Dear clusterflock
Today is more than just your routine Tuesday. Michael Smith is now 30 years old today! I heard from a reliable source that he really was torn up over missing clusterflockstock this year. Happy birthday, Mr. Smith. We missed you there too.
HipHop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes
Apologies if you already know about this documentary, but I was just exposed to it in my Cross-Cultural Counseling class.
If you hadn’t heard of this and liked it, try checking out The New Jim Crow.
I AM THE BEST
(Via lhl)
In My Language, by A. M. Baggs
The first part is in my “native language,” and then the second part provides a translation, or at least an explanation. This is not a look-at-the-autie gawking freakshow as much as it is a statement about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.
Dear clusterflock
I keep discovering Asian packages of fruits, like spiced mango or salted lychee, which I immediately purchase and try to consume. And yet, not a single one of these delightfully marketed products is remotely edible . . . if you like fruit, or sugar, or pickles.
Am I alone in this willful impulsivity with exotic foods or do you find yourself chewing on bitter, pickled rot at regular intervals too? Where do you shock yourself into an awareness of some blind, reckless faith?
There are so many essays out there about why dating sucks
One man tries to widen the frame:
There are two types of people in the world. Those melancholy few who take care of business and then there’s everyone else. This is the way it has always been. There are those men and women who own their good decisions and bad decisions and then a vast stupid mob who moo and cluck and turn the blame game into blood sport. But let me address the mob first. You’re unhappy because no one likes to feel like they’re a line item on someone’s life plan list. A “relationship” is not a prize. Not a noun. A relationship is a verb. If you want a relationship, start by being a human being and try to relate to another human being. It’s basically a fulltime job. There is no plan. Love finds you, and either you’re listening or you’re not. This is an immutable fact of nature. The mob, the web, your fears and selfish ambitions are nothing but noise. Turn down the volume. Put your ear to the door. The heart has such a small voice, but it says such wonderful things.
Truth be told, this article reminds me of some advice I received last summer in Deron’s driveway, sitting in his Jeep.
Dear clusterflock
Is there a word for that feeling of slicing through a stick of cold butter? If it doesn’t exist, I think it could also be used to describe the experience of riding in a very expensive car or how a bite of perfectly cooked lamb shank melts in a mouth.
Ten
Accidentally kicking my sister between her cheeks in the bath and bracing myself for a slap, only to discover instead that she couldn’t breathe with laughter.
Placing my hands on the cold glass of an elevator on the outside of the Westin St. Francis as we rode to the thirty-second floor at dusk — after the Christmas tree in Union Square was lit but when the skyline still held daylight.
Making fun of the girl who said she wanted to grow up to be “wich,” less because of her lisp and more because of her superficiality.
That same girl telling me her parents were Santa a few months later.
Sitting on my sister’s hospital bed, playing double solitaire on the food tray she wouldn’t eat from.
Taking over half the dining table with my science fair presentation, incapable of moving or removing myself from the room while my shrill sister, crying, screamed at my father using a decibel only dogs could hear.
Welcoming my other sister home from Chile at the airport gate, where she pulled out two leaking sandwich bags from her jacket pockets — each containing a smuggled sea turtle the size of a silver dollar.
Being the only person on the playground who could get the new girl off the park bench and talking, even if it took almost two months.
Racing my only neighborhood friend to her house on rollerblades and winning! But by inadvertently smashing into the back of her parents’ Jeep in the driveway.
My father very delicately asking me if I thought that I might be too old to sit naked in the middle of the family room after every bath. Y’know, now that I’m developing.
Wait, what?
Late this afternoon, while my classmates and I were settling back into our seats at the end of break, someone in the room asked, “Kelsey, am I just dreaming this or do you run some kind of dating service?”
From the comments
I do bad things all the time and tell of them.
I do good things a whole lot more and keep them secret.
Helps me realize that what is unseen is more important, and hopefully to remember that in my dealings with other people.
But because everything and everyone is so far from one another, our words count more now, and so I seem to others to be a bad person. By my own recollection. Which I think is funny. Amusing myself in these ways hasn’t quite played out in the ways I thought it would.
Dear clusterflock
Last night I dreamt of petty thieving and the redistribution of assets. These days, are you more of a rebel in mind or in action?
Internet dating, 8
27-year-old female receives this instant message from a 30-year-old male located sixty miles outside her metropolitan area:
can i tounge your ass really fast somtime. i want a woman who likes that
An excerpt of his profile:
Well, many people have been searching all there lives for one certain thing, which is love. To me love is when you wake up in the morning thinking about that certain someone, go throughout you day thinking about that someone, and then go to bed thinking about that someone. Love, is when you miss a person when you just been away from them for ever 5 minutes. Love is when you are with that person and you’ve never felt happier in your entire life.
A HEART is meant to be open, not closed. Id rather be single then to settle for less then the realist & best, then to be miserable with someone that half asses love I confess. I’m not ashamed to speak from the heart and don’t know why so many people are afraid too. I guess people aren’t use to being true to themselves …& ITS SUCH A WASTE OF LIFE NOT TO BE REAL TO YOURSELF AND NOT LOVE UNCONDITIONALLY TO EVERYONE ELSE. [...]
I’M EASING GOING AND RELAXING TO BE AROUND. I’M A VERY PASSIONATE PERSON! I WANT TO MEET A WOMAN THAT’S FIT AND IF THERE’S A CONNECTION WE WOULD TRY TO TAKE IT SLOW AS POSSIBLE. I’M BASICALLY WANTING A BEST FRIEND IN A WOMAN AND FOR HER TO BE OPEN TO A LONG TERM RELATIONSHIP. I WANT HER TO BE GOOD COMPANY AND FUN NO MATTER WHAT SHES DOING. ALSO, IF SHE LIKES FITNESS THAT’S GREAT BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN STAYING HEALTHY. MOST OF ALL I WANT A WOMAN THAT IS HAPPY ABOUT HER LIFE AND IS COMFORTABLE WITH HERSELF. IN HER SKIN, AND CONFIDENT SO WE CAN BE HAPPY TOGETHER IN A LONG LASTING RELATIONSHIP. I PREFER WOMAN WHO ARE COMFORTABLE WITH THEMSELVES AND IN THEIR OWN SKIN, WHICH IS MORE ATTRACTIVE AND MORE COMFORTABLE FOR A MAN TO BE AROUND.
There might be some poetry in there.
Dear clusterflock
If it doesn’t feel like you’re on the edge, like you’re surfing a long wave and at any moment you could wipe out, is it love? And if it does, is it only lust? Or vice versa?
On the benefits of ambient seminal fluid pulsing through one’s veins
Jesse Bering of Scientific American:
Unfortunately, rather than investigate the possible psychobiological effects of semen exchange in this dynamic, Holmes and Warner leer through a fairly typical postmodernist lens to explore the symbolic nature of semen exchange in barebackers. Now, I ask you, which is the more informative paradigm for understanding why gay men would practice unsafe sex through unprotected anal intercourse: an evolutionary biological account taking into consideration the chemical composition of seminal plasma and its possible affects on attachment among gay men, or a symbolic, postmodernist perspective like the following one advanced by Holmes and Warner (in all fairness, this is just a snippet, but a good taste of their approach):
The body becomes the locus of never-ending fights, a carnal battlefield. The escape route (lines of flight) is intrinsic to the deterritorialization of the Body-without-Organs through which one becomes someone else. However, the lines of flight could have paradoxical effects. Indeed, they can be avenues of creative potential or, conversely, paths of great danger. Yet, it is ‘always in a line of flight that we create’ … ‘that we must continue to experiment with such lines.’ Lines of flight (nuclei of resistance of resingularization and heterogenesis) permit freedom to surge through a process of creative transformation and metamorphosis.
Trust me, even in context that paragraph reads like the authors were cobbling together a braille sentence using the random distribution of acne on someone’s back. Sorry to sound a bit testy, but while such soupy postmodernist rhetoric may still have its place in certain scholarly circles, in dealing with something as clinically important as unprotected sex among vulnerable populations, a scientific understanding of these people’s motivations is essential before any intervention of their high-risk behaviors can even begin to occur.
The whole thing makes me giggle and gawk.
Dear clusterflock
What’s the idiosyncratic behavior or cognition you most recently discovered that you never grew out of?
Therapeutic Communication, 2
Empathy does not imply losing yourself in someone else. You cannot get lost over there if no one is over here.
Human Development and the Family, 2
What happens if we don’t have experiences where we feel safe, we start to notice the reality of the outside world. And what happens is that we then develop skills to deal with what’s out there, instead of skills to identify with ourselves. The problem is, the more we feel that we have to protect, the more that becomes the story — the way we are.
It’s all in the way you trick yourself
As a student again, the only money I spend is on groceries, school supplies, and rabbit litter. It’s cathartic, really, to have fewer options. These days riding a bus — as opposed to my bike — is a $2 luxury I don’t use. I buy only the produce in season or on special. Legumes are boiled from scratch. Meat is brought home from the butcher including the extra fats and bones for future flavors.
But coffee! In trying to reduce the quality (cost) of my daily fix, I think I’ve come up with a solution. Since the only money I spend on myself outside the home is a cup of coffee twice a week at a cafe for studying, why not make that $1.50 extraordinarily worthy (delicious) by drinking gruel every other day of the week?
See what I did there?
Psychodynamics, 1
We don’t get better at managing our loving and desiring. We get better at managing our suffering and the fallout of love.
Therapeutic Communication, 1
It’s only when you understand just how little you understand that you can begin to understand.
Internet dating, 7
29-year-old male contacts 26-year-old female in same city. Note: face in profile photos is scratched out like a fatal threat.
Hey, do you happen to have a band-aid? I scraped my knee up pretty badly when I fell for you.
Human Development and the Family, 1
Intermittent reinforcement is worse than negative reinforcement.
I am changing
Last week I attended a retreat to kick off my counseling psychology master’s program and now I have this desire to tell you, clusterflock, that I don’t think I am going to remain exactly as the person you met online two years ago. I believe that in the next three to five years, I will become a more dependable, generous person. And yet, I fear two things:
1. This process will strip away my spike and you will love me less.
2. I will outgrow even more local friends than I already did in my evolution toward choosing you.
Do you have fears about your personal growth and if so, what are they?
Internet dating, 6
Remember this guy? A few days ago there was a follow-up:
It’s [redacted name]. You didn’t strike me as someone who would drop an opportunity without at least checking it out.
I invite you to think about the things that would most deeply, really fulfill you. You might find that when you let those thought provoking pictures run through your mind and feeling those feelings, for whatever mysterious reason, your mind begins to move in a new direction. It’s like there’s a much bigger part that you want to take on.
Anyway, if other men are not with you in the way you truly want them to be, then I invite you to think about the things that would most deeply, really fulfill you. There may be another level of satisfaction that you haven’t even thought about. Isn’t there?
And if you should discover other men are not meeting your needs in the way you truly want them to, maybe we owe it to each other to talk.
Here’s my number [redacted].
While I’ve been out traveling…
My father has been working in Russia every other week to research and develop recommendations for Putin’s economic advisors, most of whom are (relatively) new to capitalism and the competitive spirit of innovation. We’ve spoken on the phone most of my driving days, but it wasn’t until I arrived here at his brother’s house in Vancouver, BC, that I heard about these interviews. Frankly, that humility makes me even more proud of his accomplishments.
Is there someone in your family that you’re lately proud of?
