LVNA Hotelambush questions
Tell Me About YourselfI’m a 19 year old who is currently a student in Philosophy and Hispanophone Literature, but underneath this my true passion lies in writing and creative production in general. I enjoy literature as a vantage point into how others extravert representations of their own reality and philosophy as a means of giving shape to the worlds I build once I’ve generated them internally.
What do you study or do for a living? How did you come to do that? What do you like or dislike about it?
Initially I was only studying philosophy. As a kid I was rather interested in science and the potential for studying geology or cartography. Maps and topography always interested me because I felt they were beautiful, yet incredibly reductive in the sense that they deny the liminal and shifting nature of reality. Ultimately, what I would call these underlying “internal perceptions” began to exert more weight in my psyche, and I became more interested in exploring them than the world itself. I began to write poetry that detailed internal visions I had that reflected a sense of liminality that the maps never could. I enjoyed the rhythmic quality with which I could write. Personally, I’m not attracted to a lot of philosophy (especially the Anglo-American variant), because it tries to concretize and define clearly our experience of reality. My main interest within philosophy is in the realm of aesthetics. Nietzsche in particular attracts me, because his aesthetics emphasize a view of reality in which internal experience may be considered just as real as the external, to the extent that they do not have to be explained, but simply captured and accepted within themselves. In a sense you could say I enjoy the argumentation of philosophy as a form of advocating for my own interests and mental explorations, which I feel are endangered by current objectivist views of the world purported by science.
My interest in literature emerged slowly. As a kid I loathed it because of the way it was presented in class as something structured and allegorical...the notion that writing has to emphasize a specific message or point is anathema to me...I believe in the value of its exploration in itself. As such my interest in literature was a self-inspired transformation. I believe in an “artistic baton passing” so to speak...I started out listening to music and visualizing scenes of people and places...building up these worlds of my own and shaping them through characters and landscapes. I’d describe my style of writing as acid naturalism. To me it’s a bit of a subgenre of magical realism, but I’m interested in constantly finding metaphors in the physical worlds I create and focusing in on my character’s perceptions of them to reveal things about how the way they look at the world reflects them and their conscious experience. I enjoy creating clashing perspectives, and see my characters as conduits who reveal forces that exist beyond them, but which they embody. It’s because of this that my work can tend to be cruel and disgusts readers because I usually place the “contour” upon which characters fall above the characters themselves, using them to reveal more than to be.
What are your values, and why?
I tend to dislike defining values, because I don’t enjoy being bound to one mode of being. Nonetheless, I’ve come to recognize that no matter how much I try to sojourn internal realities, there are things about me that I can’t avoid. I wouldn’t call these values though...they are more akin to unalienable desires which usually exist in an interpersonal realm. What that means is that no matter how much I isolate myself and leave the “communal world” I end up depending and relying highly upon those I’ve created strong relationships with and at the end of the day probably would save them at all costs. Interacting with those I love helps to keep me sane and not completely lost from “reality.”
What else do you do on a daily basis? What are your interests and hobbies? Why do you do them?
On the daily I tend to spend most of my time in my head...I’m rather impenetrable to things outside of me unless they captivate me with a sense of beauty that can’t be denied. I write every day, usually as a means of dealing with and exploring pervasive mental imagery. I also tend to run a lot as I feel it reinforces my connection to the world, though ironically it can have the effect of intensifying my thoughts. Music is a large part of how I spend my time as well. I’m constantly exploring new genres and artists. From time to time I will get into a “reading mode” and usually when this occurs I will voraciously read for a period of time, but in the interim I will just essentially do nothing structured. I also go through periods of moderate cannabis use...when I’m at the beginning of one of these periods I tend to find a heightening of my experience of internal visions, and also use the drug to intensify my emotional experiences. I find it to be something that allows me to remember things that I have blocked out from my memory, and to force myself to confront these things so that I can perhaps transform them and use them as inspiration for my creations. Nonetheless, I tend to go through these periods quickly and stop once they begin to blur the lines too much between waking and dreaming reality (so for no more than 3 days with long intervals in between).
What do you look for in friends? In romantic relationships?
Most of all I look for stimulating individuals...mentally, sexually and emotionally. Because I am generally cut off, I thrive off interacting with people who are also either ready to share and bond over their perceptions and observations with me, or people who will give me an intense experience of the world itself. Romantically I find myself caught up, because I tend to seek out people who would more or less “complete” my experience of reality by offering me a vastly different perspective on life. I’ve been very attracted to extroverts because of this, because their experience of reality is so present and as I perceive them perceive the world I begin to lust over their perspective. I realize this sorta describes “duality,” but I’m not sure I believe in that theory. Most of these relationships end up failing because there’s a lack of true understanding. In the past I’ve run away from people who I think would understand me “too well,” because I don’t like confronting aspects of myself that are unchanging or feeling like I’ve been exposed by someone who can truly get me.
What conflicts have you encountered recently with other people? Why did they happen? Which kinds seem to happen on a regular basis?
Most conflicts I have tend to arise because of my intensity and demands for intimacy from others. I loathe “faking” emotions, and have been called out for being unfriendly towards those who overwhelm me with emotional ebullience. In general I won’t interact with someone if I get the sense that they want something “transactional.” Because of this, especially in romantic relationships, I’ve been criticized for being “too intense” and always needing to discuss serious topics. Nonetheless, I’m completely uninterested in interaction if I don’t think there’s a potential for mutual growth and true vulnerability.
How would your friends describe you?
Passionate, artistic, intense, cerebral, isolated, and pessimistic, and swinging back and forth between saying a lot and nothing at all.
What are your weaknesses? What criticism do you often face from others? What do you dislike about yourself?
I’m awful at integrating myself into any sort of community and bonding over “chill activities.” Personally I wish I had more of a grounded connections to things around me. I do think I have very strong emotions that I would like to share, but I know I sometimes repress them and don’t fully express them as a survival tactic. I noted both of these things strongly when I took magic mushrooms recently. Essentially I was experiencing what I feel I had neglected and repressed within me (the entire experience was complete, life giving and harmonious emotion...I reflected a lot on those I love and why I want to see them find happiness). I also in this experience found myself for once enmeshed in the world around me. Sometimes things like bird calls annoy me because I’m an awful insomniac so I associate them with that, but in this case I was completely entranced by them, the grass, the trees etc. and even saw a mandala in the clouds, allowing me to once again find beauty outside me, this time not in the form of a lustful romantic connection.
In what areas of life can you manage well on your own? In what areas of your life would you like help?
Not many? Lol...I feel rather helpless in daily activities and lots of times when I do things on my own without structure imposed on me I fall into a state of doing nothing but exploring my thoughts. That said, the academic world is a social environment I connect very well with and in school I’m generally able to contribute to discussion and earn good grades. I’d like help in integrating myself a bit more into realities that aren’t just academic...I’d enjoy to be a part of like a backpacking community or something like that where you just go somewhere with no agenda and explore natural things.
What things do you find to be a chore? What things do you enjoy more than others?
Anything that occurs around the house I guess I find to be a chore in addition to forced social interactions, which extends to my family. I prefer organic intepersonal interaction. I also kinda hate board games and those more sort of lowkey activities where people group around each for no other purpose than to just do so. It adds an extra layer of disconnection between you and individuals, which I dislike. More than others, I enjoy writing and listening to music. I still love map-drawing, and reading theoretical books (mainly philosophy) as well as works of a few select authors I really admire (recently been devouring Herman Hesse’s works).
What goals, aspirations, or plans do you have for the future? How did you come to have them?
Honestly I just want to reach a place where my “internal journey” finds a way to be financed and made stable. It doesn’t matter to me if that’s through academia, or finding a way for my writing to get published and I don’t concern myself with how much success in the concrete I would have. I’d probably rather have it not be in relation to academia, because whenever I’m in a context like that I can feel my path being slightly manipulated in relation to the goals of the institution, but I’d still take it over another career. Ideally I just need to be in a place where I can switch between activities during the day (I fucking hate sitting at a desk), and enjoy discussing things in depth with others so academia wouldn’t be a complete shitshow.
If you had enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life without working, what would you do with your time?
I’m generally resistant to the idea of a utopia, but I’d probably like to buy a house and populate it with things that I’ve created in my mind but embodied physically. I like this idea of carrying things from the inside to the out...converting ideas and dreams into reality. Juxtaposing the real and the dream, because I find that sort of dialectical positioning of the two helps to reinforce and demonstrate the similarity of both of those realms. Beyond this, as I stated earlier realizing I do have strong emotional needs and interpersonal appetite, I’d hope to have some sort of relationship with someone and to do things to support them. It wouldn’t have to be like we have to live together at all times, but it would be nice to have that consistency.
What traits do you find endearing that others might dislike? What traits are considered positive/neutral by others but tend to annoy you?
I love anyone who’s not afraid to explore tangents in the moment and to “get off track.” I like discussions that derail and then organically find themselves back on the tracks. I love people who are daring and create an original aesthetic for themselves. Things I don’t like are people who say overly normative trends, spout cliche statements that are accepted by the masses as if they were verifiable a priori truths that we don’t need to investigate for ourselves. I don’t like people who are kind because they want others to be kind to them (transactionality again).
What kinds of things do you do to manage and/or beautify your environment (your room, your house, etc.)? What do you think of daily chores?
I wish I had more motivation to beautify my environment, but I really don’t. Sometimes I imagine what I would put on my walls, but that’s always changing so I don’t put much at all. People tell me my living spaces are messy and ascetic looking. I would say overall I probably prefer a minimalist aesthetic. I used to have stars on my ceiling as a kid and that was a nice quirk...I could do something like that again because it’s kinda hilarious pretending the darkness of your room is permeable to the light of the worlds above as is true outside. Again I like that dual tension...putting something alien inside my house would be nice...something that doesn’t belong. I hate daily chores and do them completely randomly and out of order...anyhow they give me more time to think, but sometimes I get lost in thought and spend hours doing what should take like twenty minutes if I focused.
How do you behave around strangers?
Cold, calculating, intense, and if we speak not accommodating myself to them to make it clear I’d rather not have a fake conversation.
How do you react to conflict? What do you do if somebody insults or attacks you?
I really hate conflict and tend to just let it slip by me and keep my thoughts to myself unless its consistent and then I let someone know how I feel. I don’t mind if someone insults me unless I really care about them and in that case I’d probably have a conversation with them.
What is one (listing a few LOL) common misconception that people have? Explain why it is wrong.
One of the greatest to me is that reality is decipherable through science alone. I do think it’s possible science will give us a clear rendering that we can communicate among ourselves with large certainty, but arguments by philosophers like L.A. Paul who argue that we can’t show our experiences of things are always the same ring true to me.
There is a cartesian self that is omnipresent. A lot of my thoughts I experience from a completely disembodied and observing point of view, so why would this need to connect to my sense of self?
There is a deterministic arc of time that humans are travelling on, and if we do not conquer the world, natural selection might create another being that will. To me this sort of idea is awful because it leads people to assert humans are completely self-interested and look for self-advancement all the time, when I do believe there is a way to experience life without a fully thetic sense of self who perceives the world with a consciousness that is for itself. I think my art celebrates this idea by “losing itself in the moment” so to speak, breaking with causality and linear progressional narratives of human experience. I think I employ some of what Schopenhauer talks about when he says humans fall into complete contemplation of something in the moment and it transforms into something else.
What did you do last Friday?
Uncommonly for myself, I went to a party and head some great conversation with people.
What is your biggest accomplishment?
Maintaining a friendship with my best friend from high school. We almost lost touch irrevocably because of the intensity of this friendship (we kept each other safe during times of mental breakdown). This was a big accomplishment because it showed me we could take something that was built around commiseration and empathizing over something that almost destroyed our friendship and transform it into something meaningful when the chaos was over. This “narrative” means a lot to me so to speak. I hope many things in the world go this way.
What is something you regret?
I guess as I referenced earlier running from the one person I could have found myself in a romantic situation with where I felt I’d truly be understood. I look at this as a great failure allegorically for me because it was rejecting someone who could tell me “it’s okay to embrace yourself and not simply sojourn forever.”
Who do you admire, and why?
In Philosophy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche because of their unique understandings about aesthetics. In film Lars Von Trier because of the way he plays with aesthetics in the moment to synthesize a very intoxicating and altered experience of reality that reveal forgotten things about human cognition. Musically I enjoy Nick Cave, Dan Bejar, Constanza Bizraelli because of their experimental styles and super interesting narratives. In literature I love Cortázar for his dreamlike approach to viewing human relationships. Even more so I love Kafka and Hesse for their alienesque presentations of reality and their serene underlying messages.
What's been on your mind? Has anything been worrying or concerning you? What problems have you encountered lately?
I’ve been worrying about my intensifying isolation. A lot of my recent writing has been somewhat strange. Poetry as I said before is just pure visual exploration of realities to me. I’m a conduit for what I see, but narrative is more self-reflective and I’ve been worried about the self that I encounter in it. I fear like some of my characters I might become cut off and dissociative. I’m also getting tired of the environment I’m living in so I’m wanting to change that soon and find a place where I can be part of a more interesting mythology.
What are your religious or spiritual beliefs and why do you hold them?
As a kid I rejected God because I was terrified of eternal conscious existence. I thought, if this does not come to an end, it cannot be endowed with meaning because we need flux and the depreciation of some moments to appreciate others. That said, through my drug explorations, specifically using LSD and magic mushrooms, I feel I’ve glimpsed into “psychology wholeness” or total harmony with my surroundings and love. I don’t think this will present itself ever in my reality, but I think because I’ve glimpsed at it I can’t call it completely abstract...so I believe in that.
What are your political beliefs, and why? To what extent do you care about politics?
I’m not very apolitical. I would enjoy to see a world where there is less income inequality, but I think sometimes politics puts forth this idea that we’re trapped in our circumstances which I disagree with. The system doesn’t need to change for someone’s life to become valuable and have the potential to synthesize meaning...that can be done on a microcosmic level...so I believe in that.
Would you ever be interested in starting a business? Why or why not? What role would you play in it? What kind of business would it be?
Not even remotely. I don’t want my soul to be sucked into something consistent like that that would constrain and limit my activity and require 100% focus all the time. Too scatterbrained for that.
What kind of work environment do you prefer? What do you look for in a job?
Everyone does their own work and reconvenes to talk about what they’ve made.
What is or was your favorite school subject and why?
Spanish Literature because it showed me that you could represent mysterious psychological things and a truly surrealistic world on paper. I also loved calculus, because I liked visualizing how things changed over time and the tension of being able to plot them perfectly with what I really felt like they were. I took some calculus graphs from school and would pretend to map out human relationships and stuff like that with them which was satisfying because it wasn’t quite true and yet you could pretend it was.
How do you approach responsibility? What do you tend to expect of others?
I do what’s necessary to stay alive and pretty much expect the same of others. I don’t need things to go above and beyond. I also believe in being irresponsible to find yourself outside of the system and look back on it with a critical gaze.
Where did you go on your most recent vacation? What did you do there? How did you like it and why?
I went to the western United States and visited national parks. I went hiking with some friends and had a nice time writing and just enjoying the scenery. It was a road trip and I loved being on the move...because my mind is always moving through images it suits me well to move through places too...I liked harmonizing internal and external rhythm.
What were you like as a kid? How have you changed since you were a child?
I was creative and spent time alone. I was rather sensitive, more so than I am now, probably. I liked just going on the playground and creating worlds as I do now...I would sing a lot of melodies. I was shy and didn’t like asking for help. I was considered scatterbrained and told I should try to get to know more people by teachers because I spent a lot of time alone.
What was your high school experience like?
Not so bad. I didn’t give a fuck about the social environment, and I would say kinda like little sprouts of grass popping through the sidewalk I found myself in a community of semi-freaks who just talked about random stuff and had a good time while learning a lot. I was also super depressed though and so were a lot of my friends. It was bad, but it taught me the value of interpersonal support and true love.
Talk about a significant event from your life.
I lived abroad as a kid where my family is from. It changed my life because it gave me a window into the fact that I had been somewhat created by a social situation, so it gave me the opportunity to actually form my own perspective. Ever since I’ve kinda flipped around in many viewpoints wherever I am. That’s a difference between myself and others. I was given multiple narratives, so i assembled my own. I wasn’t just organically part of one, so i realized you don’t have to be constrained to the social narratives that supposedly construct you.
Do you like kids? Why or why not?
Sometimes. I enjoy their proclivity towards fantasy and find their lack of pessimism refreshing. Still, they are their own people and can be just as bad as the next person. They bully left and right, so I’d basically have to pretend like they didn’t to fully accept them.