A shocking thing happened to me earlier this week, so shocking that I’m writing an essay about it: after approximately 20 years of decisively and performatively hating Wordsworth, I found myself being deeply and unexpectedly moved by works of his that I’d previously found dreadfully boring.
So I’m here to ask you: what opinions have you about-faced on recently? Foods you’ve hated but now love, bands you despised but now recommend to all, philosophies of life transformed by circumstance — tell me all about them.
I used to think of "guys" as a gender-neutral term. I recently realized that even though I'd reclaimed it as such, many others hadn't. For some women, being addressed with "hey guys" was a grating and unnecessary reminder of gender... so I've been working on switching to "y'all" or "people" or "murderfriends..."
I have always hated a runny egg yolk, but I'm slowly swiveling in the direction of enjoying them. This is the fault of curd, which involves tempering egg yolks. I applied the theory to pasta sauces, and now I have a repertoire of pasta sauces that are thickened with yolk. Loving that velvety texture has led to me experiment with poaching egg yolks until they're custardy, and now I'm starting to fry eggs to jammy softness. I can see runny yolks on the horizon. They're coming to get me. It's just a matter of time.
For a good 22-23 years I have identified as either atheist or agnostic. Yet about 2 weeks ago, after a mountain of evidence I realized that not only I am religious but actually I have been making decisions over the last 10 years following one specific philosophy and it is now time for me to acknowledge it, embrace it and fully convert to Buddhism. Never thought I would ever be a gnostic, yet when I realized I was actually moved to tears, which is how I knew it was the right decision for me.
Not recently, but there is a very famous story between Lorraine and me about how in the space of a few weeks I went from hating mac and cheese and Panera to joyously eating mac and cheese AT Panera :)
I'll avoid food opinions, since they're low-hanging fruit. (No shade to anyone who mentioned food. I just wanted to make the pun :P )
I've begun to change my mind about romance novels. I discounted them for my entire adult life because of a couple of terrible Danielle Steele-grade novels I read in high school. Last year, the hip SFF genre writing advice was to look at how romance authors manage rigid conventions while still being original and engaging. That, combined with the RWA implosion, made me take a second look at the genre. I'm fully hooked now.
With the understanding that all personal opinions about Star Wars are garbage and should be ignored: I used to really dig the hell out of Star Wars. When the Great Quarantine started, I rewatched all the movies (still haven't seen IX), the original Clone Wars cartoon, the Clone Wars CG series, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. I realized that the movies all really kinda suck, Asohka is the only good thing about Clone Wars, and Rebels and The Mandalorian are probably the only Star Wars that I find truly interesting anymore.
Just before we all went to our rooms, I went to a vegan Indian restaurant where the biryani had cauliflower in it, and I hate cauliflower, but apparently with the right seasoning I don’t. Now I’m looking forward to one day having that biryani again.
I am originally from Turkey and I used to despise "auntie wisdom" such as "it will happen if it is the best", "kismet" and "one cannot change their fate". I am not religious but now (at the age of 38) I can understand the comfort it gives to people and sometimes I tell myself and other people these wise words.
Two traditional dishes that were common in my childhood that I did not care for were stuffed cabbage leaves and stewed rutabaga. Now I love them provided they are fixed right (add enough dill for the first and cook long enough in chicken broth for the second)
I also use to hate the colloquial proverbs of wisdom but now I relish them
For me, it started a little in Westerly, but it’s not something I associate with myself that now I will do happily (in conjunction with other people; I still don’t do it, like, voluntarily alone) and that is gardening. Particularly, shoveling. I love shoveling.
My biggest updates have been around faith and traditions.
Namely:
* A metaphor can contain more "truth" than saying something literally.
* I previously viewed annual traditions as pointless coercive things, and saw that in a healthy, loving family they are actually times of the year where you reconnect (with *something* or *someones*) and bear witness. Terri Windling's blog was where my mind was changed about this.
* There are lots of people in faith communities that are working towards making more inclusive and affirming faith communities. The fact that queer people of faith sometimes need to leave their faith communities to protect themselves is a tragedy. It is valuable to help queer people of faith find space where they can be their whole selves. Queerness is not the only important aspect of their selves.
I'm a deeply committed Bayesian (and you should be too) and so change my opinions pretty frequently, and mostly hold them with varying degrees of plausibility rather and the love/hate thing, which makes changing them a lot easier. Bayesians of my variety think that "Certain Truth" of the kind sought by philosophers for thousands of years is kind of like the philsopher's stone was in alchemy: an unachievable and uninteresting impediment to actual knowledge, given a fundamental property of knowledge is uncertainty (and therefore changeability, unlike faith, which is certain and unchangable, and also a massive epistemic mistake.)
I got here by being very opinionated in my youth, and finding that some of my most cherished beliefs didn't hold up very well against mounting evidence. These included things like "the universe is locally causal", which is a fairly hard idea to let go of, but the evidence doesn't support it.
Bayesians update their opinions incrementally in the face of new evidence, and we've had a lot of new evidence about a lot of stuff lately. I've changed my opinion on pretty much all of our elected politicians here in Canada, who have stepped up much more effectively than I had dreamed possible. I've been involved in Canadian politics for decades at one level or another, and I'm really impressed by how surprisingly not-bad our elected people are doing... even Doug Ford, about whom I never expected to say anything even slightly good, ever.
And watching my neuro-typical friends struggle with isolation, I've started thinking about being on the autism spectrum not as a cross to bear but a secret superpower (or not secret: I've started to be out about it.) I've started wondering if this is one of the reasons genes for autism are conserved in human populations, because during the Plague being comfortable for long stretches of time absolutely alone has to be some kind of significant selective advantage, no matter how much of a deficit it may be otherwise.
Evolution often works like this, especially given the overloading of the coding regions in our DNA, which all serve ten or more different functions, so natural selection is never as simple as "add a gene for X"... more like a ten-dimensional slider that interacts with a whole bunch of other ten-dimensional sliders to generate some kind of wobbly adequacy, if we're lucky.
I also discovered recently that I like grapefruit, after decades of despising it.
Yegods, what of my life today would I have recognized as a child? I own dogs; I eat spicy food; I limit myself to one wall of books; I drink coffee once a week and consider it a treat. But recently: within the past year I've become a diehard fan of _Survivor_. Imagine that. It turns out that, instead of artificially forcing _Lord of the Flies_ on real people, nine seasons out of ten it's teaching a subversively progressive agenda about respect, diversity, and human connection. Plus those obstacle courses bring back all my childhood-guilty-pleasure memories of _Battle of the Network Stars_. Who knew?
As for Wordsworth, though I've never outright hated his work — (the _teaching_ of Wordsworth, on the other hand, but that's another story) — I've certainly always found him easy to pastiche & deride. So when I saw your tweet the other day, I'm afraid I acted on the urge to doggerel before reading any further … and yet, when I did, and read the few lines you quoted in comments, darned if they didn't hit me harder than I ever expected. So I think maybe I also need to go back and read the _Prelude_ as an adult.
I feel as if I have not changed my mind on anything...but I have noticed that my consumption of TV has really declined...since wah The Good Place ended, I have lost most interest. Still feeling crushed the philosophical mental conversations stimulated and brought back by the show are basically over.
My enthusiasm for Grimes and her music has swung back and forth pretty emphatically over the years: insistent resistance to her popularity to begin with (out of a sense of contrarianism more than anything else), then I listened to ‘Oblivion’ and was quite taken with it and subsequently got really into Art Angels, then she got together with one of the most obnoxious capitalists out there and started espousing some of his principles and I’ve abandoned all interest in her work.
Far be it from me to criticise anyone for being publicly pretty weird - I myself am weird all the way down - but these days her weirdness seems very selfish, or at least self-serving, and as a result I can’t particularly see a way back to enjoying her music as I used to. Which is sad, because in a happier time I used to get a lot out of it.
I used to think of "guys" as a gender-neutral term. I recently realized that even though I'd reclaimed it as such, many others hadn't. For some women, being addressed with "hey guys" was a grating and unnecessary reminder of gender... so I've been working on switching to "y'all" or "people" or "murderfriends..."
I have always hated a runny egg yolk, but I'm slowly swiveling in the direction of enjoying them. This is the fault of curd, which involves tempering egg yolks. I applied the theory to pasta sauces, and now I have a repertoire of pasta sauces that are thickened with yolk. Loving that velvety texture has led to me experiment with poaching egg yolks until they're custardy, and now I'm starting to fry eggs to jammy softness. I can see runny yolks on the horizon. They're coming to get me. It's just a matter of time.
Mushrooms. I used to HATE mushrooms and now suddenly it's like a switch was flipped and I find myself craving them.
For a good 22-23 years I have identified as either atheist or agnostic. Yet about 2 weeks ago, after a mountain of evidence I realized that not only I am religious but actually I have been making decisions over the last 10 years following one specific philosophy and it is now time for me to acknowledge it, embrace it and fully convert to Buddhism. Never thought I would ever be a gnostic, yet when I realized I was actually moved to tears, which is how I knew it was the right decision for me.
Not recently, but there is a very famous story between Lorraine and me about how in the space of a few weeks I went from hating mac and cheese and Panera to joyously eating mac and cheese AT Panera :)
I'll avoid food opinions, since they're low-hanging fruit. (No shade to anyone who mentioned food. I just wanted to make the pun :P )
I've begun to change my mind about romance novels. I discounted them for my entire adult life because of a couple of terrible Danielle Steele-grade novels I read in high school. Last year, the hip SFF genre writing advice was to look at how romance authors manage rigid conventions while still being original and engaging. That, combined with the RWA implosion, made me take a second look at the genre. I'm fully hooked now.
With the understanding that all personal opinions about Star Wars are garbage and should be ignored: I used to really dig the hell out of Star Wars. When the Great Quarantine started, I rewatched all the movies (still haven't seen IX), the original Clone Wars cartoon, the Clone Wars CG series, Rebels, and The Mandalorian. I realized that the movies all really kinda suck, Asohka is the only good thing about Clone Wars, and Rebels and The Mandalorian are probably the only Star Wars that I find truly interesting anymore.
Just before we all went to our rooms, I went to a vegan Indian restaurant where the biryani had cauliflower in it, and I hate cauliflower, but apparently with the right seasoning I don’t. Now I’m looking forward to one day having that biryani again.
I am originally from Turkey and I used to despise "auntie wisdom" such as "it will happen if it is the best", "kismet" and "one cannot change their fate". I am not religious but now (at the age of 38) I can understand the comfort it gives to people and sometimes I tell myself and other people these wise words.
After reading The Breakbeat Poets for the last couple of years, I revisited "The Wasteland," and I was surprised at how old it suddenly feels.
Two traditional dishes that were common in my childhood that I did not care for were stuffed cabbage leaves and stewed rutabaga. Now I love them provided they are fixed right (add enough dill for the first and cook long enough in chicken broth for the second)
I also use to hate the colloquial proverbs of wisdom but now I relish them
This makes me incredibly PROUD of you somehow.
For me, it started a little in Westerly, but it’s not something I associate with myself that now I will do happily (in conjunction with other people; I still don’t do it, like, voluntarily alone) and that is gardening. Particularly, shoveling. I love shoveling.
My biggest updates have been around faith and traditions.
Namely:
* A metaphor can contain more "truth" than saying something literally.
* I previously viewed annual traditions as pointless coercive things, and saw that in a healthy, loving family they are actually times of the year where you reconnect (with *something* or *someones*) and bear witness. Terri Windling's blog was where my mind was changed about this.
* There are lots of people in faith communities that are working towards making more inclusive and affirming faith communities. The fact that queer people of faith sometimes need to leave their faith communities to protect themselves is a tragedy. It is valuable to help queer people of faith find space where they can be their whole selves. Queerness is not the only important aspect of their selves.
I'm a deeply committed Bayesian (and you should be too) and so change my opinions pretty frequently, and mostly hold them with varying degrees of plausibility rather and the love/hate thing, which makes changing them a lot easier. Bayesians of my variety think that "Certain Truth" of the kind sought by philosophers for thousands of years is kind of like the philsopher's stone was in alchemy: an unachievable and uninteresting impediment to actual knowledge, given a fundamental property of knowledge is uncertainty (and therefore changeability, unlike faith, which is certain and unchangable, and also a massive epistemic mistake.)
I got here by being very opinionated in my youth, and finding that some of my most cherished beliefs didn't hold up very well against mounting evidence. These included things like "the universe is locally causal", which is a fairly hard idea to let go of, but the evidence doesn't support it.
Bayesians update their opinions incrementally in the face of new evidence, and we've had a lot of new evidence about a lot of stuff lately. I've changed my opinion on pretty much all of our elected politicians here in Canada, who have stepped up much more effectively than I had dreamed possible. I've been involved in Canadian politics for decades at one level or another, and I'm really impressed by how surprisingly not-bad our elected people are doing... even Doug Ford, about whom I never expected to say anything even slightly good, ever.
And watching my neuro-typical friends struggle with isolation, I've started thinking about being on the autism spectrum not as a cross to bear but a secret superpower (or not secret: I've started to be out about it.) I've started wondering if this is one of the reasons genes for autism are conserved in human populations, because during the Plague being comfortable for long stretches of time absolutely alone has to be some kind of significant selective advantage, no matter how much of a deficit it may be otherwise.
Evolution often works like this, especially given the overloading of the coding regions in our DNA, which all serve ten or more different functions, so natural selection is never as simple as "add a gene for X"... more like a ten-dimensional slider that interacts with a whole bunch of other ten-dimensional sliders to generate some kind of wobbly adequacy, if we're lucky.
I also discovered recently that I like grapefruit, after decades of despising it.
Yegods, what of my life today would I have recognized as a child? I own dogs; I eat spicy food; I limit myself to one wall of books; I drink coffee once a week and consider it a treat. But recently: within the past year I've become a diehard fan of _Survivor_. Imagine that. It turns out that, instead of artificially forcing _Lord of the Flies_ on real people, nine seasons out of ten it's teaching a subversively progressive agenda about respect, diversity, and human connection. Plus those obstacle courses bring back all my childhood-guilty-pleasure memories of _Battle of the Network Stars_. Who knew?
As for Wordsworth, though I've never outright hated his work — (the _teaching_ of Wordsworth, on the other hand, but that's another story) — I've certainly always found him easy to pastiche & deride. So when I saw your tweet the other day, I'm afraid I acted on the urge to doggerel before reading any further … and yet, when I did, and read the few lines you quoted in comments, darned if they didn't hit me harder than I ever expected. So I think maybe I also need to go back and read the _Prelude_ as an adult.
I feel as if I have not changed my mind on anything...but I have noticed that my consumption of TV has really declined...since wah The Good Place ended, I have lost most interest. Still feeling crushed the philosophical mental conversations stimulated and brought back by the show are basically over.
My enthusiasm for Grimes and her music has swung back and forth pretty emphatically over the years: insistent resistance to her popularity to begin with (out of a sense of contrarianism more than anything else), then I listened to ‘Oblivion’ and was quite taken with it and subsequently got really into Art Angels, then she got together with one of the most obnoxious capitalists out there and started espousing some of his principles and I’ve abandoned all interest in her work.
Far be it from me to criticise anyone for being publicly pretty weird - I myself am weird all the way down - but these days her weirdness seems very selfish, or at least self-serving, and as a result I can’t particularly see a way back to enjoying her music as I used to. Which is sad, because in a happier time I used to get a lot out of it.