Subscribe“The unknowness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That’s what I will find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate I can’t measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, and then being on somebody else’s.”
-Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed
Lessons For Girls
Via the Glass Castle blog: lessons for girls
A collection of posts and essays by female academics and feminist bloggers. Some of which I know; some I wish I’d known earlier instead of having to find out on my own the hard way; and others new to me, and I’m glad to have read about it now.
Excerpts:
1. It’s okay to be angry.
Girls are subjected to an impressive load of anti-anger propaganda. Snow White and Cinderella, at least in the mid-century modern Disneyfield versions we’re stuck with today in U.S. popular culture, are both specifically praised for remaining sweet and good-natured in spite of the fact that they’re turned into indentured servants by their stepmothers.
2. It’s okay to opt out of toxic situations and conversations.
Opting out doesn’t mean that you’re weak, nor does it make you a bad person. [...] it is not our responsibility to opt in and to engage in toxic situations or conversations.
3. On Pity
pity is the first step in the creation of any abusive relationship. As a child, the children we were supposed to play with out of pity were the abusive ones. Because we had been so exhorted to pity these children, we then felt guilty and conflicted about noticing that they were abusive.
4. Be Independent
Boys never are raised to think someone is going to take care of them. Girls need to always think in terms of supporting themselves, owning their own property, having their own bank accounts and lines of credit, paying their own way.
Instead, we are raised to believe that men will buy us dinner, movie tickets, gifts, a home, car, clothing, vacations. They will make the big bucks: Whether we work or not, they will be capable of and responsible for supporting the family. This is nuts. This leaves girls dependent, and in an unhealthy marriage it means women will be trapped.
5. Trust Your Instincts
I have one more: trust your instincts. By that, I mean judge people based on how they treat you, not based on hypothetical models of how people behave.
6. No Apologies
After reflecting on these posts, I realized that I’m apologizing too often. I’ve earned my position as Kick-Ass Lecturer through hard work and nothing else. No one gave me anything. I’m not sorry for being good at what I do.
7. It’s Okay If Not Everyone Likes You
find the friends who like you no matter what, who like you even if you want to write science fiction or collect rocks or wear weird clothes or be friends with the odd girl in the corner. I will tell her not to do things simply because a friend told her to because she’s afraid of not being liked, of losing that friend. Friendships based on mutual support are longer lasting and healthier than those based on weird co-dependent feelings. I see too many of these among girls, many based on this need to be liked.
8. You Don’t Have To Be A Mom
reproduction is yet another arena in which girls are given such a strong cultural message – that to be a “true woman” is to be a mom, that having children is a woman’s greatest possible destiny and the fulfillment of her true essence, that childless women are “bitter” and “selfish” – that it has become nearly impossible to make an informed choice about whether or not one wishes to become a mom. And, of course, these expectations are highly gendered: while some boys or men are encouraged to become dads, there is no parallel discourse that posits that reproduction is necessary to their personhood, in the same way that there is for girls and women.
The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion
I have been reading this excellent book by Thich Nhat Hanh, which are commentaries on the Buddhist Prajanaparamita Diamond Sutra.
Here are some excerpts:
“The notion that things exist independently of one another comes from the perception that they have a beginning and an end. But it is impossible to find the beginning or end of anything. When you look at your close friend, you may think that you understand her completely, but that is difficult because she is a river of reality. In every moment, dharmas¹ that are not her enter and leave her. You cannot take hold of her. By observing her form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness, you can see that she is here sitting next to you, and she is elsewhere at the same time. She is in the present, the past, and the future. Your friend, the Tathagata², Subhuti³, and the rose cannot be grasped because they have no beginning and no end. Their presence is deeply connected to all dharmas, all objects of mind in the universe.”
Read the full article »
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Sometimes, when I read the news and get upset, I often think back on these parts of the book:
If there’s just one kind of folks, why can’t they get along with each other? If they’re all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I’m beginning to understand something. I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up in the house all this time. It’s because he wants to stay inside.
There are just some kind of men who — who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.
Perception Torn From Thinking
From the book Visual Thinking by Rudolph Arnheim:
By the time the competition for college placement becomes acute, it is a rare high school that insists on reserving for the arts the time needed to make their practice at all fruitful. Rarer still is the institution at which a concern with the arts is consciously justified by the realization that they contribute indispensably to the development of a reasoning and imaginative human being. This educational blackout persists in college, where the art student is considered as pursuing separate and intellectually inferior skills, although any “major” in one of the more reputable academic areas is encouraged to find “healthy recreation” in the studio during some of his spare hours. The arts for which the bachelor and master are certified do not yet include the creative exercise of the eyes and hands as an acknowledged component of higher education.
The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts and important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in any field of endeavor. The neglect of the arts is only the most tangible symptom of the widespread unemployment of the senses in every field of academic study. What is most needed is not more aesthetics or more esoteric manuals of art education but a convincing case made for visual thinking quite in general. Once we understand in theory, we might try to heal in practice the unwholesome split which cripples the training of reasoning power.