Monthly Archives: July 2012

Why We Blog

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.   George Orwell, 1984

 

Every once in a while, I have to pause and ask myself, “Why bother doing this? Why blog?” IF I am honest when I say, “I don’t really care if anybody reads these words,” why is keeping a journal not enough for me?

For starters, I have never succeeded in keeping a journal. I must have accumulated dozens of journals with scribbles only on the first few pages: my handwriting progressively became sloppier, and the word counts less, until … blank. Blank. Blank.

So am I really that narcissistic, as I like to accuse myself of – getting it out of the way before anybody else points this out.

This recurring self-reflexive questioning was put to an end when I came across this Time article, “Like to Brag on Facebook or Twitter? That’s Because Self-Disclosure Is like Eating and Sex, Says Study“. The title itself is self-explanatory.

Intriguingly, the researchers noted a distinction between types of self-disclosure: introspection, or privately thinking about oneself, compared with having the opportunity to share those thoughts with another human being. Again, as expected, while introspection was itself sufficient to light up brain regions associated with reward, the effects were “magnified” when participants believed their thoughts would be communicated to someone else.

 

In this other article, “Why We Talk About Ourselves: The Brain Likes It“, it was spelled out even more explicitly. Here is the paragraph that I have committed to memory as rebuttal against my imaginary accusers:

We love talking about ourselves, we really do — that’s what a group of Harvard neuroscientists found while testing the theory that we’re big on self-disclosure, anyway. In fact, say the scientists, we love self-disclosure so much because it tickles our core value centers in much the same way as “primary rewards” like food and sex.

The researchers noted that people particularly enjoyed self-disclosure if they knew other people were listening. When people were given a choice to share their responses with others or to keep them private, they gave up 25% of their potential earnings in order to broadcast the personal info. “[The] effects were magnified by knowledge that one’s thoughts would be communicated to another person, suggesting that individuals find opportunities to disclose their own thoughts to others to be especially rewarding,” says the study.

 

There you have it.

It is in our psychological make-up, part of the evolutionary outcome. How can you fight that?  In fact, more people should be doing this –

Blogging. It is good for the soul.

And since it is 100% fat free and at no risk of contracting STD, it is good for the body too.

Lucky

Before she started telling you the story, she would have said, before anything else, “This journal entry has a happy ending.”

The red light on her phone was blinking. Somehow she’d missed a phone call when she knew that nobody would be calling her. Not on her cell anyway. Her husband was out of the country, her children only TXT now, and her mother would only call the landline (because she’d never bothered to give her her cellphone number) and always when it was way past bedtime (because figuring out time zone difference becomes a lot harder once day light savings time change is (not) taken into account)

The unfamiliar number shown had the local area code. With smart phones nowadays our relationship is discreetly judged by whether you show up as a name (from Contacts) or as a mere phone number. The persistent blinking red light indicated that the person had left a voice mail. She was annoyed. Really. Who in this day still leaves voice mails? She dreads checking her voicemails on the very few occasions when some un-indoctrinated people leave them. The problem is they never ever come out clear. Press 1 to repeat the message. Press 1 to repeat. Press 1. Often she ends up pressing 7, reasoning that if the message is important enough, the person will surely call back.

It was a call from some doctor’s office but she could not make out which. She did not think twice when she missed another call from the same number later that day. The call showed up as a mere number and therefore automatically deprioritized. Funny how stupid her logics sound in hindsight.

She jumped when her phone suddenly rang in the midst of the somber silence as she and her children huddled in front of the television, watching the retelling of the horror in Aurora, CO, unfold.

Hello. You need to go in for a follow-up. It’s probably nothing. But we just want to make sure. They noticed something… that looked… calcification…

She held her breath and blinked. She’d forgot about the mammogram the day before.

The doctor wants you to schedule an appointment with the hospital right away and she will fax the order in. Call me right back and let me know the time.

She knew that the doctor’s office was concerned when they waited to hear from her. She went back to sit in front of the television at first as if she had just received a phone call from a telemarketer. The chaos on the screen made her comment out loud how fragile life is.

Oh.

She remembered the call and what it could possibly mean. She wanted to cry.

What if? No… It can’t be, right? No way this is happening to me. Maybe I should be freaking out now? She asked herself. Let’s see how good I really am at compartmentalizing.

She shook her head violently. Stop thinking about it! There is nothing you can do about it except waiting until Monday morning.

When her mind immediately, out of habit, presented silver linings to the worst case scenario, “I can finally quit my job!” I am such a fucking idiot, she chastised herself, ashamed and worried that if her friends who had fought and survived knew this was her first thought, they’d be offended by how she’s trivializing the whole thing. It’s not a fucking excuse! This is no child’s play. For some people, this is real. Too many people actually.

She shook her head violently. Stop thinking about it! There is nothing you can do about it.

She did not tell anybody about the phone call. In fact, by Monday, she herself had forgot about the follow-up appointment and almost missed it. She woke up late on Monday morning because for three nights she stayed up channel surfing. She cried through Brideshead Revisited.

At the hospital, the technician made her stay for the result. Just in case he needs to see something more, she said.

When she pulled her book out from the purse, she felt guilty for not feeling anything. Maybe I should cry, she wondered, what’s the proper behavior at a moment like this? When the radiologist walked into the gowned waiting room and called her husband’s name, she was startled by how scholarly he looked. Almost bookish. Like a professor. He blurted out even before their hands parted, “Everything looks fine,” and smiled. “I didn’t want you to walk down the hallway wondering.”

The humid air rushed into her lung when she pushed open the heavy door to the garage. Her breath suddenly caught in her throat. She fled into the car and shut the door before the violent tears came.

You are such an idiot, she murmured.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

 

Alas nowadays it seems that the eye of the beholder is an one-eye monster, (ok, NOT that one-eye monster), with its narrow, single-minded vision towards “What sells”, deciding what men want, and therefore dictating what women want (because we all want to become what men want, and yes, the assumption/implicit acceptance of heterosexual hegemony is with us. We cannot deny it)

The eye of the beholder is also imbued with the ruthless power of PhotoShop…

Behold this:

 

I don’t even…

Ugh.

 

Every once in a while someone would say something extremely stupid (MORE stupid than what is deemed as “the way the world works”, I should add), and it would rile us up. We’d rally around the targeted, start a movement, hug each other, decide that we should support one another because we are all in this together.

The latest is the brouhaha over a pro-anorexia (I paused when I saw the term “Pro-anorexia”. Anorexia is a life style choice now?!) blog’s scathing, mean-spirited attack on Kate Upton. As a result, the Internet (aka the world) came together showering Ms. Upton with encouragement and support, and by extension, the entire super model community. It’s been getting so much attention that finally when you type in “kate” in Google Search, the first suggested search term is not Kate Middleton. (Speaking of HRH, the news media is now obsessed with her being too thin, even too thin to have a baby. Thought you may appreciate the Schizophrenia here).

 

I was going to end on a cynical, pessimistic note per my MO, waiting for this particular cycle to end and we all go back to our merry old ways. Everything’s the same. Always. But this time around there seems to be something different in the air… A group of teens started petitions, staged protests and mock runway shows outside the offices of popular teen magazines, Seventeen and Teen Vogue. Since telling their peers to simply not read the garbage is not an option, these awesome young feminists started a movement to demand that these magazines stop The PhotoShopping Epidemic. (Of course, initially, both magazines staunchly denied the practice of altering the photographs.)  They confronted the modern-day taste makers publicly and asked them to “stop altering natural bodies and faces so that real girls can be the new standard of beauty.”

Just say no to Photoshop.

How hard could it be, Madison Avenue?

Perhaps it is time (and I know we’ve said this many times in the past, but we need to repeat it over and over because people are forgetful) that we take the gaze back. Forget about the stupid beholder.

You be the judge. You.

 

ETA: This is the reason why I write less and less here – I can never finish what I start. As I was brushing my hair this morning – it is a new thing for me nowadays now that I have “long” hair, it hit me that what I said as a conclusion above was kind of bullshit. Beauty exists because there is someone else other than ourselves that would be seeing us, no? If I truly, honestly do not care about the gaze, then the concept of beauty has no meaning. It is the “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it” thing, isn’t it?

Keep on Fighting

Motherhood in the beginning is sickeningly isolating, especially if La Leche League gets their hold on your conscience. Your partner may be super duper awesome and really do the concept of 50/50 co-parenting justice. BUT. When you are up at night alone (because someone has to get up to go to work so you can pay for the diapers and shit) with a crying baby that simply will not go to sleep without putting up a fierce fight, yeah, it really sucks. You (ok, I) feel so helpless, abandoned even. Day after day. Night after night. Waiting for that tyrant who took over your existence to relent and show you some mercy.

I don’t think I’ve ever properly recovered from that trauma of isolation and abandonment. And I believe this psychological scar greatly contributes to my loss of faith in the myth of motherhood and my subsequent cynicism. Paying lip service to what a great sacrifice it is to be a mother is the society’s way of keeping our mouths shut: Yes you are all awesome superwomen. Without you, the civilization will end. Now STFU and make me a sandwich. Nobody in power (yes, balding white male I am talking about you) gives a shit about making it easier for women who maybe want to be mothers and something more.

 

By now you probably have heard of /read the article on The Atlantic penned by Anne Marie Slaughter, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All: The Myth of Work-Life Balance”. Dr. Slaughter is a professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She served as Director of Policy Planning under Hilary Clinton from 2009 to 2011. Eventually she did quit the high-demanding job that frequently kept her away from her children, a fact that spurred the authoring of this article.

The premise of this article that has been shared and re-shared, lauded, debated, and of course, critiqued, thousands of times could be summed up in this:

Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

 

Although the article does not end in a despairing note, the hope it provides, the solutions suggested — necessary changes in policies, laws, representations, and cultures, simply seems too far to be within imaginable reach. Nevertheless, I actually felt relieved after I read this, that I have not simply been a whiner, or been less fortunate in terms of my choice of a spouse, or timed having children incorrectly, or not been committed enough. It is also good to know that “wanting to have it all” has been grossly exaggerated into “becoming a super human”

I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

When in fact all we are asking for is to NOT to have to make compromises that our male counterparts in marriage/relationship (i.e. fathers of our children) are less likely to be asked to make, and when they do make those compromises, are less likely to be judged or criticized for it.

I have no wisdom to part with nor intelligent comments on the debate that has been raging on somewhere out there.

One minute I am all Let’s take over the world mother-f-ers. The next minute I wish I had never got into my head to be somebody when I grew up. [Please don’t leave angry comments about how being a mother IS somebody. You know that’s not what I meant. Take your mommy war and agenda somewhere else please.]

Why do we tell our girls to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, mathematicians, that they can be all that they want to be, if in the end, should they get married, they are expected to bear children, and should they become mothers, they are expected to become perfect mothers?

There are regrets that I would never dare to have, What-if questions that I would never dare to ask. If I get to stand at the crossroads of life, which would I choose, hypothetically? And which hypothetical answers will hurt whom and how much?

 

Hello Sweetie. I need to get a grip on reality.

Seeing how I have been on a midlife crisis overdrive…

Yes, I think I may as well come out and admit it to myself. I have been going through some sort of personal crisis ever since I started this blog in 2008. Some sort of late-onset-puberty/rebellious stage sans hyper-libido. *sigh*

For someone who’s 120% sincere and honest when she vomited a post titled With all due respect, I am fucking scared of getting old, and who’s scared out of her wits of turning into some sort of predator, really, the last thing you needed to show her was a show dedicated entirely to time travel and alternate reality, starring a nerdy yet sexy 29-year-old actor and a 49-year-old actress in one of the most romantic star-crossed-lover (literally in so many ways) storyline. [Oh god, don’t you just LOVE the British? This anti-Hollywood-rule pairing would never, ever, have happened in the U.S…]

What if… BEEEPPPP. Not allowed.

*red flashing light* Compartmentalize. Compartmentalize. *red flashing light* *Steel door coming down*

Brain. Shutting down. Nope. We never ever want to go there. Just stop it right now.

Someone that I don’t know particularly well cornered me in the office one day and asked me a very blunt question about my personal life. I laughed. I laugh a lot, I’ve noticed. I explained to her how I am an expert in compartmentalizing my thoughts and emotions. Because that’s how people survive and function in reality, no?

This. Is not a cry for help. I just need to get over it. It’s full moon after all.

It’s amazing how I’ve managed to not mention the thing I have been obsessed with for the past month even once. Moving along…

I have my own time warp right here: Found this mix tape made by a classmate of mine when we were in college. He made several mix tapes for a girl that he was pining for. [Incidentally, like a plague, I now recall at least four other guys were smitten with her at the same time in our senior year. Still can’t figure out why. We’ve all known each other all these years, and all of a sudden, finger snap, they all fell in love with her…] I have no idea whether he’s given her the tapes, but the rest of us swooned over the mix tapes and like the stereotypical “great guy who never gets the girl”, he made a copy for all of us. I wonder what happened to him. I hope he’s well. Whoever he’s with, I hope she’s not having what I’m having…

Compartmentalization. Complete.