Write Drunk Edit Sober

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I haven’t really gotten drunk in a while. Getting drunk meaning drinking so much I truly feel like I start to lose grip on my consciousness — it’s there, I just don’t have control over it. I usually get sick and puke before that happens.

I sent the demos to Sam this morning. I was up all night last night putting things together. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, as my endogeneous cycle has been out of wack lately. I went to bed in French time the second to last time I slept, and then US time the last time. The boundary between “today” and “tomorrow” seemed to fade away, showing the naked continuity of time. In a way, living is quite like sitting on a boat floating in a river that just keeps going. You can’t get out and know where you are going, not at the same time.

I’m ok with sitting, though.

I have written three songs in the past two days. This productivity was impressive even to myself. But then again, in a way, it’s unsurprising knowing what I know about how I work. Sometimes I wonder how many people still hold on to the myth that productivity, especially creative productivity, is supposed to be linear. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone for whom that is the case. On the contrary, almost all of the creatives I’ve met have struggled with not meeting that kind of expectation. For most people, to create something takes being in a state where you can create something. In other words, creativity comes in a spur of the moment. All the other bits of the time are just building up to that moment of birth, so to say. Yet we call them “procrastination” as if it’s a terrible thing. My theory: it’s a concept invented by impatient people to shame other people who they want things from. Then again maybe I’m just trying to defending myself.

After coming back from HK, I spent a couple of days working on the MLAES project. I almost forgot how much I like to sit there and write code. A friend asked me for help with their data cleaning project, and after sitting in front of a Jupyter notebook for 2 hours straight, I felt surprisingly good. It’s a very cool feeling when you have an idea and you implement and validate it. It provides a sense of control, perhaps.

Then I worked on the songs. During the weekend in HK, I did a fair deal of writing and drawing. I have had the general ideas about what I wanted to say for a long while now, and even back in June, I have made extensive sketches. But then I never quite sat done and do it. Perhaps without the sense of urgency provided by the presence of a deadline, there wasn’t enough reason to prioritize this over everything else. Or perhaps I’ve been avoiding it because I was afraid to disappoint myself. Because I didn’t trust myself enough. Or perhaps I was unwilling to say goodbye to the state of gradually building to that moment of birth. Of knowing what the goal is, and working towards it. Of holding onto that illusion of certainty, of identity.

Recently I’m gradually losing the sense of who I am, what I am. In a way, this is not a new situation. In a way, I’ve never truly known who I am; or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that although I have a fairly good idea about what I could become at any given moment, I don’t know what the endpoint will be, or what I want the endpoint to be. When there is the possibility of change, it doesn’t seem sensible to put a label on it and pretend it’s all set in stone.

But recently, and truly recently, I think I began to accept this. That I’m not going to be just one thing. Or even simultaneously a handful of things. That I’m not going to always be consistent, and that trying to force myself into consistency would take tremendous effort and would make me very unhappy. Rather than picking one thing or a few things and settle, I’m realizing that maybe the REAL decision to make is to either (A) try to solidify my existence in order to appease those who expect great things for/from me or (B) confront and accept the fact that perhaps that’s not what I want.

I have tried very hard to conform to some state of normalcy. I tried to sleep at normal hours. I tried to check everything off the to-do list. I tried to have a normal relationship, a normal education, a normal career, normal in a very elitist sense. I tried to be ok, even excellent; sometimes, it takes excellency to count as ok. And I was almost always successful, but only for a short while. Then everything starts to crumble. Because it was at a great cost that I was able to put up such a facade.

I don’t consider myself egoistic, but growing up in a society that values complacency greatly, I have received such comments multiple times. To be honest, it felt like an undeserved accusation. There are a lot of things I would have done differently were I truly blind to how others view me, what others want from me. But that doesn’t matter, because that wouldn’t be who I am either. I care, and that’s part of me. Perhaps at some point I have fought, and perhaps that didn’t turn out so great, so after that I focused on finding a balance, finding a way to coexist with my surroundings. I didn’t change myself in order to fit in; that would be lame. But I did hide, I hid many bits of myself. Not intentionally, but there weren’t people around who would get it. There were no appropriate context for saying what I want to say, and there were no space for me to figure out what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I always spoke someone else’s language, played someone else’s game. I didn’t feel like I belonged. I never did — with geography, with gender, with culture, with ethnicity. I always felt like an outsider, and within the outsiders, I felt like a meta-outsider.

In order to stay relevant, I sorted out a list of labels that I could benefit from and put them on me whenever needed. I do not let any of them go, because it always felt like if I don’t have much else left, and any loss seemed so grave.

One thing led to another, I got good at playing someone else’s game. I had many advantages, and I had an abundance of luck. Sometimes I was recognized as “one of them.” And it all felt ok. But some part of me was always screaming, and some part of me was always so stoic and detached. I was dead scared that people were going to spot something that makes them suspect that I was not loyal. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to back myself up sufficiently, that I didn’t really know myself if I was truly loyal or was on their team because they were the best thing within reach at the moment. I was all these things at once, but then at the same time, I wasn’t myself. And that was deeply frustrating.

I didn’t know who I was, not in an essential sense. I still don’t. But what changed is that now I realize that’s ok.

The thing is, there is no sensible way to be one thing in a world that changes so fast and in such unpredictable ways. Other than to provide a sense of security and trust in people who expect specific things from me, there is little economic value in trying to stay the same in this environment. Under this framework of thinking, rather than trying so hard to fit into some boxes, there is another solution. I could just find people who do not expect me to be certain things, and live life however the h*ll I want.

At the end of the day, I’m just myself. No matter what name I go by, no matter what gender, no matter what title. I’m not my resume, my GPA, my medical history, my career. I am a human; no, before that, I’m a being, a being who is mostly organic at the moment but doesn’t reject the objective possibility for change. Change is inevitable, and change is necessary. If we can’t stop it from happening, might as well have more control over it, right?

One of the things I’m not: I’m not someone who likes to sit there and watch and do nothing. This is not good or bad, just a general strategic pattern that I have observed in myself.

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Since a couple of days ago I gave up trying to force myself to go to bed at a certain time or shaming myself for failing. I think the shame has taken over too much of my life, which itself is shameful to admit, but I guess it’s better to confront it now than later.

I suspect that after years and years of living life feeling like I’m somehow different from everyone else, I must stay a healthy distance away from normalcy in order to feel like myself. To feel “normal,” really, because not normal has been my normal, and normal just seem so deviant.

There is a difference between normal and healthy, though. And with health, being too perfectly healthy in one aspect of life might be unhealthy in the overall picture. I’m working on that still.

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Before I forget, I want to talk a little about love.

No one matters to everyone, but, hopefully, everyone matters to someone. It’s not easy to find true love, but it isn’t hard to find some kind of connection, I think. Be kind to each other, and the bidirectional link will make you feel warm. At least in a moment, within a physical space. And that’s better than nothing at all, I think. Maybe in a way that’s what all of us live for. Some forget this, perhaps because they got so much of it so it didn’t seem necessary, or perhaps they got so little of it that it didn’t seem possible and they lose hope, or perhaps they were going for a very roundabout way to get it.

Today I went to a friend’s place to help her rescue a cat who got stuck at a tiny balcony of an empty apartment. It was more of a place designed for flower pots, not spacious at all. The cat had been stuck there for four days, and didn’t have anything to eat or drink at all for the first two days. We didn’t have a way to get it down. The owner of the apartment apparently comes back on weekends, so we decided to wait until Saturday. Using a long pole my friend had made by taping four clothes poles together using electrical tape, we transported some food and water as well as an old shirt she was willing to abandon. I’m going back tomorrow with more cat food.

We discussed whether the cat was a stray. Then we talked about stray cats in the park. My friend told me a very sad story about a stray cat she met in a park. The cat approached her, meowing. Strays only do that when they need something from people. She pet the cat for a little while; the cat returned to a bush, and came back carrying something in the mouth. My friend thought it was a mouse and that the cat was trying to show it off to her. Then she realized it was the cat’s baby. The baby was already dead. The cat kept meowing, wanting her to help. But there was nothing she could do.

That story made me very sad. When I got home, after a few drinks, I laid on the couch with Soba and cried. Soba and Udon could have very well been one of the dead kittens, but they made it through. They’ve probably been through shit, but they made it through, and now they are living at my place, safe and supported. The thought of them dying on the streets frightened me very much, but at the same time I was also overwhelmed by gladness that they are here. It won’t be the end of their journey; rather, it’s only the beginning. And that’s a poignant thing.

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I just officially finished writing all the five songs for the music project, and it feels weird. I feel like an empty vessel. An empty vessel, or an emptied vessel, is a powerful thing because it doesn’t contain anything now, but it could contain something later, something delicious, or something spoiled, but something new.

I don’t know why I procrastinate on this project because it’s something I truly want to do. Perhaps because I feel insecure, perhaps because I’m depressed and overwhelmed. Perhaps I’m scared that it won’t turn out as good as it sounded when it’s just an idea, even though I know that’s false. No idea is better than its physical implementation, because an idea alone can’t interact with the world, while its physical consequences can. But to implement an idea one way under the pressure of limited time and resources often seems to imply rejecting other ways to implement that idea. It’s akin to the moment of quantum collapse, where an infinite amount of possible universes fold into one. And you are left with a solid thing, just one, not infinity. This makes me anxious.

I didn’t really know how the songs would turn out, but I know it came time to force myself to squeeze them out so I can find out, so that’s what I did. They made sense to me, I don’t know about other people. This project feels 20% done, and I have roughly 4 weeks to do the next 80%. I should be more anxious than I am now.

But I’m actually ok. It would be too ironic to fall prey to the pressure of modern work life when writing songs about how dehumanizing and unsustainable such modern work life is. The album is gaining a sinister overtone, a mild, obscure form of insanity. Because that’s how I’ve been feeling, and I decided to be honest.

I’ve begun to grow an interest back in Cog Sci 100. The prompt of the last essay was about designing an AI that would pass the Total Turing Test and make its own decisions. One of the comments I received from Ken was “you spent more time with details of the robot’s appearance than most people” and I think that was telling. That I care about the distinction as well as the interplay between the appearance and what’s “inside.”

One of the first movies I remembered watching was Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg. I was eight, and something about that movie really stuck with me. This didn’t affect my life for more than a decade, but then soon became a gateway connection in my pocket to justify my new found obsession with robots and AI. I got into robot ethics, I did research, I worked in the industry. I thought long and hard about all the ways to cross the line between human and AI. And then when I went back to school, I read about cyborgs and the way to break that dichotomy.

This very much mirrors my journey of discovering and making peace with my trans identity. Both are such important parts of me that I would probably cease to be who I am if either is taken out.

And it was a beginning to something. Something too big to talk about. And that’s something that has been on my mind, but I haven’t really thought through, so I’d rather stay silent for now.

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