for what it's worth

a show of good faith*

Having stood sufficiently still through winter we have made it to Bay Area spring, as in the first days of sun after our one (1) day of tolerated rain. I do not think myself as particularly superstitious but this season I was a skeptic. The year of the fire horse breaks into the Bay Area with thunder and lightning, and I wake to my room being high beamed with white light from beneath my covers. I spend that minute entertaining the empathy exercise of getting hit by a car. Every day since has brought some strange and acute misfortune to myself and the living unit: a power outage, some illness, a phone and wallet stolen, a bike accident, a fire scare, the cover of the ceiling light above my bedroom door falling abruptly and mysteriously in the night — they are the kind of bads that aren’t devastating points-of-no-return but certainly seem to be foreshadowing in a literary analysis haunted house kind of way. A new friend asks me if I believe in God Or Something Like It and I say yes. “Maybe it’s time to have a conversation with your God” she blinks at me.

favored MOMA encounter <3 digital scan traces of annual family portrait

Maybe it’s the Catholic in me that’s trained a scathing absolutist imp to help me interpret the world. That said, with age it is probably the remaining Catholic in me that finds the idea of God most compelling outside of any binaries. But you’ve heard this soap box wail from me before. I suppose there’s an undeserved aimlessness to these days that make superstition tempting. Rebecca reminds me that every misfortune is a catastrophe dodged. I find out my data has been automatically wiped off of a group server. What the fuck (read: gratitude) was coming my way?

This month, in a pure act of free will, we abandon the work day early to go to a Gen (TM) kbbq situation, a test of self advocacy that I always fail. It is a good place to set a coming of age short fiction. The place is under staffed and decorated like a rave so you can choose between dehydrating or breathing in bulgogic carcinogens from neglected grills in the black light aesthetic of a shitty Bay Area rave; an arena where most have already been pavloved into paying for LED discomfort. It reminds me of the Buffalo Wild Wings I worked in growing up, a pillar of local loitering and where it’s embarrassing to complain about the service and out yourself as having expected more. At dinner we try to distill a rule for the permutation of food we never receive and time wasted wondering. Is there a more American pursuit than gamifying the ways in which you’re being wronged? (Read: It’s tax season). It’s just something to do. I have a phantom high school memory of a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where the main character, living in poverty, watches her mother spoon a daily and generous teaspoon of coffee powder into her water even though the child hates coffee. The mother justifies this by saying that she wants to gift her children the fantasy of abundance as in an encounter with casual waste. These days I have been near nocturnal for the fruitless grind of digging a path to graduation with a spoon. If post graduate time is money, these sad 530 PM banchans are my Brooklyn coffee grounds.

The fabled late twenties approach. It feels like my mind is full of cotton balls while I am running out of time to do Whatever I Said I Was Out Here For. Grad students are righteously tomatoed for any scandal by a contemporary’s wedding or baby shower as we are the infantile minority that chose a decade of higher education over assimilating to the American work force. I can remember the idealism that brought me here and the ambitions claimed, and they shrivel against the calendar squares remaining for me to complete them. Failure is no longer abstract, in fact if I were to sit here and stand Very Very Still I would not have to wait long for it to sneak up from behind with its little butterfly net and Swallow Me Whole.

driving to LA and independently finding the same blue stunning enough to warrant the photo on the way there and back - our free will is so short sighted and rather cyclic

Maybe I should be on the market for new dreams. I keep front loading on side quests and soon I will be a thirty year old hoarder of random experience. What are my tokens for this year of life? Some postcards. Some letters. A notebook filled with kanji and another half filled with Spanish conjugations. About 90 students roaming the earth with a newfound though undoubtedly decaying understanding of PROTACs. Lots of plasmids and cell stocks in handwriting I can no longer decipher. A car trunk full of teaching certificates and crayola ephemera. A good number of zines. A lot of (derogatory) partifuls. The harder hitters: new apartment keys. My mom’s hugs, more patient and more knowing. My dad drives me with kindness to the airport for a trip I know he’d prefer I not be taking. He makes a joke and describes his allergy medication ritual with something like comfort and I know I will be haunted by this mundanity for the rest of my life. I don’t know if it’s an indicator of adulthood that every joy feels stolen and therefore triply treasured. I fear I have not triumphed over the defining struggles of the last decade so much as they have been made small by their idealism; become livable fixtures of my developing life.

maddening trace from parade by rachel cusk

All my life I have believed in some gutward tug that would bring me to continually emergent, self-evident self. But lately when I grasp for my primary indicators identity I feel annoying and tired; like I’ve been caught performing the silly little Pinterest board of my personality signifiers. Tumblr maximalism and the hyper personalization of finite options were the early 2000’s shit. But now these things are inferred and served to you with a fake DJ and a wrapped sheet. It makes me feel foolish for the ways articulation has been so precious to my formation. This week I read an absolutely delicious sentence by a research trainee and am horror-stung by the immediate wonder if she generated it with AI. We’ve either taken the fun out of expressing yourself or heinously expanded the basis set of mechanisms to do so. The fleet of 5000 SF AI billboards must laugh at the way this disarms me, but something in my chest has irrationally seeded towards never wanting to write or read again.

What am I trying to say here. Hello substack. I have not written anything in a very long time and it is increasingly difficult to lure my coco-meloned mind outside of its debt paralysis cage in order to form new words; scrounge for meaning out here. But I know that this is something a core part of me loves to do, so much so that current me, the one inhabited by post modern imps, still reaches for it and feels sufficiently guilty when I do not. I know that I bathe in the cringe of a younger self building poetry bridges and using the C word (C*mmunity) ad nauseam and in earnest. I want to believe (as versions of my previously have) that the murkiness of today, even more than the murkiness of yesterday, is bringing me toward a future worth all the tumult. And maybe clarity is not a light bulb so much as the slow transition of previously dilated eyes, emergent in the iterative re-encounter with strife until they have either transformed or, more likely, become casual and mundane — and if mundane, the landscape and back drop for what is on the way treasured.

I must pause here to be clear in naming that I think I Think I THINK I have a love and joy soaked life. I am lucky for the difficulty of these years that has made some of the care, challenge, and sweetness in my life explicit and legible. And maybe I am also lucky for the sweet cache of life that surrounds me, no matter how marginal, that I’ve yet to explicate from obscurity. I need to trust that the numbness of this spring is not the infantilization of my previously functioning sensitivity, nor the receipts of my inarguable failure, not even the Great Fire Horse Curse of 2026; but in fact The Cache Of Formation in which my conscience and consciousness are being continuously forged. Trust the cache!!! say the imps, having revealed themselves to be guardian angels. There are still things worth thinking and saying, and maybe I feed the eye that makes them clearer daily. That is a place to begin.

*quote from a once upon a time Julie notes app exchange, if u r reading this ily much (: