you might be entitled to financial compensation
if you're haunted by a past you can't go back to
this week’s Thought (singular)
guys it’s really hard to drink water
hi
not really. sorry for the fake news. there’s no financial compensation involved for abstract emotions that revolve around the passage of time. there’s also not much substance in this section of the newsletter this week. all i have for you is a few tumblr posts that express mostly similar sentiments.
hope these spoke to you. or at least whispered creepily when you were trying to escape from them. again, no financial compensation is incoming for you.
ps: i’m so grateful for all the kind words i received about last week’s edition. i’m glad that so many of you were able to find relatability and comfort in the hotel lobby metaphor, and i appreciate everybody who reached out and let me know the same. although my motivation for this newsletter has always been internal, and hopefully will continue to be so, i’d love if you went ahead and hit the like/comment/share/subscribe buttons if a particular issue stood out to you. as always, thank you for reading, and feedback is always welcome!
English Recitation Competition
Lines Written During My Second Pandemic, Eduardo C. Corral
In some languages, loneliness is imperfect. Antlers crown the bald head of loneliness. Like rough trade, loneliness won’t kiss you. Loneliness is crouched in a tree, afraid of dirt. In the dark, loneliness ripens too quickly. Beneath the roof of loneliness, my blood drifts.
Friend, I’m both a keyhole in a star and the key chained to a young boy’s neck. I’m the thistle and its bloom, father rack and pinion son, gravel and its dust. And here, before you now, I’m on a measure of consonants gnawing the green roots from a blinded moon, where I say to hell with kings and jeweled blood, for in this kingdom suffering shall be, but never be invented.
Thank God for Hard Feelings, Haesong Kwon
You have to be happy in order to weep, or sob. I can teach you, she said to me. If you can hold a pencil, I can teach you how to draw. But I’ve known people who have no hands. Who have no fingers.
A Poll!
Middle School Book Review
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. sometimes it feels like the plot is secondary to how beautiful the writing is, until something is described so incredibly and heart-wrenchingly that the story is instantly shoved front and centre. it’s a full-circle kind of narration, and it single-handedly got me out of a reading slump.
find all shared books here.
A Picture!
The Good Side of the Internet
I once fell for the fantasy of uploading ourselves. It’s a destructive vision
The fantasy began to consume me at the turn of the millennium.
I’d always felt like a half-being, a cyborg of incompatible substances: gringa daughter of a Puerto Rican MD and a long-unemployed Mexican man with addiction issues. Native or alien. Nerd or rebel. I was white and not white but thought I had to choose.
No wonder, then, that the greatest ambition of my youth was to achieve digital immortality, or uploading my mind to the metaverse. Goodbye, flawed body. Hello, god-self.
Residential schools for indigenous people have a long and dark history around the world. In Odisha, children are recognising how these schools, newly funded by mining companies, are changing their lives—and that of their communities.
This is something I have often thought about: the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm. It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it. How do you square that – the fact of the physical dark inside you? The fact that anything could be going on in there? The monster in ALIEN (1979) is scary because it’s a foreign object, but it’s also scary because of how easily the body accommodates it, at least for a little while.
Frida Kahlo’s Illustrated Diary
Leave it to Frida Kahlo to completely re-invent the diary. She transformed blank pages into vivid depictions of love and pain, built with words and images.
Victoria’s Secret (comic!)
Victoria’s Secret has always been my nemesis.
this week’s Song
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
yes? no? maybe? let me know!