On love, and the things I want to bring into my life

continuation of a string of thought I had before my biology seminar 2day...it was getting kinda long so i wanted to switch it to a blog and write a bit more on it

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My introspective journey this semester can be boiled down to love, as cheesy as it sounds! And I mean love in a very broad sense. Some influences and topics I focused on this semester were the following:

• Readings from my literature class: Plato's Symposium and Sappho
• Webtoons: The Lady and her Butler, Love for Sale (OMG. both are so peak)
  
• What I want to do in the future career-wise -> what academic subject am I passionate about? What does it mean to be passionate about an academic subject in comparison to something easier to love like a webtoon? What do I like/love? My relation to things I love and how they differ
• Family and friends: What do these people mean to me? How do my family and friends' influences imprint me/shape me into the person who I am now?
• Sexuality + The new friends I have met here: How do I differentiate different kinds of love? How do I understand and process the person in front of me? How do I treat people? What do I want to give? What do I want to receive? 
• Object vs me: How to approach literature? How to approach art?

So yeah! Introspection in a lot of different facets in my life. I was able to more consciously tie everything down under the label of "love" after reading the Symposium. Writing all of these down has made this definition feel even clearer.

There has been hardships during this school semester, and with any kind of hardship follows the realization that I am fundamentally weak, clueless, and sorta stupid. I repeat the same mistakes, become easily swayed by my emotions, and often myself questioning what everything I do is for.

Anyways. The other side of this coin of stupidity is that I'm very optimistically simple-minded. I'm very easy to please. I like warm drinks and walking around while listening to music. I like sleeping! I like yaoi and yuri🤤I like my mom, my brother, my uncle, my friends...It is usually pretty easy to pinpoint what I need in the moment to get out of a bad mental space (this is not the same as actually executing the solution though) Stupidity makes me make bad decisions, but it also makes me a very happy person. 

Outside of material/physical things I enjoy (i.e. sleep, warm drinks), I just like loving things like any other person does. I feel so so so fulfilled from immersing myself in a good webtoon, a great game, or a great show. I love drawing fanart, trying bridge the world of the media and the real world (i.e. learning to play Go from Hikaru no Go, adding pictures of funger characters to my notes), and consuming other fan-made content. It is so easy to love content that has been made to be loved that it almost feels like an involuntary phenomena. Fear and hunger is something that pulls me into itself. It's great!!!

^Lost Maria 

^Pressed Flower Story by Gakino House

 ^Fear and Hunger!!!!

But loving/appreciating something like an academic subject or a hobby that takes a lot more voluntary involvement, and I feel like it can be summarized to include these 3 steps:

1. Identify the thing you want to love
2. Find and be able to explain why you love that specific thing
3. Sustain the love

Each of these 3 steps take a lot of effort for its own reasons. To make these 3 steps a bit more practically understandable, I think I can put it in the context of my relation to art:

1. I like drawing
2. Lengthy lengthy part that could be extended on for hours; I guess I like it because I've been doing it for a long time. Sustaining love => solidification of the long; It's satisfying; I like how I can draw whatever the fuck I want; I really like designing characters!; fanart is fun; It's fun to try out different styles; art is something that has been very embedded within subculture and fandoms. Its very accessible so it's very easy to fine other people to connect about it with; I simply like looking at pretty things so I like drawing; I like how I can enjoy looking at art more because I can draw; It's a handy skill that can actually be used in a lot of places..id say its pretty useful; I can express myself; Being able to draw a character you like is a blessed feeling; It is satisfying to see yourself improve and there are many layers to getting better; It is a meditative experience. good art (like the art that I deem as good and attempt to achieve) requires a lot of patience and care and precision -> I think this is very poetic!!!! Putting in a lot of effort and seeing that effort bloom into something great is one of the most fulfilling things I have experienced; it is cool. a very show-offy skill, especially if ur good w drawing quickly; I can add fun doodles to like literally everything at any point; i can make a bit of money w it!; it is easier to make heartfelt gifts for ppl; art fight is very FUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!; i think it has made me a more creative person; it just feels good to have something so closely interweaved with my entire life; etc......ergg
3. Sustain the love, as in, keep drawing! doodle, keep trying to improve, apply it to different contexts

Art has become easier to love with time but there are also def times when its hard. But because my relation to art is sorta inseparable from the things I involuntarily love (like webtoons and games), it is sort of a special case in that I can keep coming back to it.

Now everything else!! like biology and certain people in my life, are very!!! very!!! hard to love. I guess it is also the fact that they have not settled into my life as much as art. This is the case for very specific things too and not just general things like Biology. For example, I want to enjoy reading!! I FUCKING HATE READING. WHEN ITS SHIT LIKE THE ILIAD TRANSLATED BY THE FUCKASS LATTIMORE GUY. It is also hard to love myself.

So I thought about why are some things so hard to love, and it's sort of a case by case situation for everything. 

1. A socially constructed wall: i.e. for classic literature and the arts. It is hard for me to feel a genuine connection w them bc I dont want to be look esoteric. It asks something of me when I try to delve into it, and I kinda dont like it. It's like when I got to an art exhibition and have a hard time enjoying it because I'm overthinking about the approach I should take in consuming it.
2. It gives nothing back: bc what is biology gonna do for me. I used to think this way for art too, but now I think differently bc it gives me satisfaction of finishing something. I think that's enough. Biology could perhaps help me appreciate life more or smth, but I cant be sure until I feel it for real. There is this sense of reciprocity that I require for any relation I have for anything, and my hypothesis to why this is is that it's because the human brain function to love is based on human-human connection. Like. when I reflect on my love for art, I sort of anthropogenically characterize art. Like I think art is my friend. When I try to reflect on how to go about loving myself, I create this made-up separate being of myself that I try to talk to. Idk what biology is to me yet and its hard to characterize it. It's prob bc I haven't let it spend enough time w me yet
3. some ppl r like........kinda unlovable to an extent. Now once we talk ab ACTUAL PEOPLE shit gets so much more complicated. So im not rlly gonna talk ab it here, but like ya there are people who are very hard to love. And that includes people who just generally suck but theres also people who I can like but cannot bring myself to love.

But love is this all-encompassing driving force of life, and it's something inseparable from me and like prob everyone else, but it is also something I have to actively fuel and put effort into. I want to live life driven w passion like I mentioned in one of my other blogs, and passion = love

In the simplest way to summarize everything I want in life is that I want to be a person full of love. And to specify a bit more from there, I want to love myself more and love a lot of other things external to me. 

Now how do I do this.

• A prerequisite is to love myself, so that I could give to the fullest -> journal more; active conversation w myself; sleep and good food and like all of those kinds of stuff
• Keep an active mind with enough pores for external things to seep through -> so like journaling. In a way this means to not overthink, but also do overthink. To not overthink in the sense of to not get scared and stumped by how to approach a certain thing, and to overthink as in try to actively find a lot of arbitrary connections between me and the external thing. Give things a chance to soak through my mind.
• Repetition/Repeated exposure: Sometimes, this is all I need. I think. Even if it feels a bit artificial and forced. If I don't think too hard about it, it may be easier to do this.

What does it mean to love??

I have a biased internal definition because I read the Symposium fairly recently (like a month ago), but this love is such a general thing so obviously there can many ways to think about it and im sure multiple can be correct at the same time. But I characterize love to fundamentally operate on like. A craving for a sort of ownership of the object. And the ownership I talk about here can also mean a variety of things. To someone, it could mean identifying with something (i.e. a woman's desire to identify with the phallus in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory; not that I agree with it but I guess just to exemplify the concept). I think feeling like understanding something is also a sort of ownership. The way one of the speakers in the Symposium describes love is it being fundamentally driven by the individual's lack of something. It's a definition with some holes, but to some degree, this is also true. It's this definition in combination with the whole approaching smth really great narrative from Diotima. There must be a point where the 2 definitions can sorta merge and agree. I guess like. maybe how there is a unfillable lack everyone has and they can only try to keep filling it even if it's something impossible. And this lack is literally for everything! Because literally everything is always moving. Your cells die and renew, energy is constantly transferred, thoughts are always moving in your head, and people in your life come and go. How can literally anything be truly "yours" when everything is constantly in flux? But we still want to try to latch on to something and keep it in our hands, and maybe that is what love in its purest essence is. It's like. Trying to cusp the moving glimmers in a flowing river bed. 

Literature Humanities

The readings I did for my literature class has shown me what it means to weave things back to me during the pursuit to love something. The books I have read sorta feel like a new toolset I can use to love other things. We love a good story to relate to anything, aka, we like referencing things. Being able to explain/understand something through a different facet (i.e. a reference) helps us feel more ownership of that something.

i.e. lets say you have a pie, and this pie has a lot of different kinds of fillings meshed inside it. Inside of grabbing 2 slices thats side by side, grabbing 2 slices that are directly across from each other would be a better representation (or "average") of the pie. You have more of the essence of the pie if you choose those 2 slices across from each other. This is kind of a weird analogy, but I think it shows how basically understanding something/someone from different fields(?)/facets/areas helps you feel more closer to that object/person. 

Classics are loved because they are referenced like literally everywhere. Their imprint is present in so many places, and the themes they discuss are general enough to apply to literally anything. This is why its so great!!!

i.e. I can read yuri, relate it back to sappho, I can approach the specific yuri more closely, and i will be able to love the yuri more

And this sense any information can be a toolset to love more things, but clearly literature is one of the most powerful in this area since it touches on such broad themes that are applicable to virtually anything. And so in other words, media literacy makes you more capable of loving and being passionate. I say capable, bc obv just having the tools doesn't say anything about whether you use it or not.

I think Mara Barl is a great example of this. like. Obviously I cannot understand how she feels about her life but I think she lives life with a lot of passion. Her art and writing has a lot of flavor, and the way she is able to explain her views on life and herself through external works like Boogiepop Phantom is so!! freaking freaking awesome. I love her works. and her works' depravation is proof that passion is the driving force behind it imo. Her passion is almost so. forceful. like in the sense that her work feels very obsessive and scary. All her works are an amalgamation of anime she likes, books she really likes, and her raw thoughts. I want to be able to create works with this much love and personality 

^Mara Barl's work not mine

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Honestly, this could all be explained in more simpler terms instead of me bending everything in a weird way but like...I think describing everything in this blog in this way gives more context to my flow of thoughts...so I'll just keep it like this

lowk really tired and ive been writing for a while. i gotta wake up sorta early tmr so im gonna stop. Good night!