It sure is great, having two different groups of friends that I can rob of complexities and turn into caricatures so it’s easier to reference the world around me!

I’m still torn on whether or not drugs are cool.

Tonight I came across a forum question about drugs. The main gist was:

“I just have it in the back of my mind that someday, I’ll die of an overdose. It scares the shit out of me and thrills me at the same time.”

(No, I will not discuss which forums I spend my time on.)

It wasn’t a super interesting post, but Hedonist Philosopher’s response to it (at the link above) was pretty interesting. Like, mildly fascinating. While reading it, I thought:

1. Descriptions of glamorous self-destruction will always be fascinating
2. Buying into glamorized self-destruction will always be…juvenile?

Idk what it is, but there’s some sort of conflict here—maybe just between the “drugs are cool” camp and the “drugs are stupid” camp.

And now I realize that I’m using my San Francisco comedy friends and my Amherst College friends as mental references for the two camps.

The SF crew (and probably most comedians, in general) are really good at glamorizing the dark shit. It’s cool in a rebellious way. (And when you do enough drugs, you’re not only rebelling against legal authority—you’re rebelling against yourself. What’s cooler than truly not giving a fuck about your own mortality?!)

The Amherst crew (note: my sample size is small) has a lot of disdain for drug use. From the way some of them distance themselves from it, I can’t help but project a subtext of ‘nerdy high-school overachievers justifying their lacking social and personal development by degrading the cool kids’. And I see them achieving this subtextual bolstering of their own self-worth by inflating the overall value of things like scholarly aptitude or future earning potential—things that cool kids and drug abusers are worse at than they are.

Anyways, I’ll contemplate glamour vs. prestige now and you can read that post. It’s a good one.

hedonistphilosopher:

I, too, failed to make her love me. Only “her” is academics, and the price of dinner is thousands of dollars in student loans, and the small penis scapegoat is ADHD. And playing the victim is playing the victim.

It’s just like, don’t you think all the encouragement, up until this point, was sort of leading me on? Like, she shouldn’t have let me spend all that time in her class if she wasn’t gonna fuck me with an ‘A’. I can’t believe I gave her so much attention. What a bitch.

Still 3 liters above the carry-on limit LET’S GO, PILLOW PET.

Use your quantitative skill set to belittle the humanities:

FORMAL LOGIC SYMBOLS:

∀x∃y( { Ux & Dy & Exy } → ∃z( Wxz & Vzy & Izx & { Pz → B[ x, Az ] } ) )

LEXICON:

U[α] : α is an undergraduate student

D[α] : α is dialogue

E[α,β] : α engages β

W[α,β] : α writes β

V[α,β] : α is vaguely related to β

I[α,β] : α indulges β

P[α] : α is pretentious

B[α,β] : α believes that β

A[α] : α is admirable

ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

For all things ‘x’, there exists some thing ‘y’ such that ( { if x is an undergrad and y is dialogue and x engages y, } then there will exist some thing ‘z’ such that ( x writes z and z is vaguely related to y and z indulges x and { if z is pretentious, then x will believe that z is admirable } ) ).

NORMAL ENGLISH TRANSLATION:

If an undergrad engages in a dialogue, then she’ll just end up writing some vaguely related,  self-indulgent crap. But she’ll believe her crappy writing is admirable if it’s pretentious.

Good luck with finals / exams / making puzzles out of your academic disillusionment. 

…

I do not see the humor.

Goddamn.

They call us dirty ‘cuz we break all your rules down.

Part of me wants to analyze what Janelle Monae is doing in terms of gender—how she switches between androgenous and femine outfits, how her choreography & lyrics seem unconstrained by previous examples of how gender (esp. Black gender) should function in pop music, how her persona seems empowered in a fresh way.

But, that part of me always gets absorbed by awe.

It’s not that I’m purposely trying to avoid politicizing her; it’s that I don’t want to analyze her at all. I just want to absorb whatever she’s doing.

Because, whatever it is, it’s fucking rad.

1. Find a mirror. Stand in front of it.

2. Text yourself something needy.

3. Now be the receiver. Read the text. Feel embarrassed for the needy self that sent it.

4. Look at the mirror to see your reaction to the needy text. Freeze your facial expression.

5. Now be the sender. Keep looking at the mirror. Register the reflection as reacting to YOUR text. Observe the reflection’s awkward grimace/wincing/loss of interest. Feel mortified.

6. Look back at your phone. Un-freeze your facial expression. Keep feeling mortified.

7. Look at the mirror to see your mortification. Freeze your facial expression.

8. Now be the receiver. Keep looking at the mirror. Look at the reflection to see how its doing after sending such an embarrassing text. Observe the reflection’s crestfallen face. Observe how it knows that it weirded you out and embarrassed both of you.

9. Now bask in its vulnerability.

CONGRATS YOU WON YOU’RE NOW THE ALPHA YOU MADE SOMEONE FEEL VULNERABLE YOU’RE REAPPROPRIATING THE VULNERABILITY YOU’RE ‘TAKING IT BACK’ HOORAY GOOD FOR YOU YOU’RE THE COOL ONE NOW!!!!

My favorite part of being alive.