Handmade sites as an alternative to social media. This is where I channel myself online without the inundation of careless ideas from others that become obligations to care instead. I recently learned about absurdism in its many forms in New Media Research class; read some chapters of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art by Charlotte Kent and Katherine Guinness. If optimism assumes that society tends towards good, and pessimism assumes a tendency towards degradation and disarray, absurdism is an acceptance of uncertainty; the arrow loops unpredictably, like a roller coaster track you can't see. My final project for the class is about using quiet internet spaces to inform daily practice in dealing with absurdism and the sheer uncertainty of it all.
"Absurdity would be commitment towards particular political goals, particular social demands, a particular imaginary future, knowing full well it is ridiculous to believe that one's actions actually matter from the perspective of the cosmos; knowing full well that a commitment to others will likely lead to disappointment. It would be a refusal to give up, even if there is no evidence one should keep going. We cannot accept a messianic future, in which our actions have a point. Absurdity is a commitment to an impossible future." (175)
Fulbright Applications
I'm applying this year for the (hopefully it's still a thing by then) 2026-27 year. Took a bit of mulling over what country to pick but I will most likely make a return to the Czech Republic. I am terrified by how many people would apply this year and whether my months of application work would go down the drain because, let's face it, there are only 25 finalists and if I get to semi-finalists I would be so stressed if I become an alternate and end up not going abroad. I absolutely need to go abroad again, especially when I'm this young. When I'm not tied to certain obligations and still being the free spirit that I am, I want to get a Fulbright and help my college's Fulbright numbers.
My Chronic Speech Impediment
I am privileged to be able to talk without issue most of the time. But I started developing a chronic stutter in elementary school and sometimes it emerges when I cannot pronounce things correctly the first time. The phrase "dynamic planet" was an issue in middle school and the long I of "dy-" would be lodged in my mouth like an unfamiliar bone until it came out in the form of "dy-dy-dy-namic." Stuttering is hardly an issue most of the time, but now that I have a radio show, it is a lot more noticeable when my voice is the only thing one knows of me by. I'm not the best speaker. Last Friday, I had essentially burned out from everything that past week; my cognitive abilities were exhausted and slow; I could barely read off a community message card and forgot how many string quartets Sibelius had written (two, the first being Voces Intimae). I wonder if I should see a speech therapist in the same way I need to find a physical therapist for my chronic back pain and sciatica.
Cinnabar
I received some red ink paste for Chinese seal stamps and learned that it contains cinnabar. Then I learned that cinnabar is mercury sulfide. Alarming already. Google attests to it being toxic, though scientific papers argue that it's not as toxic as people make it out to be unless it has been heated or eaten (and even then, it should just pass through undissolved because this mercuric salt is not easily soluble). I have done neither, but I certainly went down a rabbit hole searching up whether I inadvertently gave myself mercury poisoning from cinnabar and whether I will die from it. (I'm fine and no, unless I eat it every day, I probably won't suffer that fate from mercury poisoning.)
"The woman with a boyfriend-shaped hole in her life has succumbed to a reification where the idea of 'boyfriend' has taken precedence over its reality. A boyfriend, after all, is not a concept—it's a man. She has constructed a mental shrine to an abstraction, a concept made up of qualities that cannot exist independently of a human form. The boyfriend-shaped hole awaits not an individual with his own character, habits, and contradictions, but rather a collection of idealized attributes borrowed from an array of sources, all stuck together in some Frankensteinien patchwork to create a faceless figure who does not exist in any plane of reality (the woman with a boyfriend-shaped hole in her life is the kind of person who gets the ick when she sees a man do something that reminds her that he is distinctly human).
This is why the boyfriend-shaped hole is based on a dangerous fiction—it presupposes that there exists within us a pre-formed vacancy that awaits only the right applicant. In actuality, the advent of getting a boyfriend works in reverse: it is not that we discover someone who fits a requirement, but rather that we encounter a person so compelling that we spontaneously create space where previously none existed, we “make room in our calendars” where we had previously pencilled in time for ourselves. The relationship becomes not the filling of an absence but the revelation of an unexpected discovery—not a void satisfied but a horizon expanded."
I have a friend that fits this description perfectly. Avoidant and maximizing and ultimately unsatisfied. I don't have this mindset to dating, though I found the wording insightful-- the person in question is not looking for a person, but a set of traits.