Yom Kippur and Teshuvah

I was inspired by this post on Ritual Well. It’s not a new thought or a new practice for me – especially for the past two years, Yom Kippur has served as a day for me to take stock of the status of my eating disorder and set an intention to continue to recover, starting by feeding myself well on the day itself. Very thankfully, this year I can say for the first time that I’m well enough that recovering further is no longer at the very top of my teshuvah list, and I’m more in “maintenance” mode. I’m still not ready to try fasting again yet (and I actually chose to spend the day alone today partly so that I wouldn’t have to interact with people who were fasting or talk about my choices), but it was pretty amazing to be like, “I know how to feed myself. Look at me feeding myself. I can just take care of this (and enjoy it) and then go on about my business and do other things today as well.” In particular, feeling like I could spend many hours in a row writing in my journal without being distracted by my body being sad about not having the food it needs, and even without being disturbed too much by chronic pain issues that have been making it difficult for me to write by hand for several years, is HUGE progress for me and I feel so grateful. (I’m also grateful to have been able to implement the decision to spend the day alone! I’ve been realizing that I’ve been doing a lot of “saying yes when I want to say no” about social interaction, especially with housemates over the past couple of years.)

Trump Thoughts, Part 2

OK, here's part two of my post from last night.

Regarding the comparisons of Trump to Hitler: I'm glad that people are taking the threat posed by Trump seriously, but I don't like this rhetorical move.

I don't like it for the reason that making analogies between two atrocious situations is always a risky business (because it runs the risk of trivializing one or the other situation, because it's generally an exploitative move, etc.).

I don't like it because it ignores vast differences between 1930s Germany and contemporary America (Germany had just lost a major war and was in serious economic straits, it was the Great Depression, and Germany was a young nation-state with consolidated ethnic nationalism as its raison d'etre; whereas the US is currently the world superpower and doing relatively fine from an economic perspective and, however convincing it may or may not sound, is founded in explicit rhetoric about ethic diversity).

I don't like it because it is a kind of fear-mongering that seems inauthentic: if Trump is so scary, then he's scary enough by virtue of being Trump -- he doesn't also need to be Hitler.

I don't like it because dramatic tactics are by their nature short-term -- the focus here is on this person and this moment, not on the massive lead-up that got us here (like, if he loses, then everyone will be like "Yay, defeated Hitler/Voldemort! Now back to business as usual," which I don't think is the right reaction).

And I don't like it because it's a kind of avoidance of contemporary reality -- it's a kind of "othering" Trump to be part of another, "not us" era. But he is us. And it's harder to look at that than to call him Hitler.

Sorry to say it, but I think Trump's gonna win

I'm not sure exactly why I feel the need to post this, but here it is:

I am expecting Trump to win in November.

It is very unlikely that after 8 years of a Democratic president, another Democrat will be elected. For that reason alone I expect Trump to win. Beyond that, I think that if he has been able to get this far, he is likely to get further. If there were going to be significant popular opposition to his election, we would have seen evidence of it already. I think that "Progressives" have a tendency to be a little bit naive about this type of thing, like "Oh, that couldn't POSSIBLY happen, it would be too terrible, America has its problems but we're not totally a lost cause."

Well, not wanting to imagine something undesirable doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely. Candidates that seem to many of us like buffoons have won before, in recent memory, and for some reason they generally seem to do well in elections. (Also, regardless of what I might personally think or wish about Clinton, I don't think she has the charisma or show(wo)manship to compete with a figure like Trump, apart from any of a zillion other considerations.) I think it's also important to keep in mind that the last few elections have been EXTREMELY close, and the person who won did not win because of having the support of a significant majority of the country, but because of a very minor tip in the scale. So to the degree that when Obama replaced Bush, many of us felt some sense of relief, "Oh, this country's finally beginning to see sense" -- no! It was not far from a fluke that he won and didn't reflect a real shift in public opinion in comparison with the previous two elections.

I think that these are all things that most of us are in denial about, and if and when Trump wins in the fall, there will be a lot of pearl clutching and "How could this have possibly happened?" It can and probably will happen because it's where we're quite clearly headed! I think that anything else is basically denial. I'm not saying don't fight it -- by all means fight it! But fight it knowing that it's a real possibility, it's a likely outcome, that reflects a giant percentage of American public opinion -- it's not an outlier or a fringe deviation.

I also have various thoughts about how Trump is being framed and feared as a particular type of threat in ways that seem to me to miss some basic points about how racism and xenophobia work in the US and how US imperialism works in the world, but I think I'll leave that for another time...

And now for something completely different...

Had a tough interaction with a colleague today, and it made me think again about something that, as it turns out, I've thought about A LOT (and been on both sides of multiple times).  So, here's a few thoughts I've thrown together on the topic.

Tips for when you feel like you are acting, or are being perceived as, too needy or clingy!

Questions to ask yourself before you perform a communicative act (speech or otherwise):

~By doing this, am I asking for some kind of support?

~If so, what kind?

~What am I hoping will be the outcome of this act?

~Is that outcome likely? / Does the person I am asking have the resource that I am asking for?

~If not, can I ask someone else for support, who will be more likely to be willing or able to help?

~Is there something that I can do for myself in this situation instead of looking to someone else for support?

Why it's a good idea to eat your feelings sometimes.

There's something I've been thinking about around the discourse about emotional eating. It's so annoying to me when people are like "I'm eating my feelings" (for 100000 reasons), but one reason is that I think that part of what gets mixed up in that is: there are feelings that are in your life that perhaps you are eating as a way to distract from them, self-soothe, etc. But there are also feelings in your life that are "not real" that are caused by having low blood sugar or otherwise mood instability that is caused by not having eaten. So like, PLEASE eat those feelings, cuz those are feelings whose purpose and only meaning is to instruct you to eat.

Another gem from high school history class

This one from European History, senior year:

On Montaigne's Essay "XVII. That to study philosophy is to learn to die"

"Cicero says that 'to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die.'" So begins Michel de Montaigne's twenty-seventh essay, in which he attempts to train his mind to overcome fear of death. Ignoring death, decides Montaigne, doesn't work -- first of all, death is impossible to ignore, because it surrounds us; secondly, if one ignores death, it is all the more devastating when it appears. Let us then try the opposite: thinking constantly of death. Constant awareness of death causes the mind to numb to its horror; what is more, it prompts one to order one's affairs in anticipation of death, so that when death arrives, nothing is left undone. Montaigne believes that he has found his solution:

"For my part, I am, thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations; my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do."

But if Montaigne were indeed so reconciled to death, he would be able to let the matter rest. He belies his professed comfort by listing many other reasons that death is harmless -- far from being fearless, he is still trying to convince himself not to fear. Death cannot be so bad, he says; like birth, it is merely a transition from one world to another; the worth of a life is not measured by its length; death is natural; death and life are equally pleasing; nothing is known about the afterlife, so it should not be feared, etc. At the very end, he realizes that he is still uncertain: exasperated, he concludes with the sentence, "Happy is the death that leaves us no leisure to prepare things for all this foppery."

My first scathing book review

I just found a cache of my high school papers, and here's one gem (written for a US History course in my junior year):

The Metaphysical Club: A Herculean Feat of, Well, Research

In the middle to late nineteenth century, four great men were born. They came of age during the Civil War, and in their adulthood, they contributed to a great transition of ideas. These four men were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand follows the threads of these men's lives, in the process revealing the growth of a new way of thinking: pragmatism. Menand's book is a magnificent specimen of research, describing not only the ideas but also the denizens and characteristics of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century; however, the book offers little beyond simple information.

The central focus of the book is the progress of philosophy. The great transition of belief that was made was essentially from the idea that truth was something hidden and discoverable to the idea that all accessible truth was defined by our beliefs. Advances in science and mathematics helped trigger this transition, especially Darwinian evolution and probability theory. Darwinism provoked philosophers to ask whether the world was evolving toward a particular planned state, or whether the progress was random. Probability theory and its bell-curvian statistics led to two thoughts: first, just as more scientific trials lead to a more accurate measurement, more people thinking might lead the collective consciousness closer to the truth; and second, society has certain habits at any given time: murder rates stay relatively constant, for example.