The Male Hysteric

So I got a new toy that I had intended on getting for a while but was also somewhat inspired by the conversations I've had here -- I got a new external hard drive. My old one is something like ten years old at this point and, while it still works, has made me nervous given its use of HD platters and the fact that the available ports are slowly becoming obsolete (the default is a firewire connector, and it's very slow without that cable). So, I shelled out a lot of change for a samsung portable ssd T7 (in blue!), which has a USB-C connector and backing up my whole computer is much faster.

But aside from backups I'm going to try to keep a library, I think. Because the kind of things I keep online are pretty ephemeral and I do try to save it, but it's super unorganized right now. I've started with organizing PDFs of knitting and sewing patterns I have, and have found a few books that I've put on. I need to back up my music library and I should probably tackle photos at some point, but that's just a whole other beast. And then what else? Maybe a backup of my blog? Something else? It's "only" one TB, but then again, I don't really have any video so I don't anticipate running out of space. Probably. Who knows.

Was on a road trip last week and listening to Evanescence's new album The Bitter Truth on repeat, thinking, this is great, why wasn't I into this stuff when I was in middle school, back when this band was so popular (aside from the fact that CDs were prohibitively expensive for me back then)? Well, I downloaded their 2003 album Fallen and, despite The Bitter Truth definitely having that early 2000s sound, it's... much better? Which shouldn't be surprising that they've improved but not just the instrumentation as being more mature, just even the sound quality is so much better on the new album than the old one that even lil old me can tell the difference. I wonder if that's a quirk of the iTunes copy or was an issue with the original.

In the meantime I've been thinking about having more serious posts on here but in the meanwhile I'm having serious early 2000s internet nostalgia, thinking about the geocities and pixel art I made in elementary school. Some things have definitely improved while I do think the way most social media is, putting lots of people in a small pit to fight it out and intentionally making them see content that makes them angry for "clicks" has... well, made the world worse.

Back in the days of neopets I had a geocities website with a seafoam green background and a page counter where I posted my pixel dolls. I was very fond of certain artists, and one of them at least, KawaiiHannah is incredibly still around though she seems to do traditional art mostly now though her pixel art is still online.

I was thinking about how I probably would not have the patience to do pixel art now. I mean, I have a lot of tedious hobbies and interests, sure, but I guess the reward for it would not be as much now. There was a lot of community around this stuff and now I have no idea what I would do, it just seems like shouting into the void. I mean there's doing art for art's sake, I know that and do that, but like, when I do that I use physical media, because having something that's not just computer data is... well, it's something, at least.

I was looking at carrd as an alternative to the old-style static sites and I have a resounding maybe. There's also neocities, but again I do not know how much I remember of HTML and CSS and if I have the patience or energy to make a new site from scratch right now. There's also, you know... what I'd put on it. I don't even know. It's hard enough to maintain a blog, because I think I should have something important to say to post. A static website? That's even moreso!

It's really hard to be the change one wants to be, especially when there's no one else around. I really should use this site more. Bleh.

I guess I’m having a lot of thoughts in the pandemic, as being at home the vast majority of the time has given me a lot of freedom of what to do with my face. I like to wear makeup, and even when not wanting to look like I wear it, I have seborrheic dermatitis which, even when inactive can make the middle of my face very red so some light foundation and concealer helps with that, and matte bronzer can do wonders for a slight double chin. However these days i can go a lot further than that without thinking about it because, again, I have nowhere to be, and wearing a mask covering stubble can make anyone look more androgynous. There are a lot of women finding wearing no makeup very freeing, while at the same time there are a lot of women doing more editorial looks because it’s the only thing you can see with a mask on, or they have more free time, or they don’t have to worry about office comments about “how much better [they] look without makeup”.

There is a lot made about men and male-passing people wearing makeup, from some men complaining that if women have acne or “are ugly” they can wear it while they can’t, to lines of makeup made especially for men (and tend to be even more overpriced than normal makeup), male MUAs and the like. Makeup has not always been strictly feminine and has always been used by everyone being photographed or filmed so even now it’s not. But I do not think the problem with “men wearing makeup” is adequately understood by most people — they have a blanket idea of “makeup = feminine” and do not understand why.

I remember hearing somewhere that you only adorn things that you already think are beautiful. There is no point in adorning something that is not meant to be looked at as beautiful and I think that’s a big part of the taboo, and this is why I like to wear it, in some form of rebellion. I’m not supposed to see myself as worthy of adornment, so knowing how to do it and doing it myself is taboo, whereas in photoshoots it is others making the decision and putting makeup on the men so it’s in effect “not their fault” to be seen as beautiful, but rather something forced on them by others. Culturally women, especially young women, are “supposed” to be beautiful so that expectation wins out over the sin of looking at oneself as beautiful and adorning oneself, even though the self-adornment is still criticized (“you look so much better without makeup”).

Men’s fashion and presentation is such a mess culturally because of the taboo of thinking of oneself as beautiful. Often fashion for men is boiled down to one piece — a blazer, a Rolex watch, a Jordan’s shoe — and furthermore these pieces are often branded to be more a display of wealth rather than adorning oneself. To adorn oneself is to be “gay” because the only reason a man would do it is to attract the attention of other men. Straight women tend to have mixed feelings about it, because seeing a man as attractive is something they do, but one that intentionally signals it must be signaling to men, while acknowledging the double standard of “naturally pretty” for themselves.

Aside from rebellion there’s the matter of doing something artistic every day, and a beauty in ephemeral art, something meditative about making a whole work and then literally washing it down the drain every day. My other artwork, especially writing, is Sisyphean, written over and over again and rarely getting anywhere, which may be why this appeals to me. I don’t know. Maybe it is a form of that “self care” that people keep talking about, to look at my own face and examine it each day and decide what to do with it, for no one but myself. Or maybe, during the pandemic, I’m just really, really bored, and need the fifteen minutes of diversion in the morning.

If you don’t usually wear makeup, it may be worth it to try some concealer, eyeliner, blush, and think of yourself as worthy of adornment every day for once. In a world that doesn’t seem to value you, it may help.

Happy New Year!

New year means switching out last year's journals and planners for this year's, which is the most exciting thing we can hope for given the state of the world.

2020 journal is now archived and is thus far the thickest since I started in 2018. I've no doubt this is because this year I had a Stickii club subscription and in the middle of the year bought a color printer, which can bulk up these things fast. I don't know how much of it is because of the pandemic I had more time to write and decorate, though. There are a significant number of blank pages as well as pages with lots of stuff glued in.



This year I'm leery of making resolutions because of the state of the world, so I just pasted in some vibes to bring into the new year in the new book.



2020 caught me offguard but 2021 will have to fuck around and find out.

Remember when I was unsettled by the internet goings on? And then there was the bombing in Nashville, and there's a whisper that the reason why we haven't heard much more about it from muttering on social media is because a lot of the internet/phone there is still down. Don't like that. Nope.

My heart goes out to the people who were hurt and the missing pets and etc., but I'm quite sure the target was the AT&T hub. Anyway, that's it for me being a crank today. Over and out.

I am not really sure how to gather my thoughts right now but I feel like there is something evil out there, some kind of thing that is putting the "doom" in doomscrolling, so to speak, even moreso than we have already seen. And I am not sure where it is coming from or what to do with this feeling.

It might be useful to read this article I saw recently on the Atlantic about Facebook, Google, Youtube, and to a lesser extent Twitter as being doomsday devices. It's interesting to read on its own but there's more to it than just normal depression on the state of social media being social media. There was also the recent SolarWinds hack, and more and more around here it seems like major newsstations are having strange interruptions in their programming, like images freezing or technical difficulties, and I've had some major errors with ecommerce systems recently.

I guess when I put it like that, it seems kind of silly, like disparate computerized events falling into a pattern for no reason. I mean, earlier this year we were having major internet outage issues and I was starting to think that something greater was wrong with the local grid but it turned out we just had a failing modem. It's easy to think something greater is afoot when there has been greater things afoot recently, I think, and I may be suffering from some nostalgia, from when the web was smaller and it was a little easier to curate your own feed and not have a mysterious all-knowing algorithm do it for you without your explicit knowledge.

And I guess I'm posting this all here because I really miss LiveJournal.

I remember I used to think, and am thinking now, when studying antiquity how people could be so warlike, it seems like such a waste of effort and life to find so much valor in fighting all the time, and like such a strike against one's own interests. But now I see people insisting on going out and working, and feeling compelled to continue on as if nothing has happened and calling everyone else who wants to try to do something about it weak, and I think I can understand the pressure and these people more.

When I was reading world history about the development of individualism in the west were verses of Archilochus that stuck with me:

One of the Saians now delights in the shield I discarded
Unwillingly near a bush, for it was perfectly good,
But at least I got myself safely out. Why should I care for that shield?
Let it go. Some other time I'll find another no worse.

Individualism meant here to not care so much for individual battles, but to live and fight another day. It is individualism gone full circle, isn't it, that even with so much of it and people still walk pressured to their deaths.

I keep having nightmares about not wearing masks. The dream will always start normal and then I will realize that I'm not wearing a mask and nobody else is either. And I'll realize I don't have a mask to put on, and it's just... I don't know, it's worse than being naked because being naked is only embarrassing while not wearing a mask would end up killing me.

I wonder if other people are having these kinds of dreams, if these will be the new kind of nightmares that we'll have after the pandemic instead of dreaming we forgot our pants.