today i have become so bored that i have decided to start a diary..; currently stuck in some random suburb of illinois in my aunt and uncles basement and playing with this new drug my psychiatrist gave me called wellbutrin.
i called walgreens today about my prescription and i could tell the person on the other end was getting fed up with how slow my brain was moving because of the drug.
anyway, the reason i'm messing around with wellbutrin is because my psychiatrist diagnosed me with a whole grab bag of mental disorders. lol. in all honesty, i should have asked for something more fun like ritalin or adderall
i'm sure i'll probably forget about this journal in a week when i inevitably find something new to hyperfixate on
here's a painting
it's 1:58 am so i guess i was eager to get this entry in. just finished up a 2 hour vr session; i feel better now.
is it sad that i prefer virtual reality over actual reality? i can't explain the feeling, but when i'm in the web browser on the headset, i feel disappointed that i am unable to be sucked entirely into the website. i guess this makes me cringe and bluepilled, but that's just how i feel.
my dream one of these days is that they'll figure out how to get rid of my body and just keep my brain hooked up to a computer. now, i sort of understand millennials when they complain about being "bags of meat on a hecking ball of dirt speeding through spacerino"
had a panic attack inside of my dream last night. pretty sure it's related to the wellbutrin.
anyway, it's kind of hard to take asian people seriously in america.
this statement doesn't really come out of a place of hatred for asian people, it has more to do with the fact that the united states really has a way of inducing a sort of cultural amnesia in people causing them to fill in the cultural gaps in their knowledge with some pretty cringey shit.
a few days ago, my girlfriend showed me her friend's instagram profile for his business which is a boba tea shop that doubles as a streetwear reseller. boba drinks named after streetwear references and whatnot. the whole website was done in the virgil abloh quotation marks style which was also kind of cringe.
maybe i'm becoming old and i don't like it when i see other people having fun. give it a few more generations and maybe boba and streetwear will be the only part of asian culture that will be remembered in the future.
i'm not saying this is a bad thing, personally i think it would be really funny if this happened. maybe i shouldn't make these broad gestures about a culture i'm not really a part of. just kidding, i'm probably gonna continue doing this for a while
at this point i’ve gotten accustomed to wellbutrin so i am now able to pull off a pretty convincing fluoride stare
how do i feel when i’m on this drug? well, i no longer want to make art anymore. any creative impulses that were lingering in my brain have now been beaten out. i just stare at my fucking computer all day and do nothing. i wish i were dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FY-57Gt1TM
i am seething. malding. no more copium in the tank. i generally feel like a leper . anger is the only thing keeping me awake. . no matter how much i try to change things, Nothing Ever Happens™.! the wellbutrin has worn off and i see the ugliness in my heart reflected in the world around me
**update (september 7th): i think i was trying to be really angsty when i wrote this.;. i can't remember if this was meant to be sincere, ironic, or post-ironic
for the past 23 years, i have been a very reactive person. i would intake stimuli, and just react without being fully present in the moment. i was like a raw nerve for two decades, and i was unknowingly taken advantage of by people for this reason.
i feel like if i talk to other people about this they’ll say some shit like the only person you can blame is yourself. And they're right. it just feels so good to have someone or some thing to blame though. i have largely forgotten what has happened in those years . The main emotions i feel now are a mixture of shame and regret knowing that i have probably been a burden to everyone i’ve met in my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXXkDe2XvHU
i’ve been taking the metra a lot recently. there tends to be a large number of amish people that travel through the station. they look so quaint. right now I’m looking at an amish family and the husband and wife are wearing these strange hats and the son is dressed up in a pair of adorable overalls.
I’m thinking that they probably have better mental health than most terminally online American people do. Maybe we should all be amish.
thinking about this quote today:
“For the new year. – I’m still alive; I still think: I must still be alive because I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum.1 Today everyone allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so I, too, want to say what I wish from myself today and what thought first crossed my heart – what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them – thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati:2 let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!”
i hear the phrase Angry Young Men™ quite a lot. particularly from mainstream news outlets. usually, these Angry Young Men™ often have the problem of feeling Rejected By Society™.
trust me, we are not prepared for the next wave of Angry Young Men™ that will be headed our way. if you thought the problem of Angry Young Men™ is bad now, it's gonna be way worse in a few years.
when men and women from generation alpha see vaporwave edits of millennials and zoomers in the 2010s having fun and hanging out together before the pandemic with the caption Remember What They Took From You™, we are going to see a shitstorm on a scale we can't even comprehend. hopefully this leads to a wave of people from gen alpha storming the capitol (again) lol.
who knows, maybe they'll actually change something. oh wait, nevermind. i forgot, Nothing Ever Happens™
i occasionally wonder what it's like for people from other parts of the world to view america in its current state. the closest i ever got to this perspective was when i was working with an international student on a project proposal and they kept inserting the phrase "diversity and inclusion" into the proposal.
i was puzzled by this as our project didn't remotely have anything to do with "diversity and inclusion" ...; apparently (according to their logic) americans will automatically favor projects that have those words; hahahahaha man what a life
flying back to california today. was groped by the tsa security guard..; kind of crazy that we still have tsa 23 years after 9/11 happened.
nothings happened since so it all kind of feels pointless at the moment. hopefully something crazy will happen in the next few years;
when i look back at all the music i made the past couple of years, i think 2022-early2023 was my slop era. i would just take 15 second snippets of obscure songs and stretch them out to 6 minutes. truly artistically bankrupt. it wasn't until ryuichi sakamoto died that i realized i needed to put more effort into my music.
i feel doubly bad about his passing as his intern posted some shit about nfts on his twitter a few weeks before his death and i was a dickhead and replied with this image.
1688930341400506.jpg
something funny happened in the news recently. those asian american groups that were so against Affirmative Action™ won in the supreme court ruling against yale and princeton, so they had to take Affirmative Action™ out of the application process ..
now the number of asian american students is at 24% instead of 30% .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT13kk8HDDo
decided to look up all my old classmates. don't know what i expected to find. everyone's off doing their own thing. they're all... old and boring. just like me.
also i guess i should be more transparent to myself about the nature of this diary. this is probably the first time in my life i've been able to keep up a journal for over a few weeks. also, it's not like i'm writing this in a cute little moleskine book or anything, i'm writing this in html that will be hosted on a url for others to read if they have the link. haven't really publicly or privately shared this with any people yet. right now, it just feels like me and the internet.
by that, i don't mean other people on the internet, i mean if the infrastructure powering the internet developed a consciousness, this diary would be a nice little secret that me and the internet would share.
heeeeeh eh hehh heh heh hoo hee ha ha he he he
i can't explain it, but growing up on the internet has caused me to develop a sort of pavlovian response to 9/11 related imagery. every time i see something related to 9/11, i can't help but chuckle
speaking of hijackers, i got to thinking.. people use the term "hijack" in the phrase "tiktok is hijacking your brain!" if tiktok is hijacking our brains, what's the target? which kind of metaphorical twin tower is tiktok trying to fly us into?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gHjJKnXtWw
do you know jira? how about figma? are you proficient in azure or yaml?
i want to pour coffee all over my laptop keyboard and break it over my knee. sadly, i know the laptop is not responsible for my pain. the spirit sucker that is linkedin is the cause of my pain.
i know my resume will get rejected by the applicant tracking system . fuck it. i'll send it anyway. hopefully once i get past 3 rounds of interviews, i'll finally land that internship
was eating dim sum with my mother at a chinese restaurant across the street today and i saw on the tv behind her that tiktok was gonna be banned in the u.s.
good ; they should also ban instagram reels and youtube shorts as well. it might suck for everyone in the short term but millions (perhaps billions) of man-hours will be taken back. think of all the things we could accomplish [collectively]
also now that i think about it, that's probably the reason i gave up on starting a record label haha. how can artists/musicians compete with an endless stream of entertainment that is tailored to the user? i should have realized this well before i even started working on the webpage/bandcamp page for the label considering that tiktok was already around for a few years
thinking about playboi carti and clyfford still today.
they are very similar to each other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_sncSSqobc
was driving a few miles away from my parents house today and was captivated by the new communities being built everywhere. just people handling heavy machinery and hanging off houses with staple guns. good stuff.
side note : i normally consider myself a very trainpilled individual but cruising down the i5 at 80 miles per hour is one of the more therapeutic activities i've engaged in recently. nothing like it.
also, speaking of therapy, i should probably get back into therapy sometime. my health insurance ran out a month ago so i kind of need to get my shit together.
in the future, everyone will either be an uber driver, a doordasher or an onlyfans model. perhaps a combination of those things all at once. everyone will also be genderfluid / nonbinary as well. this fluidity will extend to politics, sports, language, employment, art, music, sexuality, religion, nationality, and race too lol.
i think that would be so based. each of these characteristics will be labeled as vector coordinates in some sort of latent space. people will be able to see the distances they've covered in each dimension of the latent space and they'll be able to see their own trajectories (along with everyone elses) through the space based on their current and past movement.
we'll no longer have to worry about ever misunderstanding each other ever again
had a dream where all of the menu buttons on the music app on my phone were replaced with links to different taylor swift albums.
hell.
i don't want to be in the art or music scene anymore. i was probably never "in" it to begin with lol. could it be exhaustion? could it be sour grapes? i don't really care. i just want to rot. this angst isn't even related to the wellbutrin anymore. i just do not want to be perceived..
...there's a japanese woman who records these vlogs from her apartment. there's usually cockroaches and other small bugs on the walls. a recurring object in these videos is a stuffed bear that is kept inside of a plastic bag so that the insects don't eat it. this lady clearly takes care of herself, she records herself cooking food and brushing her teeth. perhaps that teddy bear is the last thing keeping her going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vF64hsGkYY
boomers have vinyl crackle, zoomers have late 2000s youtube compression
...
... ... i kind of feel bad for boomers (the evangelical ones). here's my point of view : a lot of these older folk are unable to cope with the speed and change of late-stage capitalism so a lot of them get reeaallly deep into the bible/church. when you can filter the chaos of the external world in the 21st century through the logic and scope of a medieval religion, it can have a sort of soothing quality about it.
and i'm not saying that younger people are any better. we carry around our own sort of bibles (our phones lol) and we use social media apps as a coping mechanism. if anything, social media apps allow everyone to craft their own biblical narratives. by following an influencer that matches your own tastes, it kind of feels like you're engaging with scripture in real time.
idk i'm just yapping. in short, phone bad, touch grass, and stop using hyper personalized narratives from microinfluencers as copium.
back at my aunt and uncle's house in illinois after being stranded during a layover in vegas. 5 minutes before the plane landed, the pilot said something along the lines of "for the 17 of you headed to chicago, your plane just took off." anyway, i decided to wander around the strip for a few hours watching everyone gamble. had some jello shots for the first time. nice
also the new nail polish doesn't taste as bitter and makes my fingertips feel strange... i'll have to go back to the mavala
i might have accidentally killed the scoby in the kombucha the nice communist gave me by putting in arizona instead of unsweetened tea
some of the romance has been sucked out of the art making process. i see people sharing timelapses and speedpaints of their art next to the finished piece and it just feels..weird? like someone just has the self discipline to crank out a work of art in one sitting, in front of a camera no less
what happened to letting an unfinished piece fester in the corner of your room for weeks on end and then suddenly finishing the other 70% of it in a drug fueled frenzy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCmQlO-ca78
there's a cafe in san francisco my dad and i would go to in north beach called mara's pastry. i've probably had every flavor of italian soda on their wall by now. my dad always goes for the chocolate croissant.
why am i bringing up this memory? the crushing realization that i may be in the midwest for the next few months is setting in and i will probably milk this memory for all it's worth until i return to california
i think the best art is made by people who may appear a bit “slow” on the outside. someone who is an expert in music theory or art theory is fantastic at thinking symbolically, at being able to remember patterns and sequences of information. however, i fear that during the process of making art/music , their mind may be allocating too much importance to the “left side” of their brain instead of their right side (yes, this theory of mind may be debunked but you know what i’m talking about). too much focus on the apollonian and a disregard for the dionysian.
i've seen a lot of these "intellectual" artists during my time at graduate school, and they'll sound so smart vomiting out the psychoanalysis/poststructuralist/postcolonial word salad of the day but i look at the art and it's probably a tree branch jammed into a cement block or some shit.
i don't even have beef with psychoanalysis/poststructuralist/postcolonial theory, i just think artists tend to be a bit hamhanded in their application of these theories in their art
now that i think about it, i think i took this photo at the guggenheim
i have finally struck a nice balance with social media. by social media, i mean instagram, because that's where most of my age demographic lies. i download the app to post something once a month and then delete the app immediately. life is good.
however, the times that i log into instagram and look at what my friends are posting gives me a bit of whiplash. i see pictures of my friends with other people, pictures of their food, their pets, then BOOM pictures of a hospital or school that israel bombed that week, and then back to images of their lives.
i am not saying that it is wrong that events like those are getting shared, by all means i would like to know if there are injustices being carried out with my tax money, it's just that i get whiplash just from looking at just one of my friend's profiles lol. it'll go something like this : picture of friend, picture of food, picture of concert, picture of someone getting torn apart by a missile, picture of pet, picture of friend, etc.
thinking about a comment i saw on a music forum one time. people were discussing "the right thing to say" when asked about what music they listened to. now, this question was posed to a forum with a ... ..strange taste in music, think destroy all monsters, gerogerigegege, pere ubu, etc.
anyway, someone said that the best answer to that question in any situation is "a tribe called quest"
apparently, if you say that, 100% of the time, people will nod their heads inquisitively and go "ah yes, a tribe called quest...."
if i remember correctly, this commenter said that they've never actually listened to a tribe called quest in their life, however they did say this trick has never failed them in any social situation.
also this diary is now one month old! i think i'll add a link to this diary from the homepage now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcuUn2zka3w
everything is copium
i feel like i’ve lost the ability to read fiction. i anxiously wait for camus to “arrive at the point” and i feel like i can’t enjoy his writing. i also tried reading the plague by camus a year ago. i thought it was about rats and casually mentioned it to my advisor. his face turned solemn and said it was about nazism. oh well
i keep on falling into cliches but they are cliches worth experiencing
i love living in america. everyone is the same here (to a degree). when I’m walking around in the city I can’t tell if a crazy person is talking to themselves or if they have earphones in and they're talking to a friend. I’ve also seen BMWs next to 20 year old corollas in the McDonald’s drive-through. i think warhol said something like this some time ago about coke, but nowadays instead of coke, everyone (rich and poor) doomscrolls on the same apps on the same phones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0AUpCq-UEA
i guess i didn’t realize how often i use chatgpt to generate cover letters for jobs. i have no qualms with this. the human soul was not created to write cover letters all day. however, i began to worry that i might forget how to write if i kept on depending on chatgpt to generate everything for me. hence this diary. and the tone too.
i realized that you can easily bypass any of these “ai detector” websites if you just write in a casual tone and use lots of contractions like isn't, doesn't, hasn't, etc. basically the opposite of academic writing. if that’s what qualifies as “human” writing, i guess i desire to be more human than humanly possible. also, there’s another thing that chatgpt can’t do *yet*..; that is writing in a really apathetic tone. chatgpt tends to do everything in a very cheery, customer servicey kind of tone, which is a dead giveaway. even when i ask chatgpt to sound really apathetic, it sounds apathetic in an enthusiastic kind of way.
so i guess the reason i may sound apathetic in this diary is to convince myself that i’m still human.
what have i done recently? haven’t really made any art or music. i’ve just been writing in this diary. and yes, writing may be an art form, but what i’m doing right now isn’t writing. i’m just twiddling my fingers being a little hater lol
i think about detroit every day. i can hear her calling my name
i realized that most of the diary entries have nothing to do with things happening in my life; instead it’s just shallow navel gazing about meaningless topics .
..; continues to navel gaze
also i saw megalopolis at the theatre with my gf. what an incredible movie ,; i intend to see it again
i’ve been feeling more in touch with my high school self recently. what do i mean by this..?
when I was going to college for an undergraduate degree, I was slowly discovering myself and becoming more sociable. however, I ended up regressing when the pandemic happened. I often think back to high school in the mornings at 6am. my band director switched me from the trumpet to the tuba, so I made a habit of bringing this massive instrument home every day only for it to just sit in the corner of my room.
I didn’t even practice it at all. the only reason i lugged this thing around was so i could have an excuse for the janitor to unlock the door to the band room in the mornings so that i could sit in silence for two hours before school started.
finally met up with an online friend that i've known for years now! she's very cool, she's a tattoo artist and we spent the day having dim sum and looking at paintings in the art institute. good stuff
i have realized that one of these days I’m going to run out of my own thoughts and observations, so i'll eventually have to sprinkle in green texts and copypastas
i guess i should explain this picture before i suddenly develop dementia or something.
this picture was taken of me on the first day of kindergarten and this might also be the first drawing i’ve ever made. the teacher had provided a bunch of coloring sheets for all the students and everyone was doing a great job of coloring inside the lines… …except for me. this isn’t a metaphor for anything by the way, my parents saw the wall of coloring sheets that were stapled to the wall and my drawing stood out from the rest, and not in a good way.
apparently, i had wrapped all 5 of my pudgy fingers around a green crayon and took the coloring sheet to task. whether the sheet of paper had any outlines on it didn't matter at all because i covered the entire thing with scribbles. now that i think about it, that might be why my kindergarten teacher told my parents that i might have been autistic.
also this first art memory reminds me of my first memory of pain. a year after kindergarten when i was in the first grade, my mother told me to doodle something on a piece of paper for a city wide drawing competition. anyway, i probably made something in less than 30 minutes and went back to doing whatever it is that five year olds do. what i had not expected was that my drawing was chosen over every other first grader’s drawing in the school district. i mean really, this was not a technically skilled drawing for a five year old, especially compared to my classmates who had probably spent more time doing better drawings.
annyyyyywayyyyyy, i had received a ribbon as an award for this drawing which hung on the top shelf in my bedroom. one night, i climbed up the shelf to grab the ribbon and was swishing the ribbon through the air by its string. however, the string that was attached to the ribbon snagged on the doorknob and tore all of the skin off of my ring finger. not fun
hopefully this entry sheds some light on an early moment that might have led me to become the self indulgent, egomaniac piece of shit "artist" i am today.
also, to create art requires love. and pain.
something that these dork ass losers making ai art have probably never felt lol.
added a page to the site at strauh.al/influences. this page is just a collection of visual artists, musicians, and writers that have left a lasting impression on me. might add a list of my favorite movies to the site in the future. i hate leaving things up to interpretation.
...i feel like i'm slowly turning into scaruffi.
![good ; they should also ban instagram reels and youtube shorts as well. it might suck for everyone in the short term but millions (perhaps billions) of man-hours will be taken back. think of all the things we could accomplish [collectively]](./culture_society/IMG_4371.JPG){kind=link}
