HINDsight
Always Almost There
I remember a faculty member telling someone in my class who had finally found a room to stay in, about a month into the start of our program, something about how she can probably finally take the big city in, now that she has a place to be oriented from.
A Hard Time
I spent a couple of months thinking about a single replacement desk. How big would it be? What material would it be made out of? Would it have any storage? How high would the desk be, taking into consideration the chair I already have, and my preference for the way my elbows would eventually rest for hours at a time? Even without a desk, these are questions that any good work requires: context and observation.
The Potential of Things
Commitment is a concept. As in, the advice that I get about committing to something is conceptual. Actual advice sounds more like “We should both probably just do it,” which my friend said to me over Instagram when I told her that I think about writing all the time.
A Note on Remembering
It was, like most things tend to be in hindsight—and yet very rarely during—a beautiful, ripe, hard, and hopeful time.
A Meditation on Change
I have been glued to the weather app, desperately looking for smaller numbers that I can revel in because frankly, I was still sweating outside, shivering cold in the air conditioned indoors, and unable to find pleasure in the supposedly-changing weather. For a while, everything had been feeling, suffocatingly, the same.
Fluently, Not Fluency
A language, of course, is not only its words. It is how those words work together. It is what syntax can communicate, and it is the meaning that is delivered when it all comes together.
Conversations in Transit
I think everyone yearns to have a fleeting conversation with someone they don’t know. In an instant, you can puncture the fabric of disillusionment. There’s power in that.
The Incompleteness of Fact
Knowing something is ecological—it depends on the company we keep, the articles we read, whether we pay attention to our surroundings while walking in a city or if we tune them out. What I know, and what you know, are necessarily different.
Planning a Summer in Hindsight
Make summer plans. Open your notes app or take a pad of sticky notes. On any surface, write the words you want to bring into your world for this summer. Action words like ‘Play’ work just as well as abstract nouns like ’Theory.’ Define your summer with ideas in phrases, sentences, or even photos. Then go live it.
How Do You Look?
Getting dressed is a basic human pleasure, and even I can confess that style is the most charming when it is expressed. But the reliance on appearance as a fundamental, nay, lasting expression of who someone is, is disaffecting. My leggings simply don’t deliver. Did they change the way I was to be perceived? Maybe. It would be socially naive to suggest they wouldn’t. But what matters is if I can come to terms with that.
Amidst Plenty
Abundance is not a bad thing, until it is multiplied into a material state of overabundance. It becomes hard to distinguish the former when we adapt to seeing the latter as a constant norm, as when the lack of extra plated food becomes abnormal… it becomes not enough.
A Day on Paper
But I’m also a regular realist who, at the end of the day, knows that it’s just normal to be living a human life in tune with a two-steps-forward-one-step-back choreography. I’m not interested in the purely ultra-human, or in the achievement of optimal results. I’m interested in the complicated and interpersonal everyday that it takes trying to get there.