I have the internet in my new home, but still no phone. Anyway, here's a blog I wrote late last night going on early in the morning.

When I think about what I would like this blog to be, I envision less personal talk and more writing about art and music. I would like to get my criticism skills up to snuff. But when late nights turn into early mornings and I feel the need to write things down, the thing I'm most likely to be critical of is myself.

Basically I worry about the way maturity is manifesting itself. I find more and more I'm acting in ways based on some kind of concept of coolness. People do this when they want people to like them. People wanting other people to like them and then acting in an artificial manner is kind of a hallmark of social interaction, but it's awful. Especially the whole "coolness" concept. Because coolness more often than not translates to emotional distance.

I'm finding this really hard to articulate. I can articulate it in fiction where you can maybe grasp it intuitively based on your own knowledge, but I'm trying to put it simply.

The issue that arises is that, in acting cool because you want someone else to like you, it becomes really easy to not actually care that much about the other person, because they don't know the entirety of you. And this is the thing in relationships- all of them, not just those based on undercurrents of lust, friendships as well- that always striked me as fucked-up. To phrase it in terms of romantic relationships, that element where saying "I love you" becomes a massive thing. It seemed to me so simple, there were times when I loved everyone. Why would that be problematic to say? But now, it just seems like there are very few people that I love, and a lot more that are kind of bothersome and problematic for one reason or another. And those reasons all translate to not actually being yourself around them to the extent that you feel you should be. The idea of "coolness" begets actual coolness, i.e. an absence of warmth.

It leads to these weird imbalances in relationships where one person likes the other person much more than their feelings are returned. I'm using the term relationships in the broad sense, but when you start to think about in the more common and more specific sense you find a situation that people take for granted as fact and turn into power dynamics and that is really disgusting and troublesome.

What I'm saying is that I very genuinely do not want to care what other people think about me. Or at least, I don't want that to dictate my actions. I think that's the ideal place to be. It puts you in a space where you can actually love people. This is idealistic, an urge towards childhood rather than adulthood, in a way that does seem problematic. It also points away from hipsterdom towards nerdiness, but clearly that is the way to go.

It can't all just be making art that reveals our deeper selves in the hopes that someone finds that presentational form attractive.