2. My dwindling bank account balance, how few ATMs in my area will take Sofi deposits, and how much I want to go to writing nights at Trident Booksellers & Cafe, but that paying the cost of dinner feels irresponsible.

3. LinkedIn puzzle games. Over the course of two days in June, I played the entire backlog of Queens. I’m close to cracking the secrets to Tango, but I’m not quite there yet.

4. Candlepin bowling. The pins are thin and uniform, the balls are 2 lbs., you get three rolls, the downed pins aren’t removed between rolls, and the lane isn’t waxed (so you feel like a powerful Ancient Greek Olympian when you toss the ball). After only four games, I’m fully convinced this is one thing New England has gotten completely correct.

5. Central air-conditioning, and if returning to the South would be worth it simply for the AC.

   

6. The Old Guard franchise, specifically the Netflix sequel movie that came out on July 2nd. They took my favorite premise ever and shat the bed for the sake of Uma Thurman, but if the third and final movie isn’t greenlit, I’m going to lose my shit.

7. Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

   I really went off in a review of this book at 2am the other day. It made me sick to my stomach. Six stars; best book I’ve read so far this year.

8. Fandom behavior, media literacy, and the idea of “beginner fandoms.” In my - god, decade, at this point - of fandom, I’ve seen a lot of conversations, both textual and meta. Some people take characters as formless blobs for them to project whatever the hell they want onto them. Some people take characters and, to put it frankly, think critically about them. The first option is perhaps a more peaceful existence, unfortunately. The second option has enriched my life immeasurably.

9. These driving images for my writing project. I’m fundamentally opposed to making moodboards as a form of procrastinating putting words on paper, and am happy to report that I made these well past the flaking point of my first draft.

   1. Bonus: the fact that when I tried to upload these files as svg types, my computer ate shit so hard that it crashed and auto-restarted.

10. Old love letters from old loves. How sadness isn’t something that needs to be feared, or even always run from, but, instead, examined.

11. Zach Bryan & Maggie Rogers, “Dawns”

12. Where I want to live, what I want my daily life to look like, the state I want my heart to be in, if I’ll ever learn to cook meat, if I’ll ever see my long-distance friends again, and if I’m on the path to getting what I want.

13. And finally, this tumblr post:

The past two years have grown around me like rings around a tree, building off of the shape of the past while obscuring it from view. Reading what I wrote in the spring of 2023 feels like receiving a time-traveling hug. I feel it, here, in my chest.

No matter. Life goes on, and so did - and shall - I.

This spring has been particularly challenging externally due to family matters and a distinct lack of gainful employment, and internally due to a lack of routine, primarily as a result of the aforementioned unemployment. I’ve fished my love of writing and reading out from under the floorboards, but have been sleeping in stages both far too short and far too long. I’ve learned to make myself laugh again and discovered more about my neighborhood in the past two months than I had in the previous six, but I have very few new stories to tell around the coffee table. Mostly I talk about other people’s cats or other people’s children. It’s a character flaw.

Primarily, what I’ve done is write. This time, it’s original fiction. As of the middle of May I’m a bit more than a third of the way through the first draft of the story that’s been rattling around in my brain since last February. I sat down and got to seriously writing at the beginning of March. (35k words! Sing my praises, preteen Sara.)

It doesn’t make for good everyday conversation. “What are you up to these days?” “Oh, I’m Handshake’s bitch, but when I’m not in the depths of resume hell or negotiating with a man over email, I’m writing a book.” “Oh! How is it going?” “Well, I’m very excited; I’m about to kill someone’s mother.”

See what I mean? Anyway, I’m having a delightful time on that front.

Could I give you a plot summary? Even a blurb? Not yet. But I will say that the book is actually far less cynical than I appear to be. It’s a fantasy because of the magical content, but also because of the hope and agency I’m working hard to embed between the lines. The vampires don’t sparkle. Everyone is a little bit queer. It’s a terrible, wonderful little world, not so different from our own.

As I say this, I realize the irony. Everyone these days is ‘writing a book.’ Everyone, more crucially, is unemployed, and has to kill the time somehow. I want to say I’m not like other girls and I’ll actually finish the damn thing - I do believe it myself, for the first time, the words coming out of my fingers feel true - but only time will tell. Maybe one day you’ll read that in supplement to this goofy little Substack and we’ll all get to look back and laugh. God, that’d be the day.

Even if it never sees the light of day, writing this story has helped me through quite a dark season. As the very silly saying goes: saving only yourself is still saving somebody.

It’s finally sunny in Boston. Everything is green in Arkansas. I’m running through the streets and driving fast down the backroads, listening to the thump of the bass in my ears and the beating of the heart behind my ribs, and I’m smiling.

All my love,

S

Song of the week:

“Everyone in this
room got here somehow and everyone in
this room will have to leave.”

- Richard Siken, “Unfinished Duet”

A comment a friend made recently has wedged its way into my brain and stuck. They were talking about a new project – a mechanical, physical thing, something unportable and damageable – and how they may spend the next half-decade on it while they’re here. Here being this city, this place. We’re told to make two-year and ten-year plans at every turn, but I’ve never heard a peer speak of one with such care. This is not a plan born out of necessity or requirement, but of love and passion.

All this also lays aside the fact that they intend to make a clock. With their time, they are making a measure of time. I may simply be a pensive person, but I think it’s pretty damn wonderful.

In the past month I’ve started and stopped many, many things. Square dancing was a joyous routine that lasted for all of three weeks before the calendar notification brought more dread than excitement. Same with yoga – I’ll get back into it at some point lest my back gives out on me entirely, but not this quarter. Any momentum I regained for reading and writing over winter break burnt out when the semester began.

Now that I list them out, the things that I’ve stopped in the last semester aren’t big. I haven’t moved, or dropped any classes, or made any traditional permanent life decisions. But the things that I’ve put down weigh heavily still. Dance and yoga have long been two of my favorite activities in the world; I love it when my body moves, even if it protests in the process. My inner child is defined as a reader, with writing being the natural next step for that person I used to be. In my heart, a twelve-year-old is shaking her finger at me menacingly.

The writing is happening again, if ever so slowly and by sheer force of will. The reading will follow, one day, when I don’t have 100s of pages of research papers to read every week.

It’s only four months until summer returns. I can do anything for four months.

I can do anything for four months – only three to go – but I miss my projects.

If I took anything out of literature class last semester, it’s that life is a series of overlapping projects. We all have our own projects, big and small, ranging from an afternoon craft to the rearing of a child. Some are collaborative and others are solo endeavors. Part of learning to live, at least from where I sit, is learning to embrace our personal projects while accepting those of the ones around us. My projects now tend toward travel plans, storytelling, and degrees. My friend is going to make a clock. Some other friends, well… I may not like the ruckus that’s happening down the hallway, but it’s what gets people through the day – the years – the life – and that makes all the difference.

The going is tough right now. The project I call college is crowding out its companions and wants to be the only star on stage. It’s almost physical. I’ve grown attached to my other projects. I’d kill to fuck off to Philadelphia for a weekend and simply be as I did last semester, but the grip of my duties here is too strong. Every morning I leave a warm bed and remind myself: there are only three more months left in the semester. Three and a half weeks until spring break.

But why the wait? I’m generally a patient person, but I hate the existential waits. I want to rush to the end of this short story I’m living, get everything done, not waste a minute more than I must thinking about a problem set at the expense of my creativity. I am equipped to lay it all aside for three months, but what if I never pick it up again? What if the summer is as busy as the spring? What if I don’t have to wait three months, but fifteen, until graduation sets my evenings free once more? What if I go to grad school, and then don’t pick up my silly little projects for years?

Worse, yet: what if three months is more than I have left?

I have no outstanding reason to worry about running out of time, but alas, I worry. Time’s all I have. My projects get me through the time and are also what the time is all about.

I love college. I love learning, and I love what I believe I’ll be able to do with what I know. I love my friends, and this city. But, God, what a cost. Is the good worth the heartless days of late?

It is. It will be. I’ll have more stories to tell. I need to let them rest so I can enjoy the moment that I’m in. That’s why I’m here, anyway – for the life. Not to look back on memories, but to live them.

There’s unresolvable dissonance to be found from listening to my past and future – often equally fuzzy – as I move forward. The only way I know how to live is to be true to this room, this body, this mind. Countless more two- and ten-year plans are to come, most of which will be left unfulfilled. One or two I’ll follow happily. Nevertheless, I move forward in the hopes that Future Me is looking back on the time I view as now and isn’t holding the way I’m living against me. Past me, I know, is alright.

I’ll keep blowing off the occasional reading to leave campus. I’ll make a more nuanced personal syllabus. Soon, my friends will leave, and I will too. We’ll float down separate streets, but the present will never die. It will follow us forever. The coming plans will be filled not with sheer necessity but with joy, if I have any say in it. And I do.

Now: another 7pm meeting.

Another three months.

All my love,

S

This is notably not the result of a New Year’s Resolution – I do partake in the silly tradition, but a blog has not and will not be on my list. Simple and relatively low-commitment resolutions are more my speed. (This year I dyed my hair blue after years of making excuses and have become intimate with the Duolingo owl and all his little friends.) The timing of this blog’s creation is coincidental, a combination of a seven-hour Chicago layover on two hours of sleep and a large coffee, building on a couple years of made-up reasons not to do this and half-assed attempts that never went anywhere because I was disgusting bad an keeping a routine. Still am, a bit. But I’m getting better. As I said, I’m now the proud holder of a hot and sexy Duolingo streak.

Now is a good time to mention that this will be a sweary blog. Sorry to anyone directly related to me who may have found their way here. It wasn’t you; it was the Godless Northeast corrupting my good Southern stream of consciousness. Consider yourself warned.  

As I was saying, no, this isn’t a result of a New Year’s Resolution, but a separate itch.

It sounds straightforward and obvious, I know. But it isn’t. The most important lesson I’ve taken away from a handful of years of college is that the only way to do something is just that: to do it.

To extrapolate a bit, people, or at least myself and nearly every person I’m close to, are inclined to do things that we feel we are inclined to be good at. We generally take the path of least resistance, even when faced with the impossible. If I was faced with taking either a literature class or a computer science class, I can almost guarantee that I’d take the literature class, because that’s where I feel that my natural abilities lie. I like to read, I love to write, and I adore talking about words with others. Meanwhile, computer science still scares me after hundreds of hours of work in the subject. I’ll pick literature over CS any day I’m not feeling particularly masochistic, but plenty of people would make the exact opposite choice for remarkably similar reasons.

But in the non-hypothetical, real-life situation of my sophomore spring, I took the CS class anyway, and I liked it. It sucked most of the time, and I talked to the wall a lot, but by the end of the semester, I was able to cross basic Python off the list of things I fully don’t understand. I didn’t want to go to my stupid tech school without learning at least a bit of code, and the only way to do that was to take the hard class.

The catch? My cornucopia of literature classes is all hard, too. The classes give more readings than my high-speed monkey brain knows how to pick through, so I spend the semester furiously reading and analyzing, while also continuously reevaluating how the hell I’m going to get all these pages read while still forming a coherent thought that will give me an iota of affirmation from my classmates and professors during the roundtable.

I’ve melted my brain over Wilde and talked everyone’s ear off about him, too, just like I did my wall about the sorting algorithm. At the bottom of the barrel, it’s all the same, in the best possible way. No matter how much joy something brings or how “easy” or “natural” it sometimes feels, nothing is going to happen if nothing happens. That’s why I’m here, putting cursor to doc, typing words. Because my little thoughts aren’t going to form and share themselves.

One more tangent. (I am always one stray thought away from a literary reference, be warned). There’s this quote from the final episode of The Haunting of Hill House (2018) that relates back to what I don’t want my words to become. One of the main characters is an author, who spins the tragedies of others – including him and his siblings – into bestsellers. When he’s at his weakest, a nightmare of his estranged wife confronts him about not remembering things until he’s written them into a story.

“The things you write about are real. Those people are real, their feelings are real, their pain is real, but not to you, is it? Not until you chew it up and you digest it and you shit it out on a piece of paper… Normal people’s lives are flesh and blood and muscle and bone.”

It’s something I’ve over-learned about myself: I tend to write to understand people, sometimes others, and sometimes myself. I write fiction to make the bad things worse, to make the horrible things palatable, to make the good things complicated. By weaving stories, I create a fabric over which I view life and make sense of it. If there’s a pattern in the thread (and there is), there will be a pattern found in the reality from which the spool was born. Even nonfiction is a hoax. Life doesn’t make sense, surely not enough for some one person to come up with a sweeping explanation. One can only hope to pick at little bits and eventually contribute to a puzzle piece.

Intellectually I think it’s a good thing, that we can’t possibly know anything. But the part of me that craves endings hates it desperately. I attempt to understand through writing, and I’m deathly afraid of becoming someone who must understand before I can love. If I wait until I understand something before I love it, I’ll be waiting forever, and where’s the fun in that? That’s how I end up a half-filled person full of abandoned moments, and I’d personally had enough of that nonsense.

All that to say - this is an imperfect endeavor, and in this case, the imperfection is the point. No more excuses, only continual appreciation of the experience of being myself. So, while I’m here, I’ll spit words that have no end, and form sentences that will bring me shame in a month’s time. I’ll make statements full of doubt and mix every possible metaphor. It’ll be hard and scary, but I’m going to do it anyway, because that’s the only way anything gets done.

Until next time, all my love.

-      S