Category: writing from college

life and the game of hearts

Last weekend, I played a game of hearts with some of my friends. In the game of hearts, you are dealt a hand. There are good hands, and there are bad hands. If you have a lot of non-heart high cards, it is a bad hand. Thankfully in the game of hearts, you are allowed to pass your shitty cards to the next person at the beginning of the round. This mitigates the amount of shit you hold in your hand. Unfortunately, this also means that you are prone to picking up more shit from other players.

Unlike the game of hearts, you cannot pass the cards that you are dealt in life. If you have a sack of shit as a hand, you cannot pass your shit to the next player. You just have to play with the shit you have.

This, you can imagine, is unfortunate. One moment, we are out of existence. The next moment, we are in existence. And, when we are in existence, we are given a mystery bag with different proportions of shit within. You can be give a bag with a speck of shit that isn’t even that smelly, or you can be given, as Jeremy Irons’ character in Margin Call put it, “the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” We did not opt to enter the game of life, but since we are already playing, we might as well make the most of it.

You can be dealt a bad hand or a good hand. For example, if you were born into the 1%, you probably will have a pretty good life ahead of you. That’s a pretty nice card. If you were born into a loving family, that’s a pretty nice card too. Having a pre-existing condition will make your life harder, so that’s the equivalent of having the king of spades or something. But, if you born into the 1%, have a loving family, don’t have any pre-existing conditions, are above 5’10” (if you are a guy), conform to western standards of beauty, have perfect pitch, et cetera, you’re probably going to have a pretty good life. It’s the equivalent of having the queen of spades as well as all of the hearts; you just can’t lose unless you really fuck up.

I would say that upon entering this round of hearts (a.k.a. life), I’ve been dealt a pretty good hand. It’s not a hand with the queen of spades and all the hearts, but it’s a pretty good hand. Sure, I wish I had a more affectionate childhood and a better educational experience, but it’s still a pretty comfortable life for the most part. No one gets a perfect hand, or at least very few people get a perfect hand. But, the thing about having a pretty good hand is that you still want a better hand. Even though my life is pretty comfortable right now (for one, I’m not unemployed as a result of an epidemic I literally cannot control), I oftentimes reflect about my past wishing that things were different, as if my hand was not good enough.

There are plenty of times in hearts when I was dealt a bad hand. I would pass whatever shit I can to the next player, and then I would play. It’s about making the best of what I have out of my situation, even when I have the king and ace of spades and no other spades.

Now, I ask myself: If I am able to adopt this mentality when I am playing the game of hearts, why am I not able to do it in real life?

I clearly have been given a good hand in life, yet why do I have this mentality of wanting a better hand. I could make some extrapolations based on some neo-Marxist critique of the culture industry, but blaming capitalism for my problems always seems like a cop-out to me.

Part of it could be the exposure I have had my life. If I have been dealt good hands my entire life, and if everyone I know has also been dealt good hands their entire lives, then I only have a sample size of good hands. I mistakenly believe that good hands are the norm, so I am disappointed when I compare my above-average hand to individuals who have above-above-average hands. Biased sample smh.

Yet, I feel like this explanation is inadequate because I have clearly met and become good friends with individuals who were borne out of less fortunate circumstances than me. It seems to me that this is not a function of exposure but more a function of internalization. If I draw from Ayn Rand in “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art”, then I could identify my thoughts as a form of selective perception. Even though I am exposed to more information, my confirmation bias only allows me to internalize individuals who fit this pre-conceived framework of self-pity. The question, in the metaphysics of belief, is, what comes first: sentiment or construction?

If I have a tendency to compare myself to individuals who have been dealt better hands than me, I want to know, what causes it?

For this question, I can take a Freudian view to investigate my childhood as a determinant of my patterns of thought. In particular, there is one part of my childhood that comes to mind. There is a lot about Asian American upbringings that puts a lot of emphasis on comparison. I am not alone when I say that my parents frequently brought up other successful Asian children who were relatively the same age as me who were worlds more accomplished than me as a way to “motivate” me in a way that was pretty toxic, if I recall correctly.

I was thinking the other day that, in this regard, there is a lot of my identity that is attributed to racial melancholy than to individual problems. Since facets of Asian American history and culture tend to be overlooked in American education, it is often difficult to attribute racial issues to racial theories because of inexposure. Therefore, a lot of my current attempt understand my own melancholy is to understand which parts of it are attributed to racial experience and which parts of it are just personal problems I need to work out myself.

Whatever, I can think about that later.

But, nevertheless, this part of my upbringing just another king of spades that I have been dealt in the game of hearts. There’s plenty of good cards I have been given as a result of my upbringing as well. Part of playing the game of hearts is learning how to strategize with what you have. The is the fun of the game: part randomness, part strategy.

There is a lot about my past I wish I could change — cards that I was dealt — but the game of hearts is not necessarily deterministic like that. The player with the best hands is not necessarily the winner of the round. And, even though I don’t like the metaphor of “winning” at life (it’s just… tasteless?), there is a lot to be learned at how to navigate life through the game of hearts.

memories, context, and emotional pain

The thing about emotional pain is that there is a source to it. External stimulus is perceived and translated into something we can understand. Then, it is bounced around our memories in an attempt to find context before it is converted into the conscious thought that we can articulate. Emotional pain only arises when our attempt to contextualize stimuli recalls a previous painful experience. Thus, our attempt to understand our own emotional pain is dependent on our abilities to recognize the role of memory in conjuring context.

The thing about drugs is that it creates an experience that cannot be replicated without drugs. Our perception of the experience that certain drugs invoke is dependent on our ability to contextualize our memories and adjusting the necessary distortions to replicate its effects. If you take acid, for example, your ability to understand the effects of acid on the mind is dependent on your ability to recall your experience when you are on acid. Yet, if something happens when you were on acid and you cannot remember your thoughts when you were on acid, then you effectively have never taken acid.

I find this to be an interesting concept because if you have a drug that makes you forget about the experience of being on the drug, then this experience effectively does not exist as a function of identity. If our access to our own memories constitutes the construction of our identity, then an inability to access memories would constitute a destruction of identity. If we were to take a metaethical perspective, if we are unable to contextualize where we are in the world, then we would not be able to identify ourselves.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls postulates the concept of the veil of ignorance as a state of forgetfulness as a determinant of ethical value. If we have no memories of who we are, then we are effectively absent of identity.

For a long time, the concept of torture literally freaked me out. Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain that the reason the experience of torture is so hard to understand is that the pain does not have a source. Once immense physical pain exists, it deconstructs the world in which we inhabit and reduces experience to the totality of the pain.

Thankfully, most of the pain I experience in my life is emotional pain, which I would honestly say is nothing compared to the worst physical pain I have felt. I don’t believe that there are forms of intense emotional pain that are equivalent to intense physical pain. Sometimes, when I find myself vomiting over a toilet from drinking too much, I question whether my subsequent forgetfulness is from the effects of alcohol on memory or the effect of intense pain on memory. Either way, I forget about how bad of an experience it was.

If I am exposed to something that causes emotional pain, then I would need to trace the path of how my perceptions have bounced around my internal world to translate into the negative sentiment that I feel. If I am able to identify which memories have been touched, then I am able to contain the effects of traumatic reoccurrence. Yet, per the nature of something as intangible as the internal world, the hard part lies in identifying the pathway between perception and sentiment.

the yearbook effect

You know, at the end of The Office, Darryl was talking about how he hated working at Dunder Mifflin. He wanted to leave every minute of it, yet at the end of the series, these supposedly negative memories turned into the sentiment of nostalgia.

He goes, “Every day when I came into work, all I wanted to do was leave. So why in the world does it feel so hard to leave right now?”

Sometimes, I have a similar feeling regarding college. I would classify most of my college experience as pretty sad. The same goes for my high school experiences. Every moment of college and high school, I just wanted to move onto the next period of my life, and it wasn’t because I believed that the next period of my life would be better; I just wanted whatever sadness I felt at the time to stop.

Truth be told, there are very few periods in my life that I would remember fondly, yet there is something about reflection that is able to distort these experiences into something that is worth remembering.

I used to have this train of thought that goes somewhere along the lines of: if you have a shitty life, you’ll eventually forget about how shitty it was and grow to remember it fondly.

If I think of nostalgia as a form of measurement bias, I can easily add an instrumental variable in my head in order to counter its effect, thus allowing me to measure the emotional value of my own experience to its true value. I just need to make sure that the instrument is correlated to the error term but uncorrelated to the regressors. Unfortunately, everything about my life is a determinant of another part of my life because I consider my life deterministic like that.

My therapist told me the other day that even though I attempt to have positive thoughts, I still fall into a pattern of negativity whenever I reflect on my past. He told me to analyze how my parents used to criticize me and reflect upon how those patterns have translated into the present. But I ignored the second bit because there is only a limited amount of Freud shit I can handle each day. Nevertheless, I see his point. Most of my writing is just a pity party starring me, myself, and I. Thus, I wonder if whenever I write, I indulge in these same trains of thought that I try to abandon for so long. When I write, there is absolutely no one to challenge my thoughts.

In high school, I wrote about this concept I created called the yearbook effect, which is basically another way to say the wave of nostalgia that comes at the end of school. Obviously, with COVID-19 and everything, there is very little room to experience nostalgia with my classmates, but the effect is still present in the messages I send back and forth.

I wonder what is the mechanism that establishes this force of nostalgia. Why is it that we are so prone to having negative experiences but also so receptive to misremembering memories in a positive light. On one hand, I would argue that human nature propels us to experience negative moments more intensely. On the other hand, nostalgia proves that there is a force that compels us to indulge in positivity regardless of whatever external merit it yields. What a contradiction.

The thing about poetic conclusions is that it necessitates poetry. Graduation is one of those poetic conclusions we have in life. I was discussing my commencement in a networking call today. The person I was talking to said that my online commencements were stupid. I agreed, but for some other reasons. At the end of the day, graduations are there, in my opinion, mostly to serve parents. After all, it is our parents that have invested the past twenty years of their life in raising us, and the end of college marks a departure from responsibility to independence.

I never really felt the emotional turbulence I expected to feel in transitions. I didn’t really feel anything from middle school to high school or even from high school to college. All these periods of my life were pretty equally sad, so there wasn’t much difference in terms of how I classified them in my head. Even though I can block them out, conceptually, they all meld into one block of sadness to me.

There was this girl I used to be friends with who told me about how she would lie to herself in her journal. Then, when she looked back on it later, she would be able to believe that her past was a lot happier that she remembered it to be.

I wonder if that’s what nostalgia is: Are we just re-writing our own memories to convince ourselves that we had much happier of a life than we actually did?

I don’t think much about high school or middle school anymore. I have effectively compartmentalized those memories so well that I don’t even know what recess of my mind I left them in. But, sometimes, I read some of my journal entries from those days. They were, to put it simply, incredibly sad. They were sadder than anything than I write as of recent, and that’s even with my limited writing abilities back then. That being said, I used to only write whenever I was sad, so there is definitely some selection bias that goes into my early. Even though I can recall some happy memories off the top of my head, the sheer content I have produced about my own sadness serves as a relic of a past I don’t even remember. My writing is the archive that tells the truth about my feelings, regardless of how I have altered my memories over the past couple of years.

There’s probably no way I could ever assess how sad my college experience was. On one hand, I am me and will realistically have an inclination to remember my past as a lot more negative than it actually was. On the other hand, college high key pretty ass.

Oh well. So it goes.

definitive feeling

You know, in the end of Harry Potter? Harry was like, “Yo Voldy, it must suck to live without love.”

Yeah, Harry was an asshole. Don’t be like Harry Potter.

At the end of the day, feeling loved is an internal reaction to an external experence. This poses two different instances when individuals could not feel loved. Either their environment does not give them love, or they lack something internally to process that love.

Either way, the feeling of love is such an individual experience, and it is so quickly that individuals can feel in and out of love. There are some things about the external world that drastically realign the experience of the inner world, regardless of its logical proportionality. The mechanisms that connect the internal and external worlds are not tangible like that.

It started so long ago with Descartes’ hypothesis that the pineal gland separated the noumenal and phenomenological self. In retrospect, it’s a pretty stupid idea. But Descartes was really onto something: namely, that it is impossible to understand the relationship between the internal and external world without some defined mechanism.

To be honest, I haven’t looked into this subject since studying Descartes. I’m sure that someone has thought more about it since him. Why is it, that seemingly insignificant parts of the external world are able to affect our internal worlds so significantly? I bet someone came up with an answer already.

So much of my life, I have realized, is learning to identify how my external world affects my intenal world. Specifically, why certain things that happen have a way of inflicting more damange they seem to, theoretically. It’s the difference between observing a certain phenomena in theory versus observing it in practice. There exists an infinity of space in between.

I observe this phenomona when I look at Instagram photos. Sometimes, I am hit with the force of nostalgia.

I find nostalgia to be the enemy of gratitude. Sometimes, I would feel very grateful to have the opportunities that I have right now, and other times I would long for another universe where things could have gone more my way. This was not the world I imagined, but somehow I am living in this particular timeline, and that is the extent to which I could practice stoicism.

Most of the time, I try to forget the other timelines that I can inhabit. Most of the time, I forget. But, sometimes, there is always something about the world that reminds me. This time, since I am responding in response to something I saw, of course, it was just a post on Instagram that included someone I used to be close with.

The mechanism of proportional effect isn’t so much the viewing, but the connection of the experience to other aspects of life. The view is innocuous, but the connotations attach itself to other insecurities about unfulfilled features of the past. And, for me, being able to recognize that is coming one step closer to understanding the mechanics between the inner and outer worlds.

forgetting dreams

Usually, whenever I wake up and remember a dream, I would take a couple bullet points in my Notes app while I still remember the dream. But, yesterday, I had a bad dream. When I woke up from it, I didn’t take any notes. After a couple of hours, I forgot about the dream, and it was my conscious choice to do so.

I had the choice to remember it or not. I would write it down, and I would be able to construct something from it, but I am choosing not to do so.

So much of my ability to perceive the world is dependent on my memories. If my memories are a function of what I can perceive in the world, then I am able to perceive more happiness in the world through forcefully forgetting sad memories. Therefore, if I am exercising choice in order to negate memory, then it is an act of selectively changing my reality.

I have been doing that a lot recently — altering reality with my mind.

Because the phenomological reality is a function of individual experience, changes within the internal world is able to change the phenomological reality despite no changes in the external world. Yet, these realities are distinctively different. Happiness and sadness, whatever they mean, are a products of different phenomolgical experiences to the same external reality. By changing the phenomological system that governs the construction of the phenomological reality, we are able to effectively change the world we inhibit.

Ayn Rand once wrote in “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art” that art is a function of selectively perceiving reality. But, in terms of the first-order function of what generates perception at all, it seems that memories allow us to notice things and not necessarily the art itself. After all, even if it is art that alters our reality, it is still our memories of art that serves as a guide for our own thoughts.

Yet, unlike our perception of art, we have a lot more say over our dreams. We can unsee something that we saw if we chose to do so. And, lately, that’s what I’ve been doing. I am using the dreamscape to unsee the parts of my life that I don’t want to see. I’m sure someone can invent some sort of therapy based on this idea. There are thoughts that I don’t want to have. There is the wave of consciousness that naturally washes these thoughts into oblivion. I am simply taking a passive role in letting my memories die with my dream.

If anything, this translates into an overarching attitude towards life. I am moving on from my past. There is the past that I find unpleasant, and then there is me effectively rendering my past as if it never happened.

So much of my life, I felt as if I should cling onto my past as if there is some sort of value to them. Since most of my past has been either uneventful or sad, I tend to cling onto a lot of negative memories because there was a part of me that believes they were somehow more “real”, whatever that means. I’m sure there is some sort of behavioral economics framework that I can use to describe this heuristic: the idea that experiences that belong to us seem more “real” than experiences that did not happen.

In reflection, all of that thinking just convinces me of the irrationality of my human mind. I was so attached to this idea that I should cling onto memories that are “real” because they belonged to me that I could spend hours in my own head.

There was always this mentality that, if I could sufficiently think through a part of my past, then I would be able to obtain some sort of resolution and move on. In my head, I thought that if I could reframe a part of my past in some sort of larger context of growth, then I would be able to escape the memory itself. The spill would be neatly cleaned, and then I would be able to move onto other issues in my life.

But this is faulty logic. It’s just a cyclical pattern of thought that leads you back to the beginning. There is no such thing as thinking through past events. All there is is just time spent in self-flagellation, using willful emotional pain as a means to reclaim and redeem experiences that you cannot change. Better to hurt yourself on your own terms than to let the world hurt you again.

But there is no redemption. There is no metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel that will resolve the past. There is only more pain.

I am forgetting about my past, slowly but surely. I used to wonder, what if things have been different? I used to think? why did things have to happen in the way that they did? There was so much I would reflect on, and these thoughts would consume my present experience as a projection of my past experiences. But I see it now: there is no point in thinking about it.

I think of it like my carpet right now. It smells, and I’ve been attempting to find the source of the smell, but I can’t. I have put so much time in attempting to resolve the smell. But, in this case, it’s probably better if I let it go. Sooner or later, I’ll get used to the smell. In a couple of days, the smell will most likely go away, or at least decrease significantly in magnitude. As long as I don’t devote my attention to it, it won’t affect my life. Most likely, it will go away. But, if it doesn’t, my life moves on.

So it goes.

冠状病毒后

这学期到春假之前，我每天都早晨七点起床。但我今天下午一点才起床。春假以后， 我的大部分演讲都被消了。我只有作业，但我不必早起做作业，我什么时候起床都行。我睡觉的习惯很糟糕， 从小我爸妈告诉我早睡早起， 可是我现在都是晚睡晚起。

除了睡觉习惯不好以外，我也感觉自己很懒。起床以后我一般自己做一点麦片。我一般边吃麦片边读新闻。吃完麦片我有两个选择。要是我想做作业，我就会开始做作业。要是我不想做作业，我就会躺在床上闭眼睡觉。大部分的时间我都不想做作业，所以我这几天睡觉睡得很多。我在高中时我一天最多睡六个小时，但是我现在每天至少睡十一个小时。我真是个懒虫。

我这几天哪里都不能去。街区都关了。要是你在外边玩警察就会抓你。除了散步, 你只可以离开房子去锻炼身体和买杂货品。 但现在杂货店也需要排队进去。 防止冠状病毒，很多商店不让太多人进去。 进商店以后服务员不允许人靠近。你必须要跟别人之间离六英尺的距离。 对我来说这很容易。我不喜欢靠近别人。我跟别人离得远远的。

世界上有很多死亡。冠状病毒比普通感冒危险得多，死亡率是普通感冒的两倍甚至更高。我的家长吓坏了，我的老师吓坏了，所有人都吓坏了。我的大学关了，我的高中也关了。我最喜欢的饭店也关了。世界经济现在一塌糊涂。股票每天都跌。今年开始我投了两千块钱在股票上。现在只剩一千块钱了。我损失了很多钱。我家长也损失了很多钱。我的公司也损失了很多钱。所有人都损失了很多钱。

这几天经常有消息讲亚洲人被歧视。因为冠状病毒是从武汉出来的，很多人怪中国人产生了冠状病毒。经常有中国人在街上被打，被骂。现在在美国亚洲人非常危险。我是一个二十二岁的男子汉，所以对我来说没有那么可怕。但是对亚裔女士非常危险。 大部分受害者是女士。我非常担心我爸妈。 我们住在郊区很好， 但是还很危险。

我跟我女朋友分开了。我们没有分手，但是她回纽约和我待在费城。远距离谈恋爱非常难。我们每天都打电话， 但是有时候打电话不够。我觉得身体亲密很重要， 但是这么远没有机会互相拥抱亲吻。我们只能看一样的电影， 假装我们在互相旁边， 但是我们俩都知道冠状病毒过以后我们的生活会很好。我们俩都会在纽约，有好工作。冠状病毒仅仅是一个挫折。

我爸妈给我几个口罩，但是我不喜欢戴口罩。我觉得很不好看，也觉得很难呼吸。我爸妈也给我很多手套。他们觉得外面的东西很脏。我同意他们的逻辑， 但是我还不戴手套。我觉得回家洗手就够了。每天我出去时候，我永远都是回家后马上洗手。我得洗二十秒，因为必须要二十秒才可以杀死所有的细菌。我唱两次《祝你生日快乐》的歌就够了。

有时候我想跟我朋友玩。但是现在的法律不允许我跟我同学玩。反正我的大部分朋友都回家了。我只有两个朋友还在费城。我只跟这些朋友玩。他们也只跟我玩， 所以没有传染的风险。开始我感觉很孤独， 因为我很多朋友都搬走了。但是我现在明白我不需要那么多朋友， 有几个好朋友就够了。

这几天我花很多时间无聊地陪我自己。没事干，我花很多时间思考自己的想法。这么多年在大学，我老以为我朋友不够。我老感觉我所有的同学都比我的朋友多。我很伤心， 因为我觉得肯定是我自己有问题， 但是我现在了解为什么我以前的想法是错的。

因为我在大学大部分时间感觉没什么朋友，其实是我跟自己花了很多时间。朋友有是有，但是我永远感觉我跟我朋友不够亲。 我感觉我跟我的朋友很不一样。 我想跟我的朋友讨论很多哲学的问题，但是我的朋友不想跟我讨论哲学的问题，  而且我感觉我比我朋友伤心得多，感觉跟我朋友很不一样。

我现在了解到我不需要跟我朋友一模一样。 做好朋友不是自然的过程，做好朋友需要花很多时间， 也需要经常聚会。 但是我觉得做朋友最重要的一点是需要对互相感兴趣。 做朋友最重要的一点不是有同样的兴趣，而是有开放的心态。对我来说，好朋友不需要感兴趣哲学。

坦帕 (tampa)

这个春假我本来准备去田纳西帮助建房子。但是我们打算离开的前一天，我们收到了一封电邮， 告诉我们所有的计划都被取消了。当时我感觉很难受。我从小就想去田纳西, 但是新冠病毒把我的计划打乱了。我去不了田纳西，但是我还想出去旅游。取消后的第一天，我去了一个咖啡店上网买机票。过了一个小时，我找到了一些便宜的机票。我决定去坦帕。这几天宾州特别冷，所以我想去那儿晒晒太阳。坦帕不但很暖和，而且靠海边。所有的机票都很便宜， 趁这个机会我星期二飞到坦帕。

我到坦帕机的场时候还没有定旅馆呢。我用我的手机看看附近的旅馆， 然后定了个最便宜的。我到了旅馆以后， 马上出去租了一辆自行车。我租完了自行车才下午三点。一位店员向我推荐了一条路，所以我听他的推荐往这条路骑。沿着大海骑，第一天我骑了二十英里。第二天，我骑车去了另一个城市。我的大部分时间都跟着汽车在高速公路上骑。我经常望着蓝蓝的海， 非常感动。我一个人感觉到了大海的美丽，我激动得哭了， 哭了很多。第二天，我骑了七十英里。第三天，我回到了费城。我度过了一个愉快的春假。

thunderstorm and cold intimacies

It’s 3:48 AM right now. I woke up amidst a violent thunderstorm to watch tutorials on TensorFlow. It’s really interesting how modernity has created products where you can develop an expertise in neural nets without entirely understanding the mathematics behind statistical learning.

I took a melatonin pill about an hour ago, but it doesn’t seem to be working. So, here I am, writing, when I am supposed to be sleeping.

Occasionally, I am graced with a bright wall of lightning. For people who are experiencing particular turbulent times in their lives, I’d imagine that they would derive some sort of symbolic catharsis from this storm. I would make sense really; given the human propensity to assign meaning to particular instances of pain, storms offer quite a compelling symbol of uncertainty and intensity.

I am having a moment that is reminiscent Nikolai viewing the thunderstorm in Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth trilogy. When I read the scene for the first time, I viewed the thunderstorm as a symbol for the experience of adolescence, particularly at its emotional parallels to a boy approaching puberty. Although I am well past puberty at this point (although, the other day, someone did ask me if I was 18), I think there is still value in deriving meaning from symbols that do not necessarily apply to me anymore.

This thunderstorm is quite particular because I feel quite sheltered from it. I am inside (and therefore, by definition sheltered), but I feel more than sheltered in the sense that I no longer identify with the thunderstorm. That is a past life, and this is my present life. I would use to stare longingly into the thunderstorm because I would feel some sort of solidarity from it that I would not have been able to feel from other aspects of my life. I have often understood college as a period of collective turbulence. But, for some reason, I never seemed to gather that my friends felt the same intense emotional frenzies that I would go.

Is that an immature attitude to have? At this point, I would say yes. I think feeling things strongly, in general, is a mark of immaturity. There’s something distinctly adult I would say about being able to control your own emotions.

But perhaps I am also propagating a patriarchal notion of emotional capitalism as outlined in Cold Intimacies by Eva Illouz. Since I am a guy, this is something I probably overlook because a lot of what I consider to be masculine norms probably coincide with societal privileging of masculine identity. But, on the other hand, I take issue with this critique of masculinity because it assumes that the association between masculinity and coldness is a product of patriarchal indoctrination whereas I align more with the view that this is a bottom-up creation of society itself.

There is much literature on the fear of womanly passions in much of early modern British literature. When I was studying abroad, my professor in my Shakespeare class referenced Measure for Measure to highlight the contradictory nature of criticizing a woman of succumbing to her passions while simultaneously being coerced into sex through holding her family hostage. The fear of being cuckholded was the driving instinct in the plot of Othello. I would imagine there are far more examples if I wasn’t sleepy. But that was a popular norm to explain love at the time: a man’s coolness to tame a woman’s passion.

Given society’s tendency of privileging male identity, that eventually translates to the privileging of being “cold” regardless of whether that is actually representative of male identity or not.

My girlfriend once asked me how I would describe myself in one word, and I jokingly replied: cold. I don’ t think I’m a cold person, but I think there’s a lot about my past experiences that have conditioned me to be a cold person. I think, in general, there’s a lot about modernity itself that conditions everyone to be a cold person. It’s just a product of the internet age we live in, but I think the effect is especially pronounced in a culture that utilizes historical norms and also assumes that men are cold.

I don’t feel strongly anymore. I don’t identify with the thunderstorm anymore because I feel like I have fully moved on from that period in my life. But I think I have also moved on from that period in my life where I try to be a cold person. There is also something aesthetically wrong, to me, about wanting to be a cold person when feelings are one of the most distinct parts of being human.

There is something also about the thunderstorm that is reminiscent of external forces attempting to conquer the internal. No matter what is going on outside, I am in my bedroom, with my window cracked slightly open, so I am still aware of what is going outside without being affected by the forces of external influence. I have faith in the house that I am in, and I am acting in a way I feel true to this room I am occupying.

A typical response to the turbulence of late adolescence is the coldness of young adulthood. That notion, I feel, explains much of what romance is in the internet age. But, from where I stand now, it feels that true maturity is being able to reconcile both intense passion and cold indifference. Both are necessary, to a certain extent, as long as one is not completely privileged over the other.

quarantine thoughts

At this point in my life, I’m somewhat familiar with my thought patterns. Usually, my thought patterns aren’t that great. But, most of the time, I am able to distract myself enough so I don’t engage in these negative thought patterns. That’s what human nature is to me: a propensity towards negativity countered by the will for distraction.

Seeing as though I am confined to my apartment for most of these days, there is not that much that distracts me. As such, I delve back into the same negative thought patterns that have caused me so much pain over the years. The difference now is that I am aware of these patterns of thought, so I attempt to avoid them instead of indulging them.

But, sometimes, it is so easy to believe the things that my mind wants me to believe. It is the direction that my mind wants me to take, even if I don’t want my mind to go in that direction.

My ex once equated the feeling of boredom with the feeling of wanting to die. It was an interesting observation. At first, I thought that she was elaborating on Heidegger’s notion of existence as defined by an awareness of time. But, lately, I find that boredom stirs up something closer to human nature, which are cyclical thoughts of negativity. While what we considered colloquially to be “life” distracts us from these negative thoughts, the absence of “life” from boredom draws us back.

When we have a “life” we are able to escape ourselves and lose the ability to cultivate negativity. I tend to think of it as a glass of still water sitting out. If you are able to drink this glass on a regular basis, you needn’t worry about the build-up of pathogens and scum in the water. But, if you let it sit out, then the water cultivates bacteria or mosquitoes or whatever. It is not an evil force or anything like that. It is just the force of nature that discourages stillness.

I think a quarantine is an interesting concept precisely because it invites stillness. The quarantine is in place to freeze “life” as we know it in the pretext to protect public health. But, on a more individual note, quarantine is also an invitation towards stillness.

My last couple of weeks remind me of how I remember my winter and spring breaks: timeless. I wake up in the morning. I’m sure I’m somewhat productive one way or another. But, by the end of the day, I have little idea of what I accomplished. Without any sort of context like classes or plans, I have no idea what I have done in my day. Likewise, the ability to live without context is precisely what I consider to be a facet of boredom. Structure invites a sort of “life” that constitutes living in a contemporary capitalism-driven society, and the absence of structure composes an absence of “life”.

In most ways, I long for the structure that I never cherished when my life was driven by simple day-to-day goals. I could never understand artists and musicians who were able to live without this predictable structure. Without structure, I would have no reason to wake up. Without structure, the only way I could wake up is to force structure onto myself. When I wake up, I put on a pair of jeans and make my bed. I have no reason to put on clothes or make my bed because I am not leaving the house, but it is the structure that drives me through the day. Without this type of context, then my day falls into nothingness.

I return to the idea of human nature, at least, my nature, as a force of negativity restrained by social context. I refer to social in a societal context. Society — interaction with others — is the only force that is able to dispel the negativity afforded by individuality. Among others, it is a sort of ego death that liberates the death instinct. Otherwise, I am just at the mercy of nature.