Lucía > Recent Status Updates

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

“The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits. (…) Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see.”
Laurence Gonzalez

“The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.”
Laurence Gonzalez

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers.

Women’s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you.
Laurie Penny

Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harassment and intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear.

some men explain things they shouldn’t and don’t hear things they should (…) I love it when people explain things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know; it’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes wrong.

Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being. Things have gotten better, but this war won’t end in my lifetime. I’m still fighting it, for myself certainly, but also for all those younger women who have something to say.

that is the mark of a good source myth; it is water so wide it can reach across centuries.

At the heart of the struggle of feminism to give rape, date rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment legal standing as crimes has been the necessity of making women credible and audible.

She seems active and zestful, the way people who die young always do, as if they were given an extra dose of energy and passion for life, as if they knew they had less time to spend it. Or maybe it’s just the way we see their photos afterward, when any life we still find in them feels exaggerated.

Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. (...) I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

I’m done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don’t know or can’t tell you what they want. I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

It always takes me by surprise when someone wants to kiss me, even if they’ve met me at midnight with wine and a blanket. People change their mind. Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow.

Between the idea and the reality
Between the motion and the act
Falls the Shadow
Eliot

Our dates are not self-conscious like that. We don’t acknowledge that they’re happening or say what they mean.

a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life
Kay Boyle

There’s a madness to beauty when you stumble on it like that.

I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.

A novel is a long story with something wrong with it

you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

Like many parents, my father wanted to give me what he didn’t get, then he wanted me to get what he couldn’t reach.

quick, outspoken, a thin but charming layer of femininity covering a masculine confidence and drive.

Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore ‘reality’ would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped in the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called ‘hyperreality’.

Much of Baudrillard’s work was a commentary on this same effect: the way in which the abolition of the Symbolic led not to a direct encounter with the Real, but to a kind of hemorrhaging of the Real. For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls – both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way – would always pose an insoluble dilemma.