a list of open tabs

need to close so my laptop can run photoshop:

zauberball (and the potential for a coraline, straight jumper)

artist duos writing to each other through riso-printed correspondence, which you (you!) can subscribe to and receive

Art for Radical Ecologies (manifesto)

Studio Visits by Chih-Tung Lin (ordered via Instagram dms, for me in Canada)

an interview with Patricia Rozema and Saffron Maeve, on I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, seen months ago at the lightbox

Anne Carson's Totality: The Color of Eclipse

Kaia Gerber's backlog of book club picks (just curious)

A page about em dashes I don't remember opening

Googled lyrics for Imogen Heap's The Moment I Said It

Biches & Buches le sock yarn, mentioned previously in this diary

Several product pages on 100 percent silk shop, regrettably but necessarily closed

Danielle Dutton's Not Writing

a googled murdering of his quote "your worst sin is that you have destroyed yourself for nothing"

Lucy Clout's archived editions of the Good Sleep Ring, in silver, via tenderbooks, via the internet archive

The Serene Steamroller

Shane Waltener's Instagram profile + Walton Flax Exchange

National Knitting Eve

The Persephone Post

The Dry Garden via publicknowledgebooks

The Nose's past book club events

reading

Sillily happy with this project's half-existence: it cannot be left temporarily or permanently as my notebooks are, in my apartment and in my bags, so it must be updated and thought of--but, crucially, with myself as the only reader. Myself in the future as the only reader: me a minute from now, reading this back immediately after posting, me next week after I write the next entry, me maybe in the months ahead. I used to read back old entries I kept on a different blog, but it was traumatizing and horrible to think about myself at 16, again, so clearly, living with terror perpetually. Occasionally I wish the sites I kept even more writing on--fictional, or life updates sometimes, often fictional as well--weren't wiped and lost forever. I used to literally(!) write chapters in the captions of Youtube videos. Used to post one shots based on randomly selected songs onto fanfiction sites whose focus I didn't care about. A grace, probably, that I can't access them again. There's always the option, here, if I really wanted, of returning to notebooks for something that shouldn't be shared--we haven't reached it yet but it is a kind of test for myself.

3:04 am saturday may 11th

Tried to describe this state of exhaustion once to Rachelle, in a different time: my eyelids feeling like sandpaper, my lungs heavy, my soul receding back against the furthest wall of my skull. My hands are so far away from where I really am. Earlier tonight my (noise sensitivity? Tinnitus? If I'm alone in a room I can't tell if I'm overblowing a noise that is there, or if my brain is making up a sound that doesn't exist.) problematic relationship to sound was so terrible I started playing on loop an evil little mantra wishing harm against my eardrums. If I keep talking about my symptoms will it give them meaning

may, again

It's May, again, and soon it will be August, and I wonder if I should make it all the way there, a repeat of two summers ago. My first summer working at the bookstore, a different place than where I am now, where I work on the floor but around different books, where I work at a back office desk surrounded by notes left by other people, where I work on Tuesdays at a basement desk that holds none of my belongings. I don't leave my favourite pens on the Tuesday desk--I didn't have any desk at the bookstore two summers ago.

I don't have to ask to know that it's different this year--I'm not sure, but at least I suspect. Two summers ago I lived in a different part of the city, above shops I couldn't afford to browse in, businesses that sometimes had packages delivered to our stoop instead that I considered stealing but never did. I brought you six boxes--would you please give me a steep discount on the cashmere scarf in your window I look at every year? No one ever buys it. It goes on sale and off again, pretending it doesn't exist on an unseen basement desk in the warm months. I had no AC, I had no working stove, I had mold across my bathroom walls, I had gas leaking out of my kitchen, I thought I was nauseous because of the weird odour as I brushed my teeth, getting too close to the sink drain. I was hot in my apartment--my fan is pointed at my rabbits, under the bed, on the hardwood floors, there are frozen waterbottles in their corners, not mine--and then I was hot on the walk to work, in streetcars, striding up hills in small heeled shoes, long sleeves to hide tattoos like I am sixteen and applying for a grocery store job again, hot on the walk home after working on my feet eight hours, lapping circles and straightening cards, hot walking through the ravine with a scoop of kawartha dairy.

I know it's different, now, to suspect and to wade through the summer all the same. Maybe I should pretend to consider, though? Pretend to be considerate? It's not knowing, not really. I think about a memory from when I was eleven, but I won't share it with you. I think about collapsing on my bed two summers ago at seven pm, book open and eaten beside me, waking up at eleven at night to cicadas through my open window, no reprieve, sweat around my ears and the feeling of having no blood in my body, heavy limbs moving to the fridge and finding only lemon-lime gatorade inside.

levelling

Getting quite stuck on work at a micro-level: word choices, structuring in a sentence, am I remembering this exact detail in a memory no one else can recall correctly. I finish pairs of socks up to the toe--string them off to be measured against their recipients--and then never return to them. Red yarn loops through almost all of my projects. I have a dream, my little sister is in it, and we create small, strange felted creatures in a landscape she creates and orders. I become obsessed with all the tools and materials I need, the design of would-be entities, instead of starting and altering.

Had a conversation with Justin on Friday about many things but specifically on his adjusted metaphor of the ship, its rudder, its sails (your sails), you looking through the glass, the waves, and you, on the island, waiting. I recount a lyric to him of being the forest and the fire and the person watching it. I see the end, I see where I am, I am in it, and most of all, I am spectating it, and overlaying past moments of the forest on top of the current one so it's not at all clear as to where in time I am.

cross-referencing

During a q&a with the editor following Duras' La navire Night, someone notes the disorienting of her other films, of the disembodied voices over contextual images, of images of France shown while a voice discusses Athens. Following Baxter, Vera Baxter, another audience member brings up visual displacement. I listen to the new Between the Covers podcast episode focusing on Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other this same day walking to lunch and on the subway, and Danielle Dutton speaks on writing where one action is happening and then a previous memory or dream is explained--so at once you witness the current moment and still experience a prior one.

In this same podcast episode the host asks Dutton on her referencing system, of writing about and in dialogue with previous reads, reads from childhood. I read and despise Ashley Poston's forthcoming A Novel Love Story, where the protagonist lands in the town of her favourite book series, and think of Wisteria and Elizabeth Chandler, and a town full of ghosts and lakes that I have been dreaming of since I was 11. Claire introduces Nathalie Granger, earlier this week, and I text her that night on the lack of knitting (after a promise of knitting) and mention that the clothing tags for boarding school remind me of Thomas A Clark's Personae project: a set of 4 name tapes, not your own, that I first saw on Tenderbooks' online site. (It takes me three hours to track these down again).

I learn the signs for various languages on Saturday morning and discover my classmate also studied Classics as he fingerspells ancient Greek. I imagine going back to school and fingerspelling the grammatical cases, how the cases were classified by different names in Australia. I learn how to sign how useless I am with ancient Greek now, and how to sign that I go see a movie almost every day.

wednesday-thursday

Oh! Oh! Oh! I forgot to pick up groceries on my walk home and now am eating froot loops for dinner. Oh! Last night I had a conversation with a stranger who told me he knows the pain of losing an impossible love and understands Duras' fear of it--when he first saw Hiroshima My Love, "a million years ago," he hadn't. I worry I haven't. I imagine that I can feel ghosts pass through me.

re: on a return

A realization I turn to the Marías' songs in Spanish I can tune out and allow myself not to pay attention to or translate the lyrics -- a tuning out of the dialogue in La Chimera: words are passing but they're not for me.

on a return

I don't listen to any new music on my own because it's too tiring to sift through (shift through) minutes and minutes and hours of songs to see what sounds like noise and what sounds like music -- and then what sounds like something I like. At work, where I'm subjected to noise regardless, whatever Jess is playing becomes the only new music I encounter in my entire life. This last week, I remembered to write down the Marías when they came up on her queue, and so I've been listening to their discography all weekend on loop. It reminds me primarily (obviously!) of a handful of my mother's sisters, all named María--they go by their middle names. (My mother, not named María, has no middle name). I keep imagining them as a troupe, based off one of the only photos I have of my mom's childhood, dark long braids and striped shirts.

One month of ASL classes and where do I land. With the ability to tell you I hate avocados and your cat is ugly. Told my coworkers after brunch on Sunday morning I have to stop answering the phone soon--first questions are if I would ever get hearing aids, is there any medical solution, would I answer the phone and tell them to email? I get it, but also: okay! I fingerspell in my elevator and wonder if the concierge is watching me on the cameras. I know I have to start signing soon as I speak--in all spheres of my life, and grey skies loom. I am accidentally in the Reference Library at the same time as a weekly ASL social I'm hyper-aware of and feel a wall come down. I don't want hearing people in my life to ask me to repeat what I'm signing so they can get a demonstration to immediately forget. I'm not signing to communicate with you -- I'm signing to communicate with a hypothetical future ally. Do I mind appearing performative if it's for my own wellbeing? Do I mind being performative if it's for my own wellbeing?

I wish every film was a silent film. I see La Chimera again and watch the light. Sometimes don't bother reading the subtitles and think about fate, birds, coincidences. I do feel I've been chasing something for years and am catching glimpses of it, too often for peace of mind, in my dreams and outside of train windows.

second week of april

The first week I started posting entries here I re-read the earliest few and got stuck on all the sentences beginning I, I, I. Stupid, obviously, since this is some sort of diary, and there is no audience. I try to remind myself to just name people; I already know who I'm talking about and their greater context in my life. Who am I picturing in my head as I over-explain? (I think I know.)

When I was seven, my aunt gave me a diary that locked with a key and had a jelly cover--square plastic pockets with different coloured liquid go all the way around. I found it last year in my mom's house, looking for more recent sketchbooks, and it lives amongst stacks of my books now in my apartment. I remember writing in it and didn't have to break the lock to read the entries: she gave it to me at Christmas, when I also received a computer game of Operation. I filled thirty pages in big, wide hand-writing covering every single minigame and larger story, a step-by-step instruction manual. Documenting for the sake of documenting -- and not for myself? Hope to move torwards documenting just for my sake.

la chimera

Coming from class, I go to the screening at the lightbox and mostly think of Shanna. She has been on digs before and after me, but I only did the one, and so she is my dig partner. I think of our mornings, of hiding half-drunk 1L water bottles under our beds, of my boots turned red from the dirt. It was never that everything is beautiful so that nothing is beautiful -- everything was beautiful so everything was beautiful. I think of brown and green fields, crying in la banca, feeding the cats leftover meat from our pasta. I think of being sick, (I can remember any time in relation to being sick). Of not searching for anything, at all. We only moved a few millimetres in depth each day. We comb through a neighbouring farm to pick up pottery and toss it back down, leaving it to get cracked again by their tractor. It rains, we label hundreds of tiny shards with a small permanent marker, looters come to our site, disturb the tarps and let their shovels and the rain move more ground than we did all summer. The sloping hill to the site isn't made up of earth, but pottery. Find a loom weight by the tree you eat lunch against and chuck it into a bush. Visit an Etruscan tomb in an air-conditioned museum basement after-hours. Stale bread, lemon-lime powerade, Mt. Etna from the train window, I think of Shanna texting me from a different city about a novel someone's written (I know it) that's set at the site she worked at after our dig, how everyone from their team has their own analysis. I think of someone in Basilicata having nothing to look for.