anomalies

'it takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence'

[carvedinair]

“vmware server redirects hatemail from god”

whoa.  log into tumbr for the first time in a long time and suddenly my feed is full of things i have zero interest in seeing, including ... torture pr0n?  seriously?  bro, do you even bayes?  there should be three things and three things only in there: images of medieval manuscript illuminations, updates on my favorite ex-anticon musicians, and gut-wrenching self-disclosure journals, because *that is what i asked you to put there*, derp.

i *was* going to write really thoughtful gut-spilling stuff that actually means something more than getting off (although it has a lot to say *about* getting off), but apparently that doesn’t rank highly in your revenue model.  ah well, thanks for reminding me you’re just another fly-by-night corporation and for making this an easy decision for me: your software sucks tumblr, never gracing you with my presence ever again.

*goes back to learning to urbit* 

(really, try urbit.org, it’s fun -- like learning to write code from some parallel universe where the anglo-saxon tongue slowly morphed into computer-readable syntax.)

[carvedinair]

... it is often because the man is unable or unwilling to deal with his wife's enigmatic desire ... that he demands she tell him exactly what she wants (fer her birthday, in bed, and so on) and then refers to her as bossy.  She is upset that he never seems capable of 'reading her desire', of realizing that she wants something from him that reflects how he sees her, what he wants from her, what his desire is regarding her.  He laments that he is unable to express any desire of his within the relationship (this being reserved for his fantasy life, in which she plays no part), but in fact has orchestrated this modus operandi himself, albeit in spite of himself.

Bruce Fink, _A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychiatry_ (p. 63)

[carvedinair]

validation is ignoring motivation

here is something i feel like saying every time somebody i know talks about their fibromyalgia or other chronic pain problem: i know you’re hypersensitized to people looking at you skeptically, suspecting perhaps that your pain is fake.  i’m not one of them.  *i know* it’s real.  but the pain is not actually the symptom -- we are all in pain, all the time.  my knees and back hurt right now, almost all the time in fact.  the symptom is your frequent attention to your pain, combined with your wish that you could ignore it.   ‘dude, wtf are you talking about? it’s *pain*, of course it captures my attention.’  dudette (it’s always a woman, never a man, sorry), i have had skullsplitting headaches *disappear* the moment a highly absorbing emergency arises, then *reappear* the moment the emergency passes.  that effect is real, and ubiquitous: any good dentist knows that even trivial distractions interfere with attention to pain, which is why they babble at you and let you watch teevee while they play around in your mouth.  it is much, much easier to believe that i am motivated to ignore the pain by alternative targets of attention than that the physical source of it magically varies for precisely the interval that the absorbing event is happening.

so, given that you would like to not be absorbed by your pain, why are you when other people aren’t?  ‘because mine is more intense and frequent, probably.’  bzzzzt, this can’t be the correct answer, and i mean physically can’t.  the rate at which any organism habituates to a given stimulus is directly proportional to a) the frequency of the stimulus, and b) the differential of intensity between that stimulus and the ambient background noise in the same channel.*  that is, all else equal, you should habituate *faster* to more frequent and intense pangs of pain.  but clearly you don’t.  so, what gives? it’s obvious (!) that attention is a motivated behavior, which means that chronic attention to pain must be a process addiction, like fantasizing or playing bejeweled, except suckier.  i wish this was a joke, but it’s the only conclusion i can believe.  which means we have to ask what it is about your pain that makes it a compelling choice of attention *in comparison to everything else you could be attending to*.  part of the symptomology is that the pain (i.e. the attention to pain) isn’t constant, that it comes and goes, ebbs and flows, sometimes retreating and sometimes dominating.  unsurprisingly, it correlates with other exogenous stressors.  people typically engage in process addictions to avoid thinking about other problems.  is the problem that the pain is too compelling or that something else is too aversive? the one person i am thinking of most as i write this was almost certainly sexually abused by her dad.  her symptoms got better after she moved to another city.  surprise. * the main enduring impact of my former life as a neurology dropout has been to make me way more effective at being strategically annoying.  you do not want to know the horrible, perverse things i can do to your poor nervous system using only sound or light, far more acutely painful than stomping your toes.  it’s a really good thing i’m not evil and would never consider, say, contract work on crowd-control weapons.  

[carvedinair]

thursday morning

an exchange between my better half and i this morning, both of us 30% conscious and attempting by fits and starts to dress ourselves for work: i: ‘sorry i woke you up last night. [at 3am, after being up reading things on the internet way too late]’ she: ‘eh, i’m sorry i got so grumpy with you.  but i just can’t help myself sometimes.’

i: [hesitating for a telltale fraction of a second, then in a slightly too perfunctory and casual tone] ‘it’s fine, no worries.’

she: ‘. . . are you mad at me?’

i: ‘for getting grumpy?  not at all.  a little bit mad at your excuse-making, though.’

she: ‘I’m apologizing to you, not making excuses!’

i: ‘you know, in ancient greek those two words were the same thing.’

she: [short pause to simultaneously process this and fend off creeping exasperation]  ‘. . . yes, and in modern english they’re two different things: an apology is about your feelings, an excuse is about mine.’

i: [delighted] ‘yes, exactly: the “i’m sorry” was for me, and the “but . . .” was for you.’

she: [longer pause] ‘god, remind me never to talk to you.’

i: [impishly sincere] ‘i love you!’

she: [uncertain whether i am taking the piss or not]

i: [in 100% earnest] ‘. . . really!’

i actually regard this exchange of thrusts as indicative of a healthy relationship dynamic, but then of course i’m deranged.  believe it or not this is us on the *upswing*!

[carvedinair]

In the world where the media postulates social media as an absolute requirement of the modern era-- the era where everything is fetishized-- no one is permitted to make the distinction between a value and the picture of a value, they are made equivalent, so daring to criticize Randi's baby pictures is made to sound like misogyny or misobaby.  It's not. I love food but if you ask me to look at a picture of a food I will poison your toothpaste.  Be careful: the point is not that a woman shouldn't post her baby pictures, the point is that the system cannot profit from her baby except as a photo, so that in order to get them to do it more-- to be online more-- the system teaches them to overvalue the photo; and this must necessarily be at the expense of the object itself.  #porn.

The Last Psychiatrist http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html

[carvedinair]

One of our time's great sociological questions is why we filled downtime back up with work, and the reason is it's better than alcoholism.  ... [The] standard criticism of social media and texting is backwards: it doesn't detract from real life relationships, it represents a much desired break from them.  Having to be with someone, especially someone you're not having sex with, especially someone you're not having sex with anymore, is very, very hard; having people see you, especially when you're not amidst the symbols that you believe form your 'real' identity-- say, a hedge fund trader who has to be home with the kids or a pretty girl in a sweats at a supermarket -- this is a kind of exposure far more embarrassing than any selfie.  What if they confuse that as the real you?  You can see a version of this in married couples who talk to each other, joke, eat, raise kids, do couples stuff, but don't make eye contact.  Avoiding eye contact is a way of keeping reserved a part of yourself, to yourself. 'I'm here,' you whisper to yourself, 'but I'm not going to let this all overtake me, I'm more than this.'  This message is strictly internal, after all, you may not be looking at them but they can still see you.

The Last Psychiatrist http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/01/randi_zuckerberg.html

[carvedinair]

that thang

d.h. lawrence got this one really, really right: love is not a merger, and has nothing in common with the oceanic feeling, or with an unparticularized charity.  it's an increasingly sophisticated affection and appreciation for the otherness of another.  but it is also intimacy: it means allowing something different to get inside you, letting their experiences recontextualize and transform your own.  which is why people would rather talk about it than engage in it: it comes with real obligations, ones that inevitably make us reevaluate who we are or should be.  it ain’t the real thing if it can’t draw blood.

[carvedinair]

i need less me in my monitor less little to say and a new moniker

doseone, ‘future confetti’

[carvedinair]

... has God not said that those who sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven? And the Holy Ghost is within us. It is the thing that prompts us to be real, not to push our own cravings too far, not to submit to stunts and high-falutin, above all, not to be too egoistic and wilful in our conscious self, but to change as the spirit inside us bids us change, and leave off when it bids us leave off, and laugh when we must laugh, particularly at ourselves, for in deadly earnestness there is always something a bit ridiculous. The Holy Ghost bids us never be too deadly in our earnestness, always to laugh in time, at ourselves and everything. Particularly at our sublimities. Everything has its hour of ridicule--everything.

D.H. Lawrence, _Studies in Classic American Literature_ (p. 74)

[carvedinair]

... the lack of originality is caused by an inability to take advantage of alternatives ... not by a lack of alternatives. And pressure for conformity comes not from the linguistic structure but from the general opinions and common expressions found in what everyone around us says. ... the originality and prominence of the speaker are also reflected in the lexicon, in his choice of names: if he responds to a phenomenon with standard names, what he says may as well have been said by anyone else; he is only slightly engaged in the activity of disclosure. ... But if he is able to make a deliberate choice of names to register and report more appropriately what is going on, he can make himself irreplaceable as a speaker and his voice will carry authority; no one else can express things the way he does.

Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, p. 73

[carvedinair]

Besides intellectual expertness in distinguishing fact and fact as supposed, a certain emotional control is required to tolerate a proposition as only a supposition. When listening to what someone says, we will always feel some sense of being pushed to admit the facts as the speaker frames them. People sometimes feel contaminated by statements they hear even though they do not agree with them; they may not admit the truth of these propositions, but the mere articulation they must perform in hearing them seems to make the hearers also assent in ever so slight a degree.

Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, p. 60

[carvedinair]

The way our attention moves, the kinds of association that arise in our speech as we continue to talk about something betray what is interesting to us and reveal how we are made up emotionally; someone trying to figure us out may be more interested in our speech as a symptom than in what it tells him about the world: 'I don't understand everything you say ... but I understand everything you hide.'

Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, p. 36

[carvedinair]

sense and sensibility and syntax (iii)

we don't need syntax when we're just limning a common experience; a few fragmentary verbal hints are generally enough to direct attention when the very thing is staring you in the face. the whole point of syntax is to convey an uncommon experience: it provides the requisite exactness to steer you clear of the legion possiblities of misapprehension. this is why logic, and grammar more generally, is not some alien imposition on our interwoven emotional lives: it is their very sinews. it is what makes it possible to say what i mean and induce you to comprehension -- and, hopefully, to empathy. romantic rejection of precision ends in autistic withdrawal from meaningful intercourse, and the motive is not far to seek: accomodating your strange experiences often means dislocating my own, altering their significance to me. this unsettles a weak identity, and romanticism is a disease of the weak. 'be strong, that thou canst bear more joy!'

[discardingimages]

boiled clergy

Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, France ca. 1450-1470

Bodleian, MS. Douce 134, fol. 85r

[carvedinair]

the kind of medieval imagery that has an instant resonance with me.

[carvedinair]

the dog days

the worst thing about this summer is not having the time or spare energy to think deeply about ... anything, really.  my stream of consciousness has dried up to a pathetic trickle, my emotional landscape looks like wisconsin, and my intellect is so caked over with accumulated work-grime at every joint that it feels as if it may never be limber again.  even now i’m only writing this to prove that i can write something, not because i have anything serious to say.  this will pass, but ‘stultifying’ does not even begin to describe it. at least i don’t have a fur coat.  the dogs looked like they were actually wilting today, poor things.

[carvedinair]

I wanna open like the bay does to the ocean With an equal portion of every emotion Or soldier forward and be hard as a flat board With the heart of an approaching astroid Let go and ride like a cat's toy in a dryer Stay true to my matter like a brick in fire Wrapped in my long years like a spool of wire Unspoiled by the boils of fame and desire So I'll hold my own death as a card in a deck To be played when there are no other cards left

Yoni Wolf, ‘As a Card’

[carvedinair]

it’s in the handbook

so, i’m starting a club.  it’s called the league of real motherfuckers.  the rules are as follows:

1.  when you think something is excellent, say so.

2.  when you think something is wack, say so.

3.  when you aren’t sure about something, say so.  and ask an intelligent question.

4.  always be ready to back your shit up.  and if you can’t, change your mind, and say so.

5.  assume that other people are also being real motherfuckers until you catch them violating one of the rules.  in which case, say so.

the last rule is a bit more subtle than the rest, but just as important: if you go around assuming without solid evidence that other people are bullshit, you’re bullshit.  good news is, it also means that you too are already a real motherfucker (until you aren’t) -- so yo ass betta be one, 'coz if it ain’t some real motherfucker just might come around and say so.