Life update

[rax]

I am not just a machine that does tasklists, I promise. Of course this post is also a list, but it's not a tasklist, so at least it's something?

• School: Is going better, overall, at least for me. I'm excited about my final projects even if they weren't what I initially hoped to be doing, and I'm seeing people on campus I can build alliances with. I'm also getting excited about theory again, which is never a bad thing. Occasionally I say things that make me sound a little crazy: "Yes, but I want to be interpellated as an animal by the state," but I'm actually being challeged in really productive ways by one professor and I appreciate that a lot.
• Work: Remains... workly? Distance is beting harder these past couple of weeks than normal but after this weekend I will be less of a stressball and have some plans for trying to work on that. I'm getting some longer-term stuff done and that always feels a little more distancing because I am not talking to people about it every day. That doesn't mean it's not important.
• Pokémon: I'll be in Providence playing competitive Pokémon this weekend. A: This is awesome. B: How is this my life. I don't actually think I'll do very well, because I've been putting my free time into school, work, and relationships rather than obsessively testing things in a card game. I am OK with this. It should still be fun.
• Relationships: I got to see Ruth recently, which was great and amazingly stress-reducing and involved a lot of exciting cookery. (Getting together with people I am involved with or attracted to almost always results in our producing lots of food. I ... do not know what to make of this? Except mmmmm, seitan.) It looks like I will get to see her more often in a few months, which is even more exciting! Also, we're coming up on three years. Holy crap. Also, I got to have Rik over for like eleven days which just... wow. At first having both Rik and Krinn here was super confusing, but once I figured it out, that was really nice. It's amazing to feel so supported and to spend time with people who I love dearly. Also Rik made me a cake when I turned 27 again. <3 Clearly I need to trick everyone into moving to the same city in five years. The distance is hard, and having Rik leave Monday and then tomorrow leaving Krinn (who is amazing and wonderful to live with and I am sad when she leaves for work in the morning which is not to say that I'm unhappy that she has a job but that I would like to be sufficiently spoiled as to have someone to lean on at all times) to go to Boston is currently feeling way harder than I expected it to. It's kind of a crash. But Boston is Boston, so I think I will be OK.
• Real estate: Pending extreme fuckery, the house in Bloomington will be sold as of tomorrow. That was an expensive mistake. Live and learn? Or maybe "make sure your advisor is happy somewhere before you buy real estate there?" I don't know. I'm not sure what the moral of this story was other than "ha ha sometimes you get fucked over by things that have nothing to do with you." I already knew that lesson, life. Why the repeats? Lucky for me, I am in a good enough state that getting fucked over only makes me sad, not in any sort of serious danger. Go team Nokia bought my startup I guess. When it's all over and done with, I am ritually washing my hands of Indiana.
• Pronouns: I'll be writing another post about this soon, but my preferred pronoun is now "they." I'd appreciate it if you used that pronoun when referring to me. If you could hold your questions until the pronoun post, which I hope to write right after this one if work stays quiet, I'd appreciate it.
• Overall: I am happier in Tucson than I was in Bloomington; I feel safer in Tuscon than I did in Bloomington; I am glad that I moved here. I still need to develop more of a local social group, but I feel better equipped to do that here and I've made some progress. I have friends. Who are not students. This rocks. Living in multiple time zones is still weird --- half of my clocks are set to Eastern time for work and half are set to local --- but it's producing interesting shifts in my thinking that I don't know how to express yet. I'm a huge stressball right now but I foresee things getting better; I have all of my hard assignments done except final papers and those are fun because I get to pick the topic and write about the stuff I've been thinking all semester, and I have some vacation days to actually use and have my time in California in December be calming. And some projects for fun that I am working on that are silly but fulfilling. So: Yay!

Comments

[lhexa]

Have fun in Providence! I'm surprised that you find Arizona more welcoming than Indiana -- lacking experience, I've imagined Arizona to feel like, well, Texas.

[jadia.livejournal.com]

Boston? Did I miss something?

[perbac.livejournal.com]

Some people are going to Boston the wrong weekend. :P

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

So the definition of interpellated with which I am familiar is the right of a parliament to question government ministers, i.e. the House of Commons interpellated the Minister of Defense. And then the minister has to justify their policies or risk a vote of no confidence.

... I have this belief that somehow this cannot be the definition which you are using, although I am enjoying the mental image of Congress asking you questions about species self-definition. Help?

[rax.livejournal.com]

It's... sort of like that actually? Have you read Althusser? (I'm sorry, it's going to be one of those explanations.) He has this thing where he says that we come into being as subjects because the state interpellates us --- it calls to us, and we turn around, acknowledging that the state was talking about us in the first place. To not do this is terrifying (at least according to Zizek whose name has a diacritic I can't be fucked to find the UTF-8 for right now, sorry Zizek). Butler then works with this and says some additional things, among which are "we get interpellated all of the time and this is part of how things like gender are produced" (in another paper she also connects this to, like, Bordieu and the habitus and also J.L. Austin and Doing Things With Words and either you see where I am going or you can safely ignore this parenthetival). I dig this, but I sort of want to (a) tell the state to fuck off and (b) make the state interpellate me as I want to be interpellated (as, tongue 75% in cheek, a giant talking fox). You can't tell the state to fuck off because if the state calls to you and you don't respond it hits you over the head with a stick and says "You, you are an X" and well sucks to be you; even if it doesn't bother hitting you with a stick, you know you're an X because people keep calling you one, even if you know you're really a Y and it's all very frustrating. Convincing the state to interpellate you as you want to be interpellated can be awesome --- this is how we get gay rights, trans citizenship, blah blah blah --- but also leads to homonationalism and the construction of a "transsexual patriot" in opposition to a queerly gendered terrorist. (This last bit from a talk I just heard today by Nick Clarkson.) And so right now I'm tempted by learning to not realize when the state is calling me to parliament to testify. But I have no idea how to do that. And also I want other people to call me a fox. And a they. The they part is a little easier to ask for, so I did that.

...hopefully that makes ANY SENSE AT ALL my brain is FULL OF THINGS I want to GO TO SLEEP and not do anything for the next week HAHAHA THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN EVEN IF I WERE TO ASSEMBLE THE COMBINATION I WOULD NEVER DEFEAT THE GUARDIAN.

in short if you want PDFs of the Althusser and Butler pieces I have the hookup

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

In addition to other things, that explanation was totally helpful to me, so thank you. ♥

[zanazibar.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it's going better for you here than for me. I'm still not 100% sure what is it about this place that is fucking me up so much.

[kelkyag]

Getting together with people I am involved with or attracted to almost always results in our producing lots of food. I ... do not know what to make of this?

Sharing food is an important human social ritual. And for at least some of us, feeding our friends and family is a way of expressing concern for and promoting their physical well-being. And some of us bought into the "food is love" meme somewhere along the way ...