< - iv - >

2021 - pt ii

you know, these pages aren't even a product of that "numbers thing" that i mentioned at the
start anymore, really. they're just where i put things i feel sort of. compelled to get rid of

i guess i feel sufficiently entangled with my blog psychologically that clearing things
off of it helps me maintain a feeling of overall sparseness? that's a little embarrassing...

it feels like i'm coming to dislike so many things, things completely decent & reasonable people i talk to are
ok with, that i observe a list of things i explicitly like, rather than dislike. it was like that in 2016 too, in
fact it's probably gotten far narrower. the difference then was i could hardly cope with the existence of a
single one of these things. now i can & i just concern myself greatly with removing myself from them
instead of getting really despondent & misanthropic & typing absurd rants at strangers

a word for just sort of, fulfilling the basic expectation of behaving as what feels like a normal person,
with the caveat that i believe i was insane & awful in the past, so instead of the normality feeling
totally thoughtless, natural, & well, normal, it feels like a thunderous contradiction of the past
malignant abnormality, & also like it may be in constant danger of reverting. i mean, ok, i doubt
anything can really take away my personal growth, it's just scary how the malignant past
has already proven that the normality is anything but essential...

i keep thinking about how sort of revolted i feel when i see the trans flag / colors because queerness is a
totally self contained idea that can take infinite forms &, while the flag theoretically represents all of
them, my particular exposure to it has led me to associate it only with it being reduced to like, cutesy,
self- gratifying, internet-centric, aesthetically homogeneous slop. like, i have the fortune of
existing in a time & place where queerness is being established as valid in a very forceful
& righteous way, but on the other hand it's like the quality of goodness is smeared over
it so broadly that any expression of it is, like, unconditionally good. & it'd be insane
for me to sit here & demonize that unconditional goodness, that comfort, but it
still seems so open to ... smugness? not caring?

like, the reform is legitimately good, & it makes me fear the comfort of being on the right side of
history encouraging people to just be totally lax, let personal standards & individuality go out the
window because everything you're fed feels good, let the gross homogeneous quality hew itself
out autonomously like with any other ingroup ... i really really really don't get how people derive
earnest satisfaction from typing something like "anyway trans women are cute & awesome." it's
a fine belief but the ritual of typing it feels so, so alien to me, whenever i see it i feel
like the other person has to be insane to be getting something out of it

i guess it's on me for having a really weird attitude, which resurfaces for me again & again, that i should necessarily be able
to personally relate to the majority of a whole class of people who only have the same material interests as me ... also,
because i use the internet too much, this whole feeling really is just an artifact of social media & the horrifying
ways that the mechanics of it augment people's self expression. if i took more time to explore, i'm sure i'd find
the people who ... explore. probably an artifact of being sheltered from abuse at the hands of conservatives, too ...

probably survivorship bias(?) on my part too. like, the people who really visibly proclaim themselves as queer online do
have a good chance of being people who'd like to be out there acting as like, the faces of it, the people pouring out
support. & if i see such an overlap between that, & all these alienating qualities, then, well, there you go. all
the most visible people get on my nerves & all the exceptions might slip by me ... jeez, i sound like i just
reinvented the whole "ok, be queer, but be quiet about it" thing but god it's like i said up there, i want
it to take infinite forms, it's do literally anything you want except let the whole current milieu
snare you into a comfy erosion of personality ... & if you really like that flag, especially
don't let alex on neocities talk you out of liking it

interplay between "trans girl," distinction between "woman" & "girl," a sense of having had an invalid
childhood, infantilizing aspects of traditional feminine gender roles, the capacity to be infantilized
at the same time as having benevolently childlike, necessary qualities rooted out of oneself?...

ooh wah wuh whee wooh. i caused the "i want fuit gummy" meme. i haven't gotten
eight hours of sleep for three nights in a row so if i go making tumblr posts
(unhinged behavior) i'm going to feel really exposed & insecure. bye

i find it harder & harder to imagine the idea of people's friendships graduating to romantic relationships. which
feels like sort of a flaw i have... it's just that, it's like... "i know you," like, like you trip & smash your face
into a table & look around to make sure nobody you know saw. only it's a mortifying inversion of that
impulse... maybe it only seems that way cause i imagine people who i imagine to be friends in the first
place specifically cause they're not romantically compatible, so naturally the graduation seems wrong?

regardless, it's like... if one impulsively fell in love with someone they didn't know especially well, it's like, you
don't build up a whole representation of your identity & then subject that to the humiliating vulnerability, instead
it's there from the start, it's a foundation that your behavior does include it, you build the representation from
it... see, like, that's where something's wrong with me, that i imagine being close enough to someone for
long enough that i could display that sort of vulnerability, & i'm like "what? oh my god, no"

more description of the time i drank a coffee too fast right before a guided cave
tour & had an anxiety attack during, because it is a memory i find compelling

right before we went in, an old guy who i thought looked sort of weird (mean of me) wandered up to the
back of the group. he followed us in. i think he was like, registered to take part in the tour, but he hadn't
been with us in the room that we all had to stand in before we were led out. so my brain, quickly filling
to the brim with anxiety, decided that would all be projected onto this guy. i became totally convinced
he had a gun, & he was waiting for us to get real deep in the cave before he shot us all

it replayed in my head over & over, always projected to happen in the next second, how sudden, how deafening
& disorienting a gunshot would be in such a small, echoey space, & the screaming, too. assuming i even wasn't
the first one to be shot. then i imagined everyone's lamps going out, or at least everyone dropping them, it
becoming pitch black, trying to flee through the dark, hoping i'm going in the right direction, trying
to hurry without banging my head on invisible rock protrusions... & someone is probably dead now.
if someone has to be dead, i'd hope it was at least one of the strangers, not one of my friends...

while i thought about all of this, i forced a smile & stared intently at the ceiling so my tears would stay in my eyes

thoughts such as "that seems like a very kind & benign thing that i just expressed... i must be getting
even better at meticulously appearing not to be a deranged freak. that's bad. people should be able
to identify me as a deranged freak, & they can't do that if i don't display it in the slightest.
there's nothing worse than a deranged freak who can slip past detection..."

but if i'm reporting these thoughts as a problem, then i must not believe them. if i believed them, i'd
talk about them like rational guidance, not like a problem. & they'd only be a problem if i believed
them. so they can't be a problem. so did i only type this for attention & sympathy? oh my god

thoughts such as "i'm so afraid that i might have a panic attack in this stairwell & earnestly
believe it was an actual panic attack, when really it was something i subconsciously forced
myself to do so i could report it for attention & sympathy without feeling like a liar. i
do not want that to happen, i do not want an opportunity to be tricked into lying"

"the broadest, most 'self-aware' perspective on all of this, where i'm generally
anxious about being performative, is itself probably a construction"

oh nooo i've gone & bundled up all my feelings of existential security into the consistency
of my bangs, i'm a complete fool, i've totally played myself, i'm just an absolute ignoramus

calling my dog "you little social mammal" in a jokingly detached way, which is something i do a lot
without thinking about it, then getting sort of uncomfortable about it, & like, language, & how the
humor is supposed to be in ironically putting my sentiment in a dryly accurate way like it has
more truth than "you cutie-pie" etc in the first place, when it's just a more specific categorization
someone made up. then feeling tangled in lots of other qualities i let be imposed on my experience
of the world in the same way, & saying "i just want you to be wordless & good"

wanting to share the experience for its specificity, but being afraid that i subconsciously designed it from
the ground up to be something that'd make me sound all thoughtful if i went & "neutrally" described it. then
wondering if the vanity i'm afraid of displaying is already present in that fear, since i'm assuming that
there's even a veneer of thoughtfulness to try to abuse, when really anyone who read it might just
go "hehe, nice" without even taking that quality or lack thereof into consideration

or, i guess if i'm generous to myself, i can just say i randomly project thoughtfulness onto things in
a way that's entirely rooted in anxiety, rather than any vanity, or desire to be considered thoughtful
whatsoever. for years i've felt so frequently petrified of sounding pretentious or overwrought about
anything i do that i'd like if nothing i ever say or do could conceivably be seen as thoughtful by
anyone, just to remove any chance of being annoying in that way... you know, i don't what my
model is for pretentiousness even, i have no idea what i'm comparing myself against...

in the last city described in invisible cities he talks about just people, who "avoid nervous & complicated
moods." i've been thinking about that phrase a lot. that's been such a constant for years, that little makes me
feel more guilty or irritating than a "nervous or complicated mood," nothing seems more foul than indulging
an attempt at conveying a thing that seems impossible to convey without an excess of words & an expectation
to put more energy into reading them. it just feels like the most disgraceful thing i can imagine, to like... betray
a composed simplicity that is so easy to maintain & so much more pleasant for myself & anyone i'm exposed to

but then... verbosity is still something, it's more, like... it can probably have its own
value, it's fleshed out, it's detail where there could be a void, it's there for anyone
who wants it... detail or sparseness? detail or sparseness?? detail or sparseness???

this is too sad of a veneer to put over a nice & cute event, but after my teacher gifted me those socks i got
really uncomfortable & left the office quickly, even though i was surprised & grateful... something just
felt very wrong, in a way that feels irrational on my part. there is just something in me that makes
even the slightest deepening of a social relation with anyone i'm acquainted with feel very
wrong & bad. it's why i don't know anyone face-to-face. i wish i understood it

i drop coins on a shelf while alone in my room. a bunch of them roll off onto the floor.i think "heh, it's like i
can't get the coins onto the shelf. kinda cute as a suggestion of ineptness, what with cuteness necessarily
being a product of brief displays or invocations of helplessness, i think. pretty cute coins event"

the subset of dances & running gaits that are compatible with breasts

every day it's just, like, yesterday, i walk home with a book in my hands, randomly cringe at an embarrassing
memory, then get sort of concerned that long ago i might have seen a movie or tv show where a character
walking with a book in their hands might have cringed in the same way, so i worry that i subconsciously
did it as a little performance for myself in a very shamefully, juvenilely gratifying way, as if i'm
trying to suggest to myself that i have some like, dramatic & dignified quality reserved for fictional
characters. then moving on to the final stage where i decide that this entire concern was the same
kind of juvenile performance, just performed for myself in my head by thinking sentences

i stare at the beautiful tree in my backyard, then feel kind of manic

'The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live
every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the
inferno & become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky & demands constant vigilance &
apprehension: seek & learn to recognize who & what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them
endure, give them space.' (italo calvino, invisible cities) <<< thinking of looking at a tree in the perfect
temperature & becoming the positive half of a dualized state where in one it's so obvious how many
things are literally Hell & in the other it's impossible to notice because the foundation of my
existence becomes the compromising with, or reacting to, or having to willfully ignore, all
of those things or respond to them or translate them into irony... like it's hard to put into
words, like making the compromise of accepting a million microscopic offenses as
the conditions inside of me that i'll start at for thinking anything... instead
of the tree that should just effortlessly annihilate all of it...

also, the way that the legitimate true feeling that a whole cultural setting is literally Hell interacts with e.g. a "relatable
expression" self-deprecatory joke here of the site being "literally Hell"... also thinking of fear of there being nothing you
can say here that isn't affected by its being here. a few nights ago i also thought about making good private resolutions
to myself that have the condition that they only work if i keep them a secret... incommunicable things in general...
maybe it's so so easy to be lulled back into things that are literally Hell being the baseline to start anything
from, it's very scary, & maybe it all slips so cleanly back into normality & maybe everything that was
so obvious & pure before stops being either of those things...

heaven is earth as-is just without being obliged to eat or drink or breathe or sleep or slip into any concerns that are a buffer
between you & those obligations!!!... i guess if dead people got to wander the earth as ghosts that would be like heaven then.
what's the point of being alive if you're not permitted to go outside during any & every time that it feels good & calm &
warm... being able to look at a tree & think "tree" is good but being forced to by the language center of my brain maybe
isn't that great. it's crazy how hard it is to meditate & keep my head empty... its comforting to think of myself as "an
'observer' plunked into the condition of being human to react to it" but everyone's thoughts r probably totally
biased by being human in ways that r totally undiagnosable! or they're literally not. it's ok, i can just type
things that aren't true & even be snottily confident about it & it literally doesn't matter unless i'm
engaging in Hellish preconceptions that anyone can call it mean adjectives & it can remotely matter

there's always a conflict between... do you set just standards that you focus on making your
happiness contingent on them then realizing them, or do you try to make yourself happy in any
conditions, or a balance between them... someone never go outside & they're happy. do they
find happiness in being inside or do they yearn to be outside yet they're truly happy? my
idealization of the tree is just romanticizing something i like... i want to believe
in people who want to frolic through meadows over all else

it makes me feel like a biased sillyhead that i prefer intact fabrics to
torn fabrics, that i'm actually distressed by the tearing of fabrics

"i really don't know when it was that i first experienced the surprise that i existed, surprise accompanied
by a touch of fear that i could just as easily have not existed, or been a stick, or a dandelion, or a
goat's leg, or a snail. or even a stone. at times it seems to me that this happened before the war,
& therefore in the period dealt with here, but i am not sure. in any case the feeling of surprise
was never to leave me, although it did not become an obsession. it was to visit me in different
ways, & i would react to it in different ways, sometimes dismissing it as nonsense, a thing
to be ashamed of, like a deformity. & the question haunted me: why are these &
not other thoughts entering my head, & what governs & directs them?"

"in the case of adults, an amorphous, meaningless existence isn't right- but for a child?"

"in the bedroom were two things that fed my earliest imaginings: the ceiling & a large iron chest. lying
on my back when i was very small, i would look at the ceiling, at its plaster relief of oak leaves &,
between the leaves, bumps of acorns. they occupied an important place in my mental life. i wanted
to pick them, but not really, as if i understood, even at that age, that the intensity of a wish
is more important than its fulfillment. something of this infant mysticism passed to real,
ordinary acorns; removing their caps seemed to me, for years, a portentous thing, a kind of
transformation. my attempt to explain how important this was to me- it is probably in vain"

any time i shower & get my bangs wet enough that i have to entirely redo blow drying them, i become
convinced there was some magical perfect factor that kept them looking ok, which i destroyed &
won't be able to restore. i get really fixated on them for days. it's like a transient illness

i have a bad habit of eavesdropping sometimes. it's hard to force myself to miss a conversation i
overhear. it's like i'm hungry for the stimulating dynamics of conversations but so unsocialized
& accustomed to listening that i feel totally reliant on others to have conversations for me

each day i'm more convinced that anything good on the internet is a transmission of something with an origin
totally unrelated to the internet, & that it's really hard to find any culture produced here that isn't kind of puerile
& awful. even with stuff that tries its best in good faith to be good, like good-natured, i get this weird uncanny
valley feeling that it's missing some fundamental quality i can't quite place... ok i thought of some exceptions,
so, the stuff i said doesn't apply to some stuff i just thought of. just wanna make that clear...

i think anything on the internet that tries to make some aspect of reality feel like an epistolary narrative made for
you to consume is evil e.g. an extreme example of this is k--- f----. see also the "final fantasy house" or templeos

(falling asleep with someone on a video call) sigh they're not even capable of murdering
me, there's no room for it to be significant & trustworthy that they are not doing so...

my total lack of drive to check up on people or ask them about themselves or how they're doing feels like it can
only indicate that i earnestly don't care about others at all, which feels bad, & which in another person i might
criticize as a personal failing, to just put in the effort of caring, or to apply some willfully guided way of
developing the trait of naturally caring. but in myself i can't really rationalize it, i guess because it
feels so ingrained & true, & i don't know what exactly is wrong inside me that ultimately sums to
not caring. i can't directly experience other people's cognition & compare it to my own so
that i know what is wrong, i can only compare my behavior to theirs

i don't care, but i do recognize, or at least believe, that not caring is no way to live!

i really never dwell on feeling isolated anymore but last night it hurt to think about the sheer variety
of things that might've occupied a lot of my time had i had the right people in my life & the psychological
toolset to realize the potential between me & them... countless un-had sits & drives & walks where i'd
hope to have found myself more capable of holding a conversation than i tend to assume i am...

questionably accurate but useful assumptions i maintain about social media: nearly everything on it (or that spills out of it into
my personal interactions) is an infohazard where even if i think i know why something is really dumb, if i bother commenting on
it in any meaningful way & let it into my brain as a legitimate or meaningful idea for .01 seconds it'll permanently rip my
soul out. also, everything is just purposefully repugnant to give me things to feel like i could "perceptively criticize"
instead of "buy into," & the trick is they'd rip my soul out regardless. the structure of social media probably gives
nearly everything produced on it a kernel of horrible fundamental wrongness, & it's safe to arrive at this conclusion
about something long before i can articulate or even feel it. any thing might be perverted in such a basic way
that it is really difficult to articulate. if i don't think of everything like war being actively waged against me to
purposefully damage my personality & dissociate me from my private local physical normal life, it'll happen to me

reading music reviews is always tempting but in my experience they can completely & irreversibly screw my ability to have a
real relationship with a given piece of music by prescribing a meaning to it or saying it's a particular form of commentary.
which totally destroys & overwrites its ability to unfetteredly entangle with the peculiarities of my life & develop its
own unique idiosyncratic meaning. now it can't paint its qualities onto the places & events it's present for, or take
its qualities from them. it's just a self-contained representation of that single meaning, unrelated to any place or
situation. like an object i'd take out of my pocket & it'd just sit there intrusively. oh, the album is about ___. ok,
now it can never be about a certain place near my house. a place near my house can only be a place i can go to &
play the album if it's where i want to think about ___. maybe, god forbid, that place will even take on the qualities of ___

i think some publications even specialize in forcing meanings onto things so they can be the keepers of
these like profound enticing interpretations that people will seek out because it's exciting to have
it suggested there this is this powerful (& depressingly homogeneous) artistic experience that -
you too can have!!!! & it's just poison it just exists at the direct expense of listeners

having even the option of looking at my phone during car rides instead of being entirely forced
to direct all my mental energy at the things going by or the interior of the car feels like death

i wish the depressed mood from getting behind on sleep could ever manifest for
me in any way that isn't the very painful & specific & immediate way that it does

the delight & relief of the act of letting go of my self awareness & replacing it with the
feeling of feeling like a vehicle for only the aesthetic appreciation of my surroundings

get sleep deprived -> more prone to accidentally not think about love -> who knows what...

i kind of despise a ton of media that's supposed to be "thrilling," i just cannot cannot cannot
stand the idea of someone with the opportunity for every day to be quiet & calm deciding they
need to go home & like, "distance themselves from the monotony of their workday" or whatever
by just listening to gunshots & screaming, as if the scenarios can even remain "thrillingly
out of the ordinary" when you're exposed to them every day. i'm sure there's a million
exceptions i'm just thinking about lots of really scummy garbage i've had to hear

a little over a week ago, i said this:

an additional effect of this is that, when i do have very personal & meaningful conversations,
i actually get an impulse to share them, to publish them, because... they can feel so poetic,
& honest, & i guess it'd be like, out of sympathy for anyone else who feels like this?

it's like, i don't have the conversation for the outsiders, i have it for myself & the
person i'm talking to. but a byproduct after the fact could be that they vicariously
experience it & i vicariously experience their possible appreciation of it. i just
can't help but to imagine myself in the shoes of someone who doesn't even know
that they don't know of it. & the more personal it is, the... more value it has as
an unfiltered human experience, but also, the weirder it'd be to share

& i want to stress, this isn't, like... a hazard of talking to me. it lingers as a weird desire, but i'm
not really prone to realizing it... i have, a few times, but, y'know, always with permission (which
i'm pretty hesitant to ask for anyway) & none of the conversations were especially personal

it makes me feel really affected by the internet, i guess, it feels like a weird way to process experience.
to feel that the value of a conversation isn't limited to the participants, to have an impulse to not "hoard"
my life experiences, that anyone & everyone should have the opportunity to interpret them if it could be
in any way beneficial, that i can live my private life partly so it can contribute to a collaboration of
reported experiences. i just want to splay my guts out, for anyone driven to look

it feels like i should be thinking, "i don't want to reduce real conversations to things
framed like prose to be consumed," but, it just doesn't feel like i'm reducing them, they're
as beautiful as so many other things in life & they're right there preserved as digital text.
in reality, though, anyone who read such a thing would probably just be baffled as to
why they're reading it. this is all just weird, i apologize for being weird

i guess a way of looking at it is that the most engaging dialogue in all sorts of narratives can just
be a masked version of this. it's not like the inspiration for that stuff just comes out of thin air

situation: you're with someone you love but scared that they might start to regard you with
the same flavor of contempt that the writers of family guy seem to have for the average person

i take a gender roles class where i have to write a summary & reflection for each chapter
of the textbook. the first chapter is very broad, so its reflection is the one where i
kind of just vomit words at the teacher about why i feel very guilty all the time

something about being obligated to hear nu metal in any capacity goes past distaste for a music genre
for me, it's like irrational knotted stomach "i can't see any way of coping with having to hear this"
"all i can do is wait until it isn't playing" experience like suffering through a dental abscess

3:30 am self analysis

not good at interpersonal relationships, falls out of contact with people, strong bonds may wither all the same

reactive, forms relationships with people who keep starting conversations. a lifelong entrenchment in reactivity

wants to be regarded as cute more than most anything

feels rewarded by being a subject of infatuation

possible problematic tendency toward knee jerk reciprocation of infatuation, feeling that brain rearranges
itself on the fly to see compatibility that isn't there (probably an effect of prolonged isolation)

previous bullet point may just represent a tendency to forget non-reciprocal situations, & only
remember reciprocal ones, giving the impression that all infatuation is reciprocated,
& the knee-jerk rearrangement thing would be the only way to explain that

strives to be an "island of [[normality] or [absence of perceived pervasive cultural infection(s)]]"

great fear of becoming the wrong-doer in any situation where wrong is done. feeling like i'd
internally disintegrate into nothing if i was rightfully designated a villain in any context

current phase of life feels like making up for the entire stretch of my life from ~2015 to ~2018

once felt like i'd truly wronged someone & kept trying to not eat or drink anything
for one to three days cause i had no idea how else to process it or make up for it

belief that i understand people poorly enough that getting too enmeshed with anyone (mainly
romantically) would stand a good chance of harming them (maybe by "leading someone
on" cause i contorted myself into thinking i liked them then realized i didn't)

there's probably no feeling of love strong enough that i could confidently believe it not to be self-deception

fear that in being isolated i am weighted toward this sort of self-deception in pursuit of physical/
verbal affection, starving or acting out the "personal connection" side, then if i realize i don't
actually like someone (or just can't tell whether i do) everything would treacherously crash down

even a fear that i'm incapable of normally bonding with others at
all (hasn't had enough "exercise" to know if this is unfounded)

wonders if i can emotionally respond to being hugged at all. emotionally responds to imagining being hugged by
people i care about being hugged by, but they are fictional constructs whose defining feature is my caring
about being hugged by them. it's debatable whether that could carry over to any actual people

if never pursuing romantic love were to be the price to pay for not causing any people harm ever then ok

very repulsed by the idea of wanting at all to possess another person, instead places self
at extreme opposite end, i.e. kind of wholly at the mercy of others to grant acceptance

types bulleted list on tumblr

i feel like a metal ball on a table in the exact center of a magnetic steel ring that has the
exact circumference for there to be a tiny spot in the middle that the magnetism doesn't reach

i find it very very hard to entertain the idea of committing to a monogamous relationship because i've let
the experience of yearning for a vague idealized person, who i don't know exists yet but always might meet
tomorrow, be a part of my life for too long... such that, the more realistically i entertain the idea, the more i feel
immediate, urgent distress at excluding myself from that meeting that would have happened tomorrow... a relationship
is being petrified that any day i might really fall in love with a person... so i just stagnate in the fallacy of continuous
exclusion from any love that could certainly exist now for the sake of love that might exist later

Binary

heights, deep water, wasps, screamer pranks, succumb to omnipresent cynical influence,
never really understand love, neglect to realize potential of infinite access to art

my leading theory about why it feels so impossible & wrong to form even tenuous bonds with anyone is that
maybe i was exposed to sufficiently extreme sexual/shock content through the internet as a child that i
now feel permanently totemic of such revolting things on some level. i don't really know, though

oh, or i read too many wikipedia articles about weird freudian psychology so now
i'm scared that if i form bonds with anyone it means a structure in my brain wants
them to be my parent or something which makes me incredibly uncomfortable

i leave a critical comment on a tumblr post. the next night, i stare at it... i think the
site creates an atmosphere that's kind of indefensible & masochistic, but i usually like
to try to quietly function as an alternative to the things i dislike, instead of sitting around
decrying them. doing the latter just makes me feel incorporated into the weird hostile
atmosphere. talking at anything in particular is "losing" & "getting riled up." cool
people silently read & share things that are written to inflame them all day

if the internet pummels me with sixty things at once that would each take a week
of mulling over to really articulate why they're so revolting, then the only way
to not become twisted & rotten is to forfeit the privilege of articulating anything
& just flee from things based on how they feel viscerally on my brain

i think social media encourages making lots of tiny compromises where you get something to say or share at
the expense of it being a little bit of a distortion from what you'd ideally be able to express or communicate,
then a million of those add up until you're like a weird husk who feels all curatorial & in control of your
self-expression because you only share what variants you find funny of whatever random Thing gets organically
chosen as this week's Thing like extremely limp, forced jokes about orbs in the void or something

deliberately making a self-descriptive blog post = telling myself a distortedly stylized story about an
undistortedly unstylized aspect of my life & hoping other people confirm it. like anthropomorphizing an
inanimate object. things are only what they are, which usually isn't very much. um it can be fun though!

distancing oneself from people with obnoxious personality traits means nothing if you go on social media
& be incessantly exposed to ironic memes about the same traits also its weird to rationalize the
bewilderment of being exposed to peoples gross sexual eccentricities by turning them into
weird subcultural landmark things (burger post... + like seven million other things)

internet stuff is just analogous to a caterpillar hanging from a tree that i showed my
teacher in fifth grade... you can enjoy it alone but undisturbed or call a friend you
trust over to appreciate it or theoretically the whole class. but each kid raises the
overall chance that someone swipes the string & stomps on the caterpillar. completely
uniform exposure to everything by everyone raises risk to one hundred percent instantly
constantly. stomped caterpillars r the fundamental unit of the memetic evolution of anything

it feels like i started typing stuff in 2013 & i just still haven't managed to stop. basically my whole
existence to the outside world for a majority of my life now has been one prolonged compulsion. i'm
a mammal & there is an electronic device. what effect does that have? i don't know. there's just my
firsthand account & probably some other people's. i am weary of feeling like a lab experiment. my
friend says my blog feels like an art that uses time, text, development, & introspection as its mediums

for me the lo-fi quality emphasizes the mysterious space between the voice/instruments & the microphone, & lets
my mind wander about what the surroundings are which typically gravitates toward satisfyingly mundane spaces

love to walk around quietly & frantically deciding lots of different things either do or do
not have lots of different abstract qualities i thought they didn't or did have & hoping
the endless switch flicking represents a progression towards understanding or catharsis

i want to imagine being loved in a way that is clean & unfettered & in line with love, owing to its partly being for my
benignity, absence of wrongdoing, & to do anything wrong would confiscate even that private ability, i could then
only honestly imagine being loved in spite of wrongdoing, which... well, in comparison with being loved in part for
benignity, it's horrifying, urges me to question even the imagined figure, to question myself for thinking i even
deserve to envision it. so this is something that lingers & reminds me i shouldn't do anything wrong

i meander around a distant, old, urban part of town late at night, test how far i can go from
safety of a certain pub before i get too nervous, whisper to myself about things i want... classic bit

there was a several year period where i was sort of addicted to using tumblr with no filter whatsoever, & i had
some kind of disease where if a post got zero notes a structure in my brain would force me to interpret that
there was some quality about it that i was completely blind to but warranted the unanimous, stern, disapproving
silence of several hundred or thousand people. which is to say, even one note relieved the feeling immediately,
even if that one person was less than 1% of the followers, but i couldn't handle the seeming total unanimity
of zero. this would be applied to very personal or honest or heartfelt things (although, in retrospect, often
very immature or affected things that i would find kind of unlikable by my current standards, actually!)

i was convinced i was fundamentally removed from decency & likeability in some invisible way. it'd get
so distressing, feel so vindictive & unfair, that i'd post tirades begging no one in particular for feedback
on what had been so repulsive about this or that, because i was so desperate to "improve" myself. i wasn't
really close enough with anyone to develop myself interpersonally otherwise, so it was like... that was
kind of all there was, just trying to desperately construct a self that didn't seem deserving of
the tired hatred of a lot of people, using only the binary feedback of whether i
was "punished" for various things, like a rat in a skinner box...

all of that is over with, though. i don't know why i am describing it all again on the morning
of may 20th, 2021. just trivia for the people newly paying attention to me i guess. i wonder
if such a prolonged experience of whatever this was had any lasting effects on me
that i don't recognize. certainly not a chapter of life i'd have asked for

suspicion that when people talk about various problems in their relationship(s) to one or both
of their parents, which result in analogous emotional problems etc, it can be a self-fulfilling
prophecy for others who receive those ideas by osmosis & become uncomfortable interacting
with them because they're then framed as weird symbolic rebuses of the person's
emotional development instead of just people who are family members

i imagine myself to have an extreme vulnerability to the condition of walking through life feeling no love for
anything, particularly anything in the subset of "things which are clearly clearly to be loved" which would shift
between observers but for me would be for instance trees & greenness that i could look at & feel nothing. i think
it's entirely too possible to forget about a vast majority of what existence is &/or can be. the conceptual terror
of being lost without even feeling lost. what would the point of life be if if i were to stare blankly at all sorts
of things i could love? maybe i could love ninety-nine percent of what exists. i believe in widespread
external forces that would incessantly nudge me toward this condition. (i imagine these beliefs maybe
having great value when multiplied by practice that sadly feels almost impossible?)

every computer & tv should say "ANYTHING THIS PUTS INSIDE
OF YOU WILL LIVE THERE FOREVER" in big red letters

why do people say "born a man/woman?" & i'm not even talking about the essentialist bent of that phrasing,
i mean this: no cis person has ever been born a man or woman, everyone is born a tiny baby. in fact,
a lot of people's transition seems to only become a pressing concern once they start to experience
the pressures of being expected to become a man or woman. with the desire to escape, say, manhood
as soon as it becomes a factor, there's really no room for any descriptor but "born a boy,"
if someone has to put it that way. the invocation of adulthood feels like it retroactively
burdens the child with an adult agency that creates more of an air of them
being "culpable" for being trans

interacting with a cat & maybe thinking of it like interacting with a quantity of a substance called
"cat," & you'd like to interact with a person & have it freeingly feel like it's with a quantity of
person but it's only so easy with cats because they have less um individuality pretense?

i think in year 2300 someone will think. hmm maybe if i make standard fun relatable song that passingly involves
the new current technology that people socialize with. called ultra nano bloids. that will be cool & show how
songwriting is evolving with the new things of the world. & it will still be oh my god no no no please stpp

high-fidelity... low-fidelity... anti-fidelity

i think boomers had sitcoms to prime them with feelings of social relationships
operating on shitty cartoon logic & subsequent resentment of the cartoons
they lived in now there's wojaks & virgin chad templates & the like

my dad has been marathoning family guy. i'm kind of convinced that overhearing it & having memories of
various jokes reawakened is like. infecting me subconsciously. like when i'm just thinking stuff without
trying to & i almost don't notice it all going through my head. now it can veer into family guy songs.
what good can come of that?? i think it's genuinely bad... just casts a pall over everything,
makes me think less good things, possibly long after the actual exposure

don't be like me & make the mistake of "stockpiling" several hundred dollars' worth of
medication purchased on the internet hoping it won't lose that much effectiveness as
the expiration dates pass then finding out, yes, a lot of it is in fact going to waste

i'm not going to imagine being loved, that's a gateway to scrutinizing the degree
of love's direct presence in my life instead of just appreciating that it exists
& trying to use it as a perspective to see everything with...

trying not to set my expectations too high or anything but i hope to start feeling extremely
blissful constantly for six months straight as soon as spring really hits... i feel
like i'm gonna wake up in league with all the animals & plants...

cringe culture rejection phase two... if you're not cringe, i hate you

must go from "embarrassed to casually sing around others" past "not embarrassed to casually sing around others"
to "not bothering to casually sing around others from time to time would represent the destruction of everything"

it's weird how there is probably very direct causation between people choosing to put shock content
on the internet & me having permanent emotional problems, yet you can't realistically fault them
for causing the emotional problems, their culpability stops at it just being very distasteful

my thoughts keep returning to it lately. maybe i'm processing it all in an overly dramatic way. (some
people have things actually done to them... what's the worst that can come through a monitor?) still,
i feel... inferior to anyone who was never exposed to anything like that. in that i sort of feel like it must
have left me with some kind of chronic pain, & that i am living a tale as old as time where any ways i find
of existing turn out to be abstract sublimations of that pain, which makes them all kind of wicked at their core

i have a stretch of about five days where i hardly go more than a couple of hours without wetting my bangs & blow
drying them again. i can't glance at my reflection without becoming neurotic about it. wetting, drying, brushing,
adjusting, redoing, combing, scrutinizing, watching the same unwanted patterns appear over & over, just wanting
to know what's become wrong with my technique, or whether they've drifted into some wrong state where i
need to do something specific to bring them to a right state. every time, i think it's done, that they
look fine, but it finds a way to flare up again after a while. i just do not feel okay. i would like
either for them to cooperate or for me to be able to just not care. maybe it's just a condition
i have to get used to, as a product of the more humid spring weather? but i don't know...

& then comes a day where i just do not feel very good, mentally. i fixate on an enduring fear that over the course of years i've
been robbed of having any natural way of being, that i have nothing where there should be a something that takes hold when
i relax & lean on my intuition. i imagine it being bleached off by my being chronically steeped in thinking about myself, about
the act of self-presentation, about how personality traits function. either that, or i'm choosing to believe there's nothing
there. out of a separate enduring fear, that there are aspects to the formation of my self that are kind of fatalistic,
deterministic, mechanistic. where it's possible that all the media & people & stuff i've been exposed to could have
corrupted me in some way i don't really have a say in, like... i'm an awareness saddled to a structure? & it would
have left my intuition as something no reasonable person, or at least i, would want to look out from behind the
eyes of... the idea of deterministic exclusion from being a meaningfully good person. & if i want to improve my
intuition, where is the line between improvement & performance? i just feel like i'm being pulled forward with the
momentum of having spent so many formative years alone, paying so much attention to the internet, concerned about
asinine things like "am i really a person." it feels like as time goes on the degree of it all could just keep incrementing

i've probably been unconsciously observing a kind of sardonic script which insinuates that people, or
least some subset of people (surely including me), i guess run around in a frenzy for a while then die at
having never identified & reconciled the deeply rooted (& obvious, & notedly unsympathizable) character
flaws that endlessly bound them to whatever chronic unhappiness they were always trying to rationalize

one of those things you're wholly repulsed by but it sort of worms
its way into the bedrock of your reality without you noticing

i crave the feeling of being stuck in a house with no internet for a long time, the only entertainment available
being a movie or book that i don't really understand but have no choice but to ruminate on for hours &
hours, somewhat purgatorially, without the possibility of searching it & reading reviews or comments

one night, i suddenly realize: i have no idea what hormone replacement therapy has actually
done for me since october 2018 that i wouldn't have accomplished anyway simply through
the way i currently dress, present, etc. so i decide to enumerate the things it has done:

1. a vague sense of peace of mind ("at least 'it' is not getting 'worse'")
2. i am enormously more comfortable with a greatly reduced sex drive
3. i appreciate having less acne
4. i appreciate my legs growing less hair. it was never a concern anywhere else, really
5. i guess i can't discount that there are technically breasts, for whatever psychological
utility that represents. if i have a shirt on, you can't tell. if i have a shirt & a bra
on, you can "tell," insofar as you could "tell" if i had never gone on hormone
replacement therapy & simply wore a bra under a shirt
6. something about my face? maybe? i really don't know

ultimately, i can't deny that these effects are better than their absences. i don't feel especially
different, though. it's not unlike being a cis man taking medications that, independent of sexual
dimorphism, simply make me marginally more comfortable with having to physically exist

i still feel that the more i come out of reclusion, the closer i get to anyone, the more large
& square, & with the quality of being a compromise over all else, i will come to feel. i am
still too humiliated by my voice to speak in public. when i imagine a romantic, domestic
setup with another person, i imagine lying in a bed, straining the muscles in my throat to
let every drowzy reply to this or that make me cringe inside as little as possible. & all the rest

after i post this, i actually get sort of freaked out & upset. i imagine people finding it repugnant because
of some quality about like, like, like... i typed it normally & earnestly, but i imagine someone reading the
phrasing about the exclusion of an internet connection as being too... "i want stuff without the internet, too much
internet. heh. i would like less." like "smug," i guess, trying too hard to be the opposite of something common

so i kinda freak out, imagining like, millions of potential innocent & sincere sentiments that happen to land in danger zones
where someone irrationally hates them because of really shallow, flat patterns of interpretation that people might have. like
anything that too markedly mentions the absence of a phone or internet connection. & nothing else about it freaking matters
past that point. infinite possible meanings & statements funneled into the same place for that shared attribute. & i think
about what other danger zones & patterns there could be. a fear of things having their face value meaning stolen because
of their superficial resemblance to some stupid random garbage that there's no reason to be so vigilant about
disliking. pointless cultural black holes of things people can't passingly reference

i guess it'd be pretty sickening if this was actually real. it's probably not, i think i'm just having problems again

you know when you think about something all day but then you finally like. notice at all that it's something you've been
thinking about. for the past few days i've had that about like, the idea that i could become stuck preoccupied with the
idea of myself becoming unpleasantly crazy, or get "snagged" on the narrative of becoming that way. & that if i thought
about it too much in those ways it could turn into like a self-fulfilling thing. like, either that the fear of craziness is
the craziness or that the fear of & rumination on craziness sprouts into a multifaceted & caustic craziness. this is so
dumb, there is literally no reason for me to go crazy. nothing happens in my life so i start just making up problems
that don't rely on any external ingredients. maybe i've woken up too early several times in a row

it's way easier for me to think of lcd monitors as evil demons that have infiltrated every home i've ever lived in when i
consider that they showed me a guy's exploded head when the only way that would have been possible otherwise was on
the off chance that a guy's head exploded in front of me (statistically "earning" the experience of having to see an
exploded head). where in place of it i instead probably would have looked at. literally just carpeting & sofas &
classrooms & trees. but without the computer my parents would have still had tvs maybe playing family guy
& fox & jeff dunham sooo X) i wonder if if my head gets exploded it will be shown to children

i have this situation going on in my head that makes me feel insane where i'll see a drawing of a woman that people are saying is
a drawing of a trans woman, & i'll have this unshakable suspicion that the artist drew a cis woman, or drew a woman under the
assumed standard of her being cis (& may have even retroactively decided later that she is trans), & that people are deciding
after the fact that the drawing is of a trans woman. now, i'm aware of why this is really absurd: people have control over
what drawings look like, & because there aren't really any truly uniform discrepancies between the appearances of cis
& trans women, there is in effect literally no difference between drawing a cis or trans woman in many cases

but because of this suspicion, the idea of believing that the subject of the drawing is actually trans only seems to
ironically highlight how distorted my body feels. it makes me feel pressured to be an insane person rocking back
& forth in a corner, insisting to myself that there isn't really any problem. this, or they do draw what is explicitly
from the ground up a trans woman in some really stylized, like, chibi way. & it's like. awesome. you know the
testosterone actually did exist in my veins for like seven years right?! what is this supposed to do for me?

not that drawing, like, trans women who i think look all masculine, & un-passing, &, "realistic"
would make it any more palatable to physically exist either though. there are not any drawings
that would make it any more palatable to physically exist. it's drawings. i already physically
exist. the situation is just that: i physically exist & people draw drawings, nothing else to say

in a vacuum, i am pansexual. but i've landed with sort of a primary attraction to men. i believe
this is a product of my being a trans woman with heteronormative "man" brain conditioning, that
my feelings toward women can be something very slimy & repulsive while my feelings toward
men in comparison are a safe blank slate. not true preference but repression (maybe)

a very skittish & unproud transness, always primed to say: "is it ok? it doesn't have to
be, & i won't hold it against you if it isn't," or: "i don't blame you if you have difficulty
mentally disentangling me from masculine aspects. i had a crap of a time with it myself"

a necessary week or so of caffeine withdrawal ramps up, & i have lots of really
despondent thoughts that feel too uncertain & scattered to gracefully put into
writing right at the time but center primarily around living in total isolation

i'd like to think that, metaphorically, my brain matter is undeniably my well-meaning self. while things i
dislike thinking are a big shard of glass, of a blur of some despicable fictional character, embedded in
my brain matter. i mean, that's bad, it seems to leave me able to feel unthinkingly normal only
very fleetingly. but it at least leaves a strict demarcation between myself & it

to briefly feel like a character, a loathsome character who i feel so little relation to that to feel like them is
tortuous, to feel like the patterns of a character are embedded like a shard, to feel alienly masculine, to think a
sentence or two in an inane voice that repulses me, to wonder if it's a "real" expression of my "self," to smile at
someone & in my head unwillingly place over the moment a cloak resembling the aesthetic of the event of a sexual
predator smiling at someone, to stop smiling out of fear that the cloak will leak from the facial nuances,
to avoid eye contact for fear of eye nuances, to be very formal & terse

to truly not understand why it's so hard to conceive of speaking to anyone anywhere, even though it'd be so
quick & simple, to fear that i am mired in a loathsomely pathetic sort of self-inflicted helplessness simply
through the act believing in the slightest that it's hard, to try to attribute it to the sorts of things i
described initially, to wonder if i'm in a small, pessimistic bubble of time where i retroactively imagine
those things happening in all my interactions when they never do, to wonder if i'm fine constantly except
for the time that i type all of this, to fear that some fundamental & indescribable aspect of having an
emotional connection to the world around me may have been unfairly snuffed out by something & i could
only tell through some impossible direct comparison with another person's subjective experience

to imagine having every maligned social trait ever described in a 100,000+-note tumblr post, to imagine
being helplessly folded into a listless example of what to avoid being, to fear the idea of becoming
something i am wholly against simply because i retained some tiny kernel in my head of the narrative
of tragically & fatalistically becoming it, for it to have acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy for no
reason beyond its being present, as if because of an illness that would cause me to live
out any mundane narrative i thought about too much

to be very confused, to be trying to figure things out with no face-to-face guidance or support or anyone to
simply relax & feel normal around, because i feel like a tumor that is in stark contrast to relaxed normality

i don't know if i can put all of this very gracefully right now, it feels really simple but just explodes into this big
stupid revolting overwrought paragraph. i walked up to a rabbit, & it hopped away, & i realized i hate video games
& technology for teaching me to think about how everything can be modeled, i could think of that moment as one
expression of an abstract, timeless model for how the rabbit might move. the model, being an abstraction,
feels like it could be expressed infinite times. the single actual moment doesn't stack up against that.
if there's a model of something, that's all that seems to matter. all the times it's expressed are
indistinguishable. like a little sequence of events you can make happen by clicking an arrow in
a flash game. when you can just click the arrow really fast, none of the individual occurrences
are interesting! i think this is an awful way to experience life. like every day birds fly away
from people walking by, & those are just expressions of that process, & the world is just
all these interlocking processes that are too homogeneous to ever meaningfully represent
a present moment. like being in a blizzard & feeling blind because there's just a sheet
of grey no matter which way you turn your head... instead, how about ichi-go ichi-e

wishing parts of my own body were exempt from the ability to form associations between any thing &
any quality, wishing my eyebrows didn't feel like physical manifestations of sociopathy, wishing
i hadn't freaked out on may 22 & cut my bangs to far above my eyebrows in the process
of "fixing" my bangs, wish my bangs were even close to growing back down!

it took way too long for it to register for me that like, the church of the subgenius' deity isn't
just a white man but possibly the most repugnant way that a deity could possibly be a white man

the deep-seated conditioned boomer hatred of the overt conservativism and conformatism of the 50s

the 2011 brony who thinks 1950s america aesthetics are awesome
aesthetic (i've said it before: this is why i cannot like art deco)

somewhere along some highway there's an incredibly remote grimy little diner that looks like it's from the
1950s which someone might think is a charmingly "earnest" expression of its own aesthetics when in reality
someone calculatedly devised it as a "1950s style diner" & placed it there knowing that its being so
remote would create that impression of earnestness (i'm making this up but its how everything feels)

hyperreality. is this meaning not implicit or at least latent in the word "aesthetics"

it's people in the 50s (presumably) liking that type of 50s aesthetic for the convoluted stew
of reasons that shape any time-specific thing like that at the actual time vs people after
the 1950s liking it because it exotically represents the 50s... now with respect to the
former thing it's like nothing has any reasons to be anything in particular really

i mean... doesn't calling something an "aesthetic" sort of intrinsically otherize / exoticize it into
being a set of signifiers, rather than artistic / visual / audial / etc decisions on the part of an
individual that might be engaged with. once you're conscious that you're operating in the realm
of an "aesthetic" your capacity for personal expression and agency are severely compassed

it was still an aesthetic when the 50s were actually happening

in the 50s though the "50s aesthetic" was tied to a multitude of underlying material concerns (eg plastic
becoming more common, and allowing for a greater variety of household products made thereof, and
they can be curvier and more colorful, etc etc) and convergent artistic decisions (chrome coming into
fashion) and so on. whereas outside that context, once it's conceived of as "an aesthetic",
all those factors are simply effaced and glossed over in favor of a unified homogeneous
look/feel. and i think that the word "aesthetic" implies that glossing-over

that's what i mean. i just think the word aesthetic contains both of those

i understand, i think

when i was around seventeen or eighteen i raved about the notion that an aesthetic
is equivalent to a person which is equivalent to a little self-contained universe

my favorite kraftwerk song is indisputably either "computer love" or "vitamin." i can't decide which though