narratively significant flashbacks

[serpentinemalign]

This week has been a weird time capsule across several layers of points in time and that has made me very sad and strange and tired.

• did workshop 2 for cool opportunity. got some very good feedback. now must shelve it for a few months.

• been doing some academic type research for work. it's giving me uni flashbacks again. I would say it's ok I'm getting gradually less triggered each time. it just feels very weird. I wrote my work report in bed which I know everyone is like, that's Bad for sleep hygiene. but it truly felt like I didn't have a choice. sitting at my desk felt like pulling teeth. the weird part is I'm like, repeatedly just falling into very familiar patterns. Today I woke up at midnight and went downstairs and made pasta for the first time in possibly a year. I make it very infrequently because it is basically all I ate in uni, being part of a sad rotation of classic and frugal student foods. so I lost the taste for it. I tried a new jarred pasta sauce with capers and it was actually pretty wonderful, despite usually hating capers.

• not so frugally, yesterday I ordered a big pizza for us because I forgot to eat lunch, but I'm also associating that with uni because we used to live practically next to a dominos and man. That was pretty bad lol. dominos isn't even that good. My interoception is Very Bad right now. I don't know if that's like a post-illness thing or just a, I'm losing touch with my body because I am burnt out thing.

• while I was working on cool opportunity stuff, I went back through the wayback machine for one of my favourite and most formative bands. it was cool seeing their website evolve... it looked so fucking cool. now it looks like any other wordpress blog. definitely a loss from web 2.0 homogenisation. I read their blogs from back then too... they seemed kind of miserable. this struck me as a kid too. just desperately perfectionist about their output and traumatised. they're not what they used to be, but they seem a lot happier nowadays. it did make me wonder, is that what I'm meant to do? and I think, like, that fucked me up a bit as a kid, reading that. I probably internalised some bad ideas. that sense of needing to constantly move like a shark or you'll die, just keep going forward onward onward and don't for a moment consider that the process could be less painful. i guess that's coming at it from a perspective of, my art being a Side Thing at present. i couldn't bear to have to work and then also hate what i do in my spare time, and like... sometimes I do anyway, but then i don't have to force myself to keep going.

• I didn't mention this but I am having a minor surgical procedure in a few days and I'm kind of shit scared about it, since that's still the upper level of medical stuff I've had. so, I guess that's also adding to the general load of existing. 🤷