there’s a post going around about mixing nyquil with 5 hour energy and I’m thinking about the time my parents were both out of town and my brother was in charge of dropping me off at school and I must’ve been 15 or 16 and I was really miserably sick so he gave me nyquil and but the time we were pulling up to the school I was crashing so his friend who was driving said ‘I have a redbull in the glove compartment” and they said “drink it and it’ll like even it out” so I did and I walked into school at 7:30 AM
and then immediately the last bell rang and school was over.
potion seller, I’m going into school and I need your STRONGEST dissociation
how terrifying, to be aging and girl. at 18 i was told by men that i was “the perfect age,” and i still thought it was a compliment. is it because at 20 i figured out how sharp those words were. i felt old at 21, felt like if grey hairs came and my spine cracked i was done for. how scary. i am reminded constantly by “realistic” ideas in fantasy novels that i should have five kids.
my life feels short. like it is squeezed into my twenties. like at 30 i become ghost, just another mother or hard worker or both, just another background character. like if i am not settled and making a difference by 27 i should just give up already. is this something men feel? like a clock is painted on their back, one hand warning: your beauty is something you are valued for and it is something you cannot get back.
and why was i only beautiful, i wonder, at 18 on a riverbank. i’m told often my childish face is a blessing. that i shouldn’t want to look older. one told me i was a trap falling: “you look young but you’re not” he said to me, “it kind of led me on”. am i not young?
maybe i am wrong. maybe it’s just how we all feel, getting old, like time is slipping from us. maybe men do worry that they will be alone forever if they don’t settle by thirty, maybe it’s even because they think they’ll turn ugly. maybe we all squish our lives into that incredibly young decade. what do i know. i’m still learning.
I’m almost 25 and I’ve been feeling this a lot lately.
As a 48 year old lesbian, I offer my perspective on aging, and you all can take it or leave it.
Our understanding of our own aging is very much conditioned by the priorities of straight men, who in the aggregate understand beauty and femininity, indeed women in general, in literally superficial terms. Most of the ads you see for anti-aging products, for instance, focus on its *visible* symptoms: graying hair, wrinkling skin or discolored skin, sagging breasts, changes in body shape, etc. These are the symptoms of female aging that men perceive, and they are the ones that the cosmetics and the larger anti-aging industry therefore target. (Men do have their own anxieties about visibly aging, mostly related to hair loss and body shape; but they are not, for instance, generally terrified by the appearance of wrinkles, unless they work in the entertainment industry.)
But aging is not just something that happens to everyone else’s perception of you; it is something that happens in your own body, at levels deeper than anyone else (especially anyone male) is ever likely to perceive. From my POV the really important thing about aging is how you feel. Your body is where you live; it is for you. Aging is inevitable, but it can to some extent be intentional, in that you can (to some extent; all this is limited by the amount of time and money available to you and the healthfulness of the environments you have lived in and how you did in the DNA lottery) choose to do things that will help preserve the things about your body that make YOU happy to be living there–things like flexibility, strength, and the smooth functioning of your major organs. Generally, if you’re healthy, you don’t think about any of this stuff at 18 or 25; but when you are 40, you will start to take more of an interest as you come to understand how important all of this is to your own ability to enjoy life.
So that sucks, as does menopause, which is the unacknowledged referent of a lot of cultural anxieties about female aging. But the point I want to make is: one of the worst things that the phenomenon described so evocatively by the OP does to girls and young women is to make them so anxious about their own bodies that they are unable to enjoy and appreciate their youth while they have it. And that is theft. It really is. I miss youth, but even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then. I did not appreciate its many excellent qualities, and it was a long time before I allowed myself to accept and act on its desires. At a time when I was beautiful, I thought I was fat and ugly, and that because no man would ever find me attractive, I was doomed to loneliness and isolation. After I met Mrs. Plaidder, her conviction of my beauty eventually passed into me. As a result, I enjoyed my life in general a lot more in my 30s than I did in my teens. I’ve enjoyed my 40s more too, apart from the cancer and the current catastrophe. Age does actually bring experience and knowledge and, to those able to profit from it, wisdom. You do gain, even as you lose.
Catullus, yelling in Latin verse at his lover Lesbia, asks her venomously, “cui videberis bella?” By whom will you be seen to be beautiful? It’s a question that still poisons our sense of self and our understanding of our own possibilities. By myself, asshole, she should have replied; and so may we all, at any age.
Long post, but – my three cents. At 67 I don’t feel old and/or ugly. In fact, I really enjoy myself. I’m happy with how I look – because I got over the brainwashed way we see ourselves. As plaidadder said: “even more do I regret the fact that when I was young I was so fucked up by cultural obsessions about female beauty that I was unable to fully enjoy the body that I had then.” BTW, plaidadder – you are STILL beautiful, trust me. The American cult of youth and they way of evaluating women’s beauty as inevitably liked to age is fucking TOXIC. I now live in South America; was complemented ( in a non-creepy way) by two guys less than half my age last week, grey hair & all. Love it here.
You will never feel as old as you do in your late 20s to late 30s. Seriously. Western culture makes the passing of youth into a tragic death and that’s – so fucking sad. Once it has passed and you can no longer reasonably think of yourself as young, no matter how desperately you try to hang on to it – you find yourself in a whole other country, you realize that you’ve lived on one side of a mountain all your life and told there’s nothing beyond it only to discover that there is, in fact, an entire world on the other side. Don’t believe the lie.
I’m just going to reblog all these responses because they’re so solid and right on.
Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact,
are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New
York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor
at the City University of New York, conclude in the latest issue of the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content,
arise from one system in the brain,” explains LeDoux, a professor in New
York University’s Center for Neural Science. “Specifically, the
differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of
inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a
network essential for conscious experiences.”
As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, “the brain mechanisms that
give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally
different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences.”
Their paper—“A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional
Consciousness”—addresses a notable gap in neuroscience theory. While
emotions, or feelings, are the most significant events in our lives,
there has been relatively little integration of theories of emotion and
emerging theories of consciousness in cognitive science.
Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the
brain’s subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as
different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related
to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren’t a
response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather,
are intrinsic to our makeup.
However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both
cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different
architecture for emotions—one more centered on process than on
composition. They conclude that emotions are “higher-order states”
embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they
see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.
interesting! kind of a slippery distinction, isn’t it? i mean from the end-user point of view. from the neurological point of view it’s pretty significant.
This is just a very short article based on an abstract, so it’s difficult to assess it. Typically emotions are thought of as a response; an event happens, your brain is hardwired to respond to it with a specific, autonomic biochemical and anatomical reaction, which we label “emotions”. But what they’re saying is that emotions are how particular inputs, particular sorts of experiences, are processed by the brain using a single cognitive system. I’m going to talk this through for myself under the cut.
literally no r/prequelmemes meme will or can ever top this I don’t even know what to say other than good luck ever creating a single image that reaches this astral plane
She’s calmly eating in the dining hall when an owl swoops in and drops off a scroll and a howler.
Hesitantly, she opens the scroll. All it has i done word on it:
“SOME”
Looking over at the Howler, she suggenly get very worried. Carefully she opens up the Howler, dreading what it’s going to contain. The Howler rips itself open.
Why study for exams when you can deduce the answers based on context clues from other questions and then use those answers to provide you with even more context clues for even more questions in an hour-long stress-fueled Professor Layton-esque logic puzzle extravaganza of future-hinging doom.
Believe it or not, if you want to do well in academia, this particular skill set is at least as important as knowing how to study properly.
Acing an exam doesn’t require filling in answers that are, in some abstract sense, “correct”; it requires filling in what whoever authored the exam thinks the correct answers are. Often the two have very little to do with one another!
Working up a mental profile of the exam’s author based on the wording and arrangement of the questions and going “okay, if I was the joker who wrote this thing, what would I expect the correct answer to be?” is a totally legitimate exam-writing skill, and arguably more critical than actually knowing the material.
awww now im picturing snowy tucking his head on a sleeping taters shoulder and just cuddling up to him a bit on a falcs roadie and when they land they’re both fast asleep and kinda tangled up in each other
just moving along like everyone else 