Muddled Musings

May 13, 2020. 

May 10, 2020. 

I went on a l-o-n-g hike today, and now I’ve got blisters on both my feet. :/ Despite this, the hike was a very refreshing and productive three hours for me. I listened to hauntingly beautiful tunes from Hozier and Florence + The Machine, and it sort of transformed my being in the naturescape to this feeling of lightness and ethereality. Like I was an elven being traipsing around the woodlands. But maybe that feeling has less to do with what I’m doing externally and says more about who I am, mentally. I’m okay with that, really. 

Although the semester just concluded, I’m feeling a need for academia to swallow me up again. I like school; it gives me a lot to ponder, even if it is tedious sometimes. But I’m telling myself the summer semester will have me in that headspace soon enough and I should just build up this motivational energy and be creative until then. 

May 9, 2020.

I found some purpose today. Not quite enough to shake me from my aimless trance, but enough to make me feel something. 

I properly went outside for the first time in weeks, spending some time cleaning the deck and doing some yard work with my brother. It’s been surprisingly cool these months, but the sun was just this gentle warmth (just the way I like it!) and it felt so comforting. 

May 8, 2020. 

So maybe my original goals for this blog space are dashed dreams now, which is fine, though it is, admittedly, one more thing that makes me feel less creative (even as I crave pouring my creative energy into something) and deeply unproductive.

My ethics, my motivation, everything seems to have faded, made easier by the absence of any sense of time. We live in inexplicably expansive times, so I am able to get easily lost and have no means to return to a space of proper being and life. Perhaps this is why i’ve been pondering T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land so much lately, wondering about the detriment of our lives in this age and the decay of humanity at large. 

Regardless, I hope one of these days my excuses of “tomorrow...” will bear some fruit and enlighten me with some sense of productivity in the near future. 

In less... existential news, it’s been exactly a month since I cut my bangs! :) 

April 16, 2020.

So, this is the new normal. I haven’t really left the house in a week, mostly because there aren’t many places I can go. COVID-19 has swept everything in its wake, and I wish there was something I could do, but hey, I’m just a twenty year old who wants to fight the good fight. 

At first, I was all gung ho about using this quarantine order to gain a better sense of self, something I’d been fretting over for quite a while at that point. It helped, having a little time to reset, because I got a lot of reading in, made some connections, cleaned and re-cleaned my closets and desks, continued to study French... It felt productive and meaningful. Because if I couldn’t be out there doing whatever, I might as well make the most of my time, right? Well, that wore of real quick.

I’m not reading much anymore, even less than I did when I was at school and was in my parasitology lab until 3 a.m. I’m really not reading at all. I haven’t looked at any french in weeks, I haven’t always felt motivated to make my bed each morning. I’ve been scarfing down butter cookies and cheese puffs and I’ve really done nothing. I did cut bangs out of the blue one day, so I guess that’s a new development. 

Truly, I feel like I’ve lost touch with the world. School is all kinds of weird, schedule-wise, and I have all this work to do though the way I am approaching things doesn’t feel natural and proactive to me. The machinations of life seem mundane and pointless and this nihilistic view of the world is really setting in now. 

March 19, 2020.

I moved out of my dorm today. It’s been... weird. Totally not how I was expecting sophomore year of university going, nope. 

Spring break, which is officially coming to a close, has been pretty uneventful. I’ve mostly been holed up in my room, reading, consuming a lot of media in general, though being stuck at home has been a little tiresome overall. 

Instead, I get to spend time listening to, watching, and reading about love and heart and romance! It’s nice, I suppose, but sad. I feel more profound want for love and romance in my life again, mostly because there isn’t much else to distract me or occupy my time at the moment.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s desperate, or pathetic, or just sad that I am 20 and have never been kissed, never been on a date, never been in a romantic relationship, never been in love. Other times I’m okay being by myself, okay with things taking time, okay with believing that I’m just not there yet. But I feel too much and I want these things and I think that I’m not quite ready for a relationship of that sort at all and I think that I’ll never know if and when I’m ready and what it is I want until I am in a relationship. 

Besides the disappointingly same romantic life of mine, I’ve also lost all sense of platonic relationships. I have CW, with whom I communicate and check in regularly, even though we don’t physically speak much considering we go to different schools now. It’s weird but nice to know how we grew closer from a physical distance than when we lived across the hall from each other. I have SJ, from high school, who is pretty much the only person I really talk to from that point in time, besides MT, that is. And I have like my little parasitology lab crew. They’re a little out there sometimes, but they make me laugh. What can I say, I gravitate towards fools, being one myself.

In any case, while in quarantine I’m doing a lot of thinking. Naturally, a lot of it is my anxious brain’s overthinking, but some of it is more conscious and deliberate. Like what I’m doing here, and what I’m thinking about and considering for my future, my identity, my work, my dreams. Anxious brain takes over during those thought trains, and steers us off a cliff more often than not, but I’m getting some thoughts out there, and I think that’s worth something. 

March 14, 2020.

Today was... lazy. And it feels sort of liberating to use the word “lazy” without needing it to be a particularly negative term. 

The last two weeks I had spent a ridiculous amount of time in/on my parasitology lab trying to solve a lot of problems and hitting so many walls throughout the process. Being in a wet lab like this one has definitely expanded my experience with science and research and has contributed to my identity crisis as much as it has aided in answering questions about where my interests lie. Overall, the lab has been quite gratifying and empowering. But, I got maybe seven hours of sleep over the entirety of last week, so here I am today, having slept in and sort of just laid in bed all day without giving into the nagging feeling that says I should be up and about and doing something. 

I spent the day reading (admittedly, not as much as I’d normally like), rewatching the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, catching up on almost a month’s stock of podcasts! (there’s a lot of COVID-19 related podcasting there at the moment, but I appreciate the sensible distribution of information courtesy of BBC Radio 4′s Beyond Today, Alie Ward’s Ologies, and Bill Nye’s Science Rules!) 

March 13, 2020. 

It’s the Friday before spring break, it’s my second year (fourth semester!) of college, and COVID-19 news is everywhere. The panic is palpable, the shops are empty, people are... somewhat hysterical... and I’m technically not even allowed to visit the library. In this moment of social distancing I am also left with a lot of questions about identity, my future, my academics, my personality... Lingering questions about myself that I’ve been grappling with for quite a while, but certainly haven’t really come bubbling up nearly as intensely before as they are now.