NOTE: in code, to make something a note, a piece of info that isn't put into your code as active material, you bookend it with "//" either at the beginning of each line or at both the beginning and end of a large chunk of text.

Introduction

In the most basic of terms there is a convergence of all things, which feels incompatible with myself and it is in this place I am trying to explore. Each supposed binary has met at a point: I aim to accept this truth to some degree, that perhaps there is no clean division between any thing or any clear correct and right I can do. How can I transmute myself, so that as I transgress the borders of digital and physical, male and female, white and brown I can also move between gray space I am not built to swallow. I was similarly not built to perform my gender or sexuality or race but have learned that. These pieces of data that have not computed for me include the space of shame and gratification, collective and individual, inherited and evolutionary, comfort and restriction, magic and hopelessness. Just as natural material used to be the ingredients of that which would become consumption now it has become my sex and body and cultural experience and identity. I isolate sex from physicality and transmute it into raw material, I isolate my body from my perception and mental reality, I isolate the pieces I love of myself as an individual from my percieved duty to my familial community, each piece becomes loathsome if they ever touch and they consistently do. My love language is isolation, separation, sealing, what could be cleaned, and taken apart and restricted and that is perhaps that is the force that can drive me to live in any of these places. Any sort of progress must happen in clean measurable space. Can I enter this grey space when I am speaking only in negation? I dream of wrapping around barriers instead of bursting through them and filling all this space in comfort and sometimes that makes me feel sick.

Community

//I am meant to pursue success at any cost, to be my own independent man, a good american, but also to be a good child and member of my community, is there a space in which I can serve my community when my own self interests feel so opposite from the invisible laws of my immediate roots. I know my white family does not see my personal shame as theirs as well. Where in the techno-world, the queer world, the individualist world, the western world there is a sense of clan, structured around emotional affinity, while in the pinoy world the sense of clan is intergenerational and connected through blood and years of names and relations. My mother immigrated here from the Philippines, she moved from the visayans to manila to guam to america all on her family’s back. They were isolated by relatives who left their 11 person clan with a recently deceased Paternal guide to be broke, hungry, lonely, grieving. She was raised by her sisters and brothers and sometimes by no one but that was how they all were raised. When she finally came to America she was slapped in the face, with racism, ostracization, more isolation. I know why I have been told to take care of her and my aunts and uncles and grandmother before all other things. I feel no sickness over maybe leaving behind senses of myself so that I can love them better. I grew older and was able to separate from the whiteness I had been surrounded by and taught in schools and saw that to serve my family and hold them higher than my own selfishness or non blood affinities was fulfilling to the way I value structure and care. I was also taught that I need to assimilate, just like she was, that I must be well adjusted and successful and secure and respectable. These factors tie into serving my family through my own goals but also to the great american dream. My mother was an individual too, she did everything for herself and had a career and had a creative dream and she wants the same for her children but she does not want that conflicting with our sense of duty and I know that. Maybe I don’t give her enough credit, to view and respect me as an adult. My artistic practice and own self revelations feel directly in conflict with being respectable for my family. How can I be sexual, a victim, a queer body, a naked body, a shamed body, a mentally ill body in public space without shaming her? I feel like to do my best, I have to make this work and accept my identity and flaws in this sphere and to do my best means to honor my mother and her sacrifices and work and teaching but my best is in direct conjunction with what is unacceptable and shameful not just of myself but of her and every other body associated with my clan.//

Where does my true sense of community come from, those who hold my queered body in kindness and love or with the ones who raised me and hold my head up at my neck. There is our fictionalized universal community and it feels as if that is both my home and my future, both my homes in totality. I don’t have a queer community holding me with real hands and bodies. There is no other trans-ed skin on mine just more cis bodies that will allow my dysphoria to exist silently with them sometimes tokenized sometimes a joke. In my family community, I am brown but also diluted, I am americanized and ostracized, I am passionate but failing, I have done things the wrong way, the way I must be quiet about things. But I still feel their hands concretely on my body and their blood in mine and our years of water and soil stewing in my stomach. Is this lack of belonging manufactured within me so that I can safely separate from them? What are community values for me then, or to any person who has not found security in any side of their identity? What values do I uphold and fight for, a distanced eastern responsibility or my identity as an individual with desire? What is my responsibility as someone existing in the larger community of the public? What is the morality of vulnerability and showing oneself especially if that implicates others? Is my identity as an individual even a moral belief?

I am no more than a single thread in a weave millions of miles long. This identity, as a desirous individual, is still connected to a large community, my second home. I am praised when I am vulnerable, when I am honest, when I am selfish, when I am naked, when I am sexual, when I rebel. This is antithetical to the standards of my clan, I am more attached to these people by emotional affiliations, digital affiliations, the arc of the world swings towards justice and that is our home, maybe speculative sometimes real. Maybe if I could touch someone else with a body like mine, (is there a reason I haven’t). Is there a reason that I still mostly see cis bodies, and I don’t hear my pronouns said with tenderness and love, and I can’t look someone I love in the eyes and talk about dysphoria. Maybe that is my disillusionment. My family doesn’t say these things with love either maybe I don’t either. Where is my liberation? Because I am afraid to know the bodies of people like me and hold them, associate them with sex that chokes me without asking, will I never be able to stand next to them. Because I refuse to distance myself from a family that holds me tight, too tight sometimes, can I not understand them. Because I feel deeply ashamed about myself can I not feel safe with my queer family or have them feel safe with me. Am I trying to manifest some queer utopia that I can not enter because that heaven community does not exist? Have I been a poor member of this community and that has kept me from knowing this clan? I am once again trying to make myself an outsider. I am not the first body in conflict.

This other community, maybe a third option is it?, could I liken it to the cloud, could it be the only real sense in what we know as modernity of closeness and connectivity as globalization and digitization shift these perceptions. This information is Digital and Physical, each of us held on machines and applications in which we can connect and feel whole together and learn a history but never own it right, paper was killed, by digital, digital file holding was placed onto the cloud and then once again we are held far away from things, our photos our bodies our porn our sex our community our family on servers scattered that then zap to us those zaps held by more companies who own our connectivity as in wi-fi, how can one replicate a wi-fi connection, do I miss ethernet and wrapping chocking wires. Could I walk into a building filled with servers and know them, and touch them, and feel them, and have them feel me too. Each piece of our data is so diverse and expansive that we can be processed as individuals, the time, what we search, what engine we use, what sites we are on, what language we search in, our geolocation, they are our digital fingerprint. They can be tracked and then attached to us, just like our voices can be heard and recorded and analyzed. Think of that processing space, the huge amounts of servers and shelf space, the algorithms, but part of me feels like that might even be too much to waste the money on, the time, the brain power. Maybe I underestimate the reach and ability of capital and advertisement, of unground dealings of data and that kind of power. But sometimes I think it may not even be that hard. That we may not have to be known as individual threads of data, a unique user, to be properly amazed and assimilated into it all. Not even a distinct user, not even a thread in a weave, paper mulch, pressed into the sheet.
link: connectivity

//some people whom i recognize, i can look them in the eyes and know exactly how they see me
i know when its exactly how i see myself
their words can be soft or hard or not of mine at all but they understand me deeply
i think i may be addicted to that kind of view
when people who hold me and desire me look at me, and i feel that gaze
it makes me sick
the eyes of someone who can hear the shake in my voice and hate it too
rest on me different
they roll through me with the recognition i desire
a true representation
my dysphoria melts away
i am held exactly where i need
by the neck//

To be successful in any right. What that means in a place like this,, in a career like this,, a school like this. I’ve always been told to be an individual a unique body, like said before, a unique digital fingerprint. Or even the one whom holds capital, with which I can say something loud enough. To be paid, to sell, to be acquired, to be better and loud about it. Maybe there is more power in being silent, fully matriculated as a fiber among a flat vellum. When I was young I had dreams that never involved anyone else but me looking beautiful and being free. Now each dream I have is being kind and being useful and being loving and being good. That is the best peace I can imagine when I am in my best mind, and everyone is there.
link: congratulations

Sex

//If I was a science fiction hero I could scroll through back streets real fast, armed and safe with no guilt spitting tears with a built up body, maybe too much time and memory replaced by metal and plastics and computer. It would need to be safe and cool to kill and run and die and if I hated it all I would go off again, not afraid of my things and body being wrong or lost. If I could have learned something else I would have long clean hair and no scalp psoriasis and be a virgin in a church with a boyfriend and a reasonable dream, at least just a clean and responsible woman, with a good dream still.//

Is there a third option, other than disgrace or servitude, love or trauma, shame and gratification, fucking and getting fucked, being a man and being a woman, could I take testosterone and still feel viable as a feminine person, if I don’t is my essence as a masculine body negated. Is there a space for bloodletting without a certain amount of unhealthy dramatics, where does suffocation stop being exhilarating and begin to be sick.

The materials for production that were once natural elements isolated and fired and recombined have become sex and rare unknown earth. Just as even the means of production have been dragged away from the population so has our sex become more grey and unappealing, a rare earth element, must be fired and isolated and recombined, for it to work it is magic. We believe that we have separated from the art object or the sex object through computerization but these things have just become outsourced, physical copies of porn no longer take up shelf space and art objects no longer take up white space but all of that data is stored somewhere in large servers that take up millions of square feet in rural areas, where a large tech building sits in anonimity among flat desert ground, all over the world. The production of sexual labor has likewise been co-opted: by websites that steal and advertise, acting as if making pornographic labor free is revolution rather than theft. I have to continue living, which means taking medication, any and all birth control destabilizes mood and thus becomes inaccessible to me, psychiatric medication decreases my sex drive, cis men refuse condoms, cis men refuse my boundaries, cis men refuse my pronouns, cis women remind me of my dysphoria, cis women make me feel safe, then cis women tell me I am a woman. These are all reductions but that is fine for now.

Perhaps that is also my reduction of myself into an innocent and so a victim and that allows me to make myself a victim again and more. Is my own attachments to converged spaces of being white and brown, nonbinary, queer, traumatized and gratified affiliated with my own desire to be an innocent and then be a victim. Do people look at me like a weak person, do they see me as someone that is actively feeding on trauma, begging for it, holding it close to me, see me as someone who wants to be a victim, who has made my own abuse a touching reality. I refuse to believe in mythic nature. My power as a magic woman, manifesting source only serves to say that because of my energy I have attracted abuse or distanced love and grace. Could I choose different affiliations, with whiteness and womanhood and heterosexuality and vanilla sex? And furthermore is my dysphoric relationship to feminism and femininity spawned from internalized misogyny? These questions are not ones I posit to any other trans and gender nonbinary person but as I move through life as myself they are ones I cant help but parrot in my skull. To further that point I do not stand as a voice of the trans community or a voice of the filipino american community or a voice of the converged and do not mean to expand myself to cover such a diverse base nor to minimize the base to fit me.

Metal and plastic and silicone has empowered the sexually viable but once again we have become attached to the inhuman, what we cannot singularly produce but now raw sex is now being forced against the reciever’s of imposition as revolution of naturalism, even intuition and intimacy: how must we reconcile the two. Its this sense of mythical naturalism that calls us back to sex with no condom it feels, as its pressed against technologized bodies, sex organs, and pornographic space sometimes we are begging for plain old fashioned taboo, or perhaps even the reacclimation to the christian ideals, that if you do not feel safe enough to have sex without a condom (ie both virgins, risking pregnancy) that sex is wrong or even just the libertine desire for pure pleasure and abuse, no regard for the safety of both bodies. Both of those spaces are where our technologized bodies and that growth becomes negated, in which there is no space for safety and fear. Technology has made it so that safe sex is an accessible option to the traditional genital pairings, but as the uterine body is then controlled by various forms of birthcontrol, so many so that one’s refusal is seen as incompatibility with modernity, that when the onus of the phallus’ pleasure rests on the condom and its removal with other contraceptives as a safety net, and even emergency ones that can be bought at any corner pharmacy, the refusal of condom removal is seen as paranoia, your own judgement over sexual partners called into question or interest and care for your partners pleasure. Perhaps I do not find my deepest intimacy in flesh on flesh but rather hermetics and isolation. A trusted seal.
link: personal practice

With the advent of cheap labor, vulcanization outsourced, extrusion. The pure fascination with a heat injected plastic of our parents and grandparents. The delight and spectacle of each one of us at new technology. They are one in the same. I know that the same lingering historical shame will follow as well. The marvel that was readily and cheaply manufactured one use products is now a branch stuck in our eye. A fish bloated with micropellets. A drain stopped up with polymer. Each computer board is a hole ever growing in this ground. Like an emptied chest. Past, like a thing in its tight package. And here is our condom. Whether that is a bag over our head, a rubber over our dick, a latex suit over our skin, a pillow over our face. That is safety. Amnesia of each revelation and revulsion causing another cycle of this same sort of gratification and trauma. Could that be our new ecstacy?

//a bunch of white people are talking about Mao right now,, and he when talking about good leaders he says, Just like Hitler,,, just kidding,,, the west,,,, etc etc loudly beating across the bar at my chest... my head. what a bad first date,, i talk about it with contempt to a white person who just tried to justify to legitimacy of the 2000’s racist movie Love Guru to me,, she feels attacked while i talk about whiteness, and it's fruitless//

City’s of servers, computers, boards and boxes, coolant and coolant and coolant, each thing mined and built again until our pleasure in it is dried out and our shame creeps into us again. Like the change in how you view your screen post completion.

//Could we assuage that feeling if we paid for our porn, if we didn’t harbor shame about sex work, porn and those who make it.//

Servers are our sexual bodies becoming more and more ambiguous and disconnected and owned, in a building is housed all of our biometrics, what porn we watch, what porn we read, what porn we make, who we are fucking and how. No one can create their own business, the ownership of labor and its modes by the state has made it so inaccessible that we outsource each part for premium prices. To hold our data we hire server companies, to host our video we hire websites either through advertisement and data collection or traditional capital.

I think that I am perhaps the things I was most fearful of in my conservative youth and that is a lech and demon. Because I chose to abandon religion I have become an obsessive and a victim and a masochist and continue to enter into this cycle of abuse and if my mother sees this, and sees my work, the public proof that I am an addict to shaming myself, abusing myself, shaming her and my family and their legacy that that is much worse than any queerness or rebellious haircut and cutting phrase I could ever tell her. I don’t touch queer bodies because I am afraid of being known and touched with care in bed. I am afraid of where my trauma meets my gratification. How do I find pleasure in my silence and loss when these things had led me into hospital rooms and more shit. Because I fuck I get abused. Must I make her an opposer to myself as another sense of victimization, do I unfamiliarize my shape so I purposefully jut out of normal space as another facet of my desire for abuse. Do I have some queer fascination with Christ still and so the position as martyr? I know the history of sex and shame, promiscuity and trauma, its ties to queerness how does one allow for their body to be a part of the greater narrative of history and morality rather than a piece of invented subjectivity.
Douglas Crimp:

I want to forget about everything that is me, and it can feel good when I think of really where all of this lives, we think of this deep importance in data, how impossible it is to delete right. Well how easy it can be to lose it all too, when you can never really touch it. Could I make my body, as a sexual, gratified or otherwise entity, just as easy to disguise as numbers and locations in code and boxes when uploaded and abstracted. I could be every body I love on someone else and that could be freedom. Where are the little differences in a string of circuit, ram, motherboard, coolant, code, hard drive, adaptor, processor? Little insecurity is ice, cold hard, cutting in dreams, math in reality. I think about maybe years ago, when these barriers were smaller, every man a hacker, a bio hacker. I could just grab a pack of gel and be rebellious or get through one wall of code and hit the system. Straight through. Maybe it is still that simple, maybe it’s good that it isn’t, it's good to wrestle in a bag, decide to ask loudly or touch no one. “Its always good to complicate things.” Ask a question, is this okay??

link: dataholdings porn

Convergence

Each of these is connected, raw and tech fired metal, my clan and my own desire, domesticity and sexuality, trauma and gratification and they can only be combined with deep care and patience. The euphoria associated with isolation and constriction comes from the eventual release, when you can breathe again and are reborn. The importance of alchemy and science is in the ability to isolate each element from one another and recombine into something new, fuse these singular beings into multitudes. I can reappropriate magic and myth and religion and hardware/software and science and installation and rubber vulcanization and pure metal into my skin and into each other, if we are clean and understood we can then be fused with kindness and safety.

I think this is where I must rest for now. In this space, hopefully when I put this to bed I can fully focus on the recombination of my own sex and theory, my own body and correctness, my own family and friends, lovers too. I think this answer lies in safety, something that faces off with paranoia. The paranoia that lives within any body that feels marginalized, maybe the paranoia of generational trauma still whispering in my bones, maybe the sound of everytime I quieted myself trying to fight back. I know that not every body is an opposer that when I sit on the subway their eyes aren’t trying to take me down, that the railway isn’t going to burst and split, that the people behind me on the street aren’t following me, they don’t know anything more about me, they are just passing strangers, that the people who I let into my home are not there to hurt me, not always. If I could quiet that whisper the right way, and look at somebody as neither an opposor or a saviour, give them the same reverence I try to give myself when I am healthy, then maybe I could feel that safety.

I hope that one day I can recognize that naturalism in its purity of elements, and high fire in its melting together are touchable, I am touchable. My dream each day is to just be good.
And that starts with the people who are right beside me. Compassion for my family and myself.
and that requires getting better. I don’t want to answer or ask anymore questions. Time is long and hard and I could write a book about everything i want from myself and the world and each chapter would be a different story. But i also know that sometimes i need to be quiet too.
I hope this was enough.