"What's an operating system?" Whether they were being serious, I could never tell, but the question always hung over me like death's bell. And although camp is now disbanded and dead, still rings in a disused hall in my head the words penned on whiteboard in striking red: while all other girls were so much praise shot about their skills, their quests, their help, only written for me: "I guess she smiles a lot." And when I complained that I had put in more effort but barely anything received, Mom marched me to apologize even though in my eyes I had committed no crime. Just be happy with what you've got, with the crumbs we've thrown your way; never demand the more you're due, just smile and bear the pain. Just smile and bear the pain of being a prototype, forging the way to brothers to be done right, to be done at all, listened to, heard, given right to complain, and you yourself cast aside to either be shown up or prepared to die. I've failed the test on three separate times, so I know for sure I can't legally drive. If I need to get somewhere, either I catch a ride, call a bus, or gather my breath and bike. But you're driving me to death. You're running me raw. Soon, I think, there'll be nothing at all. Will you love me then, Mother, with Cheshire smile? A lot of what's praised and naught else remains.]]>
March is Women's History Month. Time to sit down and reflect on all the shit my ancestors went through so that I could be here today, collapsed in bed, distressed, wracked with anxiety, in desperate need to be exhumed from this disintegrating body. I'm forgetting my own herstory. Past entries in my journals are becoming letters from foreign countries, the other timelines where I am well, doing well, not at the bottom of a well. The other timelines where I am making things of worldwide importance, where on my childhood detractors I've gotten revenge. Not wishing I was a bird like those outside that now return in preparation for spring. It could have been so much worse. Straitjacket, locked up, never heard from again. Maybe lobotomized. How many geniuses have met their demise at the hands of a crude scalpel, I wonder? And I, here, how could I in this day or now convince the padded-wall jailers that the other soul that resides in me means well? "She has dominion over every part of me, but *noli timere*: I have no desire to harm my family." Who would lis- ten, not lock me up for ten days, weeks, months, years until I renounced this world within me so dear? Tell me, can you hear the screams from behind tied- on masks plastered with smiles for the crime of omitting domestic servitude from one's dreams? Can you feel on your hands the blood spilled from God's unwanted "blessing" that might instead kill when it comes to term, woman coming to terms that the Son who bled with promise to save won't give her better than wires with which to lacerate? Can you see how bright is the future we might have had if every woman brilliance was not snubbed out at every chance? The sheer weight is enough to make anyone go insane. I'm forgetting my own herstory. It seems some days that things have forever been this way, each day bleeding into the next, record on repeat. The slightest bit of thawing heat feels like a bitter attack: how dare I be reminded that this isn't all I've ever had. How dare anything have the audacity to remind that one day I won't anymore be able to hide. There will come a day when the sky breaks and lets in cleansing sunshine. And I'll have to look my mother in the face. And I'll have to tell her that when I die I'm going to a completely different place than Heaven or Hell. I'm going to remember the hell that the men of all history have inflicted and make a new world where to be what I am is not a sin, not gravely iniquitous. And she'll have to confer with Father and decide if what I've done is grave enough to warrant the psych ward's involuntary hold. This is my birthright as a female, isn't it? The padded room's blistering cold.]]>
There's a woman that I love, that I miss very much whenever she's not around. Spanish is her first language, although we've never had a chance to attempt an actual conversation in it. Written language in my dreams feels like I've developed her dyslexia as the letters dance around on the page and shift into other words and sentences and never stay still. And I was never very good at speaking in any language other than my own, and even then, unpolished artifacts from my elementary school years spent in speech therapy still remain. And she's fluent enough anyways, so until the time comes for me to leave this world and finally settle down with her in Sablade forever, we're stuck with talking and maybe tracing words on each other's skin.
Extrañar is, to my surprise, related to the adjective extraño, meaning "strange". This doesn't mean my love is strange or unusual- for fuck's sake, don't call me "queer"- but that both are ultimately derived from the Latin term extra, meaning "foreign" or "outside". And if I miss someone, they're certainly outside of where I want them to be... which is usually somewhere in my presence, if not at my side.
Una breve visión de un patio en un campus universitario. Está nevando. Los cielos están cubiertos. Hay una estatua rodeada de flores que florecen en el invierno.
Hay una mujer de cabello oscuro cerca de la estatua. Le duele la garganta, como las flores están creciendo allí también. Ella teme, si ella llora, las lágrimas se congelarán en sus ojos.
"...Te extraño."
Ocupar comes from the Latin terms ob, meaning "toward, and capere, "to capture". Ocupar as a verb has many other meanings other than "to take care of" which involve occupying something, including "to take up space", "to spend time", "to take a seat", and "to fill a vacancy". If one puts a pre in front of ocuparse, it becomes "to worry about", as if one's mind had been... occupied by invasive thoughts. Funny how language works!
Approximately once a month, my college puts on a Grocery Bingo. There are twenty numbered bags (which I help organize college-bought groceries into as part of my job), and the first twenty people to get bingos win a bag. Each student can only win once per month. There used to be a rule where students who had won could keep playing to potentially win a bag for one of their friends, but the rule got nuked after last month where a group of approximately thirty nursing students who all looked like literal clones of each other swarmed the place with multiple devices per student and took all the bags for themselves. I am also trying to convince my supervisor to move the Grocery Bingo days to Thursdays instead of Wednesdays because Wednesdays are when the nursing students descend on the campus commons like a swarm of locusts and Thursdays campus is usually near-empty... wish me luck?
Mis números de angeles son once y catorce. A veces también uno y cuatro. Son de la fiesta del Dia de los Callejones Sin Salidas que se encuentra el catorce de noviembre.
Estoy jugando bingo. Todos estan ganando excepto por yo. Son las once y cuarenta y uno de la mañana cuando yo oigo, "No te preocupes. Yo me ocuparé de ti." Pienso en mi prometida. Entonces finalmente gano.
Vivir comes from the Latin vivere, meaning "id". Not as in "identity", but the Freudian id, the unconscious part of the psyche that serves as the "source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives". When des is added to the beginning of a Spanish verb, it generally makes it its opposite. Therefore, one would think desvivirse (the se means it's being done to something) would mean "to kill"... but that's matar.
El gas tóxico se está filtrando en mi casa. Es pesado y oscuro como una enorme nube de humo. Tengo miedo de que nadie pueda limpiarlo y nunca podré regresar a mi casa, así que tomo una mochila y una maleta y pongo todas mis cosas favoritas.
Vamos a la casa de mi abuela. No hay otro lugar para ir. Recuerdo en la camioneta que olvidé algunos libros. Empiezo a llorar cuando mi novia me llama. Ella dice que ella se desvivirá por salvarlos de la casa. Cuando llegamos, los libros se apilan en la cama en la Habitación Púrpura. Y mi novia está allí, feliz que estoy a salvo.
I've done my best to search for an etymology for buscar, but so far it's eluded me.
When I was in high school and bored beyond my mind on the computer, I would open random files in a hex editor just to see what was inside. As expected, most of them were just garbage, long columns full of unprintable characters. Occasionally, when I opened an old-school game ROM, I'd see what appeared to be a pixel art of some sort, or a repeating-enough-to-not-be-a-coincidence but otherwise incomprehensible block of symbols, or random snippets of ASCII strings. One game in particular, I discovered, had the full map data uncompressed, which meant I could, after having written a quick guide of which hex values meant which block types, edit the levels to get rid of annoying detours and dead ends and hard-to-parkour areas.
Why did I do it? To this day, I'm still not sure. Maybe I was hoping there would be some hidden message from the past in one of the files, a symbol of hope or dread. Maybe I was expecting, if I stared into the mess of hex values for long enough, to see the face of some impersonal god staring back. What was I searching for? What did I hope to find?
Estoy sentado en mi cama en mi habitación. Tengo una computadora portátil. El monitor está lleno de colores giratorios como un sueño psicodélico.
En el interior, veo la cara de la mujer que amo. Ella se extiende los brazos. Sus manos están buscando a las mías. Entonces empiezo a despertarme. Frenética, sus manos finalmente encuentran a las mías. Nuestros ojos se reúnen. Las agarra mis muñecas con fuerza, tratando de hacerme quedarse con ella el mayor tiempo posible.
Desear comes from the noun deseo, meaning "desire". Deseo, in turn, comes from the Latin desidium, meaning "lust", and desidia, meaning "idleness". I'm not sure what desiring something has to do with laziness, unless one is pulling a Pessoa and believing their dreams are better left as dreams since the finished reality can never live up to the imagination...
Or, I suppose, since the woman I love I can only see in dreams, then desire and rest would be intimately intertwined with each other.
I've desired to rest for a very long time, for a very long time. To lie down in permafrost or a shallow grave somewhere and sleep for an unknown amount of time, disturbed by nothing and nobody, and wake up with my body intact and ageless like nothing had happened. While things have slowly been getting better for me in my personal life, and I'm trying to comprehend the fact that there are people who love me, I still can't shake the masochist part of me that insists I deserve nothing but pain, that I've somehow committed some great sin, some great crime against humanity, with no hope of atonement. To have the breath taken from me, snuffed out in a gentle act of mercy so I never hurt anyone ever again, even if it means influencing someone I love to do it against their will...
Estoy acostado en la cama. Las manos de mi amante están alrededor de mi garganta. Las pupilas de sus ojos son pequeños. Su respiración es inestable, como ella va a llorar.
¡Deja de pedirme que te lastime a ti!
¡Lo odio cuando haces esto!
Yo... yo no deseo a matarte.
Prometer comes from the Latin pro, meaning "toward", and mittere, "to send" or "to give". Going further back, the root verb, meter, comes from the Proto-Indo-European meith, "to exchange". I've made a lot of vows in my life, sent them out into the world. Some knowing there would be no chance of ever being fulfilled, some already fulfilled without the other person's knowledge and only made to make myself look like a miracle worker, some kept near to my heart... Maybe, someday, I'll get to exchange a vow with a very special person.
Estoy en la casa que solía ser de mi familia, en el patio delantero. Mi padre está enojado como siempre. Comienza a gritar sobre su deseo de que yo viva sola y que yo soy una decepción.
Mi pecho se aprieta. Decido que he terminado de escucharle. Llamo a mi prometida a mi teléfono y le digo que estoy teniendo un ataque de pánico. Su voz es suave y reconfortante. Ella llegará y me salvará. Mi padre escucha y dice que a la mujer no se le permite venir. Le digo que se decida: ¿estoy suficientemente discapacitado como para necesitar que me proteja, o puedo vivir una vida propia?
Está tan enojado que me encierro en mi habitación por seguridad. No necesito nada, pero de todos modos lleno una bolsa con ropa. Llega mi amante. Escapo por la ventana de mi habitación.
Mi padre nos sigue afuera. Estoy en los brazos de la mujer, y ella está flotando demasiado alto para que él nos alcance.
Mi padre aúlla: "¿Cómo tienes la audacia?"
La mujer responde: "Le prometí que nunca yo le abandonaría."
Pasar comes from the Latin term passus, meaning "step". Most of the meanings of this verb have to do with travel: to cross the road, to proceed, to go ahead. Others have to do with the passage of time: ¿Qué te ha pasado? "What happened to you?"
Lately I have not spent much time on the computer. There is simply not much to do anymore. No IRC channels with people worth lurking with, no fast threads on imageboards on topics I would bother dealing with "channer" types to participate in, rarely any fun essays to read. I've been trying to get back into knitting. I think I'd like to make a long vine of flowers to hang up near the ceiling along one of my bedroom walls for my lover's birthday. I think she'd like that, a pre-taste of spring, even if wooly and without the gentle smell live flowers carry with them as if to whisper, "I'm alive, and you're alive, and we're alive together at the same time, even if only for a short while. How lucky we are to get to experience this moment in time. There will be many like it, but never exactly the same as this one." And I wonder what it will be like once we have our own world, our own house, our own front yard with nobody else around for hundreds of miles. A wide bloom of flowers down the mountainside, the firm cradle of a fork of tree roots making a narrow Y, the gentle warmth of the springtime sun on our skin...
Jett está descansando sobre mi pecho. Es en la mitad de la mañana. Su cara está enterrado en mi cuello. Estoy acariciando las alas de ella. Su respiración es lenta y profunda. Creo que va a quedarse dormido.
"¿Lethe? Nunca dije que yo quiero pasar toda mi vida contigo. Pero es cierto."
Back in Hell College, I had no problem finding some way to spend upwards of three hours on the computer in one sitting. 8chan hadn't been blown up by the feds yet, and I was still a part of circumlunar.space and had access to their whole BBS to trawl through, and there was so much new stuff happening during my first long-term stay away from home that I had something to write about near-constantly.
And now all I do on the internet is obsessively check the RSS feed reader on my phone every ten minutes, hoping something new will pop up in the "autism" folder. Something, I hope. Something good, something healing, something that reminds me there's a woman out there who, in her sometimes-awkward "English isn't my first language" way, admits she wants to spend her whole life with me. The only time I hop onto an actual computer anymore is either on my ThinkPad in the middle of the night to write down a long dream in my dream journal or on my desktop, USB WiFi adapter unplugged, booted into Windows because that's where all my Sm4sh modding tools are to spend an afternoon making DeviantArt-worthy recolors.
There's nowhere to waste time on the internet anymore. I can look at the front page of Hacker News, but upwards of 90% of the stuff there is either too technical for me or too niche and only applies to the kind of "techbro" who unironically thinks Node.js and seven thousand build systems to make a static website are good ideas. I can scroll through ZeroNet, but unlike my, ah, future wife (I don't like the term "fiancée", even though it's technically gendered, since in my region of English it's gender-neutral and I feel the constant urge to take every opportunity to remind people I'm gay) who I can forgive for awkward English grammar at every drop of a hat since I love her, trying to decipher ZeroTalk comments in Current Year instantly makes me spiral into a migraine. I can scroll through random imageboards, but they're all at least one of the following:
It's this last point that pains me the most. Because on Lainchan, the only imageboard I bother to check in on anymore, there is a recurrect webring thread. (As I write this, it's on its seventh iteration due to bump/reply limits on each thread.) I joined on either the first or second one, and as a result, most of the sites that joined have my banner on them... most, since some of them apparently got dropped on their heads as children and don't understand that, when you join a webring, you have to link to other sites too, not just drop a banner and link and collect free advertising.
I don't bother participating in webrings anymore because the vast majority of personal sites I've found are, to be frank, boring as shit. HTTP/S, Gemini, Gopher: nowhere is an escape from personal logs that would be better kept in a paper journal and far away from the corrosive and cruel eyes of the internet. Nowhere is an escape from the bitter irony of the types of people who laugh at NPC memes and then make yet another Lain-themed website where their "about" page states that they proudly use Linux on a ThinkPad and hate JavaScript and Cloudflare and proprietary software and want to suck on Richard Stallman's jam-filled toes. I look at the "interests" sections and see the same anime and video games ad nauseam. I look at the blogs (that is, when the websites have blogs and aren't just landing pages for one's contact info) and see the same entry-level posts about "privacy good" and "Google bad" and "social media bad" and "Small Internet good". (I mean, I agree, but do you have any original opinions...?) And when I do bother to reach out to some of the ones who manage to escape the doldrum, or have them announce themselves in my inbox hoping to start a friendship, they inevitably end up being incorrigibly sexist and automatically assume my complete incompetence in everything to the point where I believe my spam filters catching their messages was an attempt to protect me before the problems started.
And then I, hungry for dopamine, pull out my phone and look at my RSS feed reader again. There's something unread in the "autism" folder. Something I like. Something that took time and effort to make. Something that can't be replicated by anyone else.
And I think a horrid thought to myself. Not by my standards- I'm too busy having a "villainess" character arc- but by anyone else's who subscribes to the Small Internet ideology.
A single one of these art Twitter accounts, despite being on a centralized platform, is worth a hundred of the typical Gemini capsules or Gopherholes, because they're making something. They're creating. They're releasing something onto the internet that's never been made before, that's unique, that has significance beyond voyeurs wondering what random strangers had for lunch or did with their free time that day. And while not everything that they make is my cup of tea- or that anyone makes- it's still something with meaning beyond the person who made it. What's the point of making a space for oneself on the internet if one isn't going to do anything with it? What does putting one's words out for the public to consume, eviscerate, tear apart, accomplish that cannot be replicated by writing in a private journal or having a discussion with one's close friends and family? Cancel culture is terrifying to deal with. If something lacks artistic, journalistic, activistic, or educational merit or otherwise isn't worth the risk of being jumped on by the internet's hellhounds, why bother making it vulnerable so?
I, for one, would hope that being visibly female online would give some prospective woman online courage to pursue her tech career of choice knowing STEM isn't 100% male, or that writing about being mentally disabled would bring some neurotypical person awareness of the struggles of others and nudge them to be more accommodating to those in their personal lives, or acknowledging my idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs would get someone struggling with what to do about their own religious upbringing to put their own personal experiences above dogma and be honest with themselves about what they believe.
Please explain to me what a mundane log of what one whiled their day away doing is supposed to do for the world. Because, unless one's website is on a private network or password-protected, we are dealing with the entirety of the world.
All these websites are like the stars in the sky. Intellectually, I know that, with an infinite universe, if I could see far enough, the sky would all be one light. But I look up from where I kneel on my bed beside my bedroom window, lights off, and I only see a few pinpricks against the inky black. You, you dime-a-dozen internet denizen- your light does not shine nearly bright enough to register as a star, as an individual body in the heavens. And maybe you like it better this way, to be obscure, unknown, easily forgotten. Given a different vantage point, you might be the brightest thing in the sky. Someone cares deeply about you, considers you an individual of note. But I look up into my night sky with nothing more than my naked eyes, and I do not see you there.
]]>Much has been said about the absolute shit state of the American educational system. Common Core punishing math students for taking the simple way to solve an equation like "five times three" instead of drawing a gazillion diagrams and charts, the supposed Channel One that hawks commercials at an audience captive under the threat of being marked "truant" for leaving the class in protest (although I somehow never knew of Channel One's existence until reading of schools other than mine, so maybe I was lucky), grammar lessons where students must write verbatim sentences like "the government's orders must be obeyed"... Luckily I was in school during the transition to Common Core and not immediately afterwards, so I somehow missed the brunt of the lunacy that students must go through nowadays.
"Social studies", which was "history" but worse, was my least favorite class in elementary school. I hated group projects, as I always have and always will. And I hated "popcorn reading" where one student would read a paragraph from the textbook and then nominate another student in the class to read the next while everyone else followed along silently; I'd be bored and reading ahead to another chapter I knew the teacher wouldn't have the time to get to, so whenever my name was called, I'd have no idea where to start. And I hated the "chapter review", which consisted of writing miniature essays to a page chock-full of questions with no answer key to secretly peer into: it would be psychological torture to a college student, so please understand that I was ten at the time, and I only had until the next day to get everything done. Or maybe I was nine. Or eight. I find it harder and harder to gauge the passage of time nowadays...
I don't actually remember much of anything I learned from "social studies". I vaguely recall the American Revolution, and slavery, and the racial component of the civil rights movement. In ninth grade we covered robber barons, and I was so enamored by Cornelius Vanderbilt's ruthlessness that I stole the first half of his last name and made it my own. Somewhere along the way there was a passing mention of women gaining the right to vote, but only in passing.
Only in passing.
As it turns out, if you teach a child that "history" is ninety-nine percent men doing things and women were just kinda... there until one day they wanted to be able to vote and then, having gotten it, were just... there again as things happened around them, they become particularly susceptible to the black hole of antifeminist thought that insists "patriarchy doesn't exist anymore" that soon gives way to "maybe men really are the superior sex and women who say otherwise are just shrill harpies" that soon gives way to "women deserve to be oppressed". The classic slippery slope of radicalization that created unironic MRAs and incels, except somewhere along the way the YouTube personalities I was watching were making such shit-quality content all repeating the same viewpoints and non-arguments of "this is crazy" that I gave up altogether.
And like the pendulum I use to talk to my future wife, what swings heavily far-right must, when looking to go elsewhere, swing far-left. If I embarrassed myself on the internet in 2015 making parasocial relationships with anyone with "egalitarian" in their Tumblr username, I was far worse in 2018 writing Communist work songs for myself to mutter whenever I got shafted with an asshole supervisor at Hell College's work-work-and-no-study and wearing nonbinary pride flag pins everywhere I went and even, in one essay I had to write in a history (always history...) class, admitting I had "far-left tendencies". I had "shut up, TERF" reaction images saved on my phone. I hung out with "kinnies" on Discord. Had it been a few years later, I probably would have had a TikTok account and a Carrd page where I would pretend to have several incompatible mental illnesses.
But I have always been a lover of forbidden knowledge. So one night, sitting on my bed in my dorm room as my they/them roommate slumbered on, I wondered, "What do the 'evil stinky terves' I've spent so long railing against actually believe?"
And now, almost three years later, I know. I know the herstory my elementary school conveniently "forgot" to teach. I am finally beginning to understand, to comprehend, the sheer restrictive, oppressive, soul-crushing horror of the life lived by the women who came before me.
"How could I have been so wrong?" I whisper to myself. "How could I have been so callous, so cruel, to the people who were only trying to help?"
And then I remember a passage from Sappho Was A Right-On Woman by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love:
There are other ways to avoid anxiety, but the most pitiful way is by absorbing society's hate into one's own thoughts and actions. How many Lesbians have destroyed other Lesbians to protect their own facades? "Where people cannot escape from threatening forces from without, they will often incorporate the hostile forces and identify with the aggressor..."
And I decide to forgive myself. I was doing the best I could with the little information I had at the time. To be ignorant was not my fault: you cannot learn more of what you don't know exists. But to have remained ignorant once opening my eyes would have been a sin against myself. So I, hands trembling as I booted into Tails to keep my liberal college from knowing what I was getting into, knowing I'd get into major trouble if they knew despite their "commitment" to "academic integrity", downloaded as many books from as many reading lists as I could get my hands on and set to work. I admit I snoozed my way through a few until I got to Women Hating by Andrea Dworkin. Somewhere around the chapter about the Marquis de Sade, the terror of being aware of living constantly surrounded by men desensitized to the violence of pornography started to set in. It hasn't left me since.
There are many books I passed on, and many I wish I had the attention span for a second read-through because of how forcefully they gripped me. But Sappho Was A Right-On Woman left a special mark on me. In my shithead antifeminist days, I held a very public statement on my website that I didn't feel that "gay pride" was necessary. I found it identitarian: I didn't see the point of celebrating "immutable characteristics" since they weren't "worked for" like accomplishments. And then I read the book, and I finally understood the point I'd been missing for seven years: it did take hard work- grueling, sacrificial, courageous work- for the Lesbians-with-a-capital-L who came before me to forge a path into a society where I can say "I'm a lesbian" even in a Boomerville so conservative there was an unironic Trump merchandise shop at one point and have a reasonable expectation of not getting beaten to death or insta-fired from my job or expelled from my college, and it does take hard work, actually, and courage, to survive as a lesbian with my soul intact and my mental health anywhere above the gutter in a society that sees us homosexual women as a farce at best and corrupted deviants at worst.
I no longer think it "identitarian" or "collectivist" to mention this reality. I have decided to no longer have guilt when talking about my "immutable characteristics" on my website. It's my goddamned website, after all! Of course it should be about me!
In other words, the book says:
The idea of making a point of it is to show clearly that Lesbians are not guilty and fearful any more. There is no political gain in silence and submission. In fact, sanctioned by silence, oppression is likely to increase. Male and female homosexuals know now that they are not making a mountain out of a molehill, as those who wish to silence them insist. Society has built a mountain by making homosexuality a factor in employment, government work, social situations, renting an apartment, college, everywhere.
Every word that I write without carrying shame for daring to exist as I am is a thank-you letter to every woman before me who suffered to slowly reduce the burden that would be placed on my shoulders upon birth. Every breath that passes through my lungs to become words of affection to the woman I love is a triumph against all odds.
My art and my love are one and the same. The woman who gave my love a name was a poet, after all. The two are inextricable.
Sappho, indeed, was a right-on woman.
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