oh it’s sunday, time for “i’ll be your baby, on a sunday”

Honestly making new friends in my late 20s early 30s has in some ways been indistinguishable from dating except the courtship period is not romantic or sexual. I think people need to revisit the art of flirting in a friend way…like presenting your best self to a person and genuinely glowing when they return the gesture. And letting people influence and change you and getting excited when you have a chance to talk to them. That’s what makes getting to know someone fun in the first place…everyone in those advice threads about how to befriend people is basically describing how to have Coworkers not friends. “Go to a bar and hang out and start a conversation” you can do this but you have to follow up the first encounter with putting your best foot forward instead of just listlessly hoping for the social approval of the other party!!!!

It took me a while to understand, but the ideas that "your mindset creates your reality" "how deserving you feel" and "debunk your limiting beliefs" are some of the most toxic beliefs I fell into. I wasted precious time trying to debunk my limiting beliefs and answering endless prompts when the only thing I truly had to do was align my will with God’s will. When I fully commune with God, God does not care whether I have certain limiting beliefs or whether I feel deserving or not. At the end of the day, what matters is my relationship with God and how aligned I am with my higher self. When I realize that there is no reality to "create" and that my only mission here is to fulfill the mission God entrusted me with, everything begins to change without having to dismantle my entire inner world, repeat 400 affirmations, force feelings of worthiness or write thousands of prompts. God works in mysterious and miraculous ways and life is a process of constant unfolding. God’s timing is not something I am meant to fully understand and there comes a time when I realize I need to give more authority to God than to my mindset

This guy I went on a date with ages ago who is now genuinely a good friend of mine is a fairly well known writer, has published a few books, is a creative writing professor at a good university, but every time we get together he talks about how much of a failure he is. He makes very little money which is a big stressor, and even though he is consistently published in magazines like the Kenyon review, is getting into prestigious residences, he is unhappy with his life’s progress. I always tell him to quit this attempt to make money off of his writing and to go work in a bar because he will make more money and his relationship to writing would drastically improve, but he feels like his youth and opportunities to do anything else already escaped him. (He’s 39). I adore him, but find it so interesting how most of the successful writers I know are so married to this made up system. The MFA, the awards, the agent. Writing is an act of courage, it’s not a job. He agrees with me but sees no other way. He knows writing could never be a job and to ask your writing to be a job is to shamelessly participate in its death. I so wish he would free himself, but instead we get coffee. We take turns editing each other’s things, I talk him off the ledge about his current novel, and then we don’t see each other again for 5 months.

"those with terror for god have terror for nothing" (sirach 34:14). god is nothingness, you know. he's tohu vavohu, the formless unformed of genesis. he's the virescere, greeny garden, river to river to river, though vacant now. he's the neglected fields of the fertile crescent, his charmers lying on the ground therein, feeling no content. he's the hole in your chest, too