Hurt Me Daddy, for I Have Blogged

Recently on Bluesky I wrote a thread about the first major experiences 10 years ago that caused me to get un-addicted to social media and revamped my PoV about it to instead understand social media platforms (particularly Meta and Xitter, but honestly a lot of places have their icky aspects) as places that are authentically harming a lot of people. Seeing how arbitrary the treatment I received during that encounter 10 years ago was, plus post- 10/7/23 when I saw a space that was previously supposed to be fun not only become a propaganda machine (for no singular viewpoint) and a viewfinder for the endless slaughter and torture of people, I grew heavily disillusioned with how socials were functioning. Those were the big moments during which I started to notice the diminishing returns. It then became slightly easier to leave spaces that were suffocating me with their lack of reach. What, so I pay in personal data but you don’t show my stuff to anyone? Not reciprocal. In a lot of ways,...

What do people even mean when they talk about self-love? I’ve seen the rhetoric around Valentine’s Day move from romantic and sexual love, to galentines and palentines, to self-love, and that is such a strange concept to me, because I think Americans have a great methodology of self-loathing (thank you, destructive Xtian hegemonic practices that don’t talk about healthy accountability at all), but I don’t even know what people are referring to at its core when they talk about self-love. Are they talking about self-acceptance? Are they talking about commitment to freedom from guilt and shame, especially for the past? Are they talking about the spiritual and psychological equivalent of body positivity or body neutrality, like accepting your flaws—which, it’s worthy to note, has also been extensively weaponized by some to just consistently excuse away abusive and shitty behavior? Are they talking about neutral acceptance of the fact that we all have healthy egos and take things personally...

Here's one of those weird peripherally personal stories about Lynch. When I was between 8-10 in the early 90s, my mother used to visit this elderly Romanian professor in Garden Grove. He was fluent in at least 4 or 5 languages but not too strong in English. Occasionally he and I were able to communicate in French. I was often bored in his house and I don't even think he had a working TV, or if there was my mom wouldn't let me watch it. He did however, seem to, like many immigrants I knew at the time, collect stacks of TV Guides--both for the English practice and the pop culture understanding. And that was the first place I learned about Twin Peaks. It seemed so sophisticated and grown-up, and I often got it mixed up with Knots Landing (also quite frequently on the cover of TV Guide at the time). I remember once reading an article about the show but I don't remember what it said. The visits to the Professor eventually ended. He had a home caregiver, and eventually he was...