summer is coming to an end

after getting t-boned 4th of july weekend, i finally have MY baby (bernie the honda civic) back!!! i have not been exploring much partially because full time work schedule has been getting me down, but mostly because i hated driving the rental and i didn't have my ez pass. but i'm back in business for the final days of summer!!! classes start back on the 25th... that does not feel real, but i guess i will take it as it comes. i never did go to the cape this summer, and no one is up to go this weekend, so i'm gonna solo trip out there tomorrow. if i am brave i will get up early (going to the barcade tonight, so we'll see) and i'll drive all 4 hours out to ptown, and cross a lot of places off my massquest. time permitting (if i drive 4 hours there, i also have to drive 4 hours back...), i'd like to find a quiet beach and engage in some mycological endeavors of the mind. not too much though. but i think a little mental reset would do me well.

but the drive shouldn't be too bad, and i'm excited for the scenery. despite whatever i said last time about my chicago girl, i have accidentally kinda gotten myself into a dating situation. we've been talking every day, good morning and goodnight texts, whenever she goes on a long drive we call for hours at a time, she's flying to visit me in worcester for labor day weekend... clearly things have progressed and we've talked about it somewhat but i knowww we have to #dtr when she's here. i know i know!! we've talked about it. all that is to say that she's making me a playlist for my long drive tomorrow, and i'm excited to see what she comes up with.

anyway!!! mt antler hope reunion soon. i am not excited for classes to start back, but work is going well and i'm excited to have my best friends and our communal apartment living back, because i have not been thriving in my summer living arrangement. i've been rotting a lot and not eating any real food, and i need sarah and kalani back, and now i'm booked and busy pretty much every single day for the next 2.5 months. hype!!!

like, for example, september 21st, i am going on a kayaking birding tour of some fuckass massachusetts islands, which is not only going to cross off some very difficult to access massquest locations, but will be so cool and birding and get me some really cool new lifers. HYPE!!!!!!! also sept 6th i am seeing willie nelson + bob dylan + sheryl crowe + waxahatchee... and now that my sept 7th is opened up i'm trying to figure out if i should buy mcr tickets... much to consider. and there's a million other fall plans and halloween is on a friday this year and i'm so excited!!! life is so beautiful dude.

August 15 2025

journal entry found scrawled on a wall

it used to be the worst of times but it's kind of the best of times now

i can just say whatever on here because no one checks my website #mywebsite

went through tumultuous lesbian breakup (as all lesbian breakups are...) in late april/all of may, but then the first week of june i finally got to go to one of my favorite places in the world for the first time, chicago illinois, and it fixed all of my problems immediately. i got to meet maahum and go birding with maahum and get boba for 6 hours and play pool with louie and maya, and i stayed in the bean, obviously.

on my last night in the city, i went to whiskey girl tavern, the whiskey-centric lesbian sports bar with $5 beer and pool tables and darts and plenty of room, aka heaven on earth. i expected to be a fly on the wall all night, because i was there by myself. but i ended up playing pool with a group and hitting it off extremely well with someone. i think it's natural after a breakup to have a lot of fears of "i'm going to be single forever, i'm never going to just click with anyone like that again" but holy shit, that girl seemed like she was engineered in a lab and carefully placed truman show style to appeal to me specifically, and even more insane was that that was so mutual and i did successfully pick up a girl in a bar and now we've been texting every day and aaa!!!!!

i'm not someone that jumps from relationship to relationship so i am somewhat grateful for the fact that distance-wise i really can't date this woman right now because i'm absolutely not ready to be in a relationship right now or while i'm in grad school or long distance in general, but i'm hoping she will still be in chicago and single by the time i move there so that i can ask her out. this situation has really been an exercise in being direct and communicative... i did reach out to her first to say that i think we have a lot in common and i like her a lot and that i don't want to be in one-night-stand-instagram-mutual purgatory, she enthusiastically agreed, and after talking a lot for several days i did say explicitly that i have zero desire to be in a long distance relationship but am hoping the timing will work out for us both once i am able to move. and we are very much on the same page. but also if circumstances allow she clearly really wants to visit massachusetts, and i will likely be in illinois for like, 4 days in october, in which case i'd spend one of those days with her, which is really exciting.

blah blah blah blah blah no one reads this. i'm still friends with my ex, which is so weird to call her, and i have truly made peace with the idea that we're better off as friends than in a relationship. thank god i have reached that point, because i did not want to be a lesbian with an ex relationship that ended purely circumstantially, because that would just nuke any potential future dating for me, yanno. it still sucks a lot because while i took the breakup extremely hard initially while she took it...differently... it is now the exact opposite where i am handling it very well and my life is generally going great right now, while she is now devastated over the breakup and a shit ton of other things have gone wrong since we parted ways... like, i want to talk to my best friend about what's going on in my life but it would just be cruel in myriad ways so i instead must inflict all of my thoughts on a ton of other people and my neocity.

man. we'll get there at some point. until then i will keep it to myself.

July 2 2025

spring is finally here

even when everything else feels like a trash fire, every morning i look out my window and the tree out there is blooming a little more

April 23 2025

massquest

i think it's important to always have at least one sidequest going on, something to obsess about. it's the spice of life. recently, i have decided that my sidequest will be the state of massachusetts. also, baking bread (i made some absolutely delicious garlic-sharp-white-cheddar-guinness bread yesterday). but the main sidequest is massachusetts. my goal is simple on its face: go to every place in massachusetts. the details are a little more difficult. how do you define a place? how do you define going to a place? what counts? what is massachusetts? who am i?

according to all official sources, massachusetts has 351 municipalities or local governments. thankfully, everything is at least incorporated into a county, which makes it easier than tracking down unincorporated areas outside of counties.within counties, some places have unincorporated areas like villages, and some census-designated places. i was initially including them in my schemes, but most census-designated places were actually just, like, a historical section or a neighborhood within a city that was already on the list, so whatever. i am informally including unincorporated areas if they're interesting, for instance, the ghost town of Dana which was wiped out for the contruction of the Quabbin Reservoir, and Satan's Kingdom in Franklin county, because, duh.

i say informally because of my methodology for counting somewhere as having "visited" it. i just want a clean, easily verifiable number for what i consider a place, so i don't want to just arbitrarily throw some in and count them but not others. so i am including only formal municipalities. while researching for this endeavor, i came upon an article in the worcester telegram & gazette about a father and daughter from worcester that did this exact thing, but what they did was visit every city/town hall in the 351 municipalities in massachusetts. i that is a fantastic metric, especially for places that don't otherwise have much going on. of course, there's lots of places in massachusetts that i have been but that i don't have a photo of the town hall, but i will make sure i double back and get that town hall pic. i don't think that fully counts as visiting a place, subjectively, but driving to some town halls has had me driving past some interesting places that i DO want to come back and actually go to. also in my research, i read about a man (and a community of like-minded individuals) who has visited all 3000+ counties in the united states. by their (honor system) logic, it doesn't count if you flew over it, but it DOES count if you drove through it, because "if you weren't there, where were you?" and that is so true. of course, for interesting places i will spend more time there and actually do something.

there are going to be some challenging ones to visit, but by "ones", i mostly mean the town of gosnold. gosnold is the least populous municipality in massachusetts, with only about 70 inhabitants. gosnold is made up of the chain of 20ish elizabeth islands off the cape. most of those islands are irrelevant, and a lot are OWNED BY THE FORBES FAMILY AND I CANNOT VISIT THEM. about half the population lives on naushon, owned by the forbes family. the other half, the normal people, live on cuttyhunk, a real town that isn't owned by the forbes family. unrelated to either of those, there is also penikese island, which was a leper colony and then school for troubled boys and is now mostly a bird sanctuary for wildlife research. unless you have your own boat or charter one, pretty much the only method of getting to cuttyhunk is a ferry that's like, $60. BUT! it seems that for a few short weeks in september and october, tthe long pasture auduborn in barnstable does guided birding kayak tours of cuttyhunk and penikese, with time to explore town in cuttyhunk. obviously, my happiness and the success of this mission depend on me getting on one of those tours. and i love birds. i am so excited. this will be the crown jewel of my quest.

regarding "what is massachusetts", i found out that the answer used to also be, like, all of maine and a lot of new hampshire and connecticut. who knew? probably a lot of people. we didn't learn about massachusetts like that in florida school.

anyway, i have already lightly kicked off my quest and will dive in with gusto this summer, and soon i will be making a page on this website to keep updated on my massachusetts exploration. stay tuned!

March 22 2025

she should be at the club!

on saturday, i started having a crisis. i've been having a lot of those in the past few months. this time, i was worried that i have been contained to such a social bubble that i had lost the ability to "correctly" socially interact with people outside of my bubble and that after graduation i wouldn't be able to integrate into the Real World that i have been longing for as an escape from this bubble. maybe it's the nice weather that knocked some sense into me, but as i was driving back, i figured that instead of sitting inside freaking out and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of separation from the Real World, i'd just go find it. it was saturday night! st patrick's day weekend! the national holiday of massachusetts!

i asked if anyone else wanted to go out, but no one was up for it. turns out, solo night on the town was exactly what i needed. i walked probably 2 miles, bothered a yuppie accountant from boston and got his number to use his woosox season passes, ran into a friend and her friend, had extensive conversations about threesomes and kanye (separately), went to a second location and joined a UV dance party, danced with a gay guy and reassured him about his ex, got locked out and let back in, went wild and free into the night once more, got in an uber and made conversation with the driver, made it home in one piece. it was a perfect night in every way. i wish i was in a city with a better going-out scene, but maybe it's been there more than i thought it was, and i just hadn't looked particularly hard. whenever i do really have a successful night out, it make me understand how people get obsessed with going out every weekend or several times a week. humanity is beautiful. sorry for being such a square that i have to wax poetic about the beauty of human connection because i went to the bar, but billy joel made a banger about that, so...

in honor of st. patrick's day and a very lucky night:
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

March 17 2025

is anybody out there?

i'm brand new here, but i have a lot of big plans for my site :) be patient and let's be friends!!!