relentlesserudition

[relentlesserudition]

ok time to hard launch the fact here too that i'm headed to grad school (again, womp womp) this fall. only for another masters, which is a bit of a bummer, but (between a fellowship and RA work) is effectively entirely funded! this, i am happy about. i dislike this country, but i endure boston reasonably well so we will do this! this will also be my first time doing academics full-time while being adequately medicated for my ADHD, so i have good feelings about what this may lead to.

(also, the UK refuses to offer me a funded PhD. and i refuse to pay £25k per year for 3-5 years as an "international student" for a fucking doctorate) (i have some sadness about this but i've got to delude myself into thinking getting an MIT degree will help me eventually with this goal) (++ i still refuse to take the GRE and without it, i could only apply to three programmes this past cycle that waived/did not have this requirement, which unfortunately, excluded all public policy and adjacent programmes and thus, here we are)

#phd plans

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for the past several months, i have only been doing paper-based journaling — a more doodle-heavy activity for me; not much actual writing involved — and i am now discovering i can no longer write actual sentences and paragraphs. or more correctly: i can technically thump out words in some order but i'm quite shit at it! my sentences? stilted. metaphors? incomprehensible. clarity? like my vision, ever worsening.

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Why Get Annoyed At High School Classmates Who Are Now Parents That Just Want To Show How Bouncy Their Baby Is When You Can Be Annoyed At Complete Strangers For Formulating Incorrect Theories About Taylor Swift's Exes Based On Her Latest Musical Endeavours 

don't like people who get married or have a kid and make it their whole personality.

only having cat can be whole personality.

#online culture

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but jokes aside, i'm suddenly exposed to a lot more of this since reactivating the true hellsite™ that is facebook. sure, all these years, i have been aware via instagram too that several people have made their weddings and babies their schtick, but finding that some folks will create entire albums on fb dot gov of a Single Evening Out With The Family is mysteriously annoying. i wonder why. what is it to me, etc.

don't like people who get married or have a kid and make it their whole personality.

only having cat can be whole personality.

[relentlesserudition]

don't like people who get married or have a kid and make it their whole personality.

only having cat can be whole personality.

#to each their own but like

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girl with the nervous system of a prey animal

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You'll notice that I haven't talked about love. Or about happiness. I've talked about becoming - or remaining - the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it's all about. It's not. It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

— Susan Sontag, from "Notes on 'Camp'" in "Against Interpretation" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) (via Whiskey River)

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i've had to reactivate my facebook account (basically to look for housing options on there since i'm moving to the cambridge area this fall) and—ick :/

#gen/misc

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at the ripe old age of 32, i'm still discovering new! special! physiological responses to my autism that my body is capable of generating: things i've assumed everyone experienced, distresses i ignored, stuff i downplayed for reasons i'm not even sure. anyway, i'm very tired. it has been A DAY. happy autism awareness month, etc.

#autism tag #personal #neurodivergence

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some iMovie bullshit after much too long

#video #life #scotland #Vimeo

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springtime :))

#bostonnnn #life #personal #flora

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everything I know about Dune I know against my will. -_-

also I guess I’m back here??? either intermittently or wholly headfirst — we’ll see. been seven whole months!

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significant shifts in how i want to go on and what i want to report to the world mean i may put this blog on ice (at least temporarily). to live! to live!

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My inner crow is very happy with the shiny shiny (handmade! engraved! identical and gender-neutral!) bands we got :3

#S

[relentlesserudition]

a vow, from early days

Wrote this about (for) S in mid-Feb and then forgot it in an Obsidian vault. Glad that this is exactly how things turned out. :)

Listen. Listen. If and when we commit to each other in a Big and Momentous and Final way — say, with a marriage — it has to be about just us. I firmly believe that every single thing we do is autobiographical and very telling of who we truly are as people, and so this is something we must be honest about as well. We must ensure that we continue to write the story of us in a way that does justice to how it began. Because what a story this has been: to have begun by chance, complete and utter chance! We met in a goddamned elevator, of all places. Then this Thing was nurtured by interest, persistence, curiosity. Then, turning inwards inwards inwards unto ourselves every second we spent with each other, right from the beginning. One evening in the early days when you stopped by my spot in the library, we ended up talking for so long that outside, night fell. I had things to attend to but I didn't want to leave. You had so much to tell me and I had so much for you! Why would we look outside; why would we consider anything else at all? When we did look outwards, it was to show each other things that interested us. A creeping plant that clambered over a rock (what made it stick? We are curious, and we eventually found out — sticky lac!), a woody fruiting fungal spore, porcupine quills on the ground, the sun setting over Hussain Sagar. And this is what I liked best when we were close enough to do this: hold hands and look at the world and each other. I've always considered myself an intensely private person, and I used to think you were more extroverted than I was — because I beheld you in the company of other people, laughing with ease, confident, firm when you had to be. But together, again, we have our own little world. This world too feels very private, our own little cocoon. In our minds, we have our little library, a workshop, the co-owned accoutrements that we will use to create (because what is there to do with this one precious life but create?). In the real world, however, we have something perhaps more important: true, unbridled affection, as much honesty and clarity as we can muster, and a wish to see this through. If we're deigning to go through the trouble of paperwork and getting the government involved in our affairs, then these processes too must mirror our values. If life admin requires the sacrifice of our time — time we could instead have spent with each other — then we will make it the most outrageously honest-to-us affair as we can. And there will be no place or time for ostentatiousness. Instead, I want to consider: what can two private people that love language and stories and each other do? How do we keep this pure and true to us? I would much rather give you a story, because that would mean more to you than any contrived, pre-arranged, edited, airbrushed performance in the world. For this, for you being the way you are, I am so grateful. But what story could do justice to our own? Nothing would ever feel adequate. So we propose instead to give each other the substance of stories: symbolism, space, and time. And the substance of us: attention, affection, allegiance. It is so easy when there's clarity in my own mind. So effortless. This is what I did not have in the years past: my own mind was never truly there. Unlike you, it took me the better part of this past decade to understand and learn to honour who I am. Several years of living alone — and by alone, I mean well and truly and abjectly alone. With nobody to distract me from my duties towards my own mind. What a privilege this has been, though — and what luck, to have met you when I did. You found me after I found myself. Earlier, I was simply lost. I think a part of me still is — or is it undiscovered and unknown to me. And there are parts of you still waiting to be found and claimed too; I see that. We can do the discovering together. All the figurative cutting through the rushes to chance upon worlds not yet known, etc. I get to do this with you. And we get to decide how we begin.

#S #diary #letters

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“To be with G-d is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive of G-d, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

— James Baldwin, In Search of a Majority (1960)

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