#where else will you experience such a large mass of people crying over fictional eggs. its incredible lmao

[pixiecaps]

ate breakfast feeling better about today!! theres something nice about a shared type of mourning in a community like this. truly is a one of a kind experience till the end

[andhumanslovedstories]

what I’ve read 2017 (books 7-10)

Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, Marlene Zuk

A Time to Dance, Padma Venkatraman

Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, Rebecca Traister

Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston

or, God made bugs kinky; we explain so many things through interpretative dance, maybe it’s time for interpretative dance to be explained; no not that election the other election;  and this book about depression made me more depressed

Nonfiction: Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World, by Marlene Zuk (1/15)

  Despite the first part of the title, which is the only part I read before I immediately checked this book out, Sex on Six Legs is in fact about much more than just insect sex. The majority of the book focuses on other aspects of insect communities and relationships, as Zuk takes a plethora on nonsex angles to examine the intricate interdependence of these highly sophisticated social structures. You have to read most of the book to get to the sex, which is good because all of the book is interesting and gosh I’d never thought about the complexities of insects this way and boy does it make you question how humans consider ourselves so unique in our complexity when insects are just as complex while also being staggeringly diverse in that complexity, yes, all of this is true, but I’m not here to lie to you. My main takeaway from this book has to be that, yall, bugs fuck so weird. 

  Yall. 

  Yall. 

  They fuck the weirdest. Bugs fuck like xenophiles aren’t thinking big enough. Bugs read your Mass Effect fanfic and they aren’t impressed by your sex scenes. Gimme them vaginas that store multiple deposits of sperm so that the female can select whichever she wants to fertilize her eggs. Gimme them males who answer the question “what that dick do” with “scoop out my competitor’s sperm, obviously, while ejaculating like someone dropped a mentos in diet coke.” Yall, I find out that ant queens mate once, in a midair orgy as they fly to their new hive, and that’s their store of sperm for the rest of their lives. There’s competitive secret egg fucking. There’s exploding penises. There’s a lot of death. Insect sex (Insex? no. no let’s not go with that) is as diverse and otherworldly as insect social structures are, and a book like this should be mandatory reading for anyone doing science fiction or fantasy world building. The natural world is weirder than your imagination. And Zuk is a good writer to escort you through it, with clear expertise paired with a minimum of jargon, a sense of the best insect anecdotes, and the kind of dry humor you often find in science writing about traditionally esoteric or disgusting subjects—a convivial kind of concession that, yes, this is what I’ve dedicated my life to studying, yes, I can see how that might seem an odd choice, no, I’m not embarrassed in the slightest, now please follow me as we find out what that dick do.

Fiction: A Time to Dance, by Padma Venkatraman (1/16)

  I struggle with books written in verse, largely since I spend the book wondering why it isn’t just written in prose. If I’d noticed A Time to Dance was entirely in verse when I’d picked it up at the library, I might not have brought it home. Having said that, small freeverse chapters do allow you different opportunities for writing style and flow, and Venkatraman takes advantage of both the possibility for increased lyricism and increased fragmentation to convey dance and trauma. The novel centers on Veda, a teenage dancer of Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance. Her career is derailed after an accident after a competition costs Veda her right leg. The book covers Veda’s relationship with her body, her family, and her dance, as the accident forces her to dig deeper into the spirituality behind physicality. It’s dance as dance and dance as prayer, which works well (I grudgingly admit) as verse.

Nonfiction: Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, by Rebecca Traister (1/29)

  I’m going through the books in the order I started them, rather than the order I finished them. Usually they’re the same thing. Sometimes, as is the case here, the book takes a long time to get through. It turns out that this January I was not really feeling reading a book examining the impact of the 2008 election. Especially when the first half was, “Why did Hillary Clinton lose?” Traister opens the book talking about her own conversion from a John Edwards supporter (hey remember when we thought he wasn’t a piece of shit?) who thought Clinton was too compromised a candidate to a Clinton supporter sobbing in public the night Hillary conceded. She talks about the transition of Hillary Rodham to Hillary Clinton and the decades she spent as the lightening rod of feminism in politics, from taking her husband’s name some years after marriage because it was hurting him in the polls, to why Hillary Clinton has always been her most politically popular when she is suffering personal lows. And post 2016, it’s fascinating studying Clinton’s genderless (or probably more accurately, masculine) 2008 campaign, where after a career of focusing on women’s issues, Clinton moved them to the background, to her detriment.

  But it’s not a book about Hillary Clinton. She is the largest figure in it, but Traister analyzes Sarah Palin’s brand of conservative womanhood, the Obama bros and their gender troubles, Michelle Obama (who comes off amazingly in this book, Traister straight up admits that when she was reporting on the campaign she had to call her editor and be like, “I can’t report on this woman any more, I now love her too much”; the analysis of Michelle as reluctant political wife with a complicated relationship to her country is one of the standout sections of the book), media figures like Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and one of the parts I found most interesting, Elizabeth Edwards. Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton form an interesting tryptic of the new political wife—women who are as accomplished as their husband, who are routinely credited as the brains of the partnership, and who struggle publically with traditional femininity (which is especially complicated for Michelle Obama as a black woman) and political ambition.

Nonfiction: Get it Done When You’re Depressed: 50 Strategies for Keeping Your Life on Track, by Julie A. Fast and John D. Preston (1/18)

  I picked up this book because I was starting school again, because I was feeling mature and aware of my problems, because I’ll pick up anything even self-help related. (Sidenote: self-help is my number one guilty pleasure. I’ll read self-help books on whatever, problems I have and problems I don’t. I’ve read about raising your child who has ADHD, about dating after divorce, separating your life from narcissist parents, dating multiple men at once, and reentering the workforce after decades of teaching in academia. My ultimate wish fulfilment is anything that promises me a solution in 300 pages or less. ) 

  The book’s chapters, each a different strategy for being productive while depressed, are a few pages long and rigidly formatted: an explanation of a problem caused by depression, a testimony from someone with depression, a testimony from author Julie Fast on her own experiences with depression, an explanation from Dr. John Preston as to why depressed brains do this, and some advice on implementing the advice. Most of the advice made sense—keep a schedule, get sleep, find the place that you work the best—while other made sense but were also a deep affront to my soul—namely if you can’t do something, just ask someone else to do. The visceral horror I felt reading this advice has forced me to confront how I think about my own and other people’s mental illness. (also an affront: maybe drink less caffeine, which I’m gonna pretend I didn’t read because I’ve been trying to drink less caffeine because it makes me jittery and now I can’t stop taking naps which are taking over my days, so I think jitteriness is less of a detriment than the exhaustion, and by the way, this sequence of trial and error body balancing is perfect microcosm for trying to cope with depression.)

  I’ve had a check tire light on in my car for weeks now, a light that, oh boy, I should do something about, but every aspect of checking the tires, from finding the pressure gauge and actually using it, to figuring out the steps to take if there actually is a problem, seems like so much effort that it’s easier to ignore the problem. Which translates to, it’s easier to force my hand by making the situation a crisis than it is to motivate myself to do preventative maintenance. It’s occurred to me that I could ask Dad to do this for me. Or ask him to at least come with me to the garage. Why don’t I? Answer: because I am capable of handling this tire if I function at my best and make it a priority, because Dad might ask how long this has been a problem and I’ll have to admit that it’s been weeks, because a serious car problem would drain what’s left of my savings, because Dad will be so ashamed of his lazy adult daughter that he’ll never respect or love me again (I never said these were all reasonable excuses.) So I don’t ask him to help with this. And I think less of the author for admitting that she would.

  It’s more acceptable to hate yourself for your mental illness than it is to hate other people, because self-hatred at least allows you to be both victim and victimizer. But I judge people for procrastinating on the things they know they should be doing while I strenuously avoid all my tasks, I judge people for their depression while I keep bursting into tears in parking lots because I don’t want to get out of my car, I judge people for their anxiety while I crank up youtube videos of hand massages so I don’t need to focus on my own thoughts, and I excuse my judgment of others by arguing that I’m no harder on them than I am on myself. And if (when) I am, it’s because clearly I am putting in the work to handle my problems while they aren’t. So I disliked Fast for most of this book. I hated her anecdotes and her honesty. When she talked about how her depression had lost her relationships and profession opportunities, I quickly listed all the ways that way my depression was better than that depression. The book took me longer than I expected to read; it’s hard to speedread when what you’re reading makes you feel ugly.

  I had my epiphany around strategy 45: I hated how she talked about depression in the present tense. I hated how she had a book’s worth of strategies for coping with depression, and she was still depressed. I didn’t (and don’t) want to cope with my depression. I want to not be depressed. But she’s still depressed. And I’m still depressed. And maybe I’m going to be depressed forever. In which case, it’s good for me to remember that loving myself and loving other people are one and the same. Empathy for me is not a high-road, moralistic treatise on how we should behave; it’s simply that when I make the strong effort to love people who do and think the same ways I wish I didn’t, I get better at loving myself. Maybe more useful than the entire book’s worth of strategies was the one that I ended with, my strategy number 51: Forgive us our depression, as we forgive those who are depressed.

  Someone please come help me check my tire.