Nevertheless, We Persist

one: as long as you aren't hurting or, like, being a dick to anyone, just staying in your comfort zone isn't an immoral action. if you just want to read one type of book (or just fanfiction), or just eat one type of food, or just watch one type of movie, or not go to new types of social events, you aren't being a bad person for that, and if people say that, they are soundly wrong and just trying to get a self-righteousness kick.

two: trying new things because you want to expand yourself feels a hell of a lot different than trying new things because you're being forced to. you'll feel better about trying new foods if you know you have a back up familiar one in case you can't stomach the new one, it's easier to read new books if you can experiment with audio versions or reading it in little five-page chunks by yourself, you can breathe a lot easier going somewhere new if you aren't chained there for three hours because your parent is your ride home, etc.

THE PERFIDIOUS POLLEN PARTICLE:

All of my thoughts about this are very unfinished because I have no actual answers

It's a fucking fever dream. And I don't know how to reconcile the fact that we all just quietly moved on.

The piles of bodies in the morgues? The refrigerated trucks? The fear and uncertainty, doing it while under year 4 of the most incompetent President?

Simultaneously the BLM movement (remember the Instagram black squares?) and George Floyd and Trayvon Martin and so many others whom I regrettably cannot remember their names?

And then Jan 6th? I was on a fucking Zoom call with some clients in the Bahamas when someone said "Are you watching the news? Is there a revolution happening right now?" and somehow we just put that aside for a while and discussed a building for a client that would cancel the project a year later because the FTX crypto scandal/whatever.

People saying goodbye to their loved ones hugging through plastic sheets or waving through windows.

Meanwhile also this was when NFTs were also somehow a big thing? ChatGPT kicked off the AI-era in 2022.

This whole period of 1-2-3-4-5 years remains completely unreconciled. The cruel progression of time leaves us no gaps to process anything, we just kept going and going and going because whatever the fuck else were we supposed to do?

Anyway, this all weighs heavily on my mind and I think I should probably find a creative outlet for that energy because otherwi

For fucks sake, in the US we lost 1.2 million people. Parents and grandparents and friends and coworkers and

Ownership meant a physical copy. Now you own nothing and can't find what you want across multiple streaming platforms.