about cake. At least I wrote something.
Due to the horrible economy, I guess I’m going back to work on Tuesday.
I can’t (legally) post what happened publicly at my job over the Fall and Winter terms, but sufficed to say, it is not a place I want to work anymore: it is a performative cesspit of misogyny and ableism. The last two months, I start to panic at the thought of returning. But I also start to panic at the thought of having no money to buy food.
I tried to get out, but it hasn’t worked so far.
And so, I might use my time there to write about a one hundred percent hypothetical situation that most definitely would never happen at a place like where I work. Like, for example, an administrative assistant stealing candy I put in everyone’s mailbox, which totally would never happen. Ha. As if I managed to write even five words during my two months on EI. Every second of existence is like it says in real Little Mermaid:
every step you take it will feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives
I tried and I am tired now. Yet, it’s always on me to change and never anyone else. The world is made for people who aren’t like me. I have a diagnosis now that says that, but it means nothing. The world doesn’t accommodate. The world just takes.
Am watching horror movies ad nauseum and sliding last year’s smut story into one about longing. Smut is dull. Longing is what little I feel each day.
Longing for friends.
Longing for meaning.
Longing for to be anything but this.
By this Thursday, I am meant to give a talk about teaching as a radical welcoming-in. So maybe by Friday next I’ll rework the smut into longing.
I know no one ever said it would get easier. I just always kind of hoped it would somehow.
I found a bunch of shots on my computer of bits of the last time I taught Complex Analysis (2022). Not shots of full pages of notes. Just closeups randomly. I’ve forgotten why I did it — maybe drawings for typed notes? But here is one below.
This is my life: looking at old files on my computer and wondering why.
Two-ish years ago I got a day job.
The day job isn’t great. It maybe was once, but now it is just where a lawyer and my boss said I was lying, where my union rep told me “you have to be perfect right now”, as if being a short, femme, woman in a male-dominated field that is not already expected of me, where my coworkers treat me like their admin assistant if and when they even remember I exist. Mostly they don’t. Mostly I can be alone.
I have a notebook with a blank page. I have a pencil. But writing is just like work: another way to get rejected.
There are things about me I don’t like, so then others don’t like me either. I write stories that people think are odd, but aren’t odd to me. They are just what I am. People will never love me the way I love them apparently. That’s just the way my brain works now.
Maybe I’ll write some words down on a piece of paper. Maybe it’ll turn into a story. But probably I’ll just end up feeling sorry for myself while laying in bed, annoyed at my coworkers, but, in all reality, actually annoyed at myself.
as I feel spilled out.
“I don’t really allow myself to get close to people on an emotional level because my insides are all riddled with maggots, which is very frightening for people to see, especially up close, especially when they are, you know, inside you.”
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—, middle stanza, by Emily Dickenson.
Finished a book already. Graphic novel, which I just speed through since I don’t look much at the pictures, hence ruining the whole purpose of the medium, the same way I turn on the subtitles and read those rather than look at the screen. And, sometimes I don’t even do that. Sometimes I watch something in a language I don’t even understand (right now High Water; I don’t speak Polish), only half-glance at the subtitles, and spend my time crocheting or knitting instead.
That’s right: at the end of 2023 I taught myself to knit. Why? Perhaps I thought it would impress the universe, or at least someone.
Spoiler: It did not.
Question: Why is purl so easy and knit so hard?
I might get a second book done tonight, but only because I read 90% of it when it was still 2023.
Wolf Children at Kaleidotrope.
I wrote Wolf Children in what felt like a fever haze in the summer of 2015, but if a haze lasted weeks rather than hours, by taking a set of stories that I thought were unrelated, but then realizing they weren’t.
So it is a weird story, like a dream. But I am a weird person, like a dream’s character. Everything about Wolf Children is its own closed fictional ecosystem. I don’t really feel like living in reality anymore, but I wouldn’t live in Wolf Children for anything, but it’s strangely prescient considering how long ago I wrote it and how relevant it is to the BIG BAD THING I can’t discuss about my job. The world, any world, even the ones I make up, aren’t made for women, especially weird ones. Eldritch ones I suppose. Like Enid too. Just weird women who don’t fit in and feel it every second. This past year, this line from The Little Mermaid:
every step you take will be as if you were treading upon sharp knives, so sharp as to draw blood
I know this line. I live it now.
Photo source — interestingly the file name says it is a female wolf, which, if you’ve read Wolf Children, is fitting.
Was nominated for two book awards and won zero.
I got a job that has some serious problems. It took over my life and I am sad all the time. So I barely read.
I wrote nothing outside of work stuff. I’m actually about to have a panic attack thinking about work right now, so I’m going to sign off and try to read more books and write more things next year.
I’ll put one of the amigurumi’s I’m least happy with with one of the stories I’m most happy with. And why does this story get a syringe? Well — come to my reading on Sunday and find out! The Happiest Place on Earth is one of the stories I’m going to read!
Event info: 7-8.30 this Sunday at the Sackville Commons.
Special Guest: Fellow author Eric Sparling
Door prizes! Books for sale! You can ask me questions not even about anything related to writing. Bring your Calculus homework (I’m great at Calculus).
