labingi

I think I saved the bird. In fairness, I think I'm the one who got it in trouble too. This afternoon, I went out into my yard and found a little wren (?) madly treading water in the bird bath. (I think the bowl I appropriated for a bird bath was too steep for it to get out.) I scooped it out with a trowel and set it down in the bushes. The poor little guy or girl was panting and shivering, and I was 90% certain it would die. I left it there, not having much else I could do. I came out a couple of hours to later expecting to find a dead bird, and it was gone. No sign of blood, feathers, or struggle, so I'm cautiously optimistic it rested up and flew off. I'd like to think that's today's happy story. I also put a stick in the bird bath so there's some means of escape.

Don't have much to say about the 4th, except I am grateful for free speech. Yes, the concept is getting a lot of abuse in the US right now, but I'm still grateful for it and all the related freedoms (religion, press--basically the whole First Amendment).

Since this account is connected to my "labingi" email, I wanted to post here to let you all know that the "labingi" email has been hacked and is sending out spam/possible phishing. If it looks like it's not from me, assume it's not from me. (You can PM me here if you need clarification.) I'm working with my ISP to resolve this. Thanks.

In my researches for my book on relationship cutoff, I came across two interesting and uplifting articles today:

Jaron Lanier suggests that social media be reformed by orienting it around small groups. Yes, please! Let's at least try it!

Greater Good has a great article on what peaceful, non-violent people and societies have in common.

(What has this to do with cutoff, you ask? I'm in the book's later sections on a larger culture of disconnectedness and how to address it.)

Wondering if anyone can help with this question: I was trying to find the origins of the saying, "Where there's hysteria, there's history," i.e. if someone has an outsized reaction to something, it's probably due to prior issues being triggered. I feel like this is such a common saying it's getting into the realm of tired cliché, but when I tried to find its origins, I went down a rabbit hole of emptiness.

All of Google produced only three exact-word hits, all random blog entries just using the phrase.

Academic Search Complete produced nothing.

My school's library catalog produced nothing.

The Gale reference library and power search produced nothing.

Does anybody know about the origins of this phrase or have an idea for how to track it down? Thanks!

My mother recently unearthed a short (few pages) memoir written by my father's mother, Gertrude, about her teenage years and early adulthood, c. World War I through 1920. In addition to being of family interest, it's quite a window into an experience of life in the US a hundred years ago.

For example, my grandmother tells an anecdote from her days as a young nurse about being taken to task by her superintendent, at her sister's "instruction," for dating a Greek! She writes, "I was called into the Supt. office and given a lecture on going with a Greek. One statement she made I'll never forget. Quote – 'some Greeks are heap better than some white men.' I came away thinking What is a Greek?" She concludes this reflection, "It's a wonder they didn't disapprove of intermarriage with Northern Europeans. To each their own inherited country. 'I, a Swede.'" We may feel like our society stubbornly resists evolution, but the distance here between our culture and this truly astounds me:

1) That her sister tells her boss to tell her who to date.
2) That her boss tells her who to date.
3) What a wonderful example of a social construction of race. We are not actually that far away from the days when Greeks were not white, as well as the days when Northwestern European Americans still held tight to their affiliations with their country of origin. (My grandmother's parents were born in Sweden.)

She also illustrates the vast gulf daily technology between then and now. She explains with some pride that in her youth in Utah, "My father had electric lights, telephone, bathroom, and an electric washing machine. This he invented by putting a large belt around the wheel of a hand-worked washer, connecting this to a motor under the washer, using a cord to attach to an electric outlet. We burned coal in the winter, but had a gas stove for cooking in the summer. And he had a car. This was 1913." However, she remarks that when she went to live with her sister in Idaho, they had no electricity or indoor bathroom. Of this hardworking farm lifestyle, she says, "I wouldn't have missed it ever. But neither would I go back to it if I could. Two and half years were quite enough."

My grandmother was always a great lover of animals and her closeness to them, both emotionally and in daily life, is evident here. She talks of riding her horse, being genuinely frightened by the howl of coyotes (which she spells "cayote") and generally enjoying the out of doors. (Trigger warning for non-graphic animal cruelty-->) She closes with a childhood recollection of watching a rabbit cull in performed by local ranchers and being horrified by the unnecessary cruelty of their assaults. She states she understood rabbits ate the ranchers' crops and were an economic problem, but she did not understand why the ranchers would not shoot them humanely. Apparently, they avoided guns in favor of more grisly methods. She declares she will never write of that incident again and has no wish to ever revisit it, though my mother recalls that she did tell her about it. This passage, which is described more graphically than I have here is upsetting. I suppose, though, it is a sign of progress that for all our continued plunge toward terracide, this kind of wanton cruelty seems rare today. At least, if there is a cull, my sense is that animals are usually shot fairly humanely, so again we have signs of some progress.

Fun illustration of cat reasoning today: my daughter stuck a gummy worm on our first floor ceiling, which was very exciting to Hudson. However, not registering the difference between first and second floor ceilings, he immediately dashed upstairs and began staring with all his eyes at the frustratingly empty second floor ceiling. I know how he feels though. It's exactly the way I feel in the Portland State parking garage: lost in an Escher painting.

Good, upbeat video on the need for economic degrowth and bird's eye view of how it might work:

Watch on YouTube

So our neighbors' cat adopted us about a month ago. The neighbors said she was afraid of their new dog, and she started hanging out in our yard basically all the time. After some emailing with the neighbors, which suggested they weren't going to do anything, we pretty much accepted she'd be our yard cat for the foreseeable future. I have never known such an affectionate cat! Every time I stepped outside, she would come up to cuddle. She'd snuggle in my lap and purr, and even follow me on walks down our (very low traffic) dead-end street.

Then, night before last, the neighbors came unannounced and got her. We didn't realize this till they emailed later. They had previously mentioned something about taking her back to the farm she's originally from, so maybe they did that. Anyway, I really miss her! I got very attached to her. It almost feels like having a pet suddenly die. Our yard is so empty now.

Happy Downfall of Sauron Day, belated! I did actually keep the day, but didn't have time (forgot) to do a post about it. (In general, I've been backing way off posting during COVID. I like DW best of all my internet presence, but the way the internet is structured today, it feels more like a black hole of time suck than real communication. Good article on it in The Atlantic. Reaffirmed my sense that, yes, the LJ days were the last hurrah of healthy internet community and the age of Tumblr, "like" buttons, "share" buttons, and social media destroyed it. Anyway...)

March 25 was my last day of spring break in California. I missed last March due to COVID, so it had been two years since I'd seen it in spring--longest gap in my life. My main hobbit-inspired adventure was a great trek of trespassing across the neighbors property to check the fire damage and recovery. It was the first time since I was ten that I walked down the neighbors' private road, quite prepared to be stopped for trespassing, but nobody stopped me. I think all three houses on the road are still under reconstruction, so people aren't really much around. Still, I'm not a bold trespasser, so it was very Tookish for me. It was my adventure, and that's about as much as I can tie it into Middle-earth.

Going back there is, frankly, traumatizing (in a mild way, and, yes, there is such a thing as mild trauma activation). I think I have impressionistically told people in the past we may have lost 40% of our trees. On the south-facing hillsides, it's more like 90%. Almost the whole south-facing hill looking down into the Napa Valley (our property and the neighbors') is completely denuded. It is a tree graveyard with black sticks standing up in the grass like headstones.

The manzanitas are coming back on one neighbor's land, which is nice to see. Everywhere else, they are still all gone. No new seedlings. Next to no oak seedlings. Every madrone I took note of has died (though madrone seedlings are springing up very fast). Drus is mostly dead now. Of its broccoli-looking live oak remains, half is reduced to bleached bones. Maxima is not quite as dead yet but plainly dying. There is not an inch of his trunk that is not rotting, the bark just peeling away.

Since the fire, of the trees immediately around our house, we have lost Senex, Frater, Phagos, the swing tree, the tree by the library, the tree by the circle bench, two trees by the carport, one of the hammock trees, and all but one of about ten planted Christmas trees. And we will soon lose Drus and Maxima. Of the living trees on the property in general, about a fourth are so damaged it's very hard to tell if they'll ultimately make it. The rest that are alive look fairly well recovered.

The squirrels are all gone. (We used to have three or four squirrels running around in Maxima at one time.) The deer seems to be flourishing. I saw the lovely sight of four or five racing breakneck across a hill opposite me. I saw one butterfly, other than the small white cabbage butterflies. A number of flower species were blooming but not profusely. The grass is pretty but rather sparse; you can tell it's been a dry year. The flowers that used to boom around May are now blooming at the end of March (ex. the blue-eyed grass, the Brodiaea). There were some buttercups and wild iris in the usual places. The hounds tongues were doing rather well, just going to seed.

I had thought I was noticing so many acorn woodpeckers in Glen Ellen because I'm not used to seeing many in Oregon, but I've come to realize they're flourishing because of all the dead wood. They have many acorns stuffed in Maxima, for example.

And that was my adventure.

It amazes me how relieved I feel after Biden's inauguration.

The past four years I have devoted so much work to dissociating my own sense of wellness from the craziness going on in my country's national politics. In fact, I think this has been one piece of the larger work of dissociating my wellness from external signals in general. It's part of the work I've had to perform in managing the trauma of being cut-off without any resolution to the cut-off, to feel decent in myself despite the external signals that I'm horrible, unforgiveable.

Don't seek external validation, my therapist said several months ago.

And I thought I had gotten fairly good at it. Yes, Trump got to me. Yes, I was afraid. But I wasn't in terror or daily distress. I was as prepared as I could be for the chips to fall: for the country to fall into civil war, etc.

And so it amazes me how relieved I feel, how suddenly and profoundly it shifts all my feelings about my world just to see a president do normal president things: fill cabinet positions, rejoin the Paris Accord, have a competent press secretary, communicate with the press. Just to see politicians do normal, decent politician things, like Pence showing up at Biden's inauguration and getting his little trumpety fanfare like everybody else, because there is such a thing as decorum.

Yes, what people do around us does matter. Leadership matters. Our treatment of each other matters. Having an even somewhat working social contract matters. For all my psychological attempts to learn self-sufficiency, I am still deeply enmeshed in social need. So are most of us. That's human.

Today, I feel astoundingly relieved, probably more than any day of my life.

It's the end of week 1 of the teaching term, and I am so ungodly exhausted, despite a fairly light week comparatively, that I wonder if I'm having a mild "trauma" response from fall term. I don't want to overuse the word "trauma," hence the quotes. Fall term was not really traumatic. But it was stressful and far too busy, basically seven days/week of work for twelve or so weeks. And I think I may just be having residual fear of going back. Like I just intrinsically need a longer break (like 6 months would be ideal).

Every day this week, I've had a headache that has gone away in the afternoon after my Zoom meetings and main teaching tasks, but is generally replaced by exhaustion. Hopefully, I'll get into the swing and stop scaring myself before the fact.

From

sallymn

A meme (in the old-fashioned sense)!

1. What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?

A toss up probably between the vibrant colors of the ocean as seen from the cliffs out at Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino County, California, and the little knoll out by our oak tree Senex when Senex was alive. One is still there, one gone. I look forward to returning to Russian Gulch.

2. What is your greatest dream in life?

This varies by mood and perspective, I’m sure, but right now it’s to see the world really embrace degrowth economics and to be able to be a meaningful participant in that.

3. What is the best book you have ever read?  I’m just going to say it: Mirage of Blaze.

(Okay, it’s multiple books, but it’s one series.) It is deeply flawed and often badly written, but when it is not…

4. What is your most cherished childhood memory?

I don’t really have just one, but one that stands out to me is in 8th grade when I had to perform a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest for my drama class, and I was worried the night before because I kept cracking up at the way my performance partner said, “The Brighton Line,” and I thought I would make a fool of myself in class. So my dad stayed up till like 11:30 p.m. with me, saying “The Brighton Line,” in every funny voice he could think of until I was too exhausted to laugh anymore. (He was an actor in college, so he had a lot of voices.) I remember feeling very loved by the attention he put into that endeavor. (I did crack a smile in the actual performance, but I did not burst out laughing.)

5. What is your best character trait or strength?

This is the hard one. Probably hope.

I had a dream about Donald Trump last night, and the weird thing was in my dream I wasn't really angry at him. I still disapproved of him, but emotionally I felt fairly neutral. In real life, I have noticed, too, that I've been less angry at Trump in recent weeks--not less disapproving; he continues to accelerate toward terrifying dictator, but less angry.

I put this down to my fledgling Buddhist practice, which I've been acting practicing for about four (?) months now. It really has made a marked change in my levels of anger. And it is very much a relief.

I am reminded slantwise of a friend who is a trans woman remarking that when she started female hormones, it felt like the first time in her life she could actually relax, that there wasn't some driving compulsion in the background always saying, "Go, go, go!" Myself, I have always had a female hormone mix, but it is a relief to be able to step, even sometimes, off the speeding locomotive of continual rage.

Happy Downfall of Sauron Day! Remember to think before you shoot—no, that's a different fictional holiday. Coronavirus has cancelled my annual March 25th bask in the California spring, so I thought I'd celebrate with a substantial essay online instead. This is also a red-letter year in the LotR-verse in my mind: the 40th anniversary of the War of the Ring. (I've been counting this in real years since approximately high school, which, no, was not 40 years ago. My imagination had already gotten about 15 years past the war.) Finally, being back in therapy, I have been grappling with Issues, and I'm going to use LotR to talk about them, sans personal details.

With Issues in mind, I want to talk about Frodo and the Ring and the nature of evil. This train of thought arises out of discussion with my therapist over my need to develop a more stable sense of self-identity, particularly surrounding my assessment of how good or bad a person I am. So let me lay that all over Frodo… (LotR spoilers follow, if you care.)( Read more... )

Snagged, with thanks, from

anneapocalypse:

Things that are uplifting me right now:

1. I got a very sweet fan letter (PM) from someone who was moved by my Banana Fish fics, and I poured a lot of my soul into those fics, so it's doubly gratifying for me to hear they've touched someone. A dear friend of mine who passed away in 2015, reading a chapter of my on-hold book, Mercy, once said, "Your pain has meaning," and I feel some echo of that validation whenever someone tells me they were touched by these fics.

2. I'm very proud of my poor beleaguered college, which is pulling itself together over the coronavirus scare to support students and employees, prioritize everyone's safety, and really try to navigate our very low enrollments so that benefited adjuncts don't lose their health insurance (due to losing FTE). That's about the nicest consideration I've seen for adjuncts ever.

3. Speaking of the day job, I'm also very pleased with the meeting I had earlier this week with faculty colleagues over planning sustainability curriculum. We had a far-ranging discussion, from broad philosophical concepts to concrete action items, and I think we got a lot done in terms of planning to green our curriculum.

4. On a lighter note, I've been enjoying Movie Nights' comedic YouTube reviews of worst Star Trek episodes ever, chosen from all series up to Enterprise. Both nostalgic and hilarious.

5. I also got some very nice support on a short fantasy story from a work colleague, who helped me localize it to a Mexican-Californian setting. He did a very quick turnaround with excellent suggestions, and while I offered to pay him for the cultural consulting, he declined and did it for free. Sometimes people are really nice!

6. Speaking of people being nice, another work colleague offered, as an anonymous donation, to give a fellow colleague the money to cover her rent. She didn't end up needing the money, as her tax return came through, but it's so good to know people have each other's backs.

7. My kids are getting big into Doctor Who, which just makes me happy. They're marathoning through the entire New Who canon. (I can hear that music as I type this.)

Honestly, I could go on. Lots of people have been really nice lately, but I think I will end there.

Writing to Sustain Hope

Happy New Year! After a jam-packed fall term, it’s been a relief to have a slower winter break and a little time to reflect. While I’m still enthusiastic about Workable Utopias, which launched this newsletter, I’ve moving toward a focus on the rhetoric of "hope." The word “utopia” carries complicated and negative connotations, and while it's worth reclaiming, it’s not always necessary to fight that battle. Moreover, we’re in no danger of achieving utopia—even ambiguously—anytime soon. What we do need right now, though, is hope. Indeed, how to find and sustain hope in the slow apocalypse of climate crisis is arguably the defining issue of our age. Without it, human society will collapse, but with it, even a collapsed society may re-learn how to live.

And so my science fiction writing, my scholarly writing, and my teaching are all bending toward hope. I mean a genuine hope, not a frivolous lie that things will be “all right” or an imaginary golden age can be recovered, but a determination to see the good and find ways to heal. I have a couple of upcoming hope-related workshops in the works, and will report in due course.

Report from Jolabokaflod PDX

I had a wonderful time this past December at the Jolabokaflod book festival, based on the Icelandic new year’s tradition. Hosted by Nordic Northwest, the event was just the right size to be cozy but bring in a good number of people. Many thanks to Margaret Pinard for developing and executing this project. I had a blast tabling with Arthur Smid, who kindly helped me workshop my focus for my upcoming Writing to Sustain Hope class. (The title is his wording, in fact.) It was also very gratifying to meet Monica Bourgeau, author of The Change Code: A Practical Guide to Making a Difference in a Polarized World, just the sort of hands-on approach to making positive change we so profoundly need right now.

Pay Raise at Clark College: It's All Connected

The delay in my newsletter this month has largely been due to my union, the Clark College Association of Higher Education, going on strike, which was exhausting, nervewracking, and exhilarating, and culminated in our ratifying to a good contract with significant pay increases for both full-time and part-time faculty. (I’m part time.) Aside from distracting me from writing this newsletter, the pay raise may not seem directly connected my life as a writer. But really it’s all connected. While I’m still underpaid as adjunct, I now have more leeway for things like paying editors, attending workshops, and so on. One open door opens another. And that’s one reason equity is always important.

Well, we voted with 97% in favor to ratify our new contract. It obviously doesn't plug all the holes in the leaky boat of American higher ed, but it's as good a deal as we could have hoped for, after 15 months of negotiations and organizing!

We were back at school teaching today, which felt really good. Even if it was a little hard to get back in the swing, it was so nice to just be with my class discussing Leslie Marmon Silko and Frederick Douglass, who, oddly, we ended up talking about on the same day.

I missed the picketing today due to my son having a fever of 103F, too high to leave him home on his own. But I have just been informed our union and the College have reached a tentative agreement! No picketing tomorrow. Instead, we have a meeting to vote on the agreement. And my son's fever has now broken. Win win.

First day on strike for our faculty today. We picketed for about four hours before being released for lunch. (As a part-timer, I left for the day.) Many people honked in support, including several staff members. (I've heard staff were instructed to go to work or have their pay withheld.) It was about 37F (which is a few degrees above freezing for those who use C), consistently raining in that Pacific Northwest way that is not very cold but feels cold because you are soaked. I dressed in layers but was shivering uncontrollably by the end. The mood was good--big turnout, both full time and part time faculty, lots of snack food: almost all sugar and coffee. I am seriously amped!

I had more than one conversation debating what the administration hoped to gain by dragging this out. We faculty can't back down. We have too much at stake. Admin can't run the college without us to teach. With 10-week terms, every lost instructional day is hard to make up. We've now lost one with no word yet of any contract agreement. My best guess is they're hoping the weather will break us. The forecast keeps saying snow is coming, though it keeps not coming. In truth, snow and ice might keep me home because the hills I live on are treacherous, and I'm not prepared to die for a fair contract, but snow will not get us back to work.

It's hard not to check my email/course site and check in on my students, also weirdly freeing of my time (for now), but I'm holding the line for the greater good. We'll see how it goes...

Happy new year, all!

It's going to be an important one, but I guess in the US--and the world, given US power--we won't know if it's a happy one till November. Still, we can do our best.

So far so good for me: I'm several hours into 2020 and in a pretty good mood. In the last couple of months, I've had two revelations that, I hope, will help me get myself in hand and move forward.

The first came as a result of attending the Anarres Project Symposium on Just Futures. I did not expect this symposium to speak to me about my trauma at being abandoned, but amazingly one of the panels struck right to the heart of it. It was a panel on care ethics vs. rights-and-duties ethics. And it clarified why I have experienced such intense cognitive dissonance in the social response I've received to having been abandoned. It's because the dominant social response is predicated on rights-and-duties ethics while my own response is grounded in relational (if not care) ethics. Simply being able to identify that was like a huge leaden weight lifting off my shoulders, right there as I sat in that panel at Oregon State.

The second realization was that I have become chronically depressed, albeit fairly mildly on the spectrum. Now, I have spent a lot of my life unhappy. But that depression has always been what I'd call acute. That is, it's been based on very clear, identifiable things wrong in my life. When those things were alleviated, the unhappiness was fairly immediately alleviated. And even when I wasn't actively thinking about those things, I could be in a very good mood. In contrast, over the past few years, I've slipped into a more chronically depressive, persistent state of sadness. It certainly has external triggers: abandonment, climate grief, our property burning, Trump, financial insecurity, overwork, aging, my dad’s death, etc. But it has become settled as my dominant mood in a way that resists elevation. Even the characters in my head had become persistently depressed, even when they had nothing at all to be depressed about--and this is very new in my psychological experience. Having identified this, too, almost immediately helped me begin to pull out of it. It's still with me, but having clarified it, I can better use tricks of mindset to pull myself in more positive directions. (And for all it's contentiousness, I want to shout out to Star Wars for giving me a fun fandom mood boost.)

I have a friend who is a psychoanalytic therapist, a sub-field less and less common today. But he told me he likes psychoanalysis over more behavior-based therapeutic approaches because sometimes you cannot move forward until you do, in fact, uncover the root of what’s going on. Mental health not just about modifying behavior or even habits of mind; it’s about figuring out why your mind is the way it is. This has proven true for me before. The last time I had a great breakthrough in my mental health (c. 2012), it also came very fast on the heels of a realization about why I experienced the cognitive dissonance I experienced. (In that instance, it was, in a nutshell, that I’m a friendship bonder and our society does not recognize our existence.)

I have high hopes, therefore, that this couple of late 2019 realizations will lay the groundwork for significant improvement in my mental health in 2020. To facilitate that process, I’m adopting the following resolution: to process my realizations about abandonment by working on a book about it (non-fiction) and to do that in conjunction with resuming therapy, which I dropped (or was dropped by) when my therapist left her practice.

That’s me, heading into this portentous year. I wish everyone else wellness and support in a frightening time. If you ever need to talk, reach out. I’m here.

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Entries tagged with rl

Random 4th of July Happy Bird Story

PSA: I've Been Hacked

Very Small Linkspam Cuz I Found Two Cool Things Today

Question: Origin of "Where there's hysteria, there's history"?

A Look Back at My Grandmother's Life 100 Years Ago

Kitty Brains

Good Degrowth Video

I miss not-my kitty

Happy Two-Days' Belated Downfall of Sauron Day! (And Cali Update)

Huzzah for the Return of Sanity!

Ramble - Work, RL

A Happy Meme

On Dreaming about Trump

Happy Downfall of Sauron Day! Here's an Essay on Frodo, the Ring, and Good & Evil

Positivty & Uplift Post

Author Newsletter - January 2020: Writing to Sustain Hope

Post-Strike: New Contract

On Strike - Day 2

On Strike - Day 1

Happy New Year! And Resolutions