I need to write. It’s midnight; something is wrong with me. These words might be my last! I had a weird day today (the school schedule was weird, I guess). Um. Where do I start?

I think I should mention nearly fainting. That was a cool experience: I blacked out, nearly collapsed, couldn’t breathe, and felt my brain… become pain. Every part of it was on fire. Fainting hurts. A dozen seconds later, I regained the ability to use the neurons in my brain for anything other than pain processing and decided to take a sip of water. Nearly threw up. Turns out fainting is not a great experience! I admit this episode may be a sign of a greater medical problem I have, but I can’t be bothered to investigate it and, like, I’m still alive, so whatever.

And nothing hurts anymore; I feel kinda free. We’re still the kids we used to be.

These lyrics—used by Kanye West in “Ghost Town”—have been stuck in my head for a few days. They’re an earworm, something highly memorable, a memetic. (If you haven’t read There is No Antimemetics Division, which I read two days ago, I highly recommend it!). Anyways: after fainting, nothing hurts anymore. Pain goes away. It’s a temporary problem—in fact most problems are, actually.

There are very few problems that are truly permanent. Crimes, yes. Debt and other mishaps with large organizations, sure. But even the biggest problem you face today is really just a dozen seconds in the grand scheme of things. It might black out your world, cover you in all-consuming pain, and make you finally sit down to write out your thoughts (oh—yikes) and still: it’ll go away. Tomorrow it will hurt less. Maybe it won’t hurt at all; maybe it’ll be just the memory of pain.

And on the subject of pain: did you know that one in every three GoFundMe campaigns, today, is for medical bills? American healthcare is, at its core, a popularity contest where if you lose, you die. (I might write a short story or novel with that as the core premise. Would healthcare CEOs get shot in that world too? Maybe I’ll write that as a way of procrastinating.)

And man, do I benefit from procrastinating. It’s not that I have a lot of work—it’s the opposite. The devil dances on my idle hands. I have an exceptional amount of work while simultaneously having no work at all. A twelve-page foreign policy whitepaper that we had two weeks to do took me four hours (submitted at 11:57pm). I had to prep a model United Nations (MUN) case for one of my classes as homework; I didn’t. I walked into class today and spoke more times than any other student in the class—and I don’t have any idea what the impacts of high American tariffs on the European Union are. But, y’know, be confident. Smile more, and everyone will listen!

I think nobody has any idea what they’re doing. I don’t know the format of MUN, but I just showed up confident and ready to bullshit. I did that for years in Speech and Debate (until I quit—check out Resolved: Debate is Stupid) and it worked splendidly; I am a great programmer (allegedly) and still have no idea what on God’s green and all-loving Earth a Box<dyn FnOnce() + Send + 'static> is^[1]. I just pretend I do. Be confident.

But I have to wonder (which is another Kanye West song…): does anybody have any idea what they’re doing? Today the world’s richest person (Elon Musk, for those who don’t know) modified the behaviour of the Grok language model to always take Musk’s side in debates. So, yeah. Now Grok is claiming it would rather vaporize Slovakia than Elon Musk, that Elon Musk is the “Top 1” human in any category, and of course that… well, NSFW warning (text only). Obviously an intentional decision by Musk that went wrong, but… this guy is smart. Objectively so. How does he make a mistake that embarrassing unless he has no idea what he’s doing? Presidents have admitted that they’ve had no idea what they were doing at some of the tensest moments in world history (the Cuban Missile Crisis and various other nuclear threats were basically decided by coin toss, by the way).

Nobody has any idea what they’re doing. So yeah. Nothing hurts anymore.

(p.s. — I didn’t proofread. Cope.)