Updates from the Land of The Big Sad

The world is burning, and I'm an elder millennial with an internet connection.

For a long time I remember looking forward to logging on to livejournal. Some of my best friends had aliases there and we would talk about what we were going through as we came into adulthood. It was mostly a fairly private affair, since our blogs were locked to approved readers, but it was nice because it was so much more expedient than handwriting letters.

And for a time, these sorts of social networks were suitable to staying in touch, while offering a creative way to express oneself. It was the art of writing letters online: a blog. Blogs were cool. Blogs were great.

There’s that part in Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet” song where the melody and chords wax nostalgic and melancholy and he sings of an internet from the “before” times. (For me, peak internet wholesomeness was the hamster dance, xanga, dancing baby, and HTML coding my own Sailor Moon fansite.)

There was a lot more hope back then. For how could something that brings us together, drive us apart?

Flash forward to the present, and I find the latest Kurzgesagt video on polarization thanks to social media so relevant:

Personally, I have been staying up to date of current affairs with independent reporters like Chris Hedges, Marc Lamont Hill, Motaz Azaiza, Bisan Owda, and enriched by commentary/community discussion by inspiring women of color, including Amanda Seales, Gabes Torres, and Nikki Blak.

I’ve also attended teach ins and protests in support of Palestine here in Vermont, and was especially troubled with the recent news in my state of the shooting of Tahseen Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani, Palestinian college students who were walking down the sidewalk in Burlington, speaking Arabic and English and sporting traditional keffiyehs when they were shot in an apparent hate crime.

During this time, throw in the strange mix of holiday season ads that come off as more and more separate and disconnected from the cultural zeitgeist, because to acknowledge the truth of what we are feeling and experiencing would kill any urge to do some shameless consumerism.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. There was a time where it was part of the daily routine to wonder what was the point of anything if I couldn’t do the thing I worked and studied so hard to do. I felt so useless all the time. I made my profession, title, academic achievements, my source of value.

Now I do this thing that some people really like, others scoff at or ignore, and that my family finds amusing. But I have to regularly ask myself, am I still doing what I want to do? And… what’s the point?

But I have received such nice feedback from people. And I consider regularly how being a buttonsmith and a bruxa makes me feel a little special, like how I am sending sigils and intentions out into the world, and people, members of my community are passing them along.

But there are times I fall down a memory hole, and times I miss being a librarian.