i'm writing this directly into the terminal, which i think is at least a little funny. i dug up my notes from my one semester of computer science classes, but they were useless, so now i'm just googling things like "how to indent a paragraph html." all very stupid. my generation was supposed to know stuff like this! and instead i ended up rather useless, technologically speaking. i think i maybe figured out how to add a music player to my tumblr blog when i was 13 but i don't think i ever got it to work right. probably for the best, given that i most likely was trying to subject my followers to, like, early halsey or something.
so much for this making me look cool, i guess, but that was never really the intention. i'm so tired of ads and ai and all the shit that the internet has deteriorated into. enshittification etc. i used to think that there was a life out there that i could build for myself on the internet - as a journalist, as a thinker, as a writer, whatever. i could read and write and share ideas with other interesting people. but now the internet kind of feels like a decaying husk of itself, and i use it to talk to my friends and send my sister stupid photos of dogs with weird haircuts, and i use it to find interesting people and interesting things to read, but i always feel like i'm being sold something. all the tiktok slop, the amazon affiliate links, the hacks and the dupes and the 10 things you need to know. and the influencers are always lying because that's their job -- if there really were that many miracles to change your life in the world, i hardly believe that they'd be shoppable on amazon.com and brought to your door by exploited labor, and if the miracles were real the influencers would run out of them pretty quickly--anyways. i can feel it rotting my brain. so this is an attempt to get that under control. make myself a little creative space where i can try to create something for once, instead of just consuming and curating.
also because i kind of hate my job right now and i'm bored intellectually and at least teaching myself to code a basic website is interesting. ignore me!
i live in a tiny little northern european city. it's beautiful, but all my friends live one city over and i live alone and work from home most days, so i spend a lot of my time alone. i go on long walks and i look at the ducks and i go for runs. today the canals iced over because it was so cold, and i found a used bookstore near the end of my run and gave up on it entirely in favor of perusing stacks and stacks of musty old penguin classics which clearly had spent the better part of the last century in someone's damp attic. heaven! i did my work and drank lots of coffee and called my mom. i made lentil stew and listened to belle and sebastian and an audiobook and went to my [REDACTED] language class, where i shredded my cuticles to pieces and practiced my verb conjugations and flirted with the guy who sits behind me.
i'm only here for a year, and i don't know what i'm going to do once i'm done with this. should i stay here? should i move back to the us? should i move to a different european country, preferably one where i actually speak the language? i'm still quite young. i don't know what i want to do with my life, which loved ones tell me is perfectly reasonable at my age, but i don't know. i feel a little adrift. i've felt adrift for longer than i'd like to admit. for a long time i was very driven, i had clear goals, i worked harder than i should have. i probably could have had more fun, all things considered. that's not the point, though: i feel like i have nothing to work towards these days, no idea what will happen in the misty period of time after the end of my current stage. in a weird way, i just want someone to tell me what to do, or to find me a job, or to have a place open up in a shared apartment, or something. i'm tired of working so hard, and i'm scared of not having anything to work towards. because then what's the point? what's it all worth?
ok, ignore me, melodrama over, young woman doing confessional writing on the internet ETC. i've been practically adopted by the nice older Greek lady who sits next to me in my [REDACTED] class, she keeps trying to buy me soup and give me rides home. the only language we have in common is the one we're studying in the class, and she's much better at it than i am, so i keep worrying that i'm going to mortally offend her because i'm painfully inarticulate in [REDACTED LANGUAGE]. it's nice to feel a little bit babied, though. i feel like such a fucking dork half the time. or like my heart is on the outside of my body. i'm generally fairly bubbly and exhuberant and loud and enthusiastic, and last night i turned it up to 11 to make sure that my new friend felt ok meeting all my other friends, and i couldn't tell if the aforementioned new friend was kind of into me or whether he was just mirroring the bubbles. i have no idea, i have hardly any guy friends. generally i acquire them by accident (or by sleeping with them and then deciding that they're unsuitable for romance or sex or anything other than friendship). anyways, i'm trying to live deliciously, but last night i slipped down a very steep flight of stairs while hurrying to catch a train and my dress went all the way up and my new friend had to catch me and he definitely saw a lot more than either of us would like. or--well, i don't know, but he certainly has a girlfriend and i do not wish to be a bad person nor am i actually all that attracted to him. i think i just miss having friends. sometimes i just feel like i'm playacting at being a normal person, like i have to pretend to have the same reactions as everyone when actually my heart is bloody and vulnerable and fucking stupid, beating right there on the outside of my chest for anyone to poke or prod or inadvertantly stab.
i should just tattoo "needy little freak" across my forehead, actually. i feel like that would solve a lot of my problems. at least let people know what they're getting into. once, when i was in high school and dealing with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder (and a whole boatload of associated control issues), i had a bit of a meltdown on a trip with my friends. i was cleaning up the kitchen with another friend, late at night in the aftermath, when she turned to me and said, "you know, you're really difficult to be friends with sometimes, but it's worth it because you're so---" and then she sort of waved her hands around, if i remember correctly. it's been so many years but i think about that moment probably once a week: that my friendship was a burden to her, that i was annoying and difficult and Too Much Alltogether. I think she meant the second bit more than the first, but it's the first bit that's stuck with me. it's why i have a journal and write so much and am constantly overanalyzing everything i do: i don't want to be too much for my friends. i want things to be easy, to glide without friction. anyways-- thinking about o'hara, as always - "quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern." from mayakovky. enjoy!
next.