round-up: 5/03
what i'm reading, looking at, watching, & listening to, and some quotations <3
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m looking at
What I’m watching
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
I tried my hand at lino-cutting/block-carving this week. I think I’m getting better!
I’m also trying to teach myself how to screenprint. Big week of trying to stave off dread with new hobbies.
What I’m looking at:
This rabbit!!!
What I’m watching:
This trailer!
The movie looks ridiculous and probably awful, but, dang, that’s a great cast.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
Personally, as a proponent of ‘laziness’ and an outspoken hater of labor exploitation, I’m all in favor of people slowing down their work flows, letting errors that are not their problem slide, and asking a tedious number of questions as a way of reducing the heat their managers place on them. Generally speaking, I would recommend that workers learn the fine art of only doing what they are literally told to do and nothing else (also known as malicious compliance) and not picking up the higher-order responsibilities of monitoring work process or anticipating problems when they are not compensated for it. Making the world frictionless for others offloads an immense amount of stress and unacknowledged responsibility onto you.
Ask any woman who dates men about her experience with weaponized incompetence, and you’re likely to hear a litany of horrific examples.
A co-parent pretends to take an hour-long bathroom break after every single dinner so that he won’t be expected to wash the dishes. A boyfriend fills the washing machine with dish soap and ruins all the clothes. A spiteful male co-worker creates the most hideous PowerPoint decks imaginable, and says his female colleague has a much better eye for such things than him. This Reddit thread is filled with real-life instances of weaponized incompetence, if you’re in need of a little rage porn today.
Many disabled people are unfairly accused of ‘weaponizing incompetence’ when all that they’ve done is express a limitation as clearly as they possibly could, which ought to be a good thing! There is nothing wrong or manipulative with asking for help, or for articulating what you are and are not capable of, as honestly as you can.
Every disabled person has to arrive at a distribution of household duties that works for them — and they should do it clear-headedly, rather than having to lie or apologize for how they work. Unfortunately, due to the pressures of capitalism and hyper-individualistic contemporary life, some people simply can’t arrive at an arrangement of household duties that fully functions. The expectation that anyone be capable of working a full-time job and maintaining a clean home and keeping themselves fed is completely unrealistic — it’s not even possible for abled people, to the extent that’s an identifiable human group. It’s definitely untenable for most disabled people (and remember: all humans eventually become disabled, if they live long enough).
As Marta Rose has written about frequently, disabled people will only be met with failure and frustration when we try to make an idealized abled life fit our minds and bodies. If you have a family that grazes snacks all day long because they cannot handle the sensory experience of a full belly, then why stress about maintaining a spotless dining room? Why cover the back yard in difficult & wasteful-to-maintain grass imported by Europeans if you have a special interest in native grasses and would love the sensation of a rock bed beneath your feet?
Choosing to end one’s own life is an act of bodily autonomy, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it deserves respect, alongside other modes of resistance and freedom-fighting. Though the hope here is that we can work together to soften the edges of each other’s pain when it gets too much, because we all deserve, deeply, to stick around, to enjoy the parts of life that are enjoyable.
For those of us who live with suicidal ideation of any kind, it’s really useful to learn how it shows up for you, how you can manage it, and how you will know when you’re in danger. Are your thoughts about death coming up because you actually wish to end your life, or do they stem more from a desire for something to change or stop? Can you tell the difference? What are your triggers? What is your support network looking like and how will you communicate with them? What crisis services are available in your area? How often would you like people to check in with you about your suicidal thoughts? In what ways are your suicidal thoughts useful?
Glennon is less of an individual contributor and far more like an institution at this point—she speaks directly with the audience in a we fashion, in a way that obfuscates the fact that she is now a well resourced multi-millionaire, a billionaire in terms of the attention economy, and has an entire team surrounding her, as well as a thick network of celebrity friends that promote and enable her work (for instance: Liz Gilbert is hosting a “welcome to Substack for Glennon” and this is exactly the thing: they are both folks with more than enough wealth, and why couldn’t some unknown writer barely making it here be who Liz welcomed, or who Glennon chose to host her welcome party?). The point is, what I see in the largesse of Glennon is a replication of the current sick in our society—a growing gap between the haves and the have nots, a refusal to relinquish any kind of privilege, a need to own more than their fair share, and thus a person demonstrating to us that if it isn’t enough for her—that with all her wealth and privilege she still needs more money, more attention, more whatever—it will trickle down and have a heavy influence on how many others with lesser means have to operate.
Overall, the link between ultra processed foods and mortality is, at best, a bit weak, and may not represent a real finding as much as it shows that people who eat a lot of cheap, low-quality foods are less healthy in many ways.
My favourite example of this is bread. If you buy packaged sliced bread from a store, it is almost always ultra processed. It lasts for 1-2 weeks on the counter, or up to a month in the fridge. If you instead buy fresh bread from a bakery, it is usually just processed - no “ultra”. Fresh bread usually lasts 3-5 days and goes stale quickly in the fridge. It is much tastier, but if you only have time to go grocery shopping once a week, fresh bread is going to be a sometimes rather than everyday food by default.
Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive. The only reason we fear sugar so much is because we link it to fatness.
Body sizes have increased on a population level for a variety of complicated reasons, but some of us have always been fat. And even though RFK somehow never met an autistic person when he was a child, they have also always existed.
I was 14 when [the 1965 Richard Avedon guest-edited issue of Harper’s Bazaar] came out. I’m 74 now. Being 14 was so horrible. I’d rather be 74. No one wants to be 74 unless they’re 78, but I promise you, being a 14-year-old girl—I’m sure it’s different now, but I bet it’s not much better. It is so hard to be a 14-year-old girl that there’s not a single 40-year-old man who could be a 14-year-old girl for even a week. That’s how hard it is.
People are suffused with nostalgia, which is, I think, one of the most destructive things there are in the world. The odd thing is how many kids, by which I mean people in their 20s, have nostalgia for an era they didn’t even live through. I mean, nostalgia in its most acceptable form, to me, is personal. It’s for your childhood.
I am aware of the effect of the internet, which is suffocating. One of the things it does is flatten everything. It flattens geography and also time. Kids see images, and they’re always coming up to me saying, “Oh, this looks so great!” But images are not life.
People dread the future now. The planet is melting. There’ll be no water. This I don’t understand, but apparently there will be no water. There’ll be no water, or there’ll be too much water, depending upon where you live. AI, I don’t understand. To me, it seems just like stealing. But everyone asks me all the time, are you afraid of AI? Are you worried about it? Maybe I’d be more worried about it if I understood it.
Not understanding things is helpful to not being worried. I have to point that out. So if you’re a very stress-free person, you are not paying attention or you don’t understand. I’m more worried about human intelligence than I am worried about artificial intelligence.
In politics, revenge is horrible. In my personal life, I have found revenge to be totally satisfying. When people say it’s not worth it, it’s not the best human response, that may be true, but it’s worth it for sure. And I will tell you that any time I’ve been able to wreak vengeance on someone, I have found it to be delightful. And even, or sometimes especially, if the person doesn’t know it was me, it lasts forever with me. Sometimes I’ll see someone—I mean, not deliberately, but I’ll see someone and I’ll think, “Did you ever wonder why you didn’t get that fellowship?” I know. It was me.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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