Me, Tommy Shelby for Halloween: Coming at You One Week Pre-Conceived to the Larger Universe

A quick hello from me! Checking in from week nine of school – upon a recommendation from Delaney I watched “Hacksaw Ridge” earlier today which sent me down a rabbit hole on the internet. According to my research, nine weeks is how long it takes you to complete Navy bootcamp. Nine short weeks takes you from civilian to sailor. (They ate with that little full identity world transformation type pitch.) I wish that nine weeks here had taken me from civilian to scholar. Alas, that is just not the case! Ohhhhh but how much time do you guys want to guess that I spent contemplating if it would have just been easier had I in fact joined the Navy instead of grad school.

I looked up the physical requirements. I can’t swim all that well and I don’t think the Navy probably wants a uniformed soldier doggy paddling in the water, but I could learn quick! I can do a plank and pump out 17 pushups in two minutes easy. Thanks to Peyton I have made them a part of my (almost) daily routine. I started out struggling to do ten in a row. I can do ten easier now and I don’t really have to pause around five or six like I did at the beginning, but I am working my way toward 15. I can also hold a plank for a minute. Part of being a perpetual, self-torturous asshole is being able to bargain with myself. When I hold a plank the first 15 seconds are me enjoying the song I’m listening to, shortly after that it gives way to deal making (i.e. “if you stay up the whole minute you don’t have to run another mile” or “think about how miserable you were while running, you did that for ten minutes so you can do this for 30 more seconds”) usually sprinkled in with a bit of self-degradation and loathing, and by the time that’s run its course I usually have around 15 seconds left. Then I like to do this little sway thing where I shift my weight forward and backward on my toes and to my elbows – I’d like to think it makes it harder and works some super-secret part of my core that isn’t unlocked by the normal plank, but I think it really just makes it easier after staying in one position so long. And I do that usually three times per workout. And the only other entrance requirement for the Navy is to run a mile and a half in 15 minutes or less. To be so honest with you all, the thing that deterred me most wasn’t the rigorousness of it, it was imagining myself wearing the slicked back bun, exercising in wet clothing, and having to clean the fucking barracks. Maybe I am too self-confident, but I was trying to (and if this doesn’t reek of desperation, I don’t know what does) rationalize the strength of my resilience and self-discipline and imagining that if I could theoretically graduate from the Navy, I can definitely complete four semesters of graduate school and walk across The Lawn with my MA diploma in a year and a half. I can so do that, right?

"There remains a yearning within my subconscious that cries out for a sacrifice, and so I offer up a faint shadow of a proper vice and drink Diet Dr Pepper".

(John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed) 

I am on my couch right now in my apartment watching Sleeping Beauty with a Diet Dr Pepper. I found out from John Green (makes it sound like he told me... no I just read him again) that they took out the period after “Dr” because they thought it made the label too difficult to read. Now, for the above quote to be entirely applicable based on its broader context (which I have failed to include here) first I have to actually give up said vice. And nicotine, my friend, you are a lover I will be glad to see go. I am in my pajamas and was listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man” while I took a shower. That’s a change up from my usual Dear Hank and John or The Broski Report, or more recently I have been listening to this audiobook type of thing by Penn Badgely. He talks about love, loss, and coming of age. The Leonard Cohen album was nice. It made me feel old. It made me feel for a second like I should be here and like maybe I am an adult. What is performativity? But also, I listened to his “Paper Thin Hotel” about a cheating lover. *Activated! (as Aliana says) Now in fight or flight!* I thought of “Undo” by The 1975 which, to me, seems like it echoes Cohen:

Paper Thin Hotel:       The walls of this hotel are paper-thin

Last night I heard you making love to him

The struggle mouth to mouth and limb to limb

Undo:                          Bombs have run out

Call 'round the town

"I could hear you giving her head," she said

You think we're doing it again?

Keep dreaming

And you know what? It doesn't echo Cohen. Not even a little bit. They’re entirely different and just both talking about hearing. But in my brain, what I hear are the echoes. Similar to how I find Taylor Swift’s “we gather here, we line up, weeping in a sunlit room” an exact reincarnation of Matty Healy’s “Twist around the lounge / Sun drowns the house”. And they’re not twins, fuck, I mean they're not even cousins. AGAIN, IT'S JUST THE SUN... but to me they are. And this is exactly what Saskia was talking about last night when she told me that no one here knows anything. They know a lot about one specific, niche thing but all of their research is just them making guesses and seeing if it’s true. I guess in my own brain these are my guesses and that’s my research. God knows if I will make it. I only worked Saturday of this week – I gave up all the rest of my shifts. I feel lazy even though I went to the gym and I am writing and I am not spending money and I am going to use all of tomorrow to work on school. I don’t feel like I am ever doing enough. I will never know enough. And I think that is just what this field is. I am not a scholar, but I am doing scholarly work. And that’s what the feeling is, too, I think: a drifting with an occasional moor. But at what point does the drifting ever not feel like sinking? Maybe it doesn’t?

My favorite thing to make recently has been steamed broccoli. I become more and more like my mother every single day. I bought eos body butter; it’s the cashmere scent. That has been making me feel good at night and has been something to look forward to at the end of the day. It’s also a good motivator to moisturize! Trying not to let self care fall between the cracks! My body feels like this fucking vessel of primal struggle right now and I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Make. It. I don’t know how to make it sound good, feel good, look good. How do you write like you know what you’re talking about when you feel like you’ve been launched into the ether? “Sounds good, feels good”… who said that? Oh, yeah. My recent in-traffic-on-the-way-to-the-gym anthem. I was told by a coworker last night that I looked like I got “rode hard and put up wet" – to clarify: not sexual. And I have been. I am currently.

I see what I’ve learned everywhere. My brain lights up like a Christmas tree all day, every day. I have ideas and I feel like I am teeming with excitement about the most important things in the world – feeling, literature, poetry, mourning, death, body, love, home, pain – but I go to write it down and I don’t know how to get it out. And what is my voice? What even actually is it? Every writer has one. Is it this? No. This is unsmart and incoherent. But maybe you can’t want a voice, maybe you just have one. I just have to find it. This is just my own Ulysses stream. Not a consciousness, but an inner monologue. Was that Joyce’s voice? Good God. Was it? Because it is him, but it’s his characters, and they are their thoughts not his. It’s his implied meanings, but those aren’t a voice those are… what are those? Personal aphorisms? Aliana is a writer. She’s a really, really good writer. She has found her creative voice and her writer mind works in such amazing ways. I am happy to have a writer friend. Oh, to find that voice. Maybe someday I could be a creative writer – *clears throat* my own personal genesis resulting in an actual, successful mimesis of all the pain, suffering, and spindle fibers that connects all of that with the resounding hope and beauty I experience every single day.

I read that and I hate myself, hence the problem.

One of my professors finally called me out on what I would classify as my disastrous, emotional comma usage in one of my papers. I got an A so maybe I can still fix it. I knew he was right and honestly, I am so appreciative that he took time to actually explain the mechanics of the problem to me because its one of those things that is hard to see when you're the one in it. It's like a damn relationship the way I lean on them. Like I said: I ha,ve an e,motional, reliance, o,n commas,. I use them where it feels right! Apparently they just don't feel right to everyone. Honestly, part of me that hasn’t mastered that whole fragile ego thing wanted to be like, “Oh, this is just my thing. That’s how I roll.” *queue the Mike Posner song and Delaney singing in the ISMS locker room with her electric purple Nike's on* But in reality he is so fucking right. Self loathing and defensive simultaneously; I contain multitudes. “I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns.” (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

She’s about to prick her finger on the spinning wheel.

I am making a habit of going to the gym for myself. Aliana and I have been going together. Going to get myself right – eating right, working out, I’ve got to be ready for Gabby’s wedding in May! My fish do, too. They're being fed once a day now. I was overfeeding them. It will be here before we know it. The days are long, but the weeks are short. Oh, yeah, and that fuck ass date I went on a while ago (group date, first one since the you-know-what) texted me last night for the first time since he acted a freak: “Come to Fitz”. Who do you actually think you are talking to right now? Goodbye men, hello me. Hello, John Donne and American wildness. Maybe I am just fucking self-centered and that’s why having the blog appeals to me? Maybe all writers are a little bit? There is something inherently self-important about it. You can’t have a fragile ego as a writer, something I learned very quickly and am still trying to put in practice. Professor F said: “A beginning writer is anybody under the age of 67.” Okay, so still me. Thank God. Also, 67. Also, I don’t even know what that means. It’s the new 1738 from what I can understand. (Thank you, Elle.) I am off to read some Malory and probably watch Gilmore Girls. I also started that which has been a good thing. It feels good in my heart. Going to the gym in the morning with Aliana again! We tried to get Dunkin afterward today… tell me why they were out of the cereal milk coffee, mind you, the biggest thing on the menu. And then they were out of caramel. Ok! Anyway, we both got the candy bar latte.

1,800+ words of vomit and I have to produce 60 pages by early December. I am going to throw up. Probably going to make a few deviled eggs first, though, add kalamata olives on top thank you so much.

Goodnight, everybody.

Virginia Woolf