How do you know when someone's left an impact? I ask because I really want to change the world for the better, cliché as that is, but I don't know how, and I'm not sure how to tell if I've succeeded. 

     I just saw the trailer for The Wild Robot, and I'm super excited. Granted, I was also really excited to see Wish (which I'm super glad I saw in theaters, it's my kind of film), but unlike Wish this movie looks awesome. If it's not on every animated movie critics top ten list at the end of the year, I'd be floored. 

Respect

 I may not be able to 
Convince you 
To treat me like royalty,
But that won't stop me from asking for it. 

    I don't think I have it in me to write anything more than this for Thursday. Sorry.

Invisible

 If you think that invisibility
Keeps you safe from harm,
I have bad news;
The only thing that will protect you
From those who want to eat your soul
Is to give them indigestion on the way down. 

A Creatively Empty World

      This probably sounds insane, but I don’t think that our current world is all that creatively satisfying. Unless you’re in the top one percent of creatives, no one is going to hear you. 

     Our world demands success. The kind of success that would make Bill Gates blush. But being successful doesn’t equate being heard. A lot of successful people got to where they are by being able to effectively monetize those who could come up with the ideas, without coming up with anything of their own. Our world expects success to mean turning the world into a pretzel, ruining lives without ever getting your hands dirty in the process. It doesn’t think about people who want a world where they take as much as they give. To the people watching, the world is either a place where you give all you have or take all you can. 

      Looking at YouTube, I can’t help but think about everyone who wants a solidly small audience of people who all share their opinions and have things to add to the stupid conversations they want to have. People like me, in other words. Solidly unimportant individuals who want to be their own version of failure. I think about those who have singularly bad artistic visions who want to share their art anyway because it’s silly. And yes, in a lot of cases it runs the gamut of stupid at best and problematic at worst, but sometimes you find someone who’s come up with something incredible no one has thought to try. They wind up inspiring someone else who can build on that idea and make it into something not great, but a little better, and over time that idea becomes something that changes the world. I’m not sure if that’s worth the mountains of hate speech and misinformation that YouTube is responsible for, but I know that it is worth giving up a world where every book is expected to be the next Hunger Games. 

     To the people in charge of the platforms we post things on, I have something to say. Don’t build our world in terms of view count. If it isn’t financially feasible to build a version of Facebook where we can spend time with communities of people enough like us to be friendly but enough unlike us to spot our faults, than Facebook shouldn’t exist. This goes both ways, if we can’t be on social media without becoming worse versions of ourselves, than we probably shouldn’t be online. 

      I think it’s worth asking; what do the people in charge of our world want out of our future? I’m not the first to ask that question, nor will I be the last, because the best you can say about those in charge is that they have no plan other than to make money. Our world is full of people who, if they were in charge, would take it in a direction that would allow for a more creatively fulfilling existence for them, for better and for worse. The people we have in charge now don’t seem to care about creativity at all. They only care about reenforcing a narrative that was old when my mother was a child. I don’t think that we should expect our leaders to be the only ones in charge of writing our world’s story, and while I’m glad that they’re no longer the only one’s with the privilege, we’re dangerously close to losing the one good thing I think the future gave us. 

      I feel like we, the audience of the world, owe it to our creators to expect them to be a bit silly sometimes. To say things that don’t land, to do things that make no sense, to write stories only they thought would be interesting. What we should hold them accountable for isn’t disappointing us, it’s creating things that we know could make the world worse if people decide to build on those ideas, the way the Twilight series was indirectly responsible for the Fifty Shades of Grey series. I think we also owe it to our favorite authors to genuinely build off of their better ideas, through fanfiction and things like that, and to build our own stories and worlds based on what we like. I may be projecting, but I think that inside of every audience member is a writer of some sort, yearning to write their own story. I also think the best stories are the ones that no one is responsible for, because they’ve been retold so often no one even knows who created them in the first place. We owe it to our world to retain the right to say what’s on our minds and to expect someone who agrees with us to be able to hear it. We’ve reached the point where our society is now sound enough to protect us from the Infinite, I think we should be able to create a world where people can be as crazy as they want to be without worrying about destroying the world they were born in. 

The Hanged

 My cell is empty, dark and dank,
A evil scent fills the air. 
I look out of the small window searching for the flower
The guards say will grant me freedom.

They're lying, of course,
Nothing could grant me freedom.
My crimes are many, my sentence was long,
But then I did the unforgivable.
I pleaded with the judge to spare me,
But the sentence was firm,
"Death, by hanging,
One week from Tuesday."

It's almost time.
The executioner comes, 
Her face invisible behind the black mask she wears.
We walk over stone, to the outside world,
Strange that this is the last time I'll see it.
They say that in the past, prisoners wore garlands of flowers when killed,
To remind others that freedom only came from death.

I don't know if that's true,
I only know that this is the last freedom I'll have
Before the underworld consumes me. 
Even in death, one can't escape the judgement of man. 

The Worth of a President

    Why is it that British Monarchy has survived a slew of terrible kings, but one bad president is enough to put American Democracy in serious Jeopardy? Seriously, we’re in danger of falling into fascism after one president did fascism, which seems to me shouldn’t be a problem that we have to worry about. I do realize that getting rid of Donald Trump didn’t put an end to Fascism, but that’s kind of it, isn’t it? If Donald Trump was the problem, then getting rid of him should have fixed it. 

     I just voted in the presidential primary. If they hadn’t allowed me to vote for “Uncommitted Delegate” on my ballot, I probably wouldn’t have voted at all. I’m a registered Democrat, but I hate Biden, and I hate that voting for him means voting for a genocide enabling maniac. I vote Democrat to avoid moral dilemmas, and also death. One would hope. I’m exceedingly grateful that our leaders let us not vote for Biden, but the fact that they did that speaks to their knowledge that something’s very wrong, and they know it. Deep down, they know it’s only a matter of time before we abandon them, and the only people they’re fooling are themselves. 

      I wish there was some other, better way of making my opinions known than by voting, something that felt real. All I have is just complaining and hoping someone finds my blog by accident. Not exactly a great way to establish any political traction. Like a lot of people, I keep screaming at the sky hoping that the Universe will hear me and do something about this, because I keep forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we’re mostly too small to bother with. What I want, right now, is a ballot that lets me say, “I’m voting for Biden because he’s the only choice I have.” Because that’s what I want to tell the government right now. I’m not voting for Biden because I support his political policies, I’m voting for him because the other option is even more unthinkably awful. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, votes from people are weighted equally no matter their reason, so my vote will be treated as an enthusiastic embrace of a man I quite honestly loathe and a system I can’t wait to die off. 

      I don’t think Democracy is supposed to feel like this, where you go to the polls solely because you know the world expects you to and you vote only because the system will collapse if you don’t. I know that our laws of physics stay real because everything in the Universe makes a conscious effort to follow them, but I don’t think our system should fall apart just because the choices are really bad for an election. Just because there’s no one on the ballot that I want to vote for doesn’t mean I don’t want to not be allowed to vote at all. 

     As an Infinitelist, I think I’ve just realized that in order for democracy to work the way that it was meant to, it can’t truly feel real. A world that feels real feels like it’s going to be there no matter what you do, you’ve followed its laws for so long they’ve become grafted to your bones. Democracy isn’t like that, if you forget that it’s there, it often ceases to exist. It requires that people fight, in every way they can, for the world that they want to live in. If that’s the case, this era of people doing all they can to make their voices heard should feel like a win for democracy, as we’re getting a wake up call for just how fragile our world is. But it doesn’t. Because Democracy, real Democracy, means constantly facing your worst fear every day of your life. 

      The fear I’m facing right now is this deep sense that no matter what I do, I’m making the wrong choice. The right choice feels like buying a ticket to outer space on one of those rockets heading into the sun. Reality has become so hard to maintain that it just feels impossible. Nothing I can do will let me create a world that feels real. Everything I can think of just winds up turning into a world meant for someone else. I guess that means I just have to keep fighting, in whatever way I can, for a world where, in the future, our country isn’t destroyed because of one bad president. No president of the United states should have the ability to destroy Democracy. 

The First Post of March

     Technology isn’t behaving itself around me. The Fitbit Inspire 2 I inherited from my mother when she got a new Fitbit started losing charge really quickly around yesterday, for no reason as far as I could tell. I decided to go back to my Inspire HR, which I kept around in case of an emergency, but it’s now also having battery issues. Or at least it looks to be having issues. Maybe my Inspire 2 will magically start working. I’d buy a new Fitbit, but their both expensive and owned by Google. I don’t work out enough for it to be worth it. I keep using them to inspire me to exercise, but I need to own up to the fact that if I was the kind of person who exercised, I wouldn’t need a Fitbit for inspiration. 

      I know, first world problems. It just bothers me that the stupid thing broke only a few months after I got it, even if it was used. It also bothers me that I can’t seem to let go of wearing a Fitbit, even if I don’t use them for anything other than telling the time. It’s become a part of my identity to forever wear a fitness tracker that does me pretty much no good at all. Considering that, I do wish it mattered to me less that they tend to die within a year or so. I really just need to start wearing bracelets, which would fix the problem nicely. 

     

Dreams of Normalcy

 Why is it that only normal people
Are allowed to dream of a place that's safe?
When will I be allowed to be fooled
By that which I cannot have?