very filled with dreams

by the time this post goes up i will have asked A Trusted Confidante to change my tumblr password to something i don’t know and thus, be locked out of tumblr till i come back, which i’m currently planning to do after the 18th (end of classes/papers + philosophy final) or poooossibly the 23rd (my only other final). i mean, i am fickle so, like, i could be totally lying. but anyway my point is if you don’t hear from me i’m not dead. PROBABLY NO ONE WOULD HAVE WONDERED THIS ANYWAY but i am weird and vaguely paranoid, so.

xoxo~

ugh this is ridiculous self

i am LOGGING OUT OF TUMBLR and not coming back till…. hm. i’m gonna be real real bold and say next monday. this week is my work vacation which means i should get sooooo much work done. and since i’ve started timing myself i’ve realized, once i sit down and like, do work, a lot of it doesn’t take me that long (i have pretty light workloads in my courses this semester). but i’ve spent a bunch of time on tumblr today having ~thoughts~ about things that are, um, not work. i have 4 papers due in the next 2.5 weeks. theoretically, the extra 17 hours i’d spend at work + ~8 hours? i’d spend commuting to/from work, not to mention just the mere fact of not coming home at like 7:45 real tired, should let this week enable me to make this not at all a problem or a source of stress. i love you all but I Am Being A Silly and need to shut it down. c u monday~

It was news to my stupid naive white ass in college when I realized that Argentines like my then-boyfriend looked down on Mexicans, so… yeah, this is something that a complacent white USian probably won’t get. This book sounds fantastic.

i mean, and i forgot to mention this, like, “not understanding latin@s can be racist/prejudiced in other ways against other latin@s” is another terrible effect of US latin@-identity homogenization, yeah. (in general, “not understanding ‘minorities’ can be racist,” and not in the sense of “racism = prejudice + power” [which IMO does apply in some cases especially wrt anti-black racism] but in the sense of “how could minorities not be all one big happy family?????” is such a pet peeve of mine because 1) inaccurate but also because 2) it’s like, assuming that everyone from everywhere centralizes whiteness in their view of the world, that whiteness is the sun and everyone else understands themselves to be on a planet equal among other planets gazing at the light of whiteness, that people don’t center their own communities, their own kinship, and orient themselves with themselves, their communities, their families, in the central position. like, what????? get over yourselves.)

ETA and it is a really great book! it also has some amazing stuff about education (and is written by a dude who is a graduate of my current school and a fourth-grade public school teacher) that made me mad again at the way “universal~~~~~~~” topics like boring existentialist angst are privileged as more “artistic” than talking about the alienation caused by being a poor youth of color in a racist apathetic/abusive school system.

and i don’t wanna defend the latin american social hierarchy, not just cuz puerto ricans are pretty far down on the ladder (above basically dominicans and that’s it) but because, i mean, fuck social hierarchies generally, but extra fuck social hierarchies based on 1) economic status 2) race/percentage of white people in the country (and percentage of black people in the country) 3) perceived education levels 4) accents (i mean, all latin american accents are frowned upon by spain, but caribbean accents are extra stigmatized within latin america) 5) lots of stuff i’m not getting to. i mean fuck that. let me be very clear. fuck that.

but fuck also the US imposing its own narrow, racist* homogenization on AN ENTIRE CONTINENT OF PEOPLE, JESUS CHRIST.

(*as a white assimilated latina i don’t experience racism, wanna be clear about that.) (*as a white latina with an accent idk what i would call what my mom has sometimes experienced in the states. i mean in puerto rico, she is straight-up white, never gonna be a victim of racism ever. is an english professor being shocked that she would be into chaucer’s wife of bath because she’s a “married hispanic woman” racism, per se? what about her white cuban friend getting abused by a police officer on the road in the middle of the night? these things would be more common for them if they were non-white latinas, they would be less common for them if they had no accent, more common with a stronger accent, in my mom’s case probably more common without the mooooost english name everrrrr, thx legacy of colonizing british great-grandfather. i support bad-dominicana being like “fuck white latina tears” but i don’t support americans, especially white americans, not understanding that these things happen to people these things would not happen to in their lands of origin.)

i don’t usually tumbl much about books i read for school, because i’m always focused on reading them fast, by the deadline, checking chapters off on my to-do list, but i might try to talk about this book we read in my writing for the humanities class called bodega dreams. it is — very explicitly and consciously — a gatsby of spanish harlem, and it is also very specifically a puerto rican gatsby. this is very cool in an “about time!” way. in reading it i remembered how surprised i was when the great gatsby was on my crime narratives class and while once the professor was like, this is a gangster novel, i was like, duhhh but i also felt bad/implicated about not having realized that when i would have realized this about bodega dreams right away, because cocaine, because more explicit violence earlier on. i was thinking, “isn’t bootlegger kind of a fancy word for white drug dealer?” i mean, it’s a word that was (as i understand it?) used at the time and maybe worth preserving. but saying gatsby is in bootlegging, now, in 2013, sounds different than saying gatsby is part of a drug ring, even though literally that’s what bootlegging was. and i mean, there was never a constitutional amendment banning cocaine.

so i might wanna talk about that stuff more than we will in The Worst Class Of All Time That Didn’t Feature A Creepy Professor, Just A Terrible One. we haven’t talked about it yet and i hope i get the chance to ask her, “do you understand what it means in a novel very situated in not just the latin@ but in the puerto rican/nuyorican experience that the daisy buchanan character married not just a rich dude but a cuban?” i mean i just want to know. does she know latin america has its own social hierarchy that the united states racialization of latin@s largely elides? does she know what it means to have a puerto rican gatsby rather than a gatsby from anywhere else? because one thing my crime narratives professor pointed out is, the gangster narrative was an immigrant narrative, a narrative about being locked out of legitimate roads to american “success” because of, to maybe oversimplify, xenophobia/racialization of certain ethnicities at the time. and in gatsby, fitzgerald shifts it to be about a native son, demonstrates how the power structures of this country are, by that point (and always, in some parts) closed even to a lot of people on top, the oligarchy is even smaller than it would have, for example, white dudes believe (because that believe is in service of “the 1%” which isn’t to cry for white dudes — although ok i do feel for gatsby — but just to point it out i guess).

puerto ricans are in a weird state. citizens without representation, native sons and immigrants simultaneously. so, a puerto rican gatsby is in keeping with the gatsby story although it also complicates it, it sits in a liminal space between jay gatz of the midwest and a first-gen family from southern italy. not that a dominican or cuban or argentinian model would make for a worse book — but the gatsby figure’s frustration (which is more explicitly political here — he’s a former young lord) is grounded in large part in this native/immigrant mingling, in being theoretically entitled to citizenship while barred from the “dream” that entails. and i just wonder if my hella condescending, kinda racist white US professor understands that subtlety.

(*& actually, our nick carroway character is half ecuadorian, which places him in a liminal state within a liminal state, which is, well, in keeping with with the peripheral nature of nick carroway, yeah?)

wolfsisters:

game of was that scene fucking necessary

whoa no one told me hbo changed their name

(via missvoltairine)

(i don’t remember the specifics of simmel well enough to really give an example of why i like him, but — we had an assignment to take an issue in contemporary sociology and write 1) how the big four would approach it and 2) which of their approaches we thought was most useful and why, and i picked the second shift, mostly relying on the book of that title, and tbh i found a little something useful in all of them — “marx would probs say that the dominant class, in this case men (*although this is sort of cheating because like, weber would be a necessary step in considering a “class” not based in relation-to-means-of-production), creating the expectation of women doing housework no matter what is a way of exploiting free labor,” i don’t not-believe that tbh — but, ok, in the book the second shift, the two coples arlie hochschild profiles who managed to successfully work out an equal balance of household tasks literally only did so because the women were willing to leave their husbands over it. the portrait she paints is that this is what it takes, that only when forced with a genuine choice, which the woman is ready to actually enforce, between “losing the expectation of free domestic labor” and “losing your wife,” did men manage to get their shit together. and, the book is a profile of 12 couples, despite the larger statistical observations of the second shift this is questionable methodology as to the ways couples avoid it, yes. but simmel, if i remember right, basically says, over the course of a couple essays, something along the lines of, in a relationship both people have two things they want, and the one less willing to give up the thing they want will always have the power and will always win. which is way depressing — although, now that i think about it, probably an idea that has been elaborated on a lot, and very obvious to many of you????? this is where i encountered it first, though — but also kinda true. so i basically said, simmel would say that as long as women value maintaining their relationships more than they value being treated as equal partners, as long as they consider the relationship itself to be offering them more than that kind of equality would offer, men will never change because they don’t have to. and, like, Not All Men, and this is eliding all kiiiiiiiiinds of “outside” power dynamics that very much exist and carry over inside a relationship, and this isn’t a definitive statement. but… kind of, i’m kind of pessimistic enough to think that, at the least, this is a useful way of thinking about it.)

(*of ALL THINGS, a cathy cartoon comes to mind — awful, i know, but she’s comforting a dude friend who just got dumped, and he’s like, i never saw this coming!!!!! and she’s like, did you have any problems, and he’s like, no, and she’s like, did she ever ask for such and such and such things, and he’s like, well yeah, and she says basically, how did you NOT see this coming jfc, and he says something like, “i didn’t think they were problems she would break up with me about!” and i know cathy is a nightmare world for gender commentary but i kinda think that one is not bullshit, or at least not totally.) (**Women Do This Too I’m Sure, but.)

(i did lose the thread of my sociological theory class when we hit foucault. i felt a little okay about it on the grounds of my TF being like “i mean, no one is pretending he was good at history here” but i also felt bad about it because i was having a nervous breakdown. NEVER TRY TO READ FOUCAULT WHILE HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, is my advice to you, from the experience of a brutal attempt to write a final paper on him, because nervous breakdowns, in my experience, lead to 1) low frustration tolerance with other things 2) low frustration tolerance with one’s self 3) varying degrees of cognitive impairment and the dude sort of requires one to be firing on all cylinders. i mostly picked him as the later theorist to do a paper on because my mom but, mostly, a dude i had been obsessed with loved him a lot. then i found out that dude was a sexual abuser who was into the idea of deciding whether his ex’s description of him that way was legitimate or not and not that i would’ve gone back, i don’t think, but that association is kind of another impediment to the idea of my ever giving him another shot.)

i don’t — and i say this very tentatively and with the assumption that i don’t understand him because whenever it comes to anything remotely abstract i operate from the assumption that i don’t understand it, which 1) is why i mostly avoid abstract stuff 2) why my sociological theory tutorial was actually pretty easy, because those bros (the early “founding fathers” one anyway — marx, weber, durkheim, and simmel, as we learned them, although simmel is sort of an outlier both in terms of what i’m saying and in terms of the course i took choosing to identify him as a member of the big 4 — kinda wish i hadn’t sold back my copy of his essays tho because iirc he had some really good depressing stuff to say about power dynamics in interpersonal relationships, and “the stranger” is also a very charming little piece — anyway) were mostly trying to like, work against abstraction in their various ways, even though durkheim has sentences like “what, indeed, is a thing?” (but i love durkheim because his mission for the sociologist, which was pretty much a profession he invented, was to identify 1) the original causes of a “social fact” and 2) its current purposes, and maybe this should have been obvious but when i was 20, like, having it laid out for me that those were often very different things, that an institution or pattern in its current incarnation often had nothing to do, really, with its origins — idk, i think that is a CRUCIAL insight especially for certain things, like marriage [obvious] but also, god, how important is the awareness of that potential distinction for any conversation about higher ed ever??????? — also i love that he, like, tried to use data to explain suicide rates, not super successfully, in a very very baby way, lil baby data-wrangling, but he was like, using facts is important!!!!!! which is a motto of mine kinda and his insistence on it helped set a standard that is FAR FROM UNIVERSALLY WELL-APPLIED but a good standard to have around, i think) (sociology makes me sad because i think it has real good things to offer but most sociologists are terrible people/very shallow thinkers/both, plus several of its methodologies, most obviously i think ethnography, have their roots in some HELLA RACIST ways of approaching ~exotic tribes~ like lab rats)

—ANYWAY, tentatively i don’t hate heidegger, is what i started to say, a few pages into the question concerning technology, mostly tbh because i like his tonal approach, he’s kinda like, “come on guys, follow me down this rabbit hole,” which is very friendly-seeming although like, i know really nothing about him, and also i just read some nietzsche and he’s probably benefiting from the comparison (heidegger that is)

—but i’m already tired of his grounding a bunch of stuff he says in the greek roots of certain words????? i guess i should be more accepting because, Conventions Of The Time, and he’s pretty explicit about like, Entering The Philosophical Tradition As He Knows It, so, i should just accept that that’s where he’s situated and ignore the fact that a bunch of stuff he says probably falls apart if you don’t uphold the cultural primacy of ancient greece, right? i should let it go. and i should be grateful for the moment to have an ok amount of experience with the idea of the cultural primacy of ancient greece, i’m thinking about reading this in a language of a culture with no longstanding historical connections to ancient greece and wow, those would be some longass footnotes. i should let it go. i don’t hate him, that’s really enough for me, the end.