March and April

Small update!

I saw these balloons in the middle of a vacant lot by my house. I wonder if they escaped from somewhere. Weird.

Everything often feels like it is floating at the top of my throat. My stifled creativity is going to break free soon. It might be violent, it might be gentle like a stream. I have a two-week break from school and I am very excited to do some creative writing. I want to finish the two novels I have been working on for a while. One of them I might write over again even though I thought I was in the final draft. I just have this weird phantom imagining of the novel and I can hear parts of it in my mind. So I’m holding myself against this fantasy novel, which I’m sure is (not) healthy.

My health is about the same. I began taking a very hardcore medication about five weeks ago, around the time I last updated. I felt nothing from it yet. If anything, my aches and pains have been a little worse, but it could take up to 12 weeks to feel any sort of relief from this medication. Also in health news, I was told I have skin cancer…but when I showed up to get the cancerous area removed (it was a pretty large area.) and when the nurse came in they said, “LOLZ J/K NO CANCER.” Ok, so, not that ridiculous, but they told me there had been a clerical error I did not have cancer, and my arm just needed steroid shots. So, in a daze, I got the shots, and they helped. But it was crazy going from worrying about dying from cancer to being sick, but not dying. Part of the reason I didn’t update for a while was this was a very stressful time for me, and I had some mental health issues during and after the cancer scare. I’m doing OK now though.

I am finished with school for the semester as I mentioned before. I think I did OK and I should get all my grades in the next week. Next semester, I am taking two literature classes, one in astronomy and one in history. I also will study for a math placement test. I’m hoping to test out of at least two classes. So I will be busy this summer. I am excited about the new classes, the last week I was just so done and ready for something new. I did enjoy sometimes studying in the nice library near my house. (I have a couple of libraries near my home but one is very new and modern and I like it for study days. The other two are better for book reading days.) I usually got these yummy homemade pop-tarts and cold-brew coffees.

Here is a typical study setup. I usually study Math at the library because I can grab a room and be less distracted. My cats at home are super distracting and sometimes I just want to get out of the house.

In my British Lit class, I did a lot of reading. I’ve been reading a lot this year, not as much as some people, but more than I did last year. I have read 19 books so far this year. I just started Crime and Punishment last night. I learned a lot about feminism in 1700-present British writings, which is a subject I’ve always been curious about, but never had time to look into. My favorite of this type of writer was George Egerton, and my second favorite was Mary Wollstonecraft. I also read some James Joyce, which I’ve never read before either. Knowing that Ulysses is notoriously difficult to read and understand, I was fully prepared to hate it. I thought his writings would be pretentious, but actually, everything I read was very heartfelt or even funny, and I loved Ulysses. His short story, The Dead, honestly was so beautiful, especially the ending, and it was my favorite of what I read. Unfortunately, I have sampled some of Joyce’s letters and journals and all I can think of is the “sexy” letters he wrote to Nora. If you know, you know, if you don’t… well, let’s just say it gets weird 0_0. So I kept thinking of that the whole time I was reading these lovely stories from him.

I also finally read To Sir, With Love, which I liked less than I thought I would. I am a big fan of the movie from the sixties, and I enjoyed most of the book, but some parts made me feel creepy. The way Braithewaite explains women’s bodies, sometimes underage teenagers’ bodies is creepy. Certain things in the book were just explained from a weird point of view I couldn’t vibe with. He makes women who aren’t perfectly thin seem monstrous and really goes into immense detail describing the fat on people’s bodies in a very unflattering way. And worst of all, this fat-phobic weirdness serves no purpose at all. He like spends a weird amount of time looking at his student's breasts, he comments on if they are wearing bras or not because if they aren’t wearing bras they are “sloppy and unkempt”. So weird. So those were some highlights from that class. Everything else I studied this semester was mostly math or programming-related. Maybe soon I’ll talk more about that.

I don’t have much else to talk about, but I thought I would do a small update. The photos in this substack are all ones from the previous few weeks.

Be Well, and there will be more updates soon,

Aisling!