#surely this is uncharted territory in the mapping of human experiences

[carlyraejepsans]

tragic! trans person no longer merely tolerating the act of existing just now realising their entire wardrobe is ass

[lifeonlockdown-turtlepuppet]

Day 2 of Lockdown - 25/03/2020

Intro

Hey to anyone who’s there! This page is where I’ll be keeping a diary of each aspect of my lock down. I’ve created it more for myself, as I’m extremely interested in the effects of pandemics and disease (Not just biologically, mentally, or politically, but in all aspects including those and beyond, really) and I hope to be able to use this as a study into humans reactions to isolation and the interruption to the everyday routines and systems we place ourselves in.

To me, this is crazy, fascinating, and terrible.

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Update

Today I’m a bit bored and after yesterday already struggled a little this morning to find things to do. However, I managed. I haven’t seen anyone outside however from what a member of my household who had to go out to pick up medicine has told me, there are still plenty of people in stores. This worries me that not even these measures are making people take Covid-19 seriously.

I found this song today from a trailer for Narcos.  Slept last night - 2300 Woke up - 6:30 AM Today’s Stats: UK total cases -  8,227 (+ 1427 from  yesterday) UK total deaths - 433 (+87 from yesterday) Global Mortality Rate - 4.5%

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Food

Today I will be making bruschetta for dinner. 

Yesterday, I made the aforementioned bean chilli. After feeding everyone, there was what I can only estimate to be around 4kg of chilli left (estimated by comparing weight of 2kg bag of red lentils). It was a little sweeter than i prefer this time, i don’t think i added enough chilli powder, however it was still widely enjoyed. I loosely followed this recipe with a few personal  and circumstance adjustments.

Options still available for dinner:

Fried Rice 

Lentil Soup

Bruschetta  

Lentil Daal

Makeshift-Roast-Dinner

Baked Potatoes

Chip stuffs

Bean Chilli (already cooked)

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Activity and Health

I’m still playing animal crossing and plan to do some other things today such as plant some rocket for my roommates tortoises to eat. 

My activity options include:

Indoor gardening

Painting

Digital Art

Animation

Animal Crossing + other games

Cooking

Calling friends

Keeping this diary

I still don’t have any plans for exercise routines but might pick up something later on. Mental Health Splurge:

Health wise I feel okay, but clearly lazier and more reclusive. I’m also stressed as a teacher is making posts about online tests despite being previously told that we were done with the course. They mentioned this in a post at the beginning of the week however didn’t mention that it would be timed. As such I thought it would be posted and we would be allowed to complete it in our own time. However, today I was told its a timed test. To me this is was too short term notice and unfair not to clarify in this uncharted territory.  Also, due to the noise in my house I wouldn’t be able to complete the test well had i been studying for a few days. I know this due to my past experiences of failed tests or greatly lowered marks when there was as much as a person repeatedly clicking a pen. This setting wouldn’t accurately show my ability at all. As such I’ve decided to ignore it to be honest, as it’s far too stressful for me to be worrying about (I’m realising now that my security around my results is a lot lower than I first thought).  I hope that this does not annoy my teacher or make her negatively biased to put me forward for a lower grade than I deserve. As well as this, I can already feel this lifestyle reverting backwards to how it was before I moved here. This was my plan, and so I’m fine with an internet and indoors based lifestyle - but it reminds me of abuse. I also can feel very easily how my mentality could slip back into worthlessness and I’m listening to similar music I would at the time of living with my abuser. This already feels unhealthy but I’m trying to convince myself that this is completely different and I really have changed and grown as a person since leaving. I already feel a little bit broken inside, and I can remember the worst parts of my life.  It doesn’t help that my abuser still texts me over a year later and I can’t bring myself to remove her in case she breaks things of mine that she still has and  refuses to give back / says she will give back but I’d have to meet her face to face in her house (my previous house) to get it. (Even then I don’t truly know if she would) To help prevent and stop this I’m going to make myself more busy than I have today and try to be around the rest of the people in my house more. I’m also considering using my daily exercise as a walk around the area to get some fresh air. Either that, or I’ll sit out the window like I used to when I first came here when it get’s dark. Lo-fi, stars, and fresh air.  While writing, I’ve also realised that these posts will be good evidence for my therapist when those sessions are eventually able to restart, as no appointments are taking place unless absolutely urgent and serious.  tl;dr Mental health has worsened, but I’m gonna try and do some things to combat it. I think it’s worsened due to memories of previous abuse brought up by social isolation and grade stress.

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Work

Over the years, I’ve discovered that I really require a sense of productivity and work routine in order to feel successful and avoid disappointment in myself. As such today I wrote a to-do list on my hand as usual. Today This said:

“To do

-Start Grant application -Work On MAP Part -Cook Bruschetta -Plant Rocket -Blog post”

Yesterday I wasn’t able to start my grant application, and to be honest I’m a little hesitant about applying considering the situation as I’m not sure how I’ll complete the project. My friend suggested if I’m unable to create what I want, I could submit a mock up instead.  I’ve been watching a few AMVs and animation memes which are reminding me how awesome it is to be able to create something so beautiful from scratch; I might add some personal projects to my to do list later now that I have all this free time.

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TL;DR:

I’m a Scottish girl who does art, cooks, is vegan, and plays games who has recently been placed in lock-down along with the rest of the UK. I’ll be making a daily diary of it all and maybe eved-n posting some art if I make any. Read the rest to find out today’s Daily update incl. Food, Activity & Health, and Work.

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If you read this far, thank you so much and I hope my updates are useful and informative and that we can all stick together and see this pandemic as not only a thing to be afraid of, but also a think to be fascinated and educated about.

ByeBye~

[scotfroelich]

The Simultaneous Genius and Mediocrity of Mike Birbiglia

A number of storyteller/theatre-type friends on social media recently clamored about the genius that is Mike Birbiglia. So much so, that I thought, "Hell, I better check this guy out!"

As a writer/storyteller, I'm constantly on the lookout for new styles, motifs, and tips I can learn from other storytellers. Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, for example, is an eye-opener in how thoughtfully expressing anger, frustration, sorrow, depression, and humor can actually be beneficial for not only the storyteller but the audience. Something we actively try to avoid is "theatre as therapy," and Gadsby sidesteps this entirely while convincing the audience why the things that have happened to her should also matter to them.

By contrast, Birbiglia's latest 90-minute special New One is an exercise in already presuming the things that happen to him matter to us, when there's no reason they should. He possesses all the same skills and talents: humor, timing, pace, variation of pitch and tone, patience, and a willingness to "go there." But, the "there" for Birbiglia isn't some mystical map to uncharted territories. It's a heavy pickax into the potholes of well-worn roads.

While Gadsby's story is about genuine human suffering, and the need for society to do better - to be better, Birbiglia's story is about an upper-middle class white man failing up. By the end of his nearly 90-minute story (which is full of memorable, well-crafted moments of storytelling), we realize we've been duped into feeling for a guy who lost his favorite couch due to his own inattentiveness, and FINALLY learned after ten years of marriage that he shouldn't have to be asked to do the dishes. That's it. 90 minutes. He lost a couch. His wife shouldn't have to beg him to do the dishes.

At every step of the way, he repeats a pattern of being almost touched into decency and kindness, only to resolve in a punchline about how that's really annoying for him. The set focuses on he and his wife's decision to have a baby, and the year or so that follows. He constantly reminds the audience that he never wanted a child, which functions well as a comedic device, in part due to his exceptional talent as a storyteller. But the reality is, he's reminding us of his reluctance to be a parent, and that he chose to be one anyway. He refers to his wife as alternately crazy or illogical in coded terms, both societal tropes so firmly-ingrained that you almost don't notice at first. "Oh yeah! Here's the part where we laugh at her for hormonally demanding [insert random food here] - that's funny because women are hormonal!" Nary a man has performed a set about pregnancy without trotting out that old chestnut. It's funny (I guess?) but it's boring, and his wife is now a punchline.

And here's the thing. Birbiglia is not acting with bad intent. I'm sure that moment actually happened to him and his wife, he's explaining it for comic effect, and he's gifted at it. But why tell the same joke for the millionth time? We're once again faced with a person capable of so much more resting on easy tropes for laughs, in a culture where they no longer exist in a vacuum. His material is tired: "White man is cajoled into parenthood by pushy wife and is supplanted in importance by the child." And if that's his genuine experience, I can't feel sorry for him. We're all responsible for our own choices in life, though he makes it out like he was a captive observer in the whole thing, including a bit about how he had surgery to be able to help conceive - which, dude. If you didn't want to have a kid, WHY would you do that?! The audience is left with no assurance he respects his wife or the effort she puts in, or that he intends to be a part of the family for any reason other than that his wife is the only woman who will settle for him. That's not a compliment, and it's not a promise to be an equal partner.

So, if you're looking for a master class in storytelling, you could watch either Nanette or New One, but if you want a master class in making that storytelling matter, Nanette is where it's at. Mike Birbiglia is a white guy doing his best; which is to say, taking a mountain of talent and doing only what's necessary to get a laugh. And truthfully, he's under no obligation to do better. But he could, and we don't have to watch him reinforce such mediocrity.

[bentonpena]

The Ways We Remain Immature Children, Even as Mature Adults

The Ways We Remain Immature Children, Even as Mature Adults http://bit.ly/2PbcZQf

In discussions about growing up, you’ll sometimes hear people say something like, “When you’re young, you think adults really have it together. But when you become an adult yourself, you realize grown-ups actually don’t have any idea what they’re doing either!” This is shared as some kind of conspiratorial secret — a ubiquitous-yet-under-discussed truth.

Yet it is largely bollocks — a justification for continuing to flounder even as you advance in age. We personally know plenty of adults who do have it together, who do know what they’re doing, who are able to operate as very capable grown-ups. While it’s true that everyone undergoes continual, sometimes crisis-filled seasons of change, and faces uncharted, and initially perplexing territory throughout their lives, by the time you reach your thirties, you should have developed a decent amount of emotional and practical intelligence — a set of adaptable mental tools that allow you to adequately grapple with any problem, no matter how novel. If you haven’t developed such a capacity, then something has gone wrong either with the upbringing to which you were subjected, or the personal development track you self-selected; either way, this lack ought to be intentionally addressed, rather than excused as a universality.

Nonetheless, while everyone should strive for greater maturity (which is characterized by these 33 marks), it is in truth a state that can never wholly be attained. Given the inherent weaknesses of human nature, and the relative brevity of the lifespan, aspects of our selves invariably remain immature, no matter our age.

And this fact should be understood and acknowledged, not so it can be used as a justification for infantile behavior, but to gain greater compassion for ourselves, and for other people.

So today we’ll unpack just what these areas of perennial immaturity are, using insights from Harry and Bonaro Overstreet’s The Mind Alive (1954), which surfaces the following four ways in which “the human being remains a child all his life”:

Depends on Others for Help

As a child, you are almost completely dependent on adults for your food, shelter, clothing, schedule, recreation, and decision-making. As you grow up, you become more independent and self-reliant . . . but never entirely so.

This is obviously true in a practical sense: we don’t grow the food we eat, make the cars we drive, or create the media we consume, and even the handiest among us still have to occasionally call a plumber or hire a contractor.

But our lifelong dependence is also true when it comes to the realms of emotion and cognition.   

Nobody can be on top of it and in control 100% of the time; everyone needs to know they can count on others now and again. There are times in adulthood when one needs a break from taking care of others, in order to be taken care of oneself. As the Overstreets note, there is a kind of dependence an individual “wants to keep — and must be permitted to keep” which involves:

taking time out from his adulthood, now and then, and letting someone else be ‘strong’ in his stead — when he is overtired, lonely, disappointed, or just feeling foolish and irresponsible. If he does not have a healthy chance to abdicate his adulthood occasionally, he tends to abdicate it unhealthily all the time.

Having someone be strong in your stead isn’t just a matter of being able to occasionally lean on people emotionally, but to sometimes delegate your authority to others as well. Being the sovereign decision maker regarding every.single.choice is absolutely exhausting. Sometimes even adults simply need to submit. That’s why people hire a nutrition or fitness coach; “Just tell me exactly what to eat.” “Just tell me exactly what workout to do.” It’s part of why religion is appealing too; even the most mature, self-actualized adult finds it debilitating and paralyzing to try to construct an entirely DIY meaning for life.

No matter your age, there are areas where you simply want someone else to give you the recipe, pass on the instructions, tell you what to do.

Feels Puzzled About Himself

The Overstreets observe: “Every normal youngster . . . is constantly trying to find out who he is, where he comes from, where he fits in, what he wants to do, what he ought to do, and what he can and cannot do.”

Even as we get older, we continue to feel some degree of perplexity about ourselves and our place in the world; in fact, these feelings can only deepen as the questions we ask get more profound and complex, and as the answers we think we receive end up being faulty, or we inexplicably fail to act on those which we know to be true.

Indeed, our “many-sided nature” ensures we often have contradictory impulses that never get fully resolved. This fact drives us back on our inherent dependence on others. As the Overstreets write: “[An adult] never outgrows the need of someone to whom he can turn for insights beyond his own; to whom he can voice his doubts about himself; and who makes him feel he is cared about whole even when he seems to himself a welter of pieces that do not fit together.” This sounding board could be a spouse, friend, mentor, or minister, “But he needs someone.”

Faces Unsolved Social/Relational Problems

A child is constantly having to learn what is expected of him; what the rules are; what is acceptable; what is called for by his human environment. No one of us ever puts this problem behind once for all. We never fully master even the more intimate parts of our social environment: never fully know the few people with whom we live nor the range and depth of our own line of work. Since our social environment keeps changing, moreover, such mastery as we do gain is always becoming dated.

As the Overstreets recognize, no matter your age, you never stop having times when you feel awkward, when you feel like a fish out of water, where you’re not sure how to act and what to do or say. Every person you encounter is a world unto himself, represents a completely unique combination of personality traits, so that you can never know the exact approach to take in befriending, arguing with, leading, or comforting another human being. Each individual you encounter is a new puzzle to unlock, as is each environment in which there resides a group of individuals. And even this is not a one-and-done type challenge: every person and institution, as well as the very fabric of the culture and the structure of the economic marketplace, changes over time, and you change over time, so that even when you do learn the lay of the many interpersonal lands you navigate, you have to update their maps over time, and find new ways to recombine yourself with external realities.

Possesses Undeveloped Capacities

A mature individual should be capable in areas where a duty is placed upon him; he should have the competence to carry out the roles and responsibilities in his life. So too, he should strive towards lifelong learning and becoming a “T-shaped man” — possessing both mastery in one area, and a breadth of knowledge in many others. But, no one has either the time nor the inclination to become competent in every subject and skill. The Overstreets observe:

the human being becomes a grown person not by carrying forward on an even front all the capacities with which he was born, but by the selective development of a few of these and their integration into a working whole. Since we thus grow up by neglecting some of our powers — ignoring them; ruling them out — each of us remains partly undeveloped. We sometimes say of a man that he may be an expert in his own line, but he’s a child when it comes to politics, finance, science, or what not. Every person is a child in those areas where his capacities are scarcely more developed than they were in childhood.

Maybe you’re extremely handy with DIY skills, but understand nothing about how the stock market works. Or you know everything about Russian literature, but not a lick about hunting. Every adult is “mature” is some areas of knowledge, and “immature” in others.

Developing the “Parental Orientation” and Extending Tenderness to the Immature in Yourself and Others

Understanding the ways in which all adults perennially remain as children can help us in two ways.

First, it helps us develop greater self-compassion. As an adult, it can be disorienting and demoralizing to bump against the parts of yourself that haven’t grown up at the same rate as others. But while you should try to address all the resident immaturities in your life, especially those which impinge on your personal progress, you should also realize that continuing to struggle with some of the incompleteness you experienced as a child is normal, natural, inevitable.

In the second place, understanding the ways we remain children helps us develop more patience with other people — an enhanced ability to offer them what the Overstreets call “the indispensable emotion”: tenderness.

The human experience is a difficult one: confusing, uncertain, and pockmarked with pitfalls. There are so many ways, whether one is young or old, to expose one’s immaturities (often attached to insecurities) to others.

These humiliations happen in public:

[An individual] encounters at myriad different points the authority of public opinion or of expert opinion in fields where he is not sure of himself. He talks politics and economics; voices his convictions about art, education, science, religion, world affairs; and joins groups and takes on responsibilities within them. As he enters each situation, his ignorance goes with him as surely as his knowledge; his need for approval and support as surely as his independence.

And they happen within our most intimate relationships, especially the pressure-cooker of marriage, in which a man puts “himself into a position where at least one other person is likely to find out what the ways are in which he has not grown up and what the nagging doubts are that he has about himself.”

Knowing that all of one’s fellow travelers are “lonely, perplexed, and still incomplete in growth,” can allow us to be more tolerant of their shortcomings. As the Overstreets conclude:

What this all comes to is that tenderness in the human scene cannot be simply an emotion that moves along one line in one direction: from parent to offspring. All through life we have to take turns, as it were, being ‘parents’ to one another — because we all take turns at being children. Tenderness, therefore — a warm acceptance of what is incomplete but capable of growth — must be so extended throughout our human society that it becomes a veritable field of force. It must be extended from each person’s strength and maturity to each other person’s weakness and immaturity.

The Overstreets call this stance the “parental orientation,” defining it as “the capacity to extend a warm, nurturing welcome to what is young and undeveloped in a fellow human being.”

Approaching people with tenderness, with the parental orientation, is often needed within marriage, but also within friendships, and with co-workers and strangers too. It is not a patronizing attitude, nor is it a call to “pamper people or to condone evil.” Instead, the Overstreets explain, it “establish[es] the only condition we know under which growth can continuously take place.”

This is to say that when you approach others’ foibles as an opportunity to “blame and belittle; to humiliate and punish; to reproach and scold,” you tend simply to make the person defensive and/or dejected but bring them no closer to learning from their mistakes. If, on the other hand, you approach someone’s immature failings with a “Hey, everyone falls down sometimes; everyone messes up; here’s another way of looking at or doing this that you might consider,” then he or she will have the space and security to actually grow from the experience.

When you’re frustrated with someone (or yourself), it can literally help to step back and see a bewildered eight-year-old in front of you. Just a kid trying to make it in the world. That child within all of us never wholly grows up, and never stops making himself known.

As the Overstreets conclude: “the human being needs to receive tenderness as long as he continues to be mentally and emotionally young in ways that make him feel inadequate and incomplete — which is to say as long as he lives.”

The post The Ways We Remain Immature Children, Even as Mature Adults appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

via The Art of Manliness http://bit.ly/2NeG3FZ December 10, 2019 at 08:34PM

[travellinghistorystudent]

A little advice for all my budding and or first-time researchers out there, from someone who knows (sort of) what she’s doing:

1. Start with questions. Pretty basic, right? But seriously, write that shit down. I don’t care if you’re in sociology, history, chemistry, biology, whatever. Write down what you’re looking for. It’s easy (at least in the humanities. I’m not sure about science) to have so much fun going down little rabbit trails that you forget what your initial goal was. It’s okay if your questions change (they almost certainly will), but write them down. It helps.

2. Expect things to change, and be flexible when they do. The first thing I found out when I started doing my own research was that, once you’re actually doing whatever it is you do (in my case, reading a lot of documents because I’m a historian), nothing is going to stay in the tidy neat box that your research plan came in. In my case, I found sources that I didn’t think I would find (and didn’t find sources that I was convinced were there), processed information that absolutely goofed up all my expectations, and then ran up against deadlines that short-circuited some of my grand schemes. I imagine the same things happen in science when an experiment doesn’t work or doesn’t yield the results you expected. This is okay. It is normal, and it probably means you’re doing something right. Be open to stuff that’s changing, and learn how to incorporate new ideas. Go with the flow. 

3. Ask for help/feedback. This can seem hard to do, especially if you’re either in uncharted territory in your field or if you’re trying to prove to everyone that you can do independent research (both of these were me on my first independent project). But sometimes having an older student, or your mentor, or someone else you trust look over your work and give you constructive feedback on whatever you have is super helpful. I remember going to my advisor with the absolute worst first draft of my research paper and I was tearing my hair out because the data wasn’t gelling the way it should, and she took one look at it and was able to suggest another way of analyzing things that was very fruitful. She couldn’t do the analysis; that was my job. But she could help me find a way to use what I had, because I was too close to my work. See what I mean?

4. Discover your own process and use it. We all should know how we process and organize information. For me, I take notes on paper and then make oodles of diagrams on white boards (I once had ten wheel-in whiteboards in one conference room. The custodial staff was not amused). If you like lists, venn diagrams, outlines, concept maps, spreadsheets... whatever helps you see what you’re looking at, use that. And trial and error is okay. It took me years of scrambling through lists and outlines to learn that I loved concept maps. Find what works for you, then stick to your guns. 

5. Remember: you are not your research. Two components to this one. First: take a break once in a while. You are not a machine. Your life exists outside the lab, the library, or your study cave. Go for a walk. Eat something (no seriously, do that. It’s super easy to forget). Talk with a friend or a family member. Cuddle your pet. Then go back to work. Second: YOUR WORTH IS NOT DEFINED BY THIS WORK. This is super hard to remember. I’m still working on this, and I’ve been researching for three years now. If this project takes longer, or your results blow up in your face (literally or figuratively), or whatever goes wrong... this does not, not, NOT mean that you are a worthless human or a bad scholar. You are human. To quote my brother (also a historian): “I am a person. You are a person. We are all people, and it’s okay.”

So there you go. Add anything if you think it needs it (particularly for the sciences, because that’s outside what I know well), but these are my general go-tos for research. Good luck, guys.