Carolina's Bugs

On Monday, Carolina loved spiders. She woke up a bit before five, snoozed twice, and dragged herself to a sitting position on the edge of her bed.

“I gotta stop doing that,” she mumbled to herself, gathering her hair back in a messy ponytail and half-stumbling to the bathroom. She turned on her speaker with a small chirp and considered her options. Mississippi John Hurt and his layered fingerstyle trickled out of the speaker, and water poured over her curls and down her shoulders.

Blues all on the ocean, blues all in the air…

She pumped soap into her hands, worked it to a lather, and washed herself. Getting out of the shower, she appraised herself in the mirror for a moment, eyes drifting past the bruises covering her torso and fixing on their reflection.

“Stunning,” she whispered, then turned and broke eye contact.

When my earthly trials are over, cast my body out in the sea…

Descending the stairs, she grabbed her bag, packed the night before, and walked out the door. 20 minutes to drive to work. 20 minutes to weave through the cars on the highway and stare into the middle space between them.

Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

Arriving at the library, Carolina began her daily duties. She unlocked the building, grabbed her pushcart with its broom, bottles and mop, and started her cleaning work for the morning. It would be a few hours before anyone would talk to her.

“Good morning, Carolina. Beautiful day today, isn’t it?” said a voice, cutting through the rhythm of her broom. Her head jerked up. Lewis had been wishing her a good morning for a month now, and she still almost missed it every time.

“Yeah, good morning,” she hardly managed.

Lewis had already walked away, on to another staff member. As the library’s director, he was technically her boss, connected to everyone in the library and everyone in the larger community. He knew what was happening with each member of the town, their marital troubles, their financial situation, and even their favorite book. His network was wide-reaching, and he felt each small disturbance. Carolina wasn’t sure what he got out of all his this. It seemed a bit overwhelming. She liked her music and her simple, methodical job. People are complicated, but Lewis was sweet.

The spider was in a random back corner of the stacks, somewhere near the end of the alphabet in the adult fiction section. Carolina liked fiction, but she never got books from the library. They had given her the job partially because her love of reading was one of the only things she’d been able to properly express in her interview. She hadn’t read in months, though, and was sort of worried she’d become defined by a past version of herself that she wasn’t living up to.

The spider sat in the middle of its large and impressive web. Carolina spotted three new trapped bugs: two bluebottle flies and one tiny housefly. The corpses were bound in silk, bounced in the web by the air currents of Carolina walking past. Carolina knew the spider well. She looked for it whenever she cleaned there. She wished it good morning when she walked in and good night before she locked up. She never spoke to it through — what would be the point?

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On Friday, Carolina loved cockroaches. She was at a DIY show with a friend under some bridge in the South End. She hadn’t been to this particular spot before, but she knew all the bands playing except one. They didn’t know her, though, or at least she didn’t think they did. Her friend, Nora, had invited her, was trying to get her out of the house, but Carolina was going to go anyway. Nora probably didn’t know that she went to nearly every hardcore show in town, that getting battered in the pit felt good. Being fairly new to the scene, Nora stood a bit away from the edge of the crowd, passing a half-smoked cigarette to Carolina.

“How was work this week?” Nora probed. She was in grad school, and they had met at the library, instantly recognizing something in each other. They hung out probably once a week, and each liked the other a lot, but they hadn’t quite broken through.

“It was alright. About how it usually is. I haven’t seen you there in a while,” said Carolina, her voice rising.

Nora laughed it off. “Yeah, they locked me in the campus library. Can’t get out. Five thousand years of reading about boat construction. No clue how I always end up on something like that.”

“Yeah, that’s a weird one.”

They would’ve said more, but the first band kicked up, a sheet of overdrive cutting off any further potential conversation. Bass thumping, Carolina wanted to join the mass beginning to scrabble, but Nora wasn’t ready for that. They stood on the side the rest of the night, Carolina fiddling with a bottle at her feet and watching the cockroaches scuttle around the side of the bridge.

ººººººººººººººººººººº

On Sunday, Carolina loved maggots. Every weekend, she went for a hike. Sometimes someone joined her, Nora or April or Mads, but today she was alone. She had been for the past few weeks, actually. She went to the same spot she always did when she was alone, a small mountain off some dirt road. There wasn’t a lot or a trailhead, it might’ve not even been a trail, but she always left her car on the side of the road and walked into the woods, following the twisting path.

Carolina would never describe herself as a hiker. She wasn’t serious enough about it; she didn’t have the appropriate equipment. She just wore her old sneakers. No boots, no poles, not even a particularly appropriate outfit.

On the trail, she passed a series of large maples connected by a stone wall. The trees were some of the oldest in the forest. Their sprouts first broke soil long before the land was cleared for grazing. They had been left, alone among their fallen siblings’ stumps, to serve as property boundaries. She stepped up onto the stone wall, dancing her way down the line, testing each rock before stepping, hugging the trees and whirling around them. Eventually, the wall petered out and the forest opened to a large meadow. Walking to the middle, she found the corpse and the rock she knew well.

The corpse smelled today, resting in the sun. Maggots had made their home in about half the face, but from the other half one could tell it used to be a man, probably around 30. He was splayed out, clothed in jeans and a hoodie, muddy, and not particularly nice to look at. Carolina didn’t look at him, but sat against the rock next to him, pulled out her notebook, and sketched. Quick pencil lines and smooth strokes filled the page, with Carolina only briefly pausing to get a sense of scale of the landscape.

She sat for a while, pencil working in her hand. At some point, she took an apple from her bag and ate it, core and all. Then she returned to her sketch. When the sun was starting to touch the horizon and the cicadas got loud, she headed back.

At the end of the trail, she put on Amyl and the Sniffers and started the car. It was dark now.

Guided by angels, but they're not heavenly…

The engine came to life. Shifting into gear, she pulled out into the road. Winding turns lit up by headlights sped past, and all the roadside trees slipped into the forest.

They're on my body and they guide me heavenly, the angels guide me heavenly, heavenly…

Bats flitted across the road, chasing their prey. Her mind turned to the week ahead.

And they pray for forgiveness, never give it, I never want it…

She was seeing Meg on Thursday. Work as usual.

I always carry on heavenly, energy — fuck!

She merged onto the highway, no cars in sight.

 

 

author's note: the songs in this piece are real, and i encourage you to listen to them. the first is "let the mermaids flirt with me" and the second is "guided by angels." the albums these songs are on also respectively have songs entitled "spider, spider" and "maggot." thank you for reading!

liquefy

they won’t even let you have

a chrysalis. you’ll liquefy

in the street. you'll be rapidly losing

precious fluids to the thirsty earth.

you'll be lucky if there’s a bucket

to fall into, to be contained by.

 

someone might come and keep an eye

on you, stir you a little. your face melted

down your chest, your joints came loose

from their sockets, and the liquid flowed.

a reformation is a choice, but did you choose

the circumstances? you're wearing two sodden

shoes, one of your eyelids winks

at the other from across the ocean.

pull it all together and squeeze

it through a cheese cloth, catch in a colander,

whisk until smooth.

i wish i could stop biting my nails

in the summer of 2021 or maybe 2022 i was sitting on the grass with blake and he said he bit his nails as a nervous thing, like when he was anxious. this is stereotypically why people bite their nails. i said i did it when i was bored and i didn't know myself well enough to know that i was lying. 

in 2024 i painted my nails a lot. i got a polish with flecks of white and black that was otherwise clear and it worked well because it stayed on for a while. i did red for a vampire party when it was halloween and redid it a couple times. it worked but the habit didn't stick. i have very clear memories of scraping it off in my art history class. that probably was because i was bored.

it's really not fun to bite my nails. it's not a satisfying activity. sometimes a bit breaks and then i have to bite them to fix them. but it doesn't fix them, it's worse, and eventually it gets to a point where i can't bite them anymore and i have to get out clippers to fix them when they're barely even long enough to cut. not that cutting them makes them smooth and even either.

i tried filing my nails for a while, but i hated the way it felt. when i was a kid i would scream and cry about getting my nails cut. i don't remember what my mother did about it.

i think i have fairly weak nails. they always have those weird little white spots in them, my cuticles are kind of a mess, it's all around not super cute. even if i didn't bite my nails, i don't understand how people get theirs to look as good as they do. 

in february, i tried to keep a list of every time i bit my nails. there are 2 entries on the list, 4 days apart. 

i think guitarists are supposed to have consistent, nice fingernails, but i'm probably not good enough at guitar for that to matter. maybe if i get good at fingernails i'll be better at guitar. or the other way around.

biking

memoir for creative writing class. please be aware of the format as you read. there are some things i would likely say differently if i was writing for myself.

I don’t remember the first time I rode a bike. I probably lived in Burlington then, only a few years old toddling and around some patch of grass or asphalt. I’m sure I was a little terrified and giddy when the training wheels came off. You don’t need me to tell you all this — the image in your head from countless Hollywood-produced mock home videos is good enough.

I don’t remember the first time I fell off my bike either. Surely it was while I was learning. If I was a biking prodigy, my mother probably would’ve told me. I don’t remember the first time I kissed asphalt and realized just how much something so intriguing could hurt. I don’t remember learning that stoves are hot, but my mother has relayed the story — I kept wanting to touch the burner, and eventually she let me, albeit only for a moment. I reevaluated what I wanted after that.

I don’t have any scars from falling off my bike as a kid. I have a scar on my lip from splitting it on a jungle gym, but that’s not even visible if I don’t show it to you. We biked a lot then, all over town. We biked before I could bike independently, a contraption attached to the back of my mother’s bike that gave me half a bike of my own. We biked through the dead of winter, long underwear layered and muffs on our handlebars. We biked to campus, we biked to my preschool, and we biked along the waterfront.

I do remember flipping over my handlebars when I was in first grade. We were going down to the intervale, probably to pick up our CSA, and I, impulsive child that I was, decided to bomb the hill. I would do the same now, but just as I was reaching top speed, I made the fatal error of only pushing the front brakes.  My bike bucked me, and I went tumbling.

Thankfully, I wasn’t badly hurt. The fall shook me up, though. It took several years before I felt comfortable going down a hill with that much reckless abandon. When we moved to Brattleboro the summer after my accident, I didn’t ride my bike nearly as much. The town was smaller, hillier, and my new school wasn’t really practical to bike to. I don’t remember much about moving to Brattleboro — it’s all sort of in a haze of locations. I have only vague senses of the people I left behind, and I know the people I met through later versions of them. Now that I’m back in Burlington for college, new memories get overlaid on old ones, fresh grease building up on the chain.

My new school was entirely uphill from my house, and a long ride at that. It was called Hilltop, and the name fit. The only people dedicated enough to bike up there on a regular basis had electric bikes and were really, really into them. Maybe you know the type. Maybe you don’t if you’re not from a hippie-filled small town, where, as your grandmother says, there are “a lot of windchimes.” We didn’t make the mounted pilgrimage up to school very often, and when we did it was an event, not a method of transit. As I slowly rebuilt my confidence, the hill was still too large. Even so, Multiple switchbacks, steep straightaways, and an overlook of my town nestled among the mountains made for an excellent ride, as liberal as I was with applying my brakes.

In fifth grade, I joined the mountain biking afterschool activity. It was mostly middle school boys, and I was there with my rigid frame, no disc brakes, and padded gloves my grandmother had gifted me. I’ve never considered myself a biker, and this activity certainly cemented that. I couldn’t keep up with them socially or on the trails. It always felt like I was the butt of the joke or last in the pack, like there was something they all knew that I didn’t. Maybe it was just about masculinity, or experience, or age.

We moved outside town to a small dirt road, I got a new bike with some half-decent suspension, and I started high school. In the early-pandemic lockdowns of my freshman year I spent a lot of time speeding down our road, riding without my hands. Those rides gave me an outlet in a lot of ways; blitzing to the end of the road and back got me away from my desk and away from the house. It didn’t require the endurance and commitment of some longer ride, but it got me moving. I would’ve had a much harder time that year if it weren’t for those small escapes with the wind in my hair. I don’t remember any of these rides, but I know they happened. I can see the tapestry, but not the threads. Most of my memories of the early pandemic are like that.

I didn’t ride my bike at high school. Some friends were in a mountain biking club, but it wasn’t appealing to me, mostly because of last time. My freshman year I was pushed away from sports after dealing with malicious teenage boys as teammates, so I continued to do an odd panoply of activities, riding my bike sparingly. My first two years of college, I brought my bike to school and didn’t use it once. The barrier to getting off campus felt insurmountable, and I wasn’t as confident in the city as I had been as a small child.

This summer, I fell off my bike. My partner, who was staying with me, hadn’t rode a bike in years. They’re from a city and went to our boarding high school, so they hadn’t really had a chance. We dug my old bike out of the shed, pumped up the tires, and set out down the less-steep portion of my dirt road. They told me after we finished our first ride that it was the most comfortable they’d ever seen me in my body. Something about the way I knew the road, its texture familiar, riding past the trees I’ve seen hundreds of times. Something about my hands being out and the wind in my hair that was longer than it had ever been. On another ride, I think I was lost in the beauty of the moment, a moment that was, in a way, a culmination of thousands like it. I was myself then, a version of me built on everyone I was before. My foot slipped off the pedal and I fell hard, hip scraping. I got back up though, wiped off the dust, and rode home. There’s still a mark, a reddish circle blending with the stretch marks on my hip, telling the ways I’ve used and changed my body.

It’s hard to write in a new and exciting way about a story you’ve told a hundred times. Sometimes it’s easier to write one you haven’t, one that you don’t already have language for. I’ve told a lot of the stories in this piece before, and I’ll probably keep telling them. I’ll keep riding my bike — I ride it to class whenever I can. I might forget the details of the stories, I might rewrite them in my mind, and they might blur and merge together, but you know what they say about riding a bike…

 

five haiku

from the first assignment of the semester for my creative writing class.

strange marks cross my skin

but bring me no pain. i woke

late, my sheets tangled.

 

twelve bells envelop

the neighborhood at midnight.

who said they should ring?

 

cascading cups lie

stacked, filled with playing children

in a narrow gorge.

 

i carefully pinch

and pluck strings at the right times

but my thumb fails me.

 

of the two streetlights

outside my window i much

prefer the softer.

 

slaughter blackout

today in my creative writing class our professor brought in a certain campus newspaper and had us write blackout poetry from it. i haven't really read the article and would probably have a bad time if i did. one day i'll write about ai and that's not today. 

corner the edges upon

us and come out

to nothing. we will be inescapable

and no wonder. accept

help, heft hundreds of echoes.

try women, and have god

for yourself. now we live

plagued, but so what? big deal.

 

 

ink(from my pen)tober announcement + day 1

this month, i will be attempting an inktober challenge of writing a poem (or piece of short fiction) every day with a list of prompts. i plan to post them every few days, or when i have something i feel is worth sharing. this was inspired by the wonderful createglue, who often motivates me to write, and i'll be using their prompt list. that said, here's day one. associated song: day one by hemlock.

landscape

we read a story in book club last spring about a girl

who turned into a mountain, slowed and calcified,

with rivulets down her back and a treeline blanket.

it wasn't very good, caught fighting

the author's fractured focus and oil-baron aspirations,

but i think it would be nice

to be part of the landscape 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the story mentioned in the poem is "rock jenny" by callum angus from his book "a natural history of transition." i have a pdf if you're interested.

salt

consider low tide.

the water is peeled

back slowly and forcefully

leaving tangles resting on outcroppings.

i’ve always swam in fresh water,

lakes and streams with mud to my knees

and toes battling rocks.

my mud is not the mud of bay,

the mud of small bodies

and their neighbors’ dead,

empty homes.

mine is the river that runs past the developed floodplain,

the river near the substation,

water warmer than the air and pregnant with pollen,

the river not deep enough until it floods.

power washing

one weekend i went up the mountain

to powerwash the porch. i biked

past the stream, small bugs swirling and

gravel spitting from my tires while i swiped

sweat aside and spat on the road.

we painted the bathrooms first, me and some girl

whose name i don't remember. she was old,

or at least older than me; my curls

 

weren't yet long enough to tie back, connect.

later, layers of dirt came at my feet, 

all the dust that shouldn’t have been swept

out the door and whatever else had steeped.

 

"too long in one spot and you’ll damage the wood,"

you said. it's gone now, though it used to be good.

loose sonnet i wrote for creative writing. feedback very welcome!

summer movie challenge 2025

this summer, i undertook the @bobkeposting summer movie challenge. inspired by a post by @caseyjune, i have decided to blog about the endeavor. i was already attempting to watch a solid amount of movies this summer due to my goal of watching a movie every week for a total of 52 on the year. if you wanna you can follow my letterboxd or just look at it. some of this post is kinda short because i didn't wanna cover-what i said in my letterboxd reviews again although a lot of them i did that anyway. take a shot every time i said movie in that paragraph.

 

composed by hans zimmer or ludwig goranson: sinners

this one was easy. i already wanted to watch Sinners, and it certainly lived up to the hype. i don't think i have much to say on this that hasn't been said, i'm very sad i didn't see it in theaters and it's amplified my interest in fingerstyle guitar.

 

letterboxd top 250: singin' in the rain

watched this one twice actually. i'm a fan. originally watched it because my friends had watched it in the spring without me. i was gonna watch it a third time this summer because someone wanted to but somehow july and august disappeared. it's a very good movie, but the new york section really drags.

title with five or more words: furiosa: a mad max saga

i liked fury road, and this is quite good too but in a different way. does a great job with colors and themes and all of that. 

 

best picture winner: anora

really visually gorgeous and well acted movie but i just still don't know how i feel about it. i think it's probably staying that way unless someone really wants to present me with their opinion.

 

director whose name starts with the same letter as yours: gravity

directed by alfonso cuarón. not a great movie, but one that tries some things. it's an experience i appreciate, but it doesn't have character depth or really any depth to back it up. what it does well, it does very well. it's got a feeling to it, but the feeling is a generic one.

 

language you haven’t seen a movie in: the worst person in the world

this movie's in norwegian. it's a bit of a cop-out, as i wanted to watch something in a language i would be less likely to watch on my own, but this is what i ended up with. i'm still so struck with how beautiful the main character is. i think it's just a me thing. i hate men. it's a solid movie though.

doc or concert film: stop making sense

i'm really not that into the talking heads. i appreciate and like them, but i haven't really listened to them on my own. i enjoyed this a lot though, and it was the last movie of the challenge. i was fighting to stay awake but it was not because of the movie. great movie to watch people playing instruments and think about how you could play like that. big fan of how rhythmic david byrne's guitar is.

 

released in 2025: the phoenician scheme

there are a fair few movies on this list that could fit into this slot but this is the one that took it. saw it at my local theater in the big room and it was a good time. not my favorite wes anderson movie, but i like the direction he's going at the end of it. worth watching if you like that sort of thing, which i do.

 

based on a non-marvel or dc comic: ghost in the shell (1995)

wow what an awesome movie. beautiful, beautiful animation. raises ethical questions or something but it's also really hot. if you're a girl and you haven't watched this you should fix that.

 

hand-drawn animation: barber westchester

this movie found a spot in my letterboxd top 4, and i'm not certain that it should be there but it's a very very good movie. the premise is ridiculous and partially important. it's just really nice to watch, and i think pushes the limits of hand-drawn animation. totally indie film, so few people working on it, strongly recommend. art with transfem characters also just means a lot to me.

 

bipoc director: nickel boys

experiments in an awesome way and succeeds. i would be happy to watch more first-person films if they were approached with this level of consideration. emotionally brutal.

nominated for a razzie: mamma mia

i really struggled with this category because it felt so much more constraining than any other. however, in doing some consideration of my list i realized i had already watched mama mia. it was previously in a later category, so i swapped it. had a fun time watching this.

 

musical: mama mia 2

worse than the first one. still not awful.

 

rom com: she's the man

fun movie. you gotta have a few.

 

a fish appears on screen: election (2005)

this was the category mama mia was originally in. the scene with the fish may be the most impactful of the whole movie, and is a masterful ending. the first half is kinda lackluster but the end is just so good.

and that's it! i watched those movies. allegedly there'll be a party as a result. maybe i'll make a complete movie recap at the end of the year. you should tell me about movies you've watched, and maybe even blog about them.

come with me

it’s one 

of those summer mornings 

you forget about in winter where the 

haze isn’t quite bright 

golden or 

warm and the birds are quietly 

determined.

one of those mornings 

where you 

push yourself to the edge of the bed and 

tie your hair back to get it off your neck,

pull on shorts and

socks and walk around 

half naked because 

no shirt seems quite right 

yet, letting the sweat evaporate.

the day lilies are open and if 

i had a dog she’d

be surprisingly wet from the dew and 

i’d dry her paws with a towel before starting the kettle 

for a pot of coffee but

i have to get in my car and go to work

and as i drive 

a deer 

stands in the middle of the road

jumps over the whole second half

and vanishes

new england air conditioning

it's hot as fuck out and i want to talk about heat management in vermont and why i haven't really felt the need for air conditioning until the last few years. the short answer is climate change. it was not this warm when i was young. you already know that though, and there's a more interesting part to the story. i often think about daytime temperatures, but a really important change is how cold it gets at night (or doesn't).

i spent most of the summers of my childhood sleeping outside, and it got cold. wear a sweatshirt and socks in your sleeping bag sometimes kind of cold. in august. or, at more normal levels, cold enough that you definitely needed a layer. this summer, i've been going outside at night in a tank top and been warm still. the cold air lets the humidity drop a bit, but it also allows for some beautiful tech: new england air conditioning. 

in my house we open the windows at night and close them in the day. this is a fairly obvious thing to do, but it's really very effective. our house has a lot of south facing windows and would often be uncomfortably cold in the summer. i would put on a sweater because it was too cold inside and then go outside and it would be really warm. i'm don't really like air conditioning, but at this point i understand the necessity. i miss cold summer nights.

internet road trip

today, scrolling tumblr i happened across a post directing me to internet roadtrip. if you haven't heard about it, it's a website where people are collectively "driving" via google street view and trying to get to canada. you drive the car by voting on what direction to go.

the website has a couple cute little oddities which i'll let you explore yourself. i booted it up, fiddled around with a few things, and was about ready to leave. then i turned on the radio.

when i opened the site, the car was in maine and the radio was playing WBOR, the bowdoin student radio station. people can collectively choose to change the radio station, and the available stations are based on the car's location. the DJ, named Talia, knew that road trippers were tuned in. she was talking to us, and suggested we take a detour to the town of blue hill, where her grandmother is from and she spent summers. blue hill, interestingly, blue hill is where one of my friends is from, and i've driven there to visit them a few times.

the chat immediately decided to make the detour, although some elements (branding themselves route purists) wanted to continue to canada. however, due to some internal miscommunication about what turn to take we ended up taking a wrong turn and having to do a whole loop of an area we'd already driven.

 

(i think there are more factions in the chat, but i didn't join the discord server to find out. that is left as an exercise for the reader)

i requested some courtney barnett, and the dj played sunday roast which was very lovely. the dj was generally playing good music i enjoyed, and that was fun. i left when her set finished. i trust they made it to blue hill, though i didn't stick around to see it.

i think it's neat that this exists, and that i shared a small thing with all these strangers. typical sentiment. you can find a deeper philosophy yourself, i'm just here to tell you about a nice thing that happened to me.

on the very day i'm gone

another song research rabbit hole! if you missed the last one, it's here, although they're not really related. except that they're both about nora brown kind of, unclear how this happened, i swear i listen to other music. anyway, definitely check out the songs i link. enjoy!

i watch a lot of music on youtube. this includes following individual artists; watching tiny desk concerts, live on kexp, audiotree live, and similar; following channels that feature artists such as gemsonvhs; and assorted videos that just pop up in my recommended.

the other day, i was recommended a video of nora brown performing a song called "the very day i'm gone".

she also performs it on her tiny desk home concert, as well as on an album that i haven't really listened to. 

i like this song, and i've also heard it before, particularly as the last track of the norfolk broads' album "yonder green grove" i found the norfolk broads through the longest johns (a former [and my favorite] johns' member, anna, was a part of the broads), and i will write more about shanties one of these days, but for now here we are and i have a song entitled "rambling woman" that i first heard through an english folk group now performed by a new yorker who plays appalachian traditionals. what gives, and where did this song come from? i also have a suspicion that i had heard this song before the broads, but i have no evidence to back this up.

my suspicion of hearing this song previously may be related to how familiar the song sounds. it shares many lyrics with "railroader's lament" which you might also know by the name "500 miles". my dad sang this song to me as a kid, we sang it at my summer camp, and while writing this i'm learning that it's actually not a traditional. wikipedia claims it was written by hedy west in the 1960s, and was very much part of the folk revival being performed by cash as well as peter, paul, & mary alongside others.

however, it's likely an adaption of an older song "900 miles" originating in the aughts of that century. here's a recording of "900 miles" from 1924 by fiddling john carson.

 

according to baladindex.org, it's also very related to the songs "reuben's train" (meredith moon performance)  and "train 45" (guthrie performance)

anyway, bringing us back around to "the very day i'm gone," the video description for nora brown's tiny desk cites it as being written by addie graham. i missed the information initially and found it through some other sources after watching a lot of cover videos on youtube. addie graham's wikipedia tells us she was born 1890 in kentucky. there's a tribute album to her i found on bandcamp, but an actual recording of her singing "on the very day i'm gone" eludes me. various sources tell me she has an album entitled "been a long time travelling" but the tracklist provided on discogs doesn't include the song i want. wikipedia links to the digital library of appalatchia but their website is broken and it also doesn't claim to have this song so i haven't bothered to dig in the archives. 

the full album is actually on youtube so you can listen to that if you like. it's got a charm to it. i also found some video of her singing "the old churchyard"

it's fascinating to me that very possibly no one will ever hear the woman who wrote this song sing it again.

how i make an instagram post

maybe this is a really self-centered post for me to make but i have a very particular process to it. maybe it's not even particular, maybe everyone does it this way. i think too much about these things. how do you make instagram posts? tell me in the comments. regardless, here we go.

i try to make an instagram post every month. if i have something particularly eventful or that has a lot of photos (e.g. my montreal trip over thanksgiving break) i’ll make extra posts. months segment things nicely, and also tend to be a good timeframe where i can cover all the things that happened.

i started making posts this summer, when, after some prodding, i realized that i actually liked the way i looked in photos and could post them. i made 8 posts catching up my life since the start of college, although i'm fairly sure i didn't post any photos of me from the fall semester.

to start, i go through all the photos from the month and put everything i think might be good in an album. often this involves a couple duplicates, as well as versions of shots that i think will crop differently and want to check which one i want.

once i have all the raw photos (this month i had 24), i start narrowing. some photos just aren’t that good comparatively on a second pass, sometimes i don’t need quite that many photos of one person, it very much depends on the month. i try to get down to 10 photos, even though instagram raised the limit. i could be pretentious and claim it’s an exercise in craft, but it’s also just habit and feels like the right number. narrowing can be tricky, and often i'll sit on it for a day or two and come back.

this month was interesting because i had a lot of photos from shows and low-light dorm rooms which were all kind of terrible quality, and a bunch of pictures from frisbee that i was considering making into their own post. i think the final post suffers from too much frisbee syndrome (tm) but i didn't feel like changing it.

once i've narrowed, i crop everything down to square. instagram changed the profile grid ratio recently and i'm going to be angry about it for a while. i put a lot of care into cropping. my time doing digital and film photography in an academic setting taught me the importance of careful cropping. sometimes, i can't get a photo to crop well and i'll swap it out for another. a few times, i've made a post in a different aspect ratio to allow for different crops. sometimes i'll touch up the editing on a photo, but usually that's not needed.

the photos are gradually placed in an order. this is never at a consistent time in the process. i'll consider order as part of narrowing, or do it before cropping, or partially crop and then order, or just do it last. i try to vary types of photos and give a sense of flow to the post. this could be narrative or aesthetic.

lastly, i pick a caption. common caption sources include in-jokes from the month, a phrase that wormed its way into my head, or an event.

then i post it! that's all.
 

outtake

recorded in february.

 

frisbee + photos

this weekend i was at an ultimate frisbee tournament. specifically, my team was at d1 regionals. i'm on a b team so it's awesome that we can even make it this far, and especially that we can actually compete once we're there. it was a really great weekend, and i'm going to talk about it a bit before i share some photos.

we drove down friday and i didn't do my homework and we had a campfire and s'mores and i went to bed very early. saturday we had breakfast and went to the fields and it was wet and raining on and off all day so my cleats got so thoroughly soaked and my feet still don't feel quite normal after 2 days of playing with wet socks + cleats.

the tournament was weird format with this thing called "clipped pools" where its not round robin in a pool your second match in your pool is determined by your first one. anyway, we won our first game pretty easily (14-3) and thus had a harder matchup for our second game. this one we lost 13-5, which feels like a more extreme difference than i remember the game being, but i'm not sure. one thing that's odd about frisbee it that i'm often not exactly sure what the score is while playing. or maybe that's just a me thing. anyway, i met a cute girl that game and told her she looked like adrianne lenker so it really wasn't that bad of a loss.

our third game saturday was the first game in the bracket section of the tournament. we won 14-7 and i don't really remember that much about it. before the game, we got a beautiful lunch at the dining hall of the host school and it was so so good and i'm not just saying that because i was hungry from playing. i had some indian curry and dumplings and a red bean paste bun and a little coffee drink thing and some grapes with really good surface tension.

saturday night we had a big team pasta dinner and i drank a single angry orchard and yet again went to bed very early.

sunday was properly the bracket play, and while we were guaranteed 3 games saturday the amount of games we played sunday depended on if we won. essentially, if we lost a game we would be kicked into a losers bracket, play one more game, and then be done. sadly, that's exactly what happened.

our first game was really intense and competitive. the opposing team had a player who was a lot better than all the others and we ended up running what's called a box against her. this is a type of zone defense and we affectionately call it a "fuck meribel" zone after a former teammate we ran it against. in this zone, it was my job to just cover the player 1-1 while everyone else played a normal zone defense. i fairly successfully took her out of the game, although she did end up scoring the winning point and we lost 8-6. i'm not too mad about it though, i played really well, just disappointed that we couldn't make it work.

our second game sunday a lot of the team was kind of demoralized from the first game and we definitely weren't playing our best. also, it was the last game of the season and the last game of college for the seniors on the team. we lost 9-8 on what's called "universe point" which was difficult. i think if we played them in most other circumstances we'd win, but i was just happy to be with my team. also, my mother and partner drove down to watch and while i didn't get played a lot the second game, it meant i got to spend more time with them on the sidelines.

we finished sunday watching our a team lose their game. it's ok though, they were kind of expected to lose because the other team is undefeated. they placed 2nd and secured a bid to nationals, and we placed 8th out of 14 teams. then we went and got lunch at the dining hall again and drove home.

one of these days i'll write about playing sports as a trans woman but i'm not there yet. enjoy the photos!

 

 

 

 

 

it’s about the process

it’s about the process

running down my face

working out the knots in my hair

the careful force of depressing the plunger

and i’ve always been

careful with force.

 

sold my love and bought a thunderstorm

open the window unzip the sleeping bag

watch the field without the horses

5 or seven of them

cap the needle.

 

ball jar and the door’s ajar

whipping in the wind

revisiting his dark materials

lately, i've been re-reading the book northern lights by phillip pullman. that's the name on the title because i have the uk release, but it's called the golden compass in the us. i have the uk release because when i was a kid living in burlington while my mom did grad school at uvm we made friends with our upstairs neighbor. she later went to oxford and i spent the night in her apartment and she gave me the book. i was in oxford because my grandfather's ex girlfriend (who we do still talk to) took me on a trip to london, which was the first time i had ever been to another country (unless you count being conceived in the virgin islands. or maybe i went to canada at some point first).

anyway i've been re-reading the golden compass bc it's the first book in a series. for a while, i said that the third book in the series (the amber spyglass) was my favorite book. too much time has passed since i read it for me to continue making this claim, so i'm rereading. also, i'm a woman now and have a lot more thoughts about politics and media so it's worth another read.

so far, i've been enjoying it a lot. lyra is a wonderful character. some of the world building has interesting implications about transition and power structures. maybe i'll write about it more if i feel like it. i am firmly opposed to watching the show or the movie, i don't care if they're good, don't send me anything about them or any pictures of them.

leaving my guitar behind

yesterday, i took my acoustic guitar to the shop. i got my guitar in december 2021 as an early gift for my birthday and i've played it a lot since then. if you want to see a photo of it you can look at the guitar tag on my blog. it came to summer camp with me for several years, and more or less goes wherever i go. in the intervening time, i didn't do any maintenance on it, which is not exactly good. when i took it in, the guy at the shop (his name is steve) said that the bridge was lifting. thankfully, it's not as damaged as it could be, so he's going to do some minor repairs and it'll be good again. i've also discovered that my action (that's the string height) is very low, about as low as it reasonably can be, so i might get that raised. he's also going to clean and oil the fretboard, which will really make the purple heartwood pop. it's been starting to look a little grimy lately, and i'm excited to see it clean again. it's good that i'm taking care of it, but i also want to be playing it right now, which is why i wrote this post.

 my guitar, sitting in steve's shop

 

 

 

 

page

 

signs of spring

i went home this weekend.

until i got there i hadn't seen the right signs of spring. 

on campus there are no spring peepers in the small pond by my shed. i can't listen to them while i fall asleep. 

on campus i don't get woken up by birds. i can't hear them over the vents outside my window. 

i hadn't seen how full the stream near my house was with snowmelt. i saw the buds on trees, but they weren't all around me. 

i didn't know the frost heaves in my road; the mud didn't cover my boots. i need to sink into it all.

markers

today at work they made me test all the markers and pens in the art supplies cabinet. my supervisor told me she likes the reading i picked for book club about being a trans girl on ket. there was a bead stuck in the cap of one of the sharpie pens. uncapping a marker is a lot like uncapping a needle, but i would never fish a marker cap off the table. my fingers are covered in marker and pen, not blood

 

 

 

you can just do that

on tuesday, i did my first injection. i've been on estrogen for a while, but only finally got around to switching off pills. i don't think i've too drastically noticed a difference, but there's something nice about it being inside me for a week and not having to worry about it. 

i've never been scared of needles, or even worried by them. i'm maybe even a little too chill about them. the first time i got my blood drawn i'd say i was around 10 and the woman drawing it missed the vein. she dug around in my arm a bit, and it hurt. didn't put me off needles though.

it's amazing that i can just put a needle in myself. it feels like something i shouldn't be allowed to do. the world is beautiful and full of possibilities.

vein

i.

there's a vein in my nose, or so 

my mother says, that's only 

visible when i'm 

going through a growth spurt. i

look in the mirror and i

never see it. i wake up 

one day, every day, and everything 

is irreversibly different. 

 

ii.

my bras don't fit and my duvet 

is tattered and the backs 

of my knees don't hurt. 

they used to. 

i used to not sleep for 

the growing pain. inches in a year. inches 

on the miles i ran, 

drove, hiked. 

 

iii.

tonight it's raining. i used to sleep 

with only 3 walls around me and 

the rain would come right in. 

alessia

would read me a story every night. she bought bamboo 

curtains to keep the rain

out of her bed. mine was deep enough 

in the cabin it didn't matter.

both our books 

got damp all the same. jesse told me i was a 

carbon copy of her. 

none of us knew yet. 

my name's from her. 

 

iv.

when i was 6 we had a cat

named minerva and a cat named spike. 

i played dozens 

of games of euchre with our med student roommate. the

garden had a small gazebo and

our upstairs neighbor was eve. 

when i was 6 i had a 

cd player and i'd listen to bill frisell every night to fall 

asleep, through the pain 

of my knees, through the pain

of only getting half an ibuprofen, 

through the pain of not yet knowing.

the air

written saturday evening in blue pen waiting for a play to start.

there's something in the air in montreal that makes me want a cigarette.

i miss a lot of people. i'm happy to be in the city. i'm happy to be seeing the play my friend is directing. the main character is really afraid of getting cucked. the city is beautiful with its careful stonework, mixed colors, twiling metalwork, and tangled vines. i'm not comfortable in the city without a close companion, and while i have a companion i'm in the position of support. i'm unclear if i can or should venture out alone (my phone is broken) but it feels wasteful to stay in. i could get a drink here but it feels out of place. i'm going to get some water.

it's called cigarette smoke. it's called ghosts.

 

murphy's law

murphy's law: "anything that can go wrong will go wrong"

on saturday, i went on march break. i packed up my bags and closed down my room and loaded my car and picked up my friend. we drove three hours to my house. we mostly stayed there until this morning.

on sunday night, my phone broke. i was mid-phone call when it restarted. i made the call again, and again it restarted. i put it aside and continued the call on my laptop. later, i tried to figure out what was wrong. it was restarting in random increments. i did research, attempted a force restart, and had no success. i noticed it was getting hot, so i turned it off.

i had a very nice and restful break, and didn't really need a phone. i lost track of the time a lot, and it was good for me. i wasn't able to get in to brightspace, and that was also good for me, although maybe bad for my grades. probably fine. i almost burnt a couple things my mother texted me to take out of the oven, but all of them ended up perfectly cooked. ultimately, not having a phone allowed me to focus on what mattered over break.

i went to get my phone repaired, and the guy was being solidly misogynistic in the sort of way where he didn't believe i could know anything about what might be wrong with my phone. i walked in and told him it was probably a battery issue because it was rebooting and getting hot and he provided several other options before i repeated what i said and he agreed. he said he'd replace the battery and disconnect some other sensor but that didn't work, the phone wasn't worth fixing, so i paid $70 and left.

while waiting for my phone to get fixed, my friend and i were going to go to probably my favorite burger place for lunch. they were closed. this is the second time i've tried to go there and they've been inexplicably closed. we went to a different burger place and it was mediocre.

on thursday, i got a haircut and went to a local pottery studio that was having a sale on seconds. after acquiring beautiful pottery, my friend and i returned to the car and found a parking ticket. if you know me or my twitter, you know i don't stand for such things. no resolution to this one, i still need to pay it.

on friday, i was going to go to montreal to see a play a friend was directing and be in the city. on thursday night, i had finished cooking a very late (for nice reasons) dinner and sat down and realized i didn't have my passport. in the morning, i texted someone i know on my floor who was staying over break. she very kindly said she'd let me in to my room to get my passport.

after driving back to burlington, we were dropping stuff off at my friend's apartment and she left her keys inside and we got locked out. thankfully, the building staff were able to let us back in.

i picked up a different friend, made it to montreal, and tried to park. the formerly unattended lot i previously parked in now for a whole weekend had an attendant, and it seemed like i couldn't park there for more than an hour. his english wasn't the best, so we tried to find a different lot. this lot very clearly had an option to park for 24 hours, but the attendant didn't speak any english. we managed to make it work, but my bank decided i wasn't actually allowed to be in montreal so my card declined. thankfully, my friend's card worked and we parked and made it to the place we were staying.

walking into the apartment, i reached to close the door and gouged my hand on a nail poking out the back. it created two short cuts just below my pinky. i considered this my blood sacrifice, and nothing further went terribly wrong. i'm now safely back at school. much of this was my fault, and many wonderful things happened over break, but this was a string of ill events too significant to ignore. watch out.

 

catholics, snow, ropes

last month, my friends threw a catholic themed party as well as a rope bunnies themed party. we also made a snow bong. below are photos courtesy of @roseoddments and my roommate.

 

i don't think i did the best job of posing but i'm quite proud of my wounds

 

 

 

god bless

 

snong night begins

 

 i did in fact eat some of it

 

 

 

that was a really lovely night
 

how i bought an electric guitar

about a month ago, i decided to buy an electric guitar. i had been wanting one for a bit, and had occasionally played a guitar belonging to a friend as well as a few others. while a lot of what i listen to is folk and i love my acoustic dearly, i wanted more versatility in sound. i want to sing that rock and roll.

friends had told me of the power of facebook marketplace, so, having avoided it for many years, i made a facebook account. i opened the electric guitar tab and realized that i had no clue what i was looking for, so i closed it and opened youtube. i spent a great many hours watching videos on a variety of guitars and how to buy a guitar and learned a lot. i only have one video still saved.

i learned a great many things, and i'll recount some of them to you here. i am by no means an expert on this topic, but i think it's neat.

first, there are various shapes of guitars. two very popular shapes, both originated by fender, are the stratocaster (strat) and telecaster (tele). there are a lot of other shapes and models and other brands as well, such as the gibson les paul and various shapes manufactured by ibanez. this is remaining in solid-body electrics as well, not even looking into semi-hollow-body guitars.

one key thing for me to think about was pickups. there are two main types of guitar pickups: single-coil pickups and humbuckers. there are also active pickups, but those are expensive and only for playing really loud music, which is not my thing. single coil pickups tend to have a bright sound, while humbuckers are often a lot warmer. sometimes, humbuckers look a lot like two single-coil pickups stacked on top of each other. they're called humbuckers because they're designed to buck the hum (random extra noise) of single coil pickups to allow for louder sounds with more distortion. one thing that was recommended to me was to get an HSS guitar, which stands for humbucker-single-single. such a guitar has three pickups, with a humbucker at the bridge and single-coil pickups at the middle and neck. this allows for a really versatile sound.

to choose between a fender or a strat or some other type of guitar, i decided to look at the types of guitars some of my favorite artists play. i began with courtney barnett, because i love her music and she has a very versatile sound. from my research, i discovered she has three main guitars: a fender telecaster, a fender jaguar (jag), and a harmony rocket (semi-hollow body). she also plays a fender jazzmaster sometimes, and can also be seen with a strat. the tele and the jag seemed like the main things to consider, but we'll come back to the rocket. her jag has only humbuckers, and i like the sound, but i want more versatility. the tele is a solid possibility. haley heynderickx has a tele and a couple of semi-hollow body guitars. big thief plays a very wide variety of guitars, and sidney gish has a strat.

with my research done, i returned to facebook marketplace and began to browse. i'm of the philosophy that my gear being beautiful and me being in love with it is a little more important than it perfectly suiting  the sound i hypothetically want to play. my sound can evolve, but i don't want to spend a lot of money on something i feel lukewarm about. with this in mind, i plunged into the depths of facebook marketplace.

a lot of facebook marketplace is pretty bland. a lot of weird stains, odd shapes, and cheap guitars. a lot of black and white fender strats and yamaha pacificas that would be find but just don't grab me. one day, however, i found a strat with some character. it had an hss configuration and pickups with a golden color. it was subtle and a little damaged, but beautiful. it did have hot pickups, meaning the coils were wound tighter resulting in a more intense sound. perhaps not exactly what i wanted, and i deliberated for a while sadly, i eventually realized it had already been sold before i had even seen it, as the seller had double-listed it.

while i was hunting for a guitar, i also hunted for an amp. i didn't really know much about amps, but i didn't need to. the moment i saw an orange crush 12 i knew i wanted one. orange amps are a beautiful shade of orange, and the crush 12 is kind of the perfect amp for where i'm at. i did some research to make sure the sound was what i wanted, and after a friend of a friend confirmed it was a good amp, i bought one. i was a little late to the meetup, but it didn't matter. she was mine.

 

 

a picture from the first day, plugged into my friend's electric.

 

after buying an amp, i continued my search for a guitar. rather an odd order to do things in, but i was certain i wanted this amp and i wasn't certain about a guitar yet. i kept searching, and was really considering getting a cheaper guitar i'd like less, but i'm very glad i didn't.

before i get to the guitar i eventually ended up getting, i want to return to courtney barnett's harmony rocket. you can see her play it in her tiny desk concert, or in this performance of avant gardener. this guitar intrigued me a lot, so i decided to look into the company that made it.

that is how i found the harmony h62 rocket reissue, my dream guitar. she's so so beautiful, elegant, and has a gorgeous sound. really go watch that video i know there are a lot of links in this post but i promise that one's the most worth it. i hope to get one someday, but we'll see. i think between a semi-hollow body with humbuckers and a solid-body with single-coil pickups i will cover everything i could ever want an electric guitar to do.

back to my guitar. one day, i saw her. she was just the one for me. a fender strat, 3 single-coil pickups, and a limited-edition color that fit me well. billiard ball blue. i messaged the seller, she was still available, and i went to get her. the seller runs a small shop packed with guitars in a nearby town. when i got there, he realized he didn't actually have it in the store and very apologetically told me if i came back tomorrow he'd go get it and throw in a free bag and strap. he also taught me a lot about guitars, and let me play a couple of other beautiful guitars in his shop. the next day i went back, got the guitar, and the rest is history. videos of me playing her coming sometime, but for now here's a picture.