Nancy's Musings

I hear, on a fairly regular basis, the claim that suicide is selfish. Who says this? Those people who would rather see someone else in unbearable agony than have to deal with her/his temporary loss? What an obscene irony. The truth is that suicide can be a selfless act. I don't mean to glorify self-destruction, because there's no real glory in it, just a facade of triumph over the reality of defeat. There's not any redemption in making your final decision one of gross destruction. But if you convince a person that the world would be better without her/him, then you yourself have done the glorification. Then you have given that person the illusion of redemption. There are people in the world who will destroy themselves before harming others, and if you convince them that they do nothing but harm they will take the necessary steps to prevent more harm. Today, I am not so selfless. I am a horrible person . I undoubtedly do more harm than good. I serve no real purpose. I fail a...

I have always wanted to write a Magnificent Bastard . I find charisma and competence somewhere beyond appealing, in the range of intoxicating and breathtaking. I also love genius heroes - the Ender Wiggins, the Miles Vorkosigans, the Peter Wimseys, the Scarlet Pimpernels. . . Yes, I am aware that they are all male. This is the stuff I read. Note that three of them are written by women, and those three all find romance, so there's something about the trope that satisfies the female fantasy. Also note that the women in their lives are not quite as clever. . . That's partly out of necessity. If you OTP your genius heroine to a female who is smarter, she becomes. . . Elementary 's Moriarty. She must be the Magnificent Bastard. Because what happens if they stick? Does he become Batgirl? Or because what happens if you genderswap that dynamic? What if you make your genius hero female and her hetero-partner smarter than she is? That's just sexism, whether he's ultimately ev...

A while back in a Facebook status, I promised never to write the words "You have to believe me!" ever in anything. I don't think my friends quite understood why. Frankly, it's because it's the stupidest cliche I've ever heard. It's not actually going to convince anyone (it should have quite the opposite effect, because it's essentially telling somebody else what to think), and I don't think anyone would actually say it: I think the cliche has simply been perpetuated as a cinematic convention to express Cassandra's frustration. And yet, I find myself nearly that desperate in my communication with close friends and acquaintances. I have recently been on several dates with men not of my faith (okay, more like not adhering to it) for reasons. For several of them, in fact. Those relationships are not going forward for other reasons. These men are not really a problem (anymore), but they did cause a huge problem that reiterated to me something I near...

I recently read the novel Villette  by Charlotte Bronte (the author of Jane Eyre ), and before my academic analysis (which is far from complete), I engaged the character Lucy Snowe on a much more personal level. At least twice in the novel she stops to say "you can think I was happy, if it makes you feel better" implying that she was, in fact, miserable. Why was she miserable? The first time, she seems to be saying that it's because of a difficult family and a drop in financial status. The second time, she very oddly skirts the admission that her only real lover died in a storm at sea. Apparently the novel covers in detail only the times when her happiness is brief or uncertain, and glosses over misery, which is most of her life. She claims to have real happiness for three whole years, while she is confident that she is loved but her lover is absent. Happiness is a thing, isn't it? Lucy, in the novel, claims that "Happiness is not a potato." What she...

"Am I really self-absorbed?" I ask, on a post in a blog dedicated to whatever pops into my head. A kinder variation is "you have a rich inner life." And it is much kinder. I don't hate being told that. I live in my brain, and it's like Barbara Eden's bottle in I Dream of Jeannie - all velvet and cushions - except that it's more like a badly curated Museum of Curiosities. With lots of colors, and velvet, and throw pillows with gold tassels. And monsters. How did I become the insecure one, obsessed with what everybody thinks of her? Because if I am lonely, it must be my fault. "Go make friends!" as if it were that easy to find someone to talk to who doesn't say such asinine things as "go make friends" and "you're self-absorbed" or "you're no different than anybody else" or "you just make excuses for everything!" You can judge. The following is what is in my head tonight: ...

I have 4.5 brothers (that .5 is an in-law, not a step- or half-). That's a lot of brothers. Only one of them is older than I am, and he's not older by very much. My brothers treat me badly. They also like to tell me that it's my fault, and then explain (loudly, and with bad language) how I earned their disrespect. I don't know how to fix it. I can't take all the blame for our broken communication. Doing so would only make the situation worse, because I'd be pretending (badly) to believe it. I'm not going to break myself just to match them. I can't convince them that something is wrong, because it's easier for them to simply avoid me than admit that something is wrong and that they should care enough to try and fix it. But I care, and I can't fix it. My consolation: whether they are broken or not, whether they avoid me or not, they will always be my brothers. They can't divorce me.

He seemed to love me monolithically. He stood around me, the promises and gifts, stone by stone, building us in together, building them out, he and I, building us upwards floor by floor in a flood, a babble of seductive prose. We had started in a crowd, dancing in the grass on miles of gently rolling hills, the atoms bouncing cheerful, in and out of our lungs. We bounced in and out of our lungs, talking our souls. At least, I talking mine, and they talking theirs, but he was a god among mortals, incognito. Gods cannot speak their souls. These stone gods have no souls. I think they had them once, but found them uncomfortable things, and so ripped them out. How to describe the way his sunshine slowly burnt my skin, and the way his color rubbed off on mine, the way people could see it even when he was not near, the way it ran out of the corner of my mouth when I spoke and nobody heard the words for watching the way it dyed me! They moved back. They made space. And in that clear...