Justin Stewart

justin stewart

there’s a decent amt of neurologists who’ve called the sleep schedules we’re obligated to be on despite flagrant conflict with our natural circadian rhythms “borderline torture” and the work hours we’re expected to put in despite the fact that the average person can only maintain maximal efficiency and focus for 3 hours at a time “nearly inhumane” and i think about that a lot

sometimes the way humans use words actually makes me tear up a little

When I was a kid I would take the last page of all my mom's sketchbooks and draw a screen on one side and a "keyboard" on the other, then prop it open and pretend we were both doing computer work. Laptops had become mainstream only 5 years earlier, so it was still thinner and lighter than real laptops, and my mom mostly worked on a Windows 95 with a monitor bigger than I was and a computer heavier than I was. I used to think YouTube was boring because it was just a couple hundred home videos filmed by strangers. I got my first camera when I was 12 and it held 10 pictures, or 1 full minute of video, without a memory card. On my first phone, which was a flip phone, it cost $1 minimum every time I sent a text, and you had to press numbers a specific number of times to make a letter. I brought my Walkman to school to listen to Lord of the Rings on cassette tapes. Nobody was allowed to use the phone when my Dad was working in the office. Yes, we had the dial-up noise. I got an AM/FM radio for my birthday one year. Another year, I got a whole box of CDs to listen to music. I wrote my first fan fiction on a Windows 98 that came with free Minesweeper and Solitaire. I was born before El Chupacabra. And now these things are gone. Wild

when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest