The Syllabus 003

There is a layer added in online spaces, when we are no longer simply collecting, list-making, or even archiving. Now there is an audience, now we are curating. Curating on social media has become a pejorative term. Remember! People’s lives aren’t like they show online! They are CURATED!

Do those characteristics sound like the Starbucks in your suburb? Where everyone silently works, headphones on, completely separately? Avoiding eye-contact at all costs? Third spaces hold a place in history not just for facilitating friendship and community, but making meaningful societal change.

I watch my face through a filter. I flick the filter on and then I shut it off again. I want to see how close this filter is to my real face. I think to myself: if I have to post, I’m just going to have the filter on. Who gives a shit if this isn’t my real face? This isn’t my real life anyway. Behind me, hundreds of hours of videos of women flicking filters on and off their faces, giggling and protesting and acting shocked or outraged or just demoralized, seem to play all at once. I am letting them down. I do it anyway.

Research as leisure activity is directed by passions and instincts. It’s fundamentally very personal: What are you interested in now? It’s fine, and maybe even better, if the topic isn’t explicitly intellectual or academic in nature. And if one topic leads you to another topic that seems totally unrelated, that’s something to get excited about—not fearful of.

The majority of Substack’s users (~65%) are in America, and the demographic landscape of this country means that there are more white readers and writers than POC readers and writers. Substack centers American culture, which centers whiteness. Substack does not exist in a vacuum–it is a function of a historically-entrenched system that empowers and protects whiteness, even when it seems lighthearted and apolitical.

I can understand that the policing of “unsavory” views has a myriad of consequences legally. Fine. My central question: how violent is this racial slur? What’s the measure of violence here? How is Substack discourse better for the use of it? How do we not see the use of this slur in this manner as something… other than an obvious precursor to physical violence? But, I’m ahead of myself.

I want to know what to do with myself now, with the version of my body that is real and true in this season. How often do we wait to give ourselves what we truly need, only to look back and say “if only I had known then”? How often do we wish we could go back and tell our younger selves how lovely they were, how capable they were, how enough they were? How often do we forget to do that right now, in this body we’re currently in, in this messy humanity we’re presently living?

According to Andrea Long Chu’s Females (2019), everyone is female and everyone hates it. “To be is to be female: the two are identical.” This version of female isn’t sex, nor is it gender. It’s the result of a “psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” As a consequence, “the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.” Long Chu continues: “This is the root of all political consciousness: the dawning realization that one’s desires are not one’s own, that one has become a vehicle for someone else’s ego.

Essentially, Monica hacked the show. A Housewives fan with an internet troll account managed to scam their way onto the show (after turning informant and flipping on Jen Shah to the feds), become a Housewife themselves, become a fan favorite, then get first chair next to Andy Cohen at the reunion. For fans, it's exhilarating. For the women on other Housewives series, it's probably absolutely terrifying.

To complain about something insignificant is a comfort and a way to blow off steam in a place that can sometimes feel like one big obstacle course. To complain together is intimate, a signal that there’s trust and that we’re on the same team. Refusing to complain with me, or at the very least hear me out, is the same as turning down a friendly toast. But as I often heard growing up, mejor solo que mal acompañado.

On an individual level I think haunting can be a way of thinking about trauma, about a sort of pre-knowledge or deferred knowledge, where you don’t know something but its impact is there, so you’re getting the impact without knowing the cause. That’s basically what a haunting is. Inasmuch as most ghost stories are just stories about trauma, they really follow this model– you need to be able to name the ghost and figure out their unfinished business to put them to rest.

Is it that we are afraid of being perceived as desperate or cringe for trying hard and promoting our work? Maybe. But all great things happen when you forget about cringe. Who has time to be cool anyway? I want to see passion! Nothing makes me happier than seeing people proudly sharing what they have created.

I hold fear and anxiety in my stomach. As soon as I feel even slightly nervous, the first symptoms that usually appear are loss of appetite, upset stomach, and digestive issues. The intensity of these symptoms depends on how strong the anxiety is. Sometimes I can push through it with every hesitant bite until the nerves dissipate and I enjoy my meal. Other times it takes all of my energy to force down something light. Then there are those times when it’s so bad that bringing a fork with a mouse-sized portion to my mouth feels like carrying a shovel full of rocks.

The diffusion of the light, through trees and off the slate sidewalk, reflecting against the water, dripping dripping dripping. To see it, appreciate it, figure out how to describe it. I never appreciated light before life in the tropics, I want to say, but it’s a lie, because I would always thrill at the way light hits the glass of lower Manhattan at the right early hour when you’re biking over the Brooklyn Bridge. I still feel, whenever the skyline comes into view, like a superhero getting their powers restored. Leaving taught me the meaning of home.

But the confusion continues. Apparently, unless people suffer in silence, they are doing everything wrong, from rebounding after difficult experiences to relationships. Young people are supposedly more “sexless” (compared to what? Many of them are still literal children!) because they’re on SSRIs, because they’re depressed, because they’re on social media, which makes them depressed. We live in a society. We live in a culture. We live in a generation. At what point do we tumble off this roundabout of circular logic and say something of substance?

simply put, i feel made of water. i feel a constant ebb and flow. some days, i feel like there are riptides inside of me. other days, as still as glass. sometimes, i feel frozen and you could slide rocks across the surface. i feel like when i cry, i am simultaneously draining and replenishing my reservoir.