metaphortunate son

The thing is, in general, I am fully behind trying to spread knowledge and better understanding of the world.

So I totally understand the knee-jerk reaction that WATER IS A CHEMICAL, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE. I Hulk out in a similar manner whenever I hear anyone say the word "toxin".

And yet. And yet, if you are educated enough to know that water is a chemical, you are educated enough to know that some words mean different things in different contexts. You understand that one person may say "I'm suffering from depression" and another may say "God, I'm so depressed today, I hate my job" and that the same word can mean a long-term disease and a bummer of a day. You understand - clever you! - that one person may refer to "the theory of evolution" and it means an understanding of the world that is essentially proven, and another person may say "I've got a theory, it could be bunnies!" and it means that Anya is once again sharing every random neural firing she runs into.

So you should freaking well be educated enough to understand that in some contexts a "chemical" is a form of matter that always has the same proportions by mass of its components and that can't be separated into its components without breaking electron bonds, and in another context, a "chemical" is a substance that has been manufactured or isolated and refined in a lab or a factory and moved into widespread production and distribution without exhaustive long-term testing and has a very good chance of, years or decades after it has become ubiquitous, being declared to have serious adverse health or environmental effects. Because where there's a need for a word to express a concept, language users will create or adapt a word to express that concept. And if you don't understand that there's a need for a word that expresses that second concept, you're not as educated as you think.

Was talking on Twitter about how unfortunate it is that retail therapy totally works. :D: Only saving grace is that, at least for me, it's so much more helpful/satisfying if I'm filling a real need with whatever I'm buying than if I'm just impulse picking up some random crap.

For example, last week I bought a watch and a desperately needed new pair of work trousers. Behold, getting dressed in the morning is easier at least one day a week, and that is valuable to me. And the watch: I know people say watches are obsolete because now everyone has smart phones, and all I can say is, these must be people who don't walk around outside a lot or take public transportation. There are at least a couple of times almost every single day when I want to know what time it is and I really don't want to pull out my cell phone. Now I can!

In general, I am honestly a big fan of material things, as long as they are the right material things. Material things that are sort of what I want and sort of not just pile up in the house and make me miserable. Material things that are perfect give me a shot of genuine happiness every time I experience them or use them. Like:

• The gorgeous coat hooks on our stairs that Mr. E and I picked out together and he installed one day to surprise me and which mean that we have a completely convenient place to put jackets and hats as soon as we come in the house and which, incidentally, are great looking
  
• Chanel Cuir de Russie, which smells like old lady right when I put it on and within about 20 minutes has transformed into this rich, smooth, work-of-art leather aroma, so that for the rest of the day, no matter what kind of mess I look like, I smell like subtle, complex, recondite pleasures; and it makes my entire day better
  
• My purse, which took me forever to find the exact right one, and which is exactly big enough for my wallet, coin purse, sunglasses, phone, iPod, headphones, small pocketknife, tissues, hand sanitizer, pen, lipstick and enough room to pull one thing out without knocking everything else out, and not one bit bigger or heavier or more awkward
  
• Our drinking glasses, which are blue and have this smooth texture which is a small pleasure to touch every time I get a glass of water
  
• Dried persimmons, for obvious reasons!

What are your favorite material things?

I was talking to rosefox the other day about the futility and counterproductiveness of staying informed about everything horrible that happens in the world everywhere, that has nothing to do with me. Remember the wise words of Uncle Ben, guys.With great power comes great responsibility. The converse is also true. With almost no power comes almost no responsibility.

And let me give you a little depressive realism here. You know about depressive realism, right, depression has a fun little party trick where mostly it lies and lies to you about yourself and everything and how you are a loser and everything is awful but in one respect it tells the truth? There's evidence that depressives tend to more accurately estimate their level of control over external events that they have no control over? Y'all, go ahead and accurately estimate that "ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country." I mean, you know it, I know it. rosefox was saying the other day that they've been futilely protesting US involvement in the Middle East for 24 years. It is wasted time. I don't go to marches anymore. Right here, right now, they have no effect. I marched on Washington for abortion rights, I marched in my city against war in the Middle East, I wasted my time. With power comes responsibility. What that means to me is that I have to learn where I do have power and where I don't. And I need to focus my actions on where I have power.

Like for example, "staying informed" is an amorphous concept that sounds righteous and important but, really, being informed changes nothing unless I do something with the information. There's stuff I'm never going to do anything about, because I can't. I have no power over a kid being bullied by her school system over on the east coast somewhere, to take one example of something I was exhorted to care about by Tumblr this week. Look, I am sorry about that kid, but it would be creepy and wrong if a random person on the other coast had the power to significantly change her schooling experience based on information off of Tumblr, and in fact it is not the case. I have no power there. So it's not my responsibility. It's not important for me to be informed of that. On the other hand, it is important for me to inform myself of the way the police work in my country and in my city to the point that I finally, finally, really internalize that I should never call the cops again unless I am prepared for someone to die. And not necessarily someone in the situation that I wanna call the cops about. Maybe some random dude five miles away who fits a ~profile~. And I am so embarrassed that this took me so long to realize. And I am scared because the next time I hear slight thuds and a crying woman begging her boyfriend to stop hitting her, underneath my window, I can't call the cops. What am I going to do? I'm going to have to go down there and talk to them myself, and I don't want to, and probably that's what I always should have done, and I don't want to. And the next time I see thick black smoke coming from a van parked under an underpass downtown at 1 A.M., I'm not fucking going into that situation myself - so what am I going to do? Will someone die if I call the cops, or if I don't? This sucks, but it is about my actions, so it is my responsibility.

And of course this also sucks because it is limited to my individual power, to my individual actions. So neoliberal, right? I want to believe that people would be stronger if we acted collectively but maybe Ferguson is putting the lie to that. See this post: "if they can lie to us to our face and us KNOW the truth, what power do we have , then?"

Well…not a lot. And - didn't we know this already? Why didn't we know this? This isn't new, right, the people in power lying to the people without, and us know they're lying, and they know we know they're lying, and they don't have to give a shit, isn't new? I've been reading The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, about the AIDS crisis and its aftermath, and that's just the 1980s. Not even that long ago, don't we remember how the government let a gay generation die before Ronald Reagan would say the word "AIDS", let alone put some damn money into the problem? Schulman writes that ACT UP forced the government to finally take AIDS seriously as a public health menace, but….how? I know a little bit about ACT UP and its actions, but…. how do these demonstrations force people with power to do things differently? Do they? I've been reading about this, I've been listening to Revolutions - which is a great podcast by the way - I've been trying to learn how, fundamentally, people convince other people to do things. How people get other people to stop doing one thing and do something different. I swear this is a huge flaw in my education, this is a place where we have been let down. I should know this and I don't and I don't even know how to find out.

You know that argument which, I believe it is thefourthvine who has named it the "They should just" argument? You know the one. Poor people should just make better financial decisions. Women who don't want kids should just not have sex. The argument that announces that 1) there are important real-world reasons why the "they" the speaker is talking about don't just do what they're suggesting; 2) but they don't care enough to find out what those reasons are.

Is it just me, or do most of the arguments I've seen against gentrification boil down to "People richer than the people who used to mostly live in this neighborhood should just not move into this neighborhood?"

At least the Google Bus protesters in San Francisco and the East Bay are making a different argument, i.e. "If you move into this neighborhood we're going to make your commute even more fucking awful than it already is." Because the opposite of a "They should just" argument is a "How can we?" argument. "How can we make it unpleasant enough to move into our neighborhood that it's no longer worth it to you?" is kind of a dickish argument, but at least it's something.

Well, I'm officially past my due date. Still waiting.

And it turns out I'm fucking terrified of labor. I hadn't really expected that, because I wasn't last time. In fact, I hadn't really realized it, until I discovered I was putting off going to bed, because when I do, I lie there in the dark and wonder if tonight will be the night the contractions start getting more intense, and silently freak the fuck out; and also, I noticed that I've been getting more and more freaked out about going to my prenatal appointments, until I was almost kind of lightheaded with fear as I walked into the last one, even though Mr. E got to go with me. Because that was how labor started last time: I went to a routine prenatal appointment, and they got very concerned faces, and then started throwing around words like "pre-eclampsia" and "seizure", and that segued smoothly into the worst weekend of my life.

When I told my mom I was pregnant with Hypo she kind of freaked out. I didn't. I had optimism for some reason, figured it had a good chance of all being fine. For the record, it is fine so far. Late in the pregnancy now and blood pressure remains normal for me, which is low in general. But I'm doing all my freaking out now. It's probably a good thing that I will not get much of a choice about when this baby comes out because otherwise there is a chance that I would end up internally dragging around a third grader.

But I don't have much of a choice. So I will have to be brave.

[This is where I would go find a Courage Wolf macro and include it, except that the last time I image Googled "Courage Wolf", which I did to try to psych myself up for something, I mostly got a whole lot of macros encouraging men to rape women. So I don't Google "Courage Wolf" anymore, because I am trying to integrate rosefox's excellent "Don't make yourself sad" dictum into my life. Thanks for simultaneously making everything possible and impossible, internets!]

So I've been thinking about courage lately, partly because of being pregnant and facing labor, partly because of thefourthvine's post about podfic permissions. Because so much of it was about anxiety and things that you could do to reduce your own or someone else's anxiety.

[Okay it is vital that I be REALLY REALLY CLEAR here that I am not, at any point in this post, at all telling anyone else what to do. This stuff started me thinking about ME and how I want MYSELF to behave. Maybe that's narcissism; I like to think of it as minding my own business.]

Now I'm totally in favor of reducing anxiety. I had really bad anxiety for a long time, as part of the classic anxiety-depression cocktail, and it just totally fucks with you in ways that are hard to explain or even believe if you've never dealt with it yourself. It makes everything so hard. I remember one particularly awful day when I spent I am not even going to tell you how long, because I am ashamed, trying to work up the nerve to leave the house and go to Walgreens. Chris Pureka wrote in "So it Goes": now just pouring a glass of water is like trying to move boulders with your breath.

That about sums it up. You're trying. Nothing's going anywhere. The tools you have are simply inadequate for the job.

And when I had that anxiety, trying to just sack up and power on through was worse than counterproductive. If I wanted to beat myself up about how something should be trivially easy and why couldn't I just do it, well that option was available to me all day long. If I wanted to actually get a thing done, then it was time to turn to options that would actually work, CBT techniques and the like. (Not that CBT. The other one. You perverts.) The key to getting things done when you have anxiety is absolutely to reduce the anxiety, to chip down the barrier to entry.

But I don't have that kind of anxiety anymore. (Thank you, Science!) Now I have fears, about things, especially social things, which annoy me, because I used to be considered a very brave person. I would certainly not consider myself that anymore. That bugs me. I think being brave was good. I think I had more fun. I would like to get back to being brave. And I'm not sure how. And I think at this point, reducing the anxiety is not the way, because the goal is not really to get the things done; things are already getting done. The goal is…hard to define, even. To change the way I feel about the things? What does it mean to be brave? How do you learn to be braver? What are you brave about? Are you brave?

Children at Mahalaxmi played ankh micholi, hide-and-go-seek, in and out of the crowds of adult legs. This is how we are to one another, I thought, divided by generations. Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good sprites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And they, the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna-years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom, is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves.

- Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

One of my strongest memories of childhood, and one that's hard to believe now, is just how long the days were. Second grade, third grade: each day was an epoch. I couldn't see the end of the week from the beginning of it. And that was when I was like five times as old as the Junebug is now. Frankly I'm surprised that he remembers me when I pick him up from daycare in the evening, after not seeing me since the morning.

A friend of mine just wrote me for advice, citing that I am the expert regarding family members being disappointing letdowns.

I don't usually think of it that way, but…maybe I'm not just being a drama queen in that I am sad and/or stressed whenever I think of my family? Anyway, I suggested that she take a look through the Captain Awkward "families" tag. But she has two kids under four, so in case she didn't get half an hour to herself in front of the computer before Christmas, I summed up all of the good Captain's advice:

1) use your words to ask for what you want
2) but you can't change other people, so
3) if people insist on being jerks, you have to decide whether it's worth it to you to stick around.

And it's good advice. I've used it myself a lot. But it's very, very culturally specific advice. It's very America Right Now advice, where if you don't like the situation, fuck off somewhere else. There are a whole lot of situations you can be in where you cannot leave, where you have to deal with people. Sometimes people in those situations write in to the Captain, and she tells them to start organizing and planning so that they can leave as soon as possible.

And that's good advice. I've used it myself. There's a reason I live halfway around the country from my birth family. But…I can't help thinking that I'm at a stage in my life where I'd also like to hear advice about what you can do when you can't get away. Or if you don't want to get away: is there really nothing else you can do? I'm not saying that would be better advice; I'd just like to see more than one perspective on the matter.

I know seven het couples, including the one I form a part of, that got together and got serious despite both of them knowing at the time that one half of the couple wanted to have children, or at least a child, and one half strongly did not.

All seven of those het couples currently have one child, and I happen to know that at least one of the others is currently working on a second.

Possibly there are tons and tons of couples who get together despite this discrepancy and many of them end up with no kids but it just happens that the seven that I know all went the other way.

In four of them the guy was the one who wanted a child, in three it was the girl.

I don't know any of the people in the other couples well enough to ask them if they got pressured. (I feel like you would have to know someone really fucking well to ask that question. Or, not at all. I've had some hella deep conversations with people I knew I would never meet again.) I know that I was never pressured, that I changed my mind, and didn't tell Mr. E until it was almost too late, because it's such a difficult thing to change your mind about. I wonder how it went for other people.

I'm sure a lot of people get together but don't get serious because they don't agree on this issue. I wonder whether there is any correlation between getting serious and secret doubts about one's position. At the time we started getting serious, I didn't have conscious doubts. Still, I'd never seriously considered getting my tubes tied. In retrospect, I wonder about that. My brain does a lot of shit it doesn't feel the need to let me in on.

I don't have any conclusions, but I think about it a lot.

Have a couple of links:

"No Children", by the Mountain Goats.

"The Ghost Ship that Didn't Carry Us", by Cheryl Strayed.

Sometimes I wonder whether feeling bad about myself just about all the time is like the teind my brain feels the need to pay to Society for the fact that I do whatever the hell I want to just about all the time. It's like, as a mother I should be spending all my time playing educational games with the Junebug to develop his little brain and body and promote proper socialization or whatever, plus researching preschools, plus sanitizing all his toys, plus eating absolutely as healthy as possible because of nursing, plus going to bed early so I can be emotionally resilient and present for my child in the morning, plus gazing lovingly into his little eyes while nursing instead of dicking around on my phone. And as a professional I should be all caught up on submitting my experience reports for licensure and studying for my licensing exams, not to mention volunteering for overtime. And as a wife I should be making sure that Mr. E and I have alone time and real conversations when we have the chance. And as a friend I should be making more time to see my friends, and call them, not to mention I should not abandon hradzka in the middle of interesting online conversations. And as a feminist I should be reading the Marq'ssan Cycle or watching incredibly depressing movies like Osama that Raise Awareness but ideally would also be directed by women so that I could support Women in Hollywood. And as a functional adult I should have my budget all sorted out and know immediately how much money is coming in and how much money is going out and where to and I should be maxing out my retirement etc. and making the smartest possible financial choices. And also my house should be clean and things should not just live in heaps in the bedroom and living room. And as a fan I should be finishing the fanworks I have started. And as a nerd I should care more about things like robots and Maker Faire and I should like to design mechanical things and I should have far more cool and productive hobbies, ideally involving math in some way. And as a person with a stake in the future of my country and of the world I should be working on ways to lobby the government or possibly Occupying something somewhere.

But as me, I do some of these things, maybe, sometimes, in a haphazard and half-assed way, and instead I spend my time on the web, on Twitter, on this ridiculously moribund journaling site; I spend it reading completely socially unredeeming novels like Georgette Heyer; I spend it window shopping, I spend it sleeping when Mr. E will take the baby, I spend it on fic, I spend it drawing goofy jokes, I spend it looking at fashion blogs! I spend it kissing the baby, but also trying to get him to play with a toy by himself so I can have fifteen minutes to clear out my closet. I spend it watering my sad-ass plants and hoping they'll do better come spring. IDK. I enjoy the things I choose to do! But I feel awful about choosing to do them pretty much all the time. It's like, as long as I feel bad about not being a successful nurturing productive socially responsible member of society, that at least is something I can do that I'm supposed to be doing?