Craig Morey
April 2026 onward
In April 2026 I began doing short daily when-I-feel-like-it bits of writing and putting them up on my website, as something sort of in between an overly-self-indulgent blog and a freewriting exercise. The first two entries have a more complete explanation for why I write this stuff and why I post it online. I don't really expect anything here to be particularly interesting or worth reading for anyone who isn't me, but its here on my website and so you are welcome to read it if you do feel so inclined.
In northwestern Scotland, on the ferry to Lewis. Passing all the bare and forlorn-looking little islands out past Broom Firth, it makes me think of Napoleon exiled to Elba (not Elba, that was his first exile before Waterloo, I'm thinking more of his second exile on an island that I can't remember the name of.) Imagine having the powers-that-be of the world deem you to have such a dangerous mind, or such dangerous charisma (or, more realistically, maybe just such a dangerous history and reputation and influence) that they decide the best thing to do with you is stick you way out in the middle of the ocean. Imagine sitting there in the wind and drizzle by yourself, just waiting to die, and thinking about how that's what the world thinks of you.
I think maybe we should bring it back. There's some world leaders who seem suited to it. It certainly is cruel, but maybe no crueler than the prison system. And really, I think they'd like it, in a way. If I think about Trump stuck out on some little island, I think he'd be pleased as punch to know that the world hated and feared him so much. Obviously he'd be pissed about being deposed and isolated and all that, but I think his ego would be gratified. I think a lot of less-than-ideal world leaders would feel that way. We could make a whole archipelago.
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I'm almost too seasick to read or write. I have to keep taking breaks to look out the window. I've never felt seasick before, despite having been on ferries a dozen or so times before this. I hate it. Not the seasickness itself, that's whatever. But I hate thinking that there's something my body just isn't able to handle, and through no fault of my own. It's like if I were to suddenly find out that I was actually nearsighted, or allergic to nuts or something. There are very few things that my body is less than perfect at handling, my intermittent back pain and my weak sense of taste/smell are the only other ones that come to mind, and the taste/smell thing I don't even consider to be a true drawback really.
I am hoping that if I force myself to power through it and keep reading and writing as much as I can without puking, it will gradually make me less prone to being seasick. I don't actually know if seasickness works that way. Even as I write this just now I can feel myself starting to get a headache in addition to the nausea, so maybe it really would be better to just look out the window the rest of the trip. I'm going to go out onto the deck and see if fresh air helps any.
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Fresh air is helping I think. Beautiful view sitting on the stern deck watching the Highlands fade away into the dusk and the distance. It's crazy to think about all the Hebrides natives sitting around me who do this commute so often that the views must get to be a boring routine.
I figured I should write a little about what and why I'm writing. I've never been a diary person before. I remember briefly having a diary when I was fourteen or so, which became so personal and my fear of it being discovered became so great that I ended up burning it after only a couple months. My reasons for starting again now are at-least-twofold (fewfold):
Firstly and most immediately, I'm currently about three quarters of the way through reading Among Others by Jo Walton, which is an epistolary novel in the form of a girl's diary, which got me thinking about journaling. It's a YAish story about a teenager in a British boarding school with light fantasy elements, which ordinarily would make for a book that I would hate, but really I'm enjoying it. And I'm only very slightly ashamed to say so.
Secondly and most significantly, I really want to write more. I enjoy writing, but I don't do it nearly as often as I would like. I have lots of little thoughts that I would like to have written down but never actually make the time. The bigger problem, rather than not having time, is that for quite a while I have pushed all of my desire to write into two opposite and inconvenient extremes: I either write inane little microblogging posts online, or else if I have any thought that seems like it could be larger than a tweet, I mentally file it away for later use in my other main writing endeavor, which is Writing The Next Great American Novel. Suffice it to say that the big novel-writing project is not actually happening, even a little bit, but the thought that it potentially could has been sapping and subsuming all of my actual will to sit down and put pen to paper (/finger to keyboard). I used to write little essays and short stories and things from time to time, but the problem with those is that I would only ever write them out once I had a fully formed and fleshed-out idea. I'm hoping that a diary, even if it isn't actually updated daily, will give me an outlet for putting down thoughts that don't need to be completely thought out first. I think I read the idea once somewhere, and thoroughly believe, that every person has some concrete amount of crap writing that they have to do before they become good at writing. Maybe for some people it's a million words and for some it's a billion, but everyone has a number, and if they can manage to write that much, it doesn't matter what they write about or why, once they reach their number they will open the door to being able to actually write well. To paraphrase another different person's metaphorical explanation, the good writing and the bad writing all come out of the same tube, and in the beginning the tube is plugged up with all the bad writing, and so if you want to get the good writing to come out of the tube the only possible way is to push the bad writing out first, to actually just make yourself write it all down for as long as it takes and as crap as it might be. So it's in that spirit that I'm writing this diary now. I'm clearing out the tube.
Lastly (and leastly), I believe that I am living in interesting times, and also that I am an interesting person who is doing interesting things. Although it is true that the interesting things I am doing are largely unrelated to the interesting times I am living in. But I'm currently (in addition to reading Among Others) about three quarters of the way through Mike Duncan's biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, in which a lot of the history is pulled directly from diaries of Lafayette and his contemporaries. And even though a lot of the info is coming from the big players like Marie Antoinette or the American ambassador to France, even random low level soldiers who kept diaries get their moments in the spotlight, contributing to the storytelling in ways that kings and ambassadors would not have been able to. I don't know that I'm actually motivated by thoughts of helping out future historians (especially in an age where things generally seem to be so much more well documented than they were two hundred years ago), but I do feel that my life is a part of history in some minor insignificant way and so even if no one ever actually reads it the things I write do still have some intrinsic value.
Boat is pulling into Stornoway now
I can only motivate myself to write things here if I actually truly believe that they are going to be shared, or at least that they could potentially be read by others at some point. The thought of all of this just sitting and rotting on my harddrive is maybe the most comfortable for me, but at the same time it makes the writing feel pointless and so why bother. My plan is to post this diary onto my website as some sort of blog, that way it is publicly accessible and could conceivably be read, yet at the same time it's hard to imagine many people going through all the trouble of actually reading it. In a way, it's the same mindset that lets me busk with my accordion despite my fear and dislike of public performances. I'm playing music for everyone walking by, but at the same time I'm playing for no one; in general no one is actually paying much attention to me specifically, I'm just there in the background, but all the same I get the chance to gradually build up my tolerance for performing music for people.
If I make this diary too personal, I will eventually run into the burned diary issue again that I mentioned yesterday. The only way for me to write things here while both staying motivated and also knowing they might be read some day is if I avoid writing anything too private, anything that I would be uncomfortable sharing with a friend, an enemy, and a stranger all simultaneously. So in a sense, this really won't be an actual diary, it defeats most of the purpose of why people keep diaries. I'm not sharing my deepest thoughts and my intimate moments, I'm just recounting surface level events and superficial observations plus long drawn out reflections on things that do not actually feel private or close to my heart. Oh well. If that also starts making me feel demotivated then I'll try to find some other solution I guess. Maybe two diaries, one public and one private.
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Arrived at the croft in Leurbost last night. Terrain here on Lewis reminds me a bit of Newfoundland, and I said so to my WWOOF host. She and I watched BBC coverage of the Artemis II moon mission and of Trump's Iran War. I wonder which event will be seen as more important fifty years from now. There are other American volunteers here as well, and we agreed that it's a very embarrassing time to be traveling abroad as an American. I keep joking that I want to start introducing myself to people as being Canadian.
I occasionally feel like it's a deriliction of duties, that I'm running away from my inherent American responsibility to try to improve the situation, but realistically what could I really do? Even if there was a full blown civil war, would fighting in it really be a productive use of my life? As it stands, any sort of meaningful action I could imagine myself taking back in the states is mostly just stuff that would quickly land me in prison. Maybe it's cowardly, but I don't have a huge interest in making myself a martyr and doing some big ultimately-irrelevant political statement just to then get locked away for years. But at the same time, I don't think I could really approve of myself just keeping my head down and living a normal life in Pittsburgh in the midst of everything going on right now. It makes me think of questions like what would I do if I were living in Germany back in the 1930s. So for right now anyway, I'm continuing with what I've been doing for the past five months. I'm running away. And for the next two months that means living on a little farm out in the Hebrides.
My WWOOF host has a son and a daughter-in-law with a two-year-old son, and there's also an American couple volunteering at the croft with their five-year-old daughter. It's always interesting for me meeting people my age who have a family, a career, a house, and so on. I wonder what they think of me. I do think the drifter lifestyle that I've been living for the past decade or so has its own sort of dignity and respectability to it, but I doubt many of the people I meet would be interested in changing places with me. I'm also not really ever sure how I feel about them. They seem happy at least, and I don't know that there are any specific things about their lifestyle that I could pinpoint and know that I would be unable to live with, but all the same I don't think I would be happy living their lives. My experiences so far have been that the closer I get to domesticity and settled stability and all, the less content I am and the more I start to feel trapped and stifled and depressed. I have a very hard time imagining myself happy with or motivated by the things that seem to guide other people through their lives.
I don't dislike kids, and it's certainly been entertaining to have the young kids around the farm here, but I'm also feeling very happy with my choice of having gotten a vasectomy. Having said that though, I am seeing some of the appeal of parenthood while here, more so than I have in the past. There is some core human experience there that I have cut myself off from, there is an entire dimension of life that I will never get to see except via little glimpses into the lives of other parents that I meet. But their choice comes at the cost of an enormous sacrifice. Access to the experience of parenthood requires carving off and offering up a large chunk of one's own life, which is a cost that I am not and will never be willing to pay. Those who would criticize my choice not to have children might call it selfishness, and in a sense I think they're right. I am selfish about my own life, I am unwilling to exchange any of it, and by hording it the way I am there are incredibly meaningful experiences and connections that I will simply never have, and I'm okay with that.
I used to think that I would probably be more interested in having children if I lived on Anarres. Which is to say, if I lived in a society which shared responsibility communally for child raising, and which was built around an ethical framework I supported and had a potential future that was worth bringing children into. Thinking about it more though, I'm not convinced I actually would. Certainly on Anarres I would feel more optimistic about children being born into the world generally, but I think blaming society for my unwillingness to have children is externalizing a problem that is actually just internal. I think I am simply by nature uninterested in the role of parent, and I don't think that would change even if I were living in a utopia. I believe that it is perfectly reasonable and natural if people choose not to have kids for practical or logistical reasons, but in a case like mine where the choice precedes any actual concrete reasons for it I do kind of feel like it might be indicative of something actually wrong with me. I think it is normal for people to weigh the pros and cons and decide to not have kids, but I worry that it points to something deeply abnormal about me that I can't even imagine any hypothetical scenario where the pros could outweigh the cons.
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Finished reading Among Others. Wrote the following review:
"This book was better than it really had any right to be. It's a YA novel about a teenage girl in a British boarding school, with light fantasy elements, which is ordinarily a genre I would not expect to enjoy. Additionally, the narrator does not feel to me like a realistic portrayal of a teenager, and also seems a bit Mary Sue-ish.
Despite all that, and somewhat to my own embarrassment, this book really did draw me in. There were frequent moments of real insight, which I think is something largely missing from the rest of YA as a genre. One of the highlights of the book for me was the unreliability of the narration with regard to just how real the magic in the book actually is, which I found simultaneously both more and less impressive after learning that the author apparently did not actually intend for the existence of the fantasy elements in the book to be at all in doubt.
It's hard to say much else positive about the actual plot and contents of the novel, since it largely follows typical YA coming-of-age beats, but that isn't inherently a bad thing if it's done well. It is overall a pleasant little book when read by an adult, about as much as I think anyone could reasonably expect for a book that seems to be mostly for and about teenagers."
4 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8507983658)
Somehow hadn't noticed until reading a news article today that the USA's 250th anniversary is this July. Very happy that I'll be abroad for all of this year.
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Work so far this week has been tree planting, and building fences to protect the new trees from deer and rabbits. The twenty acre croft here is being planted with native tree species, partially funded through grants from the Scottish government as part of a larger environmentalist effort to reforest the Hebrides. The previous two farms that I've worked at had a little bit of a feeling of winding down their operations, but this one, as with most farms I volunteer at, has much more of a character of planning and building for the future.
As much as I enjoy doing volunteer farm work with the WWOOF program, there is a sort of contradiction there between my worldview and that of most farms and farmers I work with. We are both motivated by thoughts of sustainability and environmentalism, but whereas the typical WWOOF ethos is one of optimism, my thoughts about the future are mostly tinged with pessimism. I don't really want to think about what the world, and especially the natural world, will be like decades in the future after this croft has finished being reforested. Actions to preserve or reclaim the natural world and to fight climate change feel like loosing battles at the best of times and pointless self-delusion at worst. It is difficult to enjoy my work if I think about it in these terms, and so I mostly try not to. I do believe that there is some inherent value in well-intended projects that are undertaken even in the face of a hopeless future, but it's difficult to come up with a real justification for that value. I almost feel as though I am planting trees for a hypothetical lost future that could have been, rather than for the real one that's coming and that I have no particular interest in seeing. There is real good in the world, there are well-intentioned people doing well-intentioned things, but the good and the bad alike are all going to be drowned in a flood of runaway climate change and the resultant shortages, famines, and wars.
So, why bother planting trees? If the world cannot be saved, which I don't believe it can, I might as well ask why anyone should ever bother doing anything. I think the best answer I can give at present is that if I were living in a good world with a good future, it would be good to plant trees, and so even in the real world there is still some lingering goodness wrapped up in the act of planting trees, even if they will one day be knocked over by man-made hurricanes or bleached by acid rains. Or maybe the better answer is that I'm planting trees purely for myself. That in the moment of the act of planting a tree, I am connecting myself, however briefly, with some lost timeline where a better world was possible.
I feel in some sense as if I have transcended doomerism and come out the other side. I can't quite say that I've made my peace with the approaching age of decline, but I've reached a stage where I can somehow draw satisfaction and fulfillment from hopeful actions like reforestation even without having any actual hope in me. This stuff all used to make me depressed but it doesn't anymore.
More fencing and tree planting tomorrow assuming the clear weather holds.
Headache today. Fellow volunteer thinks it might be from gasoline fumes from me having spent all day using the brush cutter. I have some Ibuprofen with me but haven't taken any. I usually don't like taking medicine for headaches unless things get really bad or unless there is some particular reason why I definitely need my head to be functioning optimally as soon as possible. I mentioned all this to some of the people here when asked, and said that I am generally fairly anti-medication, but I didn't really have a concise explanation for why. The best short answer I think I can give is that taking medicine for a non-serious issue feels like taking the easy way out. But I don't know if that answer by itself really holds up to serious scrutiny. I am not generally interested in making myself pointlessly suffer or in making my life harder or more painful just on principle. Every time I use any sort of tool or technological convenience could conceivably qualify as "taking the easy way out" and yet those other shortcuts don't usually bother me. I think maybe a more accurate explanation for my avoidance of medication is that I don't want to get used to always being able to wipe away any minor inconvenience just by swallowing a pill. If I keep Ibuprofen set aside as a rarely-indulged luxury, I will always be able to tolerate its absence and will never have to live to see it become a taken-for-granted necessity. Maybe someday I really won't have access to modern medicine anymore, and so I'll be glad then that I never made taking headache medication into a habit. Although having written that, I suppose I can just as easily imagine myself shipwrecked on a deserted island or surviving in the post-apocalyptic wastes and suffering from a bad headache and thinking "damn, I really should have taken every opportunity to use Ibuprofen back when I had the chance." I'm not actually expecting to ever be unable to access modern medicine, really, and I don't actually justify my avoidance of medication by thinking about how civilization might collapse someday. But the general principle is there regardless, that I don't want to ever become completely accustomed to something that I know I can manage to do without. This same principle applies to several other conspicuous self-deprivations in my life, for example: I regularly sleep on floors, in part because I don't ever want to feel like I'm unable to cope with not having a bed available; I regularly take cold showers, because I don't ever want to feel like I need to have hot water; I (used to) regularly wash my clothes by hand, because I don't want to feel that my life requires me to have access to a washing machine. (Though people who know me may be tempted to suggest that my eating habits should also be included in this list, my general neglect for how my food tastes isn't really due to self-deprivation; rather, its usually the case that I really just have no actual desire for better-tasting food.)
I believe that all of these sorts of self-deprivation ultimately contribute to my freedom in life. If I choose to live a life where a bed, a hot shower, and a laundry machine are all necessary requirements, then I am restricting the sorts of lives that I am able to choose to live. I won't ever be able to do something or go somewhere that involves losing access to those things without it feeling like an unpleasant deprivation. Whereas on the other hand, if I never regularly use any of those things anyway, then I won't feel like I'm giving anything up by losing my access to them and so I will be perfectly free to travel anywhere and do anything without worrying about whether a bed, hot shower, or washing machine will be available. Ibuprofen is a little bit different in the sense that it's something small that can be carried with me, but the overall idea is the same. I don't want to ever feel that my choices in life are restricted to only those where medicine is easily available.
The counterargument to this whole line of reasoning, and (I assume) the reason other people don't usually live their lives this way, is that it is comfortable to sleep in beds, to take hot showers, and to not have a headache; and that feeling comfortable is generally more important than abstract hypothetical ideas about freedom. If I felt that material comfort was a major component of happiness then I would maybe be more open to this argument, but I honestly just don't. I don't think any material self-deprivations have ever made my life even slightly less happy. There's a quote from Thomas Jefferson that goes "we never repent of having eaten too little" and I think that goes for a lot of things. Maybe a cold shower is uncomfortable in the moment, but I never look back on it thirty minutes later and think "oh that really was so uncomfortable, I really should have taken a hot one instead." Comfort and discomfort are fleeting, they are ephemeral. The "happiness" that a person might measure by taking stock of their immediate material condition and deciding how comfortable they feel is a type of happiness that I have very little interest in. And just to be clear, nothing about this line of thought ever leads to me causing myself to suffer, or reveling in my own suffering, because lack of material comfort is not actually a form of suffering. Conflating discomfort with suffering is the purview of animals, small children, and helpless spoiled aristocrats.
Added a color-coded world map to my website today (https://t0bor.neocities.org/world_map.png), sorted into four categories as: places I've been to for less than a week, for more than a week, for more than two months, and for more than two years (so, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Sierra Leone for that last category).
I realized after making the map (or maybe while making it?) that most people might sort the places they've been to into either "places I've lived" or "places I've visited", but I don't really feel like I have a clear divide between the two, or at least not since becoming an adult anyway. At eighteen, it always sort of felt like I had one foot in my parents house and one foot in college, without either place really feeling like my home. The closest I've felt to actually living somewhere, as an adult, was probably the year I spent in Pittsburgh immediately after college graduation. Other than that it's just been a series of shorter or longer stays in various places without ever really feeling settled or moved in anywhere. I felt like a guest the whole time I was in Sierra Leone, and felt like a sort of long-term couch-surfer the other two times I was in Pittsburgh, and other than that I've never been anywhere for more than six months, with even those six-month stays being in foreign countries where I was volunteering with WWOOF and staying as a guest in someone else's house.
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Finished reading the Lafayette biography. Wrote the following review:
"Manages to walk the fine line between telling a good story and giving an academic recounting of the history, something which unfortunately seems pretty rare in popular biographies. Despite being very much about politics, the book never really felt to me like it was pushing any political agenda of its own. I can definitely recommend the audiobook for any fans of Mike Duncan's podcasts."
4 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8514574644)
Briefly tried reading a YA fantasy novel that had been recommended to me but gave up very quickly. (Not going to say what book or who recommended it other than to just say that it almost certainly wasn't you, person-who-happens-to-be-here-reading-this.) "Then, he could emerge from the cave a [magic monster-slayer]: a survivor gifted with one of four magical classes. He was tired of being a student. Going off to discover what happened to his father was completely unreasonable without having the strength of a [magic monster-slayer]." Actual excerpt from the first two minutes of the audiobook. This book could easily have been written by an actual middle-schooler. I dropped it and started reading Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg instead, and the contrast between hot garbage YA and an actual fairly-well-written novel by and for adults is astounding. Guess which one has a higher aggregate review on Goodreads of course...
I think if all the hot garbage YA out there was only being consumed by middle-schoolers it wouldn't make me as upset, since then I'd be able to fit the whole thing into the mold of "low quality product being foisted on ignorant teenagers who don't know any better, shame on the writers and publishers for taking advantage of children like that." What gets me is how many educated and otherwise-intelligent people my own age happily read this stuff and seemingly can't even tell the difference between it and actual good literature. Certainly it's always been true that a lot of people enjoy crap or have shitty tastes, but I feel like the thing that's changed more recently is that there isn't an obvious public distinction anymore between the crap and the good stuff. People are out there having serious debates about whether or not the Marvel movies are the pinnacle of modern cinema. The garbage used to all be published on pulp, you could look at the quality of the paper itself and know more or less what you were getting. Now I have to wade through an undifferentiated sea of bestsellers without being able to tell whether its actually good or just low-effort pageturner slop that I wouldn't have liked even as a teenager, unless I just go ahead and get ahold of the book to try it for myself. This happened (to an admittedly less egregious extent) with Gideon the Ninth, which I was tricked into reading by enormous hype and after multiple people whose opinions I otherwise respected had made it sound as if it was a book that adult readers could expect to like. I keep my guard up a bit more these days (e.g. I'm not going to touch Dungeon Crawler Carl with a ten foot pole) but it still keeps happening. I don't like living in a world where I can have serious and sophisticated conversations with a thirty-year-old, tell them I enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy novels, and then have them earnestly recommend me this afternoon's attempted hot garbage YA novel, without them having the decency to tell me that it's hot garbage YA, or even without them seeming to know that that's what it is. People are allowed to like what they like, that really isn't my issue here, it's just that they (and more importantly, society generally and all the cultural powers-that-be) need to be able to notice and articulate the difference between good stuff and low-quality trash, even if they then choose to continue to enjoy or even prefer the trash.
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I've been trawling through and consolidating some old correspondence, as part of the same recent general effort to write more and to better document what I've written that led to me starting this journal. Came across this paragraph, taken from an email to my dad written in January 2015:
"I think you're right that a lot of what's bugging me is having to choose what to do with my life after college. Ideally, it wouldn't matter too much what I decide to do immediately afterward, since I should always be able to switch paths, but I'm worried that I'm the sort of person who would just get complacent and decide that that wherever I am is good enough. I get your point about how I should be able to make any path I choose into the right path, but that sounds to me too much like settling with what's just good enough. I think I'd rather be the sort of person who switches what they're doing all the time, rather than be a physicist or philosopher or whatever and wonder if I would have rather done something else."
Mission accomplished, baby!
Funny how my perception of age changes as I get older. Ten years ago, age sixty onward seemed to me to be all one sort of indistinguishable monolithic Old. Whereas now, it feels like there's a huge difference between sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety.
The croft has an electric piano that I've been playing a bit the last couple days. I really enjoy playing, but piano in particular can also be frustrating for me. With guitar, for example, I already have more or less all the skill I've ever really aspired to have, I can play basically every chord (or at least any given chord in any song I'm likely to encounter) and my skills are comfortably at what I usually describe to people as "campfire level", without me feeling like I need to put any time or effort into maintaining my skills. When I play guitar, I just play for enjoyment without ever feeling like I'm missing anything or ought to be pushing myself toward anything.
With piano, in contrast, twelve years of formal lessons have both given me a higher level of skill (which I've since then largely failed to maintain), and have also showed me the possibility of new levels of skill that I could potentially reach if I were more diligent about practicing regularly and if were to actually put effort into improving. I have always had the problem, even as a teenager actively taking piano lessons, that when I sit down at the piano I mostly just want to enjoy playing songs I already know well, rather than work systematically to improve on difficult passages or to practice new material, let alone actually drill finger exercises and such. On the one hand, the fact that I enjoy playing so much means that I never feel as though I have to force myself to sit down at the piano, but on the other hand actual improvement feels like pulling teeth. And unlike with guitar, I have a hard time just being content with where I'm at rather than feeling like I ought to be improving.
The fact that I spend so much time traveling without regular access to a piano certainly isn't helping things. Whenever I do get brief chances to play (such as here), and time to myself to actually practice rather than just playing through whichever songs I remember, any effort I'm able to put into practicing is taken up entirely with just trying to relearn things I've forgotten and trying to slow down my overall decline a bit. I know I still have quite a bit of skill at the piano but it's frustrating always comparing where I am now to where I was ten years ago, and losing things faster than I can ever regain them.
At this point I only really know about a dozen songs well enough to play them confidently, and only a couple of them actually fully showcase my skills. It would probably require a year of daily practice to get myself back to the level I was at back when I stopped taking lessons, so that I could then actually start trying to improve and to learn new things. But given the sort of life I'm living and the lack of self-discipline I tend to have with regard to actually practicing rather than just playing for fun, that year of daily practice is probably just never going to happen. And so instead, every time I sit down at the piano, even though I'm having fun and people tell me how impressed they are with me, I'm still always also thinking about what could've been, what could potentially be. Which is frustrating.
Accordion is a nice middle ground. I've never had any actual instruction in it, so as with guitar I'm mostly able to treat it as just something I do for fun rather than as a curriculum that I've given up on part way through. Objectively I'm better at piano than at accordion, but a lot of the skill from the former carries over to the latter, and with accordion being less common and less central in classical music and music education it's easy to feel that I am much farther along, relatively speaking, with accordion than I am with piano. Sort of like how if you spend a lot of time practicing at chess, you might be able to qualify as a novice, whereas if you spend that same amount of time practicing at a more obscure board game you could easily be one of the best in the world at it. I'm certainly not one of the best in the world at accordion or anything, but there are comparatively fewer people out there for me to be forced to compare myself with, and fewer people qualified to judge me. I feel much more comfortable with calling myself good at accordion than I do with calling myself good at piano, despite my objectively higher skill level in the latter.
I miss my accordion. I wish it was small enough to be easily brought with me when I travel.
The moors are on fire out on the far side of the loch. The assumption is that it was some sort of controlled burn that then got out of control. There was smoke visible all day and now at night I can see the fires from my bedroom window.
There were several women over at the croft this evening for my host's Tuesday craft night. I'm working on knitting another pair of mittens, not so much because I need another pair of mittens but rather because I'm worried that if I don't keep knitting somewhat regularly for a while I'll forget everything I've learned so far and the muscle memory and have to start from scratch if I ever want to knit anything again in the future. The big gossip tonight among the other knitters was that next week Gabe Newell is apparently going to be renting out a lodge here for a couple months; the husband of one of the women works as the lodge's gamekeeper. I was the only one present who knew who Gabe Newell was.
Having one of those days where it feels like a struggle to convincingly portray a normal well-adjusted human. The sort of day where I find myself getting derailed thinking about how long to wait before responding during a conversation, how close to stand or walk near people, where to look when I'm not looking at anything, what to do with my hands, etc. Everything I say and can think of as potentially wanting to say feels awkward and/or banal, whereas the things other people say feel completely correct and yet also completely fake.
I think being around small children brings out this sort of feeling more often. Not the children themselves, though. Small children are straightforward and tactless and so talking to them requires no overthinking or performance from me. Sort of like with Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. But the way parents and other adults interact with small children is full of artifice, dishonesty, and manipulation, and to see adults constantly switch modes as they switch between talking to children and talking to me serves as a stark reminder of the reality of how orchestrated and artificial every conversation really is. Every line is a performance, an attempt to influence or misdirect or achieve something in some way. Every bit of communication and every interaction is wrapped up in layers and layers of what that communication is subtly and indirectly meant to accomplish beyond just conveying information. I don't mean to imply that the people around me are conscious and calculated manipulators, I think it all mostly happens unconsciously and automatically and is just a default part of how human interaction works. I also don't mean to imply that this whole charade is something that I consider to be beneath me or that I'm personally excused from it. Of course I do it too. It's just that with small children around I'm suddenly frequently much more aware that I'm doing it and that everyone is doing it to me, whereas usually it's something I can often manage to ignore or just forget about.
It's always difficult for me when it feels like the people around me all have their shit together in terms of how to navigate social interactions. I find it reassuring whenever I see someone clearly struggling with awkwardness or with the little subtleties of conversation and social expectations, since it shows to me that they are in fact having some authentic experience down there that they're then visibly struggling to filter into the social mask that we all wear. It's like seeing someone in a stage play briefly and accidentally break character and in that way remind you that they are in fact a real person and not just a robot following a script. I've been getting comparatively few of these sorts of reminder moments from the people around me at this current croft where I'm staying. It almost makes me feel like I should be mentally categorizing myself with the raw and affectationless two-year-old and five-year-old rather than with the polished and masked adults. I feel like I'm in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, trying my best to convincingly pretend to be one of the aliens, while simultaneously hoping to be shown some sign that any of the aliens around me are actually still humans.
Finished reading Dying Inside. It was good. Pleasantly schizoid and misanthropic. Going to start Where The Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler next. Also starting to slowly trudge my way through Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov. Unclear if I'm actually expecting to like it or if I'm just desperately chasing the high of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and being unable to read them for the first time again.
I also skimmed through a big how-to book on different types of needlework (Good Housekeeping's Step-By-Step Encyclopedia of Needlecraft, Judy Brittain, 1979) that had been left behind by one of the ladies at craft night to give to a different craft night member not present. I've read about a few new techniques now (specifically, cable stitch knitting, swiss darning/duplicate stitching, and cutwork embroidery) that I want to try to add to my repertoire with the occasional bits of knitting and embroidery that I've previously been doing.
I think tailoring and other sorts of string and fabric crafts have had happen to them the same sort of thing that happened to painting after the invention of photography, and western classical music during the ending of the common practice period. Those arts had been completely perfected within the scope of their original purpose, and in becoming perfected any further work became pointless and unnecessary. The only way to make worthwhile music or paintings was by purposefully breaking rules and always striving for a way to think outside the box. With knitting and weaving and sewing and so on, machines can now work more efficiently and perfectly than humans ever could, and the most perfect and functional and traditionally beautiful clothes have already been made and will never be handmade. The only reason left for practicing these arts is novelty, to make something that no one else would think to make and that no machine would be likely to ever duplicate. (Actually there is another reason, which is the desire for historic traditions and the human touch that keep things like Harris tweed and sweaters from Grandma in constant demand. This reason for doing handicrafts is completely uninteresting to me.) Industrial textile production has moved fabric craft as an art form thoroughly into the era of Picasso and Stravinsky. My end goal, in knowing how to sew or knit or embroider, is not to recreate clothes that anyone or any machine could make but that are unique in having been made by me. My goal instead is to hopefully be able to make weird and unexpected things that no one else could think to make.
I'm also not particularly interested in achieving any sort of traditional technical mastery over knitting or embroidery (or really any sort of craft or skill whatsoever). The Encyclopedia of Needlecraft book is full of hallowed techniques passed down through the centuries that someone could clearly spend their whole life practicing without ever reaching the end of it. My experience with piano (see 26-04-13) makes that whole route pretty unappealing. There are endless depths to many of these skills, but I believe I will only continue to enjoy doing them if I restrict myself to learning things as they come and as I want them and have use for them, rather than going as far in with the skill as I can simply because the depths are there and because I feel like I'm supposed to want to learn everything.
Trying to figure out who it is really that I'm in dialogue with when I'm out here planting trees. The Scottish isles were deforested gradually by their inhabitants roughly three thousand years ago. Is that, like slavery or the Native American genocides, a recent enough crime to still have some lingering ancestral culpability? Or is it all too far away now maybe to be seen through any sort of moral lens? In the 1700s and 1800s, after this land was incorporated into Great Britain, much of the native population was forcibly evicted and suffered under the Highland Clearances. Does that mean that maybe history has already settled the score for their crimes of environmental degradation?
Or, could it be that the deforestation was morally absolved as it happened, as a sort of crime of necessity, like when a hungry person shoplifts for food or like when my neighbors in Sierra Leone killed and ate a pangolin despite them being endangered. Could it be even more than that, could the deforestation have been not a crime at all, but instead the right thing for the people then to do, to cut trees for lumber and firewood and for making more pastures and farmland. Could it be that for those people, in the context they were living in, cutting down trees was the morally correct thing to do, but now in 2026 that act has now been reevaluated to have been bad and it's now me planting trees that is the right thing to do. Could it be that all of this is in a deeper sense just morally neutral, that the tree cutting and the tree planting and maybe even the slavery and the genocide and the Highland Clearances was all just people doing whatever seemed like the thing for them to be doing. Maybe I'm just assigning "right" and "wrong" to all this stuff in order to be able to tell myself a story, to fit myself and my actions into some meaningful larger narrative. What is it then that I dislike so much about that narrativeless alternative?
A world where some people long ago cut down trees and now me and some other people are planting trees, where there are no protagonists or antagonists or good guys or bad guys and instead only a bunch of background extras ad-libbing stuff with no actual plot relevance, just feels sort of empty somehow. I want to feel like history leads somewhere, and that by playing my part in it and trying my best to take meaningful actions I'm aligning myself with something that extends through the ages, a cosmic battle of good versus evil. When I go out to plant trees it isn't enough for me to just believe that what I'm doing is right, I need to feel like I'm righting some historical wrong. I need to be doing right in opposition to something, even if there are no actual individual people past or present for me to oppose. Even if it was just planting trees in the aftermath of a landslide, in opposition to a "bad" act of nature, that would at least still be something. I don't like this feeling that what the tree cutters did and what I'm doing is all just neutral, that we're all just going around doing whatever we're doing, endlessly, without ever opposing or moving toward or away from anything. A world in perpetual stasis, where a thousand years from now someone else will cut all these trees down again and none of it will have ever meant anything.
I remember seeing a video online years ago of footage of an aerial drone dropping a grenade on a Russian soldier. It was a Ukranian drone killing a Russian, and so it was put in front of me online in a celebratory sort of way, as opposed to Russians killing Ukranians which was tragic. I remember being disgusted with the video, but also thinking about how that video was probably representative of the future of warfare, both in the sense of robots killing humans without the victim even being aware of what was happening, and also in the sense of the whole thing being recorded and posted online as part of some sort of gaudy spectator bloodsport. Like watching a football match, except even better, because the opposing team was actually geopolitically evil and because the players were actually being killed in a big gory spectacle for our viewing pleasure rather than just being tackled or whatever.
I worry that I might be part of the last generation capable of reacting with disgust to all this. Certainly society is aware of the shift that's happening and will periodically try to comment on it with things like The Hunger Games, Squid Game, etc, but no amount of self-awareness seems to actually stop the cultural impulse to make entertainment out of mass death. I can't pretend that it's all anything new. I'm told that during the US civil war, battles were often treated by civilians as afternoon entertainment, with families going out to the field to watch the fighting and maybe have a picnic. People casually watched the guillotines during the French revolution the way people today watch TV. But I think there was always some inner voice and/or some fraction of the populace that was disgusted, that recognized the evil in war and execution regardless of how well deserving its victims were said to be. I've read that prior to the mid-1900s the majority of bullets fired during wars were intentionally fired to miss. But then that humanistic impulse was systematically overwritten through modifications in the way militaries are now trained (for example, using human-shaped targets during shooting practice). I'm worried that the internet and modern culture is having a similar overwriting effect on our natural impulse to be horrified and disgusted with any sort of killing.
The Palestinian genocide seems like a straightforward counterexample to this worry, a situation where most people seem sad and disgusted about what's happening, but I wonder if those people would feel the same way if it were happening to a population who were thought to "deserve" it somehow. Which is not to say that all of the grieving and mourning for Palestinians is inauthentic or only politically motivated, but just that we have in a sense been "allowed" by our political disposition to grieve in this case, whereas we might not be in others. Trump supporters are not "allowed" to grieve for families separated and imprisoned by immigration control, even if individual Trump voters might otherwise feel so inclined, but those same Trump voters do authentically grieve for fetuses killed by abortion since that's something they've been given permission to feel. If we were to strip away all of the political alignments surrounding every sort of killing, how much feeling is actually left? Do I actually believe that twelve million people murdered by Nazi Germany was a tragedy, do I feel it deep down in my soul, or is the fact that it was a tragedy ultimately just a fact to me, something that I've assimilated into myself and my identity and my political worldview but without it actually meaning anything in any real human way. I would like to believe there is some core observer inside me capable of actually judging, of separating out human tragedy from political tragedy, of noticing that a video of a robot dropping a grenade on someone is disgusting regardless of who the someone is, but the fact that everyone else in the world seems to evaluate tragedy as just a simple product of what they align themselves with and what they're allowed to feel makes me suspect that deep down I'm no different. I don't think the human brain is able to really comprehend the atrocities that humanity is capable of committing. The fact that we've entered an age where these incomprehensible atrocities are now being beamed into our awareness constantly from every direction in 4k resolution makes me think we're just destined for a future of thorough desensitization. The killings won't ever stop, we'll just learn to stop feeling anything at all about them.
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The croft has a free-range peacock and peahen in addition to the dozen or so chickens, and whenever the peacock is wandering around randomly in the yard or showing up unexpectedly in the background while I'm working it makes me think of The Lobster.
I feel weird talking to other people about having had cancer. Everyone has been touched by cancer in one way or another, it's always everywhere you look, and there have been several conversations where in hindsight I probably ought to have mentioned my own cancer but didn't. Typically the only times I bring it up are if it was incidental to some other topic, e.g. talking about my experiences with Medicaid, talking about why I didn't rejoin the Peace Corps, etc.
I got off too easily with my cancer. No chemotherapy, no long treatment, no lingering sense of mortality or uncertainty really. The progression from initial discovery to surgery to casually routine follow-ups all happened so fast that I never really even had time to dwell on the whole thing. To identify myself as a Cancer Survivor in the presence of other people actually impacted by cancer in significant ways feels like if people were talking about some war and I mentioned that I was also a veteran in that war but then it turns out that I had some bowel obstruction or something and was honorably discharged before having seen any actual combat. I feel like mentioning my cancer is stealing valor from the actual cancer survivors out there.
I can't even try to turn it into just some interesting fun fact about myself either, since being flippant about cancer feels wildly disrespectful to the real cancer victims (correction: I am in fact jokey and flippant about it among my friends, I feel safer doing so knowing people know me well enough to not ever take me too seriously and knowing that people my age are less likely to have their own cancer horror stories. But among strangers and the sorts of acquaintances I meet while traveling and WWOOFing like this, I do not laugh about it and generally keep the whole thing to myself). So the cancer stuff has to just stay there in my head quietly as a serious but simultaneously nonserious thing that happened to me, that I'm unable to brag about or joke about or seek sympathy for or sympathize with others about or even talk about really.
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Finished reading Where The Axe Is Buried. Wrote the following review:
"An ambitious book that feels like it actually lived up to its potential. Unfalteringly engaging the whole way through. The sort of book that's explosive enough that I almost feel surprised that I've been 'allowed' to read it while living under any government whatsoever."
5 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8537030538)
Going to start The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss next, which I expect will take me a while (28 hour audiobook. I'm also still planning on making it through Oblomov on my kindle, which will probably take longer, since I can't read it while working).
Offhand throwaway line from near the end of Where The Axe Is Buried that I've been chewing on since yesterday, concerning people's emotions and motivations when traveling: "He wondered if people went away simply so that they could return." It fits with a recurring theme running through some of Ursula K Le Guin's work as well, that going somewhere is only half a journey and that returning is the thing that completes it.
I do think my travels would feel very different if I didn't have Pittsburgh in the back of my head, this idea that I will presumably be going back there some day. There is no specific building there that I consider to be 'home' but the city itself does feel like a sort of anchor. I wonder if having that sort of thing is a basic human need. If Pittsburgh was destroyed somehow, if the whole US sank into the ocean while I was in Scotland, I wonder if I would then try to latch on to whatever farm I was at or maybe some farm I had volunteered at previously and try to make that into a new sort of anchor for me. I think about stories about people truly displaced, people who had a home that vanished and who are, for a time at least, unable to make a new one. Those stories always seem to say that it isn't possible for people to really be happy like that, but I've always assumed that the issue was more with being forced into it, having your home taken away or destroyed by force rather than by choice. I've personally always felt like I've managed to be happy while homeless and wandering, but thinking about it more I wonder if I would still be able to feel that way without carrying with me some abstract idea of coming back to Pittsburgh at some point in the future.
Last night and the night before were the first cloudless nights since getting to Lewis. Stayed up and watched out the window for several minutes to try to get a glimpse of the Lyrid meteor shower that peaked last night but didn't see anything.
It feels good to have little reminders of scale and permanence in the face of overbearing feelings of the present. I'm usually able to tune out current events if I want to but even thinking about things like the reforestation I'm doing and the long decades it will take for the trees to grow up gets all tangled up with feelings of decline and fatalism. But the Lyrid meteor shower will continue happening every year regardless of what humans manage to do to the planet. It's not that it's reassuring exactly, meteors and cosmic timescales and all that are completely separate from anything human, I can't manage to see a shooting star and think that there's a god out there tying it all together with some meaningful human connection. But if not reassuring, it is at least grounding and centering to think about recurring events that will continue to happen for eons no matter what. It helps put things in perspective.
When I was younger I assumed that living an unconventional life as a drifter wanderer type of person was more difficult, and that having a career and a house and a credit score and getting married and having two and a half kids was the easier more straightforward sort of life, the path of least resistance. I don't believe that now. I believe long-term relationships and marriages, parenthood, careers, and so on all take effort, both in the sense of requiring hard work and hard choices to establish them and carry them out well, and also in the sustained effort required to maintain them, to wake up everyday and continue with a marriage or a career, to make long-term sustaining choices rather than easy carefree choices. In contrast, the life I've mostly been living is more like the easy way out, it's the choice of life paths that a person more or less defaults to if they refuse to make any real meaningful choices, if they have no real interest in long-term goals or plans or commitments of any sort. I live a shallow sort of existence, but it is one that requires very little maintenance or dedication or effort.
I think my earlier confusion was partly due to the fact that the vast majority of people I encountered, especially as a kid, were people with conventional lifestyles rather than aimless drifters. The adults I might meet at school or via youth groups or church or my friends' parents were almost all, almost definitionally, people with careers and permanent addresses and typical nuclear family structures and so on. The only way really in which I was exposed to the idea of people being purposefully homeless or careerless or happily unmarried was through books, movies, and television. I think this led to me seeing the conventional sort of suburban life as the default, the thing people would grow up and fall into if they weren't strong enough or brave enough or dedicated enough to be some sort of romantic heroic adventure-movie-protagonist wanderer. Adults could sleepwalk into becoming normal and boring like my friends' parents, or else they could actively put effort into turning away from the beaten path, resist the pull of the trappings of normal boring life and fight to be something else instead.
So it then came as something of a shock to me, in my early twenties or so, to find out that there wasn't actually any gravitiational pull toward the conventional lifestyle stuff. It's like I sort of assumed that marriage and homeownership were things that would just happen to me unexpectedly if I didn't diligently keep my guard up. But in reality, I never had to fight anything. It turns out being single and careerless and homeless and so on at age thirty is as simple as simply doing nothing. I braced myself to pull against restraints that just weren't ever actually there. The people around me all rent nice apartments or work for promotions at their jobs or have children not because those are the things they've been brainwashed into doing or because there's some societal zeitgeist subtly urging them to conform, but because they actually just want those things for themselves. If I tell people about my life and about what I want or don't want out of it, they often get skeptical or confused but they don't usually try to change my mind or to convince me of the merits of the components of conventional life. To the people I talk to, those merits are self-evident and require no argument in their favor.
In theory all of this ought to lead to me having a greater respect for people who live these conventional lives, who put real effort into jobs and homes and families because they truly want those things. It mostly doesn't though. I think it would be different if the people around me actually seemed happy with their lives more often. I feel like I see too many relationships and marriages that look like people who have gotten used to each other rather than people who actively want to be with each other, too many people employed in careers that they don't actually seem to like in the day-to-day but feel too invested in to quit or too scared of being poor or unemployed, too many homes that people aren't really happy with but where they live anyway because they don't know where else they'd rather be or because they've decided that they have some arbitrary standard of living they feel they have to uphold in order to respect themselves. People actively put effort into getting these lives that they want but then it seems like they aren't ever really happy with it in the end all that often, they're just sufficiently comfortable with it.
So all things considered, I think I'm pretty happy with my life choices so far and intend to continue drifting.
My WWOOF host took me around the west side of the island today to see two stone circles (from five thousand years ago), the ruins of Dun Carloway broch (from two thousand years ago), and a preserved blackhouse village (from two hundred years ago, but still inhabited up until fifty years ago).
It's strange to see the history of the island laid out as a mostly unbroken chain like that. There's a sharp divide in the Americas between indian burial mounds and mesoamerican ziggurats on the one hand and then the colonial period and everything after it, with no real continuity extending across the gap. Even in places like Europe or in cities that were more or less continuously inhabited, the history of the place tends to be broken into distinct periods (before, during, and after Roman imperial rule, for example). It could partly be my own ignorance, and I do know that there were multiple different historical periods in the Hebrides with various influence from the Vikings and the British and such, but it feels like the history of the people and places here is mostly a continuous unbroken chain, a series of gradual shifts and slow depopulations and repopulations but without any sudden dramatic changes or distinct eras.
I've personally never felt as though I have any real ancestry, and I wonder how that affects my perspective on the world. I know that I have mostly European ancestors but I don't really know anything about who they were or where specifically they came from, and I kind of make a point of not knowing. I'm not interested in tracing my ancestry or in doing genome testing or anything, partly because I think that stuff is silly and irrelevant but also because I have no desire to be linked, however tenuously, to any place or group. Being from the US certainly helps me with not being tied to anything. White American immigrants never had their heritage erased to the extent that black Americans did, but it does still tend to obfuscate things quite a bit. America also is somewhat unique in having both very little concrete unifying culture (due to its comparative recency, large size, and cultural syncretism), and also spreading that culture pretty thoroughly over the rest of the modern world through American hegemony, so that American culture (such as it is) is much closer to feeling like the "default generic international human culture" than any other country's national culture is. Sort of like how American English has established itself as the default generic international human language. Being from the US, and eschewing any sort of warm feelings of attachment or patriotic loyalty, gives me the ability to feel like I'm from nowhere and simply come from the world as a whole. Or at least, I would assume, I can feel that way as much as anyone really can after having spent their first two and half decades in a single place.
So coming back to the Scottish historical sites visited today, it feels a bit strange to be walking around a place with so much constancy and continuity, all while holding myself as some sort of unattached history-less identity-less free agent. Like I'm a ghost or something. The rest of the world is real, they all have a heritage and an ancestral homeland and culture and connections to each other, and I'm floating around in between them all, looking but not touching, purposefully never staying anywhere long enough for me to become anything real.
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Another assassination attempt on the president. It seems like security is so much tighter than it was decades ago, hard to imagine what it would take for someone to succeed at this point. Maybe someone will eventually but I suppose that would just end up making it that much harder to kill the next one.
I'd like to be able to say that I don't think assassinating the president is the right way to go about things. One thing I can say honestly is that I don't think it really accomplishes anything or changes anything at the end of the day. People like Trump are symptoms of their time and of the systems that produce them, if they die another one would just step in to replace the one that was killed, there's no way to actually kill enough Trumps to make a difference just through assassinations. To borrow an analogy from Where The Axe Is Buried, the rot that gives rise to Trump is like a fungal mycelium, spread throughout the soil of the country. Trump himself is just the fruiting body, the mushroom sticking up out of the ground, and if you kill him you don't actually kill the organism.
In a healthy democracy there would be no need for assassination and any political assassins would be justly demonized for selfishly and recklessly subverting the will of the people. We don't live in a healthy democracy though. When regular people feel disempowered by their government and unable to make changes via the orthodox channels, the next step is necessarily the unorthodox channels, of which violence tends to be the most straightforward. Assassination attempts are, to my mind, a healthy way of coping with an unhealthy democracy. Not productive or advisable or ethical, but healthy.
Finished reading The Name Of The Wind. Wrote the following review:
" It's not badly written, and probably qualifies as one of the better epic fantasy YA novels out there, so for fans of that genre it certainly has plenty to offer but for me I still felt like it was a bit lacking. I kept being told implicitly and explicitly to expect to have my expectations subverted, but then it never actually happened really, nothing in the book ever ended up being particularly unexpected. The main character's progression through the course of the novel pretty closely followed the format and tempo of a sort of wish-fulfillment shonen anime, to the point where I think I would have enjoyed this book more if it had been a TV show or a comic book rather than a novel.
There were a lot of promising aspects to this book that then never felt like they got properly developed. The magic system could have had a lot of potential, the early chapters set up expectations for further developments there and the parellels between magic and real-world chemistry and physics were interesting, but then it all never really went anywhere. Every opportunity for clever problem solving through use of the established rules of magic fizzled out and defaulted to the main character just repeatedly setting things on fire with his mind. The themes brought up regarding the interplay between history, myth, and religion, and how it all related to the main character's focus on cultivating his own heroic reputation, was another topic that felt like it could have all gone somewhere but then never did. It's possible that this stuff is handled better in the sequel, but after the limited payoff from having invested this much time already, I don't think I'm going to be reading it. The fact that this was the first part of an unfinished trilogy that has seemingly been abandoned by the author after only two books certainly doesn't help things either."
3 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8560557883)
Planning on starting The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse next.
Only one other person tonight at my WWOOF host's Tuesday craft night, so it was a very relaxed evening. The other Scottish WWOOFer left this morning and the American couple and their daughter are leaving tomorrow, so it's going to be a very quiet week until the two new Belgian WWOOFers arrive on Monday.
We finished planting all of the trees today that have been delivered from the nursery so far, ~3000 trees out in the field plus ~1000 trees in the hedging closer to the croft. The last ~1000 for the field and ~500 for the hedges won't be delivered until Thursday or Friday so I'll be working on other odd jobs around the croft for most of this week.
Warm (~15°C) and sunny without too much wind all of last week (other than a little rain two days ago), with more of the same expected for the rest of this week. A nice contrast from the first couple weeks I was here, when it was 10°C and raining almost every day.
The nice weather continues. Spent yesterday evening burning off briars, rotted pallets, and unneeded cardboard in a big bonfire in the yard. Most of the time the last couple days has been spent cutting and moving firewood, as well as doing some random odd jobs around the croft.
Having some complicated thoughts about The Glass Bead Game. I'm only a short way through it so far, although I've also skimmed the Wikipedia article on it and the plot summary. Castalia is supposedly a metaphor for Hesse's having found refuge in Switzerland during World War II, yet the novel doesn't actually feel to me like it's taking an entirely positive view of Castalia's separation from the rest of the real world. If so, I think there's a little bit of a parallel there with The Dispossessed, where a fantasy utopia is built around some philosophical ideal that's been taken to its utmost extreme (dispassionate insulated scholasticism in the case of The Glass Bead Game, anarchist communism in The Dispossessed), and the resulting society is then both celebrated and also critiqued and undermined by the author. Looking at the plot summary, it also reminds me a bit of Hesse's Siddhartha, with a spiritual seeker leaving behind orthodox prescribed paths and finding their own uncertain way to enlightment (although apparently that's true of every Hesse novel).
Overall though I can't say I'm exactly enamored with the book as a book, independently of what it's about and what it's trying to say. This being the third Hesse novel I've read (and having been not particularly impressed with Steppenwolf), I'm not sure if I'll end up trying a fourth one after this. There are so, so many good books out there that I haven't read yet, there are undoubtedly books that would be my new favorite that are languishing somewhere on my to-read list, or that haven't made the list, or even books that I've never even heard of. It feels like a wasted opportunity to spend time reading a book that I know I'll probably like but also know that I probably won't love.
I wish I could play the glass bead game. Maybe everyone does. At the same time though, I don't think I could devote my life to it with the total monasticism Hesse's world requires. There are probably times in my life when I could have mustered up that level of devotion to pure scholasticism. While at university before having become disillusioned with academia and science-as-a-career, for example. Today though the whole thing makes me think of nothing so much as the two Torumekian princes near the end of Miyazaki's Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind manga, so enraptured by rediscovering pre-apocalyptic classical piano music that they're able to forget and ignore the plight of the entire world. Arts and sciences cultivated in isolation from the outside world are empty, meaningless. Truth itself is meaningless by itself. The world makes itself worthwhile, without it everything else is ultimately drained of vitality. Maybe the glass bead game is one of those cases where the only winning move is not to play.
I don't think I could be a Castalian scholar monk, but I also don't think I ever had my big blowout Samsara phase, like Siddhartha had with Kamaswami and Kamala. I've never in my life cared about money or power or relationships of any sort, or even more innocuous things like entertainment or beauty or comfort. I'm living almost like a monk out here while WWOOFing, except for the fact that I'm not actually devoted to anything, and don't want to be devoted to anything. Does that mean I'm still seeking, like one of Hesse's characters? Or have I truly given up, fallen off the path completely? I suppose the fact that I still can't stop myself from asking the question proves that it's not over yet.
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I feel so much more alive, more mentally active and awake, these past couple days. It could be a coincidence or maybe just the extra sunlight or something but I really think the main thing that caused the change was the departure of the five-year-old. Being around children is like the opposite of meditation. Thank goodness I will never be a parent. It's also been nice just generally having fewer other people around. I feel so much more content being by myself. I wish I was able to say that to myself without still feeling a bit guilty about it.
Somewhat related, I came across the term "amatonormativity" for the first time while wandering around Wikipedia earlier today. I suspect maybe I'd have an easier time figuring out my own situation with regard to what I ultimately want out relationships and such if I had been raised in a non-amatonormative society. Maybe if I had been born on Anarres. Except that Anarres had its own arbitrary and sometimes limiting cultural expectations with regard to sex and romance. It would be an improvement certainly, but I think even if I were raised on Anarres I would struggle to navigate things, like Shevek did. Although now that I think about it, I guess most of the Anarresti characters in The Dispossessed had issues with relationships and with figuring out what role relationships played in their lives. Maybe that's the point, that it's part of being human to struggle with that sort of thing regardless of what kind of society you live in. But I still feel like a society that presumes or enforces nothing or almost nothing would be an improvement over one that comes with a strict expected trajectory (monogamy, intimacy, commitment, marriage, children) built in.
Started writing a short story, inspired in part by bits and pieces of The Name Of The Wind and The Glass Bead Game. Actually the idea for the story is much older, I remember coming up with it and jotting the idea down in a notebook in sophomore or junior year of college, but then I was busy and forgot about it and never actually bothered writing it out.
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Finished the story thingy. The Hermit and the Master (https://t0bor.neocities.org/the_hermit_and_the_master.txt). I think it turned into a fun little piece. Sometimes the stuff I write seems better and better to me the more time goes by, and with other stuff it starts to seem worse and worse to me until I eventually just bury it somewhere in my harddrive in embarrassment. I'm curious which way this one will end up going.
Still thinking about The Glass Bead Game and the Torumekian princes in the garden (as per 26-04-30). The Castalians don't actually produce art themselves (although I don't quite understand why not, it feels like that fact exaggerates the uselessness and irrelevance of Castalia to such a degree that it ultimately makes it into a sort of strawman and weakens Hesse's overall themes and discussions running through the book, in my humble opinion anyway), but all the same it's been making me think more about how I view the purpose of practicing art.
I have dedicated a not insignificant portion of my life and my attention to the craft of baking. It's a skill that people can devote their entire lives to, that whole schools can be built around, and that can produce extraordinarily difficult and ornate products. But in all my life and experience, the single most memorable, valuable, and meaningful baked good I've ever encountered was the cake that was served at the wedding of the principal of the school I worked at in Sierra Leone. The cake was, objectively speaking, pitiful. It was tiny (maybe ten inches in diameter, an inch or so high, such that the people at the wedding each got to eat only a less-than-bite-sized sliver) and looked completely unappetizing and ugly, like a child's first attempt at baking. But all the same, that cake was the only instance I ever saw in my two years in Sierra Leone of a pastry of any kind, or of any sort of attempt at treating food as a decoration or artform rather than simply as nourishment. I didn't get the impression that anyone present other than myself saw the cake as pitiful. To them I suspect it was seen as a moving and hallowed experience, a once in a lifetime luxury.
That is the sort of baking that I would like to do. I want to make things that can be truly appreciated by others. Making more and more elaborate cakes just for connoisseurs who are completely numbed to it all is a waste of talent. Any form of making nice things for people who are so used to nice things that they take them for granted is a waste. Art is only valuable when it provokes a reaction in a person's life. A public mural that actually makes people stop and look and think is worth a thousand paintings in a museum or a million rarefied works of insider art that can't be understood or appreciated except by a handful of overeducated specialists. Artistry is wasted wherever it has no impact, and in my experience that occurs only very rarely in the 'pearls before swine' sense, where the audience is too unrefined and uneducated to appreciate good art. Much more frequently, I think artistry is wasted when it's a case of 'pearls before jewelers', when the audience is so inundated with the art that they're completely incapable of even seeing it as art anymore.
I believe that I am someone who likes music. I like making music. I suppose everyone on the planet claims to like music but I feel like I actually truly like it deeply, I think it is my primary interest and hobby, and the single form of art or craftsmanship that is most accessible to me as a creator, my best avenue for reaching out and touching another person's soul. But I do not like music in some idealized academic or abatract platonic sense. I do not like music the way the Castalians or the Torumekian princes in the garden liked music. My music has to touch people, or else it's meaningless. I think this is a big part of what draws me to busking. Busking is the music equivalent of a public mural, or maybe even graffiti. An actual music concert is like an art museum, people go there already knowing what they're going to be getting, they're expecting it, they're used to it, they can completely tune it out. It's pearls before jewelers. Wasted. But busking is bringing the art to the people, whether or not they asked for it, without them being prepared for it, without them having any defense against it, any ability to calmly look at it without actually seeing it. I do not want to make music for people who already know the music they're going to be getting. It's boring for me and it's boring for them, regardless of how much they may think to themselves that they like it. If I do ever make music by request, I want it to be the musical equivalent of a Sierra Leonean wedding cake. Something where the people know better than to tune it out and ignore it. Pearls before peasants.
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My WWOOF host's son went to the hospital yesterday seemingly almost on a whim for a concerning but probably not life-threatening issue, without him having to worry at all about how that decision would affect his finances, his employment, etc., and my immediate instinctive thought was about how pampered these people are. Truly living in the US has poisoned my brain. No matter how much I might consciously believe that access to hospitals is a basic human right, apparently some deeper part of me is still brainwashed into the American belief that worry-free healthcare is a privilege only for the rich.
Put Oblomov on hold for a bit (I've been crawling my way through it, though not through any fault of Goncharov's) to read a fun little book on firewood techniques that my WWOOF host recommended to me off of her bookshelf, Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting.
There's a minor reference in the second of The Glass Bead Game's "Three Lives", about the hermit confessor and his self-doubt, where the deuteragonist mentions that it's only possible to reach people with Christian argument and proselytizing if they're in a place of weakness. People (e.g. the philisopher scholar who comes to the hermitage and horrifies the main character with his casual blasphemy) can't be converted if they are happy and content with their lives, only if they are uncertain, suffering, brought low, etc. Maybe the blasphemous scholar will have something terrible happen to him in a day or in ten years and then come back to the hermitage, and at that point he would he ready for a Christian conversion.
I remember discussing similar things with fellow atheists in college discussion groups a decade ago, this idea that devout atheists and casual non-believers are all just one really bad day away from becoming religious. Or framed in a different light, the idea that organized religions prey upon the weak and vulnerable when seeking new members. There's also a related idea in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, that Christianity and religions like it originated as the religion of slaves, and are designed to appeal to the weak and to elevate weakness over strength.
My understanding of Hesse's religious views was that he was a thoughtful and uncertain person, a spiritual seeker pulling from many different sources, but still ultimately a Christian, both in heritage and in personal beliefs. It was interesting to me to see someone with a positive view of Christianity (unlike Nietzsche or my college atheist friends) basically affirm that same idea about Christianity only being able to reach the weak and the suffering. I would think that a thing only being understandable and acceptable when a person is weakened and mentally distressed would be clearly seen as a mark against that thing. It feels like it puts Christian conversions in the category of "rash decisions made irrationally under duress", sort of the way non-depressed people think about suicides.
Overall I don't think I'm an especially happy person on average, but if I've made it to 30 years old without suffering any calamity that has forced me into a religious way of thinking, can I begin to safely assume that maybe I'm just immune to that sort of thing? Nietzsche certainly wasn't a happy person either, he seems like he was about as morose as they come. So maybe it's less about unhappiness and more about having an uneven temperament. Maybe the sort of person who has a tragic low point followed by a religious conversion is the same sort that gets inadvisable tattoos and cries when a pet dies and falls in love too easily (which biographers seem to agree Nietzsche was... not). Am I right to be looking down my nose at those people and at the belief systems that require them, or am I just doing that thing where I casually assume my disposition and worldview is automatically the best one simply because it's the only one I've ever known?
The last batch of trees was delivered to the croft this morning, so with the Belgian couple here now we're on track to finish all of the tree planting this week.
I had a brief but good talk with my WWOOF host's son about planting trees for a future I don't really believe in (as per 26-04-09 though not in so many words). We seemed to largely agree on a lot of the main points, that several different factors are pointing to a fairly bleak future, that some things are improving with regard to green energy technology and such but probably not fast enough and that we are already past a tipping point, that the next couple centuries are probably going to involve a lot of famine and a lot of death. It is simultaneously both encouraging and discouraging to learn that my pessimistic mindset while continuing to plant trees isn't really as unique as I might have thought.
He seemed to be coming at the problem from a more "keeping our own hands clean" angle (e.g. "the trees we're planting are offsetting our own carbon, so we personally are good") which feels to me largely symbolic and beside the point, which I sort of said to him. I've never felt motivated to build things or help people or help improve the world out of any sense of guilt or personal responsibility or anything like that, that almost feels to me to be reducing things down to a more simplistic sense of karma or atoning for sins or whatever, this idea that one good action cancels out one bad action of equal magnitude. I suppose if I did see things that way it might be easier for me to come up with a straightforward answer to questions like "why am I out here planting trees if I believe the world is doomed" though.
Finished The Glass Bead Game Wrote the following review:
"It has a lot in common with Hesse's other novels, particularly Siddhartha, but I can't help feeling that while The Glass Bead Game almost certainly has more in it than Siddhartha did, it also feels like I got less out of it. The whole thing is somewhere in between a philosophical digression and an actual novel. As a philosophical digression, it would probably have been more clearly insightful and meaningful if it were pared down to just the meatier bits. As a novel, it is unfortunately missing just about everything that would make a novel actually worth reading (plot, real characters, motion, engagement, wit). Hesse seemingly lacks the ability of someone like Dostoevsky to unite both philosophical insight and good story into a single book. The Glass Bead Game was thought-provoking enough overall that I can't just dismiss it entirely as a waste of my time, but I also can't claim that I particularly enjoyed reading it."
3 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8582496327)
I feel a little bit weird going ahead and assigning it a three-out-of-five-stars rating as if it was just some other mediocre book that I felt vaguely unimpressed with. It feels like apples and oranges putting in the same bucket as a three-out-of-five fantasy novel like The Name Of The Wind. A lot of the stuff discussed in The Glass Bead Game is stuff that I find important and meaningful, and I suspect aspects of the book will stick with me for a long while, but ultimately it just wasn't really all that fun to read. An unnecessary end-of-career magnum opus from a guy who probably already put all his main ideas into words more succinctly in his previous works. I wonder if I would have gotten more out of it if I had read it ten years ago instead, or if I had read it before having read Siddhartha or Steppenwolf maybe.
Going to start reading No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai next.
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When I'm doing long-term WWOOFing like this I get periodic momentary flashes of "What am I even doing here? I'm spending months out in the middle of nowhere, getting nowhere, I'm wasting time and wasting my life, I should be—" and then the thought abruptly ends there, because of course I don't actually have any idea what it is I 'should' be doing instead. I sometimes have this vague idea that if I was in America right now then I would be able to be more 'productive', or would be contributing to the story of my life in some way in contrast with WWOOFing which just feels like a sort of time-out from 'real life'. But then that idea never really holds up to scrutiny. There isn't actually much of anything that I value that I could be doing in Pittsburgh but couldn't do while wandering around Scotland. Most of what I consider to be productive or life-building uses of my time (reading, writing, learning, making music, meeting people) I can do just as easily or in some cases more easily while on the road. The only things I'm missing out on out here are (1) working, e.g. at the bakery (or perhaps at some equivalent blue-collar job that I would also find moderately enjoyable and fulfilling, maybe bike mechanic or something), which is to say that I could be slowly increasing my bank account instead of slowly depleting it. Except that I don't actually care about money or saving it up or having more of it, I think I just have some lingering sense that I'm 'supposed' to care about it and so if the number is going up then I'm living life 'correctly' and if down then I'm doing things all wrong and wasting my precious life. Which is all bullshit. And then there's also (2) the fact that my friends all live in Pittsburgh. I don't think I actually count being around friends as inherently 'productive' or 'life-building' or whatever, I think it's more that being in the company of other people who are generally moving in the same directions as me is reassuring. I have other friends who have lingered in Pittsburgh (or whatever city they've ended up in), who work dead-end-ish jobs that they like well enough but have no real love for, who have no plans for or interest in marriage/children/etc., and being around such friends makes it easy to believe that whatever it is I'm doing with my life can't possibly be all that wrong since other people are in the same boat with me. Whereas long-term WWOOFing while being homeless and unemployed and having no future plans whatsoever means that I have to be constantly explaining and justifying my life, both to the people I meet and to myself. I think at the end of the day I am happy with how I'm living my life and I'm confident in the path I'm on, but there are plenty of people I meet, even among the fellow WWOOFers, who seem to not really get it or think I'd be happier if nudged onto some more conventional or 'successful' path, and being all alone and on the defensive can get exhausting.
The periodic moments of "Oh no! What am I doing with my life?"sometimes make me wish I had been born into some culture that views human life as inherently meaningful, rather than feeling that a life needs some sort of career or historic achievement or something to pin its worth to. I've read that in some Native American tribes, it was understood that the purpose of a human life was simply to experience things, to live life peacefully and happily, to dance around the world for a little while before being folded back into the earth. Such a culture has no value or need for ambition, striving, greatness, and all the consequent anxiety and unrest that comes with it. I wish I could truly feel deep down all of the things that I say I believe, about not wanting to have any goals and not wanting to accomplish anything with my life other than to live it compassionately and adventurously. I do believe those things, but I don't feel them in my bones. My bones want a 4-digit credit score and a paragraph to be written about me in future textbooks. I can't ever change how I was raised or the values that were originally instilled in me, but maybe hopefully if I spend long enough believing and living out the values that I actually do want to have, I will be able to gradually internalize them. It's been about a decade so far, and I suppose only about five years or so that my ideas have actually all been more or less settled into place. So maybe another decade and then I can have an inner peace that actually reaches all the way down.
I think staying at these farms for two months or longer is part of what prompts these reflections and all this uneasiness. If I only ever stayed in any one place for a month or less while traveling I don't think things would ever quite become placid enough for the "what am I doing here, why am I wasting my life" thoughts to show up. But I don't think I would want to switch to only WWOOFing for a month at a time per farm. The thing I like about spending months rather than weeks in each location while I'm out doing this is that I get the chance to really settle in and become part of the place and part of the work. Staying less than a month would mean I would begin leaving a place almost as soon as I had finished arriving. The second month onward always feels qualitatively different from the first month. The first month is about learning and settling in, the second month I become the 'gaffer' and get access to a deeper sort of experience. Both months feel worthwhile and important and I wouldn't want to give up either one. If I currently feel antsy or listless or whatever now that I'm entering the second month here at the Lewis croft and the novelty has worn off, then really that's just a shortcoming of my own constitution and my capacity for serenity, rather than a shortcoming of the actual experience itself.
Tree planting is essentially done, minus thirty rowans which no one has quite figured out yet if they were supposed to be planted out in the field or in the hedge woodland corridor thingy closer to the croft. I'm presumably going to be doing odd jobs around the croft for the rest of the month now. Weather is back to being typically Scottish, cold and windy with bits of rain coming and going constantly.
One of the Belgian volunteers asked me today which country in Europe I would most like to live in out of the places I've been so far. If I were to ask myself that question and try to answer it honestly I would think the answer would be somewhere in between "I don't know" and "I don't really want to live anywhere". But the thing I said was, either Latvia or Sweden, with my justification being that I like all the big empty land, and that even though the Hebrides also feel pretty big and empty, I miss being in and around forests. Which is all true, in fact. I hadn't realized it was true until after I had said it, I was just trying to improvise my way into some sort of answer more socially acceptable than "I don't want to live anywhere" and in doing so I ended up saying something that turned out to be true. I miss forests. Maybe I wouldn't really want to live anywhere, but I especially wouldn't want to live anywhere without trees.
Retaught myself Debussy's Clair de Lune on the croft's electric piano over the past few days. Or actually, I've always been able to play it pretty well for the past fifteen years or so, essentially by sightreading, I just never actually memorized it and so was always restricted to having to find sheet music for it whenever I happened to have access to a piano to play. But Debussy's First Arabesque is one of the piano pieces I've known and remembered for the longest and never forgotten how to play, even having gone three years without touching a piano from 2017 to 2020, which I assume is at least partly due to the fact that it's also one of my all-time favorite songs to play. So I'm hoping Clair de Lune will benefit in the same way no matter how infrequently I may have the opportunity to practice it in the future.
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After rereading my short story thingy a week later (The Hermit and the Master, https://t0bor.neocities.org/the_hermit_and_the_master.txt), I'm happy with the overall idea of the story still, but the execution and the actual writing itself feels clunky to me. I think I'm just not very good at writing dialogue, or descriptions of things and people and scenes, or pacing and flow between plot elements... which is to say, all the actual building blocks of fiction writing. On the other hand though, I do believe that I am fairly good at this style of discursive explanatory nonfictional writing that I'm doing here in this journal, and which can be found in various other forms and places around my website. I suppose it could just be that I have a lot more practice with this style of writing, but I also think writing in the style of explaining a topic or constructing an argument just comes naturally to me in a way that telling a story does not. I feel like this journal and my other nonfictionish writing is to fiction and writing generally as photography is to visual art. I can accurately, photographically, convey an idea in my head fairly easily and without really having to think much about how to do it. Whereas writing a short story, analogous to painting a watercolor maybe, involves artistic techiniques and flourishes and things that I don't have any knack for. I wonder if it's just something about the way my brain works. I read a lot of fiction, and so I can try my best to mimic the way other fiction is written in my own writing, but it always feels like mimicry, artificial. I reread my short story and can almost hear how a better author might have written some given paragraph differently instead, and so one might think I could then try to capture that and rewrite my own writing to match that hypothetical better style, but I don't really want to. It feels like it would be inauthentic. When I write this journal, or long political emails to my dad, or book reviews, I don't feel like I'm borrowing techniques from other authors or from other things I've read. I don't feel like I'm trying to conform to any given style, to make my writing sound like anything in particular. I'm just trying to get my ideas across and I'm doing it in the way that comes most naturally, and after I've written it down and I reread the thing I've written I generally tend to be pleased with it. Whereas if it's a story, and I write it out naturally and straightforwardly as I think I would want to convey it, then afterwards when I reread it it feels flat, stilted, empty of life, lacking color and texture and everything else I expect a story to have when I read one from someone else. If I then try to go back and add in color and texture, it doesn't work. The end result just ends up feeling to me like something that's had color and texture bolted onto it in post-production. I can't write a story so that it comes out the way I would like to read a story, whereas I can always do that with non-story writing, easily and automatically.
I've always felt that Isaac Asimov was a writer who was good at coming up with ideas but then not very good at execution. He was very successful as a science fiction writer because ideas matter a lot for that genre, but I don't think he was actually a particularly good writer in terms of the actual writing itself. If I flatter myself by saying that I think I'm good at coming up with good ideas, then I wonder if that's the kind of writer I would end up being. Someone who thinks of good stories but who's words, the actual dialogue and prose and stuff, comes off as flat and awkward and unengaging.
Maybe I'm just kidding myself. Maybe my fiction writing is fine actually, and the issue is just that I'm the one who's reading it and I therefore can't engage with it the way I would with someone else's writing, and if someone else were ever to read my fiction writing they wouldn't see anything at all wrong with it. Or maybe I'm kidding myself about the other stuff, maybe my story ideas are shit, hell maybe my nonfictionish writing is all shit as well. The actual thoroughly-unexciting answer to all of these questions is probably just that writing is a skill, a type of craft, like every other creative enterprise, and if I want to become good at the skill of writing then I would need to study, to take writing classes and attend writing workshops, to read about how to be a better writer, etc. If I wanted to be good at watercolor painting, for example, it would be pretty stupid of me to spontaneously try my hand at it without any direction, be unsatisfied with the results, and then just keep making more untrained watercolors anyways and wallowing in my lack of education, like pointlessly slamming my head against a wall. But that's what I'm doing with writing. And I am going to keep doing it. I have no interest in treating writing as an actual skill that could be studied or taught. I will write in my own individual untrained way, and whether it's good or bad I will continue to stubbornly refuse to do any of the concrete straightforward things that could potentially make my writing any better.
If I wanted a way out of uncertainty, I suppose the pragmatic thing would be to go in for a reality check at some point. To do the extremely normal and reasonable thing of sending stuff I've written to some trusted friends and soliciting their feedback. And although it is true that this journal and various other writings and even a selection of my hopefully-least-cringey short stories are all posted publicly up on my website, I am not othewise interested (at least for now) in actually going out of my way to share my writing, particularly my fiction, with anyone. I'm uninterested for basically just the normal reason why everyone ever avoids a reality check: If no one else ever gets to review my writing, then maybe actually the best case scenario really is true after all! Maybe I'm secretly a Nobel-Prize-worthy writer, who has been tragically undiscovered all this time. Maybe upon setting eyes on their first line of text, people would in fact demand that I send everything I've ever written to a publisher immediately, and that I devote all the rest of my free time from now on to writing down as much of my beautiful life-changing fiction as I possibly can.
Bleh. This is the world's most boring and unoriginal form of angst. "Oh no, I don't want to share the thing I made because what if it's actually bad??" Pathetic. Pedestrian. This is honestly now getting into the sort of embarrassment-adjacent topic that I need to be wary of discussing here in this journal, lest I deem everything written here to be too revealing and I pull it all off the internet to hide it somewhere on my harddrive in shame.
Stern reminder to self: I don't write (journaling, fiction, or otherwise) because I think or hope that maybe my writing might secretly be amazing. I write simply for the purpose of practicing writing, of sharing ideas and of organizing my thoughts. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I write for no one but myself. I write, because I want to write.
Continuing yesterday's thoughts about writing. I've never felt nervous or self-conscious really about sharing music I've made, or even original songs that I've written, so I don't think that "what if people think the thing I made is bad??" is some universal anxiety running through my entire life, but rather just something specific to writing (or possibly even more specifically to fiction writing).
I remember explaining to a friend once why having people judge my music feels different to me from people judging my writing. If someone writes a novel and it gets a less-than-great response, if it comes off as flat or uninteresting, then the implication is that that person has a flat and uninteresting soul. Whereas if someone writes music that gets a bad reception, all that that really implies is just that the person isn't all that great at writing music. Judgements of most arts and crafts aren't judgements of the creator's character but simply judgements of their level of skill. Writing (and I would say specifically fiction and poetry) is somewhat unique for being a window into a person's actual inner thoughts, in addition to being the creation of a work of art and/or form of entertainment. Writing is an uncomfortably vulnerable form of expression.
I guess the normal defense against worrying that the things you make aren't very good (continuing the topic from yesterday and the day before) is to affect a sort of casual nonchalance. If I make out like it doesn't really matter to me whether people like my writing or my music or whatever, if I treat it all like it's just some silly trivial stuff that I did in my free time and don't take seriously, then it can't really hurt me if I don't get the response I might hope for.
I use this defense frequently when talking in person about my music and other things I've made. I think everyone does it to some extent. Actually Caring About Things is a dangerous business out in the modern world, real life is made out of jagged shards of glass and you need to wear a cultivated mask of indifference like a suit of armor if you want to make it through without getting cut. I'd rather not resort to that here in this journal, however. I don't think I've written anything dishonest here yet and I'd rather not start now. The truth is that I do care about the things I make and I do want them to be good. I suspect that, with me being neither an expert nor prodigy nor savant in any field but rather a dabbler and jack-of-all-trades, most things I do or make are fairly mediocre, and at the end of the day I have mostly made my peace with that fact. But saying that I've mostly reconciled myself with mediocrity is not the same thing as saying that I don't care. I put care into what I make and do even when I know from the beginning that realistically the result is going to be mediocre, and for me to then put on a show of careless indifference to use as a shield after the fact feels like a betrayal. A stronger person wouldn't need such a shield. I would like to fully achieve the mindset where if a thing I make is good enough for me to be pleased with it, then it is good enough, period, regardless of what anyone else might think. Maybe I'll get there someday.
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Memorized the first movement of Mozart's Sonata no. 16 in C Major. As with Clair de Lune, it's another piano piece that I've played quite a bit by sightreading but have never made the effort before to actually sit down and learn it. It was much easier to memorize since musically speaking it's very simplistic and straightforward when compared with Debussy, but there are a few complicated fingerings in some places and so it'll probably take me a bit longer before I'm able to play it at the speed I would like. I would also potentially like to learn the second movement as well eventually, though in reality that's probably a pretty low priority in the context of all the other music out there that I'd like to be able to play. And I'm really not interested in learning the sonata's third movement, it's garbage compared to the other two (sorry Mr. Wolfgang).
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Finished No Longer Human. Actually it was very short, I just haven't had as much opportunity for listening to audiobooks while working alone lately now that the tree planting has finished. Wrote the following review:
"Disappointing. Based on the description I was expecting something along the lines of Albert Camus' The Stranger or Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, but this book never really got there. It mostly just felt to me like a chronicle of severe undiagnosed autism combined with some run-of-the-mill chronic depression and substance abuse. In place of any deep philosophical insights, the main thrust of the book seemed to me to be a sort of childish confusion more than anything else. If it weren't for the book's popularity in the West, I would be tempted to think that there must have just been too much that was lost in translation, or too much that would have felt relatable only to readers more familiar with Japanese culture maybe. At least it was short."
2 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8593235440)
So yeah, not a big fan of the book. I haven't read any actual Japanese literature before and I'm really hoping this one was a fluke and not indicative of typical quality or anything. I like Kazuo Ishiguro a lot but I suppose that doesn't really count.
Going to start reading The Circle by Dave Eggers next.
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Starting to make arrangements for WWOOFing in Switzerland beginning in August. It's looking like getting from Scotland to Switzerland via train and bus will be about half the price of a plane ticket, so that'll be exciting. I also bought my ferry tickets and such last week for WWOOFing in Shetland starting in June, although I still don't really have a clear picture of what the farm I'm going to is like or what it is I'll be doing there. My current WWOOF host has had previous volunteers who worked at the same Shetland farm that I'm going to, but the only detail I've gotten is that it apparently involves a lot of washing dishes.
Actually I can feel that the thrill of international travel is starting to wear off. Ordinarily the thing I say about traveling is that I start making plans to end a trip whenever I can feel my thoughts about Pittsburgh turning from JOMO into FOMO. In other circumstances I would probably continue WWOOFing in Europe for another six months or so and then head back to the states, which would make for a total of one year abroad, which matches the pattern and timeline of the year I spent WWOOFing in Asia in 2023-2024. In reality though, my JOMO during this trip has now started to run out but isn't really being replaced by FOMO. Which is to say, even if I'm starting to no longer get enjoyment from being away from Pittsburgh, I also haven't started to miss it at all really. If I felt like there was stuff I wanted to be doing back in Pittsburgh then I think I would be hitting the turning point right about now where that stuff would start to outweigh my desire to continue traveling. But I don't really feel like there is actually anything much to draw me back. I do enjoy spending time with my friends (and I hope any of them who might be reading this don't take it personally), but I don't really miss any of them whenever I'm away. The only two things I really miss about Pittsburgh at the moment are my bicycle (there are a bunch of bikepackers doing tours through the Hebrides who I see passing by the croft nearly every day on their way to or from Stornoway, which has me missing bikepacking as well) and playing my accordion, and neither of those things are actually specific to Pittsburgh or to America at all. The actual day-to-day of my life in Pittsburgh the three times I've lived there post-college doesn't actually appeal to me much at all. There must be things I could change in order to make a life that I'd be happier with, but it's hard to see from a distance what that would involve, and probably even harder to see from up close; I think if I were in fact back in Pittsburgh now I would probably fall back into most of my usual hobbies and activities and routines, and even though every choice I made would individually seem like the right one I would probably still wind up feeling desperate to leave again in a matter of months or weeks.
The hard reality though is that I will eventually get sick of traveling and WWOOFing as well and will be ready for this trip to end at some point, and so unless some other better alternative comes up out of nowhere I expect I will be returning to Pittsburgh in about a year from now.
One of the women at my WWOOF host's Tuesday craft night tonight had just returned from a week-long quilting retreat event in Texas, and so it was interesting to hear her talk about her impressions of the US and all the things that she found strange. My WWOOF host is going to be out of the country starting next week and so the craft night is going to be moved to a different member's house, and I was surprised and honored that the people there tonight invited me to come and offered to give me a ride to the craft night happening two weeks from now. I've been half-jokingly asked to give a report on my impressions of Scotland, in the style of tonight's report on impressions of Texas, so I'll have to brainstorm about that a bit. Also I finished up the mittens I've been knitting, so I'll have to come up with a new craft project to work on as well.
Keir Starmer hasn't resigned as prime minister, but the BBC makes it sound like he might at some point in the near future. It's concerning to hear about how well Nigel Farage's Reform Party did in the elections last week. If part of my motivation for even being out here in the first place rather than in the US is a desire to outrun fascism, apparently I'll need to be running even further away.
After Tuesday's craft night report on one member's impressions of Texas, I had asked my WWOOF host afterwards if I ever seemed rude or obnoxious or anything in the way that the Texas visitor had described Americans as being, and she reassured me that I didn't come off that way. She also let me know this morning that she had mentioned the craft night episode to her son and that he had said that I seem to him more stereotypically Canadian than American. Feeling very proud. Even if it is just a case of them politely telling me what I want to hear.
I do put in effort, particularly when traveling, to be quieter, slower, more mindful of my words and actions, but I know I still have a lot of unconscious behaviors that are stereotypically American and that it's hard for me to outgrow. A lot of the work (taking up less space, interrupting less, self-aggrandizing less) is stuff that I think overlaps considerably with trying to overwrite my having been raised and socialized male within a patriarchal society. I do not want either my maleness or my Americanness to protrude into conversations and social events unexamined or unrestrained. I do often notice positive differences between myself and other Americans that I meet while traveling, but it's hard to tell how much of this is actual progress I've made versus just a sort of projected self-loathing for my American identity.
Aside from mannerisms and such, I've also had a much harder time with decentering America from my worldview. It is very hard to not view the world as broken up into just the USA, and then a bunch of other lesser countries which are only ever really important in terms of their relation to the USA. Hearing about world news or news from whichever country I'm currently in, my first instinct is still to relate it back to America in some way, to compare political news with my views and knowledge of American politics, to think of economic or cultural events in terms of how they will impact America, etc. Some of this is probably just the normal way that everyone feels about their own home country when traveling, but some of it definitely goes beyond that into a sort of internalized American exceptionalism. I want to learn to stop thinking of America as the default country or as the most important country in any given conversation, the same way I want to learn to stop thinking of English as the default language, white as the default skin color, male as the default gender, and so on.
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Finished reading The Circle. Wrote the following review:
"I get that this was presumably meant as a sort of 21st-century 1984, but it felt cartoonishly and almost painfully over-the-top and heavy-handed. The meat of the book was mostly a series of teachable moments and John Galt-esque didactic speeches, which made it feel like something in between a YA dystopian novel and some Baby Boomer's anti-technology rant. It's as if Eggers was primarily driven by a terror that some potential reader might somehow be too dense to see his point.
While I don't think that the sentiment of "maybe Facebook and Google are eating up TOO much of our information and personal lives, maybe people are tweeting TOO often" was anything particularly groundbreaking back in 2013, I can't deny that this book makes a good point and is certainly culturally relevant. And I'm willing to admit that I was engaged enough that despite my annoyance I did still want to keep reading through just to see how things ended. I believe this book does in fact cover an important topic, I just really wish it had been done better. More subtlety, more nuance, more sophistication. Better characters and plot. More artistry. I could be here writing what I assume is the intended review, something like "Wow! A thought-provoking story that really makes you think more about how much of yourself and of the world ought to be shared publicly on the internet!" but instead I have to write a much longer review about wasted potential and how it came up short. It's good science fiction political commentary (if I excuse the fact that it felt like I was being hit in the head with a hammer), but it's a mediocre book. On the other hand though, I suppose this book may very well be written at the level of ethical sophistication and maturity that the average American tech worker is operating from, and so maybe I should be giving it more of a pass in that light."
3 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8601850754)
Honestly it was okay I guess. I wrote a pretty negative review, mostly just because it felt like I was being engaged and annoyed in equal measure simultaneously while reading. I wish I had read a different book that was about the same thing but that was done better. Where The Axe Is Buried was also a sci fi about totalitarianism and social control, but comparing the two feels like apples and oranges. Nayler's book was an actual work of art, the discussion was elevated, there were depths to it. The Circle was like being hit in the head with a hammer.
I suppose I'm supposed to reflect here on the fact that after reading a book about oversharing and the total erosion of distiction between public and private life in the internet age, nevertheless here I am sharing all my thoughts publicly on my website and posting a review to Goodreads.com where it can be collected and assimilated into all the instruments of corporate control. Actually though, I feel pretty good about my information-sharing habits and my internet presence. I have a Mastodon account, Goodreads and a couple other scrobbling sites, music videos on YouTube, some curated Google albums of travel photos, and this journal and a handful of short stories, and that's the extent of my public internet presence. The Mastodon, Goodreads, and YouTube accounts all have single-digit numbers of people who actually follow or interact with them, all of whom are people I actually know in real life, and to my knowledge no one has ever looked at any of my photos or writing. What's more, I actively do not want more followers on Mastodon or Goodreads and would probably stop using the accounts if they somehow became popular with anonymous strangers. I feel like the vast majority of my identity and inner life is kept private and only things I actively want shared ever get shared. The danger menacing the characters in The Circle is, to my mind, less the technology itself than the way it warps people into seeking validation and into trying to become what they think people want them to be. I think I have made myself pretty immune to these impulses over the years. I think I have an inner serenity which makes the negative effects of internet socialization roll off me like water off a duck. I can comfortably have social media accounts that I use only occasionally, without the risk of it melting my brain.
I used to be more worried, five or ten years ago, about the way observation or even the possibility of observation warped my actions and desires. I worried that having any internet presence whatsoever or being part of a friendgroup that kept informed about my life was causing me to live my life less for myself and more for the 'audience'. I would watch out for signs that my excitement about some upcoming adventure was due in part to me being excited about taking good pictures to share, or being excited to tell people about the trip afterwards. I worried that knowing my life was and would continue to be shared would prevent me from living authentically, living in the present and for myself. I don't really feel as worried about this stuff anymore. I am in fact a part of the world and of a social species and so some amount of living for the sake of sharing is natural, but really I think I am pretty solidly in control of my own life and free from most external influence. I will occasionally catch myself thinking something like "oh that happened it would be a great photo to send to such-and-such group chat" or "if I did that it would make for a great story to tell so-and-so", but even when they happen I can tell that these thoughts have very little power over me. I spent a long time actively pushing back against such impulses and so now I really don't think they pose any danger to me. So anyway, short of being microchipped or having a government-mandated Facebook account assigned to me, I'm not worried much about the effects on me personally of anything touched on in The Circle.
Planning on reading bell hooks' The Will To Change next, kind of on a whim. Actually it's been on my list for a while, but I had it in mind again after thinking earlier today about trying to be less stereotypically American and the parallels and overlap there with trying to be less stereotypically male.
Relearned Mozart's Turkish March. Fairly simple since it's one I can already play on accordion, so mostly I just needed to relearn the left hand. As with Sonata no. 16, it'll still take me a while before I'm able to play it at speed. Not planning on memorizing any other pieces during the last two week that I'm at the croft here. I'll be lucky if I can still remember how to play the three I've already learned whenever I next happen to find a piano.
Bought yarn and some double-ended needles from a charity shop in Stornoway yesterday, which I'm planning on using for practicing cable knitting by making a sort of celtic knot patterned scarf. Not that I need any more knit items at the moment, I already have a scarf and three pairs of mittens now, and it's about to be summer anyway. But I'm worried that if I don't keep knitting at least periodically for a bit I'll end up forgetting a lot of what I've learned and losing the muscle memory.
Weather has been mostly nice, and the work is going well. After having planted the final thirty rowan trees, the tree planting is now all finished. I finished building a stone wall garden bed yesterday, and today (and probably most or all of next week as well) have been working on excavating, lining, and graveling a new path from the house to the road running along the west end of property.
Finished reading The Will To Change. It was good, but not in a way that I would really know how to write a review of for my Goodreads account. I had a lot of thoughts while reading, many of which I don't think I want to share here. But I'll write down the stuff I do feel comfortable sharing, in no particular order.
I think with books about psychology, sociology, self-help, etc. and especially with those which ask for introspection and self-evaluation, I have a tendency to keep them at arms length by telling myself that they don't really apply to me. Books written about humanity and society and such are written for and about 'normal' people, and so they might still be worthwhile for me to read as a way of learning more about how other people work, but they won't help me understand myself (and so therefore I don't have to actually engage critically with whatever is being discussed). Objectively there are in fact many ways, both internally and externally, in which I am set apart from the normal human experience, and the stuff in The Will To Change was no exception. Entire chapters about, for example, men's role in the home (I will never be a father and intend to never marry or have a home) or the relationship between masculinity and work and finance (I purposefully participate in the economy as little as possible, do not like or want money, and am intentionally chronically unemployed and do not want a career) just do not seem relevant to me. Additionally, in many other less external and less surface-level ways, I do not feel that common characteristics of men or of humans generally are applicable to me. I have tried my best to read and engage with the book despite all of that, and I do think it has a lot of important things to say about masculinity and patriarchy and future paths men can and should take. But not me. At the same time though, I'm worried that I'm wielding this sense of 'otherness' as a defense mechanism, as a way of taking the easy way out and excusing myself from the need for reflection or growth. Am I actually so unrepresented in the book, or do I just tell myself that so that I can pretend that I'm not part of the problem? Does my non-engagement mean that I lack bell hooks' "will to change"?
On the topic of how anger is the only emotion that patriarchy allows men to express: I personally can't remember the last time I felt angry. I can remember a fellow WWOOFer in Japan three years ago asking me once whether I ever get angry, and I had said no and that personally I think getting angry is a sign of immaturity. Given that I don't really feel or express any other emotions either, I wonder whether the author would see my lack of anger as an improvement, or as indicative of me being even more emotionally stunted than most other men.
There was a lot of talk in the book about developing a new alternative masculinity distinct from toxic or patriarchal masculinity, but still no firm description of what that alternative masculinity would actually look like, beyond just generally being a good person and I guess also the absence of any overtly feminine traits. If that's the case, if an alternative feminist "masculinity" is just whenever someone with a penis (as bell hooks puts it) is a decent human being, with no actual uniquely masculine or non-feminine characteristics, then why bother using the word "masculinity" for it at all? Why insist that "good masculinity" is being a good person while also being male, when it would seemingly be much more straightforward to just say that masculinity is a bad thing and that men should seek to divest themselves of it in order to be good people? I wonder if the conversation is framed this way because too many men would simply stop reading the moment they were told that masculinity is bad actually. The way I would state it is that being a man doesn't inherently make a person bad, but all stereotypically male personality traits are in fact bad and should be avoided.
I personally have no interest in being masculine. Neither in a toxic macho 'traditional' sense, nor in whatever sort of tenuous reimagined sense bell hooks and other progressives might mean by feminist or 'non-toxic' masculinity. I personally have made use of the stance, touched on briefly in the book, that manliness ought to be reimagined as an inherent state of being rather than as a code of behaviors or characteristics to be conformed to. This view of manliness runs along the lines of "I am a man, therefore everything I do is automatically manly. If I choose to get into knitting, then that means that definitionally knitting must be a manly activity." In my opinion and in my experience this view works well for combating the shame and hostility of enforced patriarchy that non-traditionally-masculine men experience out in the world. I remember seeing an analogous sentiment (jokingly) expressed online once concerning heterosexuality and attraction to nonbinary or transgender women: "I am a heterosexual man, therefore if I am attracted to something, then definitionally that thing is a woman".
I have expressed the view to friends before that I view transgender people and all other nonbinary or gender-nonconforming people as doing important groundwork in the path toward the eventual destruction of gender as a concept. We aren't there yet (as much as I would like us to be), but I think moving toward a collective worldview where gender identity is seen as fluid and arbitrary and having no actual concrete defining characteristics is all getting us closer to that point. I have no real interest in being a 'man', in any of the ways that that category has been put in front of me. I have been assigned to the category, and I'm generally happy enough with that assignment and not interested in changing my appearance or pronouns or anything like that, but I also have zero interest in performing maleness or conforming to male interests and stereotypes. I do unfortunately have stereotypically-male traits instilled in me from having been raised as a boy, but I actively want to get rid of them and if I could go back in time and remove my male conditioning I would. But on the other hand, I also have no interest in being feminine either. I think if I had been born into a society that assumed children were genderless by default, I would probably be genderless, but I don't feel strongly enough about it to actively cultivate a nonbinary identity or to pick fights with people who look at me and see a man or anything like that. I am, ultimately, given the world we live in, a man, but that is such a small and meaningless part of me and I have no desire to actually indentify myself with manhood. I want to be a good person, an interesting and likeable and happy person, in all the ways that transcend the gender binary. I think most people would feel that way, if they were stripped of the conditioning that makes them see the world as primarily divided into men and women. I hope humanity will be able to one day destroy the concept of gender. I think if patriarchy is someday eradicated, gender itself will have to follow. Once stripped of its hierarchy and power dynamics and cult-like enforced conformity, I think the gender binary will start to seem meaningless, like how handedness stopped mattering once left-handed people stopped being demonized. Or like how specific white American ethnicities became meaningless as soon as discrimination against specific ancestral European homelands (e.g. Italians, Irish, Slavs) stopped being commonplace. The fact that I was born with a penis could be seen as being as irrelevant to everyday life as the fact that I'm left-handed or the fact that my great-great-grandfather immigrated from Germany.
But given that we do not yet live in a post-gender world, no matter how disconnected I may feel from masculinity I do still ultimately have to figure out how to navigate the world as a man. I remember talking once with a female friend who also did a lot of traveling, camping, hitchhiking, etc. and explaining to her about how when I'm out on long bikepacking trips and generally looking homeless and eating my meals sitting outside in parking lots and such, women and families would give me an extremely wide berth and not interact or even make eye contact with me. And that I don't fault them at all for that, it's the prudent thing to do in a world where strange men are often unsafe. My friend told me that no matter how unconventional or homeless she has looked, she has never before felt that anyone saw her as threatening or seemed at all afraid of her. I envy that. I do not want to be feared. If the world has to be divided into on the one hand people who automatically instill fear in others and on the other hand the people who must fear the first group (which is to say, men and women), then all else being equal I think I would rather be part of the second group. I would rather live a life where I did not feel that I could safely walk around the city alone at night, rather than the life I currently have where I'm one of the people who is making others feel unable to safely go out. I think this is the closest I have felt to wanting to be a woman, this feeling that if the world must be divided into masters and slaves, oppressors and oppressed, then I would rather be oppressed. I have often wondered if there is anything I could do to make myself no longer inherently threatening to others, without simultaneously making myself liable to be threatened. Some way to make myself look both incapable of mugging or assaulting someone and also incapable of being assaulted or mugged. I think visibly-trans women get the worst of both worlds, being perceived as a threat by many cis women while simultaneously being seen as a target for patriarchal violence. Really I want to just be exempted from the hierarchy entirely. I suppose old men are largely exempt from both being perceived as threatening and also from being perceived as a target, so I guess if I just wait long enough I could get there eventually. But honestly I just wish the whole division itself was abolished.
Regarding the book's many involved discussions of love: I do not feel that I am a very loving person, but I also don't particularly feel like that is something connected to patriarchy in my case, that I have been 'forbidden' from loving or from being loved due to my maleness. I do not have any particular desire to be more loving. Whether romantic love, familial love, or platonic love, I experience very little of it and I think I don't particularly want to experience more of it. If someone were to get especially abstract about what counts as love, then certainly some of it applies to me. I am interested in being a good and compassionate person, I am interested in helping people, I like spending time with my friends, I am interested (at least in theory) in building community, and generally in making my corner of the world a better place through my words and actions. But I personally don't think of any of that as love. I think love, capital-L Love, as it shows up in songs and books and movies, is an emotion that I do not experience. I get the appeal of canned phrases like "make love not war" or "I'm a lover not a fighter", but really I don't want to be either a lover or a fighter. I want to be some third thing.
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My WWOOF host left Scotland today for a wedding and extended vacation in Arizona, along with her son and daughter-in-law and grandson, so for the next two weeks it will be just me and the Belgian volunteers (plus a couple of their family members coming to visit from Belgium) housesitting, dogsitting, and taking care of the croft's chickens and gardens.
The cable stitching for the scarf I'm knitting is actually pretty straightforward. It's simple enough that now suddenly it feels like the magic is gone and the cabling doesn't actually look all that impressive to me anymore. I think it mostly only looked so cool to me in pictures because I couldn't really wrap my head around how it was done. Hopefully the women at craft night next week are impressed at least.
Still thinking about The Will To Change. The only thing I can come up with as a seemingly good masculine trait, something that I believe is beneficial to the man and also to society but that I don't think of as being associated with women or with humans generally (and which also isn't just a direct consequence of having testosterone or a Y chromosome, e.g. physical strength or facial hair) is stoicism, the ability to calmly weather hardships, to be unperturbed by misfortune and level-headed in the face of danger. It's the one thing that's been instilled in me from having been raised as a boy that I actually do value in myself. But this masculine stoicism is directly adjacent to and probably dependent on men being emotionally stunted and repressed, so it's hard for me to imagine how the stoicism could continue to exist if all the other bad masculine traits went away.
I think that men are a net negative in society. Not just men as they currently are in our imperfect patriarchal world of today, but men in abstract, definitionally, no matter what society is like or how 'improved' their masculinity becomes. This isn't a belief that I've come to from reading bell hooks, it's something that I've believed for a very long time now. Actually part of why I wanted to read The Will To Change was out of a hope of being proven wrong, of having someone who's thought about it all more than I have tell me reasons why men are ultimately worthwhile to have around or why some aspect of masculinity might be worth salvaging. I didn't find anything like that in The Will To Change though. She didn't outright say that she thinks men and masculinity ought to be abolished, but she might as well have. Her vision of an 'alternative masculinity' is just people who have been born as men but who are devoid of any recognizably masculine traits. That isn't actually masculinity in my opinion. If I believe that having a penis doesn't inherently make someone a man (actually I don't know what views, if any, bell hooks had on transgender identity, but the category of 'men' seemed to be synonymous in the book with 'people born with a penis'), if I think there is a distinction between sex as a biological category and gender as a social category (which I do in fact believe), then hooks' idealized alternative man is not actually a man at all, just a genderless male.
I wish I lived in that world. If hooks' argument is that patriarchy can only end when patriarchal masculinity ends, and if my theory is correct that there is nothing much left of manliness or masculine identity once the bad parts are removed, then the thrust of the book becomes the idea that patriarchy can only end if men are abolished. I wish I lived in that post-patriarchal post-man world. I have long believed that many aspects of society would be wildly better if men were not present. The internet would be a much kinder and more useful and pleasant place if only women were allowed to use it. If men were somehow required to follow strictly enforced curfews and restrictions on their freedom, violent crime would all but vanish, and everyone else would be free to do and wear and be whatever they wanted. If men were not allowed to be politicians, I suspect there would be basically no war.
In my own life specifically, I wish I could spend more of my time in female-dominated spaces. Bakeries, Peace Corps, and WWOOFing are all nice places to work in part because they all tend to attract more women than men. I wish I could have gone to an all-girl high school. Note that I am not saying that I wish I had been a girl going to an all-girl high school, or that I wish I had gone to a high school that only allowed girls and also the occasional "good" boy like me. I get that it's a contradiction. How can I dislike male society if I am myself a man? I don't believe it's a case of projection, something where I actually just hate myself and so I then shunt that hate into a hatred of the fact that I'm a man and by extension a hatred of all other men. I don't think I hate myself or hate what I am. I also don't hate individual men. But as a collective, I do hate male society and the concept of men.
I remember hearing about how scientists have figured out how to fertilize a woman's egg and produce a child using only another woman's DNA, but that the resulting child would as a result always be female herself. So it's scientifically possible anyway. You could hypothetically eradicate patriarchy by force, wipe it out at the roots like a weed or an invasive species, and leave behind a better world made up of only women. But my issue isn't actually with people born with penises, my issue is with men. I think, rather than through eugenics, male genocide could be more realistically and more ethically achieved if society simply stopped raising male children into becoming men. But how to get to that point?
I'm thinking about the Jana'ata from Mary Doria Russell's novels The Sparrow and Children Of God. How do you successfully convince a group of people that their entire culture and way of life is bad actually? I suppose my blunt direct way of voicing things here in this journal isn't helpful, I think if I were to start preaching what I've written here from a soapbox I would just sound like a man-hating feminist, a man who has been brainwashed into being a gender traitor. But espousing anything less than that while believing in the fundamental badness and ultimate need for eradication of masculinity feels underhanded. Did bell hooks write the way she did because she actually believed that a masculine but non-patriarchal future is possible? Or would she have agreed with everything I've written here but then purposefully wrote her book in weaker and more compromising terms anyway in order to avoid upsetting and scaring away men?
What can I personally do, as a man who wants 'man' as a gender category to be eradicated? I don't think I could convince even my most left-leaning male friends of the need for ending masculinity in its entirety, but I suppose I could at least try, and hope that maybe that view will become less fringe in the future. I guess my analog in the Russell novels would be the character Supaari. Was Supaari self-hating in the end? Mostly it just seemed like he wanted the whole awful system brought to ruin, through whatever means necessary, which I guess feels relatable. Malcolm X used to say that the only good white person, the only actual 'white ally' in his opinion, was John Brown, since he was willing to actually kill his fellow white people because of how strongly he believed in abolition. I don't actually want to kill men, I just want to destroy manhood. Is there some gender extremist equivalent of Supaari or John Brown? What does a true and earnest gender traitor actually look like, and how do I become one?
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I think there's a temptation to say, in response to all this, "But I've known good men! I wouldn't want men to disappear entirely if it means that those good men I've known would then be gone as well!" I've also known good men, but in every case I can think of, their goodness was independent of their masculinity rather than being a result of it. Good men are simply good people who have managed to make it through life without be dragged down by masculinity, or maybe while only carrying superficial trappings of masculinity. I think in most cases the good men would be even better if they were less manly, or if they weren't men at all.
I think I also ought to reemphasize that my intention is not to denigrate masculinity in order to glorify femininity. While I think it is true that feminine traits are largely benign or beneficial when compared to masculine traits, and seem to me to be only occasionally negative (being overly deferential, or prioritizing beauty and grace over actual substance, for example, are traits that I would characterize as both syereotypically feminine and also generally detrimental to society and to their possessor), femininity is ultimately just the reverse side of a dichotomy that I would prefer to see entirely erased. Femininity and masculinity are largely defined in contrast to each other, and if one can be abolished the other will evaporate in its wake. A society with only one gender would be indistinguishable from a society without gender. The remaining gender would just become the ubiquitous societal culture. When I say that I want gender abolished what I effectively mean is that I would like for one single gender, made up of all the traits characteristic of humanity at it's best, to become the default identity and behavioral mode of all people.
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Started reading When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I unraveled the six inches of scarf I had knit so far and started over with a different pattern idea. After having now understood the principles of cable stitching I wasn't super thrilled with the way it was looking so far and wasn't exactly enthusiastic about continuing for another four feet or so. Plus also the cabling was coming out way too tight and unbendable for it to have actually worked well as a scarf I think. The project that I killed was a five-strand (celtic?) braid bordered with garter stitch, based on a pattern for a headband that I had found online. The new one I'm starting still uses cable stitching but is something a bit more experimental, more in line with the sentiment expressed in 26-04-16. I don't know much about knitting terminology but I would describe it as a seven-strand braid, borderless and doublesided. Actually I wasn't quite sure if the geometry would even work out when I started it, but it seems to be going okay so far. I'll need to get a couple dozen more rows done though before I'll really be able to get a sense of what it's going to look like.
I'm not quite naive or cocky enough to think I'm actually truly inventing something new here. Knitting seems like one of those things where there really isn't much room for new techniques to be discovered, given that it's an art that's been around for something like fifty thousand years probably, and certainly not by me given that I only learned how to knit less than six months ago. But on the other hand I am at least somewhat convinced that the scarf that I'm making now is something that I personally haven't seen or heard of before, and so that's at least something I can be proud of and feel motivated about even if ultimately I am just celebrating my own ignorance. Really I have done basically zero research online to actually know whether the thing I'm trying to do is common or not. In all likelihood I'll show the finished scarf to an actual knitter and they'll be like "Oh nice, I see you made it with Anglo-Moravian Twist Stitch" or something. Or worse, "Oh that looks like Anglo-Moravian Twist Stitch, but why did you do it in such a stupid way instead of the normal simpler and better-looking way that everyone else uses?"
Well in any case, I suppose maybe I'll find out what's what in a week from now when I bring it to Tuesday craft night.
Currently overthinking the fact that I put parmesan on my pasta during dinner yesterday, even though I couldn't actually taste the difference between cheesed and uncheesed pasta. I did it for the sake of keeping up appearances since I was eating with the Belgian volunteers and they were putting parmesan on their pasta, so I did as well without really thinking about it even though I couldn't even taste it. When I'm out traveling and meeting lots of new people for relatively short periods of time I usually try not to make a big deal out of the fact that I can't really taste food. Mostly I try to just not rock the boat and generally just eat whatever the people around me are eating in whatever way they're eating it. I haven't explicitly told the Belgians or anyone else I've met here on Lewis about the fact that my sense of taste is almost nonexistent, but I have told them that I'm extremely not picky and will eat basically anything, and I suppose at this point they probably have had the opportunity to witness me eating some weird things or at least eating things in weird ways even in spite of my having half-heartedly tried to blend in.
The problem with the cheese thing though is that objectively it probably would have been better for me had I not eaten it. I guess there's some protein and vitamins in parmesan cheese but there's also fat and salt and in the end it probably made my dinner less healthy overall, if only in some extremely small way. It also was just an unnecessary waste of good cheese that someone else could have eaten and actually enjoyed. It's not the waste of money that bothers me so much, but rather I think about the farmers raising the cow from a calf, the workers at the cheese factory, the truckers and freight haulers carrying it around for miles, the grocery store worker putting it up on the shelf, all so that in the end it can get eaten by some guy who can't even taste it and who now just regrets the fat and salt it contained, who only ate it out of some misplaced sense of decorum.
Obviously it's a ridiculously stupid thing for me to be dwelling on this much. Objectively, there are almost certainly much more consequential consumer decisions that I'm fumbling dozens of times per day. Casual choices between which of two stores I shop at or which brand I buy at the supermarket, which then add up down the line to significant amounts of other people's time wasted, of resources needlessly consumed, of extra carbon pumped into the atmosphere. I thoughtlessly eat bananas and chocolate and in doing so I do my part to help sustain modern-day third-world slavery.
If there existed a magic button where pressing it instantly gave you two thousand dollars but also caused someone you didn't know in some other part of the world to die, I would not press the button. I believe most other people also would not. But two thousand dollars donated to high-impact charities is the estimated cost needed to avert one death by malaria. So the reality is that there is in fact a button where pressing it causes you to lose two thousand dollars and causes someone you don't know to not die. How is not pressing that button any different from going and pressing the previous one? In both cases you're up two thousand dollars and someone you don't know is dead. And yet here I am continuously not pressing it. And it hardly feels like much of a consolation that no one else is really pressing it much either. I'm sitting here condemning twenty people to death (the math wizzes among you can use this figure to calculate the current size of my collected savings) and worrying instead about a handful of cheese I ate.
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I feel like thinking too much about that sort of stuff is paralyzing. It's basically an infohazard, in particular the two-thousand-dollar malaria death button. And so as anyone should do with any good infohazard I of course posted the relevant paragraph on social media (https://mastodon.online/@tobor/116611236720694718). Turns out the number is probably actually closer to five thousand dollars (I trust GiveWell.org more than I trust any government or any actual charity) so really I'm only consigning eight people to death rather than twenty. Yippee.
The reality of course is that there is a huge difference, in a deep human way if not in any real consequential way, between directly acting to save a person's life and indirectly giving money to an anonymous save-people's-lives fund. I believe that if I were to witness a stranger dying in front of me and had the option of paying five thousand dollars to save them, I would. I feel like charity is to helping people as masturbation is to sex. Human lives are not meant to be reduced to numbers, and the impulse to equate a real human life to a simple five-thousand-dollar figure is the same impulse that lets people dissociate enough to be able to start wars or to bomb civilians. Helping people is good, but making people abstract and unreal in order to help them is bad.
I gave away half of my life savings six years ago, when I returned to the US for the first time after having been with the Peace Corps. It wasn't exactly the magic button idea that motivated me, but it was done out of a deep sense of guilt. I had more money than I actually needed, and for two years I had witnessed first-hand what life in countries at the receiving end of high-impact charities often looks like. I have often wondered over the years which action of mine had more positive impact in the end, the two years I spent teaching in Sierra Leone, or the few thousand dollars I impulsively donated to anti-malaria charities.
My bank account today is larger than it was when I made that donation, and I really have no more actual need for the money now than I did back then. So I guess it's just that, being more removed from Sierra Leone and the direct experience of it all, I'm able to feel the guilt less powerfully. As with war in Ukraine and genocide in Palestine and every other terrible but far away news item, I've managed to make two years of my actual lived experience into something that's only there off in the background, something I can successfully ignore in order to live my own life more happily. It all no longer feels quite as viscerally present in my everyday life as it did four years ago when I had written about a trip through Sierra Leone's Falaba District three or four years before that (https://t0bor.neocities.org/blog_addendum#1), instead it's now been reduced from a distracting foreground static hiss to more of a dull roar. Objectively speaking, I feel 'better' now than I did back then, but at the same time feeling better makes me feel worse.
I often think about a fellow volunteer from Peace Corps who, after a landslide near the Sierra Leonean capital had killed many people and displaced many more, had been adamant about wanting to go to the site and help out, if only in some minor token way, to give some bottles of water to the refugees or something maybe. When her fellow volunteers tried to convince her that all the straightforward simple things that could be done were already being done by other people, her response was that she just needed to feel as though she were helping. I think that that sort of person and that mindset is the real meat of charity work. Charity is ultimately less about helping people, and more about letting other people feel as though they are able to help.
Something consistent across all the people who devote their lives to helping others, the NGO workers and food bank operators and Christian saints and dedicated peace activists and so on, is this idea that people can't truly live a life of helping others unless they actually enjoy what they're doing and get fulfillment out of it. No amount of guilt can actually force someone into living that kind of life, no religion or ideology can do it, no traumatic experience or life-changing connection can all by itself make someone into a do-gooder. People have to like the good work they're doing in order to do it. I personally get more fulfillment and contentment now out of planting trees for a reforestation program in the Hebrides than I did out of teaching with the Peace Corps, and got more fulfilliment in turn from Peace Corps than I did from a large one-time anti-malaria charity donation. So even if it is ultimately the case that the positive impact of those three actions is the reverse, that the charity money helped the world more than the Peace Corps service, which helped more than the tree planting, I am nevertheless going to continue helping in ways that I enjoy. The guilt isn't productive. It can make me depressed but it can't ever actually make me a better person.
Finished reading When We Were Orphans. Wrote the following review:
"Brilliantly done. In classic Ishiguro style, it rolls along slowly and pleasantly enough for the first three-quarters or so of the book, then suddenly hits like a lighting bolt and ties your guts in a knot. By far the best detective novel I've ever read. Although having said that, I should probably clarify that it isn't actually a detective novel.
It's true that this probably isn't Ishiguro's best book (I personally thought Never Let Me Go and Remains Of The Day were both slightly better) but at the same time I feel like that hardly matters. When We Were Orphans feels like a full display of the heights that novels as a medium are capable of."
5 / 5 stars (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8621669296)
It's so good. None of the books I've read this year have been particularly bad and several of them have been very good, but even so, this one felt like a sudden breath of fresh air, a beam of sunlight breaking through clouds.
I wonder what it must be like to be conscious of having that much power as a writer. Ursula K Le Guin had the power, but I don't think she really came into a consciousness of it until later in her life. And writing mostly science fiction and fantasy mostly in the 70s and 80s, I don't think she ever really got the recognition she deserved. But Ishiguro has won a Nobel Prize. I wonder how it feels to have that level of craft at your disposal, to look out on the world knowing how much power you can bring to bear through your storytelling.
I suppose reading fifty books a year makes me qualified to say that reading is one of my hobbies, but I don't usually like to think of it as one or to say so to people. Saying that my hobby is reading novels feels too much to me like saying that my hobby is watching TV or reading comic books or playing video games or something. It's all just passive consumer entertainment. Reading has a bit of a lingering stigma of being a more 'elevated' medium than those others, but I wonder how much longer that will last for. Already if I meet someone else who tells me that they read novels as a hobby, my first instinct is typically to assume that maybe they're talking about shitty romance novels, or maybe murder mystery slop or something. And if I tell people my favorite genre is science fiction, it's even worse. Science fiction as a popular genre is by-and-large the sort of YA or YA-adjacent crap I ranted about in 26-04-11. Yes I'm being a hater. I do think people are allowed to enjoy what they enjoy, but I reserve the right to judge them for it. And so I also don't want to be judged for liking novels myself, for saying that I read as a hobby, even though the majority of other hobbyist readers I meet are doing it in a way that I would judge them for. I want a word I can use so that if I tell someone I like reading they will immediately think of When We Were Orphans rather than Sword of Darkness Chronicles, Book 23: The Wizard Slayer's Apprentice. Something like the difference between the words "movies" and "films", or "movies" and "cinema" maybe. "Literature"? Is that the word I'm looking for? What gets conveyed about me if I were to tell someone that my hobby is "literature"?
And then of course the other problem is that every so often one of the books called something like Sword of Darkness Chronicles will turn out to actually be incredible, in contrast to all the trash it's shelved next to. Whenever that happens, those rare science fiction and fantasy books that are actually well done will often end up being my favorite books of all time. But then half of the time it seems like the very fact that they're actually good and sophisticated and subtle and made for adults will mean that they don't get all that popular with the typical science fiction crowd, and so they never get any particular recognition commensurate to their actual quality. And so if I want to find them, my only option is to trawl through the shelves full of trash, to keep on the alert for the slightest hint of any book being mentioned as being something more than just a run-of-the-mill page-turner sci fi. Science fiction award lists, the Hugos and Nebulas and Locuses, help a little bit, and it has still been an ongoing project of mine to read through the winners, particularly the Hugos, but even then it tends to be pretty hit-or-miss.
So anyway, with all that in mind I'm going to try reading Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion next. Wish me luck.
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The two family members of the Belgian couple arrived at the croft last night, one of whom doesn't speak English (or at least, it seems like her English is worse than my French). So, a good opportunity for me to practice my French in preparation for going to Switzerland in a few months. Still haven't arranged a Swiss farm to WWOOF at, though I've messaged a couple places nearish Lausanne that I'm waiting to hear back from.
It's been rainy all week and so I've been procrastinating on working on the new path construction and have been spending the work days mostly moving firewood around instead. My sleep schedule has been forcibly shifted ahead by almost two hours at this point now that sunrise is happening before five o'clock. Curious what that's all going to be like next month when I'm even farther north in Shetland.
Haven't touched Oblomov in ages, since all the time I would normally spend reading my Kindle has instead gone into knitting. The new scarf pattern seems to be going well still though. After my WWOOF host's departure, I've taken on responsibility for the dogs and the Belgians have been taking care of the chickens, and the dogs here are all neurotic and are gradually driving me crazy. I'm planning on baking an apple pie at some point this weekend I think. Hoping to go swimming in the loch next week maybe assuming the weather gets nicer. Nothing much else to report.
I had arranged to arrive in Shetland next Tuesday but it turns out the ferry from the main island to the small island I'm planning on WWOOFing at doesn't operate every day (or at least, it won't be running that Tuesday), so my host-to-be arranged for me to stay at a different farm on the main island with a friend of his when I first get to Shetland. Digging in some old gardens and working with sheep, by the sound of things. Excited to be going somewhere different at the last minute without any idea really of what I'm getting myself into, it makes things feel more like an adventure again. WWOOFing in northern and western Europe is nice in that it's so organized and established and never really involves any hiccups or surprises, but the downside is that it's very organized and established and never really involves any hiccups or surprises.
I'm about a third of the way through The Curse of Chalion. It's pretty good so far, maybe not as good as I might have hoped for but still a bit better than I was expecting, and certainly better than the title and cover art would otherwise imply, in any case. It reminds me of the Game of Thrones books more than anything. Not sure yet if I'll continue on with the sequel, but I think I will at least be giving Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga a try at some point. Apparently that one is her more celebrated series, I honestly don't remember why I had originally decided to read her fantasy first rather than her sci fi.
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Okay I actually just learned from Wikipedia that the Curse of Chalion sequel (Paladin of Souls) won the triple crown in 2004 (i.e. the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel), so even if I'm not exactly blown away by the first book I will in fact be going on to try the sequel if only on that recommendation. I suppose that must have been the thing that originally got The Curse of Chalion onto my to-read list in the first place however long ago, and then I had apparently competely forgotten about it by the time I finally got around to reading it.
Craft night was nice. Uneventful other than reaffirming the thing I said in 26-05-19 about how much I appreciate and tend to prefer woman-dominated spaces. Actually one of the women complimented the scarf I'm working on as being a "masculine color" (it's dark green and black) and I think I physically cringed. People were impressed with the scarf and with the fact that it's a custom pattern, but no expert cable-stitching opinions were expressed regarding whether the non-ribbed double-sided thing I'm doing is actually anything out of the ordinary.
The Belgians were having a conversation at breakfast this morning about what they had dreamed about last night. Actually the conversation was all in French and so I missed about ninety-eight percent of it, but I did manage to contribute that "je ne souviens jamais mes rêves" ("I never remember my dreams"). Not only do I almost never remember by dreams, but also (at least this was the case several years ago, though less so lately) the occasional dreams that I do remember tend to be pretty mundane, dreams about things like walking through shopping malls or folding laundry, etc.
I've often wondered whether my lack of dreams is actually a kind of advantage. Or at least, whether it has contributed to my choices in life and to the sort of life I've lived so far. My theory is that if I were having exciting and vibrant adventures every night in my sleep, then maybe I'd be able to be more content with a boring and routine life during my waking hours. Whereas lack of night-time enrichment has instead forced me to seek out a more interesting path in my real life while I'm awake.
The temperature went up to 22°C today, I think the first time in the four months I've been in Scotland that it's been above 15°. I went for a (very brief) swim in the loch during high tide in the late afternoon. In typical fashion, the first foot or so of water was a nice swimming temperature but then everything below that was like ice still and it was too cold to swim for more than a couple minutes. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've been swimming since having biked through San Diego late last summer. I'm also pretty sure I haven't been in an actual swimming pool since Japan three years ago. I don't like swimming pools, but I do like swimming and wish I had more open-water opportunities for it.
I didn't swim nude (I had a swimsuit packed with me), but the fact that I had the loch all to myself got me thinking again about a recurring philosophical-ish question I've had about nudity. The question is as follows:
Is it the case, socially rather than legally, that (1) nudity is explicitly allowed in certain designated places (bathrooms, bedrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms, doctor's offices, strip clubs, European saunas, etc.) and implicitly forbidden everywhere else, or is it that (2) nudity is explicitly forbidden in certain places (all buildings, all vehicles, all parks and other public outdoor areas, etc.) but implicitly allowed in any remaining areas? Putting the question another way, if someone were all alone in the woods or out in the middle of the ocean, and knew themselves to be alone, would they be "allowed" to be naked (case 2), or would they merely be able to get away with being naked without getting caught (case 1)? Again my question isn't about the legality of public nudity but rather abou society and how we ourselves internally think about nudity.
I think I personally view the world as in the second case, that nudity is allowed by default unless prohibited, but I also feel like that's a stance that I've had to fight with myself to bring out. I think society, or American society in any case, encourages us to think of the world more as in the first case.
There's a distinct but very similar question, of whether humanity's "default" state is to be nude or clothed, which I think is the question that leads people more in the direction of nudist colonies and such, and gets more at the topic of what it means to be human and more abstract and simultaneously more foundational questions of that sort. There's also all sorts of questions to be asked about whether social nudity is good or bad for society and /or for individuals; I personally think it is a good thing and that there should be more of it, I think never seeing other humans naked except in a sexual (or, rarely, medical) context is ultimately unhealthy. But in contrast, what I'm trying to get at more with my question is the way we internalize society's rules, the way we take unspoken social norms and make them in our heads into actual facts about the world. Whatever we may theoretically believe about nudity, our clothes become as real a restraint around us even in the middle of an isolated empty loch as lines of yellow paint are to us while driving down an empty road.
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Finished reading The Curse of Chalion yesterday. It was fine. About at the level of The Name of the Wind I suppose. It wasn't exactly YA but it also wasn't not YA, I would say it was sort of borderline, like Mistborn or Dune maybe.
I'm about halfway into the sequel Paladin of Souls now. I'm liking it slightly better. It feels more like what I might expect from a middle-aged female author. I hope that doesn't come across as chauvinistic at all. I mean it entirely as a compliment. I don't think it's just the fact that the role of protagonist has switched from a man in his 30s to a woman in her 40s, although I do think that's part of it. The Curse of Chalion was a story of action, whereas Paladin of Souls is a bit more of a story of introspection, and in sci fi and fantasy novels I tend to like the latter much better. It reminds me somewhat of the turn that occured in Ursula K Le Guin's Earthsea series after the first three books, from book three (The Farthest Shore) to book four (Tehanu). The move from book one to book two in Bujold's series is much less striking, and Paladin of Souls hasn't actually made it up to the level of Tehanu (which is probably my favorite fantasy novel) but it's a change and a direction that I very much appreciate. If I remember right, Le Guin wrote Tehanu many years after having written the first three Earthsea books, which might lead me to want to jump ahead to Bujold's later writing to see if it gets even more Tehanuish. But then again, The Dispossessed, despite being my favorite book of all time, was written relatively early in Le Guin's career. So who really knows.
A quote from near the beginning of Paladin of Souls that stood out to me: "You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said. And like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them."
I don't think Uno is my least favorite board/card game, but I do think it's the board/card game that I dislike the most. Like, there are plenty of games that I think are worse than Uno, but I end up crossing paths with all of those games much less frequently than with Uno. The fact that Uno shows up in my life so often means that I have experienced more negative feelings toward it than toward any other game. So if you were to take the integral of all the board/card game hatred I've felt over my entire life, Uno wouldn't ever account for the maximum of the function being integrated, but it would have the single largest cumulative total hate out of any game I think.
Last day in the Hebrides. Having a hard time staying present. I suppose it's only natural when I'm leaving tomorrow after having been here two months, but I wish I could actually spend my last day here, rather than mostly in my head thinking about wherever I was a year or ten years ago or wherever I might be a year or ten years from now.
I finished work on the new path through the west end of the croft on Thursday, and spent Friday on finishing restacking the firewood shed. Haven't done any work yesterday or today, partially because of constant rain but also because I don't really have any other obvious projects that I could start and finish in a single day. I haven't gotten done quite as much work as I might have liked these past two weeks (I had originally intended to rebuild one of the raised wooden garden beds as well, and maybe work on another walking path closer to the loch) but I think I probably did okay all things considered given that the main priority while my WWOOF host has been away has been housesitting and dogsitting rather than actually WWOOFing.
Spent part of yesterday studying some sheet music I found online for the Gentle Giant song "Raconteur, Troubadour". It's always been one of my favorite songs of theirs, and they've been one of my favorite progressive rock bands for quite a while. I remember I used to be able to play and sing their song "Think of Me with Kindness" on piano a decade ago. I messed around with "Raconteur, Troubadour" a bit on the piano here yesterday, but really I think I'd like to be able to play it on accordion. It's a complicated song obviously, but I think it should hypothetically be possible to get all of the important moving parts mapped onto a single accordion, at least for the lyrical parts if not the instrumental interludes. The lyrics really speak to me, both abstractly in the sense of chosing an itinerant unconventional life and also specifically with regard to busking.
This is all a part of that issue I'm complaining about in the first paragraph though. Here I am out in the Hebrides thinking about what I would like to be playing on accordion in Pittsburgh, but I'm sure if I were back in Pittsburgh playing accordion I would instead be thinking about the next remote wilderness I'd like to travel to. Is there any way for me to actually be where I am?
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Copying out some thoughts that I've written a few times before in various places, about the controversy surrounding trans women in women's sports:
I think society needs to start making a distinction between "sports" in the sense of a fun activity where people try to move a ball around or whatever with their friends and other people watch them do it, and "sports" in the sense of "let's find out which human out of all the ones currently on the planet can jump the highest". Because with the first kind of sports, I think the trans debate honestly has the potential to just blow over, nobody should care if a trans girl is 'too good' at high school volleyball because that isn't even remotely the point of sports of that kind. People are there to have fun.With the second kind of sports, the Olympics and things like that, how to include trans people is a valid question but so are a ton of other things. I think a lot of sports have already understood that having just two categories based on sex is wildly insufficient. In wrestling or boxing for example, in addition to men's and women's boxing there's also heavyweight, cruiserweight, middleweight, welterweight, lightweight, featherweight, and so on, because without adding weight classes the vast majority of people would just never get a chance to compete, through no fault of their own. Or as another example, 5Ks and marathons will often have age categories. Maybe hypercompetitive basketball or polevaulting competitions could add height classes. And so I think if sports of the second type continue down that path, "men's" and "women's" sports categories will evolve into perhaps several levels of gradation based on hormonal levels or prior sexual development.
The answer to the question of "which human can jump the highest" will still ultimately end up being one of the ones with a lot of testosterone, and it's probably the case that the majority of sports fans will only ever care about that highest-jumping category, but honestly that's kind of already the case with women's sports of the second type anyway. The same way that no one gives a shit about who the current boxing champion is unless you specify heavyweight boxing.
So ultimately I just don't think women's sports of the second type has much of a future, because women and men aren't actually distinct or meaningful enough categories to cleanly divide up all competitions in that way and only that way. But the vast majority of sports in our current society are of the first type, played for fun and entertainment rather than for determining superlative ability, and so in my opinion those sports can continue to have women's categories while still being fun to play and to watch, if only everyone can agree to stop losing their minds about trans women for a little bit.
This does of course all overlap a good deal with my views on gender abolition as expressed in 26-05-18 and 26-05-19, but I don't think it's necessary for someone to believe in and desire the eventual abolition of "men" and "women" as distinct social categories some day in order for them to agree with the idea of abolishing men's and women's sports categories as we currently think about them at the Olympics.
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Finished reading Paladin of Souls. It was okay. Nothing spectacular. Honestly it was a bit of a letdown in light of how promising it seemed in the beginning. I haven't written any review for my Goodreads account because I think the book probably doesn't actually deserve any of the criticisms I would be tempted to lob at it, and because honestly an uncommented three-out-of-five star review probably sums up my feelings about it all better than any sort of long-winded tirade would.
Overall it was hugely disappointing for a triple crown winner. It wasn't necessarily anything less than what one might expect for an award-winning fantasy novel, but neither was it anything much more than that. It wasn't especially immature but neither was it anything particularly mature, despite my hopes after seeing the turn to an older female protagonist. It followed the script, charted its plot around satisfactorily, would potentially make for an entertaining movie if it were adapted, etc, etc. But none of that is what I was actually looking for. I wanted something that I've found in very few places outside the writing of Ursula K Le Guin, something where an author uses a foundation of fantasy or science fiction to then go well beyond the traditional bounds and scope of those genres and bloom into a full-depth adult novel, combining the heights of artistry that fiction writing is capable of with the speculative, exploratory attitude that gives fantasy and science fiction its spark.
Oh well. I suppose I've crossed another book off my to-read list now in any case. One fewer place for me to have to look to potentially find the sort of writing I'm hoping for.
I've spent the weekend pirating a few dozen more audiobooks, so that ought to keep me supplied for a while.
