Freyja's Day Thing: 2/24/23

Mom, Dad, please stop fighting.

Freyja And The Necklace, James Doyle Penrose

Basic/boring stuff:

• We recently sold our first two major-sized orders (couple hundred bucks) of meat from beef that was raised entirely on Mouth Farms.

• We’ve finished the last of last year’s meat and have started in on the steer and board slaughtered in January. They are absolutely delicious and the difference in tone, fat, and tenderness compared to a “retired” animal is very clear. Stews, meatloafs, steaks and roasts (I’m cooking almost constantly) have been so qualitatively different. Where your meat comes from (and how it lives!) matters- a LOT.

• It has been weirdly warm, T-shirt warm, for a couple days this week. If similar temps continue past the weekend I’m calling it for starting spring planting.

• I am down about 8 pounds from the second week of January when I began keto and intermittent fasting (equaling a little over a pound a week). This weight loss is holding consistent on weigh-ins twice daily. I am steadily increasing situps, pushups, and dumbbell reps every two days or so. I hope to do more outdoor stuff once things are consistently warmer.

• I picked vaping back up because it makes me happy but I’m trying to be relatively chill about it. I have given up basically every other vice so GFY.

• Husbandmouth does not have a job yet but has been redoubling his efforts and we have stopped fighting about it because I can see genuine concern. He has several in-person interviews next week and has been getting more callbacks.

• He had his forty-somethingth birthday this week. For the first time ever, I baked and frosted a cake from scratch- I’m much more of a cook than a baker so I’ve always either done the cake or frosting from mix in the past- and watched him and Brothermouth devour a cake-sized black-and-white cookie while glaring at the mountain of carbs. We have now been together exactly 17 years.

• We have decided not to do surrogacy and are exploring adoptions again. I am not looking forward to diving back into this but we’re not getting any younger. At least I’ve (mostly) stopped getting overemotional about it.

Now today’s topic:

I’m gonna do the polls first (yep, there’s two) so I don’t juke anyone’s thought processes before their votes.

I’m doing these polls/talking about this because for at least the past week it seems like I’ve been hearing the phrase “national divorce” or something similar almost everywhere I go online and offline. Now, just because The Discourse latches onto something, it doesn’t at all mean the topic is especially salient to anything that has happened or will happen; in the absence of any other evidence, it’s simply the meandering internal monologue of the collective American consciousness. (P.S. today I learned some people have no internal monologue, apparently testable with a series of exercises such as “picture a red apple” or “imagine how you would feel if you didn’t eat yesterday.” I can’t conceive of this. I am unable to shut mine up under any circumstances- at times it is near-deafening.)

Nevertheless, the constant nudging prompted me to ponder this, and in the interests of my own consistency, I looked back over the past few years and saw that I HAVE, myself, made comments to the effect of “it’s time for a divorce” and so forth- in nearly all cases, pertaining to a schism between those who would be sincerely content (if not demanding of) an all-powerful state governing their movements and freedoms for the sake of preserving their “safety” in situations such as COVID, and those (such as Gutterballs) for whom such a reality is a waking nightmare. Certainly that’s one possible divide, and lately I’ve heard it in the context of numerous others- Red vs. Blue, anti-abortion vs abortion rights, largely autonomous confederated states vs. the current federalist state, etc.

…and I may surprise or disappoint or even anger some of you to say that in the end, I don’t want a divorce under the majority of conditions people are talking about. While I am more sympathetic to a complete defanging and emaciation of the federal government and a devolution to an originalist vision of a confederation of largely-autonomous states free to act in accordance with their own values, this isn’t what most people (that I hear, anyway) mean when they say “divorce”- they envision something akin to a dividing of land and population centers along political lines, inevitably clarifying their positions with statements like “unfortunately a lot of people will have to move but it will be worth it,” with some presumable outcome where these now-segregated populations will be free to enact their own ideological visions of civil society without having to deal with the other half of the population JUST NOT GETTING IT.

And the problem is I’ve been taking a hard look at myself these past couple weeks while I’ve been too busy to sit still, and this dream of amicable divorce just doesn’t fly for me.

I would have absolutely nowhere to go.

In grad school I took a few courses of industrial/organizational psych along with my general focus on cognitive development. These, and a few stats courses, included a lot of very enlightening lessons on the ways we can reduce human populations to various sets of data to try to make predictions and draw conclusions about them.

Something you learn, especially if you’re operating in a situation largely free of intense ideology, is that both researchers and non-researchers engage in a lot of logical fallacies in how we think of humans when we’re exposed to what people look like when they’re reduced to datasets. One of my favorite examples of this was, interestingly enough, not from a professor of I/O psych but one who taught a class on group modalities (i.e., group therapy and the dynamics of group behavior). He had a favorite phrase, which was, “a completely average person would freak you out.”

What he meant was essentially this: picture we have a normal distribution curve for various qualities we might compare (for example) men and women on: aggression, lifetime income, sex drive, extroversion, height, etc. Reading this list, we can probably imagine where our two groups in this example- men and women- might roughly fall as populations relative to each other. This can be, in the right context, very useful and predictive information.

But what this kind of understanding fails to capture is the reality that this virtually never also maps IN AGGREGATE to an individual. Your chances, given a day of searching a crowded place like Coney Island or something, of finding a male or female that was the statistical average of every or even nearly every such variable would be extremely low if not almost impossible. You could probably find a lot of people that are the perfect statistical average for their sex in, say, height and IQ and extroversion, but on 8, 10, or even more of the many qualities we’ve developed statistics for on the basis of sex, or race, or any other demographic all at once? It would be as interestingly rare as finding an extreme outlier on even one such dimension.

And as Professor Whothefuckwasheagain liked to say, if you DID manage to find Mr. or Ms. Mean, you’d likely have only a very small handful of things in common with them, and their complete lack of diversion from the mean would probably look pretty odd to you.

What’s the point of this increasingly long tangent?

By most standards of a “national divorce” fantasy, there’s nowhere I’d want to go that I wouldn’t find a deeply unpleasant state of affairs. For either a Red or Blue fantasyland, there are at least one or two deep departures from ideological dogma that would make living in a society where the laws were an all-or-nothing embrace of either package deal feel pretty horrible, even with all the other stuff I’d agree with.

Furthermore- and this isn’t a slight on anyone who has, including me, had this thought- I don’t think most of the people who chant “divorce” are closely examining themselves if they truly believe this is what they want. (I will grant you that I can imagine relatively small clusters of people with VERY intense, VERY specific ideologies that can only really exist with people running exactly the same playbook.) I think every single one of us- from the community of regulars here to the people we would generally agree to be fucking nutbars- has gotten a little brainwashed into thinking that our only choice as Americans if we want any kind of future is a binary choice of vast, comprehensive package deals of rigid ideology, and that if we can’t get our shit together to get behind this very limited number of totem poles, the people who CAN do so will… do something or other to us and everything will be either Handmaid’s Tale or Drag Queen Story Hour forever and ever.

The prevalent belief that we court our own destruction without organizing in specific opposition to branded ideological packages, with no line item distinctions whatsoever, is increasingly beginning to feel to me like a really, really big con.

And the idea that the landscape seems to support this theory points to massive, systemic flaws in the nature of our governance and the people who hold and amass power within that framework.

It seems like a really great way to simplify your market segments and control the fuck out of you.