embodiment

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untitled thoughts

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steven universe drifts away into a canopy of yellow stars and a pink and blue sky

Lately, I’ve been realizing just how challenging it is to recognize my own harmful habits and ways of thinking, interrupt them, and embark on a healing process.  Although something like this has happened several times in the past, it only took a few deadlines and assignments to launch me into a spiral of over-analysis, self-criticism, anxiety, avoidance, and distraction.  All the while, I felt powerless to stop this process, and I really hate that!  

You see, what I had been struggling with up to that point was a couple papers, a presentation, replying to emails, doing weekly readings and assignments; all pretty mundane tasks, but ones that can feel like mountains with impossible summits some weeks.  Even so, as I start to slip and fall behind, one part of my brain reassures myself that I’ll catch up on everything “over the weekend,” no problem, without the need to ask for help or communicate in any way.  Another part is already recognizing the warning signs, pointing out my flaws, and criticizing myself on where I need to do better.  The most destructive side deals with all this noise by shutting down completely. Sleeping in until 3pm, skipping meals and classes, being anxious to leave my room, neglecting self-care, and raking up my screen-time on Genshin to do nothing but avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid has indicated there is a bit more than academic stress below the surface.   

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a late night contemplation of pitbull’s discography, nostalgia, and growing old

I Feel Good Sticker by Pitbull for iOS & Android | GIPHY

Content Warning: While this post is a mostly humorous description of how music can be a very nostalgic experience, I do talk about thoughts of mortality and fear of aging, so please take note if that affects you!

Now that I’m on the brink of 20, growing old has become such a terrifying feeling…Woah woah, before you click off this post, scoffing at how someone so young could possibly be feeling something as aging so profoundly, hear me out!!  Please?  

Luckily, my joints aren’t failing me yet, but every now and then I’m struck by a sinking feeling that my childhood is coming to an end, if it hasn’t already.  A year like 2012, which feels like yesterday in my mind, was actually ages ago.  Back then, ten-year old me was distressed over some cataclysmic end of the world prophesied by an ancient Mayan calendar and ingrained into my mind by the science-fiction movie 2012.  Nine years later, I’d argue that I am living during the beginning of the end of the world: routinely chipping away at Blackboard response posts and humanities readings while my country is crumbling, my community is dying, and the climate is rapidly atrophying.  And you’re telling me that once I graduate, I’m expected to live out the rest of my days spent working for the privilege to rest and retire?  My inner child yearns for more.   

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It Hurts So Good! Hot Sauce Review
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It Hurts So Good! Hot Sauce Review

This past weekend, I was strolling through the mall when I saw a particular bottle of a menacing seeming liquid at some store that I can not now remember. The image upfront was a glittery yet jittery image of a clown that is smiling yet looks bloody and angry. His name was the “Fiery Fool”. And he was quite an interesting addition to the Hellfire Hot Sauce brand.

In an air of competitiveness, this brand claims that this was “THE HOTTEST SAUCE IN THE WORLD WITHOUT EXTRACT”! At first I brushed it off as more exaggerated marketing to the extreme but then I realized that I had just heard about this phenomenon in a recent Gender Studies class. I bought this at $14.99 but for the low low price of $14, you too can feel the pain.

And you better believe that you will feel the pain. In fact, after trying a few small drops, I was in agony. It was like eating liquid lava. And this is coming from somebody that normally puts half a bottle of regular hot sauce on anything. Was this an example of the “extreme culture” that Mary Kosut was talking about? I believe so. According to her analysis, “extreme bodies engage in practices and regimes that push beyond the mundane or acceptable”. Although this might seem tame in comparison to the examples she mentions such as body suspension, this fire sauce that burns you inside was definitely not mundane. And it was definitely not exactly societally acceptable either. Of the 5 friends I asked, none of them wanted to try it. Even just the labeling scared them away. Spicy foods and spiciness definitely can relate to her definition of extreme as challenging to “the body’s limits and borders”.

But why would anybody choose such a life of burning and crying? Kosut can answer. Extreme experiences, in her view, are “uniquely carnal and sensate”. They represent our feelings and maybe even our motivations “to take charge of one’s life and body, and to defy comfort zones”. There is pleasure in the struggle and the pain. On a more scientifical level, research has shown that spicy foods elicit the release of dopamine and endorphins, making us happier even when the pain seems unbearable, confirming this as true. Personally, even though I felt like I was going to die, it was a good type of pain. I might have died but I felt like I achieved something by taking the sauce and I could die happily…

In my view and in the view of Kosut, there is a reason why these extreme products are so highly marketable in an extreme kind of way. “They purport to offer an embodied experience that involves intense engagement of the senses that is beyond ordinary.” After experiencing this hot sauce, as it really was an experience, I know that that is the kind of experience I would pay for. This hot sauce appeals to society in this way and it doesn’t bluff.

I would urge anyone to try this hot sauce. If you would like to try some, you could ask me as well!!!

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Physical Evidence of Existence

I’ve never liked having my photograph taken. After experiencing  several years of bullying that involved ugly candid photos of me being publicly laughed at, I started hiding from cameras. From the ages of about 11 to 18, there are very few photos of me. I appear in the occasional family holiday or homecoming dance photo, but if I were to cease to exist, there would be very little evidence of my life. All of the photos are carefully posed; I’m dressed to impress. They say nothing about who I am or what I am doing. Continue reading →

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Feeling My Body

Lying on the cold ground outside of Penn Station on Thursday night, surrounded by activists chanting “We Can’t Breathe” as I chanted those very same words myself, I felt my body. I couldn’t say how many times it has happened other than to say that it rarely does, and if you asked me to describe the feeling now, I couldn’t for the life of me. I call it a feeling and not an experience because that’s what it is: a feeling. Everything else seems like an experience in comparison. The magic in feeling my body is that I am not in control of it. It just happens to me. It feels as though there’s a shift in my being in which I go from experiencing my body through my consciousness to actually feeling my body, being my body. Continue reading →

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Transformative Selfies

Last night, I took a loooot of selfies. I got home, undressed, freed myself of my bra and my jeans and threw on a tank top. I walked up to the bathroom mirror, examining myself as I usually do, making faces and posing and all that good stuff.

I think because of how closely I follow plus-sized fatshionistas who seem to perform femininity perfectly I often feel like I’m not feminine enough because I don’t dress impeccably or wear makeup very often. And to be really honest, that has left me feeling not at all attractive or sexy.

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My Last: Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvxHPtEsmFc&index=3&list=TLpeq8S1i6LwNK1D2FmPLMg93sSTLV0wpv

This video is one of my favorites. I believe that most people fall in love more than once in their lifetime. Some are just the “ideas” of what being in love really is… we yearn to feel accepted and crave that feeling of Love by different people.  Continue reading →

The internet allows for instant communication with people from all over the world. We can email, blog, instant message, “poke” on Facebook, Skype call — and, potentially, all without ever seeing the body behind the text or voice. The pessimist might assert that these communications are superficial, detached, and “not real”; we are ignoring “real” people in favor of glowing screens and lines of text.

Yet this point of view invalidates the incredible, long-lasting, very real relationships that people such as myself develop over the internet. There is the chance that we may never see in person, or even in photographs, the people we interact with this way. However, with things like Skype Video and Face Chat and “selfies,” it is easier than ever to match a face to the text. And anyway, even if I’m not talking with a person face to face, they are no less a person and our conversations are no less valid.

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image by hugtherobots on tumblr

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