anedonia: incapacità a provare piacere

The following are expressions that can be followed by 😏 in text convos!

Ouh la la: a reaction to someone’s expression of feelings towards someone

Me: “I have to admit, I love Tom”

My friend: “Ouh la laaaa”

Hmm pas mal: when you find someone good looking (literally translated as “not bad”)

Ah ouais?: Oh yeah? (could be used in 😏 situations youknowwhattamean lol)

À toi de voir: It’s up to you

J’aime ça: I like that

Eh ben dis donc: Well well well...

You’re in luck! I, @khaleesi, read so much Gothic romance my senior year of college. “I want to do my thesis on it!” I said, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and still believing that academia didn’t frown strongly upon anything amusing. “No one will take you seriously!” said my advisor. “Oh,” I said, and did Restoration drama instead because I am nothing if not a rebel. “If anyone asks just claim you studied the Romantics,” sighed my advisor.

BUT I READ THEM ALL (I.E. A LOT OF THEM) ANYWAY AND IT’S COMING IN HANDY NOW ISN’T IT, PROFESSOR?! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!*

*my thesis advisor was a delightful man and I love him very much and he was great

Gothic romance as a genre is more commonly referred to just as “Gothic literature,” but that’s boring imo and doesn’t really get at the crux of the thing, which is CONSUMPTIVE DRAMATICS IN LOVE. 

Ultimately, Gothic romance stories are about the human mind – what’s hidden, what lurks in dreams and the subconscious, and what version of ourselves we are when we are quite alone. 

There are several important tropes that crop up again and again in Gothic romance (though bear in mind some have all of these, some only have a couple, and some may have combined them):

A creepy enormous (sometimes derelict) castle. This is the primary setting of all good Gothic romance. Usually, it symbolizes the subconscious mind, though whether it’s the subconscious mind of the heroine, the villain, or a general commentary on the human subconscious mind depends on the book you’re reading.

Our Heroine, a distressed woman who is all alone: She will probably be sobbing, terrified, screaming, hiding, or shaken, and sometimes all at once! She has been abandoned – intentionally or not – by her protector(s). She might be an orphan, or she might have been brought to the creepy enormous (sometimes derelict) castle by a protector who then goes “I’m going to get help, stay here!” and is summarily murdered. Or she might have been brought there by her husband, who turns out to be a traumatized abuse victim/have his former wife locked in the attic/may or may not mean her harm; then, the abandonment happens because she expected a certain person and got quite another. If you want to put a fine point on it, she is abandoned by her sense of peace and well-being.

She usually won’t be in distress for the entire story – Gothic romance heroines usually get their shit together and figure out what’s going on, take a stand, go down into the basement and turn all the lights on, or get flung off a cliff by a man who is literally Satan. Hey, can’t win ‘em all.

Oppressive, tyrannical male. Sometimes her father or guardian (not necessarily her protector! different!), sometimes the owner of the creepy enormous (sometimes derelict) castle, who has authority over the heroine in some way and is trying to force her to do something intolerable, like marry him or commit a crime.

White Knight/a dude who is not as oppressive or tyrannical as the other dude. The White Knight is not as common as you might think, but I’m including him anyway because he’s fun. Also, he’s exactly what he sounds like – someone who comes along to rescue Our Heroine. Sometimes the two men are conflated and become one character, a White Knight with a terrible secret. 

Creepy and/or skeletal and/or murderous servant. Primary job is to skulk around with a massive key ring or other symbol of authority over That Which Is Locked Away. May or may not be obsessed with someone who died traumatically before the heroine turns up. 

Various omens, portents, visions, and supernatural occurrences. Sometimes a likeness of somebody will fall over and portend their death. Sometimes Our Heroine will have a dream about what’s to come. Sometimes a ghost will appear and rattle some chains and give her a good scare – right into the secret back room where there’s a coffin. Ghosts are usually symbolic of buried impulses or memories, or they could represent the id if they hang around the house a lot making noise and destroying things.

The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764) Man’s son gets crushed by enormous falling helmet. Man decides to avert ancient prophecy by getting a divorce from his wife and marrying a younger woman (typical). Man fails in a truly spectacular fashion. (This is considered the first Gothic novel.)

The Mysteries of Udopho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794)  Beloved daughter loses everything, is given to hateful aunt, meets a man who feels a ~mystical connection~ to the natural world.  Blood-spattered hijincks ensue. Ann Radcliffe is the Queen of Gothic romance and is also known for The Italian.

The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1796) This book is so fucking complicated it’s impossible to condense to a single paragraph, but it is Important so I’m including it. Don’t let the complexity scare you – it’s batshit insane and very entertaining. *Stefon voice* It’s got everything. It’s got NUNS. It’s got ELOPEMENT. It’s got DRAMATIC SUDDEN DEATHs. It’s got INEXPLICABLE ROMANTIC ENTANGLEMENT. It’s got SATANIC WITCHES TRYING TO CONVERT PROFLIGATE MEN. It’s got SATAN HIMSELF. Run, don’t walk.

Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1817) This is a satire of Gothic romance and it is hysterical.

Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) Man adopts orphan. Orphan makes man’s son wildly, violently jealous. Orphan and man’s daughter fall in love. Everyone is absolutely fucking awful to one another, and no one ends up happy. When it first came out, Wuthering Heights was deeply polarizing, as many contemporary critics believed that the mental and physical cruelty depicted were too stark. It also challenged literally every Victorian ideal: misogyny, religious hypocrisy, social class… You name it, Wuthering Heights is coming to tear it to shreds.

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) Orphan child is treated horrendously by everyone except her benefactor, sees ghosts, is sent off to a school for poor and orphaned girls. More awful things happen to her, like having her friend die in her arms of typhus. Becomes governess for a young girl in the home of one Mr. Rochester; fires go out, things move of their own accord, and a terrifying woman rips her wedding veil in two. This one is a marriage plot as well as a Gothic romance, so there is a wedding at the end, but it’s up to you to decide if it’s happy.

Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier, 1938) Young woman marries older dashing man who is also very sad. Sad dashing man likes her just the way she is even though she feels insecure because she keeps getting compared to his dead wife, who was Perfectly Perfect in every way, and whose PRESENCE still LINGERS in the SPOOKY CLOSED PORTION OF THE HOUSE. Rebecca has one of the most horrifying creepy servants of all time. I would be her for Halloween every year except nobody would have any idea who the hell I was.

Here are some of my other favorites that I highly recommend, but don’t necessarily come up on the average rec list for this genre.

Zofloya, or The Moor (Charlotte Dacre, 1806) This book is so racist and also the wildest literary ride I have ever been taken on. Satan shows up to fling somebody off a cliff. Dacre herself said that Zofloya was about morality, but there’s an argument to be had that it’s also about the kinds of things we choose to punish women for.

Carmilla (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1871-72) LESBIAN VAMPIRES. I repeat, LESBIAN VAMPIRES.

Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853) Famously passive protagonist encounters possibly-dead nun again and again, falls in love-hate with famously chauvinist professor, describes the three years he was away at sea as “the happiest years of my life.” He might die at the end. It’s ambiguous.

1. Scalp: 

5 layers  S - the Skin on head from which head hair grows

C - Connective tissue. A dense subcutaneous layer of fat and fibrous tissue that lies beneath the skin, containing the nerves and vessels of the scalp. A - The Aponeurosis called epicranial aponeurosis (Galea Aponeurotica). It is a tough layer of dense fibrous tissue which runs from the frontalis muscle anteriorly to the occipitals posteriorly. L - The loose areolar connective tissue. In scalping the scalp is torn off through this layer. It also provides a plane of access in craniofacial surgery and neurosurgery. This layer is sometimes referred to as the “danger zone” because of the ease by which infectious agents can spread through it to emissary veins which then drain into the cranium.  P -  The pericranium is the periosteum of the skull bones and provides nutrition to the bone and the capacity for repair. It may be lifted from the bone to allow removal of bone windows

2. Skull: It supports the structures of the face and provides a protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of 2 parts:

- the cranium - the mandible 

The human skull is generally considered to consist of 22 bones—8 cranial bones and 14 facial skeleton bones. In the neurocranium these are the occipital bone, 2 temporal bones, 2 parietal bones, the sphenoid, ethmoid and frontal bones.

The bones of the facial skeleton are the vomer, 2 nasal conchae, 2 nasal bones, 2 maxilla, the mandible, 2 palatine bones, 2 zygomatic bones, and 2 lacrimal bones. Some sources count a paired bone as one, or the maxilla as having two bones (as its parts); some sources include the hyoid bone or the three ossicles of the middle ear but the overall general consensus of the number of bones in the human skull is the stated twenty-two. 3. Dura mater:

Thick membrane that is the outermost of the three layers of the meninges. The dura surrounds the brain and the spinal cord and is responsible for keeping in the cerebrospinal fluid. 4. Arachnoid 2nd layer of the meninges 5. Pia mater

3rd layer of meninges

6. Subarachnoid space

Space between arachnoid mater and pia mater It is occupied by spongy tissue consisting of trabecular (delicate connective tissue filaments that extend from the arachnoid mater and blend into the pia mater) and intercommunicating channels in which the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is contained. 7. Cerebral cortex

Ten core principles necessary for the remodeling of your brain to take place:

1. Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it.

If you are alert, on the ball, engaged, motivated, ready for action, the brain releases the neurochemicals necessary to enable brain change. When disengaged, inattentive, distracted, or doing something without thinking that requires no real effort, your neuroplastic switches are “off.”

2. The harder you try, the more you’re motivated, the more alert you are, and the better (or worse) the potential outcome, the bigger the brain change.

If you’re intensely focused on the task and really trying to master something for an important reason, the change experienced will be greater.

3. What actually changes in the brain are the strengths of the connections of neurons that are engaged together, moment by moment, in time.

The more something is practiced, the more connections are changed and made to include all elements of the experience (sensory info, movement, cognitive patterns). You can think of it like a “master controller” being formed for that particular behavior which allows it to be performed with remarkable facility and reliability over time.

4. Learning-driven changes in connections increase cell-to-cell cooperation which is crucial for increasing reliability.

Merzenich explains this by asking you to imagine the sound of a football stadium full of fans all clapping at random versus the same people clapping in unison. He explains, “The more powerfully coordinated your [nerve cell] teams are, the more powerful and more reliable their behavioral productions.”

5. The brain also strengthens its connections between teams of neurons representing separate moments of successive things that reliably occur in serial time.

This allows your brain to predict what happens next and have a continuous “associative flow.” Without this ability, your stream of consciousness would be reduced to “a series of separate, stagnating puddles,” explains Merzenich.

6. Initial changes are temporary.

Your brain first records the change, then determines whether it should make the change permanent or not. It only becomes permanent if your brain judges the experience to be fascinating or novel enough or if the behavioral outcome is important, good or bad.

7. The brain is changed by internal mental rehearsal in the same ways and involving precisely the same processes that control changes achieved through interactions with the external world.

According to Merzenich, “You don’t have to move an inch to drive positive plastic change in your brain. Your internal representations of things recalled from memory work just fine for progressive brain plasticity-based learning.”

8. Memory guides and controls most learning.

As you learn a new skill, your brain takes note of and remembers the good attempts, while discarding the not-so-good trys. Then, it recalls the last good pass, makes incremental adjustments, and progressively improves.

9. Every movement of learning provides a moment of opportunity for the brain to stabilize – and reduce the disruptive power of – potentially interfering backgrounds or “noise.”

Each time your brain strengthens a connection to advance your mastery of a skill, it also weakens other connections of neurons that weren’t used at that precise moment. This negative plastic brain change erases some of the irrelevant or interfering activity in the brain.

10. Brain plasticity is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones.