April 30 2026

The term "alley-oop" is derived from the French term allez hop!, the cry of a circus acrobat about to leap.

I remember fiercely debating a girl in my college philosophy course. I was arguing that everything is political, she was arguing that only the political is political. I don't know why I remember this debate so vividly. Maybe because of the red-hot streak of assured confidence that bubbled in me. I was annoying. While on a certain level, I still believe my own point... I have started to appreciate and believe something a bit differently. Sometimes, I am exhausted by the desire to couch everything in bastardized socio-anthropological terms. To relate every single thing to a social theory. Sometimes, I think we get the relationship all wrong in the circles I exist in. Most of the time, I believe in a biting, concise, and simplistic approach to analyzing behavior that leaves room for the poetry in between. You are what you are and the labels come forth as responses to political and legal structures. The other gradations are the things you write beautiful, haunting, sentences about. That you fill pages with stilted and flowing stories of and we all find relation or empathy. The moments of quiet in the symbolic plot left for contemplation.

When I read historical fiction, I think about this even more. The stifled and constrained way everyone is described as speaking. There is so much unsaid and that feels foreign in a time when so much is said, in so many ways, dissected over and over and over. While I know people had their own issues with the conservative morality that led to such reservations, I do think it allowed for so much of the self to be revealed in beautifully poetic ways. How can I just be when I've been inundated with analysis of every possible behavior before I even behaved? That is, in my opinion, one of the weirder results of being in online spaces from age 15. I can't even imagine how it feels for those who are younger. It's like we saw the camera and heard the language before we even existed and now I can never tell where the inside of me starts and the vomit of exposure ends.

This is probably just me. I am the kind of person to spill my guts out everywhere to everyone. Maybe I'd feel more like a world within myself if I did a better job of keeping to myself. Writing this here sort of negates that entirely, doesn't it? But all I've known is public, even if anonymous, blogging. I knew that before I knew diaries in earnest. Read It and Weep. I used to beg to be mute against my will.

April 29 2026

So, my roommate is officially moving to Florida with his girlfriend. This means I want to do whatever is possible to move my girlfriend and I out as well. I have a lot of feelings. We've all been living together since 2021. A lot of my feelings are about that. The other ones are about what they usually are about: it is painful to watch straight people be enthusiastically pushed and supported by their families to live together and get married.

April 28 2026

I do love my new haircut. This was a good idea.

I keep having this experience where my girlfriend and I will be out to eat and a table nearby will be having a conversation about lesbians. There are never lesbians at the table. The conversations are always horrible. Homophobic and lesbophobic. Sometimes it is straight men. Sometimes it is other queer people. The conversation is always too loud or too close or the room too empty to avoid hearing it. It is starting to drive me crazy. The most recent time, I think they realized my girlfriend and I could hear and were bothered. We may have startled them a bit.

Lost 100 dollars to a subscription that makes itself incredibly difficult to cancel. Trying my best to be calm about this.

April 24 2026

Today will be the first day I try to bring a new habit into my system. Writing at a bar! It's small but I'm just hoping to loosen up my movement. As Liz would say: high agency individual. I submitted a PTO request to take a Friday off for going to the DMV again. I really need to get this license. My skin looks quite dull which I think is because of my impending period, my lack of water, poor sleep. I am dreading it but I did finally make an appointment to tell my doctor that I suspect I have sleep apnea. Being an adult is so incredibly boring sometimes. I need to work my imagination like a muscle.

April 23 2026

I think I might be a bit depressed. I'm very unmotivated and have been sleeping too much. I don't think it's a heavy depression but more work related.

I wonder what it would look like if I tried to translate my skills into a for-profit job that has a significant pay hike. Maybe I could accomplish some of my bigger goals faster? What is keeping me in non-profit other than my knowledge of the culture?

April 22 2026

I'm coming to this page a bit hotter than usual. I try to express a sweet, soft, yearning to live somewhere else one day with my girlfriend. It--like always--becomes that she is miserable here and needs a change. I never feel a part of this. It'll never be our life. She will never be comfortable or happy.

My office is giving us admin professionals a "free" 1/2 day off of work! Amazing!

I spoke excitedly about my office too soon. I am now drained. Sometimes working for ***** feels so disorganized and irrelevant. I feel like no one and I have no relationships with my coworkers. I can't be good at the one thing I'm good at it because there's a million steps to everything and no one is ever all that helpful.

I was really obsessed with Girls when it was airing. I never knew many other people that watched it. 6 years ago I rewatched it 3 times and found it so comforting. I rewatched it again when I was 24. I've made several of my friends watch it. I need to finish all of the books I'm currently reading so I can read Famesick.

April 17 2026

I feel insignificant today. There are things I'm not pushing myself about.

I have crafted a near complete itinerary for an Ireland road trip with B and G in Spring of 2027. I can't let myself feel completely excited about it yet but this would be a true lifelong travel dream realized. Since I was playing the online Build-A-Bear game where you kiss the Blarney stone and writing a murder mystery novel that takes place in my child-mind's version of Ireland. Woo!

April 15 2026

Sometimes I love journaling regularly but sometimes I realize that for all the intelligence I consider myself to have, my journal is likely to be a repeating dredge of my body image issues. Ultimately, I am quite vapid and shallow and spend significant portions of the day worried about my body, my clothes, my hair, my skin.

April 14 2026

Reading 15 year old reddit threads of women sharing their pixie cuts on their round faces. It is quite wild for me to realize I can't tell what shape my face is. WILL I LOOK GOOD WITH A PIXIE CUT!? Why can't I decide. Maybe over the summer, I'll get bold enough for it!

April 13 2026

We spent the weekend in Boston with Beth's niece. I do love to be around a little baby. She's so cute and sweet and I feel glad I got to bond with her a little bit. It's hard because I feel like Beth is often frozen in a way that makes me feel never fully integrated into the family. I feel less like her partner and more like a sibling. It's this sort of Peter Pan syndrome that I think can come with being gay. No one wants us to marry, no one can push us for kids. All we can do is what we are doing and no external force will ask us to grow up.

April 10 2026

I am not better than that. I still want her to want to marry me.

I do really like my new job but they hired me for reasons related to my love for cleaning up Salesforce data and pulling reports. I cannot yet pull reports because of the October data security breach and they have the worst practices regarding Salesforce records. There are no naming conventions and you can't delete records that aren't real--you just mark them Closed Lost. So there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of gift records that were mistakes or never real and they don't delete them. They don't even have a category to mark them with that communicates this. It is driving me CRAZY! I can't clean up any of this data.

April 8 2026

Beth and I drove to Augusto's shop in New Jersey to get tattoos. I'm working on covering up and balancing my arm and then removing some others on my left side. I just want to get to a place where I feel like my pieces reasonably compliment my body and each other. I only want 1-2 more ornamental pieces after the removals and then I want to take a very long break. Tattoo regret is difficult. I do know that it is more just an obsessive thought process than a real regret because it didn't happen until I started the process of straightening my teeth which was the thing I focused on the most before.

I feel numb to the world right now. Everything is so horrifying. Reading I Who Have Never Known Men and facing the abyss of grass and gray skies and vast expanse of no people, no vegetation, silence, and the slow hum of the prose. It was weird to sink into yesterday at the same time as all that is going on. Now, I'm reading BlackWave by Michelle Tea and it is set in the early 2000s but one where climate change has ravaged more of the United States. There is no water and no native plants and no sushi following mass fish extinction. The descriptions of the sun she writes feel impending. It is rattling me.

I'm sitting in bed with my space heater on because I can't afford to turn the heat back on in the whole of my house. I'm listening to Transatlanticism on CD in the tiny radio I bought for 3 dollars. My hair is clean and my soap smells like vanilla and lavender and warmth. This is what is grounding me.

April 7 2026

I am feeling a bit more collected after a weekend of intense paranoia and obsessive thinking. April and May are months of calm.

Sadly, I think I have to take a season off from the community garden. They are implementing member dues--which is very reasonable--but I had every single thing I grew last year stolen. I can't pay for that. It was a lot of hard work that just resulted in tears and anger as I ripped vines out of the ground. It's hard to walk there and water the plot in the high sun since the walk weaves through two of the worst blocks in my neighborhood. I bought five-gallon buckets and will tend to some produce plants on my porch while hoping a different garden nearby tells me they have space.

April 6 2026

I don't have much to say today. I'm not working very hard right now because I keep getting distracted by the many things in my house I want to get rid of. Some of them I want to replace. The hardest ones have been the table by my front door and all these gold frames. It's very habitual the way the season changes and I feel moved to shake my whole house up.

April 3 2026

I'm sure my exponential increase in caffeine consumption has no relation to my terrible, no good, sleep habits. Right

April 2 2026... at night

Nothing makes me feel more infantile, more petulant, than the green-sick envy I feel when I see a beautiful woman. Especially if she is a feminine lesbian. Will I ever grow out of this? It covers me in a sickly desperation that practically has me clawing at my skin and selling all of my clothes.

I want to be bold enough to try a pixie cut. I wish I knew what it would look like before I did it but isn't that the pain of it all.

April 2 2026

Sometimes I worry that my peers and I grew up too aware of what every previous generation thought about themselves. We are bogged down by realizations not fit for our age and it stifles us. I read books about people who really did wild things in the streets they live in and everyone I know can seem so timid in comparison. I don't know if I want to have us in the gutters like this but there is a grittiness we definitely lack. Maybe that is a good thing? Maybe I am too interested in what would make a riveting story. Maybe I am tired with the unpoetic, unconvincing, self-analysis everyone around me engages in. Sometimes we seem too self-aware, too self-observant.

I finished reading Valencia by Michelle Tea. It is obviously, and admittedly, inspired by Chelsea Girls. I am impressed by the alcoholic loss of responsibility. It is something I cannot ever give myself. I grip the plans and structures and routines I find correct and respectful with a white-knuckle grasp. These people were loose. Alcoholic poverty can do that. More importantly, there were a lot of them in one space moving in and out of homes and bars with a community recognition. Lesbians. This is what I feel gets lost when people focus too much on where else they could be rather than where they are. Cities used to be a place to strive to in their own right. Everyone seems to be trying to get away now.

I'm on a roll with the reading. Valencia and Patience and Sarah and Native Tongue all finished in March. Now, I am reading another Michelle Tea book and I Who Have Never Known Men. I love reading.