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:

06.22.2025

My son has an almost unbelievably rich and complex inner life. When he was seven or so he began developing this imaginary world he calls "Sangolia." Sangolia takes up about a third of a massive island in the Argyle Sea. The island has mountains in the northeast, fertile farmland in the southern valleys, several forests of varying sizes and intensities, and a small but brutal desert near the western coast, which is prone to sand storms but is also the only place where Ermite, an energy-rich mineral, can be mined. For now, The Desert falls within Sangolia's borders, but there have been many wars fought and many lives lost between Sangolia and the neighboring Lundmere over the strip of land (not counting the innumerable deaths in the mines themselves, which are subject to cave-ins, sand-floods, and attacks by carnivorous, subterranean Lugs).

Other than ermite, Sangolia's primary export is witchweed, a flax-like plant that can be spun and woven into a soft, lightweight, warm-but-breathable fabric.

My son will spend hours in his room every day drawing maps and play-acting with toys. He also has this alternate timeline he likes to visit in which JFK never met Jackie O and instead married an early-career Elvis Presley. In this timeline, JFK was never assassinated. Elvis stayed svelte. My son has cast a plastic Mutant Ninja Turtle toy (Donatello, I believe) as JFK. Elvis has never settled into one form, however, and is instead represented by a rotating ensemble - various WWE action figures (the Undertaker, Stone Cold Steve Austin...), Swan Lake barbie, a range of zoo and aquarium animals (zebra, giraffe, seal, shark, hippo), a very small horse (dime-sized), a blown glass paperweight, a Washington DC souvenir snow globe, Mulan, some bundled twigs, a travel speaker, the Elf on the Shelf (TM), Michelangelo...

Recently, my son told be that Sangolia and JFK+Elvis exist in the same World. The Argyle Sea has only just been discovered by the USA (its magically masked existence was uncovered by the invention of space photography, and it was viewed for the first time by astronauts on their moon mission). JFK and his First Lad will be traveling to the region shortly in an attempt to negotiate a peace deal between Sangolia and Lundmere. I asked him if he thinks negotiations will be effective. He gave me an odd look - for a moment, there was a sadness in his eyes deep enough to be unnerving. Then the cloud passed and he smiled tightly.

"I hope so," he said. "I hope so."

Generally, this is a safe, expansive, and overwhelmingly positive exercise.

I have never generated a world, but I must have faith that a world is the sort of thing that can be generated.

My dissertation is due in 24 hours.

06.19.2025 Back in All-Souls, final 2 hours of access

At lunch, A-- asked how old I was and I had to answer truthfully because God was watching, along with all his voyeuristic friends - they care a lot, I am told, about honesty. She said she thought I was 21 because I look young and act young. I ate broccoli and told her I am old as the hills, I have grandsons, my grandsons have grandsons, my grandsons' grandsons don't have any kids yet but that's their choice and I would never pressure them - you know how young people are nowadays. They contracept. Some even abstain.

I emerged from the conversation sweating. From normal heat, though. Today's temperature. Not from the heat of honesty.

I hope that I finish this dissertation in time, that I get my act and my words together, that I coax a cohesive thread from all this madness like a small farmer milking a silkworm. This is my little break, this worming. This is my little way of just typing typing typing, loosening up my fingers and getting myself in the zone of unthinking and continuous production.

Back in the old days, monks used to sit at wooden desks just like the one I am sitting at now, using single-hair brushes to draw whiskers on marginal cats. God was watching back then, too, along with all his voyeuristic friends, occasionally sending down a delegate to test someone's faith or encourage a revelation. Somewhere, out of even His eyesight, there is still a marginal world of distorted cats and warring snails. I imagine it's located in a smudged bit of map, maybe those tricky east-Russian swaths only residents and geoguessers solidly recognize, maybe somewhere along the shifting historical borders of Germanic principalities. Surely Prussia is still hovering unmoored somewhere, teeming with marginal cats like that one island in Japan that people who are the type to post on Reddit (god bless and keep them) probably travel to while experiencing REM.

later, sitting outside Trinity café (in the shade, a bit of a nice breeze)

It is absolutely imperative that I be set before judge and jury (in a local courtroom) and officially found attractive.

06.18.2025

Crying in Mary's old room trying to write my dissertation (due Monday at noon). Why is nothing coming out? Why is nothing happening? Why are the words stuck? Why are the thoughts tangled? I feel helpless and frightened and deeply overwhelmed and immensely bloated and really sad. Outside, Oxford is sunshine and celebration. Other people have turned in their dissertations and are punting and having picnics and dancing reels in the flowering park. I seem somehow unable to make ideas happen. Nothing is becoming. I seem somehow unable to coax anything into being.

06.14.2025

I am having so much trouble writing. Weeks and weeks of complete compositional impotence – it is excruciating and inexplicable. Looking back at the building journal I sent Sophie weeks and weeks ago I can’t but feel a nauseous hopelessness at just how much nothing I have produced between then and now. Less than nothing, in that the journal somehow seems to capture the heart of what I want to say in a way I have since strayed from. Less than nothing, in that the journal is honestly (if it’s legal for me to say this) really well written, but I no longer seem capable of writing any sentences, let alone cohesive sentences.

I don’t know what has happened. I don’t know what has taken over. Depression, I guess. Phone addiction. Sugar consumption. Clinical anxiety. Self-loathing if not emergent from at least fortified + clarified by four lost years (!!!!) of my life passed in stagnant isolation. The swooping return of mental health issues long left festering. So there maybe are things I can point to and say “oh, probably that.” But still – god I don’t know what has happened.

I am determined to write something. If not good, extant. Fairly cohesive. With an argument and a structure. Mostly just extant. We’ll start with extant. Writing a paper is a process of building. I know this. I know this and I know this. I am building about building. I am building a building and the foundation is my page and my construction materials are letters, words, etc (Garamond). I am building a building but because my materials are words etc I don’t need planning permission, I don’t need to get a permit or run plans by the local architectural commission, I don’t need to get OSHA involved to regulate workplace safety for my scaffolders or anything. It’s all just simple fun. It’s all just play, and play is fun. I am playing and having fun. This is all play. This is just for fun.

One of my main barriers – in this, but also in some other assignments – is my irksome inability (no! I won’t use the word inability! Will mentally reword later in the form of a positive mantra!) to access my casual writing voice (this voice, I guess. I might even go so far as to say My voice.) when approaching academic work. It’s not just that my writing gets more stilted – it gets syntactically clogged. My sentences get thick. Thoughts double back on themselves. I start sewing girthy clauses together in a human centipede of forced connections, attempting to enforce a tenuous through-line that obviously has no chance of survival. Why do I do this? Why? ???

But today (Saturday, June 14, 2025, Jesus FUCKING Christ) is a fun day. Today is a play day. Today I am not writing to Get Things Done, I am only writing to play and have fun. I will not desperately and grotesquely stitch together bodies while punishing myself all the while for doing so. I will collect my materials on the nursery floor – bricks, blocks, mother-of-pearl card counters, mother-of-pearl opera glasses with one eye cup missing, aging plastic Winnie-the-Pooh figurines with a penetratingly cancerous smell, books on urban anthropology, books on global capitalism, books on material objects, a felt rat sewed by Zach and his mom, NOT my phone (no more phone, we don’t want phone), a travel packet of tissues, a cheap retractable ballpoint pen given by a kind bookmaker, an old Trader Joe’s tea-tin filled with big plastic rhinestones, a rectangular carpet printed with a city that repeats and repeats...... – and I will PLAY.


06.11.2025

I have not been keeping a diary lately or journaling or externalizing my thoughts in any productive/intelligible way, but it suddenly feels important to record that I am in All Souls Library right now, sitting at one of the old-fashioned writing desks, the fifth from the left on the side facing the Codrington statue. If we were allowed to take photos in here I am sure I would just passively and carelessly take a photo, thinking that would capture it (for "it" read: the moment, the feeling, the scale, the shade of green paint, the plasterwork, etc), but I'm not allowed to take photos in here so I can't make that mistake.

I only have one more Monday - Thursday of card access to the building. Time is pressing my wrist in a forceful and bruising sort of way. I don't like it one bit. I just want to hover a little longer. I just want to float a little longer. I just want...

I want so much, and so wantingly.

My whole backpack reeks of coffee because I went to the botanic gardens on my lunch break (my free access there will also end soon, after that I become a regular old paying Member of the Public) and bought coffee beans along with my cortado at the coffee cart I keep saying I will go to and never actually go to and finally went to. The woman ground the beans while I waited. She apologized for how loud the grinding was. In the moment, I felt bad about the noise (for inflicting it on others in such a peaceful setting) but now I kind of like the memory of it, because the coffee smells so loud - usually most things don't smell loud. Hopefully these beans will make my mornings brighter. Hopefully these beans will propel me towards a better tomorrow.

There is a man (blue button-down, khaki pants) with some sort of little scanning tool and a measuring tape on his belt who keeps wandering around making notes on paper and occasionally beeping and at one point motioning with the tool as if Wii bowling. I am sure his work is thorough and important. I wish him the best.


later, 8ish, at Trinity, sitting outside café -

three boys. pants - 2 khaki, 1 pale-wash denim, all loose without being baggy. all button-down shirts - 1 pale blue, 1 pale pink, 1 classic white, black fleece gilet (I have learned the word gilet) over the blue, all necks unbuttoned, all collarbones revealed, all untucked. all sandy shaggy young prince Harry confident stride, bags slung carelessly over one shoulder. they're going to the pub. come to the pub, then. we're all going to the pub. it's going to be okay. it's going to be okay. it's all going to be okay.


later, 9:46, Trinity library -

feel sick from the amount of sugar I have consumed. snacked throughout day and visited the MCR for free snacks and was stressed so I ate 3 biscuits and took a Mars bar which I ate like 20 minutes later and am now bloated and consumed with self-loathing and also feel secondary self-loathing because there's nothing more boring than being a woman who hates herself for overeating. It's a trope. It's overdone. It's unoriginal. at some point I will thoroughly investigate my relationship with sugar and also my relationship with self-loathing but right now I have a full dissertation to write -- I have devoted too much time already to self-loathing and feel it would have been better spent elsewhere.