tiger

If I should lose all faith in God, he wrote, I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world.

a look back on 2024 & a glance towards 2025

01-09 木

I have no idea how frequent my entries will be from here. I might manage to write something small every other day, like I've been doing this week. Or it may all fall apart. I'm taking less classes but I'm teaching for two & the classes I'm taking this semester are more difficult.

I'm still going to be corresponding with people because that's my snorkel to sanity.

A literal homework question from my analysis class goes something like: if you take an infinite walk on a flat plane, how long will it take for you to start walking on top of your old footsteps? Is such a situation possible?

I'm dropping the class from the previous entry because one Franzen and one DFW essay respectively are not going to alleviate the total pain of being in a college creative writing class. So there was a reason I was avoiding them...

01-07 火

S stayed the night

Productive afternoon & evening

Read & reread the first paragraph of The Pale King, the first paragraph of the Wallace book is more impactful than any book we've read so far - a judge for the Booker Prize. On Chapter 13 out of 50 & love it so far, a few months after IJ it feels like a reunion with an old, talkative, & brilliant friend. I wish he was still alive.

Rest of the evening with S, said goodbye to him in front of his dorm building, had the strange & sad but nonsense feeling that it was the last of him I'd see for a long time

Decided to enroll in a class about creative nonfiction, just because it had Franzen & DFW on the reading list, I'm such a sucker for both of them

01-05 日

Started reading The Pale King

Started wearing the small cross around my neck again

Spent the afternoon with S & gave him a cursory tour of campus

It snowed for the first time in two years. It was a sort of hail that could not decide whether to fall as grains or flakes. I thought of Gull's rocksalt-raincoat girl.

When I got back home the cockroach from last night lay belly-up on the floor, cold-dazed, and I said sorry

Writing

In the closet, recorded myself monologuing, like Dale Cooper

01-04 土

The simile to end all similes:

Oedipa nodded. She couldn't stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears.

S touched down in my city this evening.

I saw a cockroach scuttling towards me in the living room and I clambered onto a chair. Where'd you come from, little guy? I briefly entertained the thought of putting a cup on top of it like Orin Incandenza does in Infinite Jest, until his bathroom is full of dead cockroaches in fogged-up glasses...

01-03 金

For whatever reason, I've been coming into contact with stories from Buddhism recently.

Do you know the one of Kisa Gotami and the mustard seeds? Kisa, a mother whose child has recently passed away, went to the Buddha and begged for his resurrection. The Buddha told her that her wish would be granted if she could collect mustard seeds in the village, but only from households in which no one had died. As Kisa went from door to door, she could not find a single household who hadn't lost a family member. She returned to the Buddha empty-handed and wept against the weight of understanding.

How about the story of Suddhodana and his son? Suddhodana, being a chief of a clan, was a man of enough means to construct the perfect life for his son. He promised to himself that his son would never feel an ounce of suffering in his life, and kept him confined to a gilded, perfect palace. But as his son grew older, he inevitably wished to see the rest of the world. Suddhodana kept to his word—he could not have foresawn that the total lack of suffering could be the very cause of more suffering—and released his son. And this young man walked out into the world, a veritable morass of endless human suffering. He eventually found himself under what we call now the Bodhi tree, teeming with heart-shaped leaves, and found enlightenment as the Buddha.

Classes are starting again in a few days. S is arriving by plane tomorrow. I keep all my fears to myself, like they tell you to do with your arms and hands on theme park rides.

01-02 木

Minor disaster struck the second day of 2025. I was trying to raise the blinds to let in more sun but instead the entire thing came crashing down on top of my roommate's coconut plant (still very young, not even a sapling) and damaged it. Its main stem is still intact, but two ancillary stems—the ones with actual leaves—were severed. I tried my best to graft them back & only time will tell if my hackjob surgery will be of any success. Man, would I love to have a stent.

Before all of this happened, I was trimming off the wilted yellow leaves. I looked for a while at the junction where healthy, green stem met the dry deadness. It's really just trying so hard to live, I thought. Even after I twice-beheaded it, there's only one thing it could ever do, which is to go on surviving.

01-01 水

I was the last person in the group who caught up to the new year, being the westernmost. It was my favorite time of night, the hour before midnight when I could lie in bed without guilt and watch the silver headlights of passing cars slide over the bedside wall, like shadows made of light. I was listening to Headsore from Red House Painters. What a strange, rickety song. The chorus came in on the first moment of January 1st, 2025. I listened to Blue Chicago Moon as I made my dinner; the kettle drowned it out as usual.