Book Club Log #7
Got like only 4 hours of sleep due to anxiety about seeing my PCP at 10 AM. Ironically knowing you have to be up earlier worsens insomnia because the sense of threat goes up.
Saw my PCP and maybe finally got a referral to a dermatologist who can patch test me after having an injury that hasnt been fully healed for 4 months due to contact dermatitis. We'll see if that goes through or if I just get rejected for not being a serious enough of a case.
Anyway I took a long nap after I got home and then after doing a bit of studying, left to go with my sister to the city my book club is in because she was having a friend party there in the same downtown area.
I ate like half the dinner I ordered at that restaurant and then left the leftovers with my sister to go to book club. Most of the seats were taken. I wanted to sit next to Bookstore Employee but couldn't tell if the seat was taken (it was not, so whoops). Next to that eventual empty seat was a person who sat next to me during the time we read Who's Afraid of Gender?, which I was a little surprised to see because I was thinking I had maybe been to boring for them since I didn't say anything outside of pair share for that whole session.
I ended up sitting next to Purple Corn but did not end up in pair share with them but the person to my right, who seemed like a new person? They said they only had a library card in Los Angeles and hadn't gotten one up here since they moved. The book was Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and they had read it, but I like really failed the small talk thing and we ran out of things to talk about after we hit the topics.
Overall, I just really end up thinkin that people in this book club are not terminally online like I am, since I was thinking about all sorts of Tumblr Social Justice Discourse behaviors when reading the whole points about how deference politics isn't useful in this book, but no one brought up stuff about like having to list your identities in your bio and people accusing you of being white or a dude etc. if you don't and then getting extremely individually divisive over opinions that aren't really about organizing. Online social justice tends to be more about attention and assuming that attention awareness is good enough and fostering guilt (deference politics) rather than actually building projects to enact change. That's a world I lived in, especially as a teen, to the point of engaging in "Acecourse"1 and whatever.
Or as Bookstore Employee put it, leftists seem mostly concerned with doing nothing wrong rather than doing something right.
I talked a little bit but not anything really substantial. The new book pick for the month after next is The Plague by Albert Camus, which is a book that Multiple Names Guy has been soft floating for multiple months now. It had become a running joke at this point, but it finally got picked by winning by one vote. I'm not really interested in reading this, much like I'm not interested in reading The Hunger Games + Demon Copperhead which seems to be planned for December-January, but I'll do my duty, I guess. (I just don't really feel like I need to reread The Hunger Games trilogy...)
Afterwards I talked a little bit with Teacher Lady, who's having fumigation for termites also in September. I need to send her the checklist of things to do before you move out. She gave me two sample masks that I can try out since apparently duck bill masks are more effective (even though my sis and her partner refuse to use them because they look kind of stupid). She was going to show me how she puts on one of them but my sister finished her party and came to get me before she could (Teacher Lady was busy talking to the person who I thought might not come again.) I forgot to bring her puzzle yet again.
Referring to discourse specifically about whether cisgender Asexual and Aromantic people should be allowed to be part of the LGBTQ community because if they're not gay or trans they are politically non-distinct from cishet populations and don't face any systemic oppression, or so the argument goes. This gave me an internal tierlist of LGBTQ(IA) identities, with trans woman lesbians (of color) being the "most" progressive with everyone else as less so — just by virtue of their identity, since political opinions are conflated with identity. This is deference politics and also led me closet myself as an aroace person for a few years because I figured if it was closer to being cishet rather than queer, and the very presence of someone like me would "take attention away" from those who need it more, it wasn't really worth talking about.
I called myself lesbian for a while because it is true that if I have any orientation outside of "not anyone" it's definitely "not men", but why would that lend me any more legitimacy anyway? Like many things, people can try to slot me elsewhere for not performing an identity enough (maybe I'm not agender enough or lesbian enough or whatever so you want to call me cishet despite my negative interest in men), but it doesn't actually change my political opinions or what I am or am not doing in trying to make change in the world, which are the standards in which I think I should actually be judged. If I must be judged.
(Bonus) Tangential fact that I bitch about occasionally — "Professors I Have Grudges Against Who Just So Happen To All Be White Men #3": I wrote a paper on Acecourse for my Interactional Sociology course in college and then got accused by my professor for plagiarizing... off of myself, because my introduction that described this whole phenomenon was too comprehensive that he thought that I had to have taken a Communications course and then just copied it over. I have no fucking clue to this day why he even bothered to accuse me of this because I clearly fell apart later in the essay from exhaustion so it only netted me a B anyway. I'm forever pissed about this because I had to cry in his office for him to realize that he was wrong. It's just so insulting that he suspected this of someone with chronic social anxiety who would rather die than take a class where presentations are required (I mean, like, come on, it's a fucking communications class). He better have fucking regretted it when I scored the highest on his final exam, which had a substantial essay portion. Though the fact that I had to prove myself on his grounds pisses me off. Wonder how he's doing with the prevalence of ChatGPT now!↩