thinking in circles about gender

 [pasted from a discord chat]

Today at 6:15 AM

dk if I'm trans or I just resent my own masculinity because when I am depressed I sorta resent everything. when I'm happy I generally don't think of my gender except for feeling slightly like I'm caught naked whenever someone will address me as a man, or when I have those little bouts of like mowing the lawn and thinking 'yes. manly'

pretty split on this whole issue. like. even if I consider being nonbinary my thoughts split up into "yes that makes sense you wouldnt necessarily feel comfortable being a woman" and "maybe you just want to be nonbinary so you can quit worrying about whether or not youre trans" which. is like. weird. the more I think about it the more the answer just seems to be 'do not think about it,' and even then my thoughts split into "yes express yourself intuitively" and "not thinking about it means that you are going to straight up ignore the whole concept of gender and present to others as a man because thats what they expect"

it might also licherally just be that since this covid thing I have spent more and more time alone and become generally alienated from what other people think about things like gender.

like. going off the performative model of gender, my ability to perform 'man' has sort of withered up because its not all that often that I have to perform masculinity.

idk if that last message is a complete misunderstanding of performative gender.

but writing this out has been helpful because that last bit seems plausible to my little sleep deprived head. (or it is appealing because it would for the moment let me put off making a decision about this, and hints that at some point I'll just slither back into manhood comfortably and not have to come out as trans, which seems daunting/uncomfortable. darn this whole thing.)

I am going to start to write about Paintings and visual art.

   I am going to take a class on film over the summer. I think as it stands I am comically bad at writing about film. Something about way the visual elements and narrative elements combine hurts my head when I think about writing about it. So. I am going to write about paintings on here. I like paintings/photos a lot, and I think I like them because I like poetry. I think about poetry w/ a critical lens fairly frequently, and I think about painting w/ a critical lens almost never. So. I want to do that here. 

Poetry and painting are connected because they both find beauty in a moment. They encourage thinking about one moment. I like that because once you string 10,000 moments together in a film I get a little nauseous. Actually, considering that, I don't think this project will help me all that much. oh well. it will be fun.

Today I sit and think about being poor. a ramble

 My family is poor, but land rich. sort of. the extended family is land rich, so they gatekeep our access to housing basically. Maybe we have some sort of squatter's rights.  Anyhow this is all a luxury afforded to us because of our white skin probably—the land is what keeps us afloat. I don't think we could pay for rent.

Because of my parents' SES and my current partner's parents' SES, we are likely to be poor, more poor than at least my parents for the rest of our lives. My career aspirations do not do much to alleviate us of this. I plan to study English literature. I hope to be a professor or a writer of some kind. I see my professors and think 'I want to live like them'

There's a couple things wrapped up here. Studying books is not productive. Studying books is interesting. Studying books feels significant. Studying books is what you can do if you are privileged person who either has a lot of time or a lot of money. I do not have money and so will likely not have time. My education looks like a very fun train putting me through a brick wall.

The other thing is: Is it ethical to benefit from a system that would conceivably grant me a living for looking at papers and writing papers and thinking about papers and telling kids to do all of this while there is a man outside my door sweeping the hall outside of my office, and another unclogging the toilet outside my office, and another replacing the carpet where there was rain damage? And all of these men are automatically presumed to be worse than me somehow? I will be able to point to these men and tell my children 'this is why you go to college,' like my uncle said to me? That sounds horrible. It is horrible.

I am set up to be one of these men, but I have the option to scale the ivory tower and become, if not a leech, a pet of the leeches. A Capitalist lapdog. something cute that they pay to sit around and wax philosophic about the implications of Wordsworth calling his own mind by female pronouns. god.

I guess that I will become the lapdog and I guess I will try to find meaning in the community. I will try to be like my professor who writes silly poems about going into his backyard naked and dancing instead of grading papers. I do not know what there is beyond this. Like a proper queer person I am at most pleased w/ the idea of having children and at worst scared by the prospect. Because I am poor, and will likely be. I am afraid I have no grand truths to pass down about life. there's no grand purpose. 

I have some kinda feeling that 'work' is fetishized nowadays because the only clear thing to do with your life is to fixate on a point in the distance and run at it. I am trying to fixate on excellence in the field of English Lit and running at it. Or Journalism. Or Teaching. Or Poems. I think that last bit is the closest thing to my reality. of course the work that I do in writing my poems do me any good in pursuing money. to buy shit that someone else made. aa. put me on the ground ion some book factory Id be happy at least knowing that I was making something material.

I am testing something; you are hearing something

kimsumass · Car Breakdown

my friend made this and I need to figure out how to embedd soundloud into here

in a very honest way but ultimately innocuous way I hope that I didn't link this blog anywhere regrettable and I hope that this can not be seen on Google

 Because! This blog is silly and I am afraid that it links to another blog of mine about model rocketry I did when I was a kid. Like. dang. thatd be silly. and then there are all sorts of other posts on this blog, or just two, "all sorts of" I recognize as a phrase is a cliche that works most like a Hand gesture. And then in this blog there is really bad grammar. This poest does not reflect my abilities as a writer so much as it showcases my abilities as a drafter/typist. The latter, I am incredibly poor at. 

But today I am going to write a little about the videos that I watched tonight and the pain that I feel about having a tough time doing what I need to do w/r/t university. I should be doing that stuff right now instead of this. I am not doing that stuff and it makes me sort of sick. I'm really driven mad by it. but I need a space to process what I consume, even if that takes up a little bit more of my time at first. Hopefully, writing about this stuff will put it out of my mind, so I can be more effiecient and think about my schoolwork with greater focus.

VIDEO ABOUT NARDWUAR

This video was good because it made me think about how good a journalist can be. My impression of Nardwuar, is that he has all of the character of Hunter S Thompson, but he does not let his character impede his job. Also, Nardwuar is not an asshole. I don't rememeber much about this video. Basically NDWR goes and talks to the people around celebrities, to get an interveiw w/ the celeb and get information on the celeb.

NARDWAURS TED TALK

I liked this ted talk a lot. It was really poignant to me because nardwuar spins 'bad' qualities typical of student journalists as things that are good, actually. Namely, not knowing anything and being nervous (the human condition really). He explicitly says that both of these things are good.

• Not knowing anything
• puts you in a position where you *need* to do research on your interveiwee
• research is unambigously good, and helps you in asking good questions
• being nervous
• really lets you know that you *need* to do research. If you are nervous you would naturally prepare.

On this second point I am a little skeptical. Many times (may be tonight) I get so nervous that I get paralyzed sort of. It seems like an ADHD exectuive function type intermingled shit show of feeling. It feels like anxiety but it may not be. Anyhow, nerves are not always productive for me

but the human serviate may reply. "ofc you can't be too nervous, you still have to perform"

which brings me to the next video

PHILOSOPHYTUBE VIDEO ABOUT AUTHENTICITY AND ART

Is Nardwaur being 'authentic'? I think this question is not really all that substantial in the context of nardwuar actually, because the focus of the interveiws is ultimately the interveiwee. He is a journalist, not Hunt Thompson—ayo. I also think that—and I think that my thought is generally felt to be true—that by performing as someone that does not fit the archetype of 'journalist', nardwaur reveals more about the artists he interveiws. We are able to see 'normal' interveiws with celebs, and then we are able to see those same celebs w/ nardwuar. Having the two builds a more full portrait of the celeb.

My thoughts on the philosophytube video itself, and not my riffing on the general concept of authenticity and how it relates to nardwuar:

• need to watch this one again bruv.

yeah thats it. I need to watch it again. full authenticity. shit like. I think my monkey brain always hates the criticsism of 'inauthentic' because it is so complicated and if you call something 'inauthentic' you essentially paint yourself as holding a well though out strong stance on what authentic actually means, and since I don't, I look weaker. I need to study rhetoric to get around that problem lol.

IN CONCLUSION

you can stop reading now I'll stop writing now I'll go read for class I really hope I do alright oh I do I do I do I do.