trees are harlequins, words are harlequins

hold me to this

Actually, you know what, tumblr has been messing with my head enough lately that I think I should just make a rule to

not argue on tumblr anymore

for, let’s say, at least the next month (until Jan. 20), and then if that works, maybe further.

Inspired by @jollityfarm who once had (still does have?) a similar rule.

Anything looser than this rule is probably going to let through too much arguing, I think. If I can respond sometimes, I’ll find some set of loopholes that lets to respond most times.

The loosest element of the rule is the word “argue.” I’m not saying I can never disagree with anyone (that would be a strange, chilly existence). But it has to be the kind of disagreement that you wouldn’t describe as an “argument” if it happened in meatspace. Sometimes you’re talking over something with your friends and the conversation starts to involve you and your friends having different opinions, but you aren’t having an argument, it’s just part of the stream of friend conversation. I think this is a clear distinction I’m making? We’ll see.

Anyway, feel free to construe it as restrictively as you want, and I welcome you to call me on it if you think I’m breaking the rule.

20th Dec 201529 notes

I have this unpleasant recurring dream, and I have no idea where it’s coming from, psychologically. I had it again last night – must be the 10th time or something

The premise is:

“For some reason, I decide to take a year off of grad school and re-enroll at my undergrad alma mater, where I will take another year of senior-level classes and write another undergrad thesis. It is not clear what I will get out of this; the answer is either ‘nothing’ or ‘another undergrad physics degree, but I already have one, and who cares if I have two.’ Sometimes even school administrators seem uncertain which of these two will occur. However, the school agrees to this unusual plan because hey, more money, why not. [N.B. by non-dream logic this does not seem plausible, since they could presumably get the same money from a student with similar credentials who is not already an alum and could boost their statistics or w/e in ways I obviously can’t.]

Anyway, the dream begins near the end of the school year. In some iterations, I have somehow failed to perform academically and have to deal with the shame of failing to do something I already succeeded once at, and which was, to begin with, pointless to try to do twice. In all iterations, people express confusion over why I have decided to re-take senior year of college, and I struggle in vain to remember why I thought it was a good idea, and have nothing to tell them. I also wonder what I will tell people in grad school when I get back. Around me, there is much rejoicing about other seniors being about to graduate – mostly people I don’t know – and I feel even more lost in light of this.”

(In last night’s version, I ran into the president of the college while wandering around, and spontaneously decided to ask him what I should make of my situation. He was sympathetic but couldn’t figure out what to tell me.)

As I said, I have no idea what makes this particular plot appeal to my subconscious/whatever? It’s a subtype of a broader genre – “it is stipulated that I have done something that makes no sense, people understandably ask me why I did it, I have no answer and feel ashamed” – and I understand why I get that, since it relates to anxieties I have in real life. (It’s very common for me to worry that when I do a thing, I’m later going to have to shame-facedly explain to everyone “why it ever seemed like a good idea.”)

But I have no idea where the specific “re-take senior year of college” plot comes from.

18th Dec 201517 notes

This didn’t used to be the case, but in the last … I dunno, year? or so? … pretty much all of the dreams I remember are unpleasant. I rarely have “nightmares” per se, but I have a lot of what I think of as “anxiety dreams,” where some unpleasant or embarrassing (though not always dangerous) circumstance appears and then grows and intensifies to parodic levels, piling on more inconveniences, embarrassments, mistakes recognized too late, etc. At this point nearly all of my dreams are of this type.

It doesn’t feel like all that much of a problem, since there’s that sort of separation between my waking and dreaming identity – I remember unpleasant dreams as unpleasant, but I don’t really feel like they’re things that “happened to me,” and I don’t wake up being worn out by them the way I’d be worn out by similar IRL experiences. But it has gotten to the point that I feel a certain morbid resignation when I get in bed at the end of the day – “here we go again … “

(The silver lining is that in retrospect the plots of these dreams are often hilarious, see my #dreams tag)

14th Dec 201515 notes

This is probably the most “teen diary angst” post I’ve ever written on this site, I swear I’m OK, I’m just having one of the less common sorts of brain bees and it demands a less common form of banishment ritual

Keep reading

9th Dec 201518 notes

I was going to go to sleep and then I read some Bad Stuff on tumblr and now I am not going to be able to go to sleep for a while

(This wasn’t “discourse” Bad Stuff, this was “I clicked too many successive links on tumblr and saw some stuff involving the unexpected conjunction of people who I’d rather not ever think about even individually, as if in an unpleasant dream mixing together bad memories from distinct parts of one’s life” Bad Stuff. I’ll be fine, don’t worry, just needed to excrete some text about it)

9th Dec 20155 notes

aprilwitching-deactivated201808 asked: the description in the article of "watching boys do stuff" to me read less as "boys and their boy activities are silly and hard to tolerate" and more as "sometimes i wished i could do xyz, but knew that i wouldnt be allowed to participate or wouldnt be taken seriously if i tried" + "i internalized a notion that there were 'boy things' and 'girl things', and boy things were always better/more important" + "i felt like there was something wrong with me when i didnt like a Great Male Author's work"

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:
i don’t really relate to a lot of the article, but pretty much all my social experiences ever have had more than a touch of “watching [people] do things”. and putting those things above things i would really prefer or rather do, in a lot of cases, even if i don’t really like/understand them as much as i wish i could or think i ought to. it’s a state that lends itself to frustration and alienation at times, even if you genuinely like the people you’re watching/spending time with. esp. if those
people dont/wont see you as “one of them”/“an equal”, or even if you just assume/believe that to be the case bc of previous experiences or deep personal insecurity or something. anyway, thats how i interpret that kind of phrasing. also that sense of “wait, why am i trying to appeal to those people so hard? why not do something *i* would like, even if they might look down on it or not understand it?” idk. i probably need to read the article more closely. i skimmed a lot after the e-mail bit bc

while im not sure if there was actual “gaslighting” going on in the e-mail— e-newsletter, sorry— or anything, that writeup was so, so, so, SO skeevy. i would be exasperated and weirded out if a visiting lecturer to my school program hit on me as described, but i would be, like, burning with the righteous fury of a hundred yellow suns if they then wrote about it in that way. especially for a wider audience to read! if they were a man, i might well get a bit “men are awful! i hate men!” until

i had calmed down a bit. just reading that made me very offended and ticked off on the article author’s behalf, although i don’t know anything about her as a writer. man or woman on either end, what an inappropriate— like, okay, trying to get in someones bed that way is odd, and iffy, but could be down to poor social skills/poor judgment. writing about it to “several thousand readers” in those terms is. insulting and humiliating and gross and kinda jawdroppingly entitled
and condescending/dismissive and petty and etc. given the context, too, i think its clearly that sexism *is* playing a role in that newsletter situation-framing, and she’s right to point out that fact. although, again, the newsletter anecdote would be inappropriate and sleazy if it were a woman writing about a woman, a woman writing about a man, a man writing about a man, etc. etc. under otherwise identical circumstances. to be perfectly clear. sorry thats a tangent im just a bit mad rn :)

ugh sorry for spamming you w something v tangential. anyway to be clear im not mad at you, rob, im mad at stephen elliott + people i’ve encountered in my own life who were sleazy in similar ways.
It’s fine! And yeah, that email/newsletter was astonishing. After I read that part I went on a Google tangent to look up that guy and try to understand what sort of audience he might have. (Unsurprisingly, he seems to have a sort of “edgy confessional” schtick – his books have titles like “The Adderall Diaries” and “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up.” I don’t think I would have read these books anyway, but now I’m definitely not going to)
I think I just had a … negative emotional reaction to the passage about “watching boys,” and am trying to justify/explain it in words. But really I’m not sure if the correct target of my reaction is even the author rather than the phenomenon she’s describing? My reaction felt something like “oh god, I can’t win” – i.e. no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to seem inviting or w/e, (some) women will move to the sidelines and watch me do it and then talk about how they never get to join in etc. But it’s not as though it’s her fault that she has that reaction. It’s not fun (really!) to have everything you do elevated as “special and important and better than what lots of other people do,” but it’s not as though we can just easily turn that cultural stuff off.
And she too feels like she “can’t win” – or rather, she can win by pandering, but no one will recognize that’s she’s pandering, people will just see it as “being serious and measuring up,” and she wants to do more than just pander
I do still feel … uncomfortable? … with the author’s own self-presentation, I guess because her response to this stuff is escalate the conflict rather than to create spaces of ceasefire, and my gut feeling is that that will just lead to more and more intense feelings of being unable to win. (”You’re clearly biased! I can’t win!” “Well, I’m just being biased to correct for your bias, which prevented me from winning!” “Well, anyway, since you won’t let me win, I won’t take you seriously.” “You wouldn’t have taken me seriously anyway.” “Maybe, but is this any better?”) I’m not really sure what I even mean by that though
But it’s not about winning.
I mean, I get exacerbated when cis folks get all pissy about trans discourse. It’s like, what the fuck to do expect to happen in a hella bigoted society? Sorry I can’t make your cis life easier, but actually what the fuck? The hardships of the cis? Good grief!
And like, we can rewind and replay all the conversation around #facefail. It’s as if, white writers wanted so much to get a “get out of structural racism free” card, but it doesn’t exist. Certainly POC don’t get that card — as if! It’s kinda offensive just suggesting it. The point is, it’s not the fault of POC that racism is really-actually this bad.
So it goes for sexism.
What I mean is, you’re a male writer writing in a male-dominated genre. I don’t know if you’ll reach a “make a living doing it” stage — but I hope you do cuz I like you. But still, female writers have all kinds of struggles that you don’t, and it’s not your fault (although you’re part of the system, as am I), and you can’t fix it, and it sucks, and that’s just the way it is.
So we mitigate, and we work, and things get better (two steps forward, one-point-nine-nine-nine-nine-nine steps back), and we build strategies.
And guess what! You might do best staying kinda on the sidelines (of this struggle).
Which is to say, you’re obviously not sexism-guy. You’re doing fine. But some women (and some minorities and queers and so on) are going to step away from you, find their own lanes, their own paths, and go along.
You got your path, on which you seem to be doing pretty great. Keep doing that.

I think my emotional response is more about what happens when I’m not necessarily wanted, but not clearly told I should be going to the sidelines either.

Like, if someone just doesn’t like men, and doesn’t want to be around me for that reason, I have no problem with that.

But if someone goes on having friendships and relationships with men while talking casually about unpleasant it always is to be around men – well, at that point it does affect me, and it’s not obvious to me how I should respond. I mean, my gut level response, at least some of the time (as with that article), is to say “I don’t want to know someone like that.” I already worry enough that people secretly dislike me even if there are no indications to the contrary; I don’t need to be helped along.

But I don’t know – is that sexist? I mean, maybe this author is just stating openly what a lot of women are too polite to say. Maybe I’m just trying to stick my head in the sand and ignore sexism by spending time with people who are too polite to complain to me about it.

On the other hand, maybe this response is “staying on the sidelines”? If someone says they want to hear fewer contributions from people like me, I can just not talk to them, which may in fact be what they want.

But anyway, these are things I have to think about one way or another, because I have to make interpersonal choices. “Let people step away from you” gets more complicated than it sounds when it applies to real situations. I’m happy staying away from literal separatists who simply do not want me around, but many real cases are subtler than that.

My initial, emotional response to that article was “I’m glad I’m not friends with this person.” I’m trying to figure out if that’s a defensible thing to think. But it’s not an irrelevant thing to think. I do in fact have to decide who I want to be (and remain) friends with.

27th Nov 201523 notes

aprilwitching-deactivated201808 asked: the description in the article of "watching boys do stuff" to me read less as "boys and their boy activities are silly and hard to tolerate" and more as "sometimes i wished i could do xyz, but knew that i wouldnt be allowed to participate or wouldnt be taken seriously if i tried" + "i internalized a notion that there were 'boy things' and 'girl things', and boy things were always better/more important" + "i felt like there was something wrong with me when i didnt like a Great Male Author's work"

i don’t really relate to a lot of the article, but pretty much all my social experiences ever have had more than a touch of “watching [people] do things”. and putting those things above things i would really prefer or rather do, in a lot of cases, even if i don’t really like/understand them as much as i wish i could or think i ought to. it’s a state that lends itself to frustration and alienation at times, even if you genuinely like the people you’re watching/spending time with. esp. if those
people dont/wont see you as “one of them”/“an equal”, or even if you just assume/believe that to be the case bc of previous experiences or deep personal insecurity or something. anyway, thats how i interpret that kind of phrasing. also that sense of “wait, why am i trying to appeal to those people so hard? why not do something *i* would like, even if they might look down on it or not understand it?” idk. i probably need to read the article more closely. i skimmed a lot after the e-mail bit bc

while im not sure if there was actual “gaslighting” going on in the e-mail— e-newsletter, sorry— or anything, that writeup was so, so, so, SO skeevy. i would be exasperated and weirded out if a visiting lecturer to my school program hit on me as described, but i would be, like, burning with the righteous fury of a hundred yellow suns if they then wrote about it in that way. especially for a wider audience to read! if they were a man, i might well get a bit “men are awful! i hate men!” until

i had calmed down a bit. just reading that made me very offended and ticked off on the article author’s behalf, although i don’t know anything about her as a writer. man or woman on either end, what an inappropriate— like, okay, trying to get in someones bed that way is odd, and iffy, but could be down to poor social skills/poor judgment. writing about it to “several thousand readers” in those terms is. insulting and humiliating and gross and kinda jawdroppingly entitled
and condescending/dismissive and petty and etc. given the context, too, i think its clearly that sexism *is* playing a role in that newsletter situation-framing, and she’s right to point out that fact. although, again, the newsletter anecdote would be inappropriate and sleazy if it were a woman writing about a woman, a woman writing about a man, a man writing about a man, etc. etc. under otherwise identical circumstances. to be perfectly clear. sorry thats a tangent im just a bit mad rn :)

ugh sorry for spamming you w something v tangential. anyway to be clear im not mad at you, rob, im mad at stephen elliott + people i’ve encountered in my own life who were sleazy in similar ways.

It’s fine! And yeah, that email/newsletter was astonishing. After I read that part I went on a Google tangent to look up that guy and try to understand what sort of audience he might have. (Unsurprisingly, he seems to have a sort of “edgy confessional” schtick – his books have titles like “The Adderall Diaries” and “My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up.” I don’t think I would have read these books anyway, but now I’m definitely not going to)

I think I just had a … negative emotional reaction to the passage about “watching boys,” and am trying to justify/explain it in words. But really I’m not sure if the correct target of my reaction is even the author rather than the phenomenon she’s describing? My reaction felt something like “oh god, I can’t win” – i.e. no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try to seem inviting or w/e, (some) women will move to the sidelines and watch me do it and then talk about how they never get to join in etc. But it’s not as though it’s her fault that she has that reaction. It’s not fun (really!) to have everything you do elevated as “special and important and better than what lots of other people do,” but it’s not as though we can just easily turn that cultural stuff off.

And she too feels like she “can’t win” – or rather, she can win by pandering, but no one will recognize that’s she’s pandering, people will just see it as “being serious and measuring up,” and she wants to do more than just pander

I do still feel … uncomfortable? … with the author’s own self-presentation, I guess because her response to this stuff is escalate the conflict rather than to create spaces of ceasefire, and my gut feeling is that that will just lead to more and more intense feelings of being unable to win. (”You’re clearly biased! I can’t win!” “Well, I’m just being biased to correct for your bias, which prevented me from winning!” “Well, anyway, since you won’t let me win, I won’t take you seriously.” “You wouldn’t have taken me seriously anyway.” “Maybe, but is this any better?”) I’m not really sure what I even mean by that though

26th Nov 201523 notes

There’s something really grating to me about this article even though I agree with most of its actual portrayal of the literary scene

I guess the clearest example of what grates on me is the way she talks about her short story collection. Which from the sound of it was very well received by both men and women – but when women write positive reviews her response is “yeah, I know, I wrote good shit and you are illuminating its greatness,” while when men (”the white male lit establishment”) write positive reviews, her response is “ha! no wonder you liked it, since it was merely a cold exercise in pandering to your tastes. lol i troll u”

Does she stand behind her writing sincerely, or doesn’t she? It comes off as this way of manufacturing the divisions she wants to see. Men and women can do the exact same thing and it … confirms her prejudices about how different men and women are.

(I guess I am also put off by her descriptions of “watching boys do stuff” – my gut reaction was “god, I sure hope I never meet this person and think I’m developing a real friendship or something and eventually learn that she was just thinking of me as another man she has to tolerate, and in fact does tolerate, without letting me know it’s no fun for her, since this after all (she thinks) is simply her lot in life.” It’s sort of like the notion that someone might be seeing you as “friendzoning” them when you just thought you were being friends – the idea that what you thought was real human rapport could all just explode in a puff of smoke, because they were really just rolling their eyes and gritting their teeth the whole time. I guess this isn’t really a “counterpoint” to the article, so much as I’m wondering … does she intend to be this offputting and, well, creepy?

Of course maybe the answer is “well, you’re a man, she’s trying to be offputting to you,” although then once again the Men And Women Are Totally Different worldview seems kinda self-confirming)

25th Nov 201518 notes

Those of you who know me know that I’m not really the type to complain about my personal problems. So…what I’m about to say might come as a surprise to some of you, but…what really soured me on this system was realizing that boss fight was a perfect metaphor for a number of relationships I’ve had over the course of my life, especially recent ones. I do everything in my power to be the good guy and be people’s friend no matter how many times they hurt me. I make sacrifices for them when they won’t lift a finger for me. I endure their attacks with a smile and try my hardest to calm them down. When I get hurt, I think it’s my fault for not choosing the correct option, or not choosing it in time. And when the time comes to fight back, to “Attack,” I always feel terrible afterwards. No matter how many times they hurt me, hurting them once sticks with me.

It’s not great, is what I’m saying.

When I look at what’s signposted as the “moral” path in Undertale, I instead see the worst part of myself. It’s the side that endures, placates and tries to be everybody’s friend. It’s the side of me that doesn’t care what happens to myself as long as everyone else is happy. It’s the side of me that stays up nights after I’ve kicked an actively abusive person out of my life, wondering if they’re okay. It’s the side of me I’ve had to try actively over the past year to shake myself of.

It’s the kind of morality that only adds up if you have no sense of personal value. That’s the core of “Nerd Social Fallacies.” You put the virtue of ~HAVING FRIENDS~ above basic self-care.

And in the typical fashion of hurtful people, every boss and most of the monsters comes with a baked-in excuse for why they have to make you bleed. Some claim it isn’t their fault, some claim it’s for the greater good and some bosses even make you sit through whole monologues about why they have to kill you…as they kill you. And when the battle ends, if you did fight back, the game will likely waste no time telling you why this makes you the bad guy.

—

http://atomicchainsaw.blogspot.ro/2015/09/undertale-looking-for-love-in-all-wrong.html

@nostalgebraist

the sole comment talks about how this does not count, because the player has incomparably more power than the monsters, so it’s their responsability. And I don’t know the game, but it reminds me a lot of how privilege is imagined to work sometimes around here: it makes your tears hilarious.

(via not-even-even)

Yes, and the thing about the “with great power comes great responsibility” argument is that you still don’t have endless responsibility to turn the other cheek against every single person you encounter, because that isn’t always the right thing to do, even for an ideal person who never tires and whose suffering is unimportant. I mean, in Undertale it is, because the game is designed to make that true, but IRL it isn’t.

24th Nov 2015124 notes

Several people (@those-difficult-things, @shuffling-blogs, @johnessex, @mentalwires) responded to my Undertale post from last night by bringing up the fact the the save/load mechanism is part of the game’s universe and so the player character cannot actually “die.”

My initial reaction was that everything depends on whether you read the story as a self-contained fantasy about a world with a save/load mechanism, or whether you read it as a metaphor for some real-world phenomenon. I’m usually inclined to say that not everything has to be a metaphor and that exploring human reactions to fantastical scenarios is interesting in its own right (some blog posts on this topic: 1, 2). But with Undertale it’s hard for me not to take it as at least metaphorical as well as literal. I’m not sure why this is, except that the surface-level appearance of the situations in the game just feel very much like certain real-life situations to me, and not in a good way.

But after thinking about it a bit more, I’m not sure this actually matters. Even if we take the game literally, as a completely self-contained fantasy universe, it still tells us a story about how, if a person with the save/load mechanic rigorously turns the other cheek over and over again, this will lead to a good situation where they make friends with nearly everyone and all their friends get together at the end in a big group and give them an inspiring pep talk. (Even Muffet shows up – Muffet with whom your “friendship” is basically “you avoided being killed for long enough for her to realize she was trying to kill you on a false pretext, after which she showed little remorse.”)

This is somewhat personal, but I do not like this story. I actually used to have fantasies very similar to this; I used to imagine myself as a person who could see the good in anyone, even people who hated each other, even people who hated me, and could, through meek patience, through endless moral athleticism, eventually reconcile everyone with me and each other. In college I used to fantasize about all my friends, even the ones who didn’t get along or the ones I struggled with, ending up together in harmony on a hill at night, gazing up at the stars and getting to know one another. I no longer believe this is a good fantasy.

Why? Because there are a lot of people in the world, and each relationship with another person has opportunity costs. If someone is callous and uncaring toward you, you may be able to “fix” this through moral athleticism, but the time you spend doing so is time you do not spend getting to know other people who do not behave this way. When I look back on some of my past interactions with people who were, in retrospect, pretty awful to me, it’s obvious to me that even if I had a save/load mechanic, I still wouldn’t waste my time fine-tuning my relationships with them in the hope of a Pacifist Ending. (And even if I were to try, I’d do it by standing up for myself in the hope of a more equal relationship, not by turning the other cheek.) I’d instead use my powers to work on relationships with people who are also willing to work constructively on those relationships.

Tit For Tat isn’t just a winning strategy, it’s a moral strategy. Provide incentives for cooperation. Do not reward those who obstinately refuse to cooperate.

23rd Nov 201534 notes