I love that so many of us need solace from things that were actually mean to advance society. This feels like that to me!! Thank you for reading :) I still have a profound need to communicate with strangers & be seen & be known but I continuously feel like I am sharing too much on twitter and even instagram & Idk, I like this medium very much . So many times I’ve posted & deleted, feeling like I’ve shared a secret or worried that something I’ve said has been disastrously misconstrued. Miscommunication is my biggest fear, but also why am I afraid of it? Why am I afraid of anything??? Why aren't I brave & ready?
Reading has been hard over the last week. I don’t know where my head was. I read 40 pages of a book & noticed that I hadn’t retained any information at all. I became really fixated on making my hair grow because I told myself that when my hair reaches past my tits the pandemic will be over. I hate that I’ve spent the last year waiting for a day that has yet to come instead of facing the day that I’m inside of, the one that never ends. Here’s what kept me from reading this week:
DISTRACTIONS as QUESTIONS
-Did my health insurance run out?? (it didn’t!!!)
-Did my cat fall of the roof again (he didn’t, he never did)???
DISTRACTIONS as WHAT I LISTENED TO
-If you haven’t already, listen to Lolita Podcast hosted & written by Jamie Loftus. It really expertly and carefully talks about the legacy of Vladimir Nabokov’s complicated novel. I learned so much from it, about Hollywood (uh did you know Charlie Chaplin assaulted & married a 16-year-old?) about the women who have played Lolita, about how the empathy for Humbert Humbert and the lack of critical reading has put many young girls & women in harm’s way, about how child sexual abuse is ubiquitous & cyclical… so fucking much. The pod comes with a huge trigger warning, of course, because of the subject matter, but I would highly recommend for the English Major and the Film Major. If more film bros listened to this pod, idk maybe there would be fewer film bros.
Holy shit I cannot stop listening to this record. I can’t stop! It will be the ear worm of the winter of 2021, the way Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” was the ear worm of the pandemic spring. Nnamdi is a genius & I’m happy he was recently featured in Malcom & Marie though I am probably not going to watch it because I am already caught up on **discourse**. I don’t know how to talk about music except being like “this is innovative & genius & I love it” but this is innovative and genius and I. Love. It. Listen if you like Dirty Projectors, Moses Sumney or Blood Orange, or the way the drips of water sound on tin roofs or how your mom signs off on voicemails.
DISTRACTIONS as LOOK at WHAT I DID
-I interviewed Aimee Bender for Electric Cereal back in December & we talked about intrusive thoughts & bonded over what it’s like to live inside a brain with OCD. Transcribing this was fun & also I’m horrified by how I can only ask questions by talking about myself :) Aimee is one of my all-time literary heroes & talking to her felt like talking to a warm, lovely English teacher or my aunt, who is actually also a warm, lovely, English teacher. I guess she just reminded me of my aunt. I love her immensely.
-I blurbed Cat Cohen’s new book God I feel Modern Tonight which you should read!! It gave me much-needed levity & I for real for real wrote many poems after I read it. She used to write poems on her iphone notes & I would be on the train ride home to my apartment in Boston writing notes in my iphone too. I’ve always felt a poetic kinship to her, and love the way she uses The Confessional. We are all guilty little freaks.
-I sent out 37 individually-made Valentines to strangers. I’ve been doing this since 2017, when I was living in Jamaica Plain and there was a huge snow storm and I put on Helado Negro & decided to sit on my floor and be fucking quirky like my name was Daisy Bloom & my room was lined with many ukeleles. Some of the Valentines have little confessions or secrets, some of them are about being in love at the end of the world, some of them are about fictional end-of-the-worlds where people find each other anyway. I am as morose as ever and still obsessed with love. The money I made from it all went to Bed-Stuy Strong. Here are some of them:
Reading this, I wondered if I was sick of translations or if I was just really anxious for the two days that it took to read this. As I’ve said before, with translations, I feel like you have to be a really good writer to get it right and otherwise they are so boring fuck!!! They’re always like “This wasn’t there before, I thought. The wind blew hard.” I don’t know!!! Puloma ordered this book to Greenlight Book Storebecause she knows I love to walk & she’s a good friend who misses me. I love you and I miss you, Puloma. The Hole is about a woman who moves with her husband to this eery remote place. There are big David Lynch vibes. They live next door to his parents. She falls down a hole one day and a mysterious woman helps her up. Then shit gets weird. There are a lot of cicadas and creepy smiles and mysterious dog-like animals. She doesn’t know what is real and what is in her mind. There’s also this indication that she’s been here before/she is part of this endless heterosexual cycle and that maybe she is her husband’s mother? Some parts were cool and otherwise I don’t know how much I retained because I wanted to stare at my ceiling and be sad and the text was all in one big paragraph!! I’m sorry!!! It reminded me though of this movie tho with Jessie Eisenberg and Imogen Poots called Vivarium, which is about a couple who goes to a see a new house in a creepy, monotonous neighborhood & then they get stuck there & have to raise this baby Real Estate agent & then they die. I guess what I’m saying is that both books play on a very millennial fear that we won’t ever do anything special; that we’ll get married and become a lot like our parents, that all of our dreams and aspirations will never come true & we’ll just settle & die. And like, yeah… that is fucking scary. Monotony is terrifying & we live it EVERY DAY (what fucking day is it, ha-ha…).
It’s dramatic when I cry after reading books but this one really bodied me. Hannah Rego texted me asking me if I read it & I didn’t respond because I was probably staring at the ceiling & then they texted saying WELP SORRY IT’S ON THE WAY!!! Thank you, Hannah. It’s about a woman (omg we never learn her name, I’m realizing… I’m moved) who works as a Temp but a Temp for positions that are kind of surreal: she fills in for a pirate, she fills in as a barnacle, for an assassin, for somebody’s mother. She has 18 boyfriends, who aren’t named until the end but who she refers to as her “earnest boyfriend” or her “tallest boyfriend,” her “food analyst boyfriend,” her “handy boyfriend,” her “mall rat boyfriend,” the list goes on. The boyfriends are one of the best parts of a book that refuses to be categorized. Um, I think it’s fair to say it DEFIES CATEGORY, IT PUSHES THE ENVELOPPEE??? For real, I laughed out loud at this book which always looks concerning (to my furniture) and also I cried out loud (also concerning to my furniture) because the book did that thing where it was so funny that you didn’t notice it slowly cave in on itself to reveals something serious & true. I was all “ha-ha!”then suddenly I was thinking about how precious & impermanent & awful & gorgeous life was? I was like “wah-wah!” It makes you realize that everything comes to an end, which thank god, but also everything comes to an end, which, how could you do this to me, god, are you even there? Do you even give a shit? Which makes me think that this long snow day where everything is the same will one day end but one day I’ll miss it, so I might as well enjoy it?
Here’s a poem
#1
i am hungover bc i am practically 30
& by that i mean in 2 years i am 30
& when its my 30th birthday party
i hope there r injuries
bc of my party guests’ toxic behavior
i hope someone i hate comes by & i’m like hey
what the hell r u doing
here
@ my birthday party… don’t u remember i hate u???
& we settle our big juicy beef once & 4 all!!!!
i don’t hate anybody but it’d be exciting 2 have that much energy.
i’m thinking about lobsters
how they dont die unless u eat them,
how otherwise they grow into big
school-bus lobsters which is pretty
bone-chilling & affirms something
i can’t name. okay, is that true?
i don’t care.
anyway i’m allergic
2 those little red guys.
hey, if we get out of this alive
let’s go swimming.#2
i want to be a musician who is bored
in a foreign country sitting down to write this song!
i wanna be so rich and famous & beautiful that ppl
can absolutely annihilate me on twitt twitt &
i can respond to people & be like
“if u don’t like my content this is yr final warning”!
& then have a group chat of rich famous friends
who are like “ignore the haters, mel!!!”
& i want that one thing,
that I am always waiting for the right time to buy