1: on ennui and ghosting
By the time that you’re reading this, I will be embarrassed that I’ve written it.
here’s what I listened to while writing this:
I spent all of January plotting out habits to adopt instead of implementing them and now in February, I lament the time lost even though time is not an object of scarcity but rather a thing that keeps coming at me. Does this make sense? It doesn’t really to me but maybe it will to you. (Anything you’d like to read about this year? please fill out this form!)
Mostly I just haven’t felt like doing anything much aside from pacing around my apartment and staring out the window while I sit at my piano, instead of reading my sheet music and actually practicing the piano because I said I’d relearn during quarantine. I bought a rowing machine in November that was supposed to come this Monday but has been delayed in delivery to next week (supposedly… when it comes is when it comes, they told me)—is this a metaphor?
Before quar, I started doing cardio so I’d stop getting winded while doing stand-up (lol). These days, if I do one sit-up (getting out of bed), I consider that an olympic feat. When I do manage a morning walk, I am Nike herself incarnate. I want to train like Beyonce singing Love On Top on the treadmill but instead, I want to sing It’s All Coming Back To Me Now by Celine while rowing. Because cardio, like recalling heartbreak or singing in karaoke bars, is trauma. I hate that we have to do things that feel awful in order to feel good. But I guess life exists in the spaces of dichotomy.
It’s beautifully sunny outside, and the snow melting sounds like a steady fall of light rain. Again, a dichotomy but one that is mostly good. I think a lot about the snow, about how it is either romanticized or wholly unwanted and dreaded. Everyone loves it at first but there are times when often it is too much and then too heavy, and those are the times when most people can’t wait for it to melt or for it to be shoveled away. I think maybe we treat people the same way without thinking twice about how people and the weather, just are sometimes. Does anyone or any weather event purposely mean to inconvenience us? I am trying to write a poem about it but I think mostly I’m just projecting onto another reflective thing because it feels like I’m being self-aware when I’m really just unwilling to communicate my needs. It is easier to ghost than to be a real person. If I were snow, I could just melt and find new ways to cycle through again.
I watched and enjoyed these movies last month, which I think you may also enjoy if you haven’t already seen:
-Moonlight (soundtrack, writing? wow)
-If Beale Street Could Talk (soundtrack and writing/adaptation again incredible, Barry Jenkins and Nicholas Britell are a match made in cinematic heaven)
-Peanut Butter Falcon (a mark twain mood and wholesome marvel that made me cry)
-Promising Young Woman (put this and I May Destroy You into the writing by and for women that everyone MUST watch and learn from canon)
Shows I’ve been rewatching:
-Normal People (i love sad, yearning adolescence)
-Crash Landing On You (i love romcom)
-Chewing Gum (i love romcom and yearning adolescence again)
Books I’m reading/re-reading:
-A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (if you are considering reading this, please know that I am only on part two and devastated so consider with MUCH caution)
-Little Weirds by Jenny Slate (I find being funny so easy to slip into instead of being earnest that when I only want to be earnest it’s mortifying—Jenny beautifully illustrates that she is willing to be both and that it’s not embarrassing but necessary)
Book to read if you enjoy following the stock market rebellion bc history and scamming are cyclical:
-Billion Dollar Whale - how ONE man single-handedly swindled and looted $5bill, how lavishly the rich live, and how the greed and immorality within banks and governments allowed him to pull it off
I hope everyone is enjoying February so far, I’m hopeful for the rest of it to be better than January. (Idk, someone told me to try manifesting ok!)