New Again

I’ve begun running again. For most of high school, I used to run every evening after school around our subdivision. It would be totally silent, and mostly dark. There were streets that were pitch-black those were my favorite ones to run in. I could be sure there would be no one there (because no one was as insanely lacking of the instinct of self-preservation as I was), and running in the blackness made me feel like I was disappearing, too. I liked that feeling.

Noting the difference in my phases of depression / mania prior and post to that period of regular, strenuous physical activity, I’m fairly convinced that exercise is an extremely powerful mood regulator that is largely ignored by the psychiatric field. My own psychiatrist freely admits to this disregard of the psychiatry towards anything that isn’t psychoanalysis or pharmacological – anything that has to do with emotion or the body and its needs. Basically, all the psychiatric theories that had been carefully constructed for decades were thrown out with the rise of psychopharmacology in the 80’s. And that’s a terrible shame, because meds only work for so long.

Anyway, I abandoned running and the gym when I started college. That’s really when everything went to shit. I’m only realizing this now that I think about it.

I still don’t really like to run in the gym, on a treadmill. I love running at night, though. I’d forgotten how pleasurable it was – not at all something to slog through in the name of fitness. I lost track of time as I ran quietly around the empty streets. In the previous years, plenty of streetlights have been installed, and I no longer hear the evening symphony of the toads in the puddles of the empty lots, or the crickets in the trees. They’ve probably all been murdered by pesticides. And I’ve given up on ever spotting a firefly again – when just a few years ago, I once saw a whole swarm of fireflies in the highest treetops. It was such a lovely sight that sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it while I was lying on top of the water tower. (It, too, has since been fenced with barbed wire.)

So many things have changed. But the air was still fresh and cool, and it was still quiet enough for my thoughts. There was a full moon, and enough clouds in the sky to reflect its light – but not so many clouds that they blocked out all the stars. The trees, the houses, the grass and the streets were all silver.

“In the sky, the darkness surrounded the moon, and it seemed like at any second it would take over, and the moon would be no more. And yet its light shone on the ground. How could it be that the moonlight had no effect on the darkness around it? How did it reach the earth without leaving some silver trace? He felt his intelligence and curiosity quicken, and he knew he would eventually find the answer; and when he did, he would love moonlight. From understanding, to love, was not such a big step.”

– What Hearts, Bruce Brooks 

I want to take you here. I want to drive with you in my father’s (long gone) dark red pickup truck and find the darkest street with the clearest view of the stars. I’ll spread out a blanket in the back and we’ll lie there like the teenagers we no longer are. I want to make you feel young again; I want to hear your laugh, deep and rich and full of joy. I want to lay my head against your chest and listen to the beating of your heart. I want to run my fingers over and over in your hair. I want to bury my face in your familiar scent, in the hollow between your shoulder and your neck that I’ve fit into like it was molded for me. We are not new, you and I – we’ve been lost, found, kicked around. But I can make us feel new again.

On many of my solitary nights running around and around here, I used to wonder if I”d ever have anyone next to me. On some nights, I felt the loneliness so strongly, I felt convinced that no one would ever love me.

How wonderful to be wrong about that one thing.

 

You keep me up with your silence

You take me down with your quiet
Of all the weapons you fight with
Your silence is the most violent

– Tell Me How, Paramore 

* * * * * *

I used to think that people were so lucky to have friends to spend time with (because I hardly have any) but lately I’ve noticed that even for people with many friends, their relationships have become more and more fragile and fragmented. It’s so easy to cancel a date, so easy to keep messaging “Let’s get together sometime,” telling yourself that you’re doing your part to maintain the relationship, and just never actually show up.

I have no idea what we’re all supposed to do about this. I do know that this is very, very bad news for all of us, and probably the main contributor to anxiety and depression. Uncertainty = anxiety. When the world is telling you that your generation is a failure, when the job market is telling you that your hard-earned skills are useless, when advertising is shitting on your values and repackaging your most precious emotional experiences to sell you laundry powder, what truth and worth is left in life except the love and trust that we have in our relationships? And how are we supposed to feel when it turns out that we can’t trust each other to be there when we say we will? How many of us can honestly say that love exists in our relationships – even in the ones where it did exist before?

the fucking laundry powder

I’m tired of getting over it
And starting something new again
I’m getting sick of the beginnings

By the way – it should go without saying that I rely on my girlfriend for human company and that I’d be totally isolated without her.

I think this is why having a significant other has become virtually a necessity in our social landscape. It’s evident simply from the sheer number of articles discussing why you don’t need a significant other – why must you deny it if the pressure wasn’t so strong to begin with? – and if it affected you so, it must be something you feel internally, too. I’d even go so far as to say that the pressure to have a significant other is a personal desire that is projected onto others as an external, societal pressure, so that you don’t have to face the fact that it is something you desperately want. Nobody shames people for not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend – that just isn’t a thing that happens.

SO’s are a necessity now because the monogamous romantic relationship has become the only type of relationship wherein one person can be reasonably expected to reliably be there for the other; it is the only relationship wherein it is acceptable to demand to be a priority, to demand that the other keep his or her commitments and not make excuses. This is something that most people seem to have become uncomfortable in asking even from close friends and family members. There is the fear of being labeled “clingy,” the shame experienced in the perception of having fallen down the list of another person’s priorities, and the pride involved in the unwillingness to admit that you value their presence enough that your feelings were hurt by their absence – if it is apparent that they don’t feel the same about you, how could you admit to the way you feel?

I can’t call you a stranger
But I can’t call you
I know you think that I erased you
You forgot me but I can’t forget you
And I won’t replace you

There is this need to keep up the illusion that our own lives are filled with exciting experiences and opportunities. Our real relationships are sacrificed at the altar of the illusion. Why should you feel bad about someone failing to show up at your apartment for a quiet night in, when you could just as easily go over to four clubs in one night and meet a dozen hot strangers? Maybe: because you and your friend missed an important conversation about your problems, your fears, and your plans, and instead you wrecked your liver with shots, your lungs with cigarette smoke and your eardrums with a hundred decibels of awful DJ’ing; and you met a dozen strangers who will never mean anything to you, and that you will never see again apart from the next nights of irresponsibility and running away from the pain of disconnection (if that).

I feel like I may have asked too many rhetorical questions in the course of writing this.

I’m procrastinating about my paper right now. I know this is the only ticket to getting out of here. And even then it’s more like standby booking than sure seating. But still…

When I think about this disconnection, I think about you. It makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, and the things I’ve described are true even if I had never met you… but the truth is that I think about this because of you and the hope you gave me that things could be different. For a short while, they were. It was all the difference in the world.

And now you’re gone. Yes, you’re still around. But your face is like a bolted door. And you don’t smile anymore. How do you do that? How do you close yourself off so completely? How did you learn not to need anyone (except your girlfriend, I suppose – though I suspect you could get by without her just fine if you had to)? I want to know, because sometimes this pain is almost more than I can bear.

The truth is that need you in my life. And this is as absurd as any ridiculous crush I’ve ever had, even if I now only want you as a friend. Even more absurd – a crush people can understand, but to want a friend so desperately? How much of a loser can you be?

You don’t have to tell me
If you ever think of me
You don’t have to tell me, I can still believe

Snapshots from lives I could have lived

This site is dead now. I find it rather appropriate that it died around the same time that part of my life ended – the part I lived in these places and had the same musings about random pretty girls on the train or stumbling along the avenue with their friends on Friday nights.

* * * *

Loneliness (L. Barcia)

It’s not like you imagine yourself / in the arms of every stranger you pass on the street – Just the ones that smile at you

* * * *

Missed Connections Manila 

Pink shirt, office attire, shoulder-length hair, tired eyes – w4w – LRT

You boarded at Araneta station, and I only noticed you because you were looking straight at me. Can I just say I’m sorry? I know it’s rude to stare but I couldn’t help it. You were facing me directly and you were looking at me (straight at me, okay, it was pretty unnerving) and half the time you had your mouth open in this sardonic “oh, you sweet summer child” smile. Was it so obvious that it was my first time to ride the train at night? Whenever I made a joke with my friend you would smile too, as if you heard it, as if you understood the inside jokes half the time. Did I amuse you? Your eyes were so tired, but it seemed as if you knew exactly what was going through my mind. I was glad when we both got off at Katipunan and I didn’t see you in the crush of people (also because we wandered like lost sheep for a while). You unnerve me, woman, and I would like to talk to you. Just to see what you would say.

A Polite Desire

For most anyone else, it would be a bittersweet film about a relationship that couldn’t last but nevertheless made each person better for knowing the other.

For me, it’s about the impossible longing to go back to the moment where everything could have been changed. To correct the trajectory that was a fraction of a degree off course at the launching, a tiny mistake that became larger and larger and more irrevocable the farther we went.

“Here’s to hoping that our friendship can go where our love could not.” – A., 2015

I only found that note months after the last time I ever saw her.

The French Conditional Mood: The verb “aimer” is used to express a polite desire, sometimes one that cannot be fulfilled. 

J’aimerais que si j’avais été un peu plus âgés. J’aimerais que si j’avais plus patient. Si j’avais été mieux. Si, si, si… 

Not because I’m not happy now. But because I needlessly wasted so many good things before I got here.

Nothing but wordless images now –

an open window, a moment of panic, before I saw her perched on the ledge, smoking and listening to a sad song. a body against my back, fingers suddenly harsh and unfriendly on my throat. a low voice. peeling the backing off a fever cooling patch, patting it down on her hot forehead. being manic then, I didn’t need much sleep, so I would go into the kitchen and watch movies and eat cookies with milk while she slept on the mattress on the floor. we made so many plans and there was never enough time or money. a subdivision guard knocking on the steamed-up car window, looming in the darkness outside. a christmas party with all her closest friends, giving her a box full of our history, as well as I could document it. The musty room filled with musty objects, the four walls within which we had to contain our love. a lighted river, a moment of uncertainty. fingers on my cheeks, wiping away my tears. poems. poems and poems and poems, flitting back and forth between us like birds singing the sweetest notes.

I don’t think about the endings though, all the good reasons why, all the good reasons to forget. My mind doesn’t wander down there. I still don’t really know why.

The path I walk now, and the one who walks with me, is  just as sweet – and often sweeter, in its way – but the long journey here was so needlessly bitter

Deardevils

I. So today my girlfriend and I went on a date and we both almost died. Almost. We weren’t REALLY going to, but it was a possibility under the circumstances. I mean, “NOW WE HAVE TO MOVE REALLY FAST OR SOMEONE IS GOING TO HIT US!” and “DUCK!” aren’t things you typically have to tell someone during a nice date.

II. I told off an MMDA guy on a sketchy road. He thought I wouldn’t get out of the car, but I did. My mom told me to never to do that again. I think she thought I didn’t know it was dangerous. Fuck, of course I knew it was fucking dangerous. I wouldn’t be able to do a lot of the things I do if I wasn’t so big, because I move rather slowly. (The alternative to being big and strong, by the way, is to be small and fast, when it comes to escaping physical danger.)

III. Someone said that Duterte said that he said that the following conversation took place before the number 911 became Davao’s emergency number:

D: Henceforth, I want 911 to be the emergency number. 

Phone networks: But that’ll be expensive.

D: How expensive would it be for you if I blew up your cell towers?

Of course, he wasn’t really going to blow them up. Duterte’s not into terrorism. It’s an expression of how fucking INSANE it is to say that it’s an unnecessary expense to want to save people’s lives. This is the fucking result  when emergency cases aren’t routed to the best available medical facilities. All fucking right?

IV. I stopped listening to anything that anyone from Ateneo had to say after Bianca Reyes died and NO ONE, but NO ONE, from there had anything useful to say about it. Her [redacted] is headed down the same road. Does anyone care? Of course fucking not. Filipinos are only interested in mourning loudly for their dead, not in preventing people from dying.

V. Since I think American / Filipino marketing is stupid bullshit, this puts me decidedly at odds with some of my professors.

A few terms ago, I got into a pretty bad confrontation with a professor during a presentation. To the point where I began slouching against the wall in disdain and she had to tell me, “Stand up straight.” I thought I was doing a good job of keeping my cool, but later one of my friends in the class told me that it was a patently hostile exchange, and my rage was obvious to everyone in the room. I told myself I’d never let it happen again… which is why I didn’t go to class yesterday. Nothing like that has happened again yet, but I felt like it was a possibility, so I pre-empted it.

Once again, narcissist

I.

The main distinction between children and adults is that children have no ability to take care of others. If intelligence were the distinction, then prodigies would have to be classified as adults, and the cashier lady at school and Wilben Mayor would have to be classified as children.

This is because the ability to take care of others can only come after a person has learned how to take care of herself. This takes time and experience, and children just haven’t lived long enough to gather experience.

II.

Narcissists and borderlines are essentially children who never grew up. It’s officially recognized in psychology that children are narcissistic by nature. This basically means everything is about them, everything – including negative things. So it isn’t just the definition of narcissism that you’re used to, the one of the guy or girl who thinks they’re hot shit. If Mom is having a bad day and acting like a dick, a child will think it was his fault, because he can’t yet understand the truth that other people have lives of their own, with problems and feelings that have nothing to do with him.

Children are also “borderline” by nature – that is, they’re needy and dependent. So why isn’t narcissism and borderline behavior considered pathological in children? For the same reason that constantly shitting your pants is normal for a six-month-old baby, but not normal for a teenager: because some behaviors are developmentally appropriate only for certain ages.

That’s why it’s completely useless to insult the sadness and confusion of teenagers. You wouldn’t insult a baby for having dirty diapers because she literally can’t help it. It’s the same for teenagers, poor creatures. Making fun of their behavior without any helpful solutions is a waste of time.

So when I use “borderline” and “narcissist” I describe only the age group 21+. This is obviously an arbitrary age I’ve picked, because people mature at different rates according to their life experiences and when their hormones decide to calm down / their prefrontal cortex develops. I’m just assuming that 21, in general, is the age when most people start to become the person that they will be for the rest of their lives.

III.

Egotists and narcissists often look alike. An egotist is a real adult; a narcissist is a child standing on stilts. A push in the right place will knock her over. A narcissist is always afraid of this happening, and thus is constantly on the defensive.

IV.

Halsey: “Are you insane like me? Been in pain like me? Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?
Do the people whisper about you on the train, saying that you shouldn’t waste your pretty face like me?”

Hayley Williams: “There’s no one road. We should not be the same. But I’m just a ghost, and still they echo me. They echo me in circles.”

Only narcissists seek for others to copy them exactly, to validate their harmful behaviors. Egotists encourage others to adapt to their own personal situations – in other words, to learn to be happy with their own lives, whether or not that involves imitating some of the egotist’s own behaviors – because egotists know that what is right for them may not be right for others. This understanding is only possible when a person is capable of seeing outside of herself, outside of her own life, to perceive the needs of another person.

V.

I happened to cross paths the other day with someone who used to know [redacted]. I told him that I loved her, and that she had a boyfriend and I was glad for it. He was completely confused by this statement. He tried to insinuate that I’m just waiting for my chance to swoop in and claim her. (“You just have a big crush on her!”)

It’s impossible to explain to a complete narcissist what it’s like to have the inclination and ability to care for another person because they have no experience of doing that. The pathological narcissism of an adult-aged person is completely different from the natural narcissism of a child, because a child has no choice. A narcissist chooses not to learn to take care of others.

How could I explain to him that it’s possible for me to find someone attractive, and to not want to claim her as my own because I know that she’s happier with someone else? All he knows is “mine” / “not-mine”; and nothing that isn’t “mine” means anything to him.

HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR YOUNG GIRLFRIEND

This post is for older women dating or planning to date a young girl.

(By “older women” I mean usually around 25 or older, and by “young girl” I mean usually around 21 or younger – although it’s entirely possible for someone above 21 to still think and act immaturely and thus could be called an adolescent.)

The most sensible advice would be to not date an adolescent, of course, but this relationship dynamic is so captivating and exciting that I doubt you’d be able to help yourself if it happened to you. To mitigate the damage, I have some ideas.

edit: To be more specific, this post is for older women who are being pursued by younger girls. In other words, you’re attracted, but it’s her idea. If it was your idea, what’s wrong with you? Stop it. 

also, obviously there’s a natural filter for the type of girl that pursues older women. I can’t say exactly what kind of girl this would be, but definitely different and more intense than others her own age. 

I.

As a culture, we have some pretty hard-and-fast rules about what you should and shouldn’t do with adults and children. It’s mostly to do with precluding the possibility of abuse, because actions that are abusive for a child may not be abusive for an adult, and actions that are abusive for an adult may not be abusive for a child.

For example, if you lived with an adult and you told her that she is never to leave the house without your permission, that’s abuse. However, if you lived with a child and you told her that she can go out and stay out whenever she damn well pleases, including the middle of the night, that’s abuse.

The difference is that an adult knows how to take care of herself and should be allowed to do what she wants. A child does not know how to take care of herself, and thus needs to be controlled. “Don’t cut class. Eat your vegetables. Put that whiskey down.”

The trouble with adolescents is that they’re neither child nor adult, and it becomes hard to know what is and isn’t abuse. Should you let your adolescent girlfriend cut class to have sex with you? Should you force her to drink her meds when she doesn’t want to? Should you make her stop hanging out with those creeps that clearly just want to take advantage of her? For an adult to date an adolescent is much more difficult than for adults to date each other, or adolescents to date each other.

II.

The first step is to maybe not date an adolescent, which I already said and you haven’t stopped reading, so you probably want to know my advice. Fine. Okay. Let’s see. This is really hard.

Since you insist on dating an adolescent, the real first step now is to assess your own identity. Do you know what you can and can’t compromise about? Do you know the limits of how much you can allow this relationship to influence your life? Take stock of your current situation, especially concerning family and your professional life: is there a specific career track that you’re on? To what extent can you allow this relationship to derail your progress? If the answer is that there isn’t any room for deviation from your plans, see the other first step again: Don’t date an adolescent.

Why? Because to an adolescent, everything is immediate. They’re wired that way. Everything is new, everything has massive importance. Every slight needs to be addressed NOW. They’re like newborn babies who don’t understand that you have a big presentation on which rests your next promotion, and needs a nappy change / bottle / hug and burp NOW. Except what they need is emotional reassurance. They won’t do it on purpose to make you miserable, it’s the way they are.

To a newborn baby who hasn’t yet learned to go to the toilet or mix up some formula for itself, being left alone makes it feel like it’s going to DIE. An adolescent who hasn’t yet learned to give herself emotional reassurance (or hasn’t yet become so emotionally closed off as to never need reassurance) feels like she’s going to DIE if you don’t give her the reassurance she needs. There is absolutely no way to make a baby / adolescent understand that you not being able to meet their needs immediately doesn’t mean that you don’t love them. They’re literally incapable of understanding that even if you say the words to them over and over again.

“Hmm, Trinity, I don’t think all adolescents are as emotionally labile as you say.” True. But an adolescent madly in love with a sexy, older woman such as yourself is experiencing an upheaval of identity. It’s like a newborn baby being suddenly thrust into a completely new environment. New sights, new sounds, new smells – everything is unfamiliar now. (By sights and sounds and smells, of course I mean your wonderful trysts in bed together.) The baby / adolescent is going to need much more reassurance than normal.

III.

Okay, so you’ve assessed your identity and think it’s totally fine that you get fired from your position as the executive next in line to the head of your department, because she’s really just so smart and pretty and you’ve never met anyone like her. Fine. Suit yourself.

The second step is to assess the mental health of your adolescent girlfriend. Does she have a history of depression, mania, suicidal tendencies? Is she getting help for them? If everything’s going shipshape, keep watch for signs of mental disturbance. Just Google them, don’t make me spoon-feed you everything.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s hard to know what behavior you should and shouldn’t control when it comes to adolescents. Obviously it’s going to be different depending on your relationship dynamic, but caring for your adolescent girlfriend’s mental health is one aspect of her behavior where you should probably take control. If she’s been prescribed medication, make sure she takes it. If she says the meds suck, make sure the doctor reassesses the prescription. If she starts talking all the time about killing herself, force her to see a psychiatrist, and tell the other people who are close to her, even if she doesn’t want you to.

IV.

So now you know what to do: Be ready to endanger all other aspects of your life, and be ready to face terrifying mental health problems. And these are only the two most common – you may have a fun festival of other issues plaguing adult-adolescent relationships, such as social disapproval, alienation from your partner’s peers, disconnect of cultural tastes, unequal sex drive, etc., etc.

It almost definitely won’t last, but you’ll also almost definitely never forget this girl, and this girl will absolutely never forget you.

 

Pictured: you! Right before you lose everything.

How To Be Alone – Whether Or Not You’re Single (A Movie Review)

Quick preface – The Borderline vs. Narcissist (in terms of identity):

A borderline is a person whose identity is derived from the dominant personality in her life (usually a romantic partner). When this person says, “There’s no me without you,” she means it quite literally. Think Bella Swan, her derivative Anastasia, Halsey and Lana del Rey’s creative personas, and other intense, needy characters.

A narcissist is a person who derives her identity from outward indicators, such as appearance, public associations (“I’m friends with [celebrity],” “I’m from UST and I’ll cut you if you say anything negative about it,”), pop culture tastes (“Adele is the greatest singer ever and I’ll murder anyone who says differently!”), possessions and others’ perception of them (as opposed to innate abilities).

Now, on to the review.

How To Be Single revolves around a borderline named Alice (whose actress, interestingly, also portrays the very borderline Anastasia from 50 Shades), who decides that she’s had enough of being a borderline.

(Note: borderlines who’ve had enough of being borderlines often turn into narcissists.)

She leaves her boyfriend of 3 years, a narcissist who has this to say to her right before she goes: “Can’t you just fuck one of my friends?” and “I’ll miss your boobs.” Nothing about negotiating staying together on her terms, or asking what he could have done differently, or even a simple “I love you and I’ll miss you.”

(Note: Borderlines seek out narcissists to have relationships with, since they require someone else’s dominant personality to give them identity.)

Perhaps fearful of losing a safety net, she tells him vaguely, “This is not a breakup, it’s just a break. I need to know who I am.”

Perhaps partial nudity will help

Off she goes somewhere in the heart of NYC, the perfect breeding ground for narcissists / meeting place for borderlines and narcissists, and lands right in the lap of another narcissist: Robin, played by Rebel Wilson (whom I incidentally love as an actress, but that’s not relevant here).

The narcissist / borderline dynamic between them is thrown into sharp relief by the contrast to Alice’s relationship with her sister, a neurotic, baby-crazed workaholic who’s nevertheless not a narcissist. Despite being much closer to her sister than Robin, Alice does not turn into a neurotic, baby-crazed workaholic; instead she turns into a slut like Robin. Why? Because borderlines do not take on the identities of anyone else except narcissists. Non-narcissists (such as people with secure identities, and other borderlines) usually will not permit another person to derive their identity from them. Narcissists, on the other hand, enjoy and encourage borderlines to copy their identity.

Pictured: true friendship

What Alice really wants to do is to fuck a bunch of guys, but she can’t even articulate nor follow through that desire on her own. Robin provides the excuse: “Well, my friend made me come over here…” Alice makes several cringe-inducingly awkward passes at guys in bars and functions, before she eventually gets some emotionally closed-off dude to start dating her. He’s not a narcissist, though; he’s just silently traumatized from his wife’s death. Thus he isn’t dominant enough for her, and when he starts being all weird and closed off, she gives up on him right away.

One especially overt narcissist in the movie is a guy named Tom, whose narcissism isn’t the kind that makes him wish to dominate one woman, but to use many women. Therefore they can’t be in a relationship. They do have sex, though. Again, the desire is not expressed by Alice, but the excuse is provided indirectly by Robin.

Robin had informed her of an apparently iron rule that a girl can’t drink more than 11 drinks alone with a male friend without having sex with him. Naturally, they accidentally surpass the number, and Alice has no choice but to jump on his dick. (I think this one is literal, she jumped onto his dick right after discovering the 11th bottle.)

The turning point of the movie, supposedly when Alice finds redemption from her needy ways, is when she and Robin start yelling at each other at Alice’s birthday party where Robin invited all the men Alice had been fucking so they could confront each other and she could watch the fun. This is the face-off: Borderline Vs. Narcissist.

– Alice, (mocking Robin’s Aussie accent) complains that Robin pushed her into fucking a bunch of guys.

– Robin, who obviously can’t directly defend herself against this fact, obliquely counters that Alice falls all over guys; criticizing her for getting emotionally attached to the people she fucks, instead of immediately forgetting all their names like Robin does.

“Did we have sex? Even though I’m not gay and you’re clearly a doctor and thus would know better than to have sex with a tramp who most definitely has at least one incurable STD?”

Furthermore, Robin says triumphantly, “I know who the fuck I am.” Newsflash: Knowing who you are isn’t a step up from not knowing who you are if the identity you’ve chosen is a rotten one. At least a person whose identity hasn’t yet cemented into cankerous degradation can still choose to become somebody good.

After that, A. isolates herself from everyone, which necessitates building some odd machine to unzip her dresses by herself (because she’s proven herself throughout the movie to be incapable of unzipping her dresses with nothing but her own two hands). She also learns how to cook and hike, I think.

At the end of the movie, it’s unclear whether A. managed the transformation from borderline to narcissist. Certainly she did not become a person with a secure identity, who knows how to love and accept love, as the movie would like you to believe.

In the closing scene, she hikes up to the Grand Canyon, which she expressed at the start she’d always wanted to do. Her voiceover muses:

You should enjoy the time you get to be alone… because before you know it, it’s gone.

That’s the illogical sentiment of a narcissist who’s planning to dominate her next partner, or a borderline who’s planning to lose herself in her next partner. It isn’t the joy of a person who likes being single, nor the yearning of a person who wants to be in a loving relationship: That’s a person who’s torn between being fiercely alone and being swallowed up in a relationship.

If she wanted to hike the Grand Canyon, what was to stop her, in the beginning, from telling her bf: “I want to climb the Grand Canyon alone”? What was to stop her from doing all the things she wanted to do? She left him because she needed something to blame for her own unhappiness: Oh, it’s because I keep getting in relationships all the time… As if it’s completely impossible to develop yourself within any relationship, regardless of the other person’s willingness to give you time and space.

If you’re unable to love and be happy whether or not you’re in a relationship, the problem isn’t being single or not being single, the problem is you.

Reasons Why I Like Being a Lesbian

1. Most of the hard work of fighting for social acceptance already accomplished
2. Malena Morgan’s videos
3. Statistically speaking, am more likely to excel in traditionally masculine fields like hard sciences and business than straight women
4. Am freer of social expectations (I don’t give a shit what people think of me)
5. Less time spent on my looks means more time developing my skills
6. Much lower risk of STDs than straight people and gay men
7. I don’t suck at driving
8. I can easily dodge the advances of slimy dudes
9. I avoid most typical self-defeating behaviors of straight women like reducing oneself in a show of support for others, endless gossiping, catfighting over guys (though since most of my friends have been guys, there has been the errant jealous girlfriend or two).
10. No fear, ever, of being date-raped
11. Nothing to choke on when I’m giving head
12. Fingers are much more precise than d***s. Plus can add or remove for size adjustment
13. I have long fingers (only strong on one hand though)
14. Lesbians who aren’t insane can love better than any guy

Post-Scarcity Society, Housewifery and Wild Conjecturing (and some stuff about lingerie)

My dream in life is to become a housewife with at least 3 children, possibly 7. So I looked at the people around me and considered: Do people from this background become house-spouses with many children? No, they do not! They take up sinecure jobs at their parents’ companies and go out a lot. Who could want such a thing?

No, well, most people give an involuntary shudder when I reveal my not-so-secret dream of housewifery. Let me explain:

We live in a largely post-scarcity society. That means that productivity is no longer dependent on people’s ability to go to a physical workplace regularly, as it was for the past thousands of years. No matter the unemployment rate, you’ll never go to the grocery to find the shelves empty; you’ll never see car dealerships without plenty of shiny cars in the showroom. That’s because the work is still getting done. The food is still being grown. The cars are still being made. These are all done by machines.

We as a society have no idea how to handle this abundance. So we force people to still go to work, at jobs that could easily be done by a machine, so that we can pretend that they “earned” money they can use to buy things – because the idea of simply giving them that money or giving them the goods for free is so repulsive and alien a concept to us. So much so that we’d rather throw the food away and stockpile the cars than give them away to people who need them but don’t have money to pay for them.

Compared to previous societies, it’s actually much, much easier to be happy in this one. You can go online and find a partner who suits you in every way (if you’re patient enough). You can wear whatever you want, eat whatever you want. The city is full of terminals that are full of vehicles that will take you anywhere you want.

Technology has enabled us to have so much free time to ourselves, and what’d we do? Turned right around and filled it back up with more work – except now it’s useless work, done to pretend that we accomplished or produced something.

Previous generations worked hard, and it’s fair to say that a lot of us work just as hard, but we don’t get anywhere. It’s like if they were running madly across grassy plains to get somewhere better, and we’re running madly on a treadmill that goes nowhere.

If you’re wondering why you don’t want to go to work in the morning, or why you can’t seem to make yourself write that paper for school, that’s why. You think it’s pointless because it is pointless. But you have no idea about the alternative…

That’s something I’m still working on.

The most important ideas I have so far:

1. Limit expenses. Most people work at soul-crushing jobs because they need the money. Poor people need it to feed themselves; richer people usually need it to fulfill their identity (buy these clothes so people will know what your style is, go to this place so people will know you’re a fancy traveler, etc.). If you know how to budget – what purchases are absolutely essential and what you can forgo – you won’t need to sacrifice your soul for money quite as much.

2. Care for your body. You make decisions with your body, not your mind. You may get the idea with your mind to do something, but it’s your body that actually carries out the action. For example, you may think you love someone, but it’s your body that physically fulfills her needs – gets her things she wants, tells her how you feel, listens to her, has sex with her. You may think that you want to get over your ex, but if you keep stalking their Facebook and drunk-calling them or whatever, that’s the true decision you’ve made – to not get over them.

For any goal you have in mind, it is your body that carries out that goal. If you’re constantly weak and tired from keeping your body sedentary and forcing it to rebuild itself from nothing but garbage, expect to never reach your goal.

Going back to housewifery – with all that said, I see no reason to tie myself down to a job that I have to go to daily when I can perform most administrative tasks online and with occasional meetings. (I do plan to run several organizations, but mostly from home, hence the housewife thing.)

I also see not much reason to make my children go to a school where they’ll, more likely than not, stifle their creativity and inculcate destructive values. Unless I find a school that suits their needs, I’ll probably homeschool my children. And by homeschool I mean travel them all around the world and learn about things that way. They’d learn arithmetic from those adorable part-time kid jobs that some organizations have; learn history from people who were actually there; learn biology from safaris and raising plants and pets; learn about art from the Met and the Louvre… they’d scale mountains, write books, kayak down rivers… all before they’ve reached their teens.

And my wife? I’m going to be with someone who also as practical, efficient and adventurous as I plan to be, someone who also doesn’t waste time with busywork, and wants to enjoy life with me and our children.

Want to know what it’s going to be like to be married to me? It’s going to be meals made for you. It’s going to be notes and little gifts in your lunch. Flowers for no reason. Our house full of plants and animals and children and houseguests and friends coming by to chat, all things alive and breathing. Me in lingerie every night. Massages whenever you want them. Your checkbook balanced, your dry-cleaning picked up before you even ask. Sex in the morning before you leave for work. Trips away, just the two of us, whenever you want. All your friends asking how you got so lucky.

Well, that’s the plan if I don’t die alone.

More about post-scarcity and its implications for modern society at the Cracked Podcast.