ABBOT KINNEY

This morning Adam messaged me to say Hamilton is fine. I've known him two years and he wouldn't watch it at all, so I'll take what I can get!!!! He used to be a music critic (now working at Know Your Meme) and he says of Hamilton, musically it has its charms. It's the small wins, y'all. Take them where you can. 

I tried to coax some opinion of folklore out of him, but he hasn't listened to all of it. I thought he wouldn't actively hate on it, because some tracks off folklore were co-written with maybe the frontman (or guitarist? I dunno and don't actively care) of The National, and I know Adam lurrrrves The National. 

You know I had a few American boys (the Bens, Adam, Joey, etc) and the USA is not at its greatest right now, or anywhere near its greatest, so I tend to worry about these men in America. Sometimes I wonder if this is how a mother feels, I just wanna have a dashboard that says, they're all alive, and they're all okay. It helps when they intermittently text me to ask if I'm alive or to tell me about the things they know I listen to. Stay alive!!!!! (Hamilton reference that no one apart from myself will get, sigh.)

Sometimes I feel like people think I'm a.... social experiment, for lack of a more appropriate term. They read my words and view my Instagram stories, and they observe me, but rarely interact with me. It gets a bit lonely, being an Other. I don't really enjoy it, I wish I could extend my hand and have more people on my side. I would like it if more people were open about their mental health, or even just about their daily thoughts, and to fight for what's right on behalf of people who can't. I don't understand why it's such a novelty to be an open book. To such a point that I have to move literally across the world to find my tribe so I fit in. I'm a regular human bean, I enjoy memes, I can watch Selling Sunset on Netflix and appreciate the properties. A couple of nights ago, I met a friend from Lush, her name is Seri, and we had such a good time just laughing over past shitty Tinder dates.

I am on the way to work and the shift hasn't started but I'm grateful that Adam reached out, I'm grateful that my sister made toast for breakfast and my mother made steak for lunch, before I left for work.

TONIGHT YOU BELONG TO ME

The car I'm in has some really sombre melancholy string music playing and it's got me in a funk. Today I had a really nice two-hour chat with my mentor Val, and she said I provide a different perspective from anyone else's in the team. I made a jokey allusion that it could be that my brain is wired differently, due to my on and off depression. I used to really like rollercoasters and fast cars, but recently sometimes when I get into a car, my chest gets really constricted and I feel a fear, I don't know why. It's like I want to reach out to Joey to drive safely and ride safely. I think about this one time I was talking to Adam about Kafka, and I didn't know there was a writer Kafka, I thought it was just in the title of a book. I felt really embarrassed but at the same time I felt also soothed by his reaction to me. It felt like a friendly hug or him squeezing my hand. This happened while we were chatting across the world so it wasn't physically happening. Sometimes when you immerse yourself fully in any situation, it is difficult to separate the you that exists now from the you that was tangled with three, four, five men ago. I don't know if you know what Muslim or Catholic hangover is, or if I'm using it correctly, but having grown up two decades believing that at the very end of all this, I would be guaranteed a spot in eternal paradise, to switching to a mindset that when it ends, it just ends, gives me crippling anxiety at times. I want a salve to rub on my spiritual being, but I don't want to lie to myself with stretched out niceties. I think what cripples me about it ending when it ends, is the fact that this temporary place is so painful and broken. I wish people were just nice and good for the sake of being nice and good, to make this world a better place, to save someone else from their crippling anxiety, maybe. I wish there were no religions or rat races for money and accomplishments, but people helping people to get through the dreariness. I don't feel so good.