Books: Part 1

I like to throw things away, to clear out clutter and old things I’ll never need or use, it’s quite satisfying. What’s funny is that I find cluttered environments can be very /comfy/, piles of old books and stacks of notes, weird ornaments, wooden chests or boxes lining the hall. I find bare and minimalist home interiors generally feel rather sterile and uninviting. Yet over the last four or five years I’ve been slowly (or more like in a few short frenetic sessions, spread months or years apart) turning my flat and my room in particular from the former into the latter.

When my mum passed away I moved into the room that had before been hers because my dad wasn’t willing to take it, and he moved into what had been my room until then. I had a lot of stuff, and it was over the few days it took to move everything that I really recognised how much crap I had. I’d been in that old room since the age of about 9, and along with bringing all my old toys and things from where I’d lived before I had collected quite a lot more. Wherever I was in there, a distraction was literally at hand at any moment. I could be lying on the floor in the middle of the room, or at my desk with the really old and slow desktop computer I used to have back then, or sitting on my bed, and just grab one of the books or action figures strewn across the floor.

The first things that had to go were all my toys, and this stage I suppose is pretty normal. Most kids reach an age where they decide it’s time to put childish things aside. Just like that line from the bible about becoming a man, and although I wouldn’t call myself a man even today I no longer saw myself as a boy either. Now it wasn’t easy to just discard these toys of mine because I’d developed quite a little universe for them to live in, every one of them had a story and they all had stories they shared together as well. I took them all together in a bag and gave it to my dad to take to the second hand shop, with this romantic idea in my head that they were going off together for more adventures, although in reality who knows. I imagine they were mostly sold separately.

I used to keep all of these toys in several plastic boxes (or at least I did in theory, as I said they spent most of the time everywhere in my room but the boxes), I had actually had them my entire life I believe. They were bought before I was born by my parents, blue, green and orange. I threw two of those away as well, and several other plastic boxes and containers that I had been keeping other things in, mostly stationery stuff like pens and pencils but also paint brushes and art supplies. So at some point, maybe now we’re at a year or just under since my dad moved in, I decided that all these boxes and what was in the ones that were still full all had to go as well. See I hadn’t actually used any of this stuff in years, I had long since lost interest in arts and crafts and that sort of thing. I was still taking art classes at school, and enjoying it for the most part, but in my own free time I had no desire to spend my time on that sort of thing.

I remember in particular I had these watercolour pencils which came in this lovely metal case and had a beautiful painting of a forest on one side, presumably that had been painted using the same pencils. I think they perfectly exemplify exactly what bothered me so much about all this stuff I had. As I said I like clutter, and “things”, but not just any old things. They have to be meaningful and valuable to me, not valuable in terms of market value or whatever (although the two may coincide, things that take more care or time to produce generally come at a greater cost) but rather in terms of how much I want to and am glad to own them. It’s not something that can really be measured or graded. The fact that I could so easily throw so many of my things away, shows how little value they had to me for example. It’s not that I’m unsentimental, I had memories attached to some of these things or at least they had been the decoration to my childhood, but that’s not quite the same thing. This is why the pencils are such a great symbol. I remember my mother buying them for me when I was very young. I remember the few times I had used them, and I remembered them always being there on the shelves, and when it came to it and I was throwing them out I did feel a tinge of melancholy. More importantly though, I knew that I wanted to be rid of them. It was like they were a weight, holding me down in the past.

Modern life is buying lots of things rather cheaply and then buying some more, if you’ll pardon my pretentious attempt at pithiness. That idea of value I was talking about, it’s hard to define no matter the circumstance but in the specific one I inhabit especially so. That being a modern, consumer capitalist, first world country.. or something idk. Ideally, I want to be proud of every single thing I own and glad to have it. When you’re surrounded by a sea of junk though it’s hard to identify and distinguish the things you value (in the sense that I’ve been using it so far) from everything else. This sentimentality for or attachment you have to a lot of stuff you grew up alongside just because it’s familiar can feel rather similar to the feelings you have towards something you truly value. These pencils are the perfect example because they really were of no value to me at all, if anything I had “negative” value for them as I wanted not to own them, and yet I found it hard to throw them away. I hadn’t used them in years, I never planned to again, yet it was still sad.

So that was good enough for me for quite some time, I had cleared out a lot of junk and things I didn’t use and also got rid of my toys. It wasn’t until a good couple years later that the urge to purge returned, but return it did. Now we’re in the summer break just after I had gone through the first year of my A-Levels (and dropped out, as I mentioned in the last entry) and I remember quite well I was just sitting in my room with nothing to do one afternoon and I started looking through all the piles of papers and textbooks that were piled up under my bed. See I’d just been throwing everything under there since I’d moved into the room. School textbooks, homework I’d forgotten to hand in, drawings and shitty poetry and weird notes I’d written to myself, just piles and piles of this crap. So I spent several hours a day, for a few days, going through it all and then immediately tearing it all up and putting in several huge bin bags to throw out. That wasn’t enough though, I looked at my old bed which I’d had for years and was starting to fall apart and I decided it should go as well. I took my dad’s screwdriver and I loosened all the planks one by one until there was just a pile of wood. I’ve slept with just a mattress on the floor ever since, so for about five years. I put a mat underneath it to keep it aired well and also I turn it over every weekend and change all the bedding of course.

So a pattern was developing where after a long period of time I’d throw away quite a lot and replace it with nothing. I had in my head this kind of pseudo-buddhist sounding idea that the attachment I had for these things was unhealthy and I did have a minimalist goal in mind. I felt like they were a liability, that the mere fact of owning something that could potentially be stolen or damaged made me weak. There were other things I threw away in a few other sessions like I’ve previously described. I got rid of a lot of old photographs, and I sold a lot of my old videogames and DVDs. I threw away a lot of clothes although I obviously did replace those, but now I have a much smaller and more deliberate wardrobe. I could do a whole separate post on the subject of clothing, frankly I’ve been meaning to since the early days of this blog but haven’t found the right way to do so, there is a lot more to talk about on the subject than you might initially think.

The one last thing I do need to mention though, before getting on to the actual task I had in mind before starting this post, is the books. I probably got rid of 60-70% of the books I owned, some time in 2014 I think. I threw away enough of them that I was able to also throw away the book shelf I was keeping them on and move what was left onto the other more general shelving unit I have. This was a little later down the line, and I had kind of dropped that minimalist ideal and was closer to the perspective I have now of just wanting to own only things I was proud of or glad to have. It was mostly children’s books to be honest, I don’t regret throwing any of them away, in fact I kept a lot more than I perhaps should’ve.

Which takes us to where we are today, see I threw away a lot of YA and younger children’s books which I’d been given and never read or only read once but not cared for much, but that’s mostly it. A lot of those kinds of books come in long series as I’m sure most people are aware, so for example I was really into these books when I was pretty young (maybe seven or eight years old) which were about the adventures of a kid called Jiggy McCue and his friends. Each book was a different adventure, and there were about ten or maybe more of these. Now that was a particularly big series, most of these were trilogies or sets of three or four, but after getting rid of all of these book series that I hadn’t read in years I realised how small my “library” really was. It was mostly just padding, the problem was the sentimentality which hadn’t stopped me before was harder to overcome this time, and because of it I kept some books which I know I’ll never read again (and as it’s unlikely I’ll have children of my own, so nor pass on to them) simply because of the fond memories I have from them.

Now it’s taken me a lot longer to just get to this point because I’ve been writing very little lately, and even though I’m no longer uploading a new post every week I still don’t want huge gaps between new posts, so I’ve decided to split this into two parts. There is one last thing that I was planning on talking about in this posts though so I’ll end this first part with that rather than going through the books and in part 2 I’ll do the sorting. My plan is (appropriately, given the title of this blog) not just to list the books I own, because that would make for a rather short post, but to use them as jumping off points to talk about various things.

Right, so all this talk about books lately, and specifically physical copies of books, has really made me think. See, from the time of the oldest examples of writing until as recently as two decades ago if you wanted to experience literature then physical copies of the work you are interested in were the only option for you. Nowadays, you can find most of what you may want to read online for free relatively easily. Of course, specialist things like maybe medical textbooks or very obscure works you might not be able to find, but most of the things that most people are interested in reading (even just among bookish types) are easy to find online. If not for free, then you can still save space and a lot of money by using an e-reader. For a lot of the reasons that one would choose to buy a book, going digital is objectively the better choice.

On /lit/ there was a thread recently where this guy claimed he had decided to “start with the greeks” and had spent nearly £1000 (or maybe dollars, I don’t remember) on Amazon ordering copies of various translations of classical works. Collected plays, history books, philosophical texts, and religious stuff. Now it’s highly likely that he didn’t actually do it, although what a fucking madman if he did, but still you do get a lot of people who will spend quite a bit all at once because they like the idea of owning and reading a lot of books more than they actually enjoy reading. Someone actually said something like that in the thread. Or at least, people who have this romanticised view of themselves after they make these purchases as autodidactic hermit philosophers, and I’ll be honest I’ve caught myself recently almost falling into the same trap.

The thing is, with these new cheaper and easier alternatives these people are revealed. If you really want to read as much as possible then why would you spend more money and time waiting for it to arrive or having to go to the bookstore yourself. It makes no sense at all, sure people give silly little explanations when pushed, like “staring at a screen too long, especially before bed, is bad” or that physical copies “feel nicer” but these are so transparent if thought about for more than a second. If physical copies are nicer you can still go to a public library, but well then you wouldn’t have a cool shelf to share a picture of in the weekly “bookshelf thread” on /lit/, and that just cannot be.

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that bookish types/ bookworms are generally more withdrawn or reclusive people. I’m not able to actually justify that statement, but the stereotype is as old as Emperor Claudius at least if not older so that surely counts for something. So I understand that not only do people who spend more time at home want to make this environment they spend so much time in nice to look at and be in (as I said right at the start of this post, I also understand a big collection of old books and things can be cosy), and also that if they have a nice home environment then that can sort of retroactively justify them having not spent much as much time socialising and having fun with people in their youth than they perhaps wish they had. I understand that and I’m not attacking anyone, I just think that self awareness is important and we should think about why we want the things we want.

All I think is that bibliophilia is quite superficial, it’s an aesthetic choice, fetishism even. You don’t have to actually love literature or reading to “love” books, and these recent technological developments make it more clear. There’s only one argument I’ve heard that doesn’t feel completely hollow to me, and it’s funny because it’s also kind of built on the changes in technology that have taken place over the last few decades. See, nowadays we have more distractions than ever and it’s very easy to never end up finishing what you’re reading. You might have a PDF of a book on one tab and just leave it for months. If you actually spend quite a bit of your own money on a book on the other hand, perhaps that will make you more inclined to “get your money’s worth” so to speak. Anyway I’m not saying that buying and collecting books is a bad thing to do, I just think it’s good to think about these things.

Link to Part 2

Fell for the IQ meme

Unease, I can’t escape it. I would say that it’s the only constant in my life, the forms just morph or intensify. I’ve had a really tough week, but at the same time it’s been really easy. I’ve had four days off work, I’ve had all the free time I need to write, yet it’s now sunday evening (a week since my last upload) and I’ve got nothing. It’s not that I haven’t tried, it’s not that I don’t have things I want to write about or at least did want to at one point. I’ve just not been able to actually do it. I’ve been thinking a lot this week, about all my failures and about how silly all of this is, and it’s really hard to sit down and write when having such thoughts. I suppose I’ve just been reminded of how much of a midwit I really am, and it’s difficult to feel confident sharing anything when you’re in that state of mind.

See at the thing last sunday (which actually went really well, this spiral of insecurity I’ve been on started after saying goodbye to everyone) one of my co-workers mentioned that she’s writing her dissertation for her degree at the moment. I think I remember her saying it was an English degree, although there are all kinds of those so that’s not very helpful. Anyway, even though I knew she was a student already as she mentioned it the first time we met when I was still training, I guess I didn’t really know it until that moment. Now, I always feel bad saying something that might be insulting or rude about someone who has only been nice to me, but if I’m being honest this girl seems to fit the “thot” archetype in some ways. Not just in the way she looks and dresses, but in the way she communicates, after all these things kind of go together.

To be more clear what I mean, because that term is used in two different ways, sometimes just as a synonym for bimbo/ sloot/ etc. updated for the 2010s which is not the version I’m using, and on the other hand to describe a certain and very specific kind of person that has only really existed for the last decade at most. It’s of course a young woman but with a certain style of dress that contorts their body into a pretty uniform shape, and a particular kind of make-up use, but also it’s the way they seem to interact with the world. It’s hard to really find the words to describe it, but I suppose I’d say it’s like talking to someone who is only half lucid. It’s more than just the words they use, think of someone who only engages with the world through the various artificial constructs and systems we use to make sense of everything. Not that to do the opposite and oppose any kind of systematisation is necessarily “clever”, but it’s like someone who never went through that phase that I imagine a lot of kids go through in their early teens where they will obnoxiously point out how everything is “a social construct”. It’s this weird feminine stoicism you could call it, where they just sort of take things in life at face value without giving it too much thought.

I’ll give an example, an ironically rather appropriate one given the subject of this post. Some months back we were switching shifts and she asked me what A-levels I took (A-levels are the qualification you study for at the ages of 16 to 17 here in the UK, although it’s isn’t unusual for people to take three years) and I told her that I took Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Psychology. Now her reply, which I can’t recall word for word, went “oh wow those are really hard how did you do it?” or something very similar. I then told her that I didn’t, I failed the first year and never went back to try again. That’s not important though, I mean it is actually because I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week, but for this specific example I mean. See it reminded me of how I used to look at school/ education before I went through the phase I was just talking about above. I suppose I saw it like a collection of various completely distinct subjects. See they call them subjects and you have different teachers who are trained to teach each one, and of course you have to take different kinds of tests, but in “the real world” knowledge isn’t separated into subjects.

See when I did go to do my A-Levels, the physics and maths curricula specifically were heavily reliant on one another and the chemistry course also was much easier for the students taking those two courses. The reason I was taking them after all was because I was advised to by a lot of my teachers from secondary school, including the ones who had taught related subjects, and I took their advice because I had no clue what I wanted to do and I just thought those subjects were the most impressive to do well in. I’m getting off course though, or at least I’m jumping ahead a little. See, I never completed these courses as I’ve mentioned. After a few months I started skipping lessons, something I’d never done back in secondary school, and the last third of the year I was there I was going to only two or three lessons a week. I didn’t even turn up for all of the tests when they eventually came up, not that it would have mattered as I did absolutely terribly in the ones I did go to.

Now, this co-worker of mine (and I know it’s unhealthy and kind of gross to compare myself with other people like this) was for some reason impressed by this when I mentioned it as I’ve said. Or at least she was impressed when first assuming that I had completed the courses in those subjects, although I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to assume that (given I was advised to take them by teachers of mine who had themselves done so in their younger years, and that I was allowed onto the course at all) I potentially could have passed if some circumstances been different. It’s impossible to ever know what could have been, and part of me is inclined to say that any assumption about how I could have got through it if say I still had the environment I had at secondary school (that is, friends who were also studying along with me, teachers who truly believed I was capable and liked me, someone at home to actually enforce some fucking discipline and make me study, etc.) is just a cope. After all, no one with a shred of self awareness wants to be that guy who claims to be “smart but lazy”.

I’m also aware that I really really don’t want to be stupid, my sense of identity and my pride has always rested on this conception of myself as an intelligent person. There could be all kinds of reasons for this, but I believe that being told I was clever over and over as a kid and really right up until that year I started my A-Levels by all my peers whether it be teachers, relatives or the other kids in my classes is the primary factor. So knowing that this matters so much to me I have to be on a constant watch because I’m very weak to being convinced that I am in fact just as clever as they told me I was. It’s like I was talking about last week, and have several other times, about the story of the slave at the roman triumph. There’s a reason that imagery resonates so well with me, and it’s because I have to constantly have a similar voice in my ear to keep me free of conceit. I’ve always disdained unjustified arrogance, nothing makes me lose respect for someone more quickly.

This of course only became a problem when I went to do my A-levels though, before that I was always just about able to maintain this delusion of a great intellect I supposedly possessed. Maybe that’s hyperbolic, I never really considered myself to be especially brilliant just quite a bit more quick witted than most of the people around me. This kind of goes back to an early post I uploaded and I don’t want to repeat myself. Basically, I became very good friends with this guy in some of my classes and I think he had a similar view to me in this regard. We would basically LARP as intellectuals, we talked about political ideas and philosophy and poetry, but it was all very superficial. Neither of us actually knew anything at all about what we talked about, we were nominally left-wing/ Marxists because that was what we perceived as the position of the academics we so idolised, but neither of us had actually read any theory. Not that we didn’t read interesting and difficult things, at least for kids that age, I remember thinking I was so cool for having read The Iliad and Odyssey at 12 years old (The E. V. Rieu prose translations) for example, god I really cringe when thinking back on how I used to be.

We both even wrote some stuff, him more than me though. One of my poems actually ended up being used as a sort of prologue/ opening thing to a novel that one of my mother’s colleagues was writing actually. I’d completely forgotten about that, I’ve just been trying to find the book online this afternoon since reminding myself of that but I don’t know for sure whether it was actually published and I’ve forgotten the woman’s name now along with the title of the book. I think the last time I saw her was at the funeral, she told me to keep writing..

To bring things full circle, I just want to say that my co-worker really isn’t that important here. These feelings were under the surface just waiting for a reason to come out, and that exchange last sunday was the excuse. I could be entirely wrong in my judgement, I hope I am, it is true that appearances can be deceiving and because I’ve never really taken the time to get to know any of my co-workers I haven’t had enough of a chance to really tell what they’re like. At the same time though, the judgements we make about people are rarely unfounded, and don’t forget that people choose to conform to a certain “type” in order to deliberately indicate what kind of person they are and what their social role is.

Or at the very least what social role they want to be seen as having, and dissimulation is certainly the reason for that in some cases. It was just kind of shitty to realise that this person I (again, very possibly entirely wrongly) judged as not especially clever was still far more accomplished in an academic respect than I am and probably ever will be and therefore more intelligent. Even if I for some reason completely change my position and decide to go into academia and manage to succeed, I’ll still have failed the standard path that so many people have trod with ease. That being of going to school, and then straight on to uni. That doesn’t just make me a middling intellect, which itself would have bothered me greatly to realise as a kid, but maybe even worse.

It’s lonely at the bottom

I’ve talked before about how I, and I believe a lot of people like me, fall into a trap of sorts. People who tend to spend a lot of time, perhaps too much, dwelling on things. I suppose being this way is what led me to eventually start this blog. Anyway I used the word “thoughtful”, and spoke about how these more thoughtful people can often convince themselves that they’re more intelligent than all the “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever new term might exist. Of course this is a fiction, at least that’s what I was trying to get across before. I don’t really want this post to be a rehash of that one, so I’m not going to spend too much time covering things I already spoke about in the past, but I just have a problem with those kinds of terms and the mindset behind them. The post I’m talking about was called “Thinking about thinking about things”, and it was posted October last year, if you are interested.

I’ve talked before about the probably not actually real roman tradition of the slave standing behind a general during a military triumph and whispering “memento mori” in his ear. This idea that it takes relatively little to convince people that they’re above everyone else, that they’re divine and “better”, is clearly something that has been understood since antiquity and I really do believe that the whole “sheeple” idea is another expression of that, the degree of seriousness is just different. Nowadays instead of great statesmen and military leaders getting that feeling from the roaring crowds cheering their name, you have normal people who commute or whatever who have a sense of superiority over the other people in the train carriage like in that pic I used in that other post. I say nowadays, but actually to be honest the normal day to day citizens of the roman empire or any other ancient civilisation were probably just as prone to such thoughts and the major political figures (or corporate leaders) of today are probably no different than the great figures of the past either.

It really does just seem to be something inherent, at the very least inherent to men. Now this is pure speculation, from someone who doesn’t have any kind of academic credentials whatsoever, but one idea I’ve had is that perhaps it’s an evolutionary trait. See, you kind of have to convince yourself you’re the best in order to justify being the one who reproduces, in an ancient/ stone age ooga booga times kind of environment I mean. Obviously I’m being a bit silly here, but hopefully you understand what I mean. I don’t want to just be another goof online who spouts “redpill” ideas because most of those people are just repeating things you’ve been told before but in increasingly dumbed down and less accurate ways. It’s not even that I disagree with most of it, what people call the 80/20 rule, terms like hypergamy, sexual marketplace, alpha/ beta male, etc etc. all the usual stuff. I’m kind of on board, a bit, or at least I have spent a great deal of time since my mid teens with those kinds of ideas around me. I’m trying to do my own kind of thing here though, and when those ideas influence me I might need to mention them as background, but that’s about all.

As I said I don’t really want to talk about that because having heard it all before, and I’m sure the same is true for some of you, it’s rather boring to go over. Rather I kind of want to build on it a little. See there’s a common thing that gets said, that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ones or something like that. This isn’t just a total asspull from incel philosophers like me (that’s a joke, I don’t have so little self awareness to seriously consider myself a “philosopher”) but something I’ve heard from actual legit academics and science magazines. I think it’s all something we kind of recognise, the whole meme about how women live life on easy mode being an expression of it. I think that it is undeniable that “finding a partner” being an actual difficult task is a male problem. I mean, the way women talk about their future children like it’s just a guarantee is really what gives it away. At the same time though they also seem to not get it, I mean you hear women ask things like “why are men so obsessed with sex” and it’s not a perfect analogy but just imagine someone from a modern first world country who can go to the supermarket and just pick food off the shelf asking why hunter-gatherer tribes in the amazon are obsessed with food. It’s absurd, isn’t it? I guess I’m just gatekeeping hunger now, I mean you still have to walk to the supermarket and pay for the food, people in modern first world countries get hungry too y’know, I’m just clearly a misog.. anti-firstworlder.

I’ll get back on topic in a second though, I’m giving off major incel vibes. I really like that expression btw, incel v i b e s, my friend said it to me last summer when talking about someone. It was when we were away on a camping trip, me and the only two friends I really have. I think I’ve mentioned this trip before briefly, but we were away for a few days and just went walking most of the time. It was also my first (and as of now only, because I haven’t found a good time to take those morning glory seeds yet) experience with psychedelics, but it was a mild dose of 2cb which is itself a very tame drug. Anyway, one of the days we took a really long walk over to this island (connected by a causeway) off the coast near where we were staying and up to the tip opposite the mainland. It’s shaped a little like a diamond or oval, and at this other end there’s loads of crags and cliffs and a lighthouse. It’s really spectacular, the waves smashing against the rocks can come really high up. I’ve actually been several times before with my dad when I was a lot younger. The area, a few hours drive from where I live, is very special to me and I have a lot of memories associated with it which is why I brought my two friends there.

Anyway, we were walking along this big open field just before getting to the end of the journey and were very tired. It was the height of summer, and one of my friends was struggling so much with the heat and a blister he got that he had to stop and me and the other friend went ahead to the café at the cliffs to get drinks for us all. So the final stretch before we got there was this long and wide open field, and we chatting and joking about this guy he knew of. Well, first we were talking about the heat and I said something like “right now I wish I was in Finland” and we were laughing about that and he mentioned that he actually knew someone who moved to Finland. This guy apparently met a girl online, some online dating site I think, and the madman actually moved to fucking Finland to meet her. So that was amusing and he was telling me more about the guy, and how he would often whine about tfw no gf, and that’s when my friend said it. It wasn’t “He gave me incel vibes” or I got incel vibes from him” it was just standalone. He said his story about the guy and then just at the end, like a cherry on top, “Incel vibes” and he chuckled a bit.

It’s a pointless story honestly, but for whatever reason it’s really stuck out to me. I like it a lot, it’s kinda funny in a way. In fact I was almost going to use it as the name for this blog, I’m actually still not sure whether I made the right choice. I think my mood, because of the situation at the time, may have influenced me to go with the title I have instead but looking at everything I’ve written both work fairly well. I mean this very post that I’m writing right now would fit perfectly under either title. On the one hand like I said (and what got me on to this topic in the first place) I’m certainly giving off incel vibes. This is not an “incel blog” by any means, again as I said I don’t just want to repeat things that have been said before because stagnation is death, but those very ideas have clearly had an influence on me and they do leak out. On the other hand, this post is very much me just rambling and the reason for that is indeed my neurosis. I hate to self diagnose, and I know it seems like nowadays everyone has a mental illness, but I think it’s fair for me to say that I’m not completely mentally healthy. After all I’ve been very isolated for a long while, take those two friends I mentioned who were on that trip with me. One of them I haven’t actually seen in person since, and that was like half a year ago now. The other I did see last night, but still I only see him in person an average of perhaps once every two or three months.

I do think being quite secluded most of my life has made things difficult for me in a lot of ways. I get unhealthily attached to people, and I don’t necessarily mean infatuated here it’s not a lower case romantic kind of thing. At least I don’t think it is, it’s hard for me to tell and that leads to further confusion. A lot of people are much more in tune with these kinds of things than me, and I’m realising now that I’ve come back around to what I was initially intending to talk about in this post, in a roundabout way. People like me, who will just endlessly waste their time thinking themselves to death tend to assume all problems can be solved by them thinking their way out. They might think they’re depressed because they don’t have friends or a gf or any goals, but then you’ll listen to some normalfag say something about how they started adding some herb into their meals and they felt better. Or they’ll suggest listening to music, and admittedly upbeat/ high energy music can in the short term affect my mood rather significantly. The weird thing is they just seem to know this stuff, and it’s so fucking alien to me because they’re literally talking about thoughts. Depression is ultimately just bad thoughts, and they chew some ginger root or whatever and something about hormone balance and bang! no more bad thoughts.

Not only does it just come naturally, the idea that if you’re having bad thoughts you shouldn’t continue with them and try to solve things internally but that you should just “do exercise for those endorphins bro”, but it’s not something that bothers them at all either. To me that’s kind of horrifying, that your thoughts aren’t really your own (and this is something that I do spend way too much time fretting over) is a scary idea. That you just need to min-max nutrients and vitamins like life is an RPG and that will literally change how you perceive what’s going on around you is a big deal. I’ve spoken before about religious stuff, and yes I have a very limited knowledge of religious philosophy and theology, but my current way of seeing things as I explained in much more depth in older posts is that God is kind of like all possible knowledge at once. That thought, ideas, etc. are our divine aspect. We are all made in the image of God, at least I think that’s what the bible says, and people take that to mean our material forms, two arms, two legs, standing upright, relatively hairless, and so on are what is meant by that. This is where the whole bearded man in the sky thing comes from and perhaps that’s part of it but I imagine pre-Christian depictions of deities like Zeus/ Jupiter are as well. My point though, is that God is a metaphysical being, the anthropomorphic God is silly and this is why fundamentalists are such cancer. No, it’s thought or reason which separates us from animals. Divinity is immaterial, you cannot touch or smell it. I also see ideas of enlightenment in eastern traditions like Buddhism as getting at the same thing, but again I have even less understanding of those.

If thought is just another part of instinct, which I guess I kind of also contradictorily agree with sometimes because a lot of evo-psych ideas sound rather plausible to me (clearly, after all I was spouting similar stuff myself in this very post), then how can you take any thought you have seriously. It just puts me in this constant state of self doubt, which again I can’t help but obsess over like I always do. It’s quite the conundrum, I feel like I might never achieve any sense of freedom from these thoughts, it can be quite oppressive. I know that these evo-psych ideas have this negative effect on me because of something that has been happening recently in fact, and which I was hoping I’d find a reason to talk about in this post actually just to vent.

So I found out my manager is quitting, she’s been here since I started of course and is the one who gave me the job. I know it’s the boss I work for, but it was her who gave me the interview and I imagine ultimately made the choice for me to start working there officially. So, I’ve been thinking that I should say some kind of thank you for that, but it’s very difficult for me. I don’t speak a lot, I’m not articulate at all or able to just rattle on forever about something like I do in my head or in writing here. I’ve explained it how I see it before, like there’s a cage that I’m trapped inside of when I’m outside with other people and I can shake the bars and scream all I want but my body (the cage in question) will just continue on awkwardly brute forcing through any interaction in a very forced and unresponsive way. The only sign of life is my hands shaking noticeably when I’m particularly stressed. I imagine that some of you, those who came from /r9k/, experience a similar thing although maybe not as severe.

So I decided that I had the right idea the last time and that I should write a letter, a more substantial one this time not just a little note but a real letter. Which is why this post is kind of a hastily done thing, I know I’m no longer holding myself to the weekly upload thing but I still want to be writing something always and this is kind of what I’ve been doing to take my mind off of the letter which is what I’ve been giving most of my attention to. I know it sounds silly, it’s going to be a few paragraphs long, shorter than any post I’ve made here so why is it taking such focus and time? Well the thing is it’s like every line I type I have to redo 100+ times, it’s like a minefield because as I was saying I’ve been isolated for a lot of my life and I have a lot of difficulty knowing the various societal boundaries there are. I really have a difficult time knowing what is and isn’t appropriate, after all this is a married woman. So I’ll admit I’m nervous about it seeming like I’m trying to confess my secret feelings for her or something when (in this specific instance) I’m really not. Yes, the fact that last time I actually did have secret feelings for the person I left the note for might also be causing me to worry this way I’m aware of that too.

I’m just not sure, I know I’m not able to say something in person whenever the last time I see her may be I’m just too much of a coward and I can’t get more than a couple sentences out without spilling my spaghetti. Not just with her obviously, with practically anyone even other guys. I’m saying that because the whole spaghetti meme is usually really only associated with an object of one’s affection, oneitis I suppose. Not that this woman is unattractive, although she is quite a lot older than I am, in fact I think she’s rather aware of how pretty and pleasant to be around men find her given some things I’ve heard her say before. Which is exactly my problem, I can’t help but think that when you’re a good looking woman and have been hit on by countless men since your late teens you must become a bit jaded. Any expression of genuine affection or appreciation from a guy (particularly a younger one) that isn’t an attempt to get something, that isn’t anything other than just a “thanks for what you did for me”, will not seem so. It will appear to be just more of the same, just more empty male words to get in your pants.

It’s back to the whole “nice guys” meme again, you know this idea that “nice guys” aren’t actually nice they’re just trying to get you to sleep with them but in a sneaky way. It’s easy to dismiss those people at first, after all you know you’re actually genuinely nice right? and you know truly internally, you understand your own motivations and they’re not just to “get laid” or whatever a few harpies with the thousand cock stare have to say. Then the self doubt creeps in, all that evo psych stuff you’ve been surrounded by. What if it is all some strategy you’ve adopted without even being consciously aware of it. Is everything I say and everything I think, not actually what I say and think truly but entirely at the whim of the animal I inhabit’s needs and urges? Is free will, true choice, an illusion. Now I’m starting to get into the hard determinism thing, which I have also been thinking about a lot lately after a really fascinating thread on /lit/ but I do plan to make an entirely separate post for that subject so I’m going to steer clear now.

I know that last time when I left the note for the other girl who left I felt bad after, I kind of regret it now and instead wish I hadn’t done it. The reason though is because I regret having feelings for her at all, because between thinking about how little I really knew her and understanding the way desperate people can delude themselves I realised that my thoughts were kind of “not my own”, which as I was just talking about is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and being concerned by. This case is kind of different, even with the weird evo-psych ideas about secret unconscious mating strategies it doesn’t matter, because consciously I know I’m not trying anything with this woman. I’ve never had any kind of fantasy, or daydream, like I would have fairly often about oneitis girl. I’m so conflicted, I know it seems so stupid that I’m almost having a crisis over this crap but it’s really kind of more a catalyst if you think about it.

Here’s the situation, I’ve had a couple days to think now. This entire post other than going forward of course was written primarily in one evening, kind of rushed over a few intense hours and now I’ve had a couple of days my head is a little clearer. I stopped writing that letter, but I think I will finish it. I don’t think that I will be giving it to her though, and I will explain. Tonight there’s a gathering/ social thing and the entire team is going to a restaurant and the pub. There was a group card and we all had to leave a short note goodbye there. I didn’t get to say everything I feel I’d like to, but after that and also the goodbye messages in the group text chat anything else would start to feel a little cloying and excessive I feel. Which is exactly the opposite of what I want, see I’ve had time to think and I realised that I was more doing this for me than for her.

I was thinking about it and I realised that I was being kind of reductive by assuming the only desirable role that women can play in a male’s life would be that of a romantic/ sexual partner. See my thinking was that even though I feel quite sad about this woman leaving, because I don’t see her that way, the warm feelings I have for her are something “pure” or “true” or dare I say it “platonic”. Then I remembered what I’ve spoken about before, that maybe because my mother passed away I’m looking for a mother figure almost as a replacement or at the very least to kind of fill that missing need, and that maternal role may be how I’ve been seeing this woman. As I did with that other woman who trained me and then was fired right after I started. Now on the one hand this is quite helpful, it would mean that I’m not secretly and unconsciously trying to long game my way into getting laid which would kind of make me disgusted with myself. On the other hand though it still means that my feelings are conditional on biological or at least psychological needs, so I’m still to a degree not in full control of my thoughts if this is an accurate way of seeing things.

Anyway, whatever is the case I cannot know what other people will think, and I care a great deal about what other people think of me. I don’t have any good reason to assume that were I to write such a letter, this woman would give even half as much thought to these things as I have. It’s very possible that she’d just assume I did secretly have feelings for her all along, I mean I have good reason to think this because of something she said at the last social event. The topic of tips came up, we leave a tip jar at the front of the counter. Now most of the time people just drop change loose change in there they don’t want to keep, and an actual larger tip is less common. So we were talking about those larger tips, I don’t remember exactly why, and she said something about how it’s “usually men”. This is the problem I face, I remember these little comments people make that usually go ignored and I read into them maybe more than I should but I can’t help it.

So, if I leave this letter and that is the assumption made about me then her last impression of me will be forever tarnished, any positive memory of me will be stained by this idea that all along I had some ulterior motive. If she has a similar way of seeing things as I do, and she thinks I’m just a kid looking for a mother figure, she probably would be more understanding at least. Nevertheless that is still an imposition, I’m putting her in a role that she never wanted to be in. This is an adult with a life of her own, I’ve developed some kind of warmth for her because I have very few people in my life and most people in my situation wouldn’t have. It is certainly inappropriate either way, and while at least it would be accurate to be remembered this way it would still be unfortunate. So it’s a 1/3 chance that I’m remembered as… idk a sleaze? or maybe more accurately a failed one (either of which are completely absurd if you know anything about me), a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered as a developmentally stunted weakling, and a 1/3 chance that I’ll be remembered fondly without any baggage placed on top..

Wait, no that’ll never happen not in this culture. Outside of maybe certain reactionary circles I don’t think anyone believes there are pure intentions anymore, in fact I think even those people are just pretending to themselves as well. So it’s more like 50/50, and I’m not sure I’m willing to take those odds, when it comes to something like how I’ll be remembered, which as I said is incredibly important to me. Like I said I do still plan to finish this letter, so I haven’t made my mind up 100% yet. I suppose that my decision rests on the answer to one more question, if I don’t leave the letter what will be the impression of me that is left with her? Will I even be remembered. or is this just another person quickly drifting through my life with me as a brief distraction?

A change of pace

I haven’t been on the ball at all lately, I’ve really fallen behind and I’m not quite sure why. Nothing has really happened, in fact I’m actually quite motivated at the moment, but I’m just not doing anything about it. I started my last post, thinking it was something novel and interesting, but while working on it I lost faith in the whole idea. Now this is only a part of it, because I also just became less engaged because the idea was not as good as I originally thought, but I’d say that not having a single visitor for around two weeks might have affected my losing interest. I don’t like that it bothers me so much, and that it’s becoming something I seem to whine about so often, but it certainly is interesting that when my posts are well received (or actually more importantly, just often received) I find it easier to write and I write better. Not that I’m saying I ever write well, I don’t think I do, but what I write is better I mean.

So that post was one of the longest to finish of all of the ones I’ve uploaded, and partly this was because I took a break for about three or four days and didn’t even look at the blog at all. Instead, I’ve been trying to read more, for those few days I read for a good few hours each. The book I was reading was Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought a copy of (Translated by Robin Waterfield) a long while ago, but dropped it about half of the way in and I didn’t pick it back up until last week. Funnily enough, the second half is quite different and much more focused than the first. So I’ve found it a lot easier to stick with it. The winding first half which follows the first three Persian kings as they build their empire, veering off into various fantastical stories from the many places they conquered, is interesting sure but it also drags in places. I’ve just found, surprisingly, that the story of the invasions of Greece by Darius and later Xerxes was much more engaging.

Anyway, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on /lit/, which is not my usual board at all. I’ve spent more time there this last week than the sum total of time spent during all my other visits. I did originally just go to check the sticky, because I know they have that start with the greeks chart and reading what I was and the fact that I’ve been reminded of when I read The Republic (and probably barely understood it) a few times over the last couple of months I thought maybe now is the time. I ended up just sticking around though, and enjoying it quite a lot. It might sound strange, but I quite liked that there were conversations that I felt unqualified to join in with. Feeling out of my depth almost, it inspires me to read and learn so that I will be able to keep up with the discussion some time in the future. So, over this week I said to myself I would do exactly that.

I’ve mostly stuck to it so far, I’ve definitely spent at least some time reading (even if only half an hour some days) every day since that period of a few days where I finished The Histories. I’ve had to make do with this book I got as a present years ago and never gave a read, The Crying Of Lot 49, it’s awful if I’m being honest but pretty short and it’s something to read until my copy of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War arrives. That’s the next book I’ve ordered, and I’m not listing all these off just to flex on whoever is reading this so I hope it doesn’t seem that way. Honestly it might sound rather impressive hearing all these ancient greek names, but the books I’m reading are famously written in simple language. Herodotus’ writing is a common choice for people trying to learn to read ancient greek because it’s so clear and easy to grasp, and I’m just reading a translation into English. I do have a MEGA link to all the works attributed to Plato though, which actually is pretty fucking intimidating, and if I get through all of that and actually understand it well then I think I’d have a reason to be somewhat impressed with myself.

So because of all of this, and because I’ve kind of been finding it harder and harder to consistently write a good post every single week, I’ve decided to upload more irregularly. I’ll still try to consistently be writing, so at any one time there’ll be a post I’m working on, but I just don’t want to have this deadline hanging over my head. Instead of feeling I need to rush to finish a post that I’ve been having more trouble with, I’ll just keep working on it longer. It seems to me, that I’ve established myself now on here, I don’t really see anything changing where I’ll suddenly experience any kind of significant audience growth. I might gain a new regular reader every couple months, but I also lose one as well. What I’ve realised, after this most recent long gap without any visitors, is that those few of you who have stuck around this far don’t even want to read a new post of mine every single week, but you probably will check back in eventually. There should be something new, most of the time. In fact it’s already been a week since the mess I uploaded last week, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish this today as I’m working until 22:30 tonight and going in soon.

Another good thing that should result from this is there’ll be no more of these shitty update/ filler posts, like this one. It’s hard to really tell what you few regular long term readers like, but I know that the only “likes” I get from one off visitors are on the posts where I talk about ideas rather than whining about my own life. I mean, I talk about my life and things that happen to me in those posts also sometimes, but it’s a case of me using observations, memories, or dreams as a jumping off point to talk about something more… cerebral I suppose (is that a pretentious thing to say) rather than writing a post about those things themselves. I also prefer those, as even though it is sometimes satisfying to just use this blog as a diary none of the posts I’m really proud of are those kind. There’s this kind of non-story of my life which one might pick up if they were to read through everything I’ve uploaded here, and there’s these one off vignettes which while they also build on one another could be understood without any context.

Well that’s not entirely true, I do write my posts with some kind of prior assumptions about the world settled already. The problem is, I hate talking about something that has been done to death, for the same reason I very rarely watch a film more than once. It’s easy to forget that what a lot of the ideas that I talk about here are built on top of isn’t actually accepted by most normalfags. I’ve spent so many years of my adolescence on 4chan and so on that I forget how different my perspective was before, and how differently I see the world. I’m not the only one who does this, nowadays (and ironically I’m about to state something that is exactly what I hate, an opinion we’ve all heard hundreds of times that is always presented as a new or fresh perspective) it is true that a lot of people, at least online, are stuck in echo chambers. So because of only talking to likeminded people all the time, all the assumptions and nuances of their underlying worldview don’t even come up when they start expressing ideas of their own.

Not that that means anything, even if the whole world is doing things the wrong way it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m not sure that it is “the wrong thing to do” though, in this case. I mean maybe it’s another factor preventing me from gaining more readers, and that’s a shame, but what can I do about it? I’m not making any money or getting anything out of this, other than the very enjoyment of writing and expressing my ideas. If you just want to hear people express ideas you already hold there’s thousands of blogs, and youtube channels and online magazines that will cater to that demand. This ties back into the main point of this post, why I’m going to drop the weekly schedule thing. I’m doing this for fun, I don’t see the point in holding myself to this arbitrary standard that only adds stress to my life when the whole point of the blog is to wind down and/ or vent about things in order to lessen some of the stress I have. So, I’ll be uploading less often but not a great deal less. Other than that, not much else should change.

Some stuff

The last thing in the world I want to be seen as is false or insincere, but unfortunately being unwilling to do certain things I might consider so really limits my potential. See I want a larger audience, as I’ve said before not much more so than now just a few more people, but so much of the advice or methods that are given for helping with that feel wrong in some way. I’ll take one thing I’ve seen suggested, which is to directly address the reader. Now until now I haven’t ever really done that, maybe in a couple of specific instances but not as a general rule. I don’t open up every post pretending that I actually know any of you people. I’m glad you all keep coming back, and I’m glad that what I have to say resonates with you, but I won’t pretend you’re a personal friend of mine when that just isn’t the case. Doing so apparently is a great help though, people like feeling like there’s some kind of relationship between them and the person who’s blog or video or whatever they’re viewing.

That’s why every major youtube video (I’m talking normie sphere youtube, not a three hour lecture on bronze age cloth production or something) or blog or whatever starts with the now infamous “hey guys” and ends similarly with the person telling their audience how much they mean to them and similar crap. Now perhaps, in the case of certain larger figures who have a community develop around them and other interesting people within it that’s not entirely dishonest, but they were doing that before that point. See there’s this weird “fake it till you make it” scenario here, where you have to pretend that the few visitors who you know nothing about are a real community of people you actually know about and care for personally in order to actually get such a community, at which point it becomes accurate. Now again I’m not really aiming for a “community” myself, but I have always said I would like more people reading what I have to say than I do currently and I would like if people left comments and actually shared their thoughts on my posts.

Getting viewers, just any viewers, doesn’t mean anything. I want to specifically get the kind of people that, like I said, actually feel like what I have to say resonates with them in some way. So in a way saying that I want a larger audience isn’t entirely accurate, rather I want what I currently do to gain a larger audience. Like I said in my entry right after New Year’s Day, there are certain changes that would cause this blog to lose the identity it has developed. Suddenly shifting to a more friendly vibe, and starting off every entry with “hey guys, how are you doing today?” would not only just seem insincere to those of you who have been here for a while but would feel forced and unnatural for me. After all my instinct when starting was to write the way I did then and still do and to consciously change to a new style for the sole purpose of getting new viewers or getting the one off viewers that sometimes drop by to stay feels wrong. Well that’s not entirely true, there are some things I’m willing to change and others I’m not. I guess what I’m trying to find out is what separates the two, why do some changes to help grow the blog not bother me while others do?

Let’s take another example, something else I’ve heard is to always end with a question or even several questions. Now I’m not against the idea entirely, after all I do sometimes ask questions throughout my posts. Usually I’m using them as a device of rhetoric rather than actually seeking answers, but still I’m clearly not against asking questions as a rule. The problem is that again it’d feel forced, not as much as with the whole directly addressing you all thing sure but still enough to bug me. See, if I have to remind myself to end off with a question every time it’s just gonna feel weird. I’m not really saying anything at all here, this post is a complete mess. The thing is I started writing something entirely different a few days ago and had to delete all of it. The idea really fell apart and so now having thrown away days of work I’m just trying to get something out so I can maintain my weekly schedule. I’m not saying that what I’ve been talking about today isn’t something that I think about, or that has been on my mind, I’m just not able to articulate it very well right now. Looks like another dud week unfortunately, a shame because I’ve mostly been really happy with what I’ve put out over the last month or so. I do want to quickly make another point about the idea of ending with a question though.

See it’s a little like what I was saying earlier with regard to addressing you all directly, in that there’s this funny “fake it till you make it” thing going on. See, I say “audience” and “visitors” and similarly vague things, but really there’s just three or four (maybe five, it’s hard to tell because of the one time visitors) of you. I can end with a question, but it’s clear that none of you are interested in commenting or responding or you would have done so by now. Which is fine, I’m the same I actually never comment on youtube videos or other blogs or anywhere other than threads on 4chan really. So if I end with a question, I’m just asking a potential audience which doesn’t exist yet. Maybe it will never exist, but I do feel like if I was able to find a few people who truly care about what I have to say in half a year then hypothetically I should be able to find more given just how many people there are in the world, and that keeps me hopeful.

I don’t really know exactly what it is I want, I’m unwilling to make any meaningful changes but unhappy that I’m not finding more people who want to stick around. I’m not sure if I actually magically had say ten new regular readers within a month whether I’d feel any better. I mean when I actually write these I half pretend I’m writing them just for myself. I know that people are reading them of course, I’m conscious of that fact, but on some level I haven’t fully realised it. Maybe that’s another reason why openly addressing you, whether it be you meaning all of you together or you the specific person reading this right now, feels weird to me. I’m not sure what to say, what do you think?

Anyway, there’s still more good stuff to come (if you agree that some of what I’ve written for this blog so far was good) so I’d stick around even though there will probably also be more duds like this one as well in the months ahead. I don’t really talk about my own life so much anymore, as I did when I first started this blog, but despite what it might seem I’m actually doing really well right now. It’s been a dark week, I fell into a fit of paranoia regarding my job and the people I work with, but my suspicions have proven to be entirely unsubstantial. As the first days of spring finally hit, some much needed sunlight was shed on the situation, allowing me to realise how hasty I had been. I also stopped sharing my pleb tier entry level taste for the most part, but just in case anyone cares I’ve been listening to Alt-J a lot lately and also I’ve been getting into Death In June over the last few weeks. I also took this photo, the one used as the header image, earlier this afternoon. It’s not often you can see the moon so clearly in the middle of the day, and I thought it was pretty.

Another quick one

I feel like I’ve come up against another brick wall, and this one has hit me much more suddenly than the last. Right back when I started this I had so much to write about, and I did. For the first couple of months I uploaded a lot of my best stuff so far, and I was uploading way more frequently too. I was writing for hours every day, it was new and exciting and I had a lot I needed to get off my chest as well, and to be fair I had more free time as they’ve been giving me more work since the winter really got going. I did slow down though, and I also uploaded a few mediocre entries for the sake of keeping to at least something new every week. I was worried that it wouldn’t end, that the enjoyment I had for this at the start wouldn’t return, but then over the last month it has. I’ve been really starting to enjoy it again, the last post especially might be the one I’m most proud of out of all the things I’ve uploaded. If not it’s certainly up there, and it’s definitely the best quality post. Not that you can really measure that in any objective way, but you know what I mean. It’s the best example of what I’m trying to do here, that and a couple of others are the ones I’d show as a representative if asked, not that anyone ever would.

See that period before was really concerning for me, I began to worry whether I had again got myself into a situation where I was expected to spend hours of time on something I found arduous and boring rather than the enjoyable hobby it should be. Very similarly to what I was talking about two posts back actually, where I’d started off enjoying chatting with that girl and then began to hate it, I thought that maybe I was growing to hate this. It never happened, but there were a couple of weeks where like I said I just forced myself to put something up rather than letting a post come together organically. Because of course, part of me thought it might never happen or at least that it would take a while. Of course none of those posts have been very good, and maybe it would have been better to just post even less often but I really really don’t want to go less than weekly. I’ve already gone into why before, but basically it’s because I’m scared of losing the few regular visitors I do get. I think I’m on three or four now, so back up from my lowest point of one but still a tenuous amount. As much as I am doing this for myself, I am also doing it to be heard. Not by a large number of people, but some. I write these because they will be read by someone, and maybe give them something to think about or just hear me whine idk..

I was going to force myself to write something again this week, I finally finished the book I was reading and was going to talk about that but it’s been six days since my last post and all I’ve managed is a couple of paragraphs. It’s not even that I’m not interested in talking about it, I just can’t right now for some reason. I remember at several points while reading the book there were things that stood out to me and got me inspired to share my thoughts. This post about the book, which I’m sure I’ll get around to eventually, was on my mind during those times. I think I mentioned I was planning it in my head in the post I made right after New Year’s Day even. I have both specific ideas for posts I intend to make down the line and the random moments of inspiration and yet I can’t do it again. I hope this doesn’t last as long as the last time, and next week I have a lot of time off so perhaps being stuck inside for four days in a row will get me writing but at the same time it can also be rather demotivating.

As I said before, I feel like I’m navigating my way through the black land. The thing is I don’t really know where I’m trying to get to, and I’ve been here so long I forgot what it’s like in happier and brighter places. I get a glimpse every now and then, the star poking through the sooty cloud layer, and it gives me energy to move and push on. This time a month, another just a few days, etc. The doubt always creeps back in eventually, where is this new path actually leading, further in? If I just stay where I am I’ll definitely get nowhere, and the evil things that lurk here begin to close in also, but I’m just so tired of this whole charade. I stay put and the shadow grows ever heavier, something somehow pulls me out of it and I begin a new but ultimately futile journey which ends with me once again alone in a cold and dark pit. Is my goal to get free, to escape from this place? If so why would I ever have come here in the first place, did I stray from the right course by accident or deliberately? It seems a mix of both choice and circumstance led me here, but I don’t know how much of a role either played. I don’t remember anymore, all memory of my time before being here is a blur.

I remember what it was like early on though, my spirit was weakened very gradually. It didn’t happen right away, I believe I even thought that in some way I was better for having ended up here. Like it took something to end up here that most people didn’t have, pride and delusion go hand in hand. Stupid people and boring people never end up in such places, but I see now that the boring one is me. I’ve done nothing but aimlessly wander around not developing at all, and the point at which I diverged from everyone else gets further away every day. Let’s say I can find my way back, if that’s even what I want now, and that alone takes some time. Well even then I’m at a place most people have long moved on from, and therefore still just as alone.

I’m not just talking about the thing I was talking about last week here, although I suppose that is what has brought all these thoughts up again, I’m talking about every aspect of life. It’s funny though, I talked about PUAs last week and this metaphor is quite appropriate for them in a way. You know, because the thing with PUAs is in many cases they’re chasing after the people who left them behind long ago. Even the ones who go on to be incredibly successful with women are eternally unsatisfied because they will never experience young love. If you look past the greased back hair, stained leather jacket and ripped jeans you’ll see the same lonely kid who spent too many summer afternoons indoors. It’s really quite sad, and I know I can’t ever end up like that. There aren’t many other options though, I mean where can I go from here? I’m really not sure, I just feel so hopelessly lost and not only does it seem like no one cares it’s beginning to feel like I’m actually resented for being such a loser.

I’m struggling to even stick to a coherent point, I’ve just been hit over the last week with this sudden influx of bad thoughts. It’s like you get on a train of thought and within a short few days you’ve seen all the usual scenery from the window. I’m just having a hard time right now, and I’ll try to make a better post next week. It’s a shame, I really have felt like I’ve been on a roll the last month. I think this is just going to happen sometimes.

A humble but durable legacy

The previous two evenings I’ve come home from work with the intention of relaxing by getting to work on a new entry and then after writing for a couple hours I’d read a little and head to bed. Yet both evenings I came home and ended up just scrolling through the catalogue right up until it was time to get some sleep and finding maybe one or two interesting threads the entire time, staying up later than I planned yet achieving less. There’s this image I have in my head of myself sitting by the glowing heater otherwise in a dark room, with a warm cup of chamomile and my laptop in front of me. Crafting a new entry that cleverly weaves several ideas together in a way that is both intelligent and poetic. Yes, I know it’s rather silly. It keeps me going while I’m there though, dealing with the various characters that come through the shop. It’s fair to say I have a romanticised idea of what it is I’m doing here, in a weird way I’m kind of aware of it and see it as being not entirely “truthful” yet at the same time I can’t shake it off entirely either. It’s in my nature, I’ve always done this. It’s more than mere “cope” as well, because I did it back when life was good. When I was a small child, when the world was still mysterious.

It’s hard to give examples of this because it’s more than just how I describe things, although that is of course a huge aspect of it. Even if I were to force myself to use the most mundane language when talking, in my mind there would still be a certain beauty to all the more mediocre things in life. Well, until I actually get around to being personally involved in them that is. Take this other example, my job. I’ve described it as a shop, and that’s close but not entirely accurate. There’s two different locations and the office, I’ve mentioned this before. What I haven’t mentioned is that the smaller shop, the one I’m still sent to most of the time is really more of a box/ kiosk. Here’s a drawing of the layout, to give a better idea. It’s a simple sketch, of course it looks nothing like the actual place without the colour and things all over the walls and in the front, but it gives a good idea of the size and shape.

So, as much of a big deal as I made in that one post about why I was always being placed at the smaller shop I actually much prefer this place. I have a stool to sit on and a small heater, and I can listen to whatever I want to. Lately I’ve been listening to The History Of Rome podcast for a good couple hours at the start of my shift there before it gets busier later in the afternoon and then I’ll just put some music on. I think I mentioned I was restarting that in another post here, well I’ve just got past the point I got to last time which was the end of Marcus Aurelius’ reign and the transition of power to Commodus. I can have free hot drinks from the machine, coffee (which I only drink in the morning) or hot chocolate or a herbal tea. I’ve spent days in there when there were thunderstorms and heavy rain, or pretty dense snowing (not that it ever snows that heavily here), and in the middle of the summer when the sun was beating down, all while reasonably comfortable. I even had a conversation with one of the customers the other day about this. He said he saw me sitting there with a bored expression and that I should be glad boredom is the worst thing I have to worry about while working. He was right, I’m really glad I found this job honestly. The worst it gets, at least at this smaller place, is a period where not much happens and I’m just daydreaming. Amusingly enough also recently I saw a poster on a wall while walking to work advertising some kind of scheme or something and it said “Want to get paid to daydream?”. My immediate thought, given I had had that conversation the same day, was that I already do.

So I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the job, in fact after I’ve had a good few days not working (which happens often because the schedule changes weekly and I only do four days on average, so often I’ll get three or four days off in a row) I look forward to going in and not being stuck at home anymore. At the same time, when I’ve been working for five or more days in a row because I have days at the end of one week and the beginning of the next it does start to become a slog. My point anyway is that for wageslavery, it’s pretty fucking /comfy/. When I write about it it makes it seem even better, and that’s really my point. Because of course when I’m there while I am aware of how fortunate I am I still feel like a wageslave of course. As soon as I leave though, every time despite being there for over a year now, I can’t picture the place without the romantic lens distorting things.

In the podcast I’ve been listening to there’s an episode called A Day In The Life, where Mark Duncan (the narrator/ writer/ guy behind the whole thing) goes through an average day for a citizen of the eternal city itself during the Pax Romana. The height of the empire, the period you probably think of when talking about the glory and prosperity of Rome. Well the picture he paints in some ways resembles my own life. I sit there in what is essentially the modern equivalent of a market stall and receive coins for what I sell. It really hit me when I was counting up the coins at the end of the day, see when we finish we take the coins out of the till and separate them into various plastic pouches to bring back to the main office. I just realised that two thousand years ago, not just in Rome but in cities all over the world there would be plenty of people just like me counting up the coins for the day and putting them into pouches. Pouches of leather rather than clear plastic, of course. Whether I like it or not as well, the city I live in also has a very “international” character. It’s like those posts people will make, with the meme arrows. Ywn be X person at Y point in history living an easy but /comfy/ simple life. Except, I actually kind of am doing that. I’m still a fucking loser, but in this one regard life is pretty good. I suppose, and see this is me doing that thing again, I’m continuing a legacy that goes back millennia. A simple unskilled city worker, it may be an ignoble profession but it’s outlived many more prestigious ways of making a living.

I know this is a shorter post than usual, I just can’t really think where else to take this subject. I think I got across what I really wanted to already, and hey it’s still about as long as a usual post on most of the other similar style blogs I’ve seen around. Not that that means I intend to usually have shorter posts like this, I enjoy the longer ones. Again sticking to the whole idea of this post, I have this nice image in my head of someone spending an evening with my newest entry, getting /comfy/. I know I don’t have many people regularly coming back, but I like the idea that I’m giving someone something to look forward to. Not that any of my posts are quite long enough to take an entire evening, at most maybe the longer ones might take half an hour if you’re really taking your time. It could be a nice part of it though, and if you stop to think yourself and respond in your head (because no one ever actually responds with a comment unfortunately) to what I’m talking about it could last longer. Anyway I’m rambling, which I know is what I do here but it’s not really leading anywhere interesting. I suppose I could quickly talk about one thing, just because I got reminded when typing that out. I’ve been thinking more about the title of the blog, I’ve considered shortening it. Or, I’ve considered that perhaps one day I could. See I am admittedly rather neurotic and I don’t see that changing, and I do ramble a lot which I also don’t see changing, but I do believe that one day it will no longer be fair to refer to myself as “a mess”.

There have been some setbacks, the shrooms I was growing have been contaminated with mould for one (the photo I used for the main image is of what became of them) which is a real shame because I thought they could have given me some interesting insights and also inspiration for this new hobby of mine. I suppose I could try again, but if I do I’ll wait until the spring because the cold weather also caused a lot of problems. It was tricky keeping it both warm and well lit, and I think that also led to the failure. I’m also considering the peyote cactus, which is even easier and less tricky legally to get here. It will take much longer to grow and prepare though. I haven’t been reading as much as I wanted to be, I’m reading the book Travels In Nihilon at the moment. It’s a novel telling the tale of a group of travellers sent into the fictional country of Nihilon in order to write a travel guide and how they get caught up in an insurrection. The country is a kind of hypercapitalist/ libertarian fantasy, but of course unbelievably corrupt and spiritually desolate. It is bordering a heavily militarised and equally shitty socialist state called Cronacia, with whom it is locked in a seemingly unending war. When I finish, perhaps I’ll make a post regarding my thoughts on the book. I’m enjoying it though, it’s a nice easy read to get back into the swing of things with and fits well with the kind of things that have been interesting me lately. Oh, and I’ve been listening to Still by NIN a lot lately. I avoided it when going through the whole band/ project’s discography because I thought it was just another one of their many remix albums with more recycled material. The second half is all new, and pretty good too, though. Plus the redone songs are also quite a different experience this way. I’ve got some good ideas for a couple interesting posts too, so that’s something for us all to look forward to as well.

and a happy New Year

I spent New Year’s Eve alone, for the most part anyway. I did watch a film with my dad earlier in the afternoon/ evening, but he went to sleep several hours before midnight. So when the time came, I was in my room on my own. I had my “friends” on r9k to keep me company, and this isn’t the first time I’ve been alone to witness the year’s end, but it was nevertheless quite sad. Most years I’ve spent the evening with these family friends I think I may have very briefly mentioned in a post from a couple months back. After I went to dinner with them and then my co-workers the night after that. It was a pretty bad entry, but the original plan I had for it would have been quite good I think had I been able to pull it off. Oh well, not everything goes according to plan. Anyway while this is the third time for me (last year I just went to sleep before the clock struck 12 so maybe that doesn’t count), I think it was the most upsetting. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, it’s just another night people will say and they are half right. It wasn’t that bad, I’ve had far more upsetting moments just this year. Of course the most obvious being the whole situation around which my early posts revolved. I didn’t have an emotional break down, but as I was sitting there leaning against the forest green wall in my room listening to John Frusciante’s The Will To Death and waiting for the year to be over I did get a real sense of despair. Weirdly it hit me as I was reflecting on a feeling of hopefulness I’d had all day.

Going back a bit I mentioned how people will say “oh it’s just another day”, etc. Talk about how it doesn’t matter, there’s no significance. I remember speaking to my friend about the idea of having a New Year’s resolution last year (or two years ago I suppose, you know what I mean), and he dismissively just laughed at the idea. Because it is indeed just a day literally speaking, no divine being floated down to tell us otherwise, the decision to start anew here is arbitrary. Nevertheless this is where we start, and this starting point has a long history going back to republican Rome. So while maybe in January 153 BC when an uprising in the provinces led to new consuls being selected earlier than the usual date of March 1st, the day did indeed have no significance, now two thousand years and several calendars later I think it’s earned some.

People are lazy, me especially so, and people like order and ritual, again me especially so. If they need to make a change in their lives, however small, they often look for a significant point to both start on and also to track with. The day they can point to years down the line as the turning point. So, the first day of a new month, or just a new week even. Maybe a special date, their birthday perhaps, or the day following some significant event in their lives. Maybe something bad happened as a result of their bad habits, and the following day they decide to put it behind them once and for all. Or they choose an easily memorable date, and give themselves the time until then to indulge for the last time. So with all this understood, is it any surprise that the start of a new year is so commonly chosen as the time for such a change. So common is it in fact, that the idea of the “New Year’s resolution” is something we all are aware of, especially in the west but in some way all over the world. Something that has it’s own Wikipedia page, for what it’s worth. These people who dismiss the importance of this date are in a way being so cold and rational that they’ve taken an irrational position.

This is the first year that I’ve really seen things this way though, other than as a child I mean, I guess it’d be more accurate to say this is the first year after losing my teenage cynicism. It’s been a gradual process, every year I see my worldview as being different to the year before, but I mean in regard to this particular thing. So because of this I was thinking throughout the day about perhaps taking the opportunity to change some things in my own life. I should read more, maybe then I won’t be flailing around in the dark so much when I talk about complex issues and ideas. Reading used to be something very important to me, but I fell off as so many have. I should actually commit to doing exercise, even if I just do simple bodyweight exercises at home I should have an actual routine and goals rather then the irregular and unplanned sessions every few weeks I’ve been doing the last few years that have not really made me any stronger or well disciplined.

I should continue this blog, and try to have less shitty entries and more that are worth reading. I’ll try to get more regular readers, but other than outright shilling which I don’t feel comfortable with I’m not sure how best to do that. Not that I’m making any money from this, or ever intend to. It’s quite a shame really how unusual I seem to be in this regard, just wanting this as a small hobby. It seems once again I’ve fallen for a romanticised view of what blogging is. See as I never was a part of the “blogosphere”, until I started this I suppose (of course I’ve read blogs before, a certain post that I got a link to or found through a google search, etc.), I had this clearly completely false idea of what it was. Even that term, blogosphere, it’s just a relic of something that didn’t even really exist a decade ago but certainly doesn’t now. This image we have of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people with personal blogs where they share thoughts and ideas, just as a hobby maybe they work on a couple times a week, is not representative of reality. Sure there are probably plenty of those, but the overwhelming majority of “blogs” are just completely soulless attempts at making some extra cash. At least that’s been my experience since starting here, because the last half year or so I have been occasionally checking other blogs. Sometimes through the referrer thing, but also whenever I get a like or someone “following” me I will check their stuff.

In all but a few cases, they’re not even what I’d ever have called a “blog” a year ago. Of course, they are. They fit with the dictionary definition, but they don’t fit the cultural definition. I think it should be fairly clear what I mean by that term, given the context, but if you read my post about school shootings (it’s one of the first I ever wrote) you’ll get a better rundown of this idea of mine. I know that’s a bit cheeky of me, but I really don’t like saying the same thing over and over and I quite like the idea of there being a continuity or evolution in this blog, with my posts building on one another. Anyway as I was saying, this idea I had of the blog as art is a fantasy. I swear I’m not even sure if half of these are written by real people, they could just be using a bot to manufacture a new post every day and then putting an expertly crafted title on top to scrape as many people as possible off of search engines. There are also way more fucking daily recipe blogs than necessary too in my opinion. I don’t want to appear to be shitting on people, the people who make these aren’t really doing anything wrong, if there’s a gap in the market someone’s gonna fill it. What I’m saying is I suppose I have this sense of loss or longing for something that never existed, and you could also say that I’m trying to achieve it myself with this blog. I’m hoping for this blog to almost be an archetypal example of what I always thought blogs were.

I went on a complete tangent though, not that that’s a problem I was hoping for it, but I should try and finish what I started talking about at the beginning eventually. So, I was talking about what I could do to improve or make the blog more appealing to people. Not just anyone of course, I want the people who would appreciate what I’m doing now but might overlook it currently because it’s a little rough around the edges. Some pruning or polishing is fine, but I don’t want to lose the identity that I believe has developed. For example I don’t want to change what I was talking about just now about how the posts build on one another. I like the idea of “being there from the start” being rewarded, and also I think it gives a good reason to go back. There are a few things I could change that might make my stuff more digestible or easy to read, I could change the way I’ll type how I talk in some cases (how I talk when I’m comfortable that is) and then more like I would for an essay at other times. I can see how the inconsistent tone would make it annoying to read, even if people aren’t fully conscious of it specifically it will just “feel off” in a way. At the same time though I don’t want to lose the identity that I’ve developed for the blog, maybe the weird changing tone and style is appropriate because I myself (who this blog is supposed to reflect) often have quite sudden changes in mood and regularly experience feelings of awkwardness or things being not quite right. I don’t want to sound like an annoying pseud, this is just a crappy blog with only a couple of regular viewers at this point (back up from only one at least), I shouldn’t kid myself with this grandiose talk. Oh and of course I could have shorter paragraphs, I know these giant blocks of text are offputting and I am in fact already working on it a little in this post. It’s a weird idiosyncrasy of mine.

So this kind of stuff is what was going through my head, resolutions and new plans, things I should stop doing and things I should start. Then this scene in the film I was watching earlier in the evening came on, it was The Return Of The King and the scene in Mordor where Sam sees a star shining through the clouds. Light and beauty, hope, shining through in even the most desolate and evil places of the world. Tolkien’s world and stories are very dear to me, and perhaps I could write about that more in future, but I will say I think the LoTR films don’t deserve the shit they get from “purists”. Of course they’re not perfect, but I think one should view them as a love letter to the original book. There’s no major motion picture with a budget like that and a big studio backing it with anywhere close to the same passion and care put in to the project I can think of. I also think that the philosophy and depth of the original story isn’t lost like some people say, and even if it’s not expressed as beautifully or as well the films led to millions going on to read the books anyway who wouldn’t have otherwise. Getting to see the beauty of middle earth and experience the most touching moments of the story every year is something I’m glad for. I do plan to re-read the Lord of The Rings and some more Tolkien in future, but I wouldn’t want to every year.

So, that scene, I’ve always appreciated it but this year it really stuck out to me. Of course, I suppose because as I’ve explained I was feeling rather hopeful that day. Maybe hope is the wrong word, too strong, but I was feeling positive about the future. I often get carried away on a specific feeling, probably because there’s so little of anything good or bad in my life. I will seize upon any kind of change or potential change unthinkingly, and get wrapped up in a romantic daydream. So when in the cold light of day I realise this, it is always very unpleasant. Not only is there this disappointment or longing for something that never was (seeing a pattern) but I’m also ashamed to have fallen for it yet again. So after the film finishes I’m thinking about that scene, and I realise that while that star may be shining far above the clouds, down here I am still in the land of shadow.

Merry (belated) Christmas my friends

I’m not really sure how I feel about the MBTI test, more specifically the 16personalities.com test which is the one everyone uses, because on the one hand it’s clearly not much more than a glorified horoscope. Yet so many people take it seriously, for whatever reason and despite the obvious flaws. I suppose because it was influenced by Jung who is this figure that so many hold in very high esteem today. Anyway, I’ve taken the test a couple of times before and of course I got two different results. Now yes they were a few years apart, but still I feel like with this test you could take it twice in a month and get two different results. Anyway I was about to start the test a third time because I’ve been reminded of it a lot lately and was almost immediately annoyed by the questions, and then I remembered I have a blog now (even if no one ever reads it) and an outlet for me to talk about things that bother me. Also I have less free time this week so this will be something easy to do and still stay on top of my one post a week schedule. So here we go, this should be the last time I do this test and I’ll have it recorded somewhere. The test is quite simple, there are several pages with about six statements each. For every statement you have seven options, which are not labelled very helpfully at all. See it’s a series of dots with agree on one side and disagree on the other, the dot in the centre is grey to represent “neutral” everyone assumes even though it’s never said anywhere and the coloured dots (green for agree, brown for disagree) get larger the further out from the centre you get. Maybe this will lead to me doing to test wrong somehow, but I’m going to call the largest dot “strongly agree”, the middle one “agree”, and the smallest one before neutral “partially agree”. Hopefully this is a little interesting for anyone reading.

You find it difficult to introduce yourself to other people.

This one is fine, and I’ll put strongly agree.

You often get so lost in thoughts that you ignore or forget your surroundings.

Ok this one bugs me a little bit, see I put partially agree because that’s the honest answer but I had to think about it and I very easily could have put something else. Like I was saying earlier, if I took this a month from now or after just long enough to forget this question would I put something different? I’ll put partially agree because I can get lost in thoughts/ end up daydreaming while walking or doing something that doesn’t require much thought, however it happens less often than it used to and even then I wouldn’t say it happened often. There can be several days where I’ll walk to work and do my thing there and not really spend much time dwelling on anything other than surface level crap and immediate concerns. Also though, this particular part of the test is clearly trying to get at something bigger through this statement. The real question is, are you a particularly thoughtful person? Which I would probably put strongly agree to, but certainly at least agree. I’ve actually written quite a bit about this, in Thinking about thinking about things. I understand the importance of thoughtfulness as a personality trait and maybe that’s why I recognise what this question is really about. So because of certain circumstances and learning to control my thoughts more over time, by answering this question more honestly I may actually be answering the “real question” less honestly if that makes sense. This is a big problem with this test, there are similar questions later that have the same problem. They use these irl examples of things they think would express a certain trait, but often the examples aren’t a perfect parallel as in this case. Still, I think the best choice is to answer the question honestly and if that leads to a clearly inaccurate final result that will better show the issues with this test.

You try to respond to your e-mails as soon as possible and cannot stand a messy inbox.

Firstly this is really two statements at once, which hopefully everyone can understand is really stupid. So I kind of had a hard time answering this one and while I ended up going with partially agree I again very possibly could have gone with something else, in this case neutral. See if it was just the second part, I’d say I agree or even strongly agree maybe. I do generally feel kind of uncomfortable with mess and clutter but I’m also admittedly quite a lazy person. I’ve also struggled with finding motivation even for small things like cleaning up my immediate living space or studying for tests etc. for as long as I can remember. So not only is this just a missed opportunity, because had this been separated into two questions they could have had one be about orderliness and the other about.. I don’t know industriousness maybe, but also if your answer is yes to part but no to the other it’s just difficult to find an accurate answer. See I do prefer to keep a clean inbox if we’re sticking with this particular example, but at the same time unless I’m expecting an e-mail it might take months or longer for me to check it. I also have several “lost” e-mail accounts because it’s been so long since using them I forgot the passwords. I know they have the word “try” in there for a reason which does make it a little less annoying but it is still two separate statements.

You find it easy to stay relaxed even when there is some pressure.

This one is also a little more difficult to answer, because it’s so vague and I react quite differently to being under pressure depending on various other circumstances. I’m not the kind of person to hyperventilate or have panic attacks, but I wouldn’t say I react well to stress I just retreat or avoid it whenever possible. Yes, it is cowardly of me and possibly my worst character trait. I shouldn’t be reading into these too much though, so while I do think this question is more generally asking if I react well to stress, they asked if I stay relaxed which is generally true I usually can keep my cool even when cornered with responsibility. The only exception being certain social situations, then I can get pretty shaky and visibly nervous. I’ll put agree partially for this one as well because of that last thing.

You do not usually initiate conversations.

I’m going to put partially agree yet again, I imagine these partially agree/ disagree options are going to be used a lot throughout this. See if you were to collect a record of all the conversations I’ve ever had then yes probably quite a lot more were initiated by others than by me, and yes I also am very shy and have a difficult time talking with most people naturally, but at the same time with the few people I am totally comfortable with I’m far from reserved or guarded. Now I know to take only the conversations with those people might seems somewhat arbitrary but think about it. Another word we use for shy people is “inhibited”, the Oxford definition of which is “Unable to act in a relaxed and natural way because of self-consciousness or mental restraint. The keyword being “natural” there. So while it is on the one hand true that I don’t initiate conversations usually it could be argued that, seeing as with the few people I am comfortable with I will actively seek to chat, I do and there’s an outer shell I wear when facing the outside world which isn’t my real personality. This is something I’ve thought about giving it’s whole own entry actually, and if I end up writing a whole paragraph for every question this one will be absurdly long, so I’ll save it for now. Point is there are two ways I could answer this and while I’ll go with the more “true”, materially speaking, answer in this case it’s another bad question.

You rarely do something just out of sheer curiosity.

This one is actually perfectly fine, and also fairly accurate so I’ll put agree. First page done.

You feel superior to other people.

I’m genuinely wondering what kind of person would actually say agree to this statement. I’m pretty sure even the most contemptible fedora tipping neckbeard strawman you could think up would hesitate to do so. I’m convinced that the real idea behind this question, what they’re really trying to find out with your answer, is how much self awareness you have. I’ve talked about the whole NPC meme before and how it’s the most recent expression of the “sheeple” joke, and I suppose the kind of people who without thinking would use that might say they agree but most of those people are teenagers who are still mentally developing. I understand that way of seeing the world because I’ve been there, in fact I think it was also Thinking about thinking about things in which I talked about this I believe. On the other hand though it could be argued that I am superior to many people. I wouldn’t say I’m superior to people as a general rule, but by any standard that would be used to judge such a thing (intelligence, athletic ability, raw strength, whatever) there will be people I’m superior to, and of course inferior as well, the same goes for pretty much everyone on the planet. I feel like a stupid person just reading that back, because it’s so obvious but I felt it was necessary to mention. I’ll go with partially disagree.

Being organised is more important to you than being adaptable.

This one is really difficult for me for some reason, it’s just odd to see these two things placed in opposition to one another because I don’t feel like they really are. If anything being adaptable requires someone who is organised, someone who doesn’t have their shit together isn’t going to be ready when a situation that requires them to be adaptable comes up. I think I have to put neutral, I hope that that choice actually tells the test maker something and isn’t just thrown out. I do wonder how much the neutral answers given are taken into account, especially because they literally suggest to never do so. Why would they even give the option though, and why should you have to try at all with these questions? Seriously, this is a personality test and the answers should be immediately apparent to the person going through it. The fact that I have to question what they’re really asking for almost every question really exemplifies the issues with this test.

You are usually highly motivated and energetic.

This is a much better question, easy to answer and doesn’t seem to have any kind of hidden meaning, I’ll say disagree.

Winning a debate matters less to you than making sure no one gets upset.

First of all this one is just worded really confusingly, not something I’ll go on about but it’s just easy to think you might be giving the wrong answer without realising it. I’ll say disagree partially, because of course I’m not an edgy “dude facts don’t care about your feelings lmao, trigger the libs epic style” faggot but at the same time I wouldn’t be in a debate with someone if I didn’t believe in what I was arguing for. So of course while I generally try not to upset the people around me, and like I was saying earlier there’s only a few people I’m truly comfortable around and would end up debating or arguing with, I wouldn’t be willing to hide my beliefs or fold on something just to make them feel better.

You often feel as if you have to justify yourself to other people.

Very strange question indeed, if it said explain instead of justify perhaps it’d change the entire implication but it’d make way more sense to me. I can’t think of a single instance in my life where I’ve felt the need to justify myself, maybe justify certain decisions but it doesn’t say that. I’m going to have to go with strongly disagree.

Your home and work environments are quite tidy.

Well this is difficult, because I certainly prefer them to be and generally try to keep them that way but due to the laziness I do sometimes let mess build up to a point that would disgust some people. I’ve improved a lot, it’s been over a year since I had any piss bottles in my room for example, but I still have a pizza box in the corner that’s been there for three weeks. I do have this desire to live in a clean environment though and when I stay on top of things my mood is noticeably better, every once in a while I’ll get a sudden burst of motivation and spend a few days really sorting things out and usually I can maintain it for some time after that. I’m going to have to go with neutral again, even if that might mean they throw this answer out too.

You do not mind being at the centre of attention.

I don’t see anything wrong with this one, disagree.

You consider yourself more practical than creative.

I don’t quite see these two as opposed personally, and frankly I wouldn’t ever choose to describe myself as either. I suppose I am the kind to deliberate and spend a great deal of time thinking about something rather than getting to work and fixing things, so I’ll say partially disagree.

People can rarely upset you.

The word “can” here is really what makes this question tricky, because were it just “People rarely upset you” then I would agree or even strongly agree, but the thing is if they really wanted to it would be very easy for someone to hurt my feelings if they wished to. It is true that a lot of what would probably bother most people doesn’t get to me at all, I’m not a prideful person at all, but I have old wounds that hurt when prodded. I’ll go with partially agree.

Your travel plans are usually well thought out.

This is quite similar to the question about the e-mail, but done much better. I have very little experience in this regard (or any for that matter), in fact I’ve really only organised one holiday and that was very poorly thought out. We got lost multiple times, once late at night trying to find out way back to our camp and quite a lot else went wrong, but I’m glad it went that way looking back. So, seeing as any trips I take in future will likely be not much better planned I’ll say disagree.

It is often difficult for you to relate to other people’s feelings.

Strongly disagree, I think I’m a particularly empathetic person and I hope that this blog has so far given that impression.

Your mood can change very quickly.

I’ve also talked about this before here I think, strongly agree.

In a discussion, truth should be more important than people’s sensibilities.

This is a tricky one, but like with all of these I’m never sure if I’m just reading into it way too much or it really is just too complicated for what it’s supposed to be. I really wonder what they think they’re learning about me from my answer to this question. They keep creating these weird dichotomies that just don’t make sense to me and this is another case of that. I mean it really depends on the nature of the conversation. I mean if you’re having a heated political discussion you might feel differently than if someone you care about asks your opinion and you don’t want to hurt their feelings. Maybe I’m just nitpicking here though, I think I get what they’re really asking. So agree, because I do think honesty is something important.

You rarely worry about how your actions affect other people.

Disagree.

Your work style is closer to random energy spikes than to a methodical and organised approach.

Unfortunately I’m going to have to say strongly agree. In fact I’m waiting on one of those spikes of energy right now, I feel I started this entry really strong but now I’m finding it difficult to find something intelligent to say. I should have just pushed through on Christmas eve when I started this. Now I’m just trying to wrap it up so I can do a proper post again. Maybe this was a mistake..

You are often envious of others.

I don’t actually think I am, I’m going to go with disagree.

An interesting book or video game is often better than a social event.

This is another tricksy one, the word “better” really makes it difficult to answer. See social events are not something that come up often for me anymore. They’ve become incredibly rare in fact, and while I may still turn one down in favour of being alone with a book or video game (and isn’t that an interesting thing to put in the question, rather than say a film, given the associations it has) I’m not sure it’s because those things are “better”. I really don’t like that choice of word, it’s just completely inappropriate in this context. I suppose those things are preferable, but I’ve got to be honest I prefer them in part because they’re easier. A social event is always intimidating for me, but as much as I romanticise the solitary lifestyle I do long for the company of others. When a social event goes well, it puts me in a better mood than any book or video game could do nowadays. Not to say I don’t have many fond memories of spending time alone with various things like that but ultimately there is something rather dissatisfying, and unhealthy as well, about having so many of one’s fondest memories being of spending time alone with someone else’s art. I could go on about this one in particular for quite a while honestly, but I’m just now realising how long this entry might be. I’m not yet half way through the test and already I think this is one of the longest posts I’ve ever made, even though it has taken very little time. I mean it’s been a good while since my last upload, but I’ve spent very little time actually writing this week for obvious reasons. I might just speed through as many as possible now, whenever it’s been longer than a week since my last post I start to get worried. It’s good to know I can get a lot more done when there’s some kind of a prompt or thing to spring off of though, I’ll keep that in mind. I chose neutral.

Being able to develop and plan and stick to it is the most important part of every project.

This is a far better version of what they were trying to do with the organised/ adaptable question. Only partially agree, because of the word “every”, there are always exceptions.

You rarely get carried away by fantasies and ideas.

Strongly disagree, getting carried away with ideas is why this blog exists.

You often find yourself lost in thought when you are walking in nature.

Partially agree.

If someone does not respond to your e-mail quickly, you start worrying if you said something wrong.

I’m going to substitute “e-mail” for “text” because it makes a lot more sense, and agree.

As a parent, you would rather see you child grow up kind than smart.

Again I reject the two things being placed in opposition, and the weird contrivance of them being mutually exclusive. In fact if the child is more intelligent I’d expect them to also be nicer, the two things seem to go hand in hand from what I’ve experienced. Probably because more intelligent parents will of course have more intelligent children, and more intelligent parents will probably do a better job of parenting. I’m going to say disagree, but I know they’ll take that as an agreement with the reverse of this statement which it of course isn’t, rather than a rejection of the premise which is what it is.

You do not let other people influence your actions.

I hope this is another question that is just testing how self aware/ honest with themselves the person taking the test is. Because the answer is the same for everyone, and that’s strongly disagree.

When you sleep, your dreams tend to focus on the real world and it’s events.

I’m thinking strongly disagree, the forms and shapes of the real world are certainly there albeit distorted and entirely new. It’s not “the real world” though, it’s an entirely different kind of place every time.

It does not take you long to start getting involved in social activities at your new workplace.

Strongly disagree.

You are more of a natural improviser than a careful planner.

Ok, they’re really starting to beat a dead horse now. Partially disagree.

Your emotions control you more than you control them.

Disagree.

You enjoy going to social events that involve dress up or role play activity.

Strongly disagree.

You often spend time exploring unrealistic and impractical yet intriguing ideas.

Something about this question makes me very sad, there’s this particularly unpleasant view on things that’s just there under the surface. I know this is becoming a pattern, but it really does come through thanks to a couple of words. “Unrealistic” and “impractical”, as if all thought has to be leading to some material gain. Even the idle thoughts you might have while you’re busy doing some menial task must be, it’s like the person who made this statement can’t appreciate thought as anything other than a vehicle for some real world impact. It’s just daydreams about what nice thing could happen, or whatever. I’m not explaining myself well at all here, and I even left this one to come back to because I thought I’d have something intelligent to say but I can’t. I forgot what I said as well, probably agree even after everything I had to say. I do daydream a lot after all.

You would rather improvise than spend time coming up with a detailed plan.

Partially disagree.

You are a relatively reserved and quiet person.

Strongly agree.

If you had a business, you would find it very difficult to fire loyal but underperforming employees.

Agree.

You often contemplate the reasons for human existence.

It’s questions like this that make me wonder if this test was designed for stupid people, but at least this one isn’t as bleak as the other similar question on the last page. I hate to say that, because as I’ve said before I don’t think of myself as an especially intelligent person, but the way this statement is worded conjures up the image of a total simpleton spending hours of time making no kind of progress. No, I don’t often contemplate any one thing for long at all. You could say I do I guess, I can see it, but it would be a complete simplification. I’m going to have to say partially agree, even though that will probably give an inaccurate result, because again what they’re really asking is whether I’m thoughtful or introspective. It’s so fucking transparent, they ask several questions getting at the same thing and most do a pretty bad job of it.

Logic is usually more important than heart when it comes to making important decisions.

No, I disagree that it’s usually more important, I’d say it’s sometimes more important. Of course I’m going with the dumbed down normalfag way of using that word. So, partially disagree, so they don’t again assume by disagreeing I therefore agree with the reverse.

Keeping your options open is more important than having a to do list.

They just won’t fucking give up with this one will they, disagree.

If your friend is sad about something, you are more likely to offer emotional support than suggest ways to deal with the problem.

Disagree.

You rarely feel insecure.

Strongly disagree.

You have no difficulties coming up with a personal timetable and sticking to it.

Disagree.

Being right is more important than being cooperative when it comes to teamwork.

Partially agree.

You think that everyone’s views should be respected regardless of whether they are supported by facts or not.

I suppose we’ll just ignore opinions/ views that are neither supported by or in opposition to the almighty “facts” here, something that the materialist menace doesn’t seem to be capable of dealing with. So I’ll say disagree.

You feel more energetic after spending time with a group of people.

If the interaction went well then I will, but then after a few hours or maybe the next day I’ll feel quite drained, so partially agree.

You frequently misplace your things.

Disagree.

You see yourself as very emotionally stable.

Strongly disagree.

Your mind is always buzzing with unexplored ideas and plans.

Strongly agree.

You would not call yourself a dreamer.

I don’t think if asked that that is how I’d choose to describe myself, but I wouldn’t say it’s inaccurate either so I’ll say partially disagree.

You usually find it difficult to relax when talking in front of many people.

Strongly agree.

Generally speaking, you rely more on your experience than your imagination.

Partially disagree.

You worry too much about what other people think.

Strongly agree.

If the room is full, you stay closer to the walls, avoiding the centre.

Agree.

You have a tendency to procrastinate until there is not enough time to do everything.

As recently as half a year ago I would have said strongly agree, now I’ll just go with agree. This blog is what is really helping with that actually, of course it could all fall apart at any moment.

You feel very anxious in stressful situations.

I feel like I already did this one.. Partially agree.

You believe that it is more rewarding to be liked by others than to be powerful.

This is tricky, I would say agree but I know that were I already liked by many people I’d disagree. It’s not a personality trait but rather a consequence of my current circumstances which could (although don’t seem to be any time soon) change. I’ll still say agree I suppose, because I do, but I don’t really like the question.

You have always been interested in unconventional or ambiguous things, e.g. in books, art, or movies.

I really don’t like how a lot of these are worded, I mean for God’s sake in what way are those things unconventional. If anything it would be unconventional to not enjoy art of some kind. I’ll agree, because again we all see what this question is really getting at.

You often take initiative in social situations.

Strongly disagree.

Anyway I’m done, half regretting this but it was already too late when I realised it was a bad idea to go back as I’d made quite a lot of progress towards finishing it and it had been a while since my last post. This is actually the result I got the first time I took this test, but not the second time, weirdly enough. So maybe I’ll talk about it briefly in another entry but I just want to get this one out so that’s why I’m doing that here. To whoever decides to read this at some point in the next few days, good luck in the new year and I hope to see you there.

Sleep like a pillow, no one there

I had another dream the other night, two separate dreams really but in one night. It’s funny how that works, you’ll have long periods of time sometimes with no dreams worth remembering and then when you do have those more vivid experiences they come all at once. When it rains it really does pour, in the etheric realm anyway. Like an anthology of stories almost, I do believe there were a couple more dreams that night but a few days have passed and these are the two that I’m still thinking about. I don’t really know if there’s anything to actually glean from either of them, despite my fascination with dreams and the ethereal (which I suppose we all have) I’ve never really studied or read a great deal on the subject. Therefore I’ve also never really been too interested into looking for “meaning” in my dreams or anything like that, like how people say if you see certain images/ symbols or find yourself in certain situations in dreams it can supposedly reveal something about yourself. I don’t think there’s any truth to that, I’ve come to kind of disregard that whole idea. What I think is so fascinating is the alternate state it puts you in, where the physical rules of the universe no longer exist. Time is convoluted of course, the physical environment morphs constantly and the thing that really gets me is how you will just be entirely unfazed by any of it. It’s a world of representations of material things, they exist to ground us just enough but no more. Because without some kind of material reality or at least the perception of it there can be no cohesive thought. Because our own method of thought developed in such an environment we need something like it to stimulate the mind perhaps. Not that all the environments of our dreams are always places we have personally been to, or even seen, but they resemble a world that is familiar always. Often in fact you’ll believe (or at least I experience this) you’re in a location from your own life, a school, workplace, park, library, your own home, etc. and yet when you wake up you realise that the place you were in looked completely different and had a layout of some entirely different place. For whatever reason, it had some kind of essence of that real place that made you believe you were there despite it actually being some creation of your unconscious mind that might not have any equivalent in the real world.

I don’t really like Jordan Peterson but I have to credit him with making me aware of this in his lecture series about some of the bible stories. I don’t remember exactly which one but at some point he talks about how early attempts at artificial intelligence where they believed they could create a metaphorical “brain in a jar” were unsuccessful because all thought is filtered through material experience. In a somewhat paradoxical way I suppose, in order to have any kind of objective view on things (or at least be trying to get there, if in vain) you must have a subjective/ limited cognitive experience. If there’s no starting point to work from, you can’t form a worldview or come to an understanding about anything because you’re all possible interpretations and conflicting information at once. I mean even the idea of an “idea” is something that would be impossible for this hypothetical disembodied intelligence because something that doesn’t inhabit the material world can’t possibly categorise and separate. That’s omniscience right there, that’s God I suppose, or enlightenment. You know because if we go back to my favourite subject, the ascetics, a lot of them (particularly eastern ones) have this idea that by rejecting the physical/ material world and their worldly desires they will achieve enlightenment. Well I suppose maybe they were getting at something, it seems to me anyway when you take this idea into account. It’s interesting when you think of how heaven, or paradise or similar ideal “end points” I suppose you can call them are described and represented. They’re places you can do no wrong, an eternal bliss. I remember my dad talking to me about this when I was quite young, and he said that to him heaven (I think he was really just talking about the Christian or more specifically Catholic conception of it, being born to that background) sounded like an opium den. Now that’s partly his typical Gen X cynicism talking (something which I think he should have done a better job of keeping more contained around me growing up) but there is something to it. Opium, heroin, and other similar drugs do have that effect of detaching one from their instinctual desires. People will go days without eating or sleeping, or doing anything at all, and on the surface it does seem a little like the behaviour of the ascetic monks of the world. It’s not actually if you dig a little of course, the addict is not rejecting these physical needs out of sheer force of will but rather tricking the brain into thinking such needs have been satiated because it’s overloaded with pleasure. It’s cheap, a false prophet you could say. See even in Christianity the end point might not be enlightenment but it kind of is because they say heaven is where God dwells. Only in death (losing your body) can you lose that restraint which keeps you from having a total understanding. Everything can very easily be confused for nothing, because it isn’t something.

In an article I read about the subject (artificial intelligence and how they need to give it a body in order to get anything we could actually recognise as intelligence or even just consciousness) on some online science journal they talked about this ancient idea of the separation between mind and body and how this somehow proves it to be the wrong way of looking at the situation. I disagree though, if anything it’s further proof of such a separation. Because we’re flawed aren’t we, we’re fallen. We may have eaten of the tree of knowledge but we are not knowledge unbound, we’re just something more than mere beasts. Speaking allegorically of course, I don’t believe there was an actual Adam and Eve. I hope whoever reads this understands what I’m getting at, because I know I’m not very articulate or intelligent and I’m just scraping at the surface of subjects which are far beyond my understanding, because it’s fascinating stuff and to read or listen to the people who really know what they’re talking about is very satisfying for me. I suppose there’s this arrogance in that conception these scientists (or more accurately the science journalist who wrote the article) have that bothers me, because they forget that the material form which grounds us and gives us a starting point for understanding also limits us. Because knowledge builds on itself, ideas build on other ideas, and so if you have no starting idea (food keeps you alive, etc) you can’t get anywhere at all sure. Also though, you’re always going to be constrained, it’s not that there isn’t a greater unlimited intelligence but rather that we just can’t interact or even really comprehend it because it is completely intangible. I’m reminded of something I mentioned briefly before in a different entry, about language. Of course the idea is something plenty of people have talked about, and it’s something I’ve thought about for years before starting this blog, but the idea of language as both our liberator and jailor. I think it was in “Living up to my shitty blog title” which is still in my opinion the best post I’ve made so far. Because without language you can have all kinds of ideas but can’t express them, and also there are ideas and ways of expressing things that are now locked away from you at the same time. So your potential is expanded greatly and yet also given a limit. Hopefully that helps explain what I’m getting at here, a body provides the gift of perception and yet will always prevent you from having a total understanding of things.

I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole, but I’ll give that description of the two dreams I had. The first one had me in this sleepy town, or maybe it would be more accurate to describe it as a large village. I don’t know where it was, but it was snowing heavily and there was only one way in or out. There was this huge road that wound all around and up above the town, along the edge of a cliff almost. I arrived down from this road and came to this small church car park (I was able to drive in this dream) which was completely desolate. It was the first place I saw after coming down from the road above, and other than that there were just narrow streets. There were only a couple other cars, and maybe double as many empty spaces. All the cars were kind of old fashioned looking and clearly aged quite a bit, even mine. I don’t exactly remember getting out and moving but I remember being in the graveyard right after this, and in the centre as it snowed around me I stood and looked up at this great granite statue of an old woman holding up a celtic cross with both hands almost like that scene at the beginning of the lion king. It was dark, with just the light of the moon to help me see, and so I couldn’t see her facial expression. Also in the background there were some houses, terraced it looked like, so I felt fenced in in a way. The graveyard itself was very small, but other than that I don’t remember anything else about it. I don’t even really know why I was there, I vaguely recall being sent there for something but I don’t remember much more than that. I remember walking along one of the few streets there, and none of the houses had their lights on. My memory is hazy I’ll be honest, I remember waking for a moment not long after this and feeling kind of disoriented before returning to sleep.

The second dream was entirely different in feel, instead of the spooky and silent streets of cobbled stone we were in this bright and warm building at mid morning. I say we because I wasn’t alone this time, with me was one of the girls from work. Not one I’ve mentioned before here, or ever had appear in a dream of mine before. This building we were in, a huge room with two levels under one roof, kind of like I was talking about earlier was work to me. It was the shop, even though it wasn’t even a shop. If anything it was more like a library, a big old library with an old stone façade and this wonderful art deco interior. Rich mahogany furniture, bronze cladding on the small escalators that took you to the second level and chandeliers with misted white glass. Now looking back this is really weird, but in the dream it made total sense to me, again like I was talking about earlier. My co-worker, the girl who was there in the dream with me, said that the manager had told her it was my job to make some mayonnaise. There was some kind of meeting or lunch and I had to have it ready before then at midday, luckily this library also had an open kitchen. Now the funny thing is I don’t know how to make mayonnaise and I don’t really like it very much, but there’s this scene from a tv show I watched as a kid that has for whatever reason stuck with me to this day. I mean seriously I was maybe six or seven years old at the time I first watched it. In the scene this kid who wants to be a chef when he grows up makes some mayonnaise when the party or whoever he’s with run out, I don’t remember the details, and it only takes him a few minutes. I’m pretty sure he used eggs and maybe vinegar or something (yes, it’s been over a decade and a half and despite telling myself that day I’d learn to make it too I still haven’t even got around to checking the recipe) and this kind of blew my mind at the time. See to me it was just this white goo that came in jars, like one of those jokes people make about americans who think food “comes from the supermarket” in a way. Of course I was aware all non naturally occurring food had to come from somewhere but this moment made it real as opposed to some abstract thing I didn’t ever give any thought to.

So in the dream I still didn’t know how, but I was too prideful to admit it and I think I just threw some eggs in a blender without even cracking them open. I left to go to the second level where the toilet was, and there were two small cubicles. They were right in the middle of the room, and weirdly shaped like big books almost. Long, but really narrow so inside both walls were pressing on you, and in turn both the cubicles were pressed against one another. As I went in to use one, she followed and went into the other, and as I left she left hers. It was very strange, she gave me this really odd and kind of villainous grin. I went back down to the main level and she said something about how the omelette better be ready soon as I was running out of time. It wasn’t until I woke up later that I realised something had changed, not that it mattered because soon after that things had changed again and now there was no kitchen or lunch to prepare for. I noticed there was a huge back area around the side of the escalators and somehow a bunch of people had got inside. They were sitting all separate from one another at these long cafeteria tables reading books or newspapers or magazines and I started shouting to get them to leave. “We haven’t opened up yet, how did you even get inside?”. Now we were librarians, and always had been. I distinctly remember coming down the escalator earlier in the dream before this now looking back and appreciating the emptiness though. In fact it’s that specific moment which has really stuck with me, it’s been four nights now and every night since before I go to bed some part of me is hoping to go back. It was a really comfy environment, and also it was nice to get to know this co-worker of mine better as well because I’m quite shy and reserved and I never speak much with any of them. I didn’t mention it before, but we also got to chat a bit in the dream and it was really nice. In a wholesome way as well, not ruined by the primordial urge. I’m not saying she’s not a pretty girl, but for whatever reason I’ve just never seen her in that way, which is why that whole weird bit with the bathroom freaked me out so much.

There’s not much purpose to this post, it’s admittedly aimless but so am I right now. It’s not a bad one though I don’t think, if you like what I do here this should be enjoyable. I haven’t had any real ideas of my own lately, but the stuff I talked about in the first half has been on my mind a lot. I almost didn’t write this entry at all, after the last entry which I thought was one of my better ones got no response for days I thought I had been totally abandoned. I still practically have, for just under two weeks I didn’t get a single person despite there being two new uploads in that period. I get it, most youtube channels I take interest in (the closest thing I have to compare with this blog) I also lose interest in after a short while and stop returning to. So I really do understand why people aren’t coming back anymore, I’m not entirely on my own yet but it seems inevitable now. I don’t want to stop though, and shit if having people read what I post is so important I can shill on r9k and pretty reliably get one or two anons to give me a read. That’s how I got this entire blog started, and also I linked my post about school shootings in a thread on a similar subject once and people seemed to appreciate it. I like having this little hobby, something to occupy my time when I’m not at work instead of just mindlessly refreshing the catalogue. The lonely journey is preferable to returning back to stagnation.