jardín sismo

i finally accept i love the rainy season. i love the wet streets in the evenings under the artificial lights. how flimsy the walls of the building seem in the middle of a downpour. a feeling like being an insect sheltering under a leaf. the general greeness, free water for my weird tenacious public garden. the electrical storms strobing silently in multiple locations of the sky like nervous signals in a body. i will not defend the newsworthy puddles or the floods. i have not resolved the shoe question.

my sister who had a lot of meltdowns as a kid and kind of spun out in early adulthood is by far the most well adjusted / well regulated of the three of us... turns out that holding it together out of a sake of obligation or self-image alienates you from your actual needs and feelings and gives you a warped sense of priorities. also it doesn't prevent you from acting crazy. though it might prevent you from noticing it. i spent a bunch of time being like "when do i get to have my nervous breakdown", blind to the fact that it was already happening, just much more slowly and in a way that was easier for everyone to ignore. lava flow vs glacier kind of deal.

you ever hook up with / catch a little crush on a friend and go on to make a 100% recovery but then years later they do something innocuous and your whole sexual immune system lights up like 'THAT'S what got me'

staying home to listen to ancient salsa and cumbia on the radio is really hitting the spot i am so exhausted and getting sick i think but

wrestling with distraction paralysis and lack of motivation today as if with three angels. the sky can also not really decide what it wants to do. it is sunny and clear blue but there are also heavy grey clouds and percussive thunder. cat is asleep in sofa corner like a bit of white cloud. even though i'm skeptical of this idea on a literal level, i do believe that my cats have been entities. entities with paradoxical desires. sismo was an earth entity who wanted to rise or climb into the air. mugs is a sky entity who wants to come down or fall. i've been missing sismo a lot this week. i went to the garden and it is doing pretty well. it was so dumb but i took a dead bird that i had found in the building and taken responsibility for and i buried it there. it looked like it had died suddenly in mid-air and fallen from the sky. i was incapable of giving it to the garbage truck to be crushed. i also took compost to enrich the soil. when i emerged from the metro it was the middle of a lightning storm. i had bought a waterproof from a stall while changing stations, having lost the waterproof that A lent me out drinking on a tuesday. as i walked from the metro to the overpass, i was counting the gaps between the lightning strikes and the thunder responses. there were three or four storms at once – one directly overhead. i thought that i could feel it in the air, though wet hair doesn't lift with static. the next day we watched the football together, A, A, M and D. these are somehow people who are also contradictory entities, and their reactions clashed. i liked being in the middle of the overlap.

the part time wood shop job is making me think a lot. one thing I like about it is that is doesn't encourage a performance of competency – the feeling that you need to act as if you know more than you do, and then scramble to catch up with yourself. everything is explained with great patience, which I am finding really moving, weirdly enough. I am connecting it with something that A said about the UK (where he lives now – we swapped places, so we can compare notes); that he struggles with the fact that this performance of competency is very normal and expected when applying to jobs. honesty is not rewarded. this makes sense within the culture. like certain countries swing more avoidant generally and the UK is definitely avoidant-leaning. but also my generation and the generations following came into this post-recession landscape where you really had to sell yourself as knowing everything there was to know in order to even get an unpaid internship. or the trap (which I know exists here too) of having to have X number of years of experience for an entry level position. it's such a generational betrayal, honestly. like how do people think that knowledge gets passed down. it has knock-on consequences not just in terms of people's actual ability but also by generating states of paranoia and cynicism. fragility. there is also something very essentially british about the barrier to entry being a necessary pretence which nobody buys but which makes you feel that you have sole responsibility for your ignorance, and must disguise it at all costs. i definitely internalized this. i remember years ago when i had recently arrived, C + M mocking me for opening all the cupboards instead of just asking where the mugs were.

ok i was intimidated by working in the wood shop but i think i like it. The amount of dust, respiratorially speaking, makes me nervous (i need to buy a better facemask and stop smoking as much). I do a lot of sweeping. we wear earplugs most of the time. there is a good muffled quality in the room. I sensed it looking in from outside when S was showing me around – something very quiet amid the noise of the machines. they have a huge workload right now but are going about things calmly, and are scrupulous about making sure that people leave on time. we communicate with hand gestures and our trousers are covered in wood glue, which has an authentic greenish booger consistency. the monosyllabic teen who is also a trainee cut his finger open on his lunch (can of tuna), and in a very teenage way just let the blood dry in an aesthetic pattern on his hand and carried on with his tasks stoically.

enter flat pursued horizontally by big fast hailstones