recurring motifs

 if i had to name the themes i encounter most often in literature, or the ones i tend to search for, i would describe them as this:

-empire and masculinity

    ex: Absalom Absalom!, Arthuriana, Heart of Darkness

    -the role of the prince (coming into empire)

              ex: The Henriad, Infinite Jest, Star Wars

-the search for home, homesickness, the fantasy of a homeland

    ex: Wizard of Oz, My Own Private Idaho

    relevant text: Two Essays About Finding Home in The Wizard of Oz 

-nothingness and void

     ex: The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist, Poem with No Children In It , Where is everybody?, Proverbs from the void

-prehistory

     ex: The Track in the Wilderness 

-the (presumably) unbridgeable gap between each others minds and the inability of words to fully express thoughts, the (presumed) impossibility of two people ever fully experiencing something in the same way

    ex: Moby Dick, The Other Tiger

All school is online school

 It's interesting how little criticism I see of the way both work and school have become completely assimilated into the Internet. I rarely see this mentioned when people promote a more offline existence, despite it being one of the main things that makes having Internet access necessary. I mainly just wanted to share my own feelings about the subject.

The Internet is bad for our attention spans. This much is obvious. Short attention spans destroy the ability to think deeply in a way that's entirely antithetical to our modern school system. High level coursework requires deep thought and deep work, but assigning/complete work throughout the Internet introduces the same kind of speediness that's become ubiquitous to it. The deadlines are stated boldly at the top of each page. Your schoolwork now comes in the form of a "dashboard", complete with infinite scroll. There are hundreds of tabs and modules and external sites that you are expected to navigate. I'm not an idiot; I know how to do these things. But that level of engagement is something I do for fun while messing around online. It's not an academic space. It's just a small fragment embedded in the larger network. It's not conductive to truly sitting down and understanding the material, being forced to sit with and articulate your own thoughts in silence. The energy is hyperactive and schizophrenic.

Learning was a lot easier when I was younger. I know this is due to a lot of factors, some of which are natural. Kids absorb information easier. The coursework gets harder as you get older. I've fried my own brain with an internet addiction (though I'm trying to recover). But I can't help thinking the entire way we're expected to learn now is a bit fucked up. The way I learned in elementary/middle school was through worksheets and essays, all on pen and paper, with no distractions. Each task was isolated amongst itself, not just one tab in a sea of other tabs. It didn't feel like I was multitasking then; the most I would do was listen to music. We still used computers occasionally, but that too was a single and isolated task. It was just a tool then. As I understand it, this is how most of humanity was educated. I'm not sure it was such a good idea to try and move education entirely online. Not just socially, but in the coursework itself. I feel like not much thought was given to this decision and that the consequences of it aren't fully understood. To many people, it may not seem that different from normal school. All I can say is the energy and the way my brain feels during/afterwards are entirely different than I feel when I've actually sat down with a book or written out an essay on paper.

Anyway, I'm the youngest person in my life, so I'm not sure if elementary and middle school have moved online as well or if that's reserved for high school and college. I think younger minds are even more at risk for this kind of thing; education homogenizing itself into the glossy and featureless sludge that most of the internet now provides. Anyway, time to go type out an essay.

anytime im holding two cups

 *in my head* temperance....

the real questions

1.  why is it so hard to consolidate good? if you've found this page, there's a good chance you believe there is one concentrated malignant force wishing to do harm upon the world. even if you don't believe that, you're certainly aware there have been objectively evil empires throughout history. where are the objectively benevolent and kind forces? the people working for unequivocal good? my favorite fairytale is the snow queen by hans kristoff anderson. in it, a young girl named gerda tries to rescue her best friend from the titular character. if the snow queen is a physical manifestation of evil, we can see gerda as the opposing force of good. the other notable difference between them is that gerda wields such little power in comparison to the queen. she relies on the kindness of others - small kindnesses - in order to complete her journey. there is no powerful force for good. its made up of the small moments.
   
2. there has got to be one meme whose criteria is the broader than any others. which do you think it is? keep calm and _____? __ much? are those even memes? is it anything that falls under the wikipedia for "star wars memes"? rage comics?
   
3. where is the unedited "eat yo food bitch damn" image? its going to be lost forever if we don't find it soon.
4. how many people have actually gouged their own eyes out in human history? how many times was it voluntary vs involuntary? this has been a real fear of mine for as long as i can remember. i had a dream about it last night and i'm pretty concerned that i might accidentally pluck mine out in my sleep. disconcerted to say the least.
5. how do some people WRITE so good? i'm less impressed by professional authors than i am at finding unexpected, unmatched talent in the most random places. today i was reading through seatsafetyswitch.com and wow. nothing much to really add here, just wanted to gush about this and send some people in their direction if you havent seen it already. what a guy.
   
6. why do digital libraries make you loan books? its online dumbass.
   

7/30/22

i think i am going to die soon. i feel it deeply and viscerally. the death will be self contained. my body will betray me or i will betray my body. my skull hurts. my jaw hurts. my teeth hurt. my chest hurts. my heart wants to stop. what i want has no bearing on what i will do. i am going to tear my eyes out. i am going to find a ballpoint pen and explore the hole forming in my chest, pick and tear at it until i can see inside myself. my organs will come out of each hole in my body. i will have seen it coming for months.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

 

this guy was the goat. still waiting on that roadtrip bioptic.

interesting things (noncomprehensive)

-prehistory

-objectum/objectophilia

-body identity integrity disorder

-SCPs

-wild animal welfare

-UFO/angel sighting overlap

-LAKE AND OCEAN CRYPTIDS

-lesser known biographies and backstorys of historical figures. i cant read an author until i know what her life was like/where she grew up/what was happening at the time

-evolution of ideas (esp evolution of religion)

-three body problem 

-Bicameral mentality

-humans getting eaten by wild animals