to-do list

-clear out bedroom and throw away old clothes
-get hangers for all clothes and start hanging them up
-start using a laundry hamper
-get a purse
purse contents: nail clippers, personal mirror, money clip, comb, hairbrush, gum, deodorant, toothbrush/toothpaste/floss, small notebook, blue/black/red pen, 2 mechanical pencils, pen carrying case, phone cord, makeup(foundation? lip gloss? eye shadow? tweezers? razor?), gun(potato gun?), water bottle, tide pen, tissue packet, scissors, camera, flashlight, hairspray?, cosmetics bag, stationery bag, lighters, pocketknife
-get notebooks for school
-get pens for school
-clear out drawers to archive old school stuff
-fix pipes
-buy shaving/waxing equipment
-get new glasses

hey wendy! most of your problems result from your still-extant belief that you it's okay to put off transitioning just because you're scared or that you can try to "blend in" and restrict expressing your inherent nature within the confines a very small part of your life

oh, thanks!

full disclosure

ohhh. that's what i need to do. i need to take all of the things even the ones i'm ashamed of and bring them to light.

-i don't shave nearly often enough. sometimes i'll present female anyway because i'd rather be happy than pretty. i feel totally disgusting when i look at my body/facial hair though and i'll turn away from the mirror because of it sometimes.
-the UWA LEIKS HENTIE thing is actually still pretty accurate, it's something i'm still into, i just don't talk about it all the time anymore
-i really want people to think i'm attractive. if i post a picture online i'm earnestly hoping that people will give me positive feedback. sometimes i worry that i don't deserve it, though. lol.
-i smoke weed pretty much every day unless i have something else to do that would conflict with it. i used to think that it was possible to get addicted to weed or that at some point it might have negative consequences, but i'unno. weed has been pretty much nothing but positive for me.
-after breaking up with courtney, i realized that i don't believe in lifelong monogamous relationships. my ambivalence towards these has caused me to not actively pursue relationships and has caused my sex life to become pretty sparse(although not totally empty). however, my change in morals has also caused me to question a lot of my aesthetic tastes. my secretest wish is to just have a lot of consequence-free sex with mature, responsible people, but that's so hard to pull off normally.
-when i was a lot younger i used to feel deeply ashamed of my own intelligence and would try to hide it from people. i still do this all the time; i feel like a "weeaboo" when i display talent in japanese or an asshole when i prove somebody wrong about something.

oh, i'm starting to feel better already!~

here's an essay i wrote for a class

I feel like there are some weaknesses in my reasoning here, and I'm not fully comfortable with this product, but in the interest of full disclosure, here it is.

One of the most frustrating tasks for feminists is that of examining history, recognizing those aspects of the present which have their origins in never-corrected historical errors, and attempting to remove these archaisms from the collective consciousness in which they are so deeply embedded. Essentialism is a prime example of this, as a long-outdated drain on political discourse, a blood-sucking tick located in an unreachable spot on history’s back. Uprooting essentialist modes of thought is vital to the integrity and political aims of the feminist movement. “Essentialism” is the belief that certain characteristics of an individual are definitional and that the individual can be judged to have a set of associated characteristics based on them. The worst applications of essentialism involve the marginalization or oppression by a self-identified group against another group that they themselves identify. This artificial dichotomy gives the oppressor group a language and basis of reason for justifying their oppression. In America, for example, the absorption of recent European immigrants into a greater community of “whiteness” in the early 20th century facilitated the racist political environment into the 21st. However, it is not enough to merely condemn essentialism; to do that is to seek the easy answers that essentialism offers. Essentialism also takes other, seemingly benign forms: As the feminist movement began to recognize differences within its own ranks, it was proposed by some that an individual’s level of oppression can be ‘added together’ from the oppressed groups that they are identified as being in. No harmful intent seems to drive this belief, but the inevitable oversimplification it brings can have unintentionally marginalizing effects. Feminism has, from its origins, sought to break away from oppressive essentialist myths; the earliest liberal feminist critiques of society focused on commonly held beliefs that women were essentially incapable of being autonomous. In order to understand how feminism has further broken away from essentialism and to flesh out a complete argument against its use, we must turn to the body of feminist literature regarding this subject. Three particular authors from our course readings address the issue of essentialism; in their own ways, Elizabeth Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler each seek a resolution to this historical quandary.
Elizabeth Spelman’s contribution focuses most directly on the circumstances which make essentialist thought utterly unusable for analyzing society and culture. Specifically, she is attacking the ‘benign’ line of thought mentioned in the introduction, that factors such as race, sex, and class are separately identifiable within any individual who is ascribed them and are therefore identifiable as groups at large. Spelman demonstrates in her essay that these traits are totally indistinguishable within the individual: “Nothing… would meet the requirements of being a ‘part’ of me that was a ‘woman part’ that was not also a ‘white part.’” (Spelman, “Woman: The One and Many” 161) Because these traits are inseparable from each other, identifying them in two different individuals with different group affiliations tells you nothing about either individual. Spelman’s concept of an indivisible identity is a fundamental argument against essentialism; in order for something to be essential to a group, it must be identifiable within the individuals of that group. In order to better demonstrate this concept, Spelman constructs an interesting thought experiment. She represents individuals in society as immigrants progressing through a customs hall with many rooms. The rooms all possess marked doors indicating some dimension of social grouping, and the immigrants made to pass through the doors based on their own identifications. By applying only the most dimensions of race and sex to this model, Spelman is able to create four groupings of men, four groupings of women, and two sex groupings for each race, all based on where the individuals end up. Even if these were the only ways in which people were grouped and separated, our theoretical attempts to judge people by one dimension(essentially) are completely ruined and our attempts to study all groups internally become offputtingly complicated. Spelman has, in very simple terms, demonstrated that essentialist ideologies can have no theoretical integrity. Indeed, the empirical research of people as groups seems unavoidably tied to the essentialist fudging of identities. However, that does not negate the fact of essentialism’s continued existence as a political ideology, so Spelman goes further and demonstrates the ways in which essentialist thought has fostered oppression within the feminist cause. Feminism began(so to speak) with the identification of “woman” as an oppressed class, where “a subordinated people insist[s] that they have characteristics in common with their dominators(e.g. humanity, reason, vulnerability to suffering) and therefore that they are owed a higher regard than presently afford them by the dominators.” (Spelman, “Woman: The One And Many” 166) However, the identification of “woman” as a group necessarily involved including people across other politically relevant lines of domination within that group. Within feminism itself, white middle-class women held an almost total monopoly on identity formation, legislating the identities of black and poor women whose struggles they could not identify with and were likely not even aware of. Spelman correctly identifies this as an arrogant co-opting of political identities for the sake of political convenience; history tells us that it was the cause of deep and bitter divisions within feminism. This particular anomaly, that of oppression within a group designed to combat oppression, is best explained by Spelman’s theories, which clarify how essentialist views create a blind spot to the suffering created by our own machinations. We cannot reject essentialism utterly, however, without examining other opinions within feminist literary canon.
In contrast to Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz seems far more willing to give essentialism serious consideration as an ideology. Her support for it is qualified at numerous points, and it is clear that she at least accepts Spelman’s premise that essentialism is not theoretically sound and can foster oppression. She describes essentialism and its cognates(biologism, naturalism and universalism) as “problematic in both political and theoretical terms.” (Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism”) However, because of the focus of her analysis, Grosz seems to draw a more positive conclusion about the possibilities of essentialist beliefs. To Grosz, the focus of the essentialist debate centers on the struggle between feminisms of equality—liberal feminisms in particular—which repudiate essentialism on the basis of women’s equality to men, and feminisms of difference, which seek to identify an essential difference between men and women in order to end dependency on ‘masculine’ institutions and ideologies. She discredits feminisms of equality on the basis of seven failures of liberal feminism and takes the opportunity to note approval of feminisms of difference. It should be made clear that she is misrepresenting the fundamental issue of essentialism here. Liberal feminists are not the only faction opposing essentialism, and rejecting liberal feminism does not necessarily imply accepting the ideology it opposes. The strongest arguments against essentialism are, in fact, those made by minority groups who broke from the liberal mainstream: those of black feminists, lesbians, third-world feminists, and their intellectual heirs who repurposed them into intersectional and post-structural theories. Also, in her defense of feminisms of difference, Grosz argues that feminisms of difference are using a different essentialism, one used for constructive purposes rather than maleficent ones. She claims, “In the case of feminists of difference, however, difference is seen not as difference from a pregiven norm, but as pure difference, difference in itself, difference with no identity.” (Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism”) Is this difference pure enough to eliminate the “blind spot” of oppression that essentialism creates? Is it possible to have a ‘difference with no identity’ in any political faction formed on the basis of identity? Given what we’ve already established about essentialism, the answer in both cases would seem to be ‘no’. Conspicuously absent from Grosz’ essay are answers to the questions raised by Spelman’s claims about indivisibility of identity. If, as Grosz says, “difference resists the homogenisation of separate political struggles/ insofar as it implies not only women's differences from men, and from each other, but also women's differences from other oppressed groups,” then how do you separate ‘woman’ from other oppressed groups? Are women expected to put aside other all other aspects of their identity in order to take on the mantle of ‘woman’? Grosz’ final defense of essentialism relies on the idea that oppressed people can take up the weapons of their oppressors as tools of political struggle. She states outright that women will be inevitably implicated in patriarchy, either by adopting the ‘masculine’ objectivity that she associates with anti-essentialism or by adopting essentialism itself. Grosz insists that by creating a feminism of difference using essentialism, “being vigilant” about how it is used instead of performing “the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating it”, women are given a new tool with which to fight their oppression. This is a problematic perspective because it makes certain assumptions about how the inclusion of essentialism in discourse will play out. If women are merely leveling essentialist claims against the patriarchy, then it is simple for the patriarchy to answer those claims with their own essentialist claims, which they have far better means to disseminate to the public. Or, they may simply repudiate women for their lack of objectivity, even when this is a hypocritical claim coming from those authorities who essentialism and irrationality has empowered. A stance which rejects essentialism entirely gives feminists a standard to hold patriarchal apologists to and an easy way of legitimating themselves in the minds of the public. The idea of women adopting patriarchal tools in their struggle is not a bad one by any means, but it is crucial to chose the right tools. Tools such as anti-essentialism and intellectual standards expose the hypocrisy inherent in oppressive structures and decrease their legitimacy; women have made their greatest gains when the institutions oppressing them have been proven illegitimate.
Judith Butler, like Spelman, rejects essentialist arguments completely, but derives her criticisms from the fundamental problems with essentialist categories themselves rather than the impossibilities created by their interactions. Butler’s argument focuses primarily on one of Grosz’ ‘essentialist cognates’, biologism, as a widely accepted but invalid source from which to make essentialist claims. Spelman, in demonstrating the difficulties of separating identities into parts, humorously noted her inability to point out her “woman part” without pointing to something contextualized by all other parts of her identity(Spelman, “Woman: The One and Many” 161). Butler takes this one step further and claims that even the body itself is not a source from where the essential category of ‘gender’ can be drawn, that even the “woman part” cannot be used as a basis to justify existing gender divisions. The category that essentialist difference feminists such as Grosz want to identify is actually a social construct. “Is there a political shape to ‘women’,” Butler asks, “that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view?” The processes which lead women to form groups based on interest are not derived from biological commonality or common experience, but those created and reinforced by perfomative behavior. As women act in ways that they are told define them as women, they begin to internalize the behaviors and see an essential difference where there is not one. The body is merely a symbol of this conditioning, not the source from which it derives. Within the confines of this proposition, combined with the body of related arguments, there is no room left for essentialism. Butler makes her own suggestion for combating this injustice: subverting the concept of ‘gender’ with the goal of eliminating it entirely. An example of this is gender parody, specifically exemplified by drag. Butler argues that by parodying the idea of the ‘original’ gender, the gender concept is made ridiculous and the essentialist tethers on women are loosened. The connection between satirizing gender concepts and ending identity-based oppression may seem like a bit of a stretch; I would argue that Butler’s specific proposals are imperfect, but the ideological underpinning of her argument is indispensable. The essentialist categories that people are put into(and, although Butler doesn’t go far enough in examining them, the varying degrees of importance we ascribe to these categories in analyzing people) create the conditions by which which they oppress and are oppressed. By undermining these categories, using humor as well as a litany of other tools, we begin to place less importance on them and therefore apply them less strictly. Is there any better way to end oppression than by cutting it off at the source?
Elizabeth Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler’s essays focus on what is perhaps the most critical issue in the history of feminism. Each writer’s contribution is a piece of a more complete argument with which to understand and critique essentialism. Essentialism is self-defeating as a theory; Spelman demonstrated its limited ability to capture the incredibly complexity of human identity, and Butler demonstrated the futility of applying it even at the biological level. It is also largely oppressive. As mentioned previously, essentialism is the ultimate tool of patriarchy. When the ‘battles’ are fought on essentialist terms, those being oppressed have nothing but a competing essentialist idea to fight with. As Spelman pointed out, essentialism is also the means by which some feminists have arrogantly decided to legislate the identities of others they identify as female. Grosz is correct in her assertion that we cannot fully expunge essentialism from political discourse; however, it is vital to the theoretical integrity and long-term viability of the feminist cause that every effort be made to combat it. Perhaps neither Marx nor the radical feminists were fully correct; perhaps the prime contradiction is not the dualistic struggle of one group, but essentialist thinking itself.

i am 21 years old and i may have hit the crux of my entire life. i think a lot will be decided from now and then.

do i continue to repress myself indefinitely or do i finally break out and start presenting as myself--in terms of gender but also in terms of personality and interests--for maybe the first time ever?

i just have to change this inner dialogue that's going on in my head. i'm so self-critical all the time, trying to control for every possible mistake i might make, talking too much, not enough, using too many cliches, bad comic timing.

maybe i could learn to compliment myself? would that be acceptable to everyone?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=10&ved=0CDIQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhome.uchicago.edu%2F~eoster%2Fwitchec.pdf&ei=jNCxS7Ypg_jwBr32tPMB&usg=AFQjCNE9ASZFPYjQTCNarV_Od3Cvvp48ng&sig2=09CZXuquht23akk5BpgTGQ
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/Agobard-OnHailandThunder.html

so many secret emotions
locked away, hidden bugs
in locked compartments on bugshelves.

jealousy anomie grudge vanity
lonely fear spite anger
fuck shit piss dick.

vainpetty little bug. mushikera.

NCLB notes

No Child left behind intended to expand upon equity imperatives of Title I and combine them w/ eductional reforms from the state standards movement
promises equal opportunity
1. academic proficiency for all in 2014
proficiency define by each state's academic standards
3. "highly qualified teachers
4. states + school districts accountable for ensuring all schools have capcity to keep up with needed progress, consequences and sanctions for schools that do not meet expectations
5. student progress measured through annual assessments determined by state standards, reported in disaggergted form by racial/ethnic/disability/income groupings

NCLB has failed to achieve any objectives

1. NO state is on track to reach full profiency by 2014
number of schools that fail to achieve is likely to accelerate, no progress in reading or math, achievement gaps between poor and middle class
2. most states do not have challenging acad standards, states have lowered criteria in response to NCLB pressres
3. law has ensured teachers of minimum qualification, still massive gap between poor and middle class teacher quality
4. schools in need of improvement lack resources and instructional capacity to deliver more successful students, states and school districts also lack resources
5. many states tests are not valid in accordance with psychometric standards, most state nosts not fully aligned with state acad stands, test validity affects english language learners and students w/ disabilities most

NCLB timetable puts unreasonable performance expectation w/ minimal support

law doesnt define 'challenging' pace, states set sloppy standrds
states are penalized for setting high standards and not living up to them

some support NCLB because of symbolic commitment to educational equity
"NCLB is a start"
possible to repair apparent disconnect between equity ovjectives of nclb and ineffective reform mechanisms
can it be revised?
Demanding national goals of NCLB *are* achievable
Positive academic goals must be demonstrated for all races under NCLB, but no school system has ever achieved goals set by NCLB

NCLB labels schools "in need of improvement" for failing to meet impossible goals, has effect on public perception
concept of punishment Doesn't Fucking Work
states can backload acceleration of standards under nclb
proficiency-for-all mandate must be modified

Proficiency goals are stressed while opportunity goals are spoken of minimally
NCLB reconsidered: Is it delivering MEANINGFUL education opportunities?
Meaningful has judicial and legislative antecedents that give it meaning
Consistent progress toward high levels of achievement rather than concrete levels of such
Add another dimension of judging school performance: Measure how quickly the gaps in educational opportunity are being narrowed
NCLB bargain: Increased resources for increase accountability
Extra funding has not even covered the costs of new testing and administration!
NCLB standards allow teachers with minimum qualifications to pass requirements
Health-regulated barriers to learning
Lower-class children lack linguistic development in early age

At the root of achievement gaps are opportunity gaps
Concentrates of accountability instead of developing a support framework

Comprehensive cost analyses with suggestions for how to increase cost-efficiency

Hey, what if we trade increased states rights for the inclusion of a broad antidiscriminatory civil rights framework as an amendment to the constitution.
"Laboratory" of the states

Supreme Court decided in Tex v Rodriguez that public education is not under federal interest in Constitution
Challenges to inequitable funding at the state level have met with significant success--changing legislation using the court

"What's missing from this story- what's unfortunately almost always missing from any discussion of GID revisions in the DSM, including discussion from the committee members- is any mention of the actual science. People can argue about whether the revisions are helpful or politically disadvantageous, and those are legitimate concerns, but at the end of the day the DSM is supposed to be science based. When the furor over Blanchard's taxonomy first blew up publically, the science was beginning to point in the direction of cross gendered brain wiring as the cause of transsexuality. In the seven years since, it's become conclusive. A small partial list of the studies confirming this are toward the bottom of this post:

http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2010/03/we-do-things-differently-here-in.html

TThe owner of this site has got many, many more from multiple research groups referenced in various posts I don't have the time to dig out. They all support the same conclusion- transsexuality is caused by cross-sexed brain wiring, and sexual orientation, contra Blanchard, has nothing to do with it.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that "autogynephilia" was never actually differentiated from "normal" female sexuality in Blanchard's studies. It has since been found that if you apply his criteria to cisgendered women, over 90% would be classed as "autogynephilic"

http://home.netcom.com/~docx2/AGF.htm

(Note that Blanchard's original AGP and transsexual typology study used what Moser characterized as the "common" definition rather than his "rigorous" one)

Unfortunately, Blanchard and Zucker have managed to insulate themselves from reality with their political influence within the field of psychiatry, so all this will be completely ignored for this round of DSM revisions. "

漫才と言うのは大阪で始まった二人の役者で演じられている喜劇ですよ。漫才の役はぼけとつっこみといわれています。一般的に、ぼけと言う役はバカみたく頭があまりよくなさそうです。つっこみはもっと普通し、バカじゃないのでぼけにいつもおこられます。役者は非常に早く話してよくだじゃれを使うからとっても面白いです。楽しみ見に行ってください。

final fantasy tactics

i've been playing final fantasy tactics again lately. it's such an amazing game, every time i play it i appreciate it more.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/house-passes-bill-that-intrudes-on-private-and-religious-schools-86274992.html

GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEYGIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY GIVE US MONEY

ffs

it's really important to be able to let go of and diffuse anger.

hey

stop trying to write the Great American Novel, it's already been written and it's called "gravity's rainbow"

gotta dig and dig some more

hey the c-span archives are open, do any of you readers(none) want me to start posting horrible shit that i find? i started with the search string "jesse helms", figured i'd get to the worst shit first

today i found out that it's illegal to own a raven or crow. then i found out that it sort of isn't illegal. http://corvitude.com/corvidranch.html

complexity

i want to make you understand how fucking complex everything is.

essentialism is a myth; humans have no fixed nature. the whole record of human history(and the history of existence itself) can be explained in terms of the causal principle. the only human nature that can be spoken of is the chemical reaction of the human body to its physical surroundings and internal status.

this is the template for understanding everything about human social organization. we can derive no truths about the "natural" human condition when no human can be observed outside of any social/environmental influences, but by understanding environmental influences we can explain and predict human behavior with some accuracy.

how do people look at history without this mindset? some people are certain that history is driven by the essential differences between groups divided along arbitrary borders, or the influence of a divine being with extremely obscure methods, impenetrable designs. by force of divine or biological inevitability, people possess an essential nature, are 'good' or 'evil' down to their cores.

a complete history, which takes into account the countless baleful horrors of the human condition, can't be explained in this context. the world is a place where prison doctors kick the stomachs of pregnant inmates as they're delivering their babies. the world is a place where women die in dangerous factories, scalded and drowned in vats of boiling rubber. dr. john fian, a real human being in full color who felt pain as real and exquisite as you do, met his end in north berwick, scotland, "put to the most severe and cruel pain in the world, called the boots." if such cruelty is inherent in human nature or inexorable divine will, then we are utterly beyond hope of redemption, we have only to despair.

but this isn't the case. applying the causal principle allows us to avoid viewing history in these stark terms of despair vs. optimism, because it uniquely allows us to derive some aphoristic truths without generalizing away any important facts. i'm thinking of a particular truth here: "everything makes sense." not "everything happens for a reason", but "everything happens for every reason, to varying degrees."

applying the essentialist mindset as a historical method flagrantly defies everything that we actually know about history. an intensive review of even a single historical event requires one to understand an unbelievably sophisticated number of facts which constitute a rough approximation of the sociocultural context in which the event occurred. during a historical event, each actor involved is a product of their entire personal history intersected with the results of their genetic code. the place where the actor was born, their sexual attractions, their gastrointestinal well-being, their childhood nightmares, their personal conflicts of interest, all of these can and do influence historical outcomes in ways that can't be measured. everything makes sense.

to say that these influences can't be measured, however, doesn't mean that they are irrelevant or that they can't be accounted for. as analysis of the historical record grows deeper, the influences of smaller historical forces can be seen; when we do history correctly, we develop an ever-closer approximation of actual history without fully explaining it. it's impossible to know everything, but our generalizations can become marvelously accurate and we can strive to include as much of the historical record as possible in our analysis. because everything makes sense.

when i speak of history, i'm not referring to an isolated academic subject which stands apart from other subjects; countering essentialism also requires us to recognize the arbitrary divisions even between the academic schools. political science, history, sociology, psychology, all of these fields focus on analyzing the total historical record in different parts or for different purposes, but they cannot exist apart. to understand political science thoroughly, you must understand how sociology and psychology effect political actors. to understand sociology, you must understand the place of political entities in the formation of societies and the role of psychology in informing people's social development. the political and social spheres loom large on the landscape of human imagination which psychology seeks to understand. all three topics draw on history for their analysis. an elegant understanding of art and literature is required to account for their influence in these subjects.

and all human history is but a consequence of human biology and environmental circumstances. our biology and environment are but consequences of the laws of chemistry, which are themselves the consequences of the laws of physics. our understanding of physics is shaped and limited by our chemical-biologically determined sensory perception, and the development of physics as a science is a consequence of our unique methods of social organization. things circle in on themselves. there is a completeness, a sort of reciprocal cycle, that the complexity of reality creates. because everything makes sense.

this requires us to be rigorously challenging of our own moral standards. it seriously fucks with the concept of "blame": our whole political system is founded on the idea that people are solely responsible for their own actions and life conditions. but people as actors play no role in their own genetic composition or the environment that shapes them. to go against the environment requires that the actor have some internal difficulty in dealing with an environmental circumstance, and to do this the actor must have some knowledge that things can be different. even then, there are often extreme social consequences to acting against the norm.

in short, we're like the people chained up in the cave in the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy.

john fian and the thousands of curious young girls and unlucky old women who shared his fate died at the hands of miserable, sexually repressed, uneducated, malnourished, perpetually insecure people. those who accused witches were not always petty profit-seekers often quite literally insane with grief in the wake of losing something invaluable to their lives: their virility or fertility, irreplaceable livestock or crops, their health and well-being, the lives of their loved ones. is it unreasonable to be understanding of the actions of these people, who desperately sought explanation and closure and completeness in the face of terrifying events that they couldn't understand? were they truly "evil"?

this is the defense attorney's argument, isn't it? that the atrocity that individuals do can't be separated from the society which created the individual. this is the argument which we are too quick to reject in our hunger to punish people.

the priests who condemned witches to their torture and death did so because they were insane too. deprived of all sexual gratification and given an ideological language of authoritarian malice by their churches. their wealth and privilege could barely protect them from the horrible conditions of the outside world; no amount of money could have bought them decent medical care.

do you see it yet? everything blending together. everything connecting, not in some vague spiritual sense but in the most direct sense imaginable. the individual, irreducible from the universe which developed them.

to get someone to commit torture, you must not only possess the authority which reasonably inspires fear and therefore obedience but you must also dehumanize the subject of torture, you must convince the torturer that their victim is deserving.

to maintain racial apartheid in any society, the authority figures of that society must work tirelessly to prevent miscegenation and integration. the racist institution is constantly threatened by the possibility that people will just stop caring about the cultural divide and start fucking.

to study the abuser, determine at what points and in which what ways they were abused.

do you see it yet? the causal principle is the foundation of everything. intellectual honesty can only occur when you recognize the staggering complexity of all existence and constantly compare your own intellectual products against this standard.

essentialist arguments attempt to make arbitrary divisions meaningful. they unwittingly sacrifice accuracy and validity for the sake of efficiency. this isn't necessarily wrong; indeed, the best generalizations are actually extremely effective, descriptive, and practical. they should never, however, be confused for the indescribably complex reality which they seek to describe.

do you see it yet?

i am a wildcat. you are a worm.

Draw Your Own Site Design

yes

uh, so i think my new adhd medication works?! and it isn't going to drive me crazy like adderall?!

the empty world and the throwing weapons

lately i've been thinking about the empty world. the empty world is a place after a large part of the human population is culled by disease. a place where small settlements and patterns of organized living still exist but once populous cities and towns are all abandoned and are becoming reclaimed by nature.

there's something about this kind of environment that is attractive to me. i think that a less populous world is the only environment that heroic qualities can be properly displayed in, simply because a smaller cast makes the players that do exist more immediate.

the empty world has its population distribution in microcosm to the world we live in today. it has its bullies and villains, its heroes, its victims, its common people and privileged people. it also relies on and is informed by the circumstances of a low population density.

in such an environment, physical strength and melee combat would probably figure prominently, and would become the weapon of bullies and villains. at some point, someone will be the first person to pick up a rock or other projectile weapon, learn to throw it properly, and effectively keep even strong people at bay.

i don't want to make things that are unoriginal. so many of my most beloved stories are driven by melee combat that doesn't operate on rules, the hero can succeed basically at the discretion of the author using whatever explanation they might have on hand. i'm constantly thinking of ways that this formula can be altered and replaced without compromising the intensity of the heroic struggle.

...this is what my creative process looks like right now, i guess, trying to pare away cliches and bad ideas so as to get to the core of my ideas and present them properly. "maybe it'll be fun"

finches

there are all kinds of finches hopping about my front yard every morning.

sometimes in the back of my mind there's a old woman in a heavy grey coat and trench hat sitting out and watching the finches. one day, the finches fly up and past her and she's gone, just the coat and trench hat in a perfect pile at the spot she was sitting.

state of the wendy

things are starting to move really quickly in my life. for the first time, i feel like things in my life might start to be completely under my control. i had no idea how exciting this feeling could be until i tried it.

it makes me less afraid of myself. when my life was in the hands of other people, i always felt like i had to watch what i did or some terrible unnameable thing was going to happen. this is beginning to change. when i laugh, i do it as loudly and as long as i want. when i drive i sit in the right lane and drive the speed limit and let people pass me. i make eye contact with people without feeling awkward or worrying what they're going to think about me.

this makes it easier to feel like myself. and you know what THAT means...

a place of my own

"a woman needs a place of her own to flip the fuck out and draw scrows"
--Virginia Woolf, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

this blog is a place where i can do whatever i want. there are more and more places like that in my life these days, but i figure it couldn't hurt to start another one. i'm going to try and update this often with lots of dumb little notes and longer, more well-thought-out stuff.

hi. i'm wendy. i'm 21 years old and i live in an apartment on U of Memphis campus. my goal is to learn everything in the world before i die. thanks for enjoying this thing.