The Male Hysteric

Last night my boyfriend was shopping for Christmas presents and I think I just ended up getting a very expensive fountain pen for Hanukkah. Why? Do I really need such an expensive fountain pen? It was a silly decision. I am still paying for like half of it. Welp. At least if I end up hating it it will have good resale value, that's the one good thing about this shit.

Anyway, I feel like I've gotten pretty far for writing, but the issue with writing through one's issue is one has to actually approach them. Not ideal, really. Why am I doing this. I think I am just thinking too hard, generally.

Edit: I had him cancel the pen. I saw an IRL photo and it was ugly as hell. Oops.

I read a meme about a Jew not wanting to stick around on social media because of the rampant antisemitism but feeling the need to stick on social media because they felt they needed to know that their former college friends were spouting antisemitism. I wish I still had it but if you wanted to know how my attempts to distance myself from twitter were going, that’s it.

I wish I could just get a digest of current antisemitic incidents and war crimes that I could peruse at my leisure.

On Sunday I was writing and a new character suddenly showed up who now added a whole new wing to this story that I did not realize was there. So, that's exciting, and has actually made me want to write in the past few days, and guess what, I did manage to do two pages today.

I am unsure if I should talk about my project on here, and even if I did it is hard for me to think of how to do it. I guess maybe because I conceive of all my work as highly personal, but at the same time, I guess it's not. Writing about yourself but not yourself, or something. Putting it all somewhere else where it is safer, I guess.

I am also full of stupid thoughts when I write. "Oh, is it too obvious that I favor this character?" as if people will judge me. And then I do not let others read because they will judge me. So I should just gush all I want about who I want. Pfeh.

Maybe someday I will post it somewhere. But I think that if I am going to do anything with it... I will have to learn to talk about it at some point. That's a bit scary.

I’ve begun watching Sailor Moon Crystal and have just gotten past Minako’s introduction. Unlike the 90s anime, this seems to be following the manga very closely, though I had never actually watched too much of the 90s anime despite reading all of the manga.

I’m not in love with the animation of Crystal compared to the 90s anime but I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would — there’s some bits of it that feel kinda Utena-ish that I can appreciate.

Watching this again it still strikes me that even though this series is like 30 years old, still nobody really does gender quite like Sailor Moon does gender and I find that very interesting. Like unlike a lot of other girl series Sailor Moon feels more like a true gender reversal where feminine power is the only real power to be taken seriously and masculine power is always secondary even though it exists. And that seems to be because the series really takes soft power seriously — the villains are constantly doing their work through media, word of mouth, urban legends, etc, so the idea of associating power exclusively with militia-cosplay just isn’t a thing here.

Like a really fascinating thing that was in the original comic and is in Crystal is Zoisite disguising himself as a woman to be a gemologist on the news to brainwash people. Just putting this into text shows how bizarre it is to think of even now, a man disguising himself as a woman to be taken seriously as a professional and none of it being a joke at all, just being a part of the dastardly villain plan, and it’s not even remarked upon at all. And all the previous grunt monsters were also women at this point, so there seems to be logic here in that being women allows the four kings to get close enough to people to do their villainy, and at this point Zoisite decided he had to take things into his own hands and therefore the only logical thing was to disguise himself as a woman to do it himself.

And part of what’s so weird about this is that this is how it was in the original manga — just not remarked upon at all. His characterization was changed dramatically in the 90s TV series, making him more effeminate and Kunzite’s gay lover, and then altered even more so in international dubs changing his character to be a woman to erase the gay relationship. But none of this is in the manga, and therefore none of this is in Crystal, where he similarly gets little characterization. And honestly leaving the female disguise unremarked upon says more interesting things about gender in Sailor Moon than recreating Zoisite as an effeminate gay crossdresser does.

I remember reading somewhere that part of Takeuchi’s explanation for the inspiration of Sailor Moon is that even if she wanted a man to protect her she just didn’t see much out there and how they mostly seemed pretty useless, while the women around her were the real doers in her world, so she wrote her comic to reflect that. And I guess it’s weird because that’s also how I viewed things as a kid, and lingers on today, too. Probably explains a lot of of my issues now.

I’m still disappointed Crystal didn’t include groom disguise Usagi, though. That was a favorite of mine.

I handwrite drafts and I realize I am on page 70 of a leuctturm and have not typed any of the words yet. And I feel like I'm just meandering through garbage and more garbage writing, I do not think this is something anyone would really want to read... but these are just thoughts, I don't know. I think after a certain point it feels very much like one has distilled their own fixations and is just oozing them out onto paper over and over, and the real conflict is whether or not this is a bad thing.

I need to get more through Harrow The Ninth. The badness she sees in the world feels very familiar to what I write and reminds me that people would still want to read what I'm working on, maybe.

I have not been feeling great (?) for the past couple weeks mentally I guess for various undefined reasons that I will keep to myself here. However talking to my therapist today he thinks I should find a trauma-informed therapist when I move. Which is strange because like, I am aware that there are such things, but it also seems like... shouldn't a therapist just be trauma-informed in general? Like that almost seems like something that should just be necessary in their toolbox especially considering the reasons why people go to therapy and that people are often not forthcoming about having trauma.

But maybe that is a thought for another day. Oy.

I have been writing. My boyfriend actually read something I had written and liked it. For some reason not all of my feelings are good about this. Like is he going to expect more from me when I haven't written much in ages, and am still working on... never mind.

I did finally see the Barbie movie on Sunday. I think I should probably write a post about it. Maybe not super detailed, but more than I would be able to do at this time of night, so I'll hold that thought for now, I think.

My stupidest thought right now re:writing is that I should get a lined leucttrum notebook now and that would get me to write probably.

Keep in mind that I have 3 (!) not-lined leucttrum notebooks, including one still in the package, and lined not-leucttrums, and I’m moving soon and should NOT be buying more things, but… alas, the heart wants what it wants.

And... it's not my fic!

Somebody from tumblr wrote a drabble based on a post I had made on Frankenstein that has gotten a decent amount of circulation:




Anyway, the fic is to India! Procrastinating by summerstudie on Ao3. It's very short... because if this had happened, there would be no Frankenstein, lol.

Apparently there are new “temporary” limits on Twitter: max 6000 tweets viewed per day for verified (blue checkmark) and only 600 per day for non-verified, going all the way down to 300 if the account is new.

Which is, totally nuts, especially considering it’s a weekend that he’s implementing it. Also that he wants to get rid of blocklists, well, the site is quickly becoming completely unusable. It’s very strange to decide to limit impressions when the site is run on SELLING those impressions… or does he really think squeezing $8/month out of individual users is actually going to work?

It’s incredible, but also as the big draw to Twitter these days has been fanart, incredibly disappointing. Like a significant amount of art is just going to be straight-up lost the longer this goes on for.

I had been trying to write about this for about a week or two and I am realizing I can't say that much. I have been doing what I guess is called "processing" and with rabbit hole after rabbit hole I found this article, What Everyone Ought to Understand About Schizoid Personality Disorder and the rest of Elinor Greenberg's writing and, well. I don't think it's as bad as it was even a year or two ago but it's all disturbingly familiar.

I think the thing is as well with this that Greenberg seems to be using the pre-DMS-III concept of schizoid personality disorder, which was split into 3 different parts and kind of turned into a junk category that very few people who could be helped with or classified under and has little research toward it at all. But then this isn't about the DSM, I guess.

I feel like I had more to say a while ago but it kind of dried up. I've had something like 7-8 psychs in my life at this point and they tend to be seriously unhelpful at best, directly harmful at worst. And I do not think any of them understood my problems at all. At least one tried to throw the idea of attachment issues at me briefly and while I have looked into that, well, anything on avoidant attachment you find online is really going to be about people with anxious attachment, and this seems to capture it better than that, as it includes the weird stuff. I don't know. I suppose I'm tired.