- watho
- Aug 2, 2013
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The real world will, again tomorrow, function and run without me.
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quote:I DON’T HATE RAVENCLAW OR OBJECT TO BEING SORTED THERE OR ANYTHING TBH? like… okay, I did say that I hate it, but I should’ve been more specific: Ravenclaw and Slytherin are the Houses that I most identify with personally and they’re tied for my favorite House and I’m really overly defensive of both of them because they’re both so frequently misunderstood by the fandom (and I’d even say that they’re misunderstood by JK Rowling herself and all of her morally dichotomous Gryffindor favoritist bullshit) and I would really be more than happy to be Sorted into Ravenclaw…
and uhm. I’m just gonna apologize in advance for the utter and total ridiculousness of this post, you really are under no obligation to read any of this because it is super rambling and probably really over-sharing in more than a few places, but unfortunately, I am one of my favorite subjects to talk about… so I kind of started talking and didn’t know when to shut up.
but like, okay, I kind of pitched a fit about the Ravenclaw thing when freaking Pottermore put me in Ravenclaw because it was like, “ugh really? the quiz that comes straight from JKR herself is going to do the same loving thing that everybody always loving does to me and shunt me off into Ravenclaw while overlooking everything else about me that might make a different House a better fit for me? whyyyy”… but in fairness, I have a lot of Ravenclaw traits and qualities and behaviors: I do love to learn and I love just having and sharing knowledge for its own sake, though I usually try to justify it somehow like, “well you never know, what if a zombie apocalypse plague happens and an intimate familiarity with the writings of Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia is what we need to make it stop? YOU’LL THANK ME FOR THIS LATER STOP JUDGING ME FOR WANTING TO KNOW RANDOM OSTENSIBLY POINTLESS FACTS HEY DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE WAS A MESSIANIC KABBALIST MYSTIC IN SIXTEENTH CENTURY SAFED WHO MARRIED A TORAH SCROLL BECAUSE THERE WAS HIS NAME WAS SABBATAI TZVI AND HE WAS AN INCREDIBLY DIVISIVE FIGURE OH GOSH.”
I loving hoard books, and I have been hoarding books since middle school like it’s a legitimate problem. all of my bookshelves are full of books, then I have boxes of more books piled up next to my bed, then I have boxes of more books piled up in the hallway outside my room, then I have boxes of STILL MORE BOOKS in my parents’ basement, I love books more than Hermione Granger and Twilight Sparkle combined, and I still want more books… no seriously: my parents ask for a list of poo poo I want every year for Christmas because they don’t want to guess at presents because they know they’ll screw it up because they neither know nor really care what I’m actually interested in, and every single year, my list is like… a bunch of books, maybe a couple t-shirts, and like, maybe a DVD or two. and if my extended family gets me anything? it’s usually Amazon gift cards so I can buy more books. because I love to read them and absorb their delicious knowledge and then come on tumblr and babble about the things I learned and what I think about the things that I learned.
like… having random thoughts and ideas and feels about stuff is one of my favorite hobbies, and I’m very creative and always looking for new ways to put disparate parts together in interesting ways and that’s one of my favorite things about me, I have routines and very firmly set ways that I do things and I get fussy and anxious when someone throws off my groove with them but I still also get fussy and anxious if things are too repetitive and color by numbers because then I get bored and I’m not stimulated enough and I feel constrained and boxed in and like I need to go be pointlessly rebellious before I forget how to think for myself, and I mean, I’m going into academia? I love intellectual things and things that stimulate my brain in some way or another and academic discussions of stuff, like I’m literally signing myself up to research and do scholarship and teach for the rest of my life and I’m going into a profession that has spilled so much loving ink throughout the centuries on questions like, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” and, “so were Achilles and Patroclus really for realsies loving, and if they were, then who topped do you think?”
and I’m really freaking excited about this future that I’m looking at even though I complain about it all the time. and I complain about it all the time because I hate academic culture a lot of the time because it’s so toxic and elitist and we’re supposed to be all about expanding and preserving and nuancing and passing on human knowledge. like, one of my favorite books ever is bell hooks’s Teaching To Transgress and maybe I’m a naive wide-eyed idealist about this whole pedagogy thing and my philosophy of teaching things… but that book really helped to create my whole philosophy of how to teach stuff and how to write academic theory and how to do academia
(though my philosophy and my ideas for putting it into practice were also nuanced influenced by a few other people like Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Iris Marion Young, Chandra Mohanty, a few of the essays in my textbook for my colloquium class this semester, Bill the Milton scholar who basically adopted me during undergrad, Lucy my favorite creative writing professor who was pals with Vonnegut before he died, Carolyn a creative writing professor with whom I had a few really huge philosophical and creative differences [especially over whether or not sci-fi, fantasy, Gothic stuff, and horror are worthy of being considered Real Literature and worthy of my time and efforts as a writer] but like I still respect her a lot as a person and as a teacher and in retrospect I think I learned more from her than I thought I did [though most of the people in that class were still assholes and slackers and jesus, there was this one girl who I just hated because she acted like being a white bb butch lesbian meant no one could criticize her ever even though she was such a douchebag and even though Stephenie Meyer had a better grasp on basic characterization than she did],
and Ron the guy who taught my Hebrew Bible course in senior year and who unfortunately met me at one of the worst possible times when he could’ve met me because I was having a meltdown at the time and my antidepressants were exacerbating my as yet undiagnosed ADHD, and Judy my Don [faculty advisor and therapist of a sort kind of] and a really badass scholar of Renaissance Italian literature, Spence my playwriting professor from first year, Mary Kay one of my high school English teachers and my homeroom teacher in high school [though lol, I never showed up for homeroom, I skipped it to go off campus for sushi or to sit somewhere quietly and work on my latest creative writing thing], DanJa another English teacher who was also my speech/debate coach and one of my best friends in high school, Uncle Butch one of my high school history teachers who… my feelings there are really complicated and messy because of some stuff that happened that really ripped the rug out from under my feet and totally changed my perception of him and like…
it’s all just really messy and complicated and I wrote it all out before feeling kind of bad because I was airing a lot of things that really upset the fabric of my high school’s community and ecosystem and that meant a lot to a good many people and like… maybe I didn’t really have the right to go publicly telling that story because yeah okay it affected me personally in a huge upsetting way, but it wasn’t really my story to tell and telling it all over tumblr felt really kind of disrespectful to some of the people involved in it? but… the short version is that a long time before I knew him, Butch did some really hosed up stuff and he was a brilliant, kind, compassionate teacher who changed my life for the better in so many ways like, intellectually and personally, and he was my teacher and my mentor and my friend and I still love him a lot… but what he did before I knew him, not too long after his tours of duty in Vietnam with the Marines but before he got help for that… it was just really terrible and for all the lives he influenced and changed for the better, he still through his actions and the things he did ruined somebody else’s life in a really big way? and it was so much worse because when he did this, she’d been his student?
and I’ve never met her or spoken with her ever, I don’t even know her name, but I owe her like a million apologies because right when the news of this thing hit my school’s community, like… I wouldn’t say that I slandered her or anything? but I was sixteen, and I knew him but not her, and I was angry and I took his side in a way I shouldn’t have and I didn’t really do anything with this except for cry a lot and write a heavy dramatic monologue inspired by it for an assignment at the summer creative writing program I was in at the time, but like… still. I really should have given her side of the story a good deal more consideration than I did because he hurt her and it was wrong of him and he changed the course of her entire life in really awful ways, and I should have been more empathetic and I should have tried harder to understand what she’d been through and why she did what she did to him, which was… reporting him to the cops in Baltimore and getting charges pressed finally, but… I didn’t do that and I didn’t handle that situation well at all and like, it was the single worst experience I’ve ever had with finding out that someone you love and respect a lot is actually really hugely problematic so…
yeah. I have a lot of complicated and messy feelings about Butch as a person anymore and about the whole situation, but like… he still really influenced my thoughts about teaching and education and scholarship and how to handle students, and I still learned a lot from him, and I’ve thought about it a lot and like… I think I can acknowledge that what he did to that woman was terrible and wrong while still also saying that he was a great teacher who taught me a lot and influenced me a lot and changed my life for the better in a lot of ways?)
BUT AS I WAS SAYING ABOUT bell hooks: so like… Teaching To Transgress is a really really great book and it’s influenced my still kind of fledgling thoughts about pedagogy and teaching so very much, and like yeah. okay. maybe I’m being a wide-eyed idealist and humming “The Rainbow Connection” over here about the whole thing but I do think that education and teaching and knowledge and critical thinking are some of the most important things in the entire world, and I think it’s important to take all the different possible learning styles into account, and I think it’s so very important to like, make sure that what we’re saying and how we’re saying it is accessible and something that means something and makes a difference to the actual lived realities of our students, and I think that theory and writing and teaching are not inherently liberatory and on the contrary, they can actually be used as tools of oppression really easily but they have so much potential to really make a positive difference for people and I just… that’s what I want to do with teaching when I finally end up being responsible for students.
and maybe it’s not practical and maybe I’m going to get the poo poo kicked out of me by the institutional realities of academia and maybe I can’t really change academic culture and how it’s so racist and sexist and heterosexist and cissexist and classist and elitist and colonialist and imperialist and ableist and ethnocentric and Euro-Americancetric and hosed up seven ways from Sunday, but like… okay, I’m going to show off my terrible taste in movies for a minute, but Death To Smoochy is a really ridiculous grim comedy about children’s television and the mafia, it’s got Edward Norton, Robin Williams, Danny DeVito, Jon Stewart, Cathryn Keener, a couple of other folks, and like… it’s really not a good movie but it’s amusing and entertaining and it appeals to a few of my narrative kinks. and Edward Norton’s character is a starry-eyed do-gooder named Sheldon Mopes who plays a character named Smoochy the Rhino, and he plays a guitar and does weird dances and sings cute songs about everything from why you should eat your vegetables to coping with a new stepparent to the importance of donating plasma (if you haven’t seen this movie, then you think I’m kidding… I am NOT kidding).
and he has a quote he repeats a few times in the movie: “You can’t change the world, but you can make a dent.” and… that quote gives me hope a lot? like. maybe all of my naively optimistic ideals about teaching and knowledge and stuff won’t ever pan out, but… maybe I’ll also make some kind of positive difference and if I can manage that, then I think it’ll be worth all the effort and the stuff I really don’t want to deal with like, y’know, the actual practical realities of academia and the academic institution in general because… mostly, I just want said realities to go the gently caress away immediately because they’re gross and they’re holding us all back as scholars and as teachers and GOD. EFFING. DAMMIT. RACISM (and everything else I listed). IS NOT. EFFING. ACCEPTABLE. JESUS.
but like, on another note: I’m definitely quirky and eccentric, like… I’m the sort of person who, in the middle of an otherwise normal-ish conversation will just up and ask my better half questions like, “do you think Jeff Davis meant to imply that Finstock had more than two testicles to start with or am I reading too much into things again?” and, “do you think pigeons have feelings?” or I’ll just start randomly ranting about something and then have to like backtrack and explain the process of how I got to this topic and why it’s relevant to whatever else was going on at the time. like, my logic and my thought processes generally make sense to me but I then have to explain them to other people because the connections I make are just really weird sometimes and the sense that they make to me doesn’t usually make itself evident to other people that easily.
and… I don’t know, I don’t think the feels and thoughts I have about the things that I enjoy are ever particularly innovative or insightful or anything? like, it’s not me being down on myself even though a lot of people think it is; it’s just me acknowledging that my ideas and thoughts and feels don’t exist in a vacuum and that I didn’t just come up with them all on my own from out of nowhere? like… in scholarship, we use the different citation forms and works cited pages and footnotes and things to put our work in conversation with other scholars’ work and to make it easier to trace the evolution of different thoughts and discourses and… I just think that I acknowledge that a lot about my ideas in all areas of life? like, it’s not that I don’t think I’m smart or creative. I doubt myself a lot and I try not to let my head get too big about things because everyone is special and everyone probably has something to contribute to things, but yeah when push shoves, I know full well that I’m smart and creative and I have a really great mind when it’s not being some kind of incapacitated by one of my myriad mental health issues.
like… the woman who founded my high school with her husband saw a lot of really bright, really gifted, really talented, intelligent, creative kids in her time. Annemarie Roeper, like. she was an educator, a philanthropist, a philosopher and scholar of teaching and in particular of teaching children, she and George (her husband) did a lot of work against racism and sexism and ableism, and the school they founded saved my life several times over like I could never even begin to think about properly repaying them for the good they did in my life and George never even met me because he died in 1991, and Annemarie passed away last year, and if there’s a Heaven or something any kind of comparable, then I have no doubt that the both of them are there in their afterlives and I hope they’re happy, and I just hope that I can put what I learned from them and their writings and their school into practice in the world in a way that would make them proud. but, like.
so, I met Annemarie a few times when I was younger and still fairly new to the school because she mostly lived in California at the time and she’d predominantly retired… but she was just so passionate about the school and about teaching children and sometimes, she made periodic visits back to Michigan to check in on things and meet some of the students individually. and… I guess between the kind of amazing grades I got, the occasional ridiculous emotional outbursts, the social difficulties and certain degree of self-imposed social isolation, the problem I had of wholesale fabricating stories about what was going on in my life at the time because I got dragged into the guidance counselor’s office and well that meant that something had to be wrong with me (and well, in retrospect, something WAS wrong with me because I was eight and wanted to kill myself because my mother terrorized me all the time, the kids I’d known at the local public schools terrorized me to the point that I couldn’t trust anyone and still get actively suspicious when people like me and want to spend time with me, my father was kind of sort of better but still not always that great, and I was hellaciously depressed among other things)
but I was pretty sure that I was just making things up and it was all in my head because I was being too sensitive or something. so I made up problems that I didn’t actually have and I made up feelings about the problems that I did not actually have and I told the guidance counselor and my teachers about those and I got away with this for a while until my lying issue got discovered and that’s when I met my psychiatrist because the poor guidance counselor went, “okay this is way outside of my depth, I can’t handle this”… so like, I was bright and creative but really troubled and my teachers were concerned and I guess they made some kind of special request for Annemarie to meet with me for a little bit once? and like… I don’t actually remember the details of the meeting and I only found out what she thought of me long after the fact, but this was a woman who met A LOT of bright, creative, talented kids in her time… and apparently, she said of me that she wasn’t sure if my school was really adequately prepared enough to handle a rare mind like mine and she wasn’t sure if I could really make the most of my potential even at her school because I might’ve been more of a tiny little intellectual and creative powerhouse than they could handle. and over the years, she apparently kept tabs on how I was doing by talking to some of my teachers and like…
yeah, when I doubt myself and when I doubt my abilities and when I get down on myself about whether or not I’m really that smart and creative after all, I just think about that story and I remember that… Annemarie wouldn’t have said and done what she did and said if it weren’t true and if I hadn’t legitimately impressed her like I guess I did.
so… when I don’t think that my ideas or anything I say is all that special or particularly insightful or anything new and inventive or any kind of stuff like that, it’s just… it’s not about thinking that I’m not smart or creative or talented? it’s just like… I know my ideas and things did not come out of nowhere. I know that they’re influenced by all the things I’ve read and all the stuff I’ve done and all the people that I’ve met and all the poo poo I’ve been through and that they’re inherently derivative, which isn’t a BAD thing the way that people like to imply? it’s just a way of acknowledging that I’VE BEEN INFLUENCED BY PEOPLE BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE ALL CONNECTED, and like… I’ve had people tell me that I come off as condescending before? because I tend to assume that someone else has probably thought of whatever I’m thinking before and that it’s probably common knowledge or something that I’m just noticing now because I miss things a lot and when other people haven’t thought of this or didn’t know it or whatever, I kind of… forget about tact and social graces and go, “wait what really you didn’t think of this already” and… I don’t mean to come off like an rear end in a top hat but I probably do? and it’s just like… I assumed that people DID think of this already but it kind of comes off as me going, “what are you, stupid?” and ugh how do people skills.
Most of the teachers I’ve ever had, from grade school through undergrad and even in graduate school a bit, have kind of tolerated me always having an answer for or a thought about or an idea about everything ever for a while… but eventually all of them have reached a point with me where they just start blatantly ignoring me when my hand shoots up because yes, yes, I know the answer or I have a thought about stuff and I want to contribute to the discussion some more, they KNOW that I did the reading and they KNOW that I have thoughts about the reading and no really they ALREADY KNOW that I have ideas and that they’re probably really cool… but maybe I should let someone else share their thoughts and prove that THEY did the reading now. like, Dr. Bernstein, my art history professor in my sophomore year of undergrad, like. every time we met for lecture or group conference, he would give me like one or two chances to put my hand up and contribute to the discussion, then he would ignore me.
and I would leave my hand up in the air anyway because… but Dr. Bernstein, I had thoughts about stuff, and sometimes my arm would get tired so I would switch hands and he would still ignore me, and he would only stop ignoring me if the lecture hall went quiet for too long and then he would siiiigh and go, “okay, Kassie, what do you have to say about the thing.” and like, I’d had him for another class the semester before and his major complaint about the term paper I turned in about late antique and early medieval hagiography concerning female saints and virginity? …yeah, his major complaint about the term paper was that it was insightful and well organized and well written and a really great paper… but there were too many of my own ideas and not as much grounding in and interaction with secondary sources as he would’ve liked. and he still gave me glowing evaluations both times that I had him. and like… some phrases that teachers and professors have said of me more than once: “a joy to have in class”; “uniquely brilliant”; “thorough and insightful”; “creative and an intellectual risk-taker”; and, “well, I don’t think she’s really motivated here, I wish she enjoyed the class more, but that doesn’t make her work any less high quality when she bothers to put the effort in.”
(this last one was usually the complaint of my math teachers because I hate math, math is boring for me, and past a certain point, I don’t understand the point of math? like… practical things, sure, those are useful. stuff you can use to balance a checkbook and compare prices and generally survive and do statistical analyses about stuff… but like… calculus? no, thank you, I’d rather not. I spent all of middle and high school basically completely mentally checked out of my math classes because… I didn’t care. and the worst grade I got in high school, barring the “credits” in my three English classes that one term when I turned in my NaNovel instead of the assignments, was a B-minus in precalculus because I didn’t get it, and nothing my teacher or anybody else did made me get it, and nobody’s explanations made any of it make any loving sense, and I was wasting so much energy in my attempts to get it and I never got anything for that effort, like my grades were exactly the same whether I made an actual effort or not…
so I gave up and I stopped caring and I dedicated more of my energy to classes that I actually cared about and at the end of the year, on the extra credit self-evaluation part of the final exam, I flat out told my teacher that I’d straight up stopped giving a poo poo back in February because the material just DID. NOT. MAKE. SENSE. and I felt it was a better use of my energy to like, study my rear end off for the biology AP and work on things I actually got any pleasure or productive anything out of, and I told Kelly that, were I in her position, I would fail me and that if she did the thing, then it would suck and I’d have to explain it on my college applications sure and my parents would give me Hell for it but… I’d also understand because I did the bare minimum just because my parents were stretching way beyond our financial means to put me in that school and because straight up flunking a class would not get me into NYU or Bennington or Sarah Lawrence like I wanted and I owed it to them and myself to do the bare minimum, but… my grades sucked because it didn’t make any sense to me and I didn’t try harder because I didn’t feel like it and I didn’t see the point when other things made me happier.)
and like, it’s all over my academic record: my brain is the best thing about me and it’s what really makes me indispensable to people and useful to people and when it’s working properly and properly medicated, it’s a really good brain and I loving treasure it, I don’t know what I’d do without it, and I try to take care of it because I have other virtues, sure, but it’s my brain that’s really special about me.
I went to gifted and talented kids high school (well, also gifted and talented kids middle school and elementary school from fourth grade on) and still invented more work for myself to do in most of my classes because I was bored, and gifted and talented kids high school wasn’t challenging me enough, and I had more thoughts and ideas to express and communicate and share with people. I took the AP Latin exam in… ninth grade? yeah, ninth grade. and I mean, I totally bombed it because my grasp of the Latin itself was really pretty solid but Colin, my teacher, hadn’t really prepared me really well for how to take an AP exam and standardized tests and I just generally don’t get along unless I know what to expect and/or have a really hardcore grasp on the subject matter (like the Biology and English AP exams, I slam dunked the Hell out of those… but I still had to take an SAT prep course because my scores were pretty good but my mom didn’t think they were good enough to get me into Bennington, NYU, and Sarah Lawrence).
and after bombing the AP Latin exam, I still asked Colin to teach an independent study for me and my friend Emily because… I was just really passionate about Latin, and I wanted to work on translating The Aeneid because I could and it sounded like fun, and I did this even though my mother forced me to give up other classes that I really wanted to take just so I could accommodate her ridiculous demand that if I was going to take Latin, then I was going to take Spanish or French too because she had to take Latin at Old St. Mary’s Catholic school when she was my age and she hated taking Latin and she didn’t see the point of it or what I was getting out of it or why it was even remotely useful to me at all, and that meant I wasn’t allowed to be interested in it and since I was insistent about being interested in it, she was going to punish me for that under the guise of caring by making me take a class that was “more useful” (not that I regret the seven years of Spanish that I took because I don’t, I learned a lot from Sylvia and Eulalia, and without one of my projects for Eulalia’s class one year, I probably never would have found Federico García Lorca and I might not have found Pablo Neruda without Sylvia’s classes and their writing is really really important to me, especially Lorca’s so… yeah)
BUT NO ONE WHO EVER SORTS ME INTO RAVENCLAW EVER TALKS ABOUT ANY OF THAT. EVER. loving EVER. it’s always some poo poo like, “you’re smart and creative, go to Ravenclaw.” “you do really well in school and you study hard and you actually give a poo poo about our discussions in classes, go to Ravenclaw.” “you have a lot of books and you read them all the time, go to loving Ravenclaw and get used to it because you read loving books so you can never go anywhere else.” and like… just because my intellectual and creative gifts are some of my favorite things about me and just because they’re the real reasons why I’m any kind of indispensable and just because I have defined myself in large part by my identification as a writer since I was like six… that does not mean that these are the only things about me. this does not mean that these things are my only values and my only traits and the only parts of me that are worthy of being acknowledged and validated.
AND THIS IS WHY I CHAFE SO loving HARD ABOUT BEING SORTED INTO RAVENCLAW ALL THE TIME AND IT’S WHY I AM SO INSISTENT ON HOW NO, I AM NOT A RAVENCLAW, I AM A drat SLYTHERCLAW AND YOU CAN’T REALLY BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND ME UNLESS YOU APPRECIATE BOTH SIDES OF ME AND BOTH PARTS OF ME AND HOW THEY WORK IN TANDEM TO CREATE WHO I AM… because yeah, I just wrote a goddamn essay full of reasons why I am a loving Ravenclaw but like… you know what else I have going for me? a poo poo TON of Slytherin qualities and traits and values: probably as a function of all the poo poo my mother pulled with me while I was growing up (and continues to pull with me now on basically a daily basis though some days are worse than others), I am obsessed with having power and control. like, sometimes, I joke about wanting to be a supervillain or wanting to be a benevolent dictator or dammit why isn’t, “evil overlord” an acceptable career choice why is it considered illegal and rude and stuff…
but I ultimately don’t really want power in a dominating others kind of way? I want to feel powerful enough to make my own choices and I want the power and respect enough to have those choices any kind of respected and I want to have control over my own fate and my own destiny instead of constantly being told what to do and how to do it and who the Hell I’m supposed to be. (this is why I’m so fiercely protective of Allison while still acknowledging that she’s hosed up a lot, and this is why a lot of Sam Winchester’s hardcore stans annoy the gently caress out of me but I’m even more annoyed at how his writing has just gone completely off the loving rails with a precious few glimmers of good stuff since Dean had Death force Sam’s soul back into him in mid-season six.
because like… some of Sam Winchester’s hardcore stans have a marked tendency to really bug the poo poo out of me when they invalidate anything that any other character has ever been through because like, apparently, Sam has had it worse, and some of them refuse to just admit that Sam has hosed up before and Sam has made bad choices and Sam isn’t perfect, which makes me spit fire because gently caress YOU HE ISN’T PERFECT AND HE DOESN’T NEED TO BE AND I LIKE HIM BEST WHEN HE’S NOT BEING PERFECT BECAUSE THAT’S WHEN I RELATE TO HIM THE MOST. Because Sam and Allison, as characters, are so defined by their desires to just have some basic level of power and control over their own lives and their own fates and their own destinies and I RELATE TO THAT SO HARD HOLY loving poo poo. this is really probably a big reason why Derek is one of my faves too, actually, because he wants the same thing and I relate to that so much.)
but then like… yeah, I love art for art’s sake… but I’m always so ridiculously concerned with what the art that I create is saying and whether or not it’s saying what I want it to say in the most effective way possible. and like, I love knowledge for knowledge’s sake and most of the time, my only justification for wanting to learn something is like, “but it was there and I didn’t know it yet” and the reasons why it might be any kind of useful to anyone ever that I come up with are some total bologna… but I’m still constantly looking for ways to recombine my little bits of interesting esoterica and ways to weave them together into something new and ways to put them to use and make something out of them, something more than just, “I know a thing and it’s a cool thing because I think it is and everyone should come here and join me in my enthusiasm for the thing.” and if the uses and applications that I find for my knowledges and ideas and stuff involve helping people or making the world a better place, then great because that’s important to me and I hate conflict, but… my own interests and my own gratification and my own happiness are generally more important to me, even if I kind of get my happiness by sacrificing my immediate desires and comfort in the name of making someone I care about happy.
so, like, there’s this stereotype of Slytherins, that they don’t care what anyone thinks of them and I have no loving idea where this comes from, to be honest? like… HP canon says that it’s wrong. almost all of the canonical Slytherins do some degree of posturing and social manipulation that’s dedicated to creating a certain persona and being perceived in a certain way… like, Slughorn actively modifies his own memories of telling Tom Riddle about Horcruxes just so people will think that he’s not a total gently caress up. Snape emotionally abuses children to the point that he is Neville’s Boggart and cultivates an atmosphere of terror and pitting students against each other in his classrooms and does a whole lot of huffing and stomping and being snide and dismissive to people so that people will fear him and let him do his own thing. and are we just going to ignore the fact that Draco played up and made a scene out of the hippogriff injury he got because he was being a gently caress-head for like a month and a half, even after Madame Pomfrey fixed it in like a loving minute, just so he could get pity and sympathy and make people hate Hagrid and Buckbeak?
or what about the way that Walburga Black’s portrait in Number Twelve Grimmauld Place shrieks about her family’s legacy and the way Draco throws around, “my father will hear of this” because his family’s social status and social capital should terrify people and the way that Lucius sneers all the time about how he’s a Malfoy and his family has a certain reputation? or the way that Snape’s dying action was to use his last strength to take his memories out and give them to Harry so Harry could put them in the Pensieve and see what Snape’s story was so someone other than Dumbledore could understand who Severus Tobias Snape really was and whose side he was really on and why he did all the different morally ambiguous if not outright awful poo poo that he did?
QED: Slytherins TOTALLY care what people think of them and they care how they are perceived and they put a ton of energy into making sure that people think of them how they want to be thought of… and this doesn’t always work, granted, because sometimes you get royal gently caress-trumpets like Draco and Lucius and all their posturing really makes people think is that they’re whiny brats and that they suck. and that is me with a cherry on top and homemade whipped cream. like… I have no earthly idea how I come across to people most of the time because I can’t read people for poo poo, but I have a bunch of social scripts that I’ve learned and a bunch of social rules that I’ve forced myself to learn and I am constantly checking myself and how I present myself so that I can try to cultivate the image that I want and be perceived how I want to be perceived.
like… the criticisms I’ve gotten from most of the directors or acting teachers or forensics coaches that I’ve ever had is that I’m a little too presentational and that I have trouble letting myself go and getting to the emotional heart of the lines (which is quite true and totally a fair criticism because I emotionally close myself off almost compulsively and I go out of my way to avoid giving people any ammunition that they could use against me, either to manipulate me or to publicly tear me down or whatever which… seems like a reasonable fear to me because so many people I’ve known and trusted have done exactly that to me)… but on the other hand, like. anyone who says I’m not a good actrex is full of poo poo and doesn’t know the first thing about me because ahahah NOPE. the times when I’m legitimately unguarded and when I’m legitimately not doing some degree of performing or acting or trying to persuade people into thinking of me in a certain way? are few and far between. so many people who cared about me in high school and undergrad didn’t even think that maybe I wasn’t okay when I really just wanted to die because I am just that goddamn good at convincing people that everything is fine and that there’s nothing wrong with me. all of which are some hardcore Slytherin behavior patterns and qualities, never mind that they all come out of a place of craven self-preservation and a desire to be seen in ways that enable me to get what I want, which are both total keystones of Slytherin House.
so like… I’m running out of the patience to keep talking about myself at this point because now I’m starting to feel like a rambling egomaniac but… yeah, uh. the TL;DR point here is that it’s really not that I object to being Sorted into Ravenclaw; I don’t object to that at all because I know exactly why I belong there and I know where it’s coming from and I do identify as a Ravenclaw in large part and it makes total sense, it’s not even remotely wrong… But it’s so loving obvious, and no one ever takes Sorting me into Ravenclaw to new and unexpected places or tells me anything interesting when they do it, they just trot out some surface-level understanding of Ravenclaw House and start defining me by traits and behaviors that I didn’t consent to being defined by and that I don’t WANT to be defined by in the first loving place
because yes those things that make me so much a Ravenclaw are important to me and they’re all hugely important parts of who I am, but I AM ALSO SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT. not in a way where like only being those things would be bad, but just in a way where like… my traits and behaviors and beliefs and values that don’t fit into the Ravenclaw box are so often brushed off or downplayed or outright ignored, and people tell me that they’re not really a part of who I am or that they’re not important even when I say that they’re important to me, and people say that they can understand the totality of who I am without thinking about or considering these things, BUT YOU KNOW NOTHING JON SNOW, YOU CLEARLY DON’T KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT ME, BECAUSE THESE THINGS THAT YOU’RE IGNORING ARE CENTRAL TO WHO I AM IN A LOT OF WAYS AND gently caress YOU THEY ARE SO VERY IMPORTANT.
and I’m sick and tired of these things about me being dismissed. and I’m so sick and tired of being constantly misunderstood and labeled as just a Ravenclaw because of surface level behaviors that aren’t even unique to Ravenclaw because the biggest nerdiest bookworms in the HP series are Hermione and Percy and excuse me hello they are both loving Gryffindors. and I’m so sick and tired of having entire parts of myself written off entirely just because they don’t fit with someone else’s mistaken perceptions of me—so I get angry and I reject the whole, “you must be a Ravenclaw because of reasons” bullshit unless someone’s reasons for saying so are REALLY loving GOOD because I want my non-Ravenclaw characteristics and values to be acknowledged and I want them to be respected and I do feel like it’s kind of a fight for me because I feel like the people who write me off as, “well you’re just a super smarty smarty smart pants, go to loving Ravenclaw and get the gently caress over it” are pushing me up against a wall and trying to make me be someone who I’m not, at least… I’m not entirely that person. and if that insistence makes me unpalatable to someone, then I don’t really know if that person is worth my time because like…
no joke: I spend so much loving time making myself be and act like someone else as a self-preservation technique because if I don’t, then I get all kinds of Hell from my mother and she takes it upon herself to tell me how wrong I am and to kick me right in the issues and to do the same poo poo that she’s always done to me since I can remember but the fact that I’m used to it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt… and I really don’t think that I have it in me to tolerate that kind of crap from someone who I’m associating with of my own free will. because like. I’m required to take it from my mom. we live together and she’s helping me pay for grad school and she’s shown time and time again that she is never going to stop and she’s never going to get better and she’s never going to change.
but… I’m not required to take that whole round of, “if you don’t act like someone else, the someone who I want you to be, and if you don’t keep up this facade always and forever, then you’re not good enough and I’m going to ignore everything about you that doesn’t fit with the idea of you that I’ve built up in my head regardless of how it makes you feel that I do this” bullshit from anybody else. and I don’t want to take it from anybody else. and that is why I’m so obnoxiously insistent on how I’m a freaking Slytherclaw. Not a Ravenclaw, a Slytherclaw. Because I’m not a complete person or at least I don’t loving feel like one without my Slytherin traits being present and accounted for too.
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Jul 31, 2014 11:33
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