DEMAND AVOIDANCE

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ace-and-ranty (TUMBLR ACCOUNT)

Well, goodness, this one resonated much more than I was expecting. I mean, I get it. My mind was also blown wide open when I found out “demand avoidance” was a thing that existed, and that I’m not the only weirdo in the world who suddenly wishes it wasn’t her birthday after anxiously waiting for her birthday for days.

Loads of people in the tags are asking how I do it? I feel this won’t be groundbreaking advice, but here is what I have learned:

  1. Previous experience. Really no way around it. Now that I hit thirty, I feel like I have done enough things to know, intellectually, from experience, what will feel nice if I overcome the avoidance, and what won’t. For example, every time I go to the beach, I wake up early and would rather eat a tire than get off the bed. But I remember that every time I got up and went to the beach, I was glad I did it. So I just get up, feeling like shit, and get ready, feeling like shit, and I get to the beach and magic!! I feel great, I love the beach!! Sometimes you just gotta do it scared feeling kinda like shit.
  2. Am I avoiding the thing or getting to the thing? I have a lot of demand avoidance around just, y’know, getting up, getting ready and going out the door. Universal human experience. If I notice that doing the actual thing (Swim in the pool!) sounds nice, but I’m avoiding having to rally myself to go do that (Fetch swimsuit! Sunscreen! Towel!), then I know it’s demand avoidance and I should just fucking go.
  3. Is the thing making me feel excited at all or just anxious? I have had previous occasions when I did the opposite; I convinced myself it was just demand avoidance when I really just. Hated the thing. And wanted to stop. If you feel a mix of excitement and dread, or excitement and anxiety, that might be demand avoidance. But if thinking of doing the thing just makes you feel actively anxious, then yeah. You don’t want to do the thing.
  4. Do the thing a little bit. Used often with dishes. I’ve seen this advice float around Tumblr a lot and it’s correct. Commit to doing just a bit of the thing; a little bit of the thing; the smallest bit of the thing you can do. Getting started will make it clear right away if you don’t want to do it (and in that case, you have permission to stop), or if you just having trouble getting started.

But mine were always there for me

My parents were not perfect. They never represented themselves as such. They were not mind readers. They never represented themselves as such. They loved each other, and they loved my brother and me, and I felt safe and cared for while I lived at home.

And now, across the Salish Sea, they still care for me. They help me pay my bills and enjoy the life I live so that it can be equitable with my roommate/brO. They continue to think about me and consider my feelings and ask for my opinion and snicker at my jokes and frown helplessly at my continuing weird takes on our family history.

But what motivates my writing sometimes is knowing that I was Loved, and so many are not. So many people have black holes of mental illness and assault convictions and alcoholism swirling around their parents. They have poverty and intergenerational abuse and racism and food insecurity as constant companions. When I write about these things, it’s because my parents gave me a life in which I could mentally afford to think about others, and to see my privilege as a member of a contented family as exactly that, not a sign that god loves me better.

mood

All I did yesterday was change my clothes, post to my blog, roast all the remaining almonds (fit for three batches of biscotti), do the Wordle, complete Lumosity training for the day, get Jeff some tea and a fried egg sammy (I just had the eggs with the bell peppers I roasted the other day), take my pills, throw out some compostables, empty the sink, train the cat with paw claps and running catches, police up my eyebrows, run the dishwasher, watch TV including the most recent TLoU and Vera, talk to Aunt Mary on the phone, work on Totally Boned, post shit on twitter and facebook, and order Japanese food (finally got the amount right, we had virtually no leftovers.)

I also read a lot of stuff on the internet about long COVID. Anyone reading this has survived a mass disabling event, and we’re either irritable or transfixed with our grief. When will we come to an understanding that we’ve globally:

Normalized people dropping dead from cardiovascular issues…. at any age.

increased the number of children who will never be able to pursue gainful employment in a fashion that is useful to end stage capitalism due to thymus collapse; as adults they will be immunocompromised for their entire lives.  You know how in Victorian times there were ‘delicate children’, well, this kid over here will have had a stroke at age three and have a withered arm; this kid over there will die if she doesn’t get her allergy medication and her albuterol; that kid over there had a series of mini strokes in utero and will never take herself to the toilet unassisted; this kid over here will move to the city with his parents at the age of five and never be healthy again; these kids will catch fungal infections from playing in contaminated water after an earthquake and slowly die as their lungs turn black from the inside out; and all these kids here and there will die of childhood ailments because no group of people is consistently vaccinating against them any more and water treatment will get harder and harder as there’s less and less water.

reduced the fertility of the smallest upcoming generation in history and so we will thus be subjected, over and over, in family after family, to our own little version of the ‘children of men’. The current fertility data for younger people is horrifying. Many young men simply aren’t producing enough motile and healthy sperm to be able to count on fathering children if they get the opportunity. For young women, the problem will not so much be getting pregnant (although anecdotally this seems to be an issue) as maintaining a pregnancy for 8 months and then not dying of the consequences of gestational diabetes, like eclampsia, or losing the child late in the pregnancy. Eclampsia events during pregnancy have increased (according to the CDC (US)) by 30 PERCENT IN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS. (If you don’t hear the original Star Trek klaxon at this point you’re not getting me, here.) Since the pando started. COVID hides in reproductive tissues as easily as anywhere else in the human body. Fertility gods and goddesses are planning a comeback.

 

and so ….in sum …. we’ve fixed it so that we’ll, as a species, have fewer kids and more of them will be born disabled, or sacrificed to disability after they’re born because of terrible public health policies.

The people who will bear the brunt of all this are women. Because we carry children. Because we birth them. Because we care for them. And because the patriarchy would rather that we women die and the children be born.

So my mood is bleak, on this day after ‘family day.’

 

 

Pandemic slump

February is not usually my favourite month but I’m coping okay today. A good night of sleep always helps. Wordle in four (SO CLOSE ALMOST got it in three). 17749 words. Two loads of laundry and one of them put away. (I’m always anxious when there’s no clean hand towels.)

Keeping the cat door closed most of the time since there’s someone out there bugging Buster. I’ve stopped feeding the crows because I got scared by an article about avian flu. They’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.

The front stairs are spalling very badly and every time it freezes there’s more debris out front.

Jeff Guenther LPC says early couples should ask themselves these questions (I have adapted them so they aren’t direct quotes from his facebook video.)

I’m posting them because I want mOm (the only other person who’s read it) to think about how the ‘boys’ in Totally Boned would answer this sort of as a character exercise but also just for curiosity. It amazes me that they’ve already taken care of a lot of this stuff together even without specifically discussing it. There are also assumptions inherent in these questions that say a lot about our culture, I mean…. imagine the questions during the 1920s. Nothing about religion or religiosity. Nothing about gender roles (not really.)

Will you get mad if I start watching a new show without you?

What text emojis for humour or sarcasm do you want me to use so we’re on the same page?

When we order food are we sharing or do you get all your food to yourself?

When it comes to presents what are your expectations for Valentines, anniversaries, birthdays and Christmas?

Are certain evenings blocked out for us or are we planning week by week?

Who’s paying for most stuff?

If one of us wants sex and the other doesn’t how do we handle it? 

Should I always take your side without fail or can I remonstrate with you if I think you’re being immoral or self-damaging?

 

 

I don’t know if any of you saw the Premier of Alberta attempting to shake Trudeau’s hand but it was pretty gross. A politician should know how to do that.

Off to see Paul today. Time for walkies.

New poem – the sieve

This is not a suicide note:
I’d bang on my brother’s door and waken him
rather than leave him my corpse ***on purpose***
ew, I mean, ew

my consciousness wrote the suicide note to you
but the smelly part is still here

I know that my procession
through these eroded markers
was foretold
but the weeping was tiresome
and I had no patience with the acidic streams
for – did you know – your tears become more basic
over the course of the day, and it’s 2 am here

I pull a stray hair out of my mouth and continue
in the present tense
<<< fly back and forth
destroyers of narrative >>>
I cry as if I could be cleansed
rather than imprisoned
behind bars of vapour

quit potchkying around and write this damned thing

it is my salute to those I love who live still
and everything they taught me, all of which
I will take with me to my niche
in the columbarium
for everything I’ve learned is nothing
compared to what is coming
it’s the brutal and the lucky
who will live
another sieve for humanity

I passed through one, today
Most days I don’t know
how close I came

but I do today

I believe Anthony Rapp

I always found him more credible than Kevin Spacey the man ””’HEAVILY ALLEGED ””” and now acquitted of sexually assaulting him when he was FOURTEEN.

Cousin Alex, has indicated, in consequence of conversations with other people in show business, that she believes him too.

Kevin Spacey was small time when it happened, but over and over again older white men are privileged over everyone else and we now have a world that reflects that.

A police officer with the RCMP was murdered here in Burnaby the other day and it’s sad for so many reasons. She was specifically trained to work with vulnerable populations and one of them stabbed her. There was a handwritten note on the spot of her death, “I’m sorry you didn’t make it, I hope you heard us coming.”

I’m angry because I’m afraid the RCMP will use this death as a reason to back away from less violent policing. If they don’t that would be a proper memorial for Cst. Shaelyn Yang.

I’m angry because in all likelihood she was a good cop and good cops seem to get pushed out of the profession one way or another.

I’ll be watching the trial of the man arrested for her murder with interest.

Got my flu shot availability notification; picked up my medications.

Dunnett Day is in planning mode; I don’t think I’ll attend this year. Although I may well if we’re on a heated patio.

8215 words Part II

Suzanne was here yesterday and clean floors actually temporarily existed. She finished the Part I of Totally Boned that I printed for her and wants to give it to her sister Fran now, and I approved. Go litul bok.

I bought myself a steak & lobster dinner for delivery last night. I was so emotionally exhausted after I left Katie’s (although it was awesome to see Alex (new favorite Game ‘Doors’ on Roblox, got a brief tour) and Ryker (who made strange at me). I got very self-indulgent. Briefly saw Keith; he was going walking with a friend and he gave me a hug on the way out the door which I was not expecting and much enjoyed.

Why was I emotionally exhausted – because Paul is, despite many conversations at this point, not actually understanding or able to do anything to help slow his dementia (besides exercise), he’s still in denial about it and not understanding why pestering Keith about his efforts to get a cat (they have mice AND they are all cat people) is counterproductive (Keith’s busting ass).

The reason I went over there was to record any family story he liked with the help of family photos so he could remember and he literally could not put more than a sentence together about any of the pictures we were looking at. I asked him about The House on Wortley Road (that’s the way he says it) and he couldn’t give me more than a couple of sentences and was just randomly saying stuff and saying things like “That’s a good picture of us” (from the Pan Pacific Christmas Party… I think that’s the one where Jarmo nearly got thrown out of the hotel for playing 20th Century Schizoid Man really loud in his room or was it War Pig, I was so effing drunk that night).

I have to start approaching him for this stuff first thing in the morning. And you know what, I’m not really in any shape to do this. He’s already a shell of himself (still cheerful and talkative, just not… himself)  and I was crying in the car on the way back but not loud enough for him to notice.

Ryker is run walking falling crawling at ninety miles an hour. There’s no baby gate for the front stairs (he would basically be in traction for a year if he fell down them) and he crawls CLOSE to the stairs but doesn’t seem interested in flinging himself down them, which is a perfectly fine sign of intelligence. What he does love to do is climb things. He was climbing the elliptical machine the folks have and everything turns and I thought he would end up clipping himself and he did… cried for two seconds.

I left before Dax came over. He thinks I hate him. I don’t any more but I was damned if I was going to let my emotional exhaustion trigger some kind of autistic meltdown and really didn’t want to open that door on Katie.

Jessica’s dad’s surgery was CANCELLED. He needs a triple bypass, he’s in heart failure, and he won’t get the operation until Monday at the earliest. It’s brain-punching news and Jessica and Katie are both terrified he’ll die before he can even have the surgery.

The chaos in the UK is unbelievable, and still life persists there. Brittwitter is alternating wails of angry disbelief, extremely funny reaction pictures, and people saying that Liz Truss, in flattening the pound and killing the queen, is the greatest revolutionary of her generation.

I’m going to try to do something productive today; haven’t figured out what. The rain has finally come and it’s such a relief to be able to breathe. Okay done my daily blog, COFFEE GET IN MY TANK GODDAMN YOU

not another project, must be AU Monday

It’s called The Trust Issue, and it’s a nested set of received opinions about how to trust the ourselves, the world and how we move through it and eventually out of it. I am thinking of it in terms of being on three scales; personal, familial (via family history, which is basically me saying HEY MA I THINK I FOUND ANOTHER USE FOR THE GAZILLIONS OF PIXELS YOU’VE SLAUGHTERED), and linguistic, but not in any academic sense, just in the sense that I have to use English to actually, like, do anything. English as often noted has many limitations in terms of felicity of precision *and* metaphor, at least for me, so I must perforce be appalled at operating within its tiresomely inevident confines. I know I am stuck here, in English, for I have neither the life expectancy nor the will to become able to write with ease and style in another language. The very idea makes a mockery of trust in any degree, but so be it. I shall scale Mt. Impossible because I dare not leave my room! The idea of actually making it fit into any politics, including the increasingly deadbeat anarchism I claim to claim (know what I mean) is loathsome to me so I am avoiding the political or public sphere, and I don’t think I could do it in less than 20000 words and suspect it’ll be closer to 70K.

Three loads full

I give thanks to the people, the land and water, the sky and creatures, the weather and the seasons, of this place. I will keep working to restore the stewardship of the Salish peoples and uphold their immemorial relationship to the beautiful lands and waters. It is not mine although they share it with me. #LandBack

Three loads of laundry yesterday. I haven’t dragged it back up the stairs to put it  away but, apart from my lilac hoodie which I neglected to include and must be laundered right away because it’s foul with spilled food (sigh), my clothes be clean.

Schrödingers dishwasher – did I run the damned thing or not.

Cleaned out Buster’s gammy ear this morning. Normally he bats at me and protests, but he was purring and gave me a little thank you chirp when I was done, so I think he was mebbe a little itchy.

Paul straightened things out with his housemates, and acknowledged to me by phone that his behaviour was boned. But Katie’s mellowed and I have not talked to Keith. Still thinking about the driving issue.

Curls fell out of my do but it’s still really cute and I love it. A bad haircut can ruin you but not for long and a good haircut just makes everything better. Interestingly I thought my hair was all the same colour but the ends were both darker and more washed out, if that’s possible, and now all the hair colour seems quite even to me, and the silver shine is (according to my stylist) something people pay thousands of dollars to obtain and maintain. God (for some reason) thinks I’m cool to extrude this stuff, and it’s great, because I can be harassing someone on reddit or going to the bathroom and I can still grow hair with undiminished vigour.

I told the stylist that one liner from James C., one of my all time favourite coworkers at the big X. About 15 years ago, at work, I read something like, “Hair is a sexual signalling device” so I wrote all the coworkers that I liked a little email, asking what their hair says about them, and he said, “My hair stands straight up,” and it was the best joke ever because he didn’t swear or even say anything particularly rude but it SURE got the point across and it makes me helpless with giggles every time I recollect it. And that email would get me fired these days and I’m okay with that.

I want that turkey sandwich from Big Star with cranberry sauce for lunch, calice. If it’s as good as the number 27 I’ll be happy. If you charge twelve fifty for a sammich it had better be good, and that was superlative.

Fourteen kudos this morning including one from my third fave fanfic writer. So that was pleasant. I’m thinking of sending mOm a variant of the drunk on the beach story (I ended up writing THREE VERSIONS OF A SINGLE STORY – I wrote one version in word (I never do that) and LOST IT LIKE WHOOSH INTO THE ETHER WHAT IN THE ENTIRE FUCK and then rewrote it, and then rewrote it again to be even more sappy. BABY GOATS BRINGING THE RINGS TO THE GROOMS AT A WEDDING NOOOOO. Actually not but the idea of a baby goat gambolling down the aisle at an outdoor wedding and then running off with the rings made me laugh so hard I put it in to troll one of the characters.

STOP WAR AND EAT POUTINE says the pic from a recent antiwar demo in Paris. Apparently Vladimir Poutine is what some convoyancers call Justin Trudeau.

Pierre Poilevre has a fortune of 9 million dollars – which he got pandering to oil companies – and it’s more than Trudeau has – and he’s speechifying about Trudeau being a rich elitist etc. Get bent Pierre and while so posed please do ram a caltrop through your scrotum, you’ll never be PM. Some people want Trump to run Canada But I Sure As Fuck Do Not.

scanged from WorkingClassHistory on Insta:

Women Anarchists have become the terror of world’s police – Their Daring Crimes are said to have outstripped the deeds of brothers of the red

Search for the woman is becoming a safe rule in crimes proceeding from anarchistic violence – the guardians of the world nearly always find a woman implicated when a ruler is stricken down – EMOTIONAL WOMEN LOSE SENSE OF FEAR.

yeah baby

From L.M. Sacasas’ the Accelerated Life blog

The following is from the Translator’s Preface to the English edition of Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. (The translator is Jonathan Trejo-Mathys.):

A further weighty obstacle to the realization of any ethical life project lies in the way individuals are increasingly caught in an ever denser web of deadlines required by the various social spheres (‘subsystems’) in which they participate: work, family, (school and sports activities of children), church, credit systems (i.e., loan payment due dates), energy systems (utility bills), communications systems (Internet and cell phone bills), etc. The requirement of synchronizing and managing this complicated mesh of imperatives places one under the imperious control of a systematically induced ‘urgency of the fixed-term’ (Luhmann). In practice, the surprising—and ethically disastrous—result is that individuals’ reflective value and preference orderings are not (and tendentially cannot) be reflected in their actions. As Luhmann explains, ‘the division of time and value judgments can no longer be separated. The priority of deadlines flips over into a primacy of deadlines, into an evaluative choiceworthiness that is not in line with the rest of the values that one otherwise professes …. Tasks that are always at a disadvantage must in the end be devalued and ranked as less important in order to reconcile fate and meaning. Thus a restructuring of the order of values can result simply from time problems.’

People compelled to continually defer the activities they value most in order to meet an endless and multiplying stream of pressing deadlines inevitably become haunted by the feeling expressed in the trenchant bon mot of Ödön von Horváth cited by Rosa: ‘I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him.’

ow

Poor Keith has had his first migraine. His migraines are pure pain that drugs don’t touch and light sensitivity – the classic. Not like me and my personality changes and auditory hallucinations!!!

Katie is very tired of being pregnant, but very much enjoying only having one child… so that’s fun.

Paul is about the same as always, but he’s seeing a therapist, which is great, because couples therapy was always super gross.

I still feel massively stuck and unreplenished, which is stupid, because I had a very good time last night in a painful way (we were talking about therapy, anger, parental and childhood experiences, and it got…. well how do you think discussions like this go? except we all stayed civil.) I cried of course but it wasn’t in response to anything the kids said, I just burst into tears describing the worst moment of my childhood. And I kept trying to stifle the tears and finally I grunted I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M STILL MAD ABOUT THIS.

Since mOm and pOp will be reading this with horror, it’s about the move to London, which (for an autie kid with trouble making friends meant that the entire cohort of public school kids I was supposed to go to high school with VANISHED and I walked alone at the age of 11 into a 2000 student high school although I never was schooled in a portable thank the living Christ) seriously messed me up for years. I am over it, but we were talking about childhood, and with Tom being so recently passed away I’m four seconds from tears at the best of times. I mean, normally I look at it from the parents’ perspective “EH wot can you DO ?” but this time I reexperienced it from my childish perspective and WHOOPPPPSy

Alex was playing in his room the whole time.

Jeff is SO GLAD he didn’t go for supper, although let me tell you brO Keith put on a helluva feast and there was PIE not PUMPKIN afterward.

Then I came home and practised for a while and started hacking around on a song.

Didn’t mean well
when I said those things
I’ve got a talent
for making sure it stings
It’s no cause for pride
I say sorry a lot
sometimes it seems
Spite is all that I’ve got

 

Reasonably productive day

Shopping; didn’t get to Al P.’s New Years Walk in Trout Lake, le sigh, made pizza, wrote and mailed a letter to my mOm, made biscotti dough, three loads of laundry washed and dried and sort of staged for being put away, recorded Bob Dylan’s New Years Day.

This morning I shall bake biscotti and then deliver it to the deserving and the undeserving alike. Then I’ll probably make another batch because otherwise it’s too much room in the fridge as it chills.

Continue reading Reasonably productive day