all i want is to keep everyone i love in the same place; to hold my past and my future in one big room at 49 Spadina and freeze frame. i want all the people i love to stay exactly the same in the ways i love but change in the same ways i do so we can grow up together but never grow apart, all in one city, on the same coast, forever — in the sliver of perfect California sunlight and blue ocean between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in the cross-continential distance between San Francisco and Toronto, in the distance of a train ride between Toronto and a tiny little town called Stirling, where you have to drive a Jeep to get around in the winter. i want to be bicoastal and by that i mean, i want to live in the Pacifica Taco Bell and on the rooftop of the Intrepid Sea Space Air Museum docked in the Hudson River. New York is technically on the Atlantic Ocean. i want my board game friends to be my dance-at-a-Gryffin-concert friends to be my dress-up-for-the-Shrek-rave-friends to be my Ocean Beach bonfire friends to be my algorave friends to be my hot yoga friends to be my go-on-a-lowkey-trip-to-Los-Angeles friends to be my sociotechnical implications of AI policy friends to be my book club friends to be my clown-on-effective-altruism friends to be my discuss-training-in-floating-point-eight friends, is that too much to ask? i could happily spend my whole life writing code on the west coast against a backdrop of Halsey x Lost Kings on loop, watching the sunset against the Mission Peak mountain range — the way that the light hits the Santa Clara ServiceNow sign during golden hour? it could convince you that you’re in a movie. but i could also happily spend my whole life writing code in the quiet of a coffee shop in the East Village, pretending to be something much cooler than a software engineer. i want to exist in the real world, fully present, but also on the internet and on the holodeck, able to be everywhere at once. i don't want to save the world; i just want to save the people i love and take them with me everywhere i go. i roll my eyes at the sparkle-emoji-neighborhood-bring-plants people but they sort of have the right idea. the universe is expanding uniformly in all directions every single moment of our entire lives; we are all getting further away from other all the time. Jeff Bezos says that we should live and work in space to "tap into the limitless resources of space to preserve Earth" but i don't want to get into a rocket ship to visit my friends next door. a cross-continent flight is already far enough; maybe everyone is already far away enough.
To reply you need to sign in.