Mom and I wake up at 8 am. Her, naturally. Me, by alarm. There’s a chill in the air, a fresh and promising one. I put on a sweater. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and practice my smile. I look older, it scares me, I keep looking. Mom lets me comb through her jewelry box. Shiny things from Dad, Grandma, exes. I pick out small silver hoops. She tells me they look nice on me. Dainty.
Downstairs, Dad is watching TV - the news. This just in, a murder, a burglary, five fantastic new Bay Area cookbooks. Skipper sleeps beside him, tuckered from his morning walk. We’re going shopping soon, I announce. Nordstrom’s. I ask Dad if he wants to come, even though I already know the answer. Not me, he says, scooping Skipper into his lap. He wags the dog’s paw up and down in a goodbye motion. Have fun. Use the VISA Card for points.
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These days, I spend all my free time being manic on the internet. I’m scribbling notes on machine learning, I’m pretending that lovingkindness meditation is changing my life, I’m discovering hellishly esoteric Twitter accounts that thrive on the false interpretation of buzzwords for comedy, then letting said Twitter accounts make me feel hopelessly unlearned, out-of-touch, and excluded. It is great fun for my synapses and terrible news for my self-esteem.
On the advice of Sasha Chapin, the author of my favorite Substack newsletter, I am also trying to reconcile with the parts of myself that I detest through a process called shadow work. If you run in spiritual circles, you are likely familiar with this practice. Simply, it involves confronting and making peace with your “shadow self”, the hidden parts of you that cause discomfort and inspire icky feelings. To do this, Sasha recommends a book by Carolyn Elliott called Existential Kink, an offbeat self-help guide that theorizes that many of the painful circumstances we find ourselves in are self-generated. Though we claim that we don’t want to be in difficult situations, we unconsciously act in ways that keep old patterns of behavior alive and functional even when they cause us suffering. By bringing those patterns into conscious awareness - or even better, loving awareness - we begin to reclaim agency over our feelings, allowing us to derive pleasure from unpleasant sensations, or recognize the illogic of our actions and change them. In sexier language, we can cum to our problems until they are no longer problems. when worms have sex
they line their bodies up side-by-side like twin exhausts billowing out of a steady plane. fascinated, i read webpages about “simultaneous hermaphroditism” “slime tubes” “segments 9, 10, and 11” and the “clitellum” then dug at wet soil with bare hands, like a pervert, to see for myself. the last time you and i were prone in proximity i didn’t know about the worms yet. i was preoccupied with other things, like the dinner menu and being loved in grand ways. i wasn’t aware that lying next to each other is a goal of its own. i envy the worms, who have less to prove and get to wriggle peacefully in the dirt all around us. My ikebana class is taught by an enthusiastic woman whose name I asked for once but never learned. I call her Sensei, and that summates our relationship well enough that there hasn’t been a need to inquire again. On days when we have class, Sensei sends a morning message to our LINE group chat to confirm who is coming so that she can purchase the correct amount of materials. The chat has a built-in feature that sends a follow-up message in whichever language you didn’t type in - English is regurgitated into Japanese and vice versa. Translated literally by the AI, Sensei’s reminder that class is happening is delivered stiltedly, “It's a flower tonight."
last june i made fruit tarts
to mark a new year and they were "really good!" except for i underbaked the shells and couldn’t find peaches and also the custard wasn’t as smooth as it could have been but no matter we finished them within the week and when you said "i love you" in front of my whole family i believed it easily celebrating life means celebrating moving too fast and making the best of and still not getting it right in the end but enjoying despite Thursday, 3/24/22:
Last night, I mapped out my marathon training plan. For the next eight weeks, the Nike Run Club app will track my movement around the Imasaka-cho neighborhood of Kanoya City, starting from my water-stained apartment building and looping around the FamilyMart, the Air Force base, the daikon farms, the cool-damp forest trail, and the stretches of sidewalk that smell like burning garbage on bad days, petrol otherwise, and delightful cherry blossom for two weeks out the 52 that make up a year. The weather will change from a light chill to oppressive summer humidity. My long runs will increase from ten miles to 20. I will casually run a half-marathon distance practically every weekend, which (if accomplished) will do insane things to my ego. I will run four times a week, aspirationally, and at least three times a week as a minimally acceptable floor. My knees will hurt, my hands will swell, and my AirPods will, with frustrating regularity, disconnect during what would otherwise be the best bit of a run. I will enjoy the jumble of sounds that is my running playlist: female empowerment rap juxtaposed with the latest news from AFC Wimbledon and planet Mars, RadioLab episodes, the wisdom of the exalted Nike Global Head Coach Bennett, and the best/worst of 2010's pop. I will continue to manifest and check for abs despite doing absolutely nothing in service of that fantasy. I will run and run and run, and at the end of one of those runs, I’ll find myself on the other side of a marathon finish line. Hopefully. |
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