rainglade

[rainglade]

There is a saying that people get more conservative as they age, which I feel is misleading. A couple of generations ago, a woman even talking about politics was considered absurd, and wearing pants was incredibly radical. Today, very few people think of a woman wearing pants as outlandishly liberal, but at the time it was extraordinary. Even the more conservative sides of politics now have women in positions of power.

It's not that people get more conservative as they get older. Instead, it's that society progresses, despite the hindrance put on it by conservatives (and I'm talking about the social and political kind here). Change is inevitable. Progressives create change, and thus progress is inevitable. It is not a question of if queer relationships will be legal everywhere, but a question of when. It is not a question of if transphobia will be a thing of the past, but when.

People tend to not change as much when they get older.

Society will always progress despite the odds.

The only way to stop progress is to stop the system itself, such as in the case of something drastic like global M.A.D.

It’s so easy to turn a blind eye to injustices, it’s so easy to be racist, to blame societal challenges and issues on a group because of the color of their skin. Crime going up? It’s because of those mexicans! Education system failing? Let’s save the children from drag queens instead! Economy in shambles? Blame the working class! …it’s so easy to be misled

I remember being younger and feeling proud to be an American. My heart was full on the 4th of July, it felt great to be proud of my home country. This sort of fake patriotism is easy, which is why I often understand why someone would stick on a maga hat and call it a day. What’s hard is actually learning things, its doing legitimate research into why society runs the way it does, why people act the way they do, why things don’t change they way you feel like they should. Critical thinking skills and empathy, y’all!

Intolerance is easy. Tolerance is not. Conservatism is easy. Progressivism is not. Pick the tougher path, it’ll put you on the right side of history.

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All too often, I think we undermine and overlook the fantasticity of the mundane—the little pauses in between the action. I know that I have a tendency to fill it up with something, and if the action itself feels mundane, then it feels useless not to multitask.

But beyond just our personal experiences, I think we also tend to gravitate towards that in films. One of the reasons why I don't have the same interest as some in many mainstream big box office movies is that, in an effort to make them profitable and palatable to the masses, they lose sense of the message and the purpose. They sensationalize mass violence and give people a skewed vision of the real world, which, sure, some people watch movies to escape from the real world, but I think that that doesn't mean films should shun realism at times.

I say this at the risk of sounding like a conceited film bro, but big action and superhero movies from Marvel and DC don't pique my interest as much anymore because I grew up. Those cinematic universes are huge, of course, so I obviously am not referring to all that they produce, but it feels like they are just made for people with short attention spans. They follow the same pattern again and again, leading to a very predictable ending with a big explosion every few minutes. I shouldn't be able to reduce a movie to that so easily. I shouldn't be able to watch a trailer to a movie, or watch the first 5 minutes of one, and be able to figure out the entire plot.

Generalizing these things is of course unfair to some of these film agencies, but different ones do follow different trends. I was thinking about the fantasticity of the mundane, and I think while it's uncommon in mainstream films (I was going to say Western media, but a lot of recent Bollywood and Tollywood movies haven't been much different) there are places we can see the beauty of it. Studio Ghibli is my favorite example. I remember the first Ghibli film I watched, "Spirited Away," and seeing movies, and just creative motion art in general, in a whole different light after that. There are so many places where there is no action, no dialogue, no anything, just mā or the "space between" as Hayao Miyazaki once talked about.

My favourite scene from "Spirited Away" was when Chihiro was on the water tram with No-Face. Not because I love trains (although that's probably part of it) but the way the scene was introduced. Leading up to the tram, when Chihiro first got a ticket to it, all of the mythical creature characters seemed so envious and in awe that she was going to be going on the train. There was such a high expectation, as if it was a gateway to heaven or something. Instead, when we finally got to the train scene, it was just… a train. It was mundane, but to the fantastical spirit creatures (kami), it was the opposite of mundane, it was… sublime. Living in the moment doesn't mean creating moments if they aren't there, it means allowing yourself to marvel in the intermediary when there might be a moment to be in.

All I'm saying is, if we looked at the mā in our lives with the same awe that kami did, the little moments here and there might be a little more marvellous.

Let's keep the magic alive, shall we?

[rainglade]

The united states 2024 election results were not particularly surprising. Neither were the candidates who ended up running. I remember in 2020 making a whole post about harris' ability to be president, because i think we all knew to a certain extent that biden wasn't making it two terms.

The reason their loss was unsurprising, is because biden's win in 2020 was very much a one-time thing. Having such an uninspiring conservative as the face of the party of progress, no matter how "safe" was a mistake from the get-go, and not running an actual progressive candidate in 2024 just rubbed salt in the wound. There are so many reasons why the two-party system is flawed, and a big one is that, in a properly democratic country, a party like the dnc would have fallen apart years ago.

Bernie sanders, who had the most individual donors by far, should have been their pick. I often think the centrists who run the party forget that the world has progressed further than it did when they were young. Biden's win was owed to, i think, the whole #settleforbiden campaign. He was branded as the candidate that no one wanted, but the one that we could all compromise on in order to avoid a double term from trump. Then, for the last 4 years, he did what most people expected: not much. Unfortunately, while he didn't do much but age and fall down stairs, right-wing politicians were busy reaping the benefits of a right-wing supreme court.

The people who voted for biden in 2020 didn't overwhelmingly vote for trump, they just didn't vote. The dnc is stuck in the past, and i think the results of this election will hopefully be a bit of a wake-up call that it's time to wrest control back from the people turning the 2020s into the 1920s, and a zionist cop is not going to attract a liberal/leftist vote, four years later. We settled for biden in 2020, and didn't seem to get much out of it. Why would we settle again?

I also think that those of us who are more educated tend to forget the fact that a lot of men still perceive women as innately lesser than men, which also played a part in the dnc's loss. It's sometimes scary how men will talk when there aren't women around, and quickly hide their misogyny when there's a woman's ear nearby. That's a story for another time, though.

[rainglade]

Across your featureless expanse of conformity, you drift, a leaf on placid waters. No passionate storms, no rocky crags of conviction - just endless seas of acquiescence. Meanwhile, I stand atop my mountain of absurdity, planted firmly on peaks of peculiar fixations. My flag flies high over realms of the ridiculous, where I've carved my very essence into cliffs of stubborn foolishness.

[rainglade]

I came across a cover of HOME - Resonance recently, a cover that was played on the ແຄນ or khaen, which is such a beautiful instrument. Resonance is such an iconic song, especially within synthwave and chillsynth, but it reminded me of how grateful I am that music… exists? Like, how beautiful is it to the homo sapien experience for such a universal healing power to be hard coded into our neurology

I don’t think there is a single emotion that can’t be evoked by a song, or softened by a song. I’ve written on here before about how grief and desiderium can often be my resting state, and a lot of times it feels good to sit with it. Most songs are make to evoke broader things like happiness or sadness, sometimes not even a nameable emotion but something that makes you want to move your body to the beat. And then there are ultraniche songs like Sevdaliza’s Human which evokes fear and rawer power, or Lata Magneshkar’s Abhi To Main and Thandi Hawayen which bring out a specific form or nostalgia for me. Still then i think there are some that are really so up for interpretation. For example, breakcore can help me numb my emotions if I need to let my body rest or take care of a task quickly, but it can be completely different to other people. Synthwave like Resonance, despite being such a popular and well known song, is so important to me as a reset tool, to remind myself of who I am. When I connect with a song emotionally, it doesn’t feel like I’m hearing it so much as I am recognizing it, and what it is saying, in the language spoken by the soul and spirit.

The way in which our emotions react so synergistically with sound and rhythm, the way in which we can feel the soul within the physical sound waves… I just think it’s pretty neat. I think our souls have the ability to resonate at an infinite number of vibrations at once, and music helps to single out the ones we want to experience more fully. Sure, music is heard by the ears, but it is felt by the soul recognizing its own forgotten language.

[rainglade]

The whole concept of love languages is really interesting to me, and I think it's often oversimplified just a little bit. When we talk about love languages (words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, acts of service, and receiving gifts) it's often thought that we select one or two that we like and consider those to be "our languages of love," and how we both show and perceive affection.

I'm gonna complicate it though, because I think it's complicated. I add two facets to it: See, everyone shows love in different ways, often depending on the person. This love is seldom just affirmations or just gifts, it's almost always a combination. It would be more accurate to measure them in terms of percentages, I think. Say for example that you typically show love by buying or making things for others. That would be your language of love that you more typically identify with, say 80 or 90 percent. Quality time, maybe not so much, making that 5 or 10 percent, por ejemplo

But what about the other half?

I think that the languages of love that we receive affection in and the languages that we give affection in are inversely correlated in a way (or maybe it's just me). See, I don't really like getting gifts, at least as a language of love. If I want something, I'll just buy it for myself (and get a better price than anyone else that would have otherwise bought it for me, cuz I'm savvy like that :P). Giving gifts to other people, though? Love doing that. I love making things for people, buying things for people, doing things for people etc. I show love in that way - gift giving and acts of service - a lot, but I don't like receiving love in that way. In this way, they have an inverse relationship.

The opposite is true for other things like quality time or physical touch, where I don't really show love in those ways ever. Inversely, those are the ways in which I feel the most loved, as opposed to someone buying me a gift or doing something for me.

So my languages of love are all of the above, and I think they are that way for everyone, but the way we give and receive love go in opposing directions.

All that being said, I suppose it is true that there are other factors at play (as there tends to be) in the form of mental blocks and such. For instance, if someone buys me something or does something for me, I instantly feel guilty and indebted to them. On a similar note, I don't show affection through touch not just because it doesn't feel natural to me but because I would hate to make someone feel uncomfortable if they aren't a fan of physical touch for other reasons. Ultimately, though, I do find it poetic that we have languages for love, languages that, poetically, find themselves capable of transcending the linguistic barriers we may have between each other.

The changes were minor, mostly focusing on punctuation and formality. The overall structure and content of the text remain unchanged.

[rainglade]

I know hate is a strong word but… I really hate formal intimacy. Why should I give you a hug? Ask for your blessing? Touch you without knowing you?

Don’t get me wrong, I love being held, I love giving hugs. Also, I care about people in the same way I care about all life forms, but unless I care about you on a deeper level (read: love), give me a bit of a bubble.

I think in conversations around consent we tend to focus on contact with strangers or men touching women without asking (and rightfully so! that sort of thing happens way too often) but we perhaps gloss over familial intimacy a bit too much. I am not obligated to give you a hug or touch your feet (it’s a sanatani thing) if that’s not an access to me you deserve.

I do notice, that in family, this sort of thing always happens with men. One of my aunts always asks for a hug and a kiss when meeting after a while, but she always asks. Men? Nope. They’ll grab your shoulder, try to give you a hug, clap you on the back, etc. without warning.

It is also always, always, always, the creepy men, the ones who feel uncomfy, the ones who just have a bad aura, that are the most confused and offended when someone refuses to engage with them in that way.

Some people are just raised in that way, around the idea that familial relation means something tremendously more than just happenstance, but what I think it comes down to is that men, especially older family members like uncles, fathers, etc, think that that somehow deserve access to your body for no reason. I have even tried explaining that I’d like to be asked for a hug before being given one, and with men I’m always met with sarcasm and confusion. Even the ones that do ask are offended if I say no. It’s strange! Male entitlement really is something, but I digress… I do like the gradual shift towards respecting other’s space and autonomy, especially in formal contexts and more progressive spaces, though. Ask, don't assume.

[rainglade]

The chemical formula for love is C8H11NO2 + C10H12N2O + C43H66N12O12S2, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. I think, though, that love is more than that. Reducing it to a hormonal combination greatly discredits the human experience in a way that I think is notable, especially as we progress to unembodied sentience in the form of true artificial intelligence.

That’s not to say, of course, that the empathetic capacity of a sentient cloud intelligence should be disregarded, but rather to say that there is a difference between organic and artificial life. AI (true AI, that is, not the large language models or computational algorithms we refer to as AI today) is something that I can see us coexisting with in the future, and the debate around the rights that organic life should give to AI will be a difficult one.

AI will be able to empathize. This much I am certain of. AI will be able to replicate emotions that humans possess, which may be seen as inauthentic, but I do not think this is the case. Where do our human/animal emotions come from? They are not spontaneously generated, but rather learned and compiled from others. The emotions of a computerized intelligence would, too, be compiled and learned from others. If the AI is more bionic (having organic body parts that are lab-grown, for example) then they will also be able to synthesize those chemical components of love I brought up earlier as well. Who is to say that the AI deserves less rights and autonomy than their human/embodied counterparts?

This is why I don’t think love should be reduced to hormones. There is something that AI cannot replicate, and that is Other People. Our community consciousness, is greater than any chemical formula for love. Love flourishes within a web of relationships, shared experiences, and collective understanding. Love isn't just a chemical reaction; it involves emotions, choices, shared history, and personal growth; it invokes our spiritual heartstrings just as much as it invokes our neurons. That is what fabricated intelligence will never be able to copy.

Love is our shared humanity, love is other people, love is ancestral, love is just..love is love is love is love is love !

[rainglade]

Recently, I completed two of my loftiest New Year's resolutions ever, and the best part is that I'm ahead of schedule ~

Around two years ago, on the 19th of March in 2021, I created two resolutions. I like having resolution-making as a tradition I complete on my birthday, because if you think about it, "January 1st" is just a arbitrary spot in Earth's revolution around the sun that doesn't really hold a lot of salience to anyone in particular (except maybe Julius Caesar, may he rest in pieces). My birthday, though, is the (approximate) spot around the sun where my body finished its creation around 21 revolutions ago. Thus, it is an actual auspicious time for me in specific, but I digress.

On that day, I made two resolutions, ones that I planned to complete over the next several revolutions, or years- I gave myself extra leeway since I knew the future would not be predictable. The two resolutions were this: absolve my mind of irrational fears, and absolve my mind of unwarranted culinary limitations.

I wouldn't say that one resolution was more difficult than the other. I found them both challenging, albeit in different ways. The first was self-explanatory, I didn't want to feel limited by irrational fears, and I made the choice to tackle the easier ones first. Spiders, insects, roaches, horses, roller coasters, electrocution, not being able to pull myself up if I was stuck on a cliff, fear of heights, etc. Some were, of course, easier to work through than others, but eventually I worked myself through all of them. Some fears, like heights or electrocution, have a rational side to them, so I made sure to pinpoint the aspects of them that were not rational (fearing sitting near electrical outlets or being scared of walking on a secure glass-bottomed bridge, among others). In fact, I worked through pretty much all of these fears in the first year and a half, and then only two remained.

The two that remained were complicated, hence why I left them for the end. These were 1) drowning and 2) exposing my arms or legs. I couldn't tackle drowning without swimming, and to swim I would be wearing shorts (exposing my legs), so that one became a big obstacle. I decided to start wearing t-shirts first, exposing my arms. I owe a big part of this to the closest thing I have to an older sibling, my cousin shalin.

He's the only person I know, relative-wise, that wore my exact insecurity like it was nothing. To be clear, I was never uncomfortable showing my skin or the shape of my body, it was always about hair. It realistically isn't that big a deal, but it caused such a huge dilemma for me, one that is too complex to include in this post, but tldr: I was insecure with the amount of body hair I had and too uncertain to get rid of it. Seeing him simply exist, being the only person I knew with the amount of hair I had, wearing clothes I was too scared to wear, gave me so much space to do the same. Finally, I started wearing t-shirts. (and thank goodness for that, because the scorching Texas summer heat that climate disaster has wrought is no joke).

Fast-forward to a year and a half later; wearing black jeans and a t-shirt was my unofficial uniform during warmer months, but no shorts yet. Or rather, I had worn shorts a total of only 8 times in the span of about 7 years (yes, I counted). After so long, I came to grapple with a crossroads during my recent study abroad in Colombia (thanks for the scholarship, Texas Global!).

On the second to last dayof our trip, our cohort went river rafting. The only way I could avoid both drowning and wearing shorts was to simply not go by faking illness or just saying I wanted to stay back from the rafting experience. The version of me that existed a year ago would have jumped at the opportunity to avoid the water altogether, but thankfully, I've grown since then.

I chose to go. To ease the burden, I trimmed down the hair on my legs just a bit the night before, so I could feel the anxiety and work through it without bein too overwhelmed with it. It was more or less a success, I wore a sleeveless spf shirt and swim shorts and swam in la vieja river. Did I have a panic attack in the water rapids and almost drown? Maybe, but that's besides the point :P

The next day, I wore a pair of shorts in public (not swimming), as if I had always done so, and that it was completely normal. Turns out, I had developed sensory issues. Whether I had always had them or if they had developed as a result of wearing only pants for 7 years, I wasn't sure. When I wore pants, my hair felt the same sensation all day: fabric. It was easy to tune out. Now, every gust of wind, splash of water, movement of my shorts, bumping into something, etc, made it harder to disperse feelings of overstimulation originating from my leg hair. Finally, after I came home to Houston, I did what I maybe should have done 7 years ago: I shaved my legs (actually, I trimmed them and then used a depilatory cream, but same difference).

This has felt sooo liberating, and I feel so much comfortable in my own skin. I just wore shorts! For like 4 days straight! 2022 me would be shook.

This ride ain't over yet, though.

Remember, there's still that other minor resolution, the one about "culinary limitations." See, I'm allergic to all tree nut species (except 5), as well as peanuts, chickpeas, sesame seeds, kiwi, and eggplant. On top of that, I don't eat anything that comes from an animal, except honey, occasionally. Personally I don't think this is that limiting, but that's probably because I've lived with it since forever. Other people tend to disagree "wow that sucks!" "where do you get your protein??" "so you must have been starving when you were at [insert random location here]" et cetera. Still, it does make me think about foods (read: ingredients) I don't eat because I "don't like them."

Imagine being a fully grown adult and saying something like "ew no I don't like [insert fruit or vegetable here] and I won't eat it!" for no reason. What am I, a toddler? Embarrassing.

Anyways, I took a look at foods I didn't like and narrowed it down to the ones I previously felt I could never eat: Okra (always slimy), mango (bad taste), banana (tasted horrible), avocado (tasted like grass and dirt), papaya (tasted like vomit), and carbonated drinks (too fizzy). Mango was the first to go, I don't love overripe mango but I'll eat it if its in front of me, and any other form of mango I love. Okra I disqualified because I learned that it was the cooked version i disliked, not the vegetable itself (I had pickled okra and it was great). Carbonated drinks were next, I don't crave them at all, but I'll taste someone else's if they say it is good. Papaya was next, some papaya actually tastes good, the key is picking the right species and not letting it ripen too much (otherwise it secretes compounds that are the same as what is in human bile, hence the vomit flavor). Avocado took a while, but that shift was catalyzed when I was in Mexico (thanks again, Texas Global), and avocado was served with each of our meals. It also tasted better there, I think. Now, I'd eat avocado toast any day. The final piece is banana. I tried to eat a banana in Colombia, but I gagged at the first sniff and figured it would be embarrassing to vomit in front of everyone, so I stayed away from it. That's still a work in progress, but I will complete this resolution.

I set this now; in time I intuit it will be.

[rainglade]

My grandfather once told me that it is better to have less friends than more, and to be careful who to consider a friend. He told me about his experience, and how most of the people in your life should be nothing more than acquaintances. I understand what he meant by this, but it makes me a little bit confused. I think advice like that tends to stem from the idea that I just have a super robust social life and throw around my feelings haphazardly, when the reality couldn't be farther from the truth.

When I was in elementary school, I moved three times, and while my old therapist once alluded to the idea that that had maybe impacted my ability to form close friendships (emotional detachment, hyperindependence, etc.) I think it is probably more than that.

Growing up, I knew there were things about me that were different, but I simultaneously also felt as though what I felt was "normal" per se. I just though that things like sexual attraction were barely there for most people, that gender was pretty meaningless for most people, that my perception of the world was consistent with everyone else's. I think when I learned that this wasn't the case, it made me feel a little bit alienated, more subconciously than conciuosly, which made it so that I can't think of a single person I considered an actual friend in middle school.

The people I sat with at lunch to avoid sitting alone had no respect for me and made me leave when the table was crowded. Even the majority of people who I interacted with were friendly and kind to me, but I never felt close to them. By eighth grade, everyone kind of knew everyone, so things had calmed down more and I felt less insecure, but that didn't change the fact that I didn't have friends, and refused to allow people to get close to me when they tried to be friends with me. Come high school, I never was really bullied or picked on (thank goodness for going to a small minority-majority school attached to a college) but even then, the extent of my friendships were sitting next to people in class or eating lunch with my friend starla.

Mine and my mother's brain have a lot in common, so when I learned that she didn't make many friends until college, I assumed it was the same for me, then felt disappointed when I didn't have any close friends in my first year or two. It is recently that I think I have felt that shift. I think the anti-anxiety meds helped with that, and I also think that mentally I just don't care about that things that used to make me anxious.

In my first year of uni, I used to sleep at 9pm sharp so I'd be asleep before my roommate got back and I wouldn't have to interact with him, then I awoke and left at 6am so I'd be gone before he woke up. On the several nights that I was out past 10/11pm, I slept in the library because I was anxious about waking him up when I unlocked the door. It seemed perfectly rational then, but ridiculous to think about now. Things like this have started to fade into the background of my mind; the bars that limited me before have started to disintegrate, and I couldn't be more glad.

I think my grandfather was right, but I also think that before having close friends, you have to first put yourself out there. Love doesn't come to you by making yourself desirable, it comes to you by making yourself vulnerable to it. It comes by opening your heart and mind; your people will not come to you until you come to them. The universe is a machine, and one gear cannot turn until the other one does. Everything is reciprocal, everything is circular. At the end of the day, who do you want to answer to? Who will you willingly be there for, and who will be there for you?

[rainglade]

Ok, this is definitely a bit of a hot take, but I feel like one of the biggest red flags that show up in people, especially brown people of my generation, is when they are only friends with other brown people.

The reason I specify that I refer to my generation is that I feel like the environment and surroundings for brown people when older generations were in college were very limited in how comfortable people were in their culture. Different ethnic groups came together and became very clique-y in their own way. My mother talked to me about her experience with that when she was in college and how she noticed that groups would act in their own self-interest. For example, if she asked a Muslim or East Asian classmate for help, she wouldn't get the same help as she would get from a fellow brown student. Similarly, those Muslim students would help each other as if they were family, or Asian students would socialize, study, and work in the same spaces. Nowadays, that has definitely changed for the better. It may not have been straight up racism, but something about that sort of environment definitely feels a little bit icky to me.

Here at my university, most desi students that I see seem to have friend groups that are all brown people. There's some sort of connection they have that I feel like I don't. While I feel left out, I also would never want to be a part of that type of person either. At least in my experience, the most interesting part about them is being brown; that's all they have to connect to other people with, so all their friends are brown. Other than that, they feel pretty closed-minded.

So sure, I'm not part of a brown friend group despite opportunities presenting themselves to me. But if even I was in one, what would that mean? How would I deal with that? I don't speak a shared language fluently. My parents, despite being immigrants, have an American education, an American accent, and have careers in non-stereotypical workplaces, etc. They didn't abuse me a lot growing up, physically or mentally. What shared experience do I have? How am I a first-generation immigrant but simultaneously not?

I love knowing people intimately (platonically, of course) from cultures not my own and being able to connect with them based on things that go beyond just the color of our skin. I said in an essay once that true diversity cannot coexist with ignorance, and I think elements from that quote can apply to this as well. I shudder to think the type of person I might be if I didn't have my queerness, my western-ness, my education, or my environment to push me into so many directions and experience so many things.

Con cariño y gratitud para todos las personas, I am happy with those paths I was nudged away from.

[rainglade]

I was introduced to a new term recently, "diasporic longing," which is such... such a heavy term for me.

Being desi but somehow not desi, belonging to the diaspora but not "acting like it," understanding bits of language but not enough to connect with family, it hurts. I often wonder what it would be like if even the language barrier were broken. What if I spoke Gujarati fluently? What if I were a descendant of settlers and my grandparents' first language was English, like mine? What if I had lived in Gujarat for a few months as a kid? Would things be different? Would I be different?

Of course, there's no "one size fits all" for being in the diaspora, but there are certain attributes I feel left out in.

I remember the times I have visited back to Gujarat. Even though I felt out of place sometimes, there was something so comforting about being around people who look like you, act like your family members. I feel like I used to judge people, especially desi immigrants with accents and stereotypical jobs, for only surrounding themselves with other brown people. I think I understand that now, though. For people who are used to and depend upon social support so deeply, it would be awful to be othered in a community that you already feel out of place in. There's something so irreplicable about South Asian hospitality.

Here, 12 hours away, I feel like I constantly grasp at strings, longing to be pulled back to a space I never was before. There's some sort of grief in belonging but also not. I would like to think that I'm above these feelings, that the culture of my creation is the only one I need, yet I crave more. My eyes light up seeing my peers embrace their culture. I add South Asian elements to my designs and body language. I pin a baandhani-patterned scarf on my wall and pretend it is a poster. I listen to artists from the diaspora who sing a single desi phrase or a Carnatic melody enveloped in English lyrics. If no one knows that I am trying to avoid being whitewashed, will it even matter? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I question what it means to be a first-generation immigrant when the immigrants themselves came to America as children. It has to be more than just the color of my skin, right? I have to have some spice in my soul, right? I can read and write Devanāgari and Gujarāti-lipi, so that gives me an edge, right? I learned our histories and know more about our ancestors' paths than most, so I'm better than most of us, right? I hold disdain for brown people with settler names, so I'm better than them, right? I judge those who reject their roots, so I'm closer to mine, right? I know what our scripture said before it was tainted with European philosophy, so my connection is deeper, right? My ancestry would be proud of me, right? They’d welcome me with open arms and validate my perception, right? I don't know. I guess it feels good to grasp at strings for some reason. Living on the margins is easier; I wonder if it is possible to be fully in two worlds at the same time.

[rainglade]

Men identifying with on-screen characters that were developed to satirize toxic masculinity will always be one of the most annoying, amusing, yet icky things about films.

The most recent iteration of this I've noticed is the Barbie movie. It's so interesting how the "Ken" character was developed to very obviously satirize masculinity, from the way he behaves in the real world to his solo song "I'm just Ken." Somehow, men will watch the movie and identify with his traits, fully believing that they found an anthem to perceive themselves through, and not even thinking about considering the idea that they're just proving the fact that they're a walking red flag.

It reminds me of a comment I saw a few years ago where someone was saying something along the lines of how you could literally name a movie "This is a film of a delusional abuser ruining his life and the people around him in the pursuit of a constructed perception of manhood!" where the main character's core traits are being egotistical, self-centered, sexist, playing the victim, feigned incompetence, etc, and men will watch the movie and be like "yeah! that's a character I can relate to! Wow, what a great movie! I loved the part where he talked about how he's better than everyone around him and his character development journey!"

I hate to sound like a film bro, but Greta Gerwig is a national treasure, and it sucks how all her genius goes over the heads of most of her (male) audience.

[rainglade]

I've been thinking recently about love and how we make ourselves open to it. I know for me, it feels like I delude myself by trying to make myself seem desirable, and I don't think that it is too uncommon. I feel like there's this belief that if we make ourselves seem cool or lovable, the love will naturally come, and people will automatically be drawn to us. In reality, though, I think that maybe it's harder than that.

Romanticizing our loneliness, or aloneness, can only work for so long. After some of the romance ends, it becomes a dark hole that needs to be filled- filled with love. When I say that it's harder than making yourself seem cool and lonely, I mean it has more to do with asking for love. There's an old quote I heard recently that went something along the lines of "Love is attained not by seeming lonely, but rather through embarrassing yourself by asking for it." In a way, I feel like this is harder.

As humans, we are always doing everything we can to avoid rejection or failure. I think that is one of the many paradoxes of the human experience. Even though we are hardwired to avoid failure, it is failure and rejection that create space for us to reach our goals and experience the things that we are intended to experience, to experience the lows so we can realize the highs; to experience, in a sense, what it is to be human.

[rainglade]

so... a post for those curious about my names, why i have more than one I use both professionally and socially, etc (if this is new to you, surprise! i've actually been going by different names since around 2013 lol) but anyways...

So, mostly everyone I've ever known pre-2020 has always known me as 'Pranav,' which is a very nice name, and it still is my name in every way that it matters. It is the slightly incorrect romanization of the Sanskrit name प्रणव, which is romanized as 'praṇava,' and it is another version of the universe's sacred vibration, ॐ (ōṃ). It shares roots with the dharmic and yogic concept of "prāṇa," the life force or "flame within." It also can be split into its oldest parts, "प्र" meaning "before," and "णव" which is the oldest word for "atom." It is the culmination of the three aspects of existence and the three states of consciousness. I love this name; I love my name.

The only time I've ever not liked the name is when dealing with people who don't put the effort into understanding cultures different from what they are used to. Names are the closest thing we can get to summarizing our entire sense of being into a word, hence why they hold such high meaning and significance in Deśi cultures. In Sanskrit, pronunciation, diction, and enunciation are very important to the meanings of words. Because of this, I can understand why Western monolinguals have so much trouble understanding and pronouncing things; they speak a language where their words can be pronounced 20 different ways and still hold the same meaning.

When I left everyone I knew and started fresh in university, a university where I knew pretty much nobody, I realized that it was a chance to make people pronounce my name correctly. However, when I started doing this, not only was it tiring to constantly correct people (they either spent 10 minutes trying, which is very kind but gets tiring after a while, or they just kept mispronouncing it and didn't care to try to correct themselves), but when people started to actually pronounce my name correctly, it felt... too intimate. A friend of mine mentioned feeling this as well recently. Her name is pronounced similarly to the Hebrew/English name "Hannah," and she prefers that non-family call her Hannah rather than her name, 花, romanized as hānā. When I started hearing non-family pronounce my name correctly, it somehow felt wrong; I felt uncomfortable with it even though I thought it was what I wanted all along.

I also realized that it wasn't exactly the most unique name. In just my first month in university, I had met or heard of at least 15 other "Pranavs" out there, and knew that there were plenty more. One of them I met had the same hair type as me and a similar facial structure. Since he went to a lot of parties and was more well-known, I was mistaken for him on a few occasions, which initially was okay but soon became a bad thing once he did some not-so-good things while drunk at a party.

It was then that I started using the name Daya (properly romanized as dayā), which is a Sanskrit name meaning "mercy." It was a nice name, but it felt inauthentic since I was mainly using it to have a name that was easy to pronounce while being connected to my roots. I also realized that while the Sanskrit name is pronounced like "duh-yah," there are similar names in Hebrew and Arabic that are spelled similarly in English but pronounced differently (like "day-yah" and "day-yuh"). Since the Hebrew version is much more common, I was faced with mispronunciation once again.

It wasn't the first time I had socially gone by a different name, though. In early middle school, I sometimes used the name "Mikaal," an Abrahamic name I co-opted, or "Day," a nickname taken from a book character. In late high school, I occasionally used the name "Amani," a Kiswahili name meaning "peace."

It was after the "Daya" mispronunciation that I started to think more about what a name means to me and being more open-minded. I figured that if people were going to mispronounce my name regardless, it might as well be a name that is salient to me. Those who know me know that I absolutely love linguistics, so I put that knowledge to use to put together a name for myself. The name started out as Katres (properly romanized as qātreis or "ḳātreis"). It includes elements from the Suvarnadvipa word for love and the Bantu word for "to be healed." For a while, I used this name, as healing and love are things that are salient to who I am, and who I always will be. I knew that it was important for my name to represent aspects of my identity that were core to who I am, rather than things that would change over time. Although change is the nature of reality, there are some parts of who that are so fundamental to yourself that even if they shift, they still will be with you.

It was half a year after using this name regularly that I felt that there was something missing. I knew that I didn't want to change my name yet again (for personal and practical reasons, as I had already started using the name socially) so I decided to revise it. I noticed that "saī" partially aligned with an old Sanskrit word that didn't have any direct English translation but loosely meant "divine balance" or "mediation." I then blended it with Katres to create "Katresai," properly romanized as qātreisaii or क़ात्रॆसाई in Devanagari and ક઼ાત્રૅસાઈ in Gujarati script. (I also loved my name as it was easy to create nicknames like Katres, Sai, and Trés from it.)

Sure, it comes with uncertainty. Sure, it comes with challenges. I've been using the name for around 3 years, so I've had a fair amount of unpredictable experiences, and I know there's more to come. Still, though, I don't really think I would want to go back and change it.

As I mentioned before, I approach my names in a more open-minded sense. I sometimes use the word "nickname" to describe Katresai since people are understanding and comfortable with the concept of a nickname. However, it's not a nickname. It's just my name. Pranav is also my name, and both names represent who I am in different ways. One is not more important to me than the other, and the idea of "names" rather than a "name" is comforting to me, even though it might not be for everyone. It gives room for change, for possibility, and for the evolution of self.

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also lol, thought this post was relatable and funny:

[rainglade]

Ok, so I have a theory about places of worship, especially the ones in the West.

Abrahamic religions dominate the world, and low levels of bias-free education in many areas mean that many people still follow their teachings blindly.

However.

I feel like the tide is slowly turning. More and more young people in the West are questioning the church and its power over them, and it’s much more common to see someone who is atheist or nonreligious today. This, of course, begs the question of what will happen to churches in the future. Will they become relics of a fascinating past? Will they be torn down and replaced? I feel like that is something that will happen to many of them.

I also think that although people may not truly believe that a magical man in the sky created the world in seven days and that all humans came from a man and his sentient rib, people will start to recognize the value that religion does actually hold.

Religion gives us an excuse to reflect, teach morals to those without a developed sense of empathy, practice gratitude, and even build a community. As educated youth today begins to think more critically about the world around them, I can definitely see a shift in how the West approaches their religions as opposed to the complete downfall of it.

[rainglade]

I've been surrounded by a lot of sadness lately. I think one of the tricky things about empathy is the blurred lines between your emotions and those of others. There's that deep hole in my chest that doesn't get filled and threatens to collapse like a black hole, imploding and taking me with it. It's not something that evokes fear. I think that's one thing I have come very far in, the fact that I am not afraid of myself anymore. That is why over the past several months, my subconscious has been allowing me to feel my emotions much more than I let myself previously. Although the black hole is still there, it's something that I find familiar and comfortable, like an annoying blemish or something that you don't really appreciate but that you can live with.

One thing that I am also grateful for is my control over my anger. I don't think anger is a negative thing but simply a tool, at least for me. There's the old scientific truth that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed. I think that emotions are kind of the same way. When my limits for anguish and despair start to get reached, when the black hole's gravity starts to get a bit too much, or when I just want to ease the pressure a bit, I can transform that emotion.

I can't get rid of the sadness, but I can squeeze a little bit of it and release it as anger. But because I have control over my anger, releasing emotions as anger doesn't feel harmful because I have full control over it.

One thing I am curious about is if this is a universal experience, being able to transform emotions, specifically to anger. Like, for me, anger is the easiest emotion. There is always rage that exists and that can be called up, which I don't experience with any other emotions (except maybe melancholy, but melancholy and its adjacent emotions hurt a lot, so it doesn't make sense to call them up).

Anyway, I just love using anger as a tool because I feel like without control it can (debatably) do more damage than any other. With control, though, it can create and clear out things that clog our energy in a much more methodical way, one that doesn't hurt us or those around us. As someone said to me recently, "If there was ever an emotion to have control over, anger is probably the one," and I couldn't agree more.