(almost 7pm) i remembered that silly description of ursula k le guin's daily routine and i can't stop thinking about the 3 hour gap she leaves for making dinner and eating it. i should leave 3 hours for making dinner and eating it every day. turning off my phone every day at the same time. turning on background music (why have i been listening to so little music recently). prepping a full meal. that three hours would obviously include my walk home and the trip to the grocery store. you should go to the grocery store more often, you shouldn't hold onto things in your fridge for so long. plants should only exist for maybe a few days after being picked before being eaten. the three hours would include cleaning up. it would include staring out the window for a little too long and the trees that make me feel uneasy and at the trees the make me feel calm (it's the same trees). three hours is such a long time. it's far longer than most things ive dedicated my time to at any one time. how ever much attention im giving isnt enough. today i chewed all of my nails down to shortness that hurts. yesterday i thought i should give similes a chance in my own writing. tomorrow ill make dinner and ill spend all three hours considering every action i take.
(8 pm) hi sophie sophie is sitting next to me say hi to sophie. *in unison* "hiiiiiiiii"
(dinner time but im waiting for simona) there are places you cannot go. as soon as you become aware of them the distance becomes real rather than virtual; an actual barrier forms that you cannot pass. theres a collection of books i have by eliot porter, an american photographer. he mainly took nature photos. he took some of the last photos of glen canyon.
(almost 1 pm) simona came home so i got distracted and cooked and ate dinner instead of finishing my thought. glen canyon was dammed and is now a recreation area and lake and hydroelectric generator. i have never been to and most likely never will go. but also, even if glen canyon was in the state it is in in the photos, if it had never been dammed up, if the colorado still flowed freely and the sun were to shine onto and mainly strike the sides of the canyon still (its far too steep and deep for sunlight to hit the bottom much) and was filled with moss and tall grass and damp sand and wind buffeted trees, i still wouldnt go. there really isnt anything for me there. ive never been to sequoia national park and ive never been to yosemite. both are on the way to lake tahoe which i have been to many times, but ive never been to tahoe because of the lake in particular. if i didnt know people that lived there i would never have gone. if they left there would be a suddenly real barrier stopping me from going. by real barrier im just saying, that i cant go. i wont go. cant and wont are often the same word to me. combining them makes me feel like when i complain about things its in a useless way as opposed to a victim way. instead of elaborating on this or anything else ive said im going to continue scanning/photographing the eliot porter book and eat lunch and edit the scans/photos together and upload that to instagram in such a way that lets people know that not only do i have good taste, but i also am capable of producing something beautiful that aligns with their aesthetic sensibilities in such a way that they think more highly of me.
(almost 1 pm again) ive been awake for a while, mainly spent the day throwing things away. organizing my room. moving things around. im leaving the place ive been living in for over a year now, just barely over a year now. my postcards on my wall have been falling off slowly and i havent been putting them up. i knew i was leaving soon. ive started taking them off slowly too. slowly and in such a way that i will keep my entire security deposit. a couple of days ago my landlord found an injured crow outside the house. she tried to take care of it, but he didnt last very long. today when i went to throw away some of the garbage i had been keeping (old pens, hand made paper studded with seeds from etsy, makeup that doesnt go around my eyes, etc) and found the crow in the trash can. i moved him into a box but left him in the trash. i had to touch him to get him into the box and since that happened ive done nothing. its been 4 hours now and i dont know what ive done since then. i was so close to being done moving. 4 hours is more than enough time to have done basically everything i needed to do to move, but that hasnt happened. some excess of disgust has overwhelmed me
(4:30 pm) das dasein ist rund. im moving so soon. have to send annoying emails where i stand up for myself and my desires and prevent myself from ending up in a situation where i am unhappy. i am to avoid ever being in a dumb situation where i could have avoided it again by just leaving or not doing something or (and this is new) by talking to someone. i havent been reading recently and i really havent been moving out of my room and i havent really been doing anything of note, i havent even been lounging around beautifully like i normally do... planning and fitting in so many things to the point that i end up doing less than i had wanted to because i lost track of time. i need to book a flight from chicago to ny, im moving into my nonbinary approved apartment on the 29th. nonbinary approved because i was supposed to have a roommate, but i told the housing office that not only am i nonbinary, but that i am uncomfortable living with people of a differing gender expression. im not actually uncomfortable with that at all except in that i didnt want to just have some random cis dude as my roommate again so they offered my a rare opportunity to live in one of their studios, probably because there are actually zero nonbinary graduate students if you can believe that, theyre all trans women haha. my train to chicago leaves saturday in the evening. i get to chicago monday in the afternoon i think. a lot of the more beautiful regions (the desert) it travels through is during the night, but i like the midwest and plains geography well enough, more than well enough actually; not as i have mostly experienced it, by car or occasionally by bike, but by train which i did once between chicago and lafayette: trains go at an angle that roads never really pass through, it doesn't make sense for the cars to, they can turn and stop so easily and building paths is difficult; trains cannot turn or stop easily so you want them to glide over the landscape as smoothly as possible. the hills undulate up and down in your vision while you rise up and down at imperceptable grades. most of what i have been doing recently is seeing things move while i am mostly still. mostly. from where i am sitting now i can see a tree barely move in the wind, but even that barely moving is enough to steal my attention. the sum total of trees barely moving has stolen my attention for the past year at least and for at least the rest of my life. read this
(10 am) im in new mexico. i was somewhere in new mexico that i heard the name of but am unaware of how to spell and it feels like it would be a little rude to misspell, but i also dont want to look it up right now... im on the amtrak from la to chicago and its so much more enjoyable than i was expecting i was expecting to enjoy it but its so much more relaxing and normal and i dont have the mild im going to die feeling that i get when in a car or the mild to not so mild dissociation i get when on a plane. my current plan is as ive said before to some people i dont know who atleast a few people is to become a man of letters aka get a job where i can take long long train rides and where im not in a rush. i think my actual plan is to become a nepo baby aka i keep buying lottery tickets. i gave up my cigarettes in a joke to kian by filling up a kettle im giving him with car seat headrest stickers and the half used pack of american spirits that i bought months ago and have only smoked half of because i have to be drunk to smoke them, very drunk and around other people as opposed to mildly drunk and alone. i havent reached that point yet, smoking cigarettes hasnt rolled around to being a sincere belief it's still mildly funny and done as a joke. i need to be more severe, severe is the emotion of the year, i need to start smoking cigarettes and taking 5 minute breaks to smoke cigarettes. severe was the word of the year, but now its the mood/experience/emotion/tone... other things of the year. the word of the year is now "cuntress" entirely because some hot girl on twitter i follow who gives me gender envy keeps reply to things with that - a new haircut, cuntress - a well plated dinner, cuntress - went for a walk, cuntress etc etc. this 44 or whatever hour long train ride is so cuntress of me... i wish i had my silver earrings in right now. i wish i always had them in. they would go well with the mesas im passing by. so many mesas, i didnt know there were this many mesas in the entire world, i didnt remember how far the land stretched out from my last trip across the us by land.
its now later ive escaped most of the mesas; only a few remain to torment me and they do so in a way that is too on the nose (the large hill in the distance is very normal and then has a mesa on top of it for some reason) the hills are dull and are not meeting their own requirements. i respect them for doing that their contemplation up until now has been independent of me and soon it will be independent of me again. i said soon but i keep seeing these fucking simulacra or whatever word is appropriate to describe them mesa-hills "intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality" i repeat to myself over and over as these half assed mesas invade my vision, theyre worn down but not leveled, dead on top but life is clawing at their sides. im jealous. the train is stopping to let passengers off in raton new mexico. its very beautiful here i am not intolerant of ambiguity im literally nonbinary.
(9:47 am) i believe in absolute plasticity of the mind. i read too much of this of this persons tweets and substacks and her short book that now i do. she plasticized my mind. ive chosen to its more interesting and fun to believe i have an intense control of structures and myself. i am sitting on narkis' back porch thinking about this email i will send to this professor i wont work with. a sudden burst of enlightenment and inspiration to decide that i will just do what i desire. less waiting around waiting around for nothing in particular. a little over a year ago i sat on narkis' porch in an intense heat trying to figure out what i wanted to do with my life and whether i wanted to leave caltech or academia in general or anything else. i didnt figure out what i wanted to do in that heat or in any heat or in anytime soon after that. obviously i had to wait for my brain to fully develop at 25 and then i could finally make a good decision. obviously... the good decision wasnt to leave la and go to new york, the good decision was to do what i want while at nyu. to line everything up perfectly that i can live my life doing what i want better than i was before. this just means setting up my work in such a way that i can work on more day long + train rides and not in shitty labs where nothing works and nothing you do works and where the results arent even pretty to look at. the only thing that really matters with your work is that it looks pretty and if youre really good at it then beautiful too.
(7:30 pm) talked to my dad on the phone and like 2 minutes into the call he pulled into a wendys and ordered a number 2 combo and then asked if they had diet dr pepper and when the woman taking the order said yes he ofc asked for a diet dr pepper when his first instinct was to get a diet coke. he got the combo as a sized medium when the only two options were medium and large, i dont know why small wasnt an option. a combo number two is a baconator apparently
(6:40 pm) i forgot where i was going with my dad statement yesterday... baconator... diet dr pepper... something about just fully exiting my current existence when that happened. severe derealization thinking about and experiencing how i was one sidedly listening to a very very mundane and unimportant but still requiring of decisions decision about a meal from so far away and how everything led up to that moment. mild derealization from looking at the trees sway in the wind from my spot on narkis' back porch. this happens a lot, constantly, the trees every where are so large and there are so many every where i go... not just the back porch. the mosquitoes dont really bite me here like they did in los angeles. if something mild happens constantly to the point that it plasticizes you, that it changes the way you act in general or that you decide to let it change you, it doesnt really count as mild anymore. the railing off the porch is high, from where i sit i cant really see much: i cant see the ground of the alley, i cant see into the windows of his neightbor i cant see anyone else, not many people sit out out here, it's very nice, i dont know why they dont. all i can really see, all i can really notice is the tops of some trees to my right, some tall trees that mustve been planted over fifty years ago. maybe even a hundred years ago when some of these buildings must have been built and the only reason why i can see the tops of these trees is because theyve grown so tall. they grew taller than the buildings that were taller than them for most of time and now that theyve grown taller there really isnt much for them to do but to sway back and forth and shake in the wind. they can try to go taller than eachother but they wont. i just know they wont.