round-up: 2/24
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
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.
Housekeeping:
My granola kick continues.
The only fruit I have right now is frozen blueberries. I highly recommend this compote.
I’m also getting back into jewelry.
Greece legalized gay marriage, which made me think back to an old zine I wrote.
And here are some recent Google searches:
are the killing eve books gay
kid dies at grand canyon
crying meme
jonbenet ramsey brother
sylvia/emily fanfic handmaids tale
That’s all I have to share, really. As we know, things are bad for everyone.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I am a citizen of the United States of America and my nation’s military and police kill people every single day with guns and bombs and drones. No matter what I do with my poems it is impossible to balance such unmitigated bloodshed and suffering. No matter how many poems I write I cannot undo my complicity.
-CAConrad
I know that I will not meet a single person no matter where I am in the United States who is interested in discussing our wars. It is as though they are not happening. It is as though we are asleep in an alternate dimension while in the other one there are real live human beings torn open by metal as the survivors design ways to cope and I can only imagine how they cope. I do not have to imagine how the citizens of the United States cope with our heinous crimes: I walk into a shopping mall and then another and the laughter and marketable fun times make it clear that everyone seems just fine with our military’s actions.
-CAConrad
I believe misogyny is more rampant than ever in the LGBTQ community and I believe it is directly related to the hypermilitarized atmosphere in our nation.
-CAConrad
Assimilation is the new weapon.
-CAConrad
Putting a rainbow sticker on a machine gun is not a right, it’s a cruel mistake.
-CAConrad
It is the deviants who propel the culture forward whether everyone is ready or not!
-CAConrad
We need as many people being creative right now as possible because it is the creative people who will solve the problems facing the survival of our species. If rich people could give some of their wealth to creative people who are struggling, people who are serious about fostering innovative spaces in our world but cannot pay their rent, this is where the money languishing in bank accounts can alter the future of our planet. There are already wealthy people doing this, but not enough of them.
-CAConrad
To so much as talk in public about a sex life, let alone to publish an entire novel about it, is a pursuit seething with such potent, anxiety-stirring shame that even now, as I write these words, my pulse is rising.
Be quiet, the shame begs. Go back in hiding.
I’m hardly alone in writing what I can barely tell. It’s part of what I love about reading: literature, art, can let slip the private truths, things otherwise left veiled. With all I am, I trust in fear as a guiding sign. It’s essential to what I feel called to do, as a novelist: I have to put in words that which I’m afraid of saying.
This anecdote is about (more or less) vanilla sex, but I think it illustrates a phenomenon that a lot of us overlook in SM contexts: just because someone has more power doesn’t mean they have all of it. Whether the differential is “real” (that is, based on material conditions like physical strength, or the less tangible, but no less substantial, pressures of our social organization) or negotiated, trust must be earned on both sides—not just on the part of the bottom.
Trust is not given or received. Like a dance, it takes two, and like the skill to dance well, it takes time.
I realized that marriage, which had been sold to me as this beautiful thing, had been a trap. I’d been performing uncompensated and unrecognized labor for twelve years in order to build a happy life. I’d been told that to have a meaningful life I needed to sacrifice myself on this pyre of home and family. But it was only when I took myself off that cross that I was actually happy. So, I wanted to explore the personal, cultural, and political forces that force women into marriage and then trap them there. And I wanted to argue that our happiness is not frivolous.
I was just doing what I could do. Clinging to the things that made sense. I understand now that is how we save our own lives, by holding fast to those fundamental parts of ourselves. Refusing to let them go.
There is so much in the world that uses fear to silence you. Don’t comply. Don’t capitulate to the forces that would rather have you hide. Do the work. Do your work. Do it boldly and without fear. I believe in the power of the narrative voice as provisional self. I don that voice whenever I am worried; it gives me the courage to say what I need to say.
I want to be seen, to be understood, deeply, and to be not so very lonely.
Tweets:
Reboot where they’re enemies-to-lovers WHEN
That’s all for today!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee just cus, you can do that here.