Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

It's ME Awareness Day, and my train is running 39 minutes late last I heard, so I took the opportunity to finally read this piece in a tab I've had open so long I cannot remember where it came from. It's a really incredible read about chronic illness and narratives as necessary for access to care, and what hearing from ill people does to those in a position to offer care.

( long quotes, from a much longer article )

Just found a draft of a post I was working on a while ago, a response to my friend Marcia's review of a movie I hadn't seen (still haven't!), but that's okay because it's not about The Substance as much as it is about bodies and what we embody: race, gender, age.

This film is really about white women’s insecurities and never did I have illusions that I would feel seen and heard. I think it affirmed that I am an object, and that I owe my gender or allegiance to no one; I create myself.

Feeling not female and trying to bend, cut, open and fold this body into female and instead of it being gender affirming, I felt more alienated from female, from woman.

Oof. Yes. So much of femininity is doing little violences to our bodies. I learned the word tribulation because of my grandmother, complaining about the awkwardness of buying clothes or the discomforts of jewelry, I can't now remember which, telling tween or teen me "these are the trials and tribulations we face as women" with a chuckle, but I wasn't chuckling. I didn't know what a tribulation was but it sounded scary. I was not looking forward to a lifetime of those!

I kept waiting for the little violences I did to my body in the name of femininity to pay off, and they never did. Surely this discomfort and pain, actual blood, sweat and tears, had to mean the payoff would be really good right?? And I mostly rejected even high heels and makeup, never mind plastic surgery. Never had to harm my hair and skin with relaxers or skin-lightening creams. So if even I feel such pain, when mine is a small fraction of the pain there is in the demands that femininity puts on Black and Brown people...

Once on Twitter, whilst I was defending Trans folks, a person wanted to misgender me by calling me a little boy. It was a weird sensation to process, someone wants to misgender me by calling me a boy, which is what I thought would make me most comfortable in the end, being boy, that would make life easier, but instead I work to be comfortable in girl.

I was fighting TERFs on twitter way back when they assumed absolutely anybody with pronouns in their profile was trans, so my "she/her" once got someone to tell me I looked like an ugly man and I'd never be a woman. I had never thought I was anything other than cis at the time, but I have held that in my heart for years and now am delighted to be an ugly man who no one would ever believe is a woman.

When I saw the monster, I saw my future without being honest with myself about what beauty really is, what it truly means to de-center the male gaze, to de-center white womanhood whilst being queer, of color and other identity markers; for me, the monster is the culmination of a wasted life...

I do feel like middle age has found me in the last year or so. I'm leaning in to it for the dadcore vibes and grateful that I get to age because to age is to live (I am twice the age my brother ever got to be, so I will never fear growing older). But my age feels so bound up with my gender because when I was in my 20s and first tried to imagine myself as an older person, I imagined a man. I couldn't imagine a woman at all. I never have been able to think of myself growing old as a woman, and I really want to grow old, so that's the thing that finally tipped the scales for me into I must be trans, I better take action accordingly.

I'd rather have had a trans childhood and a trans young adulthood like a lot of people, but what matters much more to me is having a trans middle age and hopefully old age. Maybe my beard will come in gray already, maybe my hair will disappear any moment, I don't care at all (or I don't think I do; maybe I will feel differently when these things happen but neither has so far). A friend of mine once said that second puberty in your 40s disrupts the usual narrative that the changes in your body after you leave your 20s are unwelcome ones. I think there are lots of ways that body changes can be more welcome, but definitely addressing gender dysphoria in middle age is one way to mitigate the "oh my knee hurts all the time now" etc. type of changes to the body.

I'm also struck by someone misgendering Marcia by calling them a little boy specifically; there's some age-related incorrectness in there too (as well as echoing the racism of Black men always being called "boys" by the kind of white people who still want them as slaves); it's setting up a power dynamic often levelled at women (and definitely at people who are incorrectly perceived as women).

I still want for us to want more than to appeal to the gaze. I want all women to want more for themselves beyond ‘beauty’, not because I think anything feminine is bad, but because I want them to consistently examine what they mean when they are reaching for beauty. Who is really defining what you deem beautiful? Who is paving that definition for you? Is it you? Is it white supremacy? Do these things matter? Yes, to a point I think they do. I want us to want more, and to imagine more.

Anyway, their writing and thinking are great; I'm so glad I can now afford to subscribe to their essays and also their DJ sets!

R.I.P. James Harrison, Australian hero, whose blood contained a rare antibody used to create medication to protect babies from a rare blood disorder.

Having the antibody was just luck. What made him a hero was donating plasma every two weeks without missing one appointment for 60+ years.

I've been trying, in my exhaustion, to pick relatively "fluffy" things from my library TBR list.

I've been surprisingly bad at this! I like non-fiction partly because it allows me more measured emotional interactions with my reading, but I've been surprised by the evocative depths of both The History of Magic From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden and The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight.

(The latter of which shouldn't have been quite so surprising, because I knew the story of people's ominous premonitions around the Aberfan disaster (many people died, mostly young children), so of course the book opens with a detailed recounting of the horrible event. But the book was also surprisingly tender towards its main character.)

Mowed the lawn. Overdue - as it always seems to be this summer, I just can't get on top of it when it rains so much. And I'm so tired/burnt out all the time. So it feels good to have done something.

I guess I also did a Tesco order for tomorrow -- we needed more milk for Gary (yes he's got his own milk, there are five kinds of milk in this house for the three humans and one dog in it) and peanut butter and a few other things, but it hadn't been that long since our last grocery order so I also flung some fun stuff in the virtual basket too, like ice cream now that I can believe that summer weather might come back.

I read a third of How Infrastructure Works, a book I originally put on my library hold list intending to see if it'd make a good present for D, my beloved infrastructure nerd. When I told him I'd done this, probably six months ago, he said he'd considered buying it for me as well. Aww. It does seem to be a good book!

And I did a lot of Gary management (this is the reason I stayed home and am not camping this weekend). He's had a sad day. He woke us both up at like three in the morning, and that takes some doing once MB has taken off her hearing aid! I was already with him and had turned the light on and had done the things that usually snap him out of his barking fits -- sometimes he's explicitly asking for help, the rest of the time whatever he's angry/scared about he can be distracted from by the presence of his humans.

I felt very helpless and disoriented when me going to him and talking to him and all the usual stuff didn't work. I'm kinda the nuclear option when it comes to the dog; if I can't soothe him/pick him up/etc, it's likely that no one can. So on these rare occasions where I can't do anything for him, it feels not just heartbreaking but a little eerie, like having a familiar path suddenly disappear and leave me stranded in lonely darkness. And this feeling is not made worse by the blood-sugar-crash hours of the night...

I very glad I didn't leave MB to deal with Gary this weekend on her own. He's behaved but he's still a lot of work right now, through no fault of his own.

Holy shit I actually got to see an aurora last night!

diffrentcolours drove us (and friends!) out to the middle of nowhere and I got out of the car thinking I wonder what I'll see....if anything and it was actually amazing. I am surprised I didn't cry.

What we saw didn't look like most of the photos I've seen: I was expecting green or purple sheets coming up from the horizon and what we saw was a band stretching l across the sky, with twisty dancing shapes almost straight up over our heads, like the jewel in a ring.

The shapes changed more quickly than I expected! What first looked like a pinch in a fabric seam was soon the Firebird logo, then something I first called a comet but quickly decided was a jellyfish... It was like looking at clouds and finding patterns in them, only better and more eerie.

One of the first shapes I saw was a bat. So that was good.

I have only these words, no photos: my phone camera just showed a black square when I pointed it at the sky. I know a lot of people had better results with their phone cameras than their eyes but this was maybe the first time my camera couldn't see a lot better than I can!

I was in bed at 1.59am, which isn't quite unprecedented for me but it is about five hours later than I've been going to bed lately. As a chronic insomniac specializing in sleep-maintenance insomnia, I'm used to waking up soon after that! I wouldn't care but I've signed up for my gym class tomorrow morning. But I thought that if in the morning I had to sleepily text the trainer and explain that I couldn't make it because I was up half the night looking at aurora, they'd probably be nice about it.

I didn't have to do that though. Despite waking up about eight minutes before I would ideally be ready to go, and D being mostly-asleep still, we did make it.

We got home, I had a shower, had lunch, then I wanted to mow the lawn because again it desperately needed it and it hasn't even been raining the last few days. It's properly warm today though; I caught the sun a little and I was so sweaty afterward that I'd already undone all the good work that the shower had accomplished.

But I had nice iced tea that I'd finally remembered to make yesterday. Green tea with spearmint, it's so tasty and refreshing.

It ended up being a busy day. The other two went to B&M while I dozed on the sofa, and then D and I went for a bike ride just in time to miss the official Cycle Fest, but there was still loud music and nice weather and food and drinks and lots of people, lots of little kids and dogs to smile at.

It's a short bike ride but on top of gym and lawn mowing which were both hard on my ankle, it was all the biking I'd be happy about doing anyway. I'm delighted at how much I've been able to do today though.

No Eurovision in this household tonight, which feels weird but I feel sick at the thought of pretending everything's okay in Gaza when it's not. So instead I finished a library book this evening (The Divorce Colony) and I think it's been months since I could say that!

The other day I was interested to read that, at least in the U.S., self-checkout machines may actually get less common in stores.

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth...

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

I am glad to hear that a mix of human and machines is likely to remain available at checkout because I know some of the customers who not only don't hate it but prefer it: Andrew was always delighted when he could get through a trip to Asda without having to interact with another person at all. The touchscreens and practically-hidden bar code scanners on those self-checkout machines mean I avoid them whenever possible, but the best accessibility comes from having options, because whatever's a nightmare for one person is going to be essential for another.

Almost as soon as I'd read this, I was reading takes on how this phenomenon could apply in other areas. Of course I was thinking about accessibility; people who work in tech were thinking about tech.

Some of those takes overlap; like number one here is "The user is always inexperienced." People who just buy groceries have never scanned groceries as much as someone who's done that job. Also, independence is a myth. They word it differently; this is how I am wording it because some disabled people and groups speaking for them emphasize "independence" and it drives me up a wall, because none of us are independent.

If you scan an item twice, select the wrong payment method, accidentally get charged for a bag when you brought your own, forget to scan your discount card at the right time, or make any other trivial mistake, you are now at the mercy of someone else. When a problem does occur, a staff member has to notice it, come to your aid, figure out what happened, and correct it. You were promised self-service when, in fact, you are so disempowered that you can't troubleshoot or correct a single thing that might go wrong.

This makes me think about the campaigning against closing almost all the train station ticket offices in England. Apart from all the ways those machines are inaccessible, machines contribute to the unnecessary expense of train fares, already a particularly complex racket that is expensive at the best of times and ensures people pay too much when they buy the tickets themselves. You have to be an expert to understand how to buy appropriate, never mind cheapest, fares, sometimes even making an journey regularly doesn't leave people confident in their ability to get the best price and not get treated like an illegal immigrant by the train guards.

The particular disempowerment of waiting for someone who looks sixteen to determine that I'm old enough to buy ibuprofen is something that occurred to me recently. The need for humans to intervene every time the machine thinks you've scanned an item twice when you haven't, doesn't think you've put it in the bagging area when you have, and vice versa means the few staff who are employed expect to be called over for false positives as much as any actual needs. I've been age-verified by people who didn't even seem to glance at me. Trying to split the checkout tasks into those that can be done by shoppers and those that must be done by staff hasn't really proven to be very effective or fun for either group, in tasks that mostly weren't all that fun to begin with at least there's a smooth process when the person who's processing the rest of my groceries is also making one extra gesture when they get to the beer.

I have no particular connection with Oakland, so it's been a little surprising how emotional I've gotten over the prospect of them losing their baseball team to greed and selfishness. (Even as I appreciate they got their baseball team due to owners' greed and selfishness in the first place! Minnesota only has a baseball team because it used to be owned by a big racist who didn't like playing in our nation's capital because he was so racist! (he literally said “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota. It was when I found out you only had 15,000 Blacks here”) but I didn't know that until a couple years ago, long after I was a fan of the team and so I feel bad for Oakland fans; there is no ethical consumption under MLB.)

But I read a Joe Sheehan piece today that explains it so well even friends who don't care about baseball can appreciate this. He contrasts the A's John Fisher with Peter Seidler, who owned the San Diego Padres, recently died, and has had warm things said about him in all quarters.

The biggest accomplishment of John Fisher’s life was the moment of his birth, to the co-founders of The Gap. He went to Phillips Exeter and Princeton and Stanford, and then became president of a family investment company. He bought a piece of the Giants with family money, and he later bought the A’s alongside Lew Wolff. The next dime he earns that isn’t in some way related to his surname will be his first. Gaining sole ownership of the A’s in 2016, Fisher proceeded to run the team down in an effort to extort a publicly-funded mallpark and real-estate boondoggle from Oakland. Having only gotten commitments for $425 million in funding and $500 million in reimbursements to that end, Fisher worked out a deal for less than half of that in Nevada. Thank goodness for rich parents.

It’s been a lot worse for me than for you.

The thing about great wealth is that it allows you to define your own life. The destitute, the poor, the great mass in the middle, even people of moderate or considerable success are all, to one degree or another, dependent upon others. I’ve made a nice little career, and the list people to whom I’m indebted runs deep into three figures. I’ve been knocked around by industry trends and bad luck and outright malice. I have not had complete control, and I doubt very many of you reading this have, either.

The wealthy, though, the .01%, they can chart their path as they wish, their deep reserves serving as both a battering ram to success and a cushion against failure. With the sort of wealth people like Seidler and Fisher are born into, you can do anything you want with your life, and in doing so, you can determine how people regard you. The people who own baseball teams are all in this group, and for any one of them to say to a fan “It’s been a lot worse for me than for you” isn’t just insulting, it’s barely human.

Peter Seidler and John Fisher were both born on third base. One decided to steal home, and the other decided to just steal.

And it turns out that even this vote -- as depressing as it is inevitable, from 29 rich guys/conglomerates to let one of their own make even more money -- doesn't make the team moving to Las Vegas a done deal. The fact that two of the three hurdles to it happening are thanks to a group called Schools Not Stadiums is indicative of which of those things I think tax money should pay for. Here's hoping.

In the last couple of years I've found myself gradually collecting a lot of blogs newsletters by straight-ish USian women, somehow interested in this culture that's so familiar to me (I love Lyz Lenz's writing for that particularly, like this thing I finally read yesterday) at precisely the time that it's increasingly receding into the distance.

Today I read about the portal, “the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in.” It appears to be particularly hegemonic USian women, I hasten to add, and as always I found myself wondering how this applies to more marginalized groups, including ones I'm in.

The rest of Petersen's piece consists of short interviews with a number of people on the subject and I'm particularly interested in the first one.

In her work, Byock describes a broad “typology” for young people in our societal moment: there are “those who are more or less comfortable pursuing the social expectations for them, and those who are questioning too much or suffering too much to do so.” The first group she calls Stability Types; the second, Meaning Types.

It goes on:

within her work, she sees [the "midlife passage"] as the moment when “stability types, realizing they’ve climbed to the top of the ladder, see that they want more out of life. And so they search for meaning. The portal might be seen as the work of people who have participated in everything society expected of them on one level or another, and are finding themselves wanting more out of life — and want to find more purpose in life as change makers.”

Which is fine. But, as a very obvious "Meaning Type" in this framework, I immediately noticed that there was no equivalent midlife journey described here for us. I wonder if it works the other way too.

I think it always has for me: I went from "suffering too much" to "questioning too much" (while still suffering! questioning was an addition rather than a replacement!) and have spent my late 30s and now early 40s chasing stability: a bachelor's degree, a divorce and consequently a vastly improved living situation, my first white-collar 9-to-5 job... even, for all it can be destabilizing (what name will I be called at the hospital?), gender transition is in the longer term stabilizing for me too.

Gender transition (social, medical, administrative, to any extent someone pursues it) actually feels like a pretty good example of how seeking stability can be as much of an upheaval, a "portal," for us Meaning Types as seeking meaning can be for the Stability Types.

Big immigrant moods here:

The book has me thinking about what it means to have a history somewhere, not just to be known by the people around you, but to know that they know your parents and grandparents too. To have a relationship with a place that goes back not years or decades but generations. When I take my kids to the playground, we are surrounded by people who, like me, have followed various currents of migration, people who are far away from the places or cultures that birthed them. One dad is Turkish, his wife is Ukrainian. They moved here to escape the war and now they worry constantly about her family. Their son, who is two, cycles through three or four languages in a single sentence. Another dad is from Nigeria; he has twins the same age as mine and he told me, laughing, that their last flight home was so miserable they’ve decided not to go again for at least a few years. (I so get this laugh, and also the heartache behind it.)

The flight can be so miserable for me on my own. I remember once watching a young woman try to wrangle a toddler on a flight and I thought If I had kids that'd be me. Ugh. And as sad as I am that my parents aren't grandparents because they'd be excellent at it, I also realized that they'd see the babies for two weeks a year just like they saw me two weeks a year, and it would feel like so much to me and hardly anything to them. I couldn't imagine getting to decide not to make that trip for a few more years because the flight had been so miserable; I'd never hear the end of it.

I never planned to stay in Appalachia. When I was seventeen, I worked as a cashier at the local K-Mart and customers would come through my line with their gallon of milk and their bag of potting soil and their box of ammunition and their Martha Stewart brand bed sheets and I’d ask how their day was going and they’d look at me and say, “Now, where are you from?” I was so pleased by this question. “Here,” I would answer, and smile at their surprise. I learned early to tone down my accent. Because even in our very homogenous part of the world, I knew that how I spoke conveyed something about who I was—or who I wanted to be. And I wanted a life that was bigger than Appalachia.

I once got accused of being from Wisconsin when I was in college -- a small school in western Minnesota, it was almost all Minnesotans: either people from within a hundred-mile radius of it, or people from the Twin Cities (my favorites of whom hated that the rest of us called it all "the Cities" and really wanted us to care whether they were from Plymouth or Wayzata or whatever, good luck with that!) -- because I'd taught myself to say "soda" instead of "pop." I too wanted to run from how my speaking portrayed me. Joke's on me: now it hurts when people don't believe I'm from there, I can't do the accent well enough even if I try! Now I know the source of linguistic discrimination isn't inherent in us but is socially determined like so many other things, I am fierce in my speech and longing for my native accent never goes away entirely. But when I was a teenager, it was also for me a sign that I had my sights on things I thought "bigger" and "better."

What I’ve been feeling lately is not quite homesickness but it is a kind of loneliness, a kind of longing. Or maybe it is a very specific version of homesickness. The version where, even though you really like your life, you sometimes long for a part of yourself that is no longer accessible, that is, in fact, invisible to everyone around you.

My brother is invisible to everyone around me. I think a lot about that specific version of homesickness...just sickness, maybe. The kind of farm I grew up on is invisible to everyone around me. My upbringing did not share the cultural references of cartoons or toys. School was completely different -- and little or nothing like the movies and TV shows have told British people to expect school to be like in America.

Yet they elide it all together, so the fact that I'm from the rural Midwest doesn't matter, it's just "America." Someone was once disappointed that I don't say "sneakers" and she would've been even less happy if she'd known that I never did: I grew up calling them tennis shoes or tennies. And every time someone Britsplains "Now, we call this jam but you call it jelly," I want to shove the jam jar up their butt. Because I have always called that jam, I did grow up calling it jam, people in the Midwest say jam! Those making it at home might distinguish between jam, jelly, preserves, and all that, but the average person just calls it all jam same as they do here.

I don't really have a point to end on here, I just wanted to share this link and how it resonated with me.