lesscensored:
Trying to do assignment 4 for the lit non fic class I’m taking (due tomorrow at midnight.)
Just got up the courage to check my mark from the last assignment — largely because I am with my friend who is in the class so it’s less scary because he’s here for support, lol.
ANNNND I got a 58! Again!
It was a proposal for a personal essay. Growing up being the smart kid and then being told you are “gifted” and having people fawn over your writing and tell you you are amazing is weird and trippy and hard, and then starting to bomb everything in this area in adulthood is just the sad cherry on this cake. Like I actually tried! Going from never trying and succeeding to trying hard and always failing.
My friend wrote a proposal for a personal essay about memories on the beach of his fancy family cottage home or something making him think about the pressures of growing up in a successful and affluent family and how he has not rebelled but fulfilled the role that was given to him. He got a 75.
This is what I wrote:
This piece will be a personal essay exploring my relationship with the internet, specifically my habit of googling my ideas rather than writing about them. It is both a product and a cause of despair, anxiety and attention issues. In a narrative essay interspersed with description of personal experience, I will generalize insight about this to the relationship between the human self and ease of access to unprecedented amounts of information. When abused, this can suppress creative impulse. I will explore the relationship between consumption and creation, and propose that repressed creativity fuels destructive impulses. Not only can consumption numb creative impulse and therefore increase the likelihood of self-destructive behaviour, but consumption can constitute a destructive impulse in and of itself. Like other consumptive self-destructive behaviour like substance abuse and overeating, information consumption can a numbing escape mechanism. Over-consumption of information can be a product and a cause of alienation from self. By googling my ideas, I avoid being alone with my own thoughts. I call this prioritization of the thoughts of others, drawing parallels to contemporary pop psychology, an intellectual codependency. Similar to relationship behaviours described as codependency (preoccupation with lives of others and a negligence toward one’s own needs) an intellectual codependency describes behaviour which neglects the ideas of the self and instead obsesses over the creative and intellectual output of others. This behaviour can be compulsive and self-destructive similar to drug abuse. I illustrate this with examples of my behaviour, using figurative imagery to describe this technological despair and evoke a sense of the interconnectedness between consumption connection and self alienation. I describe the experience during which I realized this connection between consumption and creation – 32 days without internet and my subsequent creative rebirth. To act on creative impulse is to not only to produce in the art form of one’s choice, but to also create the self: to become. The course notes quote Phillip Lopate as saying “at the core of the personal essay is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.” Through intimate exploration of my past and present struggles with technology use, self-alienation, escapism and distraction, I illustrate my understanding of who I am becoming and how. In doing so, I hope to provide insight on the broader shared human relationship with information consumption, and encourage readers to examine the interplay between their own creative and destructive impulses. The ideal audience for this essay is young people with access to technology and internet, but should resonate with others as well.
her comments were that i don’t seem to understand what pop psychology or codependency mean. BITCH PLEASE MY ENTIRE LIFE IS POP PSYCHOLOGY AND CODEPENDENCY.
REBLOGGING MYSELF because i’m going through my archives looking for stuff and this is still so so so so so RELEVANT.
DO NOT EMAIL PEOPLE PRESSURING THEM TO RESPOND TO YOUR EMAILS
When interacting with someone, or thinking about interacting with someone, assume that your existence does not benefit them, that they don’t want to interact with you, that interacting with you is not one of their evolutionary or existential needs. Doing this will cause you to be more considerate, more inclined to improve yourself so that you may become more desirable and have a larger chance of being reciprocated, and less likely to resent the other person when they don’t reciprocate your affection or communications in an equal or—in especially belligerent cases—greater manner.
Be aware that if someone has not responded to your email or Facebook message they either don’t want to or simply haven’t done it yet, naturally and without ill-will, due to the nature of time and space, that one unit of matter cannot occupy more than one space at one time and that time is unidirectional, which results in “having priorities”—an unavoidable method of existence for non-schizophrenic humans that, in its more deliberate forms, is inherently considerate, in part because it decreases the chances of misleading people. Be aware that someone may not respond to your email even if you are amazingly considerate to them (via never pressuring them to respond to you, continuing to support their endeavors in a non-pressuring manner by participating non-pressuringly in their projects, never expressing or implying they’re causing you to feel sad or lonely or abandoned or unimportant) for 15 years after sending your email. If this happens do not feel negatively toward the other person; try to focus on liking someone for reasons that aren’t “because they like me” or “because they’re giving me attention.”
Accepting non-reciprocation quietly, without suddenly and nonsequiturly “hating” the person, is not only considerate but also productive, in that it’s probably the most effective, if not the only, way to “convince” the other person—some day, maybe, in some form—to sincerely reciprocate. If you feel jealous of who or what has been prioritized over you, or if you begin to feel resentment toward the person who isn’t reciprocating your affections, then you’re operating on the assumption that you own someone or that you’re defaultedly owed things and are being “cheated” out of those things—that the other person, or the universe, is “wronging” you. Behaving in this manner is illogical (in part because if people owned what they desired you would need to continually relent your desires to be someone else’s possession) and will cause people to dislike you and want to disassociate from you, increasing the amount of emails you send that receive no response.
“
| — |
Tao Lin, How To Be Considerate On The Internet on Thought Catalog (via thoughtcatalog)
you know what they say - an expectation is a resentment waiting to happen. #workingonit
(via lesscensored)
i’m half inclined to passive aggressively post this on facebook so a certain someone pressuring me to respond to her reads it, but that would be just as bad form, if not worse than the pressuring emails so….
|
lesscensored:
Sometimes it feels like life is just one giant allergic reaction.
This is my face after lying down with a cloth on my eyes for an hour and taking benadryl. I’ve always wanted to post pics of myself looking my worst on the internet. Maybe I could do a series! There’s this one AMAZINGLY GHASTLY photo from last summer where the combination of hives, blufferitis, no sleep and questionable substance use created the perfect storm for a breathtaking “before” photo. I’m kind of into it, none of this “I feel like shit and I’m still hot anyway!” stuff. When I feel like shit, I look it too, usually.
Anyway, fuck whatever mysterious thing gave swells and eyes today, IT’S NEW YEARS EVE. Even if I don’t have any fucking plans other than hanging out with my dad (none of my friends are in my hometown) I wanted to do fun eyemakeup. I might be hanging with a parent and staying sober all night but fuck if I can’t have shimmery eyes.
posted december 31st 2011, when i was into the idea of being ugly publicly online in sad ways
posted this on here 7 months ago on a particularly interesting-difficult solitude evening
Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.
“
| — |
David Foster Wallace (via lgccgl)
this seems a lot more sinister now that i know that he threw a table at mary karr
|
just gonna reblog this again and again and again
you just need to watch heathers ok
ok
was just thinking how its kinda weird how i got into all this weird feminist alt/indie rock through my dad and then i realized HE’S ONE OF THOSE SHITTY STRAIGHT DUDES WHO ARE OBESSED WITH COOL (QUEER?) FEMINIST WOMEN
lesscensored:
am i queer because my dad molded me into his idea of the Ideal Chick?
also OMG DUH THIS IS SO OBVIOUS
he was a pseudo groupie for a woman in a feminist punk band (my mother)
but like also instead of thinking this is cool i mostly find it annoying
I know this may be hard to understand, this compulsion to repeat the situations that harmed you. Especially because you don’t remember that time, you can’t forget it but you do remember never to remember it, the time when the shattering into pieces became a way of life.
I act out the roles that are expected of me, then search desperately and in vain for my true self when I am alone. I feel most connected to my body when I am destroying it.
