Greetings, loved ones / Let's take a journey
> read my private diary> meet people I know and don't know
> explore my garden
> learn about sinks!
> about me
> eworm home
Dear Diary:
february.01.2025 (date format change to reflect marriage of american habits and new british values)
Wasted much of the day scrolling on Instagram. Sat on the floor, back leaned against bed frame, hunched in a position that would strike terror into any chiropractic heart, and scrolled.The wall-to-wall carpet in my room is an uneasy off-beige, speckled with off-black and off-tan and off-grey and off-yellow and off-orange. I assume that carpet companies market these swatches to landlords with the promise that they "don't show stains." I suppose this is true, in the same way that smallpox hides cystic acne.
Maybe carpet companies pre-distress their carpets, like early 2000s Brooklynites taking bleach and safety scissors to a new pair of jeans. They probably have a whole crew of employees whose only job is to spill ink and projectile vomit Hawaiian Punch and pour ground-up pencil shavings onto the 100% polyamide low-cut tufted pile. Their in-house design team is probably a mold colony. Our guarantee? You'll never be able to tell which bits of the carpet can be vacuumed up and which are endemic.
I sat on my floor today, knowing that I have 3000 things I need to do and 3000 topics I want to explore and about 30 books reserved across 3 different libraries and about 30 books to locate in another 3 libraries and only a few months left to write 3 papers and figure out my path for the foreseeable future and take advantage of a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience and instead I gave myself over to the algorithm, led by an overwhelming desire to think nothing and be nothing.
The algorithm showed me moms cooking easy weeknight meals. The algorithm thought I might be amused by a series of humorous experiences only gym girlies will understand. The algorithm sent me to a teen figure skating fan account which had made a post for each young athlete killed in the sky over DC, with photos and skating clips and biographies. I read them all. I scrolled through the comments, some from strangers mourning those poor babies, some from accounts with smiling podium-picture profiles sharing personal memories from competitions or pleas for this to just be a dream.
I bookmarked a recipe for broccoli spinach pasta, knowing that the sauce requires a blender and that I do not have a blender. A clip compilation of Jordan Peterson talking about rats made me laugh so I watched it three times. I bookmarked that as well, to give myself the option of going back for a fourth watch. Saving it felt like a step too far: I un-bookmarked it.
I was hit by a wave of anxiety about the man I bumped into at the party last night who I had not expected to bump into, the one I sat next to at the ---- dinner and who asked me back to his place afterwards and whose DM I finally responded to with a disgustingly stilted "I'm happy to grab a drink as friends" but who has now cut off his man bun. I glanced back at my last message. Seen Monday.
I microwaved some leftover broccoli and potato soup in a mug.
It seemed like a good time to see if I was capable of performing Shakespeare so I locked my door and pulled up Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" on my phone and gave it a few goes at a whisper, in case ---- was in the flat. I was able to tear up on cue in the same place each time. I wondered whether they were acting tears or plane crash tears or tears from having just read the Wikipedia articles for "cotard's syndrome" and "mortality salience" after the algorithm handed me an overwritten film nerd post about Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance in Synecdoche, New York. I wondered whether, if I had played my cards differently, I might have starred by now as King Lear in a mediocre gender-swapped student theater production. I wondered whether, if I had played my cards differently, I might have thousands of instagram followers by now bookmarking my pasta recipes. I wondered what percentage of me wants an audience. I wondered what percentage of me knows what it wants, and what percentage of me devotes its energy to denying it.
Last night, when I was walking to the party with ---, men outside the church on St. Giles told us to come in and light a candle. I didn't want to be converted, so I avoided eye contact. Maybe tomorrow I will light a candle. Maybe tomorrow I will allow someone to convert me to something. Maybe tomorrow I will ask someone to grab a drink. Maybe tomorrow I will not look at my phone even once and I will walk around the city and read in the library and do the work I need to do and send emails and wash my bedding and go to sleep happily content. What I will not do tomorrow is rewatch the video of Jordan Peterson saying "the rat goes like THIS." I un-bookmarked it.
I don't know what kind of career I want. I don't know what to dream. Maybe there is a carpet factory hiring.