hey friends,

long time no chat. how’s it going? you probably don’t remember to subscribing to this newsletter (or that it even exists). that’s because it doesn’t, really. school’s been absolutely kicking my ass. but I’ve been writing some pieces for class and thought hey, what better random group to share it with. so please enjoy:

A List of Thoughts That if I Write them Down maybe they will Go away.

1. I wrote down this thought the other day: play as a form of rebellion against my parents. I’m not really sure what caused this thought to appear. Maybe I was running down the street, training for the half marathon I’ll never actually run because I’m not disciplined enough to wake up at 8am every Saturday morning to train with the other group of runners. Or maybe it’s because I’m still drinking the elixir of youth, saving and salivating at the dregs of college life as I mindlessly wander between classes that I’ll never actually use, friendships that’ll die out in five years, parties that are too sweaty, and the nook of my room where I cry myself to sleep.

2. Play is an interesting idea. It has a childlike association. The sense of wonder that kids have. There’s a notion that when children are born, they start at the top of a string, closest to space, filled to the brim with excitement and potential. Eventually, as they grow up, have norms and expectations hammered into them, they slide down the string back to earth, where they’re confined by the mortal coil of existence. It’s a sad thought, perhaps.

3. This valuation of play feels inherently capitalist, that the value of an activity should be tied to the economic, social, or physical output associated with a task. In our hyperfinancialized society where even the value of a college education is measured by the amount of money you make when you graduate (which Brown CS surprisingly tops the list), incentives fail to align.

4. And so, I come back to myself, a senior in his last year of college who’s barely scraping by, completely unsure of what he wants to do with life, taking art classes because he’s trying to fill the void of the previous life where he stacked clubs, extracurriculars, and other extraneous tasks to appear “busy”. He’s not busy, mostly just sad, because he hasn’t really dated anyone and that was what college was supposed to be for right? like, if we’re using it to explore ourselves then why is everyone so horny all the time and looking to have sex as if plugging holes will solve all their problems. It clearly hasn’t, as he’s still searching for meaning lost of all ideas.

5. But he tries to find them. Except every time he picks up something new, whether that’s photography (you were never good enough for Dad with his nice Nikon) or cooking (Dad is always telling him that he’s doing it wrong), that tiny voice always rang in the back of his head. “If you aren’t the best at the thing you’re doing you might not even be doing it at all”

6. He cries.

7. Sniffles

8. …Nose blowing…

9. It’s almost as if the words spoken through the early years of childhood affect how you grow up as an individual. It’s almost as if the years of repetitive verbal and physical abuse fundamentally affect how your brain thinks. It’s almost as if the lack of healthy and loving support diminishes how you think about the world, flipping it on it’s head, suggesting that maybe you, yes you, were better at what you were doing, that if you had worked harder, longer, better, had practiced for one more hour, hadn’t played that one video game, stopped eating so much, actually went to the gym, that you could have won that tournament-game-test-activity.

10. But no. You didn’t do those things. You lost. A loser. Because you were messing around instead of disciplining yourself into doing the work.

11. Maybe you should just… grow up.

A brief moment in time

We were two rays in space, shooting off into distance, into infinity, destined to never meet. I was born at (4, 2), you, at (-3, -1), opposite quadrants of our existence. But, then it happened, we touched briefly at the origin, the naval of our tiny two dimensional world.

You waved to me, hello have we met before?

And just like that it was over, passing along into other parts of the graph, into other futures, possibilities. Sometimes I wish I could reorient the axes of the graph, change it into polar coordinates, so that we could bounce along each other, infinitely, the curvatures of our functions forming beautiful petals. Rather than being bound by time along an axis, we were bound by the distance we were defined from each other, the regularity in our loops, moving in synchronicity.

So no, we haven’t.

thanks for meeting me down here. if you enjoyed them, i’m glad. if not, that’s okay too, i’m just working on getting better and savoring the moments of learning. maybe send me a suggestion, or some resources to look at. and if there’s a typo, that’s probably the case.

cheers to tomorrow,

ivan