ten good things // {at this truth we have arrived/god damn, it's great to be alive}

1. I've dealt with two scary e-mails this evening.

2. DW work! Cackling with azurelunatic over spite-driven development, updating the list of babydev bait in dw_dev_training, staring in horror at the codebase a bit but then writing a fix that seems (after very cursory testing) to largely behave as intended (so I have submitted a PR so karzilla can tell me to nest conditions instead of replacing them). (The horror in question: the if-statement that determines whether notifications of new entries/comments/whatever provide http or https links? Currently lives in LJ::User::Styles. NOPE NOPE NOPE.)

3. Bimbling about my mother's garden this evening; I've got a box or so of blackberries to take back to London with me, my hands still smell of Liebstoeckel, and I got to eat ripe raspberries and figs straight off their respective plants.

4. Three games of Scrabble with my mother over the past few days! And it is sort of telling that they just went, unlike the last several months, which strongly suggests that this round of antidepressant is starting to work properly. (I normally score 350-400ish. Game the first: opened with three bingos, ended up scoring over five hundred slightly to my surprise. Game the second: I remain extremely pleased about GAZeTTED for 92 and WASH/Ski/Ham for 50ish, finishing comfortably over 400 and on a tie prior to sorting out deductions. Game the third: actually significantly more lacklustre scorewise, but I was still pleased at getting out with OO/bOa/rOte for 15.)

5. I picked up beads for the shawls on Tuesday, and have been cooing gently over them ever since. They are tactile and pleasing and I am making a scientific joke with them that I find far, far too amusing.

6. Cambridge-Oxford-Cambridge over 5 days is actually a really sensible way to spend time: it means middle brother and I aren't in the same building for more than 48 hours at a stretch, which means that we don't hit him actually starting to set me off badly but we do get a high incidence background neutral-to-positive interactions.

7. Lovely grounding restorative reassuring extended conversation with sebastienne this afternoon once I'd finally dragged myself out of bed. I have more of a sense of purpose and more of a sense of where I'm going.

8. That first tattoo makes me think that all of a sudden I know what I actually want Westminster Bridge to be, if I get it. An idea to sit with for sure, but seeing that photo felt like things clicking into place.

9. Pushing home up the hill from the bus stop, toward fiercely atmospheric sunset clouds, followed by turning toward a nearly full moon suspended in the pale blue sky.

10. Here is temporarily who I am.

Working definitions of forgiveness

What I'm feeling towards here, I think, is something along the lines of willingness to assume good faith, and trust in minimally adequate competence.

To some extent that's a bare minimum for reconciliation, but I think that while it's necessary for said it's not sufficient; for reconciliation I'd need a more active than passive motivation, which is not the case for this definition I'm proposing. It's a slightly more formalised version of "you won't hurt me again" (as equal parts prediction and instruction; the saying makes it so), I think, in a way that lets me sit with and accept past hurt without requiring me to cross-reference all current patterns against it in a hypervigilant attempt to avert (perceived) disaster.

On the subject of Frank Turner

Er, kab, said sgsabbage after my last post on the topic, do you actually like Frank Turner? I can't tell.

Well, something to that effect.

AHAHAHAHAHA, I said.

swaldman noted he'd liked I Still Believe (iirc) when it was performed at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, or something (I was actually completely oblivious to the fact the guy was performing at that point, but then I was kind of screamingly crazy and also in Edinburgh at the time), but hadn't particularly cared for the others or found them memorable.

And that, you see, is the crux of the matter, and it is this: Frank Turner has written one good song and a lot of variations on it, and he's also written a lot of intensely misogynist bro-y crap. (For my go-to example of the latter, look up the lyrics to Worse Things Happen At Sea, which has content notes for threats of stalking and domestic violence.)

The good song, to be clear, is I Still Believe, and all the songs that sound like it: the rock-anthem paeans to holding fierce & tight & viciously exulting to life (let's grab life by the throat/and then live it to pieces), with an endearingly misguided veneer of assertions that any of this shit is meaningfully punk rock. It's misogynist around the edges, because fundamentally there is absolutely no fucking way I would last longer than five minutes in a pub with this guy before I was yelling at him that the fucking reason he's stuck on I have to say that, honestly,/I still haven't found/the person who can take the strain/.../so I'll do this on my own is that he's straight and he doesn't think of women as people, and he doesn't want a partner he wants a Manic Pixie fucking Dream Girl, and perhaps if he could think of higher praise than Tre's the safest girl I know and if he could conceive of women having complex interiorities with motivations beyond being the addressee of but darling, if you're there, gentle voice and soothing hands,/to quiet my despair, to shore up all my plans he'd have more satisfying relationships--

-- all that aside, right, I Still Believe, and here's a run-down of its variants.
( Read more... )

But seriously there are so many other people you could spend time and money on instead. The Indelicates, obviously, though they don't particularly do much of a line in grimly-clinging-on-to-positivity-rock-anthems (and the one they have written I can't share with you, sorry, but they're perfect anyway and you should listen to them); Freshlyground (start with Doo Be Doo and Air Hostess); Matt Fishel, particularly Testament (NSFW music video; it's ok to keep your head held high/and it's ok to doubt yourself sometimes/and it's ok to fall in love), and if you're into Orphan Black please watch this then tell me that Felix isn't into the guy; Muncie Girls (Feel It Soon); everything by ONSIND. Yeah.