#I hate being negative it's a very unattractive character trait but I just feel myself slipping and spiraling

[culmaer-sideblog]

please forgive me, but I need to complain and over-share or my brain is going to explode please feel free to ignore

[taikizetsu]

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔍𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔫𝔞𝔩

I had a journal when I was 12, and I burnt it.

I am in 6th Grade, when I struggled to make friends due to countless reasons. First, I was a low-key bully; second, I had terrible communication skills; and third, I was arrogant and boisterous; the traits which my teachers at school found very annoying, I mean, any person would, right? Even the mischievous students in school who were infamous for their actions also didn’t like to be with me. People actually thought at that time that nothing ever affected me, yet the truth was, during that period, I was often confused as to why don’t people like me? Was it because I’m unattractive? Or was it because I’m too open and loud? I remember speaking with my siblings deeply about how I genuinely want to be quiet and private because I can’t take the feeling of being labeled as the “chaotic” one anymore. But all my efforts had been in vain as I really couldn’t control myself.

I was honestly getting really frustrated; imagine being a 12 year old with no friends, and being hated by every person you know. I could say that I was a cheerful kid, I did not care about what other people say, but experiencing negative energy from people, almost everyday, really took a toll on me.

I was on my way home one day when I saw something that caught my attention. It was a book entitled, “The Diary of a Wimpy Kid”. The book was in a terrible condition almost as if it was on the verge of disintegrating. I took it home with me, and I started to read it. Reading the book made me ponder and realize that the main character of the story is very much like me, a teenage boy who wanted to feel loved and secretly yearned for people’s validation. This was when I had an epiphany, which led me to make my own journal at that time.

I remember writing down all the people I hated, and the person who stood out the most was my 6th grade  classmate, Charles. He was the main reason why I wanted to make a journal. It made me feel like my journal granted me the permission to talk ill about him. Why do I hate him so? It’s because Charles was the biggest bully in our class. He would always humiliate and ridicule me in front of the crowd. A lot of people also disliked him, but because of his dominant personality, there were more who were afraid of him. This allowed him to gain connections and accomplices. Unlike myself who had none, since even the notorious students at school disliked me. Life is unfair, huh?

It was sudden, but news about me having a journal started circulating in class. A lot of my classmates were getting curious about what was written inside it. I would always tell them that it had nothing related to do with them, when in fact, it was all about them; how each one of them made me feel the smallest.

I was becoming dependent on my journal, it came to the point where I would write even the slightest details or shift of events. My journal became my coping mechanism that hindered me from talking to anyone, not even to my own family. I started to realize how it was becoming a toxic habit, but still, I couldn’t stop. My journal was the only thing who assured me that it was okay to be vulnerable.

Then in a random day, something weird happened. Charles suddenly asked me out of the blue if I could hang with him. And through that encounter, we got to know and understand each other better. At first, we would only meet a few times a week; then without us realizing, we were already hanging out every single day. Truthfully, I was unsure of him at first because I know his caliber. But one day, after the school year has ended, he told me to come with him. We went to the university field, and we talked there for a while. He told me in the most serious tone how he always felt like most of his friends were only choosing to remain friends with him because they were afraid of him. He then added how he eventually considered me as a real friend, but not just a regular friend, he told me that I was his best friend. I realized at that moment that we’re the same. We never allow people to enter and know us too well and so, we remain unheard. But that day, we have finally been listened to.

However when he told me this, my guilt got the best of me, which was why I told him about everything. I confessed how I disliked him because of everything that he did to me. I also told him about the journal. I remember him getting pissed and hurt upon discovering everything, but he couldn’t blame me as he knows quite well how he has treated the people around him poorly, including me. But the notion didn’t stop us from becoming friends. It actually strengthened our bond more as we were no longer keeping secrets from each other.

Graduation day arrived in a snap, and that was when he told me that he will be leaving the country to study abroad. I didn’t know how to react; I knew I was going to miss him, but there was still that little piece of me who was kind of glad that he would be away from me. Not because I still hated him, but rather, I think we would grow better if we would stride our journey in separate ways. We both said our goodbyes after the ceremony and once I returned home, I’ve decided to burn my journal. I think it was time to let the past go, it’s better to move on and focus on my future ahead.

Years have passed since our graduation when I got a call from Charles. We got in touch with each other and he told me everything that he had been up to nowadays. He even admitted how he wished to have spent more time with me back then. Charles proudly tells me that he still considers me as his best friend, despite being far away from him. Although, I can’t say the same to him, since I really don’t consider anyone as my best friend to begin with. But Charles would always be one of my most treasured friends.

[liskantope]

During the last few months, I read through the the entire archive of Luann comics from 1985 to the present day, as it’s freely available through GoComics. Don’t judge me. Or do judge me, I don’t care. Luann is entertaining and nostalgic (at least the period from the late 90′s through 2006 or so when I was regularly following the strip in the newspaper). Some thoughts below. (I actually wanted to write this a month and a half ago when I had just finished and everything was fresher on my mind, but that’s when holidays and all my distractions hit. This turned out to be very long and I’m not sure if any of my followers is actually interested in a review of Luann, but if anyone wants to scroll down to the final bulletpoint, that is a bit less Luann-specific and more on the lines of my usual discourse topics.)

Never mind bulletpoints; some of these are too long to be easily readable without breaking up into paragraphs!

1) I was impressed, almost all the way through, with how much sexuality is conveyed in the dialog and relationships between the characters while somehow staying within the content restrictions for a newspaper comic. (I do recall back around 2000 a particular comic coming under fire because the dialog between Luann’s parents implied that they didn’t wait for marriage, one which I was able to identify this time around.) I think Luann possibly has the most sexuality in it of any newspaper comic I’ve come across.

2) I understand that daily comic strip artists typically have to do their Sunday comics some six weeks more ahead of publication than their non-Sunday comics, resulting in each Sunday strip usually having nothing to do with the story happening in its neighboring strips. Luann consistently seems to be an exception to this, where either the cartoonist is able to follow a schedule of drawing the Sunday strips contemporaneously with the rest or he is extraordinarily good at planning a further six weeks in advance what will be going on in the story by the time a given Sunday strip will come out. That said, while I remember being annoyed that my newspaper growing up didn’t include Luann in its Sunday comics section, I see now that I wasn’t missing all that much: the Sunday strips are still mostly independent, shallow gags that often look like they could have been carried out just as easily and more space-efficiently in a daily strip.

3) Luann’s relationship with her brother Brad, which was clearly meant to reflect a classic snarky sibling dynamic, went further with the insults, name-calling, complete reluctance to acknowledge caring feelings, and occasionally outright malicious behavior than I was comfortable with (until recent years when this has simmered down now that they’re more fully grown up). Are typical siblings really treat each other by default in such an antagonistic and adversarial manner? I appreciate that I had an idyllic relationship with my sister growing up -- I mean really the closest to ideal of any siblings I’ve known -- but I wouldn’t have thought that the norm was really closer to Luann and Brad.

4) On the flip side, there’s another aspect of Luann’s life with her immediate family which strikes me as probably healthier than what I imagine as the default: the openness with which she and Brad air all their personal trials and tribulations to their parents. Luann in particular is often venting about her crushes (especially her main crush, Aaron Hill, always referred to with his full name) and coming to her parents for support over whatever teenage-style drama she’s caught up in. I suppose the fact that I didn’t feel free to be open about these types of things with my parents has much more to do with me than with them: I’ve always been neurotic about open discussion of certain things, especially my romantic interests or feelings of sexual attraction, and was somewhat more so as a teenager than now. (It would take a much longer post than this to pick apart this neurosis.) I remember actually getting into an argument with my parents over whether it’s within a normal kid-parent dynamic to mention at dinner “I met/saw the most attractive girl today!” with me convinced that it wasn’t. I have to concede that the Luann universe (fictional, but clearly based on the cartoonist’s impression of reality) is a point in their favor.

All that said, I would think that Luann might have felt kind of silly blabbering so much about her obsession with Aaron Hill to her family members (not to mention her school guidance counselor!) knowing on some level that it must come across as immature. Yet, in writing this I’ve remembered that I did plenty of blabbering as a young teenager to my family about whatever Interests I was obsessed with at the time, in a way that I kinda-sorta knew was immature but not enough to stop me... but that just wouldn’t have included romantic or sexual feelings. Also, the desire or ability to feel comfortable sleeping on the sofa in the middle of my family doing things (as Brad is constantly seen doing) is utterly foreign to me, but that touches on another of my neuroses.

5) This strip has obviously changed a lot over its nearly 34 years of syndication, which shows most obviously and superficially in the vast improvement in drawing style. In terms of content and stories it changed a lot too, and I think in a very positive direction. In fact, if I hadn’t known that it would improve in this way, I don’t think I would have bothered getting through all of the first decade of Luann. The basis for Luann in its early years was simple gags meant to reflect life of a typical teenage girl in a typical nuclear family. But there was something very pessimistic about all of it: the lives of the DeGroots, each entrenched in their roles as mother, father, teenage daughter, and teenage son, seem weary and at times slightly on the dysfunctional side. The strip could have practically be titled “The Woes of the Modern Middle-Class Nuclear Family”. It predated but was rather similar to The Simpsons in this way. Moreover, Luann, depicted as an awkward and not very attractive 13-year-old, seemed hopeless in all of the Average Teenage Girl ways, including hating everything about school; not really excelling at anything in school or out; being constantly wrapped up in spending hours on the phone with the same two friends; and never, ever, ever being able to get her the object of her long-time super-obsessive crush, Aaron Hill, to so much as glance in her direction (this theme was dwelt on ad nauseum for over a decade to the point that it got extremely tiresome and I’m surprised I got through that period; maybe what got me through was occasional acknowledgments in the voices of Luann’s friends that this obsession was over-the-top and getting pretty old).

And yet... Luann has grown up into a beautiful and talented woman with ambitions and a number of dating relationships under her belt, and the DeGroots are now held up as an example of a really admirable and healthy family (one that TJ clearly wants as his own family). While Brad’s transformation from teenage slob who lay around and ate Oreos all day into a happily married, responsible, and fit fireman is openly remarked upon, the drastic change in the ethos of the strip as a whole isn’t explicitly acknowledged. Of course the evolution happened very gradually, but if I had to point to a single turning point, my choice would be obvious: things began to drastically turn around for Luann in early 1997 when she bared her feelings to Aaron Hill by giving him a scroll containing all her memories of him (a move that would be considered obsessive and stalker-ish in another context but which finally won his attention here).

6) I think there’s a sort of trope, which the Luann character exemplifies about midway through the strip’s history, where she’s supposed to continue representing the insecure girl who feels unattractive and unpopular so that people can relate to her, while at the same time she seems to constantly attract boys (most of whom she considers really hot) and gets dates with them, so as to make for more interesting stories. I got annoyed at times at how these two things seemed to be in tension. At one point, if I remember right, Luann had no fewer than four of the boy characters super into her, including Aaron Hill even though she had temporarily decided she was through with him (this was unacknowledged later on when she went back to complaining that all those years she was in love with Aaron but he never truly noticed her). Other examples of this trope perhaps include Gus Cruikshank and George Costanza.

7) I would feel amiss if I didn’t put in a word about the Gunther character here. He’s my favorite character in the particular sense of reminding me extraordinarily of myself. If Butters from South Park is the most similar animated cartoon character to me (at least in the opinion of some friends), then Gunther Berger is, a hundred times more so, the most similar comic cartoon character to me. Not only do most of his personality traits match almost perfectly with mine (although I’m not as good with kids and don’t know anything about costume-making), his physical appearance is strikingly similar to mine, especially the way I looked as a teenager (plaid shirts and all). In fact, I sometimes wonder if, had there been (say) a call for auditions for a Luann movie back when I looked slightly younger, I might have had a decent shot at winning the part due to my physical similarity to Gunther -- I’m not an amazing actor, but there’s not nearly as much acting involved when you’re basically playing yourself.

One of the rather negative aspects of the early Luann ethos for me is not only the mildly negative way that Gunther was portrayed as the stereotypical socially-inept nerd but the level of disdain Luann treats him with (despite her own insecurities) which she’s only occasionally called out on. I’m glad to see that Gunther soon became one of the most likeable and admirable characters in the strip. Rather than feel ashamed of our likeness, I see him as reflecting some of the best parts of me and, when it comes to standing up and speaking his mind, an inspiration for me to be better.

8) Luann, throughout its history, addresses stereotypical norms, particularly with regard to gender, in an interesting (although not at all unusual) way. Let’s first keep in mind that the strip and main characters were established in 1985. The original intent of the cartoonist was clearly to portray middle-class nuclear family life, with a special focus on teenage girlhood, as honestly and relatably as he knew how. This meant in particular making each member of the DeGroot family a sort of every(wo)man: Frank is the typical father, the main breadwinner, always the one to worry about money (and the parent to go to when one of the kids wants money or something expensive), and taking a backseat with housework; Nancy is the typical mother, more emotive, burdened with all the housework and daily discipline of her kids; Brad is the typical older teenage boy, a lazy slob with little regard for cleanliness or manners spending all his time either being a couch potato or working on his car; and Luann is the typical 13-year-old girl, hating school and obsessed with boys, shopping, fashion, and talking on the phone. The strip positively revels in stereotypes (especially once we add the blonde cheerleader “mean girl” Tiffany, the unattractive nerd Gunther, and the goof-off Knute). A particular theme is gender stereotypes; in fact, it felt like a good 50% of Luann’s non-story strips, particularly Sunday ones, revolved around the differences between the genders. All of this looks pretty tiresome now and was probably tiresome already back in the 80′s.

And at the same time, the cartoonist was clearly socially progressive and a feminist (at least in the old-school sense) from the start. He made many points about the particular burdens women face and wrote many sympathetic strips about how Nancy willingly did all the housework and cooking but was expected to by default and felt unappreciated because her work went unacknowledged by everyone else. There’s a lot of focus on how the fashion industry puts pressures on teenage girls and women and how women should free themselves from basing their self-worth on how their looks compare to other women’s and on what boys think of them. In fact, the artist very deftly points out the tension between Luann’s awareness of this unreasonableness and her desire to be superficially attractive and objectified by boys anyway!

What reads as a tiny bit strange about all of this -- but only from a very modern point of view, I think -- is that all of these stereotypes are remarked upon and criticized while still being exemplified by pretty much every single character and everything they do. (Compare to Zits, debuting in 1997, where the father, a rather sweet, huggy, un-stereotypically masculine character, is shown doing the laundry from early on.) I get why someone would go with that formula, because as I said it seems at least naively like the best way to maximize relatability, but it comes at the expense of creating a subtle tension and not fully promoting the intended messages. I believe this underscores a fundamental distinction between a bare anti-conformist message and anti-conformist representation and suggests that representation as a social justice concept just wasn’t a big thing back in the 80′s and 90′s in the way it (fortunately) is today.

[radphysicist]

1, 2, 8, and 25

What’s the biggest impression you would like to leave people with when they talk to you? 

As someone whose anxiety leaves me insanely hyper-aware of everything in social situations (of my actions, my environment, the other person) and unfortunately often thinking of myself (what does this person think of me? Did their voice sound off because they hate me? Do I look extra bad today?), it would be great to get to a point where everybody I meet walks away feeling like they were listened to. That I genuinely cared about what they said and that their words and our conversation meant something. I want them to feel fulfilled when they walk away and I’m really working to make this the case!

What are three character traits you want to embody

1. Creativity is big one for me. I want to constantly be thinking of things from new perspectives and making novel connections, especially in my academics.

2. Compassion, always. Almost every situation can be made better by this, and certainly every person.

3. Passion. It’s just good to be a person who lives fully and deeply, imo. I feel, again b/c of anxiety, that I tend to be pretty reserved and don’t show how profoundly I feel for the world and the things in it that I care about. I would like to live more boldly and unapologetically as myself, dedicated to what I love. 

Has there ever been a time in your life where your circumstances changed in an instant?

You’re talking to someone with one of the most unstable childhoods in existence. lol I can name 4 very extreme instances off the top of my head, but I will spare everybody the depressing details. 

What do you think your 3 biggest character flaws are?

Well I have way more than 3, but I’ll do my best because I am working on all of these things and think it’s best to be honest to yourself about it:

1. Catastrophic over-thinking: I literally think of the worst case scenario in even the most mundane situations. Like, I will assume people hate me before I’ve met them. I can’t step outside without my brain thinking of a new situation of how I might die. I will cough and be 100% convinced I have a deadly disease. I can make below an 90 on something and convince myself I’m the biggest idiot in the world and should drop out of school. Luckily I’m working on this with professional help.

2. Self-Esteem: Mine is pretty low (which is a step-up from when it used to be in the negatives, so yay progress haha). Even if I do well, I still doubt myself because of it. I hold back my personality and thoughts often, due to it, and I feel a constant need for other people’s approval to feel of worth. All of these side-effects of zero-confidence are really unattractive and honestly turn me into someone that I’m not, so I’ve been working heavily on this problem, too.

3. Perfectionism: I am such a perfectionist and while in small doses it’s okay, at the level that I (and a lot of people) have it, it’s not at all conducive to success. I obsess over small details about myself and my work to the point where nothing is good enough. More so, I will put off so many goals, because the environment or situation I’m never feels ready enough. I will research things obsessively and plan things out to the finest details, but I don’t actually act on them a lot of the times because my perfectionism tells me it’s not the right conditions…which is ridiculous and unproductive. 

Thank you for your ask, anon! Sorry I got back to you late and for being super depressing in some of these haha