attempting to remedy the hangover anxiety shakes on a Saturday morning

“I wrote a poem” is a truly nauseating sentence for me to type, far too earnest, but against my better judgment something overcame me on my fire escape the other night.

I crawled out into my escape

a jacket with elbow patches slung over my nightgown

And my pockets heavy, in anticipation of light

That familiar feeling came upon me

I am exactly who my

16 year old

10 year old

Hell, even 6 year old self,

Imagined she’d be.

and for the first time it meant no

Pressure or Anxieties

But instead there was a freedom in her bursting from my chest

in realizing I contained her all the while

and I only have to dream a little bit more

To see who she inspires

…

It’s a pretty trash poem but important to document for me so sorry if your eyes are bleeding.

In other news, I’ve been leaning into the headlines a little too much these days. I figure as long as Americans can be horny for conflict, I can add the wartime aesthetic into my make believe reality. I’ve been out of white sugar since baking M&M cookies last week, so I now begin the mornings by squeezing out a hardened chunk of brown sugar into my black coffee. It's like I’m in a Kit Kittredge remake- Elle Fanning plays her as a hardened independent journalist living in Depression-era New York. I then go into my bedroom and do my makeup while listening to the radio- NPR, but usually only registering the forecast so I can adequately prepare my outfit. I woke up this morning in a solemn mood so I tossed on jeans and trudged to the bakery to buy a coffee and “read about” the haps. I flip through the pages for a solid four minutes before casting it aside and returning to my novel. The war is too dense and terrible to read about, but at least there’s an ambiance for me to fetishize!

Also, I think I’ve finally bullied NYU into letting me do a thesis. It turns out to get anything done at NYU the secret is to bully, trick, and irritate the administration. After a month of persistent emails, I have a team of advisors encouraging me to apply for funding and sending me reading after reading. I hope that my investigation into the architecture of the Prado Museum will be provoking and revealing enough to entertain me for the next year and a half, but even if it’s not, I am thrilled to have a writing project to sustain me long term that's not just my telling myself that I possess Great Ideas for Screenplays and Novels then writing single sentences about them in my notes app that get buried after 36 hours. I am finally beginning the process of understanding that maybe professors are not Greek Gods and they have families and exes and bad prose, too. I like that they like me and I want to prove it. To write a thesis in Spain is perhaps the most exciting senior year I can imagine.

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