06282025. good morning flounder

when you google search "how to cope with losing singing voice" you are given pages of remedies for getting the voice back

06272025. good morning flounder

listening to blonde again - "can't keep up a conversation / can't nobody read you" has haunted me since high school

i think when life starts to feel too slippery i start making mistakes as a reminder of cause and effect (friction/speed bumps/spasms)

06252025.

every day i am stunned by the emotional gap between these two moments

1) opening eyes from sleep (dread, doubt)

2) opening eyes from washing face (gonna be ok)

06242025. good morning flounder

working on the quiet/top floor but the people in the boiler room are loud. as burp castle would say, shhhhhhh

finally bought the grocery store cold brew. while caffeinating with my sleeping cat this morning tried to learn the french defense. not sure why but i like this defense. maybe because it worked against didi at the central park chess and checkers house

library director said she was into the idea of putting chess tables in the lobby. this would be huge

last night got home at 8:20 and A asked if i wanted to go to the garden. this is not usually an outside time for me. it was very blue <3

they looked in at a shop window; they did not wish to buy or to talk but to part, only with contrary winds buffeting the street corner, with some sort of lapse in the tides of the body, two forces meeting in a swirl, morning and afternoon, they paused. (mrs. dalloway p. 101)

06232025.

back from nyc :3 maxed out all the fun meters. burp castle i love you

06192025. good morning flounder

weird dream, someone said: do you have tatas, and I was stranded in fulton. I screamed, WHY IS FULTON SO FUCKING FAR AWAY. I have never been to fulton

at laguardia waiting for nematode jr.

06182025. good morning flounder

tired because went to bed around 1:30 but soon need to go conscious alive mode for nematode trip!!

people are so nice today

when i get home

eat

pack backpack (bathroom stuff, cords, books, plane stuff)

pack suitcase (clothes)

drive

bathroom stuff

transfer skincare to small pots

contact case and solution, glasses case

clothes

to drive in

to fly in

friday

saturday

CHECK IN AT 8PM

06172025. good morning flounder

in the low part of my natural rhythms

06162025. good morning flounder

feeling weird today

stayed up late with the roommate talking about college. he told me about mia. over the years he has referred to a painful friendship breakdown but i never knew the specifics. we concluded he is generally not susceptible to manipulation in relationships but can end up spending more time with someone he shouldn't be spending time with if that person likes to do similar outdoor activities, like skiing (roommate went to school in colorado where there was always a landscape to work things out on). in contrast i have been most susceptible to manipulation by inside people. for example, nino (2020). if he had been like, let's go outside, let's go to the bar, the whole thing wouldn't have happened because i would've been like, eh, me tired, no thank you. but because he was so inside and we could just be in his house i was like, yay, i hang out with you forever, i love you

awesome conversation with the parking lot kid

kid: are you a boy or a girl?

me: i'm a girl

mom: (gentle disapproving noises at kid)

kid: my mom's a boy!

me: ok! i'm [bluet's name]

kid: i'm [bluet's name]

mom: (louder disapproving noises)

kid: bye! (waving)

at the bar alone, modelo, since 2019, 1 like and i’ll ask that guy what he’s reading

he was reading kaveh akbar

06152025.

@aviary i would argue that sometimes it is that our family doesn't like to have a good time

idk i'm just thinking about when we discovered the concept of playing games together. do you remember when we would play that headbands game like once a week? it was always fun but kind of unstable like we were aware we were playacting something

today was ok. this weekend am grateful for unexpected contact with L, even though sometimes feels like we are communicating with each other in a second language

06142025. good morning flounder it is 9:31 am at work

before shifts i call people to get a head start on phonating for the day, understandably no one was awake before 9 am today except for C and L, C couldn't talk (was on the bus), but L picked up (was also on a bus - tour bus, had to whisper). what i learned is that L is a good friend, and the only people awake before 9 am on a saturday are on a bus

i think it's kind of embarrassing for daniel mason to say repeatedly how much of an inspiration virginia woolf is to his writing, because his contains absolutely none of the magic (is mostly exhausting for no reason), and to think that maybe part of him thinks he has done anything like what she was doing or that some kind of lineage exists is sad. but i understand. more than a writer influenced by virginia woolf he feels like a student in a class about virginia woolf who would get a pretty good grade from the teacher whose literal job it is to read his writing

chatGPT cannot write. generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. writing is communicating with intention...writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. ("more than words" john warner pp. 9-11)

sometimes i wonder what i would have thought about all these years, if i hadn’t spent so much time thinking about the pain. / then i remember that i’ve thought about a lot of other things as well. / also, i’m not sure the goal of life is to think about as many things as possible ("pathemata" maggie nelson p. 34)

06132025. good morning flounder

one week til new york trip and turning 26

they only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. but this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather. ("to the lighthouse," pp. 194-195)

06122025. good morning flounder

@ashley it's soo beautiful i've never read anything like this

this week have spent too much time in the petty part of my brain (aligning coworkers against the one that i hate). rest of the week i will dedicate to improving skills

ok but isn't it crazy that [coworker] with barely any prompting was like, oh yeah [coworker] cheated on his girlfriend with [other coworker] and i've warned all my friends here about him (sometimes i miss being the only 20 something at the workplace)

[a third coworker] said something funny: i actually hate him so much...and i never hate people...i think he might be evil (which is also how i feel it's not just personal beef it's like a spiritual thing)

anyways yeah i will show more restraint. but also whatever i'm just polling public opinion. citizen journalism

ok time for chess puzzles and coffee

back from puzzle time and today i was pretty bad at finding long queen checks and discovered checks

someone left this link on the clipboard how cute https://www.cbc.ca/life/hellospring/it-s-hard-to-take-a-photo-of-the-moon-here-s-how-to-do-it-better-1.5969920

thinking about how often kids are playing freestyle chess on accident at the library board because they don't know where the pieces go. every time i check the board is set up weird. awesome

gonna finally read this article [person with whom i have an uncomplicated friendship] linked me to https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/what-i-had-lost-was-a-country/

enjoyed talking to [good vibes older coworker] this morning. i noticed her jade bangle and she told me about her trip to HK. you should always ask people about their jade. i love when people ask about mine

the great revelation had never come. the great revelation perhaps never did come. instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one...in the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. ("to the lighthouse," p. 161)

when i get home

*eat

*dishes

*pack lunch (wait actually need to do groceries on the way home. or use A's food)

*violin

*shower

*chess/read/write

*bed

06112025.

for him to gaze as lily saw him gazing at mrs. ramsay was a rapture...it was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. so it was indeed. the world by all means should have shared it, could mr. bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued. ("to the lighthouse" p. 47)

did something risky - told [coworker] how much i hate [coworker] which led to [coworker] offering even MORE evidence against [coworker]

nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. she crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down...and then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the smoke of steamers made waver upon the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness. so listening to the waves, crouching over the pool, she brooded. ("to the lighthouse," p. 76)

he felt rigid and barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that you can hardly force your feet into them. yet he must force his feet into them. he must make himself talk. ("to the lighthouse," p. 89)

06092025. good morning flounder

@aviary ok i'll think of one

started keeping a log of my activities in the blu moleskine (perfect gift) in an effort to inhabit the hours. enjoying this project so far. initially was trying to follow schedules built ahead of time, but it works better to just write down what i've done after i've done it

parents visited, mom turned 60 and called it the perfect day. driving back to the apartment turns to dad and says (in canto): "that means i've spent over half my life with you" in a tone of voice difficult to describe. dad did not have any related thoughts

$72 flowers + groceries

$35 lavender

$15ish coffee

$19 games

$60ish sushi

described stranger #1 to roommate, he says he knows him. more proof this town is one room

the closest i've gotten to reading virginia woolf was reading "practice" by rosalind brown (the protagonist is obsessed with virginia woolf). now i will actually read "to the lighthouse"

reading old flounders realized i've had the patricia highsmith biography by joan schenkar checked out for a year, i was literally still reading it this morning

06072025. good morning flounder

at the lib (not working)

"excuse me do you work here"

"are you guys hiring right now"

he was really nice should i ask him to play chess

ended up playing with the next person who approached also bought a speaker from him. stranger danger more like stranger happiness

@aviary wait i believe in removing articles LOL

parents visiting tomorrow check list

*clean - laundry vacuum surfaces

*shopping - food. bday decorations?

06062025. good morning flounder

bored at work / drifting out of the moment (idi)

06052025. good morning flounder

a TMI thing happened to me in the bathroom

06042025. good morning flounder

after the free week at home returning to work routine has been rough. i love routine when the routine is wake up, coffee, write/read/chess/music for indefinite amounts of time in heart-determined order. work routine in contrast means nothing to me but think i can change this by trying harder to inhabit the time or finding ways to transpose natural routine onto work routine, but probably any solution involves waking up at least an hour earlier

[] did not say hi at the function but said the next day "i liked the dress you wore"

[winter 2022/spring 2023 ex] appeared in a dream looking into my eyes "i see your devotion"

good evening flounder

felt like me again today, by that i mean anxious and voice trouble, but it is ok i still did many speech actions and am making progress towards routine

today after work goals in order

*groceries on the way home

*unpack groceries

*dinner

*violin

*gym

*clean up

*read/write/chess

*sleep

something noticed about [] is that the "great"s he admires are all white people - larry bird joni mitchell michael brecker magnus carlsen etc...