numinousdread

 Checking in with people I followed on Tumblr a few years back feels weird, because I've basically replaced my old Tumblr circles and so there are certain parts of left Tumblr culture I am not exposed to. So people will be making critiques that I agree with of ideas and topics that preoccupied me years ago, and I get this sense of exhaustion and relief that I've left. If I had stayed there I would have to contend with these repetitive conversations, either people aren't engaging with these criticisms in a way that helps them develop their ideas, or new waves of people are entering the convo and making the same mistakes. 

Part of me does feel like-- I've grown a lot intellectually in the past seven or so years, though maybe that's a bit vain and ego-defensive. I could have done a lot more work to read the type of intellectually challenging texts I feel help me grow, and I'm ashamed about that. But there's only so much growth you have available to you within a context where you're engaging with such a small slice of take-havers (who are in turn mostly engaged with each other), only so many conceptual tools for analyzing the world you can get and facts you can be exposed to. Plus that slice of Tumblr people don't really have a developed theory of ethics or justice or epistemology. That feels so corny and self-serious to express, but I genuinely think it's part of the problem, and that engaging with more formal philosophy would help people think better. Or maybe it wouldn't, and people would just get confused by a bunch of fiddly technical shit and become more insane.  

Anyways, I feel like I'm genuinely still developing my ideas on certain topics and not purely beefing with the ghosts of discourse past. And I've entered more intellectually diverse spaces that give me new models for thinking, in terms of ranges of topics and ideological leanings of participants. I don't feel like "the master of the discourse" who can easily out-argue the people around me and is just continually surprised at how sloppy and complacent people around me are. I feel sloppy and complacent, and like I'm operating on a lower level than a lot of participants in certain convos, and that motivates me to do a better job at thinking, or to just let them hash it out and not assume that I'm so smart that I'm gonna win this one.  

And re: the ideological diversity-- there's an imaginary Tumblr user in my head who is like wait a minute, dark hinting/dog-whistle alert, that means you are on the chud Internet, why are you on the chud Internet, and that's not so. But also like, if someone hears me say I can be in a Discord server with someone who thinks capitalism is awesome or that government regulation does more harm than good or whatever, and goes "Omg, that means you're letting them get away with it", then idk that's their problem. I am not going to shame a right-libertarian out of libertarianing (nor should they shame me about supporting the welfare state), and engaging with right-libertarians can help me grow intellectually and also learn the skills to live in an ideologically diverse society (which I already had to do).

Like, I remember going to an anarchist conference in 2017 or 2018, and some ancap guy came by mistake, and my response to him was disquiet and fear. Not "Oh this is a silly set of beliefs to have", not "Ugh one of these dudes, can't wait to hear about seasteading", not pity for him getting trapped in a belief system that I regarded as wrong and harmful. I was scared of him, even though he was perfectly polite and even willing to talk to me. And I just think that was an irrational fear, and the level of discomfort I felt around "ideological enemies" made it harder for me to engage in society, learn more about why they believe that stuff, or have a conversation where I explained my views and hopefully gave the impression that not all leftists are insane or stupid. And I think I feel comfortable with feeling that level of disquiet around a fascist, but not an ancap. And that's compatible with thinking that their proposed society would have major glaring issues or thinking at least some people are ancaps because of character defects, ignorance, and/or motivated reasoning. You can think someone is wrong about a lot of things without having your heart rate increase when they enter the room.      

If you find right-libertarians step on your triggers a lot or just think they are dumb and/or evil and you don't want to be around them in your personal life, then you do you. (Like, maybe they advocate for ending programs you find important and you predictably get upset by trying to argue for their importance, maybe you can't stand people who vocally dislike leftists, maybe they just remind you of your racist gun nut uncle, whatever.) But I've drunk the liberal "freedom of association" Koolaid on this one. You should make this decision for yourself and not because of social pressure.

And tbc... I don't think the experiences that have helped me grow are like, necessary for avoiding stagnation. There's a better version of me out there who just read a bunch of philosophy or wrote a bunch of essays, but I'm not them. There's a lot of self-improvement that I abandoned in favor of short-term pleasures or just had trouble getting motivated for because it felt too big and threatening to my self-image.

But I'm proud that I grew at all, in my undisciplined way.        

Intermittently thrumming with anxiety but managed to have a good weekend despite that.
Invited some friends to a group discussion on Discord and it went well.
We've gotten the kind of low-to-mid sixties day, and the scattered and billowy clouds, that often follow rain. Have walked for an hour and a half each day and felt joy about daffodils and orange-red crocuses and the delicate apple blossoms, how they look in this light, and also the colors of flowerpots and doors. I love wandering around with no agenda on days like these. I feel connected to all the versions of myself who've jaunted around in spring, and tbh some of the happier hours of my life have probably passed this way. 
Feeling existentially unsettled about ethics and how we're all just groping around. Not shame or guilt but screaming wrongness and uncertainty (I associate this feeling with OCD). Fear of being found out, maybe. It's so strange to me how the joy I take in being in the world exists alongside the horror I feel about ethics.
Two years ago (almost exactly) the person I was dating, who told me that they loved me and I was their favorite person, dropped a letter in my mailbox in which they broke up with me and clarified over Discord they never wanted to talk to me again. I spent an entire night crying; my friend Jasper brought me homemade hamantashen. I remember thinking, I wonder if my ex is celebrating Purim. (By pure coincidence, both Jasper and my ex are Jewish. I am not. But my girlfriend is converting and keeps brainstorming twists on hamantashen in my DMs today.)
Today the barista gave me a free chocolate croissant. 

Barely reflected in my use of DW, but I've had a much better time thinking of writing and talking to my friends-- on Discord that's a genre of writing-- as "developing my ideas among supportive people who can help me notice mistakes" and "seeing if anyone vibes with my take". "Persuading everyone that it's okay to believe x" and "persuading everyone to agree" were (are?) exhausting, even though I'm jealous of people who are good at this stuff for real, the people in the Major Leagues of posting takes. It's also hard to measure how much I'm persuading people vs. finding kindred spirits, so it honestly makes me feel worse about whatever I've spun out about.
And why should I adopt a frame that makes "finding kindred spirits" feel cheap, when kindred spirits are hard to find? I want to meet people on my wavelength, and I mean stuff that's less-legible, that doesn't translate into or flow from the kind of group identity we put in bio. A million people can call themselves An X and apparently we work together on some group project, but how do they feel about this one incidental detail? Are they noticing what I'm noticing and feeling kinda similar about it? Unlikely. 
Anyways, sharing a take to a friend like, idk, a writers' group. I'm showing my friend a work in progress; maybe it has some glaring issues, but better to find that out now than to embarrass myself in front of a larger audience, and now I know what to work on. And we can become closer because we shared these work in progress ideas, the kind that are likely to provoke embarrassing interactions w/ randos, and gave each other attention for it.
(Yeah, I'm having a lot of small-scale thoughts lately.)

Got Covid and fell into a headspace where I identified as an "avolitional lump". Had desires and goals like "drink more powdered Propel" and "find a way to sleep" and "recover". I usually enjoy daydreaming about the coming year on New Year's and setting intentions but I couldn't get myself to do it, beyond a vague feeling I want to read more books and do more creative writing and maybe go to more gay social settings. 

The part of me that wants and works towards more than this slowly grows back. I've been cleared to take crisis calls for [org redacted] and I finally sent off my grad school application. I started making notes for a very humble creative project. 

I need to shape my New Year's intentions so they align with a value and concrete goals but for now I'm happy with them-- would probably just add "learning in general" so I don't fetishize written books. I feel I'd like to read long-form writing with a more extensive editing process and/or from someone working on their specialty, but I just also want exposure to more ideas and concrete details about the world. I love reading oral history interviews because they don't require intense concentration or activation energy but they're rich in these kind of details and they generally come from outside my bubble (meaning I will get more new takes and more references to unknown places and people). But I also want to stretch myself and not consume pure "comfort food".
  
Glad to be exiting lumphood. 

 I think I am ultimately kind of spooked around the concept of "community" in some instances even if I am separately(?) kind of sentimentally invested in it because I feel like buying into it too strongly would cause me to have to think about whether I have special obligations to community members and what those consist of, and I don't know how to do that in a way that doesn't cause massive scrupulosity. It really is a can of worms for me I guess
So when people apply that framing to my relationships I feel like a kneejerk aversion, like no, I haven't opted to being in community with someone just because I interacted with them once or twice. I guess that's a narrower thing than the broader "community: what is it and what do I owe it" question but it brings up similar feelings. 

 I'm done freaking out for now; thankfully I'm not alone in sadness or shock or terror. Feeling a sense of collective identity and having tapped into a "mood" that... idk, I'm often aloof from, feeling a more complicated mix of identification and alienation from a lot of political sentiments. Bad arguments, implicit assumptions that seem questionable, rhetorical choices for which I feel distaste, incompatible ethical frameworks.
I have a general sense that... I need to sit back and evaluate, not just sign on to a team. And I like being that way, but it removes some pleasures and satisfactions that I suspect people often get from politics. 
But hey, we are all on the same page about this one.
Tried to reach out to friends.  
Did an extra-long volunteer shift. We were swamped. Every single person I talked to mentioned the election.
I'm full of resolve to just keep on volunteering with people affected by Trump's anti-trans turn and just keep, idk, mopping up spills. I can't imagine what it'd be like to be a trans teenager getting this news, and I want to be a steady presence for them because I'm okay at it. 
 I look back at my journals from 2016 and I was so self-centered, so caught up in litigating the legitimacy and permissibility of my gender shit and tastes in fanfiction porn or whatever. Not saying you can't care about multiple things at once-- but, like, priorities, dude.
Need to dust myself off and keep going. I want to finish Trump's term and feel okay about what I did, the person I became in that time. I want to help other people now, as much as I can.  

Childhood memories of walking around with my dad on the morning after Halloween, soaking up lingering vibes. Candy debris in the gutters like shed leaves. I remember we saw smashed pumpkins; as a kid, that seemed so terrible. 

 Fell down a "traveler" forum rabbithole.
When I first learned about crustpunks as a teenager, I felt pretty grossed out by what I saw as "privileged people" choosing to be homeless. I didn't have a well-articulated objection-- it just felt kind of perverse and appropriative. I remember seeing a crustpunk and his dog at Union Station on my school fieldtrip and thinking something like, "He's taking resources from Real Homeless People by choosing to be homeless" or "So you think homelessness is cool???". 
Reading this forum, though, it seems like a chunk of them are burnt-out and depressed by the demands of a full-time job, and looking to ek out a small life outside that. One person talked about their cycle of taking a job, working for six months, and quitting due to the ensuing mental health crisis. One guy talks about quitting a joyless job that ate decades of his life. There are also a disproportionate number of trans people. All in all, it's kinda hard for me to feel moral reproach for people looking lives that don't make them miserable, and even the apparently romanticizing aspects of this subculture seem to help people redefine not being able to or wanting to function in a 9-to-5 job as opening up possibilities rather than as a dead-end or failed life. (I feel like I've seen a lot of trans and disabled people embrace a similarly bohemian ethos, and perhaps it's a self-protective framing.) 
Do I think living as a traveler will help the people posting about quitting their awful jobs? Is it, like a prudent choice? Well, I'm not going to make that call for someone else-- nor would I give blanket suggestions about other high-risk ways of operating outside the official economy, e.g. sex work. I'm not saying nobody is ever qualified or justified in giving advice about life choices like these, just that a lot of it amounts to kneejerk paternalism.
Anti-appropriation sentiments often boil down to "You haven't deal with what I've dealt with, so you shouldn't get to take the cool stuff or resources associated with my identity." "My culture is not a costume", etc. And, like, not sure if that's even the case here-- because homelessness is a social/material position that people descriptively move in and out of, right? If you're choosing to live as homeless, you are homeless, with all the material consequences that entails-- regardless of how you ended up that way or how you feel about it.
I'm sure there are complexities I'm not addressing here, but I was pretty much wrong as a teenager, I think.
And of course, I feel nowadays that everyone should have some bare minimum social support, and so I'm not too concerned about "the wrong" people getting resources.  "You've brought this on yourself, so you don't deserve sympathy" is not generally, like, upstream of good decision-making about helping vulnerable people, imho. Certainly I could choose not to transition!

 Started off Saturday with some wiki editing, then went to LA for a friend's birthday party at Elysian Park (never been there before).

This required a train ride, then a bus ride, then forty minutes uphill through a sort of overgrown, quiet, funky neighborhood-- terminating in a twisty narrow drive atop the hill, inhabited by obscenely rich people with decent taste in drought-tolerant landscape (nice-smelling sage bushes!). It was a fantastic little wander, and I was the only person out there for a big stretch (an apparent raven croaked at me from a tree). 

I hadn't seen the host of the party since before the pandemic(!) and had ample time to seethe about various annoying interactions we've had in my quarantine dysthymia. So I actually wasn't sure how much I wanted this friend in my life. But they seemed happy and chill in person, and I enjoyed meeting the friends they've made in the last four years. 

Speaking of those friends-- I've been feeling pretty settled in my gender presentation and social gender, at least insofar as that's possible for me while anxious about HRT and not that well-adjusted about transition. My friends and girlfriend are using he/him for me, my girlfriend has flattering opinions about my gender, and service workers are just not using courtesy titles, due to woke, which seems fine. I don't feel that inclined to butch it up in a way that makes me come off to more people as "a man".

I've also internally swung towards "lol whatever", possibly because I'm not in many face-to-face contexts Monday-Friday, so the relational aspects of gender don't feel as salient to me. I also tend to soak up vague gendered affinity from people I'm around, and I know a lot of non-binary people I guess.   

 Not really feeling deep sea level pressure to Woman Correctly, for multiple competing definitions of woman. So we're good.

But there was a gay dude at the party wearing dangly earrings, and unfortunately this took a blowtorch to my chill. I was completely caught up in "oh no he's cute" and "I want him to know I am like him" (whatever that means), and also feeling like a pile of coats concealing a dead rat. He explained his Charli XCX Halloween costume, which involved multiple props. 

And like, I am not even gay, in the orientation sense of liking only men. I have a girlfriend. But the social and cultural aspects of gayness have always been appealing to me, and gay men are often pretty cute. I remember meeting a gay guy when I was like, fifteen, and feeling this same star-struck and wistful yearning. This probably stems from growing up and receiving messages from my parents and peers that men are a certain way, and never like "girl things", and if they do, someone will swiftly correct them. And like, by the time I was 14, I kind of wanted to be a boy, but the gulf between girls and boys was fucking astronomical.

And the most visible rebuttal to that men are from Mars bullshit was like, certain gay dudes' gender expression. 

It's ultimately annoying because I really backed away from this layer of my gender feelings once I got on T, which I felt confused and relieved about. It's like, hey, I thought we weren't doing this stuff anymore! 

Anyways, party was good! Met an aspiring archivist who seems pretty cool; maybe I'll ask if she wants to hang out sometime.

Sunday I missed a train going back but ended up inviting my girlfriend to come while away the time with me (she brought our mutual friend who's also her roommate). While waiting, ducked into a boba shop for an outlet and AC; it tried for minimalist which I don't mind but had like, visible scuffmarks on the white walls and dust near the fuzzy Halloween spiders, which I minded. They played 3/3 of Kendrick's diss tracks over the course of like 30 minutes; I always associate the feud with my friend D. who explained them to me on a Discord call. I'm... not sure I actually like the tracks?

But it was a good weekend. I've been trying to learn about phylogenetics and basic evobio stuff on Wikipedia today, and like, phylogenetic trees are so fucking cool. 

 I've been making a concerted effort to try new foods (and new restaurants) this year, and you know what-- great New Year's Resolution.

Off the top of my head, I've had boat noodles and bamboo shoot salad and Montreal style bagels and bhindi masala and baigan bharta.

And mee goreng.