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.