The Nihilism of Children

Talked to DerbyK. Or at least got an update from your blog and poked you about it a bit. You’ve been sort of away for a while. Which I can understand, with your recent life. But it’s good to see you back, and hopefully we can find a time for actual talking in the near future.

@BPS was in Seattle the same weekend I was in SFO: https://youtu.be/6Kl83AoRro0 They’re sort of all over the place in this episode and it’s great. Simultaneously energized and drained from their in-office work, and grateful that offices aren’t part of their daily life. Amazed by the snow, even in Seattle quantities. Excited by buying clothes for the first time in a long time, which I can relate to. And they got a great multi-colored, many-patterned, androgynous, handmade, pocketed tunic dress thing that makes me a little sad that I can only wear clothes in size Fluffy.

Talked at CookieZ, after doing some research for them but failing to turn up any useful results. We’ll see if they can give me anything more to go on. In the mean time I’ve queued up some more cookies, this time for A. Who I also finally talked to, interactively even. I need to work slightly more at that to keep it going when I get busy. I think I’m okay with the way it works when I’m not, but I want to be sure it doesn’t fall away when I’m not looking — it’s so much more work to rebuild than to keep something in good shape. Which is a great reason you should write to someone today, even if you’re not prepared to hold up a conversation. Even if you can’t think of 2 things to say. Just do it. Your anxiety tell you to wait for some indefinite point in the future when the right motivation will finally feel easier, but I’m pretty sure that’s lie, and that waiting will only ever make it one day harder. Harder to be alone with your feelings and harder to imagine it could be another way. So do it. Doit.

We finished Life is Strange 2: Pre-Electric Boogaloo. The game is intended to give you all the feels and it always hits Shanda sort of hard. Hard enough that I want to remind you that the feels belong to the game and you are safe. You tell me that you know, but I’m not sure your feels know, at least not right away. Once we settled in it was good fine, and I really liked the final relevant choice in the game. It does end on a real fucking downer in the scene that reminds us about the terrible events the motivated the original game. Much dark, many sadness. There’s a cute post-script though, during the credits, and a fun double-flashback episode where you get to interact with the main characters as 12-year-olds for a while. The game is worth playing, particularly if you liked the original.

In-lens composites and drone shots from around Seattle: https://www.instagram.com/rudy_willingham/ I came for the off-the-shoulder flowers [fig 1] but I stayed for I stayed for bloody Lennin [fig 2].

Watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016). Shanda told me it was not a very good movie, but I think it was fine. I mean, it’s not great — like all HP films it’s about 35% too long, and most of the extra run time is “whimsy” that just makes wizards look racist and/or mean. And it’s got a little bit of Twitter fanfic author JK Rowling in it, wherein she yells a claim in support of some social good but fails to have the world or characters react to it in any way. Her inattention to consistent world building is one of the reasons HP never really worked for me. It almost has something to say about the pain of young people but fails to turn them into real characters instead of just objects for the plot to push around. But Redmayne was very good in it, and the heroes sometimes get cool 20s dresses. I also like to imagine the thieving platypus as the origin story for Perry the Platypus.

Watched “The Case Against the Jedi” ¹http://popculturedetective.agency/2018/the-case-against-the-jedi which is mostly about how the philosophy and advise the Jedi promote as important to “being a (man) Jedi” is essentially to isolate yourself from anything you might care about. They threaten that failing to do so will turn you evil (presumably because women turn men evil), because the nature of love is loss and loss makes you unable to control yourself. But the actual story shows how isolation is what turns you evil because you don’t have anything to tether you or any support for when you aren’t in control. Jedi are sort of nihilistic paladins, which is the worst kind of paladin, which is already the worst class of player character. They are “good” on the matrix but only in in a big-picture way — they are not interested in the welfare of any individual even when they have considerable power available to improve people’s lives.

I wasn’t ever pushed into repressing myself as part of masculinity, but I definitely learned a lot about nihilism when I was young. When I was slightly older I learned it as classic nihilism, wherein what I do doesn’t matter, doesn’t even reliably make me fell good or bad, certainly doesn’t have any reliable impact on my life. Often this happened for straightforward reactive reasons — expressing any preference about anything made Mother hate that preference, and expressing the opposite preference would create the same reaction. She merely wanted to disagree; she didn’t know what she wanted and held me accountable for making that evident to her. But there were other parts though where her narcissism was so intense that it looked like autism — wherein she literally can’t imagine that other people have their own thoughts or preferences and so she imagines hers apply universally. This is particularly true when she was considering you part of herself, which was of course easier when I was very young. So we’d end up in situations where she had strong opinions about how people should adopt some role that was different for the two of us (gender, for example) but then lump me into her group. For example, she might buy me a piece of clothing that is “for girls”, like it when she told me to wear it and was imagining it in the context of her, but hate it if I wore it other times when she imagined me in a separate context.

My life gave endless examples of how meaningless my choices were — or how making them only lead to pain — and so I developed a mindset that allowed me to not care so much about them ²I still sort of live there today, on all the topics where I need to protect myself from the cruelty of the world. It’s not a great plan but it’s better than being overwhelmed by the oppression and cruelty we all see every day. It’s important that I pushed it away from me, and that I am careful to avoid letting things stew in there, but … Continue reading, and to numbly accept whatever outcome that produced. I see how that same pattern of behavior gave 4-year-old me some pretty intense nihilism too, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have preferences for things like clothes or colors or gender — I was consistently given bad feedback for all of the choices I made about personal preferences and so I learned to stop making them. I think viewing those bits as nihilism might give me a better way to find places where it’s still happening, so I can make choices about it again. Sometimes I still don’t care; having gender preferences was discouraged while I was young, and now that I’m old I’m pretty happy being indifferent about it. My ability to genuinely not care about things is sometimes a powerful tool for fighting the patriarchy. But sometimes it’s nice to have a favorite color too.

I was also thinking about my particular brand of emotional repression. How I read it not as emotions being bad in and of themselves, but as me being bad for noticing them in others or letting mine affect other people. I could see the emotional disfunction in Mother but believed her when she said it was mine and not hers. Believed her when she told me that I shouldn’t be able to see them, that noticing or being noticed is a burden, and the fact infants can notice and ask to be noticed which is what make them a burden ³This was introduced both as a reason for her to hate me for noticing her emotions, particularly ones she hadn’t bothered to feel for herself despite acting on, and as a reason for me to provide child care. If was was well-controlled I wouldn’t need to “give in” to a crying infant by providing it care, I could just ignore it like she did. … Continue reading. So I felt entitled to have feelings and did, but only alone, so as not to burden anyone else with my intolerable need. I kept waiting for the day when finally I’d outgrow my ability to see them in others, like milk teeth I wanted to lose. The day when I’d finally lose my empathy and become a real boy.

There’s a point to be made here about relationships and the way you understand your role in their complications or failure. Including but not limited to romantic relationships. But I need to cook that a while longer before I can tell you the right parable about it. Or maybe I just need more space for it. In any case, it’s not going in this one. And neither is anything else.

ZiB

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