Being a junior in college is intellectually similar to being a young mother, you know what I mean. Like walking on stilts, in many ways I do not know what is going on. but for the sake of young, bright-eyed others, I will figure out what is going on. for starters, i have been eating rice everyday, and quite literally just now, it suddenly started thunderstorming outside. this is what made going high school in Singapore bearable for me: on the days when it would suddenly thunderstorm I would race myself to the top floor (14th floor) of the boarding house and watch the entire AstroTurf & surrounding apartments & grey buildings & the tall sports nets become soaked. I have always admired Singapore’s weather for its ability to become very Extreme very quickly, like the new Caroline Polachek. There is no language for this but back then I would have quoted some stupid, stupid Byron or Poe but I have since purged all of that from my head, coming out saner, I suppose.
I have been thinking a lot about my potential senior thesis topic, and becoming really excited by it. When I first came to Yale I thought that surely, surely, I’d write A Truly Leftist & Groundbreaking Treatise On Political Theory — like the quantum voting thing I wrote about in high school, like the Rawlsian veil of ignorance which, come on, would sound nice to any undersocialized seventeen-year-old, and like a theory of the Internet sociability that I became interested during Zoom college — but I’m not writing anything like that, I’m an English major now. That’s so annoying. I still would like to do some work on digital capitalism, algorithmic justice and/or Internet governance theory before I graduate, but I think I am okay with not doing political theory. Although it does sound really nice, anything remotely resembling EPE/Polisci at Yale is so far-fetched from both politics and theory, and I’m not sure I can live with that. If I have Takes I’ll just tweet; and after all, there’s nothing more deplorable than a “conciliatory leftist” (read: would sell out for less than money, unscrupulous, etc) to many, many, many of my peers nowadays. Whatever are we supposed to do? The greatest task of our generation is to be Normal — politically, socially, gingerly — to define Normality for oneself within the context of one’s social surrounds means, therefore, to pull people to oneself such that the others can constitute a Normal for you. After all the world is very, very big and there is a community of all shapes, forms, & conventions out there. But this does not escape the very menial task (or process) of being human: to be given something, and to make something out of what one is given.
Sorry if that sounds pseudoreligious. Point is, I like things that matter, and what I think matters has shifted drastically throughout my time at Yale. I no longer think politics of any sort is what governs the ontologies of our lives. Rather, I think politics is an imperfect process — much like the immune system — by which we combat the discontents of prescriptive desire, out of which more desires are wrongly prescribed to progeny. In my Inquisition notes for the VP of the place that shall not be named, I wrote: “I believe that human activity is the foundation of all politics. The root of all human activity is desire, and desire is the only political subject.” That’s more than a year ago. I still think that’s kind of true, but this time I was more tired and less wanting to explain myself in a language I’m not familiar in, so I said “Gods are other people” — which conveys roughly the same thing. Specifically, I am hoping to study the very process by which a political demand first arises through the immediate negotiation of desires in human activity; as well as whether one can transcend this political demand towards a Solution (TM) for one’s own life. To do that I must read books by very smart and crazy people on subjects I’ve chosen to focus on. All of this is very exciting to me.
A central problem of “society” is that we do not have a language or narrative for desiring wrong. Much of written history is about living one lifetime, doing one thing, finding a calling; everything else is classified as a struggle, a process, or if you’re less charitable, simply lost time. This framework demands a unity in the desiring subject: that once we have found that we’d like to do with our lives (in so many senses of so many of these words), all the dark clouds clear and the stars come out. I think this sort of unity was possible when people only had access to the collective consciousnesses of a few communities, but that is clearly either no longer true or never true. Everyone, whether they’d like it or not, embodies the zeitgeist excellently; everybody carries the burden of this entire world with them. So much of what constitutes modernity or progress is the acknowledgement of failure: to put it simply, we can start again; we have more lifetimes than we thought we do. But there is no narrative for failed careers, failed marriages, etc, that is not directed towards an eventual success of some sort; there is no grounding for the knowledge that one desires wrong other than that one will eventually desire correctly.
All of this is a lot of words for, I don’t think we ever figure things out. I also don’t think frameworks like “we are just existing” or “it’s okay to not figure things out” are helpful at all, they are incredibly unexciting to a Chinese mind like my own. What is so much more interesting is thinking about how our lifetimes interact with each other, how we move from one lifetime to the other, one mind to the other, etc, and if these lifetimes can ever talk to each other. That’s what we should have narratives for.
Nobody desires without consequence. When I first started Zoom school I wanted a club position very terribly. It’s really stupid. What I didn’t realize that I was wanting that thing on behalf of myself as I am now — a junior, and such a totally different person, thank god. I ended up running for the position in what I would see as the most dramatic elections I have seen ever: my opponent likened himself to Dwight Eisenhower during one of the standings. “Wow, I’m like Hillary.” I said to Craig. “No, you’re Ronald Reagan.” Craig said to me. None of this is at all ludicrous! We are, all of us, less than twenty-one years old, and cannot purchase alcohol. I spent finals season writing a 6000-word platform. Now, if I may, I want to recite some Chinese poetry: 苟利国家生死以，岂因祸福避趋之。My god.
I am still incredibly jetlagged so I spend my afternoons in Tamriel like a zombie. But I am staying at a family friend’s house at a nice part of Singapore; every morning I walk outside to get the bus and I have not felt like that since the very early days of high school, so happy in the sun, so happy to be sweating. Over break I am going to try to finish up our CPA project, plan out the next semester, make a Neocities, and rest, rest, rest, after a semester of much molting. And I can’t wait to see old friends. What a blessing it is to have so many stories to tell, and to have so many friends who tell me so many stories in turn!
All my greetings from singapore, merry fucking christmas, happy new year to all, & wishing you an incredibly Normal 2023 ahead. COVID is tough in China right now. My parents aren’t vaccinated, and my grandparents are old. I am worried for them. Wing, if you’re reading this, I cannot wait to see you again.