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My brain has been so fucked up by academia and just my own insufferability that I have developed a real fear of the “opportunity cost” of being in a relationship. Has that really become my reality? Sure, women aren’t having enough good sex, or any sex at all, but we are statistically having more partners than ever. So, shouldn’t the concept of more partners be a comfort? I am the norm, I’m so average. Instead, I find myself questioning if this is sustainable, or hurtful. Annoying!
Reading Girl Woman Other has been somewhat of an exercise in unpacking this. To say the obvious, there is so many experiences and perspective shifts in ones single lifetime, which is to say that to imagine encompassing all of them is impossible. It’s that one Middlemarch quote about the squirrel’s heartbeat, let me find it:
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
I’m having a Middlemarch/Dirt encrusted/Morally ambiguous fall. This growing feeling of becoming intertwined with a single person to an unfamiliar extent has me repeatedly going over this quote.
Anyway, I have also been reading non-fiction, as much as my classes demand it. Grappling with concepts of settler-colonialism as it applies to Indigenous empires like the Aztec/Comanche and realizing I don’t think it does. Colonialism yes, settler colonialism, no. Working my way through Anti-Oedipus in conjunction to my readings on Indians & Empire. Reading about conflict related sexual violence in the DRC and Palestine in conjunction with readings on surveillance capitalism. Recommending Capitalism Realism to the guy I’m talking to. It’s all filling my brain in ways that I hope I can digest coherently at a later point. I just feel like the intake valve is fully open and I’m trying to stay afloat. More soon & hopefully, with more a point to it.
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