Say What You Mean

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN
SAY WHAT YOU MEAN
SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

My friends. My enemies. Whoever is reading this blog in the year of our Lord Common Era 2025 (or beyond). For the love of communication, for the love of language, for the love of the poor sap who is stuck trying to puzzle out what the hell those fourteen pages of jargony buzzwords actually said in any kind of concrete sense whatsoever... just say what you actually mean. In as few words as possible.

Hiding everything behind six shades of pretense is on purpose, I know. Sometimes you can't outright say what you mean because there are Consequences. The people who don't say what they mean will sense weakness. I get it.

But maybe...

Maybe it's worth it anyway? Maybe it's time we actually start getting things done instead of running in the hamster wheel of the simulacrum. How many layers deep are we now?

Please tell me it isn't too late.

Things I learned while deleting facebook

 Deleting all my Facebook activity proved to be a real chore.

Facebook has this option, in the Activity Log, where you can ostensibly select "all" activity and hit the "Remove" button. Great win for data privacy, right? Now you can bulk delete Facebook stuff. Awesome.

However, that would be too easy, wouldn't it? Truth is, if you're trying to delete more than about 250 posts, Facebook will just throw you a "Something went wrong. Please try again." error message. Over and over and over. It simply cannot handle deleting everything at once. And sometimes it will throw that error message randomly even if you keep it below 250, or the "Remove" button will disappear, and there's no way around it other than logging out of Facebook, logging back in after clearing browsing history (or using a Private window), and trying again.

Also, sometimes stuff just... reappears after being deleted. My timeline posts deleted pretty easily, but other things seem to be stickier. After timeline posts, I worked my way through comments, deleting them year by year, 100-200 posts at a time. Some of them did seem to be actually deleted. But these "ghost comments" kept coming back, where it says like, "JamEverywhere commented on a post," or "JamEverywhere replied to a comment," and has a date associated with it, but no link and no content. Just a shell saying, "you cannot erase that you were here. We will not let you." I managed to delete all my "likes" except Adventure Time, stuck in the purgatory of a trash bin I can no longer manually empty. I could delete all my Life Events except one of the high schools I went to for some reason. And on and on it goes.

Facebook wants it to seem like deleting all your data is only a click away, but it isn't, and it never was. They won't let go so easily.

I also noticed some things about my own use patterns. Early in my use of Facebook--from 2007 through about 2010--I would only make something like 200 comments/posts per year. Less than a post a day... not too bad. This slowly ramps up until 2014, when I'm suddenly looking at 200 posts per month. It's kind of sad to watch. Especially the frantic posting in groups and discussion threads featuring people I'd never met in real life, and never would. It's stark, contrasting it to the early days of Facebook, when the point of the whole thing was to interact with friends you already had and arrange for face-to-face activities or share photos. 

There's something insidious about social media, and we all know it, right? We've all seen news reports of weird Twitter wars, even if we haven't observed them first-hand. We've heard that body dysmorphia and social anxiety are getting worse in the youth. We've seen our own capacity to do mundane things like wait in line without our phones turn into torture... we've seen the number of books we read per year dwindle from 24 to 12 to 6 to 3 to maybe half of one...

Or maybe we haven't. Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I deactivated Facebook today. I left Twitter a long time ago, and I nuked my entire Reddit history a few weeks ago. Now this blog, which I don't even think anyone checks anymore--not even my mom, who always followed the links here that I posted on Facebook--is my only voice on the internet.

That's okay; I think it's better that way. Maybe someday even this space will vanish into the aether. But for now, this is what I want. My daily life will be mostly free from social media and internet bullshittery. On the weekends I will indulge in a lil Discord discourse with randos, if I want. I'm reading books again, though. And doing art. And writing in my journal almost every morning.

I'm resetting. Back to pre-2007 internet use levels. Wish me luck.

Sal Telluris

Three worlds apart, we sailed on separate winds

on crafts we shaped in antithetic forms

and gathered different maybes, might-have-beens

to weather different squalls and different storms.

Our sailing taught us how to yearn and ache

although we long held silence in our eyes.

And while some fifteen years frothed in our wake

we followed separate stars in separate skies.

But then the deep jade sea curved ’round her heart

and flung our ragged rafts upon this beach:

and here we find ourselves, back at the start

where first we two had drifted out of reach.

Horizon wraps us in arms infinite:

I now know what I want—and this is it.

Cyril and Methodius

This is probably the coolest boquet I've ever seen. The large African flower in the center seems like it's from some sort of alien planet.

There's no way to predict what memory will make of us, of our choices, of our selves. All we have is now. All we have is each other. And it can be so impossibly painful to hold one's heart open--because the heart does what it does, and one can't control it, not even kind of. But nevertheless. I hope mine never closes.

BSoD

I had been ill ever since arriving in Honolulu.

First, I was overwhelmed with sadness and fatigue. I'd crossed an ocean to be here, leaving my best friend at home and my brand new boyfriend at the airport. I'd spent two staggered flights mostly awake--unusual, for my hypersomniac self--either outright sobbing or drinking free alcohol and staring out the window at the clouds, thick and tangible below like cotton batting, or maybe like bread dough crusty with way too much flour, or a rolling white forest creased with river valleys and deepening canyons that poured into abyssal blue reservoirs.

Then, I was overwhelmed by the noise. I had no idea how loud Honolulu was going to be. The noises of traffic rolling by our leaky apartment never ceased; motorcycles and souped-up engines and ear-destroying loud music blasting past at all times, tearing right through the windows we had to keep open in order to keep the apartment ventilated and a tolerable temperature. Construction noises buzzing and rumbling and shrieking into the sky. And sirens... so many sirens...

Mama took me out grocery shopping after I landed, and we took the bus to Don Quixote, and the sounds of the buses' air brakes pierced my core and rattled every one of my bones. She was talking to me, trying to draw me out of my pained silence, but her stream of words barely registered. I was doing everything I could to keep it together, to keep a neutral expression, to focus on finding groceries in the cacophony. This was not what I was expecting, and I did not prepare myself for it. I'm not sure I could have, even if I had tried.

The sensory overload instantly spiked my anxiety levels. I worried about everything. I was filled with the idea that this entire venture was a mistake. This venture, this journey, this plan I'd been making for a year, carefully crafting a vision for how I could achieve a healthy future: a mistake. It took me several days to realize that my racing heart, my shaking hands, were caused first by the noise, and that the racing thoughts and fears and worries and anxieties, the wondering if my friends back in Colorado had already forgotten me, were spurred by my physiological condition, rather than the other way around.

I shut down. I didn't expect it to be like this, and I completely shut down.

But that is not where my story ends.

i guess i was writing about depression a long time ago?

I was just reorganizing some files and I found a random snippet of something I wrote a long time ago (like at least ten years ago, if not longer).
It was supposed to be some grand speech from a ranger-type character. Instead I think it's a sad and kind of poignant look into something that I've struggled with as long as I can remember.
--

I can only describe it as a great emptiness, and when it seizes me I dare not move. I stay still, and tears roll down my face unbidden; my whole life up till then seems like nothing worth mention, and where I am going seems a long way off. It is as though there is nothing worth traveling toward, nothing I am to accomplish that has any merit, nothing I can do to chase the emptiness away. So I stand, or I sit, and I stare out into whatever environment that holds me, and the trees seem impossibly tall, or the grass impossibly green, or the mountains impossibly distant, until nothing before me is real anymore and my mind reels and I despair.

When it holds me that tightly, my breath catches, and my head throbs, and I lay down wherever I am and close my eyes and fall asleep, because there is nothing I can do but sleep. I have no motivation anymore. I have no objectives or goals or aims—so I sleep. When I wake, it is usually past, and I am free to be myself again… but I fear that someday I will fall asleep upon the snow and never wake, and it will take me. I would choose any death but that.

and then i moved to Hawaii

When I landed in the airport at Honolulu, I found this screen displaying a Windows boot error.

I don't know what it was supposed to say, or to be. It didn't either. It hung there, nakedly confused, unsure of its purpose, its identity. Failing utterly at whatever task it had once been assigned.

This sign and I had a lot in common.