!Christina's 5 questions
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agk's diary 
8 June 2023 @ 11:50 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
while first daughter's oatmeal cooks in rice cooker
& finished in the library during toddler time
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I love to answer Christina's questions; read
others' answers. She wrote 5 new ones!

 gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/christyotwisty

June 2023 Questions:
1. Most expensive object I'd like to buy?

    I keep thinking how much I'd like a scythe to
    keep the meadow around my house down and the
    stuff to keep it nice and sharp. But I never
    scythed before & it's a couple hundred dollars
    to get set up with a new one.

2. Something the generation preceding me loves I 
    don't understand?

    - Riding lawnmowers
    - Fox news or NPR
    - Facebook

3. Something the generation succeeding me loves I 
    don't understand?

    - Listening to music song by song instead of by
      album or show. Especially skipping to the
      next song in the last seconds of one you're
      listening to.
    - Performative anxiety (playing a hot anxious
      girl on the web's stage); recreational benzo-
      diazepines.
    - Cruel optimism:

    "[Lauren] Berlant's most influential book,
     Cruel Optimism (2011), describes the `relation
     which exists when something you desire is an
     obstacle to your flourishing'. Romantic love.
     Fast food. The Democratic Party. Prestige TV.
     Each offers comforts and securities. Each dim-
     inishes us in large or small ways, makes false
     promises, prevents us from striving for some-
     thing better. Yet we continue to strive, often
     blaming ourselves when things go wrong.

    "Cruel optimism explains why you continue to
     accept casual contracts, hoping for a more
     secure position. It explains why you continue
     to `work' on your marriage or save for a down
     payment on a house. It explains why you just
     spent 6 on a coffee. Cruel optimism might even
     explain why you decide to have children, or
     why you vote."[^1]

    My generation's mass affect was supposedly
    depressive hedonism, which I didn't totally 
    embody either. Most of my friends in adolesc-
    ence & young adulthood, when generational id-
    entity forms, were 5-10 years older or raised
    in the Soviet Union. I strongly identified with
    (grand)Pa's & (great-grandma) Meme's narratives
    of their childhoods. The concept of duty, for
    example, had outsize importance to me. Nonethe-
    less, I understand depressive hedonism (and its
    drug, MDMA/ecstasy) better than cruel optimism
    (and its drug, xanax).

    "Many of the teenage students...seemed to be in
     a state of what I would call depressive hedon-
     ia. Depression is usually characterized as a
     state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm re-
     ferring to is constituted not by an inability
     to get pleasure so much as...by an inability
     to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
     There is a sense that `something is missing'--
     but no appreciation that this mysterious miss-
     ing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the
     pleasure principle. In large part this is a
     consequence of students' ambiguous structural
     position, stranded between their old role as
     subjects of disciplinary institutions & their
     new status as consumers of services."[^2]

4. What holiday in my calendar needs replaced, with
    what?

    Labor day with May Day.

5. What's it mean to be redeemed? Have I felt re-
    deemed? Can one be redeemed without narrative?

    Redemption is just buying (one) back, paying
    off debt, ransoming from captivity. I've been
    redeemed out of jail & redeemed from personal
    debt. President of my country falsely promised
    to redeem me and 43 million other borrowers 
    from a trillion USD in student loan debt. I 
    never tormented myself with optimism he would.

    I don't know if narrative is necessary to be
    owned by your creditors or released from bond-
    age to them. The relation or its dissolution
    strikes me as real regardless of what narrrat-
    ive you cloak it in.

> brain hyperfocused on some problems, I'm training
> it to not ping-pong between...'hummingbird on
> crack' and 'wow, it feels like insects are crawl-
> ing on me & my eye sockets are on fire. How many
> hours did I spend on this?'

A question for you: How are you (re)training your
brain?

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[^1]: Erin Maglaque (18 May 2023), I feel sorry for
      sex. London Review of books 45(10).
[^2]: Mark Fischer (2009), Capitalist realism: Is
      there no alternative? Zero Books, pp.21-22.
      For cocaine '80s and heroin '70s affects, see
      Mutulu Shakur (198?), The politics of drugs;
      https://hhwl.branchable.com/hx/mchr/mutulu/