that you may fully understand our position.
First, I must tell you that we cannot waive the TOEFL requirement outright nor does a period of study at a U.S. institution exempt you from having to submit an official TOEFL score. Any request for a waiver can be considered only after we have an otherwise complete application in hand for our review. Remember, though, that all applications are reviewed in competition with one another, and most applicants submit all the required materials. Our faculty reviewers expect to have all the information in hand, and to submit an incomplete application is to place your file at a serious disadvantage. I am sure this is not welcome news, but it is better to be realistic than to have false hopes.
The only circumstances under which we will accept a TOEFL that is not coming directly from ETS is if your undergraduate institution will supply a **certified true copy** of the original, official TOEFL. However, I do not know whether they will agree to do this. Some schools simply do not offer this service. If they will not, then you must retake the TOEFL and have an official score sent to [name deleted]. Our application pool is typically quite strong, and weakness in any area can cause your file to be viewed unfavorably. It may be well worth the effort and cost to retake the TOEFL, even if you can get the certified true copy as outlined above.
Sincerely, [name deleted]"
The cost and effort noted are both considerable. After a few panicked hours of conviction that the next public test wasn't offered until after aforementioned institution's application deadline, I've identified a slot in the early weeks of December whose score-transmission will miss the cut-off by only a couple of weeks -- all for the low price of $150 + gas.
As a recent permanent resident of the U.S. of A, I am at this point reasonably free of governmental hassles: I no longer live in fear of deportation, no longer hold my breath when checking my mail, half hoping, half fearing to receive yet another form letter from the Department of Homeland Security. Yet while much has changed, it's the little things that communicate clearly that I retain my "outsider" status. I speak English well enough that acquaintances can dismiss good GRE results by pointing out that I am, after all, a foreigner, unburdened by poor education systems and the terrible handicap of growing up in an environment where English is actually spoken. At the same time, however, I apparently do not speak the language well enough to have a program take those same GRE scores (and the three degrees from assorted bastions of higher education) as evidence of my base-level proficiency.
"It's not personal," I've been told from a number of well-meaning folks this afternoon. "But there was this one student from that one country who flunked out of a Ph.D. program/ought to have been dropped by a Ph.D. program/caused no end of hassle for a Ph.D. program." I'm sure there were and I'm most certainly aware of the struggles faced by foreign natives in the course of American graduate education: Each quarter, I'm tasked with assisting and assessing the work of a student or five whose English proficiency is, at best, marginal. They do not see me as one of their own; my English is too smooth, my accent too difficult to place. Yet neither can I take my place with the native-speakers: No matter how prolific my writing or how proficient my comprehension, that label will never apply to me.
And so, in the long run, I won't take it personally, jump the hurdles, pay the money, take the test, smile politely, say "please" and "thank you," because those are the things that foreigners and non-natives like myself need to be good at. One of these years, someone will actually believe me when I say that I speak this blasted language. One of these years -- just not yet.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Lies.
They all deceive their neighbors,
and no one speaks the truth;
they have taught their tongues to speak lies;
they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent."
- Jeremiah 9:5
When the Pilgrim is too tired to read insightful reflections on Patristics and Political Theology, she tends to pick up shlock sci-fi. When she's too tired for aforementioend shlock, she reads web-comics*. One of the more interesting finds of recent months is Templar, Arizona. Not only is it beautifully drawn and delightfully written, it's a wonderfully subtle alternate-universe setting -- a realization that a certain Pilgrim managed to go without for a handy chunk of 20-30 strips, because, you know, she's a foreigner and there's plenty of weird things around here of which she's perfectly ignorant.
While the strip -- serialized graphic novel is perhaps the more appropriate term -- is worth a link in its own right, the portion that caught my attention is a recent batch of "intermission strips." The Sincerists, the strips' focus, are a loosely affiliated group of people who are, ahem, very sincere, particularly when it comes to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. See for yourself how well they fare**.
The question of the extent to which untempered truth is a desirable characteristic of any social group is one that's picked up by James Morrow in City of Truth. Morrow is, of course, one of the better-known satirists of social mores, theism and a-theism; Towing Jehovah is something of a classic, albeit one on which I've only recently laid hands. His deadpan streak -- envision, if you will, transcripted conversations between only moderately unhappy spouses, stripped of the dubious grace of little white lies -- notwithstanding, the novella's a tear-jerker: In Veritas, the city of truth, a place where children on the verge of reaching the age of accountability are conditioned to an inability to prevaricate, obfuscate, hedge and, in short, lie, the protagonist feels that his only hope of having his son recover from an otherwise fatal illness is to get him to believe that he is, in fact, on the road to recovery.
The trouble is, of course, that this power of positive thinking would amount to nothing short of deception -- deception of self and deception of others, in the interest of keeping hope (and thus a chance of survival) alive in the boy's mind. In the process, father and child travel to Satirev, Veritas' underground twin: A place where people have re-trained themselves to lie. Without "giving away" the ending, it's safe to say that Morrow isn't a romantic, nor one given to undue faith in the human race: Qoheleth would have applauded his acerbic sense of limits of the humanly possible.
Because all roads eventually lead to the 4th century, no comment on lies and the lying liars who tell them would be complete without reference to St. Augustine: He, of course, had much to say on lying -- little of it good. Yet while the bishop of Hippo might have made a triumphant Sincerist and a model citizen of Veritas, one wonders whether Augustine would have not had the wisdom to avoid building a City of Truth outside the City of God. Just in case you're eager to resolve in your own mind whether a little white lie might be justified in the interest of saving the life or your ailing neighbor, wonder no longer:
"But for that we are men and among men do live, and I confess that I am not yet in the number of them whom compensative sins embarrass not, it oft befalleth me in human affairs to be overcome by human feeling, nor am I able to resist when it is said to me, "Lo, here is a sick man in peril of his life with a grievous disease, whose strength will no more be able to bear it, if the death of his only and most dear son be announced to him; he asks of thee whether his son liveth, and thou knowest that be is departed this life; what wilt thou reply, when, whatever thou shall say beside one of these three; either, He is dead; or, He liveth; or, I know not; he believes no other than that he is dead; which thing he perceives thee to be afraid to tell, and unwilling to tell a lie?" It comes to the same thing, if thou altogether hold thy peace. But of those three, two are false, He liveth, and, I know not; and they cannot be said by thee but by telling a lie. Whereas if thou shall say that one thing which is true, that is, that he is dead, and the man be so perturbed that death follow, people will cry out that thou hast killed him And who can bear men casting up to him what, a mischief it is to shun a lie that might save life, and to choose truth which murders a man?"
"I am moved by these objections exceedingly, but it were marvelous whether also wisely. For, when I shall set before the eyes of my heart (such as they be) the intellectual beauty of Him out of Whose mouth nothing false proceedeth, albeit where truth in her radiance doth more and more brighten upon me, there my weak and throbbing sense is beaten back: yet I am with love of that surpassing comeliness so set on fire, that I despise all human regards which would thence recall me. . . .Add to this, (and here is cause to cry out more piteously,) that, if once we grant it to have been tight for the saving of that sick man's life to tell him the lie, that his son was alive, then, by little and little and by minute degrees, the evil so grows upon us, and by slight accesses to such a heap of wicked lies does it, in its almost imperceptible encroachments, at last come, that no place can ever be any where found on which this huge mischief, by smallest additions rising into boundless strength, might be resisted. Wherefore, most providently is it written, "He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little."
"Nay more: for these persons who are so enamored of this life, that they hesitate not to prefer it to truth, that a man may not die, say rather, that a man who must some time die may die somewhat later, would have us not only to lie, but even to swear fasely; to wit, that, test the vain health of man should somewhat more quickly pass away, we should take the name of the Lord our God in vain! And there are among them learned men who even fix rules, and set bounds when it is a duty, when not a duty, to commit perjury! O, where are ye, fountains of tears? And what shall we do? whither go? where hide us from the ire of truth, if we not only neglect to shun lies, but dare moreover to teach perjuries? For look they well to it, who uphold and defend lying, what kind, or what kinds, of lying they shall delight to justify: at least in the worship of God let them grant that there must be no lying; at least let them keep themselves from perjuries and blasphemies; at least there, where God's name, where God as witness, where God's oath is interposed, where God's religion is the matter of discourse or colloquy, let none lie, none praise, none teach and enjoin, none justify a lie: of the other kinds of lies let him choose him out that which he accounteth to be the mildest and most innocent kind of lying, he who will have it to be right to lie."
* When she's too tired for web-comics, she re-reads Dilbert collections, a truth too horrible to contemplate in these pages.
** A word of caution: The language in these pages? Not so clean.
and no one speaks the truth;
they have taught their tongues to speak lies;
they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent."
- Jeremiah 9:5
When the Pilgrim is too tired to read insightful reflections on Patristics and Political Theology, she tends to pick up shlock sci-fi. When she's too tired for aforementioend shlock, she reads web-comics*. One of the more interesting finds of recent months is Templar, Arizona. Not only is it beautifully drawn and delightfully written, it's a wonderfully subtle alternate-universe setting -- a realization that a certain Pilgrim managed to go without for a handy chunk of 20-30 strips, because, you know, she's a foreigner and there's plenty of weird things around here of which she's perfectly ignorant.
While the strip -- serialized graphic novel is perhaps the more appropriate term -- is worth a link in its own right, the portion that caught my attention is a recent batch of "intermission strips." The Sincerists, the strips' focus, are a loosely affiliated group of people who are, ahem, very sincere, particularly when it comes to telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. See for yourself how well they fare**.
The question of the extent to which untempered truth is a desirable characteristic of any social group is one that's picked up by James Morrow in City of Truth. Morrow is, of course, one of the better-known satirists of social mores, theism and a-theism; Towing Jehovah is something of a classic, albeit one on which I've only recently laid hands. His deadpan streak -- envision, if you will, transcripted conversations between only moderately unhappy spouses, stripped of the dubious grace of little white lies -- notwithstanding, the novella's a tear-jerker: In Veritas, the city of truth, a place where children on the verge of reaching the age of accountability are conditioned to an inability to prevaricate, obfuscate, hedge and, in short, lie, the protagonist feels that his only hope of having his son recover from an otherwise fatal illness is to get him to believe that he is, in fact, on the road to recovery.
The trouble is, of course, that this power of positive thinking would amount to nothing short of deception -- deception of self and deception of others, in the interest of keeping hope (and thus a chance of survival) alive in the boy's mind. In the process, father and child travel to Satirev, Veritas' underground twin: A place where people have re-trained themselves to lie. Without "giving away" the ending, it's safe to say that Morrow isn't a romantic, nor one given to undue faith in the human race: Qoheleth would have applauded his acerbic sense of limits of the humanly possible.
Because all roads eventually lead to the 4th century, no comment on lies and the lying liars who tell them would be complete without reference to St. Augustine: He, of course, had much to say on lying -- little of it good. Yet while the bishop of Hippo might have made a triumphant Sincerist and a model citizen of Veritas, one wonders whether Augustine would have not had the wisdom to avoid building a City of Truth outside the City of God. Just in case you're eager to resolve in your own mind whether a little white lie might be justified in the interest of saving the life or your ailing neighbor, wonder no longer:
"But for that we are men and among men do live, and I confess that I am not yet in the number of them whom compensative sins embarrass not, it oft befalleth me in human affairs to be overcome by human feeling, nor am I able to resist when it is said to me, "Lo, here is a sick man in peril of his life with a grievous disease, whose strength will no more be able to bear it, if the death of his only and most dear son be announced to him; he asks of thee whether his son liveth, and thou knowest that be is departed this life; what wilt thou reply, when, whatever thou shall say beside one of these three; either, He is dead; or, He liveth; or, I know not; he believes no other than that he is dead; which thing he perceives thee to be afraid to tell, and unwilling to tell a lie?" It comes to the same thing, if thou altogether hold thy peace. But of those three, two are false, He liveth, and, I know not; and they cannot be said by thee but by telling a lie. Whereas if thou shall say that one thing which is true, that is, that he is dead, and the man be so perturbed that death follow, people will cry out that thou hast killed him And who can bear men casting up to him what, a mischief it is to shun a lie that might save life, and to choose truth which murders a man?"
"I am moved by these objections exceedingly, but it were marvelous whether also wisely. For, when I shall set before the eyes of my heart (such as they be) the intellectual beauty of Him out of Whose mouth nothing false proceedeth, albeit where truth in her radiance doth more and more brighten upon me, there my weak and throbbing sense is beaten back: yet I am with love of that surpassing comeliness so set on fire, that I despise all human regards which would thence recall me. . . .Add to this, (and here is cause to cry out more piteously,) that, if once we grant it to have been tight for the saving of that sick man's life to tell him the lie, that his son was alive, then, by little and little and by minute degrees, the evil so grows upon us, and by slight accesses to such a heap of wicked lies does it, in its almost imperceptible encroachments, at last come, that no place can ever be any where found on which this huge mischief, by smallest additions rising into boundless strength, might be resisted. Wherefore, most providently is it written, "He that despiseth small things shall fall by little and little."
"Nay more: for these persons who are so enamored of this life, that they hesitate not to prefer it to truth, that a man may not die, say rather, that a man who must some time die may die somewhat later, would have us not only to lie, but even to swear fasely; to wit, that, test the vain health of man should somewhat more quickly pass away, we should take the name of the Lord our God in vain! And there are among them learned men who even fix rules, and set bounds when it is a duty, when not a duty, to commit perjury! O, where are ye, fountains of tears? And what shall we do? whither go? where hide us from the ire of truth, if we not only neglect to shun lies, but dare moreover to teach perjuries? For look they well to it, who uphold and defend lying, what kind, or what kinds, of lying they shall delight to justify: at least in the worship of God let them grant that there must be no lying; at least let them keep themselves from perjuries and blasphemies; at least there, where God's name, where God as witness, where God's oath is interposed, where God's religion is the matter of discourse or colloquy, let none lie, none praise, none teach and enjoin, none justify a lie: of the other kinds of lies let him choose him out that which he accounteth to be the mildest and most innocent kind of lying, he who will have it to be right to lie."
* When she's too tired for web-comics, she re-reads Dilbert collections, a truth too horrible to contemplate in these pages.
** A word of caution: The language in these pages? Not so clean.
Look Ma, no blog!
[The Pilgrim is beta-testing Scrybe and suggests you might want to give it a shot as well.]
But seriously, folks: This has been a long hiatus. Identifying the culprit isn't easy either, although the manic cockatiel nipping at my toes -- one of his odder fixations -- seems like a likely candidate. The truth of the matter is simply -- complex-ly -- that I've been short on time, or perhaps: short on time not filled with tasks, projects, endeavors. The lack of time has lead to a concomitant lack of reflection: When you've spent your Saturday evening arm-deep in dishwashing suds and your Sunday knee-deep in students' reflections on Psalms 89, the brain -- or at least its insightful portions -- go to pot. Add to that the stubborn desire to return to blogging with a well-formulated plan for at least bi- to tri-weekly updates, and the potted mind becomes as fertile as an unwatered Chia-pet, ca. 1987.
So -- I ain't promising much. I've got a couple of rather-important sets of paper to hand over to the powers that be in another 5 weeks and a few more with which to do the same in the weeks thereafter. I'm reasonably committed to a little hobby I like to call "sleep," and I can't recall the last time I wrote something profound. But -- here goes. Because the only thing more postmodern than imperfection is imperfection self-consciously displayed for public consumption.
[Oh yeah: I've missed you, too.]
But seriously, folks: This has been a long hiatus. Identifying the culprit isn't easy either, although the manic cockatiel nipping at my toes -- one of his odder fixations -- seems like a likely candidate. The truth of the matter is simply -- complex-ly -- that I've been short on time, or perhaps: short on time not filled with tasks, projects, endeavors. The lack of time has lead to a concomitant lack of reflection: When you've spent your Saturday evening arm-deep in dishwashing suds and your Sunday knee-deep in students' reflections on Psalms 89, the brain -- or at least its insightful portions -- go to pot. Add to that the stubborn desire to return to blogging with a well-formulated plan for at least bi- to tri-weekly updates, and the potted mind becomes as fertile as an unwatered Chia-pet, ca. 1987.
So -- I ain't promising much. I've got a couple of rather-important sets of paper to hand over to the powers that be in another 5 weeks and a few more with which to do the same in the weeks thereafter. I'm reasonably committed to a little hobby I like to call "sleep," and I can't recall the last time I wrote something profound. But -- here goes. Because the only thing more postmodern than imperfection is imperfection self-consciously displayed for public consumption.
[Oh yeah: I've missed you, too.]
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