The answer is obvious: you can’t simply discard a bad luck object, it must be ritually handled. Furthermore there are mornings which call for the bad luck mug, or rather, mornings in which the bad luck mug calls to me. It goes like this, I examine the mugs as a whole - they hang from hooks above my sink, and I take them all in at once. Slowly using the irrational measurements that emanate from the back of one’s stomach (now you feel them, don’t you), I find the mug that calls to me and I pulled it from its hook. The choice is final; there’s no going back! There is a mug for tedious processes, a good-luck-at-work mug, The Sunday Mug, the bravery mug, the Nothing Substantial Happens Today mug, the pretense of chill mug, the earnest enthusiasm mug, and so on. I pick it and the top tablespoon - the tablespoons are sorted specifically as well but this is done in one go, right out of the dishwasher - and we’re off! Later I texted him a picture of the bad luck mug, because doubling down is my forte. Fantastic, he said.

The second story is much shorter. Central is said to have a staff lounge downstairs, but due to headquarters (the Upstairs, not to be confused with the upstairs, cataloging, HR, and all that) having also been down there once, it’s a haunted place. Empty cubicles and piled up furniture in the dark. It looks like something out of STRANGER THINGS, and for the life of me, I could find no staff lounge. So I sat with whatever spirits of administration past haunt the basement at central for the half hour that I had and then I came upstairs and did what I do quite frequently: a glance around me to ascertain exactly where I am. Witnessing me, he asked me if I was okay and I said, “yes, just catching up on texts and confirming I know where I am, in that order.” To which he jokingly replied, “is that something you do often?” I said quite seriously, “yes, yes it is.” For I, dear reader, am quite capable of getting entirely lost while standing still.

What both of these stories have in common — among the many things we talked about that day, which include the thinkers that we both read, why it is bad form to lead someone around the library to look for books on the shelf instead of just checking the catalog first (I believe in a good walkabout), but weirdly not at all about the project we are working on together for work — is that they became the sort of go-to jokes of the day. We know this form, yes? It is called “flirting.” Yet simultaneously, they are stories that I would not tell a straight man at our first in-person meeting, and only tell at all out of necessity down the line. In fact, I believe it was the first time I have ever told the mug story to anyone at all, such is the security of a gay man.

But it would be wrong to suggest I am ashamed of these stories, not least because I feel no compunction about writing them up here, rather I was mortified to discover how badly I had misread the situation, and not because of the bigotry (set the virtue signals aside, dear reader), but because I had inadvertently entered into an entirely new space, and I was unknowingly witnessed in that space. The new space was created by misunderstanding the parameters and presenting myself according to parameters that were not there. And yes - all things I do are representations of me - but whenever you have a juxtaposition like this, you are privy to new information about yourself and this is far more uncomfortable in the presence of someone else, especially (as Harry argued to Sally) between an Adam and an Eve.

So we can see (or at least by this point I hope you have joined me in seeing) why being seen is mortifying, and here’s the thing. We have assumed until now that this was an extreme case because my gaydar is haywire as fuck, but perhaps every time someone else sees you, there is new information that arises from that interaction, because they are not you, and their perspective illuminates different angles. Yet being conscious, they not only see you, they witness you. Only because I had given some attention to parameters and later found out they were not what I had assumed them to be, did I accidentally uncover this possible truism for myself: it is always a case of two different sets of parameters meeting each other producing a new space, and new information, under conscious observation.

II.

But then to encounter the next thing, this is a very commonplace experience - two people bringing their individual perspectives to bear on each other occurs in literally every interaction between two people. Does everyone find it massively uncomfortable? Does everyone find it at least a little uncomfortable and it’s a spectrum? Is all humiliation at root caused by revelation? Do people find it more uncomfortable as they become more self aware (get older)?

Or is it just me?

III.

To be known is something else, because it is not precisely to be seen as you see yourself, but it is certainly not to be revealed (knowingly or otherwise), it is to return to a known space; it is to go home. By what path does a person become known? Do they have to see and be seen? I think that is what we are given to believe. It feels like a burning away to me, and the sensation of being seen is far less appealing than its sold as, whereas the feeling of being known may be diminishing entirely, among all of us, where “us” is the social technological class. Therefore, unless there is some kind of intentional pause or interruption, to see and be seen is not enough, as these encounters happen millions if not billions of times a day. What is the property that you add to seeing to get knowing?

More importantly, where is the threshold?

Some things I know - a knowing is a like a system, not like a series of facts, not even like a series of connected facts, i.e. a narrative. Like systems, a knowing has rules, but those rules exist regardless of rationale or desire, they are not chosen even when they are created by the people in the knowing, as they most often are. Since they are not chosen, they must be discovered, and in most cases, intuited through information gained unconsciously, the opposite of “witnessing.”

Does a seeing turn into a knowing or does a seeing simply cease when a knowing emerges? How is that line discerned?

It is my belief that a seeing does not turn into a knowing, in fact a seeing is an experience that many people engage in precisely because of the way it avoids a knowing so entirely. How does a knowing emerge? Is a knowing always desirable?

Counterintuitively, I think the answer is yes, because (the biggest claim of all) it is the only justice that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist, in this universe and any other. It is a multiuniversal truth. I could, and possibly should, depart from personal conjecture to discuss the ways that intentionally walking away from knowing is evil.
But - I got better things to do than lecture other people driving the wrong way down a two way street (BOOM).

But the thing is, it isn’t merely justice, it’s I think as big and as small as everything. knowing is the opposite of suffering. people who turn to rationality to solve the problem of suffering are wrong, because it is alleviated not with reason but by being known.

And that is why despite the fact that there is something very sexy about being SEEN, when the world ends, I want to be surrounded by people who KNOW me. (The world is ending, we all see this, but few of us know it).

Therefore from a deeply personal place, I ask and ask how does knowing come to be?

IV.

I want to go home.

But on the other side of that admonishment is that happiness, in that context, isn't what anybody is quite thinking of when they talk about a happy life. Most of the time, they mean a comfortable life. They mean a comfortable life that isn't replicating harmful patterns. The mode of comfort is replication, the opposite of change.

Marx introduced the idea of social reproduction, that the way a social group outlives the lifespan of a single generation is the replication of ideas. But the self is also an idea, and it also exists via replication. Most of our identities are ideas, even the stuff that isn't overtly political - like being a cheese lover or a book nerd. To become happier, you have to change the replication that is the self.

This is what the admonishers don't tell you - likely because the only thing they can definitely identify about your situation is that some or all of is existential and haven't fully realized the implications of what they're saying - choosing happiness is a violence on the self. It is not only saying "this situation is not good enough for me," it is in fact also, and mostly saying, "I am not good enough. A different me is necessary."

The narrative is that because you are not good enough for you, that this is good for your character and not abuse. But there's a lot of overlap and I don't know why we don't hold this truth when we talk about people who could be happy but make the same bad decisions over and over. There is a way in which this act, too, is one of self love, though it may not be the right act.

In experience, we (everyone who is capable of thinking about the meaning of experience) know this. Perhaps it isn't articulated a such, but I do think everyone understands this, understands that the effort to make change seem graceful, like some kind of pokemon evolve, is beautiful, beautiful garbage. It's helpful to say it. It's helpful for our own recognition of ourselves.

With no evidence except experience and instinct, I suspect that the violence in change is natural -- as in inherent to the natural world, not something that we choose. I stand before a forest of ideas here, so dense and so absorbing that it's almost painful. For example, what if we've been reading Hobbes and Locke wrong this entire time? What if the noble warrior and the savage are the intellectual exploration of the process of change, from the two-sides-of-the-same-coin perspectives of good for your character and violence on the self. (Granted, by we, I mean my high school criminal civil law class from 2004).

Another example: if we have decided that the violence committed to the self on behalf of the self carries the same weight and properties as violence committed against you by others, can violence committed against you be reclaimed for self improvement? What pops into my head is that Taylor Swift has a pond in her living room with coy fish in it, an image of happiness that belies the story of how she used to push her unpopular classmates on the stairs in high school. Why does this pop into my head? Two reasons: one, if Taylor Swift wanted to be happy, she would throw herself down the stairs. At the bottom she would have crossed the line, the one that holds us from each other. Two, a question (not loaded, a question): can violence be transmuted? If Taylor Swift pushes you down the stairs, can that violence be the same violence that provokes your change? A change you want? Or do you have to throw yourself?

And we are still left with the question of what the coy fish pond is, being that it is beautiful, relaxing, even spiritual -- but perhaps none of those things. This is is thicket we must make our way through, it's not easy but part of of trying to understand this is to say, if the coy fish pond is not happiness, what is it? And how is it different from what happens at the bottom of the stairs?

The coy fish pond can be bought. For a stupid amount of money, of course, money which after a certain point does seem to reproduce by itself. It's part of a system, and I don't think capitalism covers it. I don't think it's only a question of various entities creating false expectations about how wealth will make you happy. My line of thought always comes back to bigger questions about systems that were not made by man. Right? What if capitalism, in one of its modes, acts as a way for everyone, including the rich, to commit a group self harm by replicating an entire system of "happiness" that is also an act of group self love, a way of avoiding the violent destruction of the people we know as ourselves.

You start in to a forest like this and each tree can stop you dead in your tracks, it really can. There's just so much here. Because when you start to talk to about -- oh here's another question that just popped into my head --- when Jesus tells people to "turn the other cheek," what does that mean in this new context of violence to the self as necessary in any self improvement process, and how could the new testament compare to the old, much more violent, testament?

Is this why animals don't have the same kind of consciousness? Are they capable of the kind of self harm necessary for happiness? Is the bar on what an animal can be the degree to which he can overcome reflex and comfort to destroy himself? Or rather, his self? My god my god my god, you see? you see?

You can lose the forest for the trees and the forest is (the forest always is) the thing that is bigger than people, whatever that thing is. That's what you're looking for. In this case, it's tricky because it's clothed in very individual language, but it is, in fact, about the human condition.

It is not only saying "this situation is not good enough for me," it is in fact also, and mostly saying, "I am not good enough. A different me is necessary."

Poetry is subtext, and when it isn't subtext, something really terrible is happening. That's why it was easier to cook (having never cooked before) than it was to write poems in this pandemic. In this pandemic particularly because there was so much fear that was not the virus but played upon the virus - namely, the fear that the isolation of the quarantine wasn't just the obvious consequence of a viral pandemic but the confirmation of our fears that we are alone and will never not be alone again. A natural manifestation of an already present truth. That was the feeling.

A lot of people put it down to the Trump presidency, some people put it down to social media. Now I am biased because I really don't like to do things quickly, but I think it's a pacing problem, personally.

The gravity of this cannot be overstated: meaning -- all of it -- rises from the chaos via attention. Attention is necessarily tied to time. The more attention you give something, the more meaning it will reveal. The measurement of "more" where meaning is concerned is depth. The meaning becomes deeper. The less attention you give something, the less it means - regardless of how you label it. That is to say, the existence and depth of meaning is dependent on the length of your attention span. Right, that might seem trite but give it a second to settle in. The existence of meaning. That's a pretty big deal; at least I think it would feel like a pretty big deal if there was no meaning anymore.

This is where The Atlantic or The New Yorker branches off into a conversation about how capitalism benefits not only from our attention (the new product) but in particular from splitting it into brief episodes. If you never look at something, you won't buy it. If you spend too long looking at something, you won't buy it. You get the idea. But this isn't a think piece about late stage capitalism. It's a think piece about why the parallel meaning between there can be no poetry after the holocaust and never again bothers me so much.

What I come back to is the inevitable truth that there is a time for not poetry. A pandemic or a holocaust. But not all bad times are bad for poems; many of them are well served by poetry. The time for non-poetry is when the poem rises from the subtext and becomes the pretext. An elegance that cannot endure the complexity of humanity. A virus is elegant, fascism is elegant. Poetry is the perfect, clear lens on complexity, but the measure of a good poem is how well it reveals the simplicity from which complexity is built. This is the challenge, even right now the desire to shape what I'm talking about weighs on me with an urgency. Don't you see? Poetry -- the art of poetry -- is the art of seeing the complex as if it were simple, no -- the art of revealing that the complex is simple. It is revealer. But this function must necessarily live in the subtext of our lives, all attempts -- natural or man made -- to enforce a perfect, elegant and clear system on top of humanity is necessarily tragedy.

To reveal, via top-down administration, the gutting simplicity of the beautifully complex, is the method of the concentration camp. To discern, from the subtext of our lives, the way the complex distills into the simple, is the method of the poem.

Adorno was onto something. It troubles me. It troubles me that the poem as a governing structure is fascist. I love poetry. I love slowness. I love meaning, especially the elegance of it. What can it mean that this is not the rule by which to govern people? This is what the critical theorists must have struggled with. From this, the idea that governing is to point at every passing policy and yell "this sucks!" From this, the idea not to reveal elegance but cacophony, a mess. An uncertainty, an inefficiency, a confusion that forces us to pause, indeed to get entirely turned around sometimes. In the midst of the governing mess, though, we have the subtext, and in the subtext the poem's redemption arc.

What an idea! What an idea! No, I think it has come up before -- something about the journey being more important than the destination, but I don't think we ever read that and thought "ah yes, it is only through inefficiency, meandering, mistakes and messiness that we can arrive at the poem instead of the concentration camp."

But there it is. Take your time. Try not to succeed too quickly or too well. Celebrate the disheveled, absurd state of your life for what it is: the poem garden.

The point of Dungeons and Dragons is certainly one thing and one thing only: to form a tight knit group and slay monsters. This is something we have to do whether we play D&D or not, and it is something we have to learn how to do. For this reason the DM has to be agnostic: he cannot be against the player, indeed he can even be for the player - as in rooting for the player, but he cannot give the player the win. You are not slaying a monster if you cannot be slain by the monster. This is what taking D&D seriously is about and it is serious.

Learning how to do it is hard, and therefore easy to not even try to do. You can play whole campaigns and never begin to think about it in these terms, and it is astonishingly easy -- almost embarrassingly so -- to analogize the way people understand D&D to the way they relate to collaboration in general. It is easy to read into the way they talk about what happened, and who did what, how they feel about being in the world, necessarily connected to other people. I wish it wasn't, or perhaps I should say, often I wish I weren't -

One thing I like about it, though. Two things, actually. The first is that there are people I would have dismissed outright for their political one-dimensionalism that I get to see in better contexts. They're snobby or pushy or blunt or sweet or goofy, you wouldn't know that. The second is the rule the DM made in this campaign that we can't make dirty jokes (I don't know why) and the weird way that has affected the humor. I do like dirty humor, and dark humor, and mean humor but I also like goofy humor, sweet humor.

There's a pervasive darkness in the real world, what it lacks in literal manifestation it makes up for in anxiety and terror. When I think of the people in the campaign I play -- the first I've ever played -- I wish them success in slaying their monsters, friends to help them do it, and a nice celebratory dinner with the same friends in a warm and welcoming pub afterward. They are unexpectedly sweet people, but it may be that the people you slay monsters with always turn out to be unexpectedly sweet.

When someone says trans rights aren't politics, for example, the answer should always be: all rights are politics. A "right" is a political term. Rights are not a natural occurrence. When someone says trans rights aren't politics, what they mean when they say "politics" is "stuff we can disagree on without it being a comment on your character." Whether or not you particularly like Game of Thrones is politics, because it's okay if you do and it's okay if you don't. Pineapple on pizza? politics. Foreign policy? A matter of character.

How did we get here? Should I write about this?

In the first place, it's not going to help. Even if the whole world read this blog post, it would be up against too big of a mass to make any headway. It might reach one or two people and those people will henceforth also being extremely uncomfortable. Not exactly a win. Also, it does need saying that this post itself is making claims in a similar tone to trans rights aren't politics. I am indignant, judgmental, and uninterested in space for another point of view.

But anyway, this thing -- I think we all know what I mean regardless of how we think about what it is -- has been happening for way more than two months and thus, is not the strang thing to which I referred above. Hell, at this point it aint even strange -- I don't know who's going to get fired next for not having views Twitter agrees with, but I know that it will be somebody. I'm getting used to the reality TV of life.

No, the strange thing I want to talk about is what I see when I meditate. I meditate a lot -- it used to be 20 minutes a day, now it's every few days for an hour or so, and also most nights in bed. I don't count my breaths because defying centuries of tradition, I have decided that counting my breaths is dumb. Instead, I put meditative music on and I pay attention to the feelings that I am currently experiencing. I lean into them and images float up.  The feeling is much the same as dreaming. Sometimes they're memories. Sometimes they're many fragments of memories one after another, all connected by something usually thematic or even literary. But sometimes they're images of what I think are things that I am aware of peripherally, though I may not remember ever seeing it directly. (When I write it out, it sounds so mystical -- but it really isn't. I am aware of thinking, and the awareness is unusual, and is meditation. But the actual process -- the images, the associations, etc -- I believe that is what most of us are doing most of the time. It's the popular concept of thinking, just what's bopping around in our heads at any given moment, to be distinguished from the intellectual concept of thought which is not relevant to this conversation.)

Lately, the images are: An overweight woman in her forties in a cubicle that has been decorated seasonally. She has been in her administrative position for years and everyone knows her. She's married with children and serves on the PTO board. She is the one tasked with organizing office celebrations and potlucks. She knows everyone's birthday.

Halloween trick or treating, school dances, a child losing a tooth.

Someone in a family has cancer, and neighbors are taking turns making meals.

The way the street light looks in the rain on the street out a living room window at night.

Fantasy novels for young girls.

the memory of the fall festival at the local arboretum that I went to with my family many years.

Bath and body works products and school lockers.

**

You get the idea, maybe. Some of these images are memories, some of them aren't. What sticks out is that the emotion that swells in me and brings these images top of mind is grief.

There are many plausible explanations - the first is that for me, these images relate to the particular kind of home I had before my dad died. This is the first explanation any time grief is on the table.  In particular the security in the fat family lady, the neighbors bringing dinner, the warm friendship embodied in the picture of a Tamora Pierce novel, and so on, may be the security that I felt when my dad was around, because he was around.

This is an explanation I am inclined to believe, I think it's true. But I don't think it's the whole truth. I don't think my dad was the only source of that security.

There are two other things missing entirely from these images when they surface - The first is smartphones. There are no smartphones. The second is not a material thing, but a perception thing. There is no sense of a political self. These images don't have explicit association with myself as white, or Jewish, or a woman. Some of the images have struggles, but they're not political, they're deeply personal, they feel entirely outside of politics. Hurt feelings, because someone did or said something hurtful. Cancer, the disease and the people who love someone with it. There is something about that -- that lack of political awareness - that even as I type now stirs grief, deep grief, within me.

I know that if these words were to ever see the light of day, some articulate person on twitter would coin the term "White Grief," but until that happens, I get to sit in this moment and think about why these images resist politicization. I get to hold the thought that maybe, it isn't because of something someone else can tell just from looking at me.

**

You ever think about the work that goes into setting up a life? As I explained it to my therapist, I think all people try their hardest to move towards a state (sometimes a State, too) in which the only measure they need as a guide is their own personal taste. There is an aesthetics to this; on Twitter, I was once surprised by the ping of pleasure I felt encountering a user who had developed a not oft seen ability to read text the way one reads a room. Surprised because the user should be the height of dislikable, someone to hate-read, I suppose. But it gets you thinking about the initial preference, to be guided by one's taste and nothing else. What if, in the end, we do seek our own people, that not a one of us loves diversity, but the mistake is in assuming there is a simple definition of "our own people."

I had a strange conversation recently with a film maker who told me she had to see Black Panther both for film making and ethical reasons. This surprised me because quite obviously, neither is true. Nobody needs to see a Marvel movie for film making reasons, Marvel makes films like concession stands make popcorn. And the whole notion that we are supporting a political cause by buying a ticket to a Marvel movie -- my God, a Marvel movie that has the sheer audacity to play The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in its trailer, as if Marvel ever had that kind of integrity --  is frankly upsetting.

Constrained, I think, by the unconscious subscription to the notion that there's only one way to find your way and it requires believing that Marvel is suddenly a paragon of film or of politics (what the fuck). That is not something I want in my life. I don't want to build my life on political affordability, I don't want to build my life on anxiety either; mine, nor the anxieties of those that I love. There is a particular emotional labor that I do not want to do, the labor of being ashamed for the ways in which what I see and what I want defy what the people who care about me think I should see or should want. The labor of being ashamed for the actions of people I care about because I care about them, as if that makes them me.

All of this is aesthetic because it reaches merely the first layer, the top layer, the literal and seen layer, of experience. The pleasure bouncing around at a socioverbal tweet is aesthetic pleasure. The messier layers underneath, I think, rely mostly on humiliation and how we manage ourselves and treat each other when the experience occurs to us or in front of us.  It's funny, I used to think there were other factors -- natural resources, identity politics, economics, but in the end all of that is infrastructure to administrate power exchanges which themselves are, in the end, a question of which person gets humiliated and which person has to do the work of humiliating and a truly honest analysis must acknowledge both can be very unpleasant, both are a lot of work.

Anyway, my original point was simply that I don't think one's people is genetic, but that certainly does not mean that one gets to choose one's people. It's fully possible, I believe, to be bound to others by some strange force that is not voluntary nor genetic.  And no amount of pretense, virtue signaling, movie going, reshaping of the obvious into the obscure, can change that. It will only alienate a person from herself and I think it is foolish to do that and also seems to be what everyone I know is bent on doing.

And I do like to be the right one in the room, so I hesitate to speak on it, my ego chomping at the bit. Better to let it come from somewhere else, better to let it reprimand me, better usually to be humbled by the truth than to be the arbiter of it.

But it requires understanding "talk" in a less than literal fashion, while simultaneously having a literal understanding of what talking is. To abstract from a practice to the functional meanings indicated by that practice, then to find other structures that house similar meanings, and then to say "so this is like talking." Some people are very good at the less than literal interpretation -- largely people who are unhappy with the literal one, and are motivated to try and obtain a different sense of "real." Others excel at understanding the intricacies of the literal but can't abstract functional meaning to save their butts.

Sometimes I wish I could just lift up the divider and watch these two groups tumble into each other.

In any situation where something aint workin', it's usually a combination of me not doing what I should and them not doing what they should, and usually, it's worth it to let them get away with it and take responsibility for my end of shit and walk away with the rubber stamp. This is the first time when I've concluded that what the institution has to offer doesn't make up for what the institution should be providing and isn't, and that is because I am "established," by which I mean I have found a career, not just a job. It is also because in NYC, the things that the academy provides can be found elsewhere without any of that pesky "for credit" business.

All that said, there's a question about what it's like to be a grad school drop out that isn't really related to the why or the how -- I made a grownup decision on behalf of my grownup self and it is the first one I made despite the prevailing wisdom disagreeing with me. My co-workers were disappointed, my mom was disappointed, my friends were disappointed, hell my lyft drivers were disappointed. Yet: I'm still here. The world has not collapsed. And in fact, there are avenues re-opening that haven't been available to me for a while.

There's only so often we can do this, make decisive breaks that move us in a particular direction, leaving behind other paths, and other options, that we once seriously considered. Most of the time, we have to keep doing what we're doing, even when we wonder if we've somehow missed some sign, some signal, along the way. But much more frequently, we can make the category of decision on a micro-level by simply asking ourselves, "why do I feel like I have to do this?" Even when we decide the reasons are legitimate and we must Do The Thing, we're making intentional decisions instead of letting ourselves be driven by the events and pressures that surround us.

This is a good practice to develop because it is the key to not simply being products of the conditions in which we live, but exercising some control over the shape of our experiences. Insofar as we engage in reproducing our own conditions, we are part of any problems that exist within those conditions, and only by practicing this kind of mindfulness can we grasp our power to change conditions and solve problems.

By "grasp," I mean both "to take or have," and "to understand." Dropping out of grad school has revealed to me a level of control I have over my own life that, though always assumed on some level, I never exercised before -- to go against deeply held, common wisdom without a sure and obvious reason, because I can. Uncommon sense may be our sixth sense, the one that is capable of seeing a sum that is not simply the arithmetic of our parts.

-- I am taking a comparative politics course at NYU and a directed reading (i.e. an independent study) that was supposedly on Arendt but has morphed into the introduction to my thesis. I am a graduate student at NYU in the humanities and social thought. I am very interested in my thesis, but if I could write my thesis without having to do anything else, including getting the MA itself, I probably would. I have learned that graduate school administration is full of extremely warm, enthusiastic staff trying to navigate a whole lot of disjunction and dysfunction. If I still aimed to work in an academic library, I would want the MA for rubber stamp reasons. But that simply isn't the case anymore, and I'm not sure grad school was ever a good fit for me, even the first time around (when I got my library degree).

-- I am a senior editor for Anamesa, which is a journal my department publishes. The staff last semester, who asked me to do it, could not have had any idea that it would suddenly be Journal Revolution Season this semester, in which we are attempting to transform the entire project. This is a year long commitment, but I did bail for Spring semester.

-- I am taking American Sign Language II. I love sign language, and am very happy to be doing this.

-- I am editing my novel with actual editors. Three rounds as is standard: developmental, polish, copy edit. This is something that I can choose to do at whatever pace I want, but the part I have to pay for has been paid for already, so its a hard commit.

-- I am taking two courses this semester, consecutively, at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Thought. They are four weeks each, three hours one day per week, and consist of only reading. The first one is an introduction to the Frankfurt school which is related to my thesis (and the justification for taking it). The second one, which starts in November, is on poetry and poetics.

-- I have Games Club, where I write an open letter series on my blog about one indie PC game each month with a friend.

-- I host board game days once a month at my apartment.

-- I go to "Games with Strangers" on Saturday evenings at the Brooklyn Strategist.

-- My roommate E and I are slowly finishing the TV show Fringe together.

-- Theoretically, I should also be running a Kingdom meetup.

And that's not even to get into dating and other random social activities, like the Halloween party, the whale watching, the farm visit, poetry brothel, etc.

So... doing nothing often can feel gross, especially nothing on top of nothing. But I have found that when your schedule gets extremely full like this, either due to over commitment (as in my case) or something outside of your control (work, family, something), it is not a waste of time to waste time anymore. Last night I spent upwards of three hours lying on my bed and spacing out, and it doesn't feel like time badly spent. There's a word in Portuguese, conseguir, which roughly translates to "get," or "pull off," and there comes a point where one's mental faculties can no longer consegue anything at all. Where the whole notion of any particular process is simply out of the question. For most people, this time comes in between activities, whenever we space out. But if your schedule is as tightly packed as mine, sometimes you need to dedicate time for spacing out. In that case, staring at the ceiling is an excellent way to spend a few hours.

- Recognition that "leader of the free world" is not the same thing as "leader of the earth." For most of human history, we have lived with the possibility that some people far away from us could make decisions and take actions that negatively affect us. This has not changed, and the notion that globalization has changed this is an illusion.

-Building on this recognition, the acknowledgment that when we collaborate as peers to save something on which all our lives depend, we must trust others to make the best decisions they can given the information they have, even when we are not watching.

-To date, globalization has largely consisted of two kinds of processes - one is straightforward exploitation, and the other is a weird effort to bring democracy and the end of race and gender based oppression to countries that are not "civilized" enough, weird because it claims to be a explicitly anti-imperialist project, so it blames colonialist countries while it imitates colonialist countries. The "global south" is not much better for having been introduced to the 24 hour news cycle of the "global north." the encounters the West has had with developing countries to date have often been terribly mismanaged. We need to recognize the simple truth that though the Other is terrifying to encounter, this fear cannot be the organizing principle of our foreign policy.

-In order to create a more humane foreign policy, we need to acknowledge that there cannot be universal human rights if there is not a universal human. Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no society, only individual men and their families." To my eyes, this has been the fundamental view taken by the United States and Western Europe towards globalization. Denying that there is a universal human is often labeled as progressive, but it is mainly used to avoid taking responsibility for the people we are harming. We need to look at the people we don't like because they are different from us and the people we don't like because they're actually assholes and the people we can't afford to like because we want their stuff, and recognize there is something true about them that is also true about us, and that true thing entitles them to rights we would like to deny them.

-We need to deconstruct the business class, and reintroduce production and service as economic cornerstones, instead of financial speculation. If we reassessed the financial worth of a job (salary) by its usefulness to the community, I think that would be a big start. If we could introduce more cooperative models for businesses via tax credits and incentives, and require all high schoolers to do a year of service (instead of military) before they went to college, I think that would be good too. I think a better process of globalization would be putting our global values to good use to make our communities better where are.

-We need to transform globalization into instituting our  global values in our local communities, instead of exploiting global communities for local value.

-Embrace plurality! YOUR QUEEN COMMANDS IT. There are: different learning styles, different strengths, different sexualities, different cultures, different outlooks, different hopes, different everrrrything. EMBRACE IT.

I have also been thinking a lot about my master's thesis lately, because I'm hoping to graduate in May.  I developed an entire outline which relies heavily on Arendt and Foucault, and somewhat on  various secondary sources, to make a complex argument about Arendt's amor mundi, finding space for Place on the political Left, Foucault's carceral state, the neoliberal suppression of the relationship between citizen and Place via database theory, and the resulting carcerality of the neoliberal state.  Yes, it's about three theses in one.  But I've been thinking about it for months, and managed to work out a rough outline of what it would look like, and a bibliography. it's a writable paper, and it can be done in sixty pages or so.

This morning, I came up with an equally interesting, much more straightforward idea for a thesis.  Perhaps it is true, as they say, that you need to have the messy ideas before you can have the elegant ones.  At any rate, it was immediately evident to me that this new idea is the direction I ought to take my thesis in -- easier to sell an advisor on, more relevant to a wider population, and still wrestles with problematic assumptions in my political communities. Most importantly, it addresses directly what I came here to study: the construction of meaning.

Various people have suggested my original idea for a thesis was too ambitious, but I'll tell you what's too ambitious: taking a BISR class, three NYU classes, a sign language class,  sending my novel manuscript to Kirkus for editing and then shopping it around, and writing my original thesis idea for my website all while working full time.

A girl can dream, right?

I have been busy. Here are some of the updates: --I went to C's wedding in Seattle earlier this month. C and I are old high school friends, so I saw some of the people I grew up with, and we posed for silly pictures. I was also one of the witnesses for the signing of the k'tuba. It was a beautiful wedding and a nice weekend in Seattle. D.H. and I saw a bunch of the documentary about the making of Broken Age, which was both delightful and inspiring. --I finally settled on form for my master's thesis. I need to develop an outline, I'm hoping to pitch it to a professor in late July. The main thinkers I am drawing from are Foucault, Arendt, and certain historians of neoliberalism. With any luck, I'll be done with grad school this May. --I'm very excited for the taste of Bushwick next week. Even though I've been living in Bushwick for a year now, I don't have a good lay of the land. --On that note, it is our intent to renew where we are, so that lets me invest some money into my personal space (instead of moving), which is a relief. I had our cleaning lady come out and help me redo my room. I now have a normal metal bedframe, a large cat tree, a clean floor, and a bunch of stuff in storage, too. And of course, the annual donation of excess clothing. --I started a meetup group for the story game, Kingdom, that will hopefully also involve creative output from members. --Due to vacation time, money, and school, it looks like my plans to visit the European continent will finally be realized in July or September 2017. (I guess a lot of Europe shuts down in August) --I am visiting D.H. in Sacramento, CA, next month, where he will begin his new job as an adult librarian for their public library system there. The plan is mainly not to melt. But I am also flying there from EWR, which is the world's worst airport. So cross your fingers for me. --On the friend front, Isaac is running for state rep in Dover, NH, and Noah published his first novel (review to come shortly).

Next week begins the the Big Meetup Campaign, in which I go out and Make All The Friends. Wish me luck, wish me charm.

JTP

But seriously, I did holds twice today because I am an idiot.

I had a really lovely, social weekend. I saw Spotlight and I loved it and am pretty much decided that "newsroom procedurals" are my favorite type of movie. I also had a harrowing experience last week leading one of my grad classes. Why did I sign up to go first? I have mostly decided that the professor actually thinks I did a good job and is not just trying to reassure me, but there is this gigantic gap between the brilliant, captivating person I appear as in my head and the total mess I am in real life.

I finally bought the D.T. Max biography of David Foster Wallace who was like the center of my world from 2011-2012. I mean, my literary world. I also bought some Charles Bukowski poetry because it is just so great. So mostly I've been reading or reading about witty white dead dudes, for which I can't bring myself to feel too guilty.

What can I say? There's nothing big to say. I need a nap.

Although, there is a part of me that finds the death of romance gratifying.

The Concert for World Peace at New Years was quite beautiful, but the meditation with Dharma Punx was disappointing - there are fewer and fewer places left where one can get a nice, secular, crystals-free meditation session in. Plus, it was overcrowded. However, I am taking a class in meditation that is based on research done at Stanford, starting this Sunday, so who knows - perhaps I will become more compassionate and in so doing, be better equipped to base my overall wellness on my many blessings. Finals were easier than I expected - therefore I am only taking two classes in the Spring, and I will endeavor to do extremely well in both of them, rather than doing pretty well in three of them. It's been a long time since I've felt like I definitely knocked something out of the park, and it might cheer me up.

I am still feeling optimistic about having delegated the responsibilities of boyfriend-finding to L, and even cautiously optimistic about being able to afford a trip to Austria, Germany, Poland and Lithuania this Summer. I just finished an excellent little tome, by the name of Austerlitz, that H sent me. Next up is the first of a two-volume biography of Matisse.  Perhaps most exciting of all, I have badgered some interesting people into being my pen pals, and so I can hone my letter writing skills.

Today was the first of two days of training at the central library location for new librarians, and I did enjoy meeting everyone. Public librarians are some of the best people to work with because by the criteria of their job are meeting community needs and providing a welcoming space for everyone, so training is all about how to be better people, basically, which is...uplifting and nice, to be working on something meaningful like that with other people.

Classes at NYU start on Monday again. I am taking a class on race and the city, and a class on imperialism and colonization. So, essentially, the Hampshire education I avoided at Hampshire.  The guy who's teaching the imperialism class is even a Hampshire alum. It's a bit much, universe, and don't you think for one second that I didn't notice!

And Friday of next week, I travel home to Chicago for the weekend. Visiting my old haunts, watering my roots.

I finished my last final of my first semester at NYU Monday night, and I am leaning towards never looking at my grades for the duration of my degree. Since this is (hopefully) the last time I will ever be in graduate school, my GPA is less relevant  than the journey, right? Right? We'll find out, I guess. I'm talking about working really hard and progressing while acknowledging the difference between useful and stressful feedback.

Now these ambitions are real and in my opinion, eminently achievable, but there remains something that I think is more important than all that - one single thing I will call my 2016 resolution. It is far too easy to rush, to overplan, to fill up one's life with logistics. I will be spending New Years at the Concert for Peace, followed by meditation with Dharma Punx. I have in mind some kind of smushy opening of the soul, guided only by the vague sense that I have experienced it before. But 2016 is going to be all about slow and calm and open.  Like a Jack Gilbert poem.

Here's a 2016 wish: calm, thoughtful friends who show up.

*I am the sort of person who would have been better off having a very good childhood friend that I later married, but alas, I failed to think that far in advance. The prospect of online dating is tedious and depressing, and so I am pulling a Charlotte and counting on someone I know to do the matchmaking for me.  (I have no idea when I decided this blog was going to consistently make references to Sex and the City, I swear I never intended to be that sort of person, but here were are.) I may be the first millennial in the U.S.  divesting from algorithmic love while still generally leading a tech riddled life. My totally unoriginal theory is that OKCupid is the rationalizer of chemistry, and that we live in a time where we need to move away from rationalizing because so many people are losing access to intuitive measurement and emotional awareness. My totally unoriginal feeling is that outside of online dating, I have absolutely no idea how to meet men. Therefore! The human matchmaker. We will call her L, and I will keep you updated.