i had my chaucer recitation today. it went well-ish because i had the whole thing memorized perfectly, only when i was looking at my prof to prove it, i kept blanking on lines. i think i blanked 3 times and it took me about 5 seconds to find my place each time, which was embarrassing, and threw my pronounciation. definitely not my best performance, but he said it was ok and it's only 5% of my grade, so i won't worry further.
after that fiasco, we talked about my essay. what i'd had in mind ended up being not-so-good, but prof s. helped me to streamline it into something much more coherent and interesting. i'm going to miss this class :-( but i hope i will be able to prove myself with the final essay! i like him a lot and i want to impress him.
i am reading "mr. humble and dr. butcher", about robert white, the man who put head transplants on the table. the ethics of it are very interesting; i'm about 60% through right now. i wish the author would spend more time discussing the ethical questions she presents, but regardless, i'm having a good time with it. not so with "mbmbam" -- i guess i've been listening to it so much that it's getting to be too much! but it's good to listen to to go to sleep.
work today was a total drag. no chatty customers. lame! i had a sandwhich though, and i feel very loved today. i think i have been becoming more and more anxious this semester, but oh well...! now it is almost over, with only 2 finals left.
snowy day. cold! got to wear my owlcoat. happy :-)
december 4
i had such a horrible night last night; spent the whole time tossing and turning because of cramps. the time would not pass. finally got up at 3:50 am and shuffled downstairs to take an advil and felt better a short while after that. i slept until noon and only woke when my mom came home, but she wasn't angry with me. i am upset my brother did not think to wake me.
it's always so strange to be awake when everyone else is sleeping and the world is dark and the only noise is the hum of the fans and the dehumidifer and the pipes. outside, snow, and the black sky.
i couldn't do much in the morning because i had no morning to speak of, but i spent some time cleaning and then watched 'twilight' with jesse. i actually liked the intense colour-grading though i know a lot of people make fun of it. it gave the movie personality! all the extras had such cute costumes and hairstyles. i just wish 'twilight' didn't suck, because it did suck, it wasn't very good at all! but i did laugh watching it with them, which is what matters. i remember reading the book in the seventh grade, but not what happened in it or if i liked it or not.
i'm very tired and i am so excited to go to sleep. i feel like i'm forgetting something or like there is something i have to do, but i'm all caught up on all my schoolwork so i'm not sure why i feel that way. maybe it's because i have a deadline tomorrow and another on sunday, but i already have most of the work done for both of them so i don't know why that would be it.
today was the first properly cold day of the season—it was -16! i'm glad i didn't have to go outside because everyone came in half-frozen. -16 isn't even that cold by winter standards, but it's been a whole year since anyone had to deal with it...
hoping my cramps will go away soon... i'm going to go read my book now ^_^ feeling: happy! but a bit anxious. papa brought tangerines and those were very good. i was happy to sit at the table with mama and eat them and talk.
december 5
today was not a very good day. i was so tired and listless the whole time, and i'm not really sure why. i turned in my final for one of my classes and i'm not proud of it at all. i tried to take a risk with the story that i was telling and it didn't pan out because it was so far outside of the wheelhouse of what i'm interested in. i feel like i do that a lot—when the time to show my writing comes i'm not able to because i always choose to write something that doesn't align with my interests. this one ended up being literary fiction in a way that bores me. i'm sure i'll do ok when evaluated on it, but it's the principle of the thing...
i don't know how or why that happens. i guess i have a weird bias against anything i feel comfortable writing, which is totally the opposite of how i should approach it. mostly i'm out of practice and don't know my writing well enough, which is a funny thing to say because i've been writing basically my whole life, but it's true. i want to spend time working on that over the break, but it's hard to not feel like a doomer about it.
apart from that, nothing interesting really happened. i just don't feel very well at all. i can't even properly verbalize my feelings about the writing thing; the way i phrased it here isn't really accurate to how i feel.
hopefully tomorrow will be better. i have work so i'll have to find something good to listen to. probably i'll continue the audiobook for 'the condemnation of blackness'.
i guess i look up to so many literary giants and can so clearly see the things that make them great that it's uspetting when i can't track those same influences and changes in my work. also a stupid thing to say because i am not very old. i don't know! nothing i make is good enough, especially not by my standards. and everyone is pissed off.
december 6
i was basically finished writing this entry and then my tab crashed! >:-( anyway work today was so totally lame. that's typical of the december retail rush, especially on weekends, but that doesn't mean i have to be happy about it... plus all the customers that spoke to me today were irate and condescending so i guess something was in the water. i slept late last night so i was basically primed to be annoyed myself, but i feel like today really tested my patience. they bounced me around between my relatively quiet side of the store in health+beauty and food, which is always crowded and unpleasant, and people ask the stupidest questions! i hate my job in december.
i finished my book during the break ('mr.humble & dr. butcher') and i didn't like it. i had a hard time concentrating on it because some of my coworkers were having a very loud conversation right next to me. there's no options for places to sit during lunch apart from the breakroom so if it sucks, you're screwed. maybe i'll ask the managers if i can crash in their office next time. also, one of the annoying coworkers was my ex-friend from high school who stopped talking to me during the pandemic. we didn't fight or anything, he just stopped talking to me after [] which i am totally over because i am 21 and have better things to worry about, but it still hurts that he didn't bother getting my side of the story or anything. and then i just got sad because i don't really have a lot of friends the way most people do and i feel really lonely a lot of the time at school. that's part of why i want to get more involved with clubs next semester because i think the lack of that specific kind of interaction is making me nuts.
ok so before the pity part i was talking about how much i didn't like the book and that's because i think it presents itself as something it's not. i went into it expecting a dissection of the ethics of head transplantation and was unpleasantly surprised when it turned out to be nothing more than a plodding biography. every time the author got close to talking about something interesting, she drew back and refused to engage with it further. on the bright side, i got through a significant chunk of 'the condemnation of blackness' which is very very good! it's an extremely well-researched and -written documentation of how notions of crime were systemically associated with the black community in america. the work khalil gibran muhammad put into this book is apparent in every word. i highly recommend it, not just because it chronicles its subject with such meticulous detail and logic, but also because i think that it gives you the knowledge and language you need to fight a lot of right-wing rhetoric. overall i consider it a deeply valuable and indispensable book. i will definitely have to sit down with the physical book soon so i can read it more closely.
anyway, i'm going to go play re4 with my sister and then maybe later i will write some. i'm still experiencing a lot of, like, spiritual ennui about my writing and am dissatisfied with it overall but the only way to deal with that is to write more. when will it end...
december 7 & 8
i was busy last night and didn't have enough time to do yesterday's so i'm doing a joint entry. exciting!
yesterday was not very interesting, but it was nice. i went to the mall with my mom and we walked around for a while. the winter crowds are annoying but it's also only really fun to be in the mall if there are other people there. we got boba :-) in the evening, i submitted my essay outline and knit while watching death note (i started it in the summer but never finished). later i watched a show with jesse and talked to my sister a bunch. it was good! i was happy.
today i woke up around 10:30 and had tea and biscuits for breakfast. i knit and watched more death note before spending, like, 2 hours picking methi leaves, but i called jesse after that and we had fun poking fun at the same show as last night ^_^. that was very nice because we haven't gotten to call in ages and ages and it always makes me so happy when we do!
it was the coldest it's gotten this year today now that it's finally dipped below the -20s. i saw a friend who i miss on the bus to work and she said hello instead of ignoring me (we only saw each other as she was disembarking). i miss her. i know why, but it still makes me really upset to be ignored like that regardless of the reason, and naturally i've been worried that she hates me or something. i don't think that's true, but it's hard not to be insecure in a situation like that.
work was alright; i joked around with some regulars and coworkers and also started rereading 'the raven boys'! so that made me feel a bit better. i got my nabokov essay back from my favourite teacher with an a+ and some lovely comments :-)
feeling: robogirl.
december 9
shorter entry because i have a HEADACHE. watched ep. 3 of the horrible show with jesse and had lunch with my mom before reading 'the shining' by stephen king for a while on the couch. i've been reading so much more these past two years but i'm still not back in the swing of sitting and reading a book when i'm not on transit. like, if i have something else i could do, even if that's just scrolling through instagram until my brain leaks out my ears, i always choose the other thing and i hate that! i want to make the conscious decision to read because i love to read. it used to be so easy as a kid. i think it's like training a muscle. i got 100 pages into the book and i like it so far! it's not incredible or anything, but i don't dislike it and i would like to see how it goes.
we went out to get pizza for dinner and that was a lot of fun. when i am older i will miss nights like this more than anything. when we got home, i called jesse and wrote some.
feeling ok—a bit sad. i played 'rose' on loop as i read. winter blues! what can you do. i feel so loved but so sad.
december 10
shorter entry because nothing really happened today. i watched youtube until my mom came home from lunch and then i got struck with the intense need to keep working on boisvert. most of the work i've been doing on it recently has been mental—worldbuilding and plotting and stuff. i haven't sat down and actively worked on writing it in longer than i care to admit! i want to try and challenge myself and see if i can get significantly into the book by the end of 2026.
i wrote until it was time to go to work. it's been snowing since this afternoon and will continue to snow overnight. all the roads are white white white. a mini snow plough came up to the bus stop as i was waiting and we played a fun game where i would walk to the end of his path and he would clear it and then gesture for me to move back. work was boring as ever but i started listening to 'the adventure zone' (i've been listening to mbmbam since i was, like 15, but i could never get into taz.) it's entertaining so far but i hear it gets properly good later on, which i'm excited for.
that's basically all that happened today. talked to my friends some and now i'm going to write more :-)
december 11
today was ok. it had snowed so much by this morning, and all day the wind was blowing it around so that sometimes, the whole world looked white. i'm glad i didn't have to go out today. i spent most of the day screwing around and doing nothing, but i did continue watching 'chernobyl' with bon (we finished episode 2). it's a really excellent show but it makes me so, so sad and upset — it's really good at letting the implications of what's happening sink in. there was this one shot this episode of a deer lying dead in a forest. the camera lingered on it before slowly panning up to the treetops waving in the wind. it was deeply frightening and was compounded, of course, by the fact that everything that was being shown more or less happened in real life. i feel like i can't say much about it because everything i could say would be too trivial.
bon said something i have been thinking for a long time but have never properly articulated. at the end of the episode, a speech is given about the necessity of sacrifice; bon said that it maps well onto the current climate crisis. whenever i have tried to express this sentiment — most recently to a history professor — it has been dismissed, a bit uncomfortably, as fearmongering and defeatism. i think it is a scary prospect but it is one that needs to be reckoned with.
not exactly the same, but i saw elements of this echoed in the book i started with jesse tonight: 'fatal strategies' by jean baudrillard. we read the introduction today and i'm very excited to continue. i won't say more yet, since i haven't finished! but i am glad to be reading it, especially with him, since i think i will need to talk it out to be able to understand it fully.
i spent the last hour reblogging posts to an archive account i've made for older 'ace attorney' fanart. it's cool to see how styles have changed. i wasn't into aa when tumblr was at its peak fandom-wise, so it's kind of like playing catch-up. i'm charmed, though! i made the blog because i used to love trawling through people's blog archives to see aa posts from 2016 or 17, and as i was doing that today, i saw posts i recognized time-stamped for 6 years ago. FRIGHTENING! i love these games :-)
december 12, 13, & 14
i was either too busy or too tired to do an entry the last few days, so i'm doing a quick cumulative one right now.
i started watching 'the walking dead' with my sister because we needed a show to watch over break, and i like it so far! we're going to watch episode 3 in a bit. the weekend was pretty uneventful—i had a shift at work that was boring (again: everyone's so pissy in december...) and i spent all of today working on my final essay for chaucer. it's not my BEST work because i wanted to finish it fast, but i'll edit it tomorrow and then it'll be good! i'm glad to be done with the semester at last...
i also finally got around to starting a movie club! it's with some of my friends and mutuals who i think are cool/i've talked to a few times. me and may kept talking about watching something with jesse and then we never got around to it, so it's good to finally have an excuse. we're watching 'we cloned tyrone' sometime this week! ^_^ yay i love my friends. i'm excited to get to watch more movies and to do it with people i like. i also got a bunch of cool library books today and i WILL FINISH THEM!!!!!! ALL!!!! ('absalom, absalom!', 'the road', 'empire of silence', 'the bluest eye', 'the autobiography of my mother'.)
that's all, i think. OH, it snowed soooo much and now it's proper wintertime. -_- but it's gorgeous so i guess i'll be forgiving. ok my sister's here CIAO to FUTURE ME!
december 15
absolutely nothing happened today. i screwed around all morning and went to work, where i finished 'the condemnation of blackness' (very good; highly recommend) and started 'blindsight', which i've been eyeing for a while. c'est tout! oh, i got an a on my final exam for chaucer :-)
december 16
i've been feeling down all week, and i guess because i was up late last night, today was a day for wallowing. i didn't really do anything, just worked a little bit on this and that and looped big thief's 'dragon new warm mountain i believe in you'. i was really weepy last night because i realized my parents are going to die one day and everyone i know is going to get old and be sad, which is a very childish thing to be sad about, or at least, it looks like it in writing.
i made a post about my wallowing and bon saw it and said we should watch the next episode of chernobyl to deepen the wallowing, so we did! and that was nice. or, not nice, depending on how you look at it, but it felt good to watch something very depressing and have the freedom to be depressed for a real reason. i went on a quick walk after and listened to some more of 'blindsight' before coming home and cutting beeeaaans. everyone is nice today, i am happy to be alive. :-)
december 17
woke up sad. the whole day was sad; marchwarm rain falling on my walk to the bus stop, and that was nice, and my fingers were cold. i did nothing in the morning except for laying around feeling sorry for myself. later in te afternoon i read 70 pages of 'the bluest eye' and then wrote, but the words were all wrong. i feel stupid and dull and nothing i write comes out properly. my sentences are clumsy and unmusical and i will never make anything good in all my life. it looks like everyone else can do it and i am the odd one out and i am the one who will never be able to do it and there is no one in all the world who will help me i do not think and it feels so sick to think it because there are people who care for me and love me but i think that the kind of care i need is the kind nobody wants to give. i think i need the care you afford a truly sick person who will not be able to stay alive on her own.
when i was standing at the bus stop i saw people in their cars and people walking towards the mall and the big bus stop and i felt like an alienperson. there is not really much else to say. at work my coworker told me she had found maggots in the cat food and i remembered how last year when it was so bad i used to wish and wish that i could see maggots on my body because that would mean i was not anyone's problem anymore, and then i remembered blowfly girl, who i have always felt an admiration for because i think she is just as sick as me. every time i get on the bus now i look for my friend's face.
but i think that i must have heart. my mother said that she thinks i will be a good writer. jesse believes in me always. i feel like a liar because i am.
december 18 & 19
went to the mall with my sister yesterday and helped an old man the restaurant owner couldn't help himself. in thanks, he gave me free taters, which made me happy even though i of course did not need anything in return. my sister caught a cold today and i have been trying to take care of her. situations like this always make me so aware of my clumsiness. i feel weird referring to people in my life here because it breaks whatever sheen of privacy i was operating under and reminds me that what i'm writing is subject to scrutiny, even if probably no one is reading. i don't really care how my writing here comes off, but remembering that makes me feel self-conscious and terrible about it.
i spent most of today reading 'the bluest eye', which i just finished. i wish i felt less stupid so i could say something about it; i liked it a lot, i thought it was very smart and very sad. i've been thinking a lot about whiteness and how i am grateful that as a child, the desperate jealousy for it in my physical features never took hold in me. i don't think it did any of us overmuch; i think, for me at least, it's moreso in my temperament and the feeling of always been too much. morrison touches on this, too. i've been thinking a lot about dirt and filth and nastiness and how i always feel a litle bit of all of these. i tried writing about it last year but i don't think i got it right. that reminds me: i should probably put that up. i don't like my writing page very much and should probably fix it now that i know how to use js buttons... ^_^
going to start 'the road' by mccarthy and watch twd with my sister now. spent the better part of the evening sweeping up sawdust (we installed decorative wall panneling in my mom's room. i've been telling her forever she needs to make her room more enjoyable for her to be in; we're finally making steps towards that!) when i took these books out, the librarian talked to me about how much she loves mccarthy, which was nice.
feeling: depressed out of my gourd. keep having not-hallucinations at night. i wish i could lie in bed forever.
december 20
work today SUCKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! every single customer was so mean and pissy because of the holiday rush and getting mad at ME about my store's stupid rules like ok man do you think my dad founded this massive retail chain SHUT UP! there was a guy who didn't want to pay for a locked item with me and in the interest of not getting yelled at i said well you have to. and he got mad so i said well then i'm not giving it to you and left. which was very freeing. i feel like i get less mean customers than some of my coworkers, maybe because of my lotus flower nature or maybe because i like chatting and joking with them if they look like they won't immediately start getting angry. one of my favourite jokes to pull is to say that i charge $50 on every lock i open and i've gotten a lot of great reactions from it... i also like asking trivia about whatever's on my mind that month. ok anyway, so it was so busy and then when i crawled into the breakroom to have my lunch it was very loud and the coworker i complained about earlier was there and it made me SAD and SELF-CONSCIOUS.
but then we got cake on the way back, so that was nice :-)
my sister and i watched 3 episodes of twd and it was VERY GOOD! it makes me angry that the filler episode we ended on was rated lower than the rest because it was a good time... i think tv watchers just have rotten hearts. i don't like the pregnancy arc they introduced, though. i don't see why they had to do that! i mean i see what they're going for but i don't think this show's handling of its female cast is the best.
i'm about halfway through 'the road' and it's really so viscerally upsetting and gorgeously written. i think that the content would feel excessive or ham-fisted if it were anyone but mccarthy writing it.
i am happy because everyone loves me :-)
december 21
nothing eventful. laughed a lot. i love my family and my friends. wrote some and read some and sent a lot of emails. not feeling well, but not so acutely as before. i love the world :-)
december 22
nothing day. woke up late. watched tv. car almost hit me. feeling: upset.
december 23 & 24
i'm not really sure how i feel. i guess i started this diary as a way to prove to myself that i don't totally fall apart whenever i don't have a structure to my life, or that i can make my own structure, but i don't actually know that i can. last night i had, not an argument, but not a conversation either, with j, and they said something that frightened me about growing up. i think i value being independent too much, but i'm not an independent person. spending too much time alone makes me sulky and reallytruly upset. i don't know what to do about it. and i was thinking about that and i was thinking about how completely unwilling i was to work with my doctors every time they have put me on medication. i was thinking about a lot of things and none of them were very good. i don't know that i am a good person. i try very hard to be good but i care about everything so much and i have a tooshort temper and i am too much all of the time except for when i am not. and i'm writing these things and i feel like a bad writer. i don't know who i am if i'm not a writer and i'm bad at it. everyting i write is so vapid and without intention and i'm trying to fix that now but i don't know if i will be able to. this whole entry reads stupidly. they are the thoughts of a stupid and shallow person. but i don't think that i'm stupid and i don't think that i'm shallow and i don't hate myself. that was never really the problem. i am like a child and i am like the caretaker of that child and i will never be able to take care of it but i will keep trying. "sometimes you have to think about yourself in unusual ways."