(OOH SEE WHAT I DID THERE?)

OH HAI CLEVER CALLBACK

Nilly hasn't made an announcement, but there's a rumour Erin's birthday was yesterday. Happy Belated, sweetie, and a wonderful year to you!

bonny is also one of my favoritest people, IJS.

I'm all for giving the greatest weight to personal experience of any situation, but precisely because of the emotonal import of whatever event being experienced, I do think that needs to be leavened by the viewpoint of an outside observer. If, for example, part of your headhunting ritual is ingestion of hallucenogens, communal dancing to achieve hivemind status and reinforce the bonds of tribe before you go off to collect and end the lives of not-tribe individuals, I think your relation of personal symptoms, reactions, and the view from inside the process is invaluable. But perhaps not as factual as the non-involved observer who stands aside and reports--objectively--the behaviors, reactions, and symptoms displayed.

Equilibrium is a wonderful, not-declaring-anyone-the-winner word.

(Not to reopen the subject if folks don't want to, but I missed it, darn it.) I wonder if a woman who describes childbirth as beautiful while she's holding her child would necessarily have described it as beautiful while she was screaming and hurting and bleeding and shitting and people were staring at her vajayjay. Our own subjective definition of our own experience can change. Her "lived experience" as a memory may be different than her "lived experience" while she was actually living it.

This is in fact what my own mother told me: that childbirth was horrible and she totally understood why I wouldn't want to go through it, but that once it was over and she had her baby in her arms, the pain didn't matter; she only "remembered" the joy of bringing this life into the world. The experience was beautiful to her, but only in retrospect.

Listening to people like Aims describe their experience of childbirth has broadened my views on it; I never imagined it could make someone feel powerful, for instance. My views on childbirth are strongly influenced by my upbringing and my issues, and it's taken me a lifetime (so far) to even begin to understand why in heck anyone would WANT to do that, and to understand giving birth as something a woman would freely choose to do, as opposed to being coerced into doing by the expectations of her society and/or her family. I've always seen pregnancy/childbirth as something that takes women's choices away from them.

Changing subject: I think that to get anywhere near "truth", it requires both the subjective experience and the objective description, as well as a hunt for underlying reasons/causes, ideally undertaken by both parties. Neither the subjective nor the objective, or the personal and the public/societal, is ever the whole thing, because humans can't be entirely separated from their social/cultural environment, and personal experience is always shaped by expectations, which are usually shaped by outside forces (society, family, peers, etc.). That's not to say that we're puppets, either, just that we need both the "inside" and the "outside" of personal experience/belief to really understand what's happening and why.

Caveat: I am an anthropologist. Also, I pretty much think we humans are crazy, so there's a bias.

And a competent scientist would have to agree that because an event COULD be caused by chemistry doesn't mean it WAS caused by chemistry.

(And surely any competent spectral dead grandmother could certainly make use of the available biological processes to tell you everything is going to be ok.)

There are parts of the brain that when stimulated, say, by mild electrical current, produce subjective experiences of spectral beings hanging about or of being in the presence of God. There are also portions of the brain that when stimulated produce the subjective experience of butterflies going by. But no one says that because we can be made to hallucinate a butterfly, all our experiences of butterflies must be hallucinatory and butterflies must not exist.

Or to ask if you were wearing clean underwear.

You'd think a spectral grandmother would know that...

there are so many nick names to the genitalia, but not one to the uterus

You Cramping Bitch is what I affectionately call mine.

Being pregnant is euphemistcally called "having a bun in the oven ."

Since it's one hour from tomorrow, I'll post my manifesto (on my) tomorrow morning.

Olivia asked me what was inside her vagina last week. And Owen pointed out that a movie was rated PG-13 for violence and some sexual content.

I'm totally fucked.

But I showed Liv an general science anatomy transparency page with the internal organs represented. She seemed to get a kick out of the fact that girls have a uterus but boys don't. I didn't disabuse her of that notion. She'll figure it out soon enough.

Owen just thinks sex is "kissing and stuff."

Catching up.

I have very few opinions on childbirth, except that some women, apart from those under duress, appear to not hate it enough to do it again.

Owen just thinks sex is "kissing and stuff."

Owen is right, for suitably broad definitions of "stuff."

I really felt sort of alone while in childbirth. DH was there, my sister was there but it was just me and the contractions sort of working it out.

I felt like they were supportive bystanders but nobody else could really experience it with me.'

I didn't hate it.