I start the year with nothing to say. It isn't a beginning as much as an end. I'm standing looking off a precipice with very little bargaining power in terms of content. I thought that writing was a suitcase or ace in the hole I always carried. My obsessions dominate my style and make it difficult to write anything with an emotional storyline. I'm not prepared to give up the hope that there is something to express rather than an empty mouth. Words will eventually fill if I walk around aimlessly enough. More like I'm desperately assembling the impressions I've had of vacations and events this past year. Teenagers called me egocentric randomly on the street. And it's true that I have little concrete to offer than a tornado of self obsessed insecurity. The worker artisans who dig with smiles on their faces are liked and respected for good reason. I'm not sure what interesting I'm bringing ton anyone or anything this year, walking empty handed without charms, easy blandishments, or intelligent discussion, walking around at night like I do, demanding that the rest of the world be interesting. Ho hum.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Monday, December 24, 2012
Amazing (Is a Word We Overused in 2006)
I start the year with nothing to say. After all this time of holding something in my pocket, that maybe there was one thing I could excel at and call my calling, I say the same thing. So no ace in the hole because nothing significant is said. Repeatedly, that I'm shocked at the changes, that I'm trying to stay abreast of them, that I want to define and codify them so that we knew exactly what was happening right now. That I'm not stereotyping. That I want to satirize and encapsulate the emerging DIY spirit, emerging from lame artistic grifterism, that is now commercialized and remarketed by desperate corporate sources in the same way the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was codified by commercial interests in 500 Days of Summer as an unreachable, perfectly quirky jacking post. The new Mobile start up boom is powered by the refusal to compromise one's dreams with the savvy niche marketing and "big ideas lure" of the entrepreneur, as well as the specific creative output of the artisan. Parodied by the Google Chrome ad of the man who created a book of schmaltzy Basquiat/Adventure Time/Daniel Johnston scrawled drawings with a vague, entrepreneurial message of dreaming BIG (which has renewed the lease on life of 40 year old porkpie wearing Baby Bjorn dads... seriously, "Now I can get my mbira band started!!"), the internet Stilton enthusiast friendly word AWESOME, and the social media branding roustabout acclaim of randomly being picked up by a German blog. The TED Talk graduate metaphor couldn't be more perfect. On a diet of TED Talks, working class salumi courses, Times Magazine, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and 3rd Ward classes, who could have produced something better? It's a better highly specific legacy than being famous for temper tantrums and catch phrases on a reality tv show, or avoiding selling out by choosing a vague artistic Caption of Drew Bertram, Artist, Lacey Butler, Photographer, or being photographed splayed out on the floor in a fashionable pool of PBR, American Spirits, and a headdress listlessly mumbling to Steve Aoki on the phone. I'm happy those days are over...Ms. Kennedy.
The Dream of the 1890s is Alive in New York as Portlandia perfectly summarized. Your roustabout 30 year old trust fund artist is a farm to table charcuterie handler, your freelance photographer is NPR's most attractive rooftop kale farmer. Dyna Moe's hipster animals define the niches creative loafers have fought to find for themselves to experience their dream, a fulfilling work life, and business acumen with a grassroots sticker and no fear of selling out. The wave of independent business is sweeping in anyone who can articulate their dream with a selling point and sun filled kickstarter pitch. Want to be a food writer? Start a bed and breakfast for penguin enthusiasts in the Baleares. My stoner high school acquaintance who took up yoga created a line of Eastern Religion friendly confectioneries. (I'm being vague on purpose.) Could he have built his own website with serene, Toms-like assurance if he was merely a yoga teacher? Could the girls who created a one stop shop for haute costume jewelry for gay men and their muses ever been in Forbes AND the Daily Candy if they stayed Financial Analysts and continued to wear a subdued gray palette? No. Their amount of fulfillment would only have correlated with buying the most bioluminescent sneakers and most stylish leggings with reflecting tape for NY Marathon training.
As mainstream regurgitations of "The Small, Quirky Problems of a Dysfunctional/Mismatched Twosome/family in a Flyover State" replayed the docile, twee, sexless indie spirit of 2006 with full laptop dj indietronic apathy. Garden State degenerating into the high paid stars slummin it for a heartfelt "Middle Aged Loser Befriending Pregnant Teenager and Buying New Lease on Life" indie dram..edy. The already attenuated, anodyne idols that my friends pumped in through ipods even on the toilet, even eating, even doinking such as Okkervil River, Animal Collective, The Books, Iron and Wine, the popped up but well written songs of Rilo Kiley, Magnetic Fields, Of Montreal, The New Pornographers, and the insipid, bubble gum rehash of terrible 70s and 80s music that is Girl Talk, Ratatat, and Annie. The playfully weak and childishly whispered anti folk of Coco Rosie, The Moldy Peaches as the least worthy offender (your 6 year old sister asking "Who-oo-oo's got the crack"), Devendra Banhart, Cat Power's voice crawling sensually on its last legs as millions of girls with bangs prostrate themselves in front of it, and the Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor that wormed its way into my ear that I actually liked. Ultimately the winkingly weak, twee, and self consciously catchy nature of this music was parodied, like 500 Days of Summer, by the commercial sounding Peter Bjorn and John "Young Folks." Smiling "dance" hooks like Phoenix's attempts lending themselves perfectly to car commercials. Degenerating into bands with playfully weak names, The Fiery Furnaces, Bat for Lashes, The Fleet Foxes.
What is the snooty, independent magazine and movie's obsession with the small, quiet problems of the possibly religious people in a Flyover state or otherwise unremarkable city? I'm looking at you, sparsely written New Yorker articles about observant, unfaithful men in tipi motel rooms with a haunting twist, stories written from the point of view of a middle child adolescent escaping from religious band camp, and the recent story of a shy gay-looking guy doing fake weddings for Iraq soldiers with a Jennay Hollywood aspirant in Michigan that he's in love with. People swishing their Riesling or Pinot Grigio in Scarsdale over a roast chicken or educated older people in Madison, Wisconsin have little to do with preteens, Iraq war veterans, flyover religious bible camp extremism, or, on another topic, profiles of underrated behind the scenes geniuses you just haveta know about like Tomas Maier or Ester Dean. New Yorker profiles shine a, granted, more earnestly written, light on the underrated geniuses of the underrated movement you never heard of that snakes its spidery influence through the large cities of America, the uneasy marriage of nations in the UN, connecting its web all the way to your raised ranch in Scarsdale. Ultimately, the message is that you must pay attention to this previously obscured person because their tiny light of genius or influence shines onto all the cities and continents of the current moment, and thus is obscurely pertinent to your previously uninformed light. The finesse and delicacy of the non famous string puller like Ester Dean is outlined in compound sentences and adjectives that prickle against each other, piled into a complex result. I don't understand why the New Yorker stories don't throw their readership's problems back on the page left open and planned to be read near or on the toilet, just like Stephen Sondheim did with Company. Why beguile the reader with enigmatic, somewhat pointless fiction, of the specific problems of a tiny Cooper salesman, his more distant disease stricken wife, or combative, beautiful and runaway logical teenage daughter? Why not write a story about the small problems of a systems engineer in Westport worried about his heart health, his spiralling, boring wife, the autistic son of his old age, and needled vaguely by hints of promiscuity from his pre-teen daughter? Without him traveling to Nebraska by Greyhound. Why not write a profile that unashamedly shines the light of insight on a big ass big wig and not his right wing napkin tester? Mike Bloomberg and not Mike Bloomberg's aide's child wrangler whose hand that rocks the cradle rules his tie choices and the infrastructure of New York? Because the New Yorker dances awkwardly between the political articles of Newsweek/the Economist, the purely literary reviews and personalities of the Atlantic, your poetry teacher's crappy chapbook, and the Sunday Funnies. The thin veneer of snobbery unites all the pieces as "I swear this is high culture" and "Did you hear Bruce McCall's high class parody of toddlers drinking Riesling with crushed Paxil to ease their anxiety of mobile phone apps and April 15th? Roz Chast wrote about neurosis as if New Yorkers were still distinctive, agoraphobic Jewish people with accents!" Indeed, they are your podiatrist in a comically loose fitting suit. They are the chilled aluminum ice phallus in the plastic wine bottle when you should be getting a freakin Brita filter and switching to water with oranges in it. As TED Talks' 20 minutes of specialized learning "I swear we're innovative and big ideas entrepreneurial... Now I know about the ecobiology of bee pollen courtship," the New Yorker's tidbits scream, "take this in in memory of high culture!" Even the right triangle poem that says snow from all sides? The fifth grade sonnet I sent was much better than that offering. I challenge you to create immersive articles that either teach completely or create art earnestly. These tidbits provide the satisfaction of a Pitchfork review, turning noses higher up (Dinosaur Jr.'s pre-first album unreleased cassette mixtape was better!) and educating no one.
I know what you're doing. I hate when you're cloying. I love when you follow your dreams. I love when you create incisive, compelling content. I hate when you use the same formula. I love that you're trying to be serious about your calling. I hate/love that you're secretly an unemployed freelancer with a big idea. I hate when you're snobby, anodyne, and loving of snobby cheeses like Humboldt Fog and space distillers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I love when you rage with intensity, when you tear and then create art. I wonder where we're going to go and how we'll continue to make business dreams from penury. I don't fit in, Let me watch. Let's punk out without fully breaking or developing hifalutin non-business ideals.
The Dream of the 1890s is Alive in New York as Portlandia perfectly summarized. Your roustabout 30 year old trust fund artist is a farm to table charcuterie handler, your freelance photographer is NPR's most attractive rooftop kale farmer. Dyna Moe's hipster animals define the niches creative loafers have fought to find for themselves to experience their dream, a fulfilling work life, and business acumen with a grassroots sticker and no fear of selling out. The wave of independent business is sweeping in anyone who can articulate their dream with a selling point and sun filled kickstarter pitch. Want to be a food writer? Start a bed and breakfast for penguin enthusiasts in the Baleares. My stoner high school acquaintance who took up yoga created a line of Eastern Religion friendly confectioneries. (I'm being vague on purpose.) Could he have built his own website with serene, Toms-like assurance if he was merely a yoga teacher? Could the girls who created a one stop shop for haute costume jewelry for gay men and their muses ever been in Forbes AND the Daily Candy if they stayed Financial Analysts and continued to wear a subdued gray palette? No. Their amount of fulfillment would only have correlated with buying the most bioluminescent sneakers and most stylish leggings with reflecting tape for NY Marathon training.
As mainstream regurgitations of "The Small, Quirky Problems of a Dysfunctional/Mismatched Twosome/family in a Flyover State" replayed the docile, twee, sexless indie spirit of 2006 with full laptop dj indietronic apathy. Garden State degenerating into the high paid stars slummin it for a heartfelt "Middle Aged Loser Befriending Pregnant Teenager and Buying New Lease on Life" indie dram..edy. The already attenuated, anodyne idols that my friends pumped in through ipods even on the toilet, even eating, even doinking such as Okkervil River, Animal Collective, The Books, Iron and Wine, the popped up but well written songs of Rilo Kiley, Magnetic Fields, Of Montreal, The New Pornographers, and the insipid, bubble gum rehash of terrible 70s and 80s music that is Girl Talk, Ratatat, and Annie. The playfully weak and childishly whispered anti folk of Coco Rosie, The Moldy Peaches as the least worthy offender (your 6 year old sister asking "Who-oo-oo's got the crack"), Devendra Banhart, Cat Power's voice crawling sensually on its last legs as millions of girls with bangs prostrate themselves in front of it, and the Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor that wormed its way into my ear that I actually liked. Ultimately the winkingly weak, twee, and self consciously catchy nature of this music was parodied, like 500 Days of Summer, by the commercial sounding Peter Bjorn and John "Young Folks." Smiling "dance" hooks like Phoenix's attempts lending themselves perfectly to car commercials. Degenerating into bands with playfully weak names, The Fiery Furnaces, Bat for Lashes, The Fleet Foxes.
What is the snooty, independent magazine and movie's obsession with the small, quiet problems of the possibly religious people in a Flyover state or otherwise unremarkable city? I'm looking at you, sparsely written New Yorker articles about observant, unfaithful men in tipi motel rooms with a haunting twist, stories written from the point of view of a middle child adolescent escaping from religious band camp, and the recent story of a shy gay-looking guy doing fake weddings for Iraq soldiers with a Jennay Hollywood aspirant in Michigan that he's in love with. People swishing their Riesling or Pinot Grigio in Scarsdale over a roast chicken or educated older people in Madison, Wisconsin have little to do with preteens, Iraq war veterans, flyover religious bible camp extremism, or, on another topic, profiles of underrated behind the scenes geniuses you just haveta know about like Tomas Maier or Ester Dean. New Yorker profiles shine a, granted, more earnestly written, light on the underrated geniuses of the underrated movement you never heard of that snakes its spidery influence through the large cities of America, the uneasy marriage of nations in the UN, connecting its web all the way to your raised ranch in Scarsdale. Ultimately, the message is that you must pay attention to this previously obscured person because their tiny light of genius or influence shines onto all the cities and continents of the current moment, and thus is obscurely pertinent to your previously uninformed light. The finesse and delicacy of the non famous string puller like Ester Dean is outlined in compound sentences and adjectives that prickle against each other, piled into a complex result. I don't understand why the New Yorker stories don't throw their readership's problems back on the page left open and planned to be read near or on the toilet, just like Stephen Sondheim did with Company. Why beguile the reader with enigmatic, somewhat pointless fiction, of the specific problems of a tiny Cooper salesman, his more distant disease stricken wife, or combative, beautiful and runaway logical teenage daughter? Why not write a story about the small problems of a systems engineer in Westport worried about his heart health, his spiralling, boring wife, the autistic son of his old age, and needled vaguely by hints of promiscuity from his pre-teen daughter? Without him traveling to Nebraska by Greyhound. Why not write a profile that unashamedly shines the light of insight on a big ass big wig and not his right wing napkin tester? Mike Bloomberg and not Mike Bloomberg's aide's child wrangler whose hand that rocks the cradle rules his tie choices and the infrastructure of New York? Because the New Yorker dances awkwardly between the political articles of Newsweek/the Economist, the purely literary reviews and personalities of the Atlantic, your poetry teacher's crappy chapbook, and the Sunday Funnies. The thin veneer of snobbery unites all the pieces as "I swear this is high culture" and "Did you hear Bruce McCall's high class parody of toddlers drinking Riesling with crushed Paxil to ease their anxiety of mobile phone apps and April 15th? Roz Chast wrote about neurosis as if New Yorkers were still distinctive, agoraphobic Jewish people with accents!" Indeed, they are your podiatrist in a comically loose fitting suit. They are the chilled aluminum ice phallus in the plastic wine bottle when you should be getting a freakin Brita filter and switching to water with oranges in it. As TED Talks' 20 minutes of specialized learning "I swear we're innovative and big ideas entrepreneurial... Now I know about the ecobiology of bee pollen courtship," the New Yorker's tidbits scream, "take this in in memory of high culture!" Even the right triangle poem that says snow from all sides? The fifth grade sonnet I sent was much better than that offering. I challenge you to create immersive articles that either teach completely or create art earnestly. These tidbits provide the satisfaction of a Pitchfork review, turning noses higher up (Dinosaur Jr.'s pre-first album unreleased cassette mixtape was better!) and educating no one.
I know what you're doing. I hate when you're cloying. I love when you follow your dreams. I love when you create incisive, compelling content. I hate when you use the same formula. I love that you're trying to be serious about your calling. I hate/love that you're secretly an unemployed freelancer with a big idea. I hate when you're snobby, anodyne, and loving of snobby cheeses like Humboldt Fog and space distillers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I love when you rage with intensity, when you tear and then create art. I wonder where we're going to go and how we'll continue to make business dreams from penury. I don't fit in, Let me watch. Let's punk out without fully breaking or developing hifalutin non-business ideals.
I have the same thing, the same thing to say. Last night some yelling teenage strangers told me "You're egocentric. Not everything in the world revolves around you." Because they were yelling the n word and showing their stomach and I turned around and said "Are you calling me that?" And the guy was like, "I didn't even notice you. Not everything in the world revolves around you." And I was like "Yup." And then a couple streets later I cried. I'm here with nothing to say.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Whistling
I'm still uncomfortable with the differences between men and women. I think it's important to be truthful, truthful of our differences and our emotional reaction to our differences even if it is one of anger. I don't know how to work through it, but I don't want to ignore it because that would be lying.
Fear and insecurity separates humans from each other and underscores an individuated, separated experience that allows us to distrust one another. Adding faith and lack of fear as well as self acceptance causes one's path, thoughts, and ideas to become clear without a distortion of another choice. Faith indicates seeing the way one is going and the terrain around and accepting it, continuing on without being nervous or resentful of what will happen. Faith is something that makes me resent other people less or set up curtseys and bird dances to get to know them less. Social interactions require a certain amount of necessary prologue, but this isn't something I should resent. My bitterness and resentment comes from comparison with other people, which is ridiculous in the achievement of my individual goals, though less so with my progress in goals related to other people. I do not fit with the devil may care risk taking of the entrepreneur who arranges all to fulfill their impossible dream by monetizing it with a niche market, with the doing what you love and such. There is a great bouquet of people founding specific and gimmicky vegan chocolate bars, pop up yoghurt kitchens, books and toys that our parents made inaccessible to us due to the gender divide, other gleeful TED-baiting ideas meant to quickly expand our consciousness in the space of a Google Chrome commercial. I am too much of a follower, scribe, and detailist to focus on the huge array of syrup bars and girls' spatial reasoning toys I could be making. I don't fit into the second dot com boom as an entrepreneur or evangelist. Nor in the niche DIY rooftop kale farmer, butcher, single batch distiller, or other niche hipster animal that found a specific language to articulate and live their dream and get featured on NYT Magazine or NPR. The dream of the 1890s is alive in hipsterdom today of being an artisan of one's specific wares, whatever they may be, but before joyfully humming away at work, one must carve out one's artisanal specialty, whether a Ukrainian-Korean fruit pickling brand or a raw aperitif bar. Academia only brands itself with the specificity of one's subject. The allure of staking out a new piece of terrain as being an expert of both an arcane and popular new subject. One can take a new lens, but either the author or the focus must be narrowly arcane. God forbid we have another Dickens or Tolstoy guy. Yet, the delivery of the language, the product is not diversified, it is similar critical rhetoric, we don't use dioramas, lists, infographics, or the gimmicks Pitchfork used to keep its reviews sneering and engaging. This perceived stodginess in the medium of academic criticism and essays is probably getting a due revision in the form of the infographics and technological flourishes of the day, but isn't the point not the form, but rather the insight and the enhancement of truth in the discipline and in understanding the past and current time with it.
Fear and insecurity separates humans from each other and underscores an individuated, separated experience that allows us to distrust one another. Adding faith and lack of fear as well as self acceptance causes one's path, thoughts, and ideas to become clear without a distortion of another choice. Faith indicates seeing the way one is going and the terrain around and accepting it, continuing on without being nervous or resentful of what will happen. Faith is something that makes me resent other people less or set up curtseys and bird dances to get to know them less. Social interactions require a certain amount of necessary prologue, but this isn't something I should resent. My bitterness and resentment comes from comparison with other people, which is ridiculous in the achievement of my individual goals, though less so with my progress in goals related to other people. I do not fit with the devil may care risk taking of the entrepreneur who arranges all to fulfill their impossible dream by monetizing it with a niche market, with the doing what you love and such. There is a great bouquet of people founding specific and gimmicky vegan chocolate bars, pop up yoghurt kitchens, books and toys that our parents made inaccessible to us due to the gender divide, other gleeful TED-baiting ideas meant to quickly expand our consciousness in the space of a Google Chrome commercial. I am too much of a follower, scribe, and detailist to focus on the huge array of syrup bars and girls' spatial reasoning toys I could be making. I don't fit into the second dot com boom as an entrepreneur or evangelist. Nor in the niche DIY rooftop kale farmer, butcher, single batch distiller, or other niche hipster animal that found a specific language to articulate and live their dream and get featured on NYT Magazine or NPR. The dream of the 1890s is alive in hipsterdom today of being an artisan of one's specific wares, whatever they may be, but before joyfully humming away at work, one must carve out one's artisanal specialty, whether a Ukrainian-Korean fruit pickling brand or a raw aperitif bar. Academia only brands itself with the specificity of one's subject. The allure of staking out a new piece of terrain as being an expert of both an arcane and popular new subject. One can take a new lens, but either the author or the focus must be narrowly arcane. God forbid we have another Dickens or Tolstoy guy. Yet, the delivery of the language, the product is not diversified, it is similar critical rhetoric, we don't use dioramas, lists, infographics, or the gimmicks Pitchfork used to keep its reviews sneering and engaging. This perceived stodginess in the medium of academic criticism and essays is probably getting a due revision in the form of the infographics and technological flourishes of the day, but isn't the point not the form, but rather the insight and the enhancement of truth in the discipline and in understanding the past and current time with it.
Annoying
I am surprised and ever panting at the rate that my generation devolved from inertia, consumerism, and empty hallmarks of culture to living in interesting times. The result of the baby boom was enough time to raise two generations whose faith in progress made them think they would never go poor or hungry again. The freedom and future centric focus of baby boomers who broke through the ties of both the large family community where younger members have a specific place/owe a debt of gratitude to their elders and the quaint mores of the nuclear family cemented during the Victorian age brought forth in us materialism, individualism, and resultant alienation. Our x-boxes, technological luxuries, independence and isolation as a country are being wrested from us at a non-idealistic level, our purse strings. Americans have bought the freedom to not depend or communicate through distant relatives and community structures through avoiding the landline, moving far away, and building the kind of nuclear family whose reward is perhaps a mother in law not living in the next room and breathing down her son's neck or not living in communal apartments like my family has in the past. Yet, when not distracted by tv, activities, or even a job, the discomfort of our alienation, our roomy suburban houses with two acre zoning or our tendency only call our friends to hang out is being felt. The hurricane forced us to recognize that being trapped in the basement of our house without power for five days or much worse is less painful with the society and support of our neighbors. Even if it means some unpleasant and outmoded social overtures. I don't know if I want the interwoven social niceties of large communal societies or places where filial piety is more important than the freedom to realize one's wishes. If America becomes a less individualistic society, I'm hoping that it will have a modern take on community. I'm hoping that women will still retain some of the freedoms of, say, marrying someone you love rather than being married off as a political and economic decision or being able to take the career of your choice. Better yet, I'm hoping for a re-definition of how the sexes relate to each other that will alleviate the anxiety of the fact that women are slowly breaking the barrier of a society in which they've struggled to have the same opportunities as men.
Men seem to be processing this as "women trying to become men." This is not true, as far as vague social definitions of gender, this means not being barred from doing things because they are only to be defined by weakness and childishness. Mostly this is only to benefit from the same legal and life niceties as men. This means to not to receive lower pay based on sex, to be able to be admitted to the sports of their choice, to not be judged disapprovingly or differently for their choices or bodies, to seek the careers, lives, and relationships they want without barriers because of gender. And to not be defined in relation to other people in the same way men are not. This doesn't mean that some women don't want the door opened for them or to be paid for on the first and second date, or that they don't seek a committed loving relationship because they don't keep the box locked. My idea is that feminism is based on lack of impediment, rather than even equality. Meaning, I don't necessarily want to be punched because a man got punched and we're equal and I can take it, but I don't want to be cheated of a home loan, discriminated against in the workplace or school, or at the doctor's office, not to mention deal with danger at night. While our tendency to be seen as people "acting masculine" or "trying to be a man" is flawed and silly, the fact is that many women do want fulfilling relationships, and the sexual revolution has stacked cards in such a way that women are displaying their plumes to men and the plain grey men take their pick. This is where the problem is. A misinterpreted, simplified version of the feminism that I see as a historical, theoretical, and practical movement with many theories and great complexity is what makes a relationship where each person fulfills a different role or "energy" difficult. As I understand it, in a relationship, each element maintains commonality, but fulfills a different function in working together. This means that both members of the relationship are not going to be able to do the same things. Taking care of one another is important, but each takes care of the other in a different way. What I'm saying is that one thing I've learned from my mother is that the woman, due to being able to register emotional complexities, has to be the "cunning" one in the relationship in order to maintain it. Avoid arguments and such. Or at least one person has to. I know that I want certain things, like to be protected and supported in a concrete, thoughtful, nonverbal way (such things in the past have been coming with me to places, bringing me something or acknowledging when I don't feel well, occasionally just paying for meals rather than the looking at the check like it's on fire song and dance, small things). But, I am also controlling and domineering (when it comes to picking restaurants, music, and other trivial things),verbally overpowering, insecure, negative, and many other things that make it difficult to get the bottom line support that my father gives my mother. This behavior attracts calm, quiet men who really want someone to fill the silence and talk and at the beginning don't care about trivial things like me choosing music or restaurants or foisting internet articles on them until I overshare or overstay or over everything. In other words, there is a strong, rigid element and a flexible element. This does not have to be gendered, but one element complements or supports the other. I just want to be supported and the flexible element bends, but does not break, and therefore is the strongest. There is not much use for a domineering, unsubtle woman, who just really wants to babble about her insecurities and be "completely open" just like a "straightshooting honest" man who delivers unpleasant comments in a random, unasked for way to women will not find a listener that he finds pleasant. My mother changed and I have to change. She became less sarcastic, more pliable and realized that she had to both play a game and pick her battles. Mystery and challenge keeps both genders engaged, so, usually when I am on the chase, the man is challenging and withholding and I hold the losing hand. There are certain feminine hallmarks distasteful to feminists who don't realize that a relationship has to do with complementary roles that I will have to adopt if I want a strong, supportive partner. Like, I have to learn to cook and "keep the hearth" which is legitimate to me, because I want a hearth and either my apartment or my mom has kept it in the past. These are skills and tricks that I took for granted before I learned what being a woman is. Or being more positive and pleasant, which is a natural offshoot of going after my own goals. As someone who loves to remark on things and generalize, I am negative and I imagine that it makes me more truthful. Lemon is beautiful and relatable because she is flawed, vulnerable, and intractable in ways a woman can understand and has personal traits that make us automatically view her as the protagonist whose world we see through. Most of the men I've met in a dating context have asked at some point if I cook (probably because I talk about food so much), if I love my job, like sports, if I want children "at some point," and such things related to being a woman who is both feminine, pleasant, and positive, or someone a man enjoys being around and coming home to. I appreciate the value of home and hearth myself. Good food, a beautiful apartment, and a nice place to live. Who is going to create it if not me? Eh, the man could screw it up anyway. I loved the apartments I had, but they were lacking in furniture and certainly in timely meals. I think I love to go to restaurants and coffee shops because they have a pre-created ambiance with homelike, discriminating taste without me having to do any of the thinking and decorating. This makes them sound like an airplane food version of the home environment, but they are just trendier and I find home decoration really difficult. Most people would find me really annoying and negative, but I'm lucky that my friends can stand me for any length of time. Unfortunately, this requires little effort on my part to become a more engaging person, maybe one who talks less and asks more leading questions, so I can't say that I'm "good" at my friends. I'm just lucky to have the friendship. I've been frustrated that with little reveals or indiscretions, with staying too long, talking too much, showing too much interest, someone who you are trying to form a symbiotic relationship with can write you off. Maybe I don't have the physical attributes that excuse my not winning at life enough (I'm sure sure super attractive unemployed girls get at least a couple of months before they are written off) or talking too much, as a result, the other person is testing me or interviewing me tribunally and I don't have the advantage. At the same time, I've found the reasons for rejection to be painfully simple when people do tell me and painfully indicative of my core flaws, it isn't that they themselves suck, they do see me lucidly and why I'm not good enough for them. The freedom of having a home, job, and life whose course you steer is markedly different and provides a different set of challenges than those of living with and accomodating oneself to another person. In the corporate work environment, one is an instrument toward a purpose and one's daily work must as much as possible be in service of that purpose as well as one's behavior as a "leader." Going home, I have respite from needing to (and not making) calculated movements toward being seen as instrumental and surviving as well as the corporate rhetoric which is really of being a tool toward the bottom line or company goal. I have the freedom to be vulnerable, to party, to eat, and to wander with dreams. I imagine that home with another person again requires scrupulously framing your image as an instrument of preserving companionship, not seeming negative or crestfallen from the work day, re-applying makeup and brushing teeth on waking up. And the worst part, not going to the bathroom because apparently women don't do that freely. Omitting various things that make you shrill or slothful looking in order to have companionship, sex, and such things. For a date, I feel like it's necessary to prepare most of the day before and get into the mode of having to possibly make the omissions, confidence, and concise phrasing that I only use on telephone interviews. On telephone interviews, you are barred from saying anything unconfident or not positive about yourself so the content is incredibly rigid. As a result, when men ask me what I have going for the rest of the day, I know it's over and I'm also livid because a date is something you schedule around much like an interview. Maybe if I'm seeing a friend I have something going for the rest of the day, but no I'm not going to a benefit concert. Loneliness and lack of companionship vs. some constraint and lack of comfort and vulnerability, which is tonic after the working day. The strange thing is that romance fades as constraint, hiding, and playing games fades.
A feminist may take offense to the idea that, depending on the type of partner you want, you may have to exhibit characteristics that are not unpleasant or that complement their personality. Or that you may have to take charge with the "picking battles" and not being shrill portion of the relationship. This is something that I may have to do. I don't see many women, particularly those in relationships, that behave like me so I don't have a good frame of reference, I am at a high scale of vulnerability and unattractive habits. I carry rocks and peppermints in my pockets, I have a problem with my skin, I am bad at wearing make up, and bad at outfits among other things, I am quirky in a way that can be taken to an extreme, but not in my clothing or personal image. I bore myself with my stories and soliloquys, yet have the insatiable urge to talk. I idealize my talking companions ability to satisfy my need for intelligent novelty and entertainment, as well as a quickening of the spirit, which most men can't provide. I take a long time to do things like get up, cook simple things, etc. This is partly because I'm unused to taking care of a partner and I'm not sure if the Ally Sheedy parka is endemic to me. Yet, I don't like Liz Lemon for her finicky and particular habits like shrill insistence on rules:
Cashier: No $100s, Small bills.
Liz: Oh, I knew this was gonna happen.
Cashier: Store policy.
Liz: Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this.
Cashier: No, I don't
Gray: Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water?
Gray: You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal.
Liz: It's an illegal policy.
Cashier: You're holding up the line!
Liz: (Along with Gray) No, You're holding up the line!
I am surprised by the new habits I might have to learn to adopt because I haven't thought of them before. Of course, attractiveness comes with realizing personal goals and the resultant contentment and busy sheen the body takes on in response to achieving personal goals. Yet, what creative person can dedicate themselves to whatever unfinished, torn art they choose when they are working at every point to bring their persona into fruition? What creative person does not allow themselves to be torn, uncomfortable, slightly broken rather than some sort of burpee-doing vegetarian going after their start up idea? I'm almost worried about working on my intractable habits and sloth because of this. Because I think motivational people who hold their lives up as an example are typically overly self focused and broken, because imperfection and the distance of a dream make it easy to calm oneself by imagining something better. I don't think people who have simply realized their dreams, particularly material ones, are happy, I think they are people who know what is around the bend of a road and no longer excited to find out. The only way I can find to not become a soft feminine cat like Ms Alba is to treat externals independently of what is internally inside me and work on internal goals irrespective of how they might enhance my femininity. Because ultimately doing something will make me more pleasant and less miserable to be around, and doing something that realizes my dreams, moreso. Even though realizing one's dreams brings the possibility of monomania, as one becomes a vessel for the message of healthy eating, or sculpture, art, or worse, a motivational speaker. I think seeking improvement through one's own body rather than creating something external is toxic and makes a life perfectly lived into one's art. When you make your life your art, that's just messed up, man. Although, when you sacrifice an imperfect life with someone you love to the perfection of a goal or art, it can prove just as damaging. Finishing A Hat, but giving up the idea of a perfectly or well lived life is the only avenue toward that type of happiness..
I've never really found my habits intractable before. I didn't even see anything wrong with them. And I think it's that I'm used to myself inexpertly holding up the hearth. Or getting some ethnic food when I can't. Maybe it's that men require things of us that we don't require of ourselves, things we have to learn later in this culture that protects us from learning about relationships, facilitating interdependence, or even the emotional dimensions of sex. These are things we maybe think we don't need to learn. I think the old adage is that in a primal sense, men and women are different and require different things of each other, things we can't automatically imagine. These are shocking because they do not follow the "require of others what you require of yourself" rule. The odd marriage of "companionship" or friendship with a side of sex that men seem to view relationships as, along with the strong emphasis on loyalty, is somewhat puzzling to me. Though the various requirements of women to be supportive, but not excessively, to engage, provide a core of affection, entertain, and mystify are odd to men.
We learn the shallow gloss of nonessentials like the time and place of the Tea Party, but not how to write cover letters, create solutions to problems as they come up, take calculated risks, bring an idea to fruition, and teach ourselves. The baseline critical thinking, problem solving, and analysis required to learn and assimilate new tasks is something we learn when we are forced to make do with the insufficient teaching and lackluster instruction of weeks' training. On the job we frequently digest insufficient information and are not led by the hand in any way. There must be some benefit in not teaching us to exercise the mental tools we have equipped to deal with new information and amorphous problems because no teacher ever taught that to us.
Men seem to be processing this as "women trying to become men." This is not true, as far as vague social definitions of gender, this means not being barred from doing things because they are only to be defined by weakness and childishness. Mostly this is only to benefit from the same legal and life niceties as men. This means to not to receive lower pay based on sex, to be able to be admitted to the sports of their choice, to not be judged disapprovingly or differently for their choices or bodies, to seek the careers, lives, and relationships they want without barriers because of gender. And to not be defined in relation to other people in the same way men are not. This doesn't mean that some women don't want the door opened for them or to be paid for on the first and second date, or that they don't seek a committed loving relationship because they don't keep the box locked. My idea is that feminism is based on lack of impediment, rather than even equality. Meaning, I don't necessarily want to be punched because a man got punched and we're equal and I can take it, but I don't want to be cheated of a home loan, discriminated against in the workplace or school, or at the doctor's office, not to mention deal with danger at night. While our tendency to be seen as people "acting masculine" or "trying to be a man" is flawed and silly, the fact is that many women do want fulfilling relationships, and the sexual revolution has stacked cards in such a way that women are displaying their plumes to men and the plain grey men take their pick. This is where the problem is. A misinterpreted, simplified version of the feminism that I see as a historical, theoretical, and practical movement with many theories and great complexity is what makes a relationship where each person fulfills a different role or "energy" difficult. As I understand it, in a relationship, each element maintains commonality, but fulfills a different function in working together. This means that both members of the relationship are not going to be able to do the same things. Taking care of one another is important, but each takes care of the other in a different way. What I'm saying is that one thing I've learned from my mother is that the woman, due to being able to register emotional complexities, has to be the "cunning" one in the relationship in order to maintain it. Avoid arguments and such. Or at least one person has to. I know that I want certain things, like to be protected and supported in a concrete, thoughtful, nonverbal way (such things in the past have been coming with me to places, bringing me something or acknowledging when I don't feel well, occasionally just paying for meals rather than the looking at the check like it's on fire song and dance, small things). But, I am also controlling and domineering (when it comes to picking restaurants, music, and other trivial things),verbally overpowering, insecure, negative, and many other things that make it difficult to get the bottom line support that my father gives my mother. This behavior attracts calm, quiet men who really want someone to fill the silence and talk and at the beginning don't care about trivial things like me choosing music or restaurants or foisting internet articles on them until I overshare or overstay or over everything. In other words, there is a strong, rigid element and a flexible element. This does not have to be gendered, but one element complements or supports the other. I just want to be supported and the flexible element bends, but does not break, and therefore is the strongest. There is not much use for a domineering, unsubtle woman, who just really wants to babble about her insecurities and be "completely open" just like a "straightshooting honest" man who delivers unpleasant comments in a random, unasked for way to women will not find a listener that he finds pleasant. My mother changed and I have to change. She became less sarcastic, more pliable and realized that she had to both play a game and pick her battles. Mystery and challenge keeps both genders engaged, so, usually when I am on the chase, the man is challenging and withholding and I hold the losing hand. There are certain feminine hallmarks distasteful to feminists who don't realize that a relationship has to do with complementary roles that I will have to adopt if I want a strong, supportive partner. Like, I have to learn to cook and "keep the hearth" which is legitimate to me, because I want a hearth and either my apartment or my mom has kept it in the past. These are skills and tricks that I took for granted before I learned what being a woman is. Or being more positive and pleasant, which is a natural offshoot of going after my own goals. As someone who loves to remark on things and generalize, I am negative and I imagine that it makes me more truthful. Lemon is beautiful and relatable because she is flawed, vulnerable, and intractable in ways a woman can understand and has personal traits that make us automatically view her as the protagonist whose world we see through. Most of the men I've met in a dating context have asked at some point if I cook (probably because I talk about food so much), if I love my job, like sports, if I want children "at some point," and such things related to being a woman who is both feminine, pleasant, and positive, or someone a man enjoys being around and coming home to. I appreciate the value of home and hearth myself. Good food, a beautiful apartment, and a nice place to live. Who is going to create it if not me? Eh, the man could screw it up anyway. I loved the apartments I had, but they were lacking in furniture and certainly in timely meals. I think I love to go to restaurants and coffee shops because they have a pre-created ambiance with homelike, discriminating taste without me having to do any of the thinking and decorating. This makes them sound like an airplane food version of the home environment, but they are just trendier and I find home decoration really difficult. Most people would find me really annoying and negative, but I'm lucky that my friends can stand me for any length of time. Unfortunately, this requires little effort on my part to become a more engaging person, maybe one who talks less and asks more leading questions, so I can't say that I'm "good" at my friends. I'm just lucky to have the friendship. I've been frustrated that with little reveals or indiscretions, with staying too long, talking too much, showing too much interest, someone who you are trying to form a symbiotic relationship with can write you off. Maybe I don't have the physical attributes that excuse my not winning at life enough (I'm sure sure super attractive unemployed girls get at least a couple of months before they are written off) or talking too much, as a result, the other person is testing me or interviewing me tribunally and I don't have the advantage. At the same time, I've found the reasons for rejection to be painfully simple when people do tell me and painfully indicative of my core flaws, it isn't that they themselves suck, they do see me lucidly and why I'm not good enough for them. The freedom of having a home, job, and life whose course you steer is markedly different and provides a different set of challenges than those of living with and accomodating oneself to another person. In the corporate work environment, one is an instrument toward a purpose and one's daily work must as much as possible be in service of that purpose as well as one's behavior as a "leader." Going home, I have respite from needing to (and not making) calculated movements toward being seen as instrumental and surviving as well as the corporate rhetoric which is really of being a tool toward the bottom line or company goal. I have the freedom to be vulnerable, to party, to eat, and to wander with dreams. I imagine that home with another person again requires scrupulously framing your image as an instrument of preserving companionship, not seeming negative or crestfallen from the work day, re-applying makeup and brushing teeth on waking up. And the worst part, not going to the bathroom because apparently women don't do that freely. Omitting various things that make you shrill or slothful looking in order to have companionship, sex, and such things. For a date, I feel like it's necessary to prepare most of the day before and get into the mode of having to possibly make the omissions, confidence, and concise phrasing that I only use on telephone interviews. On telephone interviews, you are barred from saying anything unconfident or not positive about yourself so the content is incredibly rigid. As a result, when men ask me what I have going for the rest of the day, I know it's over and I'm also livid because a date is something you schedule around much like an interview. Maybe if I'm seeing a friend I have something going for the rest of the day, but no I'm not going to a benefit concert. Loneliness and lack of companionship vs. some constraint and lack of comfort and vulnerability, which is tonic after the working day. The strange thing is that romance fades as constraint, hiding, and playing games fades.
A feminist may take offense to the idea that, depending on the type of partner you want, you may have to exhibit characteristics that are not unpleasant or that complement their personality. Or that you may have to take charge with the "picking battles" and not being shrill portion of the relationship. This is something that I may have to do. I don't see many women, particularly those in relationships, that behave like me so I don't have a good frame of reference, I am at a high scale of vulnerability and unattractive habits. I carry rocks and peppermints in my pockets, I have a problem with my skin, I am bad at wearing make up, and bad at outfits among other things, I am quirky in a way that can be taken to an extreme, but not in my clothing or personal image. I bore myself with my stories and soliloquys, yet have the insatiable urge to talk. I idealize my talking companions ability to satisfy my need for intelligent novelty and entertainment, as well as a quickening of the spirit, which most men can't provide. I take a long time to do things like get up, cook simple things, etc. This is partly because I'm unused to taking care of a partner and I'm not sure if the Ally Sheedy parka is endemic to me. Yet, I don't like Liz Lemon for her finicky and particular habits like shrill insistence on rules:
Cashier: No $100s, Small bills.
Liz: Oh, I knew this was gonna happen.
Cashier: Store policy.
Liz: Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this.
Cashier: No, I don't
Gray: Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water?
Gray: You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal.
Liz: It's an illegal policy.
Cashier: You're holding up the line!
Liz: (Along with Gray) No, You're holding up the line!
I am surprised by the new habits I might have to learn to adopt because I haven't thought of them before. Of course, attractiveness comes with realizing personal goals and the resultant contentment and busy sheen the body takes on in response to achieving personal goals. Yet, what creative person can dedicate themselves to whatever unfinished, torn art they choose when they are working at every point to bring their persona into fruition? What creative person does not allow themselves to be torn, uncomfortable, slightly broken rather than some sort of burpee-doing vegetarian going after their start up idea? I'm almost worried about working on my intractable habits and sloth because of this. Because I think motivational people who hold their lives up as an example are typically overly self focused and broken, because imperfection and the distance of a dream make it easy to calm oneself by imagining something better. I don't think people who have simply realized their dreams, particularly material ones, are happy, I think they are people who know what is around the bend of a road and no longer excited to find out. The only way I can find to not become a soft feminine cat like Ms Alba is to treat externals independently of what is internally inside me and work on internal goals irrespective of how they might enhance my femininity. Because ultimately doing something will make me more pleasant and less miserable to be around, and doing something that realizes my dreams, moreso. Even though realizing one's dreams brings the possibility of monomania, as one becomes a vessel for the message of healthy eating, or sculpture, art, or worse, a motivational speaker. I think seeking improvement through one's own body rather than creating something external is toxic and makes a life perfectly lived into one's art. When you make your life your art, that's just messed up, man. Although, when you sacrifice an imperfect life with someone you love to the perfection of a goal or art, it can prove just as damaging. Finishing A Hat, but giving up the idea of a perfectly or well lived life is the only avenue toward that type of happiness..
I've never really found my habits intractable before. I didn't even see anything wrong with them. And I think it's that I'm used to myself inexpertly holding up the hearth. Or getting some ethnic food when I can't. Maybe it's that men require things of us that we don't require of ourselves, things we have to learn later in this culture that protects us from learning about relationships, facilitating interdependence, or even the emotional dimensions of sex. These are things we maybe think we don't need to learn. I think the old adage is that in a primal sense, men and women are different and require different things of each other, things we can't automatically imagine. These are shocking because they do not follow the "require of others what you require of yourself" rule. The odd marriage of "companionship" or friendship with a side of sex that men seem to view relationships as, along with the strong emphasis on loyalty, is somewhat puzzling to me. Though the various requirements of women to be supportive, but not excessively, to engage, provide a core of affection, entertain, and mystify are odd to men.
We learn the shallow gloss of nonessentials like the time and place of the Tea Party, but not how to write cover letters, create solutions to problems as they come up, take calculated risks, bring an idea to fruition, and teach ourselves. The baseline critical thinking, problem solving, and analysis required to learn and assimilate new tasks is something we learn when we are forced to make do with the insufficient teaching and lackluster instruction of weeks' training. On the job we frequently digest insufficient information and are not led by the hand in any way. There must be some benefit in not teaching us to exercise the mental tools we have equipped to deal with new information and amorphous problems because no teacher ever taught that to us.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Outsider Storyteller
What an outsider storyteller is:
I've been thinking about what an outsider storyteller is. I think that certain concerns of creative writing are more universal than others, because they relate to the formal constraints of writing. For instance, if you're writing fiction, you're writing a story on paper that may or may not be time bound and may or may not feature characters. What makes good writing? When do you write? Do you have a schedule for writing? Etc. Basically, the process includes formal constraints and that means that a lot of writers have the same concerns, regardless if they've been schooled or given any opinion on what writing is.
I think that this concept of fiction and nonfiction writing crystallized with the 19th century novel, a recognizable plot, characters, temporal storylines, etc. Modernism is recognizable as a reaction to that. I think the first kneejerk is, "Who is this story about? What is happening?" Modernism is ensconced in the history of how fiction defined itself in the 19th century and is inextricable from it. Postmodernism is also recognizable as reaction. While picking up a book from the 19th century or what I will call a "conventional" book with a temporal background and recognizable characters today will be understandable for someone who is not studied in literary history, reading a book in the modernism tradition as well as a postmodernist one will not be understandable or enjoyable, nor will the reader be able to pick up insights.
I think that an outsider storyteller is not recognizably tied to either a canonical way of telling the story in fiction (unconsciously "challenged" in the 18th century, cemented in the 19th century, and challenged frmo the mid to late 19th century on) in this reaction to the canonical way of telling fiction. Thus, they have a possibly intuitive or traditional way of telling the story. Perhaps their way of understanding how a story is crafted is more organic because they are not weighed down by the history of where they ought to be from?
I've been thinking about what an outsider storyteller is. I think that certain concerns of creative writing are more universal than others, because they relate to the formal constraints of writing. For instance, if you're writing fiction, you're writing a story on paper that may or may not be time bound and may or may not feature characters. What makes good writing? When do you write? Do you have a schedule for writing? Etc. Basically, the process includes formal constraints and that means that a lot of writers have the same concerns, regardless if they've been schooled or given any opinion on what writing is.
I think that this concept of fiction and nonfiction writing crystallized with the 19th century novel, a recognizable plot, characters, temporal storylines, etc. Modernism is recognizable as a reaction to that. I think the first kneejerk is, "Who is this story about? What is happening?" Modernism is ensconced in the history of how fiction defined itself in the 19th century and is inextricable from it. Postmodernism is also recognizable as reaction. While picking up a book from the 19th century or what I will call a "conventional" book with a temporal background and recognizable characters today will be understandable for someone who is not studied in literary history, reading a book in the modernism tradition as well as a postmodernist one will not be understandable or enjoyable, nor will the reader be able to pick up insights.
I think that an outsider storyteller is not recognizably tied to either a canonical way of telling the story in fiction (unconsciously "challenged" in the 18th century, cemented in the 19th century, and challenged frmo the mid to late 19th century on) in this reaction to the canonical way of telling fiction. Thus, they have a possibly intuitive or traditional way of telling the story. Perhaps their way of understanding how a story is crafted is more organic because they are not weighed down by the history of where they ought to be from?
On Food
The subject of health has been obsessing me lately due to the fact that I'm in this moderation morass until I know specifically where to turn. I know that I disagree with the fanatically calorie counting, next big thing Huffington Post lists of "super" foods, and people who subscribe to a Paleo diet of meat and eggs and such, or the people who supplement their workouts with meat and whey protein. I think. I used to see the sense in Ayurveda, which argues eating a mix of raw and cooked foods and carefully scheduling your life in the interest of balance. Now I see people making gains in their skin, body, and energy level from restrictive diets and it makes me think if perhaps I'm not missing anything. I've been toying a lot with the idea of moving slowly toward raw veganism, and have at least been including more raw foods and token raw vegan foods (chia seeds, flax) in my diet. There is a concept of perfect practice rather than practice makes perfect that makes the eating of a diet that keeps you vital so deliberate. To sloppily jump into raw veganism tends to spell low b12 levels and disaster, to pound lots of water all day because someone told you to can lower the metabolism, to eat well, but at irregular times in the day can also cause a problem, and to include raw food that is not organic or to lightly cook foods incorrectly and not release most of their nutrients is a waste, for instance, apparently carrots release more of their nutrients when (boiled or roasted?) in the skin and then cut up or most of the nutrient content of potatoes, kiwis, and other skinned fruits and vegetables lie just below the skin, which means having to eat the nasty orange pith. I've been obsessing about buying a juicer which also involves the idea of "perfect practice," because while a juicer allows you to up your nutrient and vitamin content, centrifugal juicers slightly heat the fruit and vegetables and produce a lot of waste and masticating juicers are expensive, plus I already got a Breville incoming as a gift. I've also been thinking of buying the Ferrari of blenders if I have a less fancy juicer, to make green smoothies and other healthy smoothie gains. The problem is, when I drink a green juice, I tend to automatically go into headache detox mode because it is so rich in vitamins, just like when I go to Souen and eat macriobiotic food. I have an intuition that juices are not as good in gains for me as smoothies, though, and the fact that my trying keeps not being even close to good just sucks. Like, I bought cayenne pepper, which is a fancy new food, but I bought it at the supermarket. I made myself a turmeric almond milk tea, but I added cayenne instead of black pepper which apparently activates turmeric, used turmeric that I worry is not that good, and Almond Breeze instead of making my own nut milk.. Some people emphasize the eating of beet greens and chards, others claim they are toxic due to oxalic acid and have you boil them. When I sauteed them and forced myself to drink the juice, bet your ass I was disappointed. There is a morass of opinions, on the one hand, there is nothing wrong with adding raw, hopefully organic fruits and vegetables and rotating your greens. On the other hand, others claim it is about metabolism, extol the benefits of potatoes, and cite scientific studies against every fad food lifestyle. Or you eat less inflammatory foods, tell that to my mom who loves nightshades and fish. It is not that simple to eat intelligently and live healthfully. Mainstream types claim the benefits of whole grains and lean meats, while others counter that fatty fish have a higher count of omega3s, oh and I eat sardines, Costco sardines, or even claim it is more about reducing the omega6 ratio, still others like the Wheat Belly guy claim that commercial wheat and even whole grain is chock full of amylopectin and spikes the blood sugar, so good to cut it out all together, this guy is also pro people eating meat. I mostly get annoyed when people tell me to eat more of stuff I hate, beets, yams, and less of stuff I like, beet greens, kale. The truth is that with any theoretical discipline, particularly one with a lot of "forget what you know because the bigwigs have been lying to you" there is a mix of scientific study and knowledge on the back end, academic cross talk, "established scientific knowledge" being levied in a simplified form by magazines and faux medical websites, types who favor you proceed with the intuitive, your own opinion, types who pitch the counter-intuitive or "don't trust yourself or what you've heard, trust me," and the conspiracy theorists who favor a model out of the mainstream, but feel suspect because they don't supply as much concrete scientific evidence. The way the concept of diet for a healthier life applies to the issues dearest to my heart is quite wide. The thing is, in Child Development, what I consider a more crucial and contentious discipline, it's hard to figure out the diet children need. Children are different from adults trying to restructure their lifestyle in a way that has more to do with workaday concepts of exercise or meal because you "have to" rather than play or eating what you want when you're hungry. Yes, adults are different from children. A raw diet or cutting out dairy might not benefit a child the way it does you. Adults lament their lack of imagination, wonder, or tuning naturally into what they might need due to socialization and the formation of logic based on their life. The fact is, some good things do come with adulthood, even with that stuff you hate, like the regimentation of routine in work and the "have tos" of now we run like guinea pigs on a wheel to get our exercise rather than playing with super soakers or rolling down a hill. I think that envying ourselves as we were as kids shortchanges the gains we've made in maturity, learning to compromise, learning to respect our own boundaries with people, learning to work and contribute to others, and learning to give. This does require the development of cumbersome logic, unfortunately, going into the box of work makes it harder to think "outside" it. But, we are on the trajectory of acquiring wisdom and insight. By learning to deal with failure, disappointment, difficulty, and crisis. I stress so much about the concept of a good, simple, sustainable way to eat that enhances health because I think if I find an intelligent solution to this I could serve others. I could serve others. Not necessarily children, but people my age or slightly younger or older. There is a big, disgusting debate on obesity in this country and the trajectory from eating mostly processed foods to intelligent eating that may go against the way your parents ate or fed you is a fraught one and can go through many stages, specifically, overly regimented eating, perhaps an eating disorder, body image issues, obsession with food. I am against too strict eating and I'm worried that forcing the way we live and eat on people who have been eating mostly processed food may be a mistake. I don't think chaining kids who have been accustomed to playing and having fun to a calorie system and causing them to run on an uninspiring treadmill system like we do is the answer. I think that incorporating whole raw food like fruit or vegetable as a valued eating accessory and snack is. Processed foods are specifically calibrated in umami and various other taste balances to be addictive. Middle class America's obsession with diet, regimentation, and deprivation is just as toxic. There is not that easy an answer to what way to eat best supports health and also does not obsess us. And I don't think the pundits who have appointed themselves to regiment our food or recommend processes live a good life free of obsession or food unhealthiness either. I guess I should stick to my own food theories and advice, add organic raw fruit and vegetables, eat at the sameish times during the day, eat greens and beans and colored fruit and vegetables, reduce inflammatory foods, and have plenty-ish of water.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
waah
I joke that I tend to like the things that people like and go through the same reactions people do, the more plebeian the entertainment (shoddy unknown romantic comedy? I like it!), particularly if it's for women, the more I'm going to eventually like it. I watched the Gilmore Girls and loved it, I resisted 30 Rock and liking Liz Lemon/Tina Fey because I didn't like the skits on SNL, but of course I'm entranced by the character and she's probably my favorite female comedian working now. I resisted red mango, but now I love it more than the average lame yoghurt consumer, it is one of the favorite ice creams of someone who REALLY likes ice cream, and I have no doubt that I'll like Mad Men and the Wire, depending how not stupid I am on the day I watch it. Because god knows I like some dumb crap.
I had a merciful 4 years of college to not understand the men are dogs, women are cats stereotypes, the formulaic disappointments of the dating scene, and the various silly failures of consensual relationships that evidently speed us on our way to being bitter cat ladies at some point, or at the very least, tired and bitter and then going back into the field. One thing I don't like that other women do, maybe because men are capitalizing on them, are cats and cat videos, by the way. But, just like everything else, both my desire for a love relationship and my consequent bitterness to the fact that "uhhh, men and women are different, and what if Jack Nicholson was a flabbity bloo" blindsided me like a herring in the face.
I am trying to piece together why, all of the sudden, after my blissful and turbulent friendships with friendly, complicated, and fairly sensitive men in college and the idea that "everyone is different, no two people are the same," has me re-reading the stupid, low brow, but funny Bridget Jones book or trying to discuss my issues with the women I have access to on the internet, either the feminists or the positivity and spiritualism set.
I think it comes down to two things. The men I have access to, men I meet, men who express their opinions on the internet, and last of all, my friends, both perpetuate and negate stereotypes, sometimes in a vaguely dismissive way and in the same breath. I read a comment that says "every man wants to fuck women who are 18 and if they don't they're lying. every one." Or the Psychology Today article on "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths... proven by evolution" or something like that. That hammered again the evolutionary basis for men wanting "young blonde, hourglass figured bombshells" and the fact that humans have practiced mild polygyny, which, status-wise, is apparently better for women. Or a dating expert who gingerly describes men as "sexual hypocrites." Even laying down this truth with sensitivity to us, it hurts. (Because of the liking and investment that naturally comes with a woman who has "succumbed" or agreed to sex, in this paradigm. The desire to create a relationship with this other person and not have them leave due to expectations of what's coming to them because dammit they paid for dinner.) Or a man who is judgmental of a woman who has an equal amount of sexual experience than he does. Just as my male friends might reference "crazy women" or confirm various stereotypes while in the same breath saying, when I point at a poster of Brooklyn Decker "You think men want that? That's a beauty ideal. You really think men want that?" Then, I see corrupt hedge fund managers jockeying for their 22 year old "slam piece." Juxtaposed with the married women I see who tell me that they, rotund and obese, have found someone who loves them and thinks they're sexy and "each ware has its own buyer."
I have ingested and researched so many reactions I find unsavory from men, some that lightly belittle feminism or tell those women to "make them a sandwich," some that describe their ideal wife as Kate Beckinsale and a fine cook who likes to screw, nothing, okay, maybe 10 times a day being too much. And then next to them the pacifying comments that everyone is different and that includes men who don't go to strip clubs or call women a requisite amount of times from a bachelor party (otherwise women are psycho and insecure.)
My male friends who claim to be "nice," I started to notice their taste in girls, specifically, provocative duck faced photographs, long blonde hair, "slim with curves" as an acquaintance who is balding describes the kind of girls he is interested in, the "hot girl at the bar" in thigh high boots and hot pants who Louis CK considers "an angel and what could I ever do to make her like me..." I want her to be stupid and slutty and something else rude. But I am morally opposed to any of my own slut shaming and assuming of my fellow woman, particularly if I am intimidated by her being hot. I know for a fact that many of the hot woman I know are sweet, polite, complicated, and some have very odd taste in men. Like, the Rip Torn sort of face-tattooed male walking problem and turn their face from the Brad Pitt or Chris Pine chasing after them, because it doesn't have many discolorations and scars.
And two, I have low self worth in terms of badly wanting to attract a certain kind of man among other things. In college, I was able to keep that the tendency to measure my self worth on who I can attract, or noticing who responds and who doesn't, at bay with crushes and the knowledge that I was in some kind of cocoon of gregarious fat where everyone was nice to me and accepted me, but someday I would graduate. The desire for a grown up relationship in a desert of just shit smacked me in the face. It was sudden and urgent. And apparently, the desire for a relationship will get you nowhere if you are not distracted, happy in yourself, and fully established in this world. Say the positivity experts. So basically I have to wait out this temporary attack of spleen until whatever weird self worth wound that hid all the while I was perfectly independent and in la la land spontaneously cleans itself.
I equate my particular brand of anger, in this case at men, with "blue balls" not because of sex, but because my anger, in all its ugly, self-hating, politically incorrect flame keeps building and folding in on itself until by the time it is expressed, I will probably be piledriving the smallest dog. Or something. When all along I want to punch and destroy the boss. The numerous quiet defeats in my life, from show downs that didn't happen with domineering colleagues, to wanting to destroy some guy that heckles me on the street and makes me feel small, ugly, and fat... with his undiscriminating attention. And I hate myself for wanting to take that guy down because I assume that he yelled some shit at the Elaine Stritch lookalike in front of me. Because hey, maybe he isn't even staring me down. Who am I to think his attention is directed to me? But if it is, get the fuck away.
Hey, at this point, my tastes seem to be not so far from sad, bathing, fireman calendar and ice cream lady. Maybe, along with the Gilmore Girls, I would enjoy Homeland, Fox News, or the fireman calendar? Lots of America's idiots enjoy these things. And, the vast wall of fusty Penguin classics I put up to differentiate myself from America's tv watching population is something I admitted to myself I didn't enjoy as much as a good meal or party or something.
In college, I used to long to play the field, in the sense that I assumed that a relationship was dull. I wanted to have the attention of lots of men. I also wanted to go to parties. The glimmering, crazy, slightly legal Midnight Cowboy and grimy New York 80s 90s parties that fueled art. New York has "blue balled" me from that since the anodyne mid 2000s and the dawn of the taste hipster and his antifolk, his lack of energy and alienation even in the party setting. The party would begin and people would already be looking in separate directions while The Shins or Ratatat or MGMT or whatever insipid, sometimes lightly dancy big headphone and no dance style generation spawned. The generation that remixed Hall and Oates or insipid 70s smooth rock in a bar so awkwardly positioned that the island space for dancing is no good to sit and talk, let alone dance. It's funny now that a couple of days ago I abandoned a populated improv theater's bar to meet for a date because that was more viable. At least I am learning something. And some time ago, I went to a party that almost shut up my endless whining about the New York scene being dead. Apparently the scene has gone underground, positivity experts, that will cut my negative commentary by 50%. I was with someone and, even with my roving eye, hanging with this awkward, chain wallet wearing Goth byproduct with a moribund job, realized that if I were alone here, I would be sad faced and have a lousy time. And nobody would be interested in me from the golden youth in somewhat hipster inspired, but almost club kid like costumes. Partly because of my extremely bewildered look, partly because any time I see someone I like I automatically slouch and seize up for fear of their reaction or that they don't feel the same.
Some say it is not your business why or whether people will reject you, or that "they didn't deserve you" or "their loss," but I know why I reject people and sometimes the reasons are obvious as the wall in front of you, direct to the point of nasty, or compelling. Like a woman denying that she needs to lose pounds and grow her hair and when she does everyone will treat her differently.
When you serve yourself up to someone in a relationship, you are serving yourself as a snapshot of how you now are. I think people are unfinished products. I certainly am. So I am complaining about this paradigm shift that I have to show the best I have right now to someone, to be the kind of person they want to be with. And all the horrific ways they could string my emotions along if they don't want it or aren't telling the truth as it goes along. The fact is, until now, it has always been my fallible journey and I never thought I had to make my profession, passions, hobbies, ambition, drive, creativity, and all those things they are asking for, look nice and clean for anybody. I have always messily avoided and sometimes pursued my goals. The little I am getting done now, there is an urgent need to have it presentation ready for someone or risk not being their type, or worse, being the type of person who is seeking to be completed by someone else. Which I don't think I completely am, I am not happy alone at this point, but I am often not happy with other people. It is profoundly shocking that I have to do all these things or be all these new ways. In the age of the start up kings and "the dream of the 1890s is alive in Portland," everyone is pursuing their ambition, drive, creativity, and side project with their little altruistic or creative business of curing meats for the social networking of college students in underserved public schools. The men work on their start up and hundred side projects, have their interesting hobbies like house building and installation projects, follow their TED talks and read their obscure scientific non fiction, and eat life whole. And the women are expected to be this way, too, but one up them. I am not in the least entrepreneurial, and have been blindsided by the intellectual being devalued and the ambition, drive, and passion overvalued. If you are not ready to take your Etsy business to a new boutique level and ride your unicycle off into the sunset in your gun toting, suicide girl bikini, you're fucked.
Another thing is, I just saw a post where a man specifically asked the woman to "not be lazy." As a criterion to be his girlfriend for the holidays. And also, for the creative activity he offered for them to do, they could get dressed up in period garb and take cheeky Christmas photos to send to their relatives. Or maybe join his band? Men must be meeting a lot of lazy women if they ask for the qualities of ambition, drive, passionate about something, "challenge me," "have a fire in you" by name. And all the same admit that they are not looking for a relationship or commitment. The fact that they bow out in that while demanding that their woman be an entrepreneur and have it all figured out is what angers me. They demand the moon and stars for a woman they won't claim to be their girlfriend. At an age and time when it is hard to find a job and harder to find one in line with the true calling....
I had a merciful 4 years of college to not understand the men are dogs, women are cats stereotypes, the formulaic disappointments of the dating scene, and the various silly failures of consensual relationships that evidently speed us on our way to being bitter cat ladies at some point, or at the very least, tired and bitter and then going back into the field. One thing I don't like that other women do, maybe because men are capitalizing on them, are cats and cat videos, by the way. But, just like everything else, both my desire for a love relationship and my consequent bitterness to the fact that "uhhh, men and women are different, and what if Jack Nicholson was a flabbity bloo" blindsided me like a herring in the face.
I am trying to piece together why, all of the sudden, after my blissful and turbulent friendships with friendly, complicated, and fairly sensitive men in college and the idea that "everyone is different, no two people are the same," has me re-reading the stupid, low brow, but funny Bridget Jones book or trying to discuss my issues with the women I have access to on the internet, either the feminists or the positivity and spiritualism set.
I think it comes down to two things. The men I have access to, men I meet, men who express their opinions on the internet, and last of all, my friends, both perpetuate and negate stereotypes, sometimes in a vaguely dismissive way and in the same breath. I read a comment that says "every man wants to fuck women who are 18 and if they don't they're lying. every one." Or the Psychology Today article on "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths... proven by evolution" or something like that. That hammered again the evolutionary basis for men wanting "young blonde, hourglass figured bombshells" and the fact that humans have practiced mild polygyny, which, status-wise, is apparently better for women. Or a dating expert who gingerly describes men as "sexual hypocrites." Even laying down this truth with sensitivity to us, it hurts. (Because of the liking and investment that naturally comes with a woman who has "succumbed" or agreed to sex, in this paradigm. The desire to create a relationship with this other person and not have them leave due to expectations of what's coming to them because dammit they paid for dinner.) Or a man who is judgmental of a woman who has an equal amount of sexual experience than he does. Just as my male friends might reference "crazy women" or confirm various stereotypes while in the same breath saying, when I point at a poster of Brooklyn Decker "You think men want that? That's a beauty ideal. You really think men want that?" Then, I see corrupt hedge fund managers jockeying for their 22 year old "slam piece." Juxtaposed with the married women I see who tell me that they, rotund and obese, have found someone who loves them and thinks they're sexy and "each ware has its own buyer."
I have ingested and researched so many reactions I find unsavory from men, some that lightly belittle feminism or tell those women to "make them a sandwich," some that describe their ideal wife as Kate Beckinsale and a fine cook who likes to screw, nothing, okay, maybe 10 times a day being too much. And then next to them the pacifying comments that everyone is different and that includes men who don't go to strip clubs or call women a requisite amount of times from a bachelor party (otherwise women are psycho and insecure.)
My male friends who claim to be "nice," I started to notice their taste in girls, specifically, provocative duck faced photographs, long blonde hair, "slim with curves" as an acquaintance who is balding describes the kind of girls he is interested in, the "hot girl at the bar" in thigh high boots and hot pants who Louis CK considers "an angel and what could I ever do to make her like me..." I want her to be stupid and slutty and something else rude. But I am morally opposed to any of my own slut shaming and assuming of my fellow woman, particularly if I am intimidated by her being hot. I know for a fact that many of the hot woman I know are sweet, polite, complicated, and some have very odd taste in men. Like, the Rip Torn sort of face-tattooed male walking problem and turn their face from the Brad Pitt or Chris Pine chasing after them, because it doesn't have many discolorations and scars.
And two, I have low self worth in terms of badly wanting to attract a certain kind of man among other things. In college, I was able to keep that the tendency to measure my self worth on who I can attract, or noticing who responds and who doesn't, at bay with crushes and the knowledge that I was in some kind of cocoon of gregarious fat where everyone was nice to me and accepted me, but someday I would graduate. The desire for a grown up relationship in a desert of just shit smacked me in the face. It was sudden and urgent. And apparently, the desire for a relationship will get you nowhere if you are not distracted, happy in yourself, and fully established in this world. Say the positivity experts. So basically I have to wait out this temporary attack of spleen until whatever weird self worth wound that hid all the while I was perfectly independent and in la la land spontaneously cleans itself.
I equate my particular brand of anger, in this case at men, with "blue balls" not because of sex, but because my anger, in all its ugly, self-hating, politically incorrect flame keeps building and folding in on itself until by the time it is expressed, I will probably be piledriving the smallest dog. Or something. When all along I want to punch and destroy the boss. The numerous quiet defeats in my life, from show downs that didn't happen with domineering colleagues, to wanting to destroy some guy that heckles me on the street and makes me feel small, ugly, and fat... with his undiscriminating attention. And I hate myself for wanting to take that guy down because I assume that he yelled some shit at the Elaine Stritch lookalike in front of me. Because hey, maybe he isn't even staring me down. Who am I to think his attention is directed to me? But if it is, get the fuck away.
Hey, at this point, my tastes seem to be not so far from sad, bathing, fireman calendar and ice cream lady. Maybe, along with the Gilmore Girls, I would enjoy Homeland, Fox News, or the fireman calendar? Lots of America's idiots enjoy these things. And, the vast wall of fusty Penguin classics I put up to differentiate myself from America's tv watching population is something I admitted to myself I didn't enjoy as much as a good meal or party or something.
In college, I used to long to play the field, in the sense that I assumed that a relationship was dull. I wanted to have the attention of lots of men. I also wanted to go to parties. The glimmering, crazy, slightly legal Midnight Cowboy and grimy New York 80s 90s parties that fueled art. New York has "blue balled" me from that since the anodyne mid 2000s and the dawn of the taste hipster and his antifolk, his lack of energy and alienation even in the party setting. The party would begin and people would already be looking in separate directions while The Shins or Ratatat or MGMT or whatever insipid, sometimes lightly dancy big headphone and no dance style generation spawned. The generation that remixed Hall and Oates or insipid 70s smooth rock in a bar so awkwardly positioned that the island space for dancing is no good to sit and talk, let alone dance. It's funny now that a couple of days ago I abandoned a populated improv theater's bar to meet for a date because that was more viable. At least I am learning something. And some time ago, I went to a party that almost shut up my endless whining about the New York scene being dead. Apparently the scene has gone underground, positivity experts, that will cut my negative commentary by 50%. I was with someone and, even with my roving eye, hanging with this awkward, chain wallet wearing Goth byproduct with a moribund job, realized that if I were alone here, I would be sad faced and have a lousy time. And nobody would be interested in me from the golden youth in somewhat hipster inspired, but almost club kid like costumes. Partly because of my extremely bewildered look, partly because any time I see someone I like I automatically slouch and seize up for fear of their reaction or that they don't feel the same.
Some say it is not your business why or whether people will reject you, or that "they didn't deserve you" or "their loss," but I know why I reject people and sometimes the reasons are obvious as the wall in front of you, direct to the point of nasty, or compelling. Like a woman denying that she needs to lose pounds and grow her hair and when she does everyone will treat her differently.
When you serve yourself up to someone in a relationship, you are serving yourself as a snapshot of how you now are. I think people are unfinished products. I certainly am. So I am complaining about this paradigm shift that I have to show the best I have right now to someone, to be the kind of person they want to be with. And all the horrific ways they could string my emotions along if they don't want it or aren't telling the truth as it goes along. The fact is, until now, it has always been my fallible journey and I never thought I had to make my profession, passions, hobbies, ambition, drive, creativity, and all those things they are asking for, look nice and clean for anybody. I have always messily avoided and sometimes pursued my goals. The little I am getting done now, there is an urgent need to have it presentation ready for someone or risk not being their type, or worse, being the type of person who is seeking to be completed by someone else. Which I don't think I completely am, I am not happy alone at this point, but I am often not happy with other people. It is profoundly shocking that I have to do all these things or be all these new ways. In the age of the start up kings and "the dream of the 1890s is alive in Portland," everyone is pursuing their ambition, drive, creativity, and side project with their little altruistic or creative business of curing meats for the social networking of college students in underserved public schools. The men work on their start up and hundred side projects, have their interesting hobbies like house building and installation projects, follow their TED talks and read their obscure scientific non fiction, and eat life whole. And the women are expected to be this way, too, but one up them. I am not in the least entrepreneurial, and have been blindsided by the intellectual being devalued and the ambition, drive, and passion overvalued. If you are not ready to take your Etsy business to a new boutique level and ride your unicycle off into the sunset in your gun toting, suicide girl bikini, you're fucked.
Another thing is, I just saw a post where a man specifically asked the woman to "not be lazy." As a criterion to be his girlfriend for the holidays. And also, for the creative activity he offered for them to do, they could get dressed up in period garb and take cheeky Christmas photos to send to their relatives. Or maybe join his band? Men must be meeting a lot of lazy women if they ask for the qualities of ambition, drive, passionate about something, "challenge me," "have a fire in you" by name. And all the same admit that they are not looking for a relationship or commitment. The fact that they bow out in that while demanding that their woman be an entrepreneur and have it all figured out is what angers me. They demand the moon and stars for a woman they won't claim to be their girlfriend. At an age and time when it is hard to find a job and harder to find one in line with the true calling....
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