136.
We forget we are no longer children and have, in fact, the necessary tools to emotionally self-regulate. But the other side of that coin is the free will in terms of wallowing that adulthood offers. Especially if your younger years felt restrictive, as opposed to those of the children who grew up with therapized parents, it’s a slippery slope once you fully realize you’re the one calling the shots, all the shots, now
Suddenly, it may start feeling like there is no better time and place for self-commiseration than right here and now, this 2 pm Tuesday, and nothing challenges the urgency of a tantrum
The farce is adulthood itself, not the biological situation but the social construct of it, with its containment and reason and altruism as a service to the whole and a disservice to the individual who will die young from some stress-related disorder
Evidence of this catching up to us is everywhere when you look for it, like when A&W tried to rival McDonald’s quarter-pounder burger with a “Third-of-a-Pound” burger, which commercially failed because people are bad at fractions, and thought they were being ripped off because 3 is less than 4
I myself spent two nights at S’s house, enjoying the well-oiled adult machine that is her abode fully stacked with sensical groceries, brand soaps, and refrigerated sheet masks. Rejuvenated and beautiful from plundering the various Costco-sized products in her shower, I briefly felt indestructibly conformist, like I had a place in the world and it had been given to me by God
Then eventually I came home and over-confidently guzzled two tall instant coffees sweetened with creamer expecting the best, and to my surprise meeting the worst, namely extreme anxiety of the trembling hands kind. Crazy how easily we regress, how circumstantial our luck
On March 8th, a curious sight: the small grocery store next to my house busier than usual and full of customers buying flowers. I’d rarely seen anyone actually pick up the humble selection of small bouquets at the entrance, but today the staff could barely keep up. It made for colorful scenery à la Parapluies de Cherbourg, inspiring cheer however questionable its celebratory spirit on such a day
Feeling wonder at the sight of flowers or adrenaline when we fill our bloodstream with caffeine both feel childlike in their naiveté, but naiveté is what everything runs on, and if as a species we were actually able to learn our lesson the world would be very different and also less fascist
C takes me out for wine after I show up at his door seeking refuge from my own thoughts when my own naiveté led me to believe I could muster up the bandwidth for abstract modern art installations I promised myself I’d go to, out of adult conditioning to disregard my emotional state. We self-commiserate together in a beautiful bar which is already a great improvement, and I realize that being one grown-up is not actually any better than being two children in one trench coat
137.
In the dead of night at your parents’ house you never lived in but are back at for the holidays it always feels like what surrounds you is someone else’s life
Still in the dead of night, because it’s winter and because this is a house of early risers I’d better describe as insomniacs for the most part, there’s meetings around the loud coffee grinder and laptop keyboards clacking. Varied combinations of smokers aggregate for the outdoor meetings, more hushed, and less serious, huddled in each other’s layers and shoes left in a crime scene of an entrance, if the crime were house configurations no longer adapted to a life with children at home. My father makes sculptures from tree trunks he finds and my sister films him setting them on fire with a camcorder she borrowed from school. I share a bed with said sister and before sleep I watch her play choppy online games we used to play as kids, when The Internet was something not every house had. My mother semi-feigns exasperation when we all reach for a beer as soon as the clock hits 6 PM, but keeps buying them for us. I give them all shoulder massages that I improvise with skill I don’t have because we seem to be genetically tense people and because I like feeling my fingers sinking into the warm muscle, when they sink at all. The cats give me allergies but I kiss their heads regardless and we can all be wholesome when accomplices
We like asking questions like What Would It Take For You To Stop Loving Me or Which One of Us Do You Reckon Will Die First, or some of us do and the others put dinner away for a chance at a glance inside the fridge, should there be any more beers
One should not so easily flee board game proposals from near-certain attendees to one’s future funeral, if anything to secure heartfelt speeches inspired by enchanting memories which are really bound to more and more be created in this crucial week of the year, but one should not think about these things and feel pressured by them too much, in the name of the spirit or whatever aftertaste of it
All that currently matters is that before the sun sets again there’s just enough time to decimate a wooden crate of clementines
I watch message notifications from friends pile up and I don’t answer them, powerless in the face of my limited bandwidth for anything beyond surviving this time and space vortex, but also because I’ve once again forgotten who I am
138.
From your love I got small, then strong; from your love I learned words; from your love I became a writer and from your love I became an adult; from your love I left
At best I push through the discomfort, or at worst I reopen wounds with stretched out scissors like a package in the mail, or at really worst, with a key
In a tarot reading my future promised a marriage-worthy blonde woman, but I have never met one, so I forgot about it, until this moment
At the Ebru Ceylan exhibit the portraits looked zoological alongside the wide, so wide, nature landscapes. Staring at photographs of snow I meditated on Anatolia as a selling word and on the market of exotics. It was a show about the other and would it have been presented the same way in Türkiye? Ended up not buying the book
Outside, the city was completely fogged up in pollution worse than London’s, but I don’t mind it
Flown around in the freezing wind, a woman’s underwear
139.
Winter is cha-chaing toward us with a rose in its mouth
Its opening act is Luigi Mangione who everyone wants sperm donations from, but one google of his name under the News tab confirmed my suspicion that this is going to be an inter-generational conversation feast for a lot of families over the holidays
Seasonal depression, like periods for type B personalities that don’t track stuff or keep records, comes as a surprise doorstep gift and leaves many confused long enough for it to be too late to do anything about it. S texts me that “life is weird right now” but is able to connect the dots insofar as “it got really cold really suddenly” and “I haven’t seen the sun in 12 days”. K copes by reminding themself they have a great rack. ”Can’t chin down. No space down there”
As for me the worst a season change can do to my psyche has passed, but now it is the cold getting into my bones that’s getting into my spirits and I’m two more nights of this away from acting like I’m the girl from the matchstick story. As expected, to say I miss it would not do justice to how I currently feel about hydraulic electricity
’tis the season of survival but coated in warm fairy lights and powdered sugar (the pandoro kind and the snorting kind)
I text A to ask whether it’s true that panettone literally translates into big bread. He confirms and opens up about how he would much rather have a big bread than “a super sweet dry raisin filled torture from hell”. V chimes in and describes it as a “dry fuck ass cake” and says that even pandoro “with the extra powdered dry ass sugar that might as well be sand paper shavings” is crusty. I don’t tell these grinches that my mother has been buying every single type of panettone she finds in stores and texting “this is all we will eat at christmas”, which I’ve yet to determine whether it’s supposed to be read in an excited, whimsical tone or more like a threat
I had lunch with V during her break yesterday and I enjoyed eating soup in a Pret a Manger at 1pm like I too had an office to return to after. I ask her how long she’s got and she tells me it doesn’t matter and she doesn’t care if she’s late, she’s “watching a documentary right now anyway”, and for a minute this really makes me miss my corporate job and the gaming chair I used to sit on to consume great amounts of television whilst taking sometimes harrowing calls for lawyers and plastic surgeons alike. V has been spending the last couple of weeks both working and hosting family and she wonders why she feels completely frazzled. I tell her I think this is why the promise of a January fresh start is so alluring for so many people; after a month of supposed rest that feels more like a marathon and enough family time to make you both forget who you are and doubt every single life decision, of course we are eager to hit the gym and make Pinterest boards
I bundle up in ridiculous layers and nestle a hot water bottle somewhere in there to sit down and write this entry. Someone knocks and no one ever knocks at my house unless I’m wearing something like reindeer pajama pants AND slippers or a charcoal face mask. It’s an old lady claiming she’s the owner of an apartment upstairs and has a question about the building’s front door. I answer and she politely thanks me and leaves. After closing the door I realize this was probably my own landlord whom I’ve never seen IRL, and replay a loop of the interaction in my mind, not understanding whether I’ve been deceived and if so, why. By the time I sit back down the hot water bottle has cooled down.
And that’s on this year’s christmas goody bag
140.
One thing I make a point of, which means a lot these days when things like devotion and time are scarce resources, is putting effort into birthday cards. This is not to brag that the cards are always good, because they’re not, but to once again bring to the table the distinction between what we are willing, or able, to do for others and what we aren’t
A few weeks ago, in the depths of a similar conversation, D said that polyamory was like Mexican food, and I wish I actually remembered or understood what he’d meant by that, but I think it’s something along the lines of, same ingredients, endless configuration possibilities
All of the birthday cards in 2024 could have doubled down as “get better soon” cards because that’s what a lot of them said or should have said. Times are dire and I know every other generation believes it will be the last but I think in our case it’s true
When I’m coloring in a sky which I want to make look inspiring and get in the zone, my mind wanders and thinks about how, in my 26 years as a human, one thing I’ve learnt is that people want to feel seen. So this I try to make my focus when writing any card, email, or telegram. But then, when does it end up sounding generic? Not for a lack of care on my part but because we are, after all, one mass. Especially in today’s frenzy for signs and superstition and desperate appetite for meaning, I could write two dozen “I hope you feel better soon” notes, leave them on two dozen random car windshields, and be ready to bet that most will feel personally seen and recognized, maybe even chosen by fate. There’s a world between the birthday card writer and the astrologer, but the line is quickly crossed if you’re not careful and start making your good wishes sound more like doomsday warnings
141.
If I didn’t know so many people in fucked relationships with it I would also still be in academia
If I had never left the country I might also ascribe to the passive/defensive Left and spend all of my activist energy marching and protesting for rights we already have
And if I had a bit more free time I, too, would probably hail Satan
142.
Sun’s out guns out except the second part is about actual weapons
I kind of wish that’s what it was coined in the mainstream as; it’s a catchy slogan for gun safety or something, though I’ve yet to determine in what context the sun being out would influence an increase in shootings. In any case, I wish the phrase would stop being printed on t-shirts and worn ironically by people like me whose arms look nothing like guns. It hurts the part of my brain that is too literal
Here I don’t know whether the sun has been out much and I haven’t caught sight of my own arms in a couple days. It’s taking me a moment to recover from jetlag and this is pointed out to me and this hurts my pride. I don’t know to what extent it is jetlag or if my body is just crashing and recuperating from two months of me being the only one in charge of it, but the eye twitch that had started to become worrisome has completely disappeared since I got back, and I do know what to make of it, I just don’t want to
143.
I was going to say, “I returned home”, but realized the moment I entered the apartment again that it no longer was. It feels like a hallucination but isn’t; when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. I somehow always forget the dimensions, the height of the ceiling or the number of steps needed to reach the kitchen, and when I come back I notice, amused, how wrong I’ve been remembering it this whole time. I look around and all of these things and objects existed and evolved while I was away, were handled by different hands in different ways. The subletter is on the phone saying “I’m back at my place” while folding her laundry. This place did everything but stand still in my absence, and it’s nice
It’s obvious I’ve been thinking of endings and how they are first born inside of us, unbeknownst and invisible to everyone else, but we know. Then you must think of ways to phrase the ending, speak it into existence, and with that comes the expectation of making it make sense. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, we look a the job or the car or the partner or the friend or the city and we can only offer, as consolation, ”it’s not you, it’s god”
or if it isn’t god: it’s the weather, it’s the government, it’s her pet, it’s your handwriting, it’s my father, it’s your father, it’s the creepy neighbor who actually isn’t that bad and I had a beer with him last week, it’s your smell, it’s the fact that none of the shelves in this house are straight, it’s the bad coffee I had this morning, it’s what’s on the news, it’s what isn’t on the news, it’s this headache, it’s their Spotify Wrapped, it’s nuclear power, it’s because Mark Zuckerberg got hot, it’s the new nail tech in town, it’s the risk and/or allure of identity theft, it’s the tarot card I just pulled, it’s porn, it’s ADHD, it’s my prefrontal cortex solidifying, it’s politics, it’s the pollution in this area, it’s the real estate market, it’s the coin I just flipped, it’s his new perfume, it’s skateboarding, it’s the holiday spirit
144.
Dedicating my life to fighting BYOB culture
145.
Beyond the interpretation of cemetery layout through the lens of seating layouts at big events like weddings, we ought to be thinking more of the implications of double-depth, versus side-by-side, or two-ashes-one-urn configurations when it comes to regrouping the dead. I question the idea that we have to be buried near (or on top of!) the person we potentially already spent most of our lives with. And if we’re doing collective graves anyway, when are we introducing regrouping all the people from a friend group? Or a double-grave situation with that coworker who was always really nice to you and sometimes left chocolates on your desk
The universe pushes us into these narratives of partnership and romance and it succeeds so well at convincing us that I believe we forget how boring it actually is. Six years ago I hooked up with my coworker and even though no friendship or relationship of any kind even felt the desire to sprout from it, he is the person I run into the most. It is almost comical in how unrealistic it can get, how often I see him compared to other people in my life I hold dearly. What is tragically funny is how little we are into it, and every time it happens our smiles become more and more pained. We don’t exchange words anymore. We’re like each other’s unpleasant haunting ghost. I think we should share a grave even just for the bit of it, and the vibe would literally and figuratively be rancid
Especially nowadays, it’s one text and then the next and suddenly you realize you are either courting or being courted, and before you know it you find yourself looking up and sending verses in Italian. God have mercy but there is no respite, and it’s so easy to fall for someone’s specific punctuation style
I saw a video of a girl smelling perfumes acquired through Facebook Marketplace. One of them she remembers her mother having when she was younger, and when she allegedly smelled it for the first time on camera she cried
Which brought me back to last week when we spent almost an entire evening with friends doing “research” on why humans evolved to be mostly hairless, and how the reason for pubic and armpit hair remaining has to do in part with scent and pheromones. And then there is the theory of compatibility between humans, related to some extent to genetic combinations being favorable or not, but not many people like that one very much. And perfume girl hints at it being more a matter of associations
I made dinner for my roommate and I and, simultaneously to his emotional support during my first attempt at hard boiled eggs, we exchanged stories of infatuation, of brothers in law, of neighbors, of subletting apartments and being aroused by the books on the shelves, of taking planes and trains and thinking “this will kill me”. Who’s making us do these things?
I asked my mother who she thought I was from the show Girls and she said Hannah/Lena Dunham, which is correct. I said we are all Hannahs who want to be Jessas and she said no I want to be Adam. I relate insofar as I’ve started picturing myself in his place during scenes in his apartment. It’s all so grey, dusty, and full of big tools and machinery that make it all look like a big boat. If I can’t escape the absurdity of human romance for another couple decades I might as well live in an absurd-looking place too
In Death Becomes Her she drinks the magic potion to be young, immortal, and hot forever. But come to think of it, if I was immortal my sex appeal would be the last of my worries. Maybe we let desire in precisely because we’re going to die. I refuse to live an eternity of recoiling in cringe
146.
Yesterday:
S, R and I went to visit an Hydro Québec plant after weeks of me lobbying for it out of deep fascination for the energy independence of this place, which as the introductory video explained is thanks to the water, which comes from the Great Lakes, which together are the size of France. It’s almost hard to believe that it’s as simple as that, as the pumps I got to see swirling water around being the reason why everyone’s apartment is so comfortable here. Before the tour ended I suddenly got a splitting headache, the kind I haven’t had in years but that had me preparing to tell S that I was going to need her to keep me alive for the next 24 to 48 hours to endure what was starting to feel like a migraine. I attributed it to simply skipping coffee that morning, which at the time I thought was really grown and healthy of me, but suddenly I was faced with the worrisome if not dire consequences of an addiction I clearly didn’t have control over. Then the tour ended and I removed the helmet I’d over-tightened and could have cried from the relief. S laughed at my red forehead.
We watched Eclipse the night before and started Breaking Dawn when we got home from the plant. In Fuck, Marry, Kill, S overthought it and said kill Edward because he can read my thoughts, and I said imagine you’re Bella and he can’t, and then she said well if I’m Bella I no longer want to fuck Charlie
I completely fell asleep on the couch which I attribute in praise to S’s nurturing presence and otherworldly hosting skill. She kept managing to reappear before I realized she’d left with a brand new pot of tea, if not homemade ayran, or food. She’s the kind of person who lays down comfortable clothes or pajamas for you when you come over, or who takes your hands to rub a mixture of hand cream and vitamin E on them before sleep. I trust this woman with my life and would let her tell me my haircut was bad and be really mean about it. I came back home with a bag full of new tea, creams, snacks, but also perhaps a whole year younger
She drove us back into the city doing a detour through blvd Taschereau which she describes as one of Quebec’s worst creations. It’s an abhorrently long boulevard with no on-street parking and an endless succession of store fronts. They all look like they are cardboard fronts, that there is nothing behind them if not the edge of the world
S (other S) and I watched Cronenberg’s The Fly at the same time and live-texted it. He’d text me quotes of what Jeff Goldblum just said such as “yeah I build bodies”, meanwhile I wanted Jeff to build me
A few friends have texted to ask how I’m putting up with November which means that my seasonal depresser reputation precedes me. I tell them almost apologetically about how I actually feel fine, aside from the great stress of life decisions which are not November’s fault. I text M to tell her I saw her on a run in the neighborhood the day before. She confirms she was on a run for her mental health. I ask her did it help, and she says an annoying amount
I ran out of cigarettes which meant I had to purchase Canadian ones. I joked to S that I hoped to get ID’d before heading to her corner store, where indeed I did. When the clerk saw my birth year she said it out loud a bit too loudly, and then exclaimed “you could be my daughter!” which I’ve been overthinking since, because I suspect it kind of cancels the ID flattery out
147.
I leave C’s house with the brand-new feel of a repaired jacket and full of his reviving potion of ginger turmeric tea with a secret ingredient, yet feeling so tired. On my walk home someone asks me for directions, seems to be in a rush, I give indications and hesitate to ask whether I could join, whatever it is they’re rushing to. C had described one of his friends as a “walking creative writing prompt”, or something like that, and spoke of how he loved it. By the time I’d completed my walk home I’d entertained the thought enough to hate it, resenting how easily the role someone plays can be snatched and rendered utilitarian by others. I’d met said friend a couple of days prior, and it only took me five minutes of one-on-one time with her to see beyond the quirkiness of someone just trying to get airtime. I wonder if this is how dogs feel sometimes. But that wasn’t why I was tired. My friendship with C is one recently revived or maybe entirely born out of the ashes of a bridge I’d so eagerly burned over a year ago I still can’t believe we ended up back in his kitchen, making dinner and listening to music as if he wasn’t, up until recently, still blocked on Spotify. It takes a lot of mature intention for me not to bring up the past incessantly, in the name of preserving whatever chance of a future friendship we might still have, but that still isn’t why I felt so tired. October feels like a lifetime ago because it was, and I’m not convinced emotions are “stored” anywhere but if it’s in the hips, like everyone says, I wonder how I walked home at all. I’m expecting to wake up back home and on my couch any minute now, realize I’ve overdosed on melatonin gummies again and vivid dreamt the whole last two months.
C loves love more than ever before, which if you know him is saying a lot, and it’s perhaps because he is bathing in this amorous bliss that he feels benevolent or perhaps takes pity on me and performs borderline criminal-grade google searches to find what city would best suit me and my own ideal romantic configurations, though we reach a conclusion in the end that everything I’ve been describing is more of a commune (or a cult) than sentimental preference. Then I step out to go get him eggs, because he is in pain and because you have to act like what you wish for, namely The Village, which is not a euphemism for polycule
In The Village everyone kisses if they wish to and everyone helps each other because they wish to. I express to C that I am so tired and bored I do not currently wish to experience anything like what he is going through, however peaceful, namely the tentativeness and risk of hurt of a new relationship. But I still want the warmth. My sustenance is not promise or potential or elation or status. My sustenance is my friends tailoring my clothes, giving me rides home, sharing my dinners, or asking if I might be able to go get them some eggs, perhaps an onion, and me replying, of course
148.
It’s an inkling, it’s a hope, it’s an enumeration of things, in the end it’s all strain, it’s death because it’s fall, then it’s hope again, it’s The Fool tarot card that tarot prodigy E pulls out for me before any other, not long after I presented my latest metaphor, in which I am a balloon, meant to float and flail but also in great need of some device (the fool’s walking stick, the balloon’s string) connecting me to earth
In a store of beautiful trinkets that stands by itself as evidence of the fact that humans developed adornment and symbolism (jewelry) before utility (clothes), I overhear ”my boyfriend’s birthday is coming up, but like, the new boyfriend, so I have no idea what he likes”, and I think my recent efforts of mental self-care are paying off because that banal statement is enough to fill me with bliss. It’s so joyful that love is alive and well, and I feel so much gratitude for not bearing the brunt of a new boyfriend right now
Said trinket/gift shop and others like it, but also the fact that I’ve been living out of a suitcase with no complaints for almost two months now, activate the urge to re-engineer my life through my belongings, that is to say, to give them all away. This recurring urge is always partly fueled by the disgust I feel at the sight of a mount of mine items that excrete familiarity. This is the aforementioned addiction to change, for which I have yet to find a culprit. Though special shoutout is warranted for my brief 2018 interest in the minimalist lifestyle phenomenon, from which my algorithm has yet to recover
The Fool also carries a small bundle, representing minimal material possessions. “And diminished intellectual properties”, E reads from the booklet. No shame in being dim; in fact, the more I read the more dejected I become
Before going to the Butch–Femme Prom event, which in itself is so much to unpack I won’t even attempt it, I have dinner with S and E, we get ready together and drink old, vinegary wine (for me) and fizzy hibiscus weed drinks (for them). This is when the tarot deck comes out and The Fool is aptly reveladed. Of note: this character is described as a “well-dressed vagabond”. That, and the fact that someone at prom said I looked like Jodie Foster, make the all the accusatory evidence of the current unruliness in my life worth it
149.
Everyone say happy birthday diary! One year of egotistical verbiage
Whenever this ends, and “this” remains to be defined though I can assure anyone it very much exists and is perhaps embodied in the month-long eye twitching I’m enduring, I will require a feast to appease the hunger of my self-imposed bachelor’s diet of which the only consistency is bad coffee. I want to feel no bone, or collapse into deep unconsciousness, whichever comes first. Then I will take an excessively long shower and, thoroughly renewed, I can maybe begin to think clearly again
I operate from a place of pretending I know everything, and I recognize this with intermittent levels of self-awareness. It’s my flavor of delusion as well as my self-parenting style. Grossly summarized, it’s how I cope. But then the sun comes out. And I feel different. And I don’t like that I feel different because the sun came out. I’m bendy and fluctuating and influenced by external stimuli. I know next to nothing of myself, and prediction is comforting but illusory like a crystal ball. In short, I am alive, the sun changing my mood reminds me of this, and I resent this fact momentarily, because it means I don’t have any knowledge of, or control over, any of it
Fuck semiotics, there is no narrative. Only my recurrent addiction to change which is, in the end, not much better than a fear of it. I go around in circles like a garden dog, and ambitiously seek enlightenment, think I’ve found it, but it’s just a bone I’ve been thrown. How do I exit the water swirl
On days when I feel I am not walking but rather flying, am I drunk off my own energy or this city’s? It’s like when you think you had an amazing date but then a friend asks you if it was really amazing or if you were the provider of jokes and conversation topics the whole time. Sometimes I wonder if I’d rather give it all up, focus on surviving and let go of the rest. After all, why tire?
I videocall K who immediately says something about needing to feed me when I come back, and to be fair the front camera is unforgiving but my gray skin and pointy shoulders do give a sense of Victorian era malnourishment, which would corroborate the eye twitch. We talk and I use the word grief and they correct me, tell me it’s more like FOMO. Then they tell me about S&P 500 and stocks and investment and I’m reminded of the great team we make
I tell my roommate that I am running out of Nescafe and that maybe it’s time for me to wean off and overcome the addiction, get some real, nice coffee that I could make in his Bialetti moka pot. I announce this like the course of my life is at stake. He says “you could just do both” and I tell him I can’t, categorically so. I decide shortly after that 2025 is the year I learn to take a deep breath, loosen up on the theatrics, find gravity again
150.
Losing my mind, as I cyclically do since childhood, which consists in removing the it suit and taking stock of the damage done to the internal cogs since the last time the trees lost their leaves, feels (or this is the best way I’ve found so far to describe it) like losing my grip. Hands and thoughts alike become viscous, I forget what I was doing mid-maneuver, and life is no longer a movement forward but an amalgamation of separate items that have nothing to do with each other, existing independently. This year I intend to take the bull by the horns which will be hard because my hands are so slippery but I will try anyway, and I will one-up seasonal depression by simply leaning into it. I shall re-brand serotonin as overrated anyway
I take the term seasonal depression with a grain of salt. We are only just starting to untangle the bias seeped into all the disorders discovered or rather coined in the 19th century and differentiate which ones are bona fide from which ones are instruments to institutionalize discrimination, so I’m not about to blindly trust I’m suffering from something first named in 1984. But also it’s pride and vanity; it makes me feel better to believe that whatever I do suffer from is ancient and unpolluted by modern life, and that I am not a mere, embarrassingly banal, victim of the 21st century
I won’t try to assemble the parts back together. I’ll let myself use store-bought contentedness instead of making it from scratch. It’s tapping into the “fuck it and fuck you” attitude of old age which can’t come soon enough. I’ve been trying to cosplay it though, as no other lifestyle feels right on my skin at the moment
Part of this cosplaying began yesterday, when I visited one of my happy places, aka Multimags, to feel both suspended in time and catapulted into the past as I browsed all the magazines, touching one too many as the owner’s glances made clear. I will not make an overdone comment on how “entertainment used to be something palpable”, but know that I am thinking it nonetheless. I overheard a little girl tell her father “it seems that this Taylor Swift person is quite famous, I see her everywhere”, and I liked this glimpse into my future wherein Taylor Swift is your mother’s antiquated idol. Last month A asked me “do you prefer to anticipate or to remember?” and coming to the conclusion that it is always, always anticipate made a lot of things clearer. Now I wonder if I’ve neglected the simple pleasure of nostalgia
In the name of re-wiring my brain, things to be nostalgic about:
When they guillotined kings and queens, and every iteration of French revolutionary spirit since then. The French are genetically nostalgic for the 18th century bloodspill and repeatedly trying to conjure that high up again, is my theory
Your penis when you are on tour, apparently, as N explained to me. Something along the lines of being so busy when on tour that you barely have time to look at your genitals, let alone have sex. Or at least I think so. I don’t remember very well, nor why we got there in the first place
The moment this morning when I first heard R’s voice note telling me the story of how his mother found the corpse of her psychic medium teacher in her hotel room in Paris. What I would give to experience those four minutes again!
151.
I want to request the relocation of my self-responsibility, put it in the hands of an entity or person granted the omniscience of what is fair and what isn’t, what is justified and what is better left alone. Anyone I tell of my hesitance to extend my stay here immediately finds the right arguments and tone of voice to convince me to do it. So I ran an experiment by adopting a more confident and assured posture when telling A, whom I hadn’t seen in a lifetime of two weeks or so. As expected, he counterbalanced my aplomb, asked pertinent questions, advised me to double check the most recent immigration policies. I’d been out searching for external validation of my decision, collecting encouraging perspectives like pebbles from a beach as if they could be submitted as evidence in my defense should the world put me on trial for my indulgence. Now I realise there will never be a final, objective answer, only a calculated gamble, and that everyone loves to be a contrarian
We walked around the rich and suburban side of the neighborhood with A, admiring the houses and wondering about the assholes inhabiting them. Then we saw the open house sign. We looked at each other briefly, knowing exactly what was about to happen, and the next minute we were ringing the doorbell and taking the place of the young couple with baby that smiled on their way out like they were in a Decathlon ad. The real estate agents smiled kindly or at least I could tell they were trying to, and shook our hands, probably feeling the cheap material and holes in our gloves which we didn’t even bother to remove. We pretended to be filmmakers on a location scout, and at least they seemed amused. But then we pretended so well that by the time we left it was real, and discussed, once outside, the house A will actually need to find for his next film. Fake until make, or is to fake to make?
I live too far from my beloved mtl library now, and have only paid her a visit twice in the last month and a half. This breaks the ritual, thus perhaps the identity, this to say I am in crisis. The uncertainty of where I will be next month frightens me, which in turn confuses me because I somehow thought of myself as more daring, but then I remember I can’t even shoplift and then it makes sense. I resent myself, I ask and expect too much, and am growing tired of shots in the dark
A and I then go back to his place and watch Knit’s Island, a documentary all shot in a post-apocalyptic video game where players spend thousands of hours, meeting there and creating real communities, churches, groups of friends to slash zombies or venerate life with. “It’s all a game, or is it”, the film implicitly asks the whole time. In a way these players are their characters, and I am mine. We are both Hannah and Miley, alternatively Elisabeth Sparkle and then Sue, Montreal Nilay and France Nilay, but in the end always just one. All these duos implicitly ask who is the real one, and one might want to optimistically claim that Hannah isn’t less real because she’s wearing a wig. Except we all know how that ended for Sue. My wig is my Canadian visa, I guess
Uncomfortable is good, comfortable is bad, I try to remind myself, though nonetheless I am tired of making all the decisions for myself around here and fantasize about volunteering for a conservatorship
To make it clear, this is the monthly allowance I give myself in terms of complaining; I am in this position because I have calibrated my entire life to be this way, and I am vastly grateful and rejoiced most of the time. But exhausting is the existence of the side quester
So much of it is hoping and pretending, gambles and crossed fingers, wander and wonder. But I’m deciding that is honest, honest enough
152.
I spent most of yesterday at home, working and then luxuriously dedicating an entire afternoon to writing a single poem. I was PMSing, felt nauseous, kept getting stuck and the writing gave me a headache. I went for a walk, sat on a park bench. Went home to write some more, cracked the code, then got stuck again. Laid in bed contemplatively. Drank water, felt better. Finished writing. Then I was taken out for live jazz music and cocktails, enjoyed great conversation. Even my bad days are great days
D asks me why Lyon is called Lyon and the fact that I don’t have an answer goes to show how long I’ve been there, or how much I take it for granted. Some people say that the beginning of old age is when you stop asking questions, being curious. Maybe that’s why I so often feel decrepit there. It’s not that it’s a bad city or that it is objectively better here or elsewhere; it’s that one stimulates my brain, the other sedates it. “You are your father’s daughter”, my mother tells me
S is getting her wisdom teeth out but one side at a time. A couple of weeks ago it was the left side, and the inflammation took a few days to go down. It looked like her face was pregnant
153.
It’s been very warm weather, barely requiring a jacket, and K asks if that’s driving me crazy because, as established before, I have deep appreciation for the moment when summer frenzy finally ends + whether my November blues are hitting yet, and I can only almost apologetically answer that life is good, I feel really good. It’s unusual enough that K asks who is holding me hostage right now. I tell them who’s to complain about weather nice enough for walks around Montreal, which is what I did yesterday with D, taking him hostage and bombarding him with my plea for advice on whether to extend my stay here. He lobbies for the extension masterfully, almost like he’s being paid to, and it’s suspicious. I’ve yet to hear a single person tell me to not do it, and I don’t know what I keep hoping to hear. He tells me I seem to worry too much, in general, and I tell him it’s true, because since I was a kid I felt the weight of responsibility for my life, namely if I fuck up, who’s going to help me fix the mess?
We sit on a bench on McGill campus and watch people walking by for hours while soaking in the rest of daylight. I tell him how funny it is that people here think my rolled cigarettes are joints, and how many times lately I probably seemed blissful enough, smoking in the sun, for people to feel compelled to ask me for one, only to then exclaim oh it’s one of those!, profusely apologise, and walk away. D asks what are my love languages but in expressing, not receiving, love, and I say I’m good at words of affirmation I guess, but I also bring mystique to the table. His raised eyebrows ask me to explain, and I tell him people seem to think I have secret thoughts. He agrees, which proves my point, and I assure him I don’t
I remember a while ago G’s comment on how films about the future (Back to the Future, for example) used to make the 2010s+ look like all-white, smooth buildings and flying cars, and now films about the future are all about the apocalypse. There weren’t as many zombie films before, he noted. People used to look forward to the future, but couldn’t have predicted for humanity to have fucked circadian rhythms, attention deficits, existential dread bad enough to never really know if we want to have sex or not. Also that orange man
Against the backdrop of US election thinkpieces and terrified Instagram stories, this unsettling warm weather, which Trump would call “just great weather, it’s just weather!”, probably further disrupts the natural order of things when it comes to human partnerships. It’s technically cuffing season but feels like spring, and I can only imagine that our confused species (especially those in my age bracket, already perpetually wondering if they’re still hot enough to keep pushing the husband deadline back) is in limbo, dancing between Vitamin D-fueled libido and doomsday desperation for something (someone) to hold onto
154.
I see C for the second time in my life at a screening, the first time having been three weeks ago, and we recognize each other after she says “you were wearing glasses last time”, which makes me laugh because three weeks ago she had long, blonde straight hair and now she has what looks like a ginger shag with bangs. I ask her how her stay in Montreal has been since, and I’m secretly hoping she’ll tell me a story about a life-changing event or perspective gained through this city, hence the haircut. She instead tells me about how the gallery she is sleeping and working at, for a residency, is infested with mice. It is so bad she has had to go stay at a friend’s, and C is distraught — the gallery owner claims she is making all of it up, while instead of putting up a show C has had to work for free as an exterminator. I offer my infinite understanding when she tells me it’s all she thinks and obsesses about, yet still find the impulse in me to tell her to make art about the mice. I contain it
S had driven me there, left foot propped up on the dashboard and right arm stretched out to hold my hand, while she commented on how she hates driving in the rain more than driving in the snow. We’d spent the afternoon working alongside each other (her studying for an important exam to be a banker, me editing and drafting ideas for a magazine), with her show playing softly in the background as white noise and taking turns getting hungry. I’d spent the first half of the day so inexplicably anxious I was shaking, but that whole setup worked better than any wim hof breathing or tapping routine
Those people who dedicate themselves to making guided meditation/breathing techniques/affirmations videos, are they retailers of well-being? Running a business like any other, cracking numbers every quarter and having arguments with the accountant. No doubt
Though November is dreadful and suddenly I don’t have clothes warm enough, despite the daylight savings it is nighttime more often than not now, which means a lot of nighttime walking. I daren’t confess how often I’ll take a blinding 3200K tungsten light over sunlight
I initiate conversations about the US elections today with anyone around me who consents, especially Americans, but then let them lead, so obscure this electoral system still feels to me. M and her friend debate whether to vote at all, and if yes, how. I learn that statistics are made on the “invalid” ballots, like when under “Other” people write “Snoop Dogg”, and that’s actually still counted. Which is something
I obviously can’t help but think of our own, recent elections this summer, the PTSD of which the French left is still recovering from. That, and the fact that I’ve watched Succession, leave little room for me to actually believe in the power of ballots to “call it”. I contain this pessimism as well
You’d hear comments or stories of people claiming to leave France if things turned out the way they did. You always hear those, and I wonder how many people follow through. I understand the sentiment, and the flight of human capital is probably one of the most effective boycott tactics. But when every single place is shit and getting shitter, in which direction should the brain drain flow?
155.
It’s November and time for me to move bedrooms in my sublet. Yesterday I had a packed day of planned work and chores and coffee with a friend but woke up more hungover than expected, both from the red wine and from my sleaziness of the night before, which I spent the day feeling alternatively cocky and viscerally embarrassed about. Drunk and happy and not wanting the night to end, I had sent a late night “Where are you” text to someone who was, in fact, already in bed. When my intrepid insistence managed to get them to suggest my coming over, I simply, and for reasons I cannot explain, told them to fuck off. I ended up cancelling the coffee the next day as I fell behind on work, which I couldn’t focus on because I felt too hungry, nauseous, and humbled. By the time evening came I made a point to do my yoga, to cook a real dinner, to generally repent. I was texting G, my oldest friend but also someone I haven’t physically seen in a dozen years, about how we are of different, parallel worlds. Nowadays we sporadically talk about art, respective projects, and magic hexagons, but know virtually nothing of each other’s daily lives. We met as kids in an extracurricular theatre class, which had been set up right before we arrived and dissolved soon after we left it. “Because it had served its purpose of bringing us together”, one of us says. He tells me he loves and adores that I am alive, and I reread the words many times, all the while thinking that of course someone who hasn’t seen me in so long, or specifically last night, might say that
Today I wake up slowly, opening one eye at a time, not daring to look at my hands and legs, hear the sound of my voice. Am I still a sleazeball, or have I been absolved, reborn? I go through messages I haven’t opened in a few days, when I was busy on my two-day manic then panic crusade. I’ve missed a couple from R, which seem to be mostly voice notes and links to songs. I play the first voice note that starts by saying “it’s November 1st!”, which sounds like a lie this morning, with the sky so clear it looks like it’s just had a deep clean, UV rays strong enough to hit my face in bed and age my skin. R says he knows how this month is a terrible one for me, and that he commits to trying to help by sending me a one-minute voice note along with a different song every day. I listen to the rest and get a sense of the care and intention that went into picking each song, and I’m beaming. I reach for the envelope that J made me before I came here, 61 little notes, one for each day. This morning it reads “what are the shapes of the clouds today?” and I respond out loud “there are none”. This all to say that, for some reason I can only explain as fraud or bureaucratic mistake, no one in the world feels as loved and confused by it as me right now
Which is maybe why the imposter/fraud syndrome affects me most in this area, wherein I’m most blessed. I can’t help but feel like you must have the wrong person. To not look the gift horse in the mouth actually feels, in this case, impolite. This is not just humility I’m talking about, but also regrettable cynicism. This man asks about my day and says “I want to know EVERYTHING” and I can’t help but wonder where he learnt that, what woman might have instilled in him the knowledge that paying attention and listening will get him laid. I have my suspicions, and by the time I’ve run all this through my mind I’m put off from telling him anything.
I’ve been pulling tarot cards, which I always end up doing when craving any kind of answer to soothe the thinking of the same, ever-repeated questions. Now I pull tarot cards more and more feverishly, because every time I check the cards’ meaning it’s demise, failure, ruin, and then catastrophe, perdition, death. Sometimes I put the cards back in the deck, shuffle again, and take the stance of someone saying “I’m going to let you try that again”, and the cards say okay I’m sorry… It’s actually weakness, violence
156.
I love few things more than a confession(al). I love the inching forward, the atmosphere of intimacy I can suddenly kidnap someone into. I also don’t know how to interact if it’s not through the medium of every single thought that goes through my head, ever. And in the last week or so I’ve woken up in an overshare hangover most days, wishing I had thread sturdy enough to sew my mouth shut. I gave gruesome and private details of my numbers obsession/compulsions to a man who bought me dinner, and now when he looks at me I always wonder if he’s trying to figure out whether I’m counting. I had to either open or close with “never told anyone this” several times with A, though she reciprocated, diligently and kindly levelling our respective vulnerability each time. I told my ex, a Tinder date, another almost ex, and one or two strangers in Toronto bars about this diary. I still can’t decide if it’s self-sabotage or pushing for discomfort in the name of things moving. My unshared thoughts become stagnant water that poisons me, so I expel all the water and wake up dehydrated
This to say that having been busy is not the only reason leading me to neglect this diary recently. Tentatively I’m approaching it again, knowing that I can hardly pivot the editorial line and turn this into a pop culture reviews column. Doubling down is the name of the game now, along with tapping into an all or nothing mentality that never was my forte. But one can learn
157.
Spontaneously I went on a date with a stranger who ended up being in a very similar situation to mine, subletting a room in the same neighbourhood and figuring life out against the backdrop of cinematic autumn. That morning I didn’t know this person existed, and by the time I went to sleep we had a Spotify blend playlist together, which I can only interpret as setting the tone for the next few weeks, for better or worse
I settle into this version of myself that is gregarious enough to entertain these types of situations, knowing full well that it’s a matter of time before I flee like draught out an open window
C tells me about his search for mental clarity/peace which he has confined to the boundaries of a 2024 goal. With only a few weeks left in the year I picture mental clarity as a percentage charging bar in an orange/red hue, colours probably no one has assigned to represent tranquillity of the spirit, ever. He wonders why all the LSD he’s taken “hasn’t yet resulted in ego death” and we spend the rest of the hangout commodifying sanity like this
I think to myself that he and I and anyone I know who’s ever purchased poetry to “fix something in me” are maybe just in desperate need of some kind of religion to store and frame our 21st century malaise. Being preached at might spare us these types of conversations, whether with each other or with strangers we met online that same day
158.
I distort everything through the lens of bespoke orderliness, and soon find myself isolated yet surrounded by a bespoke universe very neatly arranged in chaos understood only by me
But let whatever comes for me come for all, I shan’t be greedy with my ills and hog them
It’s an unexpected three-day summer here, and by the time I finally left the house yesterday and reached the café in a sweat I had seen too many men in cargo shorts to know what to order. Ended up ordering a London fog, like I was somehow trying to conjure up that weather again, and it was the best one I’ve ever had
Realised, only in retrospect, that what had afforded me such unexpected elation was that the obsession with numbers had been momentarily and inexplicably lifted, and I decided what to drink based entirely on something as banal, but concrete, as the weather, my mood. Who would’ve thought
I stayed up late finishing work because warm days make me slower, and then woke up very early. When he comes back, my roommate will probably hate my pacing around the apartment hours before sunrise, but for now I guiltlessly indulge in the quiet of the building and the street outside. I eat these pockets of quiet and stillness up like candy (for a lack of real candy), before the tyrant in my brain wakes up and starts counting things again
The word discipline shares origins with the Latin word discipulus which also gave disciple, of student, of learning. I’m not sure what I learn through discipline, if not to fear (consequences, myself, an abstract god-like entity). For someone with obsessive tendencies re: self-imposed rules, I’m definitely living in the wrong time, when the word is glamorised and sold as virtue, instead of associated to one of its first definitions, namely punishment
159.
Yesterday I saw E who had just returned from a summer of working in another province and who had no time to waste before delving into Halloween preparations. I haven’t dressed up for Halloween in maybe five years, but suddenly found myself in the Saturday frenzy of shoppers in charity shops and dollar stores to put together a costume. There should be a word for people like E who are bursting with life so much they make everything they touch feel alive. And when I say everything I include myself; lifeless and closed-off as I may sometimes seem, we make a great pair to the likes of salt & pepper or drum & bass
Halloween shopping means inevitable exposure to aisles and aisles of candy which I noticed myself craving. In one of my regular body/intake/stamina experiments I’ve cut out sugar in most of its forms for about a month now, and I’m tempted to blame my as-of-late serotonin depletion on it, or at least wonder whether a chocolate bar sugar high might momentarily solve all my problems
On the subject of depicting myself as a mop-looking energy leech: In ways I have yet to unpack but don’t necessarily care to, I confess that I sometimes (and now is one of those times) miss my driving instructor, F. The dynamic we had was perfect: I’d get into his car and for two hours essentially paid him to talk at me nonstop about his life and his various opinions on things while I intensely focused on staying within my lane and going the right speed. Making conversation back was not necessary and sometimes even reprimanded, which is to say he would rightfully cut me off to say something like “this isn’t even a road where are you going”. It was the perfect buffer and brain massage for me as far as human interactions go. Maybe I could pretend to need lessons again
160.
Bound to wonder whether the sudden and crushing doses of stress of the last few days have resulted in a lowering of all other menial stresses I’m used to? But credit also goes to the indulgent rewatch of Perfect Days, which is like getting your stomach pumped but for your soul. Yesterday I went to the cinema I used to intern at, and worked at the cafe before the showing. Then I ate gnocchi on a bench outside with the sun setting and a couple strangers. At home, some yoga to drain it all out. You just have to drain it all out, constantly, and it’s irritating to admit that self-care practices like these are less phoney than they seem
The life lesson here is perhaps to learn to differentiate what’s important from what is serious. The autumn light of the late sunrises and early sunsets lately is so glorious it’s hard to take oneself seriously at all. In any case, I’m no longer sailing but drifting and can only pray
In a similar vein to the theory of stress spoons, according to which each person has a predefined number of stress spoons to spend (and there’s always something to spend them on, however big or small), a big catalyst of stress will concentrate it all in one place, and suddenly it doesn’t matter if your text sounds foolish and it’s ok to eat in public. Like your brain is only able to focus on the pain in one part of your body. The greatest placebo is always distraction; not like TV or conversation but like a huge blow to your stupid head
I can see though how this can be addictive, why some willingly take on high-stress jobs. To forget oneself in the name of a mission we don’t have enough time to question. I always thought we humans were like the failed prototype for ants
The worry exhausts you but also keeps you awake, and I text a friend that every day I fight not to stay in bed all day. I’m told that maybe I should just for today in view of everything that’s been going on, but I don’t know how to R&R, I only know self-soothing to come through discipline and routine, to feel the cogs turning in whichever mysterious direction as long as things are in motion. I make myself write this entry
I’m bound to be the victim of every minute of the day until I find a new soothing agent. Times like these my bad habits of interpreting everything through the lens of fate and karma don’t help, resorting to deep and ancient reflexes of flagellation and sacrifice as offerings (to who?). I’m dangerously close to being receptive to mantras, but it’s better than substances
If I pull this off and get out the other side mostly unscathed, there’s no telling if it will have humbled me or turned me into an absolute menace of self-confidence
161.
The Tumblr-famous Emily Dickinson quote “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself” seemingly comes from a letter to a friend in which she complains about moving, where she also writes “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and all the adjacent buildings.”
The kingdom is not the land but the throne. The objects and touchable spaces impregnated with your habits and rituals, welcoming the most comfortable version of yourself. Same goes for good friendships
I spent all of yesterday mostly on the phone and detached. Then I went to see The Substance at a late screening, had to rush home to catch the last metro, then the last bus. Slept a few hours. Now I’m looking for myself with metaphorical lanterns. The first hint is the shoes found in the middle of the kitchen, evidence of hasty removal
I love things and people through the request don’t go anywhere I can’t find you. To build a life is to buy maps and networks, things we want to find our way back to, claiming silent, symbolic ownership to reassure us
I was inspired a couple of weeks ago to rewatch some of Friends, suddenly realizing that I am now about the average age they all were when it started. I was hoping to maybe tap into a new understanding of the show, one informed by a camaraderie of peers I might now be in on. But since I can’t relate to getting divorced while having child mid-twenties nor to Greenwhich Village apartment ownership any more than when I was 10, I return it to the archive of my mind labelled nostalgia
162.
Some have 5 year plans and some go forth without crunching any numbers. There is room for ambition and there is room for the lack of it, but what seat is there for ambition that revolves around shooting in the dark and finding out? My MO is to live off the desire of doing (great or moderately so) things but resisting entirely the urge to make game plans, hoping that whatever does happen will surprise even myself
”You’re making… techno music?” my sister asks on FaceTime, head tilted to better hear the Ableton session that’s playing on my computer, then through my phone, and out her computer. I say yes! enthusiastically like I’ve always known this but really the genre was not something I was remotely thinking about when hunched over my laptop all day, alternating between remembering where the MIDI vs Audio effects are, and YouTube tutorials. She makes a joke about me as a DJ and it lingers on my mind all evening, delightfully amused at the paradox the image conjures up, namely a DJ that is both shy and spiritless
This to say that my fatal flaw is that nothing excites me more than a revirement or plot twist if you will, but thankfully I run no risk of pursuing the techno DJ avenue, for one because I will be bored of it in half a week, but especially because I have 27 days left of Ableton trial, and though my life of shooter in the dark so far has brought great joys and stories, I’ve yet to reach the financial mindset of someone who pays for software
163.
Last night I walked 40 minutes to reach a small underground music/video performance that ripped my heart apart for 40ish minutes and then promptly walked back another 40, in bed before I’d finished processing the experience. The friend I was supposed to go with cancelled for Canadian Thanksgiving preparations, which made it an extra layer of hard to leave the house in the cold, but cultural experiences alone taste deeper, and I never complain about not having to respond to “so what did you think?”
Homesickness starts hitting in the deceptive form of hyper-awareness for the end of summer. This is the transition of the year when I thrive, but the quiet of the last few days greatly contrasts with this summer’s trips to Paris, for example, and I almost miss the feeling of wanting to beg for my life when more shots are ordered. A posts about the new Brat album/remix/version, and though I’ve no doubt it feels like a fever dream that doesn’t end for him as much as it does for me, it reminds me of our Pride weekend. Now it’s autumn and the piece I wrote about it isn’t being published
It’s Friday and my plans are the same as the previous days, namely to domesticate my own self into pleasant company, try not to hate her too much. Time alone feels torturous but mysteriously good, like the same too-vinegary salad I’ve been eating for the last three meals in a row which is starting to make my insides feel like a sulfuric acid plant. I see the irony in how this, in turn, might not be ideal to create plushness. But I’ve always been bad at self care that doesn’t involve rigorous scrubbing or strong chemicals, metaphorically or not. Yesterday, at a loss for knowing how to “listen to my body” or my needs, I responded to my restless discomfort by reorganising all of my Notion pages. I changed the pages’ titles to all lowercase, and somehow this small change made the whole thing look 20% less daunting. This is the level of thrill I’m training myself to take satisfaction in again
I’m hoping to finish reading Parable of the Sower this week. Though I’ve been enjoying it more than I expected, I’m itching to perhaps move to something nonfiction to make me feel more grounded in this time and space. The cover has a single blurb by John Green that reads “pairs well with 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale” and this haunts me. Imagine working for years on a book only for JOHN GREEN to get to write on the cover what it pairs well with, like it’s a fillet and he knows a good wine. Come to think of it, this could be a much better (subtle but informed, funny) blurb if he was indeed talking about wine or other non-book items. This diary, for example, probably pairs well with 2 litres of dark coffee on an empty stomach and adult acne
The rooftop terrace, a luxury I boasted about on my first days, is already breaking my balls. For various reasons, it’s the best and easiest place to get some air and/or smoke, but implies great preparation, arm strength to lift the glass door, and inherent anxiety that it’s going to somehow lock me outside
Now that my grouchiness has been made evident, we may recognize knowing deep down that, once I resolve to stop prolonging the suffering and decide to spend time with another human in the flesh, we will be back on
Until then, we play the “artist’s flaws” card
164.
Now that my hair is short I can’t Rapunzel my way out of towers and predicaments. I’m learning to tie sheets together into ropes, and to the knots I add handkerchiefs, scarves, dental floss and fairy lights. It’s hard not to fall into the type of thinking that constantly looks for a way out, that only finds repose in the worst-case scenario being abandonment. I want to stay and fight and for the worst-case scenario to be total failure, maybe death
I finish and publish the last film about my sister and then watch a film called The Sisters Brothers. I’m not amused by this because I don’t pick up on it until the next day. Most things fly past me lately, my brain hyper-focused on abstract shapes of world doom existentialism. Nothing much else I can think about for too long, and this also is the expression of my privilege
For some reason, one of the things that manages to catch my attention for more than a few minutes is Donald Duck’s Neverglades. The swampy, inhospitable place seemingly named after Florida’s Everglades. Gotta love good lore that is dark and grim. I stare at the comic strip box of the plane flying over the menacing vegetation and think back to my sheet rope
I’m getting news of impeachments that won’t happen and governments that won’t be censored as 2-liner notifications really close to each other while I’m browsing the salad section at the supermarket. By the time I look back down the news is about the heavy rains this week. I try listening to French radio while making breakfast only to land on a literature segment where they somehow got the president who is of course not addressing any of this and just saying that he really likes 100 Years of Solitude. Being physically away from it all only adds to the eeriness. I look up and all I see is salad aisle, clear sky, keffiyehs and Palestinian flags that at least don’t get overshadowed by thespian national politics here. Not to be a conspiracist but it’s like they bet on the fact that a society drunk off anger and revolt always ends up being a hungover society, sluggish and confused. Or maybe that’s just me
165.
I easily crave alone time but adjusting to it is more often than not just a blurry experience. The evenings are so quiet, which soon I will rejoice in, but in the meantime I’m awkward in my own presence and company. I wake up to find myself still here, and it’s like a date that drags on too long. “I guess I’ll make us coffee then”
To make the days go faster while I wait this out I itch for the calloused hands of a guitar player who also DJs or neck crooks that carry too much vanilla perfume. As long as I forget myself for a minute
Somehow Nintendogs and other pet care simulation games come to mind. Affection through screen not skin, a stylus pen that doesn’t carry heat as a mediator. But entire, undivided and reciprocal attention of user and pet simulation when the game runs. I resent whoever might lobby for this as the future of intimacy. But I wonder what percentage of those permanently nude “AI girlfriends” end up serving the purpose of just being someone to talk to
”Love is in the air!” C texts us, referring to R celebrating an anniversary, A having a boyfriend, and herself hanging out with her ex at the ER. To include myself I think to mention how the other day I saw someone with exactly the same hair as my ex
166.
S, who got here from Europe a day before me, half-jokingly comments, more than once, on the cars being way bigger here, and the streets not being pedestrian. I counter-argument that anywhere I walk here is pleasant to obscene levels, every other street a residential vibe with front gardens and buildings low enough to perceive the sky. I don’t comment on the car thing though, because it’s true that they are huge.
I myself am like a hybrid type of car, of maladaptive but enthusiastic nature as I get used to the taste of the fuel here again, the way I get used again to the more acidic tomato sauce. The fuel are the different stimuli and the lifestyle, and the first week is never the easiest one
But I stick my tongue out, on my knees, and ask for the routine and painful shedding of skin I’m getting hooked on
S texts the name of the café we always go to and a time, and I get there walking with a bounce in my step. We sit outside talking for hours and then drive to the supermarket, pick up ingredients, come back to mine to cook and eat and discuss mommy vloggers. Old habits slowly return
Here, the dirty words that define me (polyamorous, artist) are still dirty but for different reasons. We take what we can get, and how refreshing it is to change up the angle that triggers self-consciousness. Like replacing a cracked windshield with another, differently cracked windshield
The living alone thing has yet to sink in, my mornings having been filled with calls and texts to friends 6 hours ahead, and afternoons with those who live here and towards whom I can take obscenely pleasant walks. J gave me an envelope with 61 notes for me to read, one for each day here. Somehow, I’ve been getting a text from her at the same time as I draw my daily one out
167.
In the name of growth I shall learn my lesson from the last time in Montreal and take a more controlled and rational approach to my purchasing of vinegars. Walk away from the tall bottles of apple cider vinegar I might use twice, feeling taller myself; resist the call from fig or chilli vinegars, not easily found at home, and feel responsible adulthood flood me. Two months sounds like a long time, but in fancy cooking vinegar years it is nothing
Growth is a game of trial and error leading to sorting, some things stay and some must go. I keep the same ambition and drive as my last stay in the city, namely to let the discomfort of an upended routine and unfamiliar home, as well as a certain asceticism for focus, lead me to creative re-wiring. But I discard the culinary bad habits of last time (re: vinegar), and raise the bar for some things, like the apartment I rent out (yes, the private rooftop access is critical to my creative retreat)
One day you’re young and scruffy and one day you have oat milk brand preferences
These contrasts are all the more obvious to me who can not only always compare myself to how I was last time I was here, but also to who I was when I first came here as a clueless 19 year old. I still see her in the supermarket aisles, shopping for the cheapest brand of instant coffee and whole aloe vera leaves
There is a curve graph to be drawn for the increasing price of coffee I let myself buy over the years and the decreasing sex appeal this seems to afford me. Youth is currency and I’m gladly exchanging mine for basic comforts like : letting myself eat
Back at home, that’s a life hurdle I believe I’ve almost totally conquered, and I can let myself buy any vinegar I like. Here, it’s like there is another version of myself still lagging behind, and I descend back into a specific brand of hell to go pick and lug her up. I don’t mind this, because who isn’t (secretly or not) nostalgic for the warfare of the early years?
The same way a cat sniffs a new environment until it is all mapped out in their heads like for those autonomous vacuums, I spent my first evening and night listening in to the sounds of the apartment and building, sorting them into normal/fine (the neighbour’s rhythmic snoring) and abnormal/worth attention (is someone breaking in?)
168.
Humans have killed such inconceivable numbers of rodents in the name of scientific experiments, and being exposed to this information first-hand through my job for two years now has me thinking that science’s new primary aim should be to develop reparations for Sprague Dawley, Winstar, and all types of rats and mice collectively. Get them some kind of “Living+” situation, or a new status in society that lets them vote or a right to an attorney, or perhaps lifelong rat spa memberships. And then get me a coffee gift card for all the photos of cut-open rats that have jumped on me without warning as I scroll down Word documents
169.
The other day in the tramway I saw a girl wearing a shirt that said “I <3 Emo Boys” sitting down and staring into the void. By some divine blessing I was also looking around me and not at my phone, as otherwise I might have missed the guy from the seat behind her who stood up to make his way to the doors. I saw him before she did: large black t-shirt over gray striped long sleeves, baggy black jeans with chains dangling, a thick head of straight, black hair falling on his face. They don’t make them like that anymore. Then I just stared at her, knowing he was about to pass by her, and when he did I got to witness, front-row, the double take, the mouth slowly opening, the eyes widening. I probably looked demented myself, but I don’t care. Not like anyone else noticed anything, glued to phone screens as is polite in public now. She didn’t follow him, and in her place I don’t know if I would have had the balls either. But I hope they meet again. She better be wearing that shirt every day
Meanwhile, I have to thank modernity for allowing me to draft, vaguely ponder, and send so-called “risky” texts on my phone, from my couch, and in the time that it takes to smoke a rollie. God forbid I burden myself by taking the time to at least sit at a desk, light a candle. Prick my finger so I can sign the letter with a drop of my blood as evidence of my pure intentions. Imagine the Amazon Dash button but instead of instantly ordering new razors it instantly texts AI-generated poems of longing or loathing (depending on the button) to a preset list of contacts. I’ll never use AI to write and especially not messages to people, but perhaps in this instance, and in my rush to get it done and move on to stress-folding my laundry, it could have helped me avoid sending a peace offering which, upon reread, gave off vague threatening undertones. Overall this person probably deserved more than a text, not a letter but maybe a phone call, but then again nowadays what is more threatening than a phone call? I’m just following etiquette
The expected relief from sending that text after weeks of buildup is there, but ends up feeling more like ashing a cigarette or shaving your knee. And this is before Amazon gets involved
In the hour that followed my laundry had been folded and my peace offering plausibly reciprocated. Thank you modernity for dampening every human experience and reducing it to pings and retina-burning typos or autocorrects (“Do you catch my jizz?”, A was to text me only a few hours later)
In my defense, such is part of the fate of someone whose loved ones are spread across the globe (or at least, one half of it). I’ve dabbled in relationship upkeep (or collapse) by messaging over many years and through various interfaces. What I dream of is going back to the 80s (where I never was) to ring up my friends or exes on their work’s landline, and in the fantasy they would say something like “Dude you can’t call me on my work’s landline”, and I would drop a chunky piece of gossip or drama or information, and there would barely be any time for follow-up questions, let alone “how do you feel about that?”, and we’d hang up, and there would be a thrill in the air
A “read” receipt just lacks that glamor
170.
Days fly by and I barely have time to untangle my eyes before an hour and then a week have passed and I have things to do but more importantly people to see, like I’m going on a crusade type of expedition and not on a trip for the two months of the year where people are too tired and depressed to hang out anyway. Ignoring the semblance that seeing my friends one by one has to psychotically ticking things off a list, I let my heart get filled up with love and appreciation for them at the expense of letting my to-do list increase in percentage of urgent matters. So coy is the beating heart
I focus on the logistics of my absence like it’s cryosleep and neglect the part where I actually plan my time in Montreal.
Like I need to figure out a meal plan that doesn’t leave me with numerous barely touched condiments and vinegars to give away at the end of my stay, and I ought to start thinking about what kind of sleazy situation I want to get myself into this time, if any.
Emily in Paris has become a sequence of ads, with seemingly anything they can get their hands on, including our first lady in a no doubt accidental slip from commercial promotion to political propaganda for a president we are trying to impeach. This will age like a 3 euro supermarket wine kept for a couple of years in a poorly insulated garden shed
Some people online are less distracted than me by the product and government placements and are still able to pick up on the show’s abundance of inconsistencies and plot holes, like how Sylvie (owner of the marketing firm) seems to show up to every pitch meeting with clients without preemptively knowing what her employees’ pitch will be, though it’s probably because she was busy having a long lunch with Brigitte Macron
I think I am terrified of Lily Collins. In a fascinated type of way
171.
I want to return to the safety of tin foil and face paint psychedelic pop of the likes of Prince Rama or MGMT. Is this the beginning of yearning for so-called good old days? When music videos were at their prime as a genre and drugs were preached to in a metaphorical rather than concrete way in songs?
Days are good when they become old. That either means that everything constantly gets worse, or better
Either way, I argue that if we’re going to stubbornly fixate on the past like this we ought to learn to tell others about it. “Good old days” or “make America great again” or ”You had to be there” doesn’t cut it. Learn to tell a story right and tell it to me because I simply won’t take your word for it
I can be extremely patient for some things and terribly impatient for others, an example of the latter being storytelling that doesn’t do the story justice. I was reminded of this recently, when I received a letter from S in which, over 9 different sheets of paper, she manages to masterfully hook me into the tale of how she found out her ex was cheating. So carefully crafted were the prose and pace, I could have read any mundane story written by her and called it a page-turner
Today is a shit day which is why I suspect I’m turning to the past to indulge in some whining and self-victimization
”what the actual fuck” and “asshole motherfucker” text J and K, respectively, when I stop typing and erasing texts and finally give in to complaining to them about my failed hat pick up, wherein the person I was buying from never showed up. I admire their ability to enable me like this, even when it’s about hats
Only once I’m back home the person texts to apologize profusely and tell me that their daughter was sick all night and they’ve only just come out of the doctor’s. They ask if I might be able to stop by again later that day and in pettiness and exhaustion I say no. I do have work to do, but what’s the burden of a freelancer’s workload compared to the burden of a sick child? I’m the asshole, it’s me
I cancel my plans for tonight and turn on the radio, switch to the “Nostalgie” station to see if it’s already become catered to me or if I still have some “good old days” to experience ahead of me
172.
I almost envy those who get to sit in aggressively lit and disinfected classrooms this September, which is saying a lot because I hated school. I wish I could kidnap myself in a room, on a chair, for hours on end, like school did. I think this is partly because I recently dreamt of the coffee I would always get at the school machine, which I remember as a most delectable treat, perhaps because the machine was designed to saturate it all with sugar and speed so we’d hold out against the inhumane hours, but perhaps also because today I fucked my coffee to water ratio up and I’m sipping on coffee that tastes like light tea, which I don’t wish upon anyone
I once wrote here about having itchy organs, and I stand by the undervalued itch vs crave as verbs dancing on the line between want and need. I itch for laced high school coffee, for the buzzing and clinking the classroom lights made when you turned them on before the sun even rose, like they too were still asleep and awoken in a startle. I wouldn’t know how to crave something that was never enjoyable in the first place, but itching for pain I know too well
V, a high school friend, witnesses me in the crux of my recent 24 hours of haircut limbo, and is of the opinion that I look like I cut my hair on fentanyl. “It’s an F Bob”, she calls it. “the F is for Fucked Up”, she kindly specifies. It’s as if having gone to high school together kind of resembles having gone to war together. The good thing about seeing an old friend in times like these is that she actually knew me and the few iterations of hair identity I carried. She says the hair makes me look like a mom. I say I thought the long hair made me look like a mom. She says I’ve always existed on the spectrum of mom, just different variations of it. “Except for that one period of time where you looked like a problematic child”, but she won’t elaborate.
She instead tells me of her pilgrimage with her husband this summer, how one night in Spain there was a problem with their hotel reservation and, in the exhaustion of the day’s hike and prospect of not having a good bed to sleep in, she flew off the handle and screamed at the reception lady, threatened to do voodoo on her and strongly encouraged her to sleep with both eyes open. I laugh though morally I might reprimand this behavior or at the very least point to the fact that she’s the one with the mom demeanor in this situation. But for reasons I probably don’t need to explain I’m scared of V, so I don’t
I’m not actually mad about the mom association. I’d rather look like a mater than a child — secretly I’d even like to aim for grandmother, and my Pinterest board for hair being full of gray and white heads could attest to that. Nowadays I only take (online) advice if it comes from an older person. I don’t care how crazy they sound, because we are all bound to end there, and should therefore be listening much more attentively. Terry Cole Whittaker is my YouTuber of the moment even if her uncut videos and rambly pattern of speech are hard on my overstimulated iPad kid brain, not to mention the heavy religious undertones, but these days I’ll take the words of any 60+ woman who dresses well as gospel
Speaking of women who dress well getting my immediate trust for worse or for worse, I’m pedaling my way through the last episodes of Succession when I find pockets of time, at this point less out of curiosity or interest and more to be freed from the mind shackles this show has put me in. Everything is business, family, business, family, and Shiv’s stylish bob
173.
The mixed salad of emotions of the last three days had me cutting half of my hair off last night without much thought. The act itself was cathartic as intended; the result, however, is a whole new source of torment, which some encourage me to also address with scissors and “finish the job”, while others categorically stand against me fixing this anywhere other than with a professional. It’s not a shag or a bob, it’s a third, secret thing
I was in Strasbourg not writing this diary because I was busy visiting my sister’s new charmingly antique city, playing errand boy by picking up guitars from friends’ exes, buying cheap German cigarettes in large numbers, and having the kind of business meeting where it’s more just “getting a coffee” but with still really high, concealed stakes, where you have to professionally seduce someone in a casual way
Whenever I meet someone so-called famous or important or successful I still take a second to come to terms with the fact that, once sat across from me, they’re a random person like any other, who sometimes drops their phone and has split ends and a delicate stomach. I equate this experience to coming across those phone game ads that big actors are sometimes in. You’ll be minding your business and suddenly Kylie Jenner wants you to play Travel Town. Talk about a glitch in the matrix, or more realistically I suspect criminal involvement somewhere
Going over the Reddit thread of the aforementioned Kylie game ad, most people are just talking about how her haircut makes her look like Michael Jackson ‘05. You can never win with hair
174.
Call it nominative determinism if you want but the fact that even I struggle to know how to pronounce my own name (first AND last) sometimes has surely not helped to solidify a social butterfly identity. I just think that names that aren’t digestible, let alone catchy, close many doors. For example, the “running a cult” door
Just think of that social phenomenon of calling someone by their last name. It’s implicit flirtatious or at least affectionate territory. Because you have to know what their last name is to start with, implying a degree of closeness, but also in the way it establishes a dynamic somewhere in the spectrum between rivalry and teammates. Among men of the kind that doesn’t like to be called gay it allows for tenderness with a degree of separation that makes it all seem casual and playful. It just always inescapably feels like an American teen movie locker room, so capacity for irony is crucial. It also creates the I’m different effect, because I guess if every single person calls you by your last name then we are no longer in the realm of cute flirty nicknaming and I’m sorry to tell you no one remembers your actual name. But all this to say, if someone has a really good last name you’ll feel just that bit more inclined to play that card, which bitterly leads me to think that some of us are deprived by fate of some of the puppy love going around
Nevertheless it’s funny how fine the line is, because add a “Mr” or “Ms” in front of said last name and depending on the situation you’re either talking to your banker or to your dog
175.
I think about the rebrand from calling the country Turkey to Türkiye more often than I talk about it. There’s something so vulnerable and assertive in the absurdity of it all. Like a little kid standing up for himself and asking his friends to stop calling him that stupid name that makes him sound like a bird. A totally fair and justifiable request, but then imagine that scenario except with the UN involved, and the little kid is Erdoğan. I just love the theatrics of it all
As part of my bespoke curriculum I have a couple of playlists of Turkish songs, and sometimes I find myself vibing more than expected, and end up dancing around my apartment and singing things like Ayrılmam, saralırım hayallere with all the mandatory drama. Here again is a praise of theatrics, greatly helping when learning a language
I’ve also been thinking about cars a lot lately and today specifically about names we give cars. I realize the idea of naming my car sounds chore-like to me. There’s a discomfort in giving cars human names, less so than when they’re given to things like fridges or sophisticated incubators. First of all, because I only recently learned that cars are traditionally given female names, thanks to C who told me about how naming her and her boyfriend’s car Philippe triggered some reactions of the mellow outrage kind. Perhaps it’s no wonder that cars are not granted as much poetry when it comes to names as boats. I mean, just look at the structure, the material, and the stark difference between a concrete road and the open sea. But I remember my Turkish grandad calling his fishing boat Esprit, and think to myself I’d also like to name my car something gaudy and dramatic in honor of that, like Hayal
The honest and vulnerable truth is that I intend to rent a car to go pick a friend up from the airport soon, and though I love to drive, as long as some parameters (such as airport parking, or directions) remain in the realm of the unknown/never done, I will simply not stop playing imaginary scenarios, from the embarrassing to the tragic, in my head. Though it’s in over a week, I catch myself surveilling the street across from my apartment for parking spots. I guess that’s another reason I’m not a fan of human names for cars. Imagine dying in a vehicle you named something like Jeanette or Randall. It kinda ruins the inherent theatrics of a car crash
176.
I used to dream of the kind of life I have now, except in my fantasies I enjoyed it more. In a kind of constant placid state, I never had girl dinners, inhabited storms like they were my kingdom, and overall acted like someone who’s arrived at her destination. In reality it all feels more like getting all the tiles you wanted, and beginning the whole process of putting them up only to realize you don’t have grout
It’s like somewhere along the way I forgot to pack my own brand of vice to channel all the side effects of an agitated life. From the role models of my youth, I forgot to take note of their excess of spending, or fucking, or smoking, or drinking, or gambling, or eating. I found my way to the cool kid party, but sober and anxious was not the password
I used to rely on lyrics to enjoy music, and could rarely listen if not attentively, like reading. In the last year I’ve sunk into ambient music like one slowly sinks into a warm bath to cope with the busy, word-heavy life I created. And now my Spotify wrapped is unshareable
I worry that ambient music (psychotically on a loop), meditation (not preventative but as a tranquilizer), and pseudo-therapy notions of art-making are going to become my party-turned-coping drug. But I suppose there’s supposed to be a degree of shame to it. Everything has a price
I’m on a loop of “Stalagmites & Hellictites” by Lucy Gooch while the sunrise turns the sky pink outside and A sends me unprompted photos of him smoking weed. Early mornings I can usually rely on my phone to be quiet, except for the odd night owl North American friend once in a while, which always feels like a delightful secret night meeting when everyone else is asleep. It all feels very blissful, though that’s also because I know better than to lean in to check on the pigeon carcass
I like this three-level composition; the pink sky and sunlight piercing through the fig tree leaves, a decomposing pigeon cadaver on the ground, and me in the middle, looking up. It would be a good painting, depicting the spectrum I inhabit
I could no doubt seek enlightenment in more suitable settings or conditions. V did Camino de Santiago this summer, and it reminded of that random lady I met on the train one time who spent the whole ride trying to convince me to do it with the insistence of someone who’s selling. But whichever is the easy, coward way, I prefer looking for it through apartment windows
I’m late to the party of Succession but I’m hyper-fixating on it, pacing myself at one episode a night. I love feeling stressed for these characters whose sources of stress I can’t even fathom. They too need something to be drunk off to run such circus, and it’s mostly money. I’ve started transposing the show onto anything that happens to me, like any minor form of tension or slyness around me and the theme song starts playing. “In this situation I am Roman” I text K who has no idea what I’m talking about
I’ve also started using business lingo, like saying about ongoing drama and rumors that the optics are not good or calling friends shareholders. It gives me a taste of the frantic and made-up busy-ness I used to crave
177.
I am captain of the ship and fool of the captain, entirely in charge of my direction/speed/execution as much as of my will to live/laugh/love, which was always my dream growing up before I gave some thought to the union-reprehensible undertones of this arrangement. I’ve sailed far enough into sea to not have anyone to demand compensation to anyway
Not to mention I am sailing map-less, having been, for some reason, along the way, injected with enough male-typical cockiness to just kinda swing it
The dead pigeon right outside my window has been rained on at least once a day for three days now. I hesitate more and more to lean forward enough to look at it. I remember when, as a birthday present, E asked us to dispose of the dead squirrel that had been openly rotting at the bottom of his building, with the stink you can imagine. C had just kind of shoveled it into a bush for a chance at a more prudish decomposition, while I just filmed. You’re not gonna get anything much better at stopping you in your tracks than a dead animal at your doorstep, and perhaps that’s the kind of experience that vanitas painters wanted to recreate for us. The rot smell is really crucial though, I think, so idk about art etc
Vanitas warns against, obviously, vanity (of ambition, of desire, of presentation). Trying to make flailing look hot and controlled is a waste of time, and you’ll be like the sodden pigeon carcass sooner than you’ll manage to make it make sense in the eyes of others
K is stressed about quitting their job and especially about telling their bosses, but with a browser full of beach resort tabs open already. I convince myself I won’t be able to pull off the logistics of my next Montreal trip this time while things line up for me in suspicious elegance in the background. It’s not relentless optimism like m*nifestation gurus want to sell to you nor is it masochist pessimism like was trendy in my younger years. I guess maybe it’s faith that whatever happens will be okay, like maybe the ship will sink but that’s a cool way to go, so
Because of my generally subpar memory and disorderly set of activities I partake in, I can genuinely hardly see in front of me, and can’t afford to not have as much of an orderly day to day as possible, seeking ritual to appease while I wait for seeds I don’t remember planting to sprout. I’m a monk really, but highly caffeinated and periodically desperate. I really need to set a boundary re: people who ask “so what have you been up to?”, or at least be allowed to reply “that’s insensitive” instead of finding ways to explain why I don’t remember yesterday without killing the vibe
178.
So today is September 3rd, the date this diary countdown originally aimed for
No hard feelings, I tell summer while shaking its hand, soaking up the last of the sun. You’re not a bad guy, I’ve just been in over my head, like every time
J announces, after a summer of 3+ entirely different romance stories, that she feels the need to retract into her cave and into abstinence. No wonder, I scoff as someone who can barely fathom touch in warm weather. Then she sends me a video of the river and I think about how it feels like all of life somehow just wants to end up at the river. Know everything, touch everyone, and wash it all off into the river, hope it forgives us
Barricaded into my dark apartment, blinds closed and surviving off nectarines and tomatoes, I feel content and glad in a Stockholm syndrome type of way, a sub-human version of myself blinded to most things beyond the base of my pyramid of basic needs. But I’m alive, outliving demons still
I’ve seemingly got (at least) 177 more fights to fight, so let work (re)commence, however sloppily. God doesn’t exist in the calendar anyway, and it is not my discipline keeping me alive, it’s my lack of it
I wish I could cry more—it’s even more practical than writing, already arguably the art form of easiest access.
But I’m not greedy and I thank this diary, the home to my brain secretions for 10 months now. We exist in saliva as much as in rivers as much as in ink
now that we’re one and now that we’re high
all I can see is that We have to die
Sky - Easter
179.
We are blessed as a species to be hyper-conscious of our respective, inevitable deaths, because as dreadful as it can be to live in the knowledge of our end, it results in beautiful things like yolo or carpe diem. And yet we don’t apply this to our collective, humanity way of being, despite great knowledge by now on evolution processes and how we are bound to end up. Like nothing about a new iPhone or the risk of nuclear meltdown seems to accommodate our future as crabs. I’m just saying, it’s never too early to start preparing
I called my grandfather to wish him a happy 83rd birthday, and he made the obligatory comment on how he’s not getting any younger, but hopefully he can stick around some more… I jokingly said he should try to at least get to 88, but this was not well received because, as he told me, he intends to go way beyond that. That’ll teach me for trying to hasten humanity’s carcinization
180.
Perhaps we need to collectively learn when to sit this one out and when to partake, when it comes to trends of any kind dictating how to publicly exist
I raw-dogged the treadmill at the gym yesterday, meaning I showed up without headphones, and for once watched the music videos they play on the small TV. Eenie Meenie by Sean Kingston ft Justin Bieber, if you can believe it, was on there, and fell victim to my undivided, critical and sweaty attention
It inevitably and not painlessly threw me back to who I was at that time, 14 years ago, when I too loved to wear tight-fitting button down vests over t-shirts and shared a voice pitch with Justin. You’d think this harrowing experience, of watching what you once thought was the epitome of cool become the epitome of badly aged, would make us all guarded against saying or expressing anything, ever
Instead we just keep propelling ourselves into more and more sharing, and if most of us regret our youths’ “blogs” it doesn’t seem to have taught us enough of a lesson re: social media (I mean, look at me now). Like imagine if we’d had Instagram as we know it today when Eenie Meenie came out. The damage would have been much greater. Imagine the stories put together with the song playing in the background. Now imagine that but with the feature of the synced up lyrics popping up on the screen
Being the “man of the hour” becomes more and more something imbued with threat for the future. Anything can and will be turned against you
Then again, perhaps we do well to forsake “cringe” from our vocabularies. It never killed anyone, and all signs point to it’s gonna keep happening
181.
I spent some time yesterday on the private tabs, browsing flights to Montreal. This is hopefully one of the last if not the last time I enjoy such unbounded freedom booking flights, the last time I click “flexible dates” on the search engine and embark on a quest of price comparison. Next time, I better be putting in very specific and perhaps inconvenient dates, paying a high price that makes me gag a bit, and completing the whole operation in 20 minutes tops. Like regular people do.
All I do is make decisions and wonder if the finances will follow. The rationale knows they will, but my bored subconscious is only turned on if there’s something to feel guilty or stressed about, and it will find just about anything. But what if they don’t it sensually whispers in my ear, begging me to come play the game of panic. And I tell it oh you know I can’t resist when you wear that skirt
Lying to yourself is a necessary remedy and relief. Love yourself to the point of being unable to say the truth. Romance yourself with lies and embellishments of reality. Buy flowers when you’ve cheated. Text yourself late at night. Write someone a love poem, but secretly it’s for yourself. Watch yourself eat resentment dessert in the mirror. These days you can’t count on anyone not to ruin the fantasy
It’s so delicate, the dishonesty to the self. So difficult to manage, with no third-party professionals you can pay to mediate (therapists don’t count, they enable it by not caring if you lie or not, as long as you say the words printed on their textbooks they are legally allowed to call it a day and sleep peacefully at night)
Only make concessions. Allow yourself everything, see where it takes you. The finances will follow
182.
I was talking to J about the experience we share of getting “high” off sleep deprivation. For two people who don’t do drugs, this is the best we’ll get. When you haven’t slept, the mental fog lifts the entire following day, as your body is too busy with more pressing matters, namely trying to function. In a way, there’s nothing worse than a full night of restorative sleep. It’s a feeling we could chase forever if a second, consecutive night of sleeplessness didn’t already ruin the party, leaving you feeling like a depressed, dried up pizza crust. Is this a “comedown”? I tell J it feels like not sleeping makes it impossible to think about the past, or the future, so demanding of focus and attention is the present, and that the high we experience is what they call living in the moment. Live, Laugh, Love, Don’t Sleep. We close our eyes and stay silent for a minute, trying to meditate into that state, but soon give up. I suppose if you could meditate into getting high we’d know about it by now
I keep my all-nighters in discrete pouches for special occasions. I’ll all-night if I want to savor a day more than others, or if I feel like I need something to fix me up. I wake extremely early sometimes to microdose and just sit on the living room floor, lights all still off, taking it in. Meet me at my most sleepless to get the lovelier version of me, but make sure to leave before it wears off
183.
Lately most conversations feel like they should be happening with a therapist present and instead of enjoying summer greatly unclothed I get rashes from condensed sweat under the metaphorical suit of armor. I wake up ready for battle every morning and the battle is will I make it, is today it for me, is tragedy falling upon us all, is the weather app earnest or gaslighting me, and other forms of paranoia fueled by long-term exposure to heat and bad wine
The entire country has felt so quiet since the Olympics, and I almost miss the background hum of nostalgia politics. At least we had a steady supply of matter to dissect and unpack, but it feels like everyone has grown bored
For example, R’s boss in London said she would join the “demonstrations” as she called them if they started again. When he tells us this we can offer little more than a compassionate wince, like experiencing brief pain we have become too accustomed to and no longer have it in us to entertain much more
As I write this, I receive an unprompted text from V asking me if I ever feel like I am floating through currents underwater, but also like I’m totally fine with it? And this sort of question I don’t like responding to because it is rhetorical, and meant for the querent more than for me. But it’s telling of how the end of summer seems to have caught up to us all, coughing and covered in dust, overgrown hair and peeling skin, content with currents dragging the shit out of us through the mud
I patiently wait my turn to ride the high of “back to school” scents emitted by passers-by in brand new suede and fuel my own return to life. If I could physically run to September I would, but in the meantime it all feels like reaching the end of an excavation, shovels meeting metal, signaling the end of the simulated matter for us to work through.
Not to mention the enduring absence of a Prime Minister, leaving us restless like kids with brand new school supplies but no head teacher to torment yet
184.
I’ve been screaming in my dreams because I’m too busy acting out gratitude for the universe’s foot on my neck all day
Gratitude today especially goes to being cartoonishly predisposed to being in love with every boy, girl, painting, or poem that crosses my path, because what better drug than home-made? No one is raw-dogging this all, chemical-less
I try to make a comfortable nest of something resembling what Emily in Paris coined “the gray area” to sell gray hair shampoo. Had she not immediately gone back to demanding American boundaries, labels, and indoors sex, I might have been able to milk some more inspiration from her
Last night K used my full name and the third person to signify their surprise when they asked “Nilay Conraud wants a house with a garden?” and I said yes but only once I’ve slept on all the sublet couches and packed my suitcase to its destruction, sat in enough cars to tell them apart and collected 248 trinkets stolen from 248 lovers’ homes, stamped the STD passport some more, seen my home town again, seen my mother’s
I hate the word charity and that its second definition in Merriam-Webster is “as in contribution”, that the third one is “as in mercy”, and that only the fifth one is “as in friendship”. Contribution, mercy, friendship are all three rapports to myself I cycle through, some days more tainted with self-pity than others
The waitress last night pretended not to know the French word for “sturdy” talking about take-home boxes to veer into English and tentatively ask where we were from, if we were “studying here”, and other small talk ventures until we reached the conclusion we’d gone to the same high school. “You might remember my sister more” she said, slightly raising her eyebrows. “She stirred some shit up at the school”, and I kick myself for vaguely pretending I knew what she was talking about and not inquiring further. Truth is, I have no idea who she or her sister are
The self-made chemicals I currently rely on to survive and trigger by making art are turning against me in the form of a deafening biological clock’s ticks. For the first time in my life, I yearn for a dog, a creature to care for, and I hear myself saying “maybe I want a kid” out loud before I can dissect the thought. The house with a garden threateningly looms and I know the next years of my life will be spent working towards, but also running away from, it
The supermoon looks particularly stern this time around
185.
What Happens to a Family Group Chat When One of Its Members Dies for the First Time? And Other Modern Grief Housekeeping Matters
186.
In my Notes app there’s a note that says “Promiscuous rapport to the Notes app”, which I decide to temporarily revise into “licentious rapport to the Notes app”, and such other small tweaks I make to various notes to pass the time in the signal-barren countryside family home this week
I take trips to the app’s depths when looking for myself in the good and the bad but especially the bad, and rarely do I go home empty handed
My childhood friend G and I go for dinner and unprompted, naturally, slip into our farcical roles of estranged husband and wife fighting about mothers in law, the children, his suspected mistress at work. Over the last few years we’ve gotten so good at the bit that some (real) couples sitting at tables nearby might almost believe it, if G didn’t look so pubescent, and if I didn’t look so slovenly. The fantasy of hetero and class normativity, of wealthy reasons to fight about, in this dismal town where we met thirteen years ago
My descent into family time madness is thus cushioned by expeditions into my own phone-stored madness, fantasies of being someone else, and relying on alcohol (if not its consumption, the knowledge that it is there)
I sit on the front steps of the church I was baptized in, in my endless and further maddening search for some signal to publish this, and to hide from my mother who, after smoking most of my tobacco, dared look intently at my face to then claim I “don’t smoke that much but have smoker’s skin”
187.
I await the imminent recognition of the suffering of those of us who get depressed in summer, a much less tolerated concept than winter blues. We’re holding secret meetings, getting organized, plotting media takeovers to reclaim the SAD acronym
I’ve worn the same pair of shorts all week and this causes more damage to my psyche than I should admit. Summer turns everything into a competition for the most fun and the most rest, and I just miss the comfort of the briefcase, the expectations of which I’m much more skilled at meeting. I’m machinery designed to operate in specific conditions, and outside of said conditions the machinery gets existential
The headline would say “‘We exist!’” and it would be a photo of the founding meeting of summer abolitionists, the brand new societal and mediatic pest
The map of suicide rates per country is fascinating in its undecipherable patterns. You think you’re getting something looking at it, but then you don’t, and it’s a lesson in inquiring further. Just look at Greenland, trapped in the collective cliché of the sun setting early
Even in dermatologically dangerous amounts, sun exposure can’t do anything to remedy being let down by reality, not being handsome or rich
Last night I saw the heavy-handed but effective film Saint Maud and it reminded me of a recent podcast I listened to talking about saint suffering and its relation to neuroses and psychosis (heavy handed are also the subliminal messages I’m receiving from the Universe). Saints-to-be inhabit the fine line separating worship of God through suffering and worship of suffering as God. I relate to this of course, aiming to be the saint of my own suffering since childhood, looking for merit in the mysterious surrender to “fate”. As Maud says, “never waste your pain”. But saints get all the praise when really it’s the easy road they’re choosing. Crown and laud those staying in the ring, throwing punches
I go looking for God at the borders of discipline, routine, execution over any circumstance. And every August, this is greatly compromised, leaving me metaphorically writhing in pain like Maud when God is “mad at her” and makes her projectile vomit the sinfully consumed alcohol of that night. A whole new sense to the phrase she’s no fun
Sainthood and seasonal affective disorders are most popular scapegoats
188.
One way I measure time is through environmental activism and what it has looked like: rhino protection, or educational posters showing holes in the ozone layer? I can almost tell you what I was wearing, what haircut you had
We listen with J to my playlist What I Used To Be as an agglomeration of songs that belong to a version of myself I recognize as now removed, like a spider’s previous, molten exoskeleton. But J stops what she’s doing to listen to the next song that came on and exclaims I used to listen to this all the time, and stands there for a minute telling me not to tell her what it is, she knows, it will come back to her, and once she’s gotten it she asks me when I used to listen to this song myself. Somewhere in the molten past is all I can say for sure, incapable as I always am to situate things in time. Probably high school, I venture, but maybe it was last year
Standing in lake water where we were supposed to partake in a ritual of baptism of some sort, hoping to overturn the recent events and our bad luck, I kill the sanctified vibes by blabbering on about how I wish I had any idea what to answer when people ask “how’s your summer been”, not really sure if it’s been overall good, or overall bad. On the drive back, we run each other our respective life timelines, like catching up on all the lost time before we met. Then I jump into the future and ask her, if you could be certain to avoid one way of dying, what would it be? And she says, is my driving that bad
189.
A good day is one I survive, but this is so forgettable and boring a concept when there are so many fake things to spend worry spoons on. Losing a job or a pet or a relationship so effortlessly transports pain from one site to another, like harming yourself on purpose to temporarily alleviate pain somewhere else in your body, and suddenly you’d kill to go back to “writer’s block” or haircut dilemmas
Yesterday I saw J alone for the first time in a while, and we barely passed the Bechdel test, which at the time tasted weird in my mouth and felt like it warranted addressing. This morning I’ll gladly take bad feminism over the hours I’m wasting going from refreshing emails to pulling tarot cards (who, for the record, indicate that this is just the beginning of a Shit Time)
In the few hours I slept, I dreamt that most of London was on fire, and I was sitting at a bar with people I’ve never met and we were being served drinks on the house because the bar was burning down anyway. We happily feasted on ash remains of things and it felt like a metaphor
To occupy the mind during the waiting game, we seek fiction, stories to tell ourselves about what is happening and why, what it means, how we ought to feel. I look for signs and messages, and retrace my steps leading up to the bad event, looking for a culprit in good old OCD fashion. The Spanish man at the tram stop asking me for directions on my way home from J’s yesterday, and then saying that my Castilian is very good, surely was the bad omen, the city equivalent of a crow
Algorithms have been a bit heavy handed on me in the spiritual/mental well-being content, which is an insulting reflection of my current state I’ll take. Last night, before I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of fire, I saw a video of a guy walking through what looked like a west coast suburban neighborhood at night talking about how you ought to chase the feeling, not the thing/experience/reward/etc. I’m growing tired of this call for total agency and control over how we feel. Could I make myself suddenly feel ecstatic, on command? “That’s just hallucination” someone commented
It is too hard for me to be at peace. I summon chaos where there isn’t any, and when there is, I fuel the fire and feast on it. Condolences to my exes of whom, if any are reading this, I promise I mostly only keep fond memories
My French passport should have come with a heavy dose of nonchalance, but bureaucracy failed me somewhere and I only retained the pessimism
190.
I’ve given it some thought and it is perhaps not con-artistry I’m after, but impressionism. Not the paintings that never managed to thrill me, but the act of doing impressions. Fake it until you make it becomes here is my best impression of smooth, of suave, of serious. Here is my impression of employable or here is my impression of your dream girl. And with any work, sometimes you take it home
I hung out at my sister’s half-emptied apartment for probably one of the last times ever, but here’s my impression of trying not to think about that too much. She returned her extra set of keys to my house and we talked about the future, because I guess it was impossible to ignore the scenery of moving boxes all around us. We played around making music and soaking in the sun on her bed, now in the place of where the couch used to be
We watched a sudden cloud of black smoke rise in the air behind the buildings outside, impressive but fading and disappearing completely within 4 minutes. Probably a car dying. Maybe that imaginary depiction we have of souls leaving our bodies when we die and floating up into the sky comes from a guy who one day witnessed (c)arson
If I gave a drama or improv class I wouldn’t say imagine you are a tree, I would say channel your inner tofu; is it firm, is it silky? Most of these days I need to be firm, but feel silky. Have you ever tried using silky tofu for a firm tofu recipe because that’s all you had? Ends up like a bad impression
Here is my impression of spite, here is my impression of spit. Don’t take any of it personally. I’m running lines, you’re my audience
Silky tofu becomes suave tofu, and firm tofu becomes serious tofu—it’s a matter of packaging, of perspective. I’m not a liability for calling you drunk in the middle of the night, I’m suave, I’m smooth, you love it
191.
The fist-sized ventricular pump lodged in our chests is the original fraud, kind words or actions coming from the heart, heart emojis in every shape and color for every occasion, love poems memorized by heart
Such great responsibility and esteem granted to this sack of blood. The never seen mechanical, ugly key part. Aroused by our secret, mythologized insides like by the sound of a car’s engine
Yesterday I saw a man walking a dog past a homeless woman who wanted to pet the dog who then tilted over her paper cup full of coins, and I could see the terror in the man’s eyes as she laughed a genuine laugh and he seemed to hesitate to help her pick them all up, opting in the end to just say “he’s made a mess, sorry”, and heartlessly walk away as she got on her hands and knees
I wonder the story of this incident he’s created in his mind, what he’s gonna tell and how to his friends later, or how he might instead muddle his own memory to forget it
I decided to work extra hard this month to make enough money for plane tickets, shoes, gold teeth, a new liver, surgery for an even bigger nose, silk sheets, more books, speedy immigration lines, knee pads, a venue to show all my friends’ films
Recurrent imagery for me, I’ve realized, is the idea of a heaviness to my step. Like I’m always looking to stomp louder, more decisive. Maybe I could con you all and fill my soles with rocks. Maybe I should double the width of my thighs. Anything for you to hear me coming, to believe in my grandeur
I simply cannot care for the real deal, never as delightful as deception. The genre “nonfiction” means nothing to me. Isn’t everything that reaches paper transmuted to fiction? Even before that, our memories are loosely based fictions, tales we tell ourselves and then others, as are our morals and structures, or the belief that poems and attraction are stored in organs other than the brain.
To conceive of the self must we really first love the self? Does it not suffice to imagine the self, wine and dine the self, fill its shoes with rocks, show it a good time and disappear in the morning, or even just kick it out of the car?
192.
I don’t remember the last time I cried let alone the last time it was from period pain that chained me to the couch with a hot water bottle, unable to manage anything other than maybe Shrek playing on TV for distraction and a couple episodes of dry heaving
The coincidence of a brutal hangover happening the same day as a brutal late period and that day being a Sunday feels like nothing short of a conspiracy to my reality-detached brain. A call for an unscheduled day off? My body slamming my psyche down into a lucha libre full body block? It’s gonna take more than that, I exclaim with my index finger up to no one in particular, wincing in pain because the hot water bottle moved slightly
Last week at dinner, J asked the table to tell scary stories and V pulled out his phone to show us a photo he’d taken of an old friend’s Polaroid group photo a couple of years ago. There were 6 of us at the table that evening, which I think statistically implies about 2 predisposed to spook, and 3 or more paranormal non-believers. And yet I can confirm that none of us slept well that night, in addition to the people in our respective circles the photograph was relayed to: colleagues, childhood friends, siblings, no one not going slightly paler at the sight of the clear yet shadow-hidden woman in the background of what was supposed to be a classic group photo to celebrate the last night of vacation in the country home. Nothing I write can do it justice, apart from stating that it is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. J’s eyes filled with tears and she explained that she somehow always cried when she was afraid. What a strange, fascinating lady
Yet, as days go by, the discomfort leaves room for empathy, and I start rethinking my rapport to so-called ghosts, fictional or presumed real. Humans have always been humans, have they not? I look back at the woman in the picture, with her stylish yet unflattering haircut, her mouth agape which we collectively decide adds to her terrifying appearance yet is probably just an embarrassed reaction to being caught in someone’s group Polaroid. Or maybe she was trying to say something, wanted to be included
Perhaps this new perspective can be explained by my Penguin Books “Which Classic Character Are You” online quiz assessing that I am David Copperfield, namely naive
R and A talk about current workloads; after a hard year, R is getting ready to be gone most of August, and A talks about having been “at capacity” for the last 6 years, with a small admission at the fulfillment found within that, which I relate to. Then they ask me about my own state of things and I can only confirm that things feel never-ending and time feels indescribable as always, though I struggle to convey that accurately because I’m still adjusting to the realization that a busy time for me is not necessarily also productive unless it includes time for nothingness and breaks, to think. And lately summer has forced that upon me, sometimes in the form of debilitating pain and nausea (“If that’s what it will fucking take”, I faintly hear Mother Nature shouting). In that sense, I’ve been fucking busy
Another realization I feel coming for my ass, not quite yet but soon, is that pain and suffering do not equal merit or success. Things don’t have to be a sucky burden, and physical or psychic pain are not cues for me to try and push it like an Olympian martyr. But one thing at a time
Pain just creates fascination in me, ever trying to dissect what it means, represents, and how to effectively stop it. The absolute absence of water signs in my astrological chart explains this, “flow” a foreign concept to my stiff (and solid, reliable) build
After I die, you’ll know it is me haunting photos and homes because my visits will be the opposite of random. Expect me every Thursday around 11:41 PM
193.
My last summer romantic fling was in full swing exactly a year ago, and by full swing I mean it was an experience probably akin to your car slowly breaking down, the engine sometimes starting in great loud fanfare like an explosive orgasm, and coughing up bolts and screws if doing anything at all the rest of the time. I would prefer my car to self-combust and go up in flames to this slow, cumbersome decay. As for my most recent one, great build-up aside I think it would be generous to say it lasted 72 hours, of which more time than I’d like to believe was spent communicating feelings and balancing on eggshells, and by now I’m trying not to die of boredom.
I want to have a romance with someone truly wicked now. They could do things like prepare nothing but a bowl of unseasoned shrimp for dinner and I’d say I’m vegetarian and they’d make it clear they don’t care in vulgar terms, and no one would believe me.
The tragedy/blessing of being an adult is that I recognize these patterns now, and what a way to take the juice out of life. I’ve traded 19-year-old psychotic limerence for perspective, and I now know the fine line differentiating the melodrama craving from jammed creative cogs. Love spells traded for sobriety
My sobriety recently renewed, now it’s all another day, another unfulfilled hope that a well-calibrated evening of care and chores will fix me, end the restlessness, the summer fatigue. I fold laundry and tidy my tools in the evening like you would arrange a shrine for a god, hoping for their mercy the next day. The god is me in the morning, often just getting performance anxiety from it
Executive decisions and planning only get me so far. They’re a meager shield for the wind blowing in all directions, meant for me to be carried on but which I fear as much as I fear myself
The rambling on this matter doesn’t help give more weight to my step, and I’ve started feeling like the Biden of the friend group. Watch me stammer in deep confusion when asked how things have been. Maybe my memory fails me but I swear I remember someone patting my shoulder, which is never a good sign
I pay a visit to my sister who has been calling in her own psychotic state for two days now, looking for AirPods she left in their usual spot but are now nowhere to be found. No exaggeration to say the apartment was turned upside down to no avail, and in our joined forces we take breaks to sit on the couch in silence, pondering and losing sanity points by the minute together. In the end, they fall out of a plastic bag of vacuum accessories she never touches found at the back of a closet of trash and mess she swears she hasn’t touched in weeks. For a moment, I enjoy the small win of being out-Biden’d
194.
So there’s those dogs who can apparently sniff out cancer and it’s not really a smooth-running diagnosis tool by any means yet, but it doesn’t raise much question because if they can sniff out narcotics or explosives, and because the line between animals to love and animals to use has always been blurrier for dogs than we’d publicly like to admit, why not? K brings up those dogs and compares me to them because of my incredible ability to bump or hit their Fucked Knee on especially Bad Days. I think that’s their gentle parenting way of telling me to stop, but probably much like a dog, I only hear the compliment part (“you’re like one of those dogs”)
Human smell is nowhere near as good and the rate of food poisonings from bad milk or yogurt could probably attest to that, but for our species the equivalent skill may be empathy. For pain, for fear, for sadness. Except, unlike dogs who know better than to get cancer just because they smell it, for us it often takes the form of “don’t cry or I’ll cry” or “the vibes are bad” (you are stressed therefore I am now too), not to mention those people who start vomiting at the mere sound or sight of retching, which feels nothing short of helpless
J comes over with great PMS pains and in giving her a hot water bottle to soothe it [empathy?] I try to provoke proximity to hopefully sniff, if you will, some of those pheromones that could trigger my own awaited period [interest] but instead it seems to hit K who is at the other end of the apartment and who claims to “suddenly feel very weepy” and I recognize in their voice the emotional fragility of someone who is about to eject a ton of blood. Empathy kicks in and I do my best to create a comforting environment, show them that video of the guy who releases baby owls from a bucket. Except is it really empathy if secretly I’m just thinking about how I can’t even do that (syncing periods) right?
195.
I have a love-hate relationship with DeepL Write, the AI instantaneous editor soberly advertising “Better Writing”. The idea being that any text you put in, you immediately get different, “better” ways of writing it, is not even my main beef but definitely contributes. Because surely it should be called “Alternative Writing”. That, or I have yet to write the perfect sentence for it, as it keeps edging me in cruel exigence. It’s like having an assuredly dissatisfied editor at your fingertips, a less romantic but nonetheless effective version of receiving your own manuscript in your mailbox, covered in red ink. Torturous and sexy. I confess I sometimes copy-paste small excerpts of this diary into it for no other purpose than slight, mysterious masochism. It hits a nerve or scratches an itch in ways I’m not ready to unpack yet. Mouth-breathing and shaky, I type into the white box “DeepL Write, I love you”, and it hits me back with “DeepL Write, I am in love with you.”
196.
Secretly, deep down, ever since I heard about it in school, I’ve wanted to be a Renaissance man (this is not something I’d ever advise you to publicize on dating app profiles). I mean this in the sense of becoming enamored, as a teen, with the idea that one could dedicate one’s entire life to accomplishing an ideal of skill, competency, and literacy in a variety of subjects just… for the sake of it, basically. I studied film in part because I thought it was a good avenue into being exposed to all sorts of different subjects requiring learning about, constantly. But I also wanted to be able to kick ass, seduce ladies, and move people to tears with my art. Before I even knew what a Renaissance man was, I remember deciding as a child that I would dedicate all my evenings to reading every single book in my parents’ shelves, and come out of it a well of wisdom and oozing brain juice, though I remember that enterprise lasting a week, tops. It was and is as much an insatiable thirst for knowing as it is a desire to seek refuge outside of “real world” things, to be in a duel against self-betterment, that concrete distraction, instead of against existential demons. A lot to unpack here, starting with the YouTube videos offering tutorials on how to become said Renaissance ideal, all by men. How 15th century ideals predated today’s toxic masculine ego, with its tendency to encourage you to Be The Best!!! instead of, for example, going to therapy. And how, somehow, that works on me.
That side of me resurfaced in the last couple of days, when I was home alone. A matter of recharging social batteries and catching up on work, but with a secret great eagerness at the thought of uninterrupted reading or writing time, getting into the so-called “zone” and fantasizing about staying there forever, not interacting with anyone but books. Basically what I’m saying is that what I have in common with the ideal Renaissance man is that we try to glorify Being A Massive Nerd
197.
L called me while I was falling asleep to a video of Hemingway’s writing routine, of which I remember only that he wrote early in the morning which seems to be as common and unoriginal for writers as right-handedness is for, well, also writers. It’s 7 AM as I type this and despite the challenge that it has been to get out of bed, the benefits don’t need to be explained to me. But give me someone who writes best around 2-3 pm, those cursed hours, and I’ll get the medals out. The point is that when L called I was sundowning and she must have heard it in my voice to immediately ask “what’s wrong?” but I’m never ready to answer that question because if something is wrong it is not at the forefront of my problem-solver mind which would have already fixed it. L said I have two good news: the first one is that I have a new girlfriend (and it was the first time I heard L refer to women she was with as “girlfriend” instead of the usual “chick”; liberal translation from French), and the second one is that I’m about to be signed to a label. If I hadn’t been awake enough a minute prior when questioned about my state of mind, I still hadn’t warmed up enough to welcome the news appropriately. I got out of bed and walked while talking, hoping to wake up enough to be the friend I was supposed to be in that moment, but very soon after L had to hang up, “I just wanted to tell you”. Back in the ascetic silence of my apartment, I let it linger in the air that someone would want to call me spontaneously to share such good news because “they just wanted to tell me”.
198.
I spent the night at J’s house, and delighted in the opportunity to slip into an improvised outfit to go on a night walk in the neighborhood, reminding me of my years living alone in a studio apartment downtown, walking distance to the river. I miss walking to think, a luxury indulgence afforded to a select few brooders with just enough money for cramped apartments in city centers
Things keep piling up but part of me has given up in the name of trying instead to remember where I might have found comfort before, to go there again, grasp onto anything that might ground me. I vehemently ignore the signs of an attention deficit. After another restless night despite J’s incredible bed, I make my way home at 8 AM and am confronted once again with the commuters. I envy them, on their way to clearly defined time, mission, and purpose. My hair looks like it houses birds and I’m thinking “Will I be able to squeeze some work in today?” But I have to shower and write, and then I have plans for which no clear times have been defined yet, so every possibility exists in a cosmos of spontaneous and sickening chaos. How much more summer?
No doubt this adds to my drooling at J’s apartment, small and minimal yet somehow laid out to perfection. I can’t help but wonder where she found crates the exact length of her short wall and made such a stylish couch out of it, or how she somehow managed to fit not one but two different desks in this studio and make it look natural. “One for the day, at the window, and another one I migrate to when the sun sets”, I remember her telling me, my knees buckling down into proposal pose. I text her that being in her apartment without her makes me miss her extremely so. She sends me vocal messages where she tries to talk loudly over concert music, and I picture her stepping out of the crowd and cradling her phone to minimize noise pollution as she talks to me
Stop and listen in to the hum of brat summer; lean into it
This is a great example of an opportunity for me to put into practice what I preach to my friends all the time, namely embody openness to expression and experience, at the cost of the secretly worthless sense of safety. “I’m not working to make money right now I’m working to create stories to tell” I try to tell myself, half convinced yet still deeply aware of the currency of greater importance
In times like these, keep some faith in the shower to absolve all guilt, sin, and excess and represent the perpetual starting over. All we do is starting over
199.
Happy 199th entry! After 8 months of this diary I’m ready to claim I’m staying right here, no longer looking for the smooth, easy roads and no longer looking to declare war. Happy to bathe in my own dirt, I’m staying here, no longer looking to escape my own brain, but perhaps looking to make a mold of it, eventually peacefully self-destruct.
A takeaway thus far is that I think one of the greatest burdens we carry is the instinct to divide things into good or bad — mental health, time management, relationship, writing, day, week, life. All of the time, things just are, and when I read I want to see that reflected. Writing this diary has been, above most things, an exercise in nuance. I’m done looking for the good, that unrewarding search. And I’m done running away from the bad, because there’s actually nothing there. Binaries suck is the rightful word on the street
That being said.
If there is one actually, genuinely bad thing, and I stand by this, it is the polyamorous pride flag, the original 1995 one with its unforgivable colors and unjustifiable pi symbol. To me it looks like it was designed by someone who hates not just polyamory but also generally speaking love, maybe life. These days, a flag like that really doubles down on the shame I’ve already been carrying, the same one that wants to send a “just to be extra sure you’re aware” text to my upcoming date; a preemptive, insecure apology to really get the fire of passion burning. We don’t slut shame anymore, we give plenty of public space for “liberal women” to apologize
I seek nuance, not complacency. And I’m certainly not looking for the right take to have
That tone having been established, back to cheering that I passed the 200 mark on these entries (so to speak, because it’s in decreasing order). This diary started as a way to track my mental health and so far it’s worked way better than any mood trackers, mainly because it is not tracking. It just progressively grows thicker like a layer of dust on wooden furniture you don’t take care of, and the thicker, the more visible. Slowly, I’m gathering enough material to go back to, sort like a recycling machine, and hopefully find some answers. What is a passing thing, and what must I resign myself to living with forever?
Passing: the stress that unstable life circumstances bring
Lasting: the image of that flag burned into my retina
200.
Sometimes learning a language feels like blind search rewarded by small treasures along the way, and today that took the shape of discovering that the Turkish word for poetry is şiir.
201.
I slept at J’s house—she is away on a carnal seaside holiday with her sailor. She left me the keys not to water her plants as much as just for me to have them, have access to an isolated place to go sleep or work at should I need it, and it is greatly appreciated. So I slept at her oasis of calm (the quiet and darkness at night make you forget you’re in a city) two nights ago when I had a 1:30 AM Zoom meeting with people in Canada. It turns out that, no matter the comfort of the place, waking up the next morning disoriented and sleep-deprived remains a tried-and-tested recipe for a wrong footed start to the day, which in itself jams the cogs of the routine flow of my days I greatly rely on to keep sane. By the time I got back to my place, I’d declared the day fucked and on those we just try to survive. T and L suggested kind approaches (have a good cry, go back to bed, cancel non urgent plans, come hang out by the pool with me, listen to songs you like) that greatly contrasted to my state of mind, focused mostly on finding a stranger on the street that looked like they might be in the mood for a fight. Then my sister came over and we spent the afternoon half-working alongside each other, K came home and we all made dinner together, and wouldn’t you know it, by that time all was well.
It’s like my brain is a cluster of low-quality pipes, easily clogged. I need an exfoliant, a plumber, and a robber to take all of my material possessions in the night, in no particular order
I can’t really hope for anyone to understand these mechanisms, though some people come close. K has developed the necessary expertise to identify when I’m being earnest and when it’s my OCD speaking, and E has the privilege of sometimes being privy to how exactly the pipes are arranged. But generally, during these short circuits, loved ones are asked to trust I’m feeling very terrible, but also that any minute that could change.
To embody the fuckedness of the day I didn’t even change clothes, and pulled a slept-in-lived-in situation that is reminiscent of long-haul flight outfits, both situations resulting in symptoms of jet lag
In the midst of all this, I can hardly stop thinking about Christine Sun Kim’s Closer Captions film. “[day begins like the first line of a poem]” is haunting the way glimpses into what you didn’t know you wanted in life, but can’t have anyway, are. Who do I need to talk to to write closer captions for a living? I’m in a quit it all and move away mentality.
The threat in the bitch that summer is to me is that the call for easy living and subsequent failure to uphold the rigorous discipline I have the rest of the time comes with the resurfacing of sticky demons.
I seen the demons
But they didn’t make a sound
They tried to reach me
But I lay upon the ground
Squares, The Beta Band
202.
I know summer is here because the word of the hour is want, namely everything feels slow and lazy and I don’t want anything, while at the same time I/we want it all; time is fruitful and abundant, possibilities clear up. The city slowly empties and I, like most years, stay back with my fan, keys to water my friends’ plants, and my both literal and metaphorical stickiness
I would claim the inauguration was the unexpected election results two days ago, the tears and screams of joy, the celebrations on the streets, the hope, the hugs, the chants, the hugs again. The tension collectively released from our bodies for an instant, the whole city exhaling fireworks and red smoke into the summer night sky. No rest though, and sleeves are rolled up, but with greater motivation than ever. Now it’s the aftermath of the party, and we feel both the bliss and consequence like stepping out barefoot into the garden in the quiet morning, hot coffee and cool air to soothe the hangover, a landscape of joyful, trashy evidence we now have to clean up
I’m a different person in this season. I smell of floral perfume, excessive amounts of skincare, alcohol, and tobacco, and it’s not a good mix. I exist in large t-shirts and practice holding objects with my toes. I try to wake up early to juice the lemons of my overflowing creativity but no amount of Vitamin D can avoid the lethargy that hits soon after. The machine I am in winter melts into a pool of metallic debris, the rust turning to supple slime. Like Laila France sings, ”bring me the new skincare cream” and “I just want to watch TV”. I feel lustful and extroverted, but too busy being idle to meet new people
When the guided meditation video says “now close your miraculous eyes”, I try to lean into that “miraculous” instead of resisting it, see what happens. My folly of the day
In mockumentaries, à la The Office or Parks and Rec, the magic of the genre lies in the fact that, though we never see them, the camera person is very much present, never forgotten. The camera movements, zooms, and furtive self-aware glances tell a parallel, meta-story to what is happening on screen, give subtext, and allow for the distance from which the comedy aspect is born. Consider this as a tool to analyze your own day-to-day psychic state and potential disconnect from it. You are both protagonist and camera. You are saying the words “I feel blessed and relaxed” or “No I don’t mind if we change plans!”, but is the camera capturing the moment telling a different story? I breathe into the meditation and let what I interpret as bliss overcome me, but the zoom slowly pulls out to reveal the eczema patches, bags of undone laundry, piles of the scrap paper I use to write bouts of anxiety out. I’m in the middle of a protest and we are chanting and shouting and jumping in joy, but suddenly the angle is wide, very wide, and reveals the landscape of a city from which the bangs of the fireworks mix with the hum of something sinister in the works. The fight is not over
203.
The jokes are not landing, they are crashing down, which is to say, any semblance of humor I might try to find to cope with the country’s impending doom feels burdensome, uncomfortable, and desperate. The results are not even out yet but we already have a time and place to meet and take the streets, continue no matter what to reach for each other and for the symbol
But the chants the love and the hope also start to weigh us down, like an empty table Peter Pan’s friends pretend to eat a feast from, and we grow weaker, our dinner but platefuls of fear, anxiety knotting our stomachs into illusory satiety
Videos are passed around of our future leaders improvising political stances and plans on live TV, succeeding at nothing other than always bringing it all back to immigration, being humiliated for it and coming back for more. It’s the battle of resiliences fueled by very different fear, but fear nonetheless, and I somberly raise my glass at the fight that will kill us all, and who’s the audience?
It is us and our thoughts and our phones and our thoughts and our phones and our thoughts in our phones against the world and we meet up to march and protest and we can barely see each other, our eye bags so big they swallow our eyes, themselves covered in a thick veil of smog
It’s Election Day and if we die let us die with dignity, which means fighting, no matter how weak the exhausted punches
A secret fear of mine is what is to become, after tonight, of the last three weeks’ spirit of almost unquestioned cooperation and union of forces in the name of anything-but-fascism, once fascism is already here?
204.
Some things I keep at a distance and by distance I mean I stay far away from, like Instagram push notifications or (some) work emails on my phone. The assumption is that there’s always inevitably bad news waiting for me there, and they’re always related to me having done something wrong, somebody being displeased with me. That is actually rarely the case, but whenever it is, it’s enhanced tenfold by this cunning “I knew it” defeatism and drama, never not adorned with complimentary self-hatred and blame, and I’ve just described anxiety for you. Because I am unable to handle the possibility of me having made a mistake or not having been up to a task in a healthy manner, I’ve put in place the above-mentioned mechanisms to ensure that I don’t want to add bleach to my coffee right as I wake up, but rather postpone that to half an hour later when I am at my desk and I undertake the ritual of refreshing the email accounts, holding my breath, edging myself. You’d think I’d know better by now, but I never will. My prefrontal cortex is fully formed, rock solid
My body has become nothing worth more than memory foam solidifying tense and hunched postures associating the romanticized picture of the tortured coffee addicted artist at their too-low desk with the sensorial memory of organ compression from stomach to throat. My chakras be squished
Yet here I am day in and day out, somehow undeterredly optimistic and going for more, “thirsty for life”, as my therapist once said, to everybody’s surprise. Who knew such an unfit bundle of stress knots could accomplish such chaos, hide under so many trench coats, eat so many servings of love
And that’s the daze of these days really, between two SIAMO TUTTI ANTIFASCISTI chants, the daily cup of bleach coffee and emails, squeezing in some time to exclaim what a time to live!!! and then whisper to the wind why are we still here…
One could rightfully wonder which of the above aches results in me coming onto my brother in law*. Spin the wheel: is it desperation for adrenaline to replace the void anxiety, pathetic reclaiming of agency and youth carelessness before fascism takes over, or natural self-destructive pre-disposition?
I’ve ingested liters of bleach already anyway. I’ve tried but I’m indestructible, a force of nature, the strongest man on Earth. Here to witness downfall by all means necessary, it seems
I’ve talked here and elsewhere before about misery to fuel creativity, doing it for the plot because without plot there is nothing. Ease, peace, and joy seem so dissonant in this decade, if we weren’t already biologically predisposed to look for danger and menace, now it’s a cultural trait too. There’s nothing cooler than to fight that off however we can, whenever we can, and defend our own and our loved ones’ right to joy. And I really, really want to be cool.
*it feels necessary to specify this is not as gross as it sounds, definitely trust me
205.
I argue that I am always writing. When I am walking, talking, riding trains, dancing or at an underground Parisian BDSM sex club, I’m writing. Sometimes, even, it is better to live-write than to paper-write. I did not write any diary entries the past six days in Paris and I forgive myself as much as I hope you will too: I was busy fighting for my fucking life, for one, but also cooking, as the youth says. I’ve never met or heard of a writer who didn’t claim to uphold or try to uphold the standard of writing every day. Writers, more than most other types of artists and no doubt because it is a cheap art form to produce, are definitely of the quantity over quality school. I used to beat myself up for not writing every day. Now I realize I actually do, just not on the page.
Perhaps I am of weak constitution or perhaps I am an imposter. Those two options used to take turns and sometimes even join forces to hold my mind hostage, now they’re just kinda there in the back, sipping tea. Like roommates I don’t care for. Sometimes it’s better to just surrender to the fact that nothing good can be written in a state of overstimulation or overwhelm. You have to first survive Paris, and then only once you’re safely gone, write about it condescendingly at a distance
That, or maybe I need to look into some kind of Paris-related Ritalin prescription next time I go
206.
I am preparing to embark on a train ride that will take me to my nemesis, namely the city of Paris, and by preparing I mean I am sitting at my dining room table, sleep deprived and painfully early. My green carry-on contains a few pairs of pants too many, and my blue backpack a few notebooks too many, as per usual. I look forward to lugging those around across paved roads and in stuffy heat today. The day I become able to afford hotel rooms in that city is the day I start appreciating it, maybe.
I’ve tried to arrange some logistics for my trip with A, with whom I’m staying, but the only thing I got out of it was a voice message he seemingly recorded with a WWII radio. Something about a picnic? I decided not to inquire further, let it be a surprise. I’m trying to leave the Capricorn at home this week; it would be suicide to try to fit it into the frenzy and spontaneity of a Pride weekend
If I am to have the “Paris experience”, let it be the broody and pretentious one: long black coat, eyebags under sunglasses, an afternoon at the museum followed by sitting at a café so small you wonder if it’s even legal, smoking too much (perhaps a pipe?) and reading something like The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Thankfully, I am a great sport and always up for pushing through the boundaries of my comfort
That being said, consider the following: to be young and in Paris the weekend of Pride + the first round of national elections. It’s gonna be a riot
207.
Gnostics and sapiosexuals Venn diagram overlap: autophilia
208.
6-word horror story: geography level of an average American
209.
The sun rises really early here now, fuelled by the charged summer fever of hatred for neo nazis who pretend they’re not
I have never felt such bubbling tension and anticipation in this country as I have in the last 5 days and this is France so that’s saying a lot. It’s like last time when Macron’s second election was tragic but beautiful in the way it had brought the left together. Now it’s that again but times 10, and it’s like the different left parties are at a non-stop club rave, energized like doped race horses and loving each other with a sort of violent defeat. We are brothers, we are brothers, no matter what we are brothers (for now). We will dance until we fall
Yesterday I was early to my meeting so I decided to make a stop on the way to the library to get some poetry books, and in the spontaneity of it I forgot it was market day. The 4 minutes that it took me to make my way through the crowd, the market buyers and the sellers, the elders and the families, the people distributing Front Populaire handbills at every corner, winking and smiling and you when you showed them you already got one 3 meters ago, the armed police taking up pavement space, the sunshine, were probably more exhilarating than any film I’ve seen lately. I sneer at the tourists coming for the Olympic Games. These are our Olympic Games
Our Olympic torches are cardboard banners of lyrical virtue, declarations of “Le Pen in the ass” and “Yeah sex is good but have you ever emmerdé le Front National”. The French left does one thing right and it’s weaponizing anger. My banner would say “It’s a spectrum, not a binary (except for fascism)”
210.
I have so much to catch up on but all there seems to be is emails, the 5:45 alarm, pretend to pay for bus, scales of one to butch, the 6:10 morning instant coffee, pleasantries, calendar
211.
Had dinner with my aunt and her colleague who came here from Mexico for the week to attend some congress. We tried explaining some of the local dishes in Spanish and struggled, a kind Peruvian off-duty server intervened, we laughed and got tipsy in fragments of languages
My aunt’s colleague has never been out of Mexico/North America, and as we speed walk to catch our bus she volunteers to me all her observations of the past two days, which I find fascinating and clever. Teenagers hang out in interreligious friend groups, there are fathers pushing strollers, and French people have this mannerism of doing a half nod followed by a “mmh” noise that does not mean yes nor no, but rather “I’m thinking about this”.
Emily in Paris could never
I don’t know what prompts me to open up to this woman, perhaps the fact that it only takes a few minutes of interaction and the assessment of somebody as inoffensive for me to get too close too soon always, but she asks me if I miss the food and I tell her about my fragmented cultural identity. I can see in her eyes and in her silence that, if she was French, she’d give me the “mmh”.
E, who has lived outside of France long enough for it to have become a real hassle to manage to vote here, texts me about missing the European elections, and I tell her about missing the Mexican ones and give a hint at all that it’s gonna take (significant effort, time, and money) to get my voter’s papers in order for the next time. Bureaucracy as both an igniter of and a potential band-aid to the fragmentation. Should I manage to change my name back to what it was in Mexico, would that do more good than harm?
What would it take to pull off some form of Gone Girl international documentation style? Make each country that has me on record believe I’ve left it for another, an ouroboros ring of administrative disappearance, meanwhile I’m nowhere, under no name
212.
If there’s one thing I treasure it’s vocabulary, because I don’t have it. Today’s word/world is beleaguered (in a very difficult situation, besieged, surrounded by armed forces forcing surrender), the remedy for which is fight back and have hope
Politics: We’re feeling beleaguered from the European elections which came and went almost exactly like they’d been predicted, except slightly worse, somehow. All there is left is fight back and have hope
Art: I’ve been doing the artist’s way again which I hope you’ll appreciate as a very vulnerable public admission on my part, because sat in the center of a barren psyche, itself nestled in the flames of a world in collapse, to conjure up creativity all there is left is fight back and have hope
Challengers (the film, I saw it yesterday): the tennis court is the playground in which the characters experience being cucked by a partner, by power, by their own body. All there is left is fight back (cuck back) and have hope
I started this diary at a time of great distress (November) and set, for blame and imagery purposes, the fig tree outside my living room window losing all its leaves in one windy night as culprit. I’m looking at it now, green as ever. Every winter I feel more depressed than the last, but every spring life is better than the last. Cycles, blabla, hang in there, blabla. Keeping this diary was my fight back and have hope
Fight back and have hope sucks. Hand me the white flag
And if you dare to escape
I will find you again
And if you dare to get hurt
I will be there my friend
YZOBEL - Gyeongsu
213.
Women artists, building shrines of flattery
214.
When people share what they regularly dream about I realize how boring and obsessive my nighttime visions are. More regularly than I’d like to admit, I dream of being pregnant, and this can range from my finding out to the birth. Most often, it’s right in the middle, and I look down to find a big belly, which always feels exactly like a donut pool float; cumbersome but protective.
The greatest separation of mind and body I ever experience is when I wake up from these dreams. Even when in my dream I relish in my future motherhood, I always wake up feeling very relieved, though I can sense a biological disappointment.
I’m going to be dismissive of my biological clock’s cries by interpreting them as calls to give birth in the metaphorical, artistic sense. I’ve been working on finishing my list of flowers, which is to say that, when people in their youth (I’m going to go ahead and assume/hope none of us do this anymore) were making Excel spreadsheets of people they had slept with, with all types of distasteful data neatly arranged in color-coded columns, I in my own youth kept a list of flowers as codes for names under which I wrote a small paragraph, something situated between the love-hate poem and the letter, thinking it both useful and cathartic to keep some sort of literary log of how people, from my middle school girlfriend to my aggressor, were arranged in the constellation of what would probably be the basis for most of my adult interpersonal troubles and longings. Looking back, this is perhaps worse than the spreadsheet, in the pathological sense. Anyhow, I’m finishing it not because I still care for it as much, but mostly to practice cutting the umbilical cord and freeing myself of the pregnant constipation that is not finishing projects, clogging my mind, pores, and womb.
I’m also making space, in the name of spring, for future, greater babies. J and I had our best meeting yet two days ago, so good that it bled into her evening run. “Come with me and we can keep talking” she said, putting her shorts on. I sped-walk next to her and we kept scheming, bouncing ideas back and forth between jump rope sets. I could add J to the list of flowers as my artistic baby daddy.
215.
Yesterday’s itinerary started with K and I around what we call our Saturday morning fruit & veg market haul, followed by T showing up to grace us with yet another of his ceramic creations and having coffee, followed by me meeting up with J and two of her friends for the Palestine protest, followed by me meeting up with a cousin and her husband and her baby and witnessing the latter’s first taste of ice cream, finalized with me coming home to find K and N discussing my TBR pile and talking about the phenomenon of self-help books, and dinner together.
The best times are those I can’t find metaphors for. They just are
European elections are coming up and during election time I like listening in to the old and renewed ways that some politicians operate politics of nostalgia, fabricating a fictitious and better past to which to return to, like clever story-tellers, or crooks, selling an idea that not only doesn’t exist, but fictitiously only exists in the past. The right wing has the upper hand in this effective strategy, because the left tries, on the contrary, to sell the idea of a future, of new and different ways things could be, but the human brain will always choose the safety of what it already knows or thinks it knows, over the uncertainty and intangibility of what doesn’t yet exist
When I look up “politics of the present”, I find this blurb about Chris Ingraham’s book Gestures of Concern: “there is a need to attend to 'ordinary actions' on digital and social media that don't seem to have much noticeable effect, but build an 'affective commonwealth'. Ingraham argues that affirming inconsequential gestures is important because it enables new forms of being together that can create change.”
My day yesterday, relatively representative of how a lot of my days are, goes to show that my affective commonwealth is massive. My time is filled with friends, with people, I text R. I’m not sure how it happened but I am obscenely wealthy in love, I’m the 1% of social connection, thinking but not saying surely this isn’t normal. Never convinced I’m being grateful enough, and anticipating a great inability to deal with loneliness should it one day end. I don’t know what politics of the present are worth, but I can’t deny I prefer cooking for friends and exchanging objects we make and chanting at protests from one day to the next, than fantasizing about when gender was binary (?) or about a tomorrow no one whole-heartedly believes will ever happen anymore
I tell K about my theory/claim of: we have all existed from the beginning of humanity, in the form of cells and eggs and whatever don’t quote me on the biological specificities, but we were already there, and we are just slowly dying off. Once we reach our own human corporeal form it’s really just the last step in the journey, and when we die the long long journey that led to us ends too. Like there’s always been a set supply of human souls, and that despite demographic indications of baby booms or others, it is a number only ever decreasing. I feel smug when K can’t find a way to dispute it
Then I saw a video (whose source I didn’t check but that didn’t stop me from feeling validated) explaining the thing about carrying 14 generations of tissue/trauma/experience aka, in some way, we carry 30k+ people in us, and more than their fantasies or dreams we carry what they actually experienced and did, what left a mark on their tissue and psyche. Out of consideration for my potential descendants, I’m not gonna let Marion Maréchal Le Pen leave a mark on mine
216.
I went to the gym for the first time and my treadmill dreams came true. I could have walked my head off on it, and felt dizzy afterward. I loved the liminal space, no windows, disconnected from the rest of the world. All there could exist was walk, watch tennis on the TV. The delight I found in the numbing frightened, but didn’t surprise me.
The delayed arrival of summer here matches how everyone is feeling; desperate for ease, but not in the mood for it. Not capable of it.
Everyone seems to be struggling to focus on work, and it seems like we’re still negotiating that feeling, negating it as wrong, so programmed are we to put work above all, instead of giving into it. We’ve spent decades and generations slowly learning to go without others, to even equate socialization to distraction when we could be putting the hours in. Four years ago we learned to isolate to protect our health and that of others, and then we just continued in the name of avoiding traffic, protecting our peace, fearing contagion of any kind, like we are all different species and not made of the same stuff.
And yet nothing right now makes more sense than to be present, one day at a time. Watch the horrors, listen to the stories, show up to the protests, sign, donate, talk, cherish. And again. And yet, our day-to-day lives go on. I anticipate a new form of PTSD to emerge in some years, in people of our generations, and rightfully so. Let us face the collective damage.
My aunt called me to organize logistics of her upcoming and almost yearly trip to France. She hasn’t lived here for over 30 years and always seems to feel a bit lost and full of wonder when she comes. That is, when she is not making “neutral” observations that go from light to heavy, from the rise in train ticket prices to the presence of POC, which I’m sure was already the case 30 years ago, but whatever. She delegates some logistics and organization tasks to me and I’m very happy to help, but then she says she knows “millenials love logistics” and in my vanity I resent that. That being said, it sets the bar high for something I’m not particularly well versed in, for example car rentals, and it triggers in me the urge to meet that bar, which is why, in that sense, I think her observation was correct—stay with me for this—that we are problem-solvers. In the age where everything is extremely easy to look up, investigate, book, we (anyone in the 1996-1981 bracket) appear as geniuses of both the intellectual and mystical kind to older generations who were, in my opinion, lucky to live before the age where you could get an email everywhere you go. This has flattered and shaped our egos, no doubt.
But now, our problem-solving machines, the devices used to find car rentals, organize sad sex with strangers, send work emails, document our lives, present us with an enigma no one is equipped to solve. How do you watch images of beheaded babies, help families escape their own homes, and get back to your friend about brunch, all in the same minute? Our taxes and school fees fund the purchase of weapons to decimate an entire population, and the rest of our income goes to GoFundMes to finance aid and border crossings. It’s psychosis, it’s psychosis, it’s psychosis.
I am zombified, want nothing more than to walk on the treadmill, walk and not think, until the pungent smell of my decomposing feet reaches me.
217.
I make my way across town to V’s new apartment alongside damp commuters who smell like deodorant and remind me what it’s like to have to be somewhere at 9 AM. I walk past the bar where J and I had that drink on November 15, back when I began writing this diary. The place is almost unrecognizable because of the stark contrast between a gruesome November night and an enchanting May morning. In this part of town, everything suddenly feels like we are in a village. Old people are locking their wooden doors, barely wearing shoes, to go buy a newspaper next door. Everything feels slower.
On my way there I read an article about adulthood (reaching it) which thoroughly goes to posit that early/mid twenties are meant to be hard, miserable, disorganized, adventurous and chaotic, and that those years are meant for flailing. Insert flashbacks of my early twenties and it’s all me working in the same office for three years, trying to survive a pandemic. It is painfully well-behaved. Another thought one can only try to brush off.
The article, of course, does not state when the flailing stops, or how to know if it’s stopped, or when it stops being cute. I sense that the overall, human expectation is for adulthood or maturity to mean all the pieces of the puzzle come together, the good and the bad, and suddenly you have traded the obsession with self-realization for wrinkles, and you’re having a drink outside wearing linen pants and looking at the sunset, and you confidently say “I wouldn’t change a thing.” Meanwhile, 20-somethings are accidentally drinking from the can turned ashtray or getting into dropshipping, and our sanity only survives off of blind trust and suspended disbelief. It will all make sense one day
Given the chance to add to the discourse, I propose a new marker of transition called yearning. Not desire or craving, but yearning as the irresistible want of something we cannot have, also because we cannot have it. You exit childhood when confronted with the limits of your body and circumstance, and have not yet “fully entered adulthood”, if there is such a thing. During this painful time paradoxically defined by constriction (because this is when anyone older looks at you like the definition of a free, unburdened being), you yearn. First, because you mourn what you thought was a limitless existence. Then, because you get a taste of the can’t-have and it’s much safer to desire something grandiose you cannot reach for and remain passive, than to reach for the first thing, one of Plath’s figs, and face the consequence of choice, namely further constriction into a seemingly inescapable path. Claustrophobic, really. Then, you “enter adulthood”, I imagine, when you are done hanging out in vicenarian hell and make one of two choices: to give up on the yearning and reach for something concrete and tangible in your universe, or to say fuck it and go all out, all or nothing, and reach for that thing seemingly way beyond your reach at the cost of discipline and total surrender to it
At least that’s what I thought about after reading that article among the Tuesday morning commuters, them on their way to their jobs, me on my way to work on a just-born, hyper-fragile new non-profit, fueled by faith
What do you wanna be when you grow old, as opposed to when you grow up?
I remember first feeling like an adult at 19, perhaps also because I was in a rush to be older. I wanted the promised full agency as soon as possible and perhaps I was too serious too soon about the responsibility that came with it, and with world events not on my side, my flailing looked like a duck with a briefcase and a tie. I know I’m not the only one secretly wondering, do we get a voucher for unfulfilled trash years?
218.
These days I am Sexy Sushi’s fille à la tête de dinde, aka the turkey-headed girl, survivor of her own disgraceful appearance and presentation
When you are able to situate yourself in the spectrum of so-called attractiveness, you can always, always find appeal. I find there’s undeniable charm in being the ugliest person in a room, in standing out in any way, in honoring the stiffness of your body. It all always comes down to confidence, and I’m owning the avian layout of my face
Since I last wrote I: met a cute person who basically never called me back, went to Paris and bathed in the glory of the Parisian lesbian techno/punk/heavy rock scene, illegally explored underground quarry tunnels built and abandoned by the Nazis, fine dined, lost my bank card then found it, lost my umbrella and didn’t find it, speed-walked across Paris twice, held a big party at my house, lost all self-esteem then slowly started gaining it back
I barely understand how I survived all of that in half a week, let alone where I found the time to be all existential and hyper-focused on others’ perceptions of me, but I did. Don’t underestimate what the Internet has now coined as being a “thought daughter”. I keep this and other diaries because when you write no one can talk over you
Last night, talking politics with L on her balcony, I mention among other things that I believe in the power of everyone questioning themselves regularly; questioning privilege, questioning position in the world, but also questioning oneself’s every action. I omit the part where this moral value of mine becomes my daily tormentor
All signs point to me needing some rest and predictability, but nothing in my life is as reliable as my ability to doubt everything when the quiet moments come. Hyper-busy people and hyper-social people, I see you and offer condolences
I need to outsource my self-judgment for a day, a week, a year. Someone else should give me school marks on my choice of beverage, my creative output, my performance in group settings, or my face’s symmetry. I only execute and worry about getting a passing grade, which would be clearly and preemptively established. I yearn for numbers, always
219.
Everything in the spring air calls for siren singing and libertine freedom, water and bikini tops. Stubborn as I am, I make my way through the horde of slow walkers on the street still wearing a large black coat, very wide black pants. Not ready to give up on my winter trend of looking like a triangular clergyman, perhaps secretly not ready to come out of heartbreak and grief yet
I run into L and V at J’s house; they are in the middle of packing to move in together at the end of the month, but stay for tea. When they leave and before we get to work, as always, we pour our heart out and present the latest news in our lives (since last week). J tells me about her ongoing romantic dilemma and I tell her about an impossible crush I’m having. We gasp and laugh and cringe like we are meant to, and then J says it’s like we are middle schoolers again. I would assent entirely if we hadn’t simultaneously been talking about children-having timelines as well. Later that evening, I’m watching Psych with K and G and can’t help but pause to say that these kinds of shows from the 90s or early 2000s make for somehow age-less characters, all around 30, yet simultaneously much older and much younger. It’s not about collagen for me, it’s about agitated movements
220.
In philosophy, there is apparently a distinction between thin (good, bad) and thick (rude, glorious, perverted, frugal, cowardly, etc) concepts, the complexity of which I grossly summarize as there is no objective way to solve ethical dilemmas. We aim for thin distinctions but that probably does not exist.
When you integrate this idea, you can become the insufferable friend who plays devil’s advocate, says things like “it’s not black or white”, and will ruin wedding receptions.
My urge to resemble a millennial, queer-ambiguous, slightly outdated feminist modern art gallery owner hasn’t left (even the above-described impartial friend would say: this is bad). The mental list is: thick bangs, those square green specs that absolutely everyone is wearing at the moment, maybe a piercing. I try, like in meditation, to see those thoughts and urges drift by like clouds, before I commit an irredeemable act that will leave me looking like I wouldn’t hate getting a clitoris tattoo. Instead, time goes by and hair grows longer and slowly but surely I reach Bella Baxter semblances of unkeptness. Here is a perfect example of where thin concepts are not enough to discern which is better, which is worse
People in their mid-20s LOVE to start sentences with “as we age…”. It is our trademark arrogant belief that we already know all there is to know, including what it is like to age, an activity we have only just started participating in
Well my input is that, as we age, we actually only just start understanding the layers and the nuance there is to everything. Wisdom is discernment, which we gain as we realize that there is a difference between an indulgent and a forgiving blow job, between dignity and pride, between doing the job right and ruining the show, but that there isn’t that much between drastic haircuts and psychic warfare
E and I go back and forth in messages about how we cannot comprehend time; we think back to exactly a year ago when we were in his old apartment. All the things that happened and started and ended since. A year ago I barely wrote, and yesterday I was celebrating a second poem publication by eating star-shaped gnocchi. I’ve been finding it impossible not to think of my past selves as strangers. Some might say this is good, proof of exponential growth, but it is also spiraling fuel. Enter the room the urge for bangs: at least this way you can look like something you recognize, even if it’s not you
221.
A French newspaper published the president’s payslip and beyond the numbers I scrutinize the document which looks just like anyone else’s. It feeds this imagined vision I’ve always had of him, from when he was Minister of Economy to now, always adopting this paternalistic posture of some sort of business manager who meritoriously accepts to be hated as a price to pay for what he, ultimately, knows to be best for us. Here, his payslip! He’s just like us, isn’t he, but in charge
Now, let’s not hate too much on poor tiny Emmanuel as I too, for example, boast before (or instead of) delivering. Namely, I’ve been flexing my biceps to whoever will give me the time of day. There’s nothing there, but I’m hoping that if I say I’m working on it confidently enough, people will be impressed with at least the potential
V tells me my hands and arm postures make me look precocious and I say how can anything I do look precocious I am 26 years old. She says it’s because my soul is actually 56, which both doesn’t make sense and feels like random insult - I would have preferred a number that automatically inspires respect in the collective consciousness without much questioning, like 87. But that’s us falling for paternalism’s tricks again. Society’s always looking for fathers to love and to blame
This is all also because I’ve been reading de Beauvoir and talking like it’s 1950 so maybe I’ll go enjoy the privileges of a payslip to my name without permission from a father or a husband to cleanse myself from the Freudian/existentialist thinking
I tease and joke but then worry I shouldn’t, especially when I see online calls for a 6th wave of feminism that would “radically” embrace femininity, maternal instincts, so-called natural penchant for softness “again”. You always think we are collectively done using biology in social agendas but that’s my naive 5th wave, payslip-to-my-name, baby (with buff arms) brain
222.
I tried out a new library far from my house and despite the rain because if anything I want to be a library connoisseur. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off and I left after an hour because it sucked. I deleted its name from my list of libraries to go to, half muttering about the imaginary review I was going to write in my imaginary library column
I live right next to not one but two cemeteries, it’s calm. My place is surrounded almost exclusively by funeral parlors and their window displays, so I’m very up to date on the latest gravestone and urn trends. I say almost because there’s also a sushi restaurant that mostly works through deliveries and a florist of whom I’m maybe one of the only clients that buys for the living
I walked home from the library under the rain wearing a sort of long sheer black cloak and it was all very fitting; I was the grim reaper on her way to collect her share of the profits from the funeral directors
This morning is still raining and dark and as I’ve made abundantly clear this soothes my brain, in contrast to bright and sunny days which can feel like enemy onslaught. Days like these I kinda just assume everyone stays asleep, whether in their beds or in their graves, and I look forward to the quiet
I also have this theory that sunny weather and/or heat makes everything sound slightly higher in pitch and louder, while rain creates a nice sound blanket, which is more digestible. I’ve recently become more attuned to these sensory preferences and wondering where the line of normal is
Alles grau, alles grau in grau
Alles taub, alles taub, taub, taub
Asche zu Asche, Staub zu Staub
Alles Rauch, alles Schall und Rauch
Isolation Berlin - Alles grau
223.
Packed a picnic, books, and a crossword with J and we headed to the riverside, determined to lounge in the sun and perhaps even touch water in this first Sunday heatwave of the year. The city had that burst of spring quality to it, like when you finally clean your windows or glasses and can see clearly again. The cashier charging me for my peaches and I smiled at each other extra hard, both of us no doubt high off Vitamin D and fresh air
When we got there and joined others who’d had the same idea as us, there was a man yelling at his dog and a woman yelling at her son almost non-stop, and we ended up being shooed away early by an unexpectedly cold wind. I decided to bike home along the river, the idea in theory feeling very romantic to me, but really only resulted in me coughing up the copious amounts of pollen I’d swallowed for the next hour or so. You cannot conjure summer easiness up too soon
The short and under-performing heatwave is said to precede yet another week of rain, to everyone’s exasperation and my secret delight. Transitions, especially of seasons, are when I do worst, getting homesick without leaving every time the temperature changes. Perhaps because I grew up nearer to the Equator, where things are rounder and Earth spins can be felt less. Or perhaps because of my taste for constancy, regulation and control
Half a year ago already, what we then only called war had started, I remember watching a talk from author Amélie Nothomb who claimed that, among our different and respective responsibilities during these times, one of them was to feel joy, experience gratitude in our actions for what we had, for those who couldn’t. The message stuck but triggered very different reactions in me throughout the months
I think of the expectation to be the lithe, supple, carefree dancers that youth calls for (“enjoy it while it lasts”), contrasted against the impossibility not to feel heavy, so heavy, right now. Is it resistance to the system or is it disconnect from its grim reality to take the riverside bike lane home ?
I want music theorists to be the ones explaining it all now. How a musical score’s motifs follow each other in reassuring but nuanced repetitions, inviting us in but surprising us too. How life is also cycles, seasons coming and going always in the same order, inflation followed by deflation, El Niño followed by La Niña, war followed by peace. Except every summer is slightly hotter than the last. Every period of peace is slightly shorter than the last. Every year it hurts less, until it hurts more again. We notice this but then forget, carried away by the music that doesn’t stop
I’m grateful for entering the period in my life when I slowly shed the burden of self-centeredness extreme youth encourages, but I don’t do this dancing. I do this weighed down by a new connection to everything and everyone around me, the suffering in equal measure to the wonder. But here, close to the earth, is where I want to be
Pollen catches up to us all!
224.
Everything is heavy and tainted with grief now, every laugh cut short and every joy counterbalanced with guilt. The modern human condition of the privileged is being cognizant of the horrors and injustice to levels of detail never reached before, and being expected to still be hungry enough for dessert, still book holidays and plan for babies. And aren’t we good at it
If it wasn’t bad enough, the Met Gala has prompted a comparison of real life to the Hunger Games, which feels effective yet also somewhat distasteful
L and I went to pick A up from the hospital. One of my greatest blessings is that being in a hospital reminds me of: nothing because I’ve never so much as broken a bone. The only thing they could remind me of is going to meet my sisters but even then, I was too short at the times to be able to see anything. And though I couldn’t help but wonder how A or anyone could survive a week in there without deep psychic damage, I confronted a bias I didn’t know I had when everyone there was so kind. The feeling triggered by the stark contrast between the grimness of the place and the aura of the people working there has started to feel all too familiar
225.
I found myself at the table of three different versions of renounced scientists. The renouncing occurred for different reasons each time; for one, it was an abusive PhD supervisor, for another a still ongoing PhD, tasting bitter of half-confessed regret. One of them told me about the competition, the pressure to publish, to put something out there even if just for the sake of it, of science not being what it was like, or what he thought it was like, when he was a child, and I felt I was talking to yet another artist.
The three of them spent the afternoon either drawing on tablets or working on writing romance novels, while I sat there editing scientific papers written by probably more of their kind, crumbling under the pressure to publish just about anything.
I speculate that both scientists and artists nowadays live a life punctuated by their outputs, which are hopefully regular enough to replace a heartbeat as proof of life. Remind others you exist, or you don’t
It also seems regrettable that nobody seems to be questioning the potential for catastrophe/tragedy inherent to making 17-year-olds choose what they will do for the rest of their lives. It’s an extreme and sudden use of agency before the word “agency” is even fully understood, resulting in orientation choices equaling in weight the frequent dilemma of those years, namely should I learn to skateboard?
I will gladly take an aspiring artist teenager in for some kind of observation internship. Make them watch me cry at the desk, help me organize my rejection letters. Come with me to the day job. Similarly, I suggest that we make aspiring scientists read some of the literature currently being published (and remind them of the co$t)
When I was younger, my life philosophy was very much “do it for the plot”, and I remember preaching to my friends who were going through the questions and doubts of great decisions I should have gone through too, to “think of it as a video game”, as a euphemism few picked up on for “worst case scenario, you just die”. I do tend to forget this curse I set on myself these days, and sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, panicked and experiencing a bad trip off agency (the intern would have to watch this too). The majority of the time, though, I’m lucky to have no regrets and be able to say I’d do it again (except I wouldn’t because, like in a video game, I’d be curious to see the other paths, even the bad ones)
And anyway, as it turns out, my share of misery is not greater than that of the next person’s, not even the PhD scientists who perhaps make their parents marginally prouder. Dare I say, I feel freer and have more fun than most people I know. I paraphrase one of the best pieces of advice that E ever gave me, and which I think of often: “if the decision you made was aligned with who you were at the time, then it was the right decision”
And anyway bis: look at the state of the world. Who cares
Boiling and freezing
Unconscionable treason
Packing up and leaving, things will be okay
Death of a martyr
Death of our neighbors
Death in the background
Still the sky remains
Time of my Life - Penelope Scott
226.
Sometimes I think about my mother saying that this diary reads like an episode of Girls, which is neither compliment nor offense. I do see the maudlin Lena Dunham in me, chronically dissatisfied in an insufferable way, but with a touch of her friend Marnie: pretentious and meager patience but little to show for it
This week I worked with a man of the patronizing kind for the first time in a while. I had to come home to K exhausted from the interaction and do a routine of me pretending to talk to toddlers to get it out of my system. We laughed but also rage ate pineapple. You always find yourself wishing you could be kinder, more patient, all the while wishing you weren’t so much
I’ve suggested the idea that people in their mid-twenties seem to almost always fall into one of two categories; those living like they are still 18-20 and living in that frat house of a shared apartment with roommates of which maybe one is getting their deposit back, and those whose lives are but an impatient cosplay of middle age and its (let’s not lie, mostly financial) comforts. I fall into the second category, too often caught thinking I would love a new kettle, not often enough showing up for work hungover while I still somewhat can.
This morning I cleanse myself of the time spent in one of the former’s apartment by making a barista-level drink (but with supermarket-bought spices) and listening to Musique de Niche, which is not niche musique, but an instrumental album of “kennel music”, which is actually probably the same/just as bad
227.
Only a year ago I had just left on a trip where I was to have a re-encounter with someone who would inspire me to write again, then fill my subsequent months with a lot of thrill, even more negative space, some heartbreak, and now silence. I submit a poem about this silence to publications, half-convinced that anyone could pick up on something so personal, yet somehow emboldened enough to write “dear editor” and “for your consideration” and send it off.
I try to make myself believe that this is better than emotional constipation, but I’m starting to understand that nothing can really soothe the embarrassment of vulnerability, you just have to sit with it.
The worst thing about me, closely followed by my ability to not leave the house for days on end, is probably this incessant need for justification in everything I do. What’s that movie (or show?) where a guy and a girl share an apartment but each gets it for half a day at a time or something, and they never see each other? If we can imagine what their text conversations may look like, that’s exactly my brain’s MO. Passive-aggressive stagnant back and forths. Retro-active negotiations over what we did with our time, what we wrote or said, who we thought about.
I know the easy fix for this, and it is directly related to the above-mentioned second worst thing about me. When I get in this state, no Doctor’s order could surpass taking the metro, feeling the grime of public transport and of crowded spaces, walking around in either clothes you like, and experience levitation, or in clothes you hate, and suddenly feel every inch of your skin again. Basically, nothing like human contact/public spaces/discomfort to bring attention away from the internal discourse and back into the senses.
This also helps to not think of others as microcosms of self-sufficient cults too. “Implemented any new doctrines recently?” would be better replaced by “seen any good shows?”, but this gets better with regular practice.
Instead, think of others as sacks of cells, meat, and bacteria to the same extent as you. Listen in for the magic of two mortal flesh beings sharing simple experiences like a meal or a plant’s new shoot, maybe a new great show to watch together. Touch grass and stuff
This diary was probably better when no one was reading it and I, the kidnapper, didn’t try to apologetically make the experience less awful, maybe deep down hoping to trigger some kind of Stockholm syndrome (this is only human). In my opinion, things are worse when they become meta, more often than not.
For anything, the resolve should be to go from god to animal; let go of control you never had over your emotional regurgitations, your skill for human interactions, your hostage readers, or all the things you did under infatuation. Write less introspectively and more descriptively, I suppose. Things are just what they are
In short, find an enemy that is not yourself to fight.
228.
I spent two consecutive days of rest, which hadn’t happened since maybe high school. I’m used to partaking in a day of full, intentional rest every month or two, but I guess with old age that stops being enough. These days consist of little phone use, sufficient sleep, and my best attempts at passivity. I got into a meditative state that made me stop feeling my limbs on the first day and on the second I set a timer and tried to do actually nothing for 20 minutes. Torturous exercice, yet probably more effective (and cheaper) than most.
Should our ancestors be able to see us, I imagine that they would find our ways of seeking rest farcical and never far from behavior warranting a visit to the local clergy.
Unlike our ancestors, too, we might expect results from our rest, which seems antithetical. Yet it is common to hear the encouragement “rest is productivity too” and somehow we feel comfort rather than horror in that phrase. Rest is now a commodity everyone tells everyone that everyone needs, but few are those with actually healthy relationships with it. It now belongs to the territory of permission, like we must get permission from society at large but even more difficult, from ourselves. And we deny it, push it away for as long as we can. It’s kinda kinky if you think about it. Everything is these days
One thing to know about me is that I can ruin just about anything if I’m given enough time to dissect it on the page. Like a car just out of the gas station, I’m fresh out of some productive rest, reinvigorated and inspired to have critical and defeatist takes. Hide your daughters
Before I fall for the temptation to continue on the car metaphor, the actual point is obviously that you will never, ever win a case for non-rest. But as commendable as it may be to agree to rest, especially for us self-bosses, the question remains of what that actually looks like. My friend E is a seasoned spa-goer and the more I think about it the more convinced I am that regularly spending days soaking in warm waters with nothing but a book, pressured by the price you paid not to leave too early, is one of our better options out there
You are restlessly (haha) advised to get adequate rest but no one wants to tell you how much is adequate, uneasy no doubt at the idea of being held accountable for saying a potentially archaic amount of acceptable rest time, its notion nowadays seemingly adaptable by definition. For some, it’s a minute of breathing exercises, for others, long-term admission into psychiatric facilities, in order to reach rejuvenation. When someone tells you “you need to rest”, they will never tell you where on the spectrum they mean, until you cross the line and then it’s all okay buddy time to come out now it’s been six weeks back to work there’s bills to pay and a façade of business to maintain
229.
An understatement at this point: I am someone for whom routine is both ailment and cure, calling for a tightrope-walking-level of effort to maintain a balance between pattern and spontaneity. This quest has been the main theme of the past week, with people around me using soft tones of voice so as to not frighten me when they use the words “let go” or even “loosen”. My loved ones pay the price when my inability to bend the rules of my own game gets out of hand. The tightrope walker becomes the toddler whose hand you hold while they attempt to walk
As a response, a rearranging of household mess, not to be wrongly equated to the acquisition of inner peace, but a great help nonetheless. I might be non-traditional in my time management ways, but I am most like anyone in that a good rearranging (of guts, of mess) makes for at least a clearer mind space. I swoon at the sight of my own neatly arranged shelf.
Another response, an escapist one to evade the big questions: I’ve been thinking a lot about schools or establishments named after guys (McGill, Saint Andrews, Emile Cohl,(John) Harvard), how we never question it and it sounds natural until you stop to think about it. How a lot of us end up saying the equivalent of “my alma mater is Michael”, and I wonder if some guys are just born with names that look good on a building front or if it’s just conditioning. I depress myself further because I don’t think my name looks good on a building front, and this emasculates me
Stick with me for this other, recent thought: I haven’t seen an animal in a long time. Just recently P came over and texted beforehand “can I bring my dog” and I zipped myself up into the villain costume to say no, I’m allergic. “He was there with us the other day, at that terrace bar” P later says to me at my house (dogless), with a kind smile that makes it impossible to believe he’s testing me. He’d be right to, I didn’t let a dog inside and this should be punishable by decent-human standards.
The point is that I feel like I haven’t seen an animal or barely another human being for some time. The ease with which I slip into hermit-ness has me groaning with annoyance, and I wonder if this is a monster of mine I’ll one day tame, or embrace
K, who I look up to for social/easy-goingness matters, comes home from work + the gym beaming like the Sun wishes it could beam. “I picked up all the mouse traps from the week of holidays at work this morning” they say, and if you think it can’t get worse like I did, they add “they were those sticky traps” and “there were so many, like several per trap”. Of course I ask what about spending a morning looking under and between furniture/appliances for mouse cadaver agglomerations puts them in such a good mood. “It puts everything else into perspective”. Astute.
Instead of consuming online content aggressively telling me to think positive/eat berries in yogurt bowls/protect my peace and cut anyone out who even slightly upset me/not pet dogs to avoid allergies, maybe I should listen to people like K reminding me that, if I really do want to feel better, I can spend a morning picking up dead (or half-dead) animals in traps, to put things into perspective and stop agonizing over the stupid stuff
And so the answer is perhaps in these seemingly random thoughts or moments. One might think I finally got it figured out: pet the dog, leave the house, drink the wine, get into fights, take the nap, ignore the chore, age, fuck up, let go
I’ll leave you with this final random thought of the week, perhaps it contains other answer-gems but none I can be fucked to identify for now: Remember MGMT singing this is our decision, to live fast and die young almost 20 years ago (fuck)? Where are they now? I looked it up of course: very much still alive and now old, currently (re)thriving in great part thanks to Saltburn, which I’m not sure how much of a good thing it is, but this isn’t a film critic column so we’ll leave it at that
230.
What I refer to when I say I have itchy organs is a form of restlessness nothing but time can appease, one often born out of or belonging in my depressive episodes. Every depressed person spends most of their depressive episode trying to understand why they are depressed, which is impossible to do, which makes them restless, which makes everything just worse, however! By calling this the itchy organs I am momentarily amused and this is a win
R angrily texts me that he’s had “the bollocking of [his] life” from the customer “whose trousers [he] wet”. Beyond the delicious story-telling contained in this single text, I spend a second or two envying R who has things like these to worry about instead of self-absorbed DIY bollockings such as imposter syndrome, social inadequacies, etc. Only a second or two though, out of respect for all the people (including myself) having worked customer service jobs.
I walked to the tea store despite it being low on the priority list of the day and didn’t regret it for the five minutes I spent in that quiet and neatly organized shop, the soft-spoken salesman offering me a cup of the “Eiffel” blend, asking “some citrus affinity?” as I paid for my two boxes of lemon-scented green tea. I hate it when all the signs point to the solution to my problem being the problem itself I’m escaping: that the world is too loud, too fast for me, and that there’s nothing I can do to change the fact that being soft-spoken to about tea blends is one of the only things that soothes the internal itch.
I stop to wonder whether the tea salesman ever accidentally poured hot tea over a client and got “a bollocking” for it. I wonder if the angry altercation that ensued took place still in soft whispers, and whether this scenario is as pleasant to my overstimulated brain. I think yes; if everyone just whispered all the time I would be unstoppable
J often talks about morals being a very important thing for her to find in a person, and I’m still not sure I truly understand what that means, but wish I did. I asked her once to rank good food, good music, and physical intimacy on a scale of most to least possible to give up on, and she was the first and only person I’ve asked that question to who ranked music as most easy (or least hard) to give up on. I wasn’t surprised because her last Spotify Wrapped’s song of the year was “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus, but I still had a physical reaction resembling indignation and shock, a stronger one than any I’d had all evening, which taught me that, given the constraint, I might rank “good music” over “morals”, and it would probably be because “morals” can’t help you tune out supermarket noise
Which is to say, I worry I have a skewed experience of the world, one dictated primarily by my different forms of discomfort, which is as boring an ailment as they come, but also one I only have the luxury to entertain because, as my own boss, I have a lot of free brain space and time to house existentialisms of different flavors. This makes me a terrible person to just “vibe” with, but a great tea blend appreciator
231.
The memories that stay the most are those that include the strangest combinations of people, both for the probability of those people meeting and for being their common link. For example, though most of my pre-18 years are a blur, a day I will never forget was early high school when my middle school best friend visited me in the new city I’d moved to and I’d taken her to the ice skating rink along with, for some reason, both my sister and new boyfriend at the time. I remember them taking turns (when they weren’t gracefully skating around the rink) being the one in charge of holding my arm as I painfully made my way forward. I united these people by being their burden; I felt powerful in my weakness.
Moments like these, it is no longer possible to adapt oneself to the person in front of you, because you are in front of several people who know different versions of yourself, ones you’ve molded based on the omissions you decided to make. It can be deeply embarrassing of a confrontation, these different versions of your self forced to fight each other, and perhaps the brain registers this as a form of trauma and that is why those memories remain so much more easily. I invite this falling of curtains, and I welcome any potential embarrassment it may come with. In fact, I live in a perpetual cycle of over-sharing and/or seeking vulnerable and embarrassing situations, only to then fight the demons of cringe and humiliation, get bored, and start again. This diary is evidence
High self-esteem or even general confidence is an unlivable, unsustainable state to be in. Just like not being sober, we may feel great and unbreakable, more partial to taking risks and being social, but ultimately we are also on a constant verge of falling off the cliff. Taking more risks equals more consequences, it’s statistics. Knowing this all too well, I do my best to trigger the fall, anxious perhaps that the longer I wait the higher it will be, or maybe just eager to get it over with. Once down on the dirt, I take a minute to appreciate its homey safety, its familiar reassurance. Not long after I will start lifting again until I make one or two life decisions that will have me crash down, and that is the only way I have found to move forward in life; dreadful ups and downs
Same thing when two people close to me meet, but one knows me for way less time than the other. I sit back and watch as the older friend unravels versions and dimensions of me that existed before and that are perhaps vastly different to what the newer friend understands me as. I delight in these moments even when they are embarrassing (my friend C loves to show everyone the dance move I’d “coined” as a 16-year-old) because they remind everyone (me especially) that I am three-dimensional. Any confidence or comfort I may have created with the newer friend out of showing only parts of myself I like is challenged. In comes vulnerability. It’s painful but it’s the only solid foundation to build on
”Nothing good can come from me drinking”, sings Julia Jacklin, and to continue the earlier comparison of confidence to non-sobriety, nothing good can come from me feeling good about myself for too long. The problem of complacency, sure, but I argue the bigger problem is the direct route to puking your alcohol poisoning out on the street, getting some on your shoes, getting some on your date. I spend my time seeking what I now privately refer to as ice-skating-rink-weakness and what Julia means by “nothing good” because what real use is it to know how to ice skate anyway? And what could have made your date more memorable than vomit? Embarrass yourself or die could be my motto if I was better at applying it.
When people ride those electric scooters, you may look at them ride away with a smug smile, because you know like we all know that any person looks stupid on one of those. However one can’t deny that they are still going faster, and feeling greater, than you. And yes they are dangerous and they may get run over by a car and die, but so could you as a pedestrian, and they at least died going at more than 5 km/h.
There was great potential yesterday when K, T and not one but both of my sisters all ended up going to the art museum together. I tried going back and forth as a good hostess to make sure no one felt left out, and then quickly gave up. Ever seeking to break down some walls, I volunteered to T the anecdotal information of how great of a tyrant I was to my younger sisters as a child. Hiding something I am embarrassed of only makes the feeling worse for me, and I am doomed to constantly keep my worst moments alive and well, God forbid I let them die and they start haunting me but as ghosts (much harder to manage). I bought my sister a drink to commemorate the older sibling abuse I put her through upon implicit agreement that it was not the first, nor the last*
*drink, not abuse (hopefully for her)
232.
Because I am running for the next Nobel Peace Prize, but also because I always feel like I’m running behind on my karmic re-levelling, I agreed to start watching the series The Gentlemen with K. Nothing about a quippy but sexy Kaya Scodelario dealing billions of pounds worth of weed alongside man-of-the-house, justice-imparter, deep-voice-big-balls Duke What-Is-Nuance Edward (Eddie) and their numerous, repetitive, unnecessary and frankly too easy killings along the way makes me not want to drink detergent. But of course, after only 3 episodes it was me initiating the intercourse with undiluted patriarchal representation and saying “well we might as well find out how it ends”. I tell K that this whole series is just what it looks like in little boys’ brains when they play with their G.I. Joes and they can’t unsee it (and I trust now you won’t either)
We all find comfort or soothing in different ways, stereotypically for men it’s The Gentlemen series, for women maybe the Barbie movie. Who would have thought, all the roads lead back to childhood
But in order to perform a cleanse after we’d finished The Gentlemen we watched wholesome 2020 fantasy animation Irish film Wolfwalkers (footnote: I re-arranged that sentence multiple times, determined not to look up “English adjective order”, and I’m pretty sure I still didn’t get it right). Though I’ve never been a big fan of fantasy films with children protagonists and heavy morals, toxic hyper-masculinity did its trick on me and, like something too loaded with flavor chemicals, it made everything taste bland in comparison for some time. Despite how enchanting these children running through these hand-drawn forests with their wolf friends were, I couldn’t help but feel it was missing some cocaine and for a couple gunshots to be fired (what are “bows” and “arrows”...?). So in order to make absolutely sure I don’t start craving battle royale scenarios, I’m continuing an assiduous cleanse in the hopes of eventually regaining my palate for snobbish and foreign films with little morals but over-the-top social discourse in which nothing much except slow fucking, slow smoking, and slow speaking occurs
233.
I like to wonder what happens to a human being once the threshold of being rich enough to be able to afford hiring people to do things for you is crossed. By things I mean things we are all accustomed to doing for ourselves but that suddenly become out-sourceable: doing your laundry, managing your finances, managing your career, cooking for you in your own kitchen, selling your work. These are not unattainable services to reach for, I realize, but there’s a threshold to cross wherein you go from considering it an absurd luxury to not being able to remember how you managed without it (I imagine?). And once that happens, I’m sure something in your brain chemistry changes. Perhaps what makes the very rich immune to guilt, shielded from empathy, protective of something they don’t remember living without, at any cost (double meaning with a sprinkle of pun, my treat)
There is probably no way to know until we’re there, but I like to think I will never feel compelled to have someone fold my laundry for me. It feels as absurd to me as hiring someone to swish the toothbrush around your mouth for you twice a day. On the other hand, I would jump at the opportunity to give my phone to someone else. I did this frequently with an ex partner; we would spend the day together and I would give them my phone. They’d check it when it went off and let me know if something needed urgent attention. I’d replace its weight in my pocket with stones, dead bugs, lots of gum and several lighters
Maybe while we wait for the revolution we create a chain of services like this. Everyone’s torment is different, and Mother Nature surely has it in her plans for there to constantly be a harmony for us to tap into on Earth, one that ensures that there’s the same number of people who hate doing one thing than the number of people who don’t mind so much. Evidence: the ratio of very talkative people vs. good listeners seems roughly balanced and binary, does it not?
If anyone would like to start by being my objective proofreader for this diary, and let me know if the sardonic jokes are landing or if it just reads like this is MySpace, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ll swirl your toothbrush around in your mouth for you
234.
K recently noticed the open package containing one of two pens on my desk and gasp-exclaimed “Bic GLIDE?? how is that going for you?”
I collect pens (read: hoarder), and I intend to create a framed piece with all of my black pens (which I go through at a rate of 2 per month) the way the Cullen family in Twilight keep a frame of all their collected graduation caps on the wall. K loudly and openly shaming me for my pen choice opened a whole new dimension to love for me; what’s your favorite pen? I will now let myself ask when meeting new people. “You’re not a Bic GLIDE girl, are you?” Let me find honest comfort in this, let me retract into my metaphorical man cave of pens, let me be slightly less approachable for this
It (now) feels like a shameful admission but I actually love the Bic Glide, its thick and round, uneven lines wrap me up like a blanket. That being said, I have recently come to learn that the French aristocratic Bich family, the founders and owners of Bic, have greatly participated in financing France’s far right, xenophobic party, le Rassemblement National. I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole of this family so you don’t have to, and if you look up the French church Saint-Gervais- Saint-Protais de Rhuis + Bic, you should be able to find an image proving that the patriarch, in exchange for his financial help in the church’s restauration, had his logo carved into its stone front.
It turns out that pen fanaticism is just as political and dangerous as any other kind. There are no safe havens, no harmless sources of short-term respite. Long gone are the days of childish escapism we attempt to transpose onto pen swatching videos. And should you ever find a way to tune it all out, someone will inevitably end up walking behind you, looking over your shoulder, and expressing their outrage that you are using a Bic GLIDE, of all things.
235.
There has been concern, from external parties, that this diary will be victim to self-inflicted censorship now that more and more people in my life are reading it. I share those concerns, as the point is not to write a pleasant column but rather to do what I do best, namely overshare. Said concerns are made known to me upon my return from my parents’ place. The crowds (2-3 people max) are surprised I’d share my diary with them. Truth be told, I worry more about people I’ve slept with, when that time comes
As an offering supposed to communicate my determination to not fall into self-censorship just yet, a thought I’ve been keeping in my notes app: “Your parents stop being your parents when you reach the age at which they had you.” I don’t remember why I wrote this or if I still agree with it, but it’s food for thought. At my age, my mother was probably teaching me how to put on a jacket or to say how old I was with my fingers up while breastfeeding her second, just born. At my age, I think my father had not yet met my mother, or was just about to. Realizing this has me staring into the void, comparing the dynamics I now have with either of them, and how the way they are each able to relate to me at this age is vastly different. I’m in the gray zone of their parenthood and should in theory be for around 6 more years. I have no conclusion to this; I’ve grown less and less interested in the pursuit of dissecting and understanding parent–child relationships
E sends me a photo of the car she’s just bought. This is the first time a friend of mine buys a car and I’m around to witness it. You’d think to call this some sort of adult milestone, but like the article I was reading in the train back home yesterday was saying, millennials and the generations after are defined by uncertainty (the press doesn’t get tired of pointing out this fact). This purchase, though exciting, is tainted for her with a worry about getting attached because, so frivolous is such an acquisition for people my age living in cities, the plan is decidedly to sell it after the summer. I tell her not to give it a name, and she agrees like I didn’t just say a ludicrous thing. A 26 milestone used to be a second child, now it’s don’t get attached to your car. How are any two people born on either side of 1981 supposed to understand each other?
236.
R calls me in despair. He has started working at a fancy wine bar, and the promise he had made to himself not to return to hospitality stings now that it’s broken, emits pestilent fumes. I’ve taken up the habit of preemptively apologizing before responding to anything with optimism these days, and I suggest to him that he is tapping into great writing material, and he agrees with barely more enthusiasm than when he says “life is terribly hard” and I say “but also terribly beautiful!” and he says that’s true without believing it. Everything he says he is feeling I’ve known, we’ve all known, cyclically. I speak to him over the phone the way his future self is going to speak to him soon in thought; empathizing with his pain, gently reminding him that it’s not worth nothing and that it is definitely not forever. I tell him sometimes all it takes is kindness to yourself, but really I believe that sometimes all it takes is anything at all. For example, what he is looking at while calling me is the shirt he is ironing for work, in his London apartment he is killing himself to afford. I’m sitting on a camping chair, enjoying the view of a deep green ocean of a garden and squinting because of the sun, so then is it really so surprising that it is me, comforting him, and not vice versa?
Like I’m not trying to be the person who tells other people to touch grass, but while I hear about him trying to make it work and find at the very least solace but ideally fulfillment, I am literally touching grass (and smelling clean air, and hearing bees buzz) and finding it hard to picture the city of London let alone encourage someone to keep trying to make it there. All I ever think of telling him is Leave, but this time I opt for a more compassionate Let go.
By virtue of my status as self-employed struggling artist of almost two years now, more and more friends of the high-achieving and burned out kind come to me so I can tell them to let go, to embody the permission slip they crave to take care of themselves more. Who knows where I would be without this reciprocal validation because, as I often remind them, if they spiral because their job isn’t totally aligned to their master’s degree, imagine the mental gymnastics it takes not to completely lose one’s mind when nothing you do fits into a socially acceptable mold. If it’s making you lose your mind, imagine what it does to mine, and yet here you are, calling none other than me to try and find some calm. So while on the surface it is me comforting R on the phone, and even though he thanks me for my time before hanging up, I also enjoy a slightly lighter rest of my day, shoulders lowered down.
237.
Ever since she started reading this diary and unraveling this side of myself, my mother, around whom I am for Easter, has been picking up and pointing at my quirks or maladaptive North American-esque behaviors, of which, if some of you will believe it, is drinking water first thing in the morning, but also, identity politics. With an anthropologist’s delicateness she isolates these parts of me by speaking them into existence, in an attempt to objectively name more than to judge. Of course, this is impossible, and both her and I know that what compels her to note these things is the fact that, to her eye, they detonate.
I can understand, describe, and name said detonation because I know it more than I know the feeling of belonging. I know, to the point of hyper-awareness, what parts of me will be in negotiation with whatever place I’m in, and like the sleeping beauty princess visited by three fairies and a witch at the crib, I was sprinkled with nominative determinism glitter at birth. I carry a name in a language I can’t speak, and I practice saying “not me, but my mother is from Istanbul” if I know I risk meeting a Turkish person who will hear my name and interpret it as an invitation to switch languages. I have a Mexican passport neither of my parents ever had. I speak English with my partner and my friends, and flight attendants have inquired about the “transatlantic” nature of our accents. I don’t understand anyone’s childhood cultural references. No matter the language I am speaking, when I meet someone for the first time, they hear my accent and ask me where I’m from. I keep this diary in a language I remember being foreign to. I drink water first thing in the morning but then also have coffee and wine at the top of my groceries list at all times. I am partial to an eye roll, displeased by French rudeness. I am North American in Europe, European in North America.
Everywhere I’ve lived or been, including my own name, I was a guest. Perhaps this explains my inclination to excel at being a host.
238.
Visiting my parents always makes me incredibly hungry. My theory is that my body thinks I’ve time traveled back to adolescence when “growing girl” were words I could throw around to justify just about anything (food intake, abnormal laundry patterns). To counterbalance the food intake I drink vast amounts of coffee which I later regret, wide awake until the morning in the upstairs office/guest bedroom.
My sister once mentioned that, when she comes here to visit, she maybe packs some extra underwear but generally speaking just kind of shows up, vibes, raids a closet or two and then goes home satisfied. I always come over-packed and with way too many buttoned shirts which serve no purpose for a stay in this deep countryside house other than to make me look like a live-in accountant. If I could pack more clothes to have more options I would, but my bags are already stuffed with all of my neuroses. I tell my parents about my ideal routine, how I’ve struggled to establish it since coming back home, how I need to be stricter. To this last point they half stifle laughter, half choke on their herbal tea.
My parents have managed to create a perfectly balanced sitcom cast as offspring. There’s the daughter that shows up with a spare change of underwear in her back pocket, counterbalanced by the daughter that always packs 2 types of dental floss, and a third daughter to level both forces through stoicism and a composed, above-it-all attitude. Nice little mix, entertainment guaranteed.
J told me about her upcoming MRI appointment and how the email she received said something in French about avoiding metal in your head, so she called the office worried that the metal bar inside her mouth would be a problem, and the person on the phone said something like oh no it’s only if you’ve been shot at, for example, and J and the person laughed on the phone like no I have not been shot at haha, but that right after hanging up the phone she felt a dark wave overcome her, feeling guilt at the privilege of being able to laugh about the absurdity of the idea of being shot. Because I’m great at lifting spirits, all I can think to reply is “that’s how privilege thrives, by us being unaware of it”
I act so self-aware but am in fact not at all, as I preach this to J while completely replacing appreciation and gratitude for being able to visit my parents and their health and their fancy coffee machine giving me insomnia with anxieties about my self-imposed fictitious standard of a routine, my obsessive dependence on random number generators which take slightly longer to load here
Though my main aim for mind health is usually to try to find that balance between taking things seriously enough to do them and being cognisant of how unimportant and unserious everything really is, today will hopefully tilt more toward the end of the spectrum that contains less caffeine and more impromptu garden visits, breezy style
239.
In my monthly surge of online panic symptoms I deactivated my Facebook account a few weeks ago which, looking back, seems absurd that it didn’t happen before. Now I am severed from the possibility of scrolling through apartment ads and feeding the voyeurism eye by looking at people’s homes, but that is pretty much the extent of my new-found lack.
The impetus goes way further than just deactivating Facebook to be honest, but the courage doesn’t. I yap about how I intend to spend a week without my phone, first because I love experimenting with the viscous material that are habits and routines, and second because I have already noticed how good an airplane mode feels and suspect that a dopamine diet would cure literally all of my problems. Clear my skin, compel me to forgive those who hurt me
I cannot stop thinking about how Socrates feared the arrival of the written word because he claimed it would basically make people stupid by virtue of their over-reliance on being able to contain information outside of their now freed and vacuous brains. I’m no different than any person of my times who reads that and thinks of how we now contain all our information, tools, feelings, archives both in a small, flat object in our pockets and in an invisible aptly named cloud, somewhere above us, always hovering. I sometimes stop to think that I don’t believe for a second that the President truly recalls the code to the atomic bomb, and I am convinced that to everyone’s horrified dismay he keeps it in a note on his phone, which he titled “groceries”, thinking himself smart. He knows that it is that or blurting it out loud in the middle of a press conference when the endless repetition in his brain becomes unbearable. The note appeases.
I tell my sister about the new plant shop that opened in the neighborhood and she suddenly becomes alert and confident that her friend worked for their design — the name really rings a bell. She texts and calls him frantically like someone who has just discovered something incredible and is impatient to reap credit for it, but when he finally answers it turns out that it was another, similar sounding project he worked on, and that the name sounds familiar because it is her, not him, who worked on that one. She is stunned for a minute and I watch in absolute delight, realizing that potentially she will soon join me in the genetic bane that is atrocious memory, inherited from our father.
I almost jokingly want to recommend ginkgo supplements to her but end up thinking, somberly, of all of the crutches in disguise that keep me afloat. While there are people like P who keep the equivalent of scattered post it’s in their phone in the form of notes as demented as “X birthday on X date” (no title), I as far as exist thanks to my various calendars, lists, notes, notebooks labeled and categorized. They contain birthdays to remember as much as core memories and reminders of who I am and what I am doing, as well as everything in between. This is all contained of course, primarily, in my phone, and I wince and yuck whenever I try to picture a building-on-fire or sinking-ship scenario and I find I am unable to leave it behind.
Dear Socrates, if only it was just information I stored outside of myself. If only you could see me now, outsourcing critical thinking by feeding my every thought into an easily broken or lost object, hoping that, should I ever need to refer to it, my essence could be archaeologically excavated from the cluster
I got rid of Facebook in an illusory attempt to get myself one step closer to using my brain like it was designed to again, but I argue Socrates would have been as big a fan as any of us of the ability to see whose ex became a banker, who had an ugly baby, how strangers decorate homes we would have never been able to enter otherwise
I smugly end this entry with a direct quote from my cluster of phone notes: when K’s phone battery died right before a painful physiotherapist appointment which they had to endure, I quote, “with just my thoughts”
240.
This week I’ve been mimicking influencers minus the glamor minus the actual influencing, namely I’ve alternated spending days with my phone on airplane mode or vibrating but unattended in the name of “working on projects” or “resting” to then return the next day, apologetic to anyone who didn’t hear back from me immediately and who didn’t actually notice, offering reasons and explanations no one requested.
One of my students told me about a disorder involving the creation of paracosms and the behavior of (too) often finding refuge in these fantasies. I think about the rabbit hole I fell into maybe a year ago of young people online talking about shifting, how they create these alternate realities (scripts) of their lives that they train themselves to meditate into fully entering. Some claim having lived entire, fulfilling lifetimes in them to then suddenly wake up back in their bedroom and only an hour or a night has elapsed. I wonder where on the spectrum the idea of “romanticizing” (also huge online as of the last couple of years) falls.
Then, there’s fiction. Surely bold to claim fiction exists simply because we humans organically seek escapism, but not entirely unfounded.
From the fictional personality test I’ve created in my mind, my results blast “Romanticizer” more than “Fantasizer”. Not a fan of paracosms which also translates into my preference for documentary or memoir over fiction, but very big on parallel-cosmos (working title). For example, I spice up an endless and torturous week by re-framing thing through a girl boss lens, and say things like “This week I’ve been mimicking influencers” instead of the realistic “This week my eczema flared up big time”
Thankfully there is fiction in reality as well as real girl bosses to draw inspiration from. S tells me about a primary school in our hometown where a girl was uncovered as an underground vape seller for the other students, which I’m not sure anyone could have scripted. The romanticizer in me is a conjoined twin of the artist, both simultaneously experiencing the knee-jerk reactive impulse to turn things like these into a film, a book, an immersive exhibition experience, something, somehow.
I call J who has currently been embodying “coming out better the other side” better than any narrative arc I’ve ever consumed and tells me about the person (a sailor no less) she met three days ago and has been sharing a bed with ever since. The last time I saw her (worth noting: a week ago) she mentioned vaguely thinking of getting back out there and presented two potential options to go on a date with. The sailor was none of them. Go ahead and tell me art doesn’t imitate life.
There are others in my life with whom I share this appetite not to create new, alternate realities, but to squeeze the fiction juice out of what we already have. It’s not healthier, I would/could never claim that, it’s just different. Also worth noting: these others are very often also artists. This morning A sends us vocal messages recounting how he spontaneously walked into a sauna to then have sex with 11 different men, the last of whom changed his train ticket to spend more time together. There it is, I thought while listening half asleep in bed, the knee jerk
241.
I started watching videos online about 15 years ago, probably either the best or the worst time, as I feel like at that age anything projected onto one’s retina works as a laser printer directly onto one’s brain. Almost an entire childhood’s worth of parental education crumbled, in my case, in the face of Internet exposure and influence. One YouTuber from those days definitely made me gay, but has since retired/disappeared. Another, to whom I sometimes wonder if I owe as much as my pattern of speech, continues posting to this day and I have witnessed their slow but assured transition into Internet guru activity. I’m reaching the age and stage they were when they started and I discovered them, a relatable and endearing lost artist wondering how to find their place in the world, but who seems now to have found it in the form of charging hundreds of euros an hour for life coaching. I wonder which is worse: admitting to having been raised and molded by the Internet or watching someone who designed the mold that gave you shape become something you feel the urge to look away from?
One thing we might have failed to anticipate is the steady aging of the average Internet celebrity. On a canvas defined by its ephemeral quality and its ability to speed everything up, including relevancy, what as a society are we going to implicitly define as a proper retirement age? For how long can one be, for example, a YouTuber? This has nothing to do with actual, human age, and this is not to say people over a certain age cannot be influencers (au contraire, I implore it). I refer to the Internet age, spanning from the first appearance (birth) to the last (death). What is an acceptable stretch of time? How many persona reinventions, inevitable in human life but within our control in virtual life, if any, should we set the limit to re: public display? This is a question born entirely out of personal interest. In fact, though I hate to be the party killer, can we please talk again about limiting screen exposure for preteens?
Let us name things that come as close as possible, at our human life scale, to defying the saying that nothing is forever (which nowadays should be more like, nothing is for more than a year, tops). Pigeons haven’t greatly changed since your childhood or mine, and we will most likely never witness the publication of books on The Great Pigeon Extinction. Let pigeons, not the Internet, be something to bounce ideas of who we are off of through time. The next time you look at a pigeon, try to remember a much younger version of yourself once also looking at a pigeon, compare, and assess. Look at that, I too could be a life coach.
One might say to me, have more nuance! And I might reply back, I never had any!
242.
I woke up to messages from my cousin who seemingly decided it was alright to send a picture of my grandmother with a black eye and the message “guess what happened!” and then go to sleep without volunteering more information, as if it’s a game of Pictionary or a charade and I get three guesses. I gotta play smart, should I suggest senior assault or a fall first? Moan in disappointment when I get it wrong and she says something like “nope, self harm! :)” (footnote: I have been advised not to say this)
Went to lunch to L and T’s house. I missed this dynamic of having a couple set of friends living nearby with whom to roleplay adult friendship. We have a group chat called an inside joke from one of our adult summer trips to the countryside where we share photos of our meals and organize impromptu drinks after work to discuss bosses, fathers, and loser ex boyfriends.
L gives me a tour of all of her plants the way my parents give me tours of the garden when I visit. Every single one of her plants looks like it is beaming, and she tells me how it’s a good sign when the tips of the leaves are slightly wet “like they are sweating”. I proceed to touch all of her plants’ leaf tips and they’re all sweating. This is how L microdoses motherhood. She gifts me a stem cutting because she still hasn’t learned that I’m not the best recipient for them and T gives us homemade blood orange jam because that’s what adult friends do.
I have always known L to be under crumbling academic pressure, a high achiever now working for the prestigious national scientific research center and thinking of doing a PhD. Today, after the plant tour and before lunch, she’s rolling herself a cigarette and saying that she never thought she could just be a florist until recently. “If all else fails…”
We spend the afternoon working at the library and I bike home because I’ve decided (read: public transport prices have more than doubled since my last birthday) that I’m going to start biking now. I forget to adjust the seat and uncomfortably hover 3 meters above ground the whole way.
S asks how Lyon is treating me and I say it’s lovely which seems contradictory to two nights ago when T said he’d never seen me like this, so wound up and tense. My ex only ever saw me like this, I say, and he claims I have anger issues, veering the conversation which had been on fathers back to loser exes.
We all pack for long trips with only our good socks, but I’d like to volunteer the information that since coming back I’ve kept the “good socks” bag I used for a month and a half instead of putting them all back in their drawer. Whenever I come back from a trip, I make sure to promptly and efficiently unpack everything exactly where it belongs, give the suitcase a wipe down, put it away. But there’s always something I let myself neglect. Last time, it took me 3 weeks to set the time on my watch back to the right time zone. This time, it’s socks. What kind of person with anger issues would do something like that, I ask? I’m wholesome in my own unstable way. I propose that we establish a protocol that dictates that the first person to point fingers and accuse someone of anger issues should be the first person to look to in an attempt to identify the origin of said anger.
In memoriam: that girl during the pandemic who started making videos acting out “the girl who’s never felt anxiety” in different situations. “Time flies when the inside of your mouth is being drilled!” as she wakes up from a nap at the dentist’s etc. Eventually tik tok therapists and others started saying that she was a great example of how we are supposed to talk to ourselves. I now posit that that girl could have been my cousin, currently fast asleep on the other side of the world while everyone on this side just wants to know why grandma has a black eye but has to actively decide not to feel anxiety about it.
243.
Though I’m usually faultless at anticipating and getting out of people’s ways, as per my gold-star-for-trying upbringing placing great emphasis on the direct correlation between being quiet and being loveable, in this instance by the time I reach the queue for the supermarket checkout my hands are too full to reach for my headphones and either remove or turn them off, forcing me to endure a cacophony of Kelpe and Pharrell Williams’ Happy. The visuals accompanying this are two long, busy queues of Saturday grocery collectors. On my left, a young boy keeps raising his shopping trolley in the air, desperate to show a cashier busy with several other clients before him that it is empty. On the second of his four attempts, he hits the man waiting in front of me with the trolley’s wheels in the face. To my right, I peep the beauty and cosmetics section, separate from the rest of the supermarket and like tucked away, its lights off, and the gray linoleum neatly transitioning into another kind of linoleum, the one with the floorboard pattern. I could bet Happy is not playing in there. Only gentle affirmations (linoleum floorboards are actually so much better; so, so easy to clean). In front of me, about seven kilometers ahead, a cashier insists on checking whether the 50 euro note she has been handed is real, except she doesn’t know how, so she calls for her colleague, again and again because the colleague doesn’t hear, and because she is not using any kind of mic or speaker, only whatever volume her lungs can manage, but Pharell is louder and the customer is increasingly annoyed. By the time it is my turn I have forgotten my date of birth and am handed a random voucher for 50% off laundry detergent. I stumble out the exit mouth breathing and blinded by the sun, my hair a few inches longer.
244.
One time, about a year ago, we fostered an evil cat. She was the prettiest feline I’d ever seen, and had the tragic baggage of having been found, at only around 6 months old, completely starved in the street. These two facts she did not let anyone forget about. The charity in charge of the fostering originally announced an average of 2-3 months before an adoption was finalized, but instead left us to get heavily attached to an animal which hated us with all of her small body for almost a year. So great was her misery, despite our best efforts, I remained essentially home bound, my days punctuated by 15-minute timers after which I would have to give her momentary attention and stimulation to make up for her imprisonment.
Still, when we came home after her long-awaited adoption I wept at the sight of the empty space where her bed used to be. I felt small when I woke up the next morning and the house was quiet and my furniture intact. I like to microdose motherhood like this. Short chapters reflecting a portion of the insanity and heartbreak a life-long commitment to another life implies. A simple reminder to let my uterus remain an accessory. It would be a more useful organ if I had it extracted and wore it as a necklace than it is right now.
There is no solace to be found in Forbes’ “Pet Ownership Statistics 2024”. “66% of U.S. households (86.9 million homes) own a pet.”, which I immediately try to compare to statistics of children ownership—about 40% of households in the US. “97% of pet owners consider their pets to be a part of their family.”, but the same article later states “More than half of pet owners (51%) consider their pets to be as much a part of their family as a human family member.” Marking such a big distinction between “part of the family” and “part of the family as a human” is mad. I wonder if, following that line of thought, the affection you might have for a roommate not of your family but of your household is closer to the “part of the family as a pet” or “part of the family as a human” category.
Everytime I see a video of someone with their pet, which is very often (66%), I witness how effortless and beautiful it seems and wonder if the problem was me, or if people going through pet hell are just not making videos about it, the same way you don’t see mommy vloggers documenting how they forgot to keep track of vaccines or how their child became deschooled after getting kicked out for compulsively eating all of their classmates’ erasers. I’ve also been noticing more and more people naming their dogs like my ex, though hopefully not after him.
245.
Manifestation gurus say time moves through you, not vice versa. They advise you to live in the present moment and not to chase, but to stand very still and not resist.
I wish my brain didn’t immediately go to tonic immobility during sexual assault. The guru sitting in her car is talking to me through my screen about “things that are meant for you will come to you” and I am totally zoned out and, needless to say, displeased by the association.
I choose to think instead of de la Fontaine’s tale on the reed that bends against the wind versus the stubborn and proud oak, “the feet of which touched the empire of the dead” and which eventually just gets uprooted by the wind/the Universe. If de La Fontaine had been born in the 20th century instead of the 17th, he would have been all the rage and made videos from his car, too.
There is a stark difference between how easy it was a week ago, on the other side of the world, to bend in the face of the wind I welcomed and had come all the way there for, the premise being that there would be plenty of time to resist it later. Like an indulgence made possible by a promise made on behalf of our future self to “be better”, to be the oak. Now that I am home any rupture in routine feels like failure (pride) and leads to neurosis (uprooting). My easy-goingness, it seems, is geographically dictated.
I feel that it is fair, however, to question the difference between passivity and stillness. The ideal, I presume, is to be still but active, like in tree pose (or I guess, reed pose). Being in the present moment does not necessarily have to mean being grateful and full of joy in the present moment. It can also mean, make sure you hate the present moment with all your might, putting your heart into it, because then this moment will become past and we don’t burden ourselves with the past. I guess what I’m saying is if you feel the impulse to break a plate, make sure you do so with full intent, not in your mind’s fantasy of your future or alternate self.
246.
I’m looking for the word to describe going through the days fueled by an edging tension never to be fulfilled. It is found in walking on tip toes, short breaths, meals eaten in the kitchen standing up, and the Prayers lyric Approach me with caution cause I’m losing control. I was walking home with K saying I’m surprised I’m not spiraling more and K said yeah me too, and it’s always like waking from a dream when you realize you are perceived by others, not only physical things like the way you walk on your toes but also which silences mean I have nothing to say and which ones mean I am flipping out blocked-solar-plexus-chakra style. I remember the girl I met at the London pub for New Year’s, her name I don’t remember nor am I certain I ever knew it, but she told me about how she realized others could in fact see her at 9 years old, when she was picking her ear in class and the teacher made a PSA about not picking our ears, shall we? In this context it’s me ingenuously noticing that I’m not falling apart to K who has, in fact, been making a point of making sure I don’t fall apart. They wipe their forehead of the sweat from the toil I put them through and just sweetly say “that’s really good!”
Case in point was last night, when I walked into what I thought was going to be drinks with my sister and cousin who is visiting, only to find T, J, and P already there and shouting surprise. The magic of this kind of logistics happening without your knowing let alone your intervention is the adult version of a fairy tale, especially if you throw in a couple gin gardens in fancy glasses.
247.
A sore sight to be confronted with whenever I come back home is the Lyon airport’s baggage claim area. So small and quiet, it does no justice to the reality of the city, but I’m sure it taints every tourist’s view before they even get a chance to see for themselves. Some luggage gets momentarily stuck on the carousel, and two men casually walk up to it, stepping on the structure, and pull the bags with their legs on each side of the conveyor belt. We all watch this unfold with excessive tranquility, the drowsiness of small towns already hitting us, and nobody intervenes.
I wonder about the size of cities being a megascale for how it feels to be in them on a personal level. The greater the physical space, the greater the symbolic space for one to express oneself, to be imaginative and intrepid, especially with one’s appearance. The human landscape in places like New York or London will always be more stimulating than the one in places like Lyon. I apprehend the shrinking feeling I might be about to experience. I’ve become a snob.
My mum texts to say welcome back to the old world, and someone else says welcome back to the land of Macron. I feel at home on the continent of sarcasm and energy crises so bad no one uses heating anymore. Trading bulky plastic water bottles for the age-old and ever-evolving pretense of cultural superiority and insufferable people.
After being awake for 35 hours everything is incredibly funny, and your brain is so unwilling to waste energy on anxiety it’s surprising that restrictive sleeping is not more common. Like dieting to lose weight, it would be refreshing to see magazines at the supermarket advertising things like “the true story of how I stayed awake long enough to successfully forget my ex-husband’s name!” or “10 recipes full of caffeine to stay awake for an entire week”. Let us trade “summer bodies” for the search of the best natural high.
Slowly readapting to my surroundings, the illusion of being busy that living out of a suitcase creates is now gone. I’m filling back up with the usual tension and restlessness that comes with having more than 2 pairs of pants to choose from.
248.
I like myself least when preaching & lying, which I consider to be two sides of the same coin. They are the easiest to reach for and often settle the debate on whether it is best to say something or shut up. To preach is to claim knowing, which is always a lie. But there’s comfort to be found in playing the role, as much as there is comfort in filling silence with words versus sitting with it. To claim, by being silent, to be processing something so as to be able to better articulate it at a later time is also lying. All there can be is honesty from minute to minute and enough compassion and bravery to then go back on it and say “actually,”
But I revert, like many others, to these basic compartments when in need to make sense of things. Then, with time, end up gaining a greater perspective and inevitably regretting my extremism, though genuine at the time. All we act upon is lack of information and, as established here before, gaps that we instinctively fill.
I get the craving for black & white drama, for clean dramatic breaks. The fantasy of walking into you partner fucking the plumber in the bed you share. One minute holy union, the next you’re driving away with your car full of your belongings, window down and hair in the wind to convince yourself of the potential that starting anew holds. No gaps to fill, only a compact story with no plot holes to tell your friends or write in your memoir. I salivate at the idea of a lack of nuance in relationships, a rapport built on jurisdiction. Break the law, pay the price, all of this is preemptively established noir sur blanc. On paper, one could say that’s just monogamy. In practice, nobody’s interpersonal business truly obeys these dull narrative rules we apply to fiction.
Instead, i get the privilege of experiencing slow decay, the impossibility of saying “i never want to see you again” and being taken seriously in the age of always being a text away, the age of adults being responsible for communicating their feelings and validating everyone else’s, though with agency over how superficially to do this.
Someone I have a polite rapport with says to me “at least this is proof that it wouldn’t have worked out between you” and I wonder why I’m supposed to find solace in that, why the preface with “at least”. As if it was the absence of evidence that hurt, not the overflow of it, incriminating something you only ever wanted to love and must now take out of the gray area and compartmentalize in the despicable and childish “bad” bin. Fatally, this is proof that it wouldn’t have worked, is what people should say. But this me falling into self-pity again, my third least favorite trait.
I used to think a safe way to avoid regret is to be authentic but always kind about it, because it’s worse to cringe at having been kind than to lay awake at night replaying your outbursts in your mind. Now I think that just displaces the barbarity to a later, undefined time, and remains there, ominous and pending.
249.
Healing magic almost always takes the form of friends. Like after a month of being tormented with words, not actions, S takes you out and reminds you that actions, not words is still alive and well. I defend that there is more romance in dates with friends than in anything else. We go to the café where she is, you guessed it, a regular, and when it starts getting dark we head to the bar. I swoon at the undeniable class that is having a preferred drink and watch her sip her Negroni while having a conversation that has us at times both laughing hysterically, and at other times stepping out for cigarettes to honor the intimacy of escaping the music our confessions require. “You have the power to make everyone seem undateable” I joke while she drives me home, holding my hand the whole way there. “That’s the goal” she of course replies.
It’s like Icarus flew into the Sun for nothing, because foolish young pride takes hold of us all regularly, whether by losing ourselves in work, addiction, or another person’s emotional unavailability, and leaves us burnt and asking what is a lesson learned? But then your friends come and catch you again, no questions asked.
Like when I'm busy picking my heart off the floor or wasting yet another 11:11 wish and then A shares photos of me he took at the museum where I unintentionally display my inability to hold my hands in conventional fashion. Ask yourself, did they ever pay attention to your hand postures? Then later L, unprompted, sends me photos of Rembrandt portraits, with their delicate and poised (hand) gestures, and just says “you’re giving:”. Ask yourself, did they ever do anything remotely as romantic as compare you to Rembrandt paintings? Do they even know what a painting is?
It is not foolish to be human and at the mercy of someone who once held your heart and has yet to fully give it back, but it is embarrassing. Especially if it happens to be a man. I ask E if she still loves me like this, without dignity, and she says I love you even more. It checks out, as I myself never particularly pursued friendships with people because they seemed to me to be very dignified, to never fly into the Sun.
I read an article about shifting baselines and losing one’s memory, and it takes me a good minute to understand that shifting baselines is not a term that can be applied to any type of standard forced to evolve, but specifically refers to the condition of the natural environment re: climate change. I read half the article thinking, navel-gazed, about how S shifted the baseline (re: affairs of the heart) back to an appropriate level in just one evening.
The rest of the article talks about the fear of losing our memories or of them not being passed down, and what knowledge can be lost in the process. I try, in an effort to self-soothe more than anything else, to think of it as always being exchanged like currency, transformed like energy. The healing magic of when I get excited at the prospect of being driven home and S just unlocks the car and says “get in, city girl”. And then what the fuck does anything else matter, really?
250.
Something I’ve begun to fear is when all the signs point to narrative incompleteness, being deprived of the satisfying closing of cycles.
I saw someone I hadn’t seen in months and more significantly who I hadn’t seen since I ugly cried my way out of his apartment, him in just a patterned bathrobe, me carrying all my bags, hastily packed. Then time passed and suddenly we were both standing outside, wearing coats. I said “I forgot all that I wanted to say to you” and he said “I’m not thinking of anything right now”. Instead he told me about the last hockey game he went to and I made some jokes about subletting apartments. Then we withdrew back to the safety of not knowing each other anymore. I’m not sure this last memory of him is going to be less embarrassing to remember than the bathrobe one.
It’s a cliché because it is true; you have to be grateful for your past because it got you here, whether bad experiences or embarrassing versions of yourself. For example, I once flew across an ocean just to be in the same bed as someone (bathrobe guy) whose em dash usage made my head spin. Now I get to look at em dashes critically for my work. did we really need such a deep breath here? -Nilay
My roommate left me a mysterious message in the form of leaving all of the kitchen windows + balcony door open, the stove fan on full blast. I turned the fan off and went to bed. Later, lulled by the strong wind hitting rain droplets on my window, I realized it was probably raining inside of the kitchen too. It’s the next day and my roommate has yet to return.
It’s all like reading a book you can tell is shamelessly edging you. Why have closure when you can finish on an open-ended question? Because then you get to sell more books. This applies to fiction because it applies to life.
Like when A bleakly says, why is it that even in the most imaginative sci-fi or fantasy works, sex is still exactly the same as in the porn that’s currently out there? I try to think of how to say “because it’s all still catered to the global, (i’m gonna say it: male) gaze” in a way that won’t make us both depressed for the rest of the day. I mutter something about how anything we make will always reflect our inescapable physiological needs and wants, and A seems dissatisfied by this answer but then again I’m dissatisfied by men in general, so.
I’m going to start embracing having answers for absolutely nothing and finding peace in dissatisfaction. Maybe my roommate was abducted but there’s no way to know and that’s perfect just as it is.
Lyrics from Philosopher’s Calling - Crack Cloud:
I used to think that I'd never find closure
But baby that's before the amphetamine exposure
Psycho-stimulation, what a privilege for the mind
We should do it all the time, we should do it all the time
It’s a spasm, there’s a twitch, it's good for circulation
Now please listen to my thesis, it’s my third re-iteration
And I want to clarify that the sun is in the sky
And the world is always round and I am so profound
251.
I have one week left here. C asks me how my stay has been and I tell her everything I’ve been up to, and I tell her I’m tired, and she tells me I am a tank. It reminds me of the recurrent nightmare I had as a child, where I’d be in the forest/jungle with my mother and we’d be hiding from both a baby doll on a tricycle with a super low, deep voice and a huge military tank of which emanated a high-pitched, little-girl type of voice. The dissonance lacked imagination but terrified me to my core. Now it makes me laugh and I thank C. Sometimes all you need to keep going is validation in the form of comparison to armored fighting vehicles.
Said mother wants me to visit and it’s giving me paralysis. I zone out making the coffee (7th to last here), subject to fantasies about deep sleep in the countryside in my mother’s detergent-scented sheets, and then realize I’ve been holding my breath and gasp for air. The coffee (instant, second-to-cheapest is my standard), I realize, tastes to me exactly like the one from my parents’ fancy coffee machine, which in turn makes me realize how bad my coffee taste buds must be. This all contributes to definitively deflating the only just acquired ego boost from being compared to a tank.
252.
I miss having K around to ask them to name my outfits. The spectrum deliciously goes from “1950s child about to frolic in a European field” to “the plumber on a spaceship”. If they were here today I think we would both agree on me looking like a lost, androgynous priest, with my shirt buttoned up almost to my chin and the oversize black coat. They might be hesitant at first to tell me, worried because surely that’s not what I was going for, and I would say it isn’t but it is a happy accident, and off I would go, priest in my rapture (riding the metro to the library).
On said metro, a woman about my age gets on and stands next to me. She is wearing a slick blonde bun, blue tights under a denim miniskirt complemented by those thick white schoolgirl socks and an enormous scarf, framing her bold lip and cat eyes. About a minute in, a man walks up to her (he walks from the other side of the carriage!) and through my headphones I can vaguely hear he is making an advance at her and she politely declines. I’ve never been so close to this kind of situation when it happened to someone else. I’m standing right there, ignored no doubt because I look like a sexless and ominous black-cloaked figure instilling some kind of fear of god by only her presence.
The last time a man came up to me on a train to ask if I had a boyfriend was last month and I, too, was wearing tights. Maybe therein lies the key. But overall, as of the last year or two this has happened much less, and I now lock eyes with women more. This is the kind of observation we must always take with a grain of salt, because who you lock eyes with often depends more on who you were already staring at, rather than who thinks you’re hot. This offers new insight; that as I age, men are losing their appeal.
I wonder how much of it has to do with the narrative we have about prefrontal cortexes being fully formed at 25. If it is true, I can emphatically confirm that life is much more enjoyable when the gray matter behind your forehead is not the consistency of day-old mashed potatoes. Being 25/6 feels like suddenly sobering up, and feeling both embarrassed and amused by all the stuff you remember or are reminded of having done when you were blind drunk this last quarter of a century. You’re glad you had fun and have all those stories to tell, but are even more glad that it’s over.
I read an article this morning that said we often feel a different age than we really are, and that before 25 we often feel older, but after that we feel younger. Maybe we are all just programmed to reach 36 years old, maybe that’s the botanical age of flower bloom transposed onto humans. Flowers live to bloom and then feel confused when they finally do and, immediately after, start wilting.
So now that my friends and I have rock-solid brains we have the discernment to talk real business talks, go to what really matters, and exchange our strategies (not to be followed through) to get super buff arms. “I don’t care about any other part of my body” says E, “but I want huge fucking arms”. I’m so glad we’re past the age of talking or worrying about internships. I want to know where you get your protein. That’s what flowers in full bloom talk about too, among each other.
The gloom of the bloom will, however, inevitably catch up to you and make you ask yourself, who will I appeal to now that I will look like an androgynous priest with enormous arms but aging hands, with a critical-thinking stare giving me wrinkles at the corners of my eyes? Who will care for potential that has already been realized?
And inevitably the answer is yourself, which is all that should have ever mattered. But there’s panic in knowing you are leaving the swamp of virginal meat that men like to regularly visit, like a bowl of olives at a dinner party. The panic is really only there because the swamp is mostly all you have ever known, but it takes leaving a swamp to see it was, well, a swamp.
I think of that scene in Fleabag where the older woman says she loves menopause, and all other scant moments in pop culture where a platform is given to voices that say actually, aging is incredible. I wonder, proportionately, how much of our fear of aging is society and culture putting youth on a pedestal, and how much of it is primal instinct from our human bodies which are, by design, meant to last 50 odd years rather than 90+.
253.
Imminently this diary will technically go public and some people might ask what the numbers mean. Because I have no energy to fabricate a lie, the honest truth is that it was a countdown to a very specific date originally intended to make me write every single day until then. That promptly fell through and now, at this current rhythm, the countdown will take me about 3 months beyond the original date. I have no issue admitting to this slacking off regarding my personal goal; in fact, I think I deserve a medal for being so vulnerable about my failures. Not all heroes wear capes, and this one wears her humanity proudly on her sleeve.
Speaking of humanity—this humbling concept—I’m reaching a state of exhaustion not known before. It’s like a new flavor you were never particularly interested in trying but the sample person at the supermarket was very insistent. It’s different from the depression exhaustion I'm used to; with this one, it’s hard to sleep. I never understood people talking about staying up all night thinking, tormented by thoughts. If anything, I thought they were showing off about staying up late while the rest of us mere mortals lazily slumbered. Now I see what they mean. It’s more like a deafening hum, a vibration of which you cannot locate the source.
Whenever I do sleep, I've started having dreams that I am back home, which is soon. In my dreams somehow it is always summer, which I confidently interpret as dread because I hate summer. I don’t know what version of myself I will be then, let alone if I will like her. Sometimes it’s hard to catch up to myself. I’m also reaching the point where I feel dread when I am in the kitchen and see all the sauces I bought. The white wine vinegar left practically untouched. I did not compromise on my meals during this stay but now I’m in this situation. Perhaps I will organize a raffle event where my friends can spin a wheel for a chance to go home with some of my condiments. Black tie only, and whoever wins the soybean paste gets a complimentary shampoo and conditioner combo.
In last night’s dream I am back in my own apartment and looking for the scale to weigh myself, to take stock of a month and a half of not compromising on condiments but terribly slacking in food intake. I know right, what an uh oh thing to dream about. In the dream, as I wait for the numbers to appear on the screen, I think of all the things I still wanted to do in Montreal, and then I woke up and I was here still.
The pack of cigarettes I bought I intend to make last an entire month. E promptly calculated that it amounted to almost a cigarette a day, which sounded not great to him and worthy of praise to me. He said I could make it work because I have great discipline, which I do, but I am also uncompromising on the small pleasures, as we have established. Last night only, walking to a bar to have a beer alone and read my book, sticking out terribly from the loud and agitated environment, cost me 3 cigarettes total, almost back to back.
I’m slipping into greediness and asking too much of my body, which until now diligently took my exigence in exchange for my lifestyle. To exist is to constantly negotiate with your own body. You can live off condiments but only if you’re not a smoker. You can write every day but only if you get enough sleep. You can have that fifth coffee but you cannot let the adrenaline drive you to sex with strangers.
254.
I remember looking this up or maybe I didn’t look it up but stumbled upon it and then looked it up again last night, namely the sound of Frida Kahlo’s voice. I could swear on a family member’s life that the last time I found myself on this specific part of the Internet there were videos with old photographs of Frida Kahlo and captions such as “a recording of the Mexican artist’s voice!” or “is this what she sounded like?” and the sound was a very crunchy recording full of static under which you could hear a woman’s voice swearing her angry tits out. I could have almost also sworn that her words were slurred as if she were drunk, without an ounce of gracefulness but an incredible, loud and shameless presence. This was some time ago (if it even happened), but last night, hoping to hear that recording again, I couldn’t find anything other than this different recording of what apparently is Frida on a radio program, reading a poetic piece she wrote about Diego. The recording is clean, the voice is very clear, soft and feminine, like some kind of PR representative of Frida’s swept in to erase all evidence of the previous recording and planted this instead. Now I refuse to believe this was actually her, and can only find solace in the fact that most of these videos say that investigation is still ongoing as to whether this is really her voice or that of an actress.
Lately this is what my ventures to access myself look like; breaking things down into either specific tasks or, in this case, specific Google searches. I’m starting to understand that the most significant things in life hide in its crevices. Not in the grand events but in the metro rides to and from said events. Kahlo’s devastating paintings are the main entrance gates into an intricate and optional maze, a small path of which implies a search for what her voice sounded like. Why do we care? But we do. Seemingly futile endeavors are the only worthy endeavors. Conspiracy theorists are not welcome to read too much into that.
The problem being, that these undertakings (it’s synonym day) are a fundamentally private practice. But one day you’ve done it so much that it becomes visible, public, and people start expecting it from you and suddenly you have to create a substack account. It’s the transition of any artist, for example, from bedroom to business. And then, is it ever really the same again? I wonder if Frida ever lay awake in bed at night, longing to go back to the days before she was “discovered”. I wonder if she ever worried about being considered a sell-out like her husband. The lore would argue that she didn’t care for optics.
I must also concede that, like most people these days, I am consumer before I am creator of anything, and I’m very grateful that people leave their bedrooms and share their work. In 2023 I started engaging with newsletters and they would probably be in the top 5 of my gratitude list for the year if I had one. It’s not long until I succeed in overwhelming myself with emails and have to tone it down, I know this in my heart. In the meantime, keep sending out curated updates of your work; I’m reading you.
I would listen to audio newsletters which I guess are podcasts but only of Frida Kahlo’s angry voice. I would commute on buses, soothed by the sounds of her guttural discourse and smoker cough. I am both sad and glad we never definitively found a recording of her voice, shielding her from further exploitation of her image/voice when AI starts creating fake podcasts from dead people. I’m calling it.
255.
I went to see a film last night which I had a strange feeling was going to be better than I could anticipate but then surpassed even the renewed anticipation. The very first frame I thought “I must make a mental note of this”. By the one-fourth mark of the film I had a grin stuck to my face until the end, by which time the mental note had just become “find a way to own this film; watch it numerous times”. I couldn’t help but think of the application I had just submitted for a film writing residency the day before; how, had I waited a day more, I would have had so much inspiration to work with to tweak the script. I wonder when exactly film watching was ruined for me, when it went from a pleasant experience for me to sit through, to a knee-jerk sort of reflex of “taking mental notes” (how crass it is to consume art that way).
I resolutely decided I could not stifle the thrill by going straight home. In the mood to talk my head off like I’d done cocaine about the incredible and singular experience of having art make you literally short of breath, I texted around. But it was a Sunday night and everyone was with spouses, working, out of the city, or asleep. I even texted C, so great was my buzz, but he was at dinner. Then again, I don’t know how pleased he would have been to see me again after all these months only for me to talk about cinema. I stayed around still for a beer and for research on the film, other films. I took an unnecessarily long way home and even deviated from my course to go buy a pack of cigarettes (to whoever is reading this and I haven’t yet told: this is my confession). The Universe confirmed it was the right thing to do (see here an example of why I think it is too easy to see signs from the Universe that go in your favor) because on my way back I walked past a man I thought I’d recognized from the cinema earlier. Our paths and eyes crossed, he kept walking but I stopped and stared back longingly at this 80-year old man with dirty hair walk away. In the metro station I stared at the characters they’d engraved on the walls, the view momentarily interrupted by trains going in and out, and which I did not get on.
In other news my period finally came which means I can no longer blame my exhaustion on its delay — an arbitrary medical conclusion I’d reached based on vibes and arrogance alone.
The same exhaustion in fact came crushing down on me times a hundred while laying in bed after having, frustratingly, come home. I not only felt like I could not think about film or art for another second, but that I could never do it again in my life. Maybe I’d become a bus driver instead. Another arrogant guess from someone who has never taken hard drugs came to mind then, namely this is a comedown. Then again, you see how I get after a movie. Now you know why I don’t do hard drugs.
256.
A is back from Paris and I took his still-jet lagged ass out. We went to a bar with the name of a fruit and we were the only people there that didn’t look mid-30s, white québécois, fresh out of the office. He tells me he went to Versailles and I’m nodding like you do in pleasant conversation about people who went to visit a city you’re supposed to know but hate, until he provided me with the titillating information that Marie-Antoinette not only liked to role-play poor peasant, but had an entire fake peasant village built near the Versailles palace, à la DisneyLand. A shows me photos he took and there it is, a little swamp surrounded by a handful of little huts and mills that look so cartoonishly like a pre-revolution French village that it might as well have been designed by Disney himself. To have lived a life as busy as one including both building fake villages for you to role-play in as well as being publicly beheaded is what A and I would consider a life well lived.
In an attempt to channel Marie-Antoinette energy we sneak into a university building from which we hear music blasting, but once inside we lose the auditory trace and instead visit the building, sardonically commenting “that’s cute” about this rival university’s facilities. We reach the infamous second-hand book shop I originally wanted to take him to 15 minutes before it closes, and look for a book of poetry I was once promised, but isn’t there. We leave promptly, as I feel the eyes of the guy working there like daggers on our backs.
We head to the next bar which we don’t realize is a fancy hotel bar until a man greets us and activates the automatic glass doors for us. The bartender compliments A’s coat, and glasses, and earrings, all in one breath and I think that’s a bit much, but really I’m just jealous. When I get home I stay up for an hour in the dark watching videos or listening to audio recordings exemplifying the McGurk effect, and I lose my mind. The next morning my mother video calls me and says “did you go out last night? it shows” but I’m sure Marie-Antoinette didn’t look too great either long before the guillotine.
257.
Humans need gaps to fill, whether in the form of a blank space in our living room wall driving us crazy until the perfect painting or print comes around, or in the form of a lack of maternal love in childhood, met in maturity with a succession of short-term replacements (shoes, sex, drugs, cake) until we learn better. Art is the cheesy and ineluctable solution to all kinds of gaps except the ones in emmental cheese and then again, what is there not to love in a flirty pattern?
Last night I dreamt that my sister told me she liked sleeping without any pillows, and during one of my ritual night awakenings I got rid of all my pillows to test my dream sister’s theory, but woke up with a stiff neck. I texted her this and she said she did in fact like to sleep without pillows and that we’d already had that conversation albeit many years ago. Maybe our dreams are things we’ve already lived but don’t consciously remember anymore. Gaps in memory. I hope not, she says; me too, I say.
I also text her that I’ve had a new title idea for the book, and unfortunately she really likes it. What a dilemma, I say; sleep on it, she says. I ascent and move on to listening to her new song. The kid is getting wildly good. My sister and I overlap in our abundance of gaps to fill. We are practically beings of void. You should see our apartments, you should see our closets.
It gets funny when you fill gaps created by things you once used to fill other gaps. The single-use vape I found two months ago is begging for its life as I take yet another empty drag, its blue light flickering in morse code “please just let me be landfill already”. Now I have a new gap to fill, previously filled by this vape, previously filled by cigarettes, previously caused by ??? (like in video games, when you have yet to identify an item so you only get question marks in place of its name and a silhouette of it instead of the full picture). The trick with nicotine is that it’s lots of tiny gaps of relief throughout the day, barely ever longer than 7 minutes long, but probably amounting to the equivalent of one or two entire therapy sessions by the end of the week (or day, you do you). It’s particularly difficult to find some kind of artistic expression to use as a replacement in such a format.
This is why my father told me, when I was fifteen, to never ever start smoking. No matter what you do, you are never fully rid of it. Since that conversation my father has quit and picked it up again as many times as there are holes in emmental cheese. The only luck we have in this regard, my father and I, is that we are of the kind that look bad when smoking. Some people it just doesn’t suit, and it’s a great incentive to quit. When my sister started smoking, immediately and shamelessly in front of the entire family, it’s like nobody even noticed, like the cigarette had always been an extension of herself. The girl smokes like it was invented for her and that’s going to be a bitch of a thing to give up on.
258.
It’s always hard to determine how gregarious I actually am, the first clue being my visceral reticence to nights out with large groups of people which, for a 20-something year old freshly out of a global pandemic is probably going to be a considered an offense in the future. I already faintly hear my future 50-year old self insulting me with all her might, and this on a daily basis. Another clue is how alive and content I feel after having spent time around other fleshed people, which I hear is a known fact of human existence but we still act like we’re the ones discovering that it’s actually a basic human need, you know.
Where there is no surprise is actually in this contrast, a defining characteristic of my life since always. I don’t give myself enough credit for naturally striving toward finding some semblance of balance; there is nothing more aggressively social and perhaps even gregarious than film shoots, yet this is the field I chose to pursue. I reach balance by spending most of the rest of my time completely isolated and conducting activities that don’t even require me to emit sounds, for example writing or solo cinema-going.
The incompatibility of a social life with my extremely high-maintenance, regimented routine is my cross to bear, and for this cross I am grateful. There are obviously worse problems in life. But some days, very rarely but not unheard of, my competing and vital life organisms of human contact and focused flow (the so-called “process”) reach symbiosis. Those days are the days that the fear of death grips me the fuck back.
Yesterday was perhaps one of those days, where everything flows and happens so effortlessly you truly start believing you are God’s favorite child. A spontaneous visit to E’s house after the morning writing and scheming came close to the feeling of a perfectly timed cigarette break (I said close), an out breath that doesn’t make you feel like you occupy your body wrong. I found a vest and a jacket that occupied my body like they were incestuous siblings; it is wrong how much they can’t get enough of each other (sorry). I then sat at the café’s bar like some fucking swank of a person to work on editing a paper about flamenco dance teachers. On the other side of it, a woman who can only be physically described as an Instagram fit girl, with her slick blonde ponytail, her fake tan and fitted white running vest, drank beer and by drank beer I mean she got the tester glasses and everything each time, with serious discussions with the bartender about undertones and flavors, all while reading Kafka. Art wishes it could imitate life. The day ended with rosé ciders on rosé-colored leather seats at a bar with E, who delighted me in conversation about how All Of Us Strangers left her, I quote, with super dry eyeballs. I was invited back for dinner and a wine bottle her parents had brought from France, over which we discussed what were the tiniest countries in the world, what were people up to there, and what is a country, really.
It is only fair, probably, that it should all end on the sour note of losing my keys and having to deal with the embarrassment of waiting for my roommate to let me in, and borrowing a spare I’m gonna have to make a copy of. Looking back, all that coming and going around different places in town with a stuffed tote bag and my careless (God’s favorite kid has no fear) use of it could only result in that. As we speak, those keys could be anywhere, from the metro to the thrift shop to the sewing supplies shop to the streets to the café to the bar to the bus. I’ve never lost keys in my life so perhaps it was time.
Overall, I can only draw the conclusion that when I catch myself not being on top of things anymore is a good sign of my mental well being.
259.
I text G that I’ve fallen off my metaphorical bike because a metaphorical twig from the agreeable countryside road flew into my wheel, got stuck there and had me falling knees first on the paved road. To be clear, I tell G, the metaphorical twig is that guy from September resurfacing, and G says yes I know, I love your metaphors. Perhaps this is his gentle way of saying I need to stop speaking in metaphors but I won’t ask, nor worry about it, because my knees are scraped and I deserve to just be pitied for a second. I tell him falling off a bike is no big deal, nothing’s broken and I’ll get back on, but still it is terribly irritating. In his gentle ways he plays along and tells me he’ll help me remove the twig, tighten the chain back on. I tell him can we throw the twig into a campfire also, eat marshmallows off it. He says yes absolutely.
I finally saw and had a drink with M last night, with whom I also spoke of the metaphorical bike but without mentioning the twig. Since I last saw her she’d bravely quit her job and was working full time on her next film, so most of the conversation gravitated around creative routines and flows, motivation and where to safely store the fear away. She also seemed eager to enjoy life and youth and said the phrase now is the time two or three times, with that sparkle in the eyes of those who have recently quit a job. I remember that feeling.
She mentioned her upcoming trips of which one to Europe in the spring and another, in two days now, to LA. Lately I feel like everywhere I look people are talking about LA. L, who I hoped to see this month is there working at the moment, and I sent her a succession of emojis that depicted what, in my mind, LA was about, and she said yeah not far off. I told M, who has also never been before, to send me photos and dispel the myth. E, who grew up there, found cheap flights and is considering a trip. For all intents and purposes, this is what so-called woo woo Universe/manifestation/etc believers would consider a “sign from the Universe” and something to notice and act upon. But I realize now the great room for nit-picking there is in those realms, as I will continue living my life without ever thinking about let alone considering LA. It would take way less “signs” for me to say okay that’s it, I simply must go and give gambling a go, the Universe called me to do so.
What all these conversations do spark in me is a recurrent thought about feeling exhausted and also needing a holiday trip except in a way I am on a holiday trip. A very busy and quiet one.
The exhaustion is actually a recent feeling and one no doubt triggered by the bike, the twig. I’d been so focused, in a delicious state of flow and momentum, and now I’m wasting precious energy and time by being hyper-aware of his geographical proximity I’d begun to forget about. Paranoia and avid curiosity took over the part of my brain I was using to write applications and dossiers, and I give them a nasty look that says let me know when you’re done because I know now that’s all I can do.
To this brain muddle add the either perfectly or terribly timed outing with M, a venture out of my monk routine. M asks me if I’ve seen any benefits since I quit smoking, and I surprise us both by saying (and realizing at the same time) that no, not really. But then again today I feel even worse and can barely even look at the bike I’m supposed to get back on, and I can only make a connection to the alcohol consumed last night, which then felt like a long overdue and deserved treat, and now shows me the benefits of sobriety by taking them away from me. It would probably only take one or two cigarettes to become conscious of a better state of existence I’m seemingly experiencing but not noticing.
260.
While we wait for the card reader to approve the transaction she whispers to me “when did you get here?”. She says it in French and I’m still pondering how to translate “t’es arrivée quand?” in the right tone. Get, arrive, come. It would require a global translation, one that includes her eyes (lowered and not meeting mine), our circumstance (me paying to get some photos developed, her a cashier), her whisper. My mouth is huge and I spend a third of my waking time regretting things I’ve said, too fast, too much, not appropriate enough. But in this context it took me the most sensual 6 seconds of silence to finally stammer something about May. Nothing in our interactions, since meeting a minute and a half ago, suggested any kind of personal information about each other. She must have detected my accent, and I didn’t pay attention to hers. Beyond the humiliation it always is when someone clocks me as French in this country, at least when it’s a co-citizen there’s shared shame, like haha yes for sure me too, lower your voice though.
She suddenly starts talking to me like we are intimate friends, the kind of ephemeral relationship I only have with drunk women late at night in bars, except in this context (broad daylight, a pharmacy) it can’t end in us either making out or puking, so I’m not sure how to end it. She tells me she also got here in May, but she’d lived here before. I say no way, me too. And I wonder if she has many friends here. Suddenly I want to take her out, wine and dine her. It’s the bane of friendly people, they always run the risk of accidentally befriending deranged individuals like me.
I go back a few days later for dish soap and try to avoid her cash register like a middle-schooler, but fail. I ask her how she is, she seems taken aback by the question, I realize she doesn’t remember me and I fantasize about getting punched in the face. As I’m leaving, she says in passing “it’s been a while since I’ve seen a French bank card”.
261.
I suggest to E that we should infiltrate a four-star hotel’s rooftop heated swimming pool, and I know before even asking that the answer will be enthusiastic. E and I’s trademark is activities outside of the realm of what is sensical and sensible, what is easy. We walk from the metro station to the hotel’s entrance, an entirely underground walk consisting of going through abandoned-looking building basements, food courts of only empty and freakishly clean tables, up and down very short escalators. “It’s like we’re in purgatory” texts E who is slightly ahead of me and who I’m not certain I’ll ever catch up to. By the time I do, we comment on the absurdity of all this empty space, and I suggest it is a reflection of Canada as a country. The elevator has two buttons to choose from : 1 or 10, probably because anything in between is Dante’s Inferno.
We manage to infiltrate the hotel pool and by that I mean we pay the $25 fee the hotel asks for access, which is way less cool and ultimate evidence that we’ve reached Punishment. Said access feels very much like that of a municipal pool’s, the pool desk attendant (?) only able to spare 1 key for us to cram all of our clothes into one locker even though the place is deserted. I suspect that the more absurd the situation gets, the more we enjoy ourselves. Being at the right place at the right time holds no appeal. Being at a random place at a random time is our definition of fun. Our other definition of fun is deep talks on life plans and paths, earth-sign style, drawing parallels between our experiences despite them being more distant from each other each year. This we do in the hot tub.
263.
Like all best lovers, the ones that come with drama over the ones that come with kindness, this city has me in a toxic dynamic of a chokehold. At times ecstatic, at times just a big confrontation. I came here in winter to see this side of herself again, the one I’d been neglecting. I’ve been a terrible lover to Montreal by only showing up when she is ripe for picnics in parks. So I offered my vulnerability in exchange for hers and she didn’t need to be asked twice to drag me across the mud (the slush?).
I slept over at E’s last night and am now writing this at his dining table, the apartment empty while everyone is at work, and I’m drinking his coffee. It’s reminiscent of our sleepovers but it’s also not. I was invited over under implicit suggestion that I might need the company, and I implicitly agreed. It’s not like our sleepover days mainly because we are both adults with guest rooms instead of studio apartments now, and adult sleepovers mean that the actual sleeping happens alone, with the necessary privacy to conduct late-night spiraling rituals or snoring. Moreover, waking up in a foreign bed in Montreal used to be synonymous with a night of vice, more often than not with a slightly older artist who was into my baby features and my broke girl allure, himself cosplaying being too broke to afford condoms and myself cosplaying being baby enough to naively agree. Though I would never want to go back to that, there’s dark humor in me waking up not at home now and using someone else’s WiFi to log onto my telemedicine appointment with a doctor who’s concerned that my pap test results are still not good and who probably wants to tell me in advance about all the cervix scraping I’m about to have to go through. But I insist, this appointment sounds more thrilling to me than having to go back to the years of sleeping with DJs. I’ve mentioned my fucked up appreciation of dentist appointments, and I think it comes from the same place of myself which, unlike most of the population, enjoys the constant transition into adulthood more than any other transition before. At least now I can be all cynical about it online.
264.
If I bothered to take the time to psychoanalyze the reasons for this blog, I’d probably start dipping my toes by saying it’s a good, daily writing exercise. If pressed to go deeper, I’d venture to admit that, although my infamous terrible memory gets good laughs out of people at parties when I tell the story of how I thought I’d taken my gingko supplement (for memory) and then I didn’t, it’s a dreadful state of existence to barely remember anyone or anything, unable to ever connect with my past self who is really just a stranger to me. If the person in front of me started displaying signs of boredom at this explanation, I’d pull the final rabbit from the hat (the uglier one, for emergencies) and say that there’s few things I hate more than being interrupted when I talk, especially when I tell a story, and that although I am spoiled in the “friends etc” department, good listeners Do Not abound. If you cut me off in the middle of my gingko sketch to ask something like “but did you take the supplement or not?” I’m adding you to the secret list of People Who Have Insulted Me. The answer, then, is that this blog is an opportunity for one-sided conversation, which pleases me greatly.
In other news: I’ve rested and pondered and came to the conclusion that an admission is required on my part re: doing badly. Fake it until you make it is not always the solution, sometimes even the opposite, and forcing yourself into a good cry does more good than forcing yourself into a pair of pants. The cyclical (read: chronic) nature of my depressive episodes is something I should know better than to claim to be able to girlboss out of. Though I already feel better I thought I’d take stock of the phrases of encouragement that have helped: “someone is losing sleep lying awake thinking about how much they hate you” (oddly comforting and puts me in a snuggle up mood); “nobody cares about your problems” (classic, a bit aged and unoriginal, but liberating), and “at least the pain is mine to claim”. That last one is mine and I hereby authorize direct quoting, as soon as I figure out why the idea of possession of my ailment makes said ailment feel better. I’m a capitalist of mental health.
I spent the last afternoon learning AI image generation in bed before it was time to head to the cinema to watch Conann which was great. Unnecessary amounts of gore and very disgusting. I felt buzzed on my way home exactly as if I was drunk, taking pictures of the metro in the middle of the night and writing poems in my notes app which I refuse to look back at, all the while listening to the film’s soundtrack on my way home and saving the songs to play in the background as inspiration for my next AI session. Perhaps said buzz is what led me to a sex dream with a fling from half a decade ago and which my friends all hate when I bring it up. Nobody wants to know about that, but this is MY one-sided conversation.
265.
S texts me “how are you doing? what are you up to?” in an ambiguous, context-lacking manner that has me asking back if he means right now or in general, but that either way the answer is “fighting for my life” because I think I’m oh so funny. The impeccable life hygiene I’ve kept up since being here is taking a toll, as is the cruel workload I impose on myself which I justify with “but I have impeccable life hygiene, I can take it”. Turns out it’s a scam, like just about anything in life, as A and E and I established the other week. E told us about her sister working for a cheese company and being trained by said company to recognize their cheeses by taste and blindfolded so as to be a cheating jury member at the national cheese competitions. I’m paraphrasing, details outside of the pervasiveness of it evade me. A told us about L who is “doing the Oscar run” for a short film he produced, run which implies going around the United States shaking people’s hands so they remember you and like you enough to vote for your film. It’s all fake always, and we foolishly believe recognition is still awarded on merit. Anyone is hypocritical for condemning it though, as I and I suspect many others base our entire lives on deception, or at least the most fun parts.
266.
Like a lot of the cinema-going population at the moment, I’m blasting PIMP (Instrumental Version) by Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band in my headphones, and I’m pretty sure I hadn’t set my default play settings on Spotify to repeat songs on loop, but with the great ease I always conjure up when I don’t understand something, I think to myself I suppose it makes sense.
It’s 6 AM, I’m on my 4th looped repetition of the song while I text the Tinder date I had for tonight that I’m no longer feeling it after he specified that he 1) lived with his girlfriend who 2) would only be gone from 7 to 10 PM specifically. I read our texts in my mind like we are trying to speak over the loud music, à la Zoe and Sandra, while I remain polite but inflexible and he remains polite but negotiative. There’s nothing quite like text dialogues between polyamorous people organizing sex. The overt politeness of it verges on professional email tone, and “I understand” is never farther than three texts away at all times. We virtually shake hands like we are business competitors and I just retracted from the deal. He’s not allowed to admit it, but he hates me right now. At the polyamorous awards, I would win “most lazy”.
S took me out last night which is always a highlight of whatever I might be going through at the time. She takes me for turkish food and then to a shisha bar where we drink çay. An implicit thing we have going on is that S leads and I let her dazzling company revive my ever-decaying spirit during whatever it is we end up doing although it almost always includes a stop at a place where she’s recognized as a regular and owners go up to her to say hi and chat, wide smiles at the sight of her. Still I should definitely take the lead on our dates more. She’s a catch and is worth the effort. I cannot win most lazy awards in all aspects of life.
267.
I spill beet juice all over the counter, then over the sink, then wipe it off and put the beet package back on the counter, thus re-spilling beet juice over it. This is what I get for opening plastic wrappings by the stabbing method; satisfying, but you always rip the plastic more than you’d like to, and spill beet juice all over. I first try a plastic bag, a hole in which I manage to perfectly align with the beet plastic wrapper hole. I spill beet juice all over the fridge. Once the fridge is clean, I finally concede to borrowing my temporary roommate’s tupperware to contain the beets, but I spill some more beet juice on the counter in the process. I don’t even like beets at all, but I’m trying to turn this day around by getting out of bed and doing everything right, from yoga to journaling to this beet smoothie which ends up hurting my stomach, all despite the deep ancestral call within me to go back to bed and which, in retrospect, I should have listened to.
By noon I’ve achieved a decent amount of work as well as laundry which, by all means, should indicate remission from the morning depression, even if just theatrically. My boots and I face the cold, the sludge, the puddles and the salt and take a heaping 1 hour 30 to reach the library because my metro line is closed. No matter; this day will be saved even if I die in the process. Hold that thought. Now I’ve been at the library for 34 minutes and the alarm is going off. The speaker announcements are telling us to stay calm but the incessant blasting of the alarm is enough for most people to (calmly!) pack their belongings and leave, in a polite way, one that seems to say “sorry I don’t have time to die today, y’all have fun though”. I stay, because hopefully I will at least get to experience something cool today, namely dying in the flames of a public library. But they’re evacuating now, and I’m forced to watch from the outside what happens inside, which is not much at all. The firemen seem very relaxed and perhaps they are relaxed enough that I could go up to them and ask if they have any fireman clasps I could use for my DIY project; I’ve gone to all the shops in Montreal that could sell them and nobody has any.
The library security finally tells us (the few of us still waiting outside) to leave, that they will stay closed until tomorrow. Fuckers. I have got 1 hour 30 to kill (and from my recent experience of getting here I know exactly how long that length of time feels) before the movie I have a ticket for and which I don’t care about anymore. I meditate on whether I have it in me to conjure up the strength to be someone I am not yet, namely someone who can go sit at a bar alone whilst waiting for her movie. I don’t, I cry on the metro home about it, but feel gratitude still that I have been assigned a very bad paper to edit which will keep my brain numb and busy until sleep.
I still have 4 beets to go through.
268.
My sister once advised, while I was recovering from heartbreak, to apply one of those “bald” filters on a photo of the person. I am known, you see, for a pathological penchant for dark curls. Something Oedipal about it or, as I argue, objective good taste. The thing with dark curls is that they can so easily conceal anything. A disgraceful face, whatever that means, as much as a terrible personality. Dark curls are the best lawyer; they will justify one’s every action and paint it in the best possible light. The more abundant (my friends say: shaggier) the better, and I swoon over a person who looks more like a hat of themself than a person, my relationship more with their cranial angles than with the rest of their body. I’ve undoubtedly also swooned over bald or bald-adjacent individuals, which if I understand correctly is what the youth would call a “green light”, as I am confident in my attraction to something that does not hide behind illusion work. To disrobe someone of their hat like that feels, at the very least, intrusive. I have yet to do it.
269.
I downloaded Tinder again. A cry of boredom after I’d resigned to the day having been fucked and unfixable, which in itself is a rare expression of self love. I’d dutifully gone through the motions of the day, all entailing ending up at my adored Montreal library to work, only to find out, once there, that it is closed on Mondays. To simply reach for an alternative, for example, go work in one of the thousands of cafés that this city offers to posers like me, would have been the reasonable solution, and the one I would usually force myself into. This time, I rode the metro all the way back home, beyond content at having recognized, for once, that I am simply not the kind of person who can wander into any place related to food and/or drink spontaneously. I spent the afternoon working in bed, in the glory of the fucked-up-ness of the day. But inevitably evening came and so did boredom, hence Tinder. In ways I cannot explain, my only conversation of the evening was with Matias, with whom somehow the conversation immediately veered into the beauty of the brussel sprout field he posed next to in one of the photos, to which the response “but you are more beautiful” was the last nail in the coffin of something that was never born in the first place. I still got a screenshot of the brussel sprouts because they were, in fact, quite beautiful.
A (not the A from last time, a different A) texts me while I’m cooking a catastrophic meal about the last guy who ghosted him and how it hurt his feelings. I do what I do best, à savoir hypocritical speeches to the tune of “men ain’t shit”. If I’m feeling daring, I’ll do the house special consisting of asking for a photo and pulling Oscar-worthy disgusted faces (sometimes even pretending to gag for extra comedic effect) as if I usually touch men with faces I actually like looking at.
Perhaps (no, actually without any doubt) it is getting older that gives me less energy to pursue sex and instead displaces said energy into obsession for shiny objects or time home alone. At the moment, it is silver fireman coat clasps I am wooing, rather than brussel sprout guys.
270.
Seeing A often manages to set everything right in the creative cogs of my brain. We tell each other we’ll make respective (mental or not) lists of what we need to talk about, to catch up where we left off. Our red beers hit us hard by the time we start talking about colors, which is never too long into the conversation, and we let them. We talk about blue, mostly. But we never forget the ever-present, more flirtatious red. We talk so much I wonder when we find time to breathe, and we let ourselves become dehydrated to high levels of discomfort, until we are at his place and we down three full glasses of water like little children, and open up a new beer with C joining us this time.
I remember why I come to Montreal as I feel my reserves of courage and faith, so often and so rapidly depleting, fill back up. As always I briefly wonder at first if it is sexual or creative appetite, and the only semi-effective way I’ve found to make the distinction is by asking myself if it seems less appealing to sit down and write or to download Tinder again. So far, I’m only getting writing done.
271.
My goal is to try to recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of daily living in Perfect Days. It’s upsetting that I have a word file sitting on my computer containing a speech on why old directors who think cinema is doomed/dying are stupid and it’s upsetting that the main example I put forward in said speech is Wim Wenders. He did just make what will most likely be one of my new favorite films, though I argue it’s not a great feat insofar as it is basically a remake of my already favorite film, Paterson. It’s like high-quality fan fiction written for teenagers whose favorite franchise and raison de vivre ended.
I try to find a way to download it or even buy it but it seems I will have to wait until it is no longer showing in cinemas, trying to conjure up its images in my mind until then. There is a scene in a bar, where one of the clients’ wife just left him, but he claims that finding his bachelor life again is actually the dream (I’m paraphrasing because I have no means to rewatch said scene as of now). He claims that is all any man wants, over a shot of actor Kōji Yakusho whose character very much has that but seems dubious.
The bachelor life is, therefore, the aim. I sighted a small bar that looks like it contains a jukebox at the end of my street. When I start going there to have a beer with my retired buddies I know I’ll have won.
272.
It seems impossible that the next time I wash my hair will be on the other side of the world already. It seems impossible to fathom that I will be leaving my safe and comfortable haven of an apartment to other hands for a month and a half. Condensation had accumulated behind the curtain and when I am not here to do the rounds who will get rid of the water puddles before they cause damage (I’m a Virgo moon AND rising). The routine has been so well-oiled lately, so efficient (I’m a Capricorn sun), that it feels criminal to uproot and leave. Perhaps this is why I grow more and more irritable as the day approaches. It is a rarity to feel the lightness and ease I have been feeling, and I’m angry in a manner similar but lessened to Steven Avery when he was wrongfully thrown in jail for the second time.
I’ve started packing which doesn’t help. The discomfort of having to be very selective about what items (of clothing and other) I bring, and therefore of having to decide and know in advance which version of myself I will be until March, is similar to the discomfort I feel at the idea of stable, 9 to 5 jobs. Somehow knowing what the future holds is not a concept I’ve ever been thrilled about.
273.
It’s been a few evenings in a row of crashing into bed soon after guests leave, dismissing the rest of the dishes and the tidying of the living room as our future selves’ responsibility. It feels wrong, of course, also because social evenings, though in the comfort of my own house, inevitably result in me not reading or watching any films before sleep, and in the eyes of la société culturelle this stagnation of cultural capital is distasteful. Still I must admit that, despite the fact that beginning the day by dealing with last night’s mess is terrible as a productivity kick-starter, I find it more comforting to emerge to visions of P’s tobacco crumbs spilling into the leftover sauce of the pasta dish (and other jovial post-prandial evidence) than to an immaculate kitchen which, no matter what time it is, seems to be judging me for how late I am getting to it to make coffee.
It seems impossible that two of the most important things in life, namely (space for) creative flow and fulfilling social interactions, can work against each other so greatly. Cue the image of the artist who only ever wakes up hungover and covered in cigarette ash to fuck whoever is in their bed at the time and then painfully write or paint until the sun starts going down and the alcohol can be brought back out. Maybe they’ve got it more figured out than us.
274.
The patterns that have been showing up around my travels away from home have great potential to be brain massagers if uncovered, like when a puzzle piece fits exactly right on the first spot you try it on. For some reason within the same year I happen to always be gone to work on a film shoot either right after, or right before, a big trip to Canada. I’ve fallen into the habit of giving myself 24 h between each and feel like I’ll be good. And I often am, but MUST I be such a yes-man? This conception of what is enough time between trips is heavily influenced by Kimya Dawson’s lyric “now I’m home for less than 24 hours / that’s hardly time to take a shower / Hug my family and take your picture off the wall / Check my email, write a song and make a few phone calls” from the song Tire Swing which I must have been listening to for at least 4% of the whole time I was a teenager.
In this last case, I gave myself my habitual 24 hours between coming back from the UK and leaving again to work for three days. Waiting for me when I returned from that, was almost exactly a week before I leave again, for a month and a half this time. Kimya Dawson never wrote lyrics about having a week between trips and which time management strategies could best apply to that format, but I’ll do my best.
As of recently this has all earned me a new identity in the eyes of loved ones of the girl who is never home (I’m shamelessly euphemizing their actual words which are more along the lines of chaos wastrel).
275.
My weekly meetings with J always inevitably start with catching up, excitement at hearing each other’s voices, meaningful and stereotypically female how are yous. This week the balance is off, as her reporting that not one, but two loved ones just passed away over this decidedly grim holiday season makes my grievances about London being a shit city seem futile. Still, with her social elegant-ness J humors this and suggests that talking about other things/distractions is good. She is surprised when I tell her I kept thinking of her and of how she plans to move there, how can you even consider it style. Then I remember the drastic difference in our experiences of London, a city so enormous it is decidedly French of me to generalize it all to “it stinks, it sucks”. Her, a stable place to stay at her boyfriend’s in a quaint neighborhood they never really need to leave, and me, sleeping on couch corners, spending my first-born child’s college savings on public transport, and 37% of all days on the tube. Not to mention friendship drama which, of course, is still very French of me to blame on the city. But if we can attribute feeling romantic to the city of Paris, why can’t we attribute feeling homicidal to being in London?
276.
When I die and get to see my life flash before my eyes, I anticipate with excitement that it will be the sort of film that’s full of plotholes and whose budget seems to have been used a little too liberally. I would pay money for someone to extract my memories (à la Black Mirror) and struggle to edit me a coherent sequence of life events with exclusively all the situations I’ve been in where I’ve suddenly taken a step back and thought, “where the fuck am I?”. One of those moments was yesterday, as I stood, glass of white wine in hand, in the middle of a classic wealthy British house’s living room full of children and young parents eating their Christmas food and opening presents, none of whom I’d known a week prior. Soon after I was (loudly) participating in the yearly tradition of everyone guessing how many leaves there are on the pineapple as if I’d done it all my life, when truthfully I know that as I type this nobody who was in that house can remember my name let alone how to spell it (I got “Nilla” on my box of chocolates, a new addition to the collection). I made friends with the cardiologist who loves France and played with the two-year-old and her new dolls.
A few people asked me, in the mundane conversations of getting to (superficially) know each other, if this was my first time in the UK. Though I only ate my very first mince pie yesterday, I explained that I’d been to the UK many times and resorted to simplifying it greatly by just saying that my ex, whose name is the same as your dog’s, was British. That was met with comfortable assent at it being enough of an explanation, when it wasn’t followed by a polite attempt at digging deeper “from where in the UK?”, an attempt promptly and neatly killed by my lazy “around London, ish”. Truth is, I’ve forgotten the name of the place where his family lives and though it is of no importance it’s been bugging me since last night. What else might I have forgotten?
277.
I’ve always hated the saying you live and you learn though its nonchalance and positivity transpire into most things I often tell my friends (c’est la vie, nothing matters, so what), but today I hate it more. There’s something about being almost 26 and an indignation I’m told fades at 30 about discovering we don’t, in fact, already know it all. Fair enough, but by virtue of being a third culture child (at the very least) who also studied abroad and who also went to high school in Europe with many rich Brits pre-pandemic in the golden age of 10 euros EasyJet flights and Ouigo trains across the country, I have been on and booked many a flights. I genuinely believe my love for airports didn’t even play too big a role in this, but it definitely helped never deter me from booking, or getting on, a flight. But two nights ago, in the face of Covid who I’m getting to know as we speak for the first time only now, which in itself is an indignation related to breaking lucky streaks, K and I booked a later flight for me to join them in the UK for what is (was? daren’t use the past tense yet) supposed to be our first Christmas with “their family” (their cousin, but we take what we can get). I should say here, though to be clear I don’t want to, that it’s not the first time K and I book flights together only to realize we’ve majorly fucked up soon after. Like when we assumed they’d get into Canada with one of those $7 ETAs that Europeans or at least the French are entitled to. I lived and learned and unlearned very much thank you but it took 25 years of life to come into contact with the concept of not all passports being worth the same. It’s incredible the layers of bubble privileged people are in. We pop one layer and feel the god complex vein pop on our foreheads, blissfully and pathetically unaware of the rest.
But so you’d think such a mistake would solidify our common so-to-speak alertness when booking flights (you live and you learn!), and even though I had an inkling before it was not until K was already in the UK (with an extra empty seat beside them on the flight) and a call with my mother (who always preached live and learn as an education model and that day was not going to be the fucking exception) that I looked it up and verified that, indeed, I’d just lost my return flight by not getting on the first one.
I think there’s a specific brand of airport- or flying-related dignity that really aches in times like these. When you consider yourself, for some reason, a flying expert by virtue of, essentially, knowing more or less what goes on the tray at security.
278.
Finishing Dogs of Summer has me entertaining conversations with K about which age we’d most hate to relive. “All of them” said K accurately but really I was just looking for an opening to talk about my own puberty years and how I would rather eat glass than go through that again. There is simply not other word than cruel that can be used to describe what those years do to you, but because we are sharp individuals capable of nuance and critique, we didn’t stop there, and of course the whole conversation took place while I paced the apartment getting ready to leave the house and K followed me around, because that’s when the best conversations are had. I proposed that you will continue to hate yourself and feel ugly for as long as you fail to understand the agency you have (and the responsibility) over how you look, present, and identify. That some girls were lucky enough to understand that not too late, or had an environment that encouraged it, and they managed to survive those years with some grace. K agrees, especially the part about how this presentation of self does not need to be feminine, but also ventured that exposure to hyper-feminine beauty standards too early on could be damaging.
I’m also thinking about this trope of having a story told from the POV of a character whose name we never find out. A la Fleabag, for example. Thinking you can disappear and won’t mind, but like I told K about growing up, you think you can stay in the cocoon of only being spectator but you are and always will be continuously perceived, so might as well get a haircut you like.
279.
Conversations keep happening. I’ve become increasingly aware of my wealth in terms of friendship. Most certainly there have been times in my life where I’ve been more physically surrounded, verging on never being alone, whereas now you look at my life and mostly it is being alone in my apartment, typing away on this very keyboard. There are few things I love more than being alone in an apartment and bonus points if it is mine, so no complaints, but when 6 pm is when I hear my voice for the first time that day it never fails to come with an extra, generous dose of feeling completely zoned out. Like today, when I had to walk across the train station and had my headphones in quiet mode and completely turned my brain off while swerving around the suitcase people. If there was a singular person whose hand I could shake for creating that passage in Lyon, I would. It really feels like those mind-numbing phone games that ADHD people play when having to listen to someone tell a story, like squishy brain massage. But I digress. I don’t think I’ve ever been so well surrounded, with so many friends and units and all being high-quality relationships. I replay that time on holiday when I was suddenly left alone with my dad at the ice cream shop and over the noises of kids screaming and plunging into the pool next to us he decided to impart one of famous life lessons (there’s about three): that nothing, really nothing in life matters more than friends. I wish I could properly enjoy that sweet memory with my father because I don’t have very many of them, but unfortunately remembering that moment always triggers remembering when he had to pick me up the next morning of a hook-up and he essentially gave my hungover teenage self a walk-of-shame-worth talk about how sleeping with your friends’ boyfriends is not cool. He stood by his morals, bros before hoes, and he wasn’t wrong. I wonder if something happened in his life and he saw himself in his depraved daughter that morning. I should have said something back but I think I was too nauseous to speak.
280.
Some days are meant for anger but before I can identify them as such I spend a good portion wondering if I am just horny. There was a group of three short old ladies on the tram yapping to each other and then the same thing that always happens happened, i.e., the tram started to their apparent surprise and one of them started falling backwards when the boy in front of me put his (firm) hand out to (softly) catch her. If that wasn’t enough when they called him “jeune homme” and apologized for the commotion he said something like “not at all, not at all” very clearly and it felt to me like when you roll your sleeves up to eat and you are so, so hungry. My eyes were immediately on him, sharp as a hawk’s, but it wasn’t long before I came to the conclusion that there was nothing there for me (same haircut as my dad, always breaks the deal). The sexual tension was still there but I wondered vaguely how much of it was wanting to be him rather than in him. These are thoughts I always try to brush off promptly.
Still it gave a decided heaviness to my step as I made my way to my yearly dentist’s appointment, and with it my yearly confession to self that I actually like going to the dentist’s. It helps that my dentist is now this very attractive man, but that’s not it. I also liked it with the last one, who was not attractive and always made everything so painful, or the one before, who seemed to have gotten his vocation wrong as he always tried to therapize me whilst examining my gums (they can show how stressed a person is, apparently). I’d been thinking about this appointment for a while and actually booked it maybe over a month prior. I had to stop myself from coming earlier because, quoting the dentist last time I saw him, “no need to come here so often”. I wonder each year what kind of psychopath or monster it makes me to enjoy the dentist’s. This time he praised the impeccable state of my mouth but I think he was mostly excited that he’d be able to get rid of me quickly and catch a break before the next patient, and he practically kicked me out of there before I could mention the slut I am for floss. I noticed that, in this case, it was not hygiene that brought me there but a horniness for a very specific type of praise, one that is both guaranteed and gore-intimate, as if someone got a peek into my organs and said Wow Now That Is Some Pancreas, but they mostly said that because they rarely got to see a live pancreas.
I thought again of C and of chronic pain and indignantly thought to myself that he was the one giving me chronic pain at the moment, and the frustration of yet another day with an empty mailbox I carried with me all the way to the city’s central post office, not about the letter he probably never wrote me but about the package everyone seems to have lost, and I cried a little when I had to explain for the eleventh time why I wasn’t going to get my package where the notice said. The French are decidedly kinder than we paint them out to be, even in public services like the post, and soon three different people were gathered around me trying to think of a solution, and they offered to track whoever was in charge of deliveries on my street and call me if they found anything. Still, the damage was done and on my way home I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time since October (with a thought for my dentist who had asked me earlier that morning if I smoked and I boasted “used to” shamelessly). I would have laughed at myself for being so dramatic when I came home and threw my stuff on the floor and opened a beer along with the pack and smoked out the kitchen window, if I wasn’t so busy doing the drama.
281.
I wonder about the resemblance between the experience of grief for dead ones and the experience of grief for live ones but who broke your heart and disappeared. I would imagine both involve getting daily doses of seemingly random memories pop up, over the blanket of static, like a TV that can never be turned off. When I say I don’t really think of C as much anymore what I really mean is I no longer pay much attention to the static, except for those moments when forgotten instants come back to me and I replay them with delight (or resignation?), like when you wear a t-shirt you thought you’d lost. Today what strikes is us on his balcony, eating biscuits. He asks me all of a sudden if I have any chronic pain, and from information I’d gathered (I did not know him very well by then) and the intonation of his voice, one that betrays a venture into something perhaps we might share, I understand that he very much does. In the reconstruction of the memory I add some biscuit crumbs pathetically falling from my mouth onto my shirt as I reply, almost embarrassed, “No, sorry” (sorry?).
The closest thing to chronic pain in my life at the moment is my chronic grievances with the postal service. I don’t know what I hate them most for, whether it’s losing two packages in one month (one of which of great value, both monetary and symbolic), or not delivering letters I yearn for. The latter is probably not their fault, and I’ve received 1 of the 2 letters I wanted, but now I grant myself permission to blame it on them that I probably will never get closure and that my heart is broken still, and that’s not something they can refund me for (admittedly they will most likely not ever refund me for anything anyway).
My absence of chronic pain is in fact so great compared to the overbearing presence of the psychic one I almost convince myself to get that lip piercing just to feel something but then I remember it means something touching the inside of my mouth at all times and I retract. I feel deep down that it’s a matter of time anyway, and every time I think about it again the bar for things I could interpret as signs from the Universe to get it becomes lower. People do all sorts of things to their body to process hurt.
But by the time I get to J’s house I remove the fake one to be more comfortable as I prepare to talk my head off about how I feel sober from romantic and/or sexual obsession and how it’s great but also harrowing and I ask her if she would “flip the switch” and never feel attraction ever again and she says without hesitating, no. She talks later about how she finds a “moralful” person very attractive and all I can do is smile because I can neither relate nor even think of myself as someone with particularly strong morals. Only an addiction to the rush I argue is distracting from art, but she argues it’s necessary for art. So is pain, she says, and she wouldn’t take anything back from her past, not even the greatest heartbreaks.
282.
It’s the time of the year of friends doing circle therapy, and people saying “I think I’m depressed” to a room full of, in fact, depressed people. By being there for them (walks, dinners, long texts) I become there for myself too, and very tearfully and dramatically I will give speeches on community and we really forget how important it is. I’m going to be a very warm, but very annoying to hang out with old lady.
I argue, whilst watching “Velvet Buzzsaw” four years too late, that there’s a distinctive before and after 2020 in media, especially in films and TV. A taste of ingenuity and carefree spirit in the weed leaf print socks that would be deemed too unserious today. If anything I think Dan Gilroy played his cards very right (that or he was very lucky) because 2019 was no doubt the last year you could have made a film about murderous modern artworks haunted by the spirit of a blood painter, with Jake Gyllenhaal as a flamboyant bisexual art critic. The buzzsaw tattoo turning into an actual buzzsaw to kill the person wearing it is 10/10 unserious business. A luxury we couldn’t afford today, and when I say today I also mean specifically today, a day with a call for a global strike demanding a ceasefire.
We had dinner with family friends of K and one of them, P, mentioned how the succession from 2016 Trump to Brexit to the pandemic to Ukraine war to Palestinian genocide had been the actual darkest, most hopeless years of his life. I felt an unusual self-righteous indignation rise up in me, that he was saying this looking at me in the eyes and not even acknowledging that those very years were K and I’s transition to adulthood years, that “at least” he was sixty and he didn’t have to wonder every morning about the length of the future ahead. Embarrassed by those thoughts, I just nodded and didn’t say anything, but later in the evening understood that it was my own panic and distress rather than anything against P.
In these serious and dark years I find it almost impossible to think about art, let alone about making and sharing it. And yet, it’s probably when humanity needs it most and when the risks of getting cyberbullied are probably significantly lower. I picture what we once referred to as “trolls” on a daily basis wiping a single tear off their cheek with a fabric napkin whilst watching an encouraging tarot card reading YouTube video. They are scared too.
At my own scale I try to make it as real and good as I can, away from the Internet and from the world, and be grateful for my friend sitting on my couch and for the sound of my neighbors’ coffee machine at 7 every morning. The risk of staying at one’s own scale is getting caught up in one’s own tragedies, like waiting for a letter that will seemingly never come.
At 25 I (and others like me, I’m sure) already embody the senior spirit of talking incessantly of the past, or how hard it was but also of how good we had it before. Our lifespan is so uncertain, it’s not totally unfair. For all we know, we are returning to medieval levels of definitely being dead by 30. So I will gently chuckle to myself as much as I want whilst thinking about the scene where Gyllenhaal’s character visits Gita who makes a joke about the tissue she found in the paintings, and there’s a blank and then he goes “paper?” and she gives her best revelation face and tilts her head forward a bit as she says, with big eyes: “human tissue”.
283.
I wake up to the sound of a Duolingo ‘ping’ as someone seemingly does their daily lesson, at full blast and without headphones, while walking past my window and no doubt on their way to work. Welcome myself back to my old routine, waking up to the sounds of people going to work while I lay in bed still, instantly feeling terrible about who I am in this world, i.e., not someone who goes to work every morning anymore, but also consciously aware that I should not fall back into my recurrent bad and compulsive habits of waking up at 4 am every morning or not eating any food until I’ve accomplished something today in the name of productivity but really it is just to excuse myself for existing.
I can’t deny I liked the sweet taste of the Godin life, where nothing exists but your job so much that you show up an hour earlier, and you use that extra hour just to make double triple sure that the projector is working properly. Gone healthy habits, writing, gone thinking. And after work and into the weekend, non-stop socializing and spending that bling just earned. It’s not happiness per se but it kills the existential dread as efficiently as I can kill boners; like it was never actually there. Until it comes back. Now I’m back at my dining room table wishing, like every day since I became an adult, that I had a studio, or a separate office space. I bring with me a new healthy behavior which I anticipate will last 2.5 days: getting dressed.
Yesterday J said let’s go for a walk and at the exact time we planned to meet I texted I’ll be at the fountain to which she aptly responded How romantic, which it was, which I am. I’d told her not to pull a German on me but we still walked farther away than I ever have, seeing bridges and parts of the river I’d never known. We made our way back when the highway became too loud. We hugged when she said she was in and we sat down on a bench when I informed her of the Björk and Rosalia collab. Strange days are my favorite days.
284.
Few things are as strong as my self-discipline, so it is very regrettable that it is so short-lived each time. Since that morning the humidifier was still on, I entered and remained in a daze, which at first made me wonder about the potential link between writing surges and mental state, like a curse of only being able to fuel creativity with misery. Thankfully, I have had my hefty daily dose of misery, so it is not that. Now I think of it more as a required silence. As silent and as still as possible, so whatever emotion I am holding in doesn’t burst out. The cold gradually stiffens my limbs up, and my computer screen’s blue light dries the moisture in my mouth.
November is finally over, and I longingly look out the window like all hardships are over, all struggles are long forgotten. Outside said window, it’s never looked more grim. Three-quarters of the vertical view are a completely gray sky, very smooth, no clouds, completely hermetic. The bottom quarter is the same gray wall separating my apartment building from the cemetery, and the now completely naked fig tree, on the branches of which ice-cold-looking rain droplets bounce. Are you still romanticizing it? There’s a couple pieces of soaked black underwear that must have fallen off the upstairs neighbors’ window dangling on said branches.
285.
When I woke up the humidifier was still on, even though it usually only lasts until around 3 AM, and everything felt different. Being in my body felt different, as if during the night my bones had all been taken out for a thorough dusting of my inner linings, and then placed back. A different flavor of anxiety, back pain, awakening, breathing pace, arousal. Typing this at my desk I realized I could smell my own perfume, which is unusual enough but even more so considering I last applied some yesterday. All these elements put together and the conclusion I reach is not that I should leave a review recommending the perfume for its long-lasting qualities, nor that leaving the humidifier on at night helped me feel less crusty, but rather that I’m in some kind of Freaky-Friday-situation somehow related to an idea of time stopping. It’s still bright and white outside but I feel more Swedish about it today (glee!).
I’ve come to notice I describe a lot of things as being “obscene” these days, and it’s unoriginal and I should stop. This is the mental note for that.
286.
The wind in the night tore all the leaves off the fig tree outside my window. Now my apartment is blinded in the sky’s untapered white light, the cold light of freezers and ghosts, the pale sun of Sweden and other windy and snobbish places like that.
I keep receiving promises of great news: Montreal sublets who get back to me, job offers, film shoot opportunities with incredible people, and these days it’s almost become ritual to lay and rot in bed in the morning until my numb scrolling is interrupted by this sort of notification, 2 minutes after which I am at my computer typing away furiously. It’s a great morning routine, but then I am ghosted or things change and usually by 11 AM the liter of coffee I’ve downed on an empty stomach to fuel Seize the Day (and the opportunity) frenzy starts to just fuel deep anxiety and a regret for having gotten out of bed at all.
Add to that a fight (grown-ups call them hard conversations) with K and nothing about today makes me want to go outside, not even the fact that I haven’t in three days. But then night falls and things feel less aggressive (maybe the anxiety medication), and I promised C so I put together an outfit that makes me feel pathetic and head to the festival where we watch 5 short films in short succession and I wonder who ever thought this was a good idea. They are all so wildly different, and I go from being shaken to tears by one but before I can recover I am watching the literal worst film I have ever seen, in every single aspect. C and I clutch our seats, and we almost wonder if we’d rather be victims of incest instead of having to watch this “film” about incest. I remember the person who opened the screening by saying “we received 2400 films and could only select 60!” and I officially lose all faith in this, the whole thing. Eerily, C and I walk out and it’s like he is waiting for us, the actor who played the father, standing with his legs wider than his hips and making eye contact with everyone, most likely expecting for people to go up to him and want to take a photo? Or something. The fucker even stands right next to the exit. We flee.
Note to self: stay in bed the day the fig tree loses its leaves.
287.
My father called me, which in itself is a rarity but even more so when it happens twice in one week. The first one wasn’t to bring any tragic news, so when I saw his name light up on the screen I thought ah yes, now mum must have crashed her car and died! But he, in fact, called to scold me about the length of my “want to read” GoodReads list (914 books, I’m a monster or a poser, depends who you ask) which I submitted to the family group chat when asked what I wanted for Christmas. I laughed and we agreed I’d send him a short selection (5 to 10). It’s probably the strangest phone call I’ve ever had with him, one not pressed by any urgent matters or any over-performative father-gives-daughter-a-lecture exchange, just one rather banal as well as intimate, on the subject of my reading list. I pictured him reading through the list and I think it’s the closest we’d ever been, him peering into my brain, me unaware and changing the sheets.
288.
K accidentally left with both our keys and I insist they don’t come back to return mine, secretly delighted at the idea of being locked away like a cat whose only purpose is to give passable and temporary affection to whoever comes home, whenever they do. I get to do my favorite thing ever which is not talking, and who’s to say if it’s the antisocial daze or if the woman in the breathing techniques video I click on really does have very aggressive, predatorial teeth, and if I’m the only one wondering why she’s talking at length about how these breathing techniques are used in the army, “before folks are going to battle and stuff like that, which can really stress them out”, as if thinking about what it must be like to be about to go to military battle will enhance my relaxing breathing experience.
I change the water in the flowers’ vase like a good housewife, but forget to turn the sink tap to cold and I accidentally boil the flowers.
289.
I forget how paradoxically good I feel when I am hungover. It’s like my body is so exhausted from what I’ve put it through that it doesn’t bother with the existentialism. Brought back to the fundamentals, a body denied its basic needs met stops being such a whiny baby. All it wants is water and for the lights to be turned down.
Over Very Disappointing brunch, R asks if I’m “going to get married then” (maybe he didn’t ask like that, I just like remembering him with an exaggerated British accent), and I tell my reasons why I might, and my reasons why I might not, which are largely due to vanity and laziness, respectively. “An obsession with youth” I try to say mysteriously. Less mysterious is how my back now cracks when I rotate on my chair, which never used to happen before. Getting old could be a growing collection of these new bodily characteristics that, if anything, add a bit of fun. Getting old is gaining an edge to take off, and what is more pleasant than taking the edge off? The greater the tension, the grander its relief (she gets drunk ONCE and thinks she’s figured it out).
After a glorious afternoon at the library surrounded by too-zealous students (what are you doing here on a Sunday?)I somehow make my way home and ponder about what to do with the rest of my day---I challenge my OCD a few days a month like this now, not allowed to follow my rigid system but rather have to listen to myself and do what I feel like which are the entry columns to my personal hell. Thankfully I am interrupted by dominical family calls which are more monthly than dominical but the it being Sunday helps, and then I am interrupted by laundry and finally by finding out that the Season 6 of The Crown came out.
290.
P has purchased an electric bike and I use this to support my point when I tell her she’s changed and grown a lot in recent years, and that she shouldn’t let past so-called failures prevent her from trying again. R jokingly calls me Nilay life coach and I squirm but shrug it off. I tell him a few hours later in the night, with more alcohol in me, that I’m working on coming to terms with just how preachy, intense, romantic and cheesy I in fact am. We laugh remembering how blazé I acted in high school, though it wasn’t an act then, and I fully believed it. I’m just getting used to this new tenant.
The Devendra Banhart concert is the shortest concert I’ve ever attended and after R and I talk about how hard (or easy?) it must be to be a touring artist. We place bets on his age and I lose, so I buy him a pint. When we walk home we tell each other our respective book and film ideas which trickles down into deeper conversation you can only have with really close friends at 2 AM, whispering in a kitchen.
291.
Overcoming anxiety by some detailed mechanism intertwining productivity and a sense of purpose without challenging anything head-on used to feel like liberation, and now, each time feels like an added pebble in my pocket, the weight reminding me that it will always be like this, and that it’s not getting easier.
I do Wim Hof breathing, twice. It is starting to awaken some deep-rooted male ego rage in me, that I consistently fail to hold my breath throughout the entire second period, and that I always get the urge to breathe at the exact same moment. At least it gets me doing the exercises. Text messages pile up and they make me want to scream. I’ve yet to devise a way to stay on top of them, nothing sticks. But in them I glimpse at one from J that says “the way you write makes me want to read more” and the male ego is fueled again like here we go ladies, I’m back in. I hype myself up so much I even book an appointment to get that cervix cancer thing checked out.
I go to a festival opening night and the short films they show leave me unimpressed, but at least it was free, as was the wine and food served at the end. S says she hates the poster they made for the festival and everyone seems indeed to have strong opinions about it, but I adore it. S asks me what I thought of the films, and I can’t think of anything smart to say but she fills the silence for me anyway by saying she “stalked me on Instagram” and I “seem to have an artistic eye”. N shows her my birthday video where I eat an entire cake. A woman walks up to us and starts talking. It’s rare when it happens in that way. She’s an actress and a film critic, but never finds anything interesting to say about films because she likes them all, she says. This makes me tense. Somehow we start talking about how, as an Armenian, she is in fact shocked when there’s still any animosity between Turks and Armenians these days. She says this before knowing I am Turkish yet, when I inform her, her face changes.
I miss my tram stop on my way home and have a breakdown, and I keep worrying about the tears giving me an eczema flare-up.
292.
I do Wim Hof breathing techniques before I’m even out of bed, and get angry that, on the second round, I fail to hold my breath for the full minute, even if his soothing voice says it is okay. “At least the month is going by fast” I tell J last night. She counters that yes, but then it’s December! and January! and FEBRUARY! But those months I will be traveling and somehow that makes it better, like being away from home equals being out of my brain, out of office, out of order, so depression suddenly becomes N/A.
K comes home and tells me to go outside and to stand in the sun, which I do for five minutes, and call my sister. I come back and have received some work to edit, and a message from a Mtl sublet option I’d given up on. I go back to K and tell them my brain is “zoinked”.
We spend the rest of the day alternating between anxiety and caring for the other, until we fall asleep, conked out to melatonin. My laughter has never sounded so nervous or so manic and I wonder how obvious it is.
293.
It is not normal to wake up and for all my limbs to be stiff with tension already. It is not fair, even, I decide. I should get at least some respite when I’m between consciousness and sleep, at least a few minutes where I don’t remember who I am or that I am suffering, maybe let me get up first, make a coffee, run cold water on my face. Then, we may resume the anguish.
Scrolling to the end of my 29 open tabs of ongoing writing drafts to open yet another one, I see I still have Marriage by Ellen Bass open on the poetry foundation, and because I have no sense of self-preservation, I read it again, for the first time in weeks. I remember learning this poem by heart for C. I think the sensible thing would be to close the tab, but of course I don’t. I let myself write badly for 2 hours and fill three pages on why imposter syndrome/being an imposter is actually great, and I feel slightly better. I’m at the total mercy of dark brain fog coming and going like it pays fucking rent, the way I would rather be at the mercy of some domineering woman (see previous entry).
K brought back a pumpkin brioche and said this is one of the best things I’ve ever tried, which is a lot coming from them, but I ate some and it was so exquisite my fog instantly and momentarily lifted.
G and I go crazy about his rideshare from two days ago who claims to be married to Darren Criss. My theory of a mythomaniac man who likes pretending to be someone else on rideshares slowly starts to fade into erotomania. G makes my day by sending a risky message that ends with “cards on the table”.
I would give anything today for my autopilot to turn on and work properly. I want to have a quiet, boring day and that being the end of it; just a quiet, boring day. I turn the heating on, make some tea, put on a sweater and warmer pants, and instantly, like when I ate the slice of brioche, the fog lifts. Starting to get an inkling I have to start by taking care of the body. Does anyone ever feel good on November 15 anyway?
I meet up with J which makes everything feel better. Added to the bizarrely long list of things we have in common, we find that we both love Jim Jarmusch. She flaunts that she went to the Paterson premiere in Paris and I spill some of my wine on myself laughing. I tell her the gist of the film idea I’ve been religiously keeping to myself, perhaps because of the alcohol or perhaps because of the buzz of being out of the house, and for the first time it exists outside of me. I imagine it can’t be that different from giving birth, you’re excited to see what the creature you’ve been cooking up looks like and be reassured that it is, in fact, real, but you also are suddenly a bit sad that it is detached from you. She meets the idea with great enthusiasm despite me explaining it terribly. We talk about making some kind of experimental horror film together. We go to a talk about emerging documentary at the videoclub, but I think we are both more excited about just hanging out with each other. With her and in this Lyon landmark of cinema, I feel my soul return to my body. I also see very many beautiful women throughout the night and feel shy.
294.
I convince myself I can start my morning writing in my head, with my eyes closed, and still in bed. The reading lamp is on anyway, so it’s basically like I’m at the office already. The sentences that my half-asleep mind forms are not half bad, but I have half a judgment then and by now I’ve forgotten them all. I yearn for something other than a blank page in a cold and still dark living room to motivate me out of bed. I’ll even take a mean boss.
Always on the lookout for radical ways to fundamentally change my daily living, I come to the conclusion that the first coffee of the morning should be drunk with an empty stomach, with barely any water beforehand, as close to wake-up time as possible, and as fast as possible. I want my head to fucking explode and my body to yank me into reality like a mean boss would.
I wait until my mind becomes too clouded with thoughts of my own reality to write poetry, to move on to the morning pages. It’s the closest thing to “listening to my body” I probably do all day. I’ve been staring at an almost blank page of Not because, but, struggling to see a sense in having pulled myself out of bed for this. But I also don’t have thoughts other than my struggle to write and my hate of being awake. I’ve found a plane of written existence for those thoughts on this newly created diary. In a way, I will have written a good few words this morning, but it’s just like the difference between “useful minutes” and “garbage roll” in film.
I ponder about the erotic feeling I get when I check my bank account. The full and rational anticipation of a disappointing number, but still letting me hope for a surprise just to be even more disappointed and a little bit stressed after. Disgustingly, I guess, I almost would prefer getting random hundreds here and there, always keeping me on my toes and wondering if it’s the last, rather than a large or comfortable and regular sum making its way on my account. In another reality, I could fall into being a dominatrix’s moneyslave.
R and I, probably a symptom of both suffering from the same lack of work, fantasize together about the clothes we’d buy if we had money right now. I tell him about the giant aggressive silver ring that looks like it’s made for punching on my mind, while for him it is a fleece he saw someone wear in the tube; he’s tracked it down on ebay but it is too expensive.
I edit papers in a zombie state, then finish work early, spend time with K who then leaves me alone to go to a movie. I finish My Year of Rest and Relaxation and decide I like it all the more for all the reasons everyone seems to hate it. I write in my notes app “writers who keep diaries = obscene”.
this is really good.
Itchy organs my goooooodness