semiannualbeating

About me:

most people know me as auto or semiannualbeatings. i write poetry; i've been writing since fifth grade, which is long enough that it feels less like a hobby and more like an organ. i don't really remember what i was before i started writing. whenever something frustrates me, interests me, confuses me, or leaves a dent somewhere in my chest, it usually ends up becoming a poem eventually.

a lot of what i write revolves around politics, queerness, identity, community, anger, history, and the strange experience of existing in a world that often feels built incorrectly. poetry has always felt more honest than conversation. people assume poems hide things behind metaphors; i think they usually reveal things their authors would've struggled to say directly. i post my work online, mostly on pinterest, and i hope to self-publish one day. whether that happens or not, i'm probably going to keep writing until my hands stop working.

music occupies an embarrassing amount of my life.

actually, that's a lie. i don't think it's embarrassing at all.

there's rarely a moment during the day where i'm not listening to something. walking somewhere? headphones. going to a show? obviously. sitting around doing nothing? music. writing? music. staring at the ceiling for no reason? music. entire years of my life have become attached to certain songs. there are albums i physically cannot listen to without immediately remembering specific streets, specific conversations, specific versions of myself.

my taste tends to lean toward folk-punk, screamo, skramz, powerviolence, and other genres that many people hear once and immediately decide aren't for them. i think what attracts me to those genres is how impossible they are to fake. there's something deeply human about hearing someone sound like they're tearing themselves apart just to communicate an idea. i don't really care about technical perfection. i care about sincerity. i'd rather hear genuine emotion recorded through a terrible microphone than something polished into lifelessness. music is probably responsible for half the people i've met and most of the places i care about. going to shows remains one of my favorite things in the world. there's something comforting about standing in a room full of strangers and realizing everyone showed up because they cared about the same thing. for a few hours nobody has to justify their existence. nobody has to explain themselves. everyone's just there.

i think that's why i value local scenes so much.

community feels increasingly rare.

a lot of modern life feels intentionally isolating; work, school, social media, consumer culture, all of it encourages people to exist beside one another rather than with one another. shows feel like one of the few places where that barrier occasionally disappears.

outside of poetry and music, photography occupies a ridiculous amount of my attention.

i've never been particularly interested in photographing extraordinary things.

everyone photographs extraordinary things.

everyone photographs landmarks and sunsets and vacations and major life events.

i like photographing parking lots at dusk.

i like photographing old buildings.

i like photographing streets that probably won't look the same in ten years.

or my beautiful friends whom I adore.

there's something beautiful about documenting ordinary things before they disappear. every photograph becomes evidence that a moment existed. a lot of people treat photography like preservation; i've always thought of it more as resistance. not permanent resistance, because nothing lasts forever, but resistance nonetheless.

the same mindset probably explains why i enjoy sewing.

i like repairing things.

i like altering things.

i like taking something mass-produced and making it feel personal.

modern consumer culture has this weird obsession with convincing people that individuality can be purchased; buy the right thing, wear the right thing, own the right thing. sewing reminds me that individuality is usually created instead. i enjoy the process itself. i enjoy spending time making something feel uniquely mine. i enjoy proving that damaged things aren't automatically useless.

which brings me to school... guh

i dislike school in the way people dislike having rocks in their shoes. it's always there. occasionally tolerable. consistently irritating.

the frustrating thing is that i love learning.

i love history.

i love politics.

i love reading.

i love researching random topics for hours.

i love understanding why societies function the way they do.

what i don't love is spending years inside an educational system that often seems more concerned with producing obedient workers than curious people.

the american education system constantly presents itself as the great equalizer while simultaneously reproducing many of the inequalities it claims to solve. students are expected to memorize enormous amounts of information, regurgitate it on command, and then forget most of it immediately afterward. creativity becomes secondary. curiosity becomes secondary. actual understanding becomes secondary. the grade matters. the test matters. the number matters.

everything becomes measurable.

everything becomes marketable.

everything becomes preparation for something else.

it's difficult not to notice how frequently education gets discussed in economic terms. future careers. future productivity. future earnings. future labor. people talk about learning like it's valuable only because somebody might eventually profit from it.

i've never been convinced that's what education should be.

learning should make people harder to manipulate.

learning should make people more thoughtful.

learning should make people more capable of questioning the systems surrounding them.

instead, questioning those systems is often treated as a distraction.

politically, i consider myself a libertarian socialist. i've always been drawn toward ideas centered around community, cooperation, and collective responsibility rather than competition. i think people deserve meaningful influence over the institutions affecting their lives. i think many structures people describe as natural are actually maintained because someone benefits from them.

gender is one of those structures fs.

being transgender has influenced how i think about almost everything. once you've spent enough time examining one set of social expectations, you start noticing others. people talk about gender like it's this eternal, unchanging truth; but so much of what gets categorized as masculine or feminine turns out to be cultural. expectations change. norms change. definitions change. entire societies have understood these concepts differently.

i'm a transgender man.

that's important.

BUT it's also not the only thing about me.

sometimes people learn you're trans and immediately start treating it like the center of your entire existence. meanwhile i'm trying to explain that i spent three hours yesterday listening to music and sewing my awful patch pants xd

being trans matters because i matter.

not because it's the only thing worth discussing.

Who I'd like to meet: