Writing complete ideas is hard! I’ve done plenty of writing these last four months (since I finished setting up this site) and I haven’t completed a single idea to a state where I feel it worth sharing. The problem may be the limitless freedom writing permits; I only write about things I find interesting, and on those things I could talk forever, and never finish. So, I’m co-opting an idea from a good friend for the month of November to get myself used to finishing and posting anything at all. One completed idea, in exactly 100 words, each day. Enjoy!
Prioritize calm before a physics exam, at the expense of last minute review. Everything flows up from your course’s fundamentals, and those are given.You’ll see types of problems you’ve never seen before. You can’t prepare for everything. You’ll strip away the meaning and be left with puzzles and arithmetic. So, clear your mind, prep your neuron channels, and bring everything you know to the top of your memory. My body fights me each time (I get awful anxiety before exams) but it settles once the pencil drops. Stay calm, trust the practice, know there’s nothing more you can do.
Got a lil stack of squares in my back pocket. Maple red, sky blue, white. I use quarter size, 7.5cm square, small enough your hands can make a firm crease without a surface. I learned to fold roses for my first girlfriend, but I’ve made far more for myself than for anyone else. They’re sprinkled around my spaces, or in any place I’ve been for long. 10 minutes of relaxing, rehearsed motions, and then you get a cute flower! It’s not complex, I could teach you! Constructible, portable joys, at any time, any place, to be gifted to anyone.
Living is chaotic and uncertain. Chaos means detailed far future planning is doomed to error. Trying anyways will be stressful and restraining. The future is produced by the present, though! Your actions in this moment will be forever impactful. Chaos means no good deed goes unnoticed, no minuscule extra effort is lost, everything comes back to bite you. Choose something to do and do your best at it. The secret is that so long as you try, in the moment, you will do your best. You can just live, then, without pressure. Good things will come if you keep trying.
Hockey discourse is dominated by analytics, precise observation and documentation of every moment of the game. Zone entry stats, percentages, goals scored above "expected", minute by minute effort quantized. Every pundit and journalist has a prediction model, and every model is close enough to correct to make you think it's got something to say. And yet, there is no analytical explanation for the persistent and unending failure of the Toronto Maple Leafs. A dynamic, dominant, analytically driven team for an analytical age that fails in the end every year. I can tell you why though! It's because they fucking suck.
I love to walk around with Penny in my arms, letting her see and smell all the things she normally can’t reach. Why won’t some higher being lift me up, let me experience that which is beyond my reach? I dream of the world spread beneath me like a quilt, the sky’s expanse around me. Penny don’t bite those metal stars! Is there no God who can grant me passage to the sunrise over Montreal? To my neighborhood from a view beyond the reach of man? Penny don’t eat those leaves! God, I promise I’d be better behaved than this.
The pinch of a needle through my skin is a highlight of the week. It’s a celebration of being, a ritual of blood and chemistry and choice. Monday evenings fill me with joy. The pain makes it so much sweeter. I want to keep all my sharps bins, and cover them in stickers and draw on them with marker with a list with every date, and grow older and have a wall of them, a shrine to every week that I remake the decision to be myself. Getting here was so hard. I can't wait for this to never end.
One day you’ll go down to the river and the water won’t flow. The breeze will pause, as if taking a breath, and then never exhale. One day the soil will turn to rock, and the grass will harden to wire. The trees will ripen but their fruit won’t fall. The air will cool but the sun won’t set. And the light will filter down through the leaves as beautiful as ever. The flowers will be forever in vivid bloom. The sky will be forever a perfect blue. You’ll hear sparrows in your memory, and their song will be deafening.
Almost all the music I listen to today can be traced back to my dad’s 2006 iPod classic, loaded up with 40,000 digitized versions of every CD my parents ever owned, and every other album they could get their hands on. They introduced me to Newfoundland shanties, Vancouver supergroups, the Winnipeg blues. Some stuck, and it all left impressions. Some artists I’d come to love over a decade later. An obscure christmas mix is the ancient descendant of 40% of the tracks I love today. Musical continuity might be the thing that ties them into my life the most.
Today was supposed to be the most stressful day of the semester so far. I’d been dreading it. 65% worth of assessments spread throughout a 14h day. But this morning was the first snow of the year. My train to campus got delayed 25 minutes giving me time to soak it in and prepare for my presentation. I passed another trans person laughing in the stairwell. I got to take the train back too! The Hive Cafe's grilled cheese kicked ass. I took my health lecture in Concordia’s stunning 13th story rooftop greenhouse which apparently exists. Idk. It went well :3
Should get a nose piercing. Everyone’s been saying nostril, I agree. Balance it out with rings above the lobe on the opposite side of the face. OR! Get something really cool on the opposite ear, an industrial maybe? Something with a chain? Then a nostril stud-soon-to-be-ring with two rings above the lobe on the same side. Tattoos based around form can speak a body’s identity into being. Bolts on the sides of my knee will make me stable. Vines and metal around my arm would make me strong. A better self is within reach, I just need to construct it.
First, brew yourself some spiced chai. Stronger is better, I let mine steep a minute or two extra. Next, add a teaspoon of caramel, and stir it until dissolved. Butterscotch is a fine enough substitute, but you could make your own caramel easily enough if you wanted. Then, add about 20% of the volume in apple cider, spiced if you can find it. Congrats! You’ve just made the “fall drink” (I didn’t name it) (it’s great in winter and spring too)! It’s sweet! It’s spiced! It’s a little tart if you got quality cider! It’s warm! And it smells divine!
The platonic ideal of the french fry lives in one of Ottawa’s yellow and blue chip trucks on the side of the road in the neighborhood I grew up in. These are thick fries, greasy and soft on the inside and crispy on the outside, slathered with vinegar and salt. The kind you have no choice but to eat with a fork. In the winter I’d come by after school with friends and hide from the wind beside some trees, warming our hands on the soaked-clear 1.5L paper bag. Tastier fries exist, but there will never be any better.
Cover your walls in images. Etch your past in the drywall. You need to remember where you are. And you need to remember how you got here. A person is not a snapshot; a person is continuity. If you ever forget who you are, a glance can remind you.
There was a day this grocery list was seven meals and an hour of your time. This business card was a brief curiosity. This philly-shaped elastic band was three days of summer and a quick laugh. Memories stored in matter will not fade. You’ve come too far to lose yourself now.
People toss out perfectly fine chairs all the time, leaving them yours for the taking! I’ve gotten myself five high-quality chairs this way over the years. Back in Ottawa there’s “chair season”, starting the week after the weather finally turns warm. Everyone starts spring cleaning at the same time and simultaneously concludes that some of their furniture didn’t meet their standards anymore. You just need to wander down some residential streets and take your pick. I've found different cycles in Montreal, based around lease expiration dates, but that doesn’t matter so long as it stands up when you sit down.
I’ve never managed to keep a journaling habit for long. How many moments, intents, insights, feelings have I lost between the scattered entries of the last 5 years? Definition and clarity reappearing for a week whenever I decided I was going to get my shit together, for realsies this time? This project has been different. I have an audience. An audience keeps me accountable, even one that’s patient, and without expectation. Could I tie this public journal habit to a private one? Finally give myself a log of thoughts and feelings for future reference and reflection? I’m going to try.
Travel at close-to-light speed is experiencing anti-death. Time dilation works both ways, you know. Once you start your journey it’s already too late. A few seconds pass, and everyone you know is gone and every place you’ve ever seen has been ground to dust. Does it matter where you’re going, now? All you have left is what you took with you. Your destination has aged a million years in the minutes it took you to get there. This isn’t immortality. You didn’t get to live. What sort of death is it when everything else dies and you stay the same?
Hockey skaters are defined by their victories, but goalies are defined by their mistakes. Perform your miracles, but know every slip will see you beaten and humiliated under the spotlights. Don’t let it get to you. Watch your teammates take vengeance on your counterpart down the ice. They didn’t harm you, why are they the target?
You are a sacrificial lamb, the final barrier who exists only to fail. The sacred duty of a team's defence is to protect their netminder, but what allegiance do goalies have to their team?
Do they not have more in common with each other?
This website is a multifaceted art project and something to share with friends and a chance to fiddle with technology and part of a movement to carve out a livable space in an increasingly hostile web. From the community around neocities.org, inspiration is abundant and resources are numerous. Development is lighthearted and lightweight. Forget programs, I want to write little scripts[1]! It’s my hands that stitch together every seam and <div>, with help from the culture of collaboration inherent to the medium. Every little success in construction is instantly visible, to myself, and to you, dear reader (Hi!! :3).
I’ve been alive for almost 7,800 days. The first 3,000 weren’t at all memorable, so it feels like fewer. I’ve got a sense that the full length of a human life is supposed to feel unfathomably large. “Life is short”, but too long to really internalize, right? If I’m lucky I’ll have... 30,000 days total? Give or take 10,000?[1] It all depends on- wait, that’s not that big a number. That’s pretty comprehensible actually. I’ve walked 30km in a day before. I know what mining 30k cobblestone feels like. Wait. Fuck. That’s not long at all.
Really? The first vivid dream I’ve had in almost two months and it's another zombie apocalypse nightmare? I'm an adult now, shouldn't I be having nightmares about climate change or the cost of living or something? Oooooh places of safety become labyrinths you must escape through. Ooooooh watch an assortment of friends and acquaintances die agonizingly one by one. Oooooooh suicide is your only sanctuary, but only when you have no other choice. Get some new material, come on. I know the script, but that doesn't grant me any power. I’m forced to agonize though the whole show every time.
Sasha Cay caught me off guard yesterday. I rarely listen to lyrical music when working, but four hours of repeats and orbital mechanics later and she’s in my head. This week belongs to the heavy, coarse, melancholic sounds of Spin. I didn’t hear the words while I worked. The melodies alone got me. Unfolding their stories has drawn me in completely. There’s so much life in these songs. Too much. It’s long overripe. It’s a richly textured slate grey. A summer that lasted too long. Thick air tinged with love and monotony. Sorrow and wistfulness in an aging Montreal apartment.
How many consecutive ancestors of yours do you think have cooked soup? I think you’d find just a tiny fraction that haven’t. You could probably get an unbroken chain within a few generations of the invention of the pot if you looked hard enough. Cooking soup feels very human to me. Like it’s one of those things I was designed to do. This is what societies were made for, what families are built around. Biologically, sociologically, anthropologically optimized to cook up a dozen bowls to share with my loved ones on a cold winter evening. To eat and be merry.
Limiting yourself to a century turns anything into poetry. Poetry is about creating from limitations, and this is true no matter the scale. Information isn’t the goal here, and neither is clarity. I try to imply more than I can say. Paint an outline of the scene and let you fill in the body. It’s got me narrowing down the essence of today’s topic. Weighing detail here vs there. Line break, or mold the ideas to flow into each other? Concluding sentence or open-ended? If I can’t find something meaningful to say in every sentence, it’s not worth writing about.
"Inside the chamber floats a disk of carbon-neodymium composite 4095 meters in diameter, suspended in a perfect vacuum by some act of magnetism, all powered by the ambient heat of the deep earth. We don’t know who built this monstrosity, or how. But we do know it’s spinning. Fast enough to have been fucking with the earth’s diurnal cycle. It’s been storing heat from the core as rotational momentum for millennia, at least. If the fields that power that chamber ever go down, if that demon ever makes contact with the crust, it’ll scatter continents and melt the sky."
My watch is not another device, it’s an extension of myself. A smartphone is some external thing, it’s a gadget, it’s a tool. My watch is a part of myself the same way my glasses are. I have great vision. Not naturally, but granted by my glasses. This is true statement about me nonetheless. In the same way, I always know what time it is. It’s a straight upgrade to my physical form. Checking my watch is a reflex, it happens constantly. Often I’ll just have the current time in my head without any conscious effort. And it looks cool.
Not just a city, not a labyrinth (and not a mine!), but a home for an entire society since time immemorial, a realm unto itself. It predates the first rising of the sun. Think of the effort that went into carving those gargantuan halls. A living, ever-expanding engraving, forming a complete history of your people in architecture. Stone never forgets. Infrastructure built many ages ago endures still. Imagine the pride that would come from being the next to contribute to this collaborative endeavor dating back millennia. And imagine the grief of it being taken away suddenly by fire and shadow.
Step out into its frigid embrace. Force yourself forwards and carve a hole in the shape of you out of the wind. Wading through fluid that is thin and sharp. Feel your chest contract. Take a deep breath and feel the cold air draw an outline of your lungs through your chest. Steam leaves your lips like an aged combustion engine. Your body wasn’t designed for these conditions. A gust pierces holes in your skin. Eyes harden in their sockets. Steel yourself. With slow, deliberate movements, with joints stiff and layers bundled tight, make your way out into the winter.
It’s 1:40am. A seed planted in my mind this morning and 7 years ago is waiting to be resolved. Just get it out and let the day end. It’s routine now. The metagame has settled. A wave of exhaustion, then relaxation washes over me, and my watch flashes a reminder of how many minutes I’ll get to sleep tonight. I’ve lost much rest over this.
But, it would be a shame to abandon the first writing habit I’ve ever made. It’s been good for me; distilling ideas into discrete words. Let’s keep this going. I have more to say.