Author: elenloth

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Rules and Boundaries, cat edition

Last night, I accidentally taught my kid about the difference between Rules and Boundaries by using my cat as an example. See, my cat (Cloud, 2M) is a bit of an asshole sometimes. He likes to jump up on my dresser while I’m sleeping and bat things around and make noise. As a result, I’ve started locking him out of my bedroom at night, so that I can have good sleep hygiene (a serious issue for me right now in my life).

So last night, my daughter was like “Why are you punishing him? He’s just being a cat!” And, you know, she’s right! But also, I have the right to sleep without disturbance. So I launched into the explanation that I cannot control Cloud, but I can control what doors are open or closed in my house.

Then, I realized that this was a perfect way to segue into the difference between making rules for someone else versus setting a boundary for your own self!

I emphasized that I cannot control Cloud or his actions myself. I can say ”stay off the dresser” until I’m blue in the face, but ultimately I’m not the one that controls his actions. What I can control is my actions. I can lock him out of my room in order to be healthy and get enough sleep. That’s within my locus of control.

Then I drew a parallel to a real life conundrum she might face someday: say, dating a person who is a smoker. She can say “You can’t smoke in my house.” She can say “If you smoke, I will break up with you.” But she can’t say “You are not allowed to smoke.” That’s not within her locus of control.

Anyway. I hope this lesson sticks with her as she grows up and makes her own way in the world.

Cloud, in carrier
I also found this video on Instagram, which explains boundaries from the cat’s perspective.
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Ethical Clothes

A few recent threads on Twitter have caught my eye, about fast fashion and the ethics thereof.

It makes me think about how I went through a phase where I wanted to slowly transition to only wearing clothes made in America. That never happened, but it was instructive. I bought a couple pairs of $90 sweatpants from American Giant. I still wear them.

That last is part of what Cora Harrington has been saying for a while now: keep wearing your existing clothes. That’s it. Just…wear your clothes. The way you avoid paying slave labor wages is to buy less stuff. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s the most immediately effective and impactful thing you can do.

I know it’s easy for me to say this. I’ve never cared too much for fashion, and my body size has stayed more or less consistent over the years. I can’t wear my jeans from middle school anymore, but I can wear my jeans from age 29 if I’m doing housework and don’t care if I need to undo the button because I ate too much fiber or something. I’m a straight sized person and yeah that’s one form of privilege. But at the same time, there are no easy answers. Sometimes the best answer is “you can’t have cute ethical cheap clothing because it doesn’t exist.” You can pick two.

But if you rewear clothes, the dollar cost averaging (or whatever you want to call it) of the Not Cheap things actually comes out pretty good.

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Free public bathrooms

Major cities should have free public bathrooms, I don’t care if they have to pay janitors to clean every hour, or have an attendant stationed there all the time, or what. It’s just the right thing to do, and a putative use of our tax dollars that benefits *everyone*.

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What Ajah are you?

Like many “corporate astrology” determiners, I enjoy the question of “What Ajah are you?” from the Wheel of Time books by the late Robert Jordan (and, lately, the excellent Brandon Sanderson).

I got to talking with a friend today about it – she was hoping that the Brown Ajah we will see in Season Two would have lots and lots of pockets, since they are basically research academics (like her)!

Since my friend so clearly identified with the Brown Ajah, I started wondering: what Ajah am I? Descriptively, I’m probably Blue Ajah, because I am always arguing with people but also trying to understand them. But when I first read the books, I really wanted to be Yellow Ajah – whether this is due to over-identification with Nynaeve or just my nascent need to Fix everything (wrench/ear!), I loved the Healers.

But then! Then we got on the subject of sexual orientations, and all bets were off.

  • All Ajahs: pretty darn Sapphic, given Jordan’s obsession with “pillow friends”
  • Red Ajah: either lesbians or misandrists. We only see the latter in the books, unfortunately, but I have hope that there are some who don’t suck. IDK, maybe Lesbian Red Ajah is just my head canon.
  • Green Ajah: very very polyamorous. The way Jordan treats the Warder/Aes Sedai relationship is weird, though, and verges on consent violations, so this might be a dicey road to go down.
  • Blue Ajah: the canonical Disaster Bisexual
  • Yellow Ajah: is probably a therapist, and will have trouble separating their job from your relationship
  • White Ajah: they always struck me as pretty asexual. Who knows, though?
  • Brown Ajah: probably not interested in sex unless it’s with one of those devices that can, ah, track and record your biometrics during the act.
  • Grey Ajah: who?
  • Black Ajah: see Terry Goodkind
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Do more proactive good in the world

1: LeGuin, “We all do harm by being.” 2: Marissa thread.

We all do harm by being.

Ursula K. LeGuin

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and how we have cultural and subcultural constructions of what is harmful, which often bear no resemblance to the truest harms we do every day. I don’t think the vast majority of us — myself included — are equipped to grapple with the very real harm we do by just, say, getting on a plane or heating a house. We prefer to crow loudly about things like not using Spotify anymore due to the J*e R*gan contract. (I specifically chose there a platform I’ve never used and have no opinion about others using. I’m not trying to get too personal in this thread.)

All too often, whatever subculture one is a part of will have very rigid ideas of what is harmful and what its members should refrain from in order to stop them from doing harm. I don’t think these things are pretty much ever meaningful. But the more rigid and meaningless the rules, the more rabidly they’re policed on social media. (I’m truly not subtweeting one group; this is damn near universal.) All under guise of preventing harm. Which is impossible, as Ursula reminds us.

I would like to try to move myself to a different lens, where I’m less invested in stopping whichever of my harms I’ve imagined to be the greatest ones (definitionally subjective anyway) and more invested in choosing to do positive acts that I believe are beneficial to the world. Which in a nutshell would be: much less time worrying about my sins, much more time worried whether I’ve actually done anything purposefully good in a given week. We all do harm by being! But we can choose to also do good. /🧵

@ MarissaRae on Twitter

A friend posted this tweet, and I want to write more about it: about how I’ve started trying to document the companies and products that seem genuinely good to their people (even if it’s not all perfect), and so forth.

But for now, I’ll just link to this. The next time you’re anxious about a given shibboleth, instead try to think about one small change you can do to have a positive impact on the world.

Related concept: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the “adequate and you get to sleep”

Another related concept: don’t let The Discourse fool you into thinking that you, personally, are responsible for doing Zero Harm to the humans and the world around you. You cannot fix a systemic problem with individual solutions. (I know this is not something everyone agrees with. That’s okay. I am stating my opinion on it.)

Nothing you do is enough. Nothing you do will ever be Enough. But that is OKAY. It means you get to decide what is enough, for you. And I just realized that this all clicks into my general philosophy of Cheerful Nihilism, so, there we go!

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Something goofy: Finding a movie I haven’t seen

I recently saw a tweet with the meme “Share the movies that shaped your coming of age,” and had trouble identifying the movies pictured.

(I, famously, have not seen a large number of pop culture iconic movies. My friends make fun of it a lot, to the point that we have a running Excel spreadsheet of movies I still need to see.)

In order to pinpoint one of the movies I saw, here are my Google searches. Enjoy my cringe!
“natalie portman pink coat”
“natalie portman pink coat in the rain”
“natalie portman pink coat in the rain movie”
“natalie portman and the guy who played frito”
“who played frito in idiocracy”
“who is the guy in grey’s anatomy”
“who is the guy in scrubs”
“natalie portman zach braff movie” — yay I found it!

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Your reminder: end of life planning

Saw this tweet today, and thought I’d write a post about it.

https://twitter.com/AngryBlackLady/status/1609183979399438336?s=20&t=jb0ZW25N7l_Y44zkvimTwg

If you have any care for the people who come after you, you need to write a will.

It’s okay (not great, of course, but life is what it is) if you can’t afford the whole lawyer shebang at this stage of your life. Not everyone can afford to do the (important) legal part of their will. But all of us can do the emotional/mental labor of listing all our assets and debts, and writing down who you want to receive them when you die.

This goes beyond just bank accounts and cars and so forth. Do you have a collection of old Magic cards? A dear friend lost their brother this year, and he made sure to account for his collection in his last wishes. (I don’t know if he had a will or not. He was relatively young.) Anything you own will have to be disposed of when you pass, and your next of kin will be grateful to have some idea, any idea, of what you would like done with it. Even if the answer is “Sell it all to an estate sale company.” That’s still an answer.

If you have minor children, it becomes especially important to make sure they are cared for in the event of your passing. Do they have a Designated Guardian listed in your will? This isn’t a legally binding thing, but a court will take your wishes strongly into consideration when choosing a guardian for your child in the event of your death. Do you have life insurance? Who’s the beneficiary? Make sure it’s not an estranged parent, or anything like that.

Look, nobody likes to think about this stuff. But it’s important. A lot of what we call “adulting” is just the boring, painful parts of life that we do because not doing it makes things worse for the people we love. And since this is the time of year when everyone is being pensive and making resolutions, consider “making end of life plans” as an idea.

A friend of mine made a spreadsheet of Things To Do When You Are The Executor, when his father passed away. Here’s the folder for that. Note that none of us are lawyers, none of us are YOUR lawyer, and this is just a starting point for you to use in conjunction with your actual professional who has your back. But everyone needs a starting point, so if this helps you, I’m glad.

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The Genesis Cinematic Universe

This weekend, I was trying to explain Jacob and Esau to a friend who didn’t grow up hearing Bible stories (but was playing the video game Binding of Isaac nonetheless). And it occurred to me – we have the Hairy Ginger Lunk versus Clever Birthright Stealer dichotomy in another story: Thor and Loki.

I wish I was the first person to come up with this, but a quick Google shows me that I’m not. Still, though, I wanted to mention it, because it’s cool.

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Airborne swine and financial planning

Today I saw a screencapped post that said something along the lines of “If you give up your daily Starbucks habit, by the end of the year you’ll have $2000, which is nowhere near the $60,000 you’ll need to put a down payment on a house!”

It made me think about how we, as a society, often frame discussions about finance. Generally speaking, the Internet and TV scolds are not, themselves, financially literate. The thing that every Fox News Uncle seems to forget, come Thanksgiving, is that order of magnitude matters. Different target audiences have different financial goals, and the attainability of those goals varies wildly.

Like lots of things, the advice is only useful for folks in the middle. If you’re poor, then you’re likely not going to be able to save up for a down payment, no matter what you do (though your municipality may have other programs to help you buy a house, etc.). And if you’re poor, you are already not buying daily Starbucks. You’re probably not buying any Starbucks, unless it is as a treat.

The advice of “If you have a daily Starbucks habit, you can reduce it in order to save money” is Technically Correct. (The best kind of correct!) And I am confident saying that for the people who buy daily coffee, reducing it to “weekly Starbucks and cheap office K-cups or brew the rest of the time” is, in fact, a great way to save up an Emergency Fund: a thousand dollars in a disused savings account to help you through an unexpected household expense. This would catch a slice of America that lives at the intersection of “can’t afford an unexpected household expense” and “buys treats.” But I’m not actually sure how large that slice is. (And I am curious.)

On the other end of the savings scale, you have Big Expenses. Putting away your pennies won’t be enough to save a whole down payment, even with the miracle of compound interest. This part is where real choices about lifestyle need to be made, if (again) those choices are even available to you.

I think the availability of that kind of choice during my childhood is what shapes my somewhat blinkered expectations of financial capability. My parents explicitly told me, as a teenager, that they made the conscious decision to only buy new cars every ten or so years in order to save the equivalent of the car payment in the other years. They told me that they chose not to fly to Europe every year, not because they couldn’t afford to but because they didn’t want to spend that much money. They prioritized being able to pay for my college over their own lifestyle. And I think, to some extent, I have a little bit of survivor’s guilt over that. It’s not too much; they’re doing okay in retirement. But I feel acutely aware of the need to not squander their gifts to me.

I think, when pigs learn to fly and the TV scolds decide to actually offer reality based advice, they should focus on the correct Order of Magnitude: reducing $1000-level expenses (like airplane vacations) in order to save for $10,000-level goals (like a house down payment).

Or they could offer the other end of the advice: reduce your $5-level expenses to save for $100-level goals (like an unexpected car repair). That would actually be useful, modest advice that some (not zero) people can actually use.

But modest advice doesn’t feed the rage machine. And that’s why I titled my post the way I did. I don’t think they will be doing that anytime soon. But it would sure be nice if they did. 🐖 💸