At Yale, Performative Males ( “These guys perform femininity to attract women without actually giving a fuck about the feminine perspective.”) vie for the title Most Performative Male. The winner:

Marco Getchell ’29, … claimed his residential college was the Women’s Table, [and] called being a performative male “a lifestyle.” He arrived more than 15 minutes early, armored head to toe in thrifted garb for the afternoon festivities. He clutched a copy of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a brown teddy bear, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag which held a vinyl copy of Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and a speaker blasting “Perfect Pair” by beabadoobee, an indie artist.

LOLOLOLOL

Excluding Tesla purchases from his province’s electric rebate policy as an antiemetic. LOLOLOLOL

UD lives for this shit. See also.

Because it’s funny – including the cat video.

The Met.

2/22/22

… Saturday Night Live.

“I’d love to see those Trump supporters come up with a conspiracy theory about a Jewish billionaire with his own media company. Good luck making that stick.”

UD bows to the Gilbert and Sullivan superiority of the Brits. She got the link from Jon. Read it all. Sing along.

Some people like pandas; some people like koalas. UD likes this hardy Scottish breed with a double-layer coat (you can leave them outside all year).

Although the UD clan does have twenty acres of farmland just sitting there in upstate New York, and although she and Mr UD did, not long ago, price a small Beltie herd while driving the long flat roads of Delaware on the way to the beach, I would not hold my breath waiting for Les UDs to become cattle farmers.

Still, UD follows the beltie news. There’s this Norfolk couple who just got Pasture for Life Certification; and in Sweden there’s this case of a missing herd. UD went to Google Translate for details:

There are signs that the group of spacecraft has been divided. Gunilla tells that one of the struts moves in the immediate area and is about to be captured.

This one is about the world’s richest person.

At an early age, he displayed mechanical aptitude — as a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver.

Learning to write again.

Lunch.

… a bunch of oldies so the rest of us can avoid their fuckups. From the hundreds of accounts he received, he concludes a bunch of things about how to live happily and well.

One theme that runs through his list is drift. You don’t want to sit around vaguely thinking about yourself all the time; you don’t want to think of time as an aimless flow; and you don’t want to be a “rebel and …outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.”

UD thinks that Brooks must mean drifty outsiders, people sort of meaninglessly at odds with their culture. To be meaningfully at odds is to be D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Morrissey, Christopher Lasch, Christopher Hitchens, Doris Lessing, Lenny Bruce and tons of others who achieved much. Were/are these happy people? Recall what Adam Phillips says:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.

Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.

One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence.

[S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.

Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.

UD‘s excited. UD has a thing about the northern lights. (For years she’s been trying to put together a trip to Iceland or whatever to see them.)

Don’t worry. She’s prepared to be disappointed this evening. But she’ll be out there looking.