blueprints vol xi: drugs! the lack thereof! mostly about the grief(s) of performance!

Video transcript below:

Monday, February 23 2025

Hi. Grab your tea. I have this almond— NOT almond. I want almonds for this so badly. I'm gonna have this and some dates in a second because it's about to be Ramadan. So I got myself some dates, but if I don't eat them now, they're gonna go bad. I'm starting early. I have had a hell of a last like two days or so...

...or three weeks or so. I don't really know. Time is amorphous. It's been a lot of princess work this week. I have not been doing my grading for the 12 week year, much to my detriment, quite frankly, because grading is a good idea. It helps you understand when you're on track and when you're not. Such that, you know, we talked about that whole go to the store, here's your grocery list. And the grocery list just says, "Do it perfectly." Grading helps you understand what it is that you are doing consistently and what it is you're missing the mark on. I realized that my goals were too broad for one quarter's worth of work.

Like I just said, like, I wanted to work on the small prophecies course and get it to fruition. However, the work on small prophecies, the course has revealed to me that I need to teach it first to my selected teaching assistants and then I need to do it for the people that pay as— because you all are the guinea pigs that I use. And then it will be like test run and available for the general public so that we can do it seamlessly. So that's just more work than I had anticipated or thought that it was going to be. So I need to redo that goal and I just haven't done that yet then for farming things, which I didn't put as a goal because I thought that we were kind of done.

That was so silly. That was so silly. It's really truly like I live my life like one day this whole princess thing will be, like, some dream that I had like a year or two ago. And I'll be just like someone who doesn't have the responsibility of producing rice for a tribe of people. But I am that. Hi.

[chuckles off screen]

Had to see the Paramount Chief (of the Temne Tribe) on Sunday. That was a meeting that went very medium. I was not dressed. Also, I didn't know that I was going to have to meet any chiefs that day. So I was wearing, I was— I was scrubbing it by every standard. I was not dressed to meet a Paramount chief. So that meeting was very medium and also very short, because I did not look impressive. Like I told you that one of the parts of the princess job is to dress really pretty. And I did not do that. And I paid for that.

I just had a conversation with FD signifier. I think many of you might know him. I know him because I don't spend time on the Internet for fun anymore. And it was really good. It helped me understand or re understand the power that comes in visibility. Because so many, so much of being powerful is being visible. Being visible where people can see you garners a legitimacy to you that you may or may not have earned, but will be thrust upon you nonetheless.

I don't have a lot to say this week because last week was a lot of me realizing that I am powerful in ways that I didn't know. And also re understanding how many people can see me and what that means. Intellectually, I understand that I have the capacity to change people's minds and hearts, but then sometimes it like, really occurs to me, like in my body, like, oh, you have the capacity to change people's minds and hearts. What are you going to do with that power?

It's just really humbling.

[an on-screen scream of overwhelm]

I gotta go. I gotta get a dress. This is gonna be like the world's shortest blueprints. And I'm sorry about that. I hope you can hear me because I'm too tired to sit up. It's not happening.

The Following Wednesday: Feb. 26 2025

Today is a day I'm remembering why I like drugs. And it's that I don't actually like to feel exhaustion. I'm not good at allowing myself to relax. So I always thought that I took drugs because I needed something to instigate my mind turning off such that I wasn't constantly thinking about work. What it actually is, is— or, I'm not gonna say that's not a part of it. It's probably a part of it. However, I'm also noticing that a massive part of it is that the actual feeling of being tired is one that I don't like registers as painful in my body.

There's almost like— I keep expecting my physical body to be sore because my mind, my social battery, and my administrative skills are so thoroughly exhausted. Welcome to Blueprints. This is late. It's Wednesday. Sorry about that. I did record something shitty on Monday because I didn't want to be late. But I also am allergic to bad. I— I didn't want to do it poorly. I've— I've always considered that late in quality is better than on time and ass.

So It's Wednesday. This is going to be a verbal Quarry of Thoughtless Ponderments, in which I express to you the various modes and tenses of myself and hope that I don't overshare because I do not have enough energy to write out my thoughts.

• The thing about dyslexia is that if I am tired enough, I lose the ability to read and write. I read and write in gibberish because the words swim on the page. And this is a disability, of course, all the time. It is particularly cumbersome to me, someone who thinks by reading and writing it is trapping me inside of my own mind in a way that is claustrophobic.
• The— the— the emotions and the experiences that I'm having that I would like nothing more than to verbalize onto the page so they don't chew at my flesh and bones. They're sitting in my skin like maggots.
• Also, welcome to what my actual normal voice sounds like. Sorry, I hope that this isn't pop too many bubbles for you, but it's too hot to put on the engagement or school teacher voice. I actually sound like I spent my early twenties smoking a lot (because they did).

I have a couple things floating up to the surface as like general topic foci: (1) the necessity of uncomfortability, (2) the necessity of heartbreak and grief and (3) how much this job requires me to humble myself and get out of my own way.

The Necessity of Uncomfortability

So first: I am so exhausted because I have had a nonstop like five or six straight days. Basically since— I can't remember what I did Thursday. I believe I was outside, but I mean I can't quite recall.

• Last week was pretty packed full of me having to see people and make arrangements and whatnot. And then that was like all the administrative work of planning. Friday through Tuesday straight was top to bottom packed full of experiences where I had to be very sociable in a language that I am not fluent.
  • I am passively fluent in Krio. I can understand pretty much everything that anyone is saying to me at any given point in time. It doesn't matter the dialect they speak or the tribe that they're from or whether Krio is their first or second or third language. I can understand them because I am passively fluent in Krio. There are few phrases at this point in time that like, trip me up. And that is because I have been passively fluent in Krio since I was a child. However, growing up in the United States and with parents that were not particularly attuned to what it takes to produce a child that is actively fluent in a language, laughed at me and my sister every time we tried to speak Krio because it sounded funny.
    • (Of course it sounded funny. You had us on the other side of the— I digress, I digress)
  • So we were not incentivized to speak it properly. Which means that I did not discipline myself in the process of learning how to speak Krio until I got to college. And that was entirely self motivated. It was not something that was required by my life experience or by my parents or greater family because most of my Sierra Leonean family— that at least that I had interacted with at that point in time— speaks English.
• With all that being said, it was five straight days of me having to be diplomatic in a language that I don't have enough proficiency to be diplomatic in. And that is resulting in people thinking that I am less capable than I am.
  • And that is quite a hit to my ego personally. And it's a very frustrating experience. It's frustrating because I sound like a four year old. Even though I know exactly what I'm talking about. I understand exactly what I'm trying to express and I understand the person speaking to me. But because my inadeptness at this language is being interpreted as a lack of intelligence or a lack of capability, it makes business go a lot slower. And that is so frustrating.
    • And yet still I refuse to switch to English because I have now gotten to a point in proficiency that wasn't always the case where people no longer automatically switch to English when they hear the state of my Krio. Now people just kind of squint and wonder what's wrong. But no one switches to English and I'm not going to be the one that switches to English. I need to practice— hence the necessity of uncomfortability because it is uncomfortable not being perceived as particularly articulate. That's, I think, a character trait that I have assumed. But I'm only, I am only politically, businessly, socially fluent in— businessly. (lol) I'm only fluent in English, really.
    • And I, if I have the desire to get my Krio to a point of proper fluency where I can negotiate intellectually, and talk about the state of politics with people, I have to be willing to be embarrassed or be willing to [be] talked down to, or have people explain concepts that I'm familiar with over and over and over again because they think that I don't get it.
      It's humbling.

The Necessity of Humility in Internet Existence

• In the same vein, something that's very humbling is the fact that I have to exist on camera, that this is an area of life that necessitates my recording Myself and my thoughts in these particular ways. I have to humble myself in order to be online, in this online existence, because there's a lot of things about it that I don't like. And we've talked about the precarity of your face and voice being public record. I feel like I say that enough such that it's a turn of phrase that other people now use. However, there's also the sentiment of... of not really knowing where the line is.
• One of the other reasons I like to get high was because it made being online or recording videos a pretty automated process. It was the same thing that happened in strip clubs, where I would get high and go on autopilot and be charismatic and charming and funny and witty and entertaining and I'd make a lot of money. While my mind, my actual precious mind, was somewhere drifting above me in the cosmos, an amorphous cloud.
  • Now my mind is in my body all the time. And my mind is not always keen on having to share. My mind is not always keen on being examined or poked or prodded at or commented on. My mind very much likes to be alone.
• So this existence where I pry open my mind for you all so that you all can see the way that I think, I know that it's mutually beneficial in a lot of ways. And also, there are weeks in which I would rather just be a private person that exists entirely in private.
  • And there are weeks like this week where I've just been too exhausted to catch up with myself, so that I fear getting on a mic and expressing myself, because I don't want to share anything that I have not personally felt yet. Do you know what I'm saying?
• It's very precarious being someone that thinks for a living when you find your thoughts to be very intimate. We don't actually know each other.
  • Sorry if this is a downer :)
    • I like that most of my life happens away from screens and offline.
    • And I like that the most interesting parts of my life happen far away from where anybody can see them.

The Necessity of Grief and Heartbreak

• I think the last thing that I want to say for this week, this is the last week in February of 2025, is that I have now seen, in multiple iterations, the Kush epidemic up close.
• That's what I— That's what I pinned as the necessity of grief and heartbreak. Because that's a grief that is mobilizing me to action that I otherwise would not take. Because it is precarious. Because building systems that decrease people's dependency on the federal government and increase people's dependency on each other is always dangerous work in the nation state technology.
• But like I said, I like that the most interesting and dynamic parts of my life happen off screen. I like that I'm very unlikely to invite screens into those places. I like that the relationship that I have to being online is one that actually encourages me to be offline because there is no blueprints without me living a life that I feel a need to record for you all because I feel like it would be helpful.
  • (For Example): Made big strides in rice farming this week. It's one of the reasons that I'm so exhausted, because it was a lot of hours in a car on mildly paved roads, going to see farmlands and taking inspectors there and paperwork, all that kind of stuff.

Closing Remarks: I feel very tired and very lonely today.

I wish there was someone who I could compare notes with. But I'm living a very unusual life because the people that I know that were enthralled in really revolutionary work were not front facing.

I have to navigate the balance between what is public and what is private and what is personal. The balance in this new age of data and technology where visibility can be converted into literal power very quickly so it doesn't behoove me yet to completely step away.

I'm tired and I'm very lonely. And right now, Blueprints is not an apparatus where you all feel the need to speak to me. That's not shade! …It does exacerbate my loneliness. I feel as though I'm talking to giant eyeballs that witness me rather than real people who might have thoughts or feelings or emotions on the other side of this.

I don't know how many people were there for this or how many people might remember this, but I'm having a real "please say hello to me" day. Less because I (literally) want strangers to tell me hi and more because I'm remembering that existing in part for people's edification and entertainment locks you in a glass box where all some people do is witness you and you, on your side, in your little box...
never really know the impact of that.

Anyway, Ramadan is next week, so if I think I'm tired now, wait until I start fasting.

peace.

ig