goddammit this is my blog and I'm gonna say things

[sciatrix]

The anxiety weasels have returned, but I should manage a linkspam this week. It has not been a great mental health week for me, but I think I have identified the issues with my sound chambers for now (need more base-line microphone amps, peering at the chambers I )

Made the mistake of accidentally kicking off my own exclusionist trauma issues on a Metafilter post, and will be taking a break from there (have locked myself out of my account for the rest of the week). I am reminded why I tend to view lesbians with guarded suspicion until they demonstrate that they don't hold with the TERFy and SWERFy corners of queerpolitik, and regret bringing up both that particular article and tensions in queer-female-and-adjacent communities more generally.

No, seriously, the word lesbophobia is a dog whistle, and doubling down on it when I go "are you--are you intending to communicate this?" and insisting I'm speaking in bad faith is, ah. Fun.

Also today, I had a horrifically-ill student attempt to isolate his own DNA with a cheek rinse and fill it with so much phlegm that I couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing wrong when he showed me his sample. I did not, however, find this out before that student helpfully tried to dip a micropipette with no fucking tip into his cup of filthy sick spit-water and draw up a milliliter of fluid, and then get confused when the tip didn't fit on the micropipette afterwards. I think I got it dried out enough not to bleed everywhere, but I'm not sure. I definitely went back and splashed ethanol all over that sucker after he left.

I can only hope he had the same nasty bug I did a few weeks ago, so maybe I can fight it off before he infects everyone else.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

I would feel the same way in your shoes.

I didn't know that. Damn. rtha was good people.

My husband calls me a canary in the coal mine for interpersonal conflict. I tend to nope out of places pretty quickly. So I'm kind of not surprised about Crone Island also having issues? And yeah, FB is useful for me as a Gen X old but I survive there by vicious blocking of friends of friends because I just don't want to hear that stuff. Also a sadly large number of my own college friends as we age into AARP territory and so many dudes give into glibertarian "I got mine jack" privilege bullshit. It is deeply unattractive on all levels and even if I had the strength to spend on dealing with it, I wouldn't want to waste it on them. If they haven't grown up by their late 40s, they won't ever get there.

[sciatrix]

Man, I wish I'd had the warning; as it was, I was totally blindsided. I'd felt like I was bending and bending and bending, and then someone said something that wasn't okay and I snapped and lost patience and asked for the kind of allowances that were being asked from me (mostly things like: you type too fast! you speak too strongly! you're being too much!) from other people, and then suddenly everything went to hell under me. I think I had snapped and basically asked for people to keep in mind that, hey, autistic, and could you quit piling small cognitive demands onto me, I can't balance them all, can we find a point in the middle where you change your expectations a little bit to accommodate me too? I still don't understand how it happened or everything involved, but that was the feeling I had about it.

If you don't mind and you remember, what all were you picking up on?

Oh, er, I hide from FB because it's infested with family members, and I don't want to. :D

[gentlyepigrams]

Someone said in that MeTa you linked that Metafilter isn't very good at "intersectionality" meaning more, I think, that it's not good at balancing the needs of multiple identities. I think that's true but Metafilter also isn't great at heated discussion, especially when it's not clear who the "bad guy" is. There's not a lot of "we can agree to disagree and both sides have good points" even when there's not a specific zero-sum stake like deleting a thread. But yeah, I feel like that and I felt that way about the Crone Island thing, like, we don't have to choose between one site or the other, and when women on Metafilter see a problem and want to solve it, why is that a bad thing? But yeah, the idea that both sides of a discussion/argument need concessions is not something Metafilter does well.

Dropping out of Crone Island was, IIRC, part of my narrowing down during the long runup to the 2016 election. My mom went into assisted living at the beginning of 2015 and the first six months of that year were terrible for me, like I had to go on happy pills to keep from crying all the time. And from there on in until her death a year ago January, I was just dropping things left and right. So I don't remember what it was specifically. (Not politics, though. Because there was a subgroup for that and I remember it coming in. But I remember that being a tense topic.)

I'm an only child and both my parents are deceased now. And weirdly almost none of my husband's family is on FB! So it's me and my peers but that can be obnoxious enough.

[sciatrix]

Oh yeah, that makes sense. I do think in hindsight that the stress of that election was also increasing the general tension in the atmosphere--I know at least one person was spiraling around something that felt very obsessive re: US politics in an unhealthy way to me--and lowering everyone's general ability to disengage and pull emotions out of a situation to reframe.

Which is I think actually what's needed. I'd actually disagree inasmuch as I think MeFi has a dedicated contingent of people who really want to "agree to disagree and both sides have good points"; it's just that people who are really upset about X kyriarchical topic don't feel heard and keep exploding the conflict back up, and when you are that rawly emotionally involved in something, it's really hard to "agree to disagree." I mean, "agree to disagree" is literally the answer I've come up with here, and it involves taking a temporary break from the community and let time and not-being-hit-again on the blister give me a chance to heal properly instead of digging into the middle of things.

What you want, I think, is people who aren't necessarily "agreeing to disagree" but who are actively making an effort to hear and acknowledge the points that other people are making, and in heated subjects not everyone can do that. The problem is when people define "being heard" as "being in agreement with absolutely every take that person has on the situation," which is... not good. But you have to have a certain level of trust with any given person to ease into that crack, and oh god it's just a great big mess of hard work and raw nerves. Doesn't mean those conversations aren't worth trying, but it does mean that the risks of something like this going off are going to be higher when you have many people with minimal pre-existing relationships in a tight space.

Unfortunately the outcome of that election just made that even worse, I think, although post-midterms I think people are feeling a little less rawly hopeless. I am, anyway, although I'm still pretty heartbroken about the Senate.

(The other other reason I don't want to kick off a MeTa is that this morning, Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for President again for realsies this time, and I pity the mods way, way too much to kick off a heated discussion about how we treat intra-queer-community-not-centered-around-men conversations in an audience that is mostly not part of that community. Especially when people without relevant community experience or buy-in will helpfully chime in and add on unhelpful things...)

Come to think of it, I recall that particular conversation also going real bad on Crone Island, with bile and syntax in the middle of that with exactly the same refusal to hear "other" wlw's pain as she's displaying here, and I straight up don't want to get involved with that kettle of fish again. It sucked then, and I have no reason to think it won't suck again now.

[gentlyepigrams]

That's a fair take on Metafilter. There are a lot of people who don't feel heard (and many rightfully so) but won't be satisfied that they've been heard until they're "agreed with". And maybe Metafilter is just too big to have those conversations? Or a space with too many bystanders to be "won" or stick their noses in? A lot of trust-requiring conversations happen best in private spaces, I guess, and Metafilter is not even slightly private.

Yeahhhhh the Sanders thing makes it a bad moment for anything else. The number of women (white and WOC) and MOC who are running already make the discussion of the Democratic primary fraught before we add Sanders and I wish the mods well dealing with the bomb-throwing I can see coming.

I missed that discussion on Crone Island and right now I'm not sorry. To the extent that Crone Island is largely a sub community of Metafilter people, and that Metafilter can't do that intracommunity discussion well, it's not a surprise that Crone Island can't do it well either. :-/

[sciatrix]

Yeah, and the public-ness of the space makes it more easily accessible than the private spaces. There is absolutely a tradeoff and I don't think I can fault MeFi for experiencing that trade-off, you feel me?

ahahaha yeah seriously. I am personally in the camp of "voted for him in the '16 primary, swung enthusiastically over to Clinton in the general, would happily stab him in the kidney rather than deal with him at this point." The inevitable FPP on the announcement seems to be going... okay, but I hadn't been following it closely at all. I think a lot of people share my general association of both Sanders and Clinton with grief and pain and fear and our worlds having gone mad, and Clinton's graceful retirement has won her a lot of ground with me that Bernie's yearning for the Presidency for himself and to be personally in charge has lost him.

As it is, I'm vaguely hoping that the political knives knock him out early and hard and that he slinks back to his Senate seat--or even off it, in exchange for someone else!--before he splits the base again. I'm more concerned with the Texas Senate race this fall; if someone can knock Cornyn out, I'll die happy.

[gentlyepigrams]

Yes. That is exactly the tradeoff for that space and I think that's a good framing. It's just unfortunate that it leaves Mefites with the option of not discussing issues where marginalizations intersect or watching them blow up and expending all the emotional energy and work of fixing it. Which is the only way to make it better. Human nature, it sucks.

I am of the generation where many of us love HRC for coming out from under her husband's shadow and being in many ways more competent and, if not woke, awakening, than her husband (and working with our own issues about Bill and his enablers, fwiw). Sanders has a lot of good policy positions and I'm glad he helped move the Overton window and so on and so forth and ... yeah, I'll hold him and you go for the kidney.

I hear MJ Hegar is talking about running for Cornyn's seat. I would take her or Beto O'Rourke in a heartbeat. Or Wendy Davis if those rumors or true. But I think we're going to need to spend a lot of time calling into the statehouse to keep the Lege from screwing us on voting again. They almost screwed me out of my vote last time with the move coming when it did and it's made me a lot more attentive this session to all their vote suppression bullshit. (Also a regular donor to the Texas Civil Rights Project.)

[sciatrix]

Like I said, I was really well convinced to HRC's camp after the primaries; the more detailed information I hear about her, the more I love the work she did and tried to do--despite its flaws. Because that shit is so, so hard.

OMG you are hearing rumors about Wendy? I thought the gubernatorial run had burned out all her enthusiasm for statewide office. MJ Hegar I don't know as well--talk her up to me? I've been a little out of the loop in the last couple of months.

Those FUCKERS re the voting bullshit. I'm lucky, Kirk Watson is my state senator and I'm really excited about Sheryl Cole going to rep us in the House now that Dawna Dukes has finally stepped down, but then again I also now live in Lloyd Doggett's district of Austin where they've corralled all the broke deep blue folks. (Can't recall if you were around when I moved?)

(I have a friend at the Lege in one of the nonpartisan offices and she is perpetually exhausted and furious when the Lege is in session. She's got a lot of gossip about certain state reps and senators, and it's nice to know that Watson at least is just as much good people behind the scenes as he is in his letters.)

All that said, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for a rotting potato over Cornyn. I hate him more than I hate Ted Cruz for a personal immigration reason (along with Mike McCaul, who I canvassed against last season). I hate him enough to leave nasty reviews about him on his office's Google Reviews page. I hate him so much and I would die of happiness if we could pop him from his perch like an impacted zit.

Man, I gotta find the cash to donate to the TCRP. We had a bumper sticker from them for our car, but it got totaled a few months ago and the new one has been in two fender-benders since (none our fault) and is currently hanging out in a body shop getting itself a new bumper. Replacing it would be good, though. They do good work.

[gentlyepigrams]

(I should add: I would love to see candidates of color for Cornyn's seat. I haven't heard those names yet though. I kind of wish that was where Castro was going.)

[sciatrix]

God, same. I am still faintly pissed with him for not picking up the Senate run--he had the name recognition! and he didn't run for anything! and now a national Presidential run when progressive policies in Texas are so close!--but... yeah.

I think the only thing I've seen people fretting about re: that race is asking about what Beto is doing. Personally, I'd be happy if he breathes a minute, picks up his momentum, and runs again, but I'd also be thrilled if a female candidate or one of color who shares that ability to campaign and talk to people picks up the trail. (I would not vote for Beto in a national race out of hdu-abandon-Texas-progressives,-sir fury; I might be convinced to forgive Castro.)