Words on the Internet, Enterprise, Commerce, Economics, Art, and maybe Daily Life

A) I owe Dave a favor:

http://shortscreen.com/

There you go.

B) I admit to being more than a bit depressed.  I’m unhappy with school.  I’m super unhappy.  I have a BA where there is meat to dig deeper (and apparently the crit is Tuesday, not Thursday).  People love the ambiguity, what is discoverable if I can give a good presentation of the piece.  But it isn’t quite there.  And I’m tired, and I have no idea what to do, or how to present something that keeps you staring or looking away, or both. I’m just so tired.  I’m supposed to be going out, but I’m at the point where I want to go not bother.

But I’m burnt out, tired.  I keep wondering if this is what I should be doing.  I don’t feel happy.  I feel miserable.  I don’t want to be in school, and if I did, I want to go back and start all over again.  And I wish I could do it on better terms with my parents, rather than fighting with them about all sorts of stupid things.  Really stupid things.

I feel like I’m doing this because I need the degree.  I have no idea why.

I miss doing page long product reviews so much.  I learned so much by looking at the damned things.  I want to take a people friendly comp sci class. The last one I took tried to eat me alive. I got a Javascript thing partially running all by myself.  And I can’t figure out the rest of it, so I know I am not dumb (I got it from a cookbook, and now I need to really learn the basic theory of the code..doable, but I feel timecrunched and mentalcrunched and burnt)  I just want to be doing anything but art.  Art is terribly hard, and doesn’t pay well.  Art kills your spirit, it eats all your creativity alive.  Especially when you find real meat that is not ready.  And I’m burnt out.  I’m totally gone.  I have no idea what I am doing anymore.  I guess this is why Paul Graham keeps comparing the two.

And most of all, I want a hug.  I see friends here and there, but not enough.  Not that I have lots of close friends in NY, but for some reason I was less scared of going out.  The loneliness is absolutely getting to me.  And there is some pressure for me to stay in Chicago.  But I really don’t want to be here.  I want to get a job and move on.  But I have this degree hanging over my head.  I hate every moment of it.

So what if I can get people to curse and change a profile on Facebook and get Facebook to go up in arms automatically without me doing too much…Art Dova can’t friend out now, did you know that?  You can friend them, if you look for them, but it can’t friend you.  They apparently may also speak esperanto.  If you feel that should change….

So what if I have learned about the idea of social media has an edge to it, of too much exposure versus not enough, and probably long term could be turned into a sense of sacrastic saturday night live punktastic land.  I learned I think enough about social media from that experience that I think I would puke under other circumstances, because it is the kind of experience that involves losing so much more control than normal.  Most social media experts (including the bible, that I bought) would not go and do what I did.  It’s counter the norms of developing a community.  I conquered and divided, by letting each person stand on his/her own and deciding what was what.  You learnt hat you actually need guardposts and to not let it get lax, and you need real people involved.  and that you need to delineate person, place, object, and action, very carefully, otherwise you end up in some weird recursive loops of what is what.  It is why we build societies the ways we do.  And the internet is making them crash very badly.

I wish it could it could grow more.  Badly.  And time has run out for the first run.  Just so I have recovery time.  I need some time to sleep, and to package.  I have no idea what I am doing at all for that.  I knew I would get complicated.  But damn it, it is physically and mentally taxing. This is not what I want at all.

That’s not me.  The actual Shana, although ambivalent, understands that the overwhelmingness and the emotions are just the state of a mostly pure existance that I have been having because of this damn BA without enough in person Human support.  I feel so much better with it.  I went out to dinner with a friend yesterday and that made me feel better.  I want my body back present in the real world, and I feel lost in the internet, an oddly documentable/un-documentable space.  No one fully buys it in the state it is in right now.  It needs to be more art.  The most art thing on Facebook currently is the dislike button.  But no one knows that is actually a mass art piece….You have to be in the know.

I literally am losing myself to the internet, and I am hating it along the way.  And I hate the fact that essentially that’s really the BA.  That we all are losing a sense of body to the internet.  So I draw and draw these unknown empty interconnecting buildings…and I feel lost in them.  I feel lost to the space because I know they are nothing without me, but once I go into them, they become me, like liquid falling into pipes. (I drew that pipe)  But I can’t draw the human, it’s impossible, or near impossible.  And it is stressing me.  And it is stressing the packaging of this project.  For it is about packaging the human or the non-human.  And there isn’t enough material, or is there?  How much is me, and how much is it?

I feel so terribly lost on the internet.  I doubt I’m alone.  Actually, the blog makes me feel less alone.  Another reason I’m angry at the BA.  And at what I found there.  I feel like I can rely on the internet and the floating feeling, but I can never ever escape it anymore.  It’s like being surrounded in personal liquid…

Ok.  I’ve vented.  I just need to figure out how to display and get my butt to something fun…