One of the more bizarre deaf experiences is that I lack a lot of knowledge of certain unpleasant phenomena. The other day I was walking down the street with coworkers and suddenly they all looked at me uncomfortably. At my “What?” the three men had what I’m sure was the enjoyable experience of explaining to a woman that she’d just been catcalled. For various reasons, I have a distinct impression that people attempted to be mean to me when I was growing up, but I have no knowledge of how. Friends sometimes translate the various sounds of human suffering in our environment. And these moments are unsettling mostly for the way they reveal how much I am unaware of most of the time.
I’m unaware of positive things too, but for some reason this feels less tragic. Friends have to inform me if someone we passed had sincerely complimented me on my outfit. I’ve been flirted with and not realized, physically, what was happening until it was over. I’ve been not-flirted with but behaved as if I had been because I read the person’s affect instead of their words. I’m unaware of both bad ambient music and cool coffee shop jams. I’m not subjected to the inane interactions of people around me, but I also miss any worthwhile eavesdropping. Et cetera.
It’s a humbling experience the way meeting an alien or a fourth-dimensional being would be. The way it makes you intuit your ignorance of huge portions of reality. Writing dialog sometimes feels to me like being fourteen and trying to write a sex scene. Which while frustrating, induces a certain humility about other things I might be tempted to authoritatively portray. The loss of positive information feels less tragic because the scope of nice things that can happen to me, or even nice things that can happen out of there in the world, seems smaller than the scope of things that can go wrong. Or a least: go strangely. It’s a matter of entropy. Order resembles itself. It feels somehow both predictable and providential. While disorder feels infinite. Every family unhappy in its own way, and all of that.
Alright, anonymous! I created a letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/multiplectic/
It contains the first 1,160 movies I could remember having seen (before I got bored), including every single absolutely wretched romantic comedy from the 00′s that normally I might pretend I’d never heard of.
Actually it’s interesting how many movies from the 00′s are there, shitty and otherwise. I don’t prefer that period, but it’s the period when I was a teenager and lived at home, and “going to the movies” was a thoughtless social activity I did with family and friends. I still had enough hearing to follow them, and I didn’t have much in the way of discernment yet. I don’t often get to see the fodder for my availability heuristic laid out in big fat numbers like that, or see such concrete evidence that it can be detached from one’s actual preferences.
Also funny to see evidence of growing into myself: apparently I’ve seen exactly four five movies made in the last 3 years. Heh.
don’t you hate that you usually somehow manage to survive the semester and you are so close to pass and you are already so dead tired and just want to sleep for 50 years but then you recall the finals are close by so you just sit on your bed staring into the void and hoping the asteroid would hit the earth so you don’t have to learn for the finals.
I wasn’t very active on tumblr for the last... year i think and i am amazed how many blogs i needed to unfollow because they have stronger will than i do and they are actually free from this hellish website. i envy them.
i want to record the effects of antidepressants on my mental state now before i get used to them again.
1. i feel a bit like lucy pevensie insisting that narnia was there, it really was, i had tea with mr. tumnus and everything, but peter is rapping his knuckles on the back of the wardrobe, and susan is chastising you for being silly, and you’re staring at the moldy old coats in embarrassed disbelief, but you can’t deny that the wardrobe is just a wardrobe now.
2. negative thoughts no longer loop like a wildly out of control film reel that i’m being forced to watch over and over clockwork orange style. it is more like i am sitting in a chair by a roaring fire, a cigar in one hand and a strip of microfilm in the other and sometimes i set the cigar down and pick up the jeweled little loupe that’s sitting on the side table and take a nice long look at the pictures.
3. i am more anxious. slightly fidgety.
4. i am less needy. i have gone from desperately trying to talk to anyone, to having it barely occur to me to interact with other humans at all.
5. i am less hungry. i don’t forget to eat, but it’s the physical effects like tiredness or fogginess that remind me, not hunger.
6. i feel somewhat raw and delicate. like i’ve been pulled from a lava flow and it’s wonderful that i’m not burning to death anymore but that doesn’t mean i should start working on my sun tan tomorrow.
at my most self-critical, the marquee at the fox 21st censure theater lights up with the pronouncement that i ‘don’t care about ideas.’
if i compare myself to the average person, i know i spend more than the usual amount of time thinking, or caring about not thinking in cached ways. that’s clear. that’s fine. i get to be around a lot of people like that now.
this is something else. 'to care about ideas’ is a personal ideal that stands for something like ‘willingness to seek out answers.’
i write about art but i don’t seek out essays about art. if it seems like i do, it’s because they fall into my lap. maybe choosing to be around people who will put essays in my lap is the same as seeking them out. i research minimally. i polish ideas interminably and put them in protected jewel boxes, afraid i’ll never have another. i don’t see people interacting with me as a cool opportunity to figure something new out. i appreciate it a lot, but i don’t get excited about it. it mostly makes me tired. i don’t go on a hissy twitter blocking spree if someone disagrees with me, but i have an automatic unendorsed passive aggressive reaction, and that’s because i don’t have something external to ‘being right’ to ground me to the conversation. well, that’s not fair. i have something external, or else i wouldn’t bother suppressing my reaction and admitting wrongness or being more specific. when i do that. but it doesn’t drive me. i’m not sure what does.
i meta-care about ideas. i care about caring because i believe it produces better ideas and sometimes that amounts to the same thing.
i don’t write this just to put myself down. i write it because i see other people doing the same thing. you can tell, you know? when people are interested in things just far enough for social validation, and not more. you see the internet intellectuals who do go on hissy blocking sprees. they’re not necessarily wrong, and they don’t necessarily not care about ideas, but they care about something else along with it. reputation, i suppose. to others or to themselves. this is why we tend to distrust the mainstream media, and why we like scott alexander--he is generally trustworthy in his willingness to seek out answers. i hope freddie deboer gets therapy--it would make him a better thinker.
there was a post going around that i think was written by nostalgebraist (although i couldn’t find it) that talked about the tendency of certain genres of insight porn to talk in a supercilious or knowing way instead of actually being specific. i’m nervous that i do this, but i also understand where it comes from: being careful is difficult. bluster is easy. a rousing cover for a lack of work. maybe more for the writer’s sake than the audience’s. sometimes because the choice is to bluster or to not say anything at all. the latter is usually the better choice (cf, ‘in praise of passivity’), but not always.
i trust people who are obsessed. not necessarily to be right, or good, but to keep digging up information and to get closer to perfection at something than someone who isn’t. i despair about my ability to make anything i’m really proud of, artistic or otherwise, because i lack obsession. excitement. except perhaps about myself. the trick to making good things is not mysterious to me in the least: it’s to care a lot and to put in a lot of time and effort.
this post doesn’t quite make sense. but i won’t be editing it. you know?
i have a million issues around femininity, all of which say more about me than i’d ever claim they actually say about women, but one of the big ones is that ‘women care more about people than ideas.’ ‘women can only write about themselves.’ i find myself interpreting couples in ugly ways: the man is curious, the woman is curious but more to the extent that it draws her to the man, to the extent that he is adequate to validate her. there’s nothing wrong with caring about people, or introspection, but i personally would rather not. i feel frequently doomed by virtue of my femaleness to rely on riding the wave of men who care more. to never make a choice unless it’s socially secure; unless it’ll win me a friend, or lover, or an aura of cool. to never hit that level of abstraction where the things that matter happen.
this is a lament, but it’s also a shove. i need to do work. i just don’t know about what.
the religious value probably most responsible for pushing me towards apostasy was the idea of faith as a virtue. it’s just...so transparently a memetically fit value for a belief system to have (“it’s good to not examine things too closely”), especially when the belief system involves, well, implausible things. it makes sense that if a god existed and he knew best, that faith would be a value worth cultivating. but should that be the case, the degree of self-doubt and cognitive dissonance inflicted in the process is so cruel as to not inspire much reverence in me. my stomach used to turn whenever my family members (or others) would talk in a shining-eyed beatific way about the beauty of “child-like faith” in god, and it took a while to figure out why.
i’m sure there are plenty of gentle and positive takes on the idea of faith. something like “accept that there are things you just won’t ever know, or be able to control, and chill out.” or “be good at recognizing when some people are wiser than you, and consider that distrust or discomfort is in those cases is sometimes worth ignoring.” religious faith is good for social cohesion the way that civic faith is, and the way that loyalty is.
i think the thing that weirds me out the most is when faith as virtue trickles down to contexts that aren’t any of the above, where it becomes something more like openmindedness as a virtue. except openmindedness never seems to end up being “extreme evidence-based curiosity,” but more just...credulousness.
