frances-kafka

[frances-kafka]

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

[frances-kafka]

Basically:

To people who are hardline Literal Children:

"Adult Media" is Degenerate Art.

You're not going to like me for this but I'm honestly starting to think that there is a connection between the culture going so authoritarian/even fascist, including the very people who like to think they are "Nazi punchers," and the normalization of adults not intaking adult media, and even bullying each other out of being into adult media or creating it.

I want you to think really, really hard about what it means that we are all Literal Children now and what kind of fucking dystopia you are living in.

No, I'm not making excuses for this or apologizing for it, I'm too old for that and I really don't give a shit about being likable.

[frances-kafka]

You're not going to like me for this but I'm honestly starting to think that there is a connection between the culture going so authoritarian/even fascist, including the very people who like to think they are "Nazi punchers," and the normalization of adults not intaking adult media, and even bullying each other out of being into adult media or creating it.

I want you to think really, really hard about what it means that we are all Literal Children now and what kind of fucking dystopia you are living in.

No, I'm not making excuses for this or apologizing for it, I'm too old for that and I really don't give a shit about being likable.

[frances-kafka]

Older generations, about younger people: Ugh, they're wild. Degenerates, all of them

My generation (the Degenerates), about younger people:

Congrats on being the first completely fucking vat grown generation that completely submits to the Man. You're all a bunch of fucking brownshirts wtf

[frances-kafka]

The equivalent term in trans culture for a long time, was "stealth." Nobody uses that anymore... or is it just that if someone were actually stealth, we wouldn't know anyway?

A weird factor of the use of "-passing" for queer issues is how distanced it's become from the usage of "white-passing". Like, in black communities, "passing" wasn't just having light skin, it was cultivating the image of being and allowing people to consider you white.

Usually I see it used in queer issues as more of an accusation, and usually at someone who isn't "passing". Like, "Hunter Schafer is cis-passing," except that she's very publicly trans. Or "Tramell Tillman is straight passing," except that he's publicly out as gay, so he's actually not. It's just like "a queer person with aesthetics I don't like".

[frances-kafka]

Problematic is HR-ian for Degenerate.

The world never recovered from “Your fave is problematic” and we can trace everything that’s happening to society to that blog.

[frances-kafka]

The world never recovered from “Your fave is problematic” and we can trace everything that’s happening to society to that blog.

[frances-kafka]

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is so divisive.

My suspicion about this is that people who were primarily Trek fans, as opposed to general sci fi fans, did not want a Douglas Trumbull take on Star Trek.

[frances-kafka]

A big thing that happens in 70s sci fi is that it dovetails with, culturally, the gentrification of aviation and the beginning of the loss of military culture, and the winding down of the Space Age, so there is the optic that becoming an astronaut is not something an average person can even hope to achieve. Also another thing with space bros vs Everyone Else is the degree to which you see space not as a frontier that you go to, but something done *to* you.

The other theme in 70s sci fi is Space As Exile. This may correspond to immigrant input into the creative world but also to heavy Jewish presence in media (which may have peaked at about that time, and seems to have massively declined since).

A common space bro complaint about 70s sci fi is that it didn’t make people want to be astronauts, but I have to say this, for whatever reason, it really really made people want to be doctors and medical researchers. Think about it

[frances-kafka]

A common space bro complaint about 70s sci fi is that it didn’t make people want to be astronauts, but I have to say this, for whatever reason, it really really made people want to be doctors and medical researchers. Think about it

[frances-kafka]

This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.

A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.

Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic?  She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing.  But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great.  She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success.  So - what gives?

His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear.  Jeans, blazers, dresses - everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles.  He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses.  You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on.  Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered.  He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit.  That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.

I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way.  I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did. 

It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this.  But no one ever told me.  I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes.  No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.

I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed.  I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to.  No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to.  I guess I just didn’t know.  I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.

I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.

I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.

So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while.  But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not.  Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.

[frances-kafka]

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

[frances-kafka]

Lord of Light art by Jack Kirby, 1978. Later coloured by Mark Englert. From Heavy Metal magazine issue 276‬

[frances-kafka]

Instead of physically attractive? Actors in older works are *moreso.*

[frances-kafka]

As much as I didn't like the culture being run by 14 year old girls, being run by 14 year old boys isn't an improvement

[frances-kafka]

Sometimes I think that "has a support system" is just a euphemism for someone not being poor/not being from a poor family.

And actually a way we refer to a person not being baked into a struggling community. If you're the only functioning person around and multiple people rely on you, you don't have a support system.

[frances-kafka]

Art by Gerald Brom for The Starfall Anthology (1999)