© 2024. All rights reserved. 
Life is about needs, wants, and the things we conflict between the labels. Many religions make the claim that life is about suffering, and Buddhism specifies that desire is at its core. I’m relatively unreligious, but I have to agree with this claim. Life is about caving into desire, whether it be air, food, sex, or sleep— it’s just a matter of which one.
I really loved Barbie as a kid, and I’m not sure if that’s surprising. She’s beautiful, kind, and always taught that you can be anything. While I don’t think that’s a universal statement, I think it’s true a lot of the time and is a healthy message to send to young girls. You want it? You get it. Just do it. Get good! It’s a remarkably powerful but simple message, especially coming from an image of peak femininity. Even if you yourself don’t have an interest in dolls, consider that these are the toys our daughters are statistically likely to be playing with.
I talk the way I write, believe it or not. Admittedly, by nature of being written, my thoughts are more articulate and refined in writing, but the manner in which I write them mirrors my pretentious wordiness and elongated sentences. For this, I blame my multilingual upbringing, speaking exclusively Polish at home, English among my friends, and being taught Latin during all four years of high school. Sometimes the way I say words is weird too, because being as shy as I was during my childhood, I spent more time reading than speaking. Lots of my Polish-speaking friends have accents or quirky linguistic habits, even if they spent their entire lives in the United States. I do, too. Even though I don’t often talk about my ethnicity particularly often on my site, I do think there’s a lot of power in a language and an ethnic background.
Freedom of speech is dwindling. At this point, individuals who are aware of their libertarian leanings are merely waiting for the authoritarian left to admit that they simply don’t care about freedom of speech. This progressive belief finds its origins in Marcuse’s (potentially misused and misrepresented) Repressive Tolerance, functioning within the Frankfurt School, if you want to look into it. I think it’s nonsense, mostly: I’ve got far too much faith in the marketplace of ideas and my homeland’s ideological fundamentals. The 1619 Project attempts to reestablish the birth of the United States to 1619, the year the first African American slaves were brought over to the American mainland. While I can see how this honors their sacrifice, I don’t think it honors the positive, honorable endeavors inspired by Liberalism, which resulted in the Fourth of July becoming a celebration of the individual rights and freedoms that the United States was founded upon. I always thought birthdays were supposed to be happy. Gordon Wood has said enough on the subject to dispute the matter properly. It’s a matter of time until you’re “cancelled” because you ever had the audacity to challenge any progressive belief… because you ever had the audacity to verbalize an independent thought, really. I had the audacity to write for my school paper in the fall semester of my sophomore year, and my little career ended (for the time being?) in a small scandal that has, in my opinion, taken up far too much mindshare for far too long.
I loved my handheld devices as a kid. I didn’t have a smartphone until my freshman year of high school, and now, I honestly largely crave that stupid, blocky phone I had for so many years. I spent a lot of my time occupying myself with books and video games at the time: lots of Pokemon. I had this massive guidebook to the Platinum game and spend hours playing it. I even planned on including Pokemon in one of my list of my top ten favorite video games, but I was already rambling so much, I cut it short to five. I used to play a lot of Pokemon. So, here’s how to get those old games running on whatever device you have for free. I just wanted to share this with my friends if you’re bored, even if you never played any handheld games before. It’s fun, trust me. You don’t even need any cartridges.