“I guess I want to also resist the notion that love is always, somehow, an object choice, and there are therefore certain “objects” that glow or darken as a result of the attention they receive, or don’t receive. For me, love is also a kind of force field that may not even be directed to any particular objects or persons at all but actually radiates out toward the entire world and loves everything in it, or practically everything. Now before everyone jumps all over me I am decidedly NOT talking about some kind of goofy “I love everyone & everything!” kind of love. I am talking, rather, about a sort of orientation to the world that is always fixed/attentive upon its possibilities, rather than upon its already-thereness as an object. We have, of course, attraction to all sorts of *specific* persons and objects, which we sometimes call love, and which usually ends badly. The love that I want to try to practice does not fixate upon specific persons and objects, although it certainly *lands* there on occasion and, if I’m lucky, helps to light things up from within and *between*, but more importantly, the love I’m for is a kind of clearing of space that allows for something to be left alone as well as for something to unfold in just the way it always needed to whether I was there or not, but it didn’t have the space, either, maybe, before I cleared it. This also means love as a kind of making way for natality, for things to be born that you couldn’t anticipate. I think it is possible to love this way, and bad as I am at it, I see this as the only way to love.” – Eileen Joy, blogging at In the Middle (emphasis mine) they deconstruct the whole ‘natality’ thing in the comments. birth imagery - usually not the most popular thing in queer theory. still though, this seems like the only way for love not to be boring, to not be already-there and complete and intact. same for theory, same for for being young and not knowing what sorts of choices to make. the tyranny of the questions you’re expected to answer when you’re young and things are mostly ahead of you. feminist boredom is still in my head because I’m still so afraid of being bored, I’m still so caught in this aimless dread of the settling-down into stagnant choices.  what do you do when everything you thought would excite you in life bores you instead? twenty-something and wanting to wreck your future and fearing what that might lead you to, an empty collapse, wanting to “rebel better” as a friend said recently. to rebel more completely, to resist in a way that isn’t so self-destructive. we can opt out and collapse and fail queerly but I think it’s important to make those failures energetic. I think it’s subversive to acknowledge and perform your boredom, but I also think it could be easy to stay there and call it resistance. last year I spent so much time in bed, I called my unproductivity anti-capitalist, and in some ways opting-out is exactly that, but in other ways it’s utterly assimilative and expected. “Negation isn’t a form of escape. It can make you even more limited by the structure that surrounds you because it promotes an approach that is defined exclusively by the structure, can only think in a way that is reactive.” - Jackie Wang it’s so much harder to engage than it is to hide in bed all day. I’m trying to work towards the feeling that my participation is relevant and necessary. self-destruction is boring, boredom is boring, these insomnia diaries feel so so so trivial but open time matters. there’s value in natal engagement, there is a quickening, you’re smearing your blood on the walls and refusing to die at fifteen and being lovingly destructive and that isn’t the same as lying silently in bed.  I wonder what my boredom signifies. maybe this is political depression. I only want to wreck the social contracts I’ve carefully maintained. I reread what I write and it’s seeping in anger. I didn’t realize how angry I was. I’m not even going to reread this before I post it because impulse blogging is on the same spectrum as telling your friends to fuck off, it’s a release, the internet is on fire with angry isolated girls/queers/aliens like me. my favorite quote in high school: “who can measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” this post is a sort of primary puke - unwielded, uncurated but still puke. dirty leakage is a start