My First Book, page 6
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I don’t mind what a lot of people call mansplaining. The idea that anyone, no matter their gender identity, takes the time out of their day to look at me and talk to me and try to teach me something means so much. I don’t care if I already know it. I probably don’t know it the way they know it. I don’t mean they know more, I mean they know differently, and I want to know everything everyway. That’s my fatal flaw, or one of them. It’s why I wanted Adderall and why I wanted to fall in love. I’ve tried listening to podcasts on MSG or AIDS while reading books about DMT or NYC. Headphones in, listening. Eyes locked, reading. It doesn’t work. I absorb nothing. I have tried to learn alone, but I need someone to teach me. I didn’t know about Marxism or post-Marxism or modernity or postmodernity or what obscurantist even meant or how to suck a dick or how to have an orgasm or how to make sacrifices, but I learned, because I love to learn and someone was there to teach me. For that I think I will always be grateful.
We always pick up each other’s calls. It’s only fair. Maybe it’s the only thing that’s fair. Over the phone he tells me that the more he learned about my world, the harder it became to govern our own small one. His world, of alcoholic opera singers and state-run hospitals and Seattle homelessness, was the real world. My world, of orthodontics and SAT prep and “Good night, Mollie,” every night, was another real world. It was no fair and nothing I could do would make it fairer. The shoebox world was doomed from the start. A failed state. We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector. No matter how hard you love or work, or how bad you want or need, or how perfectly you build or abolish, real communism has never been tried, and never will be. Or maybe it will. Maybe we did, I don’t know, I don’t know, and history hasn’t ended yet.
I had so much. I always did, but it was never enough. Before it ended, because he suddenly left, never to really return, everything I wrote was about the same thing, playing pretend. I was obsessed with imagination games and the theater and building little worlds in shoeboxes. I wrote about Hélène Cixous, pontificating like an absolute loser, “I have always been interested in the pretend, make-believe, what isn’t there. Perhaps this is because so much of what is there is terrible, or perhaps it is because I have felt that what was there is not mine.” I added, in woke Nickelodeon mode, “I have spent most of my life trying to make a place of belonging, something that is mine and that I want to share.” I wanted to build things so that I could own them. I didn’t know that property is theft. I hadn’t had a boyfriend to tell me that yet. I wanted to say: this is my shoebox, my play, my house. This is where I am not a vampire or a party crasher. This is where I belong. In love, I thought I had finally found where I belonged, not a place but a person. When I realized I couldn’t make Snowball better, fix the broken parts, I decided that I would just have to rebuild myself instead. To build, you must destroy, so I tried, but I couldn’t and I didn’t. It was hard work and I was a lazy bitch and he was so fucking done and I was so so so sorry, but sorry doesn’t mean anything coming out of my mouth.
Nothing meant anything coming out of my mouth. My rules for our world weren’t followed. Please, don’t yell at me in public. Please, don’t punch the wall. Please, don’t push. Please, don’t give me the silent treatment. Please, don’t call me that. Please, don’t take pills. These rules couldn’t be followed because they were reactions to his rules—please, don’t smoke. Please, don’t go out. Please, don’t talk to those people. Please, don’t take pills—and if I couldn’t follow his rules he wouldn’t follow mine either. It was fair, but reality isn’t fair. Our shoebox, an interstice in the big bad unjust world, was supposed to be tit for tat, fuck up for fuck up, reparation and redistribution and revolutions in October and November and December.
In summary, Look at Russia, communism doesn’t work! or Look at college, the revolution is not coming! or Look at me, don’t date someone who will make you go to DSA meetings when you could be getting a manicure or reading a good book. Sometimes the personal is not political. When the wind was howling outside the bookstore window and I could still imagine a revolution, I forgot to think of the Romanovs or myself. Let’s build our comrades out of snow. Let’s not let them melt. Let’s share everything until there’s nothing left. We actually love each other. Right?
Z Was for Zoomer
Remember this? It’s November 12, 2018. Stop reading this if you’re not me. If you’re future me, that’s okay. Do you remember? Right now I’m wishing I had a dictionary for every second. It would contain every meaning a word has ever meant to anyone, like you could type in a date and a person and know what it meant to them then. So I’m writing one down, just for me, and you, future me. Even though Pierre Bonnard once said, “The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.” Even though Kathy Acker once said, “It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.” Time does those things too.
Words have origins, etymologies, beginnings, so they must also have endings, “exitymologies.” Where did that word come from, where is it going, and where does it end? Who used it first and who will use it last? In our crazy unprecedented beginning and end times, it seems that words are not enough. We need new words for new concepts, new experiences, new feelings. Words are magic, that’s why it’s called spelling. Neologisms abound, there are plenty of new portmanteaus, there seems to be new slang every day, crystallizing out of ones and zeroes and melting back into irrelevance, meaninglessness. We are living in an age of earthquakes and tectonic-level linguistic changes. Whole sentences are spoken, and people reply, “None of those words are in the Bible.”
I think about this stuff a lot. Is that still true? I think about how words often considered essential and/or phonaesthetically beautiful might fall into the service of upcoming hyperstitional and accelerating semantic shifts.
If I was in charge, aurora, which now refers to an outside electrical phenomenon in which wondrous light smears across the sky, could come to mean a moment or place of transcendent realization within the infinite data streams of the future, and I think the Greek afterlife word Elysium ought to come to signify a self-designed, idyllic virtual reality. It only makes sense. Felicity means intense happiness and a colonial American Girl doll, but in two hundred years it could evolve to denote the maximum amount of pleasure a consciousness can experience within a specified time frame, a measurement unit in a hedonistic future. After they abolish suffering. Gossamer is cloth right now, but why shouldn’t it become the fragile, filmy boundary between two adjoining realities or universes? I think jubilee is wasted on the British as “special anniversary,” far from its biblical origins, and should come to signify a moment of collective ascension, gathering, or communal ecstatic realization within a networked consciousness, and kismet can be the algorithmic path that that consciousness is most likely to follow. Like used to mean like, but we’re like moments away from its evolution into a catchall term for any expression of acknowledgment or validation. Organic can go from “carbon-based” to anything chaotic or naturally occurring, anything not precisely engineered or simulated. Serendipity now is for events occurring by chance in a nice way for girls who own three-plus crystals, but soon it can mean an unexpected but beneficial outcome in a deterministic, algorithm-controlled society. Our talismans bring good luck, but in the future language I’m imagining for us, they’ll be any piece of code capable of influencing probabilities in quantum computations. Right now the period of life following childhood is youth, with its pleasing reminders of the second person and the noun form of warm, left over from the proto-Germanic, but it could eventually mean the early stages of an entity’s existence, no matter how long that period lasts in the time to come, a time of extended life spans and foggily characterized “entities.” I’m just throwing out a few ideas. I know real slang rarely draws on the phonaesthetically beautiful.
We are creating the world we live in through what we call things, and our world shifts faster than it did before. With the hyperdemocratic nature of the internet, our Gen Z post-post-post-everything Joker defense mechanisms, our tendency toward the extreme, we are made of every way that everyone has ever used the words we have been called or choose to call ourselves. Now that the seas are rising and the forests are burning and information moves through the air, we can redefine and invent at an unprecedented speed. The world made us, and now it is time for us to make the world (the one you live in). We become what we behold. We built cities with LEGO, families with Sims, planets with Minecraft, websites with code, ourselves with filtered images, and now we’re building our world with words. These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.
Autism
Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism. I tell him that I’m surprised that these girls I’ve met at parties, with their thousands of Instagram followers and beautiful boyfriends, are autistic. Ivan says I shouldn’t be surprised. My surprise means that I don’t know what autism is. I do know that I was insulted when my friend Gideon called me an “autist.” I didn’t know what he meant, but I didn’t like it. I do know that there is a spectrum. In first grade I had a crush on a boy. This boy had a special helper. Some of the other kids were jealous. They missed their moms. They wanted to sit on the special helper’s lap. They wanted to play Yahtzee with her. They wanted her to braid their hair. They wanted attention from her, but she belonged to the boy. When she explained that the boy was “special,” the other kids stopped being jealous. They accepted that they were not “special,” or maybe they understood that when she said “special” she meant something specific. I was in first grade and I didn’t know that sometimes words can mean many different things. I did know that I wanted to hold the boy’s hand.
Those art girls are definitely special. That’s why they get a thousand likes when they post a photo. I get eighty on a good day, but I’ve been called special a thousand times. My dad thinks I’m special. Ivan thinks I’m special. Gideon thinks I’m special.
I think I’m special. That’s why last night between texts with Gideon I Google “Do I have autism?” I know I don’t even before I click through the two-minute quiz. If there is an interruption, I can switch back to what I was doing very quickly. I am good at social chitchat. When I was young, I used to enjoy playing games involving pretending with other children. I find making up stories easy. I do not find it difficult to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. I am not autisic, but there are questions that give me pause, questions I hit the agree button for. New situations make me anxious. I like to collect information about categories of things (e.g., types of cars, birds, trains, plants). When I talk on the phone, I’m not sure when it’s my turn to speak. I tend to have very strong interests, then get upset if I can’t pursue them. I tend to notice details that others do not. I know that I am not autistic—but I do have trouble existing in this world. I want to know why. I wish I could Google “Why am I the way I am?,” “Is there a word for it?,” “Are there other people like me?’’
It seems like everyone is being diagnosed with autism these days. My generation has the most autists in history. If something is different, we have to name it. That’s how language works. I want to matter and understand and know who I am and why I feel so strange. We young people hate binaries and love spectrums, but spectrums are vast and the scale scares us. This is why we live in the age of identity politics. This is why we need names. This is why we have asexuals and pansexuals and demisexuals. This is why we get even more specific with fraysexuals and quoisexuals and placiosexuals. This is why each of these identities has their own flag with their own colors. It feels so good to love a flag. To look at a pattern and know that it is yours. I only know two people who look at the American flag and feel like they belong. I get angry about identity politics. I read a little Marx so now I know that it is class that divides us and that capitalism will up and appropriate and commodify and then start using any words you use to define yourself to sell something to you. That doesn’t mean that the words don’t matter. Sometimes I laugh when I hear the words demigirl or trigender or otherkin, but other times I spend my evenings taking quizzes to see if I have autism. I understand the urge to belong, to have an identity with a name and know that out there, there are others like you. We all want to belong. We all want to be special.
Based
How do I begin to explain this word? By its opposite? There’s Based and Redpilled and then there’s its opposite, Cringe and Bluepilled. A “normie” won’t know either of these terms. A “normie” might not even know what normie means.
When I say “cloud” I’m not referring to the things in the sky, unless that is where our data is kept. (Like how avatar was a Hindu deity and now it’s a cyber identity, or how wiki used to just be the Hawaiian word for quick, or how a browser used to be a person who perused.) It’s 2018 and I start saying “based,” even while wondering if it will become the Gen Z equivalent of “groovy” or “cat’s pajamas.” I don’t quite mean “to use [something specified] as the foundation or starting point for something.” When I say “based,” I’m not sure what I’m saying. Knowyourmeme.com, an online encyclopedia for all things new and cyber and in flux, does not separate the word based from the word redpilled: “Based and Redpilled is a phrase that has been used on sites such as 4chan and Reddit to agree with and praise something, particularly something controversial. The opposite phrase is Cringe and Bluepilled.” Unlike many encyclopedias, Knowyourmeme .com allows for comments. One commenter says, “This description is very unbased and bluepilled. Irony awareness levels 0.” The idea that a dictionary or an encyclopedia can be edited and commented on is based.
Based does not have to mean right-wing, but it’s often seen in reference to things that are red, things that disgust you. It’s a way of saying “cool” or “I agree” in a language of a “right-wing” social group. But they do not own this language; nobody does. Based means different, and in our homemade cyber echo chambers, to lean toward the right has become an act of radicalism.
The American rapper Lil B or The BasedGod is the original source of the word based. Am I allowed to use etymology like that? No, but I’m going to anyway. There was a time when our whole generation laughed at the same jokes, listened to the same music, and loved the same rapper. Lil B was different from other celebrities. He followed everyone back, and if you sent him a selfie with his name written with Sharpie on your hand he would post it and you got to share a little of his fame. He replied to direct messages and retweeted fans and liked our selfies. This was radical, and it’s how he very briefly transcended the classic limitations of celebrity. He was all-seeing and all-loving. He was like God. He had the power to really, truly create. True creation is the creation of something out of nothing that can become nothing again and anything in between. Humans and words are the only things I know that have this power. We both are born. We both can do good. We both can do evil. We both change. We both die. Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created here on Earth? That’s a quote from Spy Kids 2. We humans have run out of control, turned into something he didn’t intend. This is what happened with The BasedGod’s word.
Based was the term he used for his life and musical philosophy. Being based was a lifestyle that involved radical tolerance of others and revolt against societal rules and expectations. Shock was good and it was based. Currently, the top definition on Urban Dictionary is from 2009, written by a user called Young Silence:
Based
Is when you dont care what people think
its a way of life
Doing what you want
how u want
wearing what u want
ex.
the LV book bag looks gay on you
idc im based
As we make up new words, they are added and sorted by how many votes they get. On the internet, time moves at hyperspeed, but Young Silence’s words remain on top unchanged.
Young Silence’s definition clarifies how this word that once meant something to someone has come to mean something else to someone else. It’s a definition anyone can agree with, for a cool new word that of course we with our mushy young brains want to absorb and use. The definition comes from outside our time of echo chambers. It is here to remind us that the definitions of words are democratic. Language is a process that we are all part of. The walls of our echo chamber prisons keep us apart. They are built by algorithms, unseen hands, powers that be and will always be, but these walls are supported by us all and the words we choose to use. We have different ideas about stem cells and borders and guns, but that doesn’t mean we need to start using different words. Politics can create its own obscurantist language of alienating jargon, and for the sake of this country I think we should all be open to learning and sharing certain words, breaking down the walls letter by letter. Based belongs to whoever uses it, whoever chooses to define it, whoever chooses to follow the definitions that they see. We all have a little voice out here on the internet, in the classroom, over the telephone. We all have something to say. Remember that people can learn and learn best when they are not under attack or being talked down to. Remember that we all think different things are #BASED. Remember that this is what makes us little meaning-making, language-shaping, tweet-typing creatures, humans so #BASED.
