could you explain why you're against non-zero days? i thought it was interesting and a worthwhile mindset esp for those struggling really hard to find any kind of meaning in themselves
iām sure itās good for some people! but i have learned an uncomfortable truth about myself over the last 5 years, and that truth is that if i donāt experience a sense of forward momentum in my life, i will literally die. kind of like a shark. in theory this is okay but in practice what it means is that if i donāt do something that is socially-defined asĀ āusefulā orĀ āproductiveā in a given day, i feel bad about myself. this includes: my academic work, all of the extra, shadow-realm academic work we donāt think of as academic work, side projects to make myself a better person such as language acquisition and being caught up on politics, occasionally even some self-care activities. my brain believes that if i do not do at least one of these things a day, i am, on a deep and foundational level, trash. this is bullshit, particularly because no matter how many of those things i do, my brain is never satisfied.Ā
anyway i am, like, fundamentally better than that, and worth more than that, as a human being, so i make a concerted effort to spend whole days at a time not doing shit. otherwise my life becomes an inexorable, hypercapitalist death march. death swim? i donāt want to be a shark, is what iām saying, and if that means that i feel a strong sense of victory when i spend a whole day lying on my bed and eating kix directly out of the bag and not thinking thoughts, so be it. thatās praxis, babey. sometimes you gotta not only allow yourself to just exist, but actively take pleasure in the act.Ā
this is a bit random but I love it when your lists of things you did in the day include things like 'vacuumed the house', 'did a facemask', 'made plans to see a friend', 'had a REALLY good bagel'. it's a really nice, genuine-feeling reminder that academia does not have a monopoly on things that can be productive, and that having a pleasant day and caring for yourself is just as important as getting through a reading list ā also please tell juno I love her
aw this is lovelyāi include that stuff purposefully, to remind myself of the same thing :) also because sometimes it feels easier (?) to stay on top of academic stuff than personal stuff. not right now lmao. but occasionally those do feel like the things that take a little more concerted effort and work to do.
Forget pulling all-nighters and chugging coffee until itās practically coursing through your veins. You know what gets me hyped up? Earl Grey tea on slow sunny mornings after a good nightās sleep. Submitting an assignment early, knowing youāve completed it to the best of your ability. Reading for pleasure. That feeling of limbless relaxation after a good workout. Unearthing all your buried interests and falling in love with them over and over again.
Repeat after me: success is not suffering. Success is nOT-
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ā90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the āculture of fatherhoodā has changed more than fathersā actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothersā expectations and reality to āa largely successful male resistance.ā This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women ā who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting ā by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel theyāre getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to womenās labor. Men resist because it is in their āinterest to do so,ā write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, āGender and Families.ā By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing āa separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.ā
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: āThe expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. Iāve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when youāre not being asked ā¦ā he trailed off, and then said: āI have justifications. Itās a cop-out.ā
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and itās clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that donāt lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work ābecause theyāre expected to.ā The men ācome into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.ā
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didnāt seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isnāt āmaternal gatekeeping,ā the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: āItās important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that theyāre not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.ā
The dad in Vermont explained: āI do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kidsā laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and Iām happy to do it, but if youāre going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.ā
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: āMy husband is a participatory and willing partner. Heās not traditional in terms of āI donāt change diapers.ā But his attention is limited.ā She added, āI canāt trust him to do anything, to actually remember.ā
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting werenāt important enough to remember: āI just donāt think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.ā
Finally, some men blamed their wivesā personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. āShe wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I donāt keep lists. I think thereās a belief that if sheās not going to do it, then it wonāt get done.ā (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: āWe fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.ā)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: āIt has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.ā
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. āHe notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,ā she said. āHow much convincing of the other person can you do?ā
All this comes at a cost to womenās well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities āas unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,ā one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings ā and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than womenās. Itās up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
I was reading a book about Tolkien like all geeks are wont to do, and the author was saying how Tolkien was careful to use words with non-latin roots in the speech of certain characters to emphasize their English-ness. And so now I'm wondering if that's a thing all English grads pay attention to? How important is the study of etymology to your research?
yes! so tolkien was an anglo-saxonist which means that he was really attuned to the linguistic shifts that were happening in britain from about 500 to 1066. the celts occupied the isle first, then the Romans held it, sort of, from about 50 to 400, and then the germanic tribes (angles/saxons/jutes/etc.) invaded (or migrated, depending on who you talk to) and old english emergedāthe language in which tolkienās academic and literary work is based. because language, like culture, shifts gradually, paying attention to roots can be useful in placing texts in particular times and geographic locations. even up until the late early modern period and further, we can use particular terms to narrow down potential locations & periods for a textās production. for me, that involves being aware of latin & french roots; both of those are, by the 13th century, āprestigeā languages, so, to massively oversimplify, authors that use a lot of french or latinate roots are either fancy or trying to be fancy. english, until chaucer, is emphatically not prestigious. chaucer and other early english poets draw really heavily on french terms to elevate their language, a kind of poetry that comes to be called āaureateā verseāitās a kind of linguistic gilding. youād spell it āadmiraciounā instead of āadmiration.ā the same kind of distinction remains in language today; the example everyone who teaches the history of english uses is that ādrinkā is anglo-saxon, while ābeverageā is french; āmeatā is AS while ābeefā is french, etc. by using anglo-saxon as his base language, tolkien is conscientiously situating fictional locations like the shire or rohan in particular historic & geographic language-spaces.
ANYWAY i digress. yes, if you work on medieval texts, you are generally very aware of etymology. itās not a major component of my research but, as someone who works on a mix of folk/country and university medicine, it is definitely something that i deal with regularly. the issues that medieval folks have with translating herbals from latin to english, for example, are many and varied. luckily there are a lot of resources!! entire books of isogloss maps (which track which linguistic features are present in which regions at which times) are a godsend but the biggest resource is LALME, the linguistic atlas of late medieval english. at a workshop i was at last summer, simon horobin talked about its construction in the 1980s, which involved sending grad students cycling to remote villages all over the english countryside so they could ask their eldest inhabitants what term they used for āshovel,ā or if they had a specific word for the patterns that ice leaves on riverbeds, or whatever.
āWalking is an acting that always unfolds within a certain landscape. [Anthropologist] Tim Ingold has used the notion of ātaskscapeā to denote pragmatic uses of terrain. Whilst walking, we come to intersect with a variety of taskscapes ā¦ When somebody walks, they melt into a taskscape not entirely of their own design. Mind is inherently ecological. It is enacted within a certain ecology, and is actually inseparable from its environment. Mind is the sum of intelligent enactments ā¦ walking may be approached in an object-oriented manner. Each form of behavior composes an enactment that meshes with a certain ecology, what has [been] called a ābehavioral field,ā Mind is the inherently relational enactment of set of behavioral disposition which are always already enmeshed with a field. When these dispositions enter āfields of sense,ā mind and walking become independent objects in their own right.
To walk is to establish manifold connections with multiplicities. The impulse to walk corresponds with a deeply rooted impulse to lose ourselves within a landscape, and ecology of openness. At any given moment, we walk a thin line between picking out a certain aspect, a specific site of concentrated desire or completely losing our sense of self. There is a gap between linguistic, theoretical representation, and actual feeling. No atomistic, one-piece notion will do when confronting the phenomenon of walking. Voluntary mobility is something that cannot be rationalized or traced back to rational reflection ā¦ The manifold, humming world we encounter never forms a complete whole. Neither perception nor its ecology from a coherent, holistic structure. Rather, both are dissected into an infinity of spatio-temporal world-slices. Practice, including the practice of walking, is a partial revelation, a becoming-alive that breaks into our interiority like a bolt of lightning that strikes down unsuspecting bathers. On other occasions, practice is more akin to the spreading of some as yet undefined sensation, filling our bodies with a certain atmosphere.ā
Adam Lovasz, from āWalking as Intelligent Enactment: A New Realist Approach,ā Open Philosophy (vol. 2, no. 1, January 2019)
as usual the comparative descriptors in medieval medicine are getting me today. iām reading this tract on timpanites, ascites, & pneumothorax and for ascites, abdominal percussion yields a soundĀ ālike a bottle half-full of water,ā but timpanites āsounds like a drum or like a bottle full of wind.āĀ
vaporwave
gummygunk
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
