#so fucking listen to me and propose relevant solutions!

[camille-lachenille]

Me: So, I have these dizzy spells that take me when I am walking and I almost fall bc of them. I also have trouble standing for any period of time because of my poor balance, which is made worse by the above mentioned dizzy spells.

My doctor: have you considered sitting down when this happens?

Me: Gee, thank you Sherlock! I really never thought that sitting down could solve my problem with standing up. But did you hear the part where I told you I kind of like walking and the point is for me to still be able to go out of the house for more than 1 hour at a time?

[thecloserkin]

book review: Carolyn Slaughter, Relations (1976)

Genre: Gothic psychological suspense

Is it the main pairing: yes

Is it canon: yes

Is it explicit: yes

Is it endgame: no

Is it shippable: yes

Bottom line: I read this concurrently with Wuthering Heights and allow me to play sommelier—10/10 recommend this wine pairing for maximum gothic extraness. tw: suicide

There’s boatloads of sex but this is not a horny story. It’s a lyrical story—in the sense of expressing direct, spontaneous feeling. Not that a story couldn’t be both (Wuthering Heights is both horny and lyrical) but I actually want to spend a minute defending this book to my past self. The first time I read it, I was unimpressed because Relations wasn’t much of a Love Story. You know the kind I’m talking about, you know the beats you’d expect it to hit: here is a pair of siblings tOrMeNtEd by their iLLiCiT pAsSiOn!!! I mean, the mode isn’t always tragic or dark but even the cream-puff versions of this arc entail some sort of line being crossed or feelings being caught. We are used to characters who begin in initial-state, a journey brings them to end-state and a clear delta separates the two conditions. This book says: fuck that. Fuck change. Fuck growth. My best days are behind me and I’m ok with that because now my brother is lost to me and I give zero fucks about anything else. We have a novel steeped in the symbolism of winter (the season of loss & deadness that is impermeable to change). Our pregnant heroine dreads her impending due date, in part because the child is not her beloved brother’s; but mostly because having a baby is just about the biggest change a body can be subjected to, and she’s actively averse to change. All she wants is her brother back. If you’re looking for characters to fall in love, as in transition from feeling one way to feeling another way, this is most likely not the book for you. But I enjoyed it a whole helluva lot and let me tell you why.

The predominant note of this story is MELANCHOLY. It’s backwards-looking rather than forward-looking, things just keep getting worse and worse for our protagonist and yet she’s unapologetic about what she did: she loved her brother, loves him still and always will. What I admire is that she is steadfast in the face of remorseless despair. Compare these quotes, this one from near the beginning: “I feel listless, often close to tears. I am beset by fiendish pangs.” This is from near the end: “I am hollow, clanging with emptiness; there is no solution.” Do you see what I mean by no delta between initial-state and end-state? I think there is an important distinction between this book and Forbidden, which holds out the promise of a happy ending only to snatch it away at the last minute, in that Relations puts its cards on the table & promises no such thing. It’s melancholy all the way down (well, three-quarters of the way down it transpires this book is in fact a high-concept Folgercest prequel I SHIT YOU NOT friends read it yourself).

In the novel’s present, our girl Catherine is entombed in a emotionally sterile marriage; in the past she grows up warmed by the sun of her brother Christopher’s regard & affection. Slaughter chooses to locate these strands at two crucial points in Cathy’s development—age ten (prepubescent) and age thirty (the age at which women’s “biological clocks” start ticking—this is relevant because Slaughter is writing in the 1970s even if Cathy is living in the late Victorian Era). We should note here that Christopher is older than Catherine by two years, aka the universally acknowledged INCEST SWEET SPOT (I know some of you favor twincest but you are WRONG and I will prove it in my forthcoming monograph on the topic). At age ten, Cathy and Christopher have intercourse for the first time after stumbling on their father’s secret porn stash. The sex is more mechanical than enjoyable, and that’s the point: they start banging out of curiosity, keep banging out of habit, and only later do hormones and feelings kick in. Ten- and twelve-year-olds just don’t get horny the way older kids do, and that is, again, the entire point. Slaughter structures it so the sex happens first (in the very first flashback chapter). The feelings don’t follow, the feelings don’t emerge, the feelings were there all along. What the sex does is seal a secret between the two of them, the secret of their father’s porn stash (hidden in an abandoned wing of the house).

If we turn back to the present, we find Catherine yoked to a man who excites zero feelings in her. By her own admission she married him because “I found him pleasant to listen to and he never made any demands upon me.”These are the qualities that recommend a husband to her—that he impose no psychic demands whatsoever! All her energies are already absorbed in reminiscence lol. We find out he proposed to her with a speech worthy of Pride & Prejudice’s Mr. Collins, and that he possesses not a particle of passion. Which is exactly how Cathy wanted it:

I entered the marriage in a state of apathy; simply undergoing it because of Mamma’s pressure, and because there seemed no other real alternative apart from marriage open to me.

We were married in the winter of my thirtieth year.

I walked down the aisle in a state of complete inertia, my sense muffled by the laudanum … I wished with all my heart he could have been my brother.

File away that glancing reference to winter; more on that later. For now please focus on how numb she is—not discontent, just apathetic. Cathy insists the present brings her nothing but pain and insists she doesn’t regret the choices that brought her here. She’s unrepentant about loving Chris, and explicitly rejects the conventional moral framing that would view her past self as “sinning” and her present self as “redeemed”:

I could not rid myself of the old and over-riding passion of my childhood. I decided eventually that no one would ever, could ever, be what my brother had been to me.

If I could have felt then, and now, that there was some evil in what we did, then I could have borne it. But I could find no evil in it.

I would not be so oppressed if I could but feel my past was wicked and scandalous. If I believed that, i could gladly submit to the institution or the grave. But some buoyant spirit within me keeps insisting that what I had was fine, and contained elements of true beauty.

“The institution or the grave,” she says. Those are the choices. If you want to have Thoughts and Feelings and not just a Body, then your lot as a woman is to end up either in a sanitarium or dead in childbed. Only when she looks back at her childhood does Cathy perceive a time when it was different, when Christopher, at least, saw her as a whole-ass person. Yes, this is another entry in dr. thecloserkin’s ongoing “Incest vs. the Patriarchy” series; if you guys thought I was going to stay off my bullshit for more than ten minutes then joke’s on you hahaha. Here are some quotes that show she was getting her emotional needs met as a child (she’s borderline suicidal as an adult):

leaves me with only the memory of such complete intimacy. It is beyond my reach now, and perhaps I shall never agin recapture it though I live to be ninety.

there was no discord in our interests and desires.

We talked all the time. We never ran out of conversation; I never grew tired of his speech.

It never occurred to me…that we would not always be together. There seemed no need for anyone else—he filled out my present and my past.

Ok so if everything was so idyllic back then what the heck happened? How did it all fall apart? Slaughter withholds the crucial revelatory scene until close to the end, but the story up till then is permeated by a very Gothic sense of creeping dread. The elephant on the horizon is change. Cathy and Chris are on the precipice of puberty, which portends seismic changes in their bodies, and the accompanying changes in their roles as they inch toward adulthood. Cathy doesn’t handle it well:

the old fear. A fear of things changing; of his face looking at me in an unfamiliar way; of our world altering and growing cold about me.

There seemed no question why it should not always continue in this way, and no reason why our bodies or our minds should change or suddenly not fit.

Our life became a little cloister: and I never wanted to leave it. The idea of change haunted me.

I was insisting, always, like a child, the nothing must change; nothing must happen to destroy our life together.

And here is where I connect her fear of change with her favorite season, winter:

I was afraid of change. It seemed menacing. I realized the sadness and bleakness of the winter really suited my nature best. It made me feel more real; sadness now seemed more real than happiness; more permanent, and therefore easier to bear.

the seasons change and find me the same. Nothing touches me, nothing makes me laugh or weep. I have no real substance.

OMG SHE’S A FUCKING REVENANT

”You are so thin. Your limbs are slim as these winter branches.”

I have touched my roots, my beginnings, the things that have formed me.

This book is an anti-change pro-winter manifesto. Winter is the season of desolation, where nothing grows, and if there is one change she adjures above all others it’s the life presently taking root within her womb:

If I am a seed about to burst, if I am to flower, the old seed, my Self, must die. Some new thing will grow out of me; but I must perish. I cannot have it; I cannot allow it to happen. I must protect myself from this that would devour me.

My body continued to change according to its own will, nothing could shift the determined embryo within me … I cannot bear the thought of this thing growing within me, living off my blood … I feel nothing but doom, and a great fear if this shall finally come to pass.

The progress of her pregnancy is literally making her mentally ill. I want to link this horror imagery to child!Cathy’s musings on the decomposition of her father’s corpse:

I wondered if all the flesh had fallen off by this time. I imagined his bones growing into the wood of the coffin, and the trees growing into his skull, the roots twisting around his rotting limbs.

People who read this passage and think “this is a really tight horror aesthetic but what is it doing in the middle of my luscious love story” are missing the point. This is a horror story. But instead of framing the incest as the impure act that violates and threatens our accepted categories, we are invited to view the pregnancy as a gross & unnatural hijacking of Cathy’s body. Her body’s fecundity defeats and puzzles her. She actually tells us about her nightmare wedding before she tells us about her real wedding; in her nightmare she looks at her bridegroom and:

transfixed with horror because he is without the male member — all that resides in the space between his thighs is a burnt-out stub—like the hacked branch of a tree deadened and blacked by many winters.

So far we’ve had body horror associated with (1) her father (2) her husband (3) her unborn baby. Notice who’s not on this list? Notice who she always thinks of with tenderness? Notice who doesn’t ever evoke an iota of fear or horror in Cathy? That’s right! Her brother. The whole incestuous affair is really an own-goal on patriarchy’s part, because the same doctor who warns Cathy’s mother against Cathy’s “wild and unnatural attachment to her brother” goes on to say:

Little girls, Madam, are the scourge of the earth. They have no future, but to grow into that unhealthy state of womanhood, with its unclean festerings and grotesque swellings of the abdomen. I would that little girls could always stay the pure young things they are before the age of eight.

This is some next-level IT WAS EVE’S FAULT SHE ATE THE APPLE spin. Can you blame Cathy for taking this venerable authority figure at his word, and staying “pure” by staying a child, by warding off womanhood and childbearing altogether? goodforher.jpg

Real quick here are some lighthearted episodes from their childhood since it’s not all doom and gloom: Christopher marches next door to confront the Frenchman who is maybe sleeping with their mom and is definitely perving on Cathy. Christopher returns the Frenchman’s gift of silk stockings with a grand declaration of “My sister Catherine has no need for these.” That’s right shut him down Chris!!! Also: Cathy falls into a frozen pond and Christopher rescues her. Their negligent mother blames Christopher. Cathy is shaking with pneumonia and all she wants to do is “make the sad look leave my brother’s sweet face.” Christopher refuses to leave her side until she rallies from the fever. He is thirteen:

I think that Christopher and I half-died together in that terrible week, and afterward, when the terror had passed, we were never quite the children we had been before.

Congrats kids you have undertaken a symbolic journey to the underworld!!!! Good job.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It wouldn’t be a real incest story without a third sibling, an odd-man-out who helps us triangulate our main pairing’s relationship. Edward is a sociopath and a bully. Parents playing favorites always wreaks havoc with children’s sense of self-worth, but I think in this case it’s 90% down to Edward just being a bad egg (fwiw their father, when he was alive, did favor Christopher). Edward is a peripheral figure for most of their childhood; he appears only to “bang on our door to tell us to be silent for our giggling kept him awake.” That’s right, our door—teenage Catherine and Christopher share not just a room but a bed (!). Edward resurfaces as an adult to beg for Catherine’s intercession with his wife. He married an heiress, and now he seems to have soured on her. He talks about her “malady” and her “hysterical nonsense.” She has “phantom confinements.” They are “phantom” because she is barren. Sir you are literally a Victorian dude named Edward who keeps his mad wife locked up in the attic, you can sit allllll the way down. A heavily pregnant Catherine rolls up to Edward’s house just in time to witness his wife’s suicide: ”I had to make sure there was nothing inside me,” explains the poor woman, lying in a pool of blood after cutting her abdomen open with a knife. This seems fine. This whole society seems fine, right? Catherine reflects: “Ill-health or madness was her only solution, married as she was to a man who so complacently felt himself her superior” and “We are sepulchered alive in this close world, and want more room.” If this applies to her sister-in-law’s tragic fate it applies with equal force to her own situation. Cathy may not be physically barren but her inner life is empty af.

I’m going to talk about the breakup now. The climax of this book is the last time Cathy and Chris have sex. Contrast the arc of many slow-burn stories where the climax is the first time the main pairing has sex. Cathy’s menses doesn’t even arrive until after the incestuous affair is over! And what precipitates the breakup? Well, their mother decides to take the family on a seaside vacation. This is the summer when everything changes (Cathy’s favorite season is winter, and she abhors change). As for what changes, exactly, it’s kind of unclear? Wasn’t like they got caught having beach sex (which they had a ton of). The forces of change are wholly internal. They’re growing up. They’re waking up to the existence of social taboos that will brand their love “unnatural” & worse. As readers we can see that Catherine and Christopher’s attachment is as natural as breathing, and it’s actually the Incest Is Icky crowd that’s drawing harmful artificial boundaries. What happens is there’s a local girl who has obvious designs on Chris. She’s a nonentity but the mere existence of someone outside of Catherine and Christopher, someone who views one of them as an object of sexual desire, sort of punctures the bubble they’ve hitherto been living in. They can’t pretend society doesn’t exist or that what they’re doing isn’t immoral by its lights:

”We have never felt bad before. It just happened and there was no harm in it. I see no harm in it now—I cannot feel suddenly that it is wrong … but even if it is, why does it signify? Nobody knows.” ”Yes, but why does nobody know? It must be because we have deliberately tried to hide it?”

Christopher is the one who unilaterally decides that incest is wrongdirtybad and it has to end. Christopher is the one who seeks out Rando Local Girl and fucks her just to prove how serious he is about ending it with Cathy, which imo was inflicting a pointlessly cruel injury for no reason?? Wtf Chris I thought you were one of the good ones. What I love about Cathy is the steadfastness of her conviction—she accepts Christopher’s decision but she is far from convinced by his reasoning, his deference to social norms. Here’s Cathy’s take: “it seems to me that to live in a way that is contrary to one’s own nature, to live in a way that is false, that is the evil. The discontent grows like a cancer.” Authenticity ought to count for something, no? But these kids and their beautiful love are ultimately outmatched by, and broken by, the weight of social mores:

I could not bear to think of anything changing. I wanted it to stay the same dear way it had always been; ever since I could remember … but the spell was broken; we could not pretend any more. We had to stop being children. “Please. Once more.”

And that’s the breakup scene. It’s devastating. Cathy keeps staring at this one beauty mark on Christopher’s familiar well-loved face and she’s crying and I’m crying too. Recall that they’re still sharing a room/a bed up to this point? “The first night alone was the worst,” says Cathy. Imagine losing the person who is your whole world….overnight. Oof. There’s a time-jump of a few years, and Chris announces he’s off to—I think South Africa? I think this is around the time of the Boer War? I didn’t make any detailed notes and I’ll be damned if I’m going to fish for my copy of the book just to confirm what we already know, that it’s the 1800’s and the sun never set on the British Empire:

”I must get away from here and see something different; begin again…I cannot imagine a day without your face, or your sweet companionship. I do love you. But this must be for the best.”

Christopher goes off to doing colonial-settler stuff, initially. Here’s his first letter home:

I want you to be happy and grow up straight without me.

As opposed to growing up crooked, or growing up gay?? Here are subsequent letters where he seems to have done a complete 180:

thought it would be simpler to be away from you, from the constant temptation. It is not. My nightmares terrify me, they are eating my brain. I don’t know how long this can last.

AND THEN he writes he’ll be coming home for Christmas! I must’ve missed the memo where this story turns into a straight-up Folgers fic but that’s about where we are. It’s literally Folgercest. He goes to Africa explicitly to get away from her. Time and distance cannot suppress their feelings. He comes home to find her still waiting for him:

”Why have you clung to me, or rather the memory of me. For surely the memory is better than this twisted, pathetic creature before you?” “I have found no one better,” I said simply.

Asdfdfkdfjd this reunion scene is heartbreaking bc Christopher and Catherine are barely five minutes in each other’s company before Edward intrudes, claims to have found them in a compromising position, claims to have suspected all along about the incest, almost comes to blows with Christopher, tells him to get out. And Chris does. Cathy doesn’t even get to say goodbye. Edward’s presence is so clearly a case of entrapment—he was expecting Chris to come to her, he was expecting to catch them doing something “inappropriate” even though it sounds like they were only embracing—that there is no doubt in my mind Edward’s intent was to hurt Cathy and Chris, rather than to protect Cathy’s reputation or whatever bullshit he was spouting. We have seen from Edward’s abuse of his wife that he is no kind of moral authority. He does, however, succeed in “making me feel unclean, and dirt was attaching itself to me with every foul word he said.” In this scene Edward is handy synecdoche for patriarchy, which berates Cathy with accusations of sinfulness while actively stifling her every creative impulse and intellectual endeavor. If this book has a villain (and I don’t think it does; it’s not that kind of book) Edward is it. I find that edifying. It’s not Cathy’s husband who’s the primary antagonist standing in the way of her self-actualization—the husband is no more than an empty suit—it’s her other brother. One brother saves her and the other damns her.

After Edward runs Chris off and Chris goes back to Africa there are a few more letters, including this one: “that nothing has changed in my heart. That I love you with the passion of our youth, with the strength of all these long, long years.” Thank you for the affirmation Chris! I needed it even if Cathy didn’t. But the war is ramping up and Chris is headed into a combat zone and the odds of his survival do not look good. Cathy is already preparing to grieve him. She’s also preparing to go into labor any day now. These two threads, her brother’s impending death and her child’s impending birth, merge in the final pages of the book where Cathy is just clearly SO OVER IT:

I have nothing to fight, yet the waiting is most terrible … I have nothing to do but wait. I have nothing to leave.

It is hard to go on. How can I escape this life, this round of boredom and other births? O, that I could be ten and happy!

That’s the end but come on. Raise your hand if you don’t think this girl will 100% yeet herself into the sea and they’ll rule it “postpartum depression”? Anybody? No?

[uberrapidash]

A vent.

I can’t stop thinking about death. Every time I do, I think about Ghirahim and how I can’t leave him. Then I immediately feel guilty for my first thought not being that it would be horrible to you if I disappeared. But then I think about how I’m not doing any good for Ghirahim or for you anyway, because I’m in such a poor state just from trying to keep up with the basics of life. I feel guilty for always being so negative. I’m upset with myself for not being more positive. Then I think that I shouldn’t have to force positivity. Like, life is legit scary and hopeless. I feel like I’m pretty objective. I know that I can’t remove subjectivity, but there is a certain amount of objectivity, I think. 

It’s not like any thing necessarily bad happened today. It’s just lots of little tiny things. They build up. Every day.

First it was that they told me they have to follow what my doctor sent me for for physical therapy (”right shoulder pain”). I don’t know how exactly to describe why that was a certain kind of upsetting. It kinda gave me a lump in my throat like I was going to start crying. Maybe I feel like I’m not being listened to? I don’t know. There was a new exercise they had me do where I stand with my back against the wall and slowly raise and lower my arms above my head, sliding them up the wall. It wasn’t difficult, and I couldn’t feel any of the muscles that it was supposed to be targeting, but I felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t do it. I barely got to 5 reps, and I couldn’t breathe. I told them this, of course. They don’t know why I would feel like I was suffocating from doing that exercise. They said to take a break and try again, and I did two more reps and had to stop. I asked again at the end of my appointment why something like that could make me feel like I couldn’t breathe, and they said they have no clue. They didn’t seem interested in trying to figure out why. They said that next time we can try to implement some accommodations to help me do it, like have me do it while lying down, and have me do it while leaning back at an incline. But, like, my concern is that that should not have made me feel like I was suffocating, and I want to know why that was happening, but they don’t seem interested in discovering what it is. Later this lady was asking me about how I manage my pain. She suggested hot showers and I said that I only bathe every so often because I don’t have the energy to do more. She said that I could just sit, without bathing, in hot water, or under a hot shower, and then I explained about my skin condition. I was embarrassed because I feel like there are too many things wrong with me and I worry that people think I’m just making stuff up or exaggerating because I actually just want to complain and am not looking for solutions. But the truth is that a lot of proposed solutions are not solutions for me. I felt like crying by the time I left. There wasn’t anything in particular that would make me need to cry. Everyone was really nice to me. Although I have been told multiple times recently that I am a “special case” because I describe these issues and these medical professionals don’t have a ready answer to explain why I’m like this. 

So then the next thing from today is that I get home and I’m so tired that my day’s plans are already derailed. I have so much shit to do for school and I’m not getting everything done. But I kept a good attitude, and I did what I could with the time that I had. But I knew that this evening I was either not going to have any down time or I wasn’t going to get hardly anything done. And now that I am here in this evening, it’s that I am so tired, and so depressed, and so preoccupied with thinking that there is no light at the end of the tunnel so what is the point in trying, that I’m not getting anything done, and neither does it feel like “down time.”

I went to opera, and things were going pretty well, but I reached a point where I got so tired that it was like I just hit a wall. So the last hour or so was awful. I felt like I was just in the way. I couldn’t remember the stage directions from just a few minutes ago and did things at the wrong time when we ran it. I couldn’t catch on to the choreography, which I was supposed to have already known by today. I did try to find the video for today’s choreography, but it doesn’t appear to have been sent to me? Or I’ve just overlooked it many times. So I asked about it, was it sent? No one told me if they had accessed the video, no one chimed in to say that they also couldn’t find the video - I was just told by the stage manager that they were emailing it to me as we spoke. So that’s embarrassing. As this was a question I asked during question time so the whole class was paying attention. I asked it then because I thought it would be relevant to others. But apparently it was not relevant to others. The stage manager approached me later to say that I could just text her if something like that ever happens again. I felt like I shouldn’t have taken up that class time. I felt stupid. I was also frustrated because after I hit that point of exhaustion, my mind became so clunky and slow. And it’s embarrassing. How am I going to get through tech week(s) if I’m like this? How am I going to get through the rest of my classes?

How am I supposed to do more than one thing? All I’ve had energy for today is: 1) physical therapy, 2) cook/eat/clean-up, and 3) opera. I still have a shit load of other stuff that needs to be done. But I am so fucking tired.

Oh yeah, another thing to add onto the pile of shit. After looking at the paperwork stuff for me getting to get on my mom’s health insurance, I am pretty fucking hopeless about it. They are asking for a lot of documentation. They need proof of “the condition” from before I was 26. But this stuff started in high school and progressed slowly. I’ve been mistreated by doctors, I’ve had doctors not do anything about my complaints. I don’t have a label to apply to “the condition” because I was shrugged off by doctors when I was younger (but also my condition wasn’t as bad back then) and then because I haven’t had health insurance. I need health insurance in order to prove that I need health insurance. I feel so hopeless about all this shit. 

One more thing: I embarrassed myself with that dead luna moth I found because I was walking back by the music building on my way to the tree that I wanted to leave it under, and I asked a group of people if they wanted to see, and one of them, like, snapped, said something like, “Not right now, sorry,” quickly followed up by something about how it’s just not a good time, they’re dealing with something. Should I have been able to tell that I shouldn’t have approached? What clues did I miss? No one looked upset. But maybe I shouldn’t have tried to share anyway, because it’s too weird. I’m the weird girl that moves dead birds and keeps cicada husks in her car and carries dead luna moths around and asks people if they want to see, because that’s how she thinks friends are made. Except she’s a nearly-30-year-old woman.

I think that that kinda goes along with how dumb I feel in opera because most of what we do is improv and I don’t know how to “be a person.” I literally have the instruction to improv DANCE for a solid several pages, just “have fun,” and I’m like “?????” Give me beat-by-beat instructions, give me choreography. I realized today that I think I have a difficult time with improv because I don’t make eye contact with people. My ease of getting through rehearsal today improved after I had that realization. I have many more choices if I’m looking to people’s faces. People interact with me more when I make eye contact, so I don’t have to do as much. It’s so uncomfortable. 

I’ve been worried that I’m in the wrong field. I think I already made up my mind some time ago that I just want to at least get my undergraduate degree, then maybe I can work some unrelated job at a coffee shop or something. Or maybe I will want to go on for a master’s, as my original plan was. I won’t know until I get there. 

This giant rant started because I can’t seem to deal with life right now. I thought about going to crisis counseling today. I am worried I should be in a hospital. But I’m not looking for that kind of help because if I do that then there’s absolutely no way that I could recover in this semester. And my whole financial everything depends on me being in school right now. And I’m not the only one dependent on it. You are, too. 

I have so much to do. It’s nearly 8pm and I still need to finish setting up Anki for music history this week (my goal was to have that done yesterday), I was supposed to have practiced for an hour and a half at some point today, I have this big assignment due on Thursday but I haven’t even started and it will take a lot of time so I really need to be working on it now, I need to work on opera memorization, I need to write my IPA and translation into my Brahms and learn the piece ASAP, and a million other little things.

I thought life would become so much easier once I was back on Adderall. I’m sure it is helping. I bet everything would be much worse if I didn’t have the Adderall. But still, even with it, I can’t do this. This is isn’t working. I don’t have the energy to keep up with everything. Mail is still going unopened. My email has gone to shit, too. And I’m afraid I’m about to lose all my healthcare stuff that I’ve acquired recently and I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know what to do if I can’t work on improving my health. I’m scared. I feel so hopeless. Part of me really, really wants to disappear. Part of me really doesn’t want that. But I can’t keep going on like this and I don’t know how to make it better. It’s not just my perspective that’s the issue. I need something to get better.

[tricky-pockets]

About the Trump survey

I know I’m late to this, but I want to talk for a few minutes about the recently-issued ‘Official Trump Law and Order Survey’ and how it’s a spectacularly shameless propaganda generator. Poor survey design gives you useless data. Intentionally poor survey design gives you propaganda.

There’s a blow-by-blow commentary below the cut. It’s long. I couldn’t help myself. You don’t have to read the whole thing. Maybe read Stanley’s How Propaganda Works instead. 

Still with me? God, I’m so sorry.

The first thing to notice about this survey is that all of the questions are yes/no. If a respondent is somewhere in between complete agreement and complete disagreement, dichotomous questions force them to either (1) misrepresent the strength of their position or (2) leave the survey incomplete. This has a filtering effect. People unwilling to commit to an extreme view are unrepresented. It also results in overestimation of the strength of respondents’ support; people who slightly lean ‘yes’ are given as much weight as those who lean strongly toward ‘yes’ (which is, of course, the goal).

I suspect there’s also a priming effect going on, especially in the first question:

Do you believe that Keeping America Safe should be President Trump’s #1 priority?

The phrase ‘keeping America safe’ is broad enough that it’s hard to disagree with. We’re not told what exactly they mean by the phrase. The respondent is free to interpret it however they want, but their answer will be used to support the administration’s specific interpretation. This question is the easiest to agree with, and that’s why it’s at the beginning. The goal is to get people to agree with increasingly extreme statements. If you start with the most extreme question, you scare people off. If you start with something like the above, people are not only more inclined to continue the survey; they’re inclined to continue agreeing in order to be consistent.  

Do you stand with President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

This is vague. It forces you to agree with ALL of the ‘efforts’ or none of them, without bothering to mention what ‘efforts’ we’re talking about. It’s also a loaded question. In order to even answer the question, you have to take the following as facts: (1) President Trump has made efforts to restore law and order, and (2) ‘law and order’ has been diminished. It’s like asking someone “Do you still take PCP every Saturday night?”

Do you agree that rioters and anarchists should be punished accordingly?

It’s very convenient that the question doesn’t mention what, exactly, an appropriate punishment would be. This is another one where every interpretation that gives a ‘yes’ will be counted as support for an unstated interpretation by the administration. This is also a double-barreled question, in which ‘rioters’ and ‘anarchists’ are lumped in together (not to mention, they’re both pretty loaded terms). ‘Rioter’ refers to an action or set of actions, but ‘anarchist’ is a political position. We’re being led to conflate the two - a very sneaky way to get people to say that there are some political views deserving of ‘punishment’.

Do you agree with President Trump that Democrat leaders who are letting their communities be destroyed need to crack down?

Another loaded question. You are forced to accept as facts that (1) there are communities being ‘destroyed’, (2) destruction is attributable to Democrat leaders, (3) Democrat leaders are not taking action, and (4) ‘cracking down’ is the solution. We aren’t told what it means to ‘crack down’, but we did just read a question about punishing rioters and anarchists. The ordering is intentional.

At this point, I’m going to stop pointing out inflammatory language; it’s in every question. They’re all leading questions, phrased such that disagreement sounds absurd at best.

Do you agree with President Trump deploying the National Guard to communities where Democrat leaders have proven ineffective?

Again, this assumes that (1) there are Democrat leaders who have ‘proven ineffective’, and (2) President Trump has deployed the National Guard to only and all communities where this is the case. It deliberately excludes communities with Republican leaders, whether the Republicans have ‘proven ineffective’ or not, implying that the only ineffective leaders are Democrats. That’s the only reason to include the word ‘Democrat’ at all. If you phrased it as ‘where leaders have proven ineffective’, you’d still be able to claim support for Trump, but you’d lose the condemnation of Democrats specifically.

This is also a great example of why the ordering of the questions is relevant. It doesn’t actually indicate what these leaders have proven ineffective at, although of course we know; we’ve just had questions about preserving law and order, cracking down, and punishing people. It also makes it sound like Democrat leaders are ineffective in general, not just in regards to this one unspecified issue.

It’s worth noting at this point that the word ‘protest’ doesn’t appear once in the survey, nor is it ever stated what exactly people are ‘rioting’ about. (As a side note, I’m not terribly impressed with a lot of Democrats right now, but that’s personal and beside the point.)

Do you support President Trump’s fearless resolve when he walked to St. John’s Church - a historical church that was set on fire the night before by rioters?

WOW leading/loaded question. WOW. I mean, wow. Holy fuck. I’m going to go get the Emergency Gin. I’m not touching this one. Jesus.

Did you know that Joe Biden’s campaign staff is financially supporting rioters?

We’re just calling all protesters ‘rioters’ now. This is an unclear question. If people say ‘yes’, how is that going to play in the “analysis”? “When polled, 99% of people already knew this thing”? Even if we accept the claim, there’s no good reason to measure people’s awareness of the claim. Even if you had a good reason to measure awareness of the claim, this wouldn’t give you anything useful. (Did you know X? Well, I do now). This is going to be used to say “X% of people know that Joe Biden’s campaign is financially supporting rioters.” And X% of people said they know that thing because you just told them the thing. People believing a claim is not adequate evidence that the claim is true; it might just indicate that PROPAGANDA IS HAPPENING. This is a fucking insidious attempt to insert BullshitTM into the body of things that ‘everybody knows’ and convince dissenters that they are a tiny tiny minority and possibly crazy.

Again, there’s no way to disagree with the claim. There’s vagueness around what ‘financial support’ consists of (donations to bail funds? or a countrywide campaign to arm the antifas?) and who ‘campaign staff’ consists of (Joe Biden? his higher-up organizer people in an official capacity? volunteers who do activism work unassociated with the campaign?)

Do you agree that the Fake News is biased against President Trump’s efforts to restore law and order in our communities?

See comments on the first question regarding these unspecified ‘efforts’.

What’s going on with the capitalization here? Is it a heavy-handed attempt to legitimize the phrase ‘fake news’ - make it sound more like a real thing? It’s not just ‘news’ that happens to be ‘fake’; it’s a proper noun indicating that Fake News is...what, an organization? We can say anything we want about the Fake News because ‘the Fake News’, a monolithic entity, isn’t real. It’ll be vacuously true.

Honestly, I don’t know where to end with this one. If the news is fake, it’s biased against Trump. If the news is biased against Trump, it’s fake. There can exist no criticism of Trump that is legitimate; any opposition is the Fake News. This is a propaganda machine.

Do you believe the Fake News should be held accountable for their bias against President Trump?

In the last question, we asked you if the Fake News was biased. In this question, we’re assuming you said ‘yes’. We won’t tell you who exactly the Fake News is. We won’t tell you what their bias looks like. We won’t tell you how we’re proposing to hold them accountable. Dissent is illegitimate and punishable, in the same way that certain political beliefs are worthy of unspecified ‘punishment’.

I suspect that the ‘Fake News’ questions are at the end just in case you need a reminder that President Trump tells the truth and everyone else is a dirty liar. In case this disgustingly biased survey raised any tiny little whispers of alarm in your head. Don’t listen to the alarm. Remember who tells you the truth. Remember how everyone is out to get him because he’s the only one who tells you the truth. You’re not one of those people, are you? Of course not.

It’s so easy to look at this and discount it because it’s so obviously bullshit. That’s why it’s dangerous. We live in a country where this psycho garbage is coming from the establishment in power. Every time something like this goes out into the world, the window of what’s socially acceptable shifts a little closer to fascism. Propaganda isn’t just people saying bad or wrong shit; it’s manipulation that makes it harder and harder to even engage in political discourse. It’s not about what’s true or false; it’s about what serves the President. The goal is to create a climate in which accuracy is irrelevant, critical source evaluation is impossible, and legitimate dissent is discredited. This is how it fucking starts - this “affirm your unquestioning loyalty to our Glorious Leader and punish the opposition as enemies of the State” bullshit.

As a final note, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that the survey does not confirm your email address; it’s not constructed to discourage anyone from submitting duplicate responses. All it asks for is a name, email address, and zip code. So, uh...you know what to do. Especially if you’re one of those kpop weirdos (whom I love very much).