ahackfromahandwash

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A Proposal

A salad is the most fun Food Thing to make.

I know this might be controversial,

and anyway, it’s actually a sandwich

that is the most Food Thing to make; but for now

let’s assume it’s a salad.  The colors, the crunch.

It takes time, but tbh if you’re making a salad

you probably aren’t that hungry, just bored

or if you don’t use the kitchen now then by the time you are

(hungry, that is)

your roommates will need the kitchen,

and you don’t want to cause any discord, even

(especially)

the minimal discord of a kitchen-need simultaneity.

So sure, you throw everything in a bowl,

maybe you chop some things, and what they don’t tell you

or maybe no one knows

or wants to admit

is that it doesn’t really properly truly matter

what you put in it.  Like sure,

maybe some things go particularly well together,

or other things can be disharmonious,

but really at the end of the day

the distance from poor to great is not so

great.

And the tossing, if you use your hands

or even a nicely sized spoon, surely that

can be such a pleasure

such a pleasure

such a

fucking

pleasure.

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Efficiency, Privilege, and a Weird Bathroom Experience

So I just had a strange and fascinating and disquieting experience.  It took place in a bathroom, and it’s the kind of phenomenon that feels like it occurs entirely within two separate persons’ experiences - a sensation that two people seem to experience silently and in concert with each other.  And for that reason, and because it happened with a near-stranger, I can’t ever confirm it.  I can only express and explain the way I experienced it.

This is going to be a weird thing to post and discuss but I gotta talk about it, you know?

So, it pretty much goes without saying I’m not a super traditional masculine dude.  Accordingly, when I stand at a urinal next to a more outwardly masculine man, I sometimes have a delay initiating . . . urination.  I’m not sure how relatable this phenomenon will be to women - it’s different from when it’s hard to pee for physical reasons (extreme cold, for example) - but this is very much psychological thing, derived from social and power dynamics etc.  It also only happens (to me, at least) at a urinal, with no physical barrier.

(Diagnose me with a psychological thing if you want, and I’m sure you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but based on conversations with friends and conventional wisdom and experience, I’m pretty sure it’s not uncommon.  Maybe not universal, but not uncommon.)

So anyway.  Usually I’m the less masculine person.  So today I walked into the bathroom and another person was just stepping up to one of the two unoccupied urinals.  He unbuttoned and unzipped.  I stepped up and unbuttoned and unzipped.

Now, this is one of the few people I’m ever around, in comparison to whom I’ll pretty much always project as more masculine.  No matter how small or shy or quiet I am, I’ll just pretty much always out-masculine this person.

So we’re standing there next to each other, and I can tell that he’s experiencing that delay.  And the really super troubling (maybe?) thing, to me, is that I am not.  I am A-OK.  Stream is strong and steady.  And I’m not trying to project my masculinity, or accentuate any difference, or anything.  It simply is happening.

And I’ve been thinking since then about what can be done, at an individual level, to counter this totally ridiculous and absurd type of personal dynamic.  In a sense, I guess I’d liken it to the question of what to do about one’s own privilege.  If I’m standing at a stoplight next to a person of color, and I jaywalk (knowing that I won’t get stopped or ticketed or otherwise punished), I’m sort of performing privilege.  And at least to me, it’s more important to negate my privilege by not jaywalking than it is to maximize total utilitarian efficiency by jaywalking by myself.

But: what action can I take, individually, where that choice isn’t necessary?  Is there anything?

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Oh, here’s another thing: having spent appreciable time out of school and working, it is very very very very hard to adjust my self-esteem calculator (which tbh has always been an eensy bit out of whack) to the fact that the vast majority of all my current labor does not produce any real effect in the world.

brief thoughts on law school six months in

(Wait, has it even been six months yet?)

I don’t subscribe to anything like a universal morality, but I do think most decent people have a somewhat similar set of moral aspirations: that is, to help other people; to witness and combat the ongoing effects of colonialism and patriarchy; to recognize but not to over-identify causal relationships; to reduce conflict outright, not to profit from its resolution.  These are things that all, simply, make sense from a human perspective.  Why fight when there is a solution that doesn’t leave either side worse off?  Why hold on to things that aren’t making you happy, except insofar as successfully and antagonistically holding onto them can make you happy?  Isn’t it better when more people feel good and are better off?

So these are ideas that I assumed (not strongly - I’m not naive) most people at school would more or less agree with.  But law school, like any institution, has its own tracks to cover.  It’ll let you countenance subversive ideas, but ultimately it won’t let you follow through on anything that undermines the conditions of its very existence.  The result is a tension along many of the strings of the law school web, a tension perhaps present in most higher educational settings, but which I’d either forgotten about or hadn’t experienced at my undergrad (I do lean towards the latter, since it’s one of the few schools I know with a firm enough financial situation to have encouraged students and graduates to pursue non-remunerative lives).

Keep reading

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brief thoughts on law school six months in

(Wait, has it even been six months yet?)

I don’t subscribe to anything like a universal morality, but I do think most decent people have a somewhat similar set of moral aspirations: that is, to help other people; to witness and combat the ongoing effects of colonialism and patriarchy; to recognize but not to over-identify causal relationships; to reduce conflict outright, not to profit from its resolution.  These are things that all, simply, make sense from a human perspective.  Why fight when there is a solution that doesn’t leave either side worse off?  Why hold on to things that aren’t making you happy, except insofar as successfully and antagonistically holding onto them can make you happy?  Isn’t it better when more people feel good and are better off?

So these are ideas that I assumed (not strongly - I’m not naive) most people at school would more or less agree with.  But law school, like any institution, has its own tracks to cover.  It’ll let you countenance subversive ideas, but ultimately it won’t let you follow through on anything that undermines the conditions of its very existence.  The result is a tension along many of the strings of the law school web, a tension perhaps present in most higher educational settings, but which I’d either forgotten about or hadn’t experienced at my undergrad (I do lean towards the latter, since it’s one of the few schools I know with a firm enough financial situation to have encouraged students and graduates to pursue non-remunerative lives).

The clearest example of this tension, predictably, is in the career services office.  The CSO’s lectures at orientation, back in August, did not prevaricate: “The law is a conservative profession.”  We were told that in order to justify the time and money we were spending on our degrees, we should also prepare ourselves to “fit in” to the professional legal culture, at least for the first 5-10 years after graduating.  It was implied that we should stay away from hardline politics; from pretty much any subculture; from displays of weirdness or accession of controversy.

All of which is, in a way, fine - or, at least, understandable.  And to be fair, the effects of this lecture on my classmates seem limited, as far as I can tell.  But the idea has been burrowing into my skull for six months and has finally reached my core, and I’m all but paralyzed.  Fitting in to a professional culture means acquiring its teleology, because that’s the only way to justify to myself my participation in it (otherwise my professional life would be a sham, and I’d be ruined).  So I’m a wreck.

Another, almost definitely related phenomenon is that I feel that I have run out of things to say.  I’ve experienced this feeling before, but I’ve never before been able to identify a cause.  Here, though, I can say pretty definitely that my recent creative impotence is a direct result of being in a course of study that is as close as 2017 America gets to prescriptivist speech.  In law school, there is a hierarchy of ways to express ideas.

This is an odd complaint, maybe, because I do seem to have a skill for finding the proper legal concept, for expressing it, and for arguing with and around it.  But intensely focusing on the particular relationship of thought and language that legal study demands is absolutely hamstringing my ability and will to express myself in any other way.

Tomorrow, or maybe later: I do have some germs of potential solutions.  Music.  Poetry.  Friendship.  I hope.  We’ll see.

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there has been a wrong

but damages are too small.

they’re always too small.

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i NEED Edith Piaf playing loudly in the background of this class but it’s not going to happen so I am now a dead person reading a novel by a dead Japanese person

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The more psychotherapy an abusive man has participated in, the more impossible I usually find it is to work with him. The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight. Many years ago, a violent abuser in my program shared the following with us: “From working in therapy on my issues about anger toward my mother, I realized that when I punched my wife, it wasn’t really her I was hitting. It was my mother!” He sat back, ready for us to express our approval of his self-awareness. My colleague peered through his glasses at the man, unimpressed by this revelation. “No,” he said, “you were hitting your wife.” I have yet to meet an abuser who has made any meaningful and lasting changes in his behavior toward female partners through therapy, regardless of how much “insight”—most of it false—that he may have gained. The fact is that if an abuser finds a particularly skilled therapist and if the therapy is especially successful, when he is finished he will be a happy, well-adjusted abuser—good news for him, perhaps, but not such good news for his partner. Psychotherapy can be very valuable for the issues it is devised to address, but partner abuse is not one of them; an abusive man needs to be in a specialized program. Therapy focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support, no matter how unreasonable the attitudes that are giving rise to those feelings. An abusive man’s therapist usually will not speak to the abused woman, whereas the counselor of a high-quality abuser program always does. Therapy typically will not address any of the central causes of abusiveness, including entitlement, coercive control, disrespect, superiority, selfishness, or victim blaming. It is also impossible to persuade an abusive man to change by convincing him that  he would benefit from it, because he perceives the benefits of controlling his partner as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many men initially take steps to change their abusive behavior but then return to their old ways. There is another reason why appealing to his self-interest doesn’t work: The abusive man’s belief that his own needs should come ahead of his partner’s is at the core of his problem. Therefore when anyone, including therapists, tells an abusive man that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You can’t simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it. Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal  as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her. I have saved for years a letter that a psychologist wrote about one of my clients, a man who admitted to me that his wife was covered with blood and had broken bones when he was done beating her and that she could have died. The psychologist’s letter ridiculed the system for labeling this man a “batterer,” saying that he was too reasonable and insightful and should not be participating in my abuser program any further. The content of the letter indicated to me that the psychologist had neglected to ever ask the client to describe the brutal beating that he had been convicted of. As a routine part of my assessment of an abusive man, I contacted his private therapist to compare impressions. The therapist turned out to have strong opinions about the case: THERAPIST: I think it’s a big mistake for Martin to be attending your abuser program. He has very low self-esteem; he believes anything bad that anyone says about him. If you tell him he’s abusive, that will just tear him down further. His partner slams him with the word abusive all the time, for reasons of her own.  His wife’s got huge control issues,  and she has obsessive-compulsive disorder.  She needs treatment. I think having Martin in your  program just gets her what she wants.  BANCROFT: So you have been doing couples counseling with them?  THERAPIST: No, I see him individually. BANCROFT: How many times have you met with her? THERAPIST: She hasn’t been in at all. BANCROFT: You must have had quite extensive phone contact with her, then. THERAPIST: No, I haven’t spoken to her. BANCROFT: You haven’t spoken to her? You have assigned his wife a clinical diagnosis based only on Martin’s descriptions of her? THERAPIST: Yes, but you need to understand, we’re talking about an unusually insightful man. Martin has told me many details, and he is perceptive and sensitive. BANCROFT: But he admits to serious psychological buse of his wife, although he doesn’t call it that. n abusive man is not a reliable source of information about his partner. What the abuser was getting from individual therapy, unfortunately, was an official seal of approval for his denial, and for his view that his wife was mentally ill.

“Why does he do that ? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling men”

by Lundy Bancroft

(via ontopofgravity)

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Theories of existential debt always end up justifying—or laying claim to—structures of authority. What we really have in the idea of primordial debt is the ultimate nationalist myth. Once we owed our lives to the gods who created us, paid them interest in the form of animal sacrifice, and, ultimately, paid back the principal with our lives. Now we owe our lives to the nation that formed us, pay interest in the form of taxes, and, when it comes time to defend the nation against its enemies, pay back the principal with our lives. This is a great trap of the twentieth century: On the one side is the logic of the market, which insists that we don’t owe one another anything. On the other is the logic of the state, which insists that we are born with a debt we can never truly pay. In fact, the dichotomy is false. States created markets, markets require states, and neither could continue without the other. The true ethos of our individualistic society may be found in this equation: We all owe an infinite debt to humanity, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else can possibly tell us how to pay it. All systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, the criminal-justice system—are revealed to be fraudulent ways of calculating what cannot be calculated. Freedom, then, is the ability to decide for ourselves how to pay our debts.

David Graeber on debt. (via macwaltonis)

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I’ve always detested the cooption of aesthetic forms for the re-expression of non-artistic work - the judicial opinion written in verse, the science teacher’s “Proton vs. Electron” rap - but yesterday I was listening to The Magnetic Fields and just couldn’t help myself.  Grabbed my pocket piano and recorded this stupid little thing about a fictional character who is in several of our class assignments.

It’s very silly.  Melody’s slick though.

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Retumble

So, I’m going to be moving back to tumblr.  Mostly because it’s free, partly because I have less time for upkeep and stylistic work, and not least because it’s more anonymous than the website.  I’ll be sharing more stuff here - writing, music, random thoughts and jokes - that I can’t really put on Facebook for social/professional reasons, but that doesn’t work on Twitter.

So, hi again, world.  I hope we get along better this time.

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Rugby World Cup 2015

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best part of my day ever

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babies are people

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The best gift from a predecessor. A warning and a solution.

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Wish I could whistle but at least I can sing #coffee #editing

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