experience is disconnected from space and/or time

When Kassandra records a 10-minute morning yoga video for Youtube, does she feel the presence of the 276,000 people who will experience it "with" her later?

I wouldn't expect her too, but at the same time, how could she not?

Now that almost all life is digital, it's so hard to have an experience that isn't just internal emotions. 

How can we make memories out of this year?

Today the wind is gusting vigorously. Shelly has turned on the heat. The sky is a chilled cornflower blue. 

It's not a wasted year. I have work and friends to show for it. It is a mostly empty year though, when it comes to memories and experiences.

Tappahannock

 We left the city for four days. On the freeway going south, I could see from horizon to horizon. It reminded me of driving through Oregon and California, except the open spaces were full of corn and soybeans instead of grass.

We stayed in a house built in 1751. The strain of historical places in the South is that you know that slavery happened there. A Customs House is better than a plantation house, though, I think.

The house has a second story (almost third story, if you count the semi-basement) balcony that looks out over the Rappahannock River. It's next to a loud bridge, but we watched osprey and cormorants and seagulls for hours. It's high enough that the breeze keeps mosquitos away. It rained every day - soft, cold, drizzly rain that was perfect for the balcony. It dampened the sound, dampened the world, and I wore a sweater for the first time in months. 

I brought a fantastic issue of the London Review of Books. I read almost every word. On the last page, there was an ad for an "aging French rock star" to write you a song, in "English, French, or Franglais (recommended)." Only $200. I'm considering it. 

The monthly farmer's market took place while we were there, and we picked up a few vegetables. There was a Blue Lives Matter bakesale, but most people wore masks. I went into a tiny thrift store and bought new shoes. 

On the first night, our friend made us a curry. Every night I ate it I had wild dreams. I wonder if it was the beet greens, or the coriander, or some other ingredient. Vivid, colorful dreams. 

Our friends cooked a lot. Sometimes it was hard - I'm used to 20-minute meals, and I'm usually quite hungry by the time I notice that I'm hungry at all. But, the food was incredible. The best tacos of my life (and huevos rancheros for breakfast). A fabulous beet salad. We made fondue as well - our friends' first!

We went on hikes every day (except for the first day, our settling in day.) On the first hike, we saw tons of boletes, just past their primes. On our second hike, I saw my first Destroying Angel, plus a Luna Moth just drying its wings for the first time. We hiked to the Potomac River, through marshes and forests and hills and creeks. Each hike had so much variety in trees and underbrush (and fungus!). Our last hike on the way home we saw a black snake and a massive hairy spider. 

I haven't had anyone to tell about my trip, so it's already fading from my memory faster than it would have if I'd told my colleagues and friends. 

So that's why I wrote it here.

There is such a thing as too much freedom

It's the end of another pandemic weekend! There were a few good Age games, and I read The Quaker by Liam Mcllvanney. It was a good plot, but not as well written as The Story of a Crime.

Maybe I should get the new Elena Ferrante in French, since it's already out! I also need to get Braiding Sweetgrass, and I saw a book called Phallacy hyped by Ed Yong on Twitter that I think I'll look for as well.

I bought Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby at Solid State this weekend. I just started The Terrorists today, to wrap up the Martin Beck series ahead of our early September book club. 

What else - I watched Viper play the Deathmatch World Cup this morning. They were exciting games, but nothing super creative or unusual. It was cool to hear him evaluate the game as it evolved, talking about what went well and what was a bad trade, and how comfortable he felt at any stage. It wasn't a very close competition, but that made it more relaxing than the normal deathmatch nail-biters.

I played three games of Age today. 1v1s - the first I lost after 1.5 hrs gametime, and the next two I won. The middle one was ridiculous - he hid all over the ravines map and made me run around and find him, but he never really boomed. The last one I was proud of - I did a few good archer pushes and got a lot of vill kills. He resigned kind of early but I was quite far ahead in villagers and map control. 

On Thursday I'll be back at clay. I have a few projects planned that will be interesting and exciting. The teacher might have some ideas for me/the class as well. I hope it feels safe, and I hope it makes me feel curious and creative. It's gonna be a bitch to get there without gears on my bike but it seems like every shop in the city is overwhelmed with work.

Yesterday's Age games were a blast. In one team game, I was down to two villagers right before castle age! In another, I only made flaming camels for the last 10 minutes. In another, Gameboy and a Sinergy dude played basically without me, because it was arena and I just boomed. But, the flaming camels game was ridiculous and fun. We laughed so hard. 

I'm still so lonely for my friends, whoever they are. I feel very lost, like I don't have real connections to anyone except my boyfriend and my Age friends, and the Age connections are tenuous. 

So, that is some of what's going on. Work is still mellow, because I barely do any!

Y lloraras como yo

I'm trying to be gentle with myself. This week has been impossible. I've been in a haze all day every day. There has been a constant, sloshing puddle of anxiety in my stomach. It is there now. I have not been able to feel accomplished. Whether because I've done so little, done it poorly, or just not been able to recognize any success, I cannot be sure. 

I should call Esther, or my parents. I know the things I should do, need to do, but I refuse to do them. What can cure me of this self-sabotage? I want Xanax. Failing that, I could go for a drink. 

Honestly, even playing Age hasn't felt that great. If my ELO gets bad enough though I'll be able to win more, and maybe that will help!

Instead of calling my friends, I am here, and the effect is positive. The 8th Martin Beck book is also a small comfort. Rosalia, Argentine tango, and Liszt are also nice. Devendra Banhart too. 

Edith says she's had a bad month, as the reason for why we haven't talked lately. Maybe we'll talk tomorrow.

SB and I are taking care of a three-legged cat. It wasn't very interested in us, but it let us pet it for a few minutes.

I have a whole bunch of events and book clubs coming up later this month. I am prematurely overwhelmed about them. 

- Longform July 15

- Deliberative Democracy Webinar July 21 (holyshit)

- FPFM Meeting July 22

- CCL meetings

- Letter From A Region of My Mind round 2

Clay starts July 23. That could be a kind of mental liberation. 

SB is newly obsessed with Arduino vs. Evil, a youtube channel of a spicy Canadian engineer. Some choice expressions:

"I'm busier than a dog with two dicks!"

"I was conned into buying these. The easiest person to be fooled by is yourself."

Ya no te espero

llegarás pero más fuerte.

I've been listening to this song on repeat. This morning I couldn't stop laughing because the first two stanzas remind me of the feeling of getting rushed right before you finish walling (supposing you started at all) in Age.

It's great when a beautiful, poetic song also makes you smile to yourself about a private joke. My whole Wallowing playlist has this effect, because I cannot take myself seriously when I'm pining. Really, it's hard to take myself seriously when I'm sad or even miserable. 

There's a difference between "not taking yourself seriously" and "being able to laugh about the absurdity of human emotion while being compassionate with your own pain." I try to stay on the latter side, and music helps. It pushes me past the moping, over peak of pathos, and down into the gully of giggles. That is my emotional management strategy - take it or leave it. 

Probably leave it; there must be a better way.

Anyways, yesterday I woke up at 4 in the morning and couldn't sleep, so it was basically a wash. Today I slept a good amount, but not enough to get me back in action. My mind is foggy, my body is collapsing in slow motion. 

I want to play Age, but I've been losing terribly and I'd rather play with friends.

Oh! I signed up for a ceramics class starting 7/23. Time to start cutting my fingernails again. 

I have 5 weeks coming up without obligation to my main job (also without a paycheck from my main job).

Rage of Empires

Last night we played two ridiculous free-for-alls. As always, they devolved into wars of attrition, but they were more fun for me than they have been in the past.

For one, my little brother joined in for the start of the first one. He was quickly pulled away by pizza and a woman (with a remarkably sultry voice, good job Lil Nug.) We played water nomad, for which the winner strategy is just to send a stream of heavy demo ships against your enemy's units. I won that one, because I sniped Gameboy's king.

My head is above water on my work (just), and I'm going to get a lot of "vacation" soon from my main job! I'm not sure what that will mean for my productivity, but I hope it will give me mental space to work on the Rob Job and perhaps even grad school applications.

Emotionally, I'm split right now. There's the deep anxiety about the pandemic and about time and life and whether I am keeping my relationships strong or letting them atrophy. Then there are the high pleasures of Age, the laughter, the honest satisfaction with who I've been and who I am and who I could be.

I took a survey on imposter syndrome this week and it opened my eyes to how far I've come. I do believe myself to be capable and I believe that others recognize me as competent and professional. I think people are mostly impressed by me.

The pieces of imposter syndrome that are left in me are more superficial. I feel them fleetingly. I struggle to take positive feedback, and it can make me more anxious about how that person sees me. I often feel that I'm not performing to my highest ability and feel that I have to share mediocre work.

I think I can be very glad that I've moved past the persistent feeling of inadequacy and the feeling that everyone knows I am stupid but will not tell me. That was the worst of it. That was why I stopped doing physics. Also, I didn't like it anymore.

Just another day laying on the floor in between working, not working, eating, stretching, scheming...

Is there a meaningful difference between feeling lonely and stressed?

I've been thinking that, while playing Age, I stopped feeling my stress. 

But, while making toast 90 seconds ago, I realized that it's not the stress that I lose; it's the loneliness. 

How would stress manifest in a world without loneliness? How would a deadline, an expense, or an argument emotionally touch us if we had an unshakable social support system?

I think they would touch us very lightly, if at all. 

But now, my days are defined by loneliness and boredom as I fail at or resist finding a way to fill my needs in these circumstances. 

This theory is also supported by the disproportionate pain and anxiety I feel when I think that I have disrupted the balance of my little Age scene. I cradle it like a glass bird nest full of shell-less eggs. Ok, maybe not that gently. Maybe I troll a little bit. 

Regardless. My stomach makes knots when I'm trying to decide what I should say, if I should bother Gameboy. What if I am being a burden? What if I am annoying? 

Where does that come from? Loneliness. 

I think a crush is also a symptom of loneliness. A symptom, because it moderates the feeling while not curing it at all. How can one feel lonely when you can conjure up a person in your imagination as if they were in the room with you and as if they were touching you? If you can "speak" to them whenever you want, about whatever fascinates and charms you? I think I've had all my most consuming crushes while I've been lonely. 

I also feel another enormous goddamn project brewing. I am trying to put it off. If I can delay it until August, maybe I'll have a ton of free time to execute it. Maybe it will be my sanity. 

The project is a virtual climate action open house. Using the Twinery tool. I know, it is crazy. But... It might be perfect too. 

Very tempted to sign off here with "Best, Julia" which is disturbing.

On the floor

Just laying on the floor, the sweet serenade of an Age game clicking and shushing and ringing in the background.

I listened to a webinar on labor issues and just transitions while watching... he needs an alias... Gameboy play on mute. I don't feel like I learned anything; I think I'd heard the same words in a similar sequence before.

I keep reading and listening hoping that something will click, and that seems like the problem. It is clicked. I do get the scale of the problem.

And yet, I'm stuck.

I can't put into words what I want a just society to look like.

Is it because my life would be worse?

Is it because I don't see the path that gets us there? I want to lay one foot in front of the other, but that's not how revolutions work.

Gamerboy just won, after two losses. That's nice. Julia making excessive emotional investments in the feelings of random men, what else is new.

My bedtime approaches. Jordan says he'll game with me tomorrow night for Sinergy Thursday. I hope he does, and I hope it's more fun than it was with the physics noobs.

I just want to talk to him too. Maybe I should call him now.

The Agony of Perceivedness

Did you miss me?

My social media feeds are almost exclusively donation links, activism how-tos and don't-dos, and a few potters still flogging their work to the masses.

I'm glad - the pressure of this moment comes from the protests being constantly visible.

I'm not part of it, though, yet. It is interesting to watch the messages change as the 24-hour Instagram Stories expire and the next level of analysis and list of organizations makes the rounds. The messages stream out like the beat of a heart. The sketches, and quotes, and photos, and Canva amalgamations spin like a merry-go-round getting lightly reshaped every day. Are we learning, or reacting? Are we thinking on the outside? Like bacteria becoming a biofilm, are we specializing our functions through constant signals and triggers to become a functional part of a bigger animal?

Why don't I join the party? Do I not think of my "followers" as people who could read these messages and learn from them? Do I think of my "followers" as copies of myself, seeing the same things again and again and drawing the same lessons? Do I just not feel the drive that everyone else does?

Am I afraid? I think it's the former reasons rather than this one. I almost posted about the CCL steering committee debate on making a group statement on LinkedIn, but I stopped, because the story is only just begun. The next chapter was the discussion we had on racism and police. The next chapter is our discussion of Baldwin (or whatever we do!). There is no arc yet except for the one inside me, and I don't share those stories online.

I used to. I used to share them here. And technically in 2009 every third thought made it to a Facebook status, but let's not dwell on that.

I wish that posting would feel like action, but it doesn't and it isn't. Trick Mirror reinforced that belief. Donating $$$ feels like action. Going to a protest felt... exhausting and neutral, but I do think it was meaningful. Talking to Longform and CCL feels very real, if a baby step for all involved.

I thought of this blog because Warren Ellis's newsletter had a note on blogging:

"None of us still blogging do it for clicks. We do it to leave our traces, because it feels good to us, and because complete statements are better than tweets or facebook updates."

To leave our traces. It does feel good. My mind is clearer, and the rhythm of the words puts chaos into order.

I think of this blog as a person trapped in time. College Julia has been on my mind lately. I've been looking at old pictures. They have made me laugh, lately. I would have expected to feel a little heartache, a little yearning, as I have before, but they make me fully happy. They make me glad for the life I've lived and the person I am. I wonder why they didn't always feel that way?

The oldest members of the DC Reed Alumni group were the most resistant to canceling our hangouts at the beginning of the shutdown, and are now the most eager to start them back up again. My conclusion is that losing 4 months of your life at that age (75+) is a much greater loss than "losing" 4 months of my long and winding future.

Indeed, my life didn't change a huge amount. It was more how I thought about it that changed, and how I socialize. But, the total time spent "with" friends? Not so different. I've made marginally more time for exercise and cleaning since the former is one of the only reasons to leave the house and the latter is more urgent with two people at the house all the time.

Oh, the title of this post. I think about Beckett in the context of social media activism, and also in the context of Age of Empires streaming. To post about what is happening strangely feels like it makes it more real. The compartments are gone - the people at the march aren't the only ones who know you were there, now. The bubble of lived experience pops into the ether of digital truth, to be perceived without context.

That stresses me out. The things that I post on social media are funny or charming to me specifically because they are out of context. Incidents that are nothing in life become something in an Instagram post. Things that are something in life become nothing on social media.

Age of Empires... the disjointed and surreal interfaces between the player, the game and the audience(s). The feeling of togetherness, watching the rules you know play out. The emotional cohesion as you read the player's mind, the opponent's moves, and watch them both striving for the goal you all share.

I suppose every sports fan knows what this feels like, but I am just discovering it. When I watch sports I just get riled up beyond control. When I watch Age I get focused. I feel the flow state of the players. I'm invested.

That is enough rambling from me. I do understand things better now though, so thank you for that, self and internet.