On Autophobia
29 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
During adolescence I was often alone. I sought quiet time away from family and friends. Even among welcome company, I reached a saturation level rather quickly, my sociability needs rather minor. This stood in stark contrast to one particular friend, who despised being alone. Feared it, even. She could not stand to be alone in her family home, and would fill the time with phone calls if she could not arrange for after-school company.
I could not relate.
There are culturally determined predispositions for ideas on aloneness. Western cultures are often pushing for autonomy, individual thought and pursuit, and the idea of the self, the person, is the prime consideration. A person wanting to be alone is not in and or itself a sign of trouble, unless it is coupled with other symptoms that could indicate issues. Merely stating your desire to be without company is often a reflection on the busyness and chaos of everyday life; it is the decompression, the quiet processing time necessary for eventually restarting the hectic schedule.
Eastern-European, Middle-Eastern, and Asian cultures have a different approach. Expressing a desire for aloneness is often met with suspicion and questions. Are you angry at the family? Have we offended you in some way? Why else would you want to read your book alone in your room? Come, sit here with us; we will be quiet, but we will all be quiet together, as a family.
There are, of course, exceptions to the general rules of broadly applied behaviour to Eastern and Western ideas on aloneness, and I will not go into the historical threads that contribute to them.
I introduce the topic because Halloween celebrates fear. And what is our most basic fear but the fear of being alone? The Online Merriam Webster dictionary defines autophobia as the, “morbid fear of solitude.” But for those of us who recognize and embrace our desire – nay, a base and foundational need essential for survival – for aloneness, there is no such fear. It is something in which we bask. It is the time dedicated to knowing ourselves, the time that aids us in discovering who we really are. And every time someone expresses an unease or discomfort with the idea of being alone, I wonder, what is it, exactly, that you are so afraid of discovering about yourself?
"Horse and Train", Alex Colville, 1954
La Rentrée
10 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies
The event commonly referred to in English as “back to school”, La Rentrée translates from French into literally, “the entering”, but which means the re-entering into regular daily activities after a summer holiday period.
I am in full rentrée swing at the moment: teaching assistantship, studying for a comprehensive exam, applying for PhD programs for next year, filling out applications for funding/grants/bursaries (which are extensive and highly detailed), and working my slave-wage job to support my academic fetishes. No rest for the workaholic wicked.
This year is the final year for the MA degree. After last year’s don’t-stop-until-you-get-mono pace, I am taking it a bit slower for the final stretch. And by slower I mean simply busy-everyday-but-make-time-for-social/rest-time-before-you-burn-out-completely. On a related note, my CV is looking soooooo awesome.
It is Saturday, so I will fit it with a final fiction book before I put down pleasure reading for the semester: Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin; intrigue, drama, backstabbing, swords, royalty, magic, dragons, and icy demons from the North. Martin has taken an interesting cue from medieval times not only for the structure of his mythical society, but also the source of supernatural evil. His “whitewalkers”, from the freezing land beyond “the wall”, are reminiscent of medieval notions of the devil, and his source: the North, the cold, the ice. In agricultural societies, it is not uncommon for winter to represent death, as crops slumber, people die from freezing, and starvation is a very real danger. The cold equals death. It is not the welcome death of the pious Christian, but the creeping, slow death of a cold demon draining warmth and life from vibrant souls.
Fun stuff.
The Absurdity of Life and Death
18 May 2011 2 Comments
in The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies Tags: absurdity, death
Two posts ago I named the song that I wished played at my funeral (“Ding Dong The Witch is Dead”, from The Wizard of Oz). I have been a called a witch for many reasons: in jest, in ostensible jest with a pinch of underlying resentment, as at outright slur, as a compliment. I am not offended by the name, and it secretly would please me to make others mildly uncomfortable. Those that knew me well would laugh. That, and someone farting in the middle of a sombre eulogy.
Life and death have always struck me as absurd. Sex, too, for that matter. The human animal develops complex and elaborate systems of meaning, influenced by an exponential amount of variants, repeating the same process of meaning-making over and over again, in an infinite spectrum of possibilities. But our base experiences, our primal fears, are virtually the same; we all fear death. There are times, in my cynical days, wherein I think that humanity’s prime conflicts are fights over the ways in which we ignore our death. If we construct notions of religions and afterlife, of social systems and philosophical positions, to assuage our fear of death, then conflicts of those systems is in reality a clash between conceptual differences surrounding our shared (feared) experience. Put another way, we dispute projections regarding what we have in common. Put yet another way, I create religio-politico-social system X because I fear death, and conflict with your created religio-politico-social system Y because of your fear of death, and will fight you to win the argument over who’s right about their highly particular coping mechanism for the fear of death. The person with the best death-avoidance idea wins. You get a harmonica.
This is not a position that I would ever argue in a paper, even in a more developed form. This blog is meant as somewhat of a sounding board to myself. I get to express ideas without the scrutiny of professors. Instead, I offer my ideas to the supremely high critical standards of popular Internet rhetoric. Oh, there I go being a witch again.
That’s what rage is like.
01 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Last night I dreamed that I was dreaming. Happily captive in the motionless abyss of deep slumber. Until I heard a buzz. It began with a faint, high pitched ringing. Its source was…elsewhere: underneath the ground, from deep space, or the cavern of hidden thoughts.
I dreamed that I was waking from my dream, and floating out of my body, to and past the ceiling, through the roof and into the dark night, higher and higher. As I did the sound grew louder, my body began to shake with it. My lungs filled with bouncing sound waves, my heart humming, the pitch echoing in its walls, my skull about to crack open from the pressure.
Until I opened my mouth, and released it. It burst out in a piercing note. It was not vocal, nor human, nor even an imagined howl. It was the release of repressed things, the things you feel but cannot say, wrongs felt, slights sublimated, desire thwarted, and love unrequited. It reverberated throughout the night sky, and bled the ears of those who have hurt me. I am the vehicle for the resonance of rage. I have finally found my voice.
Lost in Spaaaaaace…
22 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in 30 Day Song Challenge, The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies
Last night I dreamed there was an explosion, and I was desperately searching to reconnect with my family in a post-apocalyptic world. I woke up in the early hours of the morning to stare into the darkness, before falling back asleep. Then I dreamed I was adrift in space, having lost my host spaceship. Unmoored and weightless, I slowly spun through the black, cold vacuum beyond the atmosphere, wondering if my radio signal would reach anyone, anything.
This weekend I finish my final research paper for the semester. It has been an extremely successful year, academically speaking. A teaching assistantship, a published article, a well-organized conference, and the launch of the graduate journal as an online publication. Hard work, and its fruits, can be particularly thrilling. It also takes its toll. I have never looked forward to a break more than I am right now.
Once I hand in that last paper, I rest. Decisions will then have to made about my future. I must change how I support myself, as working full time and graduate school is slowly eating away at my sense of stability, and all the sacrifices (time, hobbies, friendships, social life) that formerly seemed worth it are now the source of bitterness. I know that I can longer physically and emotionally afford to live like this, but am unsure how to financially afford to change it. My dream has always been to be a student full time, and only a student. Exact steps to take in order to do this are unclear, and the uncertainty, solitude, and desire for support are reflected in my dream life.
I Need A Wife
27 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
Last year, during a particular heavy and hectic week, I lamented to a friend that my dishes were simply sitting in my sink, piling higher everyday. It was during finals while I was working extra shifts, organizing a conference, grading papers as a TA, and writing my own research. Each night I came home too exhausted to stand, feeding the kitties and laying down by 9:30, ready to start all over again at 5:30 the next day. One evening I walked into my kitchen to find all the dishes had been done. I started sobbing, deep ugly wails, snotty and choked and tear-stained collar kind of weeping.
After a 12 hour day, I would love to come home to find that someone had cooked, cleaned, did laundry, shopped for groceries, and even organized messy closets. All I want to do is sit, with a hot tea, soak my feet, and relax.
That sounds so nice.
I have an independence crutch. By that I mean that I am wholly un-reliant on anyone, for anything, ever. Since the age of 14, I make all my own money, buy all my own things, and run all my own errands. I am the sole contributor to savings accounts, or indebted in solely my own name. When I need something, I save for it or do without. I do not ask parents or boyfriends (or sugar daddies – should I find a man willing to support a workaholic chubby girl that has an academic fetish for the taboo). I’m certain my mother would contribute if she could. My father has never, nor will he ever. Weekends are spent doing all the things I am unable to do throughout the week.
My birthday is coming up. It will mark the 20-year anniversary of being in the work force. That’s two damned decades of complete independence. I will be 34.
So, would-be wives and stay-at-home-spouses, if you want someone to truly appreciate you, I am currently hiring. The pay is very low, almost non-existent, but I will weep with gratitude everyday. The position comes with no benefits except the purrs of cats and my ultra-cute 1950s kitschy apron and oven mitts; they come in the hipster colours of turquoise and red. I can offer no advancement except a promise to take you with me when I upgrade to my farmhouse, which I plan to purchase by April 2015. The only perk, besides my thanks, is that you may borrow my shoes at any time. Yes, even the Betsy Johnson’s. Who’s interested?
Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Mono!
15 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
in The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies
That’s how the grad school experience feels at this moment. All I want to do is take a nap. Right here. While I’m walking in -17 Celcius weather.
We give up a lot to do this: hobbies, reading for pleasure, social lives, cooked meals. Last night I ate chunks of cheddar cheese dipped in mustard, and olives out of the jar. Classy. I have naughty fantasies wherein it starts all hot and titillating and then I order the harem to clean my house and quietly lock the door behind them while I sleep. Not to mention the weight gain (and loss, then gain, loss, gain, loss gain. In the future, when some snarky jerk thinks it’s their business to comment on my weight I’m going to tell them I have been diagnosed with Lossgain Syndrome, and that I’m allergic to Noassatall. No Ass At All.). Oof. All the damn sitting in class, the library, studying at home, and my full-time sedentary office job. Oprah has said that her shoe obsession began as a result her yo-yoing weight; shoe sizes never change. I have about 80 pairs and counting. (But I just bought the sweetest little metallic cross-ankle strap sandals with a 2 inch heel.)
If someone doesn’t hand me a huge load of cash at the end of this thing I’m going to freak the f@¢% out.
On learning
13 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
in The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies
I need to learn how to read. By that I mean learn to read faster, more efficiently, and more critically. This semester both my courses require that I come to class having read the many assigned articles. Reading them is not the problem. Reading them, retaining them in full and being able to discuss the finer points of each study in critical detail is where the difficulty lies. I want to answer a direct question from the professor without shuffling through my notes and feeling stupid. Hours and hours and pages and pages of notes, they all blur. This year is turning out to be the most successful as well as the most difficult so far.
Writing has also become more challenging. Precise and concise academic writing is truly a special skill, one that I am learning with each critique of my assignments.
I am the writing equivalent of playing music without being able to read notes. Proper English is almost unknown to me; I have learned what I have by being a reader for most of my life.
Last week, as I organized a successful graduate conference, had my first academic article published in a peer-reviewed journal, and contributed my administrative skills to said journal, I also got reproved by a respected professor for lazy response papers. “Do better” was his firm encouragement.
He was correct to do this. As great as it feels to see hard work manifest in successful extracurricular endeavors, I cannot forget that my schoolwork is paramount for a future in academia.
At this point I am uncertain if I will continue on to a PhD, but the smart thing to do is to act “as if” I will.
Eco-Satan: Or, How Carbon is the New Evil
10 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in The Personal Rants, The Religious Studies
This last semester has been the first one that required homework almost every single night. It’s been a jam-packed three months full of my day-job, teaching assistantship, classes and lectures, research and homework. The ten pounds I lost during the summer crept back unto my ass. Thanks, Graduate Studies, you’ve done exceptional things for my mind but been pretty detrimental to my body.
My teaching assistantship was for a class that discussed the History of Satan, an overview of the depictions of personified evil, from early Judaism to the modern age. Divorced from our modern perception, this Satan character throughout the ages has shifted and changed, sometimes portrayed in unrecognizable ways. For instance, Satan in the book of Job plays a prosecutorial role on the celestial court. He is God’s confidant and advisor. Satan in the early Jesus Movement (later known as Christianity) is heavily informed by the Judaic notion of Satan – that of prosecutor and accuser. Later biblical texts shift to depict an evil Satan that stands directly against the good God. Early Christian texts are full of demons and demon possession. In the surrounding Hellenized culture, skilled necromancers sometimes summon these daemonia for specific purposes. Medieval Satan is more familiar to our contemporary perception. He is evil, a foolish and impulsive rube, a vehicle for social critique, and the prime accusation for socio-religio-political rivals. Heresy is the old “commie” and Satan is a convenient scapegoat for disagreement.
Modern day Satan serves similar roles, although the main avatar for evil, Satan, has lessened. According to my students, evil is technology, social networking, Republican, pollution, wealth, power, global warming, corporations, capitalism, fast-food, the media, globalism, and individualism. As a social scientist, I see direct parallels between the medieval notions of Satan, and the particular contemporary sensibility to find explanations for the evil-du-jour; we label the above list as evil because it’s easy, because we don’t recognize our own complicity, or even that we benefit – greatly – from most of these things we are quick to call evil. The world is not a fantastic place. In order to reconcile this, we search for things and ideas as an explanation for this problematic. Things we think we can overcome.
There is an irony of deriding the medieval mind as “primitive” for their notions of Satan, but not recognizing that our ideas are identical; we are engaged in the same type of polarizing demonization of our particular notions of the problematic. We are told the world is in peril, so we call all the perceived causal factors evil. I am not stating whether or not the claim of our environmental ruin is true or false – I don’t know nor claim to know – but I am interested in the surrounding rhetoric and perception of this perceived threat. I have a strong suspicion that even if we suddenly discovered that the global warming threat was all hooey, we would avidly search for a new evil.
Many commentaries on the medieval idea of evil and Satan are lamented for offering solutions to non-existent problems; we pay indulgences for sins. How is that not different than paying fines for carbon-footprints?
High Fidelity
10 Jun 2010 Leave a Comment
in The Family Mythology, The Personal Rants
In the summer of 1999 I loved music. I had pause tapes of recorded radio shows (Quick! Press Play/Record!), I made myself mixtapes for every mood, and every boyfriend of mine possessed a record collection. Vinyl used to be such an aphrodisiac. Aphrodisiac is perhaps too strong a word. So is “boyfriend”.
Thrift stores, garage sales, and hipster record shops: these are the places where I sifted through dusty bins, searching for music that grooved me, challenged me. A good score was a decent record sold at a cheap price, usually from a shopkeeper who didn’t know the value of what they sold: three 33 ½ or five 45s for a dollar.
Then the shift happened. I cannot explain, exactly, what it was, but somehow the thrill of vinyl lost its appeal along with the boyfriends. Searching for that arcane music seemed tedious. Then my record player broke and I couldn’t afford to replace it. Five years and almost as many apartment changes later I simply left my crates of vinyl on the curb one sunny July first day. An hour later they were empty. I felt better about that. At least someone wanted them.
None were rare, or of any particular monetary value. But there are a few records I wish I had kept. This is one of them:
