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(no subject)
I move through the world with two basic philosophies: a dim view of human nature and a belief that the universe loves me and wants me to be happy.
(no subject)
Recently
Went to a few yard sales (and the Kinky Tea and Tag Sale yesterday, where I spent most of my time socializing, and Boomerangs today, where I found a fantastic knife block for $2, which has made Ellie pretty happy). It turns out that yard sales make an effective carrot for getting me up relatively early on the weekends, and also getting me out of the house. Unfortunately, I walked 3.7 miles yesterday and 1.9 miles today, wearing flip flops for the first time since last year. Oops.Links
( science, kink and fanfic, Dreamwidth stuff, mental illness )Entry tags:
Body Beautiful
How the Fat Acceptance Movement Taught Me to Love My Body, Even Though I'm Probably Not Quite the Target Audience
( Various body and weight talk including actual numbers, near-strangers armchair-diagnosing people with eating disorders. Also some mentions of sexual violence. Also, I ramble and digress. )In conclusion: people who love their bodies, people who are working to love their bodies, and people who are working against the kinds of crap that make people hate their bodies: ♥
I was originally planning to type this up for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, but today seemed like the right day. I do hope to get some other thinky thoughts out there during 3WFDw.
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Much of this essay annoys me, but I want to reproduce this quote:
( links and stuff )
Now to get ready for my interview. It's going to be great but I am still super-nervous, of course.
But, in the digital world, you get to decide exactly who to be, where to go, and how to behave. This can be problematic if you try to create an entirely new persona (it’s a dishonest and unsustainable representation of yourself), but when wielded skillfully, it can propel the real you to new heights. Rather than create a whole new you, create the best you. Choose the traits you like about yourself, and exemplify them online. Let the less attractive qualities fall by the wayside. Place yourself in a digital environment that will allow you to flourish.This is actually something I did in my offline life, parallel to beginning and sustaining my online life. I've referred to the name 'Sofia Blackthorne' (which I use in any context where my legal name is not required and where explaining myself won't be absurd) as an aspirational identity, by which I mean: I had an idea of who my ideal Me was, and I continued to develop that ideal self, and I named it so I'd have easier access to it all.
When I focus on creating an improved digital version of me, I find those qualities actually start to carry over into my physical self.
( links and stuff )
Now to get ready for my interview. It's going to be great but I am still super-nervous, of course.
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Lazy Femme
As mentioned in this earlier post of mine:
I want to write about "lazy femme," which is what I call my gender presentation. In short: I like things like skirts and makeup, but I don't generally bother with these more effortful bits of gendered plumage.
I like femininity. I like pink and glitter and high heels and lace and whatever. That kind of stuff is fun to play with; I'm also attracted to femininity in other people.
( I am not, however, very good at doing femininity. )To sum up: I guess I'm kinda sorta femme? Why am I not more femme? Because it's haaaaaaard. Therefore: lazy femme. The end.*
* This is a really sketchy and disjointed post; there may be more later. For now, it is done, but please feel welcome to ask for any clarifications and expansions in the comments.
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Note to Mom: this icon is a dreamsheep.
Note to other users: you can find lots of dreamsheep icons at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
dreamsheep.
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise would like to know how we use the update page.
This lolcat is relevant to knitters, particularly knitters with cats.
Odd thing I have been remembering off and on: last week, I had to call my credit card issuer because my card got demagnetized. While on the phone with Super Helpful Guy, I got an accidental 'sir.' ( cis privilege is never having to worry about other people messing up your pronouns and titles, getting to lol when they do, and not having to worry about what might have led to mis-gendering or what might happen next )
So, random fuckup. I keep wandering back to it, sometimes to lol and sometimes to poke at how unimaginably sucky it would have been for someone without the privilege of laughing it off.
dreamsheep.denise would like to know how we use the update page.This lolcat is relevant to knitters, particularly knitters with cats.
Odd thing I have been remembering off and on: last week, I had to call my credit card issuer because my card got demagnetized. While on the phone with Super Helpful Guy, I got an accidental 'sir.' ( cis privilege is never having to worry about other people messing up your pronouns and titles, getting to lol when they do, and not having to worry about what might have led to mis-gendering or what might happen next )
So, random fuckup. I keep wandering back to it, sometimes to lol and sometimes to poke at how unimaginably sucky it would have been for someone without the privilege of laughing it off.
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Essays on Bandomgate.
I linked to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
impertinence's essay this morning, but it's worth linking to again.
***
kalpurna has a whole lot of awesome things to say. Here, let me quote extensively:
***
ETA: I also have to include this essay in list format bybelladonnalin.
***
I'm seriously considering writing a semi-academic paper or something on these bands and how they're challenging heteronormativity and stuff. I wish I was taking "Gender and Society in Modern America" instead of "Gender and Society in Modern Europe" because I could write it for class. But I'll pitch the idea to Professor Frader after class on Monday and see what she thinks. It'll probably be short and not-academic enough that I'll just stick it on my lj when I'm done, but whatever.
impertinence's essay this morning, but it's worth linking to again.The world is changing; attitudes towards gay people are changing. I want to make it very clear that, regardless of what you think about the band members' sexualities, they helped to change things within their demographic. In the isolated environment of adolescence, they sparked discussion and controversy. I watched it happen.
And that kind of talk is worth a hell of a lot.
***
kalpurna has a whole lot of awesome things to say. Here, let me quote extensively:When members of a dominant culture appropriate aspects of an oppressed culture for entertainment, they characteristically do two things: first, they take stereotypical characteristics and exaggerate them for comedic effect, for people to laugh at, and secondly, they distance themselves personally from identifying with the group in question. They get the audience laughing at the characters, while making sure that offstage, they are not subjected to any of the hate or bigotry that goes along with that. They say "this is entertaining" and "this is not me" with the same breath. That is what blackface entails, and that is, to me, the most hateful thing about it.
When FOB and MCR began their flirtations with gender and sexuality, they were literally doing the exact opposite of what I have described above. They were deliberately taking on the degradation, the hatred, the inflammatory remarks. And they didn't use stereotypes to do so, they used behavior. They encouraged their audience to cheer for men physically expressing affection and sexual interest in each other – not for lisps and rainbow tuxedos.
...
It may well be the case that right now, the mainstream opinion among twelve-year-old girls is that boys kissing is hot. This was categorically not the case ten years ago. If there is a market for stagegay, it is not one that these bands could possibly have been expecting to tap into when they started out. Personally? I think that the fact that middle schoolers will look at a picture of two boys kissing and say "hot!" instead of "eww!" is fucking amazing. That is awesome. And MCR and FOB didn't come around to take advantage of that – they created that.
... Consistently, over and over again, My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy have responded to "fags!" with "hell yeah, motherfucker, now deal with it." They don't say, "No, but we're really straight!"
...
All of this means that no matter what's going on in their personal lives – no matter who they're sleeping with, or what their sexual identity may be – the members of these two bands have chosen to say, "Whether or not I'm gay, I want you to treat me like I am, and I'm going to push you to wonder if I am, and I'm not going to back away from that if I get shit for it. Queer people are my people." Because these bands exist, you can be a 14 year old gay kid growing up in some small town, and you can go to your first concert and watch your idols make out on stage while a thousand people cheer, and then one of them picks up the microphone and says, this is a song for anyone who has ever felt alone.
***
ETA: I also have to include this essay in list format by
belladonnalin.***
I'm seriously considering writing a semi-academic paper or something on these bands and how they're challenging heteronormativity and stuff. I wish I was taking "Gender and Society in Modern America" instead of "Gender and Society in Modern Europe" because I could write it for class. But I'll pitch the idea to Professor Frader after class on Monday and see what she thinks. It'll probably be short and not-academic enough that I'll just stick it on my lj when I'm done, but whatever.
Yeah, I'm in bandom. I love these bands. I love this music. I don't care if you're not into it. But I do care if you rain on my parade about it. Don't call me stupid or otherwise insult me just because my squee is different from yours.
Differing musical tastes do not need to end friendships. But if you really can't stand my music and you can't stop yourself from insulting me and mine, please defriend me, right the fuck now. Seriously, just GTFO.
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Music and me (an essay, I guess)
I remember it as through a window fogged over: newly sixteen and standing in the tool shed behind a friend's boyfriend's house, listening to their band. And in an indoor soccer arena, once, and several times in some old building whose original purpose I could never figure out (I only saw it after dark), which had no stage, just a patch of astroturf.
I perched in the back seat of her car, her hand out the windows holding a cigarette, a different punk cd in rotation every time we felt like it. I was deliriously happy that such awesome people thought little ol' me was cool enough to be included, and sometimes I think I might have been in love with all three of them.
Then they broke up (my friend and her boyfriend, and also the band), and I went to another school, and that was the end of that part of my life.
***
Then, there were the Libertines, less than six months later. I owe them a lot. I remember, fuzzily because the memory can block out acute misery as well as physical agony, being seventeen and sitting behind my boyfriend in math class, bored and depressed as fuck, taking shitty notes in black ballpoint. And eventually, I'd give up on trig because my mind was a wreck, and I'd start writing on my left hand and forearm. Lyrics, sometimes, and always always always libertine like a tattoo.
For six of the worst months of my life, they were everything to me, and I'm lucky to have had them. Not that they saved me from suicide, exactly, because I'm pretty sure I'm 100% incapable of killing myself no matter how much I want to. But they gave me enough bright moments during that time that I was more-or-less okay with waking up alive every morning. They got into me heart and soul, and I've never regretted it. (Got my sanity back on a temporary basis, after all, and a few half-decent poems too.)
***
And no matter how intense the high of my time being "with the band" nor the paradoxical low at a time when everything in my life should have been great, I'm kind of thankful that I can just sit back and listen, and be a devoted fan if I want, without needing it so badly.
Because as much as I love music, I love my independence a little more.
I perched in the back seat of her car, her hand out the windows holding a cigarette, a different punk cd in rotation every time we felt like it. I was deliriously happy that such awesome people thought little ol' me was cool enough to be included, and sometimes I think I might have been in love with all three of them.
Then they broke up (my friend and her boyfriend, and also the band), and I went to another school, and that was the end of that part of my life.
Then, there were the Libertines, less than six months later. I owe them a lot. I remember, fuzzily because the memory can block out acute misery as well as physical agony, being seventeen and sitting behind my boyfriend in math class, bored and depressed as fuck, taking shitty notes in black ballpoint. And eventually, I'd give up on trig because my mind was a wreck, and I'd start writing on my left hand and forearm. Lyrics, sometimes, and always always always libertine like a tattoo.
For six of the worst months of my life, they were everything to me, and I'm lucky to have had them. Not that they saved me from suicide, exactly, because I'm pretty sure I'm 100% incapable of killing myself no matter how much I want to. But they gave me enough bright moments during that time that I was more-or-less okay with waking up alive every morning. They got into me heart and soul, and I've never regretted it. (Got my sanity back on a temporary basis, after all, and a few half-decent poems too.)
And no matter how intense the high of my time being "with the band" nor the paradoxical low at a time when everything in my life should have been great, I'm kind of thankful that I can just sit back and listen, and be a devoted fan if I want, without needing it so badly.
Because as much as I love music, I love my independence a little more.