Things have been a little topsy-turvy this week. Generally, I have been attempting to stay off social media; this has been mostly successful, although not entirely. I've been trying to KonMari my things, but I have reached a standstill at komono, the largest section. Also, I'm applying to master's programs and my roommate might be getting legally married and all I want to do is read and play Legend of Mana.
I dropped out of divinity school in November of 2017. Divinity school is a very dim memory. I was extremely depressed, despite being on medication. I couldn't read. The only thing I could bring myself to do was get dressed, and towards the end, I had a hard time even managing that. I may have handed in a few assignments. I cannot remember. I stopped checking my school email at one point, I think around the beginning of October, and the thought of checking my school email made me so anxiety-ridden that I never checked it again. Not once. I cannot even recall why I was so depressed or why things went bad so quickly. I truly believe that Wake tried to help me, as I wasn't from a Christian background. I wonder if I'd moved out of my roommate's house, if that would've helped. I guess I'll never know. Recently, my former cohort graduated. I'm happy for them, but I'm kind of sad that I'm not among them. They made it, and I didn't, and I'm not sure why. At the beginning of divinity school, they say that divinity school will tear you down and then build you up again. I guess I just let it demolish me, and I've been trying to repair myself ever since. It's very difficult to think about, because I feel the shame of being a bad student; I feel like I let my recommenders and my professors down. And part of me wonders, too, if I could do it again and succeed; if I could manage to complete this if I weren't in the home of someone who really didn't want to share space with me, who saw me as The Other. Since I left divinity school, I lost my faith. I don't know if I have faith left. But I might. I have been reflecting a lot recently on what has worked for me over the years in my spiritual journey and what hasn't; sending out feelers; exploring in ways I hadn't explored previously. Trying to find a place where I feel home. I believe that religion should be about community, that our lives should be about community. When I came to divinity school, I was part of a very minority religion in the United States. This is a religion that requires community, that has specific roles for everyone, and yet in the United States, that's very difficult to achieve. Many practitioners have relocated to large cities, where space is limited - it's difficult to realize these ritual roles in a big city, in someone's apartment. It spreads people out who should be together, and it makes things more individual when they should be communal. And individualism, while it does mean extended freedom for some, means the destruction of community, to an extent. So I have been thinking about all these things, and wondering where I went wrong, and if I even should bother trying again. It seems ridiculous, at this point. I only have something to prove to myself, after all. Congratulations to the Class of 2020, although I can't extend those congratulations to my former roommate. Forgiveness is overrated.
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I have pretty much owned a typewriter since I was in middle school, or maybe high school. My stepfather worked in an office, and I suppose they got rid of an older manual typewriter, and he brought it home. I bought an electric typewriter with a handle once at a thrift store in 2011, and I was in an Amtrak line at Penn Station, holding my typewriter, and so was Penn Jillette. "Excuse me," I said, "are you Penn?" "Yes, I am," he replied, "is that a typewriter?" That's not a super good story, but that's okay. I had an electric typewriter that I did most of my correspondence on, but the wheel that advances the ribbon stopped working. I thought the ribbon was just dry, and I ordered new ribbons, only to find out that the issue was the ribbon advance. I couldn't find anyone I knew who could help me fix it (the only person I really had faith in to assist me with this recently had a baby, so I wasn't going to trouble her with the most minor of minor problems). Luckily, my roommate, who was the source of the previous electric typewriter, also sourced another one for me! I have been coloring it with Posca markers when I feel like it: I have been writing so much! Mostly letters, but I was antsy the other day and dashed off two pages of a story that I just pulled out of my brain. I'm not sure if that story will go anywhere, but it did give me an idea for a collaborative story, so I'm going to work on finalizing the idea for that today. Here's what I've been reading this week: I read The Hunting Party on Monday. The only reason I finished it was to learn all the secrets. I was at the halfway point and considered abandoning it. It was not good. Oh well.
I read We Have Always Been Here on Tuesday. I am so impressed with people who write entire books in a language that is not their mother tongue. I really enjoyed Samra Habib's evocative childhood memories of Pakistan. I bought jasmine oil for my hair thanks to this book. I do not have strong feelings about this book, but I do highly recommend jasmine oil for one's hair. On Wednesday I read The Silent Patient before my library loan expired. My mom actually recommended it to me after my aunt recommended it to her. It was better than The Hunting Party. I didn't care for the narrator, although the unreliable narrator is integral to the unraveling of the plot. I thought it was clever, though. So, after this week of books I was kind of lukewarm on, I finally read The Night Circus. The Night Circus is so, so good. Erin Morganstern knows how to tell a story - she knows how to bring the reader in at the first sentence, which I don't think I am getting from these other things I have been reading! She crafts these wonderful worlds of magical realism and they are so wonderful. I picked this up from the library on my last trip before they closed due to COVID-19. I had already read The Starless Sea, and this was also just delightful and I am envious of her ability to create these worlds, but also grateful that we have these two books from her! I am very excited to see what we will get next from Erin Morganstern. Yesterday I tried to read The Exorcist, which is incorrectly touted as THE MOST TERRIFYING NOVEL EVER WRITTEN, which I suppose is a great cover blurb but has so far proved untrue. Maybe it was terrifying in 1971. Maybe it is terrifying for people who have no concept of what actual Satanists do or people who think QAnon is real. Right now it is just corny and overwrought. I also don't find demons frightening, I mean, a good ghost story I can enjoy. Once someone brings Satan into it, though, I'm reaching into my theoretical bag of rotten tomatoes. Let's take the movie The Conjuring, for example. The Conjuring is spooky! There's fun haunted house drama and a creepy ghost on top of the dresser! Then they bring in the hot exorcist couple and they deduce that it's a "witch" named "Bathsheba" (eyeroll) who "made a pact with the Devil" and it's all I can do to not scream, "Booo! Booo! Get off the stage!" It's such a cheap villain that it means nothing. I have read more terrifying Ouija board stories on ONTD. This book is probably responsible for a lot of people's misconceptions about the occult. But whatever! Maybe we can do a scary story for our roundtable story. I normally wouldn't write so much about something I didn't like, but it was just so disappointing. I will give it until the halfway point, just to see if it improves. Earlier this year, I was texting my best friend, Kate. We haven't seen each other in person since 2017. "I'm going to see you this year," I said. "I can feel it." She told me to put my feelings away, as she had the same bad feeling about 2020 that she had about 2016. "This year is cursed," she said. "Other grim shit is looming." Ah, she was so right, as she often is. There was a protest here that I was unable to attend on account of 1) people here cannot even wear masks properly at the grocery store so I am wary of being in a large crowd of people, and 2) I put off something that I had to do until the last minute so I had to spend Saturday doing what I said I would do. This is probably for the best, as they shut down public transit from the protest & then issued a curfew, which is not as bad as issuing a curfew 15 minutes before the curfew started, as other cities did. Anyway. What a nightmare. A very small link roundup: Here is a link where you can make a donation that you can spread evenly across multiple bail funds. You can can also dedicate specific amounts to particular bail funds. Here is a Google Drive link to a PDF of "26 Ways to Be in the Struggle Beyond the Streets". This is the link to the official memorial fund for George Floyd. Campaign Zero's website. Twitter thread of master list of safety tips for protesting. I have been numbing my pain by playing Katamari Damacy. I started (and re-started) a few books: I just got Samra Habib's We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir from the library! I was on the waitlist for it, so I haven't started it yet, but I'm very excited for it. I am still working through Living Out Islam. Re-read: Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present. This is a TOME, y'all. I had a passage marked with a Post-It note: "Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot." That's a quote from Neoclassical sculptor Harriet Hosmer (a quote from 1854!). Apparently she was married twice, both times to women, but this is something I think about often. (See also: Austin Kleon's blog post on work-life balance.) I forgot to write about Southern Lady Code in last week's blog post. Amazon recommended it to me quite a while ago, and I had it on my wish list for a while. (I knew it would be good because someone was offended by one of her essay titles.) It was so funny and lovely. I read it while sunbathing in the yard and it was such a delight. I wish I'd had a mother like Helen's, who always had a polite response to any and every situation: "Helen Michelle, if you're going to commit suicide, what you do is get into a bathtub fully clothed. That way, when you shoot yourself, your brains will go all over the tiles, and it will be easier to clean up. And since you're not nekkid, it will be less embarrassing for the person who finds you." Just started The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. This is another book I picked up because it was advertised at Target. I am so susceptible to advertisement. They say nothing about this book on the ads at Target, they just show the cover and play some Ominous Music while they are showing the cover. I think it is a murder mystery, but I'm not sure yet. It has yet to reach out and pull me completely into the story, so we'll see. This week on repeat: Hayley Kiyoko's Expectations.
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AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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