Tag: literalliterature

Write a poem about the dream I had where you compared me to Vriska.

I stacked the cups before me on
the desk. Echoing notes
came off the layered terraces,
struck out of curves of stone

that arched themselves for miles. And through
one door, water had filled
itself into the room, which now
could not be opened up.

And out the other it had changed:
when I walked through, a stair
turned back on itself, catching at
my feet. Instead, a round

field grew, circled with seats and lights
and, in the center, two
opposing sets of standing poles.
That is: a cricket ground.

But we were stacking cups; at least,
I did. You stared at me
and frowned. And crossed your arms. And tried
to speak, the way one does

in dreams: more as intent than sound.
“Do you think if I tried
to live more in myself, and less
in waiting misery—”

So it went on; I gave advice
less lofty than my work.
Til all at once you stood, and said,
in hot, reproachful tones:

“Before I read Homestuck, I thought
Vriska must be so nice
and kind, and also helpful, and
a joy to everyone

who met her— all because you said
we’re exactly the same!”
The wickets creaked. Inside, the room
set places for the game.

pomegranate, blueberry, kiwi, papaya, star fruit (hard mode: aside from the vampire squid)

honestly. how dare you. the vampire squid is the low-hanging fruit that i use when i can’t come up with anything better. i was into the vampire squid when i was 12. do you think i’m basic or something

anyway.

pomegranate: when do you feel the most confident?

while setting up a punchline in a group i have a good sense of already; when i’m discussing a journal article w other people; s*x, sometimes, tbh. basically situations where it’s not necessarily that i am exactly right/going to do everything right, even though there’s a decent chance i will, but that i’m sure that i can come across as smart and interesting and valuable regardless.

blueberry: what do you want to dress up as for halloween?

presumably as always i will try to come up with something charmingly esoteric and end up panicking and improvising with whatever i have in my wardrobe. if i’m really lazy or preferably doing several days of costumes then i may repeat last year’s Cambridge Youth Dying Of Consumption. 

kiwi: what’s something that fascinates you?

architecture & architecture theory, not that i like, know or understand anything about it.

papaya: what song describes your aesthetic?

aesthetically, i exist at the intersection of “kiss me, son of god” by tmbg and “staring at the sun” by tv on the radio. i am the middle of that venn diagram.

star fruit: favorite sea creature?

i appreciate the way that tunicates are extremely unlikely-seeming chordates that move from tadpole to notochordless colonies or superficially sea-cucumber-like organisms. plus it’s really cute to watch the backs of the larvae zip themseves up into tiny protonotochords!

🌻

as you know, bob, c. elegans roundworm are primarily self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, and males actually occur with a nondisjunction event– hermaphrodites are XX and males are XO, meaning the cell didn’t get all of the X chromosomes it was supposed to have at some point during division. this means that normally males are very rare (<1/1000), since in most cases (example exceptions: the worm sex thing, trisomy 21/down’s syndrome in humans) losing or having an extra chromosome is pretty disastrous for development, and so there are a lot of mechanisms in place to prevent nondisjunction. there is an exception to this, however: if you’re a scientist (as some people are) and want a lot of males so you can perform a cross between two strains, you can just leave the worms at 37˚C for a few hours, and a lot (25%ish ime) of the eggs they lay hatch into males, and these males can then mate with hermaphroditic worms of one’s choice.

this, of course, all just reveals the essential difference between worms and spaghetti: 

worms aren’t straight until you heat them up.

5, 29, 30

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

i think i identify myself mostly by the way i act/present myself? i don’t describe myself as an artist even though i sometimes make art, for instance. my self is about internal state/observations thereof plus how i present myself/act. this is in my mind somewhat materially distinct from being defined by my impact on others– which is not even slightly unimportant to me but i definitely think my essential self would still exist if i were in total isolation, even if many of the parts/effects of it that i care about would stop existing. i also don’t think i’m necessarily defined by the outcomes or results of my actions, which i think is what i would call being defined by “things i do”, even though i guess my actions-with-additional-intent are also self-evidently “things i do” and those do count as part of the me. 

i didn’t answer the question really. i guess even though i know what’s important on any material level is the doing, i do think i have a being in myself that i get to value just for the sake of valuing my own thoughts/qualia. anything else seems like it’s just totally subjugating the concept of me as my own person to the needs/will/totally uncontrollable perceptions of others. holding the latter view feels like it should be virtuous somehow but for me is in practice mostly self-immolating and inducing of total craziness.

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

“the last limit of bhakti”, the mountain goats
let me serve you until it’s all over./when the world is giving your secrets all away/let me give you cover

(i get some free tmg mentions right? anyway “song for an old friend”, “if you see light”, “thank you mario but our princess is in another castle”, great let’s move on) (also smog “to be of use” which i’m binning here bc for me same sentiment + i learned about it indirectly via jd)

“bike dream”, rostam
i’m sure that you’ll catch your breath/you’ll sleep into the day/to wake up with sunlight across your room

“i love you for psychological reasons”, they might be giants
lately i’ve taken to vacantly making repetitive movements mistakenly seen as improvements

30. pick one of your favorite quotes.

it’s going to be from a poem obviously, but:

“I don’t owe anybody for the bad thoughts I think
or will think.” (from I Will Make A Useful Manual For My Tasks and Hide It, laura eve engel)

😇💔🎉🐭😑

😇: Every single interaction we’ve had so far has been positive.

💔: You’ve disappointed me before. 

yeah don’t worry i’ll be meaner to you going forward. i know you need me to make fun of you more or else your hydoxylases can’t make enough collagen and your gums start bleeding.

🎉: I get really happy when I see positive personal posts from you, even when I don’t fully understand the context! you live in my room what more context could you possibly need

🐭: Please be kinder to yourself. i’ll have u know i ate like four entire meals today

😑: -__-

fuck dude.

it sure is

🐼💥🐶(pellam/keet/the platonic ideal of me)

🐼 if you could meet anyone, who would it be and why?

tbh @idionkisson or @aeide-thea? which is like, a lot, i realize– sorry– but for both of u i really appreciate your internet presences and how we’ve interacted and i think you would be really delightful to meet in person!

i don’t really want to meet celebrities, and while i could come up with historical figures who someone should ask various important questions of, on a personal level i mostly just like having friends.

and, of course, anon, my dear roommate, i wish we were friends in real life too.

💥 what are some unpopular opinions that you have?

i tried to answer this and became transfixed for several minutes by my cat, who was washing his face. anyway. part of my whole thing is that i like my opinions to be orthogonal to popularity whenever possible, but with the consequence that i’m not sure what the popular opinions actually are, or even who is supposed to be having these opinions that are popular, because i exist in such a weird opinion space that i don’t think i encounter opinions that correspond to anything that’s popular in other spheres. literally i’ve been here for like ten minutes trying to figure out what people like and whether i disagree about it, but without getting into politics, which i hate and refuse to discuss here.

ok, uh, hamilton was never very good, tallahassee has good songs but isn’t great as an album, if something makes you sort of sick and you keep eating it that’s actually fine probably and anyway is your right as the owner of your own cells. generating a stem/humanities dichotomy and then ranking one over the other is stupid, but you can see where stem people get it from, whereas surely the whole point of the kind of thought cultivated by being a humanities or art ~person is you know better than to pull that shit. just kidding, neither of them makes you good at critical thought. people become interesting and smart through exposure to michigan winters or possibly by being lesbians, although neither of those, in itself, is enough.

🐶 send me 3 fictional people and I’ll choose my favourite!

to be clear, for the readers: pellam is my roommate’s dnd eladrin wizard, keet is my roommate’s dungeon world orca mermaid, @literalliterature is……………. best not to get into it.

anyway my ranking is 1. pellam 2. keet 3. platonic ideal of you. you in yourself are my favorite of the three, obviously, but what i like is the destructive interference caused by your interactions with the imperfect and fallen phenomena of the world. a you distilled, in isolation, does nothing for me.

i like pellam more than keet because i think emotional trauma and eye injuries are sexier than amnesia.

47 and 52

47. Did you have a dream last night?

i always have dreams.

(here are two, one from last night and one that last night’s called back to. in the first, i was out in a metal boat with two people, real people. saltwater came in on every wave even though i knew it was a lake in the way that in real life i know where my hands are. one of us searched desperately for some kind of signal, radio or cell, vague because in my dreams i know even less about physics. i and the other sat in the back of the boat, idly trying to bail it out or contemplating future feelings of sunburn and not thinking about how as soon as we escaped everything would be over. the three of us had, in the boat, reached some kind of understanding; the two of us understood, as the signal-seeker perhaps did not, that our rescue would prevent our deaths but also any chance of us maintaining our collective intent. the nature of this intent varied, but it was intensely emotional and possibly romantic and involved a highly complex network of social connections and a plan for the armed overthrow of a medium-scale political power.

in the second dream, i sat with i someone i love at a wooden table in a kitchen full of sunlight. my hands were on the table. there was a small vase full of violets. they leaned across the table– i turned my head to theirs– they gently but firmly put their thumb over my mouth and pushed.)

52. Is your life anything like it was two years ago?

in several obvious respects yes– still in college at same college, still a bio major, still a lot of the same creative projects. at this time two years ago i was just starting to push relationships into being that are most of the important ones i now have. i lived functionally alone and i was sad and lonely and messy and crazy and sick all the time; now i’m just messy and crazy. two years ago my job was undoable and inescapable and i prayed to be fired, or if i couldn’t get fired then perhaps to be hit by a train. last week i said to my boss “i’m very frustrated with my slow pace at work, i think i’m not getting enough done” and he said “well, you’re producing more than you think, but anytime you’re hitting these roadblocks you should let me know and i can come troubleshoot it with you,” exactly as though i’m a real person whose problems deserve to be solved. this time two years ago i hadn’t come up with a couple of my big life problems yet, but i had far more, and i wanted to die all the time, and that was very bad, and this is much better.

sand guardian, welcome to chili’s, and they were roommates

is there anything you’d protect with your life?

[“please, is there anything i wouldn’t”]

several specific people, individually. a sufficiently large group of people generally. 

favourite restaurant?

dim sum place from last night; the seafood restaurant in sf where i had one of the most awkward dinners of my life but also really excellent crab.

if you could live with anyone, who would it be?

god has already asked me this question and i have answered. (this sentence is my concession to sentiment.) no, really, though, i have you and the boy and i will keep you! for a calendar year i shall keep you. then our faerie pact is up and you are free to leave the forest of the silver eye.

anyway certain of you are aware that i have had expansive ludicrous living-with-people dreamspirations for a Significant Time, and while both the intent and the particulars have changed dramatically i still on some level absolutely guiltily do, so let me add some more people:

M, my childhood (literally K thru 12) best friend; N, who is– not my childhood best friend (listen. shut up); my mom for a value of “live with” that is “directly next door to” (well, really you can imagine all of this subdivided into distinct-but-adjoining space until it almost starts to make some sense); and uh– well actually everyone else is either erstwhile or more neighbor than housemate or else, uh, too embarrassing even for this space, including some people who i know from the internet, oops