Pollyanna Rainbow Sunshine Apologizes to the Bard of Stratford-on-Avon

Lyda here. With deep apologies to Shakespeare, and all lovers of “Hamlet” (Act III, scene i). And with the knowledge that Marin at least will be glad I didn’t post this whole thing as a comment on her post today. 

 

To sleep with,

Or not to sleep with,

That is the question.

Whether ’tis nobler to suffer

The slings and arrows of delayed passion,

Or to take to bed against a sea of rising hormones,

And by indulging, calm them? – To sleep with, to yearn

No more; and by sleeping with to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural urges

That flesh is heir to, – ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To do it, to sleep with; –

To sleep with, perchance to destroy the dream: – ay, there’s the rub,

For in that “sex on the first date” what dreams may die,

When hopes for an actual relationship have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the truth

That makes calamity of so long a wait for sex;

For who would bear the yearning and loneliness of sleeping alone,

The phone not ringing, the hormones’ wrath,

The pangs of him not thinking one is interested, the orgasms’ delay,

The insolence of women who are getting some, and the spurns

That saying “no” gets from the unworthy jerks,

When she herself might her pleasure take

With a bare he-man? who would these fardels bear,

To not grunt and sweat under an interesting man,

But that the dread of something after consummation, –

The death of his interest, as from one’s bed

He flies like a bat out of hell, – puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear the waiting for what we want

Than fly to bed with a man we know naught of?

Thus girliness does make cowards of us all;

And thus the healthy desire for sexual satisfaction

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of “being a good girl”;

And encounters of great joy and passion,

With this worry, their potential turns too fraught,

And we lose the fun of action.

 

Here’s some actual “Hamlet”, to get the taste of my silliness out of your brain:

 

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.