#eveningpages

Tuesday 25th August - 10:26pm

Yeah, I know these are just becoming later and later, and I know I’m going to have to do this whole thing again in around ten to twelve hours, but I honestly just needed to take a whole day today. I feel like that’s genuinely something I needed to do. And a lot has happened today! I don’t know if I want to talk about all of it, but I suppose I do feel full and happy enough to talk about...some. I spoke to Malith? I called him when I was on my walk with Lonzo after realising that I was feeling a bit lonely. And Malith was #1 on my list of 50 people who’ve helped shape me into the person that I am today. Out of all the people I could’ve thought of first, I thought of him. And that was in my head all day today, so around 4pm I decided to finally call him. And I expressed that the reason I hadn’t been able to call him before that was because I was getting too in my own head about allocating time to call Malith. I mean we usually speak on the phone for hours at a time, with three or so hour phone calls being a totally normal and regular occurrence when we were younger, and by younger I mean like two or so years ago? It’s perfectly natural for us to waste away hours on the phone, and for our phone calls to include multiple toilet trips. Phone in hand. I felt like if I was always multitasking, then I’d have no time for a phone call. But on my walk today, I realised that I’d rather speak to him for twenty minutes a day rather than not speak to him at all for months just because I never had four spare hours at a time. Which reminds me, I also told the boy that I’d actually read ‘Fleabag’, so I have to do that right after finishing these pages. Yowza. I kind of fucked myself over here, didn’t I? The amount of crap I need to do is seemingly large almost always usually because I allow myself to have days like this, where I get absolutely nothing done. Well, actually it’s not entirely my fault. I had uni this morning, and so that meant a 9am start AT THE LATEST. I actually woke up at around 7am, closer to 7:30am but not close enough that it was an alarm that had woken me up. The sun woke me up, because it comes out earlier now. And I love that. Summer’s on its way in, but I still have a gross winter body and it’s still weirdly raining a lot, so I want to rectify the gross winter body, but it’s a little difficult in this abhorrent torrential August rain. 

I’ve just realised I haven’t had a single paragraph break for this whole page, so I’ve decided to put one right here. We learnt about ‘chunking’ in Writing & Editing for Digital Media this week, and the inverted pyramid model that’s used for writing content meant for digital platforms. I felt pretty confident in my ability to ‘chunk’ effectively, that is to construct my content in defined and digestible chunks so that it’s not just one wall of text, and our audience is more likely to both find the information they came for, and also better engage with our content in general. I’m really enjoying this class, and I’m also really enjoying ONLY TAKING ONE CLASS! After this class, I’ll only have one more left, and then the internship. Which is exciting. If I’ll ever be able to actually do an internship. COVID-19 has screwed up my hopes of finding full-time employment by February 2021, and calling my 24th year on this earth the first official year of my professional career. It seems as though there’ll still be some time before I properly enter my industry. But I am enjoying doing whatever I can with whatever is available to me right now. I mean maybe I could go on to get my PhD at unimelb. Maybe not at unimelb? But honestly where else would I go? I have no other connections to any other institutes, but one could also say that I have no connections at unimelb either. I just owe them a lot of money. And also $282, or I believe that is the amount. I don’t want to think about that bullshit right now though.

Evan just coughed in the other room. I’m not sure what he’s doing, but I love him. I don’t know why, I just wanted to write that. 

Sarah posted in the 21 Days group that today’s challenge was to call up one person from our list of 50 people and just touch base with them. Funnily enough, when I read the challenge I was already on the phone to Malith. I called him after realising that if he was the first person on my list, that would mean that I’ve been thinking about him quite a bit, and took that as a sign that I should definitely call him. It felt pretty nice to have preemptively completed the challenge, without even knowing that I was PREEMPTIVELY completing the challenge?! ‘Preemptive’ is such a weird word. I misspelt it when I was typing it out in caps. The ‘p’ being between the ‘m’ and the ‘t’ threw me off completely. It just felt wrong to type those letters in that order. 

Anyway, Sarah also spoke about her friend Joshua in the post, and I didn’t know how to express my condolences. I just sent her a message. I feel my mind straying from these pages. I don’t think I want to deal with anything too complicated right now, which is why I’m skirting the issue. Sometimes, I worry that if I don’t speak about my friends and what’s going on in their lives, I’ll just repeat the same basic stuff that I seem to concern myself with for the majority of my time, or over the bulk of my day. I don’t know. I need to read ‘Fleabag’, and I’m worrying that I’m not making sense. I doubt that these pages will provide me with any insight today. I honestly just feel like I’m ticking boxes at this point, and I’m a little bit annoyed about that feeling, but I’m also accepting it as part of the pages. Oh what zen. I am a revolutionary mindful practitioner, a beautiful and empty-headed queen of calm. I don’t fucking know. It’s 10:56pm, it seems ludicrous to still refer to this as a morning pages entry. LOOK. I consider it to be a colossal win that I’m writing anything at all today.

I texted Julie and organised to visit her again next Wednesday so we can spend a bit more time looking at all the stuff I’ve done on Squarespace so far. It’s not bad, what I’ve done so far. Like it’s really not bad. I’m proud of where the site’s at, with perhaps a small exception to the colour scheme and the fonts. I have to sort that out. I’m not entirely sure how to add our own font packs to Squarespace’s site builder. I hope they allow for that? Because the font pack that they do have is INCREDIBLY limited. I’ve stopped using italics in these pages because I’ve realised that when I copy/paste the text from this morning pages doc into tumblr, tumblr gets rid of all my italicised text and just turns them into normal letters again. Lonzo just had a dream where he was running and his legs were moving, but he’s lying behind me under the blanket and so his little scratchy paws were moving up and down on my butt and it felt like the largest, weirdest, most inefficient spider bite I was ever receiving.

There are now TWO spiders on the window sill above the kitchen sink now, and the newer one is smaller but still BIG for a house spider, and it’s suspended in the centre of a web that’s been prominently constructed right above the kitchen sink and in the centre of the bottom section of the window. So basically this spider is like eye-level with me when I go to do the dishes. But the problem is, is that this smaller spider looks eerily like a crab, its legs are at weird angles, and I legitimately think it’s dead? AH. I hate this so much. I’m trying not to think about it, but goddamn it’s on my mind and now I’ve described it in great detail. That horrid spider will be in these morning pages for the rest of eternity, and someday future Rue is going to read this description and hate past Rue for it...present Rue? Rue that is Rue right now, sitting here typing against her will but also for her own good.

I’m weirdly enjoying it that whenever I answer the phone at work and an older man is the one who’s calling, they say ‘like a French street’ when I tell them my name. Haha! Sometimes I’ve responded with ‘or like searing regret’ or something along those lines. And if they appreciate wit, they tend to laugh. This one time, I told a middle-aged couple about my idea for a useless superhero (‘Superfluous’), and the dad (because he was a dad and she was a mum and they were in the shop buying a phone for their daughter, if I remember correctly) CACKLED. I have a love-hate relationship with brackets. I think they’re lazy and I would never use them in anything I write and put my name to, but I’ve always used them avidly in journal entries and personal stuff like these pages. I figure nobody’s going to judge me for having horrid grammar and some shoddy structure in something that they shouldn’t be reading anyway. 

I do enjoy writing though. Always have. No surprises there. But sometimes it is hard. It feels like a part of me that I feel I need to disconnect from myself in order to survive, and yet at the same time, it is my life. I don’t want to do anything else but this, I say that a lot. But then sometimes I am SO fearful that I’ve forgotten or I’m on the way to forgetting how to do this. It’s been literal years since I last wrote long-form fiction, and I feel like all the stuff I’ve written recently isn’t even that good. But was my stuff as a teenager any good too? Mr. D.B. Kuruppu said that it was. And I owe it to him to try harder. But I owe it to myself too. I have good ideas, or at least teenage Rue had good ideas, and those ideas deserve to be fleshed out and done justice. 

Here are some of them, not chosen in any particular order or with an eye for, “oh, this one is good.” Unfiltered here.

^^^       ^^^        ^^^

at another book reading, where four of us, all so different and in many ways breathing the same air were given a question:

why do you think you are still here? is it because of your resilience? do you think resilience is hereditary? 

before that she says, 1 out of 10 of us never make it out. never stop being homeless, are chronically homeless. 

LGBTQ youth are in the streets, right now. you can find them on the pier right now, i say.

i joke afterwards that i let the others on the panel talk of the statistics, leave it up to them to mention that in nyc alone, there are only 76 beds for queer and trans youth to sleep in at shelters. 76.

is resilience hereditary?

the numbers scare me. not that i didn't witness them everyday, that i didn't watch kids shuffle lines to heat up old ravioli from out dated cans, see security guards wake people up from benches at work and scream, "get up!"  watched so many students fleeing their foster homes b/c of the bruises they got, they beating they got for presenting their gender the way they do, for bringing a girlfriend over. remembering how cold it is right now, i can see the corner of belmont and clark st. as another friend threw up from food they found in the dumpster, how everything in their body looked like steam. the first year in the east coast, me being kicked out even at age 24 from an apartment because i was queer, the neighbors banging on the door, the police asking me carefully, do you think this is a hate crime?  then, i thought i was safe finally. finally. safety is a never ever arching word that is fantasy, something will always slip away and being kicked out has made me a half-believer in people, in myself. 

this understanding, this resilience theory,  that i got something you ain't got. that i, by the almighty volition of self, pulled myself up by the sneakers and did something, pushed myself extra, deserved, somehow by blood, i am sitting in front of you about to get some warm dinner and walk slowly in the ice, eventually to my own front door, to my own floor, to my own bed, fix up some tea in my own kitchen that i never feel i truly deserve. that tape is the same mix playing inside the immigrant ear i think, the child of the immigrant, who is never welcome here, who has to be crafty as fuck, to somehow uplift themselves in this system that never meant for us to exist. 

i believe it is chance. i believe it is luck. i agree with another person on the panel, when they said, that it was possibly fate, if you believe in such a thing.

i say, i don't think so. i don't have a resilience that someone else doesn't. i know people who are savvy, mindful, wise, and and, i clear my throat, who aren't with us.

i have nightmares.

of my teacher saying not to come back to tae kwon do school ever, throw away 10 years of my life, because he heard from another coach how i kissed another girl. how i couldn't train anywhere. how people who were in my family couldn't look at me. how parents held the hands of their children, ushering them away from me as though i was going to devour them, eat their bones like delicacy. gay people do that, you know.  gay people shouldn't be teachers of anything, martial arts or science or anything.

of my ma, even lying through the nest of tubes all over her body, cooing to the nurses at the hospital, that yes, she has a boyfriend and how i am always welcome i am at home. 

of _______. who didn't make it. who bent the street the way some shape clay. bent that street for food the way some people easily laugh. 

of ________. who no one has heard from since last september after she was assaulted. the agency wouldn't let her back in after she said he attacked her. in the report i typed that he said, i can make you like dick. just come here. agency supervisors say she is no longer welcome there.

of _______. who no one has seen since his first boyfriend. when they broke up he looked at the razors the same way he had before, he stopped calling, he didn't come to groups anymore. but damn, that sonnet he wrote was perfect in form and meter. 

last week, i spoke to a student who said he is going to the military, that he gave them his word, that he needs to do this for himself. because there is now where else to go. because i'm hungry and i want to go to college. he thinks it will be as a simple pressing of buttons, that the trauma he has faced has built him sturdy as steel for this. he convinces me that he wants to be honorable. 

that is your fine shining case in point.

resilience was like a code word for gift, a singular blip on my my DNA that makes me a survivor. a bitter compliment. a setting apart of me to my fallen chosen family, to the youth i see now who work their breaths up and down the sidewalk, who go from job interview to job interview without a bed to sleep in, who write poems even when they have now where to keep them. there's guilt you know. why i am here and they are there or not, not here anymore with us at all. don't use my strength as a weapon to my chosen family, even those people who have never rested their heads on my shoulder. this will not be the correct answer to stop homelessness or queer/transphobia, this will only pull us apart from the resources and respect we are entitled. 

there's no gene that makes one stronger to survive the streets, this country, this false amerikkkan dream. there is no explanation or cordial easy way out to reward the exceptional from the batch of us failed by systems of oppression, institutions that see us still as numbers, as grant data. the resilience of those to be exemplary heads to patpat and harp, see it's not the social services, the judicial system, the law enforcement, the educational system, the parents, not the parents, the foster care system, the.......

at the former agency i worked at, i overheard a co-worker who said, i haven't seen ______. in awhile either. eh well, there will always be more.  

like a supply of stars, an inventory of constant constant lives.