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[iwaslisteningtotherain]

Dating thoughts that I am sharing here because I would never say them TO these people

What HAPPENED - how can you go from talking about Balzac and the "poetry of the bus station" and the joys of a difficult life of artistic fulfilment, in a faux-French cafe in Islington Green over nice wine (the 2nd and 3rd cheapest on the menu, but this isn't Spoons) to the next morning, acting like you can't get away from me fast enough? And ever since, silence. It's not even as if my ego is particularly bruised - It's just that I'm confused. I thought you were so romantic and different. For God's sake, you're a French violinist who travels around all the time playing music, with only what you can fit in your backpack + a book in each pocket. Don't tell me you're just a standard-issue fuckboy, in it for the sex with no consideration or sensitivity for my feelings like oh I don't know, 99% of other men. I mean like... on the first date you literally started shaking when you held me close for the first time, you held my hand to your heart to show how hard it was beating. And then you get what you want and... did you not want it so much after all, or did you lose interest after you got it, was the romantic act all put on to get me into bed, or was the sex disappointing? (OMG, am I not good in bed????????? Is it that I'm a bit fat????????) Because it was disappointing for me, actually, I hope you know (if my bedroom skills were poor, it's just that I lacked proper inspiration). But, but, were you just a mediocre, standard-issue fuckboy all along? That's my main issue with you - the thought that I got you wrong. Certainly the regard I had for you has evaporated, and I say that honestly - not as a woman scorned. It's the lack of consideration, the lack of maturity, the lack of consistency, it's not masculine.

You came on waaaaaaay too strong when we first met (and for some time after) and it was pretty repellent - but with some time apart, and now you seem to be playing it a bit cooler... well, on Saturday when I thought I may not see you again, or that you might approach someone else, I didn't like that idea at all, and when you messaged me the next day I was pretty stoked. I have butterflies for seeing you again, which is unexpected. And I have to say... what qualities are really important in a man? I like that you walk me to the station and message me to make sure I got home safe, you always let me walk through the door first, you noticed I ran out of butter for my bread roll and got me some more. What is more important in a husband, than these little acts of kindness and generosity? Everyone seems to have nice things to say about you.

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

What do I want?

It’s hard sometimes, not to descend into hopelessness. I’m trying so hard not to. Sometimes it feels like being 28 and newly single is a disaster. Sometimes, I feel absolute dread at the thought of one more day at my job. Sometimes I feel very alone... 

My ex boyfriend always acted like life is a curse, an unpleasant obligation. He always used to talk about how he was never happy. It was one of the many things I actually disliked about him. That thought process is so funny: “we would make a great match, if only you could change many fundamental aspects of your personality.” 

It’s 6 weeks since we broke up. According to my “manual” on break ups (the No Contact Rule by Natalie Lue), I should now be moving on from the wallowing stage. It’s quite natural actually: I no longer think about him all the time or feel sad all the time. I think about other things often. I do still feel sad about our break up sometimes, sometimes I miss him a lot. Usually, this is when I feel bad about other things going on in my life. 

So it’s quite natural to ask at this point: what do I want? What happens next?

The main thing I want is to believe and act like life is beautiful, it has a lot to offer, it has so much to enjoy. I can be so nihilistic, bitter and negative. And I hate that. It is one of my most unhealthy and damaging habits. I want to believe that life has a lot of joy to offer, and act accordingly. Because it DOES. 

“Sadness, sad affects are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious . . . to administer and organize our intimate little fears.” —Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues

Anyway I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked. The point of this post was to list out what I want in a MAN. 

Tolerance. I want someone who just lets me be myself. I don’t want there to be certain things I’m just not allowed to say or do or else he will get angry. I don’t want someone who thinks I’m ever so "weird” and makes a big show out of that to boot. I want someone who’s a bit more openminded. Someone with a liberal outlook, in the sense that they are non judgmental, open minded, generally want to accept others and enjoy life. 

Generosity. I don’t want someone who is always adding up what they have done for me and reminding me of it at every given opportunity and trying to compare against what I’ve done for them. I want someone who wants to do nice and supportive things for me, make my life easier instead of harder, go out of their way for me, and NOT hold it against me. Just to do it because they WANT to (and because we are in a balanced, reciprocated relationship) and not because they are trying to get something in return or feel obligated. Someone who doesn’t hold things against me and always be filing away things that I’ve done that they don’t like to bring up later. 

Integrity. By which I mean someone who commits, follows through, and pulls their weight, takes their own share of the emotional/domestic labour, the effort in the relationship, whatever, WITHOUT being asked 100s of times. Someone who takes responsibility for confronting problems rather than whining or leaving it to someone else to sort out. 

Evolved. That is to say, someone who isn’t ridden with bitterness and anger, someone who has confronted whatever demons they have in the past so they no longer dominate his life/feelings and has self awareness about whatever baggage they do have. Because everyone does. (wait... am I even self aware?)

Of course, I want someone playful and fun and who I have that kind of connection with. I’m not sure what I’m referring to by “connection” but it’s like understanding each other? It is pretty intangible. 

Shared goals for the future in terms of, marriage, children, buying a house together etc. Shared values in terms of how you treat your family and friends, work etc... 

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

The connection works in the other direction, too: if you think that cruelty, for instance, is more important than other vices, that will already lead you in certain political directions. Judith Shklar, like her heroes Montaigne and Montesquieu, thinks that cruelty is more important than anything – that it comes first, as she puts it. She is good at detecting cruelty. She finds it, for instance, in the heart of some philanthropy, but unlike others who have made that discovery, she does not give up hating it. Moreover, unlike some others who hate cruelty, she is alert to the dangers of that hatred: in particular, its ready decline into a desolating misanthropy which can itself be a source of cruelty. It is essential to hold back misanthropy, which can destroy almost any virtue. What holds it back is not merely benevolence, or any other virtue; for Montaigne, it was uniquely friendship that ‘resists that avalanche of disgust which can at any moment overwhelm anyone’.

Resisting the Avalanche - Bernard Williams review of Ordinary Vices, Judith Schklar

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

i am so determined to fall more in love with life. intentionally romanticising the walks i am on, the birds chirping, the blooming nature around me, the water in my cup of tea turning from a light peach tone to a dark pink, the poetry i write, the things i am learning, my handwriting, dozing off while sitting in ront of my window, all of it and more. I have to take a closer look at the little things that make my heart beat faster.

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

We say 'never again', but somewhere someone is being tortured right now, and acute fear has again become the most common form of social control. To this the horror of modern warfare must be added as a reminder. The liberalism of fear is a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrates on damage control. [...] Given the inevitability of that inequality of military, police, and persuasive power which is called government, there is evidently always much to be afraid of. And one may, thus, be less inclined to celebrate the blessings of liberty than to consider the dangers of tyranny and war that threaten it. For this liberalism the basic units of political life are not discursive and reflecting persons, nor friends and enemies, nor patriotic soldier-citizens, nor energetic litigants, but the weak and the powerful. And the freedom it wishes to secure is freedom from the abuse of power and intimidation of the defenseless that this difference invites. [...] The liberalism of fear, on the contrary, regards abuse of public powers in all regimes with equal trepidation. It worries about the excesses of official agents at every level of government, and it assumes that these are apt to burden the poor and weak most heavily. The history of the poor compared to that of the various elites makes that obvious enough. The assumption, amply justified by every page of political history, is that some agents of government will behave lawlessly and brutally in small or big ways most of the time unless they are prevented from doing so. [...] The liberalism of fear in fact does not rest on a theory of moral pluralism. It does not, to be sure, offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum, which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear it inspires, arid the very fear of fear itself. [...] What is meant by cruelty here? It is the deliberate infliction of physical, and secondarily emotional, pain upon a weaker person or group by stronger ones in order to achieve some end, tangible or intangible, of the latter. It is not sadism, though sadistic individuals may flock to occupy positions of power that permit them to indulge . their urges. But public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power, and it is almost always built into the system of coercion upon which all governments have to rely to fulfill their essential functions. [...] Systematic fear is the condition that makes freedom impossible, and it is aroused by the expectation of institutionalized cruelty as by nothing else.[...] What the liberalism of fear owes to Locke is also obvious: that the governments of this world with their overwhelming power to kill, maim, indoctrinate, and make war are not to be trusted unconditionally ("lions"), and that any confidence that we might develop in their agents must rest firmly on deep suspicion. Locke was not, and neither should his heirs be, in favor of weak governments that cannot formulate or carry out public policies and decisions made in conformity to requirements of publicity, deliberation, and fair procedures. What is to be feared is every extralegal, secret, and unauthorized act by public agents or their deputies. And to prevent such conduct requires a constant division and subdivision of political power. The importance of voluntary associations from this perspective is not the satisfaction that their members may derive from joining in cooperative endeavors, rather their ability to become significant units of social power and influence that can check, or at least alter, the assertions of other organized agents, both voluntary and governmental.[...] Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the reasons we speak of property as private in many cases is that it is meant to be left to the discretion of individual owners as a matter of public policy and law, precisely because this is an indispensable and excellent way of limiting the long arm of government and of dividing social power, as well as of securing the independence of individuals.[...] No form of liberalism has any business telling the citizenry to pursue happiness or even to define that wholly elusive condition. It is for each one of us to seek it or reject it in favor of duty or salvation or passivity, for example. Liberalism must restrict itself to politics and to proposals to restrain potential abusers of power in order to lift the burden of fear and favor from the shoulders of adult women and men, who can then conduct their lives in accordance with their own beliefs and preferences, as long as they do not prevent others from doing so as well.[...] To call the liberalism of fear a lowering of one's sights implies that emotions are inferior to ideas and especially to political causes. It may be noble to pursue ideological ambitions or risk one's life for a "cause," but it is not at all noble to kill another human being in pursuit of one's own "causes." "Causes," however spiritual they may be, are not self-justifying, and they are not all equally edifying. And even the most appealing are nothing but instruments of torture or craven excuses for it, when they are forced upon others by threats, and bribes. We would do far less harm if we learned to accept each other as sentient beings, whatever else we may be, and to understand that physical well-being and toleration are not simply inferior to the other aims that each one of us may choose to pursue. [...] This liberal prescription for citizenship, it is now often argued, is both a very unhistorical and an ethnocentric view that makes quite unwarranted claims for universality.  [...] To judge inherited habits by standards that purport to be general, even though they are alien to a people, is said to be an arrogant imposition of false as well as partial principles. For there are no generally valid social prohibitions or rules, and the task of the social critic is at most to articulate socially immanent values. All this is not nearly as self-evident as the relativistic defenders of local customs would have us believe.[...] Unless and until we can offer the injured and insulted victims of most of the world's traditional as well as revolutionary governments a genuine and practicable alternative to their present condition, we have no way of knowing whether they really enjoy their chains. There is very little evidence that they do. [...] A concern for human freedom cannot stop with the satisfactions of one's own society or clan. We must therefore be suspicious of ideologies of solidarity, precisely because they are so attractive to those who find liberalism emotionally unsatisfying, and who have gone on in our century to create oppressive and cruel regimes of unparalleled horror. The assumption that these offer something wholesome to the atomized citizen may or may not be true, but the political consequences are not, on the historical record, open to much doubt.

Judith Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

Students and patients who have had consensual relationships with, respectively, their professors and therapists, tend to report similar emotional consequences, particularly the feeling of having been betrayed.... The betrayal in question is not a lover’s betrayal: the therapist or professor need not have cheated on or lied to the patient or student. Rather, it is the betrayal of the trusted authority figure who fails to live up to the implicit terms set by the therapeutic or pedagogical relationship. The student is betrayed...not by the sex itself, but by the “corruption of [teacherly] love” it represents... The student is not only, in the eyes of her professor-boyfriend, transformed from a student, whose needs he is meant to serve, into someone who is meant to serve his needs (his errands, his ego). She is also transformed in the eyes of her academic community as a whole She is unable to relate any longer to her other professors as her teachers; they are now her boyfriend’s (judgmental) colleagues... The problem with professor-student sexual relationships is not that they can involve no genuine love. It is that they involve the wrong sort of love. Speaking as a teacher to other teachers, bell hooks commands us to “[t]hink: how can I love these strangers, these others that I see in the classroom?” The love hooks is speaking of is not the exclusive, jealous, dyadic love of lovers but something more distanced, more controlled, more open to others and the world—though no less love for that... When a student’s desire is inchoate—do I want to be like him, or to have him?—it is easy for the teacher to settle it in the latter direction. And it is similarly easy when the student (wrongly) thinks that sleeping with the teacher is a means to becoming, or a sign of already being, like the teacher (“he wants me so I must be brilliant”) or when the student (wrongly) thinks that sleeping with the teacher is the best she can have... I am not saying that teaching can or should be entirely free of narcissistic satisfactions. But there is a subtle and important difference between enjoying the desires one ignites in one’s students before, or at the same time as, turning them away from oneself— and making oneself their wholly consuming object... Adrienne Rich famously described the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” as a political structure that compels all women, regardless of their sexual orientation, to regulate their relations to women in a way that is congenial to patriarchy. One mechanism of that institution is the tacit instruction in how women should feel, or interpret their feelings, about those women they admire.... but another mechanism of compulsory heterosexuality is the instruction women receive in how to feel, or interpret their feelings, about the men they find compelling. Here, women are taught that it is not envy they feel, but desire: you must want him, it cannot be that you want to be like him. Regina Barreca, speaking of and to women who ended up as professors, asks: “At what point . . . did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?”... The professor’s failure in such cases—that is, most actual cases of consensual professor-student sex—is not simply his failure to redirect the student’s erotic energies toward its apt object. It is a failure that involves taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way under patriarchy—that is, socialized in a way that conduces to patriarchy—for the satisfaction of his narcissistic gratification. On a feminist understanding of workplace sexual harassment, its harmful effects are not merely contingent—not merely a matter of women having certain consistent psychological responses to certain patterns of male behavior. Instead, as Lin Farley argued early on, it is the function of sexual harassment to harm women in these ways: to police and enforce their subordinate roles both as women and as workers. Similarly, Vicki Schultz has argued that many prevalent forms of workplace sexual harassment are “designed to maintain work— particularly the more highly rewarded lines of work—as bastions of masculine competence and authority. Is it such a stretch to think that the function of the widespread practice of male professors making sexual advances on their female students is to impress on women their proper place in the university? That, insofar as women are allowed into the university, it is to play the role not of student or would-be professor, but of sexual conquest, fawning girlfriend, emotional caretaker, wife, and/or secretary?

Amia Srinivasan, Sex as a Pedagogical Failure

I feel worryingly seen by this...

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

“Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.”

— Marianne Williamson

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

What can I say but thank you?

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

It is will of heart that saves. Not discipline or strength. Even if you are completely sick, blind, and lost, desire for the good will hook into your heart and one day, you’ll wake up cured.

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

Strange to think that even today, when confronted with the autonomy of the Black movement or the autonomy of the women’s movement, there are those who talk about this “dividing the working class.” Strange indeed when our experience has told us that in order for the working class to unite in spite of the divisions which are inherent in its very structure-factory versus plantation versus home versus schools-those at the lowest levels of the hierarchy must themselves find the key to their weakness, must themselves find the strategy which will attack that point and shatter it, must themselves find their own modes of struggle.

Selma James, Sex, Race and Class (via penswordpress)

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

A single event stole my teeth from my face My half moon i wore for a year was taken from me I need a new conversation Yesterday was a day i never prayed for but i was most thankful for Blessings disguised as late arrivals How many times i have prayed - may this be a turning point If i may tell one truth I have not lived a life i determined for over 4 summers I need an honest conversation with myself about preparing Why prepare for autumn or summer or spring when you see seasons from behind a window? Inside a cave you do not know how rain falls or how ice forms

tapnashey:  -Tapiwa Mugabe, tapiwamugabe.tumblr.com (via tapiwamugabe)

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

“[V]iolence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”

— Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (translated by Alphonso Lingis)

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By: Lize Meddings

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'Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used - not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.'

FANGIRL CHALLENGE ♔ ten movies {6/10}

↬ North and South (2004)

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

A Softer World: 911

(it isn’t the storm that makes the ocean dangerous.)

buy this print

[iwaslisteningtotherain]

You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.

Ask Polly: Why Should I Keep Going?

by Heather Havrilesky

(via arabellesicardi)