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kaberettIncludes current politics + mental illness, HURRAH.
OKAY THAT WILL DO FOR NOW.
- Dear everybody goyisch, and especially everyone white and goyisch, who is reblogging Dear White People THIS IS US shit in re Charlottesville, without reblogging things about Jews' conditional access to Whiteness, given what was being chanted there, I see you. I am pretty sure you're just not thinking! Please think about it.
- I am really struggling with the posts currently doing the rounds about how ~~engaging in gratitude exercises is bullshit~~ (specifically prompted by Gratitude Lists Are B.S. — It Was an "Ingratitude" List That Saved Me). I have been Not Engaging but it seems to me that this criticism of engaging in gratitude practices is... fundamentally based on a massive misunderstanding, i.e., it's also incredibly valuable and necessary to get validation that the shit you're dealing with is hard. "and here are three things I can be pleased about" isn't about denying that bad shit is going on! It's about defiance and stubbornness and spite and taking joy anyway. Which is another place this article goes wrong:
I started making gratitude lists every day — following the directions carefully and making sure to be specific about the reasons I was grateful: I had a loving husband who laughed at the same obscure Saturday Night Live sketches as me. I had a dirt cheap apartment in the hippest neighborhood in Los Angeles. I had a commercial acting agent and got to go on big Hollywood auditions for high paying gigs.
... that's... not actually specific. It's generalities. It's not "I saw a ridiculously bright green caterpillar on my way home, I didn't even realise nature came in that colour". It isn't "this specific thing that happened specifically today". It's trying to convince yourself that your life is ~in general~ great, which is unequivocally not what those exercises are for! And I recognise that the problem here is the exercises being explained poorly, but also AUGH, the feelings of alienation and invalidation and isolation that are coming from reading this shit when I don't think it would be kind or helpful to go "actually have u considered". - on which topic: observe me here making a list of the things that are stressing me out. observe that that is literally some of my counselling homework at the moment. write a list of the things that are shit rather than sweeping them under the carpet and then wondering why you're miserable! and also take joy in... surprise free ice cream while a group of musicians plays light jazz on top of the book barge on the canal!
- Minor and petty (but nonetheless contributing to a sense of alienation): a post that is doing the rounds of tumblr that features an illustration of someone with incredibly expensive leg prosthetics using an incredibly cheap and nasty wheelchair.
- OH RIGHT AND, I say, coming back to edit this in because MORE PETTY SHIT I'M ANNOYED ABOUT: the pronunciation-of-scone "debate" is not a real argument! it serves the same social function as talking about the weather! few if any people ACTUALLY CARE. it's oKAY. IT'S JUST SMALLTALK.
OKAY THAT WILL DO FOR NOW.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 12:27 pm (UTC)What's been pissing me off is US right wingers whining that no one is criticising left wing voices there, which is creating a supposed moral equivalence between racist thuggery, and taking a stand against it.
Ice cream plus jazz plus books sounds like a pretty gratitude worthy evening to me!
And, sigh, cluelessness re wheelchairs and prosthetics, especially WRT cost, seems relent lessly endemic.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 04:48 pm (UTC)Ice cream: it was very good and there are bits of pleasant that I'd not actually mentioned here (basically because I think the number of people who care about "I caught a perfect level 27 Dratini!!!!!!" is small) -- but, yes. It was good.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-21 02:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 10:40 am (UTC)(I particularly love the ghosts of public art no-longer-extant, and the way it makes me spot more about my environment, and how many walks it encourages me to go on.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-24 02:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 12:37 pm (UTC)I mean the landscape is probably different your side of the pond? but his post sounded a lot like "conditional access to Whiteness" is the same thing to Jews that "passing privilege" is to queers and trans folks.
eh idk I should keep my emphatically not Jewish ass out of this conversation probably?
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 04:52 pm (UTC)WHICH pedantry aside: yeah, more or less? And I am completely okay with people discussing this and engaging with it/me? I have the hideous anxiety of not being a "proper Jew" anyway (suuuuuuuuper secular, suuuuuuuper culturally divorced from... everything, patrilineal) so clearly I shouldn't be talking about this either, and certainly while people are engaging in good faith I am pro conversation. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-18 05:02 am (UTC)but yeah, good point re linguistic nit, noted for future :)
what, you think the Nazis care that you're not Jewish in ways that matter to Jewish folks? I mean, speaking of pedantry. :P
and for srs speaking of pedantry, it occurs to me that every now and then someone actually does convert to Judaism and some of those folks actually are white. guy I cited previous comment's Ashkenazi. this seems a relevant distinction.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 10:46 am (UTC)(yeah my relationship with my ancestry is weird and complicated and is some of the reason I actively assert that I Am Jewish. it's... genuinely picking fights, and it's also partly bereavement -- here is yet another ancestry where I lack a sense of continuity and belonging.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 10:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 06:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 08:38 pm (UTC)My mother and her parents were German Jews who survived Hitler in part because they sort of, sometimes, "looked white," and because my grandparents' French was good enough that they sounded like native speakers. To a first approximation, most of the time, I think of myself as white: I have that sort of privilege in a lot of contexts. And I feel a lot less safe now than I did a year ago, and that's more because of anti-Semitism than because I'm out as queer.
What you've said here doesn't feel like you're intruding inappropriately in the conversation: "I saw this interesting post by a Jewish guy" is a long way from trying to speak for a sometimes-oppressed group you're not part of.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 04:05 pm (UTC)bitches y'all tarred and feathered my ancestors, lit their home on fire, would've raped several of them except it turned out they hit harder and their horses liked them more, and chased them out of the country and that's just on the TOTALLY white side so fuck you I am not part of your 'us') and some of them NOT petty (these fuckers are explicitly neo-Nazis and KKK they're out there in that iconography directly the list of people they want to light on fire is REALLY BROAD THANKS so yeah could you add some fucking more qualifiers to your thing there, starting with Xtian and then even getting rather more fucking sectarian than that even? and then I'm not getting INTO queer and disabled shit) that it is in fact part of why I'm tumblr-vacationing.- I have much sympathy. I have this with CBT a lot, for the same reasons - like, not just the exercises being explained poorly but being understood poorly BY the health practitioners who shove them on everyone without any regard for detail or their own misunderstanding. And like, I'm someone who the "gratitude" mis-understanding was pushed on so hard that I literally have to do an INSANE amount of reframe ("list things that are pleasing to me in this moment") because the SECOND "gratitude" gets invoked all I hear is the shit that article is reacting to, you know?
Which feels like part of the larger problem of "a technique gets developed or elaborated in some very careful, 'bespoke' level work by a very intelligent practitioner, and it's good . . . and then it gets disseminated in the worst kind of mass-produced LAZY crap, and that's how you get Participation Trophies, and it just fucks everyone up in a new way."
And it's super frustrating.
- I discovered that I like a new kind of ice-cream! which is convenient as ice-cream is one of those things I have Autisms about. But I like butter-pecan icecream. Apparently.
- If I could draw I would draw you Yolanda's wheel-chairs they are all sexy. (She has more than one OBVIOUSLY, because the one that's for her office is not the one you use to go on unpaved paths or to the beach with your great-nephew or horrify your niece by pretending to do wheelchair parkour in.) (She does not actually do wheelchair parkour she is FIFTY-SEVEN THANK YOU she has no desire to break her shoulder and make her life INCONVENIENT. But her niece is way too much of a fussbudget about her mobility so it's fun to make her go AAAAAGH AUNTIE DON'T DO THAT! and it makes her niece readjust her fussbudgetting about the great-nephew as at least he does not pretend he's about to jump an entire flight of stairs.)
- . . . .wait are we having a Moral Argument about whether or not you are allowed to troll people about how they pronounce "scone" now. *knocks head on desk*
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:05 pm (UTC)- The thing I think is funniest about this (in a fairly bleak sense) is that of course the entire fucking gratitude-exercise thing is... a repackaging of "count your blessings" in a way that isn't pious and condescending and sour. We have known this works for a really long time. We know it's important. CAN WE PLEASE STOP FUCKING IT UP SO PEOPLE HAVE TO REINVENT IT FROM SCRATCH. i.e. YES QUITE re frustration. I am incredibly lucky in that the only exposure I've had to CBT involved the psychiatrist involved going "... ye-aaaaaaaaah let's send you to a senior consultant psychologist for twenty sessions, not a junior one for six" and said psychologist proceeded to react appropriately to me going "I need a talk-therapy component to this and I categorically refuse to take any therapeutic approach the goal of which is uninstalling my triggers without working out why they're there and which bits I can safely decommission". Which. Is not typical.
- Ruby Violet are next to the big supermarket that reliably sells my favourite fruit juice, near my counsellor's place of work and on the way to/from a lot of places. The list of flavours is quite well-hidden, but the thing I jumped on yesterday was the damson & sour cream. (Because it's small batch and they have so many things on the roster there is always a different selection and usually something I haven't seen before every time I go in. IT IS A PROBLEM.) Hurrah for identifiable Correct Options. <3
- :D :D :D :D yepppp. I am currently at 4 wheelchairs (2 on loan, of which one is to be reclaimed Once We've Moved), I covet another 2, ye-e-e-e-ep. I would love to know what all she has (or, you know, nerd with you over finding photos of plausible non-Stark-ified equivalents, because I ASSUME Tony has irritated the shit out of her with prototypes much as he does everyone else...?)
- ehhhhh it was mostly A Kid Of Whom I Am Fond (where by "kid" I mean "early rather than late 20s" obv) having a Vent about how BORED they are of the conversation, and how both pronunciations are linguistically valid, rather than particularly being a Moral Argument? but also it was a "... child, you are Missing The Point spectacularly" moment.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:35 pm (UTC)- XD I am not sure that he's harassed her with prototypes just because I'm not sure how much they actually interact when it isn't 100% boss-employee dynamics, which put him on better behaviour, and since she seems perfectly content with what she has it's less of a drive to LOOK I BE FRIEND MAKE YOU THING! You know, I should probably map out "who Tony thinks of as an employee and who Tony thinks of as a cooperative partner even if he SAYS they're an employee", if only for my own quick reference. XDXD
- oh silly kid. *gives them tea and a book and puts them in a window seat somewhere*
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 04:11 pm (UTC)I also have issue digesting that post about the ingratitude list. It's great that that author found a way to do something that worked for them! But my 'random shiny things' AND my rants work for me! And that is okay.
I have made note of the dear white and goyisch white people reminder.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:08 pm (UTC)Part of my frustration is that I can see what the author is getting at and why they think that! But also they have been MISINFORMED and I wish to CORRECT them, which is an impulse that rarely ends well.
I am happy to talk in more detail about why the This Is Us thing gets my back up, if you'd like. <3 It's not a thing I particularly want to ~get into~ on tumblr for a wide variety of reasons, including "if I criticise anyone for this on tumblr they will probably assume that I am calling them ProblematiqueTM and therefore Unsalvageable or whatever bullshit, and that isn't what I mean, and I think I stand a better chance of communicating that here than on tumblrs NEVER MIND the kind of attention it would draw", but... yeah. Definitely happy to talk about more here if you'd like. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 07:55 pm (UTC)they think that! <<
Makes sense to me.
>> But also they have been MISINFORMED and I wish to CORRECT them, which is an impulse that rarely ends well. <<
Yeeee-ah. It is VERY RARELY possible to correct someone who does not solicit your input, and even when one CAN it's generally only on narrowly specific facts and only if they, y'know, accept that fact-based reality exists, and they still resent it. In my experience.
But one wishes to INFORM PEOPLE of the CORRECT DETAILS and NUANCES and it is so very very desirable to attempt to COMMUNICATE INFORMATION. Agh, why are humans. I am particularly aggravated when I notice myself doing *both sides* of this!
>> I am happy to talk in more detail about why the This Is Us thing gets my back up, if you'd like. <<
You certainly can, either here or in a PM to me, if you like. I'm interested in the topic. But I am *not* (generally) on Tumblr or Twitter or Google+ or Facebook or anything precisely because I don't want to field any of the frenetic hyperbolic talking past one another. So I haven't seen the OP or any of the more notable responses, and I'm not sure if you would really wish to propagate (directions to) messed up content in the course of explaining to me why it is messed up. Thank you, though.
<3 I hope there are good things in your day today. Yes. *makes little fuzzy-ripply catnoises like a bubbling pot, because catperson*
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 08:00 pm (UTC)<3 Experimental dinner was excellent, I got to pod a lot of broad beans, I have a pound or so of excellent greengages, and the remaining blackberries are in a clafoutis in the oven as we speak.
Also I caught a Lugia, and physio continues improving, and sunshine & social happened.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-17 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-27 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-18 02:53 pm (UTC)Thank you! I did not know this and have had a few instances of not knowing how to deal with the topic when it comes up (I tend to revert to "but I'm foreign anyway and I moved a lot as a kid so my pronunciation is sometimes odd").
I don't really understand the weather-as-smalltalk thing, or more specifically the bit where if it has been raining for three days many people seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the sun still exists, it has shone here before, and it will again. (And if it's been hot for three days, they can't remember it ever having been cool or cold, and so on and so forth...) I think Canadians do weather-as-smalltalk too but it is different in a way I'm not sufficiently articulate today to be able to describe.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 10:49 am (UTC)Am very glad this was helpful. <3
Weather-as-smalltalk: largely "here is an experience we share in common" pseudo-forced-teaming, I think? And I think the British thing of "it's been raining forEVER and will ALWAYS RAIN" is at least in part (a) we're super used to very changeable weather, because island climate, and (b) British-understatement-turned-hyperbole for meta-bonding on that level too. I absolutely think it's a silly social ritual! It also appears to be one that people engage in, so.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-26 11:59 am (UTC)Yeah. I'm used to changeable weather, but my "cold" is -40°C and my "hot" is 40°C and so my instinctive response to "weather's been a bit cold lately hasn't it?" is along the lines of "No, not really" because I'm not at risk of either frostbite or hypothermia if I don't wear a hat and mittens to go outside, but that...is not what people expect out of the conversation, and tends to come across badly. You'd think after living here for 17 years I'd have gotten the hang of some kind of sensible response, but instead it throws me every single time. (I am getting a lot better at "lovely weather today, isn't it?" though so that is something.)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-28 06:40 pm (UTC)So, yes. Forced teaming. San Francisco area, US.