pizzinnom

[britneyshakespeare]

it is weird being an aromantic asexual who is incidentally attractive. like. i just came back from a concert with my friends who have known me for years and know that about me. some of the very few real-life friends who know that about me actually and i only told them relatively recently. regardless. the only reason i had bothered to bring it up w them is that they had seen me in SO many situations that telling them “i’m asexual” was if anything just clarification. just confirmation, like, don’t worry. it’s not an inability to attach to others or whatever. if you can’t tell. like they’d seen me be pursued by quite a few people in our time as friends and at some point it seems like a curious thing if i only ever seem to feel negatively about anyone who’s attracted to me, ever, no matter who it is. and they were understanding and i knew they’d be. yeah.

we were talking on the way back about bucket list concerts we’d still like to see. we saw stromae which was a really big one of mine (my fucking boy btw, i had an amazing time). i mentioned that i don’t have very many, as i’m rarely the person to be like “yeah, let’s go to a concert” unless i have people i know i wanna go with. like i’ve been meaning to see the jonas brothers w my sister and sisters-in-law ever since they came back because it’d be a fun thing for us since we always listen to them together. 

but i would genuinely love to see super junior someday, like just for myself, wherever whenever if i was just able to get transportation (i don’t drive). i’ve loved suju for years but i got really back into them in 2020 in the pandemic as a sort of nostalgia comfort thing (but also the music they’ve put out in recent years is like, literally the best in their discography, they just keep getting better w age). and i had to go on this tangent to explain it, right?

in the first months of the pandemic, there was something weird happening to people psychologically. some kind of end-of-the-world loneliness. i mentioned that i had like 5 or 6 different people in my DMs at the time interested in me. not all of them men. and the friend who was driving said “you know, diana, if this were literally anyone else talking, i would think that this is some enormous humblebrag—”

and i like. didn’t even think about it that way. i was just trying to make my point that i had a serious thought in 2020 of like, when the world opened back up, just doing one (1) seriously manipulative thing in my life and convince one of those men who was thirsting for me to buy me tickets to super junior and go with me. it was hypothetical. this hasn’t happened and all but certainly will not. i would not feel good taking advantage of someone’s feelings like that. 

but i had to go on a tangent even before that because i was like. oh my goodness. i didn’t even realize that was a humblebrag. i’m sorry. i’m just telling a story.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Please tell me a story about friendship.

Peter and I became friends in high school. (Our age difference was negligible by the standards of childhood friendships -- I was a senior, he was a sophomore. The notion of "children" might not apply to us at all.)

It's not entirely clear to me why we became friends. It's not clear at all. I suspect that, in my case, I just liked him. He had a distinctive kind of perfectionism -- more obvious, in a sense, than mine -- a perfectionism that made it so that everything he did came out right. Even when it was something trivial, like math homework, even when it was something important, like an English essay, even when it was something more contrived, like performance art. He was one of those people who, when he puts his mind to something, it's right -- in the sense that the thing works, that it looks or sounds or tastes "right." He was able to pull this off because it was something that most people never learned -- that math is supposed to be a pleasure, or at least that it should be as beautiful as a poem. He wasn't just good at solving problems, he was good at liking solving problems, at the kind of curiosity you feel in the process.

Not long after he became my friend, he stopped doing well in school. That was strange, because until then he had been above average in all his classes. I wondered whether he was playing at being a dope. He was quiet, and rarely said anything in class, because if he had something to say, he'd say it in the right way at the right moment. He was also a boy, and while I don't have much in the way of experience of that, I have seen enough heterosexual male friendships that I didn't notice how female-coded his style was. I didn't notice that, when he said something amusing or insightful or pretty, it was the sort of thing that gets said by people of a particular gender -- women, in this case. It was something his girlfriend might say. (Was she his girlfriend then? His girlfriend in the time when I still had a clear sense of "now"? Or his girlfriend in the time when "now" became muddier? And would that make a difference?)

Whatever the case, I knew things were wrong in his life by the time I graduated. I was leaving for college; I think I suspected the relationship was probably ending. But I didn't think the problem was anything permanent -- I figured he'd shake it off, at least a little. I figured he'd just have to learn that failure wasn't really an option.

But he didn't. Failure followed. He dropped out of college. He became mentally unstable. He stopped talking much. He became a sort of wraith, a thing that sometimes showed up in the house we shared, slept on the couch, scribbled in the journals, drank endlessly, and at some times just wandered away to God knows where for God knows how long. He began showing up unannounced in the middle of the night, claiming that he'd been gone for days. At one point, he wandered away to the other side of the country, couch-surfing until he decided to come back. When he came back, he didn't seem much better. I remember asking him, one night, whether he had anything to talk about, and being surprised when he started talking about how he'd been to Harvard, that day, for a meeting. I asked him how he got there, and he told me he'd taken the train. He didn't say why he was there.

By this time, my relationship with him was strange. I'm not sure I would have called it a friendship anymore, although I never really thought of it as over -- just as something I was doing, out of concern. And a concern is a different sort of thing, I think.

On some level, I thought that I was being helpful, by staying his friend. I thought that my connection with him would provide a kind of constant care. I wouldn't give him up. I'd be by his side no matter what. I wouldn't abandon him.

But at some point, in retrospect, I began to realize that I didn't have a choice. To lose him would have been to lose . . . not a part of myself, but a parcel of myself. I realize now that my friendship with him had become a way for me to hold on to a version of myself I could barely recognize. But I wouldn't have noticed that yet. I'd have said that Peter was my friend. I'd have said that friendship was a part of me. I'd have said that I knew him because I knew him, or perhaps because I knew him a bit more than I knew myself. And I was right, at least in part. I did know him, I guess -- he was my friend, in some sense. He was also, I think, a way for me to hide.

The last thing I remember of him was . . . coming over to my dorm room, at some ungodly hour, to tell me he was going to die. And then wandering away again, to God knows where.

As he was leaving, he thanked me for the tape of Diamond Age, which I had recently sent to him. There was nothing noteworthy about this; he thanked me for many things. But I sensed that it wasn't the same thanking one usually gets. It wasn't gratitude, or even just politeness, but gratitude of a particular kind. This was a distorted thanking, an overextended thanking, a thanking where one used the thanking as a kind of compensation for the fact that the person was not being thanked back.

What was it that I was thanked for? I don't know. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for providing me with a stable rock in a time of storm. Thank you for providing me with a way to be happy, and for providing me with happiness. Thank you for . . . my God, I don't know. Thank you for going through hell, and knowing that there is some part of me still alive in hell. Thank you for my sense of distance, which makes life and its troubles bearable. Thank you for sticking by me, through the bad times and the good. Thank you, friend, for . . . for . . . being my friend.

Peter died, a few months later. I didn't know this until a few months after it happened. When I found out, it felt as if I was being told I was dead. It felt like being told that I'd been carrying around a parcel of myself all this time, and that the parcel had died. In some sense, it felt like being told I had died. I was grateful. I had a few vague memories of him, but that's all I'd had. I had been content with that. Now that it was gone, I wanted it back, but I didn't know how to ask.

[formulatrash]

Lewis just got his 7th title. I'm happy for him.

Me too. What Lewis has done is so almost incomprehensibly titanic, in any sport, that it feels like something that needs contextualising again and again.

It’s easy, if you remember Lewis in the hybrid era, in Mercedes, since Rosberg left - whatever the recency is that creates the illusion it’s almost straightforward for him to perform at this extraordinary level - to minimise his achievements, even if you don’t intend to. Lewis now is a force of nature so impossible to rival that it wouldn’t really matter if you gave everyone GP3 cars and told them to go, the rest of the field would just be closer together behind him. 

I am, as Tumblr constantly likes to remind me, very old - nearly as old as Lewis himself - so I remember him arriving in the junior formulas and hoping that he’d get to F1. He was goofy and nerdy and awkward and a bit of a gamer - actually way more like Lando than you’d believe, in retrospect but he had this burning, furious defiance that he was going to get there and win. Because that was what he needed, to overcome the barriers and my god, there were a lot of people openly saying what they try to at least code these days, back then.

Lewis when he was young was a Verstappen-esque firecracker of teammate beef. I don’t know that anyone other than maybe Max could have taken on Alonso, at that point, in his junior year - he’d destroy Nelson Piquet Jr, despite all his weight of racing heritage, the next - and it took a level of pretended self-assurance that I don’t think Lewis had, then, at all.

He’d proven himself all the way up, was still proving it. Licking his and McLaren’s wounds, meekly apologising after the end of the spygate scandal he’d had nothing to do with while Fernando pranced off from the smouldering remnants, there were plenty of people who were so pleased to see Lewis humbled. 

He took the championship, instead. Which made a lot of people very angry, despite really it only being Felipe Massa who had a right to be. It was very underrated, in the British press; made more striking because Jenson Button’s win, the following season, really wasn’t and the ludicrous bar that Lewis would have to jump to prove himself was moved again.

Not just good enough for F1. Not just good enough to take on a two-time champion. Not just good enough to become a champion himself in his second season. Lewis was regarded as a sort of curious celebrity most people barely considered an athlete or British, in the press.

He’s never gone a single season without winning a race. Even in dog cars, biding his time for an opportunity. Olden times McLaren was a different, dysfunctional beast to the one Andreas Seidl has somehow steered back to success and especially the Dennis era was run with a pretty iron fist* so it wasn’t necessarily somewhere the drivers had much ability to steer developing the car and you can see how badly that affected them in the KERS and ERS era. 

Comparatively, joining Mercedes, Lewis walked into an opportunity where instead of having to furiously fight for that, he could work on it as a project for the whole team. People really underestimate how hard he works, in terms of factory hours and how it wasn’t always the fastest car. 

The team pitted him and Nico against each other to force the project forwards and that turned into a destructive mess, backfiring on them quite badly. It’s probably the worst call Mercedes have made, in their modern F1 existence, although a cynic would say: it worked.

Yes, they trod a line of near-implosion for years that was only steadied by Nico’s retirement but they became, unquestionably, the best, in the inter-garage arms race. Lewis didn’t necessarily become a better driver in the sense of having more brilliant race craft for it but things like qualifying laps, at which he is now without doubt the GOAT, became so crucial that he learned to take on more and more feedback from engineers without ever forgetting it. 

When they tell them, on the radio, that their teammate is finding more speed through corner X and braking later - and they’ll show them more detailed telemetry - then Lewis can, like any driver, take that on and do it. But he can also make hundreds of micro-adjustments per lap without ever forgetting them or dropping one - again, they all can do it, sometimes, perfectly but he just doesn’t ever not. 

Since 2016 he’s been able to grow as a driver without being in the pressure-cooker of mind games with his teammate and that shows, too. A more outward-looking, globally-focussed Lewis, a Lewis who’s more comfortable sharing elements of himself, treating himself less like an industrial espionage project.

(some irony, for a man who started his career amidst spy gate)

If Lewis was a white boy from a millionaire or billionaire family, his achievements in sporting terms would still be staggering. He’s neither of those things, so they’re placed on a different scale.

It is now, even for the most racist, the most close-minded alleged fan of the sport, impossible to deny that he has the records on paper. They can’t take away the seven titles and 94 wins, no matter how they try to minimise them. The bar that was constantly set higher has been met and exceeded and a driver who, for a lot of years, looked set to be a one-off champion whose brilliance could be more easily swept away as a footnote to diversity, has become the benchmark against whom other achievements can be measured. 

That Lewis did that despite the odds against him? The racists won’t see that and sadly can and do try to deny it but that is a world-changing, sport-transforming moment that’s been a decade-and-a-half in the making, since F1 started looking achievable for him. 

Lewis has nothing left to prove, so all that furious energy he’s used for years to get this will take other outlets - he still, after all, as everyone, has a lot to change. I am so excited to get to work in the sport during this era, to see what kind of transformative effects he’ll have, has already had. The work shouldn’t be on Lewis and mustn’t be on him alone but you do absolutely fucking love to see it getting done.

Anyway, I’m so proud of him. I’m so astounded by the skill and focus - the relentless pursuit that’s driven him all this time and that isn’t diminished at all by having got here. I truly believe Lewis is gonna carry on awhile yet and it’s fucking exciting just to think about what we’re going to witness this short-ass nerd kid who looked kind of sulky and defensive in press conferences for years do.

(and, of course, the first driver accused of being a social media poseur who didn’t pay enough attention to the sport. Plus ca change...)

*This is a really petty example but you had to wear a tie if you went to MTC, as a visiting journalist, in the beforetime.