#there is always an orangutan in academia

[belamuse]

PLEASE, FORGIVE ME, IT’S MY FIRST TIME ON EARTH

Forever in awe of the Coastal Redwoods.

I am still learning how to be alive– how to allow my heart to leave my sight, to attend school, to grow up. I cannot comprehend the arguments used to bomb the lungs of children, to leach the Earth of her marrow, to ban books about love. Some days, I am paralyzed by grief. There appear to be pages missing from my manual. Perhaps I was improperly configured when they installed my software. I do what I can. I am asking the experts. I am Googling for answers. I am trying my best. Please forgive me, it’s my first time on Earth.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt out of place–like the only actress on stage without the screenplay. Some days, I wish I could have Please forgive me, it’s my first time on Earth permanently emblazoned on my chest. A reminder to others to be patient with me as I fumble through existence. 

I don’t ever remember a time where it felt easy to be human. As a child, I was often confused by other people. I did not understand why America’s Funniest Home Videos was popular. I could not comprehend what was funny about watching people get hurt. When I began to watch the news, it was unfathomable to me how humans could allow humans to go hungry. And war, why were we always fighting over lines on a map, wealth, weapons? I expected it to get easier as I aged. It never did. Rather, it became increasingly more confusing. Academia, corporate culture, romantic relationships, parenting. I cannot begin to guess how many hours I lost asking Google for answers. How can I study more efficiently? How do I network? Is my relationship healthy? How can I communicate with my child when he’s hitting me without losing my mind?

For most of my life, I thought it was just me. I didn’t share the inner workings of my mind with anyone. I was embarrassed to admit how uncomfortable I felt, the daily burdens of living in a bipedal body. Somehow I must have been improperly configured, so I committed to learn the rules. Perhaps I too could learn to be the right kind of human. I self-lobotomized as a passion project, convinced at some point I would feel normal and less like an impersonation of what a human should be. 

I numbed and escaped through avoidance and alcohol. It gnawed at my rib meat for years, but when it threatened to become a death sentence, I understood silence and numbing were no longer sustainable. Bit by bit I opened up, shared with those I thought most likely to understand– my closest friends and my peers in recovery. I explained how I felt I’d spent my life trying to learn the rules to a game I did not understand and would never win. And almost every time, the response was SAME, SAME, SAME.

We often forget we are all new, novice explorers in uncharted terrain. We watch our children experience the world with freshly hatched eyes. We parent them, do our best to impart our wisdom as they begin their journey on Earth. But we still know so few of the answers. Our eyes and ears and tongues are still dawning.

There are times I envy other species. How they do not require a personal development industry to help them navigate their existence. The honey bee collects nectar. The mama bear feeds and nurtures her cubs. The orangutan plays. They do not read books about increasing productivity, how to be the best parent, or how to decrease stress. They do not have development plans and performance assessments. They simply exist. 

It feels less lonely knowing there are others who find being human as uncomfortable as I do. The experience of shifting body and skin, how the playbook we grew up with as children is now outdated. On tough days, friends and I send each other long voice notes detailing when insecurities run rampant, when howling darkness sets in and we have lost all sense of the sun. It’s here, in the messy midst of it all, that I’m finding how to be human– where former versions of our past selves decompose. I welcome all of it— the blooming, the molting, the rotting, the growth. And on days when I struggle, please remember, it’s my first time on Earth.

Picture: Redwood National Forest Circa June 2020

[sublunarymeanderings]

I was once on a panel where the chair of said panel announced that if people didn't actually ask a question, she would just move on to the next person since comments on the papers could happen over coffee. It was a very brisk Q&A.

every conference question ever | source: https://www.tiktok.com/@drglaucomflecken

[radiantseraphina]

Am I wrong in thinking that a lot of perceived ~symbolism~ in books I've read for school seems either unimportant or unnecessary to the point of the book? I know that the white camelias outside of the neighbor woman's house from "To Kill a Mockingbird" represent perceived racial superiority but it really doesnt feel like that's necessary to the story considering that the point presented by the symbol is basically all but spelled out in the text? This is a specific gripe i know I just had to ask

No, I think you’re right to a degree, and I do think that sometimes symbolism is just kind of there. And I think many people who dislike or don’t see the point in symbolism feel that same thing. But I’ve always been sort of bothered by the way symbolism is taught. It’s taught as some sort of treasure hunt. This tree Sylvia Plath writes about is the tree that was in her yard as a child! You’re right; Lee does make the point pretty clear. But the camelias connects the conflict to nature, and that’s not quite the same thing. Rather than as a matter of function, wherein you might point out–say–the symbolism of the white camelias and talk about it within the context of an academic theory. You could, for example, argue an ecocritical* approach and say, ‘the white camelias in To Kill a Mockingbird are symbolic of the perceived white superiority, which proves that racism is ingrained, not only socially, but also into the landscape of the South’. Or you would argue that “the symbolic flowers express a link between the way African Americans and the environment are similar in their victimization by the white society.” But overall, I think symbolism is better used as a building block to an argue about how something functions than the argument itself, but the symbolism itself is rarely the endpoint in academia. Aside from situations like Poe’s famous orangutan question. 

And when you learn symbolism, you are learning it boiled down to a degree. (And I’ll admit to not being well-studied in the history of symbolism myself, so this is vastly oversimplified). Obviously, there have always been symbols, and they’ve always been used in literature. But once upon a time, a lot of people wrote “realist” fiction that was gritty and supposed to be like real life, and a bunch of French guys–specifically this dude named Charles Baudelaire who was inspired by a bunch of works written by this American guy named Edgar Allan Poe. So this is when the idea of “symbolism” really takes hold as a conscious literary movement. In 1886, some French guys get together and write the Symbolist Manifesto, and their ideas revolved around a.) absolute truths being only capable of expressed indirectly and b.) as opposed to those dark and gritty realists. 

And then, guess what? Psychoanalysis happens. And all this symbolism stuff really, really blows up. And later in the 1950s-1970s, many literary critics pick up on this “symbol” concept and apply it to other theories. So we have Burke (who puts it in context of rhetoric), Lacan (who…is kind of hard to explain but basically argues the “real” is when you’re in the womb, and once you leave the womb, you enter the “symbolic”), and Derrida (who is really interested in language). So, like, if it makes you feel better, you can probably blame a lot of this modern emphasis on symbolism on Poe or Freud, whoever you like less. The tl;dr of this is that we need to consider symbolism as a function that can be used in conjunction with an academic theory or that changes the text in some way rather than a 1+ 1 =2

*Ecocriticism is a large field, but the basic gist is that it’s looking at relationships between the environment and people or things. For example, we have ecofeminism, which draws parallels to how women and the environment are similarly victimized by the patriarchy. We have the ecogothic, which looks ecology and how we’re “haunted” by the past.

[justinehudock]

Nut butter

Really, actually good-looking people will always date really, actually good-looking people. Really. And so suddenly, so dumbfoundingly suddenly, they date. Watching them try out new people in flashes of social media updates, bodies shivering in and out like a rendition of Three Little Maids from School Are We performed under strobe lights. You feel, perplexingly, like you may be the speeddater yourself. Sad and confused, like an especially sensitive newborn, by your attempts to make sense of the endless cascade of matteness and symmetry that shuffle through their profiles.

The sheer sprightliness to their relationship mile is disheartening. You might as well be the visor-wearing sideliner distributing them waxy water cups and sponsor-branded rags to your really, actually good-looking subjects, while they soak up the cocktail of marathon-day sun and you and your fellow physical laymans’ exasperation.

Shut your eyes against the glaring beauty of one escort and a strapping new boyfriend or stripling of a girlfriend emerges in a glimmering, moory mist, like the Loch Ness Monster, except less likely to become scarce when Scotland’s wildlife commission shows up for the uncurtaining. Like the refracted, polychromatic glare of a sunset glinting off a beer can, they seem to shimmer in: shoulders splayed, as long, straight, and suggestive as a carrot. Godlings whose heavenly beneficence to you includes, not passage to a “better place” (at least not on any legally actionable basis), but acting as the breathing justification to that evening’s potato chip bag-descension, for forcing you to confront your own relative resemblance to a blobfish. Eat your insecurities, hisses the oily O aperture of their coiff.

So casually, “This is [one of three cycled names given to the most beautiful in the neonatal wing],” the introduction pours from a pair of perfectly bloomed lips. Eyes, casting out that gleaming farthing candle of their gaze. Visage, remaining otherwise expressionless in that autocratic way that all really good-looking persons tend toward.

“This is Nick/Alison/Griffin/Kelsey/Lance/Nichole, with an h.”

Throughout your acquaintance, you’ve been introduced to so many of their physically improbable Madonnas and Davids. You, their old, comfortable pal, like the satyr Phil to their Hercules. And still, this declaration hits the ear like a lisping museum guide underwhelmingly exhibiting a masterpiece:

This just hangs around places? you barely stop yourself from sputtering.

And you can, just, say its name? There’s no fee? No selfie-stick ban? No crudités?

Where’s the trumpet? you want to ask, searching in the crowd for the brigade of brass that must be crouching, poised for fanfare.

What number are they in the pamphlet? forgetting that you haven’t touched a pamphlet since that stint lifetimes ago in Nutella Addicts Anonymous.

Without a physically splendid magnet to whom to magnetize, really, actually good-looking people feel naked, in that shrunken, shower-liner-yanked-back way the rest of us feel in the buck. Not that they could relate literally. Born to be nude, them.

As for an intelligent explanation as to why really, actually good-looking persons are always dating, and always other really, actually good-looking persons, the jury’s still out. The theories are too numerous, and the investigation is constantly stalled by exasperated huffs from the researchers and intrigued private parties, grumbling, “Does Brock not desire his own, solitary company, as we, the laypeople, desire his solitary company? Pay cable fees and endure inane Youtube ads for gel mattress toppers and sexual dysfunction miracle fixes, all for proxy access to faces on tier with his own mutatedly beautiful one?”

Who knows what logic churns through those brains nested beneath skin-deep flawlessness? New hypotheses are shoved down the suggestion box every day, for, for all their complaints, the scientific community would knock itself sideways to get closure. Closure on an issue which, at its core, posits why their own ideal mate can’t simply learn to love skin and bone, as to why they keep recycling the same brand of taut, bronzed skin, and pointy, prominent bones.

Some will try to tell you that it’s the abs: that these people physically fit together like LEGO, bolted like the tumblers joining in the door of Capital Bank’s diamond vault. Others insist on the hand of an underground eugenics firm. Something neo-Arayan-y. Good Looking Lives Matter-y. Both ideas are largely resisted. Nut butter seems to be the only brick of reasoning upon which academia finds some consensus.

Nut butter: these really, actually good-looking couples fill the relationship mould, without resistance, per se, but still you find that they cling to the spreading-knife with a languidness bordering on flippancy. “Sure: this jar; I don’t see a better jar around,” they say (and it’s true!), when picking out a partner as effortlessly as Averages would pick up a three-pound hand-weight.

Though really, actually good-looking people possess the genetic latitude for ultra-pickiness when selecting mates, in a broom closet, there’s only so much room to spread one’s arms before they hit a wall or a janitor. That is, there’s a square foot or so of considerable romantic leads to choose from. Account for romantic leads within walking distance and that estimation gets hacked down to a splinter.

Indeed, the really, actually good-looking population is in constant threat of extinction. They, like the giant panda, are hence congregated into a sort of social captivity, shuffled forever after into breeding programs of their own supervision. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth they go between new partners, like an idiomatically accurate “hot” potato.

From this hypothetical model, we can see how mating inevitably retrogresses into that of humanity’s predecessors: determined by the autopilot preference for physical congruity which once prevented our smaller-hippocampus-bearing ancestors from mistakenly courting orangutans.

The truth of attractiveness is an enigmatic mistress. Our genes hard-code us with the desire to seek and pursue really, actually good-looking-ness, but apparently, not so hard-coded as to just make everyone really, actually good-looking. What hell is it to know that a few different chromosomes and America’s Next Top Model wouldn’t exist.

Remember, friends, the wisdom of cryologists: to conquer science, we must become science. So, for a moment, close your eyes and imagine existence as a really, actually good-looking person. For some, this exercise will prove a stretch, but, please, attempt the impossible.

Firstly, you’ll notice that your mind is kinder to you: less nagging, sedated by the noodling spirals of dopamine that spring up every time you glance toward a reflective surface, which is constantly.

You’ve just woken up after a restorative night’s rest, sans disruption by apnea, a disease only inflicted upon the less attractive. “Beauty sleep” is all you know the nightly coma to consist of.

You’ve showered, buttered yourself with sampler lotions eagerly pushed upon you by mall cosmetic counterists, free of charge. You’ve eaten a light breakfast, light like your mental load which lacks the normal physical occupations. You’ve breezed to your car with the cloud-riding gate of a demigod, contented by the fact that you still don’t know to what “marshmallow cereal” could possibly refer. Your rock-hard quads, rather, quake at the mention like a limb of ghost-knowledge. As you approach the supermarket entrance, its automatic doors redundantly shoved open for you, fire alarm blaring in a familiar response, by gawking exiting shoppers.

Ah, Whole Foods, the Swedish top model of grocers; the comparably “kosher” grocer for good-looking people. Shop anywhere else and you’d just be donating yourself, you justify, to the market’s stockholders, saving costs on advertising and upregulating the customer return-rate. The phenotypically less impressive Costco shopper, you feel, would only attach unconscious, positive memories based on your radiant head bobbing between the rows.

Gliding through the canned-foods aisle, utilized only as a shortcut to greener, organic pastures, you spot a beauty mark among the stacks of ridgy aluminum and pastoral graphic labels. Between the kerneled corn and pre-sliced tomatoes and quarantined sardines, someone has nestled a jar of maple-pretzel almond butter. Far from the cream of mushroom, it’s evident that this bold, pink-font-beset product was transplanted from the designer-food aisle, over which the transplanter has experienced, you presume, a gut instinct to resist.

In a sea of peas and pickled cabbage, the really, actually good-looking people are the maple-pretzel nut butter of humankind. Delicious. Luxurious. Expensive. In the supermarket, they’re plucked from the orphanage doorstep of can pyramids and quaintly middle-class shelving hierarchies to which they clearly do not belong, rescued by the person, by the really, actually good-looking person, that can—as the majority of shoppers cannot—metabolically justify their richness.

[sublunarymeanderings]

I am not comfortable with linking these two tbh.

[sublunarymeanderings]

This is insane and yet all too believable.

@wheresmytowel this seems like your sort of nonsense.

this is going to be all of you guys. also someone take the url "hegelianwife” quickly if it hasnt already been

[buterfligurl]

Wow... Ok, there is so much in that response that is either incorrect or just a misstatement...

Statement #1 -   PS it’s silly to make up labels and spread false information about a subject

Nothing that anyone has previously provided you is misinformation or made up labels. You were provided links to sources whose source information comes from experts. If anything, you are pushing your personal definitions on others.

Statement #2 - Intersex.... (which IDK if that is an actual thing or only in fantasy)

Wow... once again, you were provided linked information. This is an actual phenomena commonly observed in all species... Yes, you can live, no most intersex people do not need surgery, but are often subjected to unnecessary procedures because of our limited societal view of gender. It is NOT fantasy.... It IS SCIENCE. 

So, let’s get to the big issue here.... What you are doing is creating categories, which you have also created incorrectly. A category must be the largest unit of measure, and since we are talking about gender identity, then there are 2 categories - binary and nonbinary gender identities. These categories in no way impact the “reality” of the actual units that you are placing under them. So 2 categories....binary - with the units of female and male and nonbinary with many many separate units (another useful link with sexuality, sex and gender terms and definitions). So if you are saying there are x number of categories, then say “I believe there are 2 categories that all gender identifications can be classified under.” That is the correct statement. The also correct statement is that the total number of genders is greater than 3, as the gender id’s themselves are separate units and are counted as such. The category however is not descriptive enough (because that is the definition of a category) so when speaking on the subject it is preferable to use the more descriptive units.

An easy way to understand this is using taxonomy as an example since it is analogous.... do we go around saying to people who are talking about us and apes, “well you’re wrong because there is really only one group, hominid, and humans orangutans and gorillas are just subcategories?” This is exactly what you are doing in your statement on gender. It is pretentious and dismissive.

Or saying well, centimeters and millimeter and picameters are all just really sub measurements of meters, so I don’t want to see anything in your calculations other than meters (experiment is to measure the amount of gas emissions from reaction). This would get you kicked out of academia because meters is not refined enough of a measuring unit for the task at hand. The same applies to when you are discussing gender... refusal to go beyond categorization does not fit the need as there is a great deal of variance.

Now let’s go back to your disinformation piece. Checked with my nonbinary friend to make sure I was not spreading incorrect information and no, you cannot use that term as the gender to rule them all (other non-female and non-male genders). Also, reiterating, you were provided with sourced information. 

Listen, everyone has something they are not well educated on. My friend (the nonbinary one with a master’s degree and very active in lgbtq education and issues) did something like this for me when I was in my mid 30's and believed something similar. But I also am always willing to learn and listen to those who experience these things. I'm cis so did not have the viewpoint or life experiences that they have. It is hurtful to say “well, you saying this is a thing well it isn’t because it actually this term” even if you don’t intend it to be. It is also reiteration that that identity isn’t real (it is real).

I do hope you listen to other's experiences or maybe read up on the subject. It is in a much better place to be able to approach a subject that other's know more about from a place of curiosity as it'll open up opportunities for personal growth. Also, I would personally be asking myself, what is it that I lose by questioning my view on this thing? Take it or leave it, but I've been a happier, more fulfilled person since taking the questioning approach to life.

We build really strong opinions on incorrect, insufficient or just wrong information. That part is really no fault as we have limited resources. The fault does start when you refuse to process information because it does not fit your worldview. Really interesting article about some research as to why we do this...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.medicalnewstoday.com/amp/articles/327341

im not judging u as a person when i say this but the pansexual label has an undeniable history of biphobia and transphobia. it was created and originally (and still frequently) marketed as being inclusive of trans ppl (as if we are some third gender and as if EVERY sexuality isnt inclusive of us). historically, bi doesnt just mean men and women (or 2) and it doesnt have to mean you care about genitals. if u id as pan u could just as accurately id as bi. i hope this doesnt come off as rude

I know that many people, even folks who identify as pansexual, define pansexuality as “inclusive of all genders” and bisexuality as “only attracted to the Two Traditional Genders with No Trans People Allowed” but I have never seen it that way and I honestly think it is a misunderstanding of the pansexual and bisexual labels entirely.

Bisexual = The attraction to multiple genders. This may show itself, for example, as attraction to men and women (with no attraction to nonbinary people), strong attraction to women and slight attraction to non-binary people, strong attraction to men and non-binary people.... etc. OR (very importantly) attraction to all genders in the same way.

Pansexual = Attraction to all genders in the same way.

I honestly think of pansexual as a more specific category of bisexual. If you wanted to call me bi instead of pan, I would not really care, but since that specific label applies to me, the label I use is pansexual.

[sublunarymeanderings]

I think about this a lot.