I don't, generally, enjoy food: thoughts and insights of today [May 2021]

[originally written mid-May 2021, but I didn't hit publish until now]

This is a long one.  Lots of associative call-outs from the main realization.

Trigger warnings: emotional trauma, food issues, generational trauma

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In random self-awareness news, a conversation with my local emotional eater today caused me to take a new look at my attitudes towards/ experience of food.

Hence it has occurred to me that my level of disengagement with food (besides chocolate, which honestly I don't think of as "food")* is actually probably a Thing (something that required active choices by me to be this way) instead of a Non-Thing (a natural default).  So then ... thoughts:

... it displays (/the end result is) like the kind of overwhelm/ overload reaction where the person simply turns "off" a whole set of inputs in order to prevent future overloads.  My real-life experienced reference for this is two relatives who turned off some large chunk(s) of their emotional responsiveness as children due to trauma and/or overload; I associate this particular kind of compartmentalize-and-shut-it-down with having an autism-spectrum mind.  (Side note: both relatives are now -- cautiously -- recovering capacity in those emotional areas they previously shut down.  There's a whole set of conversations to be had there, but that is not the topic of this post.)

... food is just not that exciting to me in and off itself ( = does not excite my system either positively or negatively), and I have no "OH MY GOD NO" visceral reactions to foods as if there was a pre-conscious-memories physical or abuse trauma associated with some food(s) or other.  So my lack of engagement with food is probably not based directly on food physically existing in my world ... 

... I do have, like, physical/ biological reactions to food, but really I mostly assess it as chemical inputs: calories, serotonin, digestive upset/ calm, hydration, potassium for nerve signaling, etc..  I buy food that I basically enjoy which meets my physical maintenance needs, which requires an initial assessment but no ongoing attention.  The "basically enjoy" checkbox creates an ongoing reliable situation wherein intake requires minimum psychological engagement. 

(During high stress times of my life, like now, I usually pleasure-read -- or fluff-internet-cruise -- while I'm eating, to give myself a positive-feeling reason to stay where the food is and accomplish the eating task.)

... I can enjoy food, especially if I am by myself or with someone(s) I trust.  Yes, you heard right: if I don't trust the emotional situation, eating becomes very mechanical, and I have to really shift my focus to deliberately make an opportunity to notice if food is tasty.  And if I don't trust the emotional situation, I resent and fear being socially required to pay attention to something besides the interpersonal situation; being socially required to pay attention to the food makes me panic.  (Quietly.  In a hidden way.  Because in a situation that might be unsafe, displaying panic is anti-useful.)

Yep.  Those "trust"/"safety" qualifiers are pretty clearly the key here : P.

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This is probably the actual thing: my grandmother was enormously (in that plausible deniability/ gaslighting way) emotionally abusive of my mother, with a great deal of that abuse centering, in a complicated tangle of allowance and condemnation, around food.  Food preparation skills, eating choices, manners, chore performance, body size and shape, resource distribution authority, economic dependence -- and heavy judgement about alllllll of those things ... it's a WHOLE big mess.  Very spikey and engulfing.

So I'm pretty sure I pretty early on just checked-the-fuck-out of as much food-related anything as seemed to trigger the pain.  'Bitty kr saw an utterly unsolvable emotional pain-ball -- and nope'd right out.

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Sadly, even then I didn't nope out COMPLETELY until I (very efficiently, full kudos to my subconscious, sigh) manifested an acutely-focused version of the emotional patterns of my childhood in my young-adult marriage relationship : P.

As a kid and teenager I used to enjoy french fries, and Arctic Circle brand fast-food burgers, and pizza --  nearly regardless of the context.  (Maybe because Grandma never served those things?)

By my late-20s, though?  Food was all a giant nope.  I didn't even enjoy desserts anymore.

'Took me until I was 38 to find enjoyment in food again at all (in limited contexts, per previous), and that was due to concentrated work on re- (or newly-) opening my heart (and choosing to trust) in general.  It was mostly an accident, as I recall.  I was irritated all through my 30s about not liking food, because liking food would have made [having to eat food] so much easier, and obviously I did need to eat because I had children to take care of, but I don't remember wanting to enjoy food just for its own sake.  Liking food was kind of a surprise bonus.

(It was also useful/ an extra bonus, timing-wise, because that was about when I decided I wanted to put on weight so men would stop (1) noticing me in the first place and then (2) doing all the stupid shit that American society tells them makes sense based on that look I used to have.  I will enjoy reading the obituary notice of the Western-Civ patriarchy >:(.  I am putting the weight off again now; I'd like to say it's because it got to where it felt too unhealthy -- which is a true fact -- but probably it's actually because I can see I look 'old' now instead of 'young' and I'm pretty sure that that means most of the bullshit will pass me by, even if manage to get back to the socially "correct" shape again.  I prefer to be thin, for my own movement comfort.  I am getting hit on again, but nothing like as often as before.)

(And being thin requires less food to maintain.  So, you know, a bonus there too, as a poor person and for the environment.)

I managed to maintain for several years the reacting to food (by choice, and with effort) in a manner at least similar to how most people seem to react without choice and effort.

(Not all people, by a long shot.  But it looks to me like it's most people.)

The increased emotional trauma levels of the last few years have thoroughly drained my emotional energy batteries, though.

So I don't have energy to spend to make and maintain an inner/ mental/ preceptive "space" of perceived-safety in which I can actively choose to deal with food.  I almost *can't* spend energy to do it.  And if for some reason I decide to prioritize it and do it anyhow, I suffer elsewise for that spend.

If someone else is making a safe space for me, who finds it valuable that I enjoy the food we are sharing, then I can enjoy that food.  Them making the safe space (so I don't have to) means I can use the 'freed up' energy to pay attention to the food question.  And even when I am in a feels-safe scenario, my attention to enjoying the food is always super-temporary; I prefer to pay attention to the conversation, or the clouds, or a trail of ants on the sidewalk, or the ads on the busses going by ... .  

(I can also pay attention to interesting non-value-assignment facts about the food: this flavor exists, that is the level of spice, it arrived in a pretty presentation, the cook created an interesting texture combination.  Like, art appreciation.  Like, I appreciate the artistic accomplishment and skill of, but don't actually like or enjoy, jazz, or Toni Morrison's writing.  This frequently is as close as I can get to enjoying the food.)

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Also fits within the pattern: Now that I'm thinking about it, I do generally enjoy, in a manner that seems to me similar to the normal "enjoyment of food" process of other people, foods that noone in my family has ever eaten around me and that I rarely ate while I was married.  Particularly Thai food, Lebanese food, and Indian food.

Potentially this is also related to why I have actively avoided learning to make almost any of these foods.

And anything that is not homecooked makes the entire food situation feel WAAAAAAAY less threatening to me.  (Particularly, not being homecooked by someone who cares about whether I actively enjoy the food.)

Alas, takeout is expensive, and I can't eat non-organic food more than once every couple of weeks (and that's pushing it) without it making me feel ill.  The Nicholas/ Arabian Breeze restaurant (Lebanese) was organic/local last time I went there, which was fucking awesome, but that's the only one I've found.

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(NOTE TO EVERYONE WHO HAS COOKED ME THINGS:  The dumb part is, I don't think I've ever been offered food at someone's house that actually tasted bad, and nearly all of it has been quite good.  Not surprisingly, right?  Because we are all competent adults, and usually don't fuck up basic social tasks like 'offer food that tastes good.'  Again, none of this about the objective facts of the food existing.  This whole tangle preexists, and is inside my psyche and my history; objective food as a fact is nearly irrelevant to my experience of it.  On the other hand, if I've ever complimented food you've offered me -- which I'm fairly sure I've made an effort to consistently accomplish? -- now you have some idea how much work that 'simple' task has actually involved for me : P, and how much therefore I care about you and about our relationship, that I chose to accomplish it.)

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I was a vegetarian for 11 years, starting when I was about 15.  Although I chose it for animal-rights reasons, it meant shutting out most of my family's (meat-based) inherited food patterns.

This analytical context suggests that turning vegetarian probably insulated me from quite a lot of ongoing, not-consciously-recognized intake-trauma.

It certainly externalized and made concrete a significant set of food-control fights between Grandma and I : P.

(This is still a fucking problem with Grandma.  She turned 100 yesterday and there was a whole pre-planning session for how to keep from triggering her about a family member's literally deadly food allergy that she doesn't find convenient to believe is real.  Oh. My. God :( >:(. )  (It is my fervent hope that I never, ever ... well no.  Not true.  I don't actually care if I lose my grip on objective reality when I get old.  I do fervently hope I am never again emotionally abusive, as society taught me to be, and as I had to unlearn.  Certainly, if I live to be old, I would like to not be shitty and mean to the people who feel an obligation to take care of me.  #Goals #KeepingItReal )

... I do have some American vegetarian foods I enjoy in a limited way, even though I was a vegetarian during the first half of my food-problematic marriage.  They aren't the vegetarian foods I ate at that time, though.

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* Or maybe chocolate is the only thing I react to as "food" in the way most people experience food?

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This-all is probably why it doesn't naturally occur to me to offer food when people visit (although I have learned to mimic the behavior for some people in my life for whom I've discovered such an offer makes them feel loved).  In my psychological world, having to experience food in the presence of others is fundamentally an emotional threat unless/ until proven otherwise.  And, because of the foundational family pattern, it's one of the most fundamental emotional threats I can experience.

So I would *never* instinctively offer someone food, as (how I feel, not how I think) to do so would be a direct attack on their feeling of safety.  Offering people food just miscellaneously is absolutely an artificial overlay behavior that makes anti-sense to my feelings, but I can see it makes positive sense to a significant portion of my friends, so I superego right over my ego and my id and do the behavior anyhow.

(EDIT:  I would never instinctively offer someone food -- unless they appeared hungry!  In which case I'm offering them [category: fuel], not "food."  Fuel is a safe emotional category and morally necessary, and enjoyment of [fuel items] only logically needs to be achieved to the point of 'willing to ingest efficiently enough for the purpose' ... any enjoyment beyond that is miscellaneous, although a functional bonus.)

I have some friends who are also skittish about food like I am.  We can hang out for hours and food does not come up unless one of us hits a sugar-low.  We also, knowing the hours-thing will eventually create a fuel issue, usually negotiate the how and what of [solving the need-to-eat problem] before hanging out.  (Mostly we each bring our own.)  

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So, yeah.  Apparently I rejected the entire experiential category, as the least painful/ safest-feeling solution to consistent inflicted pain.

Yep.  Super great.

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Additionally, I (like most people) don't enjoy having to explain my many obscure but real food sensitivities, which usually makes people's "simple" food offers fucking complicated and awkward, when the people offering legit just want to be casual and friendly.

Which all ties into the larger historical pattern/ cycle of social condemnation and rejection whenever I'm not "simple" to deal with.

AND which food sensitivities are -- ZERO DOUBT, now that I've typed all of this and can see the pattern -- at least partly manifestations of my underlying subconscious attempts to avoid the pain-ball that is "food."

(It's a pain in my ass, because I'm now allergic to some of the tastiest things, like stonefruits and caneberries, which used to be some of the only things I DID enjoy about food.  That's some higher-order manifestation of "you need to face and deal with the actual problem" : P.)  (Again, kudos to my subconscious : P.)

Sigh sigh sigh.

In good news, the food allergies my kids were manifesting during the divorce/ when they were little all seem to have resolved soon after, and they all seem to basically enjoy food.  So hopefully I managed to pass down less or very little of this inherited emotional morass.

a unifying theory of modern conspiracies (lol)

[2023 note: this was actually written a couple of years ago but for some reason (cough) I never hit publish ... ]

So, I had this great insight this spring that might be the key to explaining at least a lot of conspiracist things if not all of them ...

You see, all along, it's been the dandelions.  Secretly they are taking over the earth (this appears to be some kind of hive-mind activity -- I'd hate to consider them having individual sentience!). The ships from their home planet will be arriving soon, hoping to find us softened for the easy capture of our ever-less-hospitable-to-humans, but increasingly fabulous for dandelions, environment, so their human allies have been ramping up the pressure.  From the day they talked innocent children into planting them on roadsides to beautify the country lanes (for historical evidence see Anne of Green Gables -- it's book one or two, I think -- where the author cites this specific activity in passing) -- from that day, I think we all have to admit that they have gradually been taking over at least this country (possibly invading from Canada, per citation).

And this despite the creation of and amazing increase in the use of poisons designed essentially (perhaps actually?) specifically to kill them.  And teachings in our movies, on TV, and in our schools about tidiness and perfect lawns -- a propaganda blitzkrieg that was fairly successful at least into the 1970s, and still holds sway over many human minds today.

But my clue was watching my lawn this spring -- a remarkably perfect spring for dandelions, and a remarkably un-Portland spring: deep rains followed by a week+ of no moisture at all, with clear skies and happy shining sun, repeated over and over.  *Someone* must have been messing with the weather (seriously -- who ever heard of a dry day between January and Rose Festival?!), and there were no logical economic beneficiaries to the new weather ... but ... my *dandelions* were settling in for a long, deep-rooted summer, clearly with the goal of finally eradicating my grass!!

Could it have been the dandelions all along?!?

Could this explain the obstinate support by our federal government of Monsanto and related companies, which is otherwise so unjustifiable?!?

Could this explain why all the children, starting in the mid-1860's, have been herded into compulsory standardized schooling? Both sides have a stake in that: the dandelions want us all to be green hippie drug-addled brainwashees, and the anti-dandelion freedom fighters need to train up an army of citizens who are educated on lawn poison and its efficient application, and will react with drone-like rejection when faced with a dandelion threat!

(Of course you've never heard of the anti-dandelion freedom fighters -- who would have believed them?  I'm sure they are valiant truth seekers whose families pretend they don't exist ... or they are protecting their own families from both the unfaithful and the dandelion sympathizers, by faking their deaths.  That takes a truly dedicated and intelligent person to pull off ... .)

Of course with any alien-planet scenario it ought to be easy to wrap in the secret goals (or create new secret goals that fit better) of the space programs (although this is a pretty big leap from the Isis/Masons connection, so I'm still working on that ... anyone with better knowledge of the Masons / Isis-in-space / Knights of Templar stuff is welcome to chime in in the comments ;) ).

But I think a unified theory that wraps in chemtrails, brainwashing institutionalization + media saturation, government subsidies to highly suspect companies which don't clearly benefit the nation, AND (maybe) the "faked" moon program is a pretty good unification theory ;).

OH!  AND, I just figured out 9-11's connection -- the neo-Cons/military are the normal suspects (if one doesn't go all the way to the Masons or even the Illuminati) ... what if the neo-Cons/military are, like Monsanto, carrying a secret and noble, but praiseless and seemingly nefarious, burden of keeping up and building up humanity's battle capabilities?!  I'm sure the poor dears are horrified by the use to which some incompetent leadership has put the resources that ought to have been carefully maintained for the first significant extraterrestrial conflict!  (The oddly successful movie Independence Day, in colorfully justifying Area 51, was perhaps, then, a carefully crafted warning by the resistance, bringing the strange bedfellows of mainline shoot-em-up, minority leadership, and geek sympathies together in subconsciously supporting the preparations against extraterrestrial invasion!)

And apparently even the Illuminati might truly have been cast unfairly as devils all this time.  They may truly have the success of the human species at heart ...

Although, as a green hippie (with no drug-addling), I still strenuously disagree with the methods the freedom fighters seem to be choosing (mass destruction and poison are pretty clearly counterproductive in the long run), and I wonder whether they have sufficient objectivity on the larger historical picture to work logically past the terror-stories they may have had whispered to them as children.  I prefer to rip them out of the ground and hope I'm leaving no roots behind (and hope the "commercial composting facility" in town actually gets hot enough to kill the darn seeds, since they consistently have enough mojo stored in even just their leaves to fully transform from a yellow bloom to a puffball even after being removed!).  Also, I heartily support the Organic Consumers Association for encouraging the domestication and eating of them, as a preferable solution to poison and an ironic reversal for the eville plans (as yet unclear but clearly not for the benefit of humans) of these invasive plants!

So there you go.  A decent unified theory of all the truly crazyass shit the government has been foisting on us (as opposed to the merely annoying but I can imagine it made sense to someone at some point).  Have I missed any significant "conspiracy theories"?

I suppose the JFK assassination.  One could toss him, the CIA, the FBI, and the mob in on either side of the dandelion equation probably. It's more fun if the "goodguys" were actually the badguys, so let's put the mob/CIA/FBI arrayed against the dandelions and desperately trying to root out (ha ha), by intelligence work and some strong-arming, the dandelion supporters in the halls of government.  JFK would then I suppose be the pretty face on the dandelion movement, but it's probably not hard to argue he didn't know he was being used.

P.S. I've disturbed myself, by the way.  In case anyone wondered.  (No, I do not believe the dandelions are *actually* any of the outrageous things I've here stated.  They are, however, apparently annoyingly well adapted to live with humans in a temperate climate, like rats, corbids, starlings, and cockroaches.)

Fb post from "I Love Reading Books," stored here with links intact to give credit

I Love Reading Books

February 2 at 5:41 PM

Shared with Public

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on teleportation

Well I thought I was going to sleep but it turns out I just needed to have a three hour mostly-eyes-closed think.

Not the primary part of the think, but I think I have reasonably solved (to my satisfaction) the puzzle of teleportation.

I have spent many years mulling on the physics of the problem, figuring the answer would be along the lines of "most matter is actually space, and that is why monks could walk through walls" or "time actually exists all at once, and so time travel will mostly be a matter of learning to comprehend that truth" ... but then with that latter one comes the problem of time-space: presuming we want to time-travel and end up somewhere on the planet earth (and not, for instance, in the void of space between galaxies), one would also need to comprehend also and compensate for -- quite exactly if one wanted to actually arrive on or very close to the surface of the planet -- the insanely fast motion of the planet (and the solar system, and the galaxy) through space.

And there is the problem, as a person travelling to a new space-time where quite a bit of matter already exists, of what happens to that matter, which is not going to happily co-exist with all the new matter the person is manifesting there-then.

This problem of time-space shift of course also applies to teleportation-by-intuitive-grasp-of-the-physics.  Pretty tricky to not end up in space, real problem of what happens to the displaced matter (/which matter ends up displaced and how painful is that for the matter involved).   It's actually somewhat easier, presuming this mathematical-comprehension problem is the path to a workable solution for teleportation, to move a planet into orbit around another star -- one could theoretically work out where there was likely to be little or no space dust in the proposed new orbit -- than to move a person around "on earth."

So tonight it occurs to me that the primary problems could be solved if astral-projection/out of body experiences are a real thing (which I think they are).  Of course the normal situation is that one's mind/spirit leaves the body, either on purpose or by trauma, wanders about for some bit for whatever set of reasons, and then comes back and flows back into the body -- at least in all the cases where the person comes back to tell us about it.  Some people have cultivated a skill in this.  Some surprising-to-me people have had uncontrolled (trauma-induced) out-of-body experiences.  I don't recall ever playing this game this way myself, except once when it started to slip out and I was like "HEY" and scrabbled it back in, so I have some decent initial instinctual skills or control but am not speaking as some sort of expert.

Anyhow, I think it would be interesting if the actual key to teleportation was about astral-projection traveling to where you wanted to go, and then rejoining your body to your mind/spirit, instead of rejoining your mind/spirit to your body.  It would require some of the same mind-bend that the physics solutions to traveling or walking through solid objects require (one has to fully commit to "physical reality" being just math and energy-states, not "material" in any fundamental sense -- "there is no spoon" and all that).  

This solves the ends-up-in-space and impossible-level-of-precision problems.  And it solves the equally important problems of making sure the body arrives on (or very close to at least) the ground and in clear air (not in space already occupied by a wall, or a tree, or a person, for instance).

It doesn't really solve the matter-already-exists-here problem, and it doesn't make sense that the air would magically exchange places to where you were, since the air can't astral-project itself and in any case has no reason to know where you came from, so one might still die a very messy death, but perhaps the body would show up in some sort of expands-into-reality manner that pushes the air aside ... locally loud, no doubt (interesting that Rowling included the noise in the Harry Potter series), but (presuming it displaced instead of creating a physics paradox) the air pressure change for the volume of one person leaving or arriving would be fairly minimal in terms of damage at point of departure or arrival.

I suppose if one also mastered walking through walls, one might apparate to someplace, air-included, and then move the air out of one's body-space, like a reverse of walking through a wall.  Walk the wall out of oneself.  Same reversal-of-beliefs/understandings as the teleportation proposal, actually, just hold "reality" to be the other side of the coin from what we have been taught to believe.

Anyhow I'm fairly pleased with solving the logic of not ending up in outer space and it being an intuitive process instead of one that requires 15 supercomputers and probably still wouldn't drop a white mouse within 2000 miles of where it was meant to appear.

I have been pretty sure for a long time now that if humans ever achieve time travel or teleportation, it will be by intuitive motion through time-space and not by machine.

OK, I have a Thing To Say: on whether "it" can be "worth it," and general "moral" responsibility

OK so I finished that Adlerian-psychology book and started in on the Daniel Howell book and I need to stop and capture (YELL ACTUALLY BECAUSE I'M VERY ANGRY) this set of thoughts which has been coalescing for twenty years.

People are often saying "I'm so glad I didn't kill myself, it was all worth it because life is good now" and I just fundamentally object to the "it will all be worth it, just stick with it" platitudes as regards "I had a horribly hard and hurtful life but now it's OK so all that horrible stuff must have been OK too because it was Part Of My Journey(TM)."

FABULOUS if you feel better now -- yay you!, big fan!, love you lots!, I will honestly cheer and be happy for you in real time if we are interacting <3!

But don't give the bad moral actors any credit.  Their evil is not yours and there is NO moral requirement for you to accept ANY of it.

"I'm so glad I didn't kill myself"? Yay <3!  "All the shit was worth it?" Toxic toxic toxic.

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1) Just to get this out of the way, although most of my readers will have read this item once or twice from me before:  For some people (most people actually) life literally never "gets better."  Look at history and there are lots of people, probably actually the vast, vast majority of people, for whom life was shit and then they died.  Moments of happiness, small joys, but it never "got better."  People might find spiritual enlightenment or some other version of peace, people might find love, but most people in all of human history have in very practical terms had very, very hard lives, and those lives generally only got (and get) harder and more painful as humans age.

"It got better" isn't a thing for most people, most places, most times.

It isn't *actually* a thing in modern America for most people -- that whole "it's probably going to get significantly better" thing is a MYTH and most Americans self-medicate one way or another because the "truth" (lies) we are told about "how to acheive happiness" don't match reality but we are all working hard to do the "right" things and still everything hurts and therefore there is (quite logically if one accepts the baseline lies) no actual, workable answer, and deadening (or finding ways to otherwise deny) the pain is the best solution for psychological survival in a system designed both to inflict pain and prevent access to real remedies.

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2) But my actual Thing I Have to Say is that if someday my life actually manages to do this magical turnaround thing that some people insist on telling me it "will" do (if I just [fill in their preferred blank]), and someone tries to rejoice with me by implying or asking, See, wasn't it all worth it?  ...

Let's think big and say, on a talk show.

Let's think little and say, over quiet tea in a stable-seeming living situation.

THE ANSWER IS NO.

NO.  NONE OF THIS SHIT WAS "WORTH IT."

PEOPLE BEING CRUEL INDIVIDUALLY WAS NOT "WORTH IT."

PEOPLE ACCEPTING CRUEL EXISTING TEACHINGS AND SYSTEMS THAT HURT ME AND OTHER PEOPLE WAS NOT "WORTH IT."

I WILL NEVER, EVER BE IN ANY WAY GRATEFUL FOR, OR ACCEPTING OF, PEOPLE HAVING BEEN SHITTY.

NOT TO ME, NOR TO ANYONE ELSE.  FUCK THAT.

AND

ALSO:

!!!!!

I have quite a lot of friends and some relatives who believe (more or less literally depending on the person) in each of us literally having chosen, before birth, this specific life we each are living.

I am even willing to give y'all that (I don't find that in practical moral terms it makes a difference for me, so I don't actually care).

But let's play that game and look at the logic of most of the 'self help''ish books, videos, and teachers out there, regarding the idea that "you chose this life."

If I showed up in this life AND PEOPLE TREATED ME WITH CRUELTY

there is NOT ACTUALLY AN INHERENT, LOGICAL REASON TO ASSERT THAT I 

--> "ASKED FOR" THAT, 

--> "DESERVED" THAT, NOR 

--> "NEEDED TO LEARN SOMETHING FROM" THAT.

I categorically refuse that.  I refuse all of it.  People being shitty is ON THEM.

FULL.

FUCKING.

STOP.

I *can* accept that I showed up -- that we each showed up -- offering an open heart so that the people we came in contact with could choose to learn to be better humans, so that they could choose love, so that they could learn to *see* and to *care* better.

If the humans we showed up "for" (or nearby, anyhow) didn't *do* that, THAT IS ON THEM.

NO HUMAN ASKED TO BE BORN INTO CRUELTY.

ZERO.

I DON'T BELIEVE THAT HAPPENS.

PERIOD.

I do NOT accept that ANY being asks, at ANY level, to be abused.

And every "teacher" who has every told any "student" that that was true?  Is part of the deep structure that holds the lies and the abuse in place.

NO.

So fuck that whole "it was all worth it" idea.

And also all versions of "you are morally required to be grateful for what you receive in this life."

NO.

IF SOMEONE CHOOSES TO BE SHITTY, THAT IS NOT MY PROBLEM.  IT'S NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY.  IT'S NOT MY FAULT.

EVEN IF I, REAL-TIME, *ACTUALLY* ASKED SOMEONE TO BE SHITTY?

IT 

WOULD 

--> STILL <--

BE 

--> THEIR <--

MORAL 

CHOICE 

TO DO SO.

I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO BELIEVE *I* "NEEDED" TO "LEARN" SOMETHING THAT REQUIRED ANY OTHER PERSON TO BE HORRIBLE.

THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW (which -- current version -- is due to a really unfortunate-for-me confluence of structural inequities as opposed to people being individually nasty, so ... an improvement, and a testament to how much work I have *successfully* done to stop being buried in mean people's active individual shitstorms)

ALL THE TIMES PEOPLE CHOSE TO HURT ME OR CHOSE NOT TO STEP UP WHEN I WAS A KID

ALL THE TIMES PEOPLE CHOSE TO HURT ME OR CHOSE NOT TO STEP UP WHEN I WAS A TEEN

ALL THE TIMES PEOPLE CHOSE TO HURT ME OR CHOSE NOT TO STEP UP WHEN I WAS A YOUNG ADULT

NONE OF IT

NOT ANY OF IT

WAS EVER, IS EVER, NOR WILL IT EVER "HAVE BEEN, LOOKING BACK"

"WORTH IT."

That is all bullshit and I will *not* accept moral responsibility on any level for other people choosing fear in their actions instead of courage/love.  I will only take moral responsibility for the times I choose fear in *my* actions instead of courage/love.

How badly I've been treated was not something I asked for.  It's not something I believe ANY of us asked for, not even as Soul-Seeds in the Infinite Glowing Wisdom Space or whatever the current in-fashion words are.  If you offered to trust that people would love and care for you --  maybe, even, you did it as a generous gift of hope and love *to/for those people* -- if they didn't step up and be good (or at least decent) humans, that is *NOT YOUR FAULT.*

-----

I don't believe darkness is required to see the light.  I have never believed that, and I've never seen anything in my life experience that actually supports that, but I have seen the assertion used in real time by a lot of people to "justify" their dark spaces that are *actively hurting other people* [side rant here redacted].

There is a central core of reality -- somehow -- of truth and love, and the further away things are from it, the less true they are; there doesn't need to be "another side" to that.  There *isn't* "another side" of that.  We mentally construct it because we fear facing the full light of love, and would like to believe we are choosing "something" rather than just running away in fear.

"Balance" as a "moral value" requires us to accept both mediocrity and *evil.*

Nope nope nope'ity nope.

NO.

-----

And lest the "good Christians" in the crowd think you are getting off easy because I have particular beef with the new age'y post-modern Western-Civ versions of reincarnation-teaching, most of that "if shit happened to you it must be your fault somehow" teaching is definitely firmly in the "theological" foundations of nearly all "Christian" denominations in America and without exception *is the foundation* of every major cultural structure in our nation, because it was part of the "Christian" "theology" that was in vogue among the elites in the 1700s.

I've heard "it will all be worth it" from WAY more Christian-heritage or actively Christian people than from my pagan, new age, or secularist friends.

"It will all be worth it" is not a statement of hope.  It's a statement designed to bury the reality of structural inequalities in our society that literally guarantee that for most people it will never "all have been worth it."  It's a statement designed to suppress conversations around difficult but necessary changes.

Maybe we get to go to Heaven at the end of life.  But there is no logical requirement to experience pain to get to Heaven, and experiencing pain does not make a person more holy or worthy or any other thing that would theologically justify "it will all be worth it."

There is only a requirement to *love.*

The ONLY requirement, is to love.

A human succeeds or fails *as a human* according to whether and how strongly they chose *love.*  How much they chose to grow towards love, and matured towards love, and gave love, and accepted love.

(Real love.  Not just anything people find convenient to label "love" so they can abuse others, but with added-bonus, extra-effective gaslighting.)

Hurting people because we can't be bothered to face our own pain and fears is never, ever justified.  It's understandable.  It's forgivable, for those with a will to forgive.  But it's never justified.  And nothing about the results will be "worth it" that wouldn't have been better and more "worth it" if more loving and honest choices had been made in the first place.

-----

Anyhow I have a lot of feelings about this.

The last few years I'm just *really, spectacularly* tired of people telling me 

--> "well I'm glad you see *your* responsibility for *your* situation" (that was one of the most WTF responses I've ever gotten tbh -- probably because I rarely talk to people as deeply Americanized as that person was), or 

--> "it will all be worth it someday just hold on," or 

--> "yes it's a hard life but we each asked for what we got," 

or a million other versions of 

--> "when people are horrible it's probably at least partly if not wholly your own fault and also we must avoid having honest conversations about how much of this pain is structurally designed into society and actually entirely unnecessary if people in general weren't systematically beaten into being terrified of radical love."

The choices I made in my life should, in any *actually rationally healthy* society, not have ended up with me being housing insecure and food insecure and my children only seeing me every month or two simply because of my economic hardship (and not because anyone doesn't want to see each other, or they live far away, or ... ).

My situation is a reason to reevaluate anything you think is "good" or "working" about American structures, not a reason to hope for a fairy godmother or a winning lottery ticket so I can "be happy and well" and everyone can again conveniently repress how stupidly shitty our whole social assumptions-set is because somehow -- magically -- "it all turned out alright."

(I wouldn't say no to a winning lottery ticket, don't get me wrong.  But the level of bullshit is still the level of bullshit.  The value of the next moment does not change the value of this moment.  And anyhow I'd probably stay poor because I'd rather see as many immediate broad scale positive social changes as possible with the hope of preventing more of my situation, rather than 'rescuing' one of me, so after paying off debts and putting just enough away to reasonably prevent being a further drain on my safety nets I'd be spending/ giving away all the money -- carefully -- anyhow.)

-----

There is probably more but that is enough for now.

Reading in 2020 - notes from my reading journal

I've just finished my first book (reading, not writing) of 2021 (Fermat's Enigma), which led me to my reading journal, which led to some interesting observations about my 2020 reading.

I suppose first I should state that I have a general goal of reading at least 12,000 pages of new-to-me book-bound (not periodicals) material each year (it used to be 20,000, but that fell by the wayside around the third kid, and as a serious reader it's a measure of the chaos in my life that I've missed even just 10,000 several years).  In 2020 I hit 12,802 pages.

2020 had a few key patterns:

(1) In 2020 I read more books that were gifted to me (four books, by three gifters) than in probably any year since gradeschool (when sometimes I was gifted series by adults: the 8-book Little House on the Prairie when I was 8, the five-book Belgariad when I was ... maybe 12?).

1a) The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, from Amy L, when I social-distance visited her on her front porch a day or two before I came down sick -- social distancing works, folks, because she did NOT get sick, and I must have been shedding virus like crazy at that point.  She also very generously gave me a purse-size bottle of hand sanitizer, among the last Amazon sent out at the time (she checked back just minutes after her order to get more and there was zero left).  It luckily lasted until there was a stock of hand sanitizer in some stores so I could refill that tiny purse-bottle.  (Initially I could only find hand sanitizer at the natural foods store -- I presume both that less people looked for it there and that the smallish chain store had contracts with a different set of suppliers than the national drugstores/Kroger had.)

1b+c) The Sword of the Lady, and Island in the Sea of Time, by SM Stirling, from the Yahns, as part of a COVID-recovery care package (with chocolate!).  These were much appreciated as my brain came slowly back online after being sick, and filled in most of the gaps in the series (I've read the series nearly completely out of order, as I find miscellaneous volumes at Goodwill) ... they were narratively challenging, but since I already understood the basic structure of the series, I could keep up.  I should try reading them again in a year or two and see how much of the challenge was the story and how much was COVID brain-fog ... 

1d) The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler, from Leslie B, a friend of a friend, who (long story short) gave me the only physical package I had on hand to open on Christmas Day (and nearly the only gift I got this season at all -- which isn't a problem, but it was a point of psychological interest to me, and mostly reflective of the economic stress of the pandemic on my entire network).  A book about a book, by an author who taught herself to hand-age and hand-bind her manuscripts in order to complete the sale <3!

2) This year was all about completing sets -- filling in the gaps in series I have been reading, or building out my reading of authors I like.  This was probably due to the COVID shutdown of my local book-browsing options (my local Goodwill stayed closed even after the other Goodwills reopened, because they have decided to remodel it, and I don't have a car and I am avoiding public transit because of the pandemic -- and the physical libraries are of course still off-limits), so I can't just discover new interesting-looking books (this has probably saved me quite a bit of money over the year). So, when the library system reopened for pickups, and using a little bit of my $1200 stimulus check to support some of the businesses I most want to stay open (Powell's and Goodwillbooks.com), I borrowed or bought the missing pieces of my collections of Shannon Hale, Jim Butcher, some Jane-Austen-adjacent stuff (including The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I'm glad I read but I do NOT recommend), McCaffrey, and the Avalon books (a Paxson followup of MZB's work) -- and also was gifted those two key volumes of SM Stirling (per (1b+c)).

3) About 5,000 of my 12,802 pages were books by Jim Butcher ... his Dresden Files series is amazing, and I actually liked his aeronaut book (a lot of other people didn't -- it wasn't stellar, which was considered a let-down) ... quarantine and closed book-browsing options led me to speculatively buy Book One of the Codex Alera -- which was somewhat pedestrian as fantasy books go, although well-written, but I liked the characters, so I checked out the other four books from the library, and they got better as they moved forward (although I liked the middle one best).  AND I got caught up on the Dresden files (a book and a novella that I'd somehow missed over the years), although now there are two new books published this year that I don't know when I will be able to afford.  (One of the small tragedies of 2020 was that there were going to be a series of really cool in-person fan events for the series, starting at Emerald City Comic Con, which had been scheduled for right when the COVID shutdowns hit Seattle.  I wasn't going to be able to afford any of it, but a lot of fans were SUPER excited (as was the author).  Sigh.)

4) I cleared some of my 'nightstand' stack (which I've been better about in recent years ... sometimes my nightstand stack has been like 60 books and becomes more or less my actual nightstand).  Among the highlights:

4a) Myst: the official strategy guide: Schoolmates might remember that I was not as interested in this game as they expected me to be ... when newly-wed, my husband played it and so I paid a little more attention and it turned out I not only didn't like the story, I couldn't correctly parse the 2-D representation of the 3-D world, making the 'easy' part (physically explore the environment) actually stupidly frustrating, which rather explained my initial hard-rejection of the "puzzle" game (normally I rather enjoy puzzles).  Anyhow, I finally know (30 years later) what the whole story was and what all the puzzles were and I don't regret not actually playing it out.  The two brothers made me ill and angry just reading about them and since back in the 80s and 90s computers generally made me ill and angry just working with them, this was not a game I would have enjoyed or found satisfaction in 'solving.'

4b) Several of the fill-in-gaps books (per (2)) had been sitting in my possession for a while. 'Glad to get those off the stack.

4c) The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.  I don't know if I'll keep this, but I'm glad I finally read it.  It has reinspired dreams of running my own bookstore, but that is clearly 100% out of reach anytime soon, and the older I get the stupider it would be to try to start the size of enterprise I'd like to start, so that will probably remain a pleasant occasional daydream.  In any case I'm more likely to build a store around ideas than around the age/provenance of any given book.  (We'll pretend I didn't find what I'm pretty sure is a second edition Jane Eyre at Goodwill for $6 a couple of years ago, and totally snatch it up even though I've already read Jane Eyre.  I also viscerally love the paper, print, and art of English-language books from around 1910, and own some perfectly silly books from that time simply based on their physical attributes.)

Most of my books are in storage right now ... I'm up to 42 regular-sized moving boxes of them, and some of them have been in storage since my previous move (2015) ... I'm looking forward to unpacking eventually and properly cataloging them and sorting out duplicates or not-as-important books for resale (because then I can buy more books).  Of all of the books I phsycially own, I've probably read 2/3 of them (usually more than once) ... there were quite a number bought on speculation around 2015/2016 which lowered my read/not-read ratio considerably, as I had to pack those before I had time to get into them ... and I've read quite a lot from the library, and also passed off to my kids a couple hundred others that I have reread bunches of times ... I hope before I die to completely catalogue (probably on Goodreads.com) my bibliophile history.  We'll see.

Anyhow, 2020 was a reading year quite different from my normal reading years, and I was surprised how much the pandemic directly affected my reading options and therefore chocies.

On objections to "the violence and destruction"

Trigger warnings: graphic descriptions of racist violence including lynchings

For those clutching their pearls, "but the violence and destruction! It's just not how democracy works!"

1) Democracy is clearly not working.

(a) It's not currently democracy, because there are people doing everything they can to prevent actual democracy and we never really got it set up right in the first place.

(b) Democracy is the method we chose to try to govern in a manner that preserves stated rights.  Pretty clearly, the most fundamental rights are more important than the tactic of democracy.  If the most fundamental rights are clearly and consistently trampled and the majority will not, for whatever reason, fix the problem democratically, then there has to be another mechanism, or we logically can't claim to *actually* value those rights.

Ok, so, the violence and destruction.  The two words are used together a lot, so we don’t think about them separately as much, but in the current context this is a white-supremacist/pro-“capitalist” concept-laziness.  (“Capitalist” because a lot of people feel very righteous about us living in a “capitalist” society, which we don’t.  We live in a wealth-protection racket with a veneer of righteous-sounding words.  The veneer is wearing away.)

SO: an important distinction: violence is against living things, destruction is against inanimate things.  In some times and places, violence was against *people* and destruction was against *not people* (including animals and whatever the local society considered to be subhumans ... in America, non-whites sometimes, Blacks in, if we are honest, most times).  In this essay I am aligning with the more modern usage, which exposes our inhumanity, and our knee-jerk "capitalism," better.

Violence is against living things, destruction is about inanimate things.

In the context of the protests, violence (from either side) is against *people.*

It is worrisome at a basic moral-value level that burning stores or police precincts stresses many viewers out more than the absolutely over-the-top violence perpetrated by the police on the protestors, sometimes because of real but almost completely not-actually-threatening violence from the protestors, but often, often, just because someone on the police force decided they needed to "assert their authority" or "control the situation."  In the situations when the protestors were flinging ONLY WORDS at the officers in question -- which was a bunch of situations of police violence against protestors -- I'm a little horrified that I have to point out that there was not a "situation" to "control."  There were citizens peacefully protesting.  That is not a "situation to control."  In the situations where the protestors were "complying" as best they could, even with highly questionable orders, by moving away, or being still and physically non-threatening if they had been handicapped by a police weapon or had a preexisting handicap -- again, I'm a little horrified that anyone needs to point out that that is not a "situation to control."  That is a situation that is *already under control,* and further violence *is not justified,* even if under the laws of that locale some arrests might be.  Kettling, when followed up with violence on the trapped people ... that was not a "situation to control."  That was straight-up entrapment by your government authorities for the purpose of torture.

The *actual violence* perpetrated by protestors against the police or anyone else has been nearly zero.  The destruction?  Sure some of that was protestors in some places, but 

(1) a lot of it was outside agents trying to make the protests look bad.  White supremacists, cops, random entitled teens and twenties who don't have a damn clue and think it will be a lark, have all been caught on videos or on chat strings planning or implementing this.

(2) are you demonstrating that you care more about a Target than about all the black people murdered and beaten up and framed and sent to prison by police in that city?  Are you really?

Statistical significance would discount the violence created by the current protestors compared to the violence levied against black people not only during slavery, when white oppressors had a general financial interest in keeping most slaves alive and physically capable of working, but in the Reconstruction years, when militias and sometimes just local communities on the fly -- you know, I got nothing to do after church this Sunday, you wanna? -- would get together and hunt black people.  When they assassinated elected black politicians one after the other in a targeted and deliberate way, and then started on black candidates brave enough to try to run for office to replace the dead.  When they burned and looted homes and communities.

Most of what I just described was flat-out shooting-blacks-with-guns, and mostly it wasn't battles, it was just massacre and murder.

And that's not even getting into what we think of as "lynchings," which were common enough that towns in the South sold commemorative, collectible photo-postcards. 

Because lynchings were such a public "good" at the time, they didn't, as we have been taught in our society if we are talking about them at all, just involve "hanging." They were a blood sport, for an audience (whether just a few guys or a town Sunday picnic on the green), where the hanging was not expected to kill a person quickly like an execution. Putting a rope around someone's neck and dragging them up into a tree guarantees a 'botched' hanging, a lingering and terrifying death (with an avid audience, it should be remembered) *even in the cases* when the white folks doing the lynching didn't ALSO ADD FUCKING FIRE. Late in the period when public lynchings were still an acceptable social event, the lynchers managed to keep a black male alive for four hours, burning him not all at once, but slowly and carefully.  Sometimes they killed whole families in lynchings.  Babies included.  Sometimes they experimented with fun things like poking out eyes or cutting out tongues or pulling out fingernails or cutting off fingers.  Some of those body parts were kept as souvenirs.

All of which ignores, by only considering the deaths, the severe beatings that always accompanied lynchings, to disable the victim (and for sadistic race-superiority enjoyment of course) ... and the severe beatings that were casually levied, everywhere and anywhere, in the last 150+ years on blacks who were not lynched, because white folks no longer had a financial stake in keeping "the blacks" capable of work anymore, and it's very psychologically satisfying to assert one's dominance.  In way too many places in America that is not only acceptable but encouraged, even still.  Dominance-assertion as a psychological jack-off is pretty common in every part of American society.  Certainly it is still visible from waaaaay too many police officers.

Dominance-beatings very effectively instill trauma and ongoing fear (which is the point), and sometimes permanent physical damages.  The deaths, however incredible the numbers are, are only a small part of the story of historical racist violence against the black community.  The same holds true now.  For every story I've seen over the last bunch of years about a black person murdered by police, there have been several other black people talking about the time(s) the police beat them.  And if I rouse myself enough to go looking around the internet on purpose for those stories, which I have sometimes done, it is quickly apparent that the sample making it through the social media algorithms is very small.

So yeah. There has been violence against some people and destruction in the last few weeks, and I'll even (unlike some) admit that some (although certainly and provably not all) of that was actually done by actual protestors. And that's not ideal. It's even, in a simple sense, bad.

But, those numbers, amounts, and types pale in comparison -- even the destruction (of inanimate things) numbers, amounts, and types, but especially, *especially* the violence (against people) numbers, amounts, and types -- to the overt violence and destruction that has been consistently enabled, encouraged, and accomplished against black people (and often their allies) by white supremacists (which in some places is still most white people) and the white-advantaging, black-disadvantaging power structures in our nation and in our cities.

AND the violence (remember: against people) perpetrated by protestors is in every instance VASTLY LESS than the violence perpetrated by the police, who are sometimes just *starting shit* without waiting for "provocation" or any actual physical threat. Why is the violence from protestors getting all your condemnation, but the often (cough cough) "proactive" (aggressive), and always larger and meaner, violence by the police is not?

It is notable that these demonstrators are very few threatening anyone or anything with guns. (Hence FOX photoshopped the same white dude with a gun onto several scenes in the Seattle situation, to make it look scarier. So much for gun rights I guess.  Even white people aren't allowed to be visibly armed, if the rights they are protesting for are for *black* people.)

I'm not a proponent of violence or destruction. But if you weren't complaining BEFORE NOW, the whole rest of your life, about, and trying to stop, and fix, and prevent, the much vaster violence and destruction -- the much greater suffering -- that was forced onto the black community in **all the other years** (AND STILL IS, witness a cop murdering a non-aggressive black man in the goddamn middle of this social crisis ... pretty sure I haven't heard of any black people murdering a cop during the protests, not even an armed and dangerous cop who was threatening them, which is thousands of opportunities a day in this country right now, not *even* lynching the one that slowly and with apparent personal satisfaction and zero remorse choked the death out of a black man, when white people lynched black men for nothing and everything) ... 

... if you weren't *more* outraged by all the earlier violence and destruction against fellow Americans, it's not reasonable to suddenly "find Jesus" and be some kind of moral pacifist 'in alignment with your political beliefs' now.   Your 'political beliefs' clearly value property and the current power structure over people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (but mostly over "life," let's just start with the most basic one) and JUSTICE.

Yeah, I'm against destruction, and I think it's generally morally wrong unless for real it is a move toward something better.  I wish people wouldn't burn Target.  I don't see how that moves the needle in the right direction.  I wish people wouldn't loot, but I can kind of see the justice of impoverished people looting, in the big picture, even while I mourn the livelihoods of the business people involved.  Burning that precinct -- after there was noone inside -- or trying to burn the Justice Center in Portland, when the few people inside that night could be expected to escape -- those made some sense as political statements and effective actions, against public structures and investments that *actively hurt black people in those locales.*  I'm still not down with destruction, but ... when there is evil, and it's entrenched, sometimes destruction is necessary.

DESTRUCTION OF THINGS IS NOT MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO DIRECT MURDER AND TORTURE-ABUSE OF PERSONS.

If you want to condemn some Americans for their violence, black people are not where to start to root out the problem.  Almost all black people have been conscientiously and deliberately choosing NOT TO TRY TO KILL the rest of us for 150+ years, despite having an arguable moral right, in the Old Testament sense (tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye), to *totally* do so.  Black people generally have consistently shown amazing humanity and restraint in the face of bald racism and hundreds of years of dehumanizing violence tolerated by their nation.  The fact that they've always trusted that actually, someday, the rest of us would finally step the fuck up is remarkable, and pretty much based on nothing in history.  It's an act of faith they chose and choose, and a gift of grace they offered, and offer, to the rest of us.

"But ... but ... the violence and destruction and looting!!"

Yeah, no.  Step up to fix the root causes, every day, at all levels.  If and when you have helped build a better system, so that the violence from the system pushed on black people is smaller than the violence done by black people protesting for justice and rights and basic safety, *then* you can totally complain about those evil looters and be taken seriously.  

Except, oops, there won't be any ... which is the implied goal of your freak-out, right?  

No protestors wreaking violence and destruction?

Win-win.