#linden in the tags
i hate to be this person because i used to roll my eyes at people who told me this but finally making myself go through uncomfortable situations for the possibility of joy has resulted in me being happier than i ever could have imagined being. i do think that you should always listen to yourself but i prevented my own happiness for a long time by not knowing how to tell intuition from overthinking and being too afraid and sticking to negative what if’s when i should have been sticking to positive what if’s. not every venture outside your comfort zone will result in some revelation that moves the earth under your feet but the probablilty of it is zero if you never venture out
- “Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.
- A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.
- Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.
- Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.
- “Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.
- Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.
- Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.
- MSG is not bad for you at all.
- The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.
- I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.
So I’ve literally done this twice before and so have several other people but here are sources on all of these, most of them fairly recent academic studies or otherwise the most up-to-date I could find:
- Organic food isn’t better for you: [1] [2] [3]
- Tracing food industry slave labor: [1]
- Healthier food is more expensive:[1] [2]
- Saturated fats (i.e. “junk food”) still provide needed energy, aren’t as bad as people thought: [1] [2]
- “Processed” isn’t synonymous with less healthy, because it means a lot of different things: [1]
- “Chemicals” also means a lot of things and many food components are misunderstood by the general public:[1]
- MSG is not harmful: [1] [2] [3]
- GMO’s are not dangerous to eat: [400 sources collected here]
i come from a strain of fundamentalism where it is VERY taboo to talk about God outside a strictly theological context, meaning saying things like “he’s richer than God” is considered using the Lord’s name in vain and you will be scolded if you do it. so throwing around phrases like this and also things like “oh my god” or “good Lord” gives me the same agreeable feeling of taboo-violation as proper swearing does.
UNFORTUNATELY….when i say it in general company it makes me sound like i am in fact very christian. which is the opposite of what i want. so anyway the point is. when you catch me saying things like “he doesn’t have the common sense God gave a cantaloupe” PLEASE know that my intent is reclamatorily blasphemous not reverential
periodically I get the urge to write poetry again but now that I’ve taken multiple poetry classes where I read hundreds of contemporary poems, and then read 2x the amount of contemporary poems from going through all the recent issues of poetry magazines in my school library (because i spent hours in the magazine archive section of the library every evening because I went there for alone time), I have a deep hate and loathing of “literary” poetry and the magazines that publish it
The more I have read poetry journals, the more I have despised contemporary “literary” poetry. I think it is because of the following things:
- These poems are virtually impossible to parse or “get” anything from without formal education in poetry. They are aimless, unstructured and ambiguous to the extent that most of them are almost total gibberish.
- They’re almost exclusively written by people with MFAs or PhD’s in poetry, which would explain why they seem like they come from a perspective where any combination of words that is comprehensible in a normal way is automatically rejected as trite.
- Rhyme and meter are nearly extinct in English poetry right now, and 90% of poems are flat, aimless “free verse” that reads like sad mumbling.
- Literary magazines publish material from an array of writers belonging to minority groups, creating an initial whiff of “socially-aware and ‘representing’ the experiences of oppressed voices,” but they are heavily, disproportionately interested in the trauma and suffering-oriented aspects of these voices, consistently selecting extremely raw, triggering, viscerally upsetting writing to represent minority writers.
That last point is the biggest reason I lost my taste for poetry. Partly, it was just the overwhelming focus on human misery in general, but it felt like poems by “minority” writers were especially afflicted.
I don’t have numbers gathered together to support this, but it was very noticeable, both in my classes and in my independent reading, that poems about spring, birds, flowers, appreciating beauty, and literally anything innocuous generally were written by white men. Poems by writers of color, as well as poets described as LGBTQ+ in any way, were so frequently focused on abuse, oppression, sexual violence, being called slurs, and trauma that you would easily think only cishet white guys wrote about anything else.
