december

• landed a TA position for winter!
• very sweet and encouraging feedback from my prof
• random guy at the bus stop downtown taught me how to recognize labrador tea

november

• quit twitter for this month and i think i'm gonna quit it for good in the new year, this is a way better way to live lmfao
• i'm fucking TIRED, i really love my cohort and my other classmates and learning and reading but i simply cannot wait for the semester to end. those 2-3 weeks off before christmas are gonna be so good
• finally feel like i kinda know where i want my thesis to go? maybe?
• leading a wild-ass seminar and having a great time doing so
• amazing meeting with my thesis committee + another student who is very cool!!
• full of love for my cohort and my department at large
• heading back to california next month to do the road trip we did at the start of this year in reverse??
• rip to my bff's mom :(

october

• realizing i do not really like grad school, lmfao
  • but once i get through the next semester and a half, i'm in research/thesis mode and that should be much more tolerable
    • late october update: i like it now actually
• a very relaxing midterm break aside from the random breakdown
• thanksgiving at nan's, surprise cousin appearance + her very sweet dog
• writing the hell out of a paper at the last minute and being extremely happy about it
• eating the worst ramen of my life at my fav sushi place :(
• new tattoo!!! from my artist's halloween flash, it is a toad and i love him so much
  • i have tentatively named him maximilian
• amazing dinner with two folks from my cohort, i love them
• adopted a cat!!! big timid orange boy who is 13 years old!! his name is ferguson and i have been trying out calling him gus, but he does in fact know and answer to his full name so that's maybe not gonna work
  • later addendum: turns out he's just not a gus. this boy is a ferg
• signal hill + bannerman with half the cohort, the sunset over st. john's and the moonrise over the ocean at the same time, incredibly beautiful
  • i keep flashing back to when we were at bannerman and it was too loud to hear the other half of the table. down at our end we're talking about the boot scootin boogie. and then the music quiets and we realize the other end of the table is having a very serious discussion about how the iran hostage crisis was talked about in their respective countries
• first snow of the season (october 30)

september

• 24 hours travel back home in an absolute daze
  • befriending my airport shuttle bus driver; all his impressions
• starting grad school
  • sooooo good to be doing classes with people in my age group again lmao
  • climate strike
    • crying with laughter when people jokingly started a chant of "i don't like climate change. climate change is not good" but then it ended up getting picked up
  • being absolutely overwhelmed in my arch class and bonding with d over our frustrations re: latour
• getting sick :/

august

• catsitting
  • remaining alone in the woods for the first two weeks
  • derealizing so hard for two of those days lmao could NOT get the ghost back in the machine
  • seeing their basil plant wilting: i can fix that
  • upon their arrival back: soooooo i killed your basil plant deader than any plant has ever been before
  • sweetest cuddles with the murderiest cat
  • mornings sitting on the coffee table drinking coffee, thinking "i should drink my coffee outside every day," then remembering at home i cannot step outside without being accosted by my noisiest and nosiest neighbor
• a second catsitting gig!
  • these cats once again taking two full days to be like "hmm well our people disappeared and this one arrived not long after. very suspicious timing. probably a murder. anyway they haven't murdered us so i guess it's fine"
  • me watching horror movies all day: nothing scares me [hears one (1) strange sound in the bedroom and sleeps on the couch for five nights straight]
  • sooooo much hgtv
  • crashing so hard i slept for 12 hours a night. ideal tbh

july

• doing a huge walk on the one day it was cool enough and ?? my normal, ambling walking speed is close to, like, "race walking" records, a thing i only found out was a thing when my dad doubted my times (thank u zombies run for backing me up though)
• day trip with mom, nan, and my aunt
  • somehow meeting my publisher's mom at a random cafe in a town with 600 people
  • absolutely feral with how good the food was at a hotel restaurant named 'chad's' in bellevue beach
  • feeling like i should be nostalgic but it was kinda like "oh yeah we did used to come here. anyway"
• day trip with j, c, and a
  • whale-watching but the whales didn't get the memo
  • surrounded by fog; honestly fuck the whales i wanna see FOG
  • pocketing so many cool rocks that they stretched my pockets out so far they were more like cups
    • which is ideal tbh, because whenever i looked down i got to see all my cool rocks
  • the most beautiful picnic of my life
  • "wow. nature is amazing" re: a rock covered in scotch tape
• heat wave misery, i am accomplishing nothing and not even in a fun way
• catsitting
  • alone in the woods, first cool day in weeks, rain pouring down and i'm just like... wow the cottagecore girlies are onto something, living like this would in fact fix me
    • that said i still think the cottagecore girlies in their long dresses and bare feet still need to be informed about ticks. get it together girlies

june

• festival!
  • getting in the zone at a zine workshop and spending like an hour drawing the house from monster house
  • breaking my own rule about not going to art galleries alone when i'm sad, but having a great time despite my own existential dread
    • also, getting to screenprint!
  • accidentally attending a punk show
• getting recruited to an MA program!
• summer weather overnight (not even overnight! leaving for work when it was 1°C and it jumping to the 20s that same day, 30° the next)
  • which means pollen overnight, i'm miserable
• i have never actually thrived before and so was not prepared for the guilt of doing well while various loved one's lives go to shit. i'm used to being in the shit

may

• absolutely incredible first week at the new job, cannot believe i got offered a job out of the blue that pays so well and still gives me ample rest time and coincidentally hits all my favorite research areas. honestly bummed it's only for the summer, which is wild -- normally by now i'm already counting down the days or formulating an escape plan
• the absolute whiplash of funeral home thursday, funeral friday, eurovision party saturday
• six months of "it's probably not TMJ!" later... it's TMJ and i am so tired of jaw/face pain

april

• starting the month off with a lovely outing downtown with my bff ♥ sushi, seed-shopping, record store, new fav cafe, pokemon
  • oh yeah and starting pokemon go again for the first time since 2019 probably deserves its own note. this mf will NOT stop assigning me three years worth of missed fieldwork and i'm like damn maybe this isn't actually the great end-of-term stress relief i hoped for given i am about to spend the next few days trying to, y'know. finish my actual fieldwork writeups
• house/catsitting!
  • cooking disaster so bad that i ended up deciding not to cook the nice dinner i'd planned later that night and just making boxed mac and cheese
  • a cat ignoring me for three days straight and then coming through the apparently-not-all-the-way-shut bathroom door like the koolaid man to demand attention while i peed
  • met a nice dog outside the bakery (and nice people with her but really the dog was the critical part)
  • realizing at like 10 pm i could suddenly taste garlic again and being like "well i have to bake a loaf of garlic bread right the fuck now i guess" and i nearly cried eating my midnight garlic bread, it was so good, i missed garlic so much
  • chance encounter with a really sweet person downtown
  • making sushi with leftover pease pudding from easter and honestly it ruled
  • first day it was warm enough to be out in a tank top
    • but i lost my fav scrunchie (the backup to my old fav scrunchie) bc it was on my wrist when i took my jacket off :(
  • finally making roberto, a soup
  • having grandiose plans and ambitions and then largely just spending entire days on the couch playing stardew valley with hgtv on in the background

march

• finally starting to understand basic statistics on my third consecutive attempt at this course because this prof uses horror movies to explain concepts
  • also because i actually went to class for once. like that probably helped
• developing a hand tremor out of nowhere? i'm assuming this is a covid thing since someone else i know had the same thing happen during covid but ?????
  • my doctor being like "it's too soon to worry about this but let's schedule a time to worry about this 4-6 weeks from now" god i wish i could schedule all my worrying so precisely
• still not able to taste bitter things post-covid?
  • i keep forgetting this when i'm grocery shopping and buying myself bitter little treats and it's just like "oh. this beer tastes like rancid koolaid"
• negotiating our group project contract and our prof overhearing some of the terms and being like "oh you guys... you guys have group project trauma, huh"
  • having a group meeting that was like "wow we. we probably didn't need to meet today bc we're all on track. has anyone ever experienced this in a group project before"
• happy spring! enjoy snow daily until at least april!!
• the server at jungle jim's insisting on bringing nan a complimentary birthday dessert and being like "don't worry, i don't have to sing." well she sure did do that anyway lmao

february

• [eminem voice] my loser liege lord
• [ten minutes after reading a comment on a 'how to give yourself a wolf cut in three minutes' tutorial that said 'this is foolproof']: well it sure looks like someone underestimated my ability to be a fool
• "i apologize, that wasn't very mr. boombastic of me"
• the fact that i took great and expensive pains to get back from california in january so as to not miss much school and then immediately got hit with strike and now illness, so i've been to one in-person class this whole time and we're into midterm break... don't love that
• covid for the first time and honestly fuck everyone who ever tried to be like "it's just a cold!" bc this is the worst i have ever felt and i have literally nearly died before
  • that said, i'm honestly having a blast with the no sense of smell/taste thing. like i'm having a lot of fun tasting everything to see what i like
  • this just sucks man i'm on day 12 and i still need to sleep 12+ hours a day, i have midterms this week and i don't know what the fuck to do

january

• shrieking along to truce by the dresden dolls with fai as we tried to stay awake on the road
• putting my music on shuffle as we got close, santa monica coming on as the last song, feeling a way about it ( with my big black boots and an old suitcase / i do believe i'll find myself a new place, not to mention we can live beside the ocean / leave the fire behind )
• getting a silent migraine so powerful i didn't understand what was happening to me and thinking a particularly sinister tree outside blythe had put a curse on me as we drove past
• staying in a beautifully aesthetic hipster hotel in the desert one night, a retirement village with a curfew the next
• "pull your beak outta your cloaca"
• taking an exit just because there was a sign for gas and finding ourselves at a combination ancient aliens museum/dairy queen
• getting coffee with my bff and sitting outside to drink it, but a small child inside the shop came to the window and stared at us for a few minutes like we were zoo animals at feeding time