Well, shit. I just don't know. I'm glad that I got that one programming project done, but it's disappointing that it doesn't work as well as I'd like it to. I have so many formless anxieties. I hope that I'm not just pushing immediate concerns into a more subconscious place by writing all the time. Oh well, that's not my intention, so hopefully my intentions for this stuff have something to do with what effect they have on me. Everything seems so hard. It's interesting that my definition of hard has to do with "everything feels like it'll take a really long time." I guess there's stuff that I really want to make and do, but at a certain point of 'omg this'll take years', there's this part of my mind that starts ticking into some kind of dumb (or intelligent) cost benefit analysis and there you are. The interesting thing about what I'm doing with this writing and everything I'm thinking about on the computer, is that presumably I'm trying to make digital and intellectual and conceptual tools. So if I have something that I want to do but it seems like it'll take too long to do, then the idea is that I'll make some kind of time saving tool, and so on, making tools as I see needs, until I actually can do what I want to do in a managable amount of time. I don't know if it's realistic for me to expect that metaphor to hold in all the really practical aspects of my life too. I don't know if I need it to. I guess I'm okay with their being certain constraints that I can't change, like I'm not really interested in creating some kind of Rube-Goldberg-esque device that makes it so I can make dinner by pressing a button or anything like that. What I'm interested in is ways to have intangible qualities while I'm doing all these practical day to day tasks or whatever that are really nourishing and exciting and stuff to me. And I guess if I could multi-task and be working on some sort of intangible thing while I'm doing practical stuff too, that'd be really good. But I don't think it's so important that I'm actually getting stuff done, the important part for me would be the feeling of productively or creatively using my time that would come from that kind of "multi-tasking."

I think it's really important to me to feel like I'm doing something creative, but I'm not really sure what creativity is. Which is awesome. *sarcasm*. Um, I guess it's pretty expansive. I just want to make stuff! I want to make things that I feel like are expressions of my identity that really help me understand and cherish my own identity better. That's pretty much what I want I guess. That sort of fits into the idea of having my own identity that interacts with but is autonomous from my environment too.

Dude. I hate banks. Not Banks my cousin, but banking institutions. God they are dumb. They just, arr. Take up so much money and stuff. And it's like, of course I can't save if I'm always carrying around, essentially, all the money I own on a card in my pocket. God. I wonder how complicated it'll be to hook up to Paypal's backend? I just feel really... blah. It's fine. I'm grateful for this feeling, because again it's a feeling I've definitely had in the past and I would love to figure out what it takes to have a constructive relationship with it. But I feel down on my creativity and my ability to do anything cool before I die. Heh. Yay. So cliche. Which is, of course, fine. It's interesting though. Where the hell does that come from? What happens when you can't identify with the art that you make anymore? What happens when you're creating artistic artifacts but they don't move you anymore? Or they don't move you in the way that you're used to and that makes you uncomfortable? Or your idea of art and identity is tied to recognition from other people and you're afraid that since your art has changed and it doesn't move you in the same way, people will not like you as an "artist" anymore. And then you have to deal with all the social bullshit of them thinking that you've peaked and washed up and whatever. And I mean, in a way those descriptions could be accurate in describing a certain dynamic of change, but I think that the objects it's supposedly operating on literally and not metaphorically are completely nonsensical.

I mean, what is art? What does it mean to be an artist? People love artists because artists make things that are beautiful and beautiful objects bring us happiness, right? Kind of. I mean, I think all of those things are true, but it's easy to feel like that description touches on all the points and, while I feel like that's a really important dynamic to consider as an artist or even just as a human being, I think that leaves about a billion really important questions completely unexamined about what an artist is, what their purpose is, and what they're doing. Basically I think that's a pretty toxic understanding of self to have if you yourself are an artist or are trying to be an artist. But it's important to think about. This idea that your art can sustain you is part of it. You're an artist! You create beautiful things for your community! Your community then decides to support you because they're all like "you're great, maker of beautiful and interesting things!" That seems like a pretty simple and closed loop, but it doesn't really take into account you as the artist and as an individual. Yes all these things can be true, but then what? Are you just a cog of society that's making objects and artifacts that society desires? How is that any different than being a worker a bagel shop or something? The initial response might be "oh, well, I'm my own boss, yada yada, it's a lot more rewarding than being a drone serving people food." Maybe that's true. But are you really your own boss? The idea that society is supporting you as an artist is predicated on the concept that you are creating something which society finds beautiful or interesting. Do you just magically know that somehow? Or is it simply in your nature? Is everything you make, by definition, desirable by society? I don't think that either of these concepts are likely. More likely is that you randomly (or something) create "art" which society finds desirable, and maybe you have it in your nature to continue making stuff society finds desirable, maybe you don't, but more likely than not at some point your art is no longer desirable to society.

This is of course viewing "society" as being some kind of monolithic entity with some kind of continuity of identity, when in fact it is merely a sum of individuals in most ways. So what happens is that initially your "art" is desirable to some group of individuals for some reason. And then your art stops being desirable to that set of individuals. Therefore "society" has rejected you. But what's more likely is that the set of individuals who appreciate your creations have just changed. This is kind of like Bob Dylan going electric on a miniature scale. So if you want to continue to be supported materially or emotionally by others you have to somehow be able to understand who your new "audience" is. The thing is, this can be a really strange process depending on who your initial "audience" were and depending on what kind of relationship you had with them. More likely than not, the reason you created art in the first place (okay, maybe not more likely than not, but at least "very possibly") was because there was a group of people, a social group, that you wanted to be included in and recognized by. So the first works of art you created were based on an analysis and imitation of the things that they seemed to like as a group. This is the beginning of your artistic identity. But then what happens? This social group you wanted to be a part of, people you wanted to have romantic relationships or just friendships with, change. Or you change. And this mini social group may have some kind of clique-ish continuity of identity or it might not. If it doesn't then the individuals change and the group identity which to you as an outsider seemed so solid and real, dissolves. But part of your "artistic identity" literally is the continuity of that initial group identity. If it is a clique, and their is a continuity of group identity, then your challenge is different. Your challenge is to continue to create things which will be accepted by the clique. What kinds of things are these? Things that reaffirm that validity of the clique as an entity which does and should exist. People don't like to think of art as serving this purpose though (depending on the clique that is. The more "intellectual" or "artistic" they are, the less they'll like it), so to keep up the pretence that "no you're not just validating a narrow vision of identity and values", you have to go through the motions, sometimes in an incredibly convincing way, of being an "artist." That means that there has to be novelty in your work, because of course artists are fearless experimenters trying to find some answers or whatever, but you also can't create works that espouse values uncomfortable to the identity of the clique you're trying to produce for.

This might be easy, this might be really hard. I think this is especially hard if you believe that sincerity is an important quality in artwork and that in your work you're trying to express things which come from the heart. The reason this is difficult is because you're actually going to have explicit urges not to formally analyze the constraints which you're working on, so it'll be harder for you to intelligently and methodically explore the constraints that you're working in. Instead you're very likely to start creating work which doesn't jive with the clique that initially accepted you, and in this sense you've "peaked" and you're stuck as a has-been. Or however we think of artists who have achieved some kind of noteriety and then started to create unpalatable works.

So this is hard. Because basically, uh, it's complicated. I wouldn't say that I'm a genius. I wouldn't even say that I'm a meta-genius. I would say that, at least as an unconscious hobby, I'm an artist and my medium is the character of genius. It's definitely a creative pursuit for me. And I guess the rationale is that if I want to go to all the work to be a "genius" I had better be a genius that is really aesthetically pleasing to me and also one that will be able to practically survive well. I.e., tragic geniuses who die of T.B.-- interesting, but not something that I want to plan my life around. I mean, unless I was subjectively into the experience of dying painfully and unfulfilled, which I'm not. I might be unusual in thinking this way, but I think it's quite likely that I'm not really. I would just say that among people who think this way, I'm fairly imaginative and whimsical and Aspergers-y. Heh.

So many things to think about here. One is the whole concept. How I'm a supposed to translate some kind of emotional picture or aggregation of details based on an outsiders perspective of a certain kind of identity into the subjective experience of that identity? That's a huge one, and I think it's really important to try and understand the dynamics of what's going on here and to try and be pretty conscious of them, because I wouldn't be surprised if this has a strong sub-conscious effect on my behavior.

Fuck. I'm so fucking spacey. Dammit. I mean, I guess, fuck, I don't know. There's just so much stuff that I want to be really fucking good at! And I don't understand exactly what the easiest process will be for learning this stuff, but I feel like if I devoted energy to any of them, or if I had an organized resource that worked from my own idiosyncratic level of expertise and had the opportunity to do a lot of, like, hands on things, I could learn so much stuff. I guess maybe I'd be really obnoxious? I don't know. I guess I don't know how many tools there are online that you need a lot of money to learn about. So I feel like there are about a billion things that I could be learning how to do really well. But then there's this idea of programming as craft, where sometimes you have to learn about these stupid niggling errors through trial and error. And there's the stuff I make and that totally feels true. Browser incompatabilities, etc., irregular behavior, nothing is ever clean cut. And we have to work out work arounds, and there's no guarantee that the work around we make will be worth anything. I mean, shit. Should I learn visual basic? I could. That'd be kind of bad-ass. On the other hand, I might just start crying the moment that I had to deal with a variable address. I don't know why I have such strong emotional reactions to the conceptual spaces that I inhabit. BUt dood. There's so much fucking shit to learn. I guess one question... I mean, jesus. I could make things that allowed you to visualize chemical compounds and it could work through a website and it could look bad-ass as shit. I just don't know what to focus on, maybe.

And I want to view myself as a natural process? I just want friggin' insight, man. It's hard when so much of the data that's really important for me to be dealing with doesn't really have any physical and concrete symbolic signification. Of course there are signifiers around me, but that's a whole different kettle of fish than symbolic signification. And they all exist in something of a shared space because they're all things that I'm thinking about and so to a certain degree they're all being channeled through me. And most of them, well, I'd say that all of them are connected to at least one of these four things, my thoughts, feelings, time or actions. So they should be all considered in some kind of shared space so that my thoughts, feelings, time and actions can be intelligently managed. The real goal of intelligently managing it not being that I'm so grossly incapable of doing so without some kind of overarching system, I might even be able to do it really well without them all existing in the same plane, but once all this stuff is managed somehow on the same plane, then I have the ability to actually try to optimize this stuff using different forms of my intelligence, and whatever tools I have to do that kind of thing. Basically it's an abstraction, and I think it could be enormously interesting and useful. But it's super loaded. Incredibly loaded. It's really hard to be honest about what's on that space, because it's hard to be honest about who I am and isn't what I process one of the most damning/defining descriptions of ontologically what I am? So it's hard to put things into these categories and make those kinds of connections. Because it's a complicated task to grok in the first place. But on top of that, the things that I'm trying to define, which might be hard to put into words anyway, sometimes part of my emotional and social identity is trying to add stuff that practically isn't there, transform some things into what might appear to be more socially attractive, hide things that it's (I'm?) self conscious about. And there's all the fears. Like "oh, if this is on the list, I'm a OMG I SUCK.." and "shit, where is this on the list?" And then there's a part of my mind that's trying to jump the gun and start prioritizing all these things. And it's kind of complicated to start prioritizing things before I even really understand what I'm working with. I mean, this is kind of a description of the kinds of things which I interact with on a day to day basis, but what effect do they have on me? Why? How are they connected? How are they orderly and based on some real necessity? How are they completely arbitrary and useless? How can I tell the difference between the two? What are the potential benefits in focusing in one direction?

And then the idea of having some kind of system like this. Oh my god. Potentially so time consuming. And I think there is an incredibly high possibility that the first fifty ways I think of trying to represent this kind of stuff will be total failures. And what will be the thing that makes it click? It could be some kind of symbolic representation/level of meaning, it could be graphic design, it could be color, it could be animation, it could be sound, it could be agency on the part of something involved here. It could be navigation. I'm sure navigation is a huge part. And then it might be the question or the way that I'm posing it in the first place. And it would really suck if I spent a lot of time trying to explore and implement some visualization or management tool and it ended up that I was completely wrong about the premises I was trying to make it from. I mean, I do like the idea that at some point the design of the program, the actual program creation, wouldn't be thought of as some final process but actually as a part of the dynamics of thought formation and clarification.

But isn't this the whole problem about ADHD? That I can't focus? And then there's the question of am I focusing on what I need to emotionally process? Do I know how to emotionally process what I'm focusing on? What does it even mean to emotionally process something? Isn't emotion just some kind of short-hand thinking? Dealing with things that are inherited from our biological ancestors that are critically important but too nuanced to really be able to describe or view through words? I guess I feel that there is just a language of metaphors and concepts and literal vocabulary that would need to be developed as an individual of any living species before it would really be possible to use symbols instead of physiological responses to navigate your environment and possible future environments in a timely manner.

Another thing that I want to think about: I tend to think of myself as really idiosyncratic as my emotions and desires being really idiosyncratic. But what if if anyone could experience the subjective character of living in one of my best case scenarios, that's exactly what they'd want? Is it possible to overstate the pluralistic character of our natures? Are we all looking for essentially the same identity to eventually inhabit, and we're all trying to get there from different angles of attack which we vehemently beleive to be best? What if I have a pretty good idea of what that identity is? ANd what if what I really need to do is just make people feel okay about emulating me? And any problems or whatever that I would encounter in the people around me would be emotional and thus based in some aspect of who I want to be that hasn't been adequately translated into symbolic language yet that it can be managed and mulled over in a timely fashion? Hum. Maybe.