Tag: box opener

a thing about now having bangs kind of is that i keep thinking that my sleeping roommate is moving around when really i am just seeing pieces of my hair in my peripheral vision. not constantly scaring yourself with imaginary visions is femme privilege, discuss

from now on the only cool people are: first and foremost, my mom, who is my angry unionist guardian angel and so much better than everyone else in the world. second, my elementary school best friend, chicago suburbs catholic nerd normie princess and literal caltech-attending math genius (for her, i will namedrop a school, because she earns it). third, my 17 y/o brother, who is actually literally cool and popular but also like, a thoughtful compassionate weirdo of immense artistic talent, and therefore still qualifies for this list.

the prelude/disclaimer to this post is that it’s very specific to myself and my own skewed expectations, for me only, of how things like ambition should work. i’m comparing myself to my own perceptions of other people who are also doing the exact same study/career-path thing i’m doing, but [better] or [with greater focus or passion or certainty].

puzzlingly, i really do seem to totally lack any inbuilt/innate passion: as u know, i’m studying biology, and everyone i know appears to be either driven by the pursuit of knowledge qua knowledge, the desire to alleviate suffering on the medical/biomedical level, or a passion for environmental/biodiversity preservation. meanwhile, my attitude toward biology is 1. i enjoy and am good at learning the material [which is a necessary condition of ‘my field’ for preserving my emotional well-being] 2. i find it satisfying to gain expertise with research tools (primarily imaging). but none of this is necessarily MORE satisfying to me than, say, successful execution of a poem, i just have other intellect-based concerns that make me prioritize . i do kind of care about reputation, but “positively maximizing other people’s opinions of me” just seems like a worse drive than pursuit of knowledge on the levels of controllability or ethics as well as, ironically, in terms of other people’s regard. and most of the really universal signals of/for regard from others [prizes, extremely high-prestige jobs] are roundable to unattainable and the process of acquiring them doesn’t necessarily sound like it would make me happy (where i am evaluating happiness more as “positive self-regard” than “active hedonia”, although both count i guess).

if the end goal of my life is just “establish the conditions that make me like myself the most” [“/hate myself the least”]– like, sure i guess, but shouldn’t i be more than that? shouldn’t i be anything more than that? do i just make a precondition of not hating myself be that i contribute notably and materially to [others’ lives/“knowledge”/“the world”]? that… would work….but feels like cheating???

i don’t know. i guess i believe that science is important, and i’m at least approximately smart enough to be useful to science somehow, and it’s ok for me to attach myself to “science is important” as a driver and then back into reasoning for it……. but i think something’s wrong with me, compared to others who are in the same field/type of field, doing the same kinds of things. i think something’s missing.

suicide tw, scrupulosity/guilt tw, descriptive body talk

currently-held beliefs [overall pretty posi, probably subject to day-to-day fluctuations, but i’m hoping that i can hold on to them for a while macroscopically.]:

– that my face and body are both “successfully”/ “innately” androgynous, by which i mean both: 

  • i feel that i am hot (my current most-desired ~positive body state as opposed to cute/beautiful/handsome/etc) and androgynous and even hot-because-androgynous
  • but also, that i am successfully training myself to consider my p much unchangeable visual qualities (tall, bony, very straight build, strong brows, “striking” face setup, atypically long hands/arms) to be a success of my desire to look androgynous. that is, i’m able to believe that the traits i have are successful achievements of how i want to appear. or, in approximation: i often like my face and body now.

– that my haircut is visually successful, gender/sexuality-affirmingly successful, and, again, “hot”.

– that my desire to die/become a rock/become a p-zombie or perfect simulation or robot copy of myself (which are all more or less equivalent urges, the latter of which is a relatively new one based on my newfound ability to somewhat/sometimes believe that my death would hurt others) is actually about me not wanting to be in pain/afraid/sad (again basically equivalent states), RATHER THAN about a strongly held moral belief that the world/others’ lives would be better if i did not exist. 

  • this is highly preferable because it is much harder to for me to justify “i don’t want to hurt” as a reason to kill myself than “i would actively improve others’ lives”. i am not often strongly moved to action by a desire to stop being in pain; i am often strongly moved to action by a desire to help people i love. (i don’t know 100% how much that’s true about me vs a belief about me, but the second one suffices for this.) admittedly it would also be good if i could like, make myself take painkillers when i have headaches, or whatever, but we are going one thing at a time right now. 
  • also, one of the frequent triggers for this desire for no more consciousness is being hurt by the actions of someone i love, and identifying the impulse as being me wanting to escape the pain both lowers it in seriousness and helps me keep from flipping the weighting so that i am thinking more about how i might have triggered the incident than about the fact that i was hurt.

2018 NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS IN THE SECOND PERSON

  • none of that, please
  • get serious about working at things [1.job 2.political/ethical/ethical-via-religious concerns 3.artistic works]
  • OR, acknowledge inability to get serious, and get serious instead about developing functional workarounds for this inability
  • try, like, one ethics text
  • your capacity for constructing networks and connections is not actually diminished because some of those things had an unanticipatedly difficult shelf life. that’s not a reason to stop using the shelf
  • buy correctly-fitted button-down shirts
  • figure out what you’re supposed to do if you’re smart, committed, passionless, and possessed of limited and mutable ambition
  • keep up with haircuts
  • consider if warmth of output can be maintained without exposing yourself to equivalent levels of harm
  • have you considered smugly identifying as hot
  • have you also considered possessing smug encyclopedic knowledge of the 90s output of the mountain goats
  • stop committing so many theory-of-mind failures as a method for hurting yourself
  • the reason you hate outdoor activities/exercise is because you have a blood pressure condition that makes you pass out. you actually love many of the kinds of outdoor activities and exercise that do not involve the kind of cardio that make you pass out. find and do those, even if you feel status-weird or body-weird about them, but prioritize the ones that you just feel straightforwardly happy about, because that is in fact possible, and it’s good to feel good
  • actually let’s just put that there: it’s good to feel good
  • you’re still allowed to want things. if you look back at the big things you Wanted this year you are at least at a 50-60% success rate and if you ruined anything by wanting, well, no one’s told you about it yet
  • continue to look for pleasant ways of internalizing quantitative concepts, but uncouple this from your beliefs about how intelligent, competent, or valuable you are
  • still wear makeup, but only for fun and in gay ways
  • for fuck’s sake, stop doing [that]

thank god i got back from vacation in florida just in time for the furnace in my house to break!! it is 15˚F outside but i can’t leave bc the furnace repair people come at 8am tomorrow, my parents are still on vacation for another three days, and i can’t risk going to someone else’s place and oversleeping or being unable to get back in the snow. this is highly negative