Transmission

Suffering is one of the only diseases
people think can be treated
by transmission.
Show them where your life hurts
and they'll tell you that you're cured
Because they have a bigger scar.

Online conversations are unique in the way that so many of them can take place at once, so your entire frame of mind can change by the second depending on who you're talking to and what about. Sometimes this creates shallower emotions during those exchanges, because it gets draining to become fully invested in multiple intense discussions.

Written discourse in general is also unique in the sense that the words hang in the air, existing at all times. So you can be thinking or feeling something strongly, write about it, and then hear others respond once you're no longer so engaged. But to them, the time hasn't passed. This can result in fixating on something you might not otherwise; the opposite of what happens with multiple conversations. Online exchanges can do one or the other.

Both in-person and written communication have an important place, and I can't say one is superior. It just interests me how they bring about such different interactions and thought processes.

Tumblr has its problems, but the world isn’t Tumblr.

Ever notice how the people who constantly complain that “we can’t say what we really think anymore because everyone is so politically correct nowadays” actually have no problem saying whatever they want, at any volume they want, and often seem to encounter a huge crowd of like-minded peers?

The complaint that “everyone believes X” is one of those opinions that actually becomes less true depending on how many people believe it. Because if the majority is complaining about a supposedly omnipresent belief, then that belief cannot be as pervasive as they say.

This is why I can’t buy the whole “Oh no, the whole world is turning into Tumblr!” claim. Yes, there are communities on Tumblr that use social justice as a cover to bully people, or who misuse SJ theory for personal gain within their groups of friends, or who get angry at others for being genuinely uninformed. There are also those who expect a person to change their entire worldview within the course of a single conversation and then get upset when they don’t. Because I care about social justice, I think it’s important to acknowledge these problems that exist within some Tumblr communities. But the world is not Tumblr. Even the most seemingly polarizing SJ groups are a backlash against an opposing status quo. And yes, there are people who want to make the rest of the world like those aforementioned groups, but they generally don’t have influence beyond their specific social crowd. These are not the people who are running the world.

College campuses are used as examples of ways in which some negative approaches to social justice are gaining traction. While there are campuses in which students have done certain things I disagree with, a college campus is also not a microcosm of the larger world. It’s a sub-community, and a very small one at that. Also, we forget that college undergrads are usually young. They could likely change the way they are expressing themselves as time goes on, and adopt a more productive approach to social justice.

So yes, there are factions of the social justice sphere which are imperfect, and that needs to be recognized. But those factions are not even the entire social justice world, let alone the larger world in itself.

Doodle 4 Google

Doodle 4 Google is a contest that kids can take part in, in which they draw pictures made out of the Google logo and the winner has theirs featured for the day. I wish they had one for all ages. The site's animators and artists take suggestions from anyone, though. I want to suggest a logo made from illustrated amoebas. Each would be splitting into the shape of the next letter, and their mitosis could be animated. That way it shows Google is evolving.

From April

When somebody you love has Alzheimers or progressing dementia, you miss them while you are with them. You miss the self they had always been.

I've been thinking a lot about my grandma Kiki lately and the qualities that will be missed the most.

Her problem-solving was hilarious and tended to earn her standing ovations in public. There was a time when she was caught in a traffic jam because there was a giant snapping turtle sitting in the middle of the road and nobody knew what to do. So Kiki marched out of her car, grabbed a long stick off the side of the street, and brought it to the turtle. Said snapping turtle immediately latched on and Kiki led it into the woods with the stick. All the other drivers started cheering.

Her sense of humor was so lovable. After my aunt Mary was born, Kiki and my grandpa went back to visit the nurse who had delivered her. They brought her a watermelon wrapped in a baby blanket and said, "We're returning the baby. This one leaks."

She also used to approach other old women in the grocery store, align her shopping cart with theirs, and ask if they wanted to race. And there was the time when she and my grandpa were eating at a diner and he couldn't find the menu, then discovered he had been sitting on it the whole time. Kiki told him, "You were ass-essing the menu."

Even though those are qualities that are rapidly disappearing with the brain disease, and it's crushing to watch them go, they will always be a part of my life because they were a part of her. They're a part of everyone who knew her.

Facebook socialization

Liking/reacting: Acknowledgement.
Liking and then promptly "unliking": Ambivalence.
Commenting: Social engagement.
Messaging: Friendship.
Poking: A tepid sexual advance, not invested enough to comment with boner emoticons on all of someone's profile pics.

Instrumental street harassment

After a precious week of no street harassment, I had to use my foghorn today.

On my way to my apartment building, a voice called out to me from a car, "Daaaaamn girl! Yo!" I ignored him, so he repeated it. "Hey, you hear me? I said daaaamn, girl! Yooooo!" Elongating the "yo" so I was sure to not miss a syllable.

I blasted the foghorn at him, in unison with his repetition of "damn girl, yo." Come to think of it, I was actually providing orchestra to his vocals. If he'd honked his car horn at me, it would have been a duet.