Posts tagged "personal":
Help me
I don’t think I can look at computers as a source of leisure right now. Even this is an addiction: it’s like a narcotic. I just read Avital Ronnell’s Crack Wars. She’s a sexual assaulter whose career was ruined by her actions. My space bar is sticky. Right now there’s a lot of friction when I use computers, and I don’t know anymore how to do simple things, or have to think carefully about them.
(...)Happy birthday
Post from the grave
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a post here. I have been tinkering around with concepts for redoing the site, but for now I am mostly happy with the way this works. Of course the appearance isn’t great, but that can be fixed with some CSS, once the underlying HTML is doing what I want it to do.
(...)Letter to my father and step-mother I will never send
Hello Papa and [step-mother],
(...)Tempus fugit
It’s an abstract kind of feeling. I’m not totally sure how to express it. Maybe I’m getting high too much; maybe I’m too easily distracted. I don’t know that I can keep focus well on the phone. My subjectivity is dissolving in a froth of agencies. I am a distributed system. I hope I did well on that exam. I should have studied more efficiently. There’s nothing for it now.
Mrs. Otis' regrets
Dream: I woke up this morning from a dream about my mother. First I was five years old playing super mario on my Game Boy Advanced. (latent content: my mother, father, and I visited Evanston the summer of 2003 (2?) to look at houses; we stayed at the then Hotel Orington in Evanston — now a Hilton – and I had Super Mario 3: Yoshi’s Island on my purple Gameboy Advanced. I wonder what ever happened to that) and at church for Christmas (latent content: I saw Lessons and Carols at Loyola University Chicago’s chapel with Ann Rhomberg of Solidarity Bridge this weekend — Ann Zastrow bought the tickets) when I saw Nathan Costa’s name: he had been confirmed there, or it was some odd word I can’t call to mind now. I pointed it out to my mother; I had to remind her who he was, but then she seemed, or pretended, to remember. Then she was playing with CJ (Allie’s son) and giving him water, but it was spilling on his arms (latent content: I was under the blankets and hot: the radiator was on); I apologized her for not calling her enough and she assured me that it was alright. I was so happy to be with her then, and he smile gladdened me. I woke up and cried (latent content: “the other night dear, when I was sleeping…” — I sang that song to her in the hospital).
(...)None of that "Cat's in the Cradle" shit
“Cat’s in the Cradle” is a song from 1974 by Harry Chapin that tells the story of a man who was too busy to interact with his son, who then, when grown, is too busy to interact with his father. The refrain ends with the lines, “‘when you comin’ home, Dad?’/’I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then.’” The last refrain reverses the trend: “‘when you comin’ home, son?’” My father and I both always hated this song, he because it reminded him of his father, and I because I already felt the intrinsic tragedy. This year I forgot my father’s birthday (October 30th). I was busy with the — I was going to say with the holiday weekend; but this year October 30th was a Monday, and I did nothing but lie around all day. I completely and properly forgot.
(...)Again
Lately, as part of my continuing break with the Christian faith, I have been reading about the history of witchcraft, both ancient and modern. This has lead me to the works of Ronald Hutton, of which I am now reading Stations of the Sun, a study of the ritual year in Britain. The book was published in 1996, which makes it too old to be used for any serious academic research, but Hutton’s prose is charming, his knowledge of the sources that were available at the time seemingly exhaustive (though I am no judge, not being a historian or British), and his rigor is motivated by a love for the subject rather than a desire to belittle it. Hutton is still alive and publishing books, I should hasten to add, though presumably even he could not endorse his work of nearly thirty (!) years ago. His analysis is excedingly quaint, however: in closing the section of the history of Christmas, he points out that the form of the holiday that obtained in the early 1990s, which is of course entirely unrecognizable from our perspective, was in many ways a repetition of the Roman equivalent, the Kalendae:
(...)Update
I’ve always preferred music theory to music practice, but for the past year I’ve been taking guitar (and bass!) lessons again and so I’ve been working on it. I was better at music that was a visual exercise: I can sight sing pretty well and follow a conductor, but I’ve never been very good at learning music by ear. When I was in high school I tried to sing “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” by Tame Impala with a band of my friends and I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have sheet music and couldn’t find the beats or feel the counts. It just sounded like a wave that went on and on and on and I couldn’t figure out when to come in. How pathetic, honestly, but that kept me from playing or singing with them or any subsequent group. Just too intimidating, and I’m terrible.
(...)Ahhhhhhhhh
A lot’s going on in my life lately so this isn’t going to be anything close to a full rundown — sorry about that. I’ll try to do better next time, but here I’m cutting to the chase: Cody (my dead mother’s second husband’s daughter-by-his-second-marriage’s husband) died. And what does that make us? Brothers. Well, brothers-in-law, at the least. I accidentally agreed to pay for the funeral. The total is just shy of $10,000 (US Dollars), I paid $4,000, and the $6,000 is due in five weeks.
(...)The "why bothers"
A friend of mine called me in tears the other day because she didn’t think that she could carry on with the master’s course we’re signed up for. She said (and I agreed) that we are under-prepared for the topic: she and I both recently finished a bridge program converting us from our humanities backgrounds to computer science, and there’s no way a part-time one-year on-line program can prepare you adequately to face down all the intricacies of a master’s degree in a discipline to which you were previously alien. She had signed up for a course in machine learning which is, as you know, all math; neither she nor I have done any serious math since high school, and she was understandably intimidated by the “warm up” exercise of finding the Jacobian of a matrix. I sure as hell couldn’t do it.
(...)Anyway, nevermind
It’s funny how quickly things come to a close. I said this to my father, oh I don’t know, maybe ten years ago? “It lasts a long time while you’re going through it, then it’s over.” We were hiking up a hill with brambles and briars: we were sweaty and trudging and definitely not in the least lost, and it was promising to be a brutally challenging walk for these two city slickers unaccustomed to the ways of the wilderness. But I said that it only seemed to be taking a long time because we were going through it: in the end, it would be quick to look back in memory. I guess it’s true what they say: the years start coming and they don’t stop coming.
(...)Whither, whence, and wherefore
It’s been a right while, and it’s fair to consider this “web log” defunct. I won’t bother meditating on the meaning and purpose of a “blog,” but I can’t resist noting that since (as of writing) there is nowhere on the web for this log to go, it’s hardly deserving of the name, properly speaking.
(...)Hello, nice to meet you.
Since I came back from Europe I have felt as if I wasn’t traveling any more. I buckled down to school, the move, my mother’s death, and so on. I recovered Xerxes. I took tests. I put my hand to the plough and did not look back. And in all that I lost the here and now.
(...)Time flies
My mother’s 66th birthday would have been this month. It didn’t happen. She died more than six months ago. I feel as though I’ve only just begun to mourn her. Can “morn” be a verb? “The day morned and the sun warmed the bay, sparkling in shimmering sunshine” — that’s not bad, I don’t think.
(...)Welcome home
I’ve moved, and I’m coming to you from the new apartment in the city. It’s a one bedroom on the ground floor of a twentieth-century yellow brick building on the corner. My bedroom looks out on the alley. All the contents of the apartment (with the exception of a shower curtain and some dish soap) are from my mother’s house: even the food in the fridge and cabinets I took from hers. She left me a spectacular collection of antiques and vintage tchotchkes, including the radios and posters, not to mention the furniture and rugs and kitchen appliances (ice cream maker, pressure cooker, standing mixer, wok…) and coffee-table books.
(...)Bye bye, Forest Ave
This is one of the very last nights I’ll ever sleep in this house. My mother bought it the summer I was 16, in 2014. I went off to boarding school that fall and came back in November for the holiday to the new house. I lived here during the “gap year” I took after I left boarding school. I did acid for the first time in this bedroom, looking at those posters on that wall. I thought I died then; it seemed as though it would last forever. It ended too quickly.
(...)Mother
Body of my mother broken down, dying. Decomposing into the ground, her body is probably by now dust. When I was a child she had cancer. I hurt myself and it hurt her body, but I never thought that Mommy’s body felt pain: it is like the earth, infinite, unexhaustible, impassible, unaffectable, feeling no pain, neither any sorrow or emptiness. What bullshit. From you I was torn in pain and wailing; the Cesarean scar like the plough’s furrow cutting across the whole empty body of the earth as if it were nothing to tear out the boy-child hidden inside. And they had to use suction because I didn’t want to come out; Jean’s anesthetized body cut open, gaping and raw, and sucked out because I clung to the inside of her, my world.
(...)Goodbye mommy
Today, I am twenty-five years old. My mother has been dead for nineteen days. She was sixty-five. I haven’t really thought about it since it happened — not openly, at least. I haven’t written about it, I guess I mean. It’s not as though I haven’t written at all — some fiction, the prayers for her service, her obituary — but I haven’t written openly about her death.
(...)Mommy's head is sick
About twenty-four hours ago, my mother had a stroke. She was at a restaurant in the city with her husband, and an ambulance brought them to the emergency room. I arrived shortly after they did. When I arrived, she was confused and lost, but not agitated. The doctors recommended that we administer tPA, a medicine that breaks up blood clots. This caused bleeding in her brain, and my mother became extremely agitated. She thrashed and screamed in the hospital bed and pulled out the tubes leading into her arms. She had to be restrained, then sedated. She screamed pushed off the bed; it took six of us to hold her down. I held her right arm and wrist so another needle could be inserted.
(...)Being a resident
It is late summer in Evanston. The cicadas are humming. The trees are leafiest green. It begins to get cool in the evening. Today was the first day of class for me. I called in to the lectures from my mother’s back yard.
(...)The world has never seemed so far away
I’m getting complacent. Dulling. There’s that scene in Sidhartha where Hesse describes Sidhartha’s spritual momentum slowing like a potter’s wheel at which mud is being thrown. I was talking to myself and I pronounced the word <hot>, hat. Like a real Chicagoan.
(...)I don't want to be like all the other kids
“The Purloined Letter” is the third and last of Egdar Allan Poe’s stories to feature Dupin, which stories are generally considered the foundation of English-language detective fiction. This parable is excerpted from Dupin’s criticizing of the literal-minded police chief’s search for the stolen letter, which letter is (spoiler alert, but the story was published in 1844, so I think the statute of limitations is over) hidden in plain sight.
(...)Live from the flipside
I’m coming to you loud and clear from a new macbook — commodity fetishism — at my mother and Michael’s house in Evanston. It’s the last day of my gap year: I have orientation tomorrow, and class starts the next week. My mother, according to Michael, has early onset dementia. I think this is bullshit.
(...)ma tomo Win
This is going to be a big post, so buckle up, y’all. Tomorrow (or today, since I’m writing this after midnight), I go back to the US (semi-)permanently. My gap year is, finally, over. The thing begins and it’s already ending.
(...)Lost (and found?)
I lost my teddy bear and blanket yesterday. This was the scenario: I’m in Vienna and changed from one room to another in the hostel, since I extended my reservation. I changed rooms in the morning. When I got to the new room, I made the bed I was assigned using the sheets and put my bear and blanket (hereafter referred to as the “comfort objects” or “stuffed animals”) on top of the newly made bed. When I returned in the afternoon, the bed had been stripped and the comfort objects were gone.
(...)Leaving Home
Today, I left St Andrews for the third and final time. And for the first time, I don’t know when I’ll be back next. The first time I left was last October, after I finished my degree and set out on my trip across Europe. That was when I started this blog. The second time was last month, when I officially graduated (but that felt more like coming back than leaving). And today, I visited it one last time with my cousin Kathleen.
(...)Off to see the sisters
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the creacked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.
(...)In which I ruminate on the fact that I still speak French poorly but my Italian is improving
I think I’m beginning to understand my stepmother’s point: she always talked about my sisters’ feeling excluded from making friends at school because they’re from the US and therefore foreigners. I beginning to feel that way around here—people from the US tend to make an embarrassment of themselves abroad, if only because they don’t go out very much. I’m not sure: maybe I’m an embarrassment too. It’s all difficult to understand.
(...)Don dies
With breakfast or without?
(...)Learning is slow
When I was a kid, I used to think that I could learn anything right away. I remember, when I was 12 years old, thinking that I could invent anti-gravity just by thinking about it—never mind that I didn’t know bupkes about physics or whatever rediculous knowledge you’d need to invent such a thing.
(...)Knowing and ignorance
Lawd, there’s so much I don’t know. And I don’t mean this as a general admission of ignorance or defeat: I mean, very concretely, that there are so many things that I know I don’t know. The more I inquire into computers, the greater vistas of previously unknown unknowns open themselves up to view: the more I realize I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And the more I know I don’t know, the less it feels like I know.
(...)Monolingualism Considered Harmful
This has always been a blog about language, so I’m going to tell you a story about language.
(...)Map/territory
When I was a child, I had educational place mats: the solar system, the periodic table (my mother was a chemist, after all), and maps of the USA and the world. Looking at these maps, I used to plan trips. When I started taking swimming lessons, it occurred to me that I could swim down the waterways and across the lakes: I planned to ride down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico and from there skirt the coast down to South America. I knew that people swam across the English Channel—surely this was about the same? My mother found this too sweet to disabuse, but I soon realized that the world is much bigger than it looked on my place mat.
(...)Clothes we wear and other problems of living
I’m writing this so that I can get rid of something.
(...)A long, imperfect post about some of my history as a writer
I never meant to start a blog. Well, I guess I did, but I never meant for it to become what it has. This all started out as a diary: during the late winter of 2020/21 I began to keep a record of my daily activities, because otherwise it felt as though I hadn’t done anything at all by the end of the day. I would write things like:
(...)Four square epistemology
Those who follow my life closely might know that I’m going back to school this fall. Previously I spoke about the frustrations of applying for universities; that didn’t stop me from applying nor from getting in, though not to the program I was frustrated by in that post. I’m going into a graduate certificate at the University of Illinois in “Computing Fundamentals” this fall; it’s a one year program aimed particularly at people who don’t have any formal education in computing but who want to enter “the field” (their term).
(...)Fuck you to that person who made me feel like shit on behalf of someone who had already forgiven me
We have a generation of young people…so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow. I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene. It is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts, by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
(...)Where do you think you're going, dressed like that?
Last night I got dressed up and went out to a party. This was a party held every week whose theme is “express yourself”. I think that I expressed myself pretty well. I wore silver-glitter flared trousers, a mesh crop top, and a fur vest. I had a purse shaped like a ray gun that said “zap<” on the side. A relative of mine (it’s complicated, but family is always complicated) helped me get dressed. He wore a black latex head piece like a tail sprouting from his head. I was the side kick, as it were.
(...)Progress checks considered harmful
Sometimes I feel as though time is stripey. I don’t move continuously through the day: instead, I have states that come and go. When evening comes and I start to write (I almost always write these posts in the evening, at least when I’m at my mother’s house, because it’s when my mother and step-father are asleep) I feel as though no time has passed at all since I last wrote a post. In some sense, all the time that passed between the last post and this one is swallowed up in the gap between </article> and <article>. A whole two days passed in an instant, and here I am, writing again.
Memories. Tatters.
I lose things a lot. Of course, those who know me know that I keep my room a mess because I don’t know where to put anything and tidying is exhausting. So my keys and cards and glasses and whatever get piled under all the junk and lost. I come by it honestly: my mother loses her things too. She can’t find her keys, or her wallet, or her purse and it’s getting late and we have to go now and “honey, are you alright? Don’t you remember where you left it? This happens a lot” says my step-father.
(...)My Mind is Mush
I think that I am beginning to forget how to speak English. This is terrifying, because it means that I am no longer proficient in any language. Context: I am back in the US for the winter holidays, <aside>it seems astronomically unlikely that I will succesfully acquire a visa to enter Italy: I went to the consulate today; they asked me, “did you look at the website?”; I said, “yes, but I didn’t fully understand it. I came to ask you some questions about the forms that I require”; they shrugged. I cannot even confirm whether or not I have the right collection of documents to apply: I can only make a guess based on the information on the website and send the stack in. If it is wrong, I have to start over. I think that I have some sort of special needs or disability that make me unable to understand the requirements. Even if I do succeed in my quest for a visa, it will take three to five weeks to hear about it once I submit the application. I do not know whether there is any point at all. And I still haven’t been to Rome.</aside> and I am struggling to communicate.
(...)I'm new around here
Surely by now I’ve lost all (three) of my readers due to my inactivity. But what can I say?—I’ve been busy. In the last few weeks I’ve gotten to know Bologna much better. At first, I could only navigate by checking a map or by tracing the paths that I knew worked. If I, say, had to get from my apartment to the Piazza Santo Stefano, I would follow Via Castiglione all the way in to Le Due Torri, then turn and walk from Le Torri to the Piazza. To those who know Bologna, this is a hopeless roundabout path that requires doubling back on oneself, but it was the only way I knew how to get from point A to point B; or rather, I knew how to get from A to B and from B to C, so to get from A to C, I would have to go via B, no matter how out of the way it was. The other day I learned a far more direct way to get from my apartment to Santo Stefano, a path so obvious that I can’t believe how far out of my way I would go. But my sense of where Santo Stefano is was so intimately linked to the path I took to get there, so I didn’t even notice that I was doubling back as I walked.
(...)Looking for VFD
It is known, I think, that my favorite series of childrens’ books is A Series of Unfortunate Events by Limony Snicket. The series, for those who haven’t read it, tells the story of the Baudelaire children, three youths orphaned and adrift in a cruel world. In each installment (of the 13), the children find themselves in the care of a new guardian who promises to raise and care for them; invariably, disaster strikes in the person of Count Olaf, who will stop at nothing to acquire the fortune which the children will inherit when the oldest of them comes of age. In the meantime, the well-meaning adults in their lives are powerless to stop and, more often than not unaware of, the Count’s machinations. The children barely escape the Count’s clutches by their ingeniuity, resourcefulness, and a heavy dose of plot armor.
(...)Sometimes you feel like a nut...
This is a follow up post the the other day’s post. They are, however, being posted at the same time: they were written on different days, but I seldom upload the pieces on the same day that I write them.
(...)Don't apply if you can't get in; can't get in if you don't apply.
FLAME ON
(...)