The lack of meaningful posts here can be attributed to me working more, I think. And Sparkly being at home more, maybe. IDK. I’m making more money, though, which is good, because we need it for when we move.

And speaking of, I know very few people read this but I might as well:

Do you make videos? Maybe for a blog or a Youtube channel? Would you like them to have captions? Have you noticed that Youtube’s automatic captions are pretty horrible?

I would love to caption your stuff for you. If you’re interested, my email is on the “contact me” page.

Music again

I have a song in one of my Spotify playlists that Sparkly knows how to play on piano– ey actually played it for a competition once, when we were both in high school.

Every so often, I have it on when ey is around, and I remind em that yes, I know ey played that song once, that’s why I have it, because I like it and it reminds me of em.

I want to write fiction more. I’ve been very slowly working on this one thing, and I think I have it outlined in a way that makes sense now. It was a “I want this character to do X, but why would he do that, and how long would it take for him to make up his mind?” sort of problem.

About meltdowns and dealing with stress

Once when I was little, like maybe first or second grade, my mom tried doing my hair in “rag curls”– braiding and tying it up with fabric scraps while it was wet, then having me sleep on it.

When I first woke up it was of course a huge mess, and for whatever reason that REALLY bothered me. I went in the bathroom and locked the door, and spent what seemed like a long time being viciously disgusted by how my hair looked, sobbing myself silly, calming down slightly and then seeing myself in the mirror again, and repeat.

There was no way I’d be able to untie and detangle it myself, and I wouldn’t let my mom in to do it, partly because I didn’t want anyone to see it and partly just because I was too upset.

This is the only time I remember having a really dramatic meltdown over anything.

So, this is a thing. I have the potential to go around and around in circles thinking about something that upsets me– not venting and then feeling better, not thinking of solutions to a problem, just thinking the same thoughts over and over about something that I can’t stand to think about, and not stopping until I’m totally exhausted. I don’t have screaming meltdowns about it, and I don’t even cry about it that often, but it’s a path that my brain can easily get stuck in.

It sucks. I don’t want it to happen and I don’t enjoy it.

So I don’t. I try not to dwell on things that bother me. If I am going to think about things that bother me, I try to focus on productive things like “what can I do about this” or “what should have been done instead/what should happen next time” or “why is this incorrect” or “why does this bother me”.

Sometimes that takes effort, sometimes it’s basically a reflex and I don’t even think about whether the thing in question would have actually bothered me That Much if I dwelled on it. Mostly I am very good at not dwelling on things.

I’m not sure what flips the switch in my brain between “writing about this will help me think through it” and “writing about this feels like rehashing it pointlessly” but that’s a thing that happens.

So, Sparkly, if you were wondering if I was going to write about recent stuff, I’m not going to at the moment, because… I guess I feel like I don’t have anything more, different, to say about it? And I’m tired, and going back over what I’ve said before feels like work. I might write about it later though.

Tomorrow I guess I’ll be spending time with The Guy Who Is Always Joking. I’m not sure how it’ll go, and I mean that in an honestly neutral way. I have no idea what will happen. It will probably be somewhere between neutral and mildly awkward. IDK.

Imperial Radch opinions again

So like, to amplify what I’ve said before about Breq and gender and Strong Female Characters, consider the ways in which Breq is not Wonder Woman.

1. Breq and Diana are both from societies that don’t have internal gender divisions, but the context and implications are different in each case.

— Diana’s island of Themyscira is a community of women, defined in contrast to a wider culture where men exist and so does sexism. Themyscira is a safe place for women, a place where women support each other against outside forces that harm women.

— The Radch is a society that has no concept of gender and is also the biggest, most powerful society in its sphere. Its culture is completely unrelated to those around it that do have the concept of gender, and the Radch interacts with those societies’ ideas of gender mainly by ignoring them and/or imposing its own during colonization. The Radch doesn’t have to define itself in rebellion against or in flight from sexism, regardless of the extent to which the societies around it are sexist, because it has hugely disproportionate power over them. The Radch is not a small or close-knit community and the shared (non) gender of the Radchaai doesn’t create any particularly strong bond between them.

2. Breq and Diana are both soldiers sometimes/in some ways, who fight on behalf of their people, and they are both leaders sometimes/in some ways, who have authority to make decisions about how and when to fight.

— Diana is I think literally a princess? She’s near the very top of the leadership of Themyscira and has a say in making decisions for her whole society. She is respected and valued by her society, and her fighting abilities are part of what makes her respected.

— Breq is an abomination of mad science created to do her society’s dirty work. She was created to be controllable and disposable. She is considered less than human and can only hold authority by keeping her nature secret. Getttng to know Breq as a person, and then finding out that she’s technically not one, makes people deeply uncomfortable even if they don’t totally reject her on finding out. The abilities that make her useful are also considered ugly, unsettling and demeaning.

 

This doesn’t really fit into the format I’ve created, but the other thing I want to talk about besides societal belonging is BODIES. People’s bodies don’t always relate to their genders in a straightforward way, but people’s bodies are a big deal to them, and often at least somewhat a gender-related big deal, regardless.

A woman who has experienced sexism in her life, you would expect, probably has some sexism-related feelings about her body– its beauty or ugliness, its strength or weakness, its bigness or smallness, its fertility or lack thereof– pretty much any characteristic her body has can be made to seem like a bad thing by a sexist society.

You would expect a group that is resisting sexism to make a specific effort to repair these feelings, to encourage women to feel more comfortable with their bodies.

A society that is very distant from sexism wouldn’t have to put such deliberate emphasis on body-acceptance ideas. Without sexist messages about their bodies, people would be less likely to feel insecure about their appearances without having to spend any extra thought on it.

Breq is the absolute fucking opposite of comfortable in her body. It’s literally not her body. It’s not even the sort of body she would have chosen for herself if she had a choice. She believes that the process that put her in it is morally abhorrent, but she also has no way to survive other than in a body stolen from someone else. She values her body for what it can do, but she’s very ambivalent about viewing it as anything other than an important piece of equipment. In some ways, she still relates to her body as if it’s just one among thousands of bodies and computer cores. She resists considering either her own enjoyment or her own pain as important.

Breq is alllll about alienation and not-belonging and conditional-belonging in her body and in her society and even in humanity. She is not an Amazon. Her society is not a place of belonging and protection for her. Describing the Radch (or the main cast of the books) as all-female obscures that.