I saw an article today with the headline "Elon musk might not buy Twitter." Not those exact words, but that was the gist. 

   It would be a good thing if Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter, I guess, but why make us go through so much stress only to reveal that he couldn't do it in the first place? 

   The major downside to being a writer is that you find yourself criticizing every story you ever read, even if it's the story of your own life. Why hype Elon Musk up so much if he's only going to back down in ten seconds? Why make Donald Trump the one to bring America to it's knees? Why does life have so many villains, but never enough heroes?

   I realize it's stupid. I'm well aware that life doesn't work that way. I'm not the one writing the story of humanity, everyone is the writer of that story. What seems like a stupid plot point that goes nowhere from my perspective could be a major, life changing event to somebody else. 

   Whatever I think, I don't know that Twitter will be safe even if it turns out that Elon Musk can't purchase it. Neither is Facebook, Instagram, or any other extant social media platform. All of them we're born in a lawless world, and none of them are ready for the world people want to build, a world where free speech will lose out to peoples desire to believe in basic human decency. 

     Or at least, that's what I keep telling myself. 

     Still feeling the fallout from Elon Musk purchasing twitter. I've decided I'm going to wait until the end of next month and see how thing look then. I admire George Takei's decision to remain on the platform to try and fight hate speech, but the fact of the matter is that I'm one person with next to no influence on Twitter. The only action I could take is to like and maybe retweet posts, and that wouldn't do all that much. I honestly think it would say more if I left, because Twitter relies on add revenue so much. 

On Twitter and Elon Musk

    As of April 25, 2022, Elon Musk is now Twitter's official owner. 

    I don't have any hot takes regarding Twitter's new evil overlord. Many people have said more about the situation than I ever could. All I know is I don't think a guy who made headlines for killing monkeys by implanting electrodes into their brains is a guy I'd want running any company, whether or not he made it. 

  I do have, somewhat nebulous, plans to leave Twitter. I'm not making a statement. I'm not going out in the public forums and declaring, "Elon Musk sucks, and he's going to take Twitter down, and you'll all be sorry." Even though I think that's absolutely true. This is a simple act of rebellion, an act of telling anyone who will listen that I don't want to be on a platform run by someone so thoughtless and cruel. I'm doing this because I know I'll feel guilty if I don't. 

    Not that long ago, someone who made music I really loved started selling NFTs. I've said my piece on them, but it took me until about three days ago to decide to unsubscribe from them and delete all of their videos from my watch later playlist. I love their music, but my conscious doesn't want to listen to music written by a scam artist. 

    I'm feeling many of the same things I felt when I saw that artist getting involved in NFTs. My brain keeps saying that whether or not I delete my account, it won't matter at all. I'm just one person on twitter, one person with a little over one hundred tweets and one follower to my name. But the part of my brain that handles emotions keeps saying that that's just an excuse to stay on a platform that, despite being a raging dumpster fire, brings a small amount of joy to an otherwise dismal existence. It's why, despite the fact that Facebook is in many ways worse than Twitter, I still have a Facebook account. 

    In spite of all evidence to the contrary, I try to believe in the power of people to change the world around them. I don't mean in the sense that people can boycott, protest, or condemn things. I mean in the sense that we can choose to buy things or not buy things at Walmart, to watch or not watch things on YouTube, to say or not say something online. Maybe I'm just immensely stupid, but I feel like those actions, those choices, do matter in the long run, even if it doesn't look like it at the time. Put it another way, we only vote during elections, and we only get one vote apiece, but that somehow matters a lot more than pushing the rest of the year, in whatever way we can manage. 

     I'm not a naturally hopeful person, and I'm tired of being forced to choose between doing the moral thing and doing something I know will make me feel better. More and more, I'm being forced to make that choice, and every time I do, I'm glad that I have so little to lose that doing the right thing won't affect my quality of life that much. Can I just say I think that's so wrong? To be in a system where you're punished for doing what you're "Supposed" to do? If I had an active presence on any social media platform prior to this point, it would be much harder, if not impossible to leave. If I had a job and my own house, I'd have to worry about losing that job constantly, and if what I've read online is correct I'd be scared that I would someday be unable to work. As it is, I'm stuck at home a lot, but I don't have to worry about food, or clothes, or utilities. The Government kept telling us that if they provided us with a safety net, we'd just leap off the tightrope the first chance we got. What they conveniently forgot about was the fact that a lot of people would just choose not to climb up to the top, and any performers who fell would be unable to perform again. 

    If I honestly thought people were happy, I'd still complain but I'd at least be assured that if I ever wanted to participate, I could make it work. But we have a system where everyone's miserable and only those who won't or can't participate can complain. Yet I keep hearing people say that the system is okay, we just need to tweak it a bit to get rid of the worst part. Never mind that the worst parts include woman making a lot less then men, people getting shot by police for being non-white, disabled people being shut out of everywhere because they can't do things "normal" people can do, people being overworked and underpaid, workers playing Russian Roulette every time they attempt to find work, workers having no say at their jobs, broken justice system, and to top it off a rise in authoritarianist sentiments among the right within a system that can't meaningfully condemn it. How on earth can we fix this system? Are we just pretending we can because the alternative could be a lot worse? 

    I don't know if we can fix the system. I don't know if we can build a better system if we destroy this one. What I do know is that I don't want to accept a system that' s failing this badly. All throughout my childhood, I was told about the importance of being yourself. Why can't we build a system where that's possible for everyone? 

     Is it normal to be in your late twenties debating what, exactly, you want to do with your life? I don't want to quit writing, I just want some form of income stream so that if my mother dies I'm not (completely) screwed. I'd talk about how hard it is to get a job, but honestly the hunt for jobs is so demoralizing that I stopped bothering almost as soon as I started. I'm one of those people who can't handle rejection well, especially if I imagine it. It's why I've been self publishing poetry, I don't want to deal with people telling me it's not as good as pretend it is. 

     I decided to post something to NPR poetry hashtag on Sunday. Mostly because I thought a haiku about summer would fit nicely, although I did kind of think that maybe I'd get more views. So far I haven't. I guess it's nice to know I won't be tempted into selling out, but on the other hand I thought I knew how the world was supposed to work. 

The Game of Pretend

 Don't fret.
You'll be famous yet.
Don't worry 
About how low 
Your view count is.
How many people
Seem completely 
Uninterested 
In what you have to say.

This is society.
We're all pretending
That we're getting by 
Just fine.

Don't fret.
People will love
And remember you
Yet. 
Don't forget
That even if
Nobody knows you,
You can never
Really be forgotten. 

Every flap
Of a butterfly's wings
Is the start
Of a hurricane somewhere.

So don't fret.
Your name will be
Remembered yet.  

Sunday Posts

    Sunday posts are the posts that I find the hardest to put effort into. It's just another thing standing between me and Monday, the day my next poem goes up.

    When I started posting poetry weekly, I figured that, since I was just writing as poetry came to mind and I wasn't posting everything I was writing, I'd run out of ideas quickly. Surprisingly that is, so far, not the case. I didn't realize how much I'd enjoy writing poetry. I think that, because so many associate poetry with great writers who say things the rest of us are unable to say, we forget that poetry is just another way of expressing who we are. It doesn't aim higher than prose, in fact because it's inherently restrictive, a lot of it comes out sounding rather silly. 

    I think art would be better if we didn't associate it with greatness, and instead saw it as a way for people to express, for themselves and for others, how they feel the world actually is. Most artists don't really know what they're doing, they're just playing it by ear. I don't think this is a bad thing, far from it. I took a few writing courses in college, but I'm not a trained writer at all. I just picked up what I saw other people doing online. 

The views of a famous person

     One thing that's becoming clear is that if I want to become famous, on twitter at least, I need to focus on branding more than on producing content I enjoy. I did know this before I went in, but I think that in the back of my mind I thought my content would be different, somehow. 

    I can't honestly blame people for not liking my content. I don't think the stuff I produce is any deeper than anything that, say, Disney produces, it's just stuff that makes sense to me and reflects my worldview. I also don't want to become famous for being someone I'm not. My view is that if people know me as how I have to present in public, then they don't know me at all. 

   I also, weirdly, kind of prefer it this way. I've always thought of myself as the misunderstood weirdo. Most writers do, honestly, even if they're actually fairly normal. So the fact that the stuff that I feel most reflects who I actually am is the stuff that gets the least views is, in a way, kind of vindicating. It shows that yes, I'm right that being yourself isn't the path to success we all pretend it is. 

    That doesn't mean it isn't, for me at least, the easiest path to take. I have a lot of opinions about the way the world should work. Like a lot of people, I think the world would be a better place if we were willing to see it as it actually is instead of what we think it is. But as someone who loves science, I know that that isn't possible. The universe is too large for any one person, or even super computer, to truly understand. I don't even know that we can understand what's going on with each other. The act of living takes more than most of us are willing to admit. The fact that I choose to be myself, an individual, is as much because I've never found it easy to fit into society as it is I feel it's the right thing to do, personally. 

    I think that the reason I decided to start blogging more is that I've always viewed myself as a woman who lives by her principles, however much they go against what other people believe. I'm not going to argue that point, objectively I think you could make a good argument for or against that. I could also be wrong about this, but that's something I think we all do whether or not we really want to admit it. Whether or not that's true, I like doing something that allows me to pretend I'm a better person than I actually am. At the end of the day, aren't we all trapped in an illusion, together and alone? 

     I have no problems writing short posts on my blog. I like posting daily, but frequently I can't think of anything I want to write page after page about (at least publicly). I've been posting poetry to twitter though, and I don't know why but I can't seem to write short poems. Well, I can write Haiku, but the poetry I enjoy writing, the angsty poetry normally found in teenagers diaries, doesn't fit on twitter very well. I know I could do what a lot of poets do, post a picture of their poems, but that feels a little too close to cheating for me, especially since I do have a place people can check them out if they want to. 

    I'm just hopeful that at some point someone goes "Hey wait, I like her poetry, and she has a blog, maybe I'll check it out just to see what's on their." I doubt that that's ever going to happen. But many a writer has kept writing despite the fact that nobody wanted to read anything they wrote. 

     While I enjoy posting poetry on twitter, I wish I knew of a way to direct some traffic to my blog. All of my best poems (save one) are posted here, and I don't like that those who like my poems like a version of me that only exists for public consumption. It wouldn't matter as much, but poetry has come to mean a lot to me, even if most of what I write isn't that great. I don't care if it becomes successful, I just want somebody to see, maybe even like it. 

     I would like to take this moment to mention that for the past three days I've been writing boring Haikus because I couldn't come up with anything that would a) be acceptable for public consumption and b) was short enough to comply to NPR's rules for poetry month. The moment I decided, "That's it. I don't care if this gets no views, I want to write something that feels real." That poem wound up doing better than any of the haikus I've done. 

   On the one hand, this feels awesome. On the other hand, it feels like my life story is of the quality of a direct to DVD kids movie or perhaps a book from the bargain bin of a used book store. 

     I'm becoming incredibly grateful for my blog. I can post anything I want to on it. To be fair, you can post anything you want on basically any platform, provided you're okay with the possibility of getting banned and you don't mind people yelling at you for abuse or hate speech. But for me, anytime I'm in a group setting, I'm always running speech through my head to make sure it doesn't sound terrible to my listeners. I don't have any natural filters. I'm okay with being brusque, but I'm not okay with hurting other people's feelings. 

    I wish more people talked about how hard it is for some people to know how to interact with others socially. We treat socializing like it's an inbuilt skill, but everyone knows that kids suck at being polite to others. Not because their being mean, but because they haven't learned how not to be mean yet. We take it for granted that it can be learned naturally, but a lot of us don't learn social behaviors naturally. We learn through books, or having it explained to us. 

    I don't think it's everyone else's responsibility to teach me how to be a better person, but I do wish it were more widely known that the best way to tell someone they screwed up is to just tell them that they screwed up, plain and simple.  

Backwards

 All of a sudden our world stopped,
Held in place by strange forces
We couldn't comprehend.

Then everything went backwards,
Back to a time people thought
Would be better than now,
Better than a world that was falling apart.

Looking at pictures and dresses
It was rosy and gorgeous,
But in real life we were miserable.

How do we stop it?
How do we stop falling in the middle of a black hole?
I can't see what's coming,
But I know this won't end well.

    The weather's been weird here recently. It's been weird everywhere. I know it's because of global warming, we wouldn't be having this issue if we'd put the brakes on. It's not fun being the ones in charge of the climate on planet earth. 

    Also, Happy Easter. 

     Writing for National poetry month has gotten me wanting to practice poetry writing more. Currently learning how to tell the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables, which is really making me appreciate the value of dictionaries. That way I don't have to look up if a word is stressed or unstressed in google, which is kind of embarrassing if the word you need to look up is "the". 

     It feels genuinely awesome posting poetry on twitter and watching it get feedback. I love writing, prose and poetry, but I don't know that I ever thought I was good at it. I don't know that I'd say  I'm good objectively, although I do like to pretend I'm the greatest writer of the twenty-first century sometimes, but I think I'm just happy knowing that people like what I write. 

    One thing I enjoy about national poetry month is it puts a spotlight on the fact that most poetry isn't great. 

 Participating in NPR's poetry month has really got me wanting to find a local poetry group near me. I love how casual and pleasant it feels to just post whatever you think is interesting, without putting too much thought into whether or not its good. I'm almost having more fun liking other peoples poems then I am writing my own. 

    Weird thought: Why is it we have to worry about the rise of Fascism but we don't seem to have to worry about the rise of Anarchists? 

A Story

 Built from ideas
Written on paper and stone.
A planet spins through its galaxy,
Following its star, 
Endlessly searching for its place in this world.

On its surface are creatures that grow,
Move,
And change it.
Endlessly working to build a paradise,
Endlessly searching for a better place to live.

At their heart, the heart of the world,
The heart of the planet hurdling through space,
Is a story.
A story of determination, of hope,
Of searching for meaning amongst that which has no meaning.
Ours is a world of rebels, 
Fighting to hold onto a dream that is slipping away.

Day by day,
We awaken.
We remember our past,
We glimpse our future,
And we tremble in fear. 

The only thing saving us from damnation 
Is a story,
Built from ideas,
Written on paper and stone.
The story of soul, lost to space and time,
Searching for the meaning of life

    I just found out it's National Poetry month on NPR. I've already tweeted a poem (just a haiku, nothing special) and I have to say I'm so excited. People are seeing something I've written! Maybe some of them will like it a little bit. 

    I've been writing a bunch of poems that don't qualify, so I think that once April's over, I'll expand the ones I like the most, and then post them at my regular posting time. 

An important Date

 April 9, 2022

The day I got my first follower on twitter. :)

    It would probably be easier to come up with things to post about if I didn't write most of what I want to say in notebooks. Ah well, the hoard won't fill up itself. 

     I write a lot of stuff I will never in a million years post, largely because writing long projects that don't go anywhere feels deeply cathartic to me. 

The Price of Love

    I recently watched John Green’s video “Motivation in Hard Times”, one of those video’s people make to attempt to help those struggling with sadness and worry over the state of their lives, the way pretty much everyone is right now. The point of the video was that it’s important not to let yourself be consumed by anger and to instead focus on those you love, but one part that stood out to me was when he said, “Anger burns dirty, leaving a whole inside you, while love burns clean.”, Well at least that was the general gist of it.

     Central to our cultural narrative is the idea that love is important, that our lives should be focused on seeking the approval of our friends and family. Like all narratives, you will find people pointing out how this isn’t true, and how pushing this idea onto others in harmful, kind of like how I’m doing right now. But I think it’s important to know that love, like most things, isn’t inherently evil. It helps people struggling, gives them a reason to keep going, keeps them focused on something that matters to them.

   Anger can also do that. I think most of us forget that there are those out there who, for whatever reason, can’t find love in their lives, either because they screwed up or because their community abandoned them. We forget that when we push the narrative that acting out of love is better than acting out of anger or spite, we’re pushing people who’ve been forgotten by the world to give up their inner selves in the hopes that society will take them back. For these people, anger may be all that they have left, and they often hold onto it long after people who care about them come into their lives.

    I should also mention that love can be damaging in it’s own way. In this day and age, I think all of us have seen at least one person we care about, either among our friend group or online, do something we regard as horrible, something that leaves us asking if we should give up on them to preserve our integrity or keep them in our lives because they matter to us. Morality demands we stand for what we believe in, but so many of us have stories about people we love getting involved in conspiracy theories, and love has no good answers for how to save them or ourselves.

     I don’t believe anger to be inherently evil, nor do I believe love to be inherently good. One thing I learned in AP Environmental Science is that ecosystems require a healthy balance of all sorts of resources, and sometimes you don’t know what’s important until you remove it. I believe we should value all of our emotions, and acknowledge that there are many wrong ways of doing things that people do, just as there are many right ways of doing things, but if we want to know the difference, we have to admit our feelings to ourselves.

      I've been watching a lot of Vlogbrother's videos lately. Partly due to nostalgia, mostly because I keep searching for the right way to word the thoughts going through my mind. 

    I wish I knew how to find other people interested in how society works the way I am. 

The Gift of Wealth

 The greatest country to ever exist,
Built on the backs of giants.
Where many are hungry
And most don't have enough.

A country blessed
By the gift of wealth,
Unending days,
Nights without stars,
Work that goes on forever.

A few live in towers
Built of glass and steel.
Directing our lives
As a conductor would an orchestra,
They demand we work endlessly
Or else die homeless and alone.

They allow us to live,
Only asking that we give them
Everything we make.

Some look at our country
Blessed with wealth and prosperity,
And say it is little more than a prison
Where the crime is being born
And the punishment is unending, ceaseless toil.

The citizen's don't agree.
They are blessed, they say,
To be able to work for wages
That can't even cover bills. 
So long as they work, they know their lives have meaning.
To be unable to work, 
They say,
Is a fate worse than death. 

     One of my strongest beliefs is that life isn't inherently meaningful. It's us living life, making choices, writing our own stories, that gives it meaning. I don't think the universe ever intended for there to be good and bad, just a series of choices of how to shape the world to our choosing. 

    The problem is that we keep creating systems that artificially limit the amount of choices that we can make. This isn't usually a problem, choice paralysis is a thing after all, but everyone is going to come up to a situation where they have to choose between a choice that's bad, and a choice that's worse. Or maybe a clear good and bad choice, but taking the good choice means sacrificing something they care about. This was taken to such an extreme in the United States that your choices are less "Good vs. Evil" and more along the lines of "The people who are against unionizing vs. the people who are against unionizing and have spoken out against gay marriage." Is it any wonder so many of us have become so cynical? 

The New Societal Narrative

       Like most of the world, or at least most of the United States, I’ve grown tired of watching society fall apart. What really bother’s me is that nobody seems to know why. A lot of people blame polarization between the right and the left, but if that’s the case then why is the Left willing to compromise when the right is not? And why is there nothing the Right will agree to? To me it looks less like a disagreement between two ideas and more like a power struggle between two different groups with conflicting goals, where the only thing they agree on is that compromise is the worst outcome of any discussion they have. 

     It goes much deeper than just division between the democratic and republican parties. In order to understand why they’re fighting, you can’t just look at who’s in charge, you have to look at how they got to be in charge, which in theory is by convincing the population of whatever state they’re from to vote for them. In practice, it’s more complicated than that. 

     The biggest issue is that while the United States is a democracy on paper, a lot of power is held by people we never elected. The CEOs, Billionaires, and Pundits of the United States. How they got their power varies, but what they all have in common is they didn’t get power via political channels, they got it by convincing a portion of society that they were worthy of having it. Maybe because they were elected to be in charge of a successful business, maybe because they inherited money, maybe because they were good entertainers, but however they got their power, they influence society while most of us have no say on the subject, because we aren’t in the choir they preach to. 

     This means that, in the Republican party especially, the problem isn’t limited to the politicians. Most of it is in the hands of those telling stories they know their audience wants to hear. Stories of how life was better back when you didn’t have to see the suffering of others and those who weren’t members of society knew better than to speak up. It’s a narrative that’s familiar and comforting, and if you’ve never been confronted with systemic oppression, it’s one that makes total sense. 

      It’s this narrative that’s tearing America apart. 

       It’s not a story that’s limited to the United States of course. It’s as old as humanity itself. The idea that things were better before is a story we all tell ourselves less because it’s true and more because we can easily imagine the past, and our minds all need a place to retreat to when the world feels overwhelming. But it’s a dangerous story. It’s a story about how the world was better before the world changed, regardless of if it’s true. It’s a story that puts the blame on others for changing the world, for making it worse than it was. It’s a story that says we’re better than them, that we’re inherently good, because we come from a time when things were better, and they’re evil for deciding to change things. In a world where a small amount of people holds all the power, where those with the most power can’t be replaced, and where those with power have all the incentive to stop things from changing, it’s poisonous.

     It’s time we abandoned it. 

    We need to start telling a different story, one where good and bad are relative, where change is the way we express to the world what we want from it. We need to stop treating society as inherently good, when I feel it’s become increasingly clear that it isn’t. It’s only good if we put in the effort to create a society that disincentivizes evil and promotes good, and then put in the effort to make sure that’s true. Most importantly, we need to acknowledge that what people want from the world will change as we learn more about ourselves and as people move from place to place. That’s the point. The world wasn’t meant to be static; it was meant to be dynamic, a place where you could build the world you wanted and where all your choices made an impact. The point of existing is to bring meaning to a world that would be meaningless without the beings that live in it. 

   Instead we’ve built a society where everything sucks, and nobody has any real way of changing it beyond praying to the gods and hoping that they’re willing to listen. Worse, those in charge can’t see what the issue is, because the world belongs to them. They don’t care about those who keep them in power, because from their perspective there’s no way they could be replaced. We keep going along with this because we’ve bought into the idea that there’s no way we could changed this. We had no choice. Without society, we lose everything. But what that means is that everyone participating in society is asking themselves the same question, “What is the point to any of this?”

    I don’t know if it’s possible to build a society where the rich won’t take everything from us, where we aren’t either swimming in more money than we know what to do with or struggling to just barely survive. But I’m tired of everyone saying that we need to hope, because hope is the only thing that will change things, as if living in denial means that the darkness looming over us will just go away. This won’t be easy. We will lose a lot. And when it’s over, we won’t even be sure if we made the right answer. But I don’t want to be stuck in the present because we as a species are deeply averse to the idea that our world isn’t as real as we think it is. This is our world. I know we can change it. But first, we have to believe we can. 

Life of a Writer

      One problem I have is that my brain keeps choosing random things to obsess over, a lot of it is stuff I would never talk about publicly. This means I write page after page of stuff I never plan on posting, just as a way of trying to get it out of my head. My head doesn't want to let go of things though, and I've learned that sometimes the only thing to do is to expose myself to it as much as possible in the hopes that my brain will get bored and move on. 

     I don't know if this is a common problem. I think it's mostly to do with the fact that my brain is one of those brains that loves to think about all sorts of things, to the point that a big reason I never graduated from college was that I couldn't think of a major that I wanted occupying my existence. I know my brain too well, and I know that my brain gets bored very easily. It's so bad that the tricks they give you to try to stay organized don't work for me because I can never stay organized enough to make them work. 

     Yes, in case you're wondering, I do sometimes think I might have ADHD.