pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.
today's poem is We Have Enough Dead Friends by Lena Oleanderson. it's one of my favorites.
you can read it here or from the image on Lena's blog, which i'll repost for ease of reading.
here are my thoughts:
i like that the first stanza highlights messiness— the way that loving each other requires openness. love does not let mess deter connection. i appreciate that both in a literally, as someone who can easily spiral over whether my apartment is clean enough for guests, and figuratively, as someone who is human. someone who often worries that what i have to say will be misunderstood, ignored, or judged in a way that makes me feel distant from others.
i also like the soup imagery in the first stanza. soup is ever-comforting, and i want to be someone who nourishes others, who addresses others' needs, when i can. the soup idea is especially meaningful to me because it's "probably from frozen." there's an acknowledgement that energy is finite. "probably from frozen," and "we will both eat."
i am sometimes overly concerned with conserving my energy. (this is not to say that i also don't struggle with not overextending. finding the middle ground is tough all around.) this stanza frames love as an action [love, love / is a verb / love is a doing word]. i may be tired. i may have this ache that tugs my body down, and words feel too heavy to emerge from my throat, and i will do what i can.
it doesn't stop there though. i will still accommodate and tend to myself.
we will both eat.
---
the second stanza is frank. you don't have to be dying.
this line speaks to a younger part of me that remembers care built on a foundation of chaos. it contradicts the idea that crisis is the prerequisite to care. there does not have to be an emergency, or violence, or yelling, or an accumulation of absence that makes me cry out and hope it does something this time. there doesn't have to be a betrayal, or a vicious contest, or any kind of desperation. you don't have to be dying.
but if it feels like you are…
it does, sometimes, is the thing. for all of us. we are creatures wired to survive and that necessitates a vessel that can set off the most dire and urgent of alarms. though there is a part of me that wants to say 'those are the times when need support the most,' i won't cheapen the former lines by comparing suffering, even amongst my own selves.
the idea is repeated-- the poem reassures us: it doesn't have to be that bad; it doesn't have to be bad at all.
but if it is, please call. this line opposes yet another of my childhood narratives: as much as i might want it, others cannot always intuit that i am hurting. the cruelty is that i have been taught to hide when i am injured, like a cat slinking off to lick its wounds in the shadow of a some hulking piece of furniture. so this line twinges my heart. yet it's a truth i need to remember and practice: i must speak up.
---
the next stanza lists kinds of care. it juxtaposes the everyday slog of being in the chores cycle with the warm attachment need to be held. it's giving wire and cloth mother.
the idea that one doesn't need to be dying to get care is repeated a third time here, this time directly next to creature comfort. is it sometimes easier for us to ask for instrumental care over the squishy vulnerability of a hug, a back rub, or head scritches? that is often the case for me, even though i usually want the soft-containing-connecting rest of trusted touch waaaay more fervently than the rest of the needs hierarchy.
If you want me to be there, I want to.
a direct reminder: loved ones want to help. (you are not a burden.)
the order of this statement strikes me as meaningful. loved ones want to help, but you also have to want them to. this line hits similarly to the please call line. my personal reading here is that this line carries an implicit message: opening up to the care others offer is a necessity. it isn't enough to ask for help, you have to be open to receiving it, even just a little.
i am reminded of Leonard Cohen: there is a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in
so you have to allow — and ideally learn to love? — the cracks, even if they feel like weakness or expose you. if you fill in the cracks, no one can pour into you. so the mutual wanting is important, to facilitate the flow of give-and-receive.
---
the final stanza talks about the narrator's pain. it puts us in the body of a person who cares, and who hurts, too. it insists that care work in friendships is a human-to-human process, so the reader can't accidentally slide into a dehumanizing read of the caregiving party. i also get this sense that its deliberately maintaining balance between the narrator and the person they want to support by presenting the narrator's pain so directly. this is not a relationship of carer-to-client or therapist-to-patient, for example. "we are both human," the poem says yet again. we are meeting as equals in the middle of our messy, aching lives.
then there's my favorite image in the piece:
the world is a laden thing / rolling around on my chest, lately.
the word "laden" feels laden, you know? it evokes heaviness, especially right next to the word "rolling" and the phrase "on my chest." i think of the way people frequently describe their emotions as boulders. i like that this use of heavy imagery still has movement, though. the word "rolling" brings to mind dough being flattened under a rolling pin. it makes me think of Sisyphus. we are all rolling our own boulders. sometimes our very existences feel like a boulder that threatens to crush us, and in the process, change the shape of our existence.
but we have enough dead friends.
Come over.
when i reach the end of the poem, i just want to say: hallelujah and dayenu. how right and true.
"we have enough dead friends." so come over and trust that being together will be enough to carry you through. come over and let me care for you, and in doing so, feel your care for me. and in our shared grief, nestled in the difficulty of our lives, we will re-find that vital something that helps us to live.
---
phew. thanks for coming along on this ride with me. and thank you to Lena Oleanderson for writing We Have Enough Dead Friends.
i've already spent more than an hour ramblin', so i'm only doing a light edit on this one.
this painting by andrew wyeth has got SO many ghosts in it. most andrew wyeth paintings have ghosts in, but this is off the scale!
this painting by dragan bibin has only one ghost as far as i can tell, but it's a really scary ghost (the dog thinks so too)
this painting by meraud guevara looks very peaceful, but unfortunately it has a ghost in it. i can't tell you where, but it does
you might think you can see the ghosts in this dorothea tanning painting, but you're wrong. the little girls are just ordinary girls. the actual ghost is behind one of those doors.
guys. Guys please you're allowed to say big boy words. please we cannot keep just rolling with the sanitization of every space on the internet ok. you're allowed to say suicide. you're allowed to say porn. they're not bad words, they're just words.
also by ''censoring'' the words with silly spellings you're actually making it much harder for people to filter out. please just say Sex you don't have to call it woohoo like it's the fucking sims. i promise the Word Police aren't going to arrest you
"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys
I know this might be a bold take but maybe teaching everyone from a young age that ever making a mistake will be met with unimaginable pain and misery doesn't actually encourage learning or correct behavior. If anything it creates a sense of terror so powerful it completely suffocates curiosity and exploration, thus leading to people knowing absolutely nothing but whatever is brought directly to them, which is a big problem in a world where information is so tightly controlled that a very small number of very powerful people basically have complete power over what people see and hear on a day-to-day basis when not actively seeking new and rigorously verified information from diverse and trustworthy sources.
if any of this sounds like you, start by looking up the definition of words you've heard and are pretty sure you know what they mean, but haven't actually double-checked for yourself. Just like, whenever it occurs to you. Great first step
This post goes out to the "we need to bring back bullying" crowd. Just because you aren't hitting someone physically doesn't mean you aren't being punitive. Maybe it isn't actually healthy to believe it's necessary to harass and humiliate anyone who makes you upset or uncomfortable. That sounds like a you problem actually.
Anyways, breaking the cycle of abuse starts with you and how you treat yourself. You have to give yourself grace and room for error or you'll never be able to cultivate a healthier mindset than your trauma left you with. It's not easy, but you have to trust yourself that whatever seems kinder than however you usually treat yourself is probably a good enough start. Doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be The Correct Answer, just needs to be a step in the right direction, y'know? We'll figure out the details along the way.
That's my town! Ashland, Ohio. We keep saying no to those fucking cameras but the chief of police is a smug prick, and certain citizens said fine if you won't listen then we'll just say no.
let it go my friend... i say this as a fat "ugly" dyke. your body is the vehicle w which you move in the world, give love, receive love, make things, SEE things, KNOW things. that's all that matters. beauty and ugliness are marketing scams esp for women. LIVE and FUCK THE WORLD it's not easy to get there but it's so sweet. ppl will love you fat and "ugly" i swear on god.
this is like a religious text to me and i'm not joking even a little
shoutout to the words "overmorrow" and "ereyesterday". english losing these words was stupid. "the day after tomorrow" "the day before yesterday" clunky-ass constructions. revolting. i'm bringing overmorrow and ereyesterday back in my idiolect and there is nothing you can do about it
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
Social media is weird because, if you're not careful, the place where you like to learn stuff and make friends and engage in interests turns into a mirror world where you're being lied to, everyone hates you, and it's embarrassing to be new at something so you just settle for consuming other people's content.
...in other news, I've been enjoying getting into reading, but talking to book people makes me feel dumb and I don't like it 😅
