Other notes from yesterday: Chas and Tom L. are jointly the UberCool, because they're both honest and reassuring.

EV Nova is NOT cool, because I'm stuck on the mission I'm up to.

I went clothes shopping yestertoday, possibly for the first time this century. I spent about fifteen minutes in the acquisition of two pairs of pants and two shirts; one shirt for hypothetical future job interviews, the other because it was sparkly and looked cool. This should do me until about 2004.

In case it's not obvious: I hate clothes-shopping. (Oh, let us be honest here, Rae, you dislike shopping centres and the entire retail experience.)

Let's catalogue why I hate clothes shopping.

- The shop was hot and stuffy and reeked of that stuff they treat the clothes with so they don't get all wrinkly. You know, the carcinogen.

- The shop attendants were overly effusive.

- While I was trying things on in the changing room, I had the joy of listening to a mother-and-daughter pair sniping at each other in the next cubicle.

- Full-length mirrors.

- Messing up my own hair removing my shirt to try on the other one and not having a comb.

- The twitchy thought that I may not have been the first person to try on that garment.

- It's nasty.

You know, I need a weblog or journal of some kind that isn't read by people I know.

So I could bitch about them.

A person who shall remain unnamed lest people pick on that person for telling me about this has informed me what the word on the floorboards is about me.

Apparently I'm a domineering, controlling alpha bitch. (I paraphrase, with some bitterness.)

Why is this upsetting me to the point where I'm almost in tears?

Because most of it is based on lies, or (to take one prime example) cases where I was running something because a relevant president had asked me to. And it feels kinda personal, and I hate that.

I was warned, a while ago, that getting involved in the Computer Club I was up against male power, male conservatism, and male prejudice.

I didn't believe it. I didn't want to believe it.

Silly me.

And this hurts, because my intentions are good, and really, my actions vary from "would be forgiven" to "would be lauded" if I were male. And the males aren't going to believe that, even the nice ones, because they don't see it, and I've had conversations with other women before about how the boys don't like us women with, you know, minds of our own.

So much for UCC. I'd say "fuck 'em", but the mental images that produces in the cases of most UCCans are truly nauseating.

I don't want this, I don't need this, I don't deserve this, and I'm not going to *take* this.

Synopsis of the last one post, for most people, seems to be along the lines of Huh???.

So I'll put you all out of the misery of the possibility of a repeat, exams are over.

And, by the way, that exam paper was my bitch. I also stopped by my tutor's office on the way back to UniSFA and fetched my essay; got 78%, a Distinction, 2 points short of a High Distinction, and some truly harsh criticism on it, which I like. I love knowing where I went wrong.

Harsh criticism is in this instance defined as criticism which, apart from the opening sentence praising my "intellectual force and finesse" and general insight and whatnot, would have had me in tears of owie if it were on an essay which had actually netted a bad mark. Since it was a good mark, however, the implication of such criticism is "I think you're absolutely brilliant, and so I'm going to point out all your flaws so you can learn from them and get even better."

I love my tutor.

I have him next semester for "Blood and Soil: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of European Fascism", which apparently only has 8 students enrolled so far. If we don't get more Rob plans to run it as a seminar rather than lectures, which Rae thinks would be rocking cool.

The reason it has so few is that it originally wasn't supposed to run, because Rob was sick, but he got better and it was put back on mid-year.

Seminar would rock.

Rae is rapidly falling in love with history. Please do not try and come between us on account of the age gap; what's two and a half thousand years if we're really in love?

Synopsis of the last few posts:

- song lyrics and maturation

- depression, misery, and suicidal tendencies

- cricket

- drunkenness

- astronomy.

Damn, I'm an eclectically talkative wench. This doesn't even take my LiveJournal into account. The question is, do I have too much time on my hands?

It's been days since I discoursed on historical matters, and today I'm studying for the history exam I have tomorrow afternoon. How do I do that? Don't ask me, I have no idea, so I'm just trying to get enough material into my head to cover sufficient probable essay topics to do well. Stress becomes me. Fairly random observation time.

These were unsettled times, problematical for the people living in them for a variety of reasons.

Decadence.

To some, Europe seemed to be descending into decadence, cultural and political. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the spread of literacy and education brought a rise in mass culture which led Europe's intellectuals to fear a decline in high culture in the face of the growing bourgeoisie. Similarly, the spread of democracy unsettled those who'd traditionally held power, because they were losing control to the masses - and didn't trust that the masses knew how to use it.

Coupled with the rise of nationalism (and militarism, especially before WWI), this was at the heart of the "crisis of modernity" which is the subject of the history course I'm doing. Fascism and communism both were reactions to this; both are responses to capitalism. Fascism unites people, provides drive and direction, and offers an alternative to democracy - fascism, it should be noted, arises and grows strong principally in nations where the democracy is weak. (For example, pre-war Italy and the Weimar Republic; also, to a certain extent, the French Third Republic. All of these governments were unstable.)

Fascism, World War II, and Whose Fault Was It Anyway

It was observed by one writer that many of the youth of Weimar Germany had no idea of, for example, the connection between work and food. They'd never had work - with one third of the population unemployed, this is no surprise - and food came from government agencies, grudgingly and in inadequate quantities. They had no sense of belonging to anything - not even their families, sometimes, since their fathers might well be absent, or have died in the First World War, and their mothers be preoccupied with trying to feed their families.

They had no purpose.

What did the National Socialists give them?

Purpose. Belonging. Camaraderie. Esprit de corps. A focus. Suddenly, their lives meant something.

Then take on the situation at the time; the Weimar Republic, "a republic without republicans", was never strong or stable. It never had a chance at all. The people blamed it for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles - the November Government and the November Criminals - and the intense economic misery and national shame Germany experienced. Hitler had a lot to offer. The Germans didn't support the democracy - there were cries for a more authoritarian regime, one that could give Germany itself strength and purpose.

Hitler promised that. Hitler promised to repudiate the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler promised economic recovery - and delivered.

Anti-semitism.

Discussion of Hitler brings us to this, of course. Though the Nazis were nasty to an awful lot of minority groups, the Jews are the ones that people tend to think of first.

The recurrence of anti-Semitism in European history is interesting, from an intellectual point of view; from a human point of view it's kind of horrifying, considering the awful things that have been done to Jews over the centuries. What's curious is that in the first half of the 20th century it had such a surge, and why.

A lot of it is carried over from medieval times. If you think about how things like fascism represented a revolt against modernism. against the Enlightenment values that had marked the end of the Middle Ages to begin with, then it's unsurprising that a certain measure of medieval 'tude should return. In the Middle Ages it was a dogma thing. Conveniently discarding such minor points as Jesus was a Jew and remembering only that "the Jews killed Christ", it was easy to be anti-Jew on religious grounds.

Like everything, mind you, that had an economic basis. With Christians forbidden by the Church to be moneylenders and such, the financiers, bankers, and assorted rich-people-poor-people-hate tended to be Jewish, too. Now, everyone hates bank managers; if everyone identified bank managers with Jews, wouldn't everyone also be more inclined to hate Jews?

(The answer is yes. It shouldn't be, but it is.)

This Jewish-people-are-rich-parasites-sucking-the-money-out-of-the-deserving-poor element was also carried over to modern anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitic literature makes much of it without ever explaining it, they just assume it.

Then we have the fact of Jewish culture. Rightly or wrongly, the Jews have always been a group set apart within nations. It's not just religious, there are elements of cultural differentness; this means they're still seen as Jewish, rather than German or French or Boogalonian. German Jews or French Jews or Boogalonian Jews, but still Jews. This means they can be seen as the resident aliens wherever they live. One German writer of about a hundred years ago made much of the fact that if a Dane, say, lived in Germany, within a couple of generations his descendants would be Germans with funny names; Jews could live there for 800 years and not be German, apparently.

This means that if you're looking for someone to hate, you even have examples all around you to focus on and hate with close attention. (Well, in most countries. In Australia there don't seem to be huge numbers of Jewish people, or maybe it's just that we don't notice; I can believe the numbers are small if only because I know just how recently it was that our oh-so-open-minded nation actually stopped holding Judaism against potential immigrants.)

Not only that, but there are Jews all over the world, therefore (because, of course, this kind of thinking gets paranoid) there's a Conspiracy of International Jewry that's secretly plotting against all non-Jews.

Rae ponders: If there's been a conspiracy of International Jewry plotting to take over the world for the last few centuries, and they still haven't managed it yet, why the hell even care any more? Obviously they're not very good at it, after all...

Hitler - you all remember Hitler, he was in all the papers - genuinely believed in the conspiracy. The persecution of the Jews wasn't, to him, the persecution of innocents, it was a war on a terrifying enemy; a religious and ethnic group who could not be trusted, who were secretly plotting against the other peoples. (Yes, I am drawing parallels between Hitler's persecution of the Jews and the present attitude towards Islam. You noticed. Or didn't, hence this aside to point it out to you.)

Quoth the would-be painter: "The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category." (Mein Kampf)

There's a keen insight into human psychology there.

And I really got hot when I saw Jeanette Scott fight a triffid that spits poison and kills...

You know, the lyrics to the songs in Rocky Horror are an excellent example, for me, of how growing up is a process of gradual understanding of the world around us. I heard some of the songs from early childhood, long before my parents ever let me watch the movie. All of the lines in Science Fiction, Double Feature make sense to me now, hardly any did then. Then you get lines in The Time Warp, which they used to play at the roller skating rink I was attending before I turned two, like "in another dimension / with voyeuristic intention"... I was singing that one by syllables looong before I knew what voyeuristic meant.

Then, of course, there's "rose tints my world / keeps me safe from my trouble and pain", which I just couldn't make out for years.

Then there were two jokes I first heard when I was about seven, I think, and didn't get for about eight years:

Q: What do you do when an elephant comes through the window?
A: Swim.

Q: What's grey and comes in pints?
A: An elephant.

See, it's not just stupidity; I was way too young to get them at first, and then even as I got older the people in my circles just didn't use those words or make jokes like that. (We weren't prudish; we were warped and seedy as anyone else, just in different lingo and different ways.)

Meanwhile, because I'm being far too slack about studying when I have an exam on Thursday and then am done, I've been pondering the concept of writing a series of short stories riffing off the lyrics of Stairway to Heaven.

Don't ask me why. I think it's a stress thing.

Link of the day: Acts of Gord.

Anyway. Something I read has me thinking about something. Specifically, suicide. I'm ambivalent about it.

Do I believe in euthanasia? Do I believe it's right and merciful to allow people the choice of a dignified death when it comes down to quality of life? Yes.

Is it suicide? Kinda yeah.

But when it comes to depression, angst, unhappiness... No, I don't believe in suicide. And I speak as someone who tried it once, and *meant* it, too. I lived through it. And I wasn't happy about that, at first, though I was in no condition to try again for the time being. After a while I came to my senses enough that I talked to people about it.

And since then I've dealt with a lot of the stuff that was pulling me down that far. I spent about six months on antidepressants while I did so. I put myself back together, over time.

And now I'm glad I'm alive. Life is beautiful, and so very, very sweet, even when things are bad and sucky. (Because I go through bad and sucky quite often, still.) Suicide is too permanent an option. If you really, truly need oblivion, sleep. Or drink. I did a lot of that, too, back then, which is why I don't any more - because I was drinking for the wrong reasons, and I could see my own slide into alcoholism ahead of me.

Am I teetotal? No, not really. But I'm always very careful of how much I drink, and why I'm drinking.

It's tempting sometimes to believe that your pain is unique, and that no-one understands you, and that life is more awful than it's worth putting up with.

It's also wrong. Everyone has pain - everyone interesting, at least - and everyone deals with it differently, but the odds are that there really is someone out there who knows just how you feel.

I know pain. I've known layers of bullshit, all kinds and flavours and stylings. I've known the kind of pain that makes you cut yourself until you bleed because the bleeding tells you you're real, and because the big pain is just too much to comprehend and the cutting is a little pain that it's easier to understand.

I know what it's like to loathe yourself so intensely you can't stand it. I get it, all of it, and I know that it's all so much bullshit and it doesn't have to be like that. It really doesn't. All you have to do is find someone or something that you can hold on to until you can get through the dark and nasty, until it starts to lighten up until you can stand tall for yourself, take care of yourself, be strong. It doesn't mean shutting people out - you can love people more when you can live without them, because it's untainted by that unhealthy needing.

And these things are true: I also know what it's like to love yourself. No big ego thing, just to like who you are and to be happy in yourself, confident in your own worth. I know what it's like to love another person, and to be loved. And all of it is good and wonderful.

None of the bullshit matters, in the long run. None of it.

When the day gets long and contentious, I hold fast to my breath as a tiller and take each day as it comes.

(A Zen proverb I try to live by, when I remember to.)