round-up: 12/07
recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills More World Central Kitchen Aid Workers
Israel continues to pound Gaza, issue new evacuation threats
Housekeeping:
Happy December. Look, some flowers.
And look, my keys.
What I’m listening to:
This, on repeat.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Another cool thing about crying this much is that it’s just a matter of time before people who love you start crying with and for you and you hold hands across the sugary cafe table, or stand side by side in the queue for the bun shop, or huddle on the birding bench, or peak across oceans via the little facetime window and cry together, and that has felt like a miracle of love that will keep me warm forever.
It has become clear that I have spent most of this year and maybe a bit longer lol, in a manic grief spiral that I truly need someone to fuck me out of. I mean, I used a STOCK PHOTO for my August post. (I have changed it now but real ones know and it counts in the court of depression). But the thing about being the kind of depressive that can’t have sex when they’re depressed is that in fact no-one can fuck you out of it, sir! You’re on your own! Again!
People got sad when they saw me living this way. On visits back home, I would instinctively sit on the floor because I was used to having no chairs, and my mother would say it made her want to cry. When I had company over for a birthday party one year, all my guests sat atop the milk crates I normally kept my clothes in, and drank Stella Artois from peanut butter jars. I apologized and called myself a bachelor, kind of relishing the masculinity of self-denial, but they were all too grown-up and used to the creature comforts of wealthy families to find the act cute.
That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.
And so you buy the Drain-o, even knowing it does damage. You don’t invest in a hair trap, because it shouldn’t be your job. Maybe you even flush kitty litter down the toilet, as one neighbor of mine did, because why the fuck shouldn’t you? It almost feels like revenge to wreck a place that was never yours, even though the only people who will suffer the consequences are the poor broke renters who come after you.
All my adult life I’ve considered the accumulation of items to be an unforgivable extravagance, and new responsibilities to be nothing but a source of dread. But gradually, I’m embracing the costs of being alive. The sheer complexity of a normal daily existence — all the little chores, the social visits, the bodily needs, the abundance of stuff — it had seemed to threaten to pull me down. Now it is revealing itself to be an anchor that can hold me, and others can gather around.
I want to have a life with real weight.
Everybody was disabled and no one was really holding it together. And so, as a result, I never learned how to cook, or to clean, or pursue hobbies, make friends, or care about things — nobody taught me. But I did master the art of surviving on as little as possible, and keeping my mind occupied and far away from the troublesome emotions of my body.
I know how much love is within me because I am sad all the time. I’ve beaten myself up so badly trying to shut both feelings out — the ardor and the longing, which can only exist in tandem.
There is so much to lose — that is, so much to hold dear. And so many discoveries to make if I only remain present.
Let life be harder, messier, and so stuffed full of meaning that it almost bursts from its weight. I want to be right here. I want to care.
I was born poor. How many things go back to that? America wasn’t doing us much good when I was a baby. You had to be smarter, faster, and better than anybody else, and you had to follow the rules because they were always out to get you. And that’s a terrible way to grow up, and kind of a terrible self-concept to have, but feeling constantly in danger does lead to a certain amount of pride and stubbornness.
You meet the children of the rich, especially working in an arts organization in New York, because the children of the rich were always getting the internships. You know about internships, right? So people come in and they’re not being paid, and I’m always like, “How the fuck are you managing?” And they’re like, “Well, my daddy provided me with an apartment, and Mommy gave me a credit card.” And I’m like, “Oh, I get it.” You are a different animal.
And then define, what is your own unique story? It’s a struggle for every writer. And to value your story is a struggle for every writer. The problem is, of course, that if you live in a culture that inherently devalues the poor, the working class, the darks, the queer, the other, and you are all those categories, then you are fighting the voice of your culture at the same time that you are fighting all of the other difficulties of developing a voice and telling a story.
I do believe that a great novel can change a culture. But at the same time, the culture resists being changed mightily.
Because [lesbians] do not engage in the heterosexual exchange that defines so much of society’s rules and privileges and honors, because we’re not invested in that system, we are threatening on such a basic level that you might as well take pleasure in being threatening.
I opted for the good old fashioned academic route of leaving my body. Disdaining it. Attempting to buy into the myopic idea that I could devote my life to the inside of my head, as though the head in question wasn’t full of sparking meat and sitting atop a dumb, weak body.
When you’ve never run before, running feels like drowning. Like panic.
my direction has always been art, but without a few key ingredients (for example, an income) i have had to do some interesting, challenging, bizarre, sometimes gross things for money. i’ve been an art model for a museum, i’ve been a janitor at a kennel, i’ve worked with kids, and i’ve worked in libraries, and i’ve worked in restaurants and, really, anywhere that would pay me ten dollars an hour.
what i will do to feel loved feels beneath me, embarrassing. more embarrassing than a story where i am a raging bitch.
I’m not totally freed of my suspicion that all relationships are about power. My former poetry professor would claim that almost every poem was about power. At the time, I wasn’t convinced, but now, I think they were onto something. Writing is about power—an attempt on the author’s behalf to convince a reader that the language with which they are using to express themselves is urgent enough to put on the page. It’s not the only kind of power, but it is an originating source of it.
The body experience: that's what I'm here for. Not just lust or being strong but the whole ride of having a body, incarnation from start to finish.
When your nerves are shot, everything is like gunshot. The house making one of those tiny little pop noises that normally you don't hear, it's just the sound of the sun coming out, the house expanding - that makes me jump! Myself stepping on a leaf. Everything involving cars.
I read. I walk. Anything with a cadence. I want to be massaged every moment, pounded. Not sex. This exhaustion kind kills the soft focus of fantasy. Very here and now, that's the radical aspect of this body experience. The discomfort keeps you locked to your body, like your face shoved up against a mirror, unable to shut your eyes. Here you are. Here. Here. Here.
The consumption of hot girls is at an all time high. This is partially due to the self imposed panopticon, but outside of this phenomena, demand always spikes during a recession. Hot girls are the only asset many can afford! The consumption of the hot girl signifies wealth, talent, charm, big-dick-ness. You must have one to consume the hot girl, this is the entire basis of the economy. Her value to the other is her commodification, seemingly inseparable from the self.
Yet, despite these changes in the extent to which coupledom, marriage and the traditional family structure are changing, culturally we are still seemingly fixated on romantic love as the pinnacle form of love. For women in particular, there remains so much pressure to find a husband and hence become a wife and a mother, as though our societal worth is pegged solely upon those two things. Being single is depicted therefore as a space of limbo, a holding pen we rest in for a hot minute before the next big next act, meaning the next big relationship, which represents the point at which our life truly begins. This in turn suggests that being single means having some core absence, a void that can only be filled by a romantic partner.
The Julien Baker song “Hurt Less” is about loving someone so much that they make you want to stay alive on whatever corner of Earth you figured was wretched and unbearable before you met them. And, look, it ain’t nobody’s job to keep any of us alive other than ourselves, and I get that. But I’ve been to the funerals, and I’ve held friends on the cold tile of their apartments with pills spilled out at their feet, and I’ve washed bed sheets three times in a row to get blood out of them, and I have been both the arms reaching and the arms pulling back. And so it’s all a matter of perspective is what I’m saying.
She never wore seatbelts in her car because she maybe wanted to be alive, but not enough to stop herself from dying if she happened to be thrown from a car. This is a small measure, in some ways: the choices we make to stay alive or not are sometimes a matter of the smallest circumstance. To unbuckle a seatbelt on a highway and to take a knife to your own skin aren’t equal measures. One action, once taken, forces a darkness to descend, and the other is taken to not prevent the darkness from descending once it arrives.
The thing about Otis Redding’s plane crash is that he died because when the plane crashed into the river, his seatbelt got stuck and trapped him in his rapidly sinking seat. No one ever talks about that part. How that which protects us can also be our undoing. And so sometimes it’s our saviors that do us in. I have played the card of God on the table so that I can say I think sometimes there is a God who wants us to arrive earlier than we normally would, because the party has gotten boring up there.
And in that same Once, I sat in my car on a day it didn’t rain. And I held a bag on my lap. And inside the bag was a nervously written letter, and some candy, and a few books. And on the bag I scrawled the name of a woman who was flying back home to care for her sick father and I sat outside of the airport because in a message, she’d told me that she was flying in, that she had hours to be stuck in an airport terminal, and she’d first asked if there was anything fun to do, and then asked if I could maybe stop by and say hello, and I am saying now that I know a sick father and a worried daughter is not a landscape upon which to prop up a monument to romantics and I think now that when I say act of God I am really saying who will suffer so that I might be able to wrap my hands around the neck of some fleeting blessing.
I suppose the mundane things a person does that we imagine as art are subjective, usually tied to how in love we are with the person carrying out the action. I do not know what it is called when watching a person laugh for a brief moment is the thing you want to capture in a bottle. I think you realize that you love a person when they do something they would consider forgettable, but you see it every time you close your eyes. I don’t know what this is an act of, but it is an act of something I don’t imagine myself deserving.
God, can you tell me how much longer I’ll get to be alive and in love. God, I am sorry for the times I didn’t want to stick around. God, there is a scroll of things I have taken for granted in order to survive this long, and it is endless. And it is maybe too late to want to live forever after everything I’ve seen and done. But there are freeways between me and the person I love, God. And I don’t have enough time to travel all of them. I worry that I can’t bend them all into a giant circle from where I begin to where she begins. God, I don’t know what I believe in except the shrinking of distance. God, do you worry about the things you can control? I am enough in love to worry about everything that might cast a shadow over it. God, I have touched the living face of a person I love with the same hands I have touched the dying face of someone I love and none of that seems fair. God, I am enough in love that I want to make everything about it an endless circle, with a sunset at the top of every hour. I know this is all too much, God. But as long as you’re not tired yet of talking, it helps.
And there was so much, too, and I think about this a lot for my clients as well, so much of a false sense of promise around health when it comes to, I think, generally wellness culture, but especially when I think about the experience of orthorexia. This idea that I'm taking all these steps to "prevent disease" and prevent bad things from happening to me. And of course, we know that even if you do all the "right things," bad things can still happen, diseases still develop.
I was constantly fearful and anxious, and I was definitely not fun to be around at a dinner party and didn't even like to go out. It got so extreme and restrictive in that I would not be able to freely just eat out. When I would travel, I would look up restaurants and ingredients in advance.
When I was on these various blogs looking at information, I remember there was a particular one that was about orthorexia. The person that wrote it spent the blog talking about how absurd orthorexia is, and how could they basically criticize us and come at us for being healthy? And I remember relating to that a lot. I was like, "How could this be a thing? I'm doing the right thing." You couldn't have told me anything otherwise.
I just thought it was either my fault or the food's fault or a combination of both. And similarly, I just needed to restrict more and cut out more foods and double down and be more vegan or be more fill in the blank and that of course only led to more binge eating and more anxiety and the cycle just begets itself. More restriction leads to more preoccupation with food, which leads to more binge eating as we know. And it's quite difficult to get out of the cycle. And the idea of then eating more, especially when you're experiencing binge eating, is so tough.
Even those binge moments where I was sort of like, "Okay, something's wrong here, this isn't right. I'm feeling so terrible after a binge and guilty and ashamed." The shame for me was more about how can I stop eating out of control like this and get back to the clean, pure, whatever way that I'm eating the rest of the time, that I had in my head as the ideal. How can I get back to this ideal way of eating and just cut out this portion of my eating that feels so antithetical to that and so out of control and so not in line with who I want to be? That was sort of my attitude towards it.
I've come to understand, and I think you and many of many people in our field have come to understand that restriction often begets bingeing and that the binge is often a really natural consequence of the restriction. The deprivation and low level of energy that's being consumed and the rules about foods, good and bad foods and all that stuff, that feeling out of control or having a rebound eating episode or a rebound binge is a very understandable response to that. And so you sort of have to look at it as a full picture, this is the overall way that this person is relating to food in response to this restriction.
I think binge eating feels like this thing of I just eat too much and how can I stop eating too much? And so to be told, actually you don't eat too much, you probably don't eat enough, actually and that's what's driving the binges. Such a tough thing to get your mind around. I remember actually hearing that message way back, like 20 plus years ago or whatever, in the very beginning of my eating disorder and just refusing to believe it and just being like, "This is not possible. I'm not going to do that."
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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