you can't blame me, right? they're all telling me to get out of here. ! everyone you could imagine telling "i'm leaving teaching" is happy for you. and i feel happy. like following light
- - -that was sometime earlier this week. anyway.
this time now friday night* im back to thinking. i still feel pretty: note from yesterday reads "i cross my hands, look down on them: imagining my nails painted a dark orange, seeing the two vintage rings i have on and taking in the pattern of my sleeves, nothing is imperfect. again--- i am beautiful! / been loving my hair, how its long in front of my face now, so feminine, i feel so pretty. been listening to the oldies that some of my favorite pop songs have sampled: swingin party, back, baby."
i've also been listening to lot of folky stuff, despite screaming (#sleater-kinney, #bikinikill). a note from 9/20 reads: "music rn / mj lenderman / this is lorelai / wednesday" yuuuuup.
i enjoyed making a song tonight. that was fun. i can do anything. 5-2.
a note from 9/22 is about "artists to listen to" and 23: " journal: everything changed and im a sensitive person;" 9/27 just "flagrant" and an ipa tracker log from saturday, plans for san diego, plans with mom in town this weekend, friends to invite to my show, a catch-all for career change diction, and new lyrics.
everything has been silly and ridiculously exhausting.
---*[i had just gotten back from the bar-- my favorite dive!-- with the band & friends. was drunk, high, opened my computer?? funny. so that's why this section doesn't make sense. i can't remember what 5-2 means but i know i was being smart. fuck. i don't mention that the "note from yesterday" was inspired from a moment at volleyball, leaving the reader to know my repeating thursday night commitment. if i were to re-write this, i'd change the first "pretty" to something else so as to not repeat the word lines later, such a pet peeve of mine.]
i fell asleep after writing that^ while trying to airdrop pictures from camera roll to mac. there are 44 of them, and they wouldn't send.
on a sunday afternoon after a very full saturday-- a super present one in fact, where i really stretched it out, despite also starting late-- i pull my hair from the back of my neck out of the high collar of my top. naturally, without thinking, my nails a bright and hard clacking red-orange, my rings in pairs of 2; small relief comes from completing the second-long thing & an unexpected tint of magic appears to me as well! i haven't been able to do that in how long? the answer is actually years. smiley face.
i stuff a thin, frilly blouse onto the flat part of a hanger already crowded with tank tops. i think about this whole homecoming that sylvie echoed parts of yesterday, unbeknownst to her. i think of the influences i had put on me growing up, the skinny tall women from the early oughts we all know, all chic. problematicness of that aside-- seriously, sorry, uh, the point of this revelation is actually the amoral/innocent nature of the whole thing-- i see myself becoming her, the woman i would have found most appealing, most beautiful. i had visions of her the last time i went full-femme second year of college, when i wrote things down on different scraps of paper like "jewel tones" and imagined jazz clubs and smoking and a long shag, boots. skirts and flare jeans. there's western influence, bohemian choices, all still very pottery barn, very coolest-you-could-get on long island. i understand now that, well, being white and middle-class, dodging this aesthetic sense bred within me is a fool's game i've been playing for valid reasons. but i wish to fight no longer. in many ways i have been embracing my life, all of it, even the parts i once, not long ago, found so, so ugly. there's a particularly memorable post i wrote for here a while back, in the airport, reflecting on how uncomfortable i feel around the conservativeness of LI. this is still true! all that will remain true, my non-belonging there, my distaste around the anti-social lifestyles chosen there, yes. and also, my imagination of rainy grape afternoons and the gap and a clean car with CDs... perhaps existing only within my imagination this vision of womanhood, and yet real, and beautiful to me. it is good to enjoy who you are, of course, and i will always be someone raised on mailed catalogues, the mall, high living room ceilings, and sweeping the wooden floor. i will always have watched tv at 4pm after school every day with my family, and looked up to a dark lip. it's an easier life, living as the gender assigned to you at birth. purely and cautiously i am curious to see where it goes. all you should know for now is i grin at myself very much.
<3 kate
sunday october 12