!Christina's 5 questions
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agk's diary
8 June 2023 @ 11:50 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
while first daughter's oatmeal cooks in rice cooker
& finished in the library during toddler time
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I love to answer Christina's questions; read
others' answers. She wrote 5 new ones!
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/christyotwisty
June 2023 Questions:
1. Most expensive object I'd like to buy?
I keep thinking how much I'd like a scythe to
keep the meadow around my house down and the
stuff to keep it nice and sharp. But I never
scythed before & it's a couple hundred dollars
to get set up with a new one.
2. Something the generation preceding me loves I
don't understand?
- Riding lawnmowers
- Fox news or NPR
- Facebook
3. Something the generation succeeding me loves I
don't understand?
- Listening to music song by song instead of by
album or show. Especially skipping to the
next song in the last seconds of one you're
listening to.
- Performative anxiety (playing a hot anxious
girl on the web's stage); recreational benzo-
diazepines.
- Cruel optimism:
"[Lauren] Berlant's most influential book,
Cruel Optimism (2011), describes the `relation
which exists when something you desire is an
obstacle to your flourishing'. Romantic love.
Fast food. The Democratic Party. Prestige TV.
Each offers comforts and securities. Each dim-
inishes us in large or small ways, makes false
promises, prevents us from striving for some-
thing better. Yet we continue to strive, often
blaming ourselves when things go wrong.
"Cruel optimism explains why you continue to
accept casual contracts, hoping for a more
secure position. It explains why you continue
to `work' on your marriage or save for a down
payment on a house. It explains why you just
spent 6 on a coffee. Cruel optimism might even
explain why you decide to have children, or
why you vote."[^1]
My generation's mass affect was supposedly
depressive hedonism, which I didn't totally
embody either. Most of my friends in adolesc-
ence & young adulthood, when generational id-
entity forms, were 5-10 years older or raised
in the Soviet Union. I strongly identified with
(grand)Pa's & (great-grandma) Meme's narratives
of their childhoods. The concept of duty, for
example, had outsize importance to me. Nonethe-
less, I understand depressive hedonism (and its
drug, MDMA/ecstasy) better than cruel optimism
(and its drug, xanax).
"Many of the teenage students...seemed to be in
a state of what I would call depressive hedon-
ia. Depression is usually characterized as a
state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm re-
ferring to is constituted not by an inability
to get pleasure so much as...by an inability
to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
There is a sense that `something is missing'--
but no appreciation that this mysterious miss-
ing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the
pleasure principle. In large part this is a
consequence of students' ambiguous structural
position, stranded between their old role as
subjects of disciplinary institutions & their
new status as consumers of services."[^2]
4. What holiday in my calendar needs replaced, with
what?
Labor day with May Day.
5. What's it mean to be redeemed? Have I felt re-
deemed? Can one be redeemed without narrative?
Redemption is just buying (one) back, paying
off debt, ransoming from captivity. I've been
redeemed out of jail & redeemed from personal
debt. President of my country falsely promised
to redeem me and 43 million other borrowers
from a trillion USD in student loan debt. I
never tormented myself with optimism he would.
I don't know if narrative is necessary to be
owned by your creditors or released from bond-
age to them. The relation or its dissolution
strikes me as real regardless of what narrrat-
ive you cloak it in.
> brain hyperfocused on some problems, I'm training
> it to not ping-pong between...'hummingbird on
> crack' and 'wow, it feels like insects are crawl-
> ing on me & my eye sockets are on fire. How many
> hours did I spend on this?'
A question for you: How are you (re)training your
brain?
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[^1]: Erin Maglaque (18 May 2023), I feel sorry for
sex. London Review of books 45(10).
[^2]: Mark Fischer (2009), Capitalist realism: Is
there no alternative? Zero Books, pp.21-22.
For cocaine '80s and heroin '70s affects, see
Mutulu Shakur (198?), The politics of drugs;
https://hhwl.branchable.com/hx/mchr/mutulu/
