round-up: 12/15
recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Sunday!
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:
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (download for free!)
A Call to the Modern Language Association to Let Members Decide About BDS
Dozens killed in Israeli air strike on Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp
Housekeeping:
I’m starting a second substack because I thought that would be fun. It’s free and viewable here.
And, look, some pretty flowers:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
You’re not alone if you’ve felt the cult of thinness inch its way back into your periphery over the last few months. It seems even after around half a decade of body positivity and some major achievements in the diversity of body representation, the trend cycle has spun back to its faithful and true: thinness. Fuelled by the likes of the indie-sleaze renaissance and Ozempic, thinness is re-emerging as the body standard
Put simply, I am finding it harder and harder to pay attention. To anything, which is to say, to everything in my life. Even as I commit to reading for pleasure every night, I find it harder and harder to keep my attention on the page. The ceaseless, frantic searching for something new and stimulating on my phone, and the need to respond to everything that comes my way, have destroyed my deep cognition, my ability to focus.
I've written and written and written about it over the years, but I still don't think I've ever really fully captured the experience of being a closeted, confused lesbian in the rural south, in a deeply evangelical Christian environment, growing up in an unstable home with an abusive mother. That kind of experience doesn't just fuck you up in the present; it fucks up the train tracks in your brain so badly that you have to build a whole new infrastructure and a whole new form of transportation if you're ever going to move around inside your own head in a healthy way.
I've had to claw my way to every good thing in my life. I've had to teach myself how to do almost everything, including how to survive.
Weight cycling (losing weight and then regaining weight) is the outcome of the vast majority of intentional weight loss attempts. It is also independently correlated to numerous mental and physical health issues including high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and increased overall mortality. (I have an in-depth piece about this here.) That changes the risk benefit analysis considerably.
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
-Octave Mirbeau
Even pundits ostensibly in favour of young people doing it more seem compelled by allegiance to heteronormativity and social reproduction than a vision of pleasure and authentic connection. As ever, sex is irresistible, incoherently conceived, dangerous, addicting, morally wrong, criminalised, confusing, unsatisfying, difficult to obtain. And if you’re not having it in a certain way, you’re acting against national interests.
Research has found that the amount of sleep a person averages each night is correlated with their risk of death from any cause, and that consistently getting good quality sleep can add several years to a person’s life. Sleep appears to be especially important for brain health: A 2021 study found that people who slept less than five hours a night had double the risk of developing dementia.
Even thinking positively can help you live longer. Several studies have found that optimism is associated with a lower risk of heart disease, and people who score highly on tests of optimism live 5 to 15 percent longer than people who are more pessimistic. That may be because optimists tend to have healthier habits and lower rates of some chronic diseases, but even when accounting for those factors, the research shows that people who think positively still live longer.
i was experiencing more than just being seen as a sick person, right? there is more to the story. there is more evidence to the experience.
i start getting the urge to pull a gun. the brain really is simple. it just wants to be happy.
i am also adding to my list of goals for 2025: stop knowing people who bawk at my dreams. stop knowing people who say “i’ve heard nothing but horror stories of people who tried to do that” or “how will you live?” i don’t know, man. i just know that if i stay around losers, i’ll turn into a loser, too.
Some of the poems were written in Hawai’i, where I live currently. Once I moved here, I felt an impulse to rethink the way I describe things. I think a lot about a place of un-belonging that I [occupy] here as a settler, as someone who didn’t grow up in Hawai’i, someone who doesn’t know the historical context. I am learning. I might look at a beautiful bird I love and find out that they are an invasive species, or the trees that I love might be invasive as well or brought here for the curation of tourists’ pleasure. So I felt this urgency to know more but also found that I am so inadequate. Trying to write from that unsettled knowledge has been a productive struggle for me. I don’t think I’m going to just turn to silence or give up on trying to describe my life here. Part of that struggle went into the poems in this book as well.
Kimiko Hahn, my thesis advisor for my MFA, once said something that really stuck with me: “When I die, I know I will be with my mother wherever she is. If she is ash, I will be ash with her.” I’m paraphrasing here, but no matter where I go, it’ll be where my mother is. I just found that to be so incredibly beautiful. It gave me a lot of solace when thinking about death, which has always been a difficult and scary topic for me. I returned to that quote a lot.
Poetry helps me try to create beauty out of even the ugliest situations, personally and globally. By beauty, I don’t mean something necessarily pleasant or perfectly symmetrical. It’s something that makes me more thoughtful about the language that I used to describe the people around me, the things around me in the world in which I live. Beauty can be a really useful method in how we treat ourselves and the world.
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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