But what if you never get better? & other small reckonings

You ever have an epiphany, forget you had it, and rerealize it?

I recently rerealized that some people who think they like me actually like who they think I would be if I magically stopped having social anxiety and became more confident. People don't like "Bad Vibes" so having a mental illness that makes you permanently a bit neurotic makes you less appealing, less attractive.

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dreams of a gay myspace killer

I spend a lot of time wondering what it would look like if Facebook were rooted in the science of relationships and positive psychology instead of capitalism and the science of addiction.

———

Rather than the whiplash of seeing newborn announcements, police assault videos, global crises in headline, and metaironic memes with a mayfly lifespan all colliding into each other; maybe Grammarly-style tone detectors could suggest post categorizations that people could either accept or insert their own. Those categories could be used to filter the timeline: I may want only to see pet photos today, but tomorrow I may review which of my queer friends in crisis are holding GoFundMes. If I’m well enough the day after, I will review everyone’s achievements and life updates with only compersion without envy.

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What’s So Good About Anime Anyway? [Part 1!]

I want to talk about the accidental properties of anime that were lacking in American cartoons as the time that anime exploded, the things Nickelodeon and Hanna-Barbera could have leaned into even before anime inspired them to do so.

I want to think explicitly about the things I try to apply in my own work even only under the surface.

I want to focus on craft and considerations that go deeper than “big eyes and blue hair.” I want to dig deeper than style.

I want to talk about what’s so good about anime.

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Bending English with J-Pop: FictionJunction YUUKA

But yeah, to be more explicitly pro-Asian in a way that fits National Poetry Month, I want to talk about what non-Native and bilingual speakers of English taught me about how to use the language. Some people call it “broken English” or even worse “Engrish,” but I’d like to think of it as bending English, a language which was a flexible mongrel. I mean, as a fan of AAVE/Ebonics and skin-official siblings of the coiner of “based” and “bling,” I should know a thing or two about the extra-boxilar possibilities of English.

The non-Native and bilingual speakers in this case are all J-Pop and J-Rock artists, hence the blog title.

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Quotidian Speculation on the Other Side of Revolution

When I am not finishing my read of A People’s Future Of The United States., I have been trying to watch Angela Davis lectures with my minimal Internet. I began reading A People’s Future as part of Harmony Neal’s “Making The Future Irresistible” a class designed to get us thinking about what the future could look like once freed of biased expectations of who should be in the future, who should be centered, and who should shape it.

I am still wondering how to create an Irresistible Future.

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if a black girl stands alone in the desert, is she still black?

tell me

or on the moon. is she still black

without it passed to her?

without whiteness to delineate a cage:

this & this & this is you

this & this & are yours

only so big.

 

with all the moon, is she still--

even if the earth spins faster

and she falls so slow on that no-sky gravity

even with that curved horizon

she stands romantic (have we romanticism?)

rugged uncolonial ego

the i is the self she sighs deep, thinks

sleeps beautiful, ivied as Earth

draws new codes to switch to/from

new slangs and sounds, music and gates to keep,

new heights of conscious. her old generation

sleeps ignorant. we don't say 'black' anymore

they speak low recorded, microphone to mouth

crowd cheers from where sands meet sea

rings a first contact, as prophecy

tracks her cometfall

her splashdown, seed to sea

washed ashore to a wilderness

where the weekend tribal in camouflage & beard

greet & gape

 

is this not her moment of becoming

my search for the great homeschooled novel

Back around 2011, when I bought an up-to-date Guide to Literary Agents and did market research while sincerely believing I could sell a middle grade book despite my utter distance from the literary market, I read that there was a gap in the market for book about homeschooled kids.

As a homeschooling grad, I thought (and still think) I could fill that gap. But not right now; right now, I don't know what the Great Homeschooled Novel looks like. I'll probably be fumbling towards that as I continue to write, for adults as well as for kids.

There are a couple of things that resonated with me as a homeschooled grad, and I feel like these influences will bring me closer to figuring out how to portray the experience:

  • Where the Red Fern Grows, which struck me as a kid as familiar and vivid and adventurous, same as it would strike any other kid, right? There is a scene where the wild boy protagonist comes face-to-face with a normal schoolboy from town, and someting in that scene make me realize that I was the wild boy and not the schoolboy.
  • Captain Fantastic, which I had been dying to see since it came out but have watched only recently. Based on the childhood of the director Matt Ross, the family in the movie has a particularly White Anarchist back-to-nature philosophy, but so much of it rings so true to my life. It would be easier to list the differences:
    • That we were seven siblings, not six
    • That my dad plays flute and drums, never bagpipes
    • That our mobile home wasn't a renovated bus named Steve, but a brougham of some sort
    • That my dad doesn't make fun of christians, not that much
    • That my dad would never buy us knives (wth?)
    • That we didn't celebrate Santa OR Noam but Ramadan
    • Oh, and my mom is still alive
  • The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which I haven't seen yet. I know the show covers themes of innocence/shelteredness that I am afraid I will relate too strongly. In my mind, the set-up is too close to the narratively-ironic innocence of Room, which gets way into the darker side of seculsion from society, way into abuse and neglect. I haven't seen that either, and don't really want to...
  • Similarly, Dancer in the Dark, and the rest of Lars Von Trier's Golden Heart Trilogy. The sweetness/darkness of Dancer in the Dark resulted in it being the only movie that's ever made me cry. Having Bjork portray an immigrant who believes in Broadway musicals but gets screwed over by America is just too cruel. I haven't seen the others in this trilogy, but I got into his unfinished American Trilogy through Dogville, which smacked the martyr out of me and also killed me a bit. (It was a good idea to watch them both entering the nonprofit world! 🙂)
  • On a lighter note, I loved The Wild Thornberries, or anything else where the kids live in an RV and learn from books and nature but not teachers. That show gets special bonus points because Nigel Thornberry's job is the one I once wanted. (RIP Steven Irwin, forever love and admiration for you and your wife and your kid 💙) This was one of the few kids cartoons I could watch not set in a school, but there should be more. I like to think the lack is what drove me to anime like Pokemon, which featured preteens running wild, free of all institutions, and learning about fauna and flora.
  • I occasionally read up about the Quiverfull movement, although I have been shy of watching or reading too much about the Duggars or Jon + Kate, because of all the hate aimed at them. A lot of the homeschool movement is Christian, though, so I'm obligated to know about them as well as the anti-establishment hippies, I guess.
  • Speaking of hippies, Sufjan Stevens, but also anything related to Wardorf schools, Montessori schools, or other kinds of alternative education. Since I really don't know how to portray school in fiction, I really have no choice but to set my child characters in settings where they have more choice, freedom, or democracy in how they learn. Oh well.
  • Anything Jaden And Willow Do Or Say Or Think Or Make Or Sing, on a similar weird-schooling note.
  • And last but not least, J. D. Salinger's Glass family stories. I can't and won't say too much about how this series affected me for fear of spoiling an upcoming project, but I know me and my siblings bonded over this series. It's already providing me a roadmap for how to write my life.