DEAR DIARY
10.13.2025 Pitch: New Girl meets Friends meets Big Bang Theory
I've been living a week in my temporary new home. It is a six bedroom house that shares a wall with a pub. All the other occupants are male PhD students, mostly in STEM. They're a friendly group, they hang out, they're buddies.I have been forcefully inserting myself into their world.
They'll be sitting around the dinner table chatting and I'll join them, I'll chat, I'll sit there with my tea or my almond-buttered rice cakes as if I've known them all for a thousand years instead of 5 days. I'll share a too-personal anecdote. I'll intrude.
I have a tendency to shed bits of myself. I sit on a couch for five minutes at a party and my stray hair is there a year later. I pick my fingernails when I walk anxious, leaving breadcrumb trails of mangled alpha-keratin. I pluck myself, self-harvest, scatter bits of me on tarmac and wall-to-wall carpet.
You're not supposed to feed them to ducks anymore. Breadcrumbs.
The boys eat protein. The fridge is filled with raw and cooked chicken, salmon, lamb. They pile protein and vegetables on hills of brown rice. Energy to expend at the lab and at the gym. I insert myself into their protein and whole grains. I climb into a meal prep Tupperware and expand to fill my new container. I invite myself to join their field trip to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson. They ask for my thoughts and I have no thoughts to give, I have no comment on pacing or aspect ratio or the revolution to come. Don't ask about VistaVision, ask me about me. They add me to their WhatsApp group, which has "bros" in the name, and ask politely if they should change it to a gender-neutral alternative. I reject the idea too forcefully. I want desperately to be a bro, I tell them. I want to be a bro. I want to be a nun, a monk. I want to be forty feet tall. I want to be wanted. I want to have a father figure. I want to be a regular at the pub, to have a witty flirty repartee with a bartender who sees through me but not all the way. I want a job I want a job I need to make money I need to get paid. I want to visit a petting zoo, I tell them. I want to go home - I want to sit lonely in a strip mall the way you only can in the American southwest. I want -- I tell them -- to be wanted. I want a man who is on an expedition (maybe he is going to the south pole, maybe he is in a submarine, maybe he is a hero wrapped tight in a spandex super-suit, maybe he is just a guy running a few errands, grabbing some paper goods from the corner bodega, fruit, uranium, a manila envelope of Documents, a pack of gum) to have a picture of me he keeps pressed tight against his heart, or maybe not his heart, his sternum, or maybe he's worried about being strip-searched during an interrogation so he slides some pictures of me -- a few hot ones but also the shitty one I took for my visa where I look 47 and jaundiced -- between some of his lesser ribs, letting the skin knit together over them.
I want to be told exactly what to do.
I think this is called oversharing. It is a symptom of some really severe diseases, including some vector-borne illnesses and one or two viral infections. Sometimes if oversharing settles into the lungs they have to be removed altogether and replaced with bionic organs. This happened recently to a bunch of people in this one town somewhere in the midwest, I think. Contagion spread quick. Nobody had any boundaries all of a sudden, they all talked publicly about their sex lives and their divorces and their parents' sex lives and divorces, in the grocery store they would discuss their sexual fantasies openly over broccoli and jarred pesto and fajita seasoning packets and off-brand dry fusilli. Surgeons in hazmat suits had to be dropped in via helicopter. Everyone is okay now, mostly.
10.03.2025 a belated Viddui
:אָשַֽׁמְנוּ[__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________]
.וְעַל כֻּלָּם אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת
.סְלַח לָֽנוּ. מְחַל לָֽנוּ
.כַּפֶּר לָֽנוּ
Goodness is not a state of being, it is a series of difficult choices and small actions.
.וְעַל כֻּלָּם אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת
.סְלַח לָֽנוּ. מְחַל לָֽנוּ
.כַּפֶּר לָֽנוּ
The carbon monoxide detector has been beeping daily for weeks now. It beeps once a minute, I poke it with a long stick, it shuts up for something like 25 hours, then it beeps again. It's beeping now. I need to poke it with the stick.
In the past week or so I've eaten a truly obscene amount of bread, cake, donut, sugar, butter, oil -- genuinely, a devastating amount. Probably enough to catapult me into new risk categories for several incurable diseases.
.וְעַל כֻּלָּם אֱלֽוֹהַּ סְלִיחוֹת
.סְלַח לָֽנוּ. מְחַל לָֽנוּ
.כַּפֶּר לָֽנוּ
09.30.2025 (REALLY Oct 1 bc it's now 1:13am)
I have somehow stayed up until 1:13am ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ You FOOL Ella.______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Tomorrow, if I scroll or spiral, I will force myself to write down every single video/photo/ad I see.
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2 job rejections today.
Need to start moving out tomorrow.