macrolit:

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen vintage paperback classics by Edgar Allan Poe, J.D. Salinger, Aldous Huxley, Nevil Shute, Shakespeare, and others! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? 😀

To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on May 20, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

closet-keys:

One thing I think is useful to conceptualize when thinking about the severity of depression is figuring out what counts as a ‘task’ to your brain

for example, healthy people outlining the tasks they need to do that day might be something like 

– class
– work
– homework

if a healthy person is having a low energy day, maybe it becomes 

– make breakfast
– go to class
– class
– go to work
– work
– come home from work
– work on an essay
– do 2 readings 

a depressed person, on a high energy day will probably see that same day as 

– make breakfast
– eat breakfast
– take meds
– shower
– get dressed
– walk to bus
– take bus
… etc

a depressed person, on a low energy day will see that same day as

– wake up
– get out of bed
– walk to bathroom
– use bathroom
– stand back up
– walk to kitchen
– open fridge
– take out juice
– set on counter
– go to cabinet
– reach up arm
– take down glass
– unscrew lid of juice carton
– pour juice
– drink the juice
– finish the juice
…etc

the sort of chronic exhaustion manifests in how each ‘task’ takes a certain amount of energy and when you have depression, what begins to take that amount of energy- and thus, cognitively count as a ‘task’- are smaller and smaller subdivisions of what other people consider tasks. 

And the more ‘tasks’ you do, the less energy you have, and the smaller the subdivisions must be to take equivalent amounts of energy. And the longer that “to do” list of tasks is, the more exhausting and overwhelming and hopeless it feels, which creates a feedback loop of dysfunction.

So say our depressed person on a low energy day gets all the way to finishing their glass of juice. They’ve actually gotten through a lot of tasks! They’ve tried really hard. 

But to a healthy person, even on a low energy day, that probably looks like not having done anything- not having gotten through any tasks. And when our depressed person is surrounded by healthy people, they will likely internalize that they haven’t done anything, and further that they can’t complete any tasks no matter how hard they try. And that feeds worthlessness and suicidal ideation 

That, I think, is why it’s so important to encourage your depressed and chronically low-energy friends when they accomplish tasks, even if they’re operating at a level of subdivision that you don’t recognize. It is an accomplishment to get water and actually drink it for some folks. It is an accomplishment to get to class or to work. 

And acknowledging how hard someone is trying and how much energy they’re putting towards accomplishing those tasks can make a huge difference in whether they feel worthless and hopeless or whether they feel like it’s worth it to keep doing what they can.

torrentofbabies:

metapianycist:

theubergrump:

I keep seeing stuff about Lord of the Flies going around

Obviously, the individual experiences of the people making the posts – re: teachers, lessons, the way they were forced to study the book – aren’t up for debate

but like, I feel that people might not have the whole story here and as someone who knows far too much about literature, I wanted to talk about it a little

Sir William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in response to an earlier novel called The Coral Island. In The Coral Island, a small group of upper-class British boys from a boarding school get stranded on an island and have an absolutely wonderful time. They look back on it as a fond adventure, where they had a little vacation, invented things, and generally made their well-bred high society English parents proud.

Sir William Golding read that novel and was disgusted by the way that R. M. Ballantyne used the plot as a huge essay on the superior intellect and higher morality of English folk (read: white people). The boys in The Coral Island eventually have to seek the aid of Christian missionaries (who are there to convert the local Polynesian populace) to save them from the natives who are written as raping pillaging amoral cannibals.

Sir William Golding set out to write a more realistic novel, by the way, using the same names for his main characters as Ballantyne did (although Golding’s characters are slightly younger). So, all the posts about Lord of the Flies showing the “human condition” insofar as it pertains to young middle-class British boys who grew up in a boarding house in the middle of the Cold War are correct. But I get the feeling that most people don’t realize that was the point of the novel.

Lord of the Flies was meant as a huge “fuck you” to the ingrained belief that English people are the most noble and wise of all people and thus incapable of descending into savagery. I doubt it was ever meant to be a sweeping generalized metaphor for the universal savage nature of humanity, and shame on the teachers who force that interpretation on their students.

I wish that the information in this post were told to students reading Lord of the Flies more often, considering that this context is necessary for understanding the book.

I used to study Golding and I’m so happy to see a post about this!  Basically all the good Golding scholars agree that Lord of the Flies is intended as a condemnation specifically of western positivism and superiority, not a condemnation of human nature.  Golding believed that good societies were possible, but that he was not living in one.  (Relevant side facts for the curious: Golding was a sailor and teacher who based some of the boys’ behavior on the behaviors of his male students and fellow sailors.  He also drew on Ancient Greco-Roman mythology and literature, which is both rife with examples of horrific, inhumane behavior AND considered the foundation of western society.)  When white/western/imperialist/etc. people read Golding’s books and decide he means all societies are evil, it shows that they are incapable of not conceiving of themselves as the best society – “If he believes OUR society is evil, he must think ALL societies are evil, because of course we’re the BEST society, and the others must be worse than ours” even though the other societies are not seen in most of his books and may be doing just fine.

As a sidenote, Golding was a really interesting literary figure in that he would actually publicly argue with critics who gave what he thought were unacceptably wrong interpretations of his novels.  He refused to agree that death of the author had limitless application.  So there are actually quotes from Golding about how most people read Lord of the Flies (and some of his other books) wrong and it’s pissing him off/making him sad and please just stop already.

This is brilliant!  

Another solid point to note is that Golding never intended for his book to be universally applied to the point where it became applicable to girls or women stranded on an island.  I think he said at some point that he didn’t know enough about female boarding school students to be able to write realistic interpretations of their experience on a deserted island.  So this isn’t generalizable across gender, either.  

alltheladiesyouhate:

i’m thinking abt that scene in pride and prejudice (2005) where catherine de bourgh tells collins he can’t sit next to his wife at dinner and now i’m imagining married lizzy and darcy at a dinner party and the host is like “oh mr darcy!!! you can’t sit with your wife!” and he’s just like “please… she’s my only friend”

Okay, so 

I was trying to create a prompt based on changing the gender of popular character archetypes (e.g. male shrew, female rugged individualist, nonbinary lonely orphan), when I got to male “Earth Mother” and was like “…is that the one trope that would be EXTREMELY hard to write because it’s just so female-coded in all media and we’ve never seen a male version of the trope before?”  

To name a popular example, Molly Weasley from Harry Potter is an Earth Mother.  I looked up the official definition and the TVTropes definition to try and figure out what a male Earth Mother would look like.  

Official:  

a sensual and maternal woman.

TVTropes:  

“

We are talking here about big homely gals who have a lot of love to give, who are generous, who are bountiful, who can make green things grow and flourish, and who want to share that love and bounty in one way or another — food being a particularly popular one.”  

…and that’s when I realized.  

…

…

I’m going to get eaten for this, but it checks out.  

prokopetz:

It always gets me when I buy something from the local hardware store, then come home to find that every site I visit is running targeted banner ads for the exact thing I just bought. Like, yeah, on the one hand it’s creepy as all get-out that their tracking algorithms are following my purchasing patterns in real time, but on the other hand, what the hell are they doing? I just bought the thing, and clearly they know that, so why are they trying to sell me the exact thing I just bought? Are they gambling that I’ve somehow developed a need for a second one in the ten minutes it took me to walk home from the store?