daiyi

kabocha stickers!! Possibly the best things I've ever made.

I will occasionally open up journals from a year or two ago, skim them, and close them in cringing disgust, mostly an exercise in PAINFUL SELF-AWARENESS. I was telling marco about this phenomenon on the phone today, and happened to have my computer in front of me with the text editor open so I picked a text file from last year and started reading from the top, to demonstrate how comically terrible self-reflection is in hindsight. 

even before I decided to make cutting loose from space & time a full-time job, I’ve been spending my entire life hopping from one timebox to the next. In times of high agency, purposefully running myself against a clock to squeeze the best out of an experience. In times of desperation, force-feeding a circumstance with the promise that the end is a known destination and the externality will be excisable in a clean temporal cut. I was thinking about how I’d been living the last two years in 3-to-12 week sprints: 3 months in new york, 3 weeks in california, a month hitchhiking through eastern europe, three months in berlin, 2 weeks in the uk, three more months in berlin, a couple more weeks in california, 6 weeks in new zealand–on and on, endless prototypes of possible lives, each booted up with the expiry date prestamped.

my projects are similarly hack/draft-based: WIP screenshots, algorithmic experiments, midnight pushes to master, comic strips, zines, and doodles, never murals or books or prints or a foundation anyone depends on. I never ship anything, it’s almost charming (comics and zines and doodles and games with a rough edge are cute). I have never tried to build and curate and finish something, not a project, or my personal life infrastructure (the biggest project). And I think this is the very crux of why I am struggling so fucking hard to adjust right now. yes, I have been an adult before, at least two other times minimum. but this is the very first iteration that I didn’t go into with a cutoff date. this is not a drill. this one is the real deal. I have worked v hard to assemble the components of something nice, and now I have to construct the pipeline and the infrastructure to run it long and good.

you know how sometimes you suddenly get super into something very impractical (like pulling an all-nighter on a workday reskinning your linux desktop theme, why would anyone ever do that)–last summer I somehow became oddly obsessed with consuming the bare minimum nutrients to like not be catalysing my own vital organs. it had a similar appeal to ultralight throughhiking except you can keep at it for months at a time without becoming profoundly lonely, and you’re not in danger of being ingested by bears (just yourself).

I have this hypothesis about how nerds get suckered into eating disorders and it’s because your body is actually a huge iterative strategy game that you CAN win by meticulous planning and execution. and you don’t even need to get a committed group of friends to meet n times a week for m weeks to make progress! Sometimes the compulsion to win the game of my body manifests v positively (like having a really solid climbing/running/swimming training schedule) but other times it goes horribly wrong (recreational starvation).