When I was younger, I used to be consumed by resentment over any perceived misunderstanding or false impression of me. Part of it was the very natural irritation that anyone might feel from being “misperceived,” as it were. Looking back, though, I think a lot of it was also about the obligations or expectations that people came to impose upon me based on those impressions, and the anger that came from feeling suffocated or hounded by those expectations, especially when it often felt like there was nothing I could do to dispel or escape them.
If only people understood me, I used to think, then they wouldn’t see me as just another object or cog in their plans or self-centered little illusions, and they wouldn’t make demands or requests of me that seem to fundamentally disregard / ignore / disrespect who I am as a person.
Or, as Gen Z / Gen Alpha might put it, If only people understood me, then they might stop treating me as an NPC in their little “main character” narratives and see me as a person in my own right.
It matters little to me now, being (or feeling) misunderstood. So much of what used to weigh on me, to an often debilitating degree, just doesn’tmatter anymore. Mainly because I’m clearer about who I am and what I care about, and I have more agency to rebuff, avoid, or ignore anything that doesn’t square with that.
I think a lot of last year was about encountering that notion in various forms and trying to piece those encounters together into some kind of coherent lesson: asserting what kind of spaces (if any) I have the capacity and willingness to let others occupy in my life; accepting what kind of spaces others will allow me to have in theirs.
It’s been hard, and sometimes messy, but if nothing else, I ended last year feeling much lighter than how I started, and I’m grateful for that.
Alysa Liu’s joyful Olympic figure skating performances have been the highlight of my week. Actually, the friendship and joy radiating from all the Olympic women’s figure skating competitors, but especially the US contingent, were welcome glimmers in the past few days.
It’s so wonderful to see somebody delighting in their craft, and performing at the highest levels of skill because of that. I believe it when Alysa says the medal doesn’t matter as much as getting the chance to do what she loves to do on the world’s biggest stage, because you can feel it the whole time she’s skating. She loves it, and she came back to the sport determined to love it on her own terms, and I’m so glad to have witnessed even just this small part of that extraordinary journey.
I was not at all familiar with Bad Bunny, his music, or his activism. Learning about all of that together, in a performance that focused on his heritage and the issues affecting both his community and so many other similarly marginalised ones, was such a pleasant surprise.
What really won me over was how effusively positive the whole thing was: as much a celebration of hope, love, and community as it is a fiercely loving protest pointing out how much better things could be.
4.
Apparently Bhutan’s capital city, Thimphu, is the only city in the world without any traffic lights.
Also, I may not be prepared for the extensive use of cheese in Bhutanese cuisine.
A question for next time: Do cheeses made from yak milk have the same lactose content as the ones made from cow milk?
A refreshingly candid and clear-eyed talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a screening of the documentary 5 Broken Cameras, and finishing the book (Why Palestine? Reflections from Singapore)around which that talk revolved. Quite a lot of it was dedicated to questions like the utility (if any, now) of international institutions like the ICJ in stopping, ultimately, the ongoing genocide; and to stressing that part of the reason the conflict continues is because people keep being told that the only way to end it is to keep trying to find recourse in precisely the institutions and supposedly “proper” channels for protest and resistance that have already failed or proven themselves inadequate and/or too easily dismissible.
Sinnersand its deft use of horror genre storytelling tools to delve into racial politics and art (music) as conduit for both resistance and domination.
This excerpt from a Viola Davis interview that led me to seek out the full thing, which turned out to be a thoughtful meditation on her career thus far.
Getting around to re-reading Babel — which is not the most subtle book about language, colonialism, and imperialism — now that I can read it alongside Vicente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues. I tend to forget that the book’s full title is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence; and now that I remember, it reminds me of a simple discussion question from that book talk that hit harder after having watched a civilian go through five different cameras that were shot out of his hands, damaged by shrapnel, etc.: “What would you have Palestinians do now?”
And as a result, then, a lot of simmering thoughts these days on the many ways to set the protocols and criteria and languages (in the broadest sense of the word) for sustaining or challenging various systems.
Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging—in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily—to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence.
From Orientalism by Edward Said
Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.
Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.
from Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio de nebrija, as quoted in babel by r.f. kuang
“[T]he power of the [silver] bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing — the stuff that gets lots when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.
[…]
You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.”
– Professor jerome Playfair, introducing the concept of silver-working and the british empire’s royal institute of translation, from babel by R.F. Kuang
[T]ranslation turns not just on the transfer of meaning but also on the struggle to control the processes of transferring meaning. It relates to all sorts of tensions around procedures, around the limits of what can be translated, as well as prescriptions for what must remain untranslated.
[…]
It is not so much really to avoid difference or to avoid plurality. It is to be able to exercise total control over linguistic pluralism and to make this control as automatic as possible.
vicente rafael, in conversation with siri nergaard for translation: a transdisciplinary journal, as reproduced in motherless tongues
“It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics. […] But what it denies is the human being behind all of that.
I feel that, as a Black actress, I’m always being tasked to show that I have range by doing white work. […] But we don’t put those same parameters on white actors. You know, you can have a white actress who’s fifty-four, fifty-five years old, which is a great age to play Mama in Raisin in the Sun. Is she gonna be able to pull off Mama in Raisin in the Sun? […] They don’t have to do that. So for those four years at Juilliard, all the white actor has to do is play all white characters.
[…] Juilliard was an out-of-body experience because, once again, I did not think that I could use me. Me needed to be left at the front door, even though me was what got me in there.
Viola Davis on her Juilliard education and its focus on shaping her into “a perfect white actress.”
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.
from Orientalism by edward said
“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.
And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
I think, having made certain declarations about what this blog should be or should try to be, I’ve gotten too weighed down by the thought of living up to those aspirations, haha. But this space is, first of all, meant to be a digital notebook for me, so I’ve decided to throw out the kid gloves and just post what and when I can.
Today: a collection of cat posts / photos that felt like they deserve a permanent place in my pocket, batch 1 of n
Case in point. Add to that any reminder of how small they are, and how big, strange, and bewildering all the constructs of human life are to them, and my heart just twists every time.
where is my favorite painting i need to find my favorite painting
a break in their day by david hettinger. i loveyou
Another precious intersection of interests: cats and art. This is one of my favourite paintings now, too.
As an aside, I’ve started using Quotebacks code here. Yes, after years of deliberately trying to avoid anything that would make this space feel “too much like Tumblr.”
Why?
One, because it looks cool.
Two, because I wholeheartedly believe in what they’re trying to achieve here, which is to build an easy, universally applicable standard for engaging with other content on the web without losing context or attribution.
Link rot / information decay has always been one of the main weaknesses of tech, or at least, the internet. It’s a big factor in making so much of tech feel ahistorical, I think. In a way, the movement of information on the web is a massive game of telephone. It’s so easy for pieces of information to get chopped off and framed or understood differently, or even for something to just get passed around so much that someone further down the chain inevitably loses sight of the source. 1Worse, unlike an actual game of telephone, hardly anybody on the internet seems interested or equipped to trace differences between versions.
So: attribution, and referencing, as Quoteblocks is trying to do. Bonus points for doing it elegantly, and for being able to handle the myriad forms that information on the web tends to take.
While packing for my trip back home for the holidays, I caught myself doing something curious: I was sorting my things into packing cubes corresponding to certain days, certain legs of my trip as they’d been sketched out roughly in my head.
Over the next few days, the same thing would happen: This cube with that bag of knickknacks, both stuffed into this duffel bag, specifically for this couple of days with this group of people. That bag for this trip, somewhere colder. And again, and again — a different set for a different stop, prepped and swapped in, quick as nothing.
It used to bother me when life didn’t feel cohesive. Everything was supposed to have its place; all those spaces were supposed to fit together; all of it was supposed to be essential, interwoven and inextricable, moving along as a predictable, if not harmonious, whole.
But I’m coming to learn that there’s a difference between what is absolutely essential and what is nice, or even necessary, to have in a given moment — and that the former can be a very small category indeed. Does the world end if I forget to pack my laptop charger and only realise once I’m already on the plane? No. Does time stop if everybody’s calendars are full and we can’t find shared dates for a trip? No. Life keeps going, and I’ve realised that it can move along at quite a clip even when so much has been — temporarily or not, for better or worse — shucked away.
There’s a concept from my management strategy classes that has somehow stayed with me: modularization, or the disaggregation of systems into more self-contained units. One of the main benefits is to reduce complex dependencies and their attendant risks, i.e., chaos in one unit is less likely to set fire to the whole. (Modules can still slot together to form a greater, functional unit, if necessary or expedient. But not doing so doesn’t render each unit useless.)
I suppose this tendency to map organizational theory onto the workings of my life is something I should probably sit down and reflect upon someday. But for now, it’s been a useful mental model for helping me expand my window of tolerance, as it were, and roll with whatever punches the world throws my way. A modular framework allows me to stay whole, funnily enough, by reminding me of the many different units that comprise life as I know it. Yes, setbacks and disappointments do happen; expectations can and will be recalibrated; and none of that has to shut the whole operation down each time.
Where does this sit, in the grander scheme of things? This useful little framework helps me ask. Do you see, then, how much exists beyond and outside of this, and how it can’t possibly colour everything else?
Or, phrased differently on more melodramatic days: Why put all the pieces of your heart in one basket?
Researchers built a smartwatch heartbeat monitor that relied on slime mold to operate, and over the course of caring for their living devices, the participants developed an emotional attachment to these.
This study’s main hypothesis was that requiring some degree of physical care in an interactive device would lead to users being more invested in its use. And would you look at that — the study found that, after having to take care of the slime mold to keep their heartbeat monitors ticking, users felt a sense of responsibility over the device, saw its use as a reciprocal relationship, and found the slime mold’s growth as a source of positive feelings. I love how humans care so easily.
Here’s an excerpt from the Twitter thread where I got the article link from, and the quotes from the participants are adorable:
Their little pet mold friends! “You’re my little slime” because look, they’re just both soft little entities who were being fed and watered! They felt happy enough about the slime’s growth to mention them in their diary entries several times!
This reminds me of that anecdote that’s made the rounds of the internet a few times, about how a broken bone was a sign of humanity — because our ability to care for others is essential to building the communities that have helped humanity thrive.
(Of course, there’s a lot that’s iffy about that anecdote, which this fact-checking article delves into. A post for another day, though I do appreciate that some of the points made there highlight (1) the insidious anthropocentrism of the anecdote; and (2) how it frames the concept of civilisation as inherently altruistic, when (cough) colonies the world over, for one thing, would say that hasn’t always been what the concept has been wielded as.)
But anyway. People have such a remarkable capacity to care; I wish the worlds we build for ourselves day to day reflected that better.
I didn’t know there was such an overriding lens in social science research, though it certainly feels like the case for pop culture and day-to-day conversations, so — not all that surprising. Dating culture (and, by extension, hookup culture) is a thing now, especially with dating apps popping up everywhere.
But, as the researchers and the Tumblr user they quoted in their paper1This is still hilarious to me. More chronically online references in scientific papers, please. point out, dating — i.e., “strangers striking up a conversation at a social function and then falling in love during a series of romantic excursions”, as the paper puts it — is not the only pathway for initiating relationships:
In fact, the paper argues that dating might not even be the most prevalent nor preferred way to start a relationship. Their analyses showed a startling disparity: despite only 18% of studies looking at friend-first initiation, two-thirds of participants in the studies they meta-analysed reported that this was how their relationships started, and 47% of respondents in another survey they conducted said that they saw friend-first initiation as the best way to start a relationship.
As someone who’s most likely somewhere on the aroace spectrum,2This is something I’m still figuring out, but hey, let’s see how it goes. I appreciate how this study tries to decouple (heh) the concepts of dating and relationships, when so much of the world seems to insist that one is an essential prerequisite to the other. I’ve gone on my fair share of dates3Which, as an aside, dating in college vs dating in your early twenties vs dating in your late twenties are so, so different and relationships4All of them, now that I think about it, having started from friendships (lol) and what I’m realising in retrospect is that I cannot stand casual dating. Being attracted to a total stranger is unfathomable to me, and the concept of going on — again, as the paper puts it — “romantic excursions” that are, on some level, explicitly constructed as such, with somebody whom I don’t know enough to even definitively have an opinion about, is often tedious at best.
Or, as one friend put it about another friend of ours, “They need to be friends with somebody first before the thought of even considering them as a romantic prospect occurs to them.” The literature says this is something like being demiromantic. I’ve not delved into the topic enough to have come to any sort of conclusion, personally, but the general sentiment feels deeply relatable to me, haha.
So, all this to say: it’s nice to know that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that there’s nothing clinically abnormal (heh) about my inability to put myself through the whole rigmarole of talking up strangers to find someone I’d like to jump into a long-term relationship with.
3.
I thought I would just be linking to these papers and this would be a short post.
We are all still learning about ourselves every day, I guess. Haha.
