Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Another collection of comments.


elissaann was thinking about a possible New Year's resolution, and asked whether other people make New Year's resolutions:

I don't make explicit New Year's resolutions, because they don't help me be happier or a better person: they're too likely to look like obligations I can fail at, things I've talked about and promised other people I will do. But that's about me, not about the concept in general.

I did, several years ago, decide to go outside at least once a day, unless I am seriously ill or there is a blizzard or hurricane outside. Bronchitis or having recently had surgery counts, a cold does not; similarly, mere cold weather or rain does not. I think I've invoked the blizzard exception once, in Montreal. That decision, or policy, does work for me. I don't know whether having the exceptions defined helps, nor whether it helps that this is something where if I do miss one day, I can go outside the next and it still helps my moods. I don't have to restart something with a sense of lost ground or effort (unlike, say, many people's resolutions to quit smoking).

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In a comment thread (locked, so no context here), after someone was startled to find a Facebook photo of a male classmate attractive, and someone else said her "self-labeling should be descriptive rather than prescriptive". A third party noted some difficulties there, and I wrote:

Yes, to both descriptive rather than prescriptive and the ways in which it's not without cost to change something like that. I'd say it shouldn't be prescriptive in ways that the person can't fit comfortably with, but it is reasonable for someone to decide that they will get involved only with women, or only with men, or only with people who don't already have children, or are of a specific religion, or live within an hour's travel, or are within five years of their own age, or are currently single and looking for a monogamous relationship or…

I was never strongly connected to the gay community, but it still took quite a bit for me to decide to try a relationship with a specific male person. It worked, and is still working, a quarter of a century later. A quarter of a century later, I still notice women and not men as attractive soon after meeting them or in passing on the street or subway.

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Clothing and gender:

I think I'm more likely to be called "sir" when wearing purple. I have a wonderfully bright purple jacket, which I think was designed as a "men's" coat, based on how it buttons, and am called "sir" moderately often when wearing that. I had been assuming this was either randomness or that people were subconsciously reacting to the cut of the jacket. [I bought this one second-hand, because the color was so vivid and appealing.]

The oddity is that on the one hand, cattitude laments being unable to find good purple shirts (few if any women's shirts would fit him), and on the other, another of the purple garments that get me called "sir" is a men's shirt that adrian_turtle got me because it's so wonderfully purple.

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boxofdelights was talking about calling her daughter "your daughter" rather than by name when telling her husband that she was angry at her, and asked if this was odd or wrong:

I don't think there's anything wrong with it. There are parents who may mind if a child is always "my daughter" when praised and "your daughter" when criticized, but if it's "Nixie" when you're happy with her or discussing something neutral, I don't see a problem.

I don't remember my parents doing this, but it seems to be something done more often when the child isn't in the room. I wonder, though, if part of why I stopped using a middle name after college was that I only ever heard it as part of the full-name-when-angry. Another part, which I was more aware of at the time, is that my name felt long enough without that.

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In a discussion in roadnotes's journal, in which she talked about why it is not a positive thing when people tell her they "don't think of her as black", I observed:

No white person has ever said to me anything like "I don't see you as white, redbird, I see you as a writer/strong person/beautiful woman/NewYorker/generous." Because "white" is the default and because they don't have a map in which it's relevant to distinguish "white" from writer, strong, beautiful, or generous. They may or may not think about me being white, but the ones who don't also don't feel the need, or impulse, to tell me they don't think of me as white.

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wild_irises asked "When you wake up from sleep, how do you know you're awake?":

I don't generally remember my dreams, so I'm not sure they feel different from being awake.

The times I'm conscious of being awake are when I'm falling asleep, or trying to: there are places in there where I'm aware of the shift in how my mind is working, a sort of half-way point of falling asleep at the beginning of the night, and some "do I have time to get back to sleep?" in the morning if I have an alarm set, or a related awareness of trying to get back to sleep on days when I can sleep in.

I had written "the times I'm sure I'm awake" but I'm sure of it now, as I type, which is usual. Being sleepy often means I'm more conscious of not actually being asleep, whether I want to be asleep or awake.