i'll sing you five-oh, green grow the rushes-oh, what is your five-oh?
Comment to this post, and I will list five things I associate with you. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your LJ (or just add a reply back at me). Other people (including me) can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.
via signifiers .
1. Butterflies
I like insects in general. I like flying creatures in general. Butterflies generally get a pass on the creepiness/grossness that U.S culture ascribes to most insects, probably because they often have beautiful wings and do not bite or sting people. But, although this is hardly a negative point for me, I think butterflies are a lot creepier and grosser and weirder than we tend to give them credit for. Like, chrysalides are often used as some kind of puberty metaphor, or they'll be written about as though they were little rooms where caterpillars slept and slowly grew. Actually, the chrysalis is a thing that the caterpillar turns into-- the hard outer shell is its skin, and its insides are busy melting and liquifying into a sort of undifferentiated soup, from which the butterfly will be recreated. It's almost a kind of death. It would be like if I went into a comatose or catatonic state, totally unable to move, not eating, not really sleeping but certainly not awake, my organs undoing and rebuilding themselves, and after a time, my skin just cracked open and the hollow shell of my old body split and crumbled and this shaky new person stepped out with wet hair and different features and a different heart.
By the way, butterflies make chrysalides. Moths make cocoons. The terms aren't interchangeable. Yeah, if you talk about a butterfly's "cocoon" I'll understand what you mean, but I'll most likely be a pedant and correct you. A cocoon isn't made of skin, but of silk; it actually is a little bit like a room that the moth goes into for its transformation. Or like a bird's egg, maybe, since the mature moth has to escape from its cocoon, whereas a butterfly just shrugs off its old skin when the time comes.
Basically, and I could go on about this for a while, I think butterflies are interesting as animals and as metaphor, and I'm annoyed by the rather twee, sentimental way they tend to be used in popular culture.
2. Poetry
I write poetry because it's how I think. Or it's the closest I can get to how I think using words. My short stories tend to be shit. My essays usually require a fuckton of "revision for clarity," and I have often been rebuked by my professors for being either too informal (i.e, trying to be funny) or too lyrical and flowery. I would be the worst newspaper reporter in the whole world. Anyway, I like words, and I like writing, and I like writing things that aren't entirely terrible, and I like writing things that I don't need to explain too much to other people. Associative logic and fragmented or non-linear thought are a lot more acceptable in poetry than they are in other places. Words are not the way I understand the world, most of the time, but I've learned to understand words, in my way. I like their challenge. You know how people joke about explaining things through interpretive dance? Human language is like interpretive dance to me a lot of the time. I don't know what kind of things it implies about my psyche that I engage with it as much as I do. I wouldn't say that I'm a good poet now, actually, but I do think that I have the potential to become a good poet one day.
I'm probably snobbier about poetry than I am about anything else. It irritates me that poetry so often gets the kind of respect relative to other types of writing that drumming sometimes gets relative to other types of musicianship-- people assume that anything goes, that it's easy, that it doesn't take skill, that it's boring, that it can't stand on its own, that it's primitive, that it's dispensable. They don't understand anything about it. It's fine if someone happens not to personally enjoy poetry-- I mean, for example, I don't like sports, I think it's great that other people are athletes or spectators, but I just don't find soccer or football or baseball or whatever compelling. I'd never demand that everybody like something just because I like it. It's the ignorance and the disrespect-- and the fact that the disrespect most often seems to be based on ignorance-- that drive me mad.
3. Absinthe
Makes the heart grow fonder. Also, it's my favorite alcoholic beverage, even though I've only had the real stuff (with wormwood) twice. I'll admit that I'm into it as much for the romantic connotations as for the taste or perceptual effects. I went through my teens associating beer with frat boys, sorority girls, and fat, drunk, sunburned, middle-aged white men at football games. People who catcall. I associated wine with my relatives and with church. I associated whiskey and gin with slightly burned out private detectives and the tragic protagonists of old country songs. I associated absinthe with glamorous, clever, aesthetic, worldly, possibly queer writers and artists. To some degree, I still have all of these associations even though I know they're silly-- and hell, which one would you pick? Plus, I really do like the color green, the taste of licorice, and things that induce altered perceptions and emotions without also inducing a feeling of stupidity, dread, panic, or stomachache.
4. Lipstick
is my favorite type of makeup! I just like all the colors, and the way it looks in those little tubes, and how it gets all over the rims of my drinking glasses, making them easier to identify and ensuring that most people won't want to mooch any beverage from me. It satisfies me to make a mark on things. My lips are on the darker side of pink naturally, and I don't have the loveliest mouth or teeth, so I've had several people tell me that I don't "need" lipstick or "shouldn't" wear it-- which I know; I'm not entirely sure why I like to mess around with painting my lips so much, why I'm not fixated on blush or eyeliner or nail polish instead. It isn't vanity, exactly, nor is it a desire to appear attractive or conventionally feminine. I feel more at ease and confident and ready to face the day when I've got lipstick on, though, and makeup, and I usually will slap some over my face when I get up, even if I can't be bothered to, say, wear shoes, brush my hair, change out of the clothes I slept in, or shave my armpit stubble. It's like my ancestors dyeing their skin blue with woad or some shit.
Besides the obvious reds and pinks, colors of lipstick in my collection include orange, gray, and several shades of purple. (I keep my feminist certification, my queer certification, and my badass credentials next to my lipstick collection, by the way, and I will punch you if you try to remove either set of items from that drawer on the grounds that they should be mutually exclusive.)
5. Psychiatry
Oh, gosh. Well, Alicia added this in another comment:
[...] I just wanted to clarify that when I say "psychiatry" I don't mean, like, WHEN I THINK OF YOU I THINK OF MENTAL ILLNESS, I just mean that I think you have really interesting thoughts on what it means to have a mental illness/discussing disability/ableism/I am failing at using slash marks correctly, and when I run into discussions or literature or art on those topics I think of you. OVEREXPLAINING
To which I reply, Alicia! That's not overexplaining! I didn't take offense at the topic suggestion at all, nothing like that, don't worry, but it's helpful to have a better sense of what you had in mind. Well. One thing I'll keep saying forever is that I think it's important that disabled people be allowed to explain their experiences the way they want to explain their experiences, and to handle their conditions the way they want/need to handle their conditions, without anybody-- even other disabled people-- telling them they're wrong about themselves or giving them shit about, say, taking medication that they need, or think they need, or just fucking choose to take because it makes life slightly easier. Or not taking medication that they perceive as fucking them up worse, not doing anything, or robbing them of some valuable state or experience. Also, crazy people aren't dead. Retarded people aren't dead. We still have brains, even if they aren't firing on all cylinders. People need to stop writing self-pitying memoirs about how hard it is for them to be related to someone who is mentally disabled-- yes, absolutely, I'm sure it is very hard, and you do deserve sympathy and support if you are related to someone who is mentally disabled, especially if you're their primary caretaker, but seriously, quit doing that thing where you write about how either they are as good as dead or how you think they would be better off if they were dead. Quit doing that thing where if the disabled person is or seems miserable you hate them for what they put you through while totally disregarding their suffering--- don't you think it's a worse and deeper hell for them? Quit doing that thing where if the disabled person seems about as happy or unhappy as anyone else on the planet you go on and on about what a waste their life is and how tragic and awful they are--- who's to say what counts as a waste of life? Most especially, for the love of Mike, quit doing that thing where you assume that you know and understand how the disabled person thinks and feels better than they themselves do.
Once I read a novel in which one of the characters was a girl in her late teens who had "Asperger's." I kind of liked her; although the chapters from her perspective very much read like a neurotypical person trying to figure out how an autistic person might think, she was a refreshingly three-dimensional, non-stereotypical portrayal of an autistic person in a lot of ways. Her experiences were similar to mine, and a lot of her strengths and difficulties were things I could relate to. It became clear over the course of the book, though, that readers were supposed to perceive this character as...well, sort of innately tragically damaged, in that way that I find icky and problematic; there's a bit where another character feels sympathy for the girl's mother and likens the mother's situation to that of a parent who has a child with a fatal form of cancer. And that other character is meant to be wise and likable, and there's no indication that readers aren't supposed to pretty much agree with her analogy. It was like the author had slapped me in the face. I was reminded that even books that include characters who are sort of like me are almost never written for people like me. They're written for all the real and proper human beings who enjoy ogling at people like me as though we're zoo animals or fantasy creatures or horrible car accidents. There were other problems with the autistic girl's characterization; she was a little selfish and self-absorbed, which I initially thought of as partly due to her upbringing (sheltered, isolated, very controlling mother who was both obsessed with her daughter and hypercritical of her) and partly due to her age (eighteen or nineteen, if I remember correctly, though not in college yet and living at home), but I'm almost positive that readers were supposed to infer that she didn't care about other people because she was autistic and autistic people "can't empathize," supposedly. I don't know. This commentary is getting excessive, and I suspect I'm rather far afield from where I started. I really do have a lot to say on the subject! And I'm glad that someone likes it when I write about this stuff-- I always feel like I'm probably alienating nine or ten of the eleven or twelve people who read my livejournal when I post about my (many, many) brain problems, or ableism, or etc., etc.