on the passage of time

a welcome back and a send off to past and future thoughts

a sleepy boi (me) on the way from providence to boston

welcome to this week's dispatch. if you'll notice anything different, it's that this newsletter (which used to be hosted on buttondown) has now been ported over to substack! hopefully everything should have stayed the same and you'll be receiving a slightly differently styled piece. you'll still get my same level of unhinged-ness and thoughts, just on a slightly more corporate platform. and if you're just joining for the first time, hello!

this past week i visited boston/providence for the first time since graduating (which granted, hasn't been that long of a time). i was there mostly to see a high school friend who graciously let me stay for the entire week and happened to catch a separate friend's mid-year graduation along with some other people who made the trek in. coming back, you hope to feel that something's changed, that you feel more in tune with the world and outside the liminal limbo of college. i did not. even worse, I felt that if i squinted hard enough, almost nothing had changed. I blended in too well with my backpack filled with a laptop and water bottle, with an overpriced iced latte in my hand, looking around for the nearest table in the student center to work at.

to say that the past six months have felt like three lifetimes feels both like a hyperbole and the grossest understatement. i had a three month relationship that ruined me emotionally and had many, many friends get me through it. i got my offer rescinded. i tabled an art booth and sold work. i worked on my biggest print project to date with many talented friends. i moved to a new city. i freelanced on projects then got told i was too junior for roles i was definitely qualified for (or maybe I wasn't qualified. who knows.) i had a poem in a contest. i got food poisoning again. i ran in two half marathons. and so much more. to list them all out makes me feel like hey... i'm doing things. or maybe the things i'm doing are things that i'm just passing time with, to feel that i'm living life, breathing life into the air and exalting my body to the fullest. except that i'm not. i'm merely just existing in the meandering soup.

i have a friend A who loves to talk about the vertigo from the passage of time moving through your body, which was pulled from a movie (?? article??? unsure). every day, I just go through the motions of life: waking up, eating, running, doomscrolling into the abyss, a bit of work, spiraling, occasionally a date, sleeping. in reading the news from twitter, i process whatever people are excited about. there is no filter between the information i'm actively consuming and the things that i think about. in franny choi's soft science, she has a series of poems about passing the turing test. the turing test asks if a machine can think, that if we were to ask both a human and a machine the same set of questions, would it be possible to determine the difference. at the current stage in my life, i'm not confident that I could exhibit any difference from a machine, unable to take the conditions i've been given and piece them together into something new, something functional.

while i don't experience vertigo, i have debilitating motion sickness. i can't sit in cars for too long unless i'm driving. the second a plane gets turbulence i feel like throwing up. some video games require me to take breaks after just half an hour, requiring me to turn off the console and lie down. the fix for this, i'm told, is to stare out at a location in space for a while, to concentrate deeply on this spot and hold your gaze on it until you feel better. thank you, i'd probably say as i gently ask you to pull over so i could throw up.

i wonder, however, that maybe the solution to my vertigo / motion sickness is simply to simply move my body to do something. anything. that in placing a body in motion against the lapping waves of daily life, that maybe, i'll find a rhythm and harmony in the rote automation of my life. that slowly, the 14 minute bike rides to the beach, the walk to the bookstore, the stroll to grab an iced coffee on the corner of the street to find some justification to leave my house, will piece together an amalgamation of meaning in the work that i'm doing, in the poems that i write, in the photos that i take. unsurprisingly, they don't, and simply serve as additional fodder for the never ending guilt that i have in my life every time my parents ask me how the job search is going.

i went on a date with a guy that i had matched with on tinder back in 2018, when i was just a child in college, exploring dating apps for the first time. we kept in contact throughout the years since he was based in michigan and was visiting seattle for a brief moment. he had just moved to central washington and was in town for that day. i left the dregs of my family's thanksgiving and headed out to his car, where he had driven over from central washington. we drove over to gas work's, a beloved seattle favorite, and sat in the frigid air sipping on white claws and white wine. it was bizarre to be in that moment. there were many times this year where i fully believed that life was a simulation, lines that were straight out of a movie, scenarios that seem entirely fantastical. this, while a bit more normal, felt like a romcom scene, especially juxtaposing it to the slightly overcooked turkey i was eating an hour beforehand.

nothing came out of this, of course. we sat there until we got cold, jackets wrapped tight, and headed back home, talking about anything that came up in popular media. to some extent, this was nice, that there were literally no expectations of the night, to exist in a free floating bubble of your own experiences. no passing inhibitions of worry or anxiety, only exhibitions of candor and care.

i think i've been struggling to find meaning because i want to understand for myself: what does it mean to contribute to things in a world that feels completely yourself, to be proud of the things you accomplish, to sign your name on the page and let it live in perpetuity. and until then, i'll keep paddling on.

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from the...

• kitchen: recently made some sourdough loaves with starter from a local bakery and a mushroom and sweet potato gnocchi with cream sauce

• moving media: i recently watched tar and simply have no words for it. there's an extremely good piece on it here.

• literary arts: deeply thinking about this piece on persimmons after a craft poetry workshop

• games: game awards 2022 just happened and stray is a must check out from this past year

• music: obsessed with this japanese breakfast rendition of the cranberries—dreams. somehow did not make my spotify wrapped top 5 though...

• self: i'll be traveling to mexico city in a week-ish and then to yellowstone afterwards so if you have any recommendations let me know!!

if you made it down here, thanks for the read and send me a note with something you’ve been obsessing over (or if you know of people hiring…. i’m still job hunting LMAO).

cheers,

corgo