In between the cracks of a concrete road, a flower might have bloomed. But concrete isn't a fit home for a flower, and if a sprout ever dared, it would be crushed before it ever bloomed.
We were both alone, together.
Every day, for almost a year, I sat alone at lunch. I barely ate anything, and after a while, I stopped pretending like I had things to do. So, I started to walk to class before the bell rang.
Truthfully, I know little to nothing about you. But every day for almost a year, we sat alone together in a classroom, just before the bell rang.
Typically, you got there a few seconds earlier than me, and on occasion, you opened the door for me. Once inside, we sat far apart, and we worked on whatever we had, alone.
Typically, I don't lift my head up to look at the people around me, unless it's strictly necessary. I live inside my head, the world around me flattens into a background. But every day as we passively shared a space together, your quiet presence gained a form. Before I knew, I had noticed you.
I noticed your features, your mannerisms, your voice. I wouldn’t say you are the type that would be considered “conventionally attractive”, but you were attractive to me. After all these years, I don’t perfectly recall how you looked like. I can’t remember the shape of your nose, or mouth, or eyebrows, but I remember your eyes. Something about your eyes in particular, they always seemed… Sad? Wise? Focused? I never knew for certain. Your eyes sliced into me, revealing that underneath the aloof loner, was secretly… a normal teenager girl.
I hated being around you, because you made me feel so disgustingly normal. The quickened heart beating whenever I was close to you humiliated me, it felt like everyone in the room could hear it. I remember feeling happy when I didn’t see you anymore, because it meant I was back to my uncaring state of being. Slowly though, I realized that I felt… hurt.
It's strange how every day for almost a year, two people can share a space and never exchange a word... but then again, we were likely only there together due to our shared introversion. I wondered who you truly were as a person. Eavesdropping gave me a vague outline of who you were, and for some reason it felt familiar. I thought that we were similar in many ways, although that might just be me projecting my ideals onto you. Whether we were similar in personalities didn’t matter though, as we were different in the only place it mattered. We looked so, so different. People typically fall in love with others who looked like them, but I found you to be so beautiful without us sharing even a single feature. Although the idea of ever dating you was as likely to me as being struck by a meteor, I still thought of the consequences. I think I’d rather deal with the consequences of being struck by a meteor.
I feel a stab of regret when I think about you. I give myself comfort by reminding myself of the consequences, as it takes the blame out of my own hands.
Somewhere in one of my old sketchbooks, I have a drawing of you. That's what quiet girls do to express their affection, because we have no friend who we can whisper the names of our crushes to. When I look at that drawing, I feel a sense of cringe, yet sadness, as I remember exactly where I was and how I felt when I drew it.
If anyone ever knew, it was only a silly little crush. A quiet girl and a quiet boy, quietly alone together. In another world, in another life, maybe we would have gone to prom. But in this world, in this life, I wait, alone.
There are some things about you that are so innate to your being that you feel like you’ve known your whole life, without ever needing a reason for it. For some reason, that thing for me is that I do not ever want to have kids. Throughout all the years I have been on this spinning rock, the only thing that has stayed consistent for me is my love of art, my hatred of children, and the color of my eyes.
Maybe hatred is a bad word, as I don’t hate children as individuals. After all, I was one, once upon a time. But I find their behaviors strange and gross, rather than cute. Babies are like an invasive species: it’s not their fault for existing, but their existence destroys everything around them. Growing up as a little female shaped thing, every force (both seen and unseen) pushes you towards the path of motherhood. I was given the spiel on how great being a mother is by my own mother, but I narrowly avoided a lot of other forms of social conditioning. I never had a baby doll. We couldn’t afford them. Instead, I got to play with the hand-me-downs from my male cousins, mostly action figures and Legos. Maybe that’s why I’m so mentally sterile. I never got the message that baby dolls are supposed to send to you: to be a sweet and nurturing maternal figure, not the hyperactive little monster you truly are.
I have a whole laundry list of reasons why I will never have kids. Most of them are moral justifications to explain away this malfunction in my brain. From my perspective, I really, truly, can't understand why people want children so bad. Not just children, but biological ones. I understand it's human instinct, but so much of modern society is a massive middle finger to nature already, so why do so many hold on to this instinct? I try not to be judgmental, but there is always a part of me that feels a sense of awe when I hear someone describe how adorable their mucus-covered noise machine is.
These opinions are far from being socially acceptable, so it makes sense why I don’t hear people in real life express them. I don’t either. Especially for women, just the announcement that you do not want kids results in similar reactions as if you were to declare that you’re a witch in Medieval Europe. Beyond the biological instinct to have kids, I suspect culture, and especially religion, has a role to play in this stigma. In the Christian world, life is seen as a “gift” from God, or at least that’s how I understand it to be. To not have a child is to rob a (hypothetical) person of their life. The strange thing about that is that life is far from being a gift when you look at things objectively. There is good, and there is bad. Being alive is a gamble - however, I don’t remember signing a waiver before I was born saying that I consented to taking this gamble… Yet here I am.
Weirdos with opinions that can't be spoken out loud always end up congregating on the internet - and thus, r/antinatalism. Upon initially discovering this cesspool, I felt right at home. It was nice being affirmed that I wasn’t alone in my baby-hating ways, but I started to realize that the subreddit much worse than I initially thought the longer I scrolled. From calling people who want to reproduce “breeders”, to believing that all “breeders” are all morally corrupt, I soon realized that the community was, indeed, kinda cringe. It’s the classic problem of blaming individuals, rather than the system. The subreddit did get me more interested in the philosophy of antinatalism, though. In short, antinatalism a philosophy that states that procreation is harmful. It’s harmful for the person being born, because life sucks. It’s harmful for the environment, because humans suck. It’s harmful for people in general, who are all pressured into doing it but are clueless about how to actually raise a human being.
I generally agree with the philosophy, although I haven’t learned that much about it yet. I’ve tried to look up counter “pronatalist” arguments, but most of them seem to just be heavily conservative and religious people who believe that popping out children is doing a moral good. Antinatalism has been bashed heavily because of how oppositional to… well, pretty much everything we are taught to believe, but I think that most people would likely agree with it if they learned about it and seriously considered it. Unfortunately, the truth is that nothing will change. People will continue to have kids, fueled both by biology and social conditioning, something that cannot be changed by some fringe philosophy. The way I see it, is that humanity is a giant machine with no off switch, destined to destroy everything around it to fuel itself, until it runs out of fuel. I am a gear that refuses to spin, and although my impact is small, at least I made it on my own.
I knew a boy once, let's call him T. T was a media archetype of a "bad boy": he was loud, rude, violent, and careless. T also cried a lot. I remember I made him cry once, although I don’t remember what I had said, and I didn’t do so intentionally. I guess the word to describe him was that he was hyperemotional, prone to anger, prone to sadness, and prone to laughter. Usually, laughter at the expense of others. I had known T for years, and overtime I developed a fondness for him, even though we were never friends. Most people in the school knew him, but few liked his presence, except for me. One day, there was a fight at school. It was an extremely one-sided fight, more of a public humiliation. A crowd gathered around, and I squeezed in to get a good look at the action, like any good girl would. It was T, beating up some another boy I knew. As I watched the kid being stomped, I felt a sense of pity for him, but I did not intervene. It was strange seeing him in such a state of weakness, as the boy had been a casual bully of mine. After the fight had ended and everyone died down, I couldn't help but also feel a tinge of joy. Ha.
Why did I feel this fondness for T, despite him being rude and violent? Deep down, I saw myself in him. I too, had violent tendencies, although I had learned to control them better than him. I too, cried a lot. And all things considered, neither of us were unique. We both were raised in a bad area, went to a bad school, and it was said by many substitute teachers that we were even the baddest class. We all laughed it off, but being the “bad” kids marked us permanently, or at least, it did for me.
There is this “tug” I feel towards certain people. The need for closeness, the need for understanding, it tugs me forward to them. Maybe it’s a flaw of mine, that I have the tendency to see something that isn’t really there, so when I see the bad in society, I see myself.
I remember one time I was at the bus stop with my mom when I was a kid. Just a baby space cadet, staring at a tree as we waited. A man stood slouched from a distance, I hardly noticed him. He was not “in his right mind”, which is a phrase I hate using. He gradually approached us, his eyes locked on me as be murmured something incoherent. My mom instinctively pulled me behind her back, and she told me words of caution before yelling at the man to go away. After he left, she ranted on and on. Something about drugs, something about mental illness. My eyes were locked on him. I felt no danger at that moment. I felt sadness. I wondered if that was what I looked like to others. Dazed, confused, and hollow. Am I in the wrong for feeling pity, for someone who likely did not deserve such?
I feel a sense of misplaced empathy when I see the bad in society; Not just the deviant kid fighting in a hallway, but the murderers, rapists, predators, and shooters. I know that even when I'm good, I'm no better than them. I didn’t choose to become who I am, and neither did anyone else. We choose to live in the lie that we decide our own fate, so that when we see the bad in society, we can blame the individuals rather than asking what exactly made them that way. We free ourselves of personal responsibility by drawing a line between the good and the bad. But we are all bad, we are all the villain to someone else, and at the end of the day, we are all going to hell.
“Talking about dreams is boring!” said the audience. "I don’t care!" I yelled back. "It’s my website! So shut up and listen."
I think that everyone has the question of “what really is a dream?” at least once. When you try and look up answers, the results are pretty underwhelming, stating something along the lines of “we don’t really know”. It’s very concerning how little we actually know about how our own brains work. Somehow science has progressed to the point where we’ve been able to shoot a probe billions of miles into space, but we somehow still don’t understand the pink wrinkly blob inside our own skulls. I think that’s part of the reason why dreams are so fascinating to me, because it’s one of the few things where everyone experiences it, and no one knows why. It’s a friendly reminder from your brain that you are not the one in charge.
I don’t know when it began, but I have slowly developed a superpower. It’s a very underwhelming and sometimes even unpleasant superpower, but a superpower according to me. It’s that I can remember my dreams very well. I can remember the plots of most of my dreams, and some dreams I can map from start to finish, remembering exactly how it looked like. I suspect this might have begun because I would occasionally dream of somewhere or something very beautiful, so I would try to recreate it in my art. This caused me to become more aware of my dreams, and through thinking about it more, it made me remember it more. Anywho, this has resulted in an endless feedback loop where I can’t stop thinking about my dreams even if I wanted to.
Most of my dreams are impressively repetitive. It’s like my brain is a long-running show that has run out of original ideas, and so it has resorted to reusing narratives from earlier seasons. Most of my dreams follow the same plot line of me being chased down by someone, and having to flee. Sometimes instead of a person, it’s a thing, like a natural disaster, but I always take the role of escaping. I never turn and fight. Why can’t I just have a dream where I’m a badass heroine for once?
I read somewhere that dreams about escaping are connected to discontentment of your current situation and wanting change. I’m not sure how credible dream psychology is, and it’s always struck me as a bit pseudosciencey like horoscopes or fortune-telling, but that diagnosis does check out for me. One thing that I’ve found interesting is that I almost never have nightmares anymore - the kind of dreams where you wake up shaking or in fear. Most of my dreams can be categorized as “generally unpleasant”, but not scary. I wonder if it’s just because I’ve just changed as a person, and I’m rarely easily scared now.
It may seem weird, but before I go to sleep now, I try to condition myself into thinking about positive things in hopes that I’ll dream about it, like a dream about hanging out with my favorite video characters. It never works. This makes me think about how far removed the part of your brain that generates dreams is from the conscious part of your brain. I’ve always found it a bit unnerving that there is a whole other side of your brain that you have no understanding of or control over. is up to, and it can be shocking. So much of my artwork is inspired by dreams I’ve had that it makes me wonder if it’s possible to plagiarize your unconscious self. This gets into the complex discussion about how much of “you” is really you, a question that I will likely write an entire entry on.
Although I rarely have nightmares, there is one exception, a type of dream I get that can be rather terrifying. It’s taken me a while to come to terms with the fact that they are dreams, as they seem so, so real. I call them dream loops. People who are not me call them false awakenings. Essentially, it’s when you have a hyper realistic dream where it feels like you’ve woken up, but you're actually still sleeping. Sometimes you even get up and start doing things, only to magically be teleported back to your bed, to do it all over again. That may not sound so scary, but after a while, you realize you are stuck in a dream, and it becomes an escape room. Strangely, all my dreams have to do with escape. Sometimes I can go on “looping” for what feels like hours, creating an extreme panic as it feels as if I’m trapped in a cycle destined to never escape into the real world. I’ve never watched Groundhog Day, but I probably just described the plot. When I do wake up eventually, I am still doubtful of my surroundings, expecting to loop back at any time. Maybe my whole life has just been one extremely long cycle of a dream loop… haha.
Waking up from a dream can be the best - or the worst - feeling in the world. After breaking out of a loop, I feel an extreme sense of relief and joy to be back in the real world. It’s one of the few times when I’m grateful for my life. When I wake up from my occasionally good dreams, I am filled with disappointment at how boring my real life is. Most of my positive dreams involve flying. I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved the idea of being able to fly, and I’ve had many dreams about it since I was a kid. In fact, when I was a kid, I even asked my mom why I dreamt about flying so often. She said it was because I was growing taller. I don’t think that’s true anymore, but rather, I think that flying embodies my desire to be free. Flight is the ultimate form of freedom in my mind. I would trade anything to be able to fly. No, it’s not very practical. It would probably be terrifying, given my fear of heights. Despite all that, something irrational and childlike in me feels like if I could fly, all these worries would be left on the ground, and I would be free.
I have a confession to make. I’m sorry to say this, but… I’m a weeb. Okay, you probably already knew that as soon as the front page of this website loaded. Being a weeb is truly a struggle, as I must live knowing that I am a forever a fleshy, three dimensional being, rather than an anime character. Joking over, I do genuinely love anime. I’ve been influenced by it since I was a kid watching Crayon Shin-chan, Doraemon, and Chibi Maruko Chan. As a teen, I became obsessed with Mirai Nikki and Sword Art Online. I am mature enough to admit my mistakes. Now as an adult, I have been and still currently am obsessed with many shows, and by many shows, I mean Jojo. I can't help being a Jojo fan, as it's only the greatest piece of contemporary art. However, anime is still far from being seen as a socially accepted interest in the eyes of any generation older than Gen Z. It is for the most part, “low culture”. It is not respected as art, worthy of admiration, critique, or any serious conversation.
Growing up in the West, my choice of representation was… limited. Almost non-existent, to be honest. I still enjoyed Western shows, movies, and games, but I never really saw myself in them. I remember watching American TV shows and being confused as to why the kids talked so casually to their parents, didn’t care much about academics, and why everyone WORE THEIR SHOES INDOORS. Anime was a bit closer to home. I didn’t quite see myself in anime characters either, as I didn’t have super strength or eyes that take up a quarter of my face, but there wasn’t as much cognitive dissonance. The world of anime felt strangely familiar at times, making me gravitate to it.
When Brock held up that rice ball and proclaimed it a jelly filled donut, I began to question everything. Crude attempts to “localize” anime have failed over and over, although they will continue to try. I believe that’s at the core of why anime is not, and possibly will not, ever be respected in the West. It is different, foreign, and that’s a part of the appeal. Thanks to orientalism, the East is always portrayed in opposition to the West. The West is the standard of normalcy, and therefore, the East will always be strange in comparison. Anime can be deep and meaningful. It can be shallow fanservice. Everything from the art style, the storytelling tropes, and the voice acting, goes against Western normalcy, and when people don’t know how to categorize something, they dismiss it entirely. Maybe that’s why I feel a sense of personal offense when people demean anime, because it doesn’t just feel like they are demeaning something I like, but also, who I am.
Like with many things, anime does not become respected until it is put in a more respected medium, by people who are more “respectable”. In art class once, I had mentioned casually that I was influenced by Takashi Murakami’s work, and the professor told me they were a fan of his as well. This was the same professor who stated that they didn’t like anime, and didn’t want us to draw it… yeah. Takashi Murakami is an interesting example of someone who crosses the boundaries of high and low art. His art is obviously inspired by anime and manga, yet it is hung up in museums and admired by people who likely have never watched a single episode of any anime. I think part of the reason he has gained much success and notoriety in the West is because he presents his work in the right way. In a respected way. It’s strange how much our perception of art is influenced by its surroundings. We celebrate modern artists whose works sit pristine in a gallery, while ignoring all the modern/abstract art around us everywhere - the patterns on a quilt, the engravings in a wooden door, a well-designed logo, even. These are the artists that are never given credit, never given a second thought, and will never be mentioned in an art class - but just like anime, they quietly shape the world around them, informing a whole generation of people.
I believe that everyone, even the most stuck up snobs in the art world, have guilty pleasures. As to why we feel guilty, it often has less to do with the the quality of the media itself, but the social implications of liking such media. I try not to feel guilty for liking the things I like, but even still I rarely ever talk about my love of anime to people in real life, as a consequence of the association between anime fans and sweaty basement dwellers. Do those kinds of weebs exist in real life? Yes... probably. But I do have to question why the worst versions of any fandom is always the one being pushed the furthest. Gamers are angry, bigoted, and don't shower. Furries are perverted, unhinged, and also don't shower. Any kind of media targeted towards predominately young women must have a fanbase of obsessive fangirls. These archetypes may stem from some truth, but the reason they are perpetuated so often, I suspect, is in order to keep guilt pleasures guilty. This creates a weird situation where the most commonly consumed forms of media: pop culture, is also the most hated. Everybody wants to be "highbrow", but we all enjoy lowbrow media in secret, and then later wipe our hands clean from it and turn around and mock the ones who are unashamed in their love of the same media. It's like being a repressed, closeted republican senator.
I feel pity for those who must hide who they are, while also being aware of the fact that I must hide who I am on occasion too. I hope for a day where people finally stop caring so much about seeming intelligent and just admit to liking what they like, and then we can all be free. Unfortunately, that day is still far from now. Dividing the high and the low is crucial in maintaining a social hierarchy, and as long as a hierarchy exists, we stupid monkeys will try to do what monkeys do best, and climb it. Thanks to that, we are subject to never being who we are, but instead, who we want to be.
In conclusion, go watch Jojo.