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sometimes i’m like “am i sure my old job was as terrible as i say it was?” but then other times i walk into the bathroom at work and realize that i think of it primarily as “a bathroom” and not “the place i go to hide every morning for the first 20 minutes after i get to work so i can spend as little time as possible in a public space where one of my supervisors might talk to me”

i can feel the edges of where i could tip over into a weird and yawning sadness, but i’m not doing it! everything is fine. today i have lain on the grass both productively and unproductively, and consumed a lunch without repercussions. i am very much inside my body, but that’s okay, it feels all right in here. not great, but just fine. i am writing a poem that can seem to trap the reader in a loop, but actually there’s a way to get out. that’s the feeling for today: you can get trapped in a loop, but you can also get out.

anyway bragging. so the volunteer thing i do, i’ve maybe mentioned before, is for high school & college students, selected on various axes including being underrepresented in science, to do a summer cancer research project in a lab on my campus; and my role is to act as a peer mentor, meaning for ~¼th of the students i’m their most direct contact on the program side/a general reference person for issues w their research, or anything even vaguely associated such as college apps etc, incl after the program ends if they want to stay in contact/most specifically there to help them learn to present, publicly, about science. i also was in this program the summer before i started college, and my peer mentor was useless– i saw him once, got like two emails, received functionally no support. (he is no longer a volunteer). since then i’ve been a mentor every year so this will be my third.

and anyway, i was at the start-of-program meeting, and we were discussing the role/expectations for volunteers for the new people, and the longest-running volunteer, who started the year before i was even a student in the program, said that last summer he had shifted from emailing his group of students once every week or two to check in as he’d been doing in years previous, to instead having lunch with them weekly. and that they had had dramatically increased engagement/attendance/had been more likely to come to him with their issues in the program, and done it sooner, than when he’d just been contacting them by email.

and the thing is that, as he actually mentioned in passing, i’m the one who started doing that– bc of the time commitment involved, weekly meetings were never pitched to us as an expectation of the role or even really suggested as a way of doing it; i introduced that, in my first year mentoring, because i remembered how hard a time i had not being engaged/comfortable bringing up my problems in my lab in the program, and wanted to be way more hands-on and more of a resource for my students than the suggested level of contact seemed to involve. so: i, an at the time 19-y/o w no formal teaching or mentoring experience, tried a thing, it worked well, and the highly-experienced late-stage grad student picked it up from me the next year, and now has decided to continue with it and recommend it to the organizers & other volunteers as the best way to do things.

i feel so good about that! i feel so good about that. i am not only above-and-beyond engaged/committed to this thing i care about, but i figured out a better way to make it work, and now other people in the program are also doing it so that it can succeed more and be more helpful overall. what an uncomplicatedly good thing!

ok i’ve actually wronged you all terribly by chickening out of posting the third shirt i bought yesterday, and which i am actually wearing today, at this very moment

also i did have to retake my school ID photo today, and i did wear this shirt on purpose for it

ok so i wore my suit pants from my Topman Suit to roommate’s family easter a couple weeks ago, and i had for some reason mentally glossed them as being really loose/ill-fitting but actually they look good? they fit me well and are still pretty ~~fitted~~ without, yk, the women’s skinny jeans thing where you can just see the whole fucking leg

plus the pockets thing obviously

so. now. i have to buy mens pants????

oh wow i am gonna just…. die

by which i mean: idiot, life ruined by discovery of mold on bag of bagels which it knew were past sell-by and should not have made any plans around, is unable to come up with a second option at 1AM, resigns itself to life of humiliation

also i am not done with homework bc i am not. good at making myself mark offbeats on many many lines of poetry.

ALSO i said something dumb earlier today and im still embarrassed about it bc it was stupid

i am literally not even hungry, i am in pain, that is a different experience and i am so annoyed that my brain is conflating them in this particular manner

NO clue why i feel sad/wanna float out of my body. doesn’t make sense. some hypotheses:

  • ate fried rice (??)
  • tired
  • don’t want to go to this lecture/exhibit for class (i love exhibits but im terrified of actually encountering an artist, especially a real good political activist genius artist when i am an extremely stupid baby)
  • alone in room
  • not getting my work done (more likely a symptom)
  • not actually a very interesting person; unsatisfied with own efforts at “art”
  • can’t have $6 bubble tea with almond milk in it every day of life
  • lonely again but a weird subset of it where i miss having crushes
  • lonely but because i can’t have that one thing that i should never try to have again anyway
  • tired

triumph! i have written a poem about sex and blood and plastic bags, but like, less annoying than that sounds.

well, no, it’s extremely annoying, but mainly bc i spend half the poem mugging the camera and making jerk-off motions that i’ll have to go back and edit out later, not because it’s ~about sex and blood and plastic bags~ per se