I remember this article from a year ago. It's a beautiful piece of prose that really stuck with me, thanks for sharing this again.
The first year of my PhD program is ending, and I feel like I've been adrift the whole time: floating by without much direction, not doing much more than the bare minimum. I've been needing to reevaluate my priorities and find what I should really be doing. I've already decided I won't end up in academia, I couldn't win the endless pile of tasks. Not sure what I need to learn from this article but learning to make the most of the rest of your life is high on my list :)
> I’ve wanted a job like this for so long, I barely even know why I want it anymore. I look at my hands. I can’t tell if they’re mine.
> But also I wanted an office with a number. I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom. “And then what?” says my mother. “And then nothing,” I say as I jump off the very top of a fairy tale that has no place for me.
She has such a great way with English.
She is much better off outside of the Ivory Tower, out here, making gifts and hay. Dreadfully, her mother was right.
The impression given by her piece is that everything she is doing is pointless. She is absolutely right.
The university system has evolved from teaching people how to be adults to being a scam to line the pockets of those in the administration and professorships. It needs to be blown up and started again from scratch.
I think this piece is really about identity, and what happens when you establish and associate so deeply with an identity that when something challenges it (e.g. the passing of a job opportunity) it turns your world upside down. The author claims to have found peace in motherhood and that the job she was seeking wasn’t even that great, and perhaps the interviewers single minded, and maybe the entire process a little absurd.
What I find interesting about this is that looking through the lens of ones ego, this seems like the logical way you would cope with losing a job - just convincing yourself it wasn’t ever really what you wanted
It's definitely about identifying where they can slot into society, and what it even means to exist within one. It is also about discerning what pieces of society exist in a more grounded reality and which are part of the grander meta-society that we play the hierarchy games within. A professorship to her meant she had won one of the games. An achievement within the university meta-game, which was important to her but probably more relevant, others thought it was important too.
Making bread will be important for as long as we need food, but a university degree is only important while the society that regards them highly still exists in a particular configuration. She convinced herself at first that getting a professorship was important to her because it was important to the society she was taking part in, and when that society started to fall apart, suddenly the meta-game didn't seem so important.
I come from a really young country and so it's sometimes hard to take our little society seriously, it's more obvious that it is all made up and the pandemic has also made it feel pretty vulnerable and precarious. What good is a university degree when there are no jobs left to find it important?
I can be envious of countries with a long heritage that can make the rules of society feel far more permanent and grounded, like they were borne from history itself. But it's just a perception mostly. How I feel about it doesn't change what it is just whether I am willing to invest in playing.
I sometimes hear teacher friends blurt that they’re not sure their job has any meaning. And I kind of understand in that it is supposed to be a glorified role, and at the same time it may have no direct real world impact and just be imposed boredom on unwilling pupils.
But teaching at a uni for instance is a big deal career wise, identity wise. You end up doing something that you love ans bring some riches, but may not matter at all to those you teach, is highly seen from the rest of the world and becomes your whole value proposition to outsiders.
Compared to that, motherhood has exactly the opposite proposition (lowish social regard, super high impact on someone’s life) while not being so different fundamentally.
I'm tremendously grateful to all of my university teachers. Some more than others, but in general I consider my university education to be a transformative experience in my life.
I also do, but recognize that more than half of the stuff I did to get graduation credits where very boring.
Of course, we don’t know in advance what will resonate and what will fall into a mental pit, so it’s all after the fact evaluation and I don’t see my “boring” courses as universally boring to everyone.
But I definitely was phoning in these courses, and I hope my teachers had double good feedback from the other students, otherwise it could be a depressing situation.
There is a teacher I kept contact with way after entering working life, and it sure felt like there was a small core of us really really thankful, and a gigantic mass of students just sliding by to get a number on their yearly report.
People keep saying this is beautify written and stuff, but I feel like I just read a research paper in a topic I don't know about. Am I just dumb, what am I missing here? I feel genuinely confused about what I just read.
It's a series of melancholy musings on the relationship between one's career and identity/self-worth in the context of a society like ours, told through the lens of a) the author's personal career experience and b) fairytales.
My takeaway, if I had to reduce it to one (it doesn't really want to be reduced like that), is that many careers in our society consist of jumping through a series of arbitrary and ultimately pointless hoops, in order to eke out some kind of feeling of identity or personal worth. For the people who fail these challenges, there is no story. They lose their story, in some sense, unless they reframe it around something different. The author is able to be aware of this state of affairs despite remaining subject to it on some level.
I think it is for people who love their feelings and fall into them. I also have a lot of trouble relating. I couldn’t stand reading more than 2 paragraphs.
I'm curious (genuinely), how do you feel about art, paintings, music, and poetry in general?
Do you find yourself gravitating to Realism? [1] Or are you comfortable with the abstract?
Because I think it's not just about feelings. It's about the comfort with abstractions. The writer is writing EXTREMELY specific narratives that are meant to evoke extremely RELATABLE general feelings. And she is incredible at it. It's a real skill.
But it's okay if you don't grasp it. This stuff isn't automatic. However, I will say that you could learn to appreciate it, if you were so inclined.
I like some forms of abstract art. I just don’t particularly like this form. Also, your opinion that the author is relatable is subjective. It is relatable and enjoyable to you just as it is not relatable nor enjoyable to me.
To me, this author is the modern form of Jane Austen. Flourishes, flourishes, flourishes. Full of inner dialogue.
1. Fiction: I think it is pointless. I try to watch fictional movies.
2. Information I feel is irrelevant: Say I'm writing, I would prefer:
"He proposed to her in a park with friends."
To:
"The sun stood firm, there was melody in the wind, his body was perfect like diamonds rubbed together. He held her gaze for an eternity, ignorant of his friends at the park. She felt puzzled -- he could see her in a way that would make even Heimdall jealous. Finally, he brought out the ring and proposed."
I feel like I'm missing out on a colorful part of life. But my attempts to change this hasn't work (like forcing myself to see more fiction).
I'm also motivated to change this to improve conversations (like dates or group conversations). I find more people are into this than me.
Depends on one's mental make up as well. E.g. Aspies have a hard time with such things (your description sounds like classic spectrum).
It's not something dehabiliting, but it is like missing a lot of nuance and "dimensions" of the world. I have many of the same problems in person to person interactions (but not with fiction - and I mean the more lyrical, feelings-related part of fiction too).
>"He proposed to her in a park with friends."
As a developer, notice how this loses a lot of the informational content. Did he want to propose? Was he forced to? Did he feel anxious about it? Did she? Why did he chose this place? Does the setting tell us something? Did something in the environment made the experience worse for them?
>But my attempts to change this hasn't work (like forcing myself to see more fiction).
Try books too. I think some authors work better than others. E.g. Borges classic short stories might be a good place to start (The library of Babel, etc). Perhaps some sci-fi. Things with a mental focus as opposed to a sentimental one. You could then incrementally jack-up the sentimental/empathy part of the literature you read.
It's also about enjoying the journey (e.g. the descriptions, emotional states, etc.) not just the destination (the plot, the "what do I get out of this book" in concrete terms).
> Depends on one's mental make up as well. E.g. Aspies have a hard time with such things (your description sounds like classic spectrum).
> It's not something dehabiliting, but it is like missing a lot of nuance and "dimensions" of the world.
Idunno, wild speculation: Could this be related to the old "Read the book first, see rhe movie only afterwards!" phenomenon? You know, where people recommend getting into a story as pure text first, so you can envision it the way you want, before getting it locked into your head as some film-maker's vision.
Maybe those of us who recommend this order (I frequently do) have some of the traits of your "classic spectrum Aspies".
The traits usually associated with Aspergers are, e.g. "Inability to understand emotional issues", "First-person focus" (struggling to see the world from another person’s perspective), "Abnormal response to sensory stimuli", late or less development of social skills, etc.
So I think the "read the book first" is probably orthogonal, whereas the "I don't get the point of literature/poetry" is closer to a common Aspie type. Getting literature and especially poetry, for example, is (among other things) all about having or developing an intuitive "first-person focus".
"Welcome to my very old antiquarian bookshop, Daniel"
versus:
"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you here has been somebody's best friend. Now they only have us, Daniel. Do you think you'll be able to keep
such a secret?"
This depends a lot on what sorts of things you do enjoy, I think.
There are many ways of enjoying and appreciating writing, fiction, art, etc. You can approach from so many angles.
For example, I love science fiction and fantasy, but I love it in a different way to some of my friends. For me, the real enjoyment is about strong characters, story arcs that wouldn't be possible in another genre, and to some extent about getting to the core of how humans relate to each other and what about them is "human" when you put them in a totally different context.
For some of my friends it is more about fantastical worlds that are self consistent but have different rules to our own. For others it is about prediction of the future through careful analysis of how a particular technological advance might play out. The narrative is simply a useful vehicle for that analysis.
Are there _any_ pieces of fiction that you have enjoyed? Or perhaps biographies or documentaries where the subjects were compelling characters? I would try to find the edges where these things blur a little into interests you already have. But I will admit I find it hard to relate to some extent - I've always loved stories.
First off, if you enjoy movies, then you're already appreciating art. That's fantastic. That's all you need to do: find an art you enjoy participating in, and do it.
That's the trick: you're participating. Movies are easy to participate in: they're very engrossing and they pass by literally even if you fall asleep. But you can also devote your life to them: learning how they're made, comparing and contrasting them, writing about them, etc. That's not better or worse, just another form of participation.
A book can also invite more or less participation. The type of prose you're talking about there doesn't do much for me: the metaphors are all over the place, and so they don't add up to any more than the sum of the parts (or even less). Some do feel like they are intricate jewelry boxes, which you can engage with either as a whole or by looking deeply into the parts.
Again, either way is fine: it's like the difference between writing a video game and playing one.
Don't worry that some forms are presented as "highbrow". That's irrelevant. It rewards what rich people like. Which can be great: they've got the time to spend looking at it. But the idea that it's inherently superior because of that, that's just gatekeeping douchenozzlery. The same kind as you get in comic books or sci fi or anything else where some prestigious people get to declare that they've got the only kind that matters.
The nice thing about this essay is that it's short. You can read it a few times and see if pieces of it engage you. You can talk about why some of the phrases were written the way they were; you can hold that discussion right here as an impromptu book club.
That's the really important thing: not the "colorful part of life" that you're missing, but the chance to bond over it with others. If that's not for you, you're not missing anything at all.
Try consuming fiction with friends who enjoy it. Watch a show with them, see a play. Then talk to them about it. Even if you don't find the content enjoyable, you might find their enjoyment of it enjoyable.
I would say as I've gotten older, I've gotten more pragmatic with which feelings I embrace. I've learned over time to not dwell too much on feelings of failure, inadequacy, doubt, etc. I can laugh off certain situations that would have been fairly devastating to me as a younger man.
I'm also less patient with others who dwell on such feelings (this is probably a bad thing, something I am working to address), and get annoyed with art that is overly sentimental. To be clear I didn't find this article to be overly sentimental, and I enjoyed reading it... but it was close.
You could say this is running away from my feelings, and that's fair. But I don't think I would prefer to have it any other way.
I felt it was beautiful but I don’t think you should feel dumb you didn’t also think it was beautiful! I think it’s not a set of facts, where there are right and wrong interpretations, so research paper might be the wrong analogy.
For me, I think she made me feel what it would be like to work toward an achievement, to fail, and to look back and contemplate on the idea that maybe the achievement was arbitrary and as simplistic and fantastical as a fairy tale.
I understand, conceptually, that people work toward achievements and respond to incentives like more money or promotion or power. And I understand, logically, that people often mis-identify what outcomes matter to them, and are instead working toward something that won’t ever provide satisfaction, all while the work exhausts them.
But I rarely contemplate that idea, marinate in it, feel it. She made me feel it. And she also made me realize that I’m also doing the same thing, and that I likely will some day look back on my life right now and contemplate that maybe everything I’m working for is simplistic and fantastical and not going to accomplish whatever it is I really want.
I’m curious, could you share some writing that made you feel something, and it made you feel?
It wasn't particularly a sentence or anything. I can try my best to explain though.
> the head of the creative department asks me if the courses I would be expected to teach should even exist. “No,” I wish I had said
Threw me off. I read the comments first which suggested this was something about changing desires in life. But three days into an interview she wanted she seems to have changed her mind? With no further explanation. I guess we assume she didn't get this job, but it's not clear why she lost her enthusiasm so quickly and months before the rest of this story.
After that there's an explanation of plots in fairy tales that switches jarringly again into another line I'm not totally sure how to interpret about bread. Its also the title, I expect it to be important.
Tying the fairy tale plot lines back to her sons pointless work was interestingly done. But i feel like I missed how it fit into the bigger picture of this article.
> “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me,
This I don't really get how she goes from wheat to needing machete to cut it to questioning why they want a job
> I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory
I didn't get this reference, so I think a lot of the last paragraph was lost on me.
I asked my girlfriend to read it, she really liked it and thought it was well done.
I find it beautiful in part because I have a high tolerance for ambiguity and I enjoy loose association. The wheat section was my favorite. For me, it evokes a feeling of discontent about knowing highly abstract concepts without knowing the basics. Like, she knows about fairytales, but she doesn't know how to make bread. But it's not really about bread; separating the wheat from the chaff seems to be more about determining what is important in life. And everyone else here probably has a different take on this section.
It is thoughtfully ambiguous. It's thought provoking in part because it is unclear. You, as the reader, are an active participant in giving it meaning. What makes it "well done" is that many readers succeed in giving it meaning they find insightful or entertaining.
It's an advanced writing style that you see a lot in these kinds of personal essays, where the idea is to follow a stream of consciousness, weaving together different ideas that have loose relationships with each other in order to create a kind of mental miasma where the things can mingle together and connect in the reader's mind in various ways. The main subject tends to be triangulated by the constellation of ideas, instead of being addressed directly.
Specifically, in this case, the arbitrary and pointless (and impossible?) tasks in the fairytales are related to the arbitrary and pointless interview process. The author wonders what happens to her story when she fails the tasks, just like the characters who fail the tasks and then unceremoniously fall off the narrative map. But she's not a character, she's a real person who goes on living. But that living stops making sense in terms of the narrative that she was following before.
I don't totally get the connection with the bread myself. But part of figurative writing is leaving room for ambiguity and further thought.
> It's an advanced writing style that you see a lot in these kinds of personal essays, where the idea is to follow a stream of consciousness, weaving together different ideas that have loose relationships with each other in order to create a kind of mental miasma where the things can mingle together and connect in the reader's mind in various ways.
Does this have a name? I don't know what to google to read more about it.
Some other people have responded talking about the essay in general, but I thought I'd try and respond to the specific points that you found confusing with my own interpretation. This is of course subjective. I liked this piece because it gave me food for thought like this.
> But three days into an interview she wanted she seems to have changed her mind?
There are two time periods in this line at once. "I wish I had said" is talking about what she wishes now that she had said to him at the time. The tip off is the "had said" is referring to the time period in which she responds to the dean and is in past tense, and "I wish" is present.
> After that there's an explanation of plots in fairy tales that switches jarringly again into another line I'm not totally sure how to interpret about bread. Its also the title, I expect it to be important.
"Fuck the bread" is literally something her mother said to her, but also subtextually saying "fuck academia" (and maybe even the more broad "fuck societal standards of success"). This is the chain of associations that builds up the metaphor:
1. In fairytales, the characters are given impossible tasks. <List of examples>
2. In the fairytales, completing these tasks defines their worth. Characters who do not complete the tasks drop out of the story.
3. Getting a job in academia requires her to complete a list of impossible tasks. She cannot complete it.
4. Even basic tasks in society are impossible during the pandemic, like bread making. These basic tasks are part of appearing successful.
5. "Fuck the bread" == fuck 3, fuck 4, define yourself outside of impossible tasks and do not be a bit character in a fairytale.
> This I don't really get how she goes from wheat to needing machete to cut it to questioning why they want a job
Given the rest of the piece talking about how working in academia was a useless task, I think this is about wasting her time on something so frivolous instead of her basic needs (bread?). But that does go against the title. I'm comparatively pretty unsure about this association.
I may be completely off but my interpretation of bread is the following:
- She's struggling with finding bread, the main task that is defining her at that moment (the writer goes around the idea that on fairy tales the task is what the defines the character, and no fulfillment of task means no character), so she's struggling with the definition of herself too
> “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me,
- For me this means that she wants to get bread and she discovers that for obtaining the wheat you need something to cut it, like a machete. A machete is a tool for cutting, for removing obstacles. And she doesn't have a machete, so she cannot remove those obstacles for the position, like the universities interviews, so she cannot reach the position as she cannot get the bread.
Putting it the other way around: you cannot just beg to the wheat to get the bread, you need a machete. She doesn't have it. She doesn't have what is needed to get the position.
I think the relation is not too obvious and I may be wrong, but I interpret it this way.
I think of another interpretation: if she had a machete, she could cut and make her own bread, instead of begging universities for a job, to buy bread.
I call a naked king here: if a text allows different interpretations, its just a bad text, not a smart one.
That sounds like a good interpretation. Sometimes the answer is more mundane though, the writer realised that thought out of the blue, at that time and the profundity - if the writer even realised it - came later. The link, whilst less satisfying in literary terms, could just be 'sudden revelations of things that were staring me in the face the whole time'.
But in this case it does seem purposeful, and I'd imagine your analysis is correct.
She did not changed her mind. And answered yes. And she did not get the job. The wishing to say no is something that comes only later. It would not change a thing.
The other paragraph is mind wandering. Her mind goes back to processing hiring process and her loosing it again and again.
> She did not changed her mind. And answered yes. And she did not get the job. The wishing to say no is something that comes only later. It would not change a thing.
But the description of a "beautiful, made-up reason" and the text around it makes it sound like "no" was accurate, which seems really jarring. I couldn't stop thinking about it through the rest of the story, because it confuses the context especially without any more explanation.
"In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered."
I learned English first (American), but I don't understand grammar well enough to explain what language rules were broken. I hate when ESL friends ask about this. In Chinese they don't really modify the verb words, they just add other words. Does anyone ever break rules in Spanish for poetry? I don't know.
This author uses present tenses to talk about the past. Is it hopeless or deterministic? I'm curious.
It's a deliberate decision to convey immediacy and urgency. Using present tense makes the memories read as closer and still unknown territory instead of farther removed and already determined, which matches the emotions of the memories that the author is trying to convey.
Consider the emotional difference between:
> It is summer, and the ice cream is melting.
> It was summer, and the ice cream melted.
These types of literary choices are a core part of writing prose at an advanced level the same way that camera angles and color palettes are a part of cinematography. Grammar "rules" don't really exist in creative prose, it's ultimately about using words to convey meaning however you can.
I don't think any grammar rules were broken. The author is setting a scene as if it were the present; think of it more like fiction, even though it's nonfiction. A narrator in a fictional story might say "the sun sets over the plains", even though that isn't literally happening in the present tense from the reader's perspective.
>If many understand the same thing, then she is a good writer. //
This line works for service manuals; but for art, personal interpretation can be an even better outcome than singularity of understanding amongst readers.
>> If many understand the same thing, then she is a good writer. If we all think we understood different things, then you are a good reader.
If I may be a bit dogmatic, I think literary writing is the polar opposite of technical writing. Technical writing must be as precise and unambiguous as possible so that every reader unerstands the same thing on reading; even if it takes careful, even painstaking reading, even if it takes a large amount of background knowledge to actually be able to understand what is written (think of difficult and convoluted mathematical proofs of theories in obscure sub-fields of which there are very few experts).
Literary writing on the other hand, fails if it invokes the same feelings and images in more than one person. Good literary writing should be different for every reader, so that the relation between the reader and the written piece becomes something unique and personal for every separate reader.
This last point is lost in the way that literature is taught at schools. At school, the teacher reads a passage from some literary work, asks the students for their interpretation, then proceeds to (more or less subtly) teach the "right" interpretation. This is horribly confusing to anyone who really likes reading exactly for the freedom to interpret everything as they like, and to form their own, their very own, emotions and images.
I remember this from high school. We were given reading assignments of books such as "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" or "The Little Prince" and then spent a couple of lectures disucssing them in the format above. For me, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was all about the society of sea birds and other animals. I remember wondering, "how do the seagulls know how an owl's mind works. How about eagles"? But the book was clearly written by an author who had an entirely different idea in mind. And it was taught by a teacher who also had a completely different one, also. But somehow everybody missed the point: we're all sweeping our eyes over the same text, but each one of us is reading a different story. This attempt to shoehorn everyone's mind into boring conformity irked me back then and I rebelled against it, of course.
Anyway, what I'm saying is the OP may be under the spell of the literary teachers who try to tell you, you should always read something specific in literary writing. You shouldn't. If you don't find anything in a piece of writing, then there wasn't anything there for you. Try somewhere else. Somewhere, someone has left something just for you. Probably. If not, oh well. Life goes on.
It was well written, but has the affect of an apparently quite depressed existential crisis. I’m not in that emotional place in my life so I didn’t really enjoy it, but since I have been in the place before I’m at least able to recognize it.
I’d imagine many of the people it’s striking a chord with are in a similar place so they feel represented enough by the affect to appreciate it as beautiful.
Probably a way to make sense of something not said explicitly and a little empathy. I struggle with those myself in person, but I'm good at reading the clues in prose.
This here is a prose piece with some lyrical elements about:
(a) the struggle of having a job you studied and dreamt to do and realizing it's not valued by the world, and might not even be relevant anymore in the general turmoil (which also makes your personal troubles seem irrelevant or a luxury).
It also describes the big and little ways people you apply to work for belittle you and what you have to offer, and the person going through these realizations feeling a sense of loss of themselves and their purpose, set amidst the general covid changes.
Also offers a glimpse of the author's work as a writer/poet (either directly, or through them using fairy tales as analogies), and the irrelevance by which it is met (or so it feels to them).
There's nothing wrong with being confused by prose, or poetry, or art in general. You're free to like it or dislike it regardless of whether you feel you "understand" it or whether your understanding corresponds to that of others.
It is about coming to terms with not getting what you worked for. And about process of adapting to lockdown, trying to come to terms with it and comparing the two.
"I wanted a university ID. I wanted access to a fancy library and benefits and students and colleagues and travel money. I wanted the whole stupid kingdom. “And then what? ... You’re better off,” says my mother."
When I arrived at college, I soon thought I wanted that. It took me years to get over the college movies, and music, and stories, and to see the place as it was. Lots of great people, lots of great resources, and ... the time.
A few of the profs whose courses I took seemed to actually have the gift, enjoyed teaching ... they measurably helped me to improve my capabilities. Some clearly were unsatisfied, read from the same notes every year, made fun of the popular courses. One, whose office I only glanced in on once from curiosity, jumped off a bridge.
It's a complex world, and not always a fit one for outsiders. Now and then I still wonder what might have been. But the books, movies, music ... they're fairy tales.
Just trying to understand what you're saying. My best guess is UI="Unemployment Insurance", QE="quantitative easing", 1040 is the tax form. What's the circus?
That's what I meant by circus as well, but it seemed like the person replying disagreed with me. We have some massive societal problems to deal with relating to wealth inequality, housing, and public health, but none of it seems to matter as a large segment of the population is convinced that, e.g. transgender people wanting to use the restroom that matches their presented gender is the largest ongoing attack on our collective well-being. The "circus" distracting from the general public's lack of bread (healthcare, labor rights, etc.).
> transgender people wanting to use the restroom that matches their presented gender is the largest ongoing attack on our collective well-being.
Understand what you're saying, but you could have just as easily complained about the pro-transgender-restroom-warriors fighting for unimportant things instead of all the other issues you listed.
The "both sides" argument doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. The key factor is that there is no measurable cost to, say, conservatives, for conceding on LGBT rights--just general talk in the abstract about moral decay.
There is a real, measurable cost to gay people, when they can't get married like everyone else, and to transgender people when they can't comfortably relieve themselves in public. The cost is also to society -- how does society benefit by bullying LGBT people into severe depression when they could otherwise go on to be productive members of society?
You've made a lot of rather large mental leaps that i'd rather not debate right now. But what your original comment lamented was the distraction from the very important issues you listed. Ignoring the merit of the bathroom arguments for a moment, there is definitely a similar associated opportunity cost. If it's not as important as the other issues you listed, it should perhaps be dealt with later...
Protecting people's basic rights and dignity is important.
Or to put it a different way, you can have an issue where the different factions are not equally important, are not symmetrical.
If I want to burn down all green houses because I dislike green, I am engaging in a petty distraction. If someone tried to stop me because they prefer blue that would also be a petty distraction. But the people stopping me because they're anti-arson are doing something important and very much not a petty distraction.
No. There is an opportunity cost for every action you take. Bathroom choices don't matter if the world is on fire and in danger of causing mass extinction and hardship due to global warming. There will be nobody around to mislabel or choose the wrong bathroom.
If you truly believed we were in actual peril, you wouldn't waste time on pronouns and bathrooms.. you'd be too busy trying to save the human race. Since that isn't what you're doing, you make all the hand wringing about climate look insincere.
People are allowed to care about multiple things, and don't have to dedicate their life to the most important cause they can think of. Your dismissal could be used for basically anything. Why waste time arresting a mere murderer? Why stop a company from dumping toxic waste, it's only a few barrels. Why inspect a building to make sure it doesn't collapse, those are super rare. If you actually cared about people you'd be working on one of the biggest five problems and not those!
Of course you're allowed to care about multiple things. The point is that you wont be very convincing to anyone that there is an emergency if you're also attending to less important things. If you're house is on fire, you're allowed to also sew a skirt. But it's not very wise.
If you are worried about pronouns and bathrooms.. you clearly aren't very worried about the so called climate EMERGENCY.
But again you can apply that argument do anything.
Are you worried about bathrooms? Must not be a climate emergency. Do you want to cook breakfast? Must not be a climate emergency. Do you have a light turned on? Must not be a climate emergency.
Really, you're just making an argument not to use the word "emergency" for this kind of geopolitical problem. Okay, whatever, sure.
But let's go back to the original argument, not your strawman tangent.
"We have some massive societal problems to deal with relating to wealth inequality, housing, and public health, but none of it seems to matter as a large segment of the population is convinced that, e.g. transgender people wanting to use the restroom that matches their presented gender is the largest ongoing attack on our collective well-being."
Being able to use a bathroom and not be harassed or have to defend your identity is on par with the rest of that list. The protection of rights is on par with massive societal issues.
Complaining about someone coming to pee is not on par with that.
Neither one is an "emergency" the way you're using it, but nobody was saying that.
You can play all the word games you want, but the fact remains if you treat bathrooms and pronouns on the same level as an existential crisis, demanding that people attend to both at the same time... don't be surprised when people don't take your absurdity seriously. If you truly care about saving the environment, i'd suggest getting your messaging in order. Unless you really truly don't care.
> if you treat bathrooms and pronouns on the same level as an existential crisis
I wasn't doing that. Nobody was doing that. It's not a word game; you're complaining about something that didn't happen. You're the one that brought up climate.
I think the OP explains below but my interpretation is based on how much money you make (reflected on your 1040) you either are getting help from unemployment benefits (UI) or asset price increases driven by monetary policy (QE). I imagine the circuses are an allusion to NewsMax/OANN and other American media.
I don't know if I can help anyone understand this piece but I'll try:
This is poetic prose and it's meant to evoke feelings more than tell an a->b story. Early in the pandemic last year when people were suddenly confined to their houses, a whole lot of people took to baking bread.
The author's fruitless, meaningless job search paralleled the global situation with scores of people losing their jobs. It paralleled her micro situation with being unable to find flour, and not knowing how to harvest wheat. It paralleled her assignments of fruitless, meaningless scavenger hunts she gave her children, because they're stuck at home with her, and nobody knows what the fuck to do.
Ultimately it's a piece describing exhaustion and utter bafflement at trying to find a higher purpose in the midst of the global pandemic. "Fuck the bread" is the voice of reason - when the going gets tough, keep going.
Pieces like this will be the time capsules that will help people in the future understand what we all went through. I do hope it reaches some of our non native speakers.
Thanks for taking the effort to explain this. Regardless of whether I like the story, it's interesting to try to understand what the author was attempting to convey.
> I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.
> I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers.
As someone who has been interviewing a lot lately this hits as close to home as possible. There are times where this sense of helplessness is nauseating.
> I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.
That one too. I'm thinking of that quite often lately. I've spend countless hours just to stay sharp in computer engineering but I know almost nothing of basic survival skills. If things are to go seriously South I'll have almost no skills to deal with it.
As much as I love pork rinds, I haven't been able to coax them into a "bread-like" form yet. I have had some success with Peter Reinhart's "Toasting Bread"; this [0] site's recipe is very close.
It is very freeing to realize there is no One True Path. If you thought becoming an academic was The Only Way, and it doesn't happen, you either live a miserable life or overcome this failure and progress forwards.
I think "Fuck the Bread" is the realization that something the author desired so hard, and tried so many times to get, ultimately does not determine her path in life and her mental state of being.
I would further say that there is an unhealthy way of viewing life currently in vogue where everything is "systemic" - you can't possible overcome issue XYZ because of systemic reasons ABC that are out of your control. So... why bother?
But all of that is a psychological trick - life is what you make of it. If you aren't happy, no one is going to make you happy but yourself. This is simplified as the "bootstraps" vision of the world, and obviously helping people and receiving help is important (no man is an island), but true happiness can only come from yourself and living life the way you choose. When you stop giving a fuck about what other people think and start living the way you want, is when you truly become free and actualized as an individual.
This resonates with me. A heuristic that often leads to success is learning the rules of our systems, both written and unwritten. Over-reliance on this heuristic shackles one to imagined limits. Many of the perceived "rules" can be broken.
As an example, many people assume you need to go to a top school to get a top job. But after several years working, that perceived boundary that so many are so hung up on seems like a joke to me.
This is an unpopular opinion, but I very much dislike the writing in this piece. I find it unnecessarily obscure, jarring to read as it bounces from one unfinished thought to the next.
I love it. Thanks for sharing. I felt like I could relate to the many job interviews I've been on lately. I made me thingk of my fear of change and reshaping myself. Even for me posting a comment on is a form of change from my norm - F the fear. the fear is over.
It’s bread (that is: pan, wheat or similar milled and leavened) but it’s more a euphemism of the author’s own design. To me it was a reference to - something - in the American millennial zeitgeist that congealed just about mid-pandemic when half our social media seemed to be about people making and bragging about bread at home.
I feel it's that one: all the people were talking about during the first phases of lockdown was how to make the best of this moment, surrounded with all this newfound available time and knowledge a few clicks away. Stories of starting a new hobby, learning a new language, playing an instrument. It was all temporary anyway, so we might as well use that time.
But the diversion wore off, as time went on, deaths kept piling off, countries were fighting each other over sharing vaccines and their patents, half the country still believes it's all a hoax... there's only so much bread that will keep you busy while no one outside shows any sign of pondering on our faults as a society and we are just waiting for the old days to come. Who cares about bread anymore.
Maybe I'm putting some of myself here, but so many parts of this society look too much like dumb tasks coming again and again with no end in sight, and for what result? Become a prince if you have the good friends/luck/money, or vanish into the void of being forgotten.
Stop being diverted by quirky social media phenomenons: fix the system, or leave it to make your own. Abort the fairy tale.
She is concerned about finding flour to make bread, like she is concerned about passing these interviews to become a professor at a university.
Fuck the bread - fuck the position. Times are [always] changing, you should re-evaluate everything you were so convinced about. You can make something else, you can be something else, or maybe you don't need it to begin with.
Oh. Finally, someone in this comment section managed to explain what the hell was this truckload of words about, instead of commenting about "beautifully written prose". Now that I understand the essence, I think I can actually enjoy the shape.
Still, simply telling an a->b story seems to be both an easier and more sure way to convey/evoke emotions than this "stream of consciousness" style or whatever it actually is.
I am not completely certain but I believe the authors' mother was saying "F the bread it is over" as a sort of metaphor regarding last years fad of baking bread during the lockdown and how it is no longer important.
It could also be a commentary on the ketogenic diet movement gaining ground in recent years.
Bread is also slang for money so it could be refering that the author cant make any money but thats a stretch.
On a side note, one of my favorite science/fantasy fiction authors is a professor at Brigham Young University. He completed possibly the greatest fantasy series every written, so I don't see any reason why a class about fairytales wouldn't work.
It's way more than that. The author explicitly compares making bread with heroic trials princes perform to win princesses. She is referencing her struggle to get a tenure track position in academia.
> On a side note, one of my favorite science/fantasy fiction authors is a professor at Brigham Young University. He completed possibly the greatest fantasy series every written, so I don't see any reason why a class about fairytales wouldn't work.
Uh, did I miss something or who’s this author you speak of?
There's a difference between "understanding" a language and "understanding" prose in that language. Any work, whether it's written in a language or painted in a style or whatever, is always open for interpretation, as long as that interpretation isn't based in a complete misunderstanding or lack of language proficiency.
I found this piece to be puerile. The author spends her life bemoaning the fact that no one appreciates her skillset. Instead of finding useful skills, she uses her current ones to complain about it. Being obsolete is not something to glorify, its something to FIX.
I found your comment to be a lack of perspective in appreciating a humanistic and vague piece of prose, instead interpreting it as an engineer would: a problem to be solved, and not to be whined about in the meantime.
There is no problem formulated here, I read no whining into this text, it's a very subjective observation of someone's life written in an artful style, it's not entirely happy or entirely sad, and it leaves you with more questions than answers. Accepting things that do not give you answers is a part of appreciating art, and if that's not of any interest to you then that's absolutely fine, but for your own sake I'd encourage you to be a bit more open minded about what the "purpose" of a work is rather than assume that your immediate and subjective opinion about it is beyond dispute.
I have no fucking clue what this was about. I tried reading, then skimming, then thought about it for a bit. Seems like a bunch of personal feelings stringed together in a rambling sort of way, but apparently they resonate with many people?
I'd be very grateful if someone could ELI5 the whole thing.
On a separate note, is HN the right forum for this?
It's prose, it's not a technical manual. There's no "ELI5" for art, because art happens inside you. For example, "Wave" (1889) by Ivan Aivazovsky[1] is a painting I really like. It speaks to me, but how do you "ELI5" it? There's nothing to "explain" about art, unless you only dissect art into the technical details of the painting -- because you look at it, and either you like it or you don't. If you don't like it, that's not from a lack of "understanding" the painting, there's not a bridge of knowledge you need to cross, you are entitled to simply not like it and that's fine. The fact that I do, and maybe you don't, doesn't really say anything about whether it's a good piece of art or not, or whether you understand art, etc.
I can understand that some art cannot be (usefully) explained; I imagine paintings, especially modern art, might end up in that category.
It's very common, however, for people to explain what's going on in a literary work such as a short story, a novel, etc. Therefore, I don't find your argument (that there's no way to ELI5 this) very convincing.
(On an unrelated note, I do like the painting you linked.)
If you couldn't read the (short) article closely enough to determine the author's pronouns, maybe hold off on implying they are either mentally ill or a bad writer.
The first year of my PhD program is ending, and I feel like I've been adrift the whole time: floating by without much direction, not doing much more than the bare minimum. I've been needing to reevaluate my priorities and find what I should really be doing. I've already decided I won't end up in academia, I couldn't win the endless pile of tasks. Not sure what I need to learn from this article but learning to make the most of the rest of your life is high on my list :)