#firestone library

[garadinervi]

Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond, Edited by Sal Hamerman and Javier Rivero Ramos, with contributions by Felipe Becerra, Mónica de la Torre, and Zanna Gilbert, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, 2024

Exhibition: Firestone Library, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ, February 21 – June 13, 2024 (on the way of Art Books)

[princetonarchives]

Though unrecognizable to us now, this was one of the suggested plans for Princeton University's main campus library ca. 1945, found in Firestone Architectural Drawings Collection (AC411), Box 1. For reference, this is how the library actually turned out:

Firestone Library, ca. 1950s. Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series (AC111), Box AD04, No 8323.

G. B. Moment, Class of 1928, had this to say on April 17, 1936 about the future campus library, after suggesting that Princeton avoid more Gothic architecture in favor of something more modern:

The library itself would then stand as a monument to the renunciation of sentimentality and sham and obscurantism and at the same time proclaim the spirit (rather than the letter) of the cathedral builders themselves who constructed to the highest that they knew, both conceptually and technically, rather than, with a debilitating combination of cowardice, indolence, and lack of vision, produce competent reproductions of the signatures of past ages.

[en-abime-updates]

June 15th

Morning

Mal posts the player-made zine on FreeDF. You can find it by adding the URL slug /dans-des-circonstances-eternelles to en-abime.com. She has decided to visit Tati, although it is unknown where she is right now.

Since the zine mentions a twin by name, they visit it and share a PowerPoint of all the information they had about Thomas (accessible through clicking the glitch on the page.) (It is unknown where the twin is right now.) A letter in a different font (the “T” on “The Incident”) links to w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d.

Summary: This PowerPoint includes a photo of Thomas and the details around his disappearance: He was a freshman exchange student at Princeton University in New Jersey whose parents had died 2 years before of the flu. He went missing in October of 1915 – he checked into a carrel in the library and never checked out. (The footnotes note these carrels are now in Firestone Library.) He was “kind of an introvert” but an “excellent student,” so no one noticed he was missing until months later. The Works Cited page of the PPT only lists en-abime.com as well as the page for requesting visitor access to Firestone Library. Players speculate this may be the site of a geocache.

The zine page also links to Mal’s Favorite Gigs in NYC. This page begins as a blank page and populates with pop-ups addressing the reader as you scroll down, before showing a list of Mal’s bands and performance venues – potentially another geocache lead? It also features a voice that speaks in blackout poetry, similar to the blackout poetry sections of the CYOA.

Summary: The pop-ups ask the reader to record information about themselves (to presumably join the abime) – “Log on now!” “Share abundantly your photographs, experiences, and stories with your friends.” It then presents Mal’s list of gigs as “a gift.” The list of gigs lists the band and location of each performance, as well as a short description of Mal’s experience performing with them. Mal’s handwritten note at the top reads “if you haven’t got an I.D., even a fake one, FORGET ABOUT IT, DUDETTE!” Below the gig list, the pop-ups ask the reader to “Match them with the right keys to the kingdom” for an “instantaneous cure,” “but hurry, a machine for living won’t be hanging around for long.” Below this, the blackout poetry voice begins, imploring the reader to “stop feeding us.” Their requests and cries for help are similar in tone to the ones in the CYOA.

Mal’s Favorite Gigs page leads to HELP, what looks like a customer service page with a set of Q&As and a form. The page is written by (and the Q&As are answered) by the same voices from the Mal’s Gigs page (Ad pop-ups and blackout poetry). The header at the top of the page toggles between “archive” and “appetite” on hover, and “appetite” is “all” while “ARCHIVE” is “NOTHING.” The form is “for Urgent Retrieval Concerns” and asks the reader to “DESCRIBE: WHAT YOU SEE. WHERE YOU ARE. WHERE YOU HAVE SOUGHT. WHERE YOU HAVE NOT YET SOUGHT.”

Summary: The two voices describe themselves as brothers, and have very different personalities. The popup voice describes itself as our “friend,” and encourages the questioner to find “these things” and “make them happy.” The question text eventually goes off the rails: (“Why is my skin so heavy? Why are my eyeballs so dry? Why are my bones so wet?”) to which the popup text voice answers, “You aren’t there yet, friend, but you’re doing well!” In contrast, the blackout poetry voice describes itself as our “bastard creation” and says that if we are “here” it has “failed.” It begs us to “please don’t go looking for this [...] please instead forget all about this. About them. About me.” On the left side of the page are a list of what seems to be various manifestations of HEAVEN, a series of tips that seem to be for geocaching, and there is a form at the bottom that asks for location, time, name of who they are looking for, and a description of their location.

Afternoon/Evening

Players submit form responses to HELP, most of which receive unhelpful answers via email. 

Players submitting questions to the form received a response from the email en-abime-dot-com@gmail.com from a username THE ARCHIVE THE APPETITE. Most contained a screenshot of their question and a popup image reading “USE TOOLS FOR THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE.” Some emails contained an additional image reading “HA!HA!HA!” 

At 2:41 PM EST, player sylvan receives a reply to his email “bonjour” with the additional image “I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH” and the subject line “19/20” A minute earlier at 2:40, another player Vincent received a similar email with the subject line “20/20.” Later, Vincent receives another, this time with the subject line “18/20.” Players decide not to send more emails until figuring out more about the “INTENDED PURPOSE” so the countdown stops. 

At around midnight, player charles entertainment cheese sends a question: “We have looked everywhere. We are Thomas stretched across En Abime. I want to know where he entered from - Princeton? New Jersey? The Library? We have looked across as many pages as we have. We have found him in PDFs and websites where his past self is recorded and archived.” This receives a different response, without a countdown number, hinting that these questions are closer to the “INTENDED PURPOSE” and “for greater knowledge on more subjects, use your library often!”

Overall Theories

Players think these pop-ups and blackout text are two new characters, the Archive and the Appetite, which may be made up of the Abime itself. They seem more powerful than the other characters and may have placed the flyers around the different locations. They seem to want us to find whatever information they don’t yet know, and are interested in physical geocaches. 

Next steps from this update:

Follow these geocache leads

Crack w-h-a-t-h-a-p-p-e-n-e-d

Figure out the purpose of the HELP form

[backslashdelta]

Put your music library on shuffle, then list the first five songs that come up in a poll to let people vote for which one they like the most! Then tag Tumblr friends to keep the game going!

Ngl I cheated just a little because there are a bunch of songs in my Spotify likes that I don't even really know, so I skipped those and just picked the first 5 that I would actually listen to if they came on.

Thank you @fallevs @daisyishedwig and @leydhawk for the tags!!

I'll be tagging @kurthummeldeservesbetter @mdverse @blurglesmurfklaine @gemsofthegalaxy and @cryscendo :)

[haggishlyhagging]

Jan - Jun 2023 Reading List:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dear Ijeawele, or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

Bartky, Sandra Lee. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Bittel, Carla. Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Bolen, Jean Shinoda. Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Perennial Library, n.d.

Brownmiller, Susan. Femininity. New York: Open Road Media, 2013.

Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2018.

Christ, Carol P., and Judith Plaskow. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979.

Daly, Mary. The Church and the Second Sex. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975.

Davis, Elizabeth Gould. The First Sex. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971.

Doyle, Sady. Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Dworkin, Andrea. Intercourse. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1978.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1970.

Gowrinathan, Nimmi. Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

Hawthorne, Susan. In Defence of Separatism. Mission Beach: Spinifex Press, 2019.

Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. Spinifex Press, 1990.

Jeffreys, Sheila. The Spinster and Her Enemies. Chicago: Spinifex Press, 1997.

Johnson, Sonia. Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation. Freedom: Crossing Press, 1987.

Johnson, Sonia. Wildfire Igniting the She/volution. Albuquerque: Wildfire Books, 1989.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Love Your Enemy? The Debate between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism. London: Onlywomen Press, Ltd., 1981.

Miles, Rosalind. Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Reed, Evelyn. Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975.

Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering The Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2013.

Smith, Joan. Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. London: Riverrun, 2019.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto: With an Introduction by Vivian Gornick. London: Olympia Press, 1971.

Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983.

Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Ussher, Jane. Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness? Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

West, Lindy. The Witches are Coming. New York: Hachette Books, 2019.

[digitalnewberry]

It's All Fun and (Bar) Games

"Few Americans have even heard of the sport, let alone picked up a cue and challenged its fearsome geometry."

--David Firestone, The New York Times

"A kiss off the Red", from the Monroe Sports Postcard Collection

On a winter evening in Chicago, indulging in one of the city's most cherished and authentically local pastimes involves a visit to a neighborhood bar for a game of pool. The vibrant bar scene of the city radiates a comforting warmth, providing an ideal sanctuary to escape the brisk temperatures of Chicago. Within these dimly lit and intimately adorned spaces, often featuring vintage décor, one can appreciate a nostalgic ambiance while strategically lining up shots on the pool table.

"Starke beruhrung!" or strong touch, from the Monroe Sports Postcard Collection

The roots of pool and billiards extend deep into the annals of history, originating from diverse lawn games in 15th-century European cultures. The transformation of cue sports from a croquet-like field game to an indoor pursuit with refined cues during the 17th century establishes a historical bridge between the old and new worlds. The symbolic green cloth covering the pool tables, chosen to mimic the green grass of their origins, adds a familiar and nostalgic touch to the atmosphere. It was not until the 20th century that the game took on its now-familiar forms, particularly the widely recognized 8-ball and 9-ball variations commonly referred to as pool.

"A Combination Shot", from the Monroe Sports Postcard Collection

Engaging in a friendly game of pool not only hones hand-eye coordination but also fosters camaraderie among patrons of the local bar. The resonant clack of cue balls and the laughter that permeates the air create an enriching fusion of competition and social interaction, establishing it as a superlative means to relish the allure of the neighborhood bar.

"Say- Here's your cue!", from the Monroe Sports Postcard Collection

The Newberry Library Digital Collections has over 300 postcards digitized pertaining to pool and billiards. This makes finding interesting and sometimes hilariously outrageous illustrations incredibly easy.

Start your journey and explore pool & billiards postcards.

Browse all of Newberry Digital Collections.

--Kinsey Major, Library Assistant

[darkmaga-retard]

The U.S. economy added fewer-than-expected new jobs last month because most economists still refuse to comprehend that there is such a thing as the business cycle. Here we have the Economic Confidence Model I explained, which I discovered while researching at the Firestone Library at Princeton University. That is NOT included in Socrates, in which I merely taught Socrates how to identify cycles, let it go forward without human intervention, and come back to tell me what it found.

Socrates agreed with the Economic Confidence Model that the economy would turn down in 2024 going into 2025. This Jobs Number came with big downward revisions to recent summer tallies, suggesting that the labor market if cooling and that this is likely to support the case for a larger Federal Reserve rate. What is stunning is that these people cheer on rate cuts, but the rate cuts come ONLY with recessionary trends. This is the second straight month of downward numbers since the ECM turned in May.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that a net 142,000 new jobs were created in August, a number well above the downward revised July total of 89,000 but still well south of this year’s monthly average of around 200,000. At the end of the day, it will most likely be revised to be lower than July. The low may not be seen until the first quarter of 2025. After that, we must be concerned about war.

While the Computer has projected that Trump should win the 2024 election, he added RFK, and now Musk has to have Washington up in arms. The Neocons will fight for their life, and everything is on the table. These people do not care about the country, the economy, or the people.

The other scenario that concerns me is that Putin is the only person holding back World War III. With this insane invasion of Russia by Ukraine at the direction of NATO, the intended consequence, or pretend unintended consequence, is the overthrow of Putin by the hardline Russian Neocons. This year, 2024, is a Directional Change for Russia. Even if electing Trump with RFK, we could still have a war if they overthrow Putin.

[eighthdoctor]

Book Review 46/60

Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone PhD

Well this was timely.

I actually had it on hold from the library for a bit, but Recent Bullshit makes it super pertinent.

Very, very good look at specifically Jewish trauma and how to approach it from a Jewish lens--there's a little bit in the beginning that's SUPER Jungian bullshit but it moves past that and can be easily ignored.

This is a book for us, about us, about our collective historical trauma, both directly inherited and radiated throughout diaspora & Israeli culture, and how we can grow through it, not let it dictate our fears. And--again, extremely pertinent--how to keep from perpetuating the cycle of trauma and oppression.

5/5

[mistons]

Miami Beach

Snowden Estate, 1923, looking north from 44th St & Collins Ave. Harvey S. Firestone's Harbel Villa Estate, 1930s. Fontainebleau Hotel construction, 1954. Firestone estate was used as a construction office.  

Miami History / SMU Libraries / Miami Archives / Gottscho-Schleisner collection, LOC

Fontainebleau architect Morris Lapidus: In his day, critics reviled the excesses of Lapidus’ designs, calling his architecture “the nation’s grossest national product,” “pornography of architecture,” and “boarding house baroque” ... There was a “Staircase to Nowhere” so women dressed in couture and jewels could take an elevator to the top to deposit their coats and glamorously descend the stairs to the lobby. - Fontainebleau Hotel, A Colorful History

Steve Wynn:

In 1954 a guy named Ben Novack and his brother Joe Novack, who had  experience in the Catskills at a hotel called Laurel, and in Miami Beach at the Sans Souci Hotel - sort of like Las Vegas with bunch of hotels lined up one next to the other on Collins Avenue - got an option on the Firestone estate at 41st St. on Collins Ave., a big 15-acre oceanfront piece that was owned by the famous family that made tires.

Ben Novack and Joe Novack conceived with an architect named Morris Lapidus of a hotel called Fontainebleau. This place was going to be a new idea. The hotel itself was going to be a series of experiential moments that included formal French gardens, sort of a Jewish version of Versailles; a gorgeous, soaring, high ceiling lobby; a lot of curvilinear spaces and curved stairways; murals on the wall of 18th century France; a fabulous showroom; a shopping arcade below; beyond the garden an expansive Cabana and pool club; a beautiful spa; and a curved building with blue glass. The Fontainebleau was going to set a new standard of destination resorts on planet Earth. It was so breakaway, so profoundly new it didn't even add a name on it. No sign, just the building.

It opened in 1954 and it changed everything people came from France, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil. Between Christmas and Easter you had to know somebody to get a room. Everybody from Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis worked there. It was the coolest place to be in America during high season. The Fontainebleau dwarfed in scale and imagination anything that had ever been done anywhere in Europe or America, and it was received that way.  

Jay Sarno was a character from Atlanta. He saw the Fontainebleau. He saw that this place was in the literary sense romantic, better than the outside world. It was a universe utopia within itself. Sarno never got over it

I was going to school at the University of Pennsylvania. My folks had Cabana 364 on an annual basis. I’d come there at Christmastime, and I never got over it. To me it seemed like the greatest thing in the world is to create a place that would transport people that way.

[whatsarasaid]

9 People to Get to Know Better

Tagged by the always lovely @lordbhreanna.

1. Three ships: In general, you can just say the word 'partners' and my ears will perk up like a German shepherd who's just heard a slice of American cheese crinkle open, but here are three that my AO3 history says I've read in the past six months.

(Answers below the cut because this got long).

Jyn Erso/Cassian Andor (Star Wars): War refugees finding purpose in self-sacrifice to higher ideals. Brief comfort in each other while facing the horrors. Reading into the unsaid. This one is funny because it's had a lot of longevity for me although it's never lived in the hyperfixation category. The only time I like Star Wars is when it leaves the Jedi hocus-pocus and nostalgia references behind, which means Rogue One and Andor are my personal pinnacle of SW.

Simon "Ghost" Riley/John "Soap" MacTavish (COD): Similar to above, although the military propaganda bois here have less nobility in their cause. You know, it's that— “You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself […] to be shipwrecked together, [to] perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him — to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips […] or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.” (Stoppard, The Invention of Love) Safe to say, my definition of romance includes camaraderie, devotion, banter, and gritted teeth. Also, the pro of one-dimensional video game characters is that fic writers can fill in the blanks with whatever they want, and this ship has some crazy-talented authors who flesh them out excessively well.

Peter Parker/Wade Wilson (Marvel Comics/Sony): This is my lazily-popping-Ritz crackers-into-my-mouth ship, although I'm very fussy with which fics I read from it. It's wild and irreverent and dysfunctional, but the heart wants what it wants, and sometimes, it wants the sassy vigilante who's experienced a lifetime of grief to get caught in tête-à-têtes with an unfiltered mercenary who can't die.

2. First ever ship: Probably Zelda/Link (Legend of Zelda). Ocarina of Time told me to go rescue the princess, and my kid-self went, "Yeah, let's go get my girl. We're in love, bb."

3. Last song: Vampire Empire by Big Thief.

4. Last film: Poor Things. A willful and visually extravagant satire that made me cry once, flinch constantly, and laugh scornfully throughout. It fearlessly addressed the many ways men attempt to control women in general and their sexuality in particular. It felt like watching a novel, which is difficult to do, and the triumphant ending was a nice reward.

5. Currently reading: The Self Under Siege by Firestone, Firestone, and Catlett and Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Both are excellent and have tight, elegant writing styles that uphold their even better— although very different—content. I picked up This is How You Lose the Time War by El-Mohtar and Gladstone from the library recently, too. Why yes, that is too many books to be reading at once, thanks for noticing.

6. Currently watching: Nothing at the moment. The last thing I watched was season two of The Bear.

7. Currently consuming: Black coffee.

8. Currently craving: BBQ pork buns and guava curd doughnuts from the long-closed Asian-Portuguese fusion bakery that used to be a couple of blocks from me. RIP RIP RIP. Craving never to be slaked.

Tagging: @her-satanic-majesty @primewritessmut @periodically-puzzled @elenafisher-wong and, of course, anyone who wants to participate and make it nine for me. Tell me what you're into these days.

[lboogie1906]

Ruth Inge Hardison (February 3, 1914 – March 23, 2016) was a sculptor, artist, and photographer, known for her busts entitled "Negro Giants in History". Her collection called "Our Folks", which features sculpted portraits of everyday people is of note. Her artistic productions surround historical African American portraiture, and she was interested in representing the unspoken voices of the African American past. She was the only female in the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. She was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, her family moved to Brooklyn. She acted in the Broadway Productions of "Sweet River" and "Country Wife". She began sculpting as a hobby. When she took part in the year-long "What a Life" production, she created a sculpture of its cast, which was displayed at the Mansfield Theatre. She studied Music and Creative Writing at Vassar College. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and Tennessee State University. Her works begin as clay, wax, or plaster molds, and were cast into cast stone or bronze. Her first bust in that series was of Harriet Tubman, which measured eight inches in height; she has created busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, and Mary McLeod Bethune, among others. Her bronze Douglass bust, for example, was unveiled at Princeton's Firestone Library. Other public works include a 7-foot abstract figure called "Jubilee" which stands on the campus of Medgar Evers College, a series of 18 children on an outdoor wall of I.S.74 in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and a five-foot mother and child given to Mount Sinai Hospital to express her gratitude for their help in delivering her only child. She created a series of Ingenious Americans, little-known African American inventors and other notables commissioned and sold by Old Taylor Whiskey. The series of nine busts included Benjamin Banneker, Charles Richard Drew, Matthew Henson, Frederick McKinley Jones, Lewis Latimer, Garrett Morgan, Norbert Rillieux, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and Granville Woods. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence https://www.instagram.com/p/CoMzVt-rWfN/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[garadinervi]

Syreeta McFadden, The Exhibit That Reveals Toni Morrison’s Obsessions, «The Atlantic», April 22, 2023

Exhibition: Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, Curated by Autumn Womack, Milberg Gallery, Firestone Library, Princeton University Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, February 22 – June 4, 2023

[princetonarchives]

Throwback Thursday: Using the Princeton University Library catalog in Firestone Library, ca. 1975.

Photo from 1975 Bric-a-Brac

[stop-weighting-for-change]

UPDATE 9

Hi!! So ok wow, it’s been yet again a lot of time passed since I last posted (exactly a year and week to the date of UPDATE 8 lolllllll).

So A LOT of shiettttt has changed so I’ll just begin:

-I kinda moved to new york city and got my dream job. The dream job I was devastated about not getting and posting about this time last year- HOLY SHIT. I always felt like in my heart it was supposed to/going to happen but it hadn’t allllllll the other (5 times) i applied and I told myself when applying the time I got it that it would be my last time bc i just needed to move on and... i got it. HOLY SHIT. -Although it was not as fast as I would have liked for it to have been, I’ve lost 21lbs in the last year- TWENTY ONE. Last June I weighed in at 195 again and as of THIS MORNING I’m 174.5. I NEED to keep it off this time. I WILL keep it off this time. -While i definitely do still suffer from anxiety, body dysmorphia and depression, I overall feel like things will work out this time. THEY WILL. -I miss my family (who live back on the west coast of the usa) more and more and more every single day. But I’m getting through it. The tide has been high but I’ve been holding on. -Diet Coke by Leanna Firestone is my anthem, my church, my everything and I feel v grateful to that song. -I miss my old coworkers bc while I have my dream job at my dream company I realized since being here that a lot of the glamour was built up in my head and it’s HARD to find a group of strangers bound together by work who are supportive and wonderful and funny and genuinely care about you. So when you have that/find that, TREASURE IT! Because it’s temporary. and compared to my last job, the new jabronies I work with aint shieeeeeeeet (:). -Finally I had a stellar 4th of July in The Washington Dictrict of Columbia with two of my favorite people and it was sooooooo needed.

That’s what I have in terms of updates which is pretty major: now looking towards the future!!

I get to see my mom and brother in 13 days and I could cry, i’m so happy. and i get to see them two weekends in a row!!!

AND THEN i’m meeting my family at wdw for a couple days and were gonna ride all the rides including COSMIC REWIND AT EPCOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t believe that last time I updated I hadn’t rode that ride yet........ wow what last July me didn’t even know what she was missing. Srsly if you haven’t rode that ride before ur missing out, i’ve never had that kind of serotonin boost before ever in my life.

Finally, I’m attempting to Chloe Ting again and become a runner (pray 4 me).

That’s it for now, but I forgot how good it feels to literally write this shit down even if -14 people read this. IT”S MY JOURNEY AND THIS IS FOR ME :’).

P.S. I need to pick up a library card- I signed up for one in March and haven’t gotten it yet. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME.

P.P.S. My love life (or last there of) is a disaster but what else is new. At least I’m getting my hair braided for the first time in a few decades and I’m v excited!!!!!

[samsspambox]

*shoves face in hands* aAAAAAA

(if you wanna read about my personal woes, feel free!)

so. uh. hi!

i know i don't do much of updates or much on my personal life bc doing it here kinda feels like i need to explain myself while on twitter it's more like a tweet and go situation but eh, i ran out of tweet rations LMAO.

anyway! i started working about two months ago in a library and it's been fun! but that's not what i'm here to talk about (or what you're here to read lol)

i ended up catching feelings for one of my coworkers. and let me really define feelings bc it'll make me feel better and bc i've recently discovered i have attachment issues LMAO

i really like this person's smile. that's what started all of this mess. i've caught myself daydreaming about the possibility of spending more time with them. i'm excited every time they walks through the door. they make me laugh, I make them laugh. we exchange memes on the server we made for all of our coworkers. lately we've been exchanging ai song covers and mashups (they... really liked mine which made me preen internally) imo, not quite there yet, but certainly not something to ignore. so a mishmash of emotions. hell, it took me a while to admit that my feelings had spilled into something more than friendship.

"sam just ask them out" i hear you say.

counterpoints: i suck at this. i have no experience whatsoever. im always the one who asks people out. i don't even know if they have a partner and i could overstep. i like being their friend and i don't really have my feelings cemented and i wouldn't want to do that to someone. i've come out burned several times. i don't know when people are flirting or being nice. using body language queues i think they don't like me like that. i want to be asked out for once.

i like the current arrangement. they would come in on the day we were both scheduled, along with another coworker, and we'd laugh and joke. i beat them in mario kart once (it was a thing for the library.)

and well... they got a new job. their last day is tomorrow. i'm most likely never gonna see them again.

i'm kinda sad, in a sense. they're leaving and well,,, i would've liked for something to happen. (this lowkey hits me in the 'never had anyone ask me out' feels and it makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me, if i'm attractive enough or if they like my personality, but that's for another day.) it also makes me happy in a sense? they're moving up in the world and i wish them the best. also happy for myself bc it's been such a fat while since i've had feelings like these. the last time was my sophomore year of hs. (im also incredibly loyal to my crushes, which is funny. that person i liked till the end of hs) i thought something was wrong with me (turns out you can't force emotional connections even if you want to LMAO)

but yeah. the saga of me pining for a person. (i guess i also don't wanna ask them out bc it's something i'm more used to? i'm always the one pining, eternally waiting to finally be picked. and when i do try to get out there, i get rejected. i feel safer at a distance.) they leave tomorrow and i'm just gonna stand there and watch.

anyway have some songs that i've been obsessed with bc idk how to end this lol

[bookquotenet]

Camino Island is a crime fiction thriller novel written by John Grisham and released on June 6, 2017, by Doubleday. The book is a departure from Grisham’s main subject of legal thrillers and focuses on stolen rare books. Grisham made his first extensive book tour in 25 years to publicize the book.

Plot

The book begins with the theft of five rare F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from the Firestone Library at Princeton University and then embarks on a journey to a resort town on a Florida island in search of clues about the heist. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an “underground agency” of investigators working for Princeton’s insurance company pursue the perpetrators in the black market, the story focuses on a novelist who becomes involved in the search and pursues an investigation of the heist.