oh performative social media
Jun. 17th, 2019 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Am feeling slightly guilty, as I scroll through Instagram and see everyone's tribute posts to their fathers. I don't have a particularly troubled relationship with my dad; he's got mildly offensive political opinions he only trots out for funsies occasionally, he volunteers his time for apolitical but good causes, he's kind to people in real life, and he was an excellent father to me growing up; in hindsight, it might be because all of us were daughters, and so we didn't realize he is somewhat sexist in his outlooks on the world, but since there were no boys to be treated differently, he unwittingly instilled in us a strong sense of gender equality.
Anyhow.
He does not participate in any social media, and so if I did do a sappy tribute to him online, he would not know. He also was busy yesterday, so I did not so much as text him a greeting; he was occupied, on and off of several planes returning home from a lovely vacation with my mother, so he wouldn't have had time to get a message.
Anyhow, it first guilted me and then tempted me to make a grouchy post about how meaningless these holidays are, and how insipid and performative most people's tribute posts are, but I managed to restrain myself. People get to post about what they want to, and it's no more harmful a meme than the other fashions of what to post that go around and everyone gets swept up into. Chill out, B.
My heart does go out, as it does at other compulsory-family-Hallmark-sponsored holidays, to people for whom these holidays are painful-- those whose intended Special Person is dead, or absent, or with whom they had a fraught relationship, or those who are whatever that intended Special Person is supposed to be but for whom the experience never properly worked out. That sucks. My feelings are complicated enough even when the relationships aren't; I'm sure it's horribly thorny if you throw in that sort of complication.
But it does get old. I'm glad so many of y'all on Instagram have derived so much apparent pleasures in thanking the fathers of your various babies for being great. Some of the posts have even been cute. Most have not.
I'm not sure why I've been so horridly cranky about it. I'm glad I can come here and vent about it. If any of y'all here reading this did make sappy "My Dad Is The Best" posts on Instagram and I follow you, apologies in advance; it is not about any specific thing, but more the weight of the hundred-or-two accounts I follow mostly doing the exact same thing. I suppose that's the message, really; things done individually are one thing, but when viewed in collective, become something else, something more, or possibly something less, and I don't have the braincells to devote to it currently.
(If my dad followed my instagram, I probably would have posted something. If my dad were deceased, I still might have. even if just my mom followed my insta, i'd know she'd show it to him, i might have. it's complicated. i'm not immune. but given my individual circumstances at the moment, and my not anyone else's, it struck me as crankifying.)
Also crankifying: I have a sort of pulled or strained muscle under one of my shoulderblades somehow and it is a mystery.
In other news entirely, I made very little progress on the Solarpunk Cyborgs novel despite thinking about it endlessly, and I am sad about that, and also I watched the rest of the Good Omens miniseries and have Human Feelings about it and how queer it is (and as has been so wonderfully expressed elsewhere, it's that it's queer on a meta level, with the entire story boiling down to how loving something you're not "supposed" to is what saves the world, and I had said to myself that I didn't need to write any fic about it because I'm over using other people's canons and what do I possibly have to say that other people haven't, in all these years of such a good and prolific fandom.
But, the Discourse over how it's not Gay enough (but it's super Queer) sort of hits me where I live, as an ace-spec type. And so maybe I do have something to say about it.
We'll see.
Anyhow.
He does not participate in any social media, and so if I did do a sappy tribute to him online, he would not know. He also was busy yesterday, so I did not so much as text him a greeting; he was occupied, on and off of several planes returning home from a lovely vacation with my mother, so he wouldn't have had time to get a message.
Anyhow, it first guilted me and then tempted me to make a grouchy post about how meaningless these holidays are, and how insipid and performative most people's tribute posts are, but I managed to restrain myself. People get to post about what they want to, and it's no more harmful a meme than the other fashions of what to post that go around and everyone gets swept up into. Chill out, B.
My heart does go out, as it does at other compulsory-family-Hallmark-sponsored holidays, to people for whom these holidays are painful-- those whose intended Special Person is dead, or absent, or with whom they had a fraught relationship, or those who are whatever that intended Special Person is supposed to be but for whom the experience never properly worked out. That sucks. My feelings are complicated enough even when the relationships aren't; I'm sure it's horribly thorny if you throw in that sort of complication.
But it does get old. I'm glad so many of y'all on Instagram have derived so much apparent pleasures in thanking the fathers of your various babies for being great. Some of the posts have even been cute. Most have not.
I'm not sure why I've been so horridly cranky about it. I'm glad I can come here and vent about it. If any of y'all here reading this did make sappy "My Dad Is The Best" posts on Instagram and I follow you, apologies in advance; it is not about any specific thing, but more the weight of the hundred-or-two accounts I follow mostly doing the exact same thing. I suppose that's the message, really; things done individually are one thing, but when viewed in collective, become something else, something more, or possibly something less, and I don't have the braincells to devote to it currently.
(If my dad followed my instagram, I probably would have posted something. If my dad were deceased, I still might have. even if just my mom followed my insta, i'd know she'd show it to him, i might have. it's complicated. i'm not immune. but given my individual circumstances at the moment, and my not anyone else's, it struck me as crankifying.)
Also crankifying: I have a sort of pulled or strained muscle under one of my shoulderblades somehow and it is a mystery.
In other news entirely, I made very little progress on the Solarpunk Cyborgs novel despite thinking about it endlessly, and I am sad about that, and also I watched the rest of the Good Omens miniseries and have Human Feelings about it and how queer it is (and as has been so wonderfully expressed elsewhere, it's that it's queer on a meta level, with the entire story boiling down to how loving something you're not "supposed" to is what saves the world, and I had said to myself that I didn't need to write any fic about it because I'm over using other people's canons and what do I possibly have to say that other people haven't, in all these years of such a good and prolific fandom.
But, the Discourse over how it's not Gay enough (but it's super Queer) sort of hits me where I live, as an ace-spec type. And so maybe I do have something to say about it.
We'll see.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-17 09:48 pm (UTC)