#because they feel disconnected from the solidarity that comes with growing up around people like you

[soupydoobydoo]

i love watching movies about queer taiwanese people i love you my family

[libraryben]

When their jobs were threatened in a new and acute way in the first few months of the pandemic, many tenured and tenure-track historians were able to recognize themselves as workers, sometimes for the first time. The specter of higher ed’s imminent collapse prompted many of them to ask for solidarity and support from the colleagues they have long refused to fully acknowledge as colleagues. Even as they saw themselves as exploited laborers, few were able to acknowledge—or even seemed aware—that these conditions predated the pandemic for adjuncts. Fewer still were ready to reckon with the ways that their employment was dependent on the continuation of those conditions. The lack of solidarity with striking adjuncts and grad students during this year of labor action confirms this disconnect, and it should not be surprising—the interests of these groups of employees are not the same, and are often directly opposed. The quick collapse of higher education may not have come to pass, but the hollowing-out has accelerated, especially for history, assisted by sustained political efforts from without and within. Anyone who thinks they made it through, that they’re safe, is laboring under a delusion, and reality is swiftly catching up with them. Like all hierarchical systems, adjunctification has always harmed the people in the middle of the hierarchy as well—because, of course, tenured and tenure-track faculty are not the top of this hierarchy. “Burnout” is a serious and growing problem, especially for scholars of marginalized groups; it’s making you all miserable, and leading some to leave the profession altogether. But let’s be clear: this “burnout” that secure scholars are feeling is phantom pain where their colleagues should be. Or, to use a term that every other normal worker in the US uses to describe their workplace under these conditions: you are suffering from the effects of intentional systemic understaffing. Jobs numbers in the field always cause a yearly freakout, but this fall the panic hit a new level. Out of 1799 historians who received a PhD in the US between 2019 and 2020, 175 have full-time faculty positions. 1 To be quite honest, a large part of that was because the numbers were so stark that even graduate students at elite programs couldn’t ignore the fact that they were in trouble—you always were, your department just worked to hide that fact from you.

But it’s not just about incoming faculty. It’s about lost lines, the erosion of departments, the disappearance of majors. And it’s deeply connected to the broader problems facing history as a field of study in K-16 education—the perpetual concern over what majors get jobs, of course, but also the concerted political attacks on the field and its practitioners, most of whom teach without whatever protections academic freedom theoretically provides. And it’s about teaching, which is what every normal person in the world thinks is our main job, and which the field as a whole does not prioritize, train for, reward, or even really understand. The other problem, unfortunately, is that nothing can really change working field by field or campus by campus, and the main professional organization for our field—reflecting the views of the majority of its members, and certainly the privilege of its elected leaders—has chosen to sit this one out. At the most, the AHA does “advocacy”—that is not the same as building power and exercising it, and as a result, it is not often effective. We see this on the individual and departmental level as well, even from self-styled radical activist professors who end up being too scared to do anything more than sign a petition. Maybe the provost who came out of electrical engineering doesn’t respect what historians do, not just because he’s in STEM, but because every cultural signal around him in this country tells him historians are to be used, even humored, but not respected—and certainly not feared. And everything we have done as a field seems to confirm that belief. And now things are very bad, and it’s time to accept that we cannot advocate and petition our way out of this position. Just as efforts on individual campuses and in individual fields can only go so far, piecemeal solutions to prop up various aspects of the profession or compensate for their failures—including all of the things the people up here, including myself, are engaging in—these things will not save the profession.

[penzyroamin]

Food and sharing food continues to be a recurring motif in “tied together”. What was your thought process around that? How do you see that connecting to some of the central themes and concepts in the story as a whole? (And, if you would like to go into this, how do you see food and sharing food playing out in the messy au where David will also be cooking but in a completely different context/power dynamic?)

HAHAHAHA! I CAN FINALLY TALK ABT THIS WITHOUT SEEMING LIKE F SCOTT FITZGERALD BEGGING PEOPLE TO KNOW WHAT THE GREAT GATSBY WAS!!!!!

okay. im calm now.

so for a couple years now i have deeply and secretly loved the concept of food as a symbol for community. i didnt use it in fic for a long time for a variety of reasons. one, it just never really felt right. two, my love of this symbol is very much connected to my southern-ness, and while im sure many people have just as strong, if not stronger connections between food and community, i didnt really know if people reading my stuff would Get It or connect w it.

i finally decided to use it for tied together for two reasons. first, this is my most definitively southern fic. ive written other fics with Humid Small Town Energy but this is my first that i really let myself go “fuck it. crawfish boils. hurricanes. middle aged women with crushes on jim cantore.” as such, it felt like if i was going to go for this symbol at any point, it needed to be with this fic. the second is that due to Pandemic and also living across the country from the majority of the family i grew up with, i have been kind of starved of community experiences as of late. i wrote tied together entirely during a period when i havent spent time with anyone besides my immediate family, so i was really thinking about community and the nature of it and how fucking badly i wanna have a massive meal with people and hence... this symbol

with the background of my decision to include it covered, let’s get into how it appears in tied together!!

in chapter one, the majority of food’s appearances are... impersonal, if that makes sense? its all premade, whether its drive-through stuff, tv dinners, etc etc, and he doesnt know the person who made it. its also worth pointing out that around the time jack and his mom stop sharing meals is the point they become disconnected from each other. essentially, that’s the disconnect from community throughout jack’s early life

davey comes around and it. is pretty obvious from the start that, through this symbol, he is the Literal Embodiment Of Connection To The People Around Him. food was a really key way for me to show just how connected he is to his community-- he’s constantly cooking for other people, working for battalion, helping people get good food, contributing recipes to little cookbooks. the end chapter also nods to this in the scene w his family where esther mentions he made her teach him to cook for a group, and the conversation afterwards where he mentions that he wouldn’t be comfortable with people paying him to make them food or making food for strangers. cooking for other people is essentially davey’s way of nurturing the community around him and becoming closer with people, so to make food in an impersonal way goes against everything he knows about food and sharing it. the interactions he has through food represent the larger relationships and interactions he has within his community. juxtaposed to jack, he’s built this little world around him filled with people that he loves and cares for, even if that does lay a heavy burden on him at points. if i ever write something delving deeper into davey in this au, i’ll elaborate further-- but, essentially, davey’s role as The Provider of food for the people around him was a real stand-in for the way that he feels both within his family and his larger community.

think of it this way-- in all the scenes we see with davey cooking at a large event-- i.e., the crawfish boil-- he’s always pushed off to the side by that. there’s usually someone talking to him or checking in on the food, but he’s not able to be engaged in the larger hubbub and discussion of the party because he’s busy. it’s in providing food for people and sharing that with him that he gets fulfillment out of the experience. in his family, we see that davey is a little bit isolated. he was growing up at the exact time when mayer’s alcoholism was getting worse and hitting its peak, and he left before mayer ever really managed to get very far into recovery. his time in their house, essentially, was a lot of heavy lifting and few moments of solidarity and joy. he loves his family, of course, it’s just a very labor-intensive process. and then, of course, he has a similar experience to what a lot of southern marginalized people feel-- this intense need to care for and better your community when your community very frequently doesn’t care for you. davey has absolutely zero capacity for apathy in this au, and it definitely shines through with this whole dynamic. he works SO HARD to care for people, even if he isnt always able to fully enjoy being around them and being loved by them

and then, of course, you have the way davey and jack interact through this motif-- davey teaches jack how to cook, gives him a cookbook, invites him over for meals, etc etc. sharing that with him essentially represents welcoming jack into his community as a whole, and giving him a place there. jack mentions davey “clearing a spot at the table” for him, and that’s both literal and figurative.

additionally, while davey uses food as a way to bring jack into his community, jack also makes davey a little less isolated. in a lot of the scenes in chapter 5, theyre cooking together, in a very domestic, symbiotic sort of way. i wanted this to demonstrate how jack relieves some of the burden davey puts on himself and exists sort of Within davey’s bubble rather than just reaping the benefits

i also wanted to illustrate with this how jack repairing his relationship w food keys into this. obviously we have the disconnect that he has early on where his unfamiliarity w what he eats and who makes it represents a larger disconnect between him and the people around him, but jack does also absolutely use food as a coping mechanism and a crutch. not to get, again, TOTALLY gatsby here, but he’s chasing that sense of community and belonging and understanding in the wrong places. it’s once he begins to actually make food for himself and understand the process of it and be able to carry something through to completion that he’s able to actually Enjoy food, yknow? i wanted that to mirror the way throughout the earlier parts of his life that he tried to kind of slap up temporary relationships and make do with that. 

side note about jack and food: jack has undiagnosed adhd (and some vague comorbidities rip) in this au, and his experiences with it i preeeetttty heavily lifted from my life and my special brand of fucked in the head. (for those of you who don’t know, carb and sugar cravings are a symptom of adhd, hence why food is often a coping mechanism for us fhskdhs). cooking and baking are processes that have REALLY helped me get a handle on myself-- it gives me an outlet for movement and stimulation, and its something that i can carry through till the end and get an actual end product that i can recognize and benefit from. plus, real time consequences if i let something do whatever for ten more minutes! so thats another element i added to the way that jack builds healthier coping mechanisms over time-- he moves away from food as a crutch and instead develops a new form of CREATING that gives him an outlet and a feeling of productivity

those are some Vague thoughts. i will probably elaborate in the future!

now, for the messy au, rather than food symbolizing community, i chose to have it represent vulnerability.

a quick review: jack married rich, and davey is jack’s new wife’s cook. on his wife, dorothy’s part, i wanted this to shine through in this squeaky clean, pristine image that a lot of rich people try to craft. she never cooks for herself, never pays much attention to davey, never draws attention to him. in essence, she is creating as few weak spots as possible-- she refuses to be vulnerable to the people and the society around her.

with davey, however, his and his family’s livelihood depends on him cooking for this woman, and later for her and her husband. he’s forced into this position of extreme vulnerability and weakness by his financial situation, and cant really regain his sense of privacy or self because of that. its also a point in this story that he has very little time or wherewithal to cook for his FAMILY. so, his job forces him into a vulnerable situation with complete strangers who hold an upper hand over him but denies him the opportunity to be vulnerable with his own family, only reinforcing this idea that he is the protector and the provider and as such cannot have weak spots and cannot, under any circumstances, break

it also really highlights the difference between jack’s relationship with his wife vs with davey and smalls-- all the scenes of he and dorothy eating together are in grand, fancy rooms, with a certain amount of pomp and circumstance and dignity attached. with davey and smalls, though, he’s usually in the kitchen, having conversation, enjoying their company, helping them with menial things. that’s an environment that he’s used to and comfortable with, the kind of relationships and interactions he grew up with, while the stuffiness of his life and interactions with dorothy are entirely less vulnerable and close

that’s just a brief overview, but its something to look for when i finally finish the fic! it definitely started as a very soapy sort of thing, but my damn instincts pushed me to delve deeper into the characters and their relationships and the fucked-up-ness of it all. so, here we are

i really hope this helped!!!! this is not organized AT ALL so please tell me if there’s anything else you wanted to know or any details you noticed

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

Approximately how close is Luca to the rest of the hphm gang? Like... A number out of 10 ? He seems like a cool character and i kinda wanna know more about his relationships with the lot... Sorry for bothering

You certainly aren’t a bother! I welcome questions like these and find them flattering! If anything, this will help me define Luca and their relationships because I’ve been wishy-washy about that, for sure. (Oh, just so you, Luca uses they/them.) 

Rowan - 11/10. This is Luca’s best friend, no question about it. The closest and most important bond in their life, second only to Jacob. At this stage I very well might just ignore the whole concept of MC and Rowan becoming distant because even though Luca does have a twin, they tend to see Rowan as having that level of importance and trust. Needless to say, Y6CH18 completely shatters Luca’s world and leaves them spiraling, and they still are. 

Ben - 6/10. It was stronger in the early days, when Ben was still timid. Luca never wanted to believe Rowan’s theory about him, they always trusted Ben. But when he abandons caution for recklessness, Luca is about driven mad trying to keep him safe. It’s stressful, it’s not fun, and admittedly Luca’s opinion of Ben sinks at this point. 

Penny - 8/10. These two have always been close, the dearest of friends, and Luca will defend Penny to anyone who talks trash about her behind her back, which is definitely possible for people who get as popular as her. Going off of canon, MC and Penny tend to hang out a lot, and that works fine because they’re Housemates and best buds. Penny’s parents adore Luca too, so that’s nice. 

Merula - 9/10. One of the major contenders for a potential end-game. I pretty much wrote Luca around their interactions with Merula. From first, they never hated her. Simply found her perplexing and mildly annoying. They didn’t blame her for the Bulbadox powder incident. Even then, they were showing her mercy. This inkling of mercy eventually evolved into genuine care and protective instincts toward the Slytherin witch who reminds them so much of their brother.

Bill - 6/10. A solid pal, like a big brother. He doesn’t fill the hole that Jacob left behind, but I chose my URL for a reason, and Bill would be there for Luca and they’d get along quite well. Sharing solidarity in how they both trust Rakepick, and heartbreak when that comes back to bite them. 

Skye - 8/10. This is just the story of Merula and Luca, but translated to Quidditch and without the phase of being opponents. Luca was very wary around Skye and not impressed by her at first. But by the end of Season 1, they had grown fond of her, felt loyal to her, and despite being keenly aware of her flaws, they stuck up for her and tried to gently guide her toward making smarter choices. 

Murphy - 5/10. They aren’t that close. Not that they aren’t friends, because they totally care, and Luca appreciates his company. But compared to the other folks on the team, Luca and Murphy are friendly with each other, but haven’t really opened up or connected on an especially deep level. 

Orion - 8/10. This right here, is the guy who fills the hole that Jacob left. I can’t quite explain it but there’s something about his wisdom and serenity that Luca just latches onto. They seriously admire him, enjoy his company, and want to make h him proud. They’re basically in awe of Orion, and he seems to see a lot of potential in Luca as well. 

Rath - 5/10. A relationship that was initially built upon uncertainty and fear gradually evolved into being an unconventional friendship through the events we see in the Rath TLSQ. Luca never wanted to be at odds with Rath, but admittedly it does feel a little awkward to trade friendly and affectionate banter. 

Tonks - 9/10. A complete disaster, an absolute nightmare that is constantly spawning chaos...but she’s just so damn lovable, and it’s not like Luca doesn’t have a history of surrounding them-self with people who are equally dodgy. Tonks is one of their closest friends, though she also felt slightly awkward around them for a while, as Luca’s aunt is Alice Longbottom, who was victimized by Tonks’ own aunt, though obviously Luca never holds this against her.

Tulip - 9/10.  Another contender for end-game, and could even share them. Tulip swept Luca off their feet almost immediately. Whatever winds up happening, it’s safe to say she was their first crush, and they always found her amazing. Growing very close to her in Year Three, especially thanks to their mutual connection to Merula. I like to think that Tulip knows she needs someone to reel her in now and then, even if she won’t admit it. Luca does that for her. 

Barnaby - 6/10. Similar to Murphy, it’s not that there’s any issue in this relationship, because there absolutely isn’t. Luca simply didn’t grow as close to Barnaby as to some other people, but they always thought very highly of him and similar to Ben, they were protective of him and wanted to keep him safe from harm. Also, his hugs were always amazing. 

Ismelda - 5/10. Luca had ambivalent feelings toward her for a while, after Year 3. They’re not really a hateful person, but they weren’t very fond of her. Made a couple of attempts to make peace, but they didn’t really go anywhere. After “Crushed” they came to understand her more and begin to develop pity, which only evolved further by Year 6, at which point they would unironically hang out with her. She begrudgingly appreciates the company.

Charlie - 6/10. Like Bill, he has a warm and cordial friendship with Luca that is able to flourish more regularly as they share classes, and Luca could honestly listen to Charlie talk about dragons all day. They don’t always understand, but Charlie’s presence is calming, and that’s why they like it.

Andre - 4/10. Luca and Andre get off on the right foot, but they barely talk. To Luca, Andre is that one friend that they wish they could get to know better, and feel bad because they never have time for them. Andre is so disconnected from the plot, but he does nice things for MC like making them outfits, Luca would appreciate it.

Jae - 7/10. In my headcanons, Jacob and Jae knew each other before Jae was at Hogwarts. So Luca and Jae were friends when they were young, but fell out when Jacob disappeared. Avoiding each other until Year 5, whereupon they reconciled and reconnected, becoming better friends again. 

Badeea - 5/10. Obligatory clarification that this is due to them simply not being very close, not because there’s any bad blood, there isn’t. Luca thinks highly of Badeea and admires her abilities and she admires their heart and kindness. There isn’t much more to say about the friendship than that. 

Liz - 6/10. Luca seriously respects her and always has. Sure, she’s a bit odd, but they more than agree with her about a lot of things that most people wouldn’t. They care about the well-being of creatures too, and Liz is always fun to be around, even if her personality is a bit prickly. She gets along well with the likes of Penny and Barnaby, no way she wasn’t going to like Luca.

Diego - 3/10. Okay, this one is actually due to some friction between the two characters. Diego just entirely rubs Luca the wrong way, and he eventually catches on to that. They’re never enemies or anything, but they’re also not really friends either. I just feel like Diego would be the most sexual person in general, and Luca’s very ace, so it’s a struggle for them to coexist. 

Talbott - 6/10. Luca’s very fond of him, and grows to sympathize with him during his quests. Talbott is just such a relatable guy, and while Luca isn’t the most anti-social, they understand the instinct. I also like to imagine that they’re less pushy than MC is in-canon, and that Talbott appreciates this. Luca is the one cat that Talbott can tolerate.

Chiara - 8/10. She’s closer to Luca, because they do share a House, so how could they not be? She was part of their friend group since Year 1, alongside Tonks, Penny, and Rowan. These two have a lot in common. They’re both socially awkward, but caring Healers who are on the quieter side but carry dark secrets they aren’t responsible for. Of course they connect. 

Beatrice - 9/10. These two would become the most unlikely friendship, but would quickly become close. Beatrice is the chaotic type Luca gravitates toward, and Luca has the gentle energy of someone like Penny without the appearance of being pretentious or trying to control Beatrice. I think she’d very much appreciate that and latch onto Luca the way she did Ismelda. I see these two understanding each other quite well as time goes on.

This was fun! Thank you for sending it my way!

[fahr-rose-mike]

Rural solidarity and wierdness

There is something I have noticed, and its a strange thing, but regardless of the primary culture, the further you get from city centers, the wierder people get - but in consistant ways. 1) Don’t trust the government or outsiders: I never understood this until I lived rural - but when you live somewhere that you have to be self sufficient to a large degreee - you stop wanting people who haven’t lived in your space telling you how to survive.  Real life example, I get super frustrated with the gun nuts screaming about wild hogs... most of them have never seen a domestic hog, much less a wild one - so they’re all about the right to bear that AR .223 with a 60 round clip... but see - I live around wild hogs, and mostly, that gun will just piss them off.  and if you shoot at 30-50 wild hogs - you deserve to get eaten.  I carry a .45 revolver (pull the trigger it goes bang, if not, repeat, no jams, I’m pretty sure it would fire dipped in cow shit just to be ornery) and I have a .30-06 bolt action rifle.  because most of the time, less than that won’t penetrate the layer of Accacia sap (also known as gum arabic) that they put in there fur to harden into armor.  I’ve heard stories of people shooting them with smaller guns and having the bullet deflect.  it makes the whole debate seem so disconnected and fake.  I need a gun to keep pigs from eating me.  seriously.  but I don’t need an AR or AK - that isn’t a useful tool for me. 2)no one seems to understand scale if they are not rural.  when I tell someone I have 50 acres of land, and that by the way is very small in my area, they can’t picture it.  its too big for city folks to conceptualize - suburban and city people live in neighbourhoods where they have 1/4 or 1/8 of an acre per house... my land is the size of most developments - but its not as simple as that, the other aspect is that when you are dealing with 50 acres, its not identical, its not like every part of my land is like every other part - I have sand pits, forests, grasslands, cultivated acres... even if I plowed it all and grew monoculture crops I’d still have good and bad parts of the land for each crop. It gets worse as you get more rural, I manage a ranch that has 2000+ acres, there is a literal town in a carved out corner of the orinignal ranch.  I can walk for miles and never leave the ranch.  i have worked that ranch for 3 years and there are section of it I have never seen.  I could work it another 15 and still have that be true. 3) The land changes all the time in unexpected ways: the city is Stagnant and static - the tree on 4th may die, but the city will replace it with an nearly identical tree, at least while the neighbourhood is not in decline.. but even after something will grow there in that only non-concrete spot... but the buildings, they’re the same, and the lawns, and the flower beds... they don’t move much. in the rural lands, your patch of land will vary wildly over the years, the less monoculture cropped it is the more obvious it will be, but even in the croplands, the weeds and the nutrients they move all the time.  the insects and animals come and go - we had one year with 10 rattlesnakes at the house, but we had 14 years where I never saw one at all.  you can watch the plants march across the landscape, patches of wildflowers never in quite the same place, the seeds carried by wind and animals and planted by the whims of the changing world.  this means you learn to navigate by noticing what doesn’t change in a  changing world, where often city folks can’t see any of it as more than the idea of the land. 4) by nessesity, rural folks build connections - but don’t rely on them.  if you live in the country, you know your neighbours.  when my kids were young, I told them how to get to the closest neighbours, because if the house caught fire, they would need to go somewhere to notify the volunteer fireman.  so its a good idea to know who they are - but, you also assume you don’t know them well, even if you’re friends - there is privacy, and that means that people can get away with things, but that also means they don’t judge - it has always been odd to me that city freedom is going to places where other people will accept you, but rural freedom is not wearing clothes because even unexpected visitors have to drive up the driveway past the barking dogs.  much of the suspician that city folk feel from rural folks is this - wether you mean ot or not, you’re imposing on there sanctuary when you visit - they may like you, but they may also spend most days naked, and your presense means they have to play by the societies rules. 5) what works you keep doing, what doesn’t you stop, and when things break you evaluate - is this worth fixing.  all the movies with tons of broken things in rural yards, thats the result of never knowing what you might need in a pinch.  its also why the canned goods and freezers - I can fill a freezer with meat from one hunting trip and eat it all year, but only if I can store it. I can fix one car with parts from another if they’re the same kind of car - its cheaper that way - so why not have three of the same car with only one functional.  when you have the space - you keep things longer that might be useful - when you pay real cash every time you throw something away, you think more about packaging.  by defualt, burning your own trash is cheaper, and composting is the norm even if its just in the form of throwing the leftovers out the back door for the racoons.

[worms-wav]

Inhabiting The Body

I began this essay wanting to write a structured, academic piece about the body as a home. Habitat. But the more I searched, the more I realised academia is not the framework within which I can best unpack and understand my (or anyone’s) relationship to the body. I grew up being told that Western forms of knowing were the only ones that were correct. You cannot write an essay without citing sources. It is not enough to just know something, or to inherit knowledge passed down in whispers. Real knowledge is double-spaced, Times New Roman, and cold. This is not to say that I don’t think that kind of research and knowledge is valid. I think there are certainly situations where I want to understand something through the lens of academia, through other people’s research, through a bright, naked paper trail.

But trying to write this essay has taught me that that can’t be the only kind of essay I try to write when I want to understand. Which has been a difficult thing to unlearn, especially when the body has always felt like a site of public discourse. Even more so when the body is femme, grew up as a cis girl, of mixed heritage. Less so because the body is able-bodied, light-skinned, Chinese-passing, and cis-passing. The body -- and I say ‘the’ body instead of ‘my’ body because in analysing it, it rarely feels like my own -- is a crazed intersection of privileges, learned behaviours, unlearned truths and internalised value systems. Who owns the body? Who has a right to the body? When do these people have a right to the body? What is the body in the context of the self? What is the body in the context of society? What is the body in the context of other bodies? These are questions that, perhaps, can be trudged through in Scopus and JSTOR, but are really, honestly, best understood through turning inwards, thinking, and speaking quietly to the people who don’t necessarily wish to filter their experiences through the pipes of academia. Western academia feeds into the myth that the mind thinks, and the body follows. The genesis of an idea can never be in the doing -- it is in the conceptualising, the theorising, the thinking. So when we think about the body, we think of it as primal and lesser and full of instincts we must evaluate before following.

And even as I write this, I know that this essay is not exactly the anarchist anti-academia piece it wishes it was. Perhaps I am Southeast Asian, but I have been so colonised that my regional awareness is clinical, not cultural. I come from Singapore, which has been dubbed ‘the imperialist of Southeast Asia’ because of how passionately we suck the empire’s cock and try to distinguish ourselves from the rest of Southeast Asia. Last year, we celebrated the ‘Singapore Bicentennial’. What is that? It was a nationwide commemoration marking the 200th anniversary of Stamford Raffles’ arrival in Singapore. Raffles was the British son of a slave trader, whose arrival on our shores marked the beginning of our colonisation. So when I speak about the body outside an academic understanding of it, as much as I want it to be an ode to local, indigenous ways of understanding the body, I know it never will be.

So here is the first marker of my body: colonised, but also, coloniser. Literate, in someone else’s tongue. Literate in someone else’s tongue that, for most of my growing-up years, was indistinguishable from my own. 

This essay is self-serving. It’s not meant to be a great essay. There are millions of great essays out there by much more qualified people than I. All I want through this essay is a space in which my thoughts and feelings can visibly exist. I speak about my own body and my own feelings, and I understand that academia does not always enjoy these things. We are meant to be rational and disconnected, a voice displaced from personality. But again, perhaps academia is not the entity that needs to read this, and perhaps there is merit in writing about my own experiences and those of the people around me. If art is about externalising the internal, then here is my contribution.

The genesis of this project lay in my own tangled relationship with my body. I used to believe it was normal to be unable to perceive my body accurately -- after all, we drown in images of other people’s bodies on the daily, and we’re constantly told what our body should and shouldn’t look like. It was unsurprising to eleven-year-old me that the sight of my body in mirrors and photographs repulsed me. But the nonchalance turned to concern when the repulsion morphed into vivid hallucinations, also often centred on my body. They ranged from the mild (the body grows old, then it is a man, then it is my father) to the terrible (the skin on the body melts off flesh, exposing neon maggots within).

I wish I could package that discomfort neatly within my relationship with my gender. I wish I could make a broad, sweeping statement like, “once I acknowledged I was non-binary, the hallucinations stopped, and I felt more connected to my body” but this is wholly untrue. I’m sure, deep down, there is some connection between my gender trouble and my disconcerting grip on reality, but on the surface at least, the only thing they have in common is my body. And so this is where we begin - at the body. At my colonised, coloniser, dissociating, disconnected, immaterial, tangible, hallucinogenic, Queer body.

I think most of us begin to conceptualise the body as a space long before we find the words for it. We explore our bodies, trace topography, memorise shortcuts, collapse geography, navigate terrain. We know what goes where, what feels good, what hurts, what is part of our body and what is outside it. We create a distinction between our own bodies and other people’s bodies. Just as geography is not simply a matter of cartographic divisions, the borders between bodies are not simply physical. Our bodies and what they mean, where they are, bleed into each other in meaning and solidarity and sex and pain. How do we group some bodies together, decide the societal value of bodies based on similarities and differences? A friend named Ants points out that the body is not truly separate from the world around us - we are a microcosm of organisms and other things, the “edges” that cut us off from the air around us do not truly exist. Art teachers tell you to look at the world and recognise there are no lines -- this is true on a bodily level as well. This friend points out, ‘the notion of a “home” relies on the ability to invite in and to refuse entry - but actually wow humans are more permeable than we like to admit.’

This permeability goes beyond the physical entanglement of us and our surroundings. We are not the only ones residing in our bodies - we share the room with a thousand other people’s opinions of us, some more dangerous than others. Some bodies, the system has decided, do not belong to themselves. There is a lot to be said about the colonisation of the bodies of Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC) by the violence of white systems of power within which much of the world operates. There is also a lot to be said about the gentrification of our bodies to fit in, the policing of femme bodies by a patriarchal system, the cheapening and exploitation of some bodies, and the way some bodies must mortgage themselves to imposed power structures in order to survive.

If the body is a space, then capitalism wants to cut us all up into little bitty pieces and make sure each of our components is most efficiently and clinically used. And, as dystopic as this idea is, it has already been achieved. We all labour under capitalism, our bodies are broken and exploited (again, some more than others. Some much more than others.), and we all go to sleep only to wake up to do it again. When the world is constructed such that nothing belongs to you without capital, the body feels like precious real estate (or, conversely - the body feels incredibly fucking distant). We want agency over it, we want control over it, we want it back. We want to feel comfortable in our skin, so we pay a premium to make sure our physical, spiritual and emotional selves line up with the identity we have created for ourselves in our minds. We find ways to slide ourselves into our bodies, we look for things like connection and authenticity. We want our bodies to feel like home. And yet, the language we are given to talk about habitation of body, of space, corner us to think about our agency in very specific terms.

When we think about habitation, we think about the home. ‘Where do you live?’ is the same question as ‘where is your home?’ or, more transparently, ‘where is your house?’ Although the concept of home is arguably intangible, we find ways to ground it in a very material context. Linguistically, we position ‘home’ through idioms like ‘home is where the heart is’, ‘a man’s home is his castle’, ‘home ground’... The English language has developed a very extensive range of phrases that link ‘home’ to a sense of permanence, ownership and identity. This conceptual positioning of the home is mirrored in very tangible ways. We want to buy a house, not rent one. We have landlords who own our houses but do not live in them. We deliberately build walls, doors and locks to demarcate ‘our’ space. And ‘our’ space is defined mostly by the fact that it is not anybody else’s. 

We think of habitation in terms of property. It is not really surprising that England declared the legal definition of property in the 17th century, around the same time the colonial empire was established. Theorists like John Locke tried to naturalise the concept of ownership -- in the process, also cementing who was viewed as a person and who was not. Property is an inherently racist, sexist and problematic idea. And yet, we don’t view home ownership as the selfish offspring of imperialism (see: mass deaths and poverty). The home, by all means, is a warm, comforting concept. The home is where the heart is! The home is where we take off our bras, put on a stained shirt and dance arrhythmically to Diana Ross. It is a safe space, where we unfurl, exist without fear of being watched, exist without concern about acing the performance. The home is apolitical - you don’t have to have the right opinion when you are at home. You can just be.

Before thinkers like Proudhon, Marx, Lenin and Mao called for the abolition of private property, there were indigenous peoples who viewed the land as sacred, as living, as relatives and ancestors, who continue to view the land in this way. We do not own the land - we exist alongside it. In many ways, we owe our existence to it. In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui Maori iwi won a 140-year-long legal battle to give their ancestral Whanganui river the same legal rights as human beings. India’s Uttarakhand high court cited this case when it ruled that the Ganges River and the Yamuna River have the legal statuses of people. I’m going off on a tangent. The point is that before we dive into thinking that abolishing private property is a radical new thought, it is important we remember it is the age-old thought of the voices we have drowned out.

The relationships between land and humanity, between property and agency, between capitalism and the individual, are complex and political. So when I speak about the body as a site of habitation, there are thousands of unavoidable histories inherent. When I refer to the body as a home, that claim does not exist in a vacuum of happy thoughts and first-world identity crises. Bodies and land are both sites of violence and ownership - historically, they have been, and presently, they continue to be. I move away from describing the body as a ‘home’ because of the way I’ve unpacked it in this essay - but I also want to be clear that I am not trying to police the language we use to discuss our bodies, our relationship to the land, the spaces between us.

In my work, I spoke of the body as a habitat. A space, landmark, geographical love letter. The home is not a habitat, and vice versa. While ‘home’ conjures images of place and ownership, ‘habitat’ alludes to something more natural, more accidental. The space we end up in because it is best for us. The space that feeds us, shelters us and places us within a larger ecosystem of which we are an essential part. When I ask ‘how do we inhabit the body?’ I am not asking ‘how do we make the body a home?’ because the home has already been made for us. It is a question, then, not of altering the body to a point of marketability, but of peeling it back and returning to the state that feels the most comfortable.

So what does it mean to inhabit the body? What does it mean for Queer people whose bodies often feel inherently hostile? How do you slide into a body that, for one, does not feel like the body you want to slide into, and for another, does not feel like it belongs to you? How do you exist as a transgender and/or non-binary person whose body doesn’t feel like the habitat it is naturally supposed to be?

At this point in the essay, I got stuck. I messaged a friend saying, ‘I forgot what my point was.’ And was promptly reminded that I started this essay to de-intellectualise the relationship I have with my body. To feel my way through the words, rub out this idea that I have to have sources and academic knowledge to discuss my primary site of existence. If that was the point of this essay, then you and I both know I have failed. I’ve intellectualised the hell out of the body. And I realise a lot of us Queer people do this - we see the body as distant, so it is much easier to evaluate it without engaging directly with the sense of loss that comes with putting ourselves inside our bodies (not to mention the fact that most of us are rarely, if at all, inside our bodies). But perhaps this, too, is a Western approach to Queerness. I think of the thousands of indigenous cultures that treated Queerness as the norm until their land was colonised and their beliefs stamped out to make way for Western laws. Singapore’s ‘main’ ethnic groups and our indigenous peoples all have long histories of non-binary genders: from the five genders of the Bugis people to the gay Hainanese sex workers to the Malay sida-sida. Was gender ever supposed to be this complicated? Or are the complications a Western import? You can understand my rage with Western LGBTQIA+ activists who view Southeast Asian countries as ‘behind’. ‘Behind’ is a flaccid word coming from those who tread on us until we could no longer walk forward.

And yet, ‘behind’ is such an important position to us -- in Singapore, we want to be ahead. Myself, in my body, wants to be better, as if better is an absolute point that can be reached if I just do the right things, am the right type of person. ‘Better’ is a weird thing to want for a body that does not really feel like it belongs to you. Early in the morning, my mama chides me: ‘you’ll never know what it’s like to fight until you have your own children.’ and I think about the life that I fight to live and I wonder if that’s not real fighting because the body I am fighting for is so far removed from my soul, the soul that is trying its best to inhabit it. And again, what does it mean to try our best to inhabit a body? At what point have we succeeded in being?

This essay is maybe useless academically, but it is useful spiritually. Writing this piece has felt like detangling a very long clump of hair in a drain, spreading them out on wet tile bathed in sunlight and watching them dry til they curl back in on themselves. I am no longer interested in coherence. I am interested in this dissonance, the words I say versus the words I learned, the land I walk on versus the land taken away from me versus the land that was never really mine to begin with. The body as its own agent but so bounded by words and language and bullshit that I have to write an entire essay just to arrive at the point of: oh. Perhaps it is okay for all these feelings to be messy, to be just loosely strung together. Perhaps it is okay that the only thing that they have in common, is my body.

[red-elric]

so ive read fruits basket like twenty times, and over the last couple of years i noticed that, each time, i was drawn more and more to the characters of kimi and momiji, and identified with them in a way that was really confusing to me because i didnt really think i *actually* had a very similar personality to either of them? (discord friends may disagree but, well, this whole post is going to be about people and characters who change up their personality to be more likable.) i got all introspective about it and finally came to a conclusion about their characters that i subconsciously knew already: the key similarity between the two of them and myself is the way we very carefully layer subtle personality masks for ourselves to protect ourselves and to seem more approachable and likable without actually being vulnerable to other people. (other characters in furuba do this a lot too--key examples that come to mind are tohru, kagura, and yuki--but i care more about momiji and kimi so this is about them.)

to clarify a bit what i mean by this, ill start with a personal example. ive always been pretty good at remembering people’s names, especially if i think theyre cool and want to become friends with them, but i noticed around middle school or high school that people subconsciously find it intimidating/stalkerish if you know their name and they cant remember yours, especially if youve only met once. on the other hand, if they *do* remember your name, and you admit to not remembering theirs, they feel empowered and sympathetic to your situation; and if neither of you remember the other’s name, you have a moment of solidarity that can lead to a more relaxed relationship. so, i started pretending to have a manageable amount of trouble remembering the names of people i wanted to be friends with. the first two or three times that i meet someone, at some point i will use “clarifying their name” as a conversation starter, ie: “you’re....[], right?” or “is it []?” this is a small effect of a pattern of behavior i tend to follow: feigning incompetence to gain trust and camaraderie. is it manipulative? absolutely, but harmlessly so. its directly derived from my own social anxieties, but its a relatively healthy way to feel more connected with my peers and to stop feeling ostracized by people who resent me for being “smarter” than them--something i struggled with a lot in my youth. momiji and kimi dont put up the *same* masks as myself, but they are both rather adept at maintaining their own masks, and are both incredibly socially perceptive in the same way that i am: they analyze people’s reactions to their behavior and sculpt themselves to get the reaction they want.

lets take a look at what this means for kimi. surface level, kimi seems pretty cookie cutter--sure, shes a little chaotic, but she fits quite nicely into the femme fatale/dumb blonde trope (even though shes not blonde). but did you know that shes actually at the top of her class? its subtle, but to me its always been obvious that shes actually incredibly intelligent and constantly manipulating people to suit her needs. there are easy examples of this, of course: flirting with a teacher to get a new whiteboard, anyone? but there’s one scene that’s always spoken volumes to me about her character, and that’s the one-off joke where kakeru starts to say some “secret” about her, clearly joking, and she immediately shuts him down by cutting him off with “don’t say unnecessary things!” and elbowing him in the side, all while still smiling cheerfully. the subtlety of this is that, with her reaction, she’s actually imitating their audience: yuki. it’s yuki she doesn’t want to know about whatever kakeru knows, so she shuts down kakeru in a way we’ve seen yuki yell at kakeru whenever kakeru makes idiotic jokes. the physical attack, the angry smile, accusing kakeru of saying something annoying, but that doesnt really matter; none of these are particularly characteristic to kimi, she causes as much chaos as kakeru on a good day, but they’re incredibly recognizable to yuki. her reaction is familiar to yuki, and it invokes an assumption that kakeru is making a lame joke, not trying to reveal one of her deepest, darkest secrets, and it works because yuki would react completely differently if kakeru tried to tell someone about *his* secrets. yuki doesnt pursue the subject further, kakeru bounces back easily and doesnt give it a second thought, and kimi is safe. so, we can tentatively say that kimi has a habit of reflecting other’s expectations to hide her true self.

now, is this one scene enough on its own to prove this idea? of course not. however, when we view her actions as a whole we start to see a pattern. we see several instances where kakeru will say something stupid and kimi will listen, encourage it, or say something just as stupid back; it’s only when he tries to reveal something about *her* that she shuts him down. we see subtle signs of genuine anger when he tries to reveal her secret: the overly violent jab, the tensed vein/angry eyebrows, etc--not very characteristic for happy-go-lucky, flirtatious kimi. and, of course, we have several examples of how she manipulates a) men into buying things for her, granting her favors, leaving their girlfriends for her, etc; and b) women into feeling inferior to her, feeling aggravated with her, and thinking she’s incredibly troublesome but knowing that they can’t argue with the men about it. overall, its not a far stretch at all to think she’s manipulating everyone around her to avoid revealing information about her true self: a proud, intelligent woman who enjoys causing chaos, but is also very manipulative and controlling to the people around her and hates being vulnerable.

momiji is in some ways similar, and in other ways very very different. most people--especially characters in the story with him--tend to put momiji in this “sweet, innocent child” box. it’s not just his height--his fashion, mannerisms, outlook on life, etc are all very reminiscent of someone much younger than he is, and people tend to *treat* him like he’s much younger than he is. even if they know intellectually that yes, momiji is significantly older than he appears, it’s very easy for the older sohmas to treat him as a troublesome but still loved younger sibling--someone to be taken care of, not taken too seriously, someone lovable. i’ve seen several people point out that part of *why* momiji does this is because he subconsciously feels that hes not allowed to act like an older sibling (to momo), so he acts as a younger sibling in an effort to get a similar sort of familial bond without overstepping the boundaries that his family instilled in his mind, and i agree. i believe momiji has a habit of feigning youth to more easily bond with the people he loves. his childish actions and behavior make him easier to deal with, and also give him a little more leeway to do things that would normally frowned upon if he appeared older, ex: sleeping in a bed with tohru, wearing a girl’s uniform top to school, taking any chance he can get to be physically affectionate with people, indulging in sweets and candy, etc.

two things draw momiji’s true personality out of its shell: his growth spurt, forcing people to acknowledge his actual age, and the breaking of his curse. late game momiji, to me, has always seemed bitter, tired, and sarcastic, as opposed to the sweet, energetic, and sincere front he’d put on for most of the series, which is very interesting to me. of course, you’d normally *expect* someone who’s gone through as much as momiji to *be* bitter, tired, sarcastic, etc; however, when he puts his child-like mask on, it’s easy to pretend that he’s this loving, saintly child who bears no ill will towards anyone, who can be knocked to hell and back and still stand back up to smile again. and i do think it’s true that momiji has an incredible capacity for forgiveness and love, but there’s also no denying that he has a limit, and we can see that during his first conversation with akito after his curse breaks. this, i think, is the most raw, true representation of momiji in the whole story; momiji has lost his link with the family he made for himself in the zodiac, he’s been physically forced to grow out of his persona, he’s finally seeing that his primary abuser is really not so powerful after all, and he’s forced to finally confront the fact that, while his curse, the thing that caused most of the troubles in his life, is broken, the impacts it already had on his life won’t magically go away. momiji in this scene seems completely disconnected from akito, who is still caught up in the curse, still desperately trying to hold everything together; in his lowest moment, we can finally see momiji, not as an all-forgiving saint, but as someone who just wants to start over. he’s not happy that his curse ended; id even go as far to say that momiji, out of every zodiac, is the one who most wishes it was still around, for the bond that it gave him with the other zodiacs and as something he could pin the blame on for his family struggles. which is why it is so sad to me that his was among the first to break.

now, yall probably know by now that i am a momimi bitch, so lets talk about them together. most of the people i see shipping them--and i fully admit, this is how i started shipping them--simply just say “same energy,” make a few cute headcanons about how they’d use each other for clout, and call it a day. this is perfectly fine. however, here at Overthinking It Inc., we take it a few steps deeper. personally, i have a hard time getting invested in a ship unless i can see how the characters compliment each other, how they help each other grow, and how they could genuinely enjoy each other’s company enough to pursue a romantic relationship. it took a little bit of obsessive extrapolating, but ive finally figured out just *how well* momiji and kimi compliment each other.

momiji, at the end of furuba, is going through a metamorphosis. he’s been forced out of his childish persona and into the life of an adult rather quickly, and he takes the opportunity to try to become more true to himself. we can see, in the last few chapters, the beginnings of bounds of growth; however, i imagine that there is a significant “awkward” period in his growth. judging from what i know about his character, i believe he would, in his effort to be more honest and confident, overcompensate a bit; he would become overbearing, intense, perhaps even oversharing. he might have a tendency to try to figure out what’s “wrong” with his friends and family, might always be trying to “fix” everything. i could easily see him, in fact, develop a bit of a selfish attitude (albeit rooted in kindness--it is, after all, still momiji); in his journey to stop letting people walk all over them, i believe he might become prone to walking over people himself. he’d have no idea where the lines are, where someone’s limits are, because he never had the chance to test them out in his youth, and because the people in power in his life (his parents and akito) never respected anyone else’s limits. enter kimi: tough, walled off, and incredibly secretive, though she tries to hide it. momiji, with his social perceptiveness, would notice at some point how difficult it is for her to form genuine, emotional connections with others, and would feel the urge to help her, to draw her out of her shell, not realizing that she doesnt necessarily want to be understood, nor that she’s (now entering headcanon territory, be warned) *scared* of those kinds of relationships. she’d take it, for a while, but there would come a time when she’d snap. this would do wonders for helping momiji figure out where the boundaries are, and how to be more aware of other people’s wants and needs (and it is something that tohru, reserved little wallflower that she is, would never be able to do for him).

kimi, on the other hand, has not quite started developing her character at the end of the manga. i like to apply all sorts of believable anxieties onto her: maybe she regrets not having an easy connection with other girls, like she does with boys. maybe she refuses to believe in the familial structure (that momiji idolizes). maybe she’s so used to playing the part of the homewrecker that, when she finally realizes that she’s found something or someone she truly loves, she doesn’t know how to handle it, and always worries that somebody’s going to take it away for her. maybe she views connections with others, or vulnerability, as a weakness, something that could be used against her, and tries to do everything she can to wall people off and hide her true feelings. well, good news for her, momiji is the resident king of loving family structures. family is something he truly loves and understands, from how much he’s admired it from afar, and been grateful for the family he’s made for himself in hatori, tohru, and the other zodiac. he’s well primed to help her understand what a true family is like, that real love is a good thing, not a scary thing, and that it’s okay to be vulnerable sometimes. this big, sweethearted doofus who somehow managed to see how much she was struggling under the many layers of masks that she hides beneath? there’s no way kimi wouldnt fall for him. and she, this girl who challenges everything he believes in, teaches him valuable lessons about how far is too far, and is basically the most fun person he’s ever met? there’s no way momiji wouldn’t fall for her.

i believe the two of them would start things off as almost a play; theyd portray a satire of the ideal male and female celebrity couple rather easily; theyd lean into the standard boy and girl roles almost ridiculously so, drawing attention to the absurdity of the standard relationship and somehow flirting through it. kimi, as we know, likes to pretend to be this helpless, flirtatious, “i couldnt possibly do anything on my own, oh whatever shall i do O3O” caricature of the feminine “ideal” to draw men in; momiji, i feel, would respond to that with a dorky, happy-go-lucky, “i can help you with that, miss ; )” caricature of the masculine, “ideal” gentleman, just for fun. theyd put on a show, for each other, for their peers, and for themselves, but they would eventually run into some troubles (detailed above). things would be tense, but theyd keep up their personas--why would they *ever* admit to their flaws to the outside world, theyre perfect? their friends would notice, of course, but wouldnt be able to do much about it; in the end, the only people perceptive enough to read through the bullshit of one is the other. theyd come to an understanding--spoken or unspoken (with the subtleties of their relationship, its not unreasonable that they could change their entire perspective of their relationship with just actions, not direct words or conversation)--and shift back into their previous, flirtatious relationship, except its different this time. because now, they understand each other, they love each other, theyre practically reading the other’s mind, and theyre perfectly in tune. rather than putting on masks to hide from each other, they wear one together to hide from the world--but, they think, that’s probably enough.

[ravencromwell]

On Rage and Complexity interwoven with disability and queerness as filtered through Sarah Gailey's "maybe novel"

I've drifted into posting much of my more personal/metaish content on my dreamwidth In an effort to try and be better about cross-posting, thought I'd put a bit of meta up here first for a change.

We lament, often and at great length, about the kind of tales we'd like to see: with more diverse characters, yes, but also well-rounded diverse characters. As Liz Bourke concisely opined recently :

It’s troubling, sometimes, how much the issue of “good representation”—and the arguments around it—slides towards a pervasive sense that creators must depict people who are good and right and do right. It’s not necessarily an explicit dictate, but there’s an unspoken undercurrent, a sense that to portray ugliness, unlikeability, fury—to portray people who have responded to suffering with cruelty and bitterness and rage—is to be complicit in one’s own vilification. And to be vulnerable. Justify your existence is the sea we swim in, always against the current.

To be unmarked by compromise, to be without sharp edges that sometimes cut even when you don’t want them to—because the world is what it is, and sometimes what it is teaches you that the best defence against being hurt by cruelty is a really quick offense—is to either be very young or hardly human. But when we come to fictional portrayals, well… As you know, Bob, Bob gets to be seen as a difficult genius, where Alice is seen as a bitch or a Mary Sue.

And as insightful as that essay is, I'd argue that a central factor it overlooks, or doesn't articulate as well as I would like, is that the more intersections of marginalization your identity rests upon, the more that unspoken pressure kicks in. I certainly feel and see it, as both a queer and disabled person, and I have friends who feel that weight even more heavily--that internal voice policing their own writing even stronger when they're brown and/or queer and/or coming from decolonized places; even heavier if/when they and their compatriots are still untangling the effects of colonialism and modern neoimperalism. And so it becomes vitally imperative for all of us, using whatever privilege we have to work in concert to expand what characters can be portrayed in mainstream fiction. And oh, aint that an easy proclamation to make; doing the work, though, is far harder.

So y'all can imagine my overwelming delight when the Bourke essay and twitter convo that sparked it--linked to in essay and so very much worth a scan--dropped on the same week as my introduction to Sarah Gailey's maybe book Every bit of what I read of Gailey's makes my love of her work slowly, steadily increase, but to be perfectly honest, this's probably my favorite thing of hers so far. It's the thing that tugs sharpest at my heart, that I see so much of my own experience reflected in, and it's only two fuckin chapters in But even if Gailey never writes another word of this--for which a large chunk of me will mourn--, it'll still be one of the most special things I've encountered for being, in western lit terms, a masterclass in putting the characters we wanna see in the world. (I insert that caveat because I know well that folks like Viet Thanh Nguyen are doing astonishing, under-appreciated work in nonwestern litfic. But the genres I'm most familiar with, western scifi and fantasy, have a long way to go to catch up.)

There are, so far, four--maybe five? I can't quite tell--characters in this novel. Three of 'em have serious, life-changing disabilities, and one of them is delightfully, tragically queer. And they're all allowed to be wonderfully vicious and complicated. Just look at something like:

Cory Jefferson is a hunched-over curled-up boy with bones too long for his body and a jaw you could use to shovel the ashes out of a fireplace. His chest has the caved-in look that comes with growing tall before you can grow wide, and his hair is long enough to want cutting but not long enough to look like it’s long on purpose. His hoodie sleeves have holes in them, and the bottoms of his jeans are frayed from walking, and all his fingers are missing, cut off at the bottom knuckle a year ago on a night he can’t remember no matter how many Thursdays he spends looking back and forth between Piper and Ethan.

"I think we should go back," Piper says. She’s chewing on her thumb, and Cory is staring at her thumb while she chews on it, probably because that used to be his nervous tic. Piper used to nag him about it.

Piper Durham has a spine as straight as a plumb-line dropped down a well. Her dark hair falls past her shoulders, less straight than it used to be, and with a few strands of white that weren’t there before. She’s thin enough to look hollow, and pale enough to look scared. She wears large black sunglasses with scratched-up lenses. She wears them because they cover up the holes where her eyes used to be, back before the night a year ago that she can’t remember no matter how many Thursdays she spends chewing on her thumb.

"That’s a bad idea,” Cory snaps. “That’s the worst bad idea I’ve ever heard, and every time you bring it up you sound stupider."

"I don’t hear either of you coming up with something smarter,"Piper snaps back, and then she immediately closes her mouth. She’s biting her tongue, literally biting it, you can see her doing it, and then she flinches again and stops doing that, because biting her tongue is even worse than what she said.

Ethan’s hands rise from his lap. After a silent moment, Cory translates for him, so Piper can hear. "Ethan says it’s okay. He says not to worry about it. He says he’s used to people saying stuff like that."

"Sorry," Piper whispers.

Across from her, in his own folding chair, Ethan signs it’s okay again. Cory doesn’t translate this time, and the decision not to translate is a hateful one. He watches with narrowed eyes as Piper, who can’t see Ethan’s hands and will never see them again, returns to chewing on her thumb.

Ethan rests his square-fingered hands on his crossed legs and sits back in his chair, his every movement controlled. Some would call him poised. Some would call him that. He wears dark jeans, like always, and a button-down shirt, like always. His fingernails are short and clean, and his sandy-blonde hair is short and clean, and his shoes are polished and his clothes are pressed. He wears a clear plastic face mask to help heal the skin grafts on his face — his face, which was cut away from his skull in one tidy sheet. He does not speak because he has not had a tongue for a year, not since the night he lost his face, which is a night he can not remember no matter how many Thursdays he spends watching Cory and Piper hate each other.

These are people not made saintly by their experiences, who fuck up and apologize, and honestly still fuck up. But who're trying, in their deeply jaded fashion, to show solidarity after this horrific experience they've all been through. They have so many rough edges between them that it'd be impossible to navigate a room between them without cutting yourself to ribbons. Three disabled characters, never put on pedestals, allowed to be as complex as any able-bodied person. It's something still so astonishingly rare that it brought me to weeping this afternoon and meant more than I can say.

And to have these three disabled characters get language this evocative and gorgeous--to have Ethan dress so sharply! when to so many people disability translates to a disconnect from cultural touchstones like fashion. As someone who loves and wants to adopt men's fashion, that, too, meant so much. Every word of this is just so lush! I can't decide whether it's the description of Piper's spine or Cory's caved-in look that comes from growing tall before you can grow wide I love most as a descriptive passage, but to see disabled characters get this kind of attention is breathtaking.

And then there's this description of queerness, from our resident ghost:

The girls fascinated me in death the same way they had in life. For all my sixteen years alive, I was hypnotized by the way a girl can move through a room fast and subtle, like a secret moving through a church during service. The way girls laughed, the way they wrapped their hands around things they wanted to own, they way their eyes got sharp when they were angry. The way they smelled. Boys always seemed the same to me, all of them echoes of each other, all of them saying the same three sentences over and over again, all of them looking at each other with the same eyes. I could never tell the difference between them, not really. But girls. Girls.

It mattered to me while I was alive, but it didn’t make a difference in the way I lived my life, which was a regret I chewed on when I’d worn my other regrets into pulp. The town was small, and everyone knew everyone, and by the time I knew I wasn’t the only girl who watched girls the way I did, I’d been dead for too long to do anything about it. If I knew then what I know now, maybe I would have said something to Molly Two-tone, whose real name was Molly Tutonne and who had straight black hair that fell between her shoulderblades as black as roofing tar, who had bright green eyes and a laugh that you could hear from a block away. Molly Two-tone, who came to my house after I died and stood in the kitchen and whispered that if I was there and if I could hear her, she wanted me to know that she wished she’d kissed me when she had the chance.

There wasn’t a thing I could do to let her know I’d heard her. All I could do was watch her cry, and then watch her leave, closing the door quiet as she could when she went. She didn’t ever come back again.

God, that description guts me every damn time. There're so many of us for whom that metaphor applies: death can be substituted for disapproval or fear or a million other things that separate us from our queerness. I don't know if there's any way for our ghost to have a happy ending, or even something close to catharsis, but Gailey confronts the mess and complication of queerness in ways I've rarely seen.

And getting back to the original point of marginalized characters not being allowed to be cruel, look at this fucking gem on Piper:

Maybe I knew, when Piper walked in with Cory and Ethan. Maybe I knew she was Piper’s granddaughter. Or maybe I saw Piper and thought, for a breath-held instant, that Molly had come back to see me again. I lost track of time more and more often as the years went on, forgetting sometimes how far I was from my life. Forgetting that it had happened one hundred years before, and not just that instant.

When Piper eased the front door open and stepped inside, waving her hand in front of her face to ward off cobwebs, she looked just like Molly — that long black hair and those jewel-bright eyes, and a mouth with a smile hidden at the corners of it. But once the moment of hope melted away, I could see the differences between Piper and her grandmother, and there were plenty of them. And then two boys walked in behind her, and they shut the door.

Piper turned to face them, and she let that hidden smile loose, and it was a different kind of smile than I’d ever seen on Molly’s face — bright and sharp and cruel, ready to have that cruelty dialed up as far as it needed to go. When I saw that smile on Piper’s face, I knew.

I knew that she was nothing like Molly at all.

This's a character who is gonna shortly be disabled, and she's allowed all her sharp edges and I will never fucking be over it. This's a novel of sharp edges, not pulling a punch in deference to its subject matter, not doing a thing to make its readers comfortable or reassured. It's all the ferocity horror should be, with probably my favorite insight being:

When there is a house that no one will ever live in again, people bring their secrets to it. They hide things there — treasures and secrets and sins and violence and love. They turn it into a place to be cruel to each other, because they’re afraid, and fear slaps a dial onto cruelty and turns it up as high as it can go. They turn it into a place to want each other, because fear puts a dial onto want, too. They turn it into what it is, and without them, a house is just a house, no matter what happened there. It’s just empty.

a two-chapter masterclass in writing representation we wanna see.

I was a disabled child told to be kind, not to make folk nervous or bristle at their pity. To know my limitations and stay quiet, not rock the boat and I wouldn't be hurt or scorned more than was expected for my disability. They're lessons I'm spending much of my twenties unknotting, and this vicious, many-toothed novel has wrapped itself round my heart even in its infancy.

[mephistophelianmusingsxo]

Sin City

It is said that loneliness is one’s lack of social activity, another humans company but true loneliness is isolation, it’s an emotional power to emptiness. It is more than just that feeling of wanting company, true loneliness is disconnection. No matter the amount of bodies that swarm your own with heat you’re still lonely, you’re still cold. It’s an impossible struggle to react and build a meaningful human contact. You’re hollow. Your insides whistle and echo the sounds of voices but they don’t quite reach your ears, the soft haze, the quiet buzz fades still. People fear being alone, they fear they may become lost without constant interaction but I, I chose to be alone. I chose this life. It wasn’t forced upon me, it was what my heart chose. You may ask “What is it like being alone?” And I can truly say, it is critical that you first assess the reason and actions to bring you to this point, whether in reasons for physical violence, emotional anguish, or the degree your mind is willing to go to accomplish this sense of being alone. I mean after all, we’re all, alone aren’t we? No one ever truly understands what it is like to be them, to experience their happiness, their pain, their sorrow and their guilt. So, how can we say that we are in fact not alone? We are. Some people find it easier to be within their own company, smothering their monadic existence from others. Pretending that all is good, life is perfect and they’re hunky dory. Drawing fucking pictures of a life everyone wants but not one single being has. Bullshit. Whether you will like to disagree or agree with my matter at fact, you cannot deny that solidarity is a fleeting feeling. It is universal. Race, creed, social standing. Once in a person’s life it will visit their soul and leave a mark so deep, they will always question if it ever left. Every song, every piece of literature, every painting extracts the inescapable fate of pure loneliness and we somehow are fundamentally distant from this, we protest that we do not have it. The paradox to all human existence for our social entities is to seek connections. May it be with another human or simply an object that holds great sentimental value.

Which leads me to my next point, by now you’ve probably already guessed my life became tangled in ways it never should. A typical story of a child not wanted, and a child gone wayward. However, you would be wrong. My childhood was the exact juxtaposition to expectancy, I was an only child. Sweet little protégé to dear old Dad’s booming company. Showered in love and adoration from the minute I was born, a child couldn’t ask for more. But it was never enough, I never belonged, I couldn’t excel in the areas my father wanted to carry on his heritage, try he might have, he could never tether my soul, could never cage my free spirit. I wanted to explore the world, I wanted to become accustomed to more than what I had growing up, I had a wild zoe for freedom. Academically I excelled in everything I did. From the writing short hand classes my father enrolled me in, to the logistics and statistics courses. In effect, there wasn’t much I didn’t excel in, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t care for flash suits, fancy jobs, exquisite restaurants, nature was more my thing. No convention or obligation, seeking out every unique possibility in each circumstance as it was. Enjoying whatever I deemed appropriate in this socially adverse world, limitations were minimal, and I rather relished in my adventurous unconventional conformity of a woman. Freedom, now freedom is open to arguments; social and political views as something that must be contained and controlled or something that cannot be. It has been across everyone’s lips, touched their tongues but never their actual mind set nor their soul. It has touched every human heart with adept fingers and a shadow that looms. Forever changing but never abandoning.

‘Freedom’. Freedom means many things to many people; politically the freedom to vote and choose your respected candidate, socially for you to choose what and who you like to acknowledge with. Standing free with those that fight for the freedom of speech, distancing yourself from those who fight for an entirely different cause but still freedom. Financial freedom is what got me in to this mess. Where others seek to free themselves from debt, standing credit and foredooming loans, I propelled myself further and further in to the outstanding debt. What’s more surprising is, I don’t particularly wish to be free either. Which is funny, wouldn’t you say? For a woman that has documented nothing but her free spirit doesn’t seem to want to be free of the hold finance has on her. I have to say it is interesting that we all pursue this Liberty as an ends to a means. An end to all our struggles. But what is our deliverance? The no longer outstanding debt, the ability to do what we like? Say what we like? It is not truly being what we all call 'free’. If you look, it is our hearts that drove us in to this mess at the beginning yes? So, who is to say that our hearts will not choose the same path? It will remain unchanged as long as our heart yearns for what it just escaped from. Why? Because we desire what we think we cannot live without. And… Voila! We find ourselves in debt again. It’s a viscous cycle. It eclipses all we know and only serves what we don’t. Feeds off the hunger of curiosity. And well, being a natural spirit of curiosity, I was an easy target. I was the prey awaiting the predator to seize. It was not an approach in the dead of night, it was more an ease of comfort and insurance slinking its way around your body, your mind, your heart until you realise and it’s too late. It’s not a peripheral remedy. It’s simply not something to help you balance your books it becomes your life. Symptoms begin to fester, and you apprehend that it’s a disease, but rather than dealing with it you run. I ran. Intoxicated with the deadness of every human strategy, the knowing that it’s something I could never conquer, my heart fell steadfast into corruption and sin. Captivating and keeping hold of the rebellion that would cause mankind to leap from ignorant innocence to full blown understanding. I do suppose that if my life had taken a left instead of a sharp right, I would never have found myself in this position, but then again, I also suppose that I wouldn’t be happy, I’d be stuck working at my father’s company, lumbered with a healthy pay-check and all the cuttings and trimmings that went with it. At least this way I was gifted with a substantial pay-check for doing what I love. I wasn’t just put on this earth to work and pay bills, that was not a life. Just an existence. There were other places I could have chosen to work, other industries I could have pursued but not everyone finds the labouring of a nine to five exciting and appealing but rather tedious. This line of work is for the ones that don’t have any advanced education or a set of degrees, for the ones that don’t have the looks or the luck, or the ones that don’t have enough gumption to be a pimp; they live a life of has beens and recent regrets. It doesn’t require sets of specific skills and it’s readily available in any city that you step your foot in. Have you guessed it? When the clock hits twelve we deal; cards and crack. Yes! The drug industry, let’s not call it that. That brings unwanted negative connotations, disastrous assumptions to those involved. Instead, I oppose we call it a free trade on the very large capitalism scale. Distributing and supplying to those who live the life in the fast lane, the ones that search for a kick, the ones that become solely dependent on the next hit. I would say I was sorry but I’m not. As long as their struggles line my pocket, I would continue to benefit from transactions, grant them another five gram, ten, the amount is limitless when you have the money. I feed their uncontrollable addictions to illicit drugs, I destroy families; people all alike. There is no age, no specific gender. It is whoever is willing to pay. Drug dealing requires no real hard work, but it’s no fun when you lose, and your balls are in the blender. Your pay-check comes from the clientele and if you slip up and squander your batch, you’re the one that suffers then. You have no income until your next run. It’s all a muddle of colours, a twisted web of lies. To say I had simply lost my way was quite the understatement. To be brutally honest, I had become adrift the many other souls settled in the ruins of their independency. People observe the streets just as people observe the sky, in one single hour a multitude of colours can paint the sky; blues, greys, oranges, yellows. In my line of work, it is crucial that I notice these. I may approach you genially, by no means am I nice. Granted I can be affable when I please, but please; do not ask me to be a friend. I simply can’t. Pick a colour and chose your path. Drug smuggling, runner, courier however you please to perceive. It is my job and as a right in doing so, I notice trends throughout rife city life. When demand is low, I simply move on. I cannot recount a single moment where I have remained in a place for longer than six months, that is until now. New Orleans has become my home, or perhaps I should say my place of work. An advantageous opportunity I could never resist. If I had known what I know now, it is almost probable my deterioration in to crime and misdemeanours would certainly have happened more rapidly. Would you believe me if I told you witches were real? Would you believe me if I told you I work for them? No, no, what if I told you my very purpose in this is to run errands where vampires cannot go? Would you believe me? Of course not. You’d only but believe I am a woman turned insane from her reckless use of narcotics or perhaps an insensate pursuit of an old crazy woman way before her time, my time. However, consider this there isn’t just one monotheistic being – Humans. We are only a minute percentage of the world’s population. Forever persecuting other people, killing them because they’re far more superior than anything mortality is capable of. But immortality, immortality is something else altogether. Creatures of brief season that remain for an eternity. Wherever you look in history, you cannot escape the record of inquisition, they have always been a part of our world. Undertaking, preceding and strengthening what we mortals are unaware. I once claimed loneliness and freedom were my downfall, I believed them to be a disadvantage of no plausible use, but as it turns out being in this new reality grants me the greatest asset of invisibility. Slipping from sunset to sunrise unseen, unnoticed. Free.

[pyratictmblr-blog]

With Who I Am Internally

I eventually confronted my co-worker about this unspoken conflict between us. I felt it best to apologize for doing what I did since, regardless if I was in the wrong or not, it was my actions that caused the harm. He confessed that it hadn’t affected him the same way it affected me, but he also apologized for getting angry at me. We aired our differences and he explained more about why he was upset with what I did.

He explained to me that before he used to tell people everything. When he was going for a job interview, going on a date, taking a course or whatever it was. However, if he didn’t get the job, the date didn’t go well or something else happened, the rumor mill would already be turning and he would have to keep correcting people. He finds it easier to simply just play things closer to the chest. Looking at it from his point of view, I can respect that and since we rooted out that issue, things have been going better. Interestingly, knowing his point of view on how he share’s information doesn’t inspire me to follow suit. I find it easier on myself to stay truthful; I don’t need to keep track of lies or alternate truths. However, despite clearing everything up, I still feel hollow; alone. 

At work, it appears as though there are conversations between co-workers that I’m just not privy to. As though there are two different communities at work: the one I’m a part of and another one beyond a veil that I can’t quite see through or pierce. I need to spend some time with my non-work friends. I sense that I share little in common with my co-workers beyond work and I feel like I can’t truly be myself in their company. I can’t fully communicate or share my love of fantasy, video games and story with them. It’s a pseudo-connection, a facsimile that doesn’t provide sufficient social satisfaction. It breeds doubt and solemn solidarity within my psyche; a feeling of disconnection. Compounded with living alone, there are few fleeting moments of happiness in which I feel valued or acknowledged. Perhaps this acts as the virtual provenance of my insecurities on relationships? I want to feel connected to someone. I want someone to view the world through my lens and understand my vision. I want to know their vision and experience their story. I want to know that I’m not alone.

This desire for connection may stem from the lack of relationship with my father as well as being an only child to a single, hard-working mother. I found my escape in video games, movies and other story-driven mediums; from which much of my social development as a child came. I even asked my mom when writing this story and she told me that I was much more extroverted before my step dad came into my life. How might things have been different otherwise? Do I want to change now? I feel like it’s a bit late to go back; to conform myself to societal norms. Last weekend, I was invited into a campaign for a tabletop RPG for the first time. We played for over twelve hours and I enjoyed every minute of it. I wouldn’t ever want to give that aspect of myself up because that’s what fills me with the most emotion. I open my heart to music, movies and video games and I get so much more out of it than what is on the surface. I embrace life with the same open mind and everything is so vivid; so beautiful. I couldn’t begin to envision anything less.

If there is some ulterior motive working against me, I still don’t know. Perhaps it’s just the voice of self-doubt that questions my actions. My desires urge me to cross these lines to create opportunities, but my fear causes worry so that I don’t turn down the same path as my roommate. Are these fears masquerading as my integrity? In that case, maybe they aren’t such a bad thing. Like a lot of things in life though, there should be some balance between the two extremes. Overthinking and overanalyzing separates the body from the mind, but at the same time, introspective understanding can be immensely beneficial as well. Enjoy life. Live in the moment when the moment comes around, but also learn to step back and read between the lines; meditate on how you handled those moments. Don’t let your emotions take you down a path that you’re going to regret.

In the situation with my online date, I made a decision that I felt was integral to my character. I wasn’t going to settle and give in to an unhealthy relationship just for the sake of desire. My roommate possibly made a decision that was integral to his character as well, it just wasn’t the character that I befriended and I couldn’t justify staying friends with him. In answering the question about trusting myself, so long as I stay true to my character, show a care/concern for my own well being and act competently on my behalf; there’s no reason why I shouldn’t trust myself. Sure, character motivations change and I may learn something new about myself and need to adjust, but that is all part of the path I trod. 

In the end, I feel it’s healthy to follow down paths that don’t have a clear end. To follow the spiral of consciousness that could lead you somewhere that no one has been before. Like the Fibonacci Spiral, created by expanding the spiral at the same rate as the Fibonacci Sequence. This naturally occurring sequence starts with 1, 1 and continues with each following number being the sum of the previous two numbers. This expansion rate also works out to be the Golden Ratio which is found everywhere in life; the spirals on seashells, the spiral of our own milky way galaxy and even in the relation of people’s facial features. The natural occurrence of this suggests the idea that we learn lessons in the same lateral pattern; constantly growing and spiraling outward. When it comes to our mind and understanding the depths of one’s psyche, it seems chaotic when viewed in a linear manner. With the experiences I’ve gone through; at the time, they weighed heavily on me and it was unclear what I had to learn or why I made the decisions I did. It wasn’t until I viewed these events in retrospect, with what I know now, that I could discover truths in the joining of the disconnects; by swinging on the spiral.

[discursivities]

From Baudrillard we’ve inherited a number of terms, the one relevant to this post being ‘hyper-real’ (sometimes ‘hyper-reality’). By ‘hyper-real’ what we mean to denote is a resemblance to The Real—unmediated reality—that is, for some very basic reasons, ‘better’ or ‘preferable’, but ultimately gives the impression of being ‘more real than The Real’. A hyper-real experience of some x is an experience of x that is preferable—given its increased vivacity, sharpness etc.—to an experience of that same x in actual ‘The Real’ reality.

An example will make the distinction clear. Our ‘post-modern’ father, who finds himself absurdly competing everyday for the affections of his son against the most impossible alternatives—video games, television, the internet, etc.—decides to disconnect the boy for a few hours and take him to a baseball game. The boy, who actually knows quite a bit about baseball and even claims to be a fan of the game, quickly grows bored and even slightly annoyed with his father for bringing him outside. His annoyance is the product of a very telling insight—that is: the boy realizes that, had he been left to his own devices (note the lack of idiom), he could have stimulated himself much more effectively and with greater enjoyment. This knowledge, almost over-whelming in its force, prompts the boy to finally proclaim to his father (not half-way through the third inning, we might imagine): ‘This has been fun and all, but you should play MLB2K13 if you really like baseball.’ The absurdity of this statement is all the more difficult to bear because we understand exactly what he means. If he was in a more ironic mood, then he might say: ‘This has been fun and all, but it doesn’t come close to the real thing.’ This wording brings out sharpest the consequences of hyper-reality. The actual game of baseball being played out on the field, under the sun, with bats, balls, and sponsors—this constitutes, for our purposes, The Real. The video-game, which began as a mere simulation of reality, has transcended its status of being a simple ‘resemblance’. The hyper-focused, beautiful, lush visuals; the ease and comfort with which the game is played; the total engagement and over-stimulation—these factors conspire in bringing the game to the position of ‘hyper-reality’. It is the trademark of hyper-reality that it seems ‘more real than real’—and this is a matter of perfection. Where an actual game of baseball may be sloppy, start-and-stop, and uncomfortable to watch (heat, lack of shade, inability to hit pause and go grab a snack, etc.), the hyper-real experience on the other hand has none of these deficiencies.

Hyper-reality is present in those movies ‘based on a true story’, especially if the events depicted happened in your lifetime and—at the time they were happening—you couldn’t be bothered to watch the news. The eagerness with which we line up outside the theater on opening night is an irony lost on just about everyone.

A very standard ‘post-modern’ critique of the hyper-real concerns the spectator’s propensity to reproduce inauthentic experience. If the hyper-real is so compelling, then our construction of experience (day-to-day) will inevitably converge upon trying to re-create the hyper-real. The two obvious problems to arise from this treatment of experience are: first, it is very seldom that the hyper-real can be recreated spontaneously; the almost inevitable failure to do so leads to disappointment and depression. Second, all experience will be mediated by a host of ‘ideal’ versions of that experience which, if allowed to mediate, will provide for the same outputs every time. What you eventually get is repetition and an inability to see yourself out of that repetition. So we become trapped in a cycle of creating inauthentic experiences that will never be enough to satisfy. You can guess what many will find to be the solution: rejection of experience in total—authentic or inauthentic (which is the only type they have any inkling of how to create)—and a return to the solitude of hyper-reality.

I think, by this point, the direction I’m taking is fairly obvious with regards to social media (and Tumblr in particular). Whereas with such media as movies, video games, books (to a diminished degree), etc. we are given a pretty well structured set of parameters to reproduce, the same cannot be said of social media. Let’s say that I’m a fan of sit-coms that revolve around some setting like, for example, a café. Now, when I visit cafes, I have these shows in mind—their general plots, dialogue and the types of characters typically involved—so that I begin to reproduce what I’ve seen. (It must be noted that this isn’t an explicitly conscious project, although it can be, however commonly operating as if by reflex). While it is impossible to perfectly mimic the hyper-real experience of watching the show, I may come close. This is because the dimensions of a ‘café-centered sit-com’ are finite and rather easily recognizable. So much so, in fact, that I could reasonably become annoyed if my friend—who I’ve arranged to meet at some café—‘drops the ball’, so to speak, and does something out of line with the re-creation. (A situation of this sort was humorously depicted in Sartre’s Nausea, when the protagonist’s lover complained that he was always ruining her cinematic moments, usually by saying something banal).

Social media (now: SM) either doesn’t have—or doesn’t have very clear—parameters of this sort. It would appear that SM is the hyper-real replica of reality’s social aspect itself. It is no wonder, then, that we cannot enumerate all of its dimensions, because doing so would be to list everything that is of and in society. I hope the horror of the situation is becoming clear. This is what we are faced with: if SM takes the place of ‘the hyper-real version of ‘social interaction’/’society’’, then all future social interactions (happening in good old capital-R Reality) will be mediated by the glowing ideal of the Internet. And I do believe SM is hyper-real. It provides for all of the benefits of social interaction—communication, solidarity, friendship, etc.—without any of the hairy details involved in actually going outside and maybe being stood-up or bored. If you’re not convinced SM is hyper-real, then consider the following examples that would be impossible in an unmediated interaction.

You’re talking to your best friend online. Knowing each other as well as you two do is great, the conversations are funny and everyone’s always on the same page, but naturally things become formulaic and after a bit of interaction you need a break. No problem. Open a new tab, watch a video, listen to music, read an article, play a game, etc. They’re still there in the chat-window for whenever you want to resume the conversation (in fact, they’re probably doing the same thing on their end). Further, Internet etiquette has evolved to the point where we don’t even have to say ‘bye’ or ‘I’ll be back in a second’ or anything. You can drop a conversation at any time, and pick it back up at any time, and no one cares.

Another example. If you really wanted (and if you had a bit of an inferiority complex) you could easily appear as a very smart, hip, well-informed person. You can see where I’m going with this. If there is ever, in the course of your conversation, a term you’re unfamiliar with you can look it up and appear an expert within seconds. Ditto re ‘have you seen/heard/read the new ____’

Imagine trying to import these examples into a real, unmediated, social experience. It can’t be done. So what happens? The two consequences of hyper-reality still take effect, but more destructively since our attempts are from the outset more futile. We are condemned to a reality where all of our attempts at unmediated social interaction fall utterly flat. What we put in place of authentic social interaction is the creation of semblances. I’m sure you’ve seen this, or perhaps you’ve done it, where you go to some social event (not online) and see people consumed with creating the semblance of a good time for their profiles. This horror reaches, for me, a nasty pitch at concerts where the crowd is more interested in producing a quality youtube video than enjoy the performance. The youtube video becomes more real than the real.  

What was the pessimistic solution again? Reject ‘The Real’ altogether and retreat into the solitude of hyper-reality. In other words, log back onto Tumblr. I pick on Tumblr because, I think, it has the most diverse functions—especially when compared to Facebook or Twitter—and so also has the greatest potential to do damage. One fairly easy to spot consequence of this retreat back to the Internet is the complex of memes, in-jokes, codes-of-conduct, and what might be called the new ‘net dialect’ that has sprung up through SM. What has happened is an utter rejection of The Real by deciding to live and flourish in the hyper-real (what we might think of, not without some hesitation, as the ‘cyber-real’). The anxiety and disappointment common to all experiences with The Real, especially after prolonged exposure to the hyper-real, can only grow disproportionally more hideous as social media expands its influence. I’m worried and feel that more solutions are in order. It is my intuition that the most elegant solution won’t be one that does away with social media, but one that can fit it most succinctly into our delegations of various types of ‘reals’.    

[emmaleesiem-blog]

Reading Blog

Reading Blog #1

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligence/200901/teens-and-parents-in-conflict

Apter, Terri. “Teens and Parents in Conflict.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 19 Jan. 2009, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/domestic-intelligence/200901/teens-and-parents-in-conflict.

Summary:

In “Teens and Parents in Conflict” for Psychology Today, author Terri Apter writes about what causes the disconnect between parent and child during adolescence. Parents often feel that they know their own child front and back but as their child transforms into a teenager, parents often find themselves uncertain about who they’re the parent of. This is because teenagers are changing who they are and are on their way to becoming a new person. Arguments are inevitable when parents don’t recognize their teenager as the person their teen sees themselves as. Furthermore, during adolescence teenagers often want to become totally independent from their parents and want to be seen as responsible and mature. Terri Apter points out that when a parent asks their son or daughter a checking-up question such as whether they have their keys or not, it makes their teenager feel like they’re being treated like a small child again which they loathe. This explains why children lash out so much at their parents for asking them simple questions as they have always done. 

Analysis:

This article relates to my identity as “daughter” because my relationship with my parents is very important to me. I remember facing the same issues with my parents that many young teens do, but not knowing how to deal with my new feelings toward them. I was fortunate enough to pass through my “rebel” phase pretty quickly and come out relatively unscathed. I was also lucky to have parents who gave me a lot of independence growing up which meant that I didn’t face some issues that other children do. My parents never babied me and asked me checking-up questions because they expected me to responsible. Although I was raised to be relatively independent, my year abroad taught me how much I really do depend on my parents. My year abroad was horrible mainly because I didn’t get along with my host family. Unexpected issues arose and although exchange students are advised not to, I found myself calling my real parents almost every day for support and advice. During my time abroad my relationship with my parents became even stronger even though they were so far away, because both my parents and I realized how much we relied upon one another. This article is important to my identity because I think that parent-child relationships are very important and people should work hard to understand what is causing a disruption in a relationship when there is one.

Reading Blog #2

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/casey-cavanagh/why-we-still-need-feminism_b_5837366.html

Cavanagh, Casey. “Why We Still Need Feminism.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/casey-cavanagh/why-we-still-need-feminism_b_5837366.html.

Summary:

In her article, “Why We Still Need Feminism” for the Huffington Post, Casey Cavanagh speaks about what feminism is and what it means to everyone. She begins by addressing the misunderstanding around the word “feminism.” Some people continue thinking of feminists as a “man-hater who hates lipstick, crinkles her nose at stay-at-home moms, and unapologetically supports abortions on demand.” Cavanagh points out that this is the reason why people are backing the anti-feminist movement. Many women think that they don’t need feminism anymore because women can vote now or because women have equal employment opportunities as men. Other women say that they don’t need feminism for more personal reasons like they don’t support sleeping around, or because they already feel equal to men. Cavanagh makes the point that feminism isn’t just for each woman by herself but for humanity in general. Just because here in the United States, women may feel less of a need for feminism doesn’t mean that women and young girls in other countries who are suffering under a patriarchal society don’t. In some countries there are young girls forced into marriage and forced to suffer from marital rape, in other countries female genital mutilation is still prevalent. Furthermore, Cavanagh reasons that feminism isn’t solely for females. Many men in the United States and other countries feel oppressed because they are expected to behave according to the supposed “gender roles.” Feminism is something that should be important for everyone because it promotes equality and it promotes people doing exactly what they want to do whether it be going to school and achieving academic excellence or being a stay at home mom or dad.

Analysis:

I can identify with this article because I am a female and because I am a human. As a female, I think it is super important to stand in solidarity with other women throughout the world against oppression, even if I haven’t experienced the same kind of oppression that they have. In the United States, young girls face sexism and oppression that isn’t as obvious. One example of sexism is the dress code that is implemented in most middle schools and high schools. Although, girls are not being physically harmed, the message we are being sent is that we are expected to show modesty in order for male teachers and male students to be able to act normally. When the school prevents us from going to class because our shoulders are showing, it tells us that they value what men think of our bodies over our education. Of course, I’m not saying young girls should be going to class in excessively revealing clothing, but the dress code is humiliating and unnecessary. This article is also important to me because as a human I believe in equality. I don’t think that everything should be gendered. Why do we feel the need to assign genders to different colors, different toys, different college majors, and even different jobs? I think it’s unfair that society places pressure on men to find a job so they can care for their wives and children, and I think it’s unfair that women are expected to drop everything important to them in order to be suitable for marriage. In countries where women suffer more from oppression, I want women to not fear for their safety because they pursued something that they wanted, and for certain societies to stop placing a woman’s value in her virginity or her beauty. I believe in feminism because I believe in equality and I hope for countries all over the world to someday treat men and women equally.

[witnesstorture]

Shutting down Sessions' hearing by Erica Ewing

I am finding it difficult to write this brief reflection from my J11 experience at the Fast for Justice in DC. Not because I have nothing to say, I usually have too many thoughts to keep up with. I struggle with the idea of sharing my perspective. This information isn’t new or special especially to a community who has been witnessing for years. I don’t know nearly enough and am aware that I never will but I am grateful for the chance to continue learning and growing with you all. I want to say my ability to be arrested was a privilege and isn’t deserving of praise. I knew my body would be safe and I would make it out of January 11 alive and essentially unscathed. Emotionally different but nonetheless safe. I am not comfortable with the idea of praise for these actions mainly because our resistance is necessary and urgent. I am grateful to honor what we are doing and our intentions but we must remember there is always much more to be done.

“Freedom should be much more precious for the human being than all the desires on earth and we should never give it up regardless of how expensive the price must be.” -Tariq Ba Odah

I won’t go into detail of why the confirmation of Jeff Sessions’ for the position of essentially the  “people’s lawyer” was greatly contested. I am grateful our community at Witness Against Torture was part of that resistance. At that time we knew Sessions was an exemplary “Tough on Crime” candidate with a reprehensible record, including his support of the use of torture. His two day hearing was interrupted by many activists protesting and bringing to light his trail of racist, sexist, and xenophobic sentiments. WAT headed to the hearings on January 11 with a clear message; NO TORTURE SESSIONS.  

I woke up on January 11 heavy. I felt grateful to wake up surrounded by community and ready to act but still vigilant in the need to slow down and reflect on what this day meant. 15 years of destruction of human dignity.

I drank my tea from the porcelain cup belonging to Musab Omar Ali. A Yemeni man, captured on September 11, 2002, held without charge for 14 years. (I now know he was transferred to Oman on January 16.) I felt heavy for many reasons but mostly because I knew our fast was an act of solidarity with hunger strikers, but when we are free to eat again they continue to languish and wait in uncertainty.

After breaking our fast and spending time reflecting together the handful of us planning to interrupt congressional hearings headed out. I was given strength knowing there were other actions my WAT family would participate in, simultaneous to our own. They would be taking over the streets and eventually the Hart Senate Building to publicly mourn the 9 men who died while imprisoned at Guantánamo and continue to demand its closure.

We made our way to the building and stand in the rotunda area waiting in line until a group of police lead us up the marble staircase to the hearing room. One police officer almost amusingly asks “you’re not gonna make any trouble are you?” to which our small group gently chuckles and brushes the comment off, and I simply shake my head. Similarly to what people must feel when they see a dozen orange jumpsuits in the streets of DC, my thoughts are jarred by the mundane “business as usual” approach of those who traverse these halls of congress. Their complete disconnect to the consequences their actions have on real live people.

We are led into the hearing room through a pair of massive wooden doors and I immediately hear the voice of Civil Rights Champion John Lewis. I quietly find one of the few open seats scattered throughout the room keeping my eyes on where my friends are able to find seats.

I am nervous and trying to remember my words, the words of the men, and why I am here. I am brought back to the where I am by Lewis, and his words as they ring throughout the room “But we need someone who is gonna stand up, speak up and speak out for the people…” Although this felt like as good of time as any to stand up, I looked around at my fellow WAT members and their eyes didn’t meet mine. I sat patiently.

Next up to speak was former U.S. Marshal Jesse Seroyer, he begins by speaking in support of Sessions and I once again feel the anger boiling. “He’s a good and decent man,” he said, “He believes in law and order for all people.” Again here is this narrative of “good”, the false belief that our country has somehow ever operated under “equal justice for all”. The idea that decency comes from your ability to sign policies of destruction and discrimination, all with a smile on your face. The man finishes speaking and I am at the edge of my seat. I wait for my friend Don to stand up,“Close Gitmo, Stop Torture”, he is calling out as he is removed swiftly from the room. My mind constantly wondering ‘Who are the real troublemakers here?’

As soon as the door closes I stand up shaking, with my anger outweighing my nervousness. Our point is to disrupt as much as possible and not let business continue. I pull out my sign which reads “We The People Must Do More To End War” and start speaking. I am trying to collapse the worlds between people sitting in this room and the human beings I have spent my week focusing on. Human beings sitting in cages.  I  make sure I am making eye contact with as many people as possible. I couldn’t tell you what I said, the words came out of my mouth and just as soon evaporated from my mind. I know it was about the men and their families, the humanity we refuse to acknowledge.

I am quickly and forcefully pulled through the large wooden doors. My sign is taken from me and the only words my brain catches, as my hands are tightly bound behind my back, are “I thought you told me you weren’t gonna cause any trouble?” My brain is reeling, as it always is when I spend time in places where “Justice” happens.

I am mostly infuriated by the toothless words used to defend evil systems. The banal way people sit behind desks and walls writing policies that will deny dignity and still feel able to claim that they are operating under the values of “liberty and freedom”.

I am taken downstairs where I find Don and we give each other warm glances. I speak freely with my arresting officer, occasionally she responds or nods as she continues to remove all my belongings and pats me down. It is both my first arrest and the first time she has arrested someone. I can tell she is nervous, as she makes comments looking for ways to demonize us and justify her work.

We were put into the back of a van and we waited. My anxiety ebbed and flowed as I am not a fan of tight spaces. I try to collapse the worlds again and refocus on liberation and the men. There is no comparison to my time confined and the suffering these men and so many others have been subjected to. I gently sing some of the songs we have shared throughout the week and they bring me comfort.  We sit and wait. Eventually making it to the police station where we are brought inside. I find great comfort in the large group of familiar and loving faces, the festival of resistance. We spend many hours together discussing the actions and passing the time as we are individually processed and booked. Experiences there are ones I hold close and reflect on as I continue to look at the system in both an institutional and interpersonal lens, (there is too much to share on these thoughts for this ‘brief’ reflection.)

I end my day heading back to First Trinity Lutheran Church where I am greeted with love and community. I have similar feelings now to how I began the day: grateful but still vigilant. The real troublemakers continue unscathed while so many under the control of this unmerciful system feel hopeless.

Looking back at Sessions, one of many in the long line of creeps that were confirmed. Our fears about him were sadly, but not surprisingly, true. Most recently, he advised Trump on increasing the population at Guantanamo stating “it’s just a very fine place for holding these kind of dangerous criminals.” The deception and outright lies continue.

The canyons seem to be widening. And the destruction of dignity is raging unabated. It can be hard to get through a day. I am given strength when I think about my time with Witness Against Torture. The necessity of being rooted in the stories, words, and art from the men in Guantanamo are the things which continue to guide me and keep me going. I hold onto the responsibility we each have in creating the world we all deserve. It will take courage to continue but because of all the beautiful resistance I have witnessed I will continue to hope and resist.

Peace,

Erica

Shutting down Sessions’ hearing by Erica Ewing was originally published on Witness Against Torture

[envisiongradnetwork]

Are young people feeling more alone despite being more ‘connected’ than ever?

At our Grad Board meeting in Bristol last month, we discussed the issue of loneliness, whether it’s related to social media and how community can help to solve the problem - here we share their thoughts with you and invite you to tell us what you think...

The problem: A study in 2014 found that compared to other EU countries, UK citizens are less likely to have strong friendships or know their neighbors. This research has caused newspapers to brand the UK as the loneliness capital of Europe. (Office for National Statistics.

How connected do you think you are to your neighbors? Do you feel that statistic is true?

Despite some of the group feeling close with our neighbors, grads could recognize that there is an issue of seclusion and community divide between the community that lives in their area and incomers, like university students.

“There’s a paradox because people who are moving here partly because its one of the cheapest, but still respected cities in the country, but also because the sort of hipster, working class vibe is appealing, but the people moving here also destroys the working class hipster vibes that they’re moving here for. The only way to really deal with that is to really integrate anyone who comes in with the community. Really make them feel welcome and just let things evolve and grow.”

Do you thinking that social media is the big drive behind that statistic?

Even with the need for integration and acceptance of newcomers, social media affects the loneliness of the country. On a positive note, it allows you to talk to people all over the world, you can interact with someone when it’s urgent, you can show solidarity with people elsewhere, and it may have even made us more social as we can connect to a lot of different kinds of people and opened that bubble of community. 

Social media allows you to think before speaking and to hide your emotions, while at the same time you can’t tell how what you say affects the other person. Though this latter point could also be seen as a negative of social media, they wondered if social media was to blame for the issue of loneliness.

“I think you can’t blame social media for degradation of conversation, because social media is what you make it. It’s only the people that are using it that are choosing how to use it.”

Others pointed to media for dividing people, the ‘echo chamber’ effect that Facebook creates of similar beliefs on your news feed, and culture as reasons for loneliness in the UK. The grads noted that older people, who are less likely to be using social media, are feeling lonelier than ever as well, with less community events and activities to attend. Loneliness effects all age generations, “I don’t think it’s just down to social media, people have just stopped caring a little bit.”

Feeling of belonging and proving oneself was also seen as a big contributor to loneliness. One grad stated that when she is alone in public, she takes out her phone so she doesn’t give off the perception of loneliness, even though she’s not. We have hundred of Facebook friends and followers, but how many do you actually know and could rely on? The sensitivity of how we look to others may be more important than building our real relationships.

How do you think as a community should we battle this loneliness?

Putting the phone away, making an effort to smile at strangers, and just being more connected to life around you and disconnected from the internet could all help us combat loneliness.

“Do something simple like when you see someone walking down the street, like smile at people because they’ll smile back. I think nowadays when you make eye contact with someone you feel awkward and look to the ground, but just smile at them instead.”

Even so, we need to get over our fear of rejection when it comes to social situations. There can be mistrust when people talk to you and it is not always safe to have conversations with strangers, but sometimes it’s good to open up. The grads saw that perhaps due to the mannerisms of the British people and discomfort about getting too close to people or showing one’s feelings, the social culture of the British could be what is causing the high levels of loneliness in the UK in particular.

Overall, our grads saw social media as a catalyst for loneliness, but not the cause of it. Changing little things in your daily life and being aware of how you could be socially active outside the internet could help combat loneliness in both yourself and others around you.

What do out think? Post your comments in the Grad LinkedIn group or tweet us @EnvisionUK