#the last couple of months I’ve been dissociating so hard and just staring at dumb shit and I want to stop now

[jmflowers]

okay, my issue with this current TikTok era we are living in as a person with a chronic illness is like, as accessible as you make these videos in terms of speech to text and voiceover and whatever, it still doesn’t acknowledge the very real challenges of motion sickness and movement-triggered difficulties

and it kind of blows my mind that I don’t hear anyone talking about how extremely awful it can be to try to engage with these pieces of media only to feel horribly, terribly sick for minutes or hours or days or weeks afterwards

but somehow I’m the weirdo for not having TikTok??? y’all, I’m not safe anywhere from these shaky, handheld, pov-walking and running and whipping around movement videos - they’re on my Instagram, they’re on Snapchat, they’re on Facebook, they’re on YouTube, etc, etc, etc. I tried to watch one vlog today and I’ve been fighting the urge to vomit for hours since and it’s made me so dizzy that even thoughtful, professional handheld shots in professionally-made media was too much

why is this just the norm now? why did everyone unanimously decide that it was fine?

[derpyfins]

Long post is long, sorry, pls skip

This popped up in today’s memories:

I can remember all my Anne moments, most of them quite vividly, which is unusual for me.  My memory is not amazing, sometimes I think I have a very mild form of aphantasia.  Memories, for me, are generally text, with faded watercolor illustrations that blur out at the edges.  I have to focus so hard mentally to bring an image into focus.  I have given myself headaches trying to do it before.  There is something about the Anne books - I’m not sure what - that deeply imprinted them into my mind, to the point where they function like pylons or anchor points.  I remember getting the boxed book series when I turned nine (I was standing in Chrissy’s house, why?  Her little neighbor boys gave them to me.  I must have had my party there.  Why?  The house was beige and the woodwork around the windows brown; the day was overcast and cool, and I can visualize my hands holding the box.)  I didn’t read them then, not for a couple of years, and the box of books wound up in storage and I forgot about it.  I saw the movie around the time I read the first book.  It must have been shortly after because I remember thinking that Mrs. Lynde and Gilbert weren’t how I imagined them.  I remember desperately wanting to get the movie out of the library and not being able to because I was being punished for something or other.  I remember, years later, finding the sequels - it was eighth grade, in the junior high library, the bottom shelf on the window side two shelves back from the back wall.  I was crouching down there in grubby jeans looking for Pern books and was shocked to find, not only an Anne sequel, but several.  I read them all.  I didn’t understand that much about them; looking back on it, they were a bit too adult for me.  I was a childish teenager and some of the concepts were just over my head.  Rilla was just, man, whoosh - I was a dumb kid with skinned knees, who still played with dolls sometimes, and climbed trees, and knew that there was a thing called World War I but in a dim sort of way.

I kind of rediscovered the series again after high school, and it just kind of became a mainstay in my life.  I love the stability of Anne’s world, the slice-of-life, day-to-day-ness of it.  It’s the only place I give any real outlet to nostalgia, since, as any historian knows, the good old days were never really that good.  I’ve always been able to keep in mind that it’s fictional nostalgia.  That’s a perfect escape and coping mechanism for me, though.  The books, particularly Ingleside, kept me grounded and in a decent headspace after 9/11 and all that happened after.  As I got older I learned how to look critically at things, and how to place things in context.  I gave Rilla a closer reread, trying to follow along with the world events on Wikipedia.  I decided to give another one of LMM’s series a shot (Emily of New Moon - and it fucked me up, derailed my thesis for two months, and sent me into some kind of dissociative depressive state the likes of which I haven’t experienced before or since.)  Then I read all of LMM’s diaries, in one go, over a dark and snowy winter (protip: don’t).  Then LMM biographies, several of them; and books about the life of the Anne series itself; somewhere in there, The Blythes are Quoted happened, which, coupled with LMM’s death and last diary entries, just... I don’t know, I just stared at a wall for a while.  You start to see the darkness beneath the light after a while, and how the series functioned as a wish-fulfillment mechanism for its author.  But that’s one of the many reasons why it’s so brilliant, and so much deeper than it seems on the surface, or to most people.  Anyway. 

A few years ago Anne dovetailed into WWI for me in a serious way.  As a scholar, WWI wound up more on my radar than I ever thought it would, but in weird, roundabout ways.  Among other things, I study grand jewels of grand houses, focusing on the pre-revolutionary Russian court.  WWI is a major part of the downfall of the Romanov dynasty, obviously, and it changed a good deal about monarchies in general and how they function today, so I had to study it, but never the war in and of itself.  Then I listened to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon and hoo boy did that change.  Now I study WWI for its own sake; it’s such an awful, fascinating conflict with layers and layers to go through.  Studying WWI in conjunction with rereading Rilla is a really great way to give depth to both subjects.  Rilla is, iirc, the first war novel (WWI specifically) written by a woman, and so it deserves a look just for that.  It’s not a book for children and shouldn’t be written off as such. Studying Anne/Rilla/LMM herself and the way she engaged with WWI - and couldn’t engage with WWII- while studying the war itself has been rewarding in ways that surprised me.

Anyway, all this to say we’ve got tickets for They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, for today.  I’ve been looking forward to seeing it for weeks; it’s supposed to be really amazing.  I just thought it was funny that the Anne memory popped up on my FB.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate Anne and WWI at this point, and I’m not sure I should try.

We go over the top at 4.