Bouncing off the walls just a little

I’ve been cooped up in my apartment all day. In true stream-of-consciousness fashion, here are my thoughts of the day.

I’m getting my first taste of Vermont winter this year. Last year I was depressed and lonely all winter and ended up gaining a lot of weight from comfort-eating, which I have since lost through lots of work and self-control. I saw pictures of some friends who went snowshoeing in today’s fresh snow and I’ve resolved to try cross-country skiing for the second time ever tomorrow. The only real way to survive a Vermont winter is to find ways to get outside, but it’s hard to do this without the appropriate gear. And some of us just don’t make enough money to buy downhill skis, cross-country skis, ice skates, snow shoes, ski pants, ski coat, goggles, etc. But I’ll rent some and figure it out, because I definitely can’t watch movies and do puzzles all winter.

Recently I went through a rather hurtful breakup. It wasn’t a long relationship, but it’s taken me a solid 6 weeks to start to move on. Today was the first day I have resolved not to think about him, look at his Facebook, etc. So far it’s going well and I feel cleansed.

I started a 2,000 piece puzzle tonight, and I realized that I hate it already. Puzzles are frustrating and depressing when you spend lots of time on them by yourself. But I’m not sure I can just pack it up and put it away because I’ve already spent an hour on it. And now it’s taking up my entire table, which is not really the best solution.

I sent in my final grad school application today. I do feel a sense of relief as you may expect, but more than that I feel bored and with a total loss of agency. Now I have to wait 3 months to find out if I got in anywhere, which wouldn’t be so bad if I could do something other than just WAIT.

Most profound moment of happiness today was singing along to a beautiful song I know every word of.

Facebook has become a new dimension of reality for social interaction. In the past few years if you saw something on Facebook, the facts were always subject to a certain amount of doubt. But now Facebook is a perfectly acceptable way to tell someone how you found out a new piece of information. Today, by looking at the chat feature and who is listed in the top friends (with whom I communicate most frequently, presumably) I saw how the ebb and flow of my relationships (both romantic and otherwise) is chronicled by Facebook’s complex algorithm. There are people I wish would disappear from this list and was relieved to see that today, finally, someone who I’ve wanted to drop to the plebeian level of “More Friends” has been moved. It feels good.

I realized that I really miss baking and cooking, mostly because I can’t consume the result on my diet. I feel torn; I need to harness the things that make me happy, and the diet is very inconvenient for many of these, but getting down to my ideal weight would make me happier than all those other things combined. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the short-term.

I hate New Year’s Resolutions, and I typically don’t make them. I guess my only resolution for this year is to have hope, to be happy, and to be a better version of myself. I think I can achieve those.

Guess I’m tapped out for semi-profound thoughts today. Now to try to read my completely forgettable book. Who knows, maybe it’ll get better.

Trauma

You’re a ten-year-old boy coming home from your neighbor’s house. You’ve walked this path a million times, and tonight seems no different. As you pick up a stick and let it hit the bushes as you walk by, you hear an unfamiliar growl just a few feet in front of you. Suddenly a huge gray wolf jumps into your path, eyes ablaze and teeth bared. You freeze for a moment, unsure of the best course of action. With one swift motion you hit the wolf on the snout with your stick as hard as you can and run back the way you came. Luckily for you, the wolf doesn’t follow. You arrive back in your neighbor’s house and slam their door behind you, panting so hard you wonder if your lungs will give out.

Obviously scenarios like this one are substantially less frequent today, considering that over 80 percent of the US population now resides in urban centers. But humans have only been able to survive and evolve through a series of life-threatening confrontations, with natural forces and with competing species. Whether it’s an attack on your newborn child, watching your neighbor get eaten by a lion, or having to treat your own compound fracture, traumatic events have undoubtedly affected our brains’ chemical structure to give us evolutionary advantages in stressful, life-threatening situations.

And yet, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was first defined in the early 1980s. It was first seen as a relatively rare phenomenon that only occurred if the victim had been exposed to an extremely stressful situation, and that the victim had a powerful emotional response to that situation. But eventually, they found this was not the case: “ And in fact, the terminology back in 1980 describes a catastrophic stressor as “beyond the range of normal human experience.” Now we have [had] 24 years to explore that, and we discovered, unfortunately, that that’s incorrect; that unfortunately, trauma is a part of life.”

Here’s the WebMD explanation for the causes of PTSD:

When you are afraid, your body activates the “fight or flight” response — a reference to our caveman ancestors facing a tiger. In reaction, your body releases adrenaline, which is responsible for increasing blood pressure and heart rate and increasing glucose to muscles (to allow you to run away quickly in the face of immediate danger). However, once the immediate danger (which may or may not have actually existed) is gone, the body begins a process of shutting down the stress response, and this process involves the release of another hormone known as cortisol.

If your body does not generate enough cortisol to shut down the flight or stress reaction, you may continue to feel the stress effects of the adrenaline. Trauma victims who develop post-traumatic stress disorder often have higher levels of other stimulating hormones (catecholamines) under normal conditions in which the threat of trauma is not present. These same hormones kick in when they are reminded of their trauma.

Physically, your body also increases your heart rate. After a month in this heightened state, with stress hormones elevated, you may develop further physical changes, such as heightened hearing. This cascade of physical changes, one triggering another, suggests that early intervention may be the key to heading off the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

So now that the daily lives of many people do not necessarily require the individual to fight for his or her life, how have we adapted to this new, safer lifestyle? Have we replaced these real, eminent, physical dangers with perceived ones (paranoia), or even with things that truly don’t matter, like gossip about our friends or celebrities’ lives?

Without a doubt, in our daily lives nowadays we are exposed to different sorts of dangers than those early humans (getting hit by a car, exposure to any of a litany of carcinogens that may or may not still be considered a carcinogen tomorrow), or even our own parents and grandparents. Part of this is a greater awareness of these dangers, combined with that unchanging mortal fear of death. More research and more preventative medicine, while undeniably beneficial for increasing our lifespans, can sometimes have the effect of unnecessary worry (“If you don’t do ____, you will die a tragically early death”). But do we always have to have these fears to survive? Is it, in fact, these fears and the long-term effects of trauma over many generations (despite many attempts to eradicate it) that cause us to need it in our lives? Is this need inherently human?

Things We Love

One of my friends, a particularly taciturn fellow, is notorious for only having an affinity for a handful of things. There are really so few that I started keeping a list, and over the course of several months in which we conversed often, the total tally didn’t go above 10. I recently rediscovered this list and started thinking about the significance of our likes and dislikes. In the end, a lot of our personality boils down to this, as odd as it sounds. And these simple facts or affinities always illicit judgment from people around you who, even without knowing it, judge their compatibility with you as a friend, as a lover, as a human being. Sometimes it reveals an ugly side when two people disagree (“What do you MEAN you don’t like chocolate?!”), although I’m not sure it’s enough to cause a rift. I asked one of my coworkers this question and I have to say that I truly feel like I now know him better as a result.

Anyway, because it’s an exercise mostly for myself, here’s a list of the things I like. I’m keeping all of your judgments in mind. In no particular order:

• people who look like their pets
• fresh tomatoes
• mangoes
• colorful pieces of clothing
• big, slobbery dogs
• pasta
• sweet things (mostly chocolate-based)
• tea
• yoga
• hiking
• walking in the snow
• children (not babies)
• masterpieces of fiction
• falling into bed at the end of a long day
• popular science
• sushi
• emails from friends
• a good beer/wine
• singing in the car
• good sitcoms
• discussing art with people who know what they’re talking about
• when people think I’m a native Spanish speaker
• when someone brings you a glass of something just to be nice
• dancing (when I know what I’m doing, which isn’t often)
• adventures in other countries
• discussing politics with someone intelligent and not belligerent 
• deja vu
• breakfast sandwiches
• a mean guitar riff
• coming home
• Thanksgiving
• seeing my name in print
• seeing old friends
• drive-in movies
• antiques
• Peruvian food
• the New Yorker

That’s all I can think of for now… reading over this list, I strike me as a pretty stereotypical girl. Judge at will.

A Culture of Stories

On a recent trip to Ecuador, I talked with some new Ecuadorian friends about their favorite movies. I wasn’t surprised that most of the titles they mentioned were American movies; I have spent time in South America before, and the countries mostly have fledgling, independent film industries of their own that are nothing compared to the US’ billion-dollar industry. Despite this cultural imperialism that the US (consciously or not) exercises over countries like Ecuador, I realized how fortunate we are in the US to come from a culture of stories and storytellers. It’s hard to say definitive things about American culture–we don’t have much cuisine or much history to speak of. But we love talking about the multiplicity of lives in America through almost every kind of medium on the planet, even ones that we invented. From grassroots musicians (Dylan) to the glossy music industry (Jackson Five) to great modernist novels (Faulkner) to the actors whose lives were stories of their own (Marilyn Monroe), Americans have captivated people around the world with yet another glimpse of what it’s like to be living their lives. It’s one of my favorite aspects of American culture, and quite possibly the thing that brings me closest to being nationalistic.

However, the generation and dissemination of American stories could, in the end, really be dependent on one important historical factor: power. In a brilliant TED Talk, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of the single story. She talks specifically of her own experience growing up in a middle-class family in Nigeria and, when she arrived in the US for college, many of the Americans she met had little concept of what middle-class could mean in Africa. That’s because, Adichie argues, fewer stories come out of Africa, and the ones that do make it are only of a certain kind (i.e. HIV-infected, starving babies). Even if the stories were being generated at the same rate, the primary decisive factor as far as their dissemination is concerned is only one thing: power. Adichie touches on this and backs away quickly, partially because there’s not much else to say, frankly. Although the US is no longer the world economic power, it still has a pretty firm hold on global cultural imperialism, even if some of that ground is being given way to other types of stories from other places. Still, I believe there’s more room for more stories from more cultures and more subsets of larger populations, and I look forward to the multiplicity of mediums (and more mediums!) as these stories become more accessible, both within cultures and to the world. 

Defining Success, the Darwin Way

For many adults here in the US, “success” has a pretty limited scope of meaning. Usually it pertains to career, income level, maybe even your family and personal life (although less often). But a (somewhat) recent episode of my favorite podcast, RadioLab, put it in a different light: you can think of “evolutionary success” as a barometer of success as well. And, if that’s the case, countries that rank the highest on scales like this one are the ones failing to the highest extent.

RadioLab’s story about Genghis Khan was broadcast in 2007 as part of a larger show about detective stories. Two scientists who were tracking the genetic history of Central Asia were astounded to discover that the same Y-chromosome could be found in a huge percentage of the male population–8 percent of men living in the former Mongol empire, translating to 0.5 percent of the world’s male population overall, according to National Geographic.  That’s 16 million men who can trace their ancestry back to one person. Yes, Genghis Khan doesn’t have a reputation for being the most merciful of conquerers (raping, pillaging, etc.). But you can’t deny the fact that he was successful–both as a conquerer and evolutionarily-speaking.

When you really get down to it, humans are not nearly as evolutionarily successful as, say, ants. Or even microbes. In order to be successful, an organism must be able to do one thing: reproduce fertile offspring, the more the better. And human babies need a whole lot of care and nurturing, so even the most evolutionarily successful woman is limited by her biology (although some less than others, as you can see here).

But “success” has another component to it: fitness. One definition I found of evolutionary fitness was, “The probability that the line of descent from an individual with a specific trait will not die out.” This is a key component to evolutionary theory, as it indicates that individuals that are more adapted to their environment will be more attractive to the opposite sex and, thus, reproduce more. But the more I think about this theory, the more I’m realizing that modern society is defying that rule and logic. Of course there’s a logic to not having kids; they’re annoying, expensive, limiting for the parents and approximately a metric shit-ton of work. But evolutionarily, it doesn’t add up. Why are some of the most intelligent, beautiful and overall “fit” individuals choosing not to reproduce? Why are they thwarting their evolutionary potential? Is there something wrong with our sophisticated, nuanced society that we don’t have to adhere to these rules anymore? Have we surpassed them and, if so, where do we go from here?

If anyone has any answers, I’d love to hear them. But in the meantime, I’m going to allow my early-20s self to take solace in the fact that “success” can mean something other than achieving all your career dreams and making lots of money. That’s the kind of success I’m shooting for, in the end, but sometimes it takes a while to get there. The potential for evolutionary success, however, is just as close as the nearest sperm-carrying male! Even if he’s no Genghis Khan.

At the Precipice

Lately I’ve been thinking about these moments that I’ve been calling “Precipice moments.” The buildup is very banal; something you think would be cool or exciting, so you go through all the monotonous plans to do it–applying for a visa, riding for hours in a car, making reservations and arrangements. Suddenly, you’re there, ready to do the thing you’ve been waiting to do and looking forward to, and you realize…

Shit, what am I doing? This was a mistake! Why did I ever think I could handle this?

This, I feel is a defining moment for many people. And I know that sounds kind of dumb; precipice moments often come about when you’re about to embark on something that could change your life, but sometimes not–it could be as simple as buying a new car or trying a new sport. But, truly, the way a person acts in this moment of acute doubt is pretty telling about his/her character. I don’t think this is a moment of clarity or good judgment per se, because in my experience the thing I’m about to do is something I have thoroughly thought about and planned–hopefully my judgment would have kicked in way before now if it wasn’t a good idea. 

I see it more as a moment of weakness, of a lack of confidence. So what do you do? Give in to your inner demons or squash those instincts and go through with it?

Over the past couple of years I’ve made more of a concerted effort to power through these moments, to take the plunge (either literally or figuratively). More often than not it has very much been worth it. What exactly this says about me I’m not quite sure, but it’s a way I think I want to define myself. Just another step towards becoming the person I want to be in the future, I guess.

Crimes of Men Who Hate Women and Related Things

In a backlash against my dormant literary urges, I have recently plunged headlong into two books that I thought would be vastly different but had overlap dramatically: the pop sensation The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel 2666.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has topped various bestseller lists (3.4 million copies sold to date) and had been made into a movie, which isn’t surprising given its pulse-racing crime-novel quality. However, it does kind of surprise me, given the fact that the book details some pretty grisly rape scenes. Each one is more horrifying than the next, and it just feels so present and utterly disturbing. Many of the scenes leave you feeling that Lisbeth is a total badass, and that’s not undue praise. But the novel also does a good job of making you feel rape, or sexual assault, has happened in some capacity to nearly every _woman in Sweden. That is corroborated by the facts that Larsson includes at the beginning of each chapter (i.e. “Forty six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.”). _Nearly every female character, with only a few exceptions that I can think of, has been harmed in some way, surrounded by the nebula of unnamed or barely-named women who have been brutalized around them. 

Mikail Blomkvist, the main character (despite not being the title character, which subtly echoes the misogyny of the society in which the text is based), is a 40-something journalist who has just been convicted of libel. His career has been raped by his nemesis, Venestrom. He’s kind of a ladies’ man, but not a woman-hating one. At that critical point in the novel where he’s about to be killed and likely raped (when Lisbeth steps in and saves him), he’s left with a scar circling his neck, mirroring the painful loop that Lisbeth had tattooed on her ankle after she was raped.  Lisbeth acts as his post-rape mentor in a way, helping him take action when he feels utterly unable to do so. That says a lot for her character, and for what Larsson believes the “solution” to this pandemic of misogyny: talk about it, tell people, share your story. It will let them know that they are not alone, and the perpetrators of this worst of all crimes can be brought somewhat closer to justice. Despite the fact that many of them were _not_ in the course of the book, you get the feeling that, if they had just told someone (for those that could have), it would have all been OK. But the original Swedish title, translated to “Men Who Hate Women” is much more fitting for the book and it’s real subject matter.

2666 is altogether a different animal. Broken into five parts, this 900-page beast of an epic novel is pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever read, for better or for worse. Much of the novel deals in some capacity with the real-life murdering of women in Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexico border, which is called Santa Teresa in the novel. The first three shorter parts focus on characters who have something to do with the situation in Santa Teresa, but it’s really the fourth part, 300 pages itself, where the reader really feels the weight of it.

Every few pages or so, the plot(s) of this part is interrupted by an objective, police-style report of the most recent woman found. Usually it describes where she was found, how recently she had been killed, the state of the body, her name (if it could be found), what the body was wearing, and how she was killed. Over the course of this part the reader is barraged with dead women who were killed in horrible, gruesome ways (one breast severed and the other nipple “torn off, as if it had been bitten,” strangulations, vaginal and anal rape, dozens of stab wounds). It’s difficult to get through, but you find yourself simultaneously desensitized to it and emotionlessly fascinated. The most frustrating thing is that, after the description of almost every one of these murders, the “report” says that “the suspect was nowhere to be found, and the case was shelved.” Almost every time the case was shelved. When it wasn’t shelved, they accused the wrong guy, in one case even sending a scapegoat to prison just to say they sent someone. In most of the cases, it’s the woman’s boyfriend, lover or husband who is the suspect, although there’s talk of a serial killer that never really comes to a satisfying conclusion. 

But the scene that really got me was when the policemen, who were supposed to be helping to solve these crimes (albeit with varying degrees of dedication) are joking in a diner. The book fills two full pages with those sexist jokes we’ve all heard (“Why doesn’t a woman need a watch? Because there’s a clock on the stove…”), just going on and on about it. I was so, so angry; how could the people who were supposed to be solving all of these crimes be perpetuating the stereotypes that helped cause them in the first place? In the end, Bolaño’s view of rape (and feminicidio, or killing of women) is much bleaker: it will happen, because that’s the society we live in. The victims are random, and no women is able to escape it. It’s up to men to fix their own attitudes, which is a very difficult message to swallow. 

So there you have it, two very different views on rape by two pretty well-known contemporary authors. 

Have you read either of these books? Care to share an opinion?