靄

I lost my job as a TA today: “Thank you so much for all your help.. unfortunately due to the low class enrollment we are combining both recitations…..”  etc. What’s there to say? I feel stupid, absurdly so – I feel stupid for caring so much about a class that isn’t mine; wasn’t mine in the first place: trying to learn all them and their names, setting extra hours for them to find me, for thinking up all the questions I could ask and all the things I could show them and the lectures I was going to have (walter b! 3d printing! flusser!) but will now never be able to. Dreams, you should never put hope in daydreams. All you taste in the ash of disappointment and the lonesome urge to drink them away.

And then bitterly, I think of all the things I’m doing now for the student organisation – the labour I’m putting in for free and the glory of nothing. I remember having the exact conversation with Bluefish – what’s the point of us, working for the internet? For putting the long hours and thankless moments as moderators and grinding away to give our work away for nothing. Nothing we could ever hope to put on our resumes, nothing that would earn us a single cent, all that data that we could never even hope to publish; knowledge that we knew but couldn’t use. So what if we knew, so what if we were “gifted”  or “intelligent” – it mattered squat outside in the Real World of school politics and moneymaking schemes. Who cared if we hacked into [] or ran [][] communities or worked on [][] – [][]. And in the end, what became of us? Losers, we are – or dead. I’m stuck in a deadspace of being haunted and hunted by ghosts in the machine; you’re a freeter lost to the World and only The Great Kafe knows what happened to everyone else. We’re all just sad people, isn’t it pathetic?

The litany of their handles, slipping like hymn beads for a prayer (oh digital gods, bring me back to the channel that once was…)

Pointless anger, that’s all that is. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run no matter how many cities I go, trying to disappear. “The Internet is our home.” That’s what we always said, and that’s the problem because you can never run far or fast enough away from it no matter how many languages you speak or countries you hide in. Just one hit, and bam! Linked. Back to the habits of shopping for emotions, the sweet wild joy of endless feeds, that deep deep dive into blue. Most of all it makes you forget you’re just another sucker in the system; that brief blinding flame that lighting! oh lighting – comes, illuminating the meaning of your painful existence. Ah, to be young and innocent again. That was it, wasn’t it; our young silliness and oh; try to be clever, trying so hard to prove ourselves – that got us here in the first place?

[ that kind of hate; to hate every human and person; to hate the stink of their humanity, that incredible arrogance of tangible position – and then realise you are human and hateable too.]

絶望. zetsubou. What to do next? There’s no point crying, so useless, all that saline. Sit and wait and hope is full of 守株待兔, which is equally stupid. Or you can pick yourself up again, brush away the dirt and skinned knees and memories; tell yourself: not for love or ambition or people or fortune or even living that makes you stay in world (because all that fades) but for; then; if; only when:  揺れ; 揺れ…..

[ tomorrow will be another day.]