nympho-maenad

[nympho-maenad]

June 25, 2025 | 20.

Marianne Gram Hansen

My current obsession. There's truly nothing like her illustrative work...

[nympho-maenad]

June. 25, 2025 | 20.

Aubrey Beardsley....

THE filthy freak. Depictions of the Grotesque, Decadent, and Erotic.

Many plans to get Beardsley's work tattooed on my torso.

[nympho-maenad]

June. 25, 2025 | 20.

Kay Neilson

I worship Neilson's work. He might be my absolute favourite artist and biggest inspiration. His illustrations haunt my dreams...

The world's this man made, completely unreal.

[nympho-maenad]

my baptism. circa. 2005

[nympho-maenad]

june . 24 , 2025 | 20 .

synchronicities are telling me that i will live in a sweet little apartment. my space will be full of love, it is filling up this very moment. our future is underway, unfolding as we speak.

[nympho-maenad]

[nympho-maenad]

june. 23, 2025 | 20.

no masturbate today... im so strong

ritualising my period-induced celibacy. not just no sex, there shall be no jorkin it (kms), and no being freaky in mind or spirit. my period will be my nun week, where i am very pious and meditative, which will counterbalance my normal freakiness. this makes sense to me

#romanticizelife #thisisnotnunsploitation

[nympho-maenad]

june. 23, 2025 | 20.

laundromat trip last night, our dryer is broken.

the parking lot has a damp chill looming above the asphalt, and the midnight sky sooths the cathode-fluorescents from my retinas

inside, it's ambient, warm, and the air smells of cotton - i saw the future in there.

i walked the route of my future self, apartment-bound and not alone. doing our laundry on a wednesday night, i'm reading, sitting on that plastic chair, and the machines whir. i feel just the same as i do now.

turns out I love the laundromat,

felt real consciousness for the first time in months inside

today I feel fresh, and real, and very calm; i've got a strange urge to go back

i'll return once my socks run out...

[nympho-maenad]

june. 22, 2025 | 20.

Internal landscape, as of late.

I never know where to put this, and it sounds ridiculous to hype up in some string of pros, but I've grown uninterested in themes of holiness and divinity. Not divinity in its entirety, just the type that's transcendent from the body. I'm uninterested in divinity that's "above" the material, divinity that gains its "holiness" through its denounciation of earthlines.

My educational upbringing was quazi-pagan, if not entirely pagan (that's something that happens when you were educated under the pedagogy of a German mystic philosopher). My early childhood was imbued with ritualism: archaic practices revived inside underfunded schoolhouses, chorus recitations of memorized verse punctuating each hour, and teachers clad in wool and silk. I was primed to be a filthy earth worshipper. It's not right for me to say I dislike the divine. I'm actually quite stuck in a tendency to fixate on the blurrier edges of reality. Really, I'd say that my concept of divinity is inherently bodily, sensory, baked into the blood of our veins and mud of our earth.

I can't really describe my sense of spirituality or godliness. I don't believe in a God. I don't believe in "god" or anything of the sort. For the most part, my belief is existential. I don't feel as if there's anything there. I think that we create "something". Yet, my mind fights against an instinct to bestow a mystic quality upon our acts of meaning creation. After all, creation has always been the ability of Gods. I could drop an evil Nietzsche quote, but I'm not rotten enough.

Apart from creation, I find divinity inside negativity. By that, I mean nothingness makes the existant more real. I can't describe it because words aren't the medium for this; the medium is sensation. Nothingness hits me with the presence of subliminty. I love bare landscapes, a black sky, and the way social restraint disintegrates when clothes slink off in the presence of another. I prefer harsh nakedness over heavenly idealism.

All of this, and it haven't explained my mood board, whoopsies

I needed to open with that because I know the collage looks a little disturbed. I needed to explain how liminality is synonymous with my spiritual atmosphere. The spindly lines and unfolding are reminiscent of a personal reconsitution of mind. I've had a terrible phase of personal disintegration. This past year, life wore down my heart and spirit significantly. Rather than chilling out and recovering, I ate away at my self-image like a nasty worm. After an intense period of self-dissection, I've worn myself out of that, as well.

At this point, I feel neutral about myself (which is better than unsympathetic or ashamed). I feel ripping apart the more egoistic picture I had of myself left me with the skeleton of me. Now, I feel like I see myself for what I am. Identifying through what I am, over what I could be, or fail to be, feels right. This collage is sort of like a mirror for something I can't see or describe particularly well (my mental landscape).

Too tired to write more. I conclude by stating that I'm in the right place.

goodnight.

[nympho-maenad]

Ice Storm ~ Montreal, Quebec, Canada 1998

[nympho-maenad]

June. 15, 2025 | 20.

having your cuticles removed for a pedicure is like getting circumcised; i am shaken.

[nympho-maenad]

[nympho-maenad]

June. 15, 2025 | 20.

MY LOVE: COMMONPLACE BOOK

I think I've gotta go analog again. I'm discovering that a digital journal doesn't do much for me. I've stored away so many drafts, mostly because they're too depressing and/or have no place in the public.

For about 3 months of the school year, I kept a very active commonplace book that doubled as a diary. The miraculous miraculous things it did for me. I find supreme satisfaction in having an intimate log of my thoughts. My discomfort with the impermanent nature of thoughts and identity is longstanding, and keeping a commonplace book (not just a diary) really quels my dread. Especially for significant moments and experiences, I quite like having a written account to keep some version of it alive. Despite my fear of passing time, I actually don't read my journals much. I have a good stack of written diaries and an enormous 150-page Google doc completely filled, but I don't touch them.

I suspect the satisfaction I find in cataloging my life is in the action of writing. When I had meticulously kept my commonplace book I felt more and more that my experiences, thoughts, and learning weren't actually complete until I wrote them down; I think writing has turned into a form of mental appraisal for me.

Another reason why I love the commonplace book is that it really encourages me to write down things that I've learned in an immediate and non-stressful way. I'm certain that writing down thoughts on books, lectures, and conversations is an essential step in how I learn. Partially fueled by my anxiety of being dumb and vapid (internalized misogyny, booooo), I feel as if I need evidence of things happening in my brain. Especially post Second Sex read I'm mortified at the possibility that all my thoughts lead back to myself, I desperately want to exist externally. Anyway. So. Yeah, I've found the commonplace book to be the most helpful tool for keeping me sane and letting me catalog and build ideas. It's great to have a web of information in your mind, but I think writing them down thoroughly and continuously aids in developing ideas.

(Forgive how long this ramble is)

On top of allowing me to internalize, specify, and archive my ideas, commonplace writing is such a calming outlet for just speaking and exploring my ideas. I find it very difficult to speak in academic spaces. In any space other than my very kind friends, I have a deep aversion to saying that I believe something or proposing ideas that could be wrong; the inability to speak for yourself really sucks in real life, and especially in the discipline of philosophy. I'm only now coming to realise that my inability to speak sets me back so far in philosophy, as it necessarily happens in conversation with peers. Of course, my insecurity about speaking comes from personal experiences growing up, but my brilliant friend also pointed out that growing up as a women hasn't exactly conditioned me to feel that I'll be taken seriously. My male friends and partner (bless him) have the confidence to speak without fear because they've implicitly been taken seriously and listened to their entire lives, they didn't have to make space for themselves, let's alone their opinions.

Sorry that was a tangent- that's all to say, my commonplace book helps a lot with my confidence for developing ideas. Tumblr is a good place to share them, but I think my Tumblr is gonna be less frequent and more polished from now on. I do still find it very scary to tag things in philosophy, so Tumblr is actually really great practice for that too.

Okay, I love yall, goodnight!

[nympho-maenad]

Empathogen grabs me by the shoulders and shakes my soul so violently I have to grip that shit and pull it back it IT'S FUCKING INCREDIBLE

I HAD THE CHANCE TO SEE WILLOW TOURING IT AND I DIDN'T GO FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME

EVERYTIME I LISTEN TO IT (DAILY) I'M REMINDED TO NEVER BE DISHONEST AND FAKE WITH MYSELF EVER- I WAS TOO EMBARRASSED TO GO BUT NOW I LITERALLY DIE A THOUSAND DEATHS DAILY THINKING ABOUT IT RAHHHHH

[nympho-maenad]

may. 30, 2025 | 20.

i'm stressing the wrong beat in this, which is why it sounds a little off. i just started playing with it, so i'll definitely fix that and maybe add some more harmonics to make it flashier.

i was in the room while my bf rehearsed for an upcoming gig. listening to him fiddle with the music and compose his own bass line reminded me that i'm also a musician. i got some advice from my dad's best friend (who ironically was my bf's bass proffessor) and he told me the essential skill of a good musican is the ability to copy things. so i'm learning "Should've Known Better" Sufjan Stevens by ear. it's probably my favourite song of all time, but Sufjan copywrite strikes any available sheet music of his songs, so you have to learn his pieces by ear. i'm a classical pianist and have been religiously attatched to sheet music, but i'd like to try connecting with music directly. i've been playing piano for 14 years but don't feel like much of a musician, i hope starting to learn things on my own outside of structured lessons helps with that.

Sufjan Stevens and Luca Guadignino never fail to send me hard into me feels. here's an homage to them and an attempt at trying to move my messy ah feelings outside of myself.

yesterday i rewatched Call Me By Your Name, with my bf. today, woke up to a dire aching of my heart and puffy eyes: the continuation from a tumultuous night. found that im really sensitive right now, so I'm trying to pull myself out of my head and onto something external. i'd really like to exist outside myself more, do and see things that aren't reflections or reminders of myself. i feel like i project a mirror onto external reality, trying to find reflections of myself, trying to "find myself" through external identification; really, i think i need to forget myself. trying to find things to identify also means projecting myself onto those things, i'd like to experience life without seeing myself everywhere, that's not how i'd like to live. i'm sick of myself.

[nympho-maenad]

cult of the self, colorized

these are too self-indulgent for the main, but too tea for obscurity

[nympho-maenad]

May. 26, 2025 | 20

Post-Read Thoughts on the Second Sex

I just finished my read of the Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir, like 5 minutes ago!

It took me a long time, I read it intermittently over 2 ish years, with the majority of it being read last summer. Formative, formative work. Having read the last bit after my first year of a philosophy degree, I have foundational knowledge of early modern + modern philosophy now, so I can actually recognize the terminology and concepts that she's building on. My new eyes totally strengthened my understanding of her philosophic groundwork, particularly her use of dialectics, historical materialism, and her understanding of "transcendence". I found that the last sections that I was significantly more affected by the last sections, and that's likely because I have a better understanding, now. Knowing this, I desperately want to reread parts One and Two. I think that I will reread sections throughout the years, and maybe do a full reread once I finish my philosophy degree. I'm excited to come back to it once I've got a wider and more thorough foundation.

I wanted to write about the parts that really stuck out to me, but I'm honestly too embarrassed to share that. It honestly feels far to intimate and revealing to share what my takeaways were because they're evidence of the parts of myself that I'm most disappointed in. I feel hopeful after my reading, but she's opened my eyes to the fact that I've been living in a way that bolsters my limitations, and I fear will lead me to dead ends. De Beauvoir's advocacy for transcendence through activity outside of the self has really sat with me ever since I started reading the Second Sex. The conclusion definitely punctuated my growing fears and concerns about the way I live, think, and act, and I'd like to sit with that much longer before I share my thoughts on it.

This wasn't much of a review, or anything really. I was just excited and thought I needed to write something. This shit life changing, and I hope it's for the better in my case.

[note: my boyfriend is requesting to borrow my copy to read before our upcoming feminist and queer phenomenology seminar this fall. I think that's funny as hell. This is reparations. This is voluntary feminization.]