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Under the Blanket

Underneath the final punching line, the blanket ripped to shreds, in the mouth of the authority my body was mangled, hanging red, my mom told me not to scream, but what else could I do, every muscle alerting my senses with unwise strength renewed, I hate the rhyming meter of the authorities, the words sung out in grander, my eyes pulse with violent purple before Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, when hearing propaganda, once and here and will, I close my eyes and count my sighs, and become a green, docile ewe

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I do so many hobbies and spend way too much time with people who do the same that I forget not everyone sings, paints, dances, or any other shit we all do.

"I mean wait, you're saying you don't make little clay figurines of magic the gathering characters as you sing showtunes while your friend is in the background painting you doing this...? WTF?"

It's like lacking object permanence or some shit except it's centered around the idea of people lacking the hobbies you do. The only types of people that exist are the ones within my own peer group. I don't get how this could be difficult to understand.

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I look at this one uh from time to time -

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PhD "anti-acknowledgements" by Dr. Rachel Los

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Mountain Religion

I wish mountains could break flesh. I wish they could grow in my imagination through my consciousness, until bursting forth from their seams, rendering me finally able to interact, to appreciate this world.

I imagine that's what death is like, or more so the moments before death.

I grew up Buddhist. Meditating, my mother always drew special importance towards the moments between breathing. This she said was Nirvana. This was where true reality lay. When you weren't breathing this is when everything would become clear to you, when everything would make sense or cease to matter whether making sense or not. This moment between life and death.

I thought the Christian purgatory was like this. I didn't know much about Christianity growing up but my mother always told me it was a lot like Buddhism and so I tried to relate it where I could, to my imperfect understanding of Buddhism my mother, a convert herself -- new age spirituality wrapped in the illusion of tradition -- taught me. And so my understanding of both were flawed.

My mala was their rosary. My bodhisattvas their saints. And all of the chanting was much the same. Mountains would break all of our flesh in the end. It didn't matter what or who you worshiped.

The mountain air was my moment between life and death. It was better than any Nirvana or Heaven. It sequestered my thoughts from my body and left any semblance of the past or the future irrelevant in my eyes. It was violent. Active. Arousing.

I want for the pines and firs to become a part of my veiny body, their roots and dry, fragile branches to be interwoven under my skin. I want to choke on juniper berries and roll around in fresh moose tracks. I never want to cease breathing crisp mountain air and I never want the peaks to become a memory. Hopefully, this mountain can be my death. Hopefully, this mountain can be my new religion.

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the amount of humans in existence right now is actually so terrifying. can we just not.

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When you have to hide the fact that you like the cute pony show from everyone as though you have a body hidden underneath the floorboards.

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Babel review:

Spoiler warning

This book tore my heart out and proceeded to slowly and methodically shred it to bits right in front of my very eyes, eating the pitiful scraps and all. Imagine Harry Potter with its group of plucky students at a school of magic except instead of quirky little adventures the book tackles academia’s role in colonialism. Oh, and everyone dies in the end. Yay :3

Robin, who is stripped from his home in Canton by a father who refuses to claim him, attends Oxford after a childhood spent grueling away at language under the guidance of his father, Professor Lovell. He befriends the rest of the Babblers in his year, all students plucked from their home countries brought to Oxford as conduits for their native tongues, other than Letty who is a wealthy Englishwoman attending Oxford at a time where women weren’t usually allowed admittance. The group bonds over their shared “otherness” the university and its students have thrust upon them and the discrimination they face at the university. After a trip to Canton where Robin is used to help facilitate a start to the Opium Wars, the illusion of Babel is lost to him. He kills his father on the journey home after discovering his intense involvement as well as being moved by his father’s treatment of him, his half-brother, and his late mother. Bruh, this dude was actually fucking vile. Letty however, being unable to understand the trials her friends face, puts into action the group's downfall after they join the secret society Hermes. She betrays the group to the authorities and kills Ramy, breaking the group’s illusion that there could be a peaceful resistance to colonialism. The surviving members storm and hold Babel awaiting a decision by the government to make peace with Canton, stopping what would be the Opium Wars Robin’s father helped orchestrate. The army attempts to storm Babel before Robin shatters the tower using the very act of translation the university breed him for, dying in the process.

"Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?" -R.F. Kuang, Babel

There is no way for me to describe this book without screaming like a dying vulture and pissing myself. It broke me. It likely won’t be a book I can reread(even though I will definitely try anyways). All of the foreshadowing, the trauma the characters go through, how it’s all so real. There’s no way I could read a single page without the ever looming ending beating against my skull. It’s unfortunate, because it’s definitely a book that warrants countless rereads. There are so many profound quotes and one-liners and the author did her research. Like, she DID her research. I'm sure it helps having been a student at Oxford in an area of study that I'm sure certainly helped with the writing of this book, but there is so much more in here than just that, which on its own would have already been impressive enough. Each chapter opens with a relevant quote from literary classics, often in the original Latin, Greek, Sanskrit. The characters are often seen quoting these classics and ruminating over etymological histories together. This book is eye candy for language nerds.

"Nice comes from the Latin word for "stupid",' said Griffin. 'We do not want to be nice." -R.F. Kuang, Babel

My only issue with the book is that I wish it were so much longer. I wish I had had more time with the characters before everything went to shit and even after it all went to shit honestly. They’re all just so interesting and they each have their own special flavor of trauma.

Ramy was definitely my favorite character. He was funny with incredible wit and a survivor’s state of mind. And his method of survival in backwards England facing this discrimination is very different to the rest of the group’s. He feeds into it, manipulating people’s perceptions of him to best suit him for the time and place. He’s an actor, a performer. I’ve met people like him, or at least people who use that same skill, fine tuning other’s perceptions of them to the same meticulous degree. Survival is the one thing on their minds, a trauma response. His death took me out. I had to put the book down and step away for a moment. I should have realized that he’d need to be killed in order for Robin to take action, but alas, I was but a naive little fruit fly caught up in the spider’s web. Oh, and the scene where Robin sees just the mess of his hair in the rubble after he returns to the scene later. I don’t even want to talk about it.

The most impactful scene for me though was when Robin enters the Opium house in Canton, how it breaks down that final barrier for him. He can no longer see himself as a neutral scholar, distanced from the very wars and atrocities the university funds and orchestrates. He is face to face with the demon that killed his family. Opium. England. Professor Lovell. And it hits in a wave of Opium. The fact too that Ramy is present for this scene. Ramy has always been the only thing keeping Robin sane and attached to the world. He’s the one who keeps Robin from jumping off the bridge, who comforts him when he’s distressed over killing Professor Lovell. 

There is so much more I could say on this book, but then I'd never stop and I need to end this soon. Maybe, I will tackle it later. All in all, this book is definitely one of my favorites I’ve read last year. I’ve already recommended it to quite a few people and will continue doing so in the foreseeable future. It has its special place on my shelf. I give it five silver bars that each could have been used to save Robin’s mother…

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#shampooed

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Yes, I know I have problems

I would not have expected the His Dark Materials series to leave such a deep, profound mark across my life. I didn't even make it past the second book even.

But, the idea of daemons stuck with me. And in a time of my life where I was most alone and in need of support, finding no one around who could support me, I imagined what it would be like to have one.

I imagined what it would be like to have a constant voice of reason there to support you, there to work with you and for you, to be there when you needed. I started imagining Lord Asriel's beautifully majestic snow leopard, whom I admired for her reassuring, confident gaze, as a companion of sorts. In the same realm as some imaginary friend.

When I find myself alone, I project my second voice onto a snow leopard and we discuss life together or more meaningless things. I let her walk with me to keep me company. I ramble to her and she comforts me.

I'm demented, but I'm coping and I'm comforted.