1/24/17

Today Trump signed an executive action to continue building the Dakota Access Pipeline.

1/22/17

Friday night I was still angry, I even found it kind of difficult to party with my friends. I went home early from the party and watched Belly. Good news though: the women's marches around the world looked awesome and full of people. Some of my friends went and my dad took some pictures of the march in Boston. I didn't really do anything yesterday.

Today I went shopping and that's about it. I feel sad but that tends to happen on Sunday night. Aziz's monologue was good but not that great, I haven't seen or heard really good standup from him in a while. I'm listening to love songs alone.

1/20/17

Today I feel angry. It's the kind of anger that I physically carry around with me like my backpack. I think about pushing the Willard Preacher or at least yelling at him but I didn't do any of that. Still I feel like he shouldn't be here. Plenty of people say things like "my parents/I pay too much money for x thing to happen at this school," and for me that thing is the Preacher. He is so persistently infuriating, especially since most of my classes have been at Willard for the past couple years. His presence really, really frustrates me and I feel like there's nothing that I can do about it.

Matt is in D.C. right now and it was cool to hear from him. I guess today kind of went as everyone had planned. It was rainy there and rainy here. In this kind of weather smoke hangs in the air. Dr. Cornel West is speaking on campus right now, and I didn't go because I couldn't get a ticket and also I am going to the standup show at 7, so I would have had to leave halfway through anyway. Still, I think it would be fascinating to see him. I watched him in a Democracy Now video and I keep thinking of this moment when he looked directly into the camera and said something like "42% of Americans didn't vote, because they have given up on the system."

Twitter is occasionally funny but also just exhausting. And I'm a part of that tiresome collective commentary too so I can't complain. I really want to relax this weekend. I don't feel like partying tonight but I will most likely go out. Hopefully I can at least catch up with my brother this weekend.

1/19/17

After so many months of eating in Pollock as some inane Trump quip played on CNN in the background, today I finally watched the guy salute the Lincoln Memorial as I shoved pizza into my mouth. The two-day inauguration process has begun, and I want more pizza. I've been alternating between emotional and exhausted. Politics is a dirty game and this is the biggest loss of my life.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what feelings (of mine) are derived from this situation and what are just due to my own shit. I still love hip-hop and I'm still horny - this is all as internal as 5 years ago. But the stress and exhaustion may partly be symptoms of some larger stress and exhaustion that have plagued the anti-Trump sphere of the political world since the election (and of course before it).

Squirrels scatter up trees and cars glide down the road so effortlessly. I feel quite full and do not want any more pizza.

1/18/17

Every day I walk on Pugh St. past the corner where I was assaulted one October night. Helplessly wrapped in the orange mesh of a safety fence by a few drunk and roused young men, I was called a faggot and pushed into the ground. Nearby there are two Trump signs. One is a big flag in the second-floor window of a house on the east side of the street and in the first floor of that house there is a poster of Bill Cosby. The other sign is up (north) the street a little bit in a first floor window of a house on the west side of the street. I am consistently irritated by the presence of these big signs in my community and what they represent, and I cannot help but conflate them with the senseless, albeit not physically harmful violence I was subjected to by the men who attacked me. That was a moment where their privilege and power brimmed over with the help of alcohol and they felt they could exercise some of that drunken power by fucking with me. And they did, and it will continue to happen to people who are less privileged and less strong than me and it will be in the form of crimes that are far more disgusting and irreparable than name-calling and pushing into the ground, which equates to little more than middle-school bullying. I can't stop thinking about it all as we collectively anticipate the inauguration of Trump, a conniving, greedy dolt who has used his power to physically and verbally assault women, instill xenophobic fears into the minds of anyone with a TV or internet connection, promote racism, steal money and, in two days, become the President of the United States of America.

I let the cold morning breeze crystallize in my face as my heart stretches. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind, bending under various internal and external pressures, but I have it pretty good. I think my generation exists in extremes: extremely funny, extremely sad, extreme drinking, extremely high etc. Granted not everyone is like this but maybe we are, collectively, helplessly trapped in the hyper-acceleration that comes from being digital natives. I can't keep my eye from the news for a couple reasons. One, because it is only a tap or swipe away. Two, because I have this insatiable desire to know what is next when everything feels unpredictable. I think that is human.

Today Trump tweeted that NBC News is "FAKE NEWS". Some, like the admirable Nite Jewel, have suggested we completely avoid reading his tweets as a form of protest. But it is like an unthinkable train-wreck occuring directly before our eyes: it becomes damn-near impossible to look away. And when we do look, we see our leader denouncing things we thought were real, things we thought were human, as fake and inhuman. It must all be some grand ruse I guess. But the man is so baffling and frustrating that it results in a great buildup of emotion and confusion inside our bodies. I made this blog to let some of those feelings out.