Itinerantdaughter's Blog

My husband pointed out to me the other day that I “don’t blog anymore,” which I knew already because I’ve been slowly eaten away by guilt about it over the past few months. Life is really hectic when you have prestige television to consume and a dead animal rotting in your basement! (Speaking of being eaten away.)

Anyway, to tide you all over until my longer post materializes, here is an amazing (to me) comic I drew at the beginning of the pandemic. The truth is I’m just ok at drawing, but I was like, I got this! And then I did it and it never came out *exactly* right. And then my friend who IS amazing at drawing was like, I can do it for you! But I had already submitted to The New Yorker on a whim (rejected!) and I thought I’d better see that through before she took over, and now I feel awkward raising the conversation again. This is the most possibly pointless mental wormhole of all time.

“Hamblin enjoyed a reputation of unimpeachable integrity among the Saints of southern Utah, who called him ‘Honest Jake. The historical record plainly shows, however, that Hamblin had no compunction about ‘lying for the Lord’ when he thought it would advance the goals of the Kingdom of God. Indeed, the record also shows that Hamblin was quite willing to lie through his teeth simply to enrich himself. It’s worth noting that John D. Lee had his own nicknames for Hamblin: ‘Dirty Fingered Jake’ and ‘the fiend of Hell.'”

~Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Butterscotch yellow quilted satin mini-pumps with a buckle and fur. Amazing! From the 1995 movie A Little Princess. Yes, I re-watched it recently; yes, I thought about the plot through the lens of contemporary issues (“Just because you’re nice to the slave at boarding school doesn’t mean you get off the hook for being a colonizer in India, Sarah!”); yes, I am fine with being a capitalist POS if it means I can have these shoes.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a thread on therapist-dedicated subreddit, in which the original poster asked if anyone else who worked with offenders felt uncomfortable with the concept of cancel culture. A few interesting anecdotes and ideas came up, that led to lots of questions (in my head, that is) about cancel culture, but the most interesting thing to come out of it was this:

I work primarily with OCD and anxiety disorders and I’ve seen [fear of being canceled] popping up more and more in OCD content in the form of moral scrupulosity. Compulsions are often checking and re-checking accounts to make sure they didn’t accidentally say or post something homophobic, racist, or otherwise offensive.

This is so fascinating to me! It’s like, the newest version of Truman Show Delusion! If the person who is to Internet Scrupulosity what Marc Feldman is to Munchausen’s by Internet is out there, please get in touch so I can write a long form piece about your attempt to get this into the DSM!