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.