The thing that is getting to me the most about news of Carrie Fisherâs autopsy report is not the results themselves, but the way the media is handling it. Like itâs a Gotcha momentâlike somehow we were tricked into thinking she was a better person than she actually was.
And that is profoundly bullshit.
Carrie was open about being an addict. Her opening line from her iconic stand up show (and book by the same name) âWishful Drinkingâ was quite literally, âHi, Iâm Carrie Fisher, and Iâm an alcoholic.â
She talked at length and in often brutal depth about her problems with substance abuse, her compulsive self destructive tendencies, and her dependencies to both illegal and prescription drugs. She wrote about it in her books, she talked about it on talk shows. She made an entire comedic stand up performance out of it, detailing the lengths she went to in order to try and regain some semblance of safety and normalcy in her life.Â
She was brutally honest that every single day was a struggle for sanity after years and years of attempting to self medicate a mental illness that for most of her life was mistaken for feckless lack of self control.Â
You know how they way âReligion is the opiate of the masses?â Well I took masses of opiates religiously! –Wishful Drinking
She was bright, and beautiful and bold about it. And she didnât have to be.
Carrie Fisher didnât have to stand there and take the shitstorm of criticism people launched at her for decades, let alone turn it into humor. She didnât. She didnât owe anyone outwith her immediate family an explanation for her erratic behavior over the years, nor the flack she caught for it. (Think of all the male actors in Hollywood who are in and out of rehab centers so quickly they could harness the revolving doors as a wind turbine. Then tell me the media press about her life and now her death are fair.)
But she did it anyway, because she knew it was important. And she took those bright lights of Hollywood shining down on her like a ruthless, malevolent child holding a magnifying glass under the sunâand she turned that merciless heat and pointed it at things that mattered, often at the expense of herself, opening herself up to ridicule and the severe cruelty of others who lambasted her for everything, ranging from her weight, her mental illness or her audacity to simply grow old.
Is it tragic that her addiction likely cost her her life? Yes, of course it is. Does it invalidate any of her achievements? The strength and vibrancy with which she lived her life and touched the lives of millions around her for the better?Â
âI call people sometimes hoping not only that theyâll verify the fact that Iâm alive but that theyâll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in. Because sometimes I donât think itâs such a bright idea. Is it worth the trouble it takes trying to live life so that someday you get something worthwhile out of it, instead of it almost always taking worthwhile things out of you?âÂ
–The Princess Diarist
Carrie Fisher mattered, her voice mattered. The things that she said and did, mattered. They still matter. And they are no less true and poignant in the light of these revelations.
Addiction is a disease. Itâs a dysfunction of the brainâs reward system which requires constant management and care and often goes hand in hand with other mental health disorders. It is not simply a question of willpower or the perceived lack thereof. And while sobriety is to be praised and encouragedâof course it is, of course it absolutely unquestionably isâyou cannot possibly know what may cause a person to slip or to feel like they canât cope without that crutch. And shame on anyone who says it was therefore deserved.Â
Shame and my heartfelt wishes that you never go through the things that can lead to serious addiction. Or that you are ever abandoned, derided and regarded as less than human because of it and your death turned into a smear campaign against your memory for the sake of a sensationalist headline.
Yes. Carrie Fisher was an addict, she had drug dependency problems related to her mental health. There was a time she kept it hidden, but after she made the decision to come out about it, she stuck by that decision and became a champion, for herself and everyone like her who struggles. Because she never wanted anyone to suffer like she did in order to get help. And she did it with as much grace and humility as she could manageâand a whole lot more indignity, immodesty, crass humor and love as well. Because thatâs who she was and she cared.Â
And thatâs a hell of a lot more than can be said for those crowing over her death like itâs just deserts.
Fuck you.
People do not exist to stand up to your demands of a perfect ideal of humanity. You do not get to place that burden on the shoulders of someone then tear them apart when they fall under that weightâfamous or otherwise.
Fuck you and your whole pretense at moral piety and the horse you rode in on.
Carrie Fisher was not your unproblematic fave. She was in fact extremely problematic, and no one knew that better than she did.Â
âI heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And while the place that Iâve arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyoneâs idea of heaven, I could swear sometimesâif Iâm quiet enoughâI can hear the angels sing. Either that or I fucked up my medication again.âÂ
the hamilton characters are the combination of the actorâs appearance, the viewerâs interpretation, and the subtle historic references in the musical. they are characters open to whomeverâs interpretation, and are flexible beings that have base features. historic context does not need to be applied, though it can be.
we are not idolizing historic figures.
they were terrible people. we know that the real thomas jefferson, james madison, and george washington owned slaves. we know that alexander hamilton cheated on his wife and wasnât very sorry about it.
in the musical, there are historical inaccuracies that build up the plot, theyâre not the same character. philip hamilton didnât die because his opponent shot him at seven, the election of 1800 was before his death, and eliza had already forgiven alexander before it even happened.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood theyâre trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back âYay for youâŚ.â how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. Itâs FASCINATING. I never know the mood theyâre trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
âHa⌠right.â
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like âwhat the actual hell?â and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didnât want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that sheâs using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create âmore space between wordsâ because it âjust looks better to herâ. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate âdownswingâ, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesnât. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
âYay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?â
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
âYay. That sounds great⌠where are we meeting?â
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like âhappy/approvalâ to my eye, whereas my motherâs looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, âditzyâ and âloudâ. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when Iâm constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I âwrote like an airhead who never learned proper Englishâ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my motherâs generation by and large didnât grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so âconversational writingâ was not a thing she had to master.Â
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like weâre scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like sheâs expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how sheâs writing, itâs always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of âhow would this sound if you said it out loud?â
has this reached the level of code-switching yet? âcause it sure feels like it.
I mean, I work with ppl in their 40s/50s/60s who are damn sharp when it comes to tech, being engineers, but they mostly talk amongst themselves, from what I can tell. So they show little to no influence from 20s/30s style texting, let alone the under-20 crowd (and yes, I see subtle differences in each). Or maybe itâs that being mostly over-40, they see their style as dominating any work-related conversations? and donât see why they need to code-switch.
But geez I feel like Iâm doing this switching thing all the time, based on who Iâm texting/DMing. 40-plus? All-caps and theyâll recoil like youâre screaming. Under-20? theyâll do entire lines in all-caps and it just means a kind of frantic excitement. Roughly, yolo and orz seem to be 20s/30s. I see lmao and rofl mostly from 40+. Under about 30, I see âahahaâ instead of lol, while 20s/30s will do âlololâ. Ones like afaict or bbiaf are 40+, which isnât to say 20s/30s donât know them, they just donât use them. And ime or imo (and definitely imho) are 40+.Â
And donât even get me started on punctuation. The crazy thing is, at work Iâll do the ââŚâ part and cut way back on the exclamation points. And you might be able to tell the first few posts/responses I do in the hour after work, like I have to get that 40+ style out of my system.Â
midnight rolls around, Iâve dropped most punctuation except to indicate tone, whacked capitalization, and litter everything with acronyms etc etc and then in the middle of it thereâs a lmao and Iâm like how tf did that get in there thatâs work crap wtf orz Â
re: all capsâIâll read it as excitement if the words express some sort of excitement. I use CAPSLOCK for happy flailing all the time.Â
BUT! While editing my dissertation, my adviser (who honestly is probably not that much older but is definitely of a different tech generation) put her critique and comments IN ALL CAPS⌠but in green, so it wouldnât be alarming (unlike red). And because itâs things like âWHY IS THIS HERE? WHAT IS THE MAIN ARGUMENT/THESIS? YOU NEED A STRONGER SENTENCEâ I literally quailed. It took me two weeks to get back to my diss, after my adviser wrote to me with concern that I hadnât said anything. Turns out she wrote it in ALL CAPS because she wanted to make sure I didnât miss it. (Because, yanno, the whole differently-coloured text might not work.)
I also noticedthis back in the late 90â˛s when I was first chatting that older folks Iâd encounter in chatrooms wrote IN ALL CAPS but not because they were excited, but because they found it easier/faster to read messages IN CAPSLOCK. They werenât yelling or expressing anything overly excitedâthey just typed IN ALL CAPS because of their eyesight.
ANYWAY! About dashes versus ellipses! When I was in secondary school exchanging fic with friends (late 90â˛s), I totally noticed friends using ellipsis in place of dashes to express when characters were interrupting each other! I was pretty confused too, because Iâd read these characters as purposefully slowing down their speech and allowing the other characters to interject, whereas my friends read the lines much faster. Because to them, an ellipsis totally signaled the cutting off of speech! I have no idea where they picked that up from tbhâit was def not in the books I was reading.
starry-eyed 