brainwane | appreciating a few quotes right now (Reply)

“queer not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” -bell hooks

(via Dr. Damien P. Williams on Bluesky; I have not checked the cited source, which is a video of a live conversation)

in 2010, in a conversation at Open Source Bridge, Jim Blandy mused aloud,

"Every good thing I've ever done has been unauthorized."

I mentioned that just now in the Fediverse and a friend replied with:

"We need people who can do good and not get caught." - Alan Furst

And I'm thinking about Huckleberry Finn, specifically:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

As I wrote a few years ago: The nuance I still ponder is: Huck doesn't say his way is right. He decides he's wrong but he's going to do it anyway. He decides to be a hypocrite. He does not see himself as articulating a new consistent ethical framework under which he is morally right; he is accepting the status and the consequences of his actions in the religious framework everyone's taught him, but he decides not to let that get in the way of what he feels compelled to do. It's a different kind of resistance.
I heard an echo of this moment in "The Rundown Job" (Leverage, S05E09), when a government official tries to get Eliot, who used to do wetwork, to leave the Robin Hood-type vigilante outfit he's with now:

Colonel Vance: The world can always use more good guys.
Eliot: Yeah, well, too bad we're the bad guys.

And, relatedly, N.K. Jemisin's "Cold-Blooded Necessity".

"I think the shift from extrinsic to intrinsic valuation -- from caring about what others think to caring about yourself -- is a fundamental part of the transition from amateur to professional..."

And, I'd add now, for me, just a general part of maturing.

So much of maturation, for me, is about accepting things about me that just aren't going to change no matter what the jerk voices in my head want to shame me about. And that's all tied up with self-confidence and self-worth.

I'm noting down here a few of the bits of compass that help me realign myself when things get foggy.