💾 Archived View for lilpeach93.flounder.online › journal.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 15:18:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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before tikok's algorithm categorized my age group i was presented with a barrage of teens showcasing their angst through dance and song and i just recall the time when I was nineteen and i begged a boy to love me and he was. just. unrelenting. and stubbornly I thought that through sheer conviction and perseverance i could change his mind. thank god i did not have a tiktok back then. I hope that all of the tumblr posts i wrote about that time are deleted or lost in the sea of data, refreshed to null in some deprecated yahoo server. he never changed his mind but he did somehow end up in jail for a sec so i don't have very much regret about how that situation played out.
but consequently in my rejection i immediately turned my back on that boy and dated someone a decade older than me, a phd student who was my math gsi two semesters prior. at the time neither the perverseness in our age difference, nor for frailty in the balance of power had occurred to me. my one thought has been that if this boy did not love me then another man would. now, almost a decade later, i cannot fathom the idea that someone my age could have possibly considered my teen self as an equal. the nature of that relationship was an inherent imbalance of power, just as potent as the rejection of the boy who did not love me. but that boy, today, he is now dating a teen, who is just completing college. dominance, frailty, and repulsion are, i think, simultaneously the undercurrent of sex, and the antithesis of relationships.
I weigh myself every day. Not out of disordered eating or OCD or even curiosity, but rather a feeling so latent I can hardly identify it - it's merely a habit. The knowledge does not empower me nor does it cripple. I know that I am not ill but I also know that if self love ran in an upward trajectory for every human, then a 10 billion dollar industry, profiting off the insecurity of femaleness under the male gaze, would collapse. And the conglomerates and the industries' bottom lines and the media that touches almost every realm of existence - would our economy even survive? The origins of disordered eating are, at its best, absolutely insipid, and at its worst, a debilitating drain of cognitive energy. The moments I spent examining my thighs on my bed as a teenager, counting and recounting the calories in a cup of cooked rice, are moments I can never have back. The lens I saw myself through was a proxy for actual experience, and those experiences I can never have back. The mental work I had created for myself was wasted energy expended, and I cannot help but think, in these moments of regretfulness, that these are moments that men have never had to waste.
I started my previous job with a bag of lies and no technical knowledge. I learned sql akin to the way Will Smith learned about stock broking in the Pursuit of Happyness -- anxiously and haphazardly in the dead of the night. Even now, when I feel a modicum of certainty in my skillset, I still feel like I entered into the workspace with a bag of lies and no technical knowledge. Concurrently, I feel this way as I am learning HTML to bold my fonts on this particular platform. I realize that the only way to test my HTML works is to save and check, and when I save my file, I alert the founder and so now I am diligently gathering knowledge on w3schools, anxiously and haphazardly in the dead of the night. ~~~
I am constantly amazed by the vast quantity of time I spend trying to prevent my pet [a species that supposedly survived in the wild for centuries without any assistance] from killing himself. Everything he does is a two derivatives away from death. Eating poisonous plants despite refusing to eat regular vegetables. Bolting out the front door onto the street because his excitement simply cannot be contained. Leaping off a hill to chase after a bird he spotted from the corner of his eye. I often contemplate the evolution of the canine species, which adapted to accommodate the desires of humans, and consider that my pet, albeit unassuming and massively stupid in many ways, has evolved to the higher caliber of his kind -- he has my undying love and cash. I keep him alive.