team lydia, what

I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time ever this week. My first Jane Austen book, actually. I'm not sure if that's surprising, but I feel like it might be considering how people wax poetic about her books. Or maybe that was a 90s thing? I'm what marketers (I know this because, for lack of direction, I majored in marketing) would refer to as a laggard, a loser who misses the boat most the time. I mean, I just joined twitter and all I want for Christmas is a web cam.

Back to the point. I read Pride and Prejudice and I liked it in the way that I like anything old timey with horses and carriages, but I had trouble following the story line with my post 19th amendment frame of mind. When the whole family was fretting over the whore of a sister Lydia for disgracing them by going off with that opportunistic asshole Wickham, whom they all hate, I thought her father and uncle were going after her to save her from marrying him. Like, I thought they loved her so much that, even though she's a twit, they wouldn't want her to marry that prick. When I realized they were running around the country to force him to marry her, I was like huh? Say what? I then turned to Spark Notes to remind me that back in the day it was unwholesome to hit it and quit it. Actually, it was unwholesome to just hit it period. So, the stupid whore Lydia was shaming the whole family by going off to elope, i.e. shacking up in hotel rooms along the way, with this dude that had no intention of marrying her anyway. He knew how to spot 'em. This character Wickham has stood the test of time. Lydia was stupid for thinking this guy really loved her, so I'll give Jane Austen that. But people fall in love super quick in this book/era anyway, so it's hard to blame Lydia for being so blind. Two people would be sitting in the parlor together barely making eye contact and the next day BAM! Engaged. As planned by the author, I didn't care for Lydia much at any rate because she was inane, but I didn't take kindly to everyone getting their knickers in a bunch over her harmless flirtation. Alas, Lydia was born in the wrong era. She would be living it up here and now. Her facebook page would display countless pictures of her all up in the club, flaunting bleached hair with boys pressed to her cheek, alcohol glasses in the air, in all her sorority face glory. Get it girl. Hopefully at one point she'd grow up and not be so vacuous.

Anyhoo. This isn't really a book review (clearly), and it wasn't supposed to be an in defense of Lydia post, though I'll go on record to say that I liked Pride and Prejudice despite the understandable, sign of the times, bourgeois morality. It was all early nineteenth century charming with dialogue and vocabulary that sent me googling, and with overriding themes that I could get behind. Speaking of morality, dialogue, and themes, it sure beats the hell out of that Twilight shit. (I probably just offended some people with that statement and I'm sorry. I'm sorry you have such bad taste.) What I'd like to point out though, which took me this many sentences to get to, is that I concurrently read Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life, in which she hilariously details her one night stands. So, class -- I dunno, I just got a vision of me reading this in front of a classroom -- what I'd like to say is this: the shameful whore of yesteryear can be today's smart and funny profiting heroine if she plays her cards right. Team Lydia represent.