Take heed of my mistakes and learn from them if you can with this guide on how to make sure the interest you earn in investment, banking, or using credit cards is not rooted in the war mongering or exploitation. This guide is for Americans, but it may help those in countries similarly set up (UK? Aus? Can?)

For Choosing a Bank Account:

Whatever money you put in your bank accounts is used by said bank account to invest and give out loans. Big banks invest in war, prison, and fossil fuels all the time while scamming customers and aiding, well, evil. (Wells Fargos 2016 corporate fraud, Chase’s wrongful denial of scam reimbursements, Bank of America’s collaboration with Epstein.) So what are the alternatives?

For Savings and Credit Cards:

For Investing:

Now here’s my story:

I whole heartedly believe in the idea of making an honest living. You do work that doesn’t hurt anybody, including yourself, meaning no gambling, no fraud, and no profession reliant on harm, meaning nothing from landlords to private equity liquidators. I thought I did a pretty good job of this, sans my job suddenly cheating clients by using shoddy AI, until I realized there was one tricky area threw myself into without understanding what or why: interest, or more archaically, usury.

Last month, I decided to invest my savings in ethical weapon free, green energy stocks and funds bolstering sustainable development in the Global South. Realizing for the first time that majority of investment was in the opposite direction, I considered every other aspect of my life where I was making, essentially, free money: the $30 a month from my HYSA, the credit card points I rack up for cashback, and, worst of all, my 401k that was apparently invested entirely in mega corporations, weapon manufacturers, and the prison industrial complex. Landing a job with a retirement plan at 22, I hadn’t think much of what it meant: I filled out the forms and forgot about it. And so I was transformed, without knowing, into the vampire parasite of the modern world, a shareholder.

My ignorance is no one’s fault but my own. Whatever I’ve given to refugee camps and war zones to offset the portion of my federal taxes given to the US military, I’ve overshadowed with supporting companies profiting from the same conflicts. Since I cannot transfer it while I’m working here, my most immediate solution was to take it out of stocks and into unrelated money market accounts, which again, I am somewhat ignorant of. I plan to donate the $2920.26 of interest accrued to the causes my investments profited from worsening once I have it, and in the meanwhile, more than I have. I feel immense guilt.

I cannot help but think about what other moral quandaries to deal with when it comes to interest. Whatever cashback I get on my credit card is from the money the companies make from leeching processing payment and those they trap into debt. Whatever money my bank and credit union pays back into me is from the interest on loans they give out. Yet, so long as people are in need of money, as we all often are, there should be some way to supply it and such supplying requires reason.

If Sumer and Mesopotamia conceded that lending a man a goat meant he could drink from its milk while you were allowed to keep its kids, why should we not find a moral way around it? Or else, in a world where housing and education is not provided by the governments that tax us to fill their own war coffers, should we leave these things to the rich who already have their bank accounts full the brim? How do we balance the practicality against predation?

I want to reject the world and it's values when it comes to money, root of all evil. I think humanity lost something when we stopped living day to day. Hierarchy started with the agricultural revolution, for then we had excess. But for now, so long as I live and participate in it, I want to know the ways I can do so without propagating harm. I reject wealth for wealth's sake, the miser, all forms of parasites, and hypocrisy making room for harm; I want to know how to live in this stupid, disgusting world in a way that hurts nobody and moves the pawns against the immensity of that evil.

I Wish I Could Be Water by Ahmed Shamlou

I wish I could be water

If one could be what they wanted to be.

Alas!

To be human

Is a dilemma bordering on impossibility,

Can’t you see!

Oh I wish I could be water— I say to myself—

Turning a young sapling into a fruitful tree

[So they chop it down with the whack of an ax to be burned?]

Or giving an everlasting bloom to the fragile seedling of a pine

[Before they turn it into a cross stained with the pointless

shedding of blood?]

Or feeling content in quenching one’s thirst

[even if they have brought them to their knees

In a square boiling over with the sun and the clamouring

Only to behead them?

Doesn’t it astound you

To become the Cain of your own brother

Or the executioner of dissidents?

Or to even think of a barely grown tree as lifeless firewood?]

I know,

I know,

I know,

Despite all this,

I wish I could be water

If I could be what I wanted to be.

Oh

I wish I were a drop of rain

Chaste,

Oblivious,

On a mountain ridge

And not a lost frail wave

In this cruel ocean of tussles

Nowadays, all I do is write, and this would not be a complaint were it not for the fact that the only subject matter is myself. Yes, I am done with the LSAT (177!) and relentlessly churning out law school essays. There’s two images that come to mind when I’m tapping one out.

The first is trite: I am a director piecing together my own biopic. I’ve picked out an actor that looks better than me (teeth a little whiter, shoulders a little broader, hair that swoops instead of frizzes) but undeniably similar. Think less of Zuckerburg’s deceitfully good-looking double in The Social Network, more Cillian Murphy’s kinder eyes and fuller lips as plain, old Oppenheimer. I direct this actor to do as I did once, things that are true but now elevated into melodrama, narrative, and triumph with his breathy sighs, his determined eyes that stay big and expressive behind fake glasses instead of shrewy behind thick, real ones. My words become set design, and I’ve got equally glamorous side characters to prop him up and really sell the whole thing. By the end of it, I’ve got something you can put on in the back while you cook dinner or scroll through emails and still come away with something to write in your Letterboxd about.

The second image is a bit abstract. When I was a child, one of the bedtime stories I heard was about a boy who put a puppet of himself in a carriage to draw out a dragon so he could slay it. The puppet was made of cloth and filled with rose syrup (Rooh Afza, my grandmother specified) so when it was attacked, it would look like it was bleeding. But despite the cloth and syrup and lack of bones, the puppet looked just like him. So, I imagine myself dancing with this rose-syrup cloth puppet doppelganger; I waltz for the both of us, spin him around, do a dip, and at every move I’m glancing over at the judges, the admissions committees, to see if they approve. Now they are all rose syrup cloth puppets too, but they move of their own accord, and they have their own reactions, mimicked and shadowy because they are not real, but their reactions all the same. I scrutinize their scrawled on features even as I step here, shimmy there, to see what they like.

All this directing, dancing, acting, show business stuff has me tired. In the process I’ve figured more about myself and my goals than I knew before. I recalled bits and pieces to actors I’d near forgotten myself, I dance around to songs I didn’t know I enjoyed, and I can see everything else I’d like to direct and choreograph – but now it’s down to editing the movie in Sony Vegas Pro and repeating what the judges want to see. I grow tired of it. There’s a dozen more thoughts buzzing around my head like flies that can’t get out because of the concentration of this task, and they’re getting in the way. Do I start my life all over again a second time? Do I give up or go through? Should I be a pragmatic liar or a foolish truthteller? How long will these questions distract me from the hikes I want to take, walks I long to walk?

Do you all know that episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender where they go to a library underneath the deserts sands with a scholar? They played it over and over again in Pakistan, more than any other episode, because for some reason they did not license the final season to play so they were stuck with reruns. Well, the library is ancient and beautiful, but the characters do something wrong and anger the owl spirit in charge, who attacks them and sinks his library back into the sand. The heroes try to rescue the scholar but he shakes his head, delighted to stay. I’ve forgotten his exact words, of course, but in the years since I made up a monologue that never happened:

“I don’t need to leave, everything I love and want is right here. All the lives I could lead, all the books I could read, all the answers to every question I ever had. There’s nothing out there that isn’t already in here!”

Something like that, and so he sinks with the library. I like to imagine he lived instead of immediately suffocated under the desert or died in a month of hunger or week of thirst. I like to imagine he was happy with himself, but then one day after several years he gets an itch like he wants to put everything into practice and see what there is that doesn’t get wrote down and he tries very, very hard but the library won’t see the sky for many more centuries, by which time he’d already be long dead. So he feels claustrophobic and sad. He starts to hate books and writes down everything he thinks would happen to him if he was up above, until this is all he does instead, hallucinating wildly at his table as he scrawls, and so he finishes tome after tome himself. The scholar lives this way and eventually dies this way, some part still itching, some part satisfied. I like to imagine the owl spirit – who has watched him, never speaking but maybe scoffing, and surreptitiously appeared for him water, manna, and salwa to sustain him – binds the pages and puts them away in a shelf for things-that-don’t-really-matter.

I was kind of scared of this episode when I was a kid. I knew then that I liked my mind better than the world, and almost as much, the minds of everyone who wrote a book, drew a comic, or made a game I loved. I felt like if I was the scholar, but the library was some place better than a dry repository of history, I would’ve done the same and I also would have regretted it the same. When I write these law school essays, I get that same uneasy feeling in my heart from spending too much time on them as I did thinking of being in that desert library. Very unnerving.

In other news: I am working on a better playlist page in fear of ever losing my Spotify as I did my 8tracks account. I’m trying to figure out how to set up a forum. I’m on my way to trying to learn pixel art. There’s many things I want to do right now: make a little webcomic about my law school application process to help others, fix up the Catcher in the Rye Wikipedia page (more than I already have, make an RPGmaker game (either the Big One, the Ottoman story with my partner, or the adaptation of ICE by Ana Kavan I always wanted), and do NanoWrimo 2.0 this year. Most of all I want to sit somewhere nice and quiet for an uninterrupted 12 hours drawing and writing and walking and napping and snacking. I think, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to do the Wikipedia editing.

International law arose not out of cooperation between nation states on equal grounds, but from the colonizer’s relationship to his non-sovereign subjects. The result pressured the organization of these non-sovereign subjects into nation states, and now a new hierarchy was required: that of international law. (How to Run an Empire (Lawfully); Public International Law, International Economic Law ; Ntina Tzouvala) Matua argues the term Third World is preferrable over the global south or developing nations for this reason, that it accurately captures the narratives characterizing these ‘worlds’ as oppositional without resorting to vague ideas of economy, hierarchy, and geography. For the sake of operating within his definition, I will use these terms as well.

Matua sets forth what makes scholarship TWAIL: it must be reconstructive, anti-hierarchical in nature, resistant to universalism that is often based in European tradition, counter-hegemonic, and seeking alliances in other scholarly communities.

#2: On TWAIL scholarship: Migration as Decolonization: Achiume

Achiume’s “Migration as Decolonization” posits that the breaking of colonial empires into sovereign nation states did not manage to disrupt power structures, leading us to the necolonial imperial formations we have today. She quotes Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism:

“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

Achiume argues that those from the first and third world are not political strangers, but bound by a co-sovereignty emerging from a globalized market, neocolonialism, and a colonial history that originally bound them. Being equals then, free movement becomes a type of self-determination, and therefore decolonial by allowing the subject to be on equal grounds with his oppressors.

This was how I understood it: The strong economic arms of international law often what drive movement from the third and sometimes second world to the first. Think of NAFTA immediately throwing a million Mexicans out of employment, driving up unemployment, and motivating dangerous journeys across the US border. *

Till now, the mainstream argues that the benefits of free trade (cheap goods, economic stimulation, higher wages for the big boys) outweigh the human costs of economic exploitation on an inter-national scale and the deaths incurred on the dangerous US-Mexico border journeys.*

Besides, undocumented labor makes for great business opportunities and adds money to tax coffers only citizens will benefit from. *

That’s why the economic refugee can’t exist, even though the circumstances that drive him out are the products of the current international, global market order. It would be an internal contradiction that may delegitimize the existing framework for political and war refugees. The Cuban Adjustment Act was a product of Cold War policy when dissidents were in legitimate danger. Today, that may still remain, but the US embargo on Cuba and its squeeze on the economic opportunity of Cuban people should be considered to play a role equal to the Cuban state that consistently favors tourists over citizens. Maybe that’s why Obama and Trump both chose to clamp down on it, and why it’s unwise to say the quiet part out loud in fear the political narrative will lose its force.

After all, the international community’s normalization of Taliban rule has, to an extent, made it harder for Afghans to immigrate and led to cruel mass deportations in Pakistan to a government now deemed acceptable to live under.

The political refugee persecuted for their beliefs is holier than the economic refugee driven by the sight of their family’s suffering, because the former may reify the norms of the host country while the latter only points out its evils. Meanwhile, Americans and West Europeans regularly and comfortably retreat to Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam and so on as second homes where their dollar goes further – their economic movement mirroring colonial interest.

Achiume is stating, under this context:

“What is widely condemned and reviled as unauthorized economic migration when undertaken by Third World migrants should instead be understood as radical political action of Third World persons seeking to formalize their status as co-sovereigns of the First World through citizenship. This Article thus frames decolonial migration as a high form of political agency, which is in part about realizing (in the “making real” sense) and fulfilling individual autonomy—and doing so through decisions about how one relates to the political communities or collective self-determination vehicles on which individual self-determination rests.”

The article is well argued and its logic consistent. My only concern comes not from the legal aspect, but from the broader context: Is there a free choice being made when someone from the Third World decides to pursue a life in the First one they are a political subject of?

Could one not argue that the factors that may push one to make that decision, economic or political, surely emerge from a state of affairs that the First world and imperialism at large is historically and currently responsible for? How many migrants today think of their countries of origin with affection, “if only things had been different…?” Can movement spurred by colonial powers be truly decolonial, or merely a stopgap solution in the time being?

Achiume addresses these concerns under different lenses. In the first, she clarifies that since neocolonialism has defanged the anticolonial movement that underpinned the independence of the third world, decolonization may be a path that an individual undertakes as a means of finding alternatives.

“For many Third World peoples, their nation-states have failed to deliver on the promises that animated anticolonial movements. Neocolonialism has been a significant factor in their continued suffering, and Third World elites, including and especially government officials, have secured their own interests while pursuing social and economic policies that have benefitted foreign powers at the expense of most Third World citizens. For Third World persons whose capacity to self-determine is diminished by neocolonialism, I propose that the closest they can get to what decolonization promises (selfdetermination) may entail something quite different than what is asserted by conventional international law accounts, if one takes as given the continuity and resilience of neocolonialism. Once the enduring colonial legacy of global economic and political interdependence is brought to the fore, political equality for Third World persons may be more fruitfully pursued by seeking politically and economically equitable relations within what so far remains a relationship of enduring subordination. In other words, for some in the Third World, decolonization as a strategy for self-determination is more realistically pursued as reformation, rather than severance, of the relationship of dependence.”

“Additionally, not all Third World persons are equally eligible to make valid affirmative claims of migration as decolonization. Not all movement by Third World persons to the First World is the sort of economic migration that must underlie or characterize decolonial migration: responsiveness to neocolonial subordination and diminished sovereignty. Consequently, Third World political and economic elites may not have claims to decolonial migration entitlements notwithstanding their membership within the neocolonial empire and their national designation to the Third World.”

“Not all, or even most, Third World persons view international migration as the path to their vision of a better life, and the vast majority have strong territorial connections to the parts of the Third World in which they reside.241 The fact is, notwithstanding popular misconceptions in the West, most Third World citizens—even those who reside in politically and economically subordinate nation-states—have no interest in permanently relocating to the First World.242 Furthermore, scholars of Third World migration to the First World have proffered empirical support for the claim that restrictive immigration policy actually discourages the return of Third World migrants to their countries of origin, suggesting that fewer restrictions might result in more circular migration patterns as opposed to an increase in permanent or long-term migration.”

My only concern is that, if this Article “proposes a novel and radical break from prevailing theories and doctrine in the international law of migration,then the theory and logic that belies it, no matter how sound, is not one that international law of migration will be receptive to. To accept the tenets of Achiume’s argument, the conservative field of international law of migration would have to also accept the uneven ground of the Third World relative to the First World is a product of neocolonialism, and if such a baseline were accepted, then equitable economic restructuring and reparations would be a stronger priority. And if that were the case, how much would people feel pressured to move from their homelands in the first place?

The World Cup and Its Pomps, Umberto Eco

Many malignant readers, seeing how I discuss here the noble sport of soccer with detachment, irritation, and (oh, all right) malevolence, will harbor the vulgar suspicion that I don’t love soccer because soccer has never loved me, for from my earliest childhood I belonged to that category of infants or adolescents who, the moment they kick the ball — assuming that they manage to kick it - promptly send it into their own goal or, at best, pass it to the opponent, unless with stubborn tenacity they send it off the field, beyond hedges and fences, to become lost in a basement or a stream or to plunge among the flavors of the ice—cream cart. And so his playmates reject him and banish him from the happiest of competitive events. And no suspicion will ever be more patently true.

I will say more. In an attempt to feel like the others (just as a terrified young homosexual may obstinately repeat to himself that he "has" to like girls), I often begged my father, a sober but loyal fan, to take me with him to the game. And one day, as I was observing with detachment the senseless movements down there on the field, I felt how the high noonday sun seemed to enfold men and things in a chilling light, and how before my eyes a cosmic, meaningless performance was proceeding. Later, on reading Ottiero Ottieri, I would discover that this is the sense of the “everyday unreality,” but at that time I was thirteen and I translated the experience in my own way; for the first time I doubted the existence of God and decided that the world was a pointless fiction.

Frightened, as soon as I had left the stadium, I went to confession to a wise Capuchin, who told me that I certainly had an odd idea, because reliable people like Dante, Newton. Manzoni, T.S. Eliot, and Pat Boone had believed in God without the slightest difficulty. Bewildered by this consensus, I postponed my religious crisis for about another decade — but I have been telling all this to indicate how, as far back as I can remember, soccer for me has been linked with the absence of purpose and the vanity of all things, and with the fact that the Supreme Being may be (or may not be) simply a hole. And perhaps for this reason I (alone, I think, among living creatures) have always associated the game of soccer with negative philosophies.

This having been said, the question could arise as to why I, of all people, should now discuss the World Cup. The answer is soon given: The editors of L’Esspresso, in an excess of metaphysical vertigo, insist that the event be discussed from an absolutely alien point of view. And so they have turned to me. They couldn’t have made a better or shrewder choice.

Now, however, I must say that I am not against the passion for soccer. On the contrary, I approve of it and consider it providendal. Those crowds of fans, cut down by heart attacks in the grandstands, those referees who pay for a Sunday of fame by personal exposure to grievous bodily harm, those excursionists who climb, bloodstained, from the buses, wounded by shattered glass from windows smashed by stones, those celebrating young men who speed drunkenly through the streets in the evening, their banner poking from the overloaded Fiat Cinquecento, until they crash into a juggernaut truck, those athletes physically mined by piercing sexual abstinences, those families financially destroyed after succumbing to insane scalpers, those enthusiasts whose cannon-crackers explode and blind them: They fill my heart with joy. I am in favor of soccer passion as I am in favor of drag racing, of competition between motorcycles on the edge of a cliff, and of wild parachute jumping, mystical mountain climbing, crossing oceans in rubber dinghies, Russian roulette, and the use of narcotics. Races improve the race, and all these games lead fortunately to the death of the best, allowing mankind to continue its existence serenely with normal protagonists, of average achievement. In a certain sense I could agree with the Futurists that war is the only hygiene of the world, except for one little correction: It would be, if only volunteers were allowed to wage it. Unfortunately war also involves the reluctant, and therefore it is morally inferior to spectator sports.

For I am speaking of spectator sports, mind you, not of sport. Sport, in the sense of a situation in which one person, with no financial incentive, and employing his own body directly, performs physical exercises in which he exerts his muscles, causes his blood to circulate and his lungs to work to their fullest capacity: Sport, as I was saying, is something very beautiful, at least as beautiful as sex, philosophical reflection, and pitching pennies.

But soccer has nothing to do with sport in this sense. Not for the players, who are professionals subjected to tensions not unlike those of an assembly-line worker (except for questionable differences in pay), not for the spectators — the majority, that is — who, in fact, behave like hordes of sex maniacs regularly going to see (not once in their lifetime in Amsterdam but every Sunday, and instead of) couples making love, or pretending to (something like the very poor children of my childhood, who were promised they would be taken to watch the rich eating ice cream).

Now that I have posited these premises, it is clear why these weeks I have been feeling very relaxed. Rendered neurotic, like everyone else, by recent tragic events during a three month period* when we had to devour newspapers and stay glued to the TV, awaiting the latest message from the Red Brigades, or the promise of a new escalation of terror, I can now skip reading the papers, avoid TV, at most looking on page eight for news of the Turin trial, the Lockheed scandal, the referendum. For the rest, the papers and the TV talk about the thing I want to hear nothing about — and the terrorists, who have a keen sense of the mass media, know this very well and don't attempt anything interesting, because they'd end up in the local news or on the food page.

There's no need to ask ourselves why the World Cup has so morbidly polarized the attention of the public and the devotion of the mass media: From the famous story of how a comedy by Terence played to an empty house because there was a trained bear show elsewhere, and the acute observation of Roman emperors about the usefulness of circenses, to the shrewd use that dictatorships (including the Argentinian) have always made of great competitive events, it is so clear, so evident that the majority prefers soccer or bicycle racing to abortion, that it isn't even worth reflecting about. But since external pressure impels me to reflect, I might as well say that public opinion, especially in Italy, has never needed a nice international championship more than it does now.

In fact, as I have remarked in the preceding essay, sports debate (I mean the sports shows, the talk about it, the talk about the journalists who talk about it) is the easiest substitute for political debate. Instead of judging the job done by the minister of finance (for which you have to know about economics, among other things), you discuss the job done by the coach; instead of criticising the record of Parliament you criticise the record of the athletes; instead of asking (difficult and obscure questions) if such-and-such a minister signed some shady agreements with such-and-such a'foreign power, you ask if the final or decisive game will be decided by chance, by athletic prowess, or by diplomatic alchemy. Talk about soccer requires, to be sure, a more than vague expertise, but, all in all, it is limited, well-focused; it allows you to take positions, express opinions, suggest solutions, without exposing yourself to arrest, to loyalty oaths, or, in any case, to suspicion. It doesn’t oblige you to intervene personally, because you are talking about something played beyond the area of the speakers power. In short, it allows you to play at the direction of the government without all the sufferings, the duties, the imponderables of political debate. For the male adult it’s like little girls playing ladies: a pedagogical game, which teaches you how to occupy your proper place.

And at a moment like this, concentrating oneself with the running of the government (the real one) is traumatic. So faced with such a choice, we are all Argentines, and that handful of Argentine nuisances who are still reminding us that, down there, people are “disappeared” from time to time, should be more careful not to mar our pleasure in this sacred mystery play. We listened to them before, and quite politely, so now what do they want? In other words, this World Cup has arrived like Santa Claus. Finally some news that has nothing to do with the Red Brigades.

But while we're on that subject: The reader who is not completely distracted knows that there are two theses in circulation (naturally I consider only the extreme hypotheses, but reality is always a bit more complicated). According to the first thesis, the Brigades are a group obscurely maneuvered by some Power, perhaps foreign. According to the second, they are “misled comra"es," who behave execrably but, all things considered, for noble motives (a better world). Now if the first thesis is correct, Red Brigades and organisers of World Cups belong to the same articulation of power: The former destabilise at the right moment, the latter restabilize at the right moment. The public is asked to follow Italy-Argentina as if it were Curcio-Andreotti and, if possible, to place bets on the number of kneecaps involved in the next outburst of violence. If, on the contrary, the second thesis is correct, the Red Brigades are comrades who are really very misled indeed — because they insist so readily on assassinating political figures and blowing up assembly lines, but that, alas, is not where power is. It is in society’s capacity for redistributing tension, immediately afterwards, on other poles, far closer to the soul of the crowds. Is the armed struggle possible on World Cup Sunday? Perhaps it would be best to engage in fewer political discussions and in more circenses sociology. Is it possible to have a revolution on a football Sunday?

1978

*Written in 1978, the year of the kidnapping and eventual killing of former. Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigade terrorists.

I was diagnosed with C-PTSD in 2024 and I've been reading more about it. I find that understanding something can help to an extent, but the hardest part is when you're in the midst of a terrible feeling and you have to wonder - how much of this is attributable to my circumstances rather than my mind? I see a psychiatrist on Tuesday to figure things out... Hopefully some solution will come. The paranoia is the absolute worst.

I'm going to set up a microblog soon for all these smaller updates in the time to come. But I am FAR too exhausted to do so currently. My last post was supposed to be a massive essay on Roger Shattuck's "Forbidden Knowledge: Pornography to Prometheus," but I had to give it up and now the fire has died down. As much as I love Neocities and the customizability of a site, I can't help but miss the social aspect of the older internet that was without all the algorithims, rage, and bullshit. I miss making groups on DeviantArt and exchanging comments with people who liked the same things. I miss making friends on Tumblr and whatever. I miss big discord groups where I hung out with people I'd known from little increments of reading about their daily lives. I guess I also miss how each post - mine or someone else's - was an opportunity to take interest in the mundanities of someone else's life, and so very fun.

I think the common factor around all of them was a common passion we all shared, and I fear now there's none of that in my life. As much as I love literature, it's hard to form a community around it becuase of the lack of overlap. And other hobbies like painting and writing get hardly any attention from me. It feels as though balancing basic needs - studying, working, eating, exercising, and recovering from all of those - takes all the time a passion needs to be fostered and paid attention to. The more I grow up, the more I ask myself: Is this really it? There's a lot more depressing questions I've been nurturing lately, and this is the one that feels safest to confess. Is this really it?!?!?

Loneliness... It's been three years since I came to the States, and I got my first job right away going 60 hours a week until 2025. To this day, I don't have any friends in person outside of my job, and job friendships are, by nature, tenuous; I recently watched Clockwatchers (1997) and I've never seen anything sum that up so well. I think the hardest part is how at odds I feel with being American all of a sudden. You know, if there's one thing I've noticed about Americans, it's that they like movies so much it's as if they live in them. Sometimes when you talk to someone, you can tell right away what kind of movie they think they're in and that's what you have to act by to get a role in speaking to them. There's such wide social isolation it often feels like people need to connect through these sorts of things, identifiers, becuse they have nothing else to claim kinship or the right to speak to another person with. I think another part of it is just the culture of Miami-Dade, especially towards the South.

I think I'm going to go journal or make a collage or paint now. Enough complaining and now moving onto doing. Or maybe I'll fall asleep as soon as I hit my futon (Our apartment situation is so complicated and messy right now, damn these Miami rents.)

Question to leave you with: What do you think happens when we die, and how does that make you feel? I've been torn about this. I don't know why death is on my mind so much. Ciao.

"… I had [a] boyfriend. He was an artist. We also wanted to get married. Everything was fine until this one thing happened. I came into his studio and heard him yelling into the phone: "You're lucky! You have no idea how lucky you are!" He's usually so calm, even phlegmatic, not a single exclamation point in his speech. And then this! So what is it?

Turns out his friend lives in a student dormitory and he looked into the next room and there's a girl hanging there. She strung herself up with some panty hose. He takes her down. And my boyfriend was just beside himself shivering: "You have no idea what he's seen! What he's just been through! He carried her in his arms - he touched her face. She had white foam on her lips. Maybe if we hurry we can make it." he didn’t mention the dead girl, and didn't feel sorry for her for a second. He just wanted to see it and remember it so he could draw it later on.

And I started remembering how he used to ask me what color the fire at the station was, and whether I'd seen the cats and dogs that had been shot, were they lying on the street/ were people crying? Did I see how they died? After that… I couldn't be with him anymore. I couldn't answer him…

[After a pause] I don't know if I'd want to meet with you again. I think you look at me the same way he did. Just observing me and remembering. Like there's an experiment going on. I can't rid myself of that feeling. I'll never rid myself of it."

But I remember the first time I had to recite something in there, written from a real memory, how the room went quiet and everyone looked at me with this disgusting pity mixed with awe, a reaction they didn't grant anybody else. I do not doubt the people in that room had lived their own pains, but standing out as the minority I in all immediate identifiers, I felt uncomfortable as if what I had just articulated to them was some exotic misery they delighted to partake in firsthand. I felt dirty.

The next session the topic veered to inspiration, and the workshop leader spoke with such a greed in her eyes, something about how 'exciting' it is to meet tragic people with tragic stories, how her mind mentally catalogues them for writing, how she hopes she doesn't scare them off, and I really did feel like vomiting.

A little later I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay, Fact And/Or/Plus Fiction, informing me this was a catalogued phenomenon:

"…Writing workshops and programs all over the country now offer courses in “creative nonfiction.” The arts of scientific, historical, and biographical narrative are rarely if ever taught in such programs (or anywhere else). Autobiography, however, has been increasingly popular in the writing programs. It may be taught as journal writing or as therapy through self expression. When it has more literary goals, it is called creative nonfiction, personal essay, and memoir.

The writer of a memoir, like the responsible biographer, ethnographer, or journalist, used to describe what other people did and said, leaving what they may have felt and thought as implications to be drawn by the reader or as authorial speculation identified as such. The autobiographer limited her account to her own memory of how her uncle Fred looked as he ate the grommet, what she heard him say when he’d swallowed it, and what she thought about it. The only sensations and emotions she described were her own.

According to those who defend the use of fictional devices and elements in nonfiction, the memoirist is justified in telling us how, as he swallowed it, Fred vividly recalled the slightly oily taste of the first grommet he ever ate, fifty years ago in Indiana, and how bittersweet the memory was to him.

Many writers and readers of creative nonfiction hold that such ascription of inward thought or feeling, if it’s based on a knowledge of Fred’s character, is legitimate. It does no harm to Fred (who died in 1980 of a surfeit of grommets), and no harm to the reader, who after all will almost certainly know Fred only in and through the story, just as if he were a character in a novel.

But who is to certify the writer’s knowledge of her uncle’s character as accurate, unbiased, reliable? Possibly her aunt, but we’re not likely to have the chance to consult her aunt. The memoirist’s responsibility seems to me to be exactly that of the ethnographer: not to pretend to objectivity, but also not to pretend to be able to speak for anybody but oneself. To assign oneself the power to tell us what another person thought or felt is, to my mind, cooptation of a voice: an act of extreme disrespect. The reader who accepts the tactic colludes in the disrespect."

"…The notion that fictional characters are all portraits of actual people probably arises from natural vanity and paranoia, and is encouraged by the power fantasies of some fiction writers (you’re nothing to me but copy)."

To bring the point back to my job, well, it's exactly this relationship that causes me to fear even articulating to myself the painful parts of it. Every day I read these things and have to draft those facts in first person, then in third. I remember one of the first things my team lead taught me was: "Put yourself in the client's head." Now I feel stuck there even when I don't want to be. I feel like for some time, I went home with them all in my head, or my head back in the word documents.

I have people whose horrible recollections come back to me with every psychogeographical anchor (the beach, Arby's, Wendy's, the city an hour's drive from here). When I'm about to have sex, I have to be wary to banish the voice going 'Don't think about rape, don't think about sexual torture, don't think about how so and so happened to so and so in that document last week.' I don't want to even admit to myself at times that what I may read stays with me. I've tried lots of things: writing a few words about my feelings and ripping them up, saying prayers, taking a walk after every case, and none of these ritualizations really work. I don’t know what the solution to that really is.

I really want nothing more but to respect my clients, and to even acknowledge that what they share stays with me feels like I'm betraying them. So many of them, I stare at their pictures and wish I could meet them and tell them something inane like "You're so strong," inane even though I would mean it when I say it. So old a sentiment in response to pain, I only hear Cassandra's response to it each time I say it: "Only the unfortunate hear such praise."

I think I consider myself quite comfortable admitting all the miseries of the world, and perhaps that's what makes me good at my job. The other day I won my third core value award in a row at our quarterly company wide meeting. I've got three little mugs in a row on my desk, and three floppy certificates in a folder at home now. It's nice to be appreciated. It's nice to think this depressing disposition may aid itself to something good. It's nice to think my moral qualms about even my own thoughts may manifest themselves positively.

I've had to rewrite entire papers because of coworkers that have a reflex to paper over the horrible stuff or discuss it with the same casual attitude you'd describe a bad meal at a restaurant. Do they even know there's people on the other side of this!? Of course, my coworkers are not all like that though. I had one once who told me about how his mom once stood across a "real, honest to god, pedophile" in a court room once during jury duty. That someone just two years younger than me really made some mythic monster out of so common an evil left me a little aghast. I answered him honestly, "Well, they're not that uncommon. You've probably come across more than you know, given how common it is." And he looked at me as if I'd just told him that for the sake of shocking him, dismissing, or even teasing him.

But is it normal, I asked my husband tearfully the other day, to just spend all your time thinking about how down-to-the-bone evil this world is? That everything you touch, everything you see, every person you pass by was most likely touched by that evil? When I say evil I mean violence, not disaster or grief or generic suffering, but violence. It feels like every brick in this world was built with violence and set with malice. This world disgusts me. I feel now like I can't even say what I wanted to say when I set out to write this, because here I am once more caught in the muck of having to bear this disrespectful witness.

I wonder if this is good for me in the long run. I wonder how much more I can handle. I wonder how I can turn off my brain. I wonder how much this is affecting my psyche. I wonder if every story I've heard recollected will stay with me. I wonder how everybody else here copes with it? I wonder if it's OK to ask, or just weird. I wonder.

At night, I recited a message to every year of me before and thanked them all. I rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with my love. I opened the most lovely present, an ink pen that I hope will be my companian for a long long time. I talked to my brother who called right at midnight despite our timezones. I spent the day sleeping, went out for dimsum with my beloved, to pet the cats in the forest at the park near my home while we narrated our games and stories to one another, then out for a few rounds of Overwatch before we end our subscription at the gaming cafe we play at and never do again.

I have many questions in my heart that I hope to answer to myself through this year. I have many wishes that I will strive to fulfill. I have a need to life by my principles, and find out what that means to me. I have a compulsion to speak and make that has finally stirred after lying dormant for three years now in the blur of daily survival. I hope to never lose it again.

And a happy Eid, Nowruz, and spring equinox as well.

September was vivid, slow, and a flurry of change. Work was good, I studied a lot, and I finally got the clear from my doctor that the health issues I've been dealing with are (hopefully) FIXED! The final crown of this journey was moving out with my fiance from his mom's house - we've still got boxes all over, but it feels like the days have gotten longer ever since. To come back to a quiet home, cook and eat in peace, clean at your leisure, keep clutter out of the way, to go out without questions and come home whenever you feel like it.. These are luxuries I had a hard time imagining. I have never judged myself at the pace of other 20-somethings, because all my life I scarcely dares to hope for something like this.

It's going to be a slow process making this neocities, but my goals for it are,

making a longer entry blog so i don't have to resort to tumblr (bc that website is pissing me off lately)

review books and films i read on here

share my art, writing, and projects eventually