keeping myself awake for an early flight

[felinejumper]

with a mix of Personal Squeeing and Link Recommendations

1. hello, I am TRAVELING and will be doing so for the next ~3 weeks. Please send me all your best posts in the meantime on any topic (this is an entirely serious request), and please forgive me for dropping any other threads!
   
   
2. Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science @ the NYTimes. I found this a really delightful and moving read, and very close to my own heart. If your interests are in climate change, science studies, philosophy, or cross-disciplinary collaboration...or philosophical banter!
   

   Impressed by Latour’s dedication, Gaillardet remarked that Latour could have been a scientist. The idea seemed almost too much for him to bear.
   
   “I could have been a scientist,” Latour said with arch gravity. “I’ve wasted my life.”
   “Oh, Bru-no!” Gaillardet said, in the way in which one might comfort a wounded bird.
   “To produce one fact!” Latour sighed, and pointed a finger in the air, as though to demonstrate its indisputable solidity. There was an ache in his eyes. “Can you imagine the pleasure of producing one fact?”

   
   
3. Love Is Not a Permanent State of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Esther Perel @ The New Yorker. On divorce, infidelity, couples counseling. The last line is *chef kiss* perfect.
   

   I think that definition today of love—“you are my everything”—where you really see it, this complete exaltation, is in wedding vows. Have you ever noticed? I mean, it’s, “I will wipe every tear that streams down your face before you even notice it’s going down.” I think a realistic vow is “I will fuck up on a regular basis, and, on occasion, I’ll admit it.”

   
   
4. I started Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism and was immediately drawn in. And. Wow. I want to excerpt it breathedout-style, but I don't know how to pull out, say, this passage about, uh, scapegoating the Jewish community and retain all of the context. The context feels very important.
   
   
5. "The Daddy Thing” by K. C. Mead-Brewer, and I will quote the official recommender --
   

   “You must listen to me, Juana,” her mother says, believing she is speaking metaphorically. “This is the way the story ends, you understand? This is the way it always ends… Vampires are parasites and they’ll take every drop you give them.”
   
   Better that you get the story filtered through the eyes of Juana, who perceives the violence of her household as only a child can: in half understood shadows, the sound of her mother crying, a BANG BANG BANG on the door. “The sound that hits you, as if you yourself were the door.”

   
   
   
6. My long term partner is reading…fanfiction… independently of me. He asked me for recs yesterday. I am breathless with anticipation + going to write him a Yuletide-style gift!
   
   
7. I have in the past week developed a crush on a good friend & occasional partner (who has also been privy to the breakup nonsense) and it is, wow, a truly frightening emotion. Flirting While Trans is just like "hey so I was thinking about monsters and whether they're internal or not" and "this is the sternocleidomastoid muscle" and "do you know how seaborn works I can't get this countplot to display correctly" (incidentally, does anyone know how seaborn works?). So the flirting is good and they're non-monogamously experienced and I trust them for no good reason and crushes are fun and I am scaaared out of my mind. A wild emotional ride, is 2019 (already!!! Why? Am I like this?! Could we chill for thirty seconds?)
   
   Something that was fucked about the break up was an unspoken and unacknowledged expectation that I would, eventually, embody transness in the same way they did (spoiler: I don't! spoiler: I don't want to! spoiler: *pulls out all hair*.) have i said this 50k times already whatever The evidence for this is kind of overwhelming, even if it wasn't cited explicitly, and it is probably never not going to make me bloody fucking furious and maybe, concerned for other people.
   It is delightful to have a new partner(??!) who is explicitly not like that, where I am implicated in their construction but explicitly so, who is explicitly aware of mentorship/partnership boundaries, who is extremely clever and quick on the emotional uptake, who employs metaphors like a sword (ohgodIhaveacrushohgodhelp), and who is not, when I look very closely, not expecting me to be anything but just exactly what I've said I am (flighty, temperamental, data-based, obsessed with Modernism, trying really hard). SO THE CRUSH IS GOOD and I know that because I'm nervous about texting them and also I want them to be here RIGHT NOW.
   If i just make my text progressively tinier do the feelings also disappear? I am so aware that this is all a story too, and it kills me to not have data, to continue to not have data. I just...want...information. WERE there gender expectations? IS it about me? COULD I have known in [present day minus 5 years] that this is the result? CAN I trust anyone ever again? and wow this little crush is just, like...tender. Which, you know, sue me, but I don't mind tenderness so much.

Comments

[breathedout]

I for one would be very interested in your continuing thoughts on the Arendt. Her The Banality of Evil has been on my TBR for uh... like half a decade, and whenever I mention it to people it elicits VERY strong reactions, both positive and negative. Always an intriguing state of affairs.

And yay, crush!

[juushika]

7 +footnote is lovely to read--intersections between gender & life experience & attraction are chewy and engaging. I hope this crush can function as a form of play and experimentation to build new (and hopefully better?) tools for exploring this territory.

[sea_changed]

Thank you for linking the Latour article, it was fascinating. (I just read We Have Always Been Modern and have had the very discussion that he's addressing multiple times recently, so this was timely as well as of general interest.)

[felinejumper]

I see my "tiny font" tactic was unsuccessful & I'll have to try a different one <3
I, too, have those hopes for aforementioned terror crush! The chewiness of Life Stuff is a nice way to put it, and ties into something of how I've felt—not a silver lining, exactly, but my extreme sensitive/empathy over the past ~6 months has been excellent for my story reading/creation muscles.

[felinejumper]

!!! crush !!!

Arendt is, whew, a LOT. I think she is working at a level of complexity that feels immediately problematic in ways that are reminiscent (to me) of ~purity discourse, or the single-minded hierarchy that identity politics can become, but...even saying *that* feels fraught, you know?

[felinejumper]

For example, on page *4* of the preface:
Even the dubious products of Jewish apologetics, which never convinced anybody but the convinced, were towering examples of erudition and scholarship compared with what the enemies of Jews had to offer in matters of historical research.<sup>7

7. The only exception is the anti-semitic historian Walter Frank, head of the [Reich Institute for the History of New Germany]...Frank's own contributions can be consulted with profit.</sup>

First off, way to slam literally everyone involved. Second, what...does one do with that? I don't think she's wrong, just every bone in my body by default protests "consult this Nazi profitably." SO. We shall see; I think parsing it for a low-stakes internet audience will be very helpful.

[felinejumper]

I'm glad you enjoyed! And in a timely fashion too, an exceedingly rare accomplishment for me.

[aerialiste]

(also while I'm stealing things, absolutely swiping "I will fuck up on a regular basis, and, on occasion, I’ll admit it" for my current WIP as a declaration of love)

[felinejumper]

it's the BEST, I have so many feelings about "I love you" being a meaningless phrase and this…not being meaningless. I would be so excited to read fic with that kind of declaration.

[aerialiste]

Exclusive preview that not another soul has seen, so who knows a) how good it is and b) whether it will even wind up in the last chapter:

He got out of the car and leaned his cane up against a gravestone, more lime scale then epitaph; he couldn't even read the name or the dates. 4 NEW MESSAGES said the screen. John frowned.

Shep, on the level? I know you have to get back to your people. You know I know how that goes. But I have to tell you something, and I should have told you to your face.

He clicked NEXT.

You're pretty hard to let go of. You should know that.

Sheppard swallowed, hard, against the lump in his throat.

So take care of yourself, and swing by next time you’re in DC, if the brass give you enough leeway. The offer stays open.

One more thing: I’m sorry about that night. What I said. It wasn’t true. I was trying not to say something else, but that doesn’t make it okay.

There were long rows of family plots, squares fenced in with low limestone railings, and filled with bright burnt-yellow flowers, tiny daisy-like masses that reflected golden light back up onto his hands and face, the way autumn leaves did back east. And he had something of the same feeling: a biting nostalgia, summer coming to an end and like he was walking away from something he would much rather keep.

His Blackberry pinged again.

But if you change your mind, if that’s even possible. I can promise you I will fuck up on a regular basis, and, on occasion, I’ll admit it. And I can promise you that I’d take care of you, if you let me. For as long as you’d let me. Out.