I wrote a while ago about how guilty pleasures are stupid and that we should all just admit if we like something even if we know it’s stupid. This week, Prison Break kicked off its fourth season, and there is no better example currently on TV of a show so bad it’s good.

When Prison Break started, I didn’t start watching because I wanted to watch a bad show. I thought the idea behind the show was intriguing and, let’s be honest, an engineer playing superhero isn’t a common occurrence. The first season was great for its first half and good for the rest. But after that the show got worse. Some people ridiculed the second season because they were no longer in prison, so the name no longer applied. But that’s a facetious argument at best. The people on Lost aren’t all lost, either physically or emotionally, that doesn’t mean the show’s name should be changed.

But that doesn’t mean the show didn’t get ridiculous. And yet, as the show degenerated rather than giving up on the show I continued to watch but with glee over the absurdities found in every new moment. By that point, half the fun of any given episode was reading the recaps over at television without pity, where not a single logical flaw or absurdity is forgiven.

The real problem here is that other entertainment media don’t seem to have this problem with “guilty pleasures.” Reality TV made the term necessary in the television world because no other medium has such bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping trash. Plan Nine from Outer Space is not seen as a “guilty pleasure” but rather it’s loved and revered for being one of the most unintentionally terrible and incompetent movies ever made.

So let’s make this clear; there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. There are simply things we like (and often love) in spite of their flaws. Would you call your brother a guilty pleasure because he has an addiction? Would you call your wife a guilty pleasure because she cracks her knuckles? Humans are passionate creatures who love and hate for reasons ranging from the sublime to the petty. It’s one of the reasons hatred and bigotry exists, and its one of the reasons adultery and polygamy exist. It is a core aspect of our humanity. Ignorance may be bliss but calling our less noble loves and passions “guilty pleasures” belittles them and simultaneously gives them power over us. Looking at the uglier aspects of our psyche, even when manifested as the enjoyment of bad television, is necessary to self-improvement.

Awareness of our surroundings through highly attuned senses and through opportunistic pattern recognition led us to the top of the Darwinian food chain. But now our society exists outside of those confines and so beyond this awareness we require self-awareness: an understanding of our internal flaws. Whether we succumb to or rage against them, our flaws drive us as much as anything else. Ignoring them is as smart as ignoring the oncoming wolf or lion 10,000 years ago.

So, am I pushing the point too hard? Guily pleasures don’t exist. Love comes in many forms and is formed by many things. Being aware of that is a good thing and ignoring it or pretending it isn’t true by calling things guilty pleasures is a bad thing. It weakens you and makes certain your ongoing ignorance of yourself.

I love monologues. All the truly moving scenes I’ve seen in television and film have involved beautiful and powerful monologues; a character has dealt with the problem for so long that the internal containment fails and everything just comes out. In those few moments you feel the pain and the joy of the character more than you thought possible. You can go through a whole movie without sympathizing with a character but at that crucial moment, the truth of the words is too beautiful to ignore.

The only problem with monologues is they need a response. These aren’t soliloquies, said to oneself to illuminate the audience, they are there to let the oblivious subject become aware of what the audience has known all along. Monologues need a result. There needs to be acceptance or rejection, cheers or jeers. There needs to be a musical swell as the maligned lovers jump into each others eyes, or the look of shame on the antagonist’s eyes as the realisation of his wrongdoing comes upon him. An utterly ignored monologue is one of the most awkward events one can experience.

I’ve tried to ignore the silence of your protestations. Every word echoes through my brain and close reading begins to look like a cursory glance as the faults in my phrasing fragment my mind like a supernova of insecurity. What did I say that was so wrong? How could my words leave no mark on you. When was it that you decided that I didn’t matter?

To say the silence hurts is an absurd understatement. My trial of silence is like Kafka’s in its unrelenting unreasonableness. Each non-word cuts into my flesh, and rips the muscles from my bones. My knees weaken out of fear of the ongoing silence, and I know that I can’t let this be. I need you to know this now and every second I wait feels like another second of waiting for your response. I’m not waiting any longer.

I like engineering. I really do. I’ve spent five years training to become one and I rarely find the material uninteresting, despite the progression in difficulty. I love so many aspects of engineering that my career possibilities with it are nearly limitless and yet my whole life I’ve had a subordinate ambition that continually whispers sweet somethings into my ear: writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I never decided if it would be scholarly writing or working in sleazy Hollywood or some other path but I always loved to write. In fact, I used to think I was pretty good in high school. I would come up with great ideas for stories or I’d just start writing and something would show up on the page that made me laugh or sigh or even made my eyes well up. I sit down and try to write now and sometimes something happens; it’s so much rarer now and yet I feel like if I really dedicated my efforts to being a writer I could succeed. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last five years deriving differential equations of second order systems and convoluting signals using hamming windows my create literary muscles wouldn’t have atrophied.

I still feel like this is a delusion I tell myself, but as I am relentlessly meta, I can’t help but feel like the rational, “safe” part of my brain tricks me into thinking that my writing skills were never really there and my creative half is waiting to explode with ideas and let the words fall onto the page the way they did when I was young. I was passionate back then. Even when I first fell in love with the internet and created my own site I used it to display my writings online. I would post poetry, short stories, and anything else I could imagine. Now after all these years, it seems like my infatuation with the internet, which began as a means to the end of letting the world at large read my works, has become the end and the means.

I’ve had a website since grade ten (around 7 or 8 years go by now) and I’ve had a blog for around 5 or 6 years by now (though I tend to write a blog, become disinterested in the whole venture and then a few months later start up a new one ignoring the old) and as much as I hate it I love it. I’m a pain in my own ass because I write so many blog posts that literally never making it out of draft mode either because I can’t find a good way to succinctly and memorably conclude my points or because halfway through, I lose the rhetoric which let me express my thoughts to that point. Unfinished thoughts that if I really tried I could write. Which brings me back to my original point.

I love to write. As much as I love engineering and technological problem solving, the concept or writing works that will move other people and connect with people on a level a face-recognition program never could is painfully tantalizing. Granted, I’m in the middle of procrastinating while trying to study for a midterm for my ongoing engineering education so that may taint my thoughts at the moment, but I feel like when I finally graduate I have to give it an honest shot at writing. In whatever form and medium I can do so, I need to try.

When I was a teenager I listened to emo music. This was in the middle age of emo. In the beginning emo was an outgrowth of hardcore rock which was explified by more emotional lyrics. Then somehow the soft acoustic music of Dashboard Confessional in addition to the pop-inspired rock of Jimmy Eat World became associated with emo. The story goes that early in their career Jimmy Eat World was an emo band and when their first commercial success, Bleed American, came around everybody called them emo despite the change in their musical style. Similarly, Dashboard Confessional was the side project of the lead singer of a band called Further Seems Forever who were a heavy punk rock band with emo sensibilities and so it seems likely the label simply traversed the chasm between the parent band and the side project. The middle age of emo was a mixed bag. A lot of it was simply duplicating the pop-punk Jimmy Eat World style rather than duplicating the lyrical style. But there were a precious few who wrote heartfelt songs about love and heartbreak. I should state here that when emo began it was not exclusively romantic in nature; the lyrics had to resonate emotionally with the listener but it could be about anything which came from the heart. The middle age of emo changed that of course.

In my eyes, the middle age of emo is not exemplified by bands or even albums but individual songs. Dashboard Confessional’s earlier works (essentially everything earlier than “A Mission, A Mark, A Brand, A Scar”) are the closest you can get to the prototypal emo band, but even then certain songs are more immanently emo.

Of course you can see where the path of emo went. It followed the path of the superficial pop-punk. And so now we have bands like Fall Out Boy who are considered emo. And thus the pejorative use of the word began. I don’t want to get into a huge rant about how the changing definition of emo has marred the works of the middle age emo bands I just want you to know that emo isn’t all bad. In fact, there are songs from the middle age of emo that I still listen to on a regular basis.

The real problem here is that emo has forgotten its origins. Emo was an offshoot of punk at first and punk’s primary philosophy is “Fuck You.” So in my eyes, which are tainted by my understanding of emo, emo is about guys saying yeah I’m a romantic and I’m not all about female conquest. I have meaningful discourse and don’t limit myself to what’s appropriate. I don’t care if you think I’m a pussy because I like cuddling. I don’t care that you’re a misogynistic douche and can’t understand guys who want co-operative and equal partnerships with their lovers. Fuck You.

And I’d like to think that if Coleridge and Wordsworth were around today, they’d be in emo bands. The good kind though.

I haven’t dreamt much recently. I haven’t dreamt at all, to be honest. When it’s already too late to get a good night’s sleep a finally crawl into bed and wonder if it would matter if I woke up the next morning. I wake up, often late for work, seconds later. The hour long dreams that would take place during an inadvertent 20 minute nap have been replaced by a frightening silence. The idea that dreams have some greater meaning doesn’t hold much water with me but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a purpose. Dreams give us something to which we can aspire. They are literally the wildest dreams of our imagination. The things that would be impossible to conceive of in the plain buttoned down world become commonplace and our mind revels in the freedom to imagine.

I never dreamed about the past. In high school, I dreamt of great love, both emotional and physical. When Laura and I were together and happy, I imagined the future. I imagined the fights we’d have and I imagined the nights when we’d gaze into each other’s eyes and drift to sleep smiling. Everything had a saccharine veneer but it was never cloying. Being in a real relationship made me realize not only that the slow motion montages prevalent in romantic comedies were unrealistic, but also that they were undesirable. Those moments would pale in comparison to just sitting around making fun of bad movies together, or laughing at dead baby jokes. It’s absolutely horrific, absolutely despicable, and absolutely endearing.

Whatever it is that we imagine in dreams is random. Sometimes, it’s our last thought of the night twisted by the random impulses surging through our brain as REM sleep drives us further into our subconscious imagination. It can be a fantasy world, with action and adventure. And it can be a canvas on which the problems of the real world are painted. Beyond the fact that some of my most vibrant and original ideas come from that precious dream scape, what’s so depressing about my dreamless summer is what it could mean. To me, dreams have always represented the elusive possibilities of the future. In that undiscovered country of the future, anything could happen. Love could be lost, love could be won. Dreams were always a way for me to see the future as I would like it.

This lack of dreaming is not contentment, it’s resignation.

Don’t wear the shirt if you don’t mean it. Of course it’s not your fault, vapid girls. The real problem is that the shirt should be saying something else, the thing you really mean: “I ♥ Nerds… If They’re Hot.” You’re not actually interested in nerds per se, you’re after what’s called a superficial relationship. Wow, you like hot people? Me too! Of course, my interest in that person is tempered by my interest in their personality but you don’t need to worry about things like that.

You see, what you’re really saying is that you care so much about looks and so little about the personality of your partner that a nerd “will do.” Nerds have a stigma as the guys who take whatever they get; if you’re a girl who can stomach our eccentricities and sit through our nerdly monologues we won’t care. Maybe if you were someone with actual ideas in your head you’d realise that having a cardboard cutout to talk to isn’t really the same as having an actual conversation.

Now I sincerely apologize to any interesting girls out there who happen to wear the shirt. This isn’t aimed at you. (Though if you’re really interested in the eclectic and quixotic characteristics we nerds imbue, you’d be wise to pick up a more subtle shirt like one of the great ones over at xkcd. If there’s anything that gets a nerd interested its obscure references.) I’m here simply to let girls know that wearing a shirt isn’t enough.

Wow, you ♥ nerds? Well I’m a nerd. What are your interests? Getting wasted at frat house keggers? Hmm… well I’m gonna go watch Babylon 5. Have fun.

See what happened there? Once you got my attention, you lost it. Now I’ve got a lot of t-shirts that are ostensibly there to entertain so I’m being a tad hypocritical, but at least my shirts are representative of my personality. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover but we do. The least you can do is be honest about who you are. If you’re an A&F girl who loves guys who pop their collar and drive Honda Civics then don’t pretend that nerds are of any interest to you.

This post has gone through a number of revisions. First I discussed why the actors in the upcoming film Watchmen need to really understand and embrace the atypical nature of Watchmen the comic to ensure the film doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming a “comic book movie” but with the recent announcement of (most of) the cast I’m relatively at ease regarding that. Then this post was to be a rant on Zack Snyder, the director of the film, his lack of experience, and his dogmatic relience on the original comic for visual details. Then Comic-Con came around and Zack Snyder represented himself as someone who knew what the fuck he was talking about and that eased. (He still seems to have some issues with deviating from vision of the text for the purpose of retaining the message of the text, but at least he’s shown that he’s a real fan of the comic and understands why it’s great.) So I figured I’d discuss the reason I began to write this post in the first place.

Watchmen is a great comic. It’s a zeitgeist for a time which our world managed to avoid, filled with mounting conflicts on a global scale and the constant fear of mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is set in a world where superheroes really fight crime through vigilante justice; most of them are good-hearted people who want to make a difference in their city. The key difference from the classic superheroes is that they have no mythic origins, they have no extraordinary powers. They saw this terrifying world and decided to make any difference they could. These are people who took on a battle larger than themselves not because they thought they could win but because it had to be done.

All except for one. Doctor Manhattan is a God among men. His powers seem limitless and we are to him little more than particles of dust flitting about in Brownian motion. He has all the trappings of superheroism but because he is inherently inhuman he becomes a complex compelling character whose decisions sometimes impress and often horrify. But the story of Watchmen isn’t about Doctor Manhattan. It is the story of the people who didn’t wake up one day with superpowers and then decide they should fight crime. They didn’t need a convoluted catastrophic event like an uncle being killed by the robber they could’ve stopped earlier to make them take the leap into the selfless, unforgiving, and sometimes overpowering, world of crimefighting. These people walked down a street one day, saw a mugging that everyone else ignored, and stepped in.

Watchmen is quite probably the greatest comic ever made. Because the characters feel real, and because the questions of morality and power are substantive and have a real, though ambiguous, contribution to make. And for reasons which are intrinsic to the paper; it must be read to be understood. So when I heard about a Watchmen movie I first felt elation. The idea of it happening was fantastic. Of course then I realised it’s the implementation that would destroy it. The odds of the film doing justice to its source material are so mindbogglingly high that anyone genuinely and purely excited without a hint of doubt or hesitation isn’t a true fan of Watchmen.

You know sometimes I need to be reminded how absolutely, breathtakingingly, heartbreakingly beautiful the world can be. I spend so much time sitting at a desk, both at work and at home, that when I finally get out of my seat I tend to treat the world as a means to an end. I go out into it to get the basics and return to my cave. That’s why every once in a while, when on my journey to the outerworld interstices, I stumble upon… the world. I looked up just a half hour ago and saw a perfectly clear night sky. It made me want to go drive out into the deep woods where no artificial light pollutes the sky and just stare at the stars. Even here, in this oversaturated suburban night I stood there agape for a few moments, unable to look away, my vision transfixed on the unending void. Of course, after a short while reliving my former years as a quixotic romantic I politely shelve it away, remember that I must let that part of me out more often and return to my life as it was. Then I blog about it. Sigh…

In fire.

With each new week, my depression gets worse. It’s been headed towards “crippling” since two months ago when my former girlfriend decided that she didn’t want me in her life at all anymore. This is going to be a series of posts discussing, most likely in a non-linear fashion, my history with her. Given my current heart-broken state I may over-glamorize sometimes, but I’ll do my best to maintain some semblance of objectivity. What this will accomplish is a mystery to me, but I feel it needs to be done.

When my penultimate year of high school started, I decided I needed a job. I had no experience and I was a fairly shy guy, but somehow I got a job as a floor-person at a nearby Zellers. And so had she. During the first few shifts I was being trained I noticed her. I was 18 and she was 15 but even then I saw her and immediately thought “I want to get to know her.” I didn’t get a chance then; I was still being trained, so I was moving all over the store and only saw her that one time. I didn’t see her again until over a year later.

In my final year of high school — which was grade 13, or OAC, at the time — I started seeing her on the floor. We started off fairly innocently. Somehow, our shared love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer made it into one of our conversations. Along the way, I told her things I knew that she didn’t about the shows we both loved. I told her about TV shows she’d like, bands she’d love, and anything else I could think of. One of the more vivid memories from that time was of me buying School House Rock on DVD and her talking about how much she wanted to see it, but that wouldn’t happen until the summer.

As I neared the end of the school year I realized something: now that I was done school I would no longer have friends. I spent much of high school with friends having great conversations but I never really got to know them all too well outside of the context of the classroom. Because of this, once school was over I’d probably never hang out with them again. In retrospect, I don’t think this was as scary as I once thought; I would’ve made friends in university and the people I knew well enough would still be my friends. But it was that fear that made me take a giant leap in my life.

One day, while working with her, I attempted to deftly introduce a specific topic to our conversation. I talked about how much I really enjoy romantic comedies and yet I couldn’t go to them with my male friends because it wasn’t the kind of thing they were into. I had no idea if this was true, but I did enjoy romantic comedies and I did want someone to see them with. I talked about how you can’t reveal your more sensitive side to your guy friends because you had to be macho with them. That is, of course, complete and utter bullshit but she didn’t know that so I was free to inform her of the politics of male friendship however I saw fit. Luckily she decided it was a good idea to have a “non-date” with me and we went to see Alex and Emma.

I’ve been known to do something thinking it was for one reason when subconsciously my reasoning is later revealed to be completely different. So, at the time, maybe I was really fooling myself into thinking “this was a great way to get a new friend to go see movies with” or “she’ll be fun to see romantic comedies with” but to look back on my actions I’d have to be delusional to think that this wasn’t my very poor, very lame attempt at wooing a girl. Fortunately for me, she had a crush on me. I was known as “Cute Service Boy” or CSB to her friends and the idea of even a “non-date” with me excited her.

So we went to see the movie and we had a great time. By then, school was essentially over, summer was starting and she and I had been talking online fairly steadily. We were no longer tied to coincident shifts at work to associate and so I invited her to a Buffy/Movie marathon. This wasn’t a normal marathon though, because I had the house mostly to myself for a week straight because my parents were going back to Newfoundland. My sister was still there but she and I have an unspoken agreement to avoid each other unless absolutely necessary; we never really got past the childhood sibling antagonism stage of our relationship. So for five days straight, she would come over to my house somewhere between 10 and 12 in the morning and wouldn’t leave until sometime after 10 at night. We watched obscene amounts of television, watched all the movies we’d talked about that one of us hadn’t yet seen (and along the way added even more to that list), and eaten obscene amounts of pizza. Everything was innocent then. Well, not really innocent. Though we only sat on the same couch, already I wanted to kiss her and hold her. That week is such a fleeting memory but the emotions it stirred rock me to this day.

After that, she would come over and watch movies or we’d go to the theatre almost every second day. It didn’t take long for us to run out of romantic comedies to see together and branch out into other movies. One of the earliest examples was Terminator 3. A fairly drastic departure from our original target film but by then that premise had been essentially forgotten. As strange as it may seem, some of my earliest romantic thoughts — real romantic thoughts, not the kind you have when you’re staring at a girl across the cafeteria — come from that viewing of Terminator 3. The reason being that it was in that theatre that she and I held hands for the first time. It was tentative, it was hesitant, and neither of us acknowledged it when the movie was over but there it was.

Obviously, I’m an immature man-child because when I decided I wanted to kiss her I didn’t actually kiss her. No, I decided that the best way to invoke a kiss was to tease and tickle. If little children do it to show they like a girl, why couldn’t I? Of course, maybe it was because I loved knowing that I was making her laugh. It was a slow-going process. I would tickle her and she’d recede. I would pursue her until we were much closer than friends usually are. Eventually, after the tickling stop, with our faces mere centimetres away, I finished the pursuit and placed my lips on hers. It was tentative, it was hesitant, but this time when it was over we looked into each others eyes we smiled and kissed again.

I upgraded my computer last summer. I got two 24″ widescreen monitors and delighted with glee. While dual monitors has its usefulness the primary reason I went with two 24 inch models, rather than the single 30 inch for which I had originally budgeted, was because I thought it would be great to be able to have a movie or TV show on the secondary monitor while I browsed the internet or did work on the primary screen. Be careful what you wish for.

I’m always discovering new TV shows and my personal faves are serialized stories with complex interwoven plot and character relations. That stuff just gets me going. Unfortunately, that type of show requires a lot of attention to details to be truly enjoyed. And because this dual monitor set up is so tempting I often find myself catching up on blogs and strolling through wikipedia while I should be paying more attention to the details of the story. In fact, I got the idea for this post while watching an episode of Veronica Mars.

Paying less attention when I’m watching shows like Smallville or Numb3rs isn’t a big deal, but I’ve been doing it with almost all my shows recently. The only show that’s remained at full attention is Lost and that’s because I watch it on my family’s big screen rather than on my computer. Even with Lost, I find myself drifting along with the later viewing when on my computer. There’s an easy solution in simply turning off one of the monitors when I need to pay more attention to what I’m doing. I’ve done it on occasion when the second screen is too tempting while studying but to simply cast it aside makes it seem like such a waste. And in the end, television is much more entertaining for me and provides a much needed distraction from the banality of my life. I suppose I’ll just turn off the other monitor.

I probably shouldn’t post about my work here but since I’m only going to be here until the end of the summer and I won’t state explicitly where it is I work, I figure I’m relatively safe. My department is devising a search engine with user-editable fields for the businesses found in the search. Combining wiki and search engine but in a really lame way that’s not really a wiki so much as it’s editable fields.

We’re early going in the process right now but I have a huge problem with the way the system interacts with the user database. Essentially, we have a database of users and then we have a site which needs to access that database to add new users, change passwords, log in users, and all those fun things. What’s the problem? My boss wants the whole fucking site to interact with the database through a web service API!

We already have a User class with all the goodies required to do all the stuff we need and we could access that in a very smart way, but then instead of having one middleman to work through we have two! We talk to the web service – through completely open HTTP request! – which talks to the API which talks to the database. Not only is adding in the web service unnecessary but it opens huge holes in the system.

I understand that he wants this to be open to having various other systems all connecting to this but have a simple web service API to access the User class but use the real User class in the actual business logic the main site uses. Otherwise the web service has to have way too many capabilities for something that anybody in the world can access and operate.

A while ago, back when I wrote short stories and poetry and the like, I wrote a poem called “Land Now Lost, or an allegory for humanity.” It was a slightly pompous villanelle though I knew it would be pompous the second I decided to write a villanelle. Anyways, somehow it was submitted to a youth poetry site. I have no idea how it got there it just showed up one day when I was googling my name. Even now, searching my name, that site will pop up in the first few pages. I really wish I knew how it got there. Also, I should add that the site never again released a group of poems after the month they published mine; I’m not sure whether that means they couldn’t find anything better or they hit the bottom of the barrel. Probably the latter given the “quality” of the other poems of that month.

I moved back to Brampton after spending eight months in Guelph for school a few days ago and had to reorganize my entire room to allow for the new computer desk and to fit in the couch I have for relaxation. It’s fucking sweet. Anyways, one of the things I had to do was reorganize my bookshelf where I store my books and DVDs as I had purchased a few books and quite a few DVDs in the past eight months. So I took everything out and put it back in. Today I glanced over there for no reason in particular and discovered that one of my books was upside down. This was the only book in the shelf that was upside down so it wasn’t a frequent mistake made in the haste of the process. This book was the Holy Bible. I’m so subconsciously sacrilegious.

The main reason for my lack of posting is my relentless self-editing. If any post I write gets too long then I find myself questioning my direction. Am I rambling? Does this make sense? But at the same time it’s better to release early and release often than to get stuck in developmental mire wondering if what you’ve written is worth other people seeing. I was reminded of this by something I did as a lark for my ex-girlfriend last spring. She had taken a trip to Cuba with some friends and beforehand we joked that her inbox would be full of e-mails from me when she got home.

Sure enough the very first day she was gone there I was writing an e-mail to her:

I am so friggin’ angry at myself… I completely forgot about getting the death cab tickets because I slept in and was running late on getting to work. I didn’t remember until just now (1:40) and I can’t get any tickets… hopefully you don’t read this while on vacation cause I wouldn’t want to bum you out I just had to vent. Anyways, I’m gonna keep trying for tickets in case they release more and I’ll start listening to the edge again to see if there are any ticket contests (I’m sure there will be) so that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. This concludes email 1 of 27 for the 7 days you’re not available…

An arbitrary number that I knew would make her laugh. In case you were wondering, we ended up getting tickets to the Death Cab for Cutie show but that’s not what this is about. By choosing that number I set a challenge for myself. Could I really write that many e-mails? What the hell could I talk about? This was challenging myself to write essentially four e-mails a day consistently for a week. So I started writing.

The topics went all over the place. I wrote about topics are varied as Arrested Development, annoying people at work, and philosophical concepts like the colour Grue. But reading back on that week, I felt more than just nostalgia for a less complicated time in my life, but I saw an aesthetic I don’t normally share. Not everything was great but there were moments of value in the mix. It’s not something I could ever fully adopt because I’m just too much of a perfectionist but letting a few things slip through the cracks couldn’t hurt.