notonline222
on habits? clipping my nails. yeah...seriously. 09/17/22
note: yeah i wrote this high (it is obvious lol) and i'm not rereading or editing it so proceed with caution if you for some reason do
im sure it's a symptom of my ongoing struggle with self confidence, but i've noticed (of myself and my own habits) just now that once i am able to aestheticize an act it becomes significantly easier to do. more motivation when i can somehow connect the experience outside of myself to something else... whether it's something i feel has inherently more value than i place on myself OR whether i need to ... in some way or form .... fetishize all of my live experiences to find them worthwhile. or something outside the bounds of either of these. i dont know, things never fit neatly into binary categories (is that even worth noting?)
at risk of embarrassing myself, and for the purpose of explaining what i mean, here is what just went on in my brain. to contextualize, one of my worst anxious habits is picking at my skin. it's not really just a minor thing either, it more often than not devolves into what i assume most would associate with the picking habits of opiate user. i'm a bit off track. anyways. this habit is made worse by my having thick finger nails. this is getting to be too much information. anyhow, i am also incredibly lazy, and let my nails grow longer than i should. i let it go until it becomes a direct inconvenience. the thought process is that i guess it is a waste of time to do it until it reaches that point. which i logically understand to be not true, but im not typically the most logically minded person.
so... i just cut my nails. if you're still with me. but i immediately started imagining the trailer for kang seulgi's upcoming mini-album "28 Reasons". sitting beside the pool, clipping her nails... calm and intense. at this point, only the trailer has been released, i don't know what that is actually going to be about.
this "x feels like y" where x is my own act and y is the reference. interesting. an urge to tangle myself in with something large than myself? an urge to dissociate through association? logically, i should just be motivated to clip my nails regularly. autonomously. for myself. so i don't claw apart my face. because i do claw apart my face. that's not even hypothetical. that should be motivation enough. but no... in my mind... the motivation was partially that my nails had gotten long, but also because as soon as i had the thought to clip my nails, the image of seulgi entered my head. what gives? this is embarrassing. why is my mind filled with media images that i respect and value over myself? my physical body feels irrelevant as opposed to the connections my thoughts make with my enviornment and experiences. maybe the confidence thing. maybe i just don't care about my phyiscal self if i don't think it is being percieved by anyone who could judge me, and i mostly stay inside, so the raw skin isn't a bad price to pay in exchange for relief of anxiety. not logical again. it makes me anxious to have sores + i know this is to the detriment of the future health and apperence of my skin. is it a value of immidiate gratification over an understanding of the future? i dont want to open that can of worms. i have a bleek view of the future. even now, as i wrote that, i began to one again pick at my skin. now i'm biting the skin on my lips. maybe because i don't know how to finish this up and i've deviated so far from where i originally was without coming to any conclusion. oh well. so it goes.
but wait. 09/17/22 pt. 2
i have something else i'm thinking about. about why i've so reluctant to call myself a writer. because my means of employment and income are not autonomous. i work as if i'm on an assembly line. the internet is the machine. i take my words as if they were sheets of metal and feed them into the machine. new means of production. potential for surplus labour value when crafted right for the machine. it is not artistic expression, it is a calculation of operating a machine. that is why what i value does not matter, because what matters is how to make the most out of the least to extract surplus value. this is under the guise of a ... creative profession? it's even less creative than advertising, where you actually need to develop a way to craft messaging. this is simply satisfying a mysterious, elusive formula... knowable just enough to tailor to it in some extent (but never perfectly knowable). content matters less than form. and the form is... exploitative of both the producer and consumer. it is what it is.