Genna G > Recent Status Updates

It occurs to me that our relationship is now in a phase where our togetherness hums with less meaning. It’s no longer an event when we’re in the same room.

Wow. What did I just rip through?

What am I doing

bah! had to return to the library before I finished. Hopefully my hold comes up again soon.

Attempting this book for the second time!

[with respect to getting older/menopause] As someone treated a certain way their entire adult life because they were voluptuous and pretty, its become a joy to be unseen.

And of course, in a patriarchy, your body is technically not your own until you're past the reproductive age.

It was as if the Internet provided scientific evidence to mirror any anxiety, no matter how arcane. So it had shifted to mirror me as I am now.

Every day there were opportunities like these. Every day Sam and Harris extended their hands and said, "come in from the cold." But I could not come in.

[...] What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

{...] Modern people who build bomb shelters, planning to survive some version of apocalypse, also do not count, he said. Yes, they go underground, but not in mind of a human continuum, a community.
They think, I'll be the clever one, the one who survives mass death. But why would you want to survive mass death? [...]

For nine-tenths of human time on earth people went underground. Their symbolic world was formed in part by their activities in caves, by modalities and visions that darkness promised. Then, this all ceased. The underground world was lost to us. The industrial uses of the earth, the digging, fracking, tunneling, are mere plunder and do not count, Bruno said. [...]

Currently we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car

Joan Mitchell called her “that Kotex painter,” — I find this so interesting. Some of the first works I ever saw by Joan Mitchell were at the Holyoake Center at Harvard. The paintings had these horizontal, vaguely rectangular block forms. Not dissimilar to those in Little Fields and Blue Territory. Immediately the forms reminded me of how blood looks on a period pad… maybe insecurity creeping into criticism??

An obsession with moss!

Interest based bargaining

Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring. Ask "do you want to be helped, hugged or heard?"

I think this book is the best of the three. It's so good--- I could never have conceived of the plot developments.

Chapter 6: Cognitive Superpowers is terrifying!!!

Holy sh*t - this book got me!

omg. it gets worse. how is is possible for this story to get sadder?

[...] By giving some credit to their feelings, whether disgust, anger, rejection, or resistance, by listening to the alarms going off in their bodies and minds, victims may find the strength to defend themselves, especially when the voice of reason is just a front for the debilitating, intimidating voice of authority.

In short, our emotions don't always lead us astray. On the contrary, when we listen to them, they can save us. This can work not only when people are trying to make us live on the edge of radioactive landfill sites but also in situations of harassment and abuse [...].

[...] It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feels more and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and a pathway toward true change."

[...] "Contrary to media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight, ascending to my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty and how to look closely into the beauty of others. [...]

Despite the censure of society, with age we do gain a strength which sometimes allows us to reconfigure life's trials. In 1978, suffering from breast cancer at the age of 44, the very years where women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures, African American poet and essayist Audre Lorde commented, [...]