1. I took 2 years of Arabic classes as a kid, and one of the first rules of grammar I found alien to my English/Urdu-developed brain then was, ironically, the em dash.

I’d vaguely known about it, sometimes coming across it in more literary publications like the NYT, but never the way I was being taught: as a paired bracket: not to explain what you said previous but to neatly unroll your overthinking into.

as a chronic over-thinker, it stuck with me, and without realizing it bled into my native languages like blood, until I realized there was barely an essay I wrote that went without including this strange, foreign glyph.

2. A lot of shallowness and lack of intelligence hides behind labels and jargon. I’ve always had an intuition that forcing myself not to use labels often pushed me into breaking down concepts to their core, most minute level in a way that few invested the effort in doing: But I think it just clicked properly for me how universal and obvious that filter is.

3. If someone has an idea for a specific sound that doesn’t yet exist and they want to mix, experiment with, or create, and the human mind although never having heard it before would be emotionally and physically moved by it — as music and auditory experiences have the capacity of doing — does that sound not deserve its place in humanity’s museum of existence even though it can? or should its creation be made difficult, its license restricted only to the holders of specific software, instruments, and money to buy them?

the answer seems obvious, except when that tool becomes AI? There are cases where the moral argument against AI can be legitimate, but for most I think it needs to be re-evaluated how much of it is a cloak around selfishness preventing the advancement of humanity’s cumulative archive and experience.

because at the core of it, all such realizations about AI skip the fact that it reduces the barrier of entry for things we might see created in the world.

4. My best creative eras begin and end with moments of extreme happiness or a thrill of emotions; my best, most poetic writings come from anger, sadness, or any enormous magnitude of emotions, and that ability I am unable to tap into without them. I’m not quite sure I hate that, because it makes me very human. Very real. What is a “human” if it is tied to “systems” and imitating the very creatures we created to try and imitate us? The most physical manifestation of the dead internet theory, an endless loop where we imitate the characteristics of our imitators and they our imitation until our graph of self-improvement attains complete… loss.