A (very nice) beautician asked me today if my glasses were real. “They’re so cool though!”
Someone, please make a salon specialised in nerdy women.
I mean, the lads have this, so we should get something like that too.
P.S
Congrats to Dave Cline on publishing Blue Across the Sea.
Full story here
There is an awful lot of talk of how social media is changing us. We’re programmed. Our brains aren’t the same. A generation has been lost into the screens of their mobile phones. Somebody, think of the children!
That’s like saying that when we invented shoes we started walking. Cop on.
This book belongs to that dying coming-of-age-in-NYC-uber-honest-personal-essay-featuring-tampons-vomit-and-DMCs genre.
It’s also sweet and embarrassingly relatable for millennials.
The best things about this book is Hannah’s startling honestly. Not even so much when it comes to her devastating eating disorder, but how she feels about men and work. You kind of wonder if some of it was made up to protect the identities of the people involved. It’s preciously revelatory and confessional. You can feel the anguish.
It’s certainly readable, but I cannot honestly say I am a fan of the style. Some of it is beautifully descriptive. Parts are repetitive. Everything shines like the moon. Hannah is preoccupied with the sensations in her toes.
The descriptions of food can be wonderful, but at times it seems like she ran out of paper and had to write her shopping list in her personal diary.
Other times, the detail seems unnecessary. For example, she cooks Irish oats. I effin love Irish oats. But frankly, they are not that different to good oats from anywhere else in the world. Why mention that they are Irish? To show your level of pickiness? Sophistication? But surely, oats are just oats – and anyone who cares about food enough to care that the oats are Irish knows that. Hannah isn’t pretentious or arrogant! (Of course, the reader is assured at this point that they know her like she is her best friend.) Maybe, it is just the glaringly obvious explanation: food is her tragic obsession and there is no rhyme or reason to it.
There are also too many Americanisms consumerinisms. She talks about writing things in Sharpie. Dude, why can’t you just say marker?
The main theme of the book, as I see it, is Hannah’s struggle to find people who will love her and accept her. She wants to find a “home”, “her people” and feel like she belongs. Despite severe anorexia, she even feels at home when the uberthin hostesses of an superposh New York restaurant side with her in a mean girls exchange. That’s all it took: knowing she wasn’t alone. Her fear of weight gain summed up in one line: “I will be unfuckable, or even worse : unlikable, unacceptable, unlovable.”
There is probably one most telling bit in the whole book. Hannah talks about the advice that works: “Get out of yourself and your own head. Call someone else. Ask how they are doing. Ask about their day. Listen. Don’t talk about you. That advice. I’ve heard it before from Aaron and it is exactly what I don’t want to hear. It works nearly every time.”
What is it? Well, the same way that steroids get rid of inflammation, this exercise gets rid of self-obsession. A crude diagnosis, but it’s there.
The ending is a little but too much of an amalgam of post card philosophy. I don’t think she’s not honest or what she says is wrong, but it’s not nearly as refreshing and gripping as the rest of the book. Then again, this also happened to War and Peace, so I don’t judge 😉
My highlights below.
Life is big and scary. Food is constant, safe, dependable. Food blots everything out and calms everything down, draws the shades and tucks me in. Cozy. Miserable. Numb.
Sure, food is my answer to anxiety, sadness, boredom, anger, but also to excitement, possibility, and joy.
And just like starving is the answer, bingeing is the answer.
Often, postbinge, I feel a sweet relief, a stillness.
It is an instant cure to whatever ails me, save the paltry price of the morning after — waking up and needing to barf and not being able to, vowing to eat nothing for a day, a week; the self-imposed, relentless suffering.
My trusty companion has let me down. All that food has done nothing to quiet my demons. I cannot escape myself.
I am not a cool girl. I always have friends, wonderful friends, and yet my identity as an outsider feels fixed from as far back as I can remember.
But most importantly, I am not thin enough. This sums it all up. This is my curse, my refrain, true as my name.
The mirror is enemy number one.
When I go back to school for senior year, nobody notices. If they do, they are silent. I feel the devastation in my chest, my bones, their marrow. I am still me.
College means everything. If my body is one measure of my self -worth, college is the other.
I read. No matter how lonely I feel, how much an outsider,how fat, I am welcome in the world of words, stories, poems. They hold my hand. They show me that there are more ways to think and feel than I may fathom.
In my fantasy, something remarkable happens at college. I am not an outsider. I belong.
I am going to be a whole new Hannah. Like myself, but immensely better. Skinnier, of course. Skinnier is everything. Skinniness is next to godliness.
The summer holidays after getting into the college of her dreams:
My new life is full of possibility but I am stuck inside myself. My stomach feels round and big as the moon. I have big plans for my summer. I want to do unambitious things like make eight bucks an hour scooping ice cream, read a lot of trashy mags, and sleep. It sounds wild, an adventure. Also, I will diet.
It doesn’t feel like enough, not even close, but hunger seems a small price to pay for liking myself, for not dreaming of carving away the flesh below my belly button, the sides of my butt.
So much better than being cool, I feel powerful. My skin and bones are different, electric.
My stomach gurgles, struggling against its own emptiness, and I am proud.
I go long stretches of days with only Pink Lady apples, coffees with skim milk and Splenda, liters of diet soda and seltzer water. A frozen yogurt, sometimes.
It is the best drug — wanting him, him wanting me. The room spins.
He peers over, and we make eye contact… “ You’re very beautiful, like a model. ” His eyes are wider than they should be, all pupils, like he’s taken an opiate. His gaze feels like a scratch on my skin, unbearable… He doesn’t say anything this time, his eyes are hard on me. I think, This is because of my diet. Fifteen pounds ago, this would never have happened. Is this what people want? Why?
“Your face is a ten, but your body is a six,” he says, unprompted. “ I’m only grading you harshly because you have such potential. You could be a ten, even, if you lost some weight, got in great shape.” I feel as if my skin has been peeled from me. And yet, I agree.
“Do you see the way men look at you?” Corey asks. “ ike they’re hungry?”
I still hate the roundness of my belly, pull on the flesh around my hips and fantasise about its evisceration. But I have felt immense pleasure and given the same. The power of that straightens my spine.
Because I don’t believe I am likable, even for a second, attention from men surprises me, every time.
I don’t think, Hannah, yikes, walk away. I think, Thank god. I am not alone. He gets it… He drinks the way I eat—to fill something unfillable.
I think about years passing with him, decades. The thought makes me want to puke.
[There is a lot on sexism. There is also a rape.]
I wonder how miraculous my life would be in her body.
“ You know,” she says, “ being skinny is such a strange part of beauty. It’s not the most important part. It’s just the only part you can control. ”
“The point is to be fuckable. ”
I fantasize about butchering myself the way the cooks I work with so beautifully break down a side of beef, carving away the excess until I’m okay.
I want to be badass and free from the patriarchy and skinny.
No one wants me to join Ari on TV because of the roundness of my belly, I am sure. It doesn’t matter, the other stuff.
I think, This is what I wanted. I’m skinny and eighteen and about to go out with a Michelin – starred, kind – of celebrity chef. I wonder why I’m not elated.
“ You’re beautiful, ” he tells me. The claim sounds ridiculous, cruel.
I don’t particularly want him, but being wanted makes up for it.
Nobody goes home sick at The Piche. It’s the restaurant code of honor.
I close the restaurant, stumble home drunk on exhaustion at 2 AM, and get up at 5 AM to open the restaurant the next day. “ It builds character, ” they tell the three management trainees.
At first, I love the profundity of my exhaustion when I come home, the satisfaction of the ache in the arches of my feet, my lower back, proof I have worked.
The day ahead here feels like a prison.
I don’t stop talking about whether to quit or not to quit. I’m trying to decide. Both options fill me with hot dread. I feel resigned. I fear that if I stay, Josh’s prediction will come true.
My soul will be constricted and slicked down, like my hair, until, starved for breath, it deflates. Yet if I go, I will be a quitter, a failure at my first real grown-up job.
What she really wants from work:
It’s the creativity, the spirit, the heart.
The Corporate Steakhouse could never have been home. Walking out past the koi for the last time, I feel the vast freedom that comes from knowing this, from setting off to find the place that is.
On finding out that what she thought was her dream turned out to be quite different in real life:
Our vision. Our dream. The truth is, I don’t love it or even like it. I am simultaneously stressed and bored.
Anorexia is the most fatal mental illness. Deadly. Before a heart stops, way before hospital visits, furry skin, even when the anorexia is merely an idea of itself, a taste of impending famine, it starts to obliterate things.
I cry in her office. I know I am getting fatter. What was the point of all this struggle? I gain a few pounds, and nobody says anything ever again to anyone’s mom ; nobody worries about me.
I am not better. If anything, I am worse. I still go as long as I can go without eating, until everything around me breaks into little dots and begins to lose its substance. And then I binge.
No longer a secret, the food very slowly loses its tight grip on me. The shame begins to dissipate.
Surreally pretty. I catch myself staring: his sharp jaw, his cheekbones, his underwater eyes. That he likes me, loves me, seems unfathomable.
I notice that the people who love me do not love me more or less if I am thinner or heavier.
My eating disorder is all about me, me, me. A selfish beast. It tricks me into thinking that if I can shrink enough, I will be safe and loved and admired. But I am safe and loved and admired just as I am, no matter what size I wear, even if I have to tell myself this a million times over to half believe it.
“And, God forbid, do not read the Soviet newspapers before lunch.”
“Um … Why, there are no others?”
“Do not read any then. You know, I observed thirty patients in my clinic. And what do you think? Patients who did not read newspapers felt great. Those who I specifically forced to read ‘Pravda’, lost weight.”
“Hmmm,” said the bitten one, ruddy with soup and wine.
“Moreover, reduced knee reflexes, bad appetite, an oppressed state of mind…”
[Translated from Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov]
Whenever current affairs get really divisive, my faith in humanity wanes. Like really, wanes.
I am referring to the combination of the Belfast trial, the upcoming referendum in Ireland, the Skripals, the Russian election and the tragic fire in Siberia…
Feeling overwhelmed by all the recent news coverage and watching friends engage in social media battles, I was walking down the street and I really didn’t know how to handle it… and then I realised I was near a gallery.
I went in to look at The taking of Christ by Caravaggio, the most celebrated painting available in Dublin. I sat beside it for like a half-hour, probably looking like a mad person.
I stared at it just to get my mind off the other stuff.
I vaguely remembered a lecture that discussed how the arms of the different characters are all disproportionate. Look at Judas vs Jesus vs guard in armour:
And then I thought: Jesus, there are some serious problems with this painting! Yet, this is one of the most celebrated paintings out there. And it is, in my opinion, beautiful.
Just because there is sh*t in the world, it doesn’t mean the world is sh*t.
Where do you guys look for new book releases? Amazon’s new release section is very messy. Any recommendations? Thank you 💞
I read a lot of personal essays from people in their late teens. The theme of hurting people’s feelings versus being honest preoccupies many of them.
It’s all the more fascinating for me because I’ve experienced two cultures that have opposing views on this.
I’ve often seen Irish people choose to err on the side of sugarcoating reality and lying by omission in the name of being kind. Around here, you will be forgiven for being misleadingly delicate, but not for being insensitive.
On the flip side, the brutes from the old country would soon forgive someone for not considering someone’s feelings given that it is in the name of integrity. I’ve heard a lot of Russians retrospectively end friendships while accusing the perpetrator of “how could you not let me know that”… <my ass looked too big in that>, <our mutual friend didn’t invite me to the party>, etc. The “it’s not my business” defence doesn’t cut it for them.
Looking at it from a skin in the game perspective, you make a much bigger gamble when you risk offending someone by being straight with them.
At the same time, people often get carried away with their opinions to the point of forgetting that it is, after all, just an opinion, not “the truth”, and so communicating it may not really be that beneficial for someone else. Realising the insignificance of our humble opinions may be key here. Not sure you can do that to facts that your friend would prefer to know.
Question.
Assumptions: you know each other very well and solicit your friend’s opinions.
Who would you rather as your best friend? The insensitive swine who won’t hide their thoughts or the kindly sweetheart that weasels around the truth to avoid hurting you?
No Frankensteins. You have to choose.
For those who think that arguing is better than sex is a sport, this article would be of interest because it’s quite methodical. It’s about steelman.
Steelman is the enemy of the strawman and, I think, is a close cousin of devil’s advocate.
In short:
First… you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
Not what one might call science, but I know a lot of my readers will like this…
The other day I showed some data from the World Happiness Index, and guessed that, as in 2016, the 2018 data would show a significant negative correlation between the religiosity of a country and its happiness index: that the more religious the country, on average the less happy its inhabitants. Now two readers have plotted the 2018 […]
via 2018 data: Across countries, the happiest ones are the least religious — Why Evolution Is True
What is a social construct? A rather arbitrary intangible concept created by society. Therefore, under the assumption that X is a social construct, one interpretation of X is not more truthful than another. For example, if gender is a social construct, by definition, the idea that there are 50+ genders is neither more or less truthful than the idea that there are two.
The concept of social constructs is itself very much a social construct – as is any sociological theory. Therefore, calling X a social construct to show that X is irrelevant is… irrelevant.
Those who claim to be at war with a given social construct, on the basis of it being a social construct, need to do more than highlight its arbitrary nature, because their proposed views are equally arbitrary, or offer an alternative that is qualitatively different than just a new set of social constructs.
If you substitute the word culture for social construct above, it’s easier to understand. Of course, if you feel that the concept of social construct is qualitatively different to the concept of culture, please convince me, so that I can stop worry about theory and just join the cool kids.
Looking at the broader picture of social constructionism, I don’t really buy into its fundamentals because I don’t think that perception changes reality, just like I don’t think that Photoshop takes the cellulite off Kim Kardashian’s behind.
“Everyone has an accent. The fact that we think the way we speak is normal is the first clue that empathy is quite difficult.”
If you haven’t already, check out Seth Godin’s blog. He started blogging before electricity – lots of interesting stuff.
A millennial's musings 