Irrelevant

It literally doesn't matter

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  • Memento Mori

    What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

    The romantic in me thinks of the decades flipping by with great warmness, of springs and autumns bleeding into summers, winters. Lean years followed by fat years, planting, birthdays, harvests, christmases, and change, change, change.

    It seems warm right now, full and sepia-toned. A scrapbook, highlight reel. A very long life, well lived.

    Then I think of all of the things that could go wrong, as things inevitably tend to. Loss. Heartbreak. People leave, pets die, harvests fail. Tragedy and cruelty mar the face of time, always.

    The eternal human question is if all of the goodness outweighs the pain, if it is worth it at all.

    See, I greatly admire stoicism but have a great difficulty employing it when things get tough. I shrug and say “thats life, baby” until the thick of it creeps in and things are tough. Then I cry the ever-tired line “Why me, God?” While shaking my fist at the sky.

    I am young, all things considered, and I think maybe this immature attitude can be forgiven.

    When I think of living a very long life, I stop short. It is memento mori. Remember: you will die. What we do here matters.

    If I am granted a very long life, what could I do with it? If any of us are blessed with long years, what is the impact?

    Even more pressing: how should we spend our time if we are not granted long life? There is a paradox here: we will not know the length of our lifespan until it is over!

    So what shall we do with our time here on earth, regardless of the duration? Am I going to sleep through it, content be shuffled through the lines of lazy safety, entertainment, numbness, joylessness? Or shall I live painfully consciously, alive aware to the sufferings, but also the wonderful joys? To create, weep, rejoice, celebrate, make mistakes, strive for better days. Food for thought.

    Anyways, remember: you will die!

    Unedited,

    JJC

  • Choose

    What could you do differently?

    I could soften. I could actually write something to put up on the proverbial void. I could do so many things differently.

    As the dead of winter settles in and we are left with January rain and remnants of pine needles under our couches. A backlog of recycling from the holidays and diets to adhere to. The baby still wakes at night and the dog needs walking and the mail comes every day. Its a slog. I am tired.

    However, there’s something I can do differently. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I have always known that in order to be well, whole things we must choose joy. We must drink our tea and eat oranges with our children even when we butt heads. We must love our neighbors even when their dogs drive us nuts with their barking.

    Imperfect as I am, I fail. I dont offer the orange slice, i get impatient with my infant for waking up for the third time, I raise my voice, stonewall, blame, seethe, cry. Humanity is immense with ways to fall short.

    We are called to love despite all of it because that’s what God does for us. This is how we repay him for loving us, by loving others. Choosing joy. Choosing him.

    Yours, unedited.

    JJC

  • The internet is killing creativity

    Yeah, you heard me right. The internet is killing creativity. You may have heard it a thousand times before, echoing across the halls of your favorite echochamer. Or perhaps you may be saying, “Hold on, isn’t it ushering in a creative renaissance? Look at all the creators! So creative! The world has never seen so many people’s art before!”

    Yeah, the world has never seen so many people’s art before, but the world has also probably never seen grandma’s quilts or that weird table that your uncle made. This is because the eye of the “world” isn’t what makes people create. Furthermore, most of the people who are creating now would have been creating without the view counter ticking above their art like some popularity-scoring eye of Sauron.

    What I’m talking about is the people who, instead of creating, are scrolling.

    The people who think “I’m no good” because it doesn’t look like the Instagram photos are the ones who would probably be hammering away at something random and fun if the world of entertainment wasn’t served up on a silver platter.

    The internet is killing creativity by bludgeoning boredom to death, murdering confidence, and poaching time.

    If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the mother is creativity. By filling every moment of every day with stimulation, we are filling up our minds on empty calories. The pressure to justify its existence and exhibit it on the internet is just another nail in the coffin.

    When it comes to creative pursuit, I think of being a kid. I was always doing something, be it drawing, writing, painting, you name it. Now? I am a busy adult, a mom, and I dont do much in the way of physical art anymore except fill in coloring pages alongside my 4 year old.

    At a certain point, art becomes for those who are “good at it” when you are an adult. Just like singing, dancing, cooking, and other life-giving activities. We get this idea as adults that in order to do something, it’s like you have to shine at it–which I think is performative bull shit!

    We need to give ourselves the permission to do things badly, or at least not perfectly, before we can make anything amazing. Beauty lies in the persuit, not the end result.

    Time is also a constraint. Why? Because somewhere we got this idea that money is time.

    If this is true, why do so many spend so much time consuming media? Probably hubris or something. Our smartphones and other tech are stealing all the time they claim to give back to us. The result is all of this creative potential being wasted on what-ifs and when-I’s.

    Not every creative hobby needs to be a side hustle. It’s ok to create just for the sake of creation. That’s an aspect of our nature–to create. It’s a part of us being made in God’s image. It’s written in our code.

    Do yourself a favor. Let yourself be bored, dont be intimidated by perfection, and don’t pressure yourself to conform to the hussle. Create. Do it for yourself. Don’t post about it. Keep it a secret between you and God. Because it’s a love letter. A love letter to your nature.

    With love,

    JJC

  • Trauma

    What is a word you feel that too many people use?

    I am going to get so much heat for saying this. However, I think it needs to be said.

    “Trauma” is what people who dont like themselves call memories.

    “Trauma” is evolving to mean “unintegrated negative experience” which applies to any variety of unpleasant experience, whether it is surmountable or not.

    I do believe that trauma exists, however, I believe that using the word trauma for every uncomfortable grating mote of dust against our souls is minimizing to the word and should be done away with, post haste.

    Using trauma to describe every negative formative memory belies a lack of growth mindset and reveals an unwillingness to integrate.

    I understand, though, that this is the vocabulary we are given to talk about the situations at hand, and as such, it can be a very useful tool.

    I also understand that some use their perceived trauma as a crutch to not push themselves, to stay safe inside their comfort zone, and to coerce others into accommodation.

    The definition of trauma, per our friend Webster’s English dictionary, is:

    a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
    b: a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury
    c: an emotional upset

    The definition has been expanded to mean an emotional upset. Seems a little dramatic to me. But whatevs, I’m an insensitive jerk. 😌

    With love,

    JJC

  • A little adventure

    Summer begs for adventure. I beg for adventure. Adventure! Please find me! Adventure usually listens, but you have to listen back.

    This, and other clichés coming soon.

    Just a little evening walk along the Nestucca River

    With love,

    JJC

  • Washed up

    Baby salmon sharks wash up on shore
    In my hometown
    Malfunctioning swim bladders lead to imbalances in temperature
    Causing meningitis in the brain
    Even famous predators
    Are beholden to bacteria

    Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.

    There’s really no point in trying to write about something uninteresting, so I cheated and chose something algorithmically perfect to talk about–a poor little shark that washed up on my native coastal shore.

    I love all of the things that wash up on the beach, like the planet gifting us with some strange token of affection from the deep, a glimpse of how it is in that secondary (or primary) residence of Earth. This alien world reveals itself to those willing to seek it out.

    As someone who was born on the coast, it blows my mind, knowing there are people who have never seen the ocean. There are those who live their entire lives without feeling the cold surf crash and wrap around your ankles.

    Maybe the shore is the same for the creatures of the ocean as the beach is for us. There are those in the world who will never see where our worlds converge.

    With love,

    JJC

  • Relevance is Meaningless! Contradiction is Truth!

    Im turning 30 in September. This makes me one of the last millenials to do so. I have always been on the fringes of things, so i’m ok being late to the party. Being fashionably late is pretty cool.

    Its funny, because when you are are a youngster, you believe you will be cool forever.

    Millennials have always faught for relevance, its currency like sweet nectar milked from some kind of exotic nut marketed for mediocre dairy replacements. This is why we sparked the advent of the crushing machine of social media.

    We still fight for it, insisting that we are cool, that we still have good taste. We pack away the skinny jeans, buy the retinol, and drink the bone broth. I don’t even like sardines! (Yet.)

    But guess what? Most of us are aging out of being entirely cool (if we ever really were to begin with?) And…what is coolness but relevance?

    I, for one, relish this newfound uncoolness, this irrelevance, this cringe.

    To me, it welcomes true freedom away from the pressures of youth and ushers in authenticity. It feels how a man in a sweaty bathrobe can feel letting his dog out at 9am on a Saturday. Free.

    There’s an understanding that we are duty-bound to act our age, finally, and let ourselves become married, parents, old, irrelevant to the svelte twenty-somethings that set the newest trends on tik tok the way we would post our selfies featuring duckfaces and bad eyeliner.

    Finally! We can stop clinging to our hipster youth and start actually being adults instead of anxious losers asking if we are “adulting” correctly.

    Irrelevance comes with Irreverence. Irreverence is cringe. Irreverence is cool. Contradiction is truth.

    If you are not enjoying your journey on earth and are instead seeking validation from the internet hive mind than you have already lost, my friend. You will always be irrelevant, so why not have a bit of fun while you’re at it?

    Relevance is meaningless!

    Fear is freedom! Subjugation is liberation! Contradiction is truth! Those are the facts of this world. And you will all surrender to them, you pigs in human clothing!’—Satsuki Kiryuin, Kill La Kill

    With love,

    JJC