unilateral

Man the days slip by. The poor man the ship. My filth accrues then I clean my room, over and over. I really miss other people, but let's get down to it.

I was recently talking with a friend about Charlotte Clymer and I feel I pulled a lot of my punches about her out of a sort of concern that I might be unfair to her. I wanted to make fun of how mannish she looks, I wanted to talk about the shame I can imagine her feeling, and how or if that plays into her public persona.

There's a certain line of thinking that says we shouldn't make fun of the president for how he looks, fat, psoriatic, diseased. Doing so will make the good fat, psoriatic, diseased people feel bad and contribute to some invisible infrastructure of bodyshaming, which in turn has some negative effects on people's ability to live full lives, so the story goes.

But I still want to, but I'm not sure why. A problem I have with the above line of thinking is that it divorces people's bodies, their corporeal selves, from their, dunno, ethereal selves. As if when I am making fun of the president's disgusting face, I am making fun of those extensional contours in a vacuum with no relation to him. To see people as so divorceable from their bodies is is in my opinion a soulless, empiricist, maybe even technophilic gambit that is not obviously more moral than anything else.

Another aspect of this proscription is the idea that you can't/don't/shouldn't convince people of arguments based on appearance, but instead based on 'the facts'. I think this is just dumb and indicates a toothless view of the world where people are rational actors making objectively informed decisions. dumb.

If we care about making arguments, winning people over to some side, we shouldn't unilaterally rhetorically disarm. Maybe we should take some ideas from the dopey newagers and do the all-is-one thing with bodies and people

Why should we celebrate bodies? Because they're inextricably bound up, and imo indistinguishable from people. Otherwise who cares?

There's more to say, obviously, I'm gonna read that body fascism thing again and come back to this

knife

A classic concern of so many apparently insecure people is spelling and punctuation and there's endless little quizzes and assessments you/they can make of someone by how they invoke little squiggles on the screen, like reading tea-leaves but discrete and soulless. A favorite is the so-called Oxford comma. I suspect its favored status as a means to evince education or something half-comes from the gilded name-dropping, like, would anyone give a shit if it was called the Cleveland comma?

fwiw I use this comma because I love adornment and extra squiggles, but the facebook-level comics advocating its utility note the ambiguity that can arise from not using it: we invited the strippers, jfk and stalin. Here it's not clear whether it's a string of three coordinated nouns: [the strippers] and [jfk] and [stalin] or whether it's an 'appositive': [the strippers] namely [jfk and stalin]. Already it's dumb casual whateverphobia of tarting up those 20th century men as frivolous and absurd women, which doesn't offend me so much as it causes me vicarious embarrassment.

But spelling and in this case punctuation is just fashion, stilted table manners and utensil placement, and expressing an opinion on the Oxford comma can only be (consciously or not) a means to convey the most superficial veneers of your education. The jfk thing above is about as compelling and funny as being an absolute card at the banquet by using a steakknife to butter some bread.

Also, it's fun to by-your-logic the exact opposite conclusion. The ambiguity between coordination and appositives is only found sentence-finally. Anywhere else, the appositive meaning is traditionally indicated by yet another comma: The strippers, jfk and stalin, were invited.

In fact, the use of the Oxford comma can create it's own coordination-appositive ambiguity because the second, Oxford comma on it's own makes for potential appositive readings, anywhere in a sentence: my dad, the pope, and jane were invited/we invited my dad, the pope, and jane. In both instances there is ambiguity between: [my dad] and [the pope] and [jane] versus [my dad namely the pope] and [jane]

the Oxford comma can introduce ambiguity anywhere, but not using it can only introduce ambiguity sentence-finally.

But even by-your-logicing this shit is a dumbass game. The real opinion to have is: who gives a shit, ambiguity is fine, you'll be fine

puppets

I'm not a critic and don't really have the background or vocab or chops to talk about this idea that I have, but I might as well give it a shot.

I few weeks ago I got really high and watched Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco. I've enjoyed Metropolitan and Barcelona in the past and had a time with this one too. But there's this thing I've noticed when I'm high and watch a movie about educated people. Like the movie A Single Man, the Tom Ford Colin Firth movie about a gay professor in the 60s, I just couldn't take it serious while high. What I imagined was a somber portrayal of deep longing and loneliness, I could only see as an indictment of a phoney milieu, po-faced sincerity like a thin veneer over pea-brained nothing. Empty gestures sorta miming erudition or intellectual restraint. Maybe that's what they were going for, but I doubt it. And if I watched it sober, who knows what I'd think.

So, Last Day of Disco. The movie follows a number of well-heeled, upwardly mobile young people in advertising or publishing in manhattan in the 70s. They talk about fancy subjects and use multisyllabic words in a dry way that has all the trappings of wit, but again I was high and could only see it as empty, and in fact an intentional coldly cynical evisceration of the pretenses of this type of person, or of a whole caste/class/whatever

***

I think animals have emotions of sorts, I'm not some old-timey cartesian who thinks they're mindless automata, but I also don't think they have the same rich inner lives that humans have. And a stupid exercise I do is: I see a picture of a dog with its mouth open and it looks like it's got this big smile on its face, but I know the dog is not actually smiling so I cover the mouth with my hand to see just its eyes, entirely emotionless, blank, empty, and mute.

***

When I watched Barry Lyndon, I went into it with this idea, gleaned from who knows where, that Ryan O'Neal was not a good actor and Kubrick knew this and used that to create this effect of a soulless forward-moving striver, a pawn of history, and that this was a brutal cynical take on, I dunno, humans, aristocrats, hollywood actors, etc etc. And I'd like to interpret Last Days of Disco this way, like a sort of ecce homo, but not of a frail and flawed and humble subject, but of a denatured, dessicated, lobotomized striver class, playing a certain filigree role in as part of the superstructure to some brute base. The height of wit or culture is just profoundly stupid and we're just watching marionettes go through motions barely comprehending the horror of their situation.

This sort of contempt for the subjects (again something I might just be making up and misinterpreting, who knows) reminds me of Lars von Trier using some sort of brechtian artifice to make a similar point in Dogville or Todd Solondz putting his characters in brutalizing situations (though his characters seem to have some sort of internal life, however fucked up).

Maybe I've got it all wrong and Stillman's stuff is sincere and sophisticated, but it's funner to see it as a scathing trick played on the characters and a good chunk of the audience. Disco was never this white, never this straight, and the characters were enjoying probably an ultra watered-down gentrified version of it, tamed and sold to them by those who know their marks. This delusion the characters share might be hinted at at the end of the movie where there's this surreal dancing-in-the-streets montage of regular people discoing on subways and stuff. Maybe it finds its modern incarnation in Pride or Drag or Burning Man, no clue. The last days of Pride. I'd watch that

psyops

a classic fun wikipedia page is the one on different shibboleths. Most of these hinge on the fact that pronunciation (phonetics, phonology) is locked in early in native speakers and it's exceedingly rare and difficult to adopt a nonnative language's pronunciation without flaw in adulthood. Morphosyntax, word order, and other stuff might be hard to acquire as an adult, but they're vastly easier in comparison. This is why you often hear hypercompetent nonnative speakers still have accents and it's rare to nonexistant to find someone who can perfectly pronounce a language they learned as an adult but who sucks at the morphosyntax.

Pronunciation-based shibboleths work, but imagine you had a shibboleth that was lexical, word-based but one that could pronounced in any old way. It'd be way weaker. Which brings me to the thing where people rail against how being suitably woke/pc/whatever changes every five minutes. This isn't wrong, but the constant shifting of correct words seems to be the result of using a shibboleth system that isn't based on pronunciation. Or at least the speed of the shifting seems to be the result of this.

For a variety of dumb reasons we exist so much in text on the internet and pronunciation is not gonna cut it as a means to distinguish the in-group from the out-. Marginalized people rightfully want a way to know who's down and who isn't, but we're in a bind because the medium only allows for shitty shibboleths. We/they have to keep everything changing because cooption can happen just as fast. Anyone can cop a new word on the internet. I don't need to know how to pronounce latinx if all I have to do it type it.

Rapidly changing the terms seems like a fine defense mechanism in this light, but it is still a bummer because it makes being down such an immaterial bore. It's way harder to fake other things, eg pronunciation, but more importantly: showing up with your physical body and doing real shit irl. This is basically not possible with quarantine mandates.

***

I got real high the other night was thinking about psyops, who to trust, is brace belden cia, etc, lol. I do this half-intentionally because I find it entertaining, but I also think these are real questions. And you can devote a lot of thought and energy to them without really getting anywhere. Is any given thing presented in the media a psyop to keep us pacified, or not? Maybe I think the chapo guys are earnest and funny and flawed in a trustworthy way because they've been precisely calibrated to neuter any nascent potentially insurrection-y types (I don't consider myself an insurrectionary type, but maybe they know more about me and my ilk than I do).

There's no way to know, but these are frets that only the weakest Left would ever grapple with. Frets about psyops or even sheepdogs only really have teeth when there is no ground game physical shibboleths to trust. It's relatively easy to fake a podcast or campaign like Warren's. It's really hard to fake irl action, still possible, but the barrier's higher

post

Trying to post again, I have a few lined up, but I want to do them justice. A few thoughts: Since I've been working at home, the days just bleed into each other nearly indistinguishable, it's become clear how absurd it is that we work 5 out of 7 days. That's so much time, just to make money for others.

It also makes me realize how much this absurd 5/7 day workweek is only made bearable by otherwise having a life. Instead of breaking from work and meeting friends, eating out, exploring, I break from work and my environment is identical. The amount of working is so unnecessary and I feel depressed by it

barefoot is legal

It’s like trying to learn anatomy by studying clothing. This is what I say when Tracy asks me how to interpret the world. Not trying to feign wisdom, I’m just really tired of clothes, especially shoes. But really, don’t fuck with me, do you respect me enough to be clear? This isn’t what she said, but I worried that’s what she was thinking so I began for real.

Are we magic? Let’s assume not and accept we’re made up of stuff that obeys the law. So some bit of light hits your eye and does it register immediately deeper in your head? Nope. Something takes some nonzero time to wriggle down a neuron path and only later take on a color. Even though it’s probably a really short amount of time, this means that everything you see is actually some refraction of what happened in the past. Same with everything else you get from the outside. We’re just in some deluded bubble out of time here, a world of yesterday at best.

And is this nipple mauve? Or, the nipple of a few moments ago at least. All we know is that it’s bouncing certain types of frequencies and not even a frequency has color. We ignore most of them and concoct some beautiful deranged representation. Call it mauve. Forget the sophomore tedium of whether we share them and instead revel in the fact that your yellow is a glorious hallucination of your own personal creation, however unchosen. A world of figment pigment that exists nowhere in the universe outside your head. Same with everything else you get from the outside, texture, taste, and tone. It’s all otherwise a colorless unity, maybe some more energy here, less there, but nothing without us providing both the paint and the veil.

Tracy keeps this in mind and tastes my mauvelessness. She swims or bobs in this glory for a time before the bottom falls out. This endless abyss isn’t even black. Does she shudder or ripple? I can’t really tell, but I roll onto my side and face her. I tell her she’s beautiful. What do you mean by that, she asks.

grow up

I enjoy Freud and find that some of the worst pedantic empiricist technophile types (among others) really don't like him, portray him as a joke, etc. But the idea that early childhood things persist in maybe altered form into adulthood seems just totally beyond doubt to me.

Language acquisition, for instance, is largely complete by the age of 7 and remains basically unchanged after that. The main tool that you use to express yourself was built by an idiot child (you, formerly), the finest, grandest sentences you construct come from the tools you came up with on your own when you were a toddler. Little You came up with a way to pronounce 'dog' or any other word and the now version of you, upstanding adult that you are, still use that same pastel cartoon pronunciation.

This is of course not the same stuff that Freud was talking about, but it's related, and it's not clear how many other things work in a similar fashion, how many other things are fixed in your head as a child and persist into adulthood, still in that childish form but in a way that we no longer acknowledge as childish.

This sort of thing came to mind when I was doing some class with a group of I guess dionysian anarchists, who were talking about the toys that were used to lure dionysus out and kill him or something. It was fun and it made me think about how our innate ideas (rationalist, Kantian) shape our lives, how things, childish or ancient, persist through time and are expressed in weird ways because whatever fodder we're given, we can't help but use those innate ideas to construct our perception. We've had the same innate ideas as long as we've been anatomically modern humans, and though they probably shape experience is hyper-abstract ways, it's fun to pretend that we can discern their workings in comprehensible ways. Even if they're silly: Zeus impregnating daughter persisting into Polanski's Chinatown, The labyrinth living on as a corn maze.

everett

. 

I spent the first part of my childhood in the house above in Everett, WA. It's on a gravel road and I still drive by it at least once each time I visit home. While my mom's mom was still alive, we'd make appearances at church every weekend (plus sunday school, though minus my dad who is a vocal anti-religionist) and afterwards we do a driving tour around the nice parts of town, always the same route around Rucker Hill. Gloomy Sundays around the port, eating church donuts. We'd wind around small lanes looking at the views of the sound and the fancy houses. These big houses grew into a sort of lore amongst me and my brother and my cousins and it was jarring to discover in high school that one of my basketball teammates actually lived in one. A highlight for me as a tiny kid was this stone drinking fountain and bench on the residential sidewalk

When I was in college me and my girlfriend watched all of the twins peaks available to us at the time. Which was a lot because we had Scarecrow video nearby so both versions of the pilot, both seasons, and fire walk with me were at hand. It was a very intense relationship and this gave the show a heightened quality. We broke up and a few years later I was in Oulu Finland at this heavymetal bar called Hevimesta (Hevi comes from the English heavy, mesta comes from the Russian место meaning 'place'). I took a picture of their downstairs cash register:

I'm usually basically agog at the nature of reality and how the fabric of existence feels against me, and these are thoughts that Twin Peaks explores too in its own way. That's fun as far as that goes and I enjoy the TV episodes and the movie. But it also does fuck with my sense of reality seeing not just snoqualmie falls but streets of my hometown in that universe. Laura Palmer's house is right along the route we would take after church. This is a screenshot from Fire Walk with Me. You can hardly see the motorcycle peeling around the corner and maybe make out the drinking fountain

Buildings play such a prominent role in the story, lodges and also residential homes. So it especially makes me feel weird when they're inside Laura's house and all I do is focus on the familiar lights of the port outside twinkling in the darkness through the window 

solipsism

When I was a kid I sorta had a sense that I had gotten lucky. I seemed to live in ~The~ important country, in a beautiful area (though to my kid's brain, unmarked and neutral), athletic, smart, and white. We weren't well-off, but we seemed normal, more or less reflected in the Simpsons (though we only had one bathroom). I entertained thoughts of solipsism before I learned that word, though never really believed them, they were just fun to think about.

I think back on this now when I think towards the future. Who really knows how things will play out, but I think it seems safe to say that things will get increasingly erratic, at least from climate change. And I sometimes entertain some scenario of things really falling apart around me as I physically and mentally fall apart into senescence, and how that would at least be sort of poetic.

yonic south

I'm quarantined in essence from work, which has meant so far that I've done no work and my plans of weaning myself off twitter have been stillborn. I've been at home for 2.5 weeks recovering from surgery and am now going to continue to kick around here indefinitely. I ducked out of contact early yesterday to go see this Olivier Assayas movie Irma Vep, mostly because I really loved his Clouds of Sils Maria.

The movie is fun and cynical but becomes something very different a few times throughout and especially at the end. It's also got this unselfconscious 90s vibe (it was released in 1996) that makes for me what would otherwise be a pretty cold production, extra vivid. The first minute plus of this video is not remotely representative of the rest of the movie, but it's badass and certainly representative of this tiny bit of the movie. 

The sonic youth song in the above clip has it's own video which is about Karen Carpenter (a love of mine).

The above song and video surely must have been inspired by Todd Haynes's Superstar, which is just brutal. Not much to say that hasn't already been said about it though

Sonic youth have also done a scuzzdream cover of Superstar, but my favorite Carpenters song is On Top of the World which I used have my go-to karaoke song back when I was yearning the hardest for some sort of feminine normalcy. I still yearn for it, but with less urgency, which is a shame

imagine

The quote attributed to basically everyone is that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. 1) the first one entails the second. 2) it's hella easy to imagine the end of the world. 3) Imagining *anything* novel is always going to be harder than imagining the negation of something. I bet people in the feudal times could more easily imagine the end of the world than they could the advent of capitalism.

That quote is bandied about as if it's deep, but I think it's kinda banal

come and see

The internet says Francois Truffaut says there is no such thing as an anti-war film, and when I first read that, back in undergrad, it really struck me and I suspect it's largely true. No matter how gruesome and heinous and bewildering a war movie, it can be seen through the lens of stiff-upper lip, this is the sacrifice we make to keep you safe. The more intense and horrific the movie, the more selfless and noble the sacrifice. It also reminds me of this thing an ex wrote about depictions of sexual assault: https://queenmobs.com/2015/03/7272/ fwiw.

There's another movie quote, this time from Roger Ebert (who I read and reread all the time like the true middle-browler I am) who says all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are. This too has largely rung true for me, the saddest, bleakest good movies fill me with a renewed zest for life like all good art does.

Last friday I walked alone over to 16th and Valencia grabbed a coffee and drank it in silence before going to the Roxie to watch Come and See and I think that's an apparently impossible good, depressing anti-war film and I've been kinda listless since.

I suspect it's a successful anti-war film because it doesn't really focus at all on the soldiers, there's no identifying with them and their struggle (though from what I understand Belorusian partisans had a righteous cause) and only one scene where we want some soldiers to kill others (the weakest part of the movie imo). It does a lot of slow POV shots and shots of innocent people just staring at the camera, like pleading with the viewer. Maybe it was other things too, but more so than other movies it made me fear war.

It also depressed me. After the 2008 'financial crisis', from what I read, we've only doubled down on the things that caused it in the first place. I think this might be the case on a longer timescale wrt to the wars of the 20th century. We've doubled down and the 'never again' refrains seem pretty empty and po-faced to me.

Though maybe I was just in a sort of fragile mood when I went in. I'm still recovering, still look weird, and I especially mope about not being able to use facial expressions easily. It makes me think of the pictures of early facial reconstruction for war victims that I've seen, sort of blank stiff disfigurement. Or for that matter, Roger Ebert after he had his lower jaw removed

mars

I'm often baffled by the rich, they say and do things that make me thing they are just profoundly stupid, like for instance elon musk's thing about the universe or something likely being a simulation. Of course who knows what's going on with reality, but where do you get 'likely' from? Like how fucking stupid can you be?

But, there's always also the chance that they're not so dumb and are putting up some sort of absurd front to hide their heinous truer selves. and I suspect this about the plans to leave the earth, colonize mars, etc, from musk and bezos and others. 

the impending climate shit is so shocking and hateful, but even if the absolute worst comes to pass, the earth will still be a million times more habitable than mars. Leaving earth to inhabit mars or outer space or anything is just beyond stupid. It's hard to express how much less hospitable anything other than earth is, even compared to antarctica or the sahara.

So why go so far as to develop tech and strategies for these things for places as wildly uninhabitable as mars, when earth is sitting right here? My guess is that these guys aren't being stupid, they're just masking the development of bunker technology intended for use on earth when/if shit gets really bad. 

This makes the most sense to me, though I'm open to other thoughs

Only Colombe

This song just pierces me. I'm terrible at parsing lyrics and I half-suspect these are just cryptic nonsense, but this just makes me want to dance or writhe or strain. I listened to it on repeat when cleaning up and moving out of my last room. The sun was in through the window on the floorboards that used to be under my bed. I was sorta straining and pirouetting and clenching my fists to it

spirit

Humans have a tough time conceiving of things that are neither deterministic or random, but some things seem to defy that sort of classification, for instance langauge. Descartes as read by Chomsky looks into this, but the basics are easy enough for anyone to introspect on: What you say is not random, it's generally appropriate to the context at hand. But it's also not determined by that context, you can say whatever you want in response to a question.

Now you might say that it actually is determined, just via countless things working in concert below consciousness, which gets to the heart of this as a free will issue. Free will is annoying to argue about. Its most ardent opponents simply presuppose that it can't exist, they presuppose that everything is deterministic or random. Chomsky says that it's phenomenologically as real as anything could possibly be and it's only a dogmatic insistence on determinacy and randomness that casts doubt on it. He considers it potentially something akin to a rat trying to understand the concept of a prime number: something our minds just aren't equipped to grasp.

blah blah blah, in short, I buy it. I buy it as much as I buy anything. Human free will expressed in language is a unique thing in the known universe and that's what drew me to study language in the first place, a sort of species chauvinism/narcissism/wonderment (that and jokes). The non-deterministic and non-random is in my opinion a source of wonder and an indestructible source of power. Whatever propaganda or advertisements or pr or intimidation is thrown at it, there's always going to be this force, protected by our profound ignorance, that we can't snuff out.

Still, the forces of propaganda etc work to a frustrating degree to distort and obscure that power and demoralize or numb people from realizing it. It sounds like new-agey bullshit, but I think trying to stoke and harness that power in people is a really beautiful and galvanizing thing to do. There are a ton of ways to do it, in my experience workers fighting the authorities over them is the best way. It gets right to the core of the issue, but I'll probably write about that later.

merge

a fun thought I've had on linguistic history and one that I haven't seen expressed elsewhere:

So in Syntactic Structures (/LSLT) Chomsky looks into ways to formally capture some linguistic facts and starts off with some simple finite state automata. He shows that there are some facts about language that these simple machines are too weak to handle. Like, they are formally not powerful enough to capture the facts. In light of this failure, he says that we need something more powerful to capture language AND we should scrap finite state automata. This is fine, though he just as easily could have said: we need something more powerful to capture language IN ADDITION TO finite state automata. This is not nutty as there are some phenomena that might be sensibly captured by these (I'm thinking 'flat' stuff like iterated adjuncts, coordination, etc.)

Ok, so he goes on and looks into phrase structure grammars. As you might expect he finds that these do not succumb to the same failures as finite state machines, but he also uncovers some shortcomings for these more powerful devices. The difference here is that the failures are not those of formal power, but of explanatory adequacy: they can capture the facts, but only in ungainly and unenlightening ways. In response to this he says: we need something more powerful to capture language IN ADDITION TO phrase structure grammars. the more powerful thing is transformations, things that that in this case take the structures created by phrase structure grammars and alter them (they move things around, delete them, substitute in things, etc). Echoing the above paragraph, he could have just as easily said: we need something more powerful to capture language AND we should scrap phrase structure grammars.

But he doesn't, and for the longest time I just assumed that the reason he didn't say we should scrap them is because their failures were of a qualitatively different, weaker type. Not formal expressive powerful, but explanatory adequacy. These things coincide here, but there's no real logic tying them together from what I see. So it's kinda odd, or at least not immediately justified, that he does not scrap phrase structure grammars here. Though he's a smart guy and I trust him and so did a lot of other people and I'm sure he had his reasons.

Fast forward to, um, 93/95, and we are met with merge, which is a real departure from phrase structure grammars (though x-bar technically is the first real diversion from them, it's not in ways that matter really here). With merge as we know, the same process that builds structure also is responsible for moving things around. That is, structure building and transformations are collapsed. Or, more interestingly put: there is no more phrase structure grammar, only transformations, only putting two things together.

This is basically the step that Chomsky seemingly arbitrarily avoided way back in 55/57, just delayed by 40 years.

alignment

Our best estimates have it that humans have been doing language for 100,000-200,000 years, which is just an unfathomable amount of time. And though we (I) often think of people back then as some sort of dusty troglodytes grunting and pounding, these were anatomically modern humans and just as 'smart' or witty or whatever as you and me. So I think this means that we've had funny people making language jokes for longer than we've had civilization. I marvel at how many absolute gems have been lost to history, never recorded, evaporating in seconds throughout the ages.

A bunch of things (at least 2) have to align for a language joke. One (not my best) for example is a tweet I made that read "hilma klint af". The artist's name is Hilma af Klint (the 'af' is a preposition like 'von' or 'de' in other last names) and she had a very singular style and was very cool, she's been around as a concept for awhile, but in the grand scheme of things, an instant. Her existence has recently and probably only transiently clicked into alignment with 'af' being used as shorthand for 'as fuck' to modify adjectives. hilma klint af

Even though this is not a super inspired wordplay thing, I think it illustrates the chance alignment of these things. Hilma Klint af would not have made any sense 10 years ago and might no longer make sense in a few years. Moreover, it only currently makes much sense for a sliver of online people who know of her. When I make a spoonerism that fails, eg: bus ride russ bide, I sometimes wonder whether it's just ahead of its time, or I'm in the wrong subculture, etc. There are so many future jokes and so many obsolete ones. My mind starts to reel as I try to think of all these sorts of jokes flitting in and out of existence for tens of thousands of years in untold thousands of languages.

color

You know how there's that dormroom puzzler of whether my 'red' is the same as your 'red', which is yeah kinda dumb, but still a fun thing to think about. But what I think is a funner and more beautiful idea is something more like this:

of course there's no red 'out there' in the world, it's just photons doing their thing at different frequencies or something like that, the apple isn't red it just bounces that type at you etc. So the 'red' that you experience is entirely a creation of your own, whether you share it with anyone or not. this holds for blue and green and hot and coffee smell and all sorts of amazing things that your body cooked up all on its own, which is really a cool achievement. Red is a very fun color, who'da thought that it was *you* of all people to come up with it!

materials

on the little sign next to a piece of art in a museum they list the materials used to make it like: stainless steel, ceramic, and plaster which is like when I was a kid my mom would tell me not to worry, that's not blood it's just ketchup when seeing gore in a movie.

when I see something amazing and then looking at the materials list I'm often like, ha, you're not so tough, you have to use leather just like the rest of us

I luv the valley yum

I'm getting ffs tomorrow. They gave me some valium to calm me down and so that I get a good night's rest beforehand. It feels good, pretty lucid, trying to get some thoughts out. I enjoy these experiences as little practice deaths and visceral acknowledgments of how ephemeral health and mobility is. It'll be gone before I know it, and it's good to keep that in mind in real ways, like by actually fucking yourself up every now and then

bodies are like temples, they were made to be desecrated. The fear and anxiety I felt today was not pleasant, but it reminded me of all the similar times that I felt dread and excitement at the same time. These don't happen all that often in life, and I cherish them: prom, coming out, first days of school, etc. 

I feel zonked out to continue and I'm not feeling like I'm getting my thoughts across the way I want to, so I'll stop

tension

Following this politics stuff online can be stressful and I'm trying to figure out why it's stressful. One idea that feels helpful to me is that I get stressed by the tension between two things. 1) the clean professional way of the world: mass media, academia, government, corporations all with their sheen of control, rationalism, level-headedness and inevitability and 2) the bonkers ecstatic tragic dayglo whatever that embodied real life is.

The stress comes from not just the tension between those, but the fact that the first one seems so dominant and is compelling and assumed as real by so many people. Engaging with the first one once you've accepted the 2) as more explanatory is stressful and you just want to yell at, shake, poke, shoot, anything at the people who assume the 1) is explanatory. Like to jostle them and free them. Maybe this is what Brecht was on about, maybe this is what every cool person is on about, whatever, I'm not claiming this is a novel idea, just that that tension is stressful!

dreams

I was recently driving around the UC Santa Cruz campus. It's a really striking campus, sitting high above the city/ocean/monterey bay, there's an expansive field with great views and then you enter a thick forest and the school is in little clusters of buildings connected by roads and trails. It is just powerfully peaceful and beautiful and I've never been on an campus that remotely resembles it.

Not only that, they have what I consider one of the best linguistics programs in the world (imo probably something like: ucsc, umd, mit, umass). this is largely the result of the efforts of sandy chung, jim mccloskey, jorge hankamer, etc. who developed a beautiful socratic style of teaching linguistics, syntax in particular. 

coming up in grad school, you internalize the idea that you don't get to choose where to live and that it's a roll of the dice to end up somewhere nice (or at least I internalized that). I never dreamed of ending up at a place like santa cruz, but then in 2016 I was a new trans woman living in iowa and was invited out there for a job talk after an interview at the lsa in DC. 

academic onsite interviews are pretty hellish, two days of nonstop talks, teaching, interviews, socializing. This was made extra hard cuz I had never done this before and I was new to presenting as a woman. I remember still feeling awkward and scared in the womens bathroom, a place that could have been a place of respite/sanctuary/refuge during something like this. The put me up in this dream hotel on the coast and I listened to the decemberists Oceanside on repeat, but was otherwise super stressed. I'd wake up at 2am due to jetlag and nerves.

I tried my best, but didn't get the job. who knows exactly why. But upon hearing the news back in iowa when sandy chung called me, I failed at concealing the fact that I was crying by the time we ended the call. My undreamt of dream life wasn't going to be. And soon enough my dream of even staying in linguistics was dead and I was back in my childhood home, unemployed and pretty much adrift.

***

I think this was a beautiful thing to have happen to me and I feel really lucky now that I didn't get that job.

I often think about what makes something brittle. sometimes it's a linguistic theory that is very brittle:  would be really easy to show that it doesn't work, and this is normally taken to be a good thing because at the end of the day we don't care if a theory works, theories are just disposable tools to aid in understanding. In organizing, we don't want things to be brittle, because organizations are hard to build and, for example, if your organization is totally dependent on one or a few people, it is really easy destroyed if those people move on for whatever reason.

Having your hopes and dreams crushed, at least in my experience with this case, makes the 'you' that persists through it very much not brittle. I know that I can survive and be happy even when my most cherished desires are made impossible. I think this is a really powerful and good thing. It frees me from the fear that I might be ruined, at least in terms of what I'm doing with my time all day, my life (this is capitalism, so it's work). It doesn't matter if I'm a linguist, or a barista, or unemployed. That's not where 'I' resides.

It makes me also think about people who have not gone through this sort of experience. Living in fear that one false step might destroy their conception of themselves or the perception of them in the eyes of others. Who knows, maybe that explains why careerists are so fucking dull and highstrung

hissing

there's a new of montreal album out and the song I've heard from it really draws into stark relief the span of time between now and when I was first listening to them. There's nothing particular to the lyrics or anything here that makes me think this. Rather, it's just the sort of wistful interludes here plus the fact that they're simply still chugging along. Here's the video

I started with satanic panic in the attic, but hissing fauna is the album that brings up the most for me. I was hanging out a lot with my friend Samantha at the time. She was sort of an it-girl in the seattle music scene for a second, dating some record label guy and we would hang out at sonic boom, go to shows together, and she loved this album.

This wasn't very edgy, it was on the safer, establishment side of things. She was in a sorority, was from fancy Issaquah and her family was from Liechtenstein. But it was fun being carefree and cool in this world for a bit, even if it was a little alien to me

youth

I often indulge in musings about mortality, but they're usually at worst pleasurable melancholy navelgazings about how we should cherish every moment and so on. But it's only when other emotional things in my life are heightened that mortality (or maybe more accurately aging) is made more visceral and intense and unpleasant.

I spent the last few days with a 20yo girl who I met in Iowa. She flew out to see me and I showed her around the town and we fucked a lot. She had never been to the west coast and hasn't had a load of experience with other girls. It was a pretty intense and jampacked few days. On our last day, we drove down the coast to Santa Cruz, watched the sunset into the ocean from a cliffside in a fantasm of blue and orange.

Maybe I'm projecting things onto her, but if I were her, it would have been a foundational experience for me. I had a number of similarly intense experiences when I was 19-21 and they are like my own personal lore, beautiful ragged-edged nights, precocious youths careening through the world agog at it all.

I was 19 in Vienna, hanging with the cool girls, the soundtrack that Spring was Placebo. We rolled up orange euros and snorted bright blue lines of adderall off a makeup mirror. Me and S walked the streets deep into the night exploring each others young lives and encountering new blisses.  At dawn we stumbled upon a soft white Maria am Gestade. We were at once jaded and vibrating, impressed with the world as our own creation.

But this weekend, I could intuit that a profound experience was happening, but it that meta distance rendered it sort of inert. I wasn't exploring, I was topping, in control. The asymmetry in ages might have had something to do with it, I dunno. The types of heightened experiences I once naively enjoyed might be unattainable for me now. I think I might be able to exhale after my surgery next month and maybe that will change things

oulu

I'm stuck on trying to write a spoonerism poem, which kept me from writing over the weekend.

In any case, I'm feeling wistful and nostalgic. This often happens to me and there are a lot of paths to it. A common one, which I traveled down today, involves me making a big life decision which in turn makes me worry and to calm myself I remind myself about how life and all this is just a dream. This wide scope extends backwards in time and memories pop up.

The particular memory I have now. I am 21, studying for the 2007 summer in oulu finland. Since it's summer the sun hardly sets and we stay out all night drinking and having fun. Near our apartments is a lake and at like 2am three of us go skinny dipping as the sky is orange and purple. It's me, Marina from Russia and Anna from Germany. I'm a straight guy, Marina is probably bi-ish, and Anna is gay. Me and Anna have been sorta jokingly competing for the affections of Marina and we're all drunkenly teasing and pulling at each other in the water. We knew what we were doing, all three of us would succeed in the end, but none of us knew that yet

sitting out

Navelgazing is fun and I do it all the time. probably like everyone else I'm constantly trying to assess and discern my place relative to everything else in the world, however hopeless a cause this might be since the world is so fantastically complex, my understanding is so limited, and things like 'myself' might not even be coherent. It's hard to attack this head-on, so I'll write about times when I've stuck-out, felt distinct from others etc. Not because these are unique, I'm sure everyone feels these things, but rather because they might be clarifying.

I went to a public elementary school. Each day, I would walk over to my friend's house and me and him and his sister would walk the 4 blocks to school. The school had a wide array of SES level kids and apparently some 'progressive' leadership because when I was in 4th grade (~10yo?) they decided to implement a policy where the students had to wear uniforms. This was, they said, a means to make the poor kids feel less bad about their clothes vis a vis the rich kids or something like that.

Whatever the rationale, I was dead set against it. I suspect now it might have had something to do with gender-related issues of mine, but I'm not sure. At the time I was very into contemporary alternative rock music. I remember a binder I had with a big pink heart sticker on it signaling my allegiance to the band Hole. I had a backpack with that jangled with the collection of random buttons I pinned to it. And I had a load of bright neon clothes and band tshirts from places like Zumiez and Trendy Wendy (womans club apparal store on capital hill in seattle). I was into the abject, I took pictures of trash and thought myself very gritty and arty. Needless to say, a uniform policy was not something I was interested in.

I got into arguments with other kids, older kids, parents about it and my own parents were very supportive of my whining. I remember people telling me that this was good preparation for the future and workplace dress codes. I remember touting my extra special fanciness and how I was pulled out of class to do big kid math and reading and stuff, so you don't need uniforms to be a good student. My brother, eager to fit in, was excited to wear a uniform, and we got written up in the paper about this. A lot of this is sort of cringe-inducing now, but it was a righteous crusade back then. I had one-on-one meetings with the principal and after a long ordeal, I was exempted from the policy. Everyone in the school had to wear uniforms, except me, I could continue to wear my silly costumes.

In high school 2001 happened when I was a sophomore and then 2002 happened and 2003. All the while I was reading lots of Chomsky, Angela Davis, adbusters, crimethinc, etc. I wrote my own little essays on how the colin powell shit at the UN was an obvious farce and my teachers were concerned and put off by it. I was a star student, athlete, etc. which made things maybe weirder. It's bullshit, but they let you gget away with more stuff if you're doing well by their metrics. In any case, I stopped standing for the pledge of allegiance and sneered at everyone else who did. I was threatened with punishment that never came.

Why am I like this? these are both individualistic meaningless ineffectual things, but also why isn't everyone else like this. I'm no more moral or smart or whatever than other people. Both of these things are basically passive refusals to do things, which imo is much less good than actually doing something. But why was no one else refusing? What does this mean?

mushrooms

I'm getting into newagey maybe hyberbolic supposed benefits of certain mushrooms in sort of an effort to overcome my lifelong phobia of them, and it actually seems to be working.

When I was a little kid, I wouldn't even touch a picture of a mushroom. Now I'm at the point where I can handle, wash, and chop those white button mushrooms. little by little

drinks

had drinks with a grad school friend last night and we talk about trans stuff as we often do. This person is pretty open about their so-called 'gender critical' views and it's interesting to interact with someone like this in person. a few tiny thoughts:

most people's opinions on most things just don't matter, and I think developing nuanced and detailed opinions in lieu of any action is just jacking off. I love jacking off and am not gonna begrudge anyone that. This person has some wrong opinions on trans stuff, but who gives a shit. Whether they see me as a woman is in part out of their hands and if they don't, well, given that they have no power whatsoever, sucks to be them. I don't believe in some sort of notion that society is shaped by any emergent properties of everyone's opinions. Some people's opinions affect me, most don't

maybe that's all the thoughts I have for now

lunchbreak

I'm at work, lunchbreak. In academia I longed for the stability and boredom of one of those office jobs, with watercooler gossip etc, and that's what I got! complete with cubicle. I don't care about what I work on and that's fine by me. I enjoy doing it and thinking about other things once I'm done for the day.

I imagine not being interested in what I spend my time on will catch up with me eventually. It probably is already leading me to want to write fiction or make some dilettante sound garbage with a musical instrument of some sort. So be it.

maybe I'll put some of that stuff here in the future

nose

walked to one of the myriad coffeeshops near me this morning, this one started in 1996 and is comfy and has a magazine rack which makes it seem anachronistic and I love it for that. It looks pretty certain that I'm gonna get facial surgery to demasculinize my face and I've been musing/dwelling on this a lot the last few days.

My face is basically fine, people say I look good, I pass easily, and I'm often satisfied with how I look. But this isn't enough apparently. I'm chasing after this image of femininity that will always recede the closer I get to it, which I don't think is so tragic, this is the same case with basically everything people strive for. Anything worth striving for is never truly achievable. probably. But that sounds dumb and aphoristic.

Another angle is the one where I'm the pampered pinnacle of white western tech treasure and I have nothing to do with the money beyond adorning my self-centered temple. Countless millions of trans women in the past and present would die to have my current position, let alone the chance to have their face fancied up by a top surgeon in the world.

Another angle is one I'm more sympathetic to. Another sort of practice death, just like my male body and name were always ephemeral but I got to experience their passing away, so too again with my face. This probably ties in with the above in the some California ideology hippie tech bullshit way, but so be it, I find that stuff appealing.

In any case, I saw a woman at the coffeeshop who had a notable nose and thought she looked beautiful and I imagine a series of vignettes, her as a girl self conscious and self hating, her as a young woman self conscious and self hating. and it made me wonder about my motivations.

everything2

This site's url is an allusion to a site that once dominated my world everything2. It's the nonneoliberal nonsterile version of wikipedia (it has facts, but also poems and dreams) and reminds me of a certain (type of) person in my life. It makes me think of the era where people would get boyfriends or girlsfriends long distance through MUDs or something. That stuff kinda repels me, but I've been adjacent to it a lot and I love other stuff that goes with it: I'm thinking late 90s alternative stuff, nick cave, manic street preachers, portishead.

pool

I used to rack up the balls and break each time, but now I just scatter them and have at it. I down all the stripes or solids and then go after the rest and play at least one game a day. If a security guard is around, I'll ask them to play with me

here's my terrence malick shadow shot

adornment

I'm generally pro-adornment, especially in writing, especially in spelling. Writing is just fun squiggles that are silly on their own (look at g lol) so why not more squiggles. The soberminded bores always toss in the caveat 'as long as it doesn't impede understanding' or whatever. but fuck that. that's dumb. Lots of things go ununderstood and it's fine, chill out

polish

Maybe it's a form of depression, but I find no appeal in the idea that I might do anything (like writing here) to get better at it, to hone it as a skill. I just want to have fun and relax. I don't want to be too clever or cute in my thinking. I also don't want to be too rigorous and clear, my thoughts are sloppy and bleed into each other, who cares. Writing is like some weird crystalline growth with odd angles jutting at each other all rigid and orderly, but it's just a kidney stone. This site will just set some of mine out in an array for you

typing

This page is half intended as a way to ween myself off twitter for good and half intended as a way to blather and muck around. I think I'm gonna try to keep it pretty twitter-like with short entries, jokes, and stuff like that