Face Value / Drill Down

This is pure kneejerk reaction. Distilled and essence of.

I have just read "When does plastic surgery become racial transformation?" and it's all in the title.

For months we've talked about his journey, about the reasons behind his surgery, and what he hopes to do in the future. But Jiang, articulate, intelligent, and using his philosophical skills to their fullest, often talks in the abstract. It's all a way to muddle the real emotion behind the actions — 16 years ago some dumb people made some dumb comments and it's still dominating his life.

"I believed that my ugliness was in part due to my ethnic features," he says. "My father thinks I'm ridiculous for building a complex system of beliefs based on that initial shallow stimulus. He says, 'You've gone and done this, so you must be very proud of it, but initially it was some stupid kids opening their mouths to you.'"

The article touches on a number of facets, but it felt like this, the individual root from which Jiang's decision stems, was brushed aside. Discussion centres largely upon why a member of an Asian race wishes to "look white", with various experts being quoted. Jiang's voice, while also quoted, isn't given any volume. It isn't that he wants to look white, just less Chinese.

Because, yes, he was bullied for being Chinese. It wasn't "some dumb people made some dumb comments". He was bullied, ostracised and had his whole life shaped because of the way he looked.

Erasing his defining features from his face should not be a path he should have to consider.

Small-minded majorities who can't cope with anything that doesn't fit in their narrow worldview without attempting to crush it are the problem. That racist, bigoted, shallow and fucking puerile mindset is what needs fixing. The incessant and overwhelming broadcast of ALL THAT IS WHITE IS PURE AND GOOD AND NORMAL needs fixing.

TV shows and movies are full of 'token ethnic person' appearances because that is what they are; token. A head nod that hey, non-white people exist so look, they're visible on the screen, but they're incidental and the narratives that matter are full of white people. The ads are full of white people. The news covers stories about white people because 'no one wants to hear about [insert whatever]'.

Just as there's nothing wrong with being Chinese, Ethiopian, Greek, etc, there's nothing wrong with being white. It's the perpetual and self-feeding delusion in the Western world that white is normal,  THAT is what is wrong, and sickening, and sets the world up so that white people will bully a Chinese guy and he will change his face to address that, and those white people will never know or care or change. As if that is okay. As if that is expected. As if that is normal.

 And yes. I was bullied as a kid too. Also because I was not 'normal'. And I've stood in front of mirrors and been fucking thankful that my eyelids have a fold because they could have just as easily not. Even though I don't even look Chinese, I don't look white enough to be normal, and I've wished, I have fucking wished I was whiter because then I would not stand out and I would be normal and no one would push me aside and laugh at me.

The problem is the Western world as a whole. You're a disgusting fucked up bigoted and self-deluded mess, and we can't get out.

The Coin of Your Life

I've been thinking a lot about time recently, and how I'm not sure if I'm spending that which I have in a way that I'm satisfied with.

No longer being fulltime at my day job does return a significant chunk of my life to me. Additionally, I'm currently housesitting at an address that has my commute down to 20 minutes from 1 hour. The amount of time that is mine at the moment is staggeringly luxurious.

Still, there is never enough time to do all that I want to do.

Which indicates that I'm getting done all that I need to do, and that is already better than before. Being torn on the fact that I must decide between various pleasures is a wonderful conundrum.

(But is writing a pleasure or a necessity? I have made time for it, but it does not feel like enough.)

(And the freelance work? Is that work or play? How do I prioritise that?)

(Friends, I am still gorging myself on friendship and camaraderie, and I really should heed the introvert warning signs but-)

I'm not sure who I need to be stricter with; those around me asking for my time, or myself. 

The Midriff Conundrum

The realisation that the t-shirt you grabbed from the drawer this morning is just a touch to short is just a touch too late, coming as it does when you raise your arms to stretch out a yawn while talking to a co-worker. The lift gives him a perfect view of the waistband of your jeans, which are just a touch too tight and emphasis that little flap of paunch just a touch too well.

And you can't work up the motivation to be disgusted with your body, or to be disgusted at the socially-conditioned reaction of disgust, because you're at capacity with frustration at the knowledge that you will have to manage this oversight of overflab over the next 16 hours when you know you do not currently have the mental resources to spend on something so ridiculous and trivial as keeping your midriff concealed because your sleep the night before was so utterly broken and crippled and limping and crying at its ineffectiveness and all this could have been avoided if you'd only checked yourself before stepping out the front door, but you were so addled, so tired, that it slipped your mind just as your belly slips into view; with easy.

This doesn't put you in a wonderful frame of mind, and you were already in negetive attitude. You can always choose your mood - no, you can - but you can't choose whether or not you are exhausted, aching, and addled. You can choose to vent your petty miseries, or you could choose to shut up and stop polluting the emotional airspace, but the one person who doesn't benefit from that is yourself.

You could try and turn this into something mildly thought provoking, and whip up some navel-gazing blogpost concerning the constructive analysis of physiological mood factors and the responsibilities we take with not only our mood by how we choose to project our mood onto the world, but truth be told it would only be a thinly veiled piece of waffle that, even with the long words and needlessly meandering clauses, is just a whinge.

Stockpiling the Proof

What I do, is I, I collect every moment;

• Comments
• FB status updates
• Tweets
• Emails
• Text messages
• Photos

And I screenshot them. And I put them in a folder called 'happy caps'.

All of these screenshots are an expression of love from you to me. They are examples of the kindness and generosity of your heart, of passing exchanges that have delighted or tickled me, compliments given without any expectation and demonstrated appreciation of my existence.

I keep all this evidence for those moments when my doubt is speaking louder than my courage, and with this evidence I punch my doubt in the face.

You are the best arsenal a girl could ask for.

Self & Prescribed

Three days ago I switched from taking Effexor to Pristiq, or venlafaxine to desvenlafaxine. The latter is a sort of 'remastered' release of the former, in order to keep the pharmaceutical patent alive, but although the molecular difference is cosmetic, the actual affect is quite marked. All anti-depressants have dulled my mind, bruised my memory capacity and generally made me vague and scatterbrained, but Effexor takes that dumbening to new depths. Unfortunately, Pristiq is not available in the EU/UK, so for the past year I have been endumbened.

It's amazing how little it takes to shake an awareness up and down. Mere milligrams is what I, we, the medicated sorehearts, take. Measures so small as to mean absolutely nothing in that small terracotta pill in the palm of your hand, which you're sure is comprised mostly of chalk and hope. Molecules, a mere additional arm, nothing, and these three days you've felt such an upheaval in your nethermind. Tearstorms and rotten softness where once you thought you were strong. You tell your friends and you tell your family; it isn't me. It's just chemistry. It'll be done in a week or so.

You tell yourself it isn't you.

We, you, I rarely speak of the faith required of medication. The invisible substance you take will alter you, and alter your ability to perceive this alteration. It will gift you with an emotional vertigo unwarranted by your surroundings. It will make you worse, so much worse, and the only thing you can do is trust, believe, hope, that it will get better. It must get better.

Please let it get better.

Last week I attended a PostSecret event at the Arts Centre. I've been following PostSecret for years, and so was not unprepared for the heartstring tugging that those hours contained. Strangers stood before a crowd of hundreds and confessed to personal crimes that stole their voices, a powerful and what should have been liberating and uplifting act, but when I left and stood at the station waiting for my train, I felt tired, deeply worn, helpless. There is so much hurt walking around these ordinary streets behind these ordinary faces. Tasting the scope of this suffering is to stop where you stand, close your eyes, and lie down right there.

There was one secret shared - the only man to stand and bare himself - in which the words spoken were a carefully crafted fish hook on a very long line, and I didn't realise I was caught and leaving a tangled trail behind me as I walked all over town.

He said that anti-depressants saved him,  have made him so much better, but it was before he started taking them that he has never felt so alive.

It's been years of medication and health obstacles, and nothing has changed except my perspective. I want to write, now. I'm not scared any more. Actually I've been bashing my head at writing for some months now, and a growing part of me suspects that this medication truly is interfering. Or is that the excuse I've come up with to hide behind? I don't know. I can't tell.

Still, strive for this. Stretch and strain. My application for part-time has been approved, and now every Wednesday is mine. The driving motivation for this was pain management, as the last three Fridays I've had a major meltdown from the stress of trying to hold myself together through the working week, as the pain signal gets steadily louder and more ragged. Fatigue has continued to dog my heels, so I must assume it is not merely the rigor of travel that was flattening me previously. Hopefully breaking the week in two will offer enough respite that I shall be able to keep on top of things, whatever those things may be.

Sadly that old paradigm remains in place, and on what should be a day of rest I will feel guilt for using my time for myself.

But maybe that's the medication talking. Maybe it's all just chemistry.

What I want, what I miss, what I long for more than anything else is Loch Broom.   I want that cold North Sea water, a finger of the Minch sneaking into the west coast of Scotland to lie lazy between the hills. A beach of rocks worn delightfully smooth, older than dinosaurs and covered in lost kelp and discarded crab shells. The languid wail of herring gulls punctuated by the piping of oyster catchers. I miss the constant salt in the air, air that has been tossed over the isles and mountains and seas. I miss the hills, barren of trees but so full of hunched life, heather and gorse grumpy and gorgeous. I miss the way the sun  would play through the mountain passes and the clouds would curl over the peaks as though suddenly shy. I miss the certainty that, no matter how much turbulence I carried in my heart, I could look out a window and see-

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Buy - Author Site

This book has been sitting on my shelves for 8 years. The receipt is tucked in the back cover. August 2005, which was when I'd just started my first job with my current organisation. It must have been a celebratory purchase.

(I don't  purchase books to be read instantly. My shelves host a library of books I have and haven't read, so that when it comes time to choose my next meal, I have a wide selection covering all moods and tastes from which I can choose. Having a To Be Read pile that spans shelves is not ideal, perhaps, but it does mean I am always reading a book that I feel like reading right at that moment.)

It was a quiet, subtle reunion. Stepping into this cramped and cluttered room after a year and a half of living out of a bag. All this stuff. All these material objects. And yet, no. There is not so much here that is not a book. I have so missed the presence of books. They are a form of companionship, much similar to the way in which our smart phones mean we are never truly far from contact, although perhaps inverted. A wall of books will hide and protect you from other people. A wall of books is a wall of doors, over which you have absolute control which and when you choose to open and close.

(And they remind me of the direction I hope to take my life in, the purpose to which I have given myself. That anchor, too, is comfort.)

What with the film out Cloud Atlas seemed a natural choice. Despite it having circulated around for more than a decade, when I started in on the first few pages I discovered I actually had no idea what this book was about, other than it was supposed to be extremely good. This was probably the best way to step in, as there is no way to truly describe the accordion of civilisation and souls. It is easy to say what happens, but not what it is about.

What it is, is extraordinarily well written. Wonderfully. I fell in love with the somewhat archaic voice that narrated the journal in the first section, and delight in how thorough that tone and flavour changed in the second. Voice, this book is so much about voice. That middle, pinnacle of reach, in which voice plays a part as strong as the events being narrated. When a voice that is so varied from what we expect of written English and yet the reading of is near invisible, then some truly incredible textures are formed.

(I did have issue with gender roles, especially in the second last histories. Surely, surely, surely by the future such gender typing will have long broken down. Surely. It wasn't something that struck me as a statement the author was making, but simply decisions about characters made according to an unacknowledged bias.)

(Also with the idea of white-skinned people being some sort of apex from which mankind shall fall, and I do say 'mankind' deliberately in this instance. The inversion of race is noted, but whether it was successful in what it attempted to do I withhold judgement.)

It is an incredibly complex, subtle and beautiful piece of work. As far as storytelling goes it is sublime, with an incredibly nuanced cast and intricate thematic weaving. I adored the shit out of it, and as a result I will not be seeing the movie for at least a few years. I don't quite remember if I have anything more of David Mitchell's work in my library here. It is something I will have to amend.

Verdict: Sublime.

"Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found."

-- Page 15, Under the Glacier, Halldór Laxness