Thin Veils

casual contrivances of a student living in the wild Wilde West

[eximergencies]

Untitled

It is 9:29 PM.

 The clock says one thing but means nothing altogether.

 I press a button and your voice proceeds to seep through speakerphone, somehow less distant than it seems.

 "Hello?"

 "Hello," followed by the obligatory how-are-yous.

 I am fine.

 "I am fine. I'm okay."

 "Are you sure you're okay?"

 .

.

 Questions are by their nature wonderful challenges for the human brain. It takes me two seconds to decide whether it is a challenge in the sense of a test, or that in the sense of a difficulty.

 But my brain somehow convinces me that the answer to that dichotomy is neither, that the question is, in this instance, yet another obligatory statement in the friendship checklist.

 I smile weakly even though I know that it does nothing for my voice and merely pauses the weeping.

 "Yes."

 .

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 I read somewhere that depression makes you 'mute yourself for fear that your internal wailing will wreck the vibe for others'. But in this instance, between you and me, I am simultaneously ringing with futile talk of self-hatred and absolutely silent in the realm of substance. I'm a school bell without schoolchildren to notify and to inform. Reams and reams of "I don't understand why you are friends with me" seem to annoy you more than intended, and yet offer no measurement of the true depth of this enveloping darkness, this silently unsheathing sword, this unwrapped single blade.

 You spend an hour and twenty minutes convincing me that upbeat music will switch my mood. I am almost persuaded that r/GetMotivated will lift me out of this depressive stupor and that a fun meme will give me the key to enjoying this corporeal existence. Your job tells you that a methodical and sequential mode of problem-solving will lead you to the ultimate conclusion that any problem can be solved in a given number of steps.

 But neither the purity of your heart or the all-encompassing nature of your exploration into the numerous ways I could be "happy" can supersede the fact that the mere occupancy of this body gives me hell. Utilising it is another battle to wage and, if able, to win.

 .

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 The cockroach that emerged three minutes into the phone call has graced us with its presence once again, unearthed itself from the depths of my open suitcase.

 Beneath the covers I feel its phantom legs prance on the soles of my feet, sharing in the comforts of sleeping in a large canopy bed.

 Suddenly invigorated with the sense of purpose we had discussed earlier, which I had thus far only attributed to "the giving of advice", I charge at the cockroach with the mist from a travel-sized can of hairspray.

 Within seconds it lies trapped in drying fixatives, the room is filled with airborne chemicals and I take a bedroom slipper to the dying embers of its existence.

 .

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 Standard Operating Procedures are for the regulation of workplaces, but the mind is a barely conquerable set of mean little bureaucracies. Therapy and medicine are the two basic tenets of a safe work environment for the human mind, but then there are stories about Harvey Weinsteins, horrible bosses and other such unmanageables. The cockroaches of the world, as they say.  

"Have you told your therapist about this?"

 "Yes."

 But it only goes so far. My treatment plan is a map where X does not mark the spot, and the search for gold has been so wrought out that it is no longer feasible to even imagine what something everyone says is so shiny must look like.

 .

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 I keep saying I am not a good person, that I am broken, that you can just hang up if you want, but I hear no such silence, even when I create the opportunity in the form of long heavy pauses.

 I give you three months’ worth of long heavy pauses before you will soon realise that cockroaches like me abound in the world, that we confound even the best of intentions with our unwillingness to accept that we are worthy of love. We are nothing if not creatures escaping into the nearest open suitcase for several calming breaths, in perpetual anticipation of the slipper, the can of hairspray, even the screaming when we are spotted. We alarm even the burliest of men, and when we eventuate in final breaths there are more of us biding our time in the distance.

 It is best that we disappear.

[eximergencies]

For a friend

In all my years of engaging in this curious thing called ‘friendship’, I have held on to one thing: friendship is fragility.

 The reason why fragility is being used as a noun and not an adjective is because (and this is where the linguistics nerd in me comes through) is that I want to equate both concepts. The concept of fragility is insufficient as a mere descriptor of the concept of friendship; to me, they are one and the same. The fact of the matter is that the latter metaphorises the former.

 I have lived for varying periods of time in many different cities, and I am only 23. This is not an exercise in bragging but an appreciation of how much more I have to go and how much more time I have to experience this world that is constantly presented to us as beyond our visual comprehension. And in this short expanse of time, I have had the pleasure of having been in short-term and long-term contact with people of various ages and walks of life. This perhaps defies the impression some people get that I am unable to expand my social circle beyond the circumstances of my immediate existence.

 The reason why I then propose that friendship is fragility is that, firstly, both concepts are tenuous --- as with most abstract concepts. And, following this reasoning, most things equate to friendship, as most things are, in fact, abstract --- even the things you think are concrete. (For more information, see Lacan.) The concept of friendship has expanded to include all sorts of imaginable configurations of persons in one or many webs and it is nearly impossible to define in a way that is universally applicable. The same goes for fragility; to some, fragility is strength and to others, weakness.

 The second reason why I see friendship as fragility is that both concepts carry within them the sense of something being fluid and gossamer; and it is now that I begin to speak in terms that are far less mechanical. For instance, there is the fact that most people accept friendships do fall apart at some point, and that it is a matter of effort that they stay intact. In the same vein, glass is notoriously easy to break; and it is a matter of effort that your wine glasses stay intact.

 Both concepts also carry the sense of being sensitive to unwarranted force. There are friends you and I may have pushed away because we have not learned to harness our emotions in an efficient way. In that sense, life is the dam that causes the river to overflow onto its banks, and friendship fades just as the banks start to erode. And yet the process is somehow natural, part and parcel of the cycle of ecological life, and will happen over and over again unless some part of the ecological process, or centuries of scientific knowledge, is proven to be wrong.

 If erosion is natural, fragility is seen as the antithesis of nature. The “noble savage” is seen as a conqueror of the unstable forces of nature, and the trunks of a tree bear testament to its strength. If so, then my equation falls apart. If friendship and its life and death are natural, then how can it be simultaneously fragile?

 Can it be that fragility (and friendship) is strength?

 Maybe now we focus on the aspect of friendship that belies its strength: the way it holds broken people together, the manner in which it forces the limping to lean onto it for the strength to move, the type of support that, in an ideal world, is fuelled by nothing but love and compassion. The fragility of friendship is then that which gives it energy. The hope that each dying ember will always resurrect itself into another form, the myth of the phoenix as they call it, is the hope that one dying friendship gives birth to another, not necessarily as a seed gives rise to a new plant, but as the spores of neighbouring plants are carried miles and miles away to give rise to new life in a fresh patch of soil.

[bangnotawhimper-deactivated2012]

[eximergencies]

A honest exposition of the modern social life

The first thing I will tell you is that I am not a friend collector. I am not interested in dehumanising people I love dearly into a pile of Facebook friends, forming some sort of numerical tally by which I can stand proud. I am not that person. I am not interested in sitting at parties making small talk and listening to the chatter of faceless crowds.  I do not greet everyone I see because I want to be seen saying hi to everyone I see; I just cannot bear the thought of someone walking past unacknowledged, unseen, and unheard. 

It is difficult for me sometimes to sit in a room full of people and fulfil the desire to account for everyone’s existence but also attend to everyone’s needs equally and to the best of my ability. And as far as I’m concerned, it can get pretty exhausting. At the same time, spouting senseless words I don’t mean to random people I don’t necessarily know on a personal level is similarly exhausting, in that I’m expending social energy not fulfilling the purpose of engaging people on a level beyond the superficialities of social network expansion.

Knowing someone’s name is easy nowadays. Facebook tells you their first and last name within a suggested list of “People you should know”. Knowing someone’s life is also easy. After they’ve accepted your friend request, you can have a breezy trawl through their lives in their photo album. You can stroll through their timelines to see where they’ve been this past week, if they’re the sort to share their movements on social media.

Giving people hugs at parties is easy. All you have to do is stretch out your arms, one to the left and one to the right, leave your chest open, and come into frontal contact with the other person. After a while it turns into yoga, this ritualistic experience of greeting other people and asking after them, saying numerous How are yous regardless of whether you really mean it or not, and laughing along at their jokes even if you can’t make out half of what they’re actually saying.

This is not a rant. This is the reality of the lives that we lead, fast-paced and jam-packed as they are. Within the 24 hours of our day we walk into where we have to be and pick and choose who we’re familiar with, whose faces we register. We say hi. We exchange tiny details about our movements. And then we walk away. The truth is, probably half of those details are retained within our minds involuntarily, and the rest just fade away.

This is not a rant. This is the reality of the modern social life, where you drive away from a party only to cry in the front seat of your friend’s car, where you smile and hug for 3 hours and then end up in your own bed wishing the world would just fade away into your thoughts, where social obligations are observed at the expense of your own mental health just because the repercussions on your mental health would be worse if you did not oblige.

Disappointing people is so easy when you’re this busy. Text messages go unread for days and days only to be replied with a cursory “sorry been busy law school problems”. Friends go unnoticed until they start showing up on your Facebook timeline with unfamiliar faces. Family is a secondary consideration when they’re a seven-hour flight away, or until something bad happens.

Struggling to deal with this aspect of disappointing the people in your lives is what makes friendly relations difficult sometimes, and unfortunately for myself, I’m not one of those people who can live with being a disappointment to those around me. I am not a weekend warrior and I hate the process of making conversation just to make conversation, of hugging just not to look like a bitch, or of smiling just not to look like a cunt. Being genuine can be exhausting as hell, but as long as it remains feasible per my social energy, I will continue to be as considerate towards others as I can.

That is the #friendshipgoal.

[eximergencies]

The Stars are Aligned

Looking out from my small window into the mist of the night I longed for culture. At this point no small dose of Buzzfeed was about to cut it when it came to providing temporary relief from daily minutiae. After all, what did a media outlet that thrives on recycled memes have to contribute to my intellectual life? Nothing. And have I truly come to that level of brain death?

All of a sudden I realised that I’d come to long for the days where I’d spend hours poring over Marx and Butler and all the Continental philosophers I could get my hands on. This is not pretentiousness. This is one tiny brain experiencing complete and utter fatigue after having been at the mercy of rigid routines for the past 8 weeks or so. For the first 2 weeks I thought, maybe I could get used to this pace of life. Maybe the newfound thirst for structure would allow my life to organise itself without much wilful input. Maybe I could learn to be more wise with my time from being so busy... more strict with myself. More afraid of being lazy.

Instead I spent most nights sitting in bed re-reading my old copy of Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. Instead of getting acquainted with legalese I hopped into bed with my first love: fiction. Not legal fiction... just fiction. Fiction for the weary and for the people who just love words for their expressiveness. For their literary value and not for what they could potentially count for in a court of law. For the level of humanity that I have strived to maintain coming into the gates of this hallowed institution.

. In the past weeks I have come to realise that there is no bad person in the world... or, simply, that the word ‘bad’ either means ‘ignorant’ or ‘self-righteous’, and often both simultaneously. By my own judgment, I have been guilty of self-righteousness. I have watched myself, as if I was a member of the audience in a theatre, explaining the tenets of feminism in brospeak. I have “schooled” various friends on the wrongs of sexualisation. I have sat down with people from across the political aisle in the hopes of breaching the social boundaries of mere fraternization. And somehow I have felt betrayed for the lack of sympathy for my self-righteousness. It is strange. I have never felt more wrong for attempting to be the voice of righteousness.

Perhaps it is a sign that there are better ways to be; that there are better ways of throwing a heavy word into the sea without rocking the boat. Consent. Objectification. Subjugation. Female tears. And yet I can’t help the voice inside of me that tells me to speak my view into being no matter how much of the normal sensibility it potentially upsets. This is what I call the fear of being fearful --- the art of pre-empting the consequences of your own actions because you are afraid of being afraid of your own words. . It is hard to remain unafraid in a microcosm of the cold, hard truth of a world. The law school is only 10 storeys high and yet it seems like too good of a cosy prison. The theatre seems like the backyard of my grandmother’s house in comparison: familiar, slightly musty and always comfortable. I don’t know who I’m becoming by being a part of this legal circlejerk. But one must always look forward, as they say.

That’s easy to say when you know where forward is. 

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One Aboriginal language (I can’t remember which, it’s been ages since I last delved into sociolinguistics) names its directions relative to the course of the wind. They will never forget how to trust nature.

But why be happy when you could be normal? Why have absolutes like the True North when you could always define your sense of direction, quite literally, by the way the wind blows? Why bother with your opinions when you could just stay silent and sail right by, fit right in, coast the surface? Not everyone is built for deep-sea diving, not even if it means scouring the bottom of the sea for pearls of wisdom...

[eximergencies]

On (Religious) Idealism

I’m thinking about this and writing about this in response to the recent spate of (unfortunately familiar) terrorist attacks in Turkey, Brussels, etc. I’m thinking about how great it would be if people stopped killing other people to further their own religious and political ideals and yet I’m conflicted because one person’s meat is another person’s poison and one person’s jihad is another person’s sin.

Yet we would be mistaken if we were to think that the world we live in right now is a world that manifests the worst of humanity. Recall in the Salem Witch Hunt, or the Hundred Years’ War, or the brutal punishments of medieval France. In retrospect, suicide bombings now appear to fall in line with every single enactment of (unjustified) violence that has ever been recorded in human history.

And my view is that all this exists because idealism exists.

Plato says that we can only ever see the shadow of an ideal. Kant says the ideal is something that forms “the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me”. Derrida plainly says that there is no ideal and that to forge an ideal is to exclude other possibilities of existence, of meaning and of language, specifically.

Idealism (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and

although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge (quasi-Cartesian?)

Following from the first definition, it would be fair to say that believing that one’s God is the one true God and fighting for a just cause in service of that belief is to the exclusion of the possibility that other Gods exist, or that there may be no God. It would be fair to say that to militantly exercise one’s faith can be to the detriment of someone else who does not subscribe to that same belief. The detriment lies not in the fact that the latter is missing out on a divine presence that the former enjoys, but that the unilateral imposition of a religious ideal upon a person who has not acceded to be thus imposed upon will be put in an ideological stranglehold that may or may not claim that person’s life. 

What, then, should we make of “good” ideals such as feminism? Being a feminist myself, of course I want everyone to subscribe to the same brand of feminism that I fervently espouse. Of course I want the world to function my way. But perhaps there is a way to assert one’s identity without infringing upon the lives of others, unless absolutely (and reasonably) necessary e.g. in the face of blatant misogyny. There are occasions for righteous anger that are perfectly justifiable but energy doesn’t disappear into nothing, says elementary school science: energy turns into energy and it is up to the individual, ultimately, to decide what kind of energy is most suited to one’s ideological cause.

As an individual with a set of strong opinions, I am still trying to find that middle ground between being completely belligerent and being passive. An ideal I continue to possess is that one day some form of manifestation of an ideal speech situation (see Habermas) in which reasonable persons can come forth and proffer their ideals by partaking in the marketplace of ideas and that some form of truth will emerge from an ideal system of free-form negotiation. Yet we all know that a system that promises complete freedom of expression will always harbour irreconcilable contradictions.

[eximergencies]

5 Things I’ve Learnt in 2.5 Weeks of Law School

1. Your non-law friends will start to hate you. Or you will feel this way because you hate yourself (self-awareness includes statements like “I’ve become that person from law school). Reasons for this include: being with the same group of people for what feels like eternity in a classroom, feeling happy to participate in activities with said group, and the power of commiserating means that you find it most convenient to rant about your life to the people who understand it the most. After 3 straight days of what feels like straight up purgatory you wouldn’t want to spend another couple hours telling someone who doesn’t know anything about what is happening in your little law school bubble.

2. You will question your intelligence. A lot. There’s always that one person in class who, in week 2, is already miles ahead of you in terms of grasping the subject material while you’re still trying to finish up last week’s readings. You will feel the need to come to his level in class and that struggle will distract you from what is actually coming out of your lecturer’s mouth. Do not let this destroy you.

3. You will want to cry, or write something witty about your experience, but you simply don’t have the energy to express your emotions to great depths.

4. You will feel like you’re losing yourself in the system. Law school is a system that is built to teach you the law in a certain number of steps and with a certain amount of expected rigour. Because almost everyone who gets in is assumed to have overcome a certain threshold of academic excellence, the law school probably assumes that there is an optimal way to educate a throng of similarly capable people and will follow that instinct to the very core (and institute the system ruthlessly as a logical consequence). This means that some people who are alienated by structure (like myself) will feel completely miserable. There is no picking and choosing what you’d like to do, or what you’d like to say. There is a right and wrong answer for the purposes of many, many things and purporting something far-fetched makes you sound like a massive wanker. As a result, unanswered questions combine with suppressed creativity to make you feel completely discombobulated. Coupled with anxiety, it can drive you to nausea. You will feel like you’re sinking in a puddle of your own lack of understanding.

5. You will meet a large number of people and learn how to deal with this. This is usually difficult for me because contrary to popular belief, I am very far from an open book. I sometimes portray myself in a certain way just so I offer very little access beyond the veil. With the exhaustion that comes from being so mentally engaged at all times, there are two ways you could go: you could set your guard way up in order to protect your ego, or you could let your guard down and allow your vulnerabilities to draw other people into your life. Again, the power of commiserating. There are some vicious people out there in law school, but if you stick to the right ones, (in the words of one of my very first friends in law school), you’ll be all right.

[photography-ga]

photography / hipster / indie / grunge

[eximergencies]

Womanhood

The media sends really confusing signals on how to be a woman.

This is neither unimportant nor new, but it’s not super important either, which is ultimately confusing because most of us live our lives on the Internet and form our senses of identity through our interactions with ourselves or other Internet users.

My womanhood was formed on the basis of fashion magazines, Barbie dolls, growing up with two brothers and a mother who taught me how to be one. Oh, and let’s not forget the father, the Catholic schools, and puberty. And what the media tells you about puberty, amongst other things.

Laurier ads taught me that periods meant I had to go out and choose between similarly colourfully packaged bags of pads.

Revlon sold me my first lipstick.

Neiman Marcus gave me my first prom dress.

And The Real Housewives of Beverly Hils showed me just how much Botox could reside under a person’s skin without it being obvious.

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The truth is, I was watching a Buzzfeed video about feminism and I started questioning my own feminism and its implications. Rationally investigating my own feminism is impossible because I’m always trying to accommodate the latest waves in the community and it never stays the same, but at the same time I’m trying to live by a standard of femininity that I can expect from others as well as myself. And that is one hell of a task for a 21st century young woman who’s constantly being told that loving makeup doesn’t make you a true feminist because you’re insecure.

The fact is, every person on this planet has some form of insecurity or other, and feminism is not armour that protects you from insecurity. It’s not an invisibility cloak that allows you to disappear into a mass of similarly-minded people, either. Today’s feminism demands that you question what it means to be intersectional, to consider beyond the cisgender and the white, beyond Twitter and Facebook and anti-MRA rants. Today’s feminism demands that you question what it means when Emma Watson says He should stand for She, what it means when Beyonce tells you that if she were a boy she wouldn’t take girls for granted. Today’s feminism demands that you question whether a black woman has it harder than a white woman because of her skin colour and what we can do about this.

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Hillary Clinton is a formidable woman; there is no doubt in my heart that anyone who is contending for the position of Top Jock in American Politics is a beast of a woman who can handle heckles and witchhunts of any sort. However, having said that, there are many women out there who would simply vote for Hillary because she is a woman, and there will be many men (and women) who would criticize women for doing that simply because of her gender. Hillary Clinton is an ally of Big Business whose former husband used to be Top Jock and now she, too, wants to be president. In the last Democratic debate, she was asked how much of a role Bill would play in her presidency and I was pissed sick as a woman but I was simultaneously glad that that question was being posed BECAUSE of her and Bill’s alliance with the American plutocracy. 

This is the kind of dilemma we face as women. Do we support women regardless of what they are aside from their gender? Or do we pick someone who’s better for the job but is not a woman? Aside from politics, of course, there are a plethora of questions and decisions that women ask and make every single day. Do I wear makeup? Do I eat whatever the fuck I want? And just last night, I, acclaimed Internet-feminist, googled the phrase “what girls should wear on a night out”. 

I can almost hear Germaine Greer swear at me under her breath as if her words didn’t mean anything to my feminism.

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The truth is that my womanhood will never be complete until, of course, I die. If and when I become famous and there are biographies written of me, then my womanhood will be continuously challenged by every single person who pens their thoughts on who I’d been while I was alive, et cetera, et cetera. Derrida must have seen this coming when he told us about iterability, you know, but I doubt he had a stocky Asian woman in mind when he was talking about whatever he was talking about. It doesn’t matter what a dead white man says about my life; I’m going to live it anyway, even if it means I sit on my bed every night and contemplate how to make my boobs fit into a dress that looks good and proper for the first day of Law School.

[eximergencies]

(via https://vine.co/v/OUnzArbnYtb)

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Caitlyn Jenner and the Problem with Assumptions

(as published in Judy’s Punch)

"It's my view that gender is culturally formed, but it's also a domain of agency or freedom and that it is most important to resist the violence that is imposed by ideal gender norms, especially against those who are gender different, who are nonconforming in their gender presentation." – Judith Butler

One of the fundamental problems plaguing society since the beginning of recorded time is the problem of assumptions. We seem to assume there is a metaphysical core to everything: gender, language, etc. I hate a priori postulations. I hate essentialism. Most of all I hate unstudied opinions. If we acknowledge everything has a stable, organising core, at least we should own up to it, instead of trying to mask it as natural.

It's disturbing that in the 21st century, amid all the investigations into identity politics, Lawrence Khong, Baptist Church senior pastor, can claim in one breath to be a Christian and that the "natural family is a universally accepted norm and a public good”. I see this as contradictory because I assume most Christians are New Testament Christians and thus they should adopt a stance of universal love. (I see the meaning of love beyond the cishet-normative schemata.)

Following from this assumption, it would be conscionable for me to say that Khong is hypocritical for preaching a message of overriding divine love and then claiming that the cishet nuclear family is the normative ideal and good for society. How can he claim that love is universal and then use the same doctrine to uphold the legitimacy of a select group within society, while subtly marginalising everyone who doesn’t belong? The assumptions inherent in the statement go woefully unquestioned.

I often wonder how many Christians would look at Caitlyn Jenner and call her an abomination. I also wonder how many people regardless of religion, gender, and sexuality would look at her and call her beautiful just because they did not want to look insensitive – or worse, uncultured.

Trans-activist Janet Mock once held an interview in which she turned the questions often directed at transgender women onto a cishet woman. A notable question was, “who was the first person you'd told you're cis to?" After the intense round of questioning, the latter felt like she was 'a token'.

When a trans person transitions the first thing everyone pays attention to is their appearance and how well their appearance fits our idealised, binarised archetypes of the male/female gender. The trans body is itemised and decoded like a palimpsest with fresh ink on. Trans women are predominantly asked questions about gendered body parts that, though well meaning, make them feel (as articulated by the cishet woman) invaded and scrutinised.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to the belief that our bodies are universally identical canvases for societal transcription and encoding, because who am I to say that everyone has the same metaphysical core at the centre of their being? But the trans body should not be a ground on which ideological battles are fought.

I would think that after Caitlyn Jenner lived as a man for so long, aligning herself with the archetypal modern woman in terms of physical image would be rather like coming into a sisterhood, and that in itself presents a wonderful source of comfort. In this case, beauty is a source of empowerment in the form of the presentation of one’s inner identity on the outer, creating a sense of female solidarity for the individual.

Calling her beautiful is understandable – until it reveals the extent to which feminine identity is bound by the limits of physical beauty in mainstream media, as wittily articulated by Jon Stewart: “You see, Caitlyn, when you were a man, we could talk about your athleticism, your business acumen. But now you’re a woman, which means your looks are really the only thing we care about.”

Welcoming Caitlyn to the world then becomes an issue of how she fits into our idea of acceptable womanhood and its physical markers: boobs, reduced jawline, lowered hairline, fuller cheeks, thinner nose, absence of Adam’s apple, etc. She is acceptable because she is conventionally beautiful. Because she doesn’t challenge the accepted standard of feminine beauty. Because she fits right in.

But what about other women who can’t afford prohibitively expensive reassignment surgery, who have transitioned but cannot afford to display on their bodies societal markers of their inner gender identity? They are marginalised, persecuted, and obsessively scrutinised for how different they are to what we think a woman should look like.

In light of this, calling Caitlyn beautiful then becomes some kind of affirmative action by the mainstream... some kind of overgenerous reassurance that she fits in. This is great until it becomes the dominant discourse about a nuanced human being who is more than just her transition. Who has raised beautiful children. Who has had a rich life as an athlete and motivational speaker. Who, in my history of watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians, seems to be one of the only members of the family who does not see fame as anything more than a nuisance. Who has achieved personal freedom on her own terms.

A trans person is first and foremost a human being. The core of one’s being human is uncertain, and a lot of our epistemic attempts to identify what makes us human is unnecessary essentialism that can become dangerous for a person who has just begun living a new identity.

Caitlyn now risks being known only for the person that she has announced herself to be on the cover of Vanity Fair. And the phenomenon of the world looking at Caitlyn and summing up her existence singularly with the adjective of 'beautiful' is exactly what is wrong with the world today – a world that struggles to accept that categorisation is ugly, unnecessary, and more pernicious than we think.

(edited by Laura Cordero)

[eximergencies]

Fatigue

When you're sick of needing people because you don't want people to keep disappointing you with false promises but you don't want to deny your own needs because to do so would be to deny yourself of your own humanity Daily dilemmas

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Now this is what I call comedic timing; get with the program Nicole Arbour

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the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun

Plato

[eximergencies]

The Politics of Desire, or, “I am Out of Luck, I am Out of Love, and Let’s Face It, Human Beings are Complicated.”

“OH, the drugs? I am allergic to feelings.”

This is the thing about desire. Desire always necessarily wants to be. This is what we are taught as kids. Since the tender age of I-can-walk we are told that when we call something by its name it means beckoning, it means desire. “Candy!” equates to the corporeal candy and therefore words become actualised, colours become vivid and life becomes, by then, already transactional.

Why desire is painful is difficult to pinpoint, really. I think desire is one part self-mediation (mutilation?) and one part fear-of-not-existing. We desire because we fear that we would not otherwise come into being as ourselves, as agents capable of pursuit, as the masters of our individualised fates. We desire because of the physical markers of our sexual identity --- because we are taught to want, because we are taught to love, and because we are then taught that to want and to love crystallises in the act of touch, of giving pleasure by the sense of touch; and that is why bodies react to the warmth of someone’s breath on the neck on a winter night.

I might just be rambling here but I think I make a fair case for what I feel at this present moment. Here I am afraid of not being able to systematise. Here I am fearful of the urge to cry at my desk as I send out multiple copies of the same fucking email. Here I am afraid of a conflation of the inner with the outer --- the personal and the public --- and I am sitting here in front of a store in an ubiquitous building on Bourke Street penning my rambling, incoherent self into the materiality of the surface I am aware that I am holding with the other hand. And I am shaking.

Look where I am. Law school. The world is an oyster I have not yet shucked. But I am not comforted. I am not warm. I am shivering with a pain in my chest I can only describe as the pain of hearing mothers stifle their babies’ tears. I cannot speak. I can only write my existence into being, word after word, as if my vocal cords have somehow failed me. I have a strangely medicated sense of self-assurance I can only descrive as a willingness-to-be-invisible-despite-being-visible, like Bubble Boy with the added safety net of the Invisibility Cloak. We can still hear his bouncing across the floor.

-

Human beings love to systematise. We love to theorise. We are eager to place, to face and place, and to repeat this process until the world seems clearly assorted into grids. I like you. I don’t like you. We’re friends. We’re not friends. Being is complexity evolving into mythic sizes and yet there is already a chain of possible categories to be flowing into. There are assorted labels for feelings we cannot even access, yet alone comprehend. And so we walk on thinking we have hung our hats on an established truth that, paradoxically, has yet to manifest itself.

-

I am hungry. I am physically in need of food. Notice I have equated two sentences by a) placing them side by side and b) creating a parallel syntactic situation that inexorably bounds meaning into one. So we learn now that “I am hungry” means, somehow, that “I am in need of food.” What I want to imagine is a world in which adjacency doesn’t necessarily equate to likeness, to similitude, to equivalence of some sort in status, and to coherence. Just because I am in bed with you thinking of some great forward gesture doesn’t mean that we are united in a vision. Adjacency. That’s it. Adjacency killed the cat, stripped it of its fur and hung it out to dry on the power lines that let the trams go by, day in day out, as if death was nothing but a part of the everyday.

I no longer want to sit beside you and watch my breath rise like the morning fog out of the sleepy bed of the streets. I no longer want to hear you speak the truth to me as if it was eternally viable. I no longer want to censure myself into knowing something that I have already refused out of my mind. The negative articulation, the negative formation of my desire has manifested itself as a positive stance towards a possible impossible, a space that has not yet defined its walls for me, and there I will sing my song of complete, unadulterated desire.

There you are already annihilated into thin, implacably cold air.

[the-final-sentence]

The wind shuffled and dealt.

César Aira, from The Seamstress and the Wind (via the-final-sentence)

[supersonicart]

Dourone, Murals.

Murals painted around the world by Spanish artist Dourone.  He describes his work as “art for the people” and paints in a visual form of the writing style known as sentipensante which is a term used to describe thinking and feeling invented by writer Eduardo Galeano.