Faust

February 22 2025 14:47 Spring is trying to break through. When I hung out the laundry on the line today, the wet clothes numbed my fingertips with cold, but the sun warmed the backs of my legs. It is the time of year when the seasons fight childishly with each other. Their hearts aren't in it because they know the inevitable, but they bicker anyways. This is why in February we get the sun on our legs but the cold on our backs, or the sun shining in your front room, but your backroom is cloudy or even rainy. As I get better, I become aware and appreciative of more things. As I get better, I start thinking something so mundane as the sun hitting my legs is something that needs to go in my journal. And then I think about how people say suffering brings better art, and all those "Starry-Night-Wouldn't-Exist-If-Van-Gogh-Wasn't-So-Sick"-isms, and how ridiculous they are, because when you are sick you only ever have energy to think about how sick you are, and how you're not making the things you want to make, and how the sun on the backs of your legs isn't anything because you'll be dead some day. To me, the attractiveness of hopelessness, and art about hopelessness, art made out of hopelessness, and so on, is not that it's deeper, or more heart-splitting. It is that hopelessness is as mortal as anything else.

February 14 2025 16:48 Happy Valentine's Day. I love you! I'm reading a book titled "Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead." It;s by a lady named Olga Tokarczuk. It's a nice dark blue colour, and it's sitting right next to me. I had to refer to the spine to get the author's surname right. My friend recommended it to me last I saw her. She hadn’t read it but she said it’s supposed to be really good, she'd said. It has a clear sticker on the front, says she won a Nobel prize in literature for it, so I was sure it’s popularity wasn’t unfounded. And I was correct; it is very good. One thing I notice about our protagonist is that, save for her reclusive nature, she is nothing like me. She is extraordinarily empathetic, and invested in astrology. We would maybe pair well if we were being grouped based only on eccentricities. I think I would hate her, but she is very kind. I don’t do well with sensitive types, not that there is a problem with them. We need every kind of person on this earth. I enjoy reading about people who are just like me, but there is also a unique pleasure in reading about people whose dispositions are so dissimilar to yours that you could never conjure it up in your own head. Just like how in dreams, the brain only presents to you people you’ve seen before, even if you don’t know them by name or even by face. I think it isn’t a stretch to suggest the same thing for personalities and habits. It’s important to understand as many kinds of people as you can, or, if understanding is too big a venture, which it often is, to realise and acknowledge and appreciate that such people exist. It makes you stronger.

January 20 2025 23:10 I wanted to begin with saying January has not treated me well, but I wondered if maybe it was that I did not treat January well. I’ve got anaemia, the doctor says, and I sleep too much no matter how much I eat. I saw an interesting woman at the butcher today. She was very loud, speaking to her mother on the phone. In the first place, this was how she caught my attention. She wore a black trench coat, more feminine than mine, and a red dress. Maybe forty years old. I was a little bit embarrassed for her, how loud she was talking, but then I corrected myself. I need to understand that being loud is not synonymous with being graceless. If I consider myself a non-judgemental person, I would do well to consider every trait a person can have as entirely neutral until proven otherwise, not just the traits I have or the traits I see fit to embody. This woman was beautiful and had an elegant air about her. She asked the butcher if the chicken through the window was minced. He said yes, but she settled for the whole chicken he was already chopping up for her on his flesh stained counter. The breasts in six pieces, she requested, with the legs in halves. And could I keep the bones for my cat please? I was endeared by the reasoning; I wondered briefly about the cat's name, and I wondered about the scenario of asking the woman “What is your cat's name?” although I never intended to do so.

January 19 2025 20:04 I like the song “Punish” by Ethel Cain. I have been humming it to myself, but some of the notes are a bit weird. I think my family don’t like me, but I’ve known this since I was a baby, so I’m not sure why it’s bothering me now. I’m twenty-one years old. Maybe things return to you brand new at the turn of the decade. Since I turned 20, I have cried more in weeks than I have in years. As a teenager, I was proud of my apathy, but it was not a skill so much as it was a dissociative state my brain had conjured all on its own.