the apocalypse

and tiny shoes

I keep waiting for summer to start and now I’m finding out it’s almost over. I famously do not, cannot, will not watch full length films, but last week I watched Bo Burnham’s Netflix special Inside and have not stopped thinking about it since. I have been listening to the soundtrack nonstop and am head banging to Bezos I as I write this sentence. 

The whole ordeal has left me with a deep confusion regarding how songs are written. It feels like designing a tune and finding rhyming words to fit inside that tune should be nearly impossible, and yet the world has no shortage of songs or the people that write them. Lately, I have been experiencing an interesting phenomenon in which I feel the desperate need to be constantly creating something (an attempt to fill some kind of void, no doubt) but cannot do any of the creative adjacent activities I need to do ie. take pictures for my professional Instagram account. All I want to do is write these silly little newsletters, (which I don’t actually know if this counts as creative or not because what am I really doing here but typing every thought and emotion that I have?) and color animals and mandalas in the adult coloring book I just found under my bed. 

I think the desperation to be constantly creating something new stems from my need to be distracted from the fact that I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that the world will still exist in 10 years time.  Despite actively wanting to die for every second of the last 14 years, I don’t know that I want to witness the event that will cause the eventual end of the entire earth, especially knowing it will likely be manmade and painfully drawn out. 

When I was young and my grandma would tell me about how the world could end at any moment and to eat the crust of the pizza last because everything could cease to exist between my first bite and my last, I thought the end of the earth was something I’d want to see. Thinking about the world not ending until after my death caused my six year old brain preemptive fomo, which, in hindsight, really should have been a sign that something was not functioning properly in my head. Instead I lived for ten more years before realizing my anxious mind was not normal, and then nearly another ten more doing absolutely nothing about it. 

This week, I have been so stressed and exhausted that I haven’t had motivation to identify and/or fix the things that are stressing and exhausting me and I guess that’s exactly what capitalism wants. As I write this, I’m cracked out on cold brew, trying to remember how to breathe normally. Caffeine does this thing to me where every time I drink it, I think I’m functioning in a way that I normally would, but in hyper speed, like someone hit the fast forward button inside my brain.  Only after the 3 pm crash do I realize that I spent the entire day in a fit of nerves and restlessness. But the feeling of being involuntarily fast forwarded is so fun compared to my foggy eyed state of normalcy that the next day I do it all again. And that, my friends, is what we call an ~addictive personality~ I guess. 

I have so many apps that tell me how I feel, and I just downloaded another app that is supposed to coach me through my own cognitive behavioral therapy.  I can’t tell if I like this new one because it’s helping or because it’s new. I did the classic thing where I got a week-long free trial and forgot to cancel it so now I have a full year paid subscription, so I will continue to convince myself I like it for the next year at least. 

Sorry that this week was kind of a downer actually. I wrote this in the car on the way to surprise my mom in Wisconsin Dells for the weekend and now I really have to pee. My shoulders feel as though someone took a meat tenderizer to them in my sleep, which isn’t that far off from what happened to me yesterday. I’m going to write some poems for you now and then go do the stretches that were recommended to me and not prescribed, for legal reasons. 

twenty second century

email is torture but phone calls are worse and

the woman on the other line tells me

I have a lovely voice and a pretty name

I just want your people

to talk to my people 

and only say what I want to hear

a bunk bed where I can actually sit on the top bunk

every day I wake up with the same brain

inside the same body in the same bed

constantly searching for new ways

to obtain external validation

sorry if I’m annoying

I don’t know any other way to be

tempura oreo cake

tempura is not seafood or tentacles

but I always think it is

I guess it’s in a lava cake or something

I’m allergic to shrimp 

food is so good and then it’s gone

that’s how you write a poem

ladies and gentlemen

Before I go into my photo dump, I want to take one single second to say that if you like this and haven’t already subscribed, please boost my ego by doing so, and tell your mom about me. I love when moms like me.

a very blurry and zoomed in picture of my cat sleeping with her head in her own lap

we went on an herb walk for school and this is vervain and it sounds like a good remedy for my personality

accidentally took a pic of the floor/my feet when trying to leave school. this one is free but you have to pay for the next one!!

made it to the Dells just to prove that my gigantic feet fit inside my little sister’s shoes

Thanks for reading my thoughts, next week will be more organized maybe but not likely!!

lol (lots of love), serena