there aren't many days where i really truly mourn being in a relationship, and today is no exception, but for what it's worth i am feeling quite vulnerable tonight and that's as good an excuse as any to grieve.

i have always been worthy of love but was not worth then, loving. not in that way, anyway. that's the sort of insecure mindset i was in when i ended up in my first relationship, with not much time to think about what it meant to commit to one. in truth, i think the person i consider my first love saw in me who i see now but whose shoes i couldn't fully step into. why should they lie in bed with someone who i couldn't accept already existed, and therefore couldn't be for anyone? not them, not me. i couldn't drag them along for any longer than the early morning we never woke up to. we never fell asleep, and there could be no more dream for us.

i suppose it's only fair then to admit that i set myself up for imminent doom, and i chose to set myself up for it with the best person i could do so with. you don't need to know why he was never sorry, or how he lied all the time. what thing i did that drove him over the edge but only for a little while, for the last time. but you should know that for what its worth and for all of my unspeakable, i came out a step closer to myself. i remind myself when i have the chance that there is not one person alive who gets to treat me that way, not even myself, and from an immense pain was born a radical and deep-seated kindness, a love for myself.

that last drive upstate from some stupid day trip, i listened to there's nothing wrong with love by built to spill. he didn't let me listen to the radio because it was too loud over the youtube video he was watching on the dash to get through that last stretch of i-87 before we were back to our stupid life. i begged him to let me listen to one of the cds we'd stolen from that overpriced record store in new york, if only at the lowest volume possible. because my phone was dead, so it was my fault. because if he didn't feel the need to talk to me it was because i should've been anyone else in that passenger's seat that night.

clairo's cover of twin falls will always remind me of senior year of highschool, and that whole bandcamp ep it came off of, and never asking more of it. it's a self i seem to have lost touch with, someone who felt so very of my age and time when now i seem to find myself digging through all that i think i've forgotten, and the world, searching for all the meaning i overlooked, all the avenues and outlets i never reached out for.

i think nostalgia's weird even though i find myself increasingly fixated on relics of the past and i think i'm realizing just how naive i am and it's been feeling great to own up to. there's still so much left to learn and so much time to grow, it was about time i started accepting that as the state of things. for however many million lives i think i've lived i can already see just how little i've traversed, and i feel reassured. but it is interesting at 21 years old to be in the adolescence of my girlhood.

i get so jealous and upset over nothing at all, and then too i remember what jealous and upset used to mean for me, and i sort of just have to give myself a pat on the back for not much more than being an adult. i wonder if it ever gets easier imagining a man caressing some random girl's shoulder, or rubbing the small of her back. i am afraid that i do not enjoy being in love unless it makes my stomach turn a bit. like wondering how wrong it is to notice a man's forearms or his neck. sometimes i think i am no better than a man and other times i find that in truth it's not lacking a body to hold onto that makes my desire feel empty, unfulfilled. i wish that when i was in love i did not have this intense urge to give, and give, and give.

every time my ex slighted me, made me feel stupid, that time i was afraid of him and the fact in the end, it's something no one can ever take from me now. one of those things you end up just sort of having to live with, because it happened. none of this makes me cry, only the time i told my guy friend about the only good memory. the only time i really wondered if i was in love with him was in bed when we wrestled and he blew raspberries into my stomach and i laughed so hard i cried and then i cried because it was good. i sobbed so violently and i don't know if it's because i realized that every day could be like that, or should've been? i don't think that's for me to know but what i do know is that i still miss the consistency of the whole thing. there was always someone to come home to, a hug from behind waiting for me. i never loved him and came to hate him, but in a strange way i think that i was allowing myself to have this thing i didn't think i could have, not for a long time, not until i had become a me that was a lover, a partner in life, worth keeping in your corner. i wish i was making new memories now, i have learned so much about love in the quiet of loving any way other than the way i was loving. i wish the same things weren't happening, even if i am old enough now to understand them and myself.

what makes a man's vanity any worse than mine? i know exactly all 5 types of men i am into, and at that it kills me to say now that i'll always wonder how much of my queerness i seem to be losing touch with the more i feel like a girl in my own right. was that ever mine to have? or was it just something i was holding onto in the process of making the image less muddy, the reflection more true. sometimes i find myself questioning a man's capacity to love me in a way that could ever give me any sort of semblance of safety, a reassurance that it'd either be worth not just being friends over or that it wouldn't devolve into a cycle incumbent on our individual neuroses and reaching that point where the constant arguments can't be normal anymore. how to love hard and give something your all without love bombing or codependency or that creeping fear in the back of my mind that maybe you, like many people, could just love to be loved.

there's no pretty bow i can use to wrap this all up nicely, in truth i exercised a lot of self restraint not to go in any particular direction or another. maybe someday i will get all comfortable with talking about my carnal and unjustified desire because i think it's pretty cool when other people do it. this website's becoming too much of a home and so for as much as i'd love to be off-putting and esoteric, ...you and i could leave this place, but i know you would never ask me for the right reason, i'm also just straight up having a super good time. i could always use a bit more sleep, and i've got to see a couple specialists and my GP over a stiff knee and weird nail that have both been neglected waaay too long, but life is good again nonetheless.

i'm leaving you all with this bandcamp ep that i enjoy :-). the lovely folks in widaparte were kind enough to put me on after i asked for a track id on their cover of track 2, my favorite track! i think it's just about time for me to hit the hay at 4:30 in the morning. i've got to stop getting the urge to write so late in the night.

but i think that's all ive got! i really do think it's time to step up my game layout wise, at the rate i'm making entries this stream of text with just a scroll isn't really gonna cut it. not sure how much time i'll have to update this week with work and tying up some loose ends before i leave town for the weekend but here's to hoping! first day of work down, three more nights to go. :-)

sorry for the lack of updates this week, i have been quite the busy girl lately as real summer begins to set in. can you feel it? it's strange how when something has changed it is so incredibly palpable. this week i am joyful, nothing really seems to get in my way.

i was feeling so blue before and now it's all changed. i have the strength now to deal with all that i have not yet conquered and so i will be holding on to that feeling tight.

in other news, i joined a webring recently! and i have found so many cool sites that i am, admittedly, starting to feel quite ambitious in terms of site design again. before, i was quite sure about wanting to realize this site layout that i've got going on at the moment, which previously was just some idea rolling around in my head. this website has got to be about 2 years old but has been updated with only about 20 entries of content total over its lifetime. i've got those older archives somewhere, but i'm not so sure i want them floating around, anyway. and yet, even as i write this, i wonder. will this entry stick around forever, or will i do away with it when i decide that it's no longer me, even if nothing can be forever anyway.

either way, whatever it is i am doing with this site right now i am having so much fun with :-) genuinely it means the world to me when people say nice things about my site because i am thinking nice things about all the lovely places i am visiting as i embark on this endeavor! this internet is a place i want to be.

in truth, the update i wish i was making right now is about lyricism and recent listens. i think i touched on this super vaguely in an earlier entry but in spite of this website which can feel so personal at times, there's so many little things i can't stand keeping on my phone or the internet. aside from letterboxd i really don't like using schedule apps or my notes app, at least not anymore, for staying organized. i gravitate strongly towards notepads and physical schedules, but often find myself too unorganized to begin the process of organizing myself. but ideally soon i'll be able to sit down and write a list of favorite songs and favorite lyrics from them to better organize my thoughts for an entry about them!

i promise it's on my to-do list! i meant it when i said that i have not been doing much playlist making, save for a road trip mixtape or two i'm working on, and even those are just concepts despite the time frame i've got to make them and burn them and create cover art, with practically no free time in sight at that.

• there is now a guestbook linked in my about page! ...which i already mentioned in my last update at the very bottom, but i thought i would mention it somewhere more prominent.... please say hello! :-)
• fixed a minor typo in my last blog post,
• and added a nifty random-site-inator on my outlinks page! curated by me :-)

it's early morning as i write this, though the lamp has been on long enough for me not to tell. that the sun is up, that the day has begun, but soon i will get some rest and recharge before some afternoon plans. yesterday was maybe the hottest day we've had all year, and today should be even hotter. i was planning on hitting up a local rail trail in the morning, but i guess it couldn't be helped, seeing as i'm still up.

this of montreal demo i'm listening to feels like the most beautiful thing. it's this song called "it's only fear". finding songs like this feels really special after what feels like years, lifetimes, of searching. it feels stupid to admit, though i think that i am starting to get a little more comfortable with that feeling. if you know anything about me, then you know that i am (?) a radio dj. the past 2 or 3 years of my life have had this perpetual soundtrack going on in the background of them, most days, because i am constantly looking for music. and yet through it all it feels like no matter how hard i work to make shows cohesive for archival purposes, or by proxy of playing my personal crowd pleasers, i am conscious of the fact that the search was never about filling in gaps of radio silence. it was always about finding the 10 songs in their respective season of my life that would bring me closer to myself, to my living.

save for a couple themed exceptions, there is no better descriptor for my early shows than sad. melancholic. moody, heartbreaking, heartbreak. it was like for the first time in my life i did not have to listen to my sad playlist in a shoebox, or a dorm room, or somewhere that didn't have to exist for anyone but me and my shame. it was a beautiful feeling to dance in the empty studio every midnight i was broadcasting, and though i did not yet know myself, it was a step towards it as i crossed that bridge between the entirely personal and the creative, the social being.

the teenage girl bedroom rock i was into before all the deep cuts and soul searching were someone else's to hold onto now, though i often doubted anyone was staring at their ceiling waiting on every careful transition, every emotional climax. it'd take me a while to realize that though it may not have been for the listener, it was certainly for a reason beyond selfishness and certainly not pretentiousness that i put every bit of me into my shows. every bad mood, every letdown, my moments of clarity, joy, hope, all seemed to manifest in some way or another within my shows.

in time, i would end up pivoting completely in terms of direction musically, though it's certainly hard for me to see it that way. the more i branched out, the more cohesive my personal favorites seemed to become. suddenly, i had something for everyone, and everyone something for me to relate to. and yet i felt as though my taste in music hadn't changed nearly as much as did the way it was manifesting itself, does that make sense? i think that's just how it goes when you are chasing a feeling! and i suppose then that it was the feeling, too, changing, and asking for something else of me than it did my teenage self.

i suppose me saying that is either redundant or ironic, i haven't yet decided which, when i look at my taste in music now. really, i'm still chasing sad! but i think that's not giving myself enough credit, especially after all these years. what distinguishes the emotional catharsis of my favorite tracks, from the perspectives of listener and creator, is something i don't think i was really ever looking for the answers to, until recently as i've begun asking myself what it takes to make a song, and how lucky we get, period, to be able to produce something that impacts others in that personal a way. at times i've had moments like that with my writing and as flattering as it is, it makes me wonder what it takes then to evoke that feeling, and to feel it myself as someone consuming music or other media.

anyway, the whole thing has me in a mood to curate music again, but for the reasons i'm sure i've enumerated above, it's also clear i am becoming increasingly careful about putting cohesive collections of music out there in the world. it's not even strictly out of a fear of not being able to meet my own standards. i haven't made any playlists even for myself in the last few months, save for the occasional genre playlist meant for upbeat moods and sounds, something to keep me from the bulk majority of my music: emotional. the later stages of this constant curating have seen me take up a practice incredibly common in radio, ultimately embracing the notion of consuming egregious amounts of new music with little discernment between what will be a deeply personal favorite for me and songs practically made for radio. and yet, i think i am okay right now with yet again listening to the same 10 things over and over. i think that where i'm at now, i am okay with giving a moment of my time.