#personal asides

all that hemming and hawing all through season two

and in the end

all it took for kala to convince rajan to sleep with her and wolfgang

was one (1) persuasive indian head tilt

oh my god

this girl apparently talked about dying all the time, and for one of her writing assignments, she'd written a news article style thingie about how she'd been found dead in the swimming pool, or something?

and little tweenage me was thinking:

a) maybe she just thinks it's funny? still, someone should probably check in with that girl, just in case

b) ... wait a minute. this could be a really great opportunity for me to talk to the parental unit about my own thoughts about ceasing to exist, which are honestly starting to scare me a little, and maybe i could possibly also talk about other types of thoughts and feelings i have that i suspect aren't super normal. maybe parental unit will help me understand what's going on in my mind!

and parental unit sneered and said, 'i told her, if you want to die so badly, i'll give you one of my saris and you can go hang yourself'

and smirked at me like she'd just said the funniest thing in the whole world

and little tweenybopper me kind of died a little on the inside

but i do feel like it should be called the many ways in which the british have fucked people over

or the many ways in which indigenous peoples have been fucked over

i love that in noel clarke's episode, he pointed out that some people are able to trace their ancestry far, far back, and for others the line just stops. i feel like it’s one of the things the show really lets you see - being able to trace your lineage far back is a privilege not everyone gets

and one of my favorite moments was in jon cryer's episode, when, like, every male ancestor he looked up turned out to be a total piece of shit, and at the end he said, 'it stops with me'

that was really, really powerful

Art begets art...

rekindling these flickering ember flames of inspiration, swirling motes from a fallow-lain field, suddenly now fertile,

whispering a gentle, quavering invocation to the Muses to lift me & my waterladen wings

---ever cautious, lest Apollo & Dionysius should overehear and take things too far, in their earnest attempts to nurture or sway or lay claim to such talents for their own gains.

For already having veered too close to the wine-dark sea and its unfathomable depths,

hurtled abruptly headlong by the manic sirens' calling, a wretched familiar refrain,

its dark despair lapping up to drench my face, sputtering, flooding my mouth and lungs with salt & guilt & shame & fears & terror... I have cried out like Icarus.

Nay, i pray:

Let the Muses lift me upwards to feel the rays of hope & light of a once-clouded sun, their steady system of support, multi-pronged, will renew me, dry me, and make me whole again.

Perchance, i might even feel that nigh forgotten stirrings of wax-melting ambition, if I am so bold to dare dream.

But may they hold me fast! may they keep my flight to the middle way: safely betwixt the air and the sea.

their Non-Binary Gyroscope Virtuvian, their verbose-Alchemist-of-words, their hobbyist Aeronaut of artistic talents, let my merits be of use!

I will sing for them as they may guide my course, for them to encompass and compass me towards accomplishment as my polarstar:

my fingers automatically find the home keys to type and fill up the blank word document, and i reach for the sharpened, classic Papermate Mirado No.2 pencil to sketch and feel the weight of a spiral-bound empty drawing notebook.

Admittedly, muscle (creative) memory & flexible cerebral celerity have atrophied since last time exerted, so long ago,

When was i last amongst my peers in a collegiate creative writing workshop?

Tempus fugit! Tempus fugit. Tempus fugit... I weep! it flees, it blurs, it parallels, it blanks, it barrages, memories & time thus so excruciatingly intertwined.

it will take great effort, it will take many, many drafts, it will take time, to produce a piece.

It does not need to be a masterpiece.

But I have time. I have time. I have time.

All the time on the world. All the time in this single day, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute. For though we cannot see nor know the future, we do have this present moment to so seize opportunity.

I am granted this precious privilege that is being, being alive to think, to love, and so on, as Marcus Aurelius so comforts.

There is no set deadline, no due date, this project that has hold of the disused flint & steel to strike white-hot

compulsion for catharsis contained upon and within the pages now inked digitally

It is a work in progress, continual, it is for me. It is for me alone. (Perhaps, shared with but a few closest.)

But all that matters is that i must keep breathing & hoping, as Cicero so comforts.

Sigh, yet trying to temper the temporal swells, though thankfully the torrential seas have calmed considerably as I look towards my mental health counselor appointment on this coming Thursday.

I did randomly re-remember this important neologism/intersectional feminist lens:

Kyriarchy

This month has been an absolutely emotional wreck/a wretched one in terms of wibbly-wobbly mental health, work stress, and life stress, etc., so I'm definitely making watching "Turning Red" my guilt-free reward come post-Friday's shift (I am not even going to link it as being an agenda itinerary reward motivator, as I sometimes do to myself in an effort to get past hurtles of my neurodivergent (ADD) executive dysfunction!)

I am going to have myself a bowl of my favorite ice cream on hand from the fridge freezer and probably will make myself one of my favorite frozen pizzas for solo dinner and just going to curl up in comfy clothes and watch this film I've been so eager to see.

perhaps it is because of the pandemic-anniversary marking yet another year of endless uncertainties & fears... perhaps it is the Ides of March... perhaps it is the changing seasons, weather that is switching unpredictably, frantically indecively from winter snowfall to summer balmy breezes and back again, seasonal turbulence... perhaps it is ceaseless worrying for the peoples of Ukraine right now, the wretched war on far shores, the rumors of wars, the terrifying sabre-rattling by all the powers that be their voices raising louder & louder in anger & tension & hate, whilst we all idle & quake in our boots & fret our hands, doing anything & everything, all what little ways we can to try to offer aide however seemingly insignificant our charity & hoping that this may make some bit of difference to someone, likewise too it is my, our, the wailing despair over the Florida goverment's "Don't Say Gay" bill & the Texas govenor's tyrannical threats, their combined endangerment of the most vulnerable, innocent of Queer & Trans children & youth & also their families who are loving & supporting & protecting them (let us hope)...

perhaps it is personal too this stress that is of fretting over work performance as it has come due for Employee Self-Evaluations, personal in all of these my pent up self-doubts & dredged up things & pensive inquisition & retroflection & reflection, rearing their ugly heads & gnashing its teeth, of internal contradictions & regrets & reclaimations, my body & soul & mind & heart is moving is breathing is beating is retreating into the sway & sound of music as all the memories come hurtling, flickering like a projector film stream-of-conscious flood of nostalgia & of latent realisations, desperate to find my centre & find my sealegs on a heaving tilting deck, "A wall for the body, a circle for the soul" echoes the words of Jeanette Winterson, and I get lost too in all of the Words & Quotes & Images that I hold onto, have read & seen & re-read & re-seen, that now come haunting me with under a new & different spotlight beam...

but O, my eyes are so weary, eyelids burning, the insomnia keeps me restless, so restless, my temples are throbbing and I'm clenching and working my jaw, my body aches, back muscles & the soles of my feet straining & contorting, my tic disorder has been acting up fiercely again, all throughout the night the muscles all spasming more often when so desperately I am struggling to settle down into a slumber, constantly flipping the pillows over and over to feel the cool-side of the fabric, I feel the electricity building, like an electric pulse, a faulty fusebox, beginning at the base of spine crackling jntil it shoots out like bolts of lightning strikes in repetitive cycling spasms of splaying limbs & shivers that wracking & contorting the spine & core body & chest, leaving me all tangled & twisted up in my bedsheets, gasping, panting for breath, all my energies spent, my bowels have been terribly, painfully gassy & the stool far too soft, and I've got a mouth, gumline full of stress-response canker sores to irritate the gums (and it is definitely not because of any pineapple juices/acids) that is slowly healing now, it is the kind of sore mouth that reminds me of Collegiate Finals & Capstone essays weeks & leaves me eating meals of only hot (maple brown sugar) Oatmeal as it does not need to be chewed too hard & slathering the gums in too much Baby Oral-Gel numbing accidentally my tongue in the process...

These pangs will pass in all due time, I know, it is temporal, I temper myself so, channel it so, and I am forging & re-forging my own foundation of solace here, "Dum Spiro, Spero"/"While I breathe, I have hope"

I look forward to being amongst in-person my small close beloved group of local friends again & to cooking supper for them to share this weekend.

And its pure nostalgia vibes! I'd forgotten how many lyricly profound & emotionally moving all of the tracks are on this album in particular, the narrative arc/cohesion of all of the songs individually & together!!! I love that I can't just chose any one single track from this album as a favorite.

I love the band VNV Nation so much (they're def one of my favorite all time techno/synth/EDM/alt rock bands, alongside the bands Negative Format and Colony 5, personally), but I have often only ever fallen in love like with only one or two specific tracks from each of VNV Nation's other albums.

Some of that was due to the piecemeal nature of stumbling upon their music initially in the early Millenium via Limewire/Pandora Radio (I think?) and then later Apple iTunes Store/Library and the primary mode of listening to music back then being exclusive to MP3 downloads and early generation iPods, but also, still in an era of physical CDs and CD players likewise being ubiquitous/not yet considered obsolete. So generally if I ended up liking/falling in love with multiple specific songs by a band, then the likelihood that I would seek out buying a full physical CD album of that specific band would correspondingly increase, but a certain threshold still had to be met, if that makes sense. Especially as iTunes rose to dominance and it was easier and easier to purchase a single song at a time, eclipsing physical CDs, and irrevocably unlinking/untethering music from the absolute necessity of purchasing an entire CD album (especially if you only liked one or two tracks).

So, with an average of like 10-12 tracks per album, give or take, over the years, with VNV Nation specifically, I love/still will absolutely jam out to the following individual tracks from their chronological albums for some perspective context:

"Legion" from Empires album (1999); "Electronaut" and "Beloved" from Futureperect album (2002); "Where There Is Light" and "From My Hands" as instant bangers from Of Faith, Power, and Glory album (2009) (three's like three other tracks that I will also jam to from this album, but only when I am in the right mood); "Space & Time" and "Nova" from Automatic album (2011), and "Aeroscope" from Transnational album (2013), rather than the majority/entirety of the album. [N.B., their most recent album was from 2018, but no tracks really captured my heart yet the same way from their albums since their Transnational album.]

The point being it is rare for me to love an entire album of VNV Nation's discography.

But then here's their Judgement album (2007) with just hit after hit and musical resonance in the heart:

The instrumental opening track "Prelude" (Track 1), the political/environmental/spiritual calls to action in "The Farthest Star" (Track 2) & "Testament" (Track 3) up through the heartwrenchingly beautiful/encouraging "Illusion" (Track 8), the solace in "Carry You" (Track 9), and the final track, bookending with another instrumental song, "As It Fades" (Track 10). Tracks 4-7 are so-so/variable as to general mood-to-vibing scale.