(11:15 am) i turned 25 3 days ago and 3 days before that i was in nyc and i was visiting nyu for my transfer. turns out the professor that i wanted to work with is awful (one of her grad students said "she made six years of my life hell") but its fine, everything is fine. theres another professor who is doing exactly what i want to do and im going to office politics my way into her group and do what i want to do. i havent finished any books recently, ive been starting more and more and its hard to finish them. the one im most dedicated to reading right now is trans girl suicide museum. the title is from when one of the author's friends told her the five words that would describe her gender were trans girl suicide museum. its hard to read this book. its hard to read anything about gender really. the five words i would use to describe my gender currently would be eats burrata every day. this is what ive been doing recently and its probably the best thing any one can do for their long term mental health. burrata with hot bread and some sort of other thing. it doesnt really matter what the other thing is to be honest as long as it makes sense in some extremely extremely abstracted way. aka, youre allowed to do basically anything along with eating burrata as long as youre doing something else. oh, you cant just do burrata and bread though, sorry, you have to put the burrata in a beautiful bowl, preferably a small low bowl. and then you pour good olive oil on it and then flaky salt. from there you can do other things too. two nights ago, which wasnt my birthday because my birthday was 3 nights ago, i had burrata with flaky-ish salt and black pepper and ruth's zaatar. it was really good. there doesnt really exist bad burrata is the thing, even the trader joes stuff is really good because at the end of the day youre basically eating creme with salt and bread and people used to crave this more than you could ever imagine. they couldnt even salt it to the extreme that i did. somehow i still feel bad in general even though i can eat burrata basically whenever i want with moderately good to very good hot bread whenever i want. maybe i should want to more, i dont know what that would feel like.
(11:21 pm) today at the grocery store (at sprouts the only grocery store that actually matters that anyone should ever even go to, i love sprouts so much) they only had truffle burrata and not even regular non truffle burrata. i hate sprouts i hate it so much. no, i would die for sprouts, i would do so much for their little perfect 4.99 sandwiches and their well priced and delicious organic produce. when im walking those aisles i cant help but imagine the beauty of contemporary american capitalist hegemony and how my life had been structured in such a boring normal upper middle class way. i finished trans girl suicide museum today and thats basically a book about being upper middle class and disaffected in some vaguely interesting way. about how clothes are beautiful. about gender nihilism (eventually). about how important your friends are. what a great book. at the end the author, hannah, put down her instagram meme account and i was already following it. at sprouts they didnt have salted organic peanut butter, only unsweetened unsalted organic peanut butter, so im now officially and for the rest of life anti sprouts... until i need more organic kale.
(9:15 am) i confirmed that im going to nyu and everything is going to be fine it doesnt matter. i need to live in as many cities as possible. ive decided on this. this is going to be a short post for now, ill come back to this later today... or tomorrow. im late for class because ive been trying to reset my password for my account for my undergrad transcripts and don't know what street i lived on in 3rd grade, what school i attended in 6th grade, or the last name of my 3rd grade teacher. or theyre just weirdly case sensitive and i dont know what answer i put for them exactly. evil system probably designed by a purdue cs major which is how you know its bad.
(4 pm) went to the renn fair today and didnt eat a turkey leg because last time i went and did that i was unabale to process anything after about the 5th bite and for the next 5 hours. ive been home for 3 hours now and havent processed any of it anyway. i finished zeros and ones two days ago and havent gathered any real thoughts about it. i think i need to read more novels and poetry and less theory. ive already started reading more novels and poetry and less theory but maybe the ratio should be like 1 novel - 4 poetry books - 1 theory book. only making that ratio so high on the theory side so i can read more walter benjamin. i havent read enough walter benjamin. when i was in nyc eleanor did a cheeky little smile and told me that his name is pronounced benyameen which makes sense, the only problem was that i learned this in the moma so it felt like a scene in a murakami novel. ive never read anything by murakami so i dont know how true this is. if you think i should read murakami please send an email to surfacespider (at) gmail (.com), actually send it to my real email that i actually use, the surfacespider one is my "brand" email. my personal is firstnamemiddleinitiallastname (at) gmail (.com) if you cant figure this out it means you dont know me or love me, but i will still take your murakami recomendations seriously. i will implement a comment section just for you, just for my murakami lovers and haters; unless the recommendation is to read norwegian wood because i read 5 pages of that and thought it was awful. i often do judge books by their covers and by their first few pages and i have no intention of stopping.
(10:28 am) cardamom is probably the most important thing i can think of. or maybe anise. just the concept of anise. im thinking of buying a anise scented perfume as a warning sign to people with bad taste. warm spices are the most important thing i can think of. i dont even use them that often or even like that, i just think theyre important. i stole some ceylon? cinnamon from whole foods like a month ago and have only used it to top instant coffee and its not even good taste wise, but the 15 seconds that i can smell it is very important. cardamom and anise are very important for my chili crisp recipe that i cant make anymore because seed oils are out. unless peanut oil doesnt count as a seed oil, but legumes are seeds and peanuts are a legume. i looked it up and it is categorized as one but its the "best" ones. ok the recipe for the chili crisp is basically just the serious eats chili crisp recipe, but obviously no one has all of those ingredients at one time unless you actually make a lot of varied chinese foods regularly, i dont even have black cardamom so ill use green cardamom. i dont even have green cardamom. my strongest memories of green cardamom are biting into pods accidentally while eating biryani at the one indian restaurant we would go to growing up. i remember hating it, but i dont actually remember that much from that time period of my life (all of my life until the past year is what i mean by that time period of my life). maybe if this anise perfume is strong enough it will also repel mosquitos which would be useful as opposed to just beautiful, but usefulness isnt actually that important. ive never actually needed specific things ive just wanted specific things. i can always make things work, always.
(3 pm) im in the third floor quiet study area of the caltech library. this is the library study area without a beautiful view of the mountains so its mainly a useless area except that you can actually work here and the building itself isnt that ugly. im mostly sick of physics that isnt related to what i want to study, but its fine. i have loose plans to get tatooed in berlin which means that everything is super fine. loose as in i dont know what i want specifically or when im going and havent actually decided on if im going, but im going. something across my back potentially. something beautiful and handpoked.