11.5.2023

11.5.2023

Time passes so differently on the weekends. I feel like Friday was just moments ago, but here I am gearing up for another week. On Friday some friends and I went to a monthly art festival held downtown, which was a lovely way to recharge and discover a new dimension of this city (one that I've been looking for, at that). I spent much of today in the lab, which isn't my favorite, but it was surprisingly peaceful. For dinner I made stuffed acorn squash and roasted the seeds :) This was my first time making them, but I now have a new autumn staple.

11.8.2023

Goose and I are on the same page tonight. But lucky for him, he doesn't have to take a chem exam tomorrow. I am trying to summon some motivation, but tbh I'm so ready for the semester to be over.

thinking about when i was living in iowa all alone, going through a pretty significant existential crisis. at the time, i was interning for a massive company doing incredibly technical, interesting work that i had always dreamed of doing. despite this, or perhaps because of it, my worldview was in pieces. i could not figure out how to justify the cost of technological progress. i could not convince myself of my own intuition, that it is worthwhile to suffer for some things as opposed to pursuing a life of comfort. i was deeply in my head and had nobody to talk to... except for my friend with benefits, with whom i matched on bumble in the beginning of the summer. we had a peculiar relationship that was damn near professional. in fact, when my internship had ended and we were seeing each other for the last time, he asked to add me on linkedin. he always offered to let me use his shower. sometimes we would get dinner. i never spent the night. that's all to say that my relationship with this kind, albeit reserved boy from davenport was hardly the variety where i'd prefer to vomit up all this dread and doubt and hopelessness. nevertheless, i couldn't help myself, and pillow talk turned into me pleading for answers--what if the sacrifices we make aren't worth anything? what if we're foolish and consumed by our own narratives, and none of it is real? why shouldn't we--like give me a real reason--sedate ourselves and embrace security and mediocrity over freedom, infinity and pain? i don't know if i expected a real response, or for him to even listen. but he paused for a while, and said so very simply,

"what if our purpose is just to help each other?"

Greenhouse reading nooks 🌱

While it might look like an abstract painting, it's actually the surface pattern off a cedar tree trunk washed up onto the beach. I found it to be a fascinating mix of shading, energy and flow. I can see people, fish, the flow of rivers - the record of a whole life story just waiting to be discovered and retold.