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here is my blog i talk about stuff
sunday, august 17: observations, being abroad, the candy house
listening to: bang the drum slowly, emmylou harris
Good morning, everybody. I write this from my apartment in Budapest, where I’m studying abroad in a math program for the fall semester. Classes haven’t started yet, and today is just my first full day in the city. I took advantage of jetlag to wake up early, and walked around the city to get used to where will be living for the next few months. I don’t have anything I have to do today, and my roommates haven’t arrived yet, so I’ll likely be alone for today.
On the plane, I finally finished The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, which is a really good novel that explores like at least a dozen different characters’ perspectives and relationships to each other. I think I might have to read it again to connect all the parts of it. All in all, though, it’s made me think about networks of people, and about observation. In one chapter a character thinks about a book he’s been writing for years, a novel that (although from the perspective of a less talented/experienced writer than Egan) echoes the premise of The Candy House itself, inspired by his observations from watching different people’s lives through their apartment windows. I’m not going to make this blog post a book report, because then I have to worry about actually making a point, so I’m gonna just recommend that everybody read the book themselves. I just wanted to tell you what I’ve been thinking about.
Observation isn’t about information. It’s not about knowing people. This is another thing The Candy House kept telling me. When you watch somebody in a moment, you don’t know their whole life. That’s not really what you’re looking for, unless you’re stalking them or something. What you care about is the story of that instant, which is partly true and partly a figment of your imagination, but the truth of it is largely irrelevant. Fiction comes from here, I think.
So I’ve been wanting to create stuff more. I have a lot of ideas in my head that don’t go anywhere, ideas for fiction or essays or artworks or digital stuff or design or whatever. The main problem, I think, is that my ideas right now aren’t grounded in anything. I want to make stuff that feels like electronic music. Or well-designed furniture. Or the inside of an airplane, off-white curves that might have at one moment seemed futuristic but now seem just like an airplane. But this is what The Candy House helped me with, I think. The premise of the book seems kind of wild and theoretical and cerebral when I try to explain it, but that’s not really the main point or actual reading experience of it. Most of the book is just short stories about people affecting or affected by the same near-future technology. The book would be really boring if none of their stories were interesting. The book is interesting primarily because the plot of every chapter is on its own compelling and grounded. The parts make up a better whole, sure, but the whole can’t exist at all if the parts aren’t really strong. (Writing this now, it’s occurred to me that this feels similar to the experience of doing abstract math. It can sound kind of out-there and complicated, but that’s not really how it feels to do. The abstract stuff is mostly just there to draw connections between more concrete examples.)
I’ll get to the point. I’m trying to practice this kind of observation. Seeing stuff and making stuff up around it. If it works, I’ll end up putting out work on this website. If I end up being too busy with classes, I’ll just end up on the observation step before the production step, and I won’t post anything, but you can trust I’m thinking about it.
Hope everybody is doing as well as they can.
-- C.S.
thursday, june 5th: i would like to stay in one place for once.
listening to: abbey, mitski
Tonight, I’m laying in a nearly empty dorm room. It’s one of those things that is a cliché image because it’s real. I’m going home for the summer again. I’ll finish up my final projects there, and turn them in online, and in a few days, I can officially say I’m halfway through college. I won’t be back on campus until January, because I’m doing a semester abroad in a math program in Europe.
I don’t like moving. Does anybody? I don’t like the part of college where I have to keep doing this all the time. It makes me feel itchy. Like I don’t have anywhere that’s my home. I think that I think a physical space is really important because I don’t really have one. I think about this all the time. I can’t buy furniture. I can’t even take that free furniture off the street, because anytime I get anything I have to think about moving it, or carrying it somewhere to pay to store it. I can’t live in one space for longer than 9 months at a time. That’s not enough time to make it lived-in. I’m not allowed to nail things to the walls. Or the wall, rather, the one wall on the side of the two-person dorm room that is my side.
I can’t imagine living like those people who travel all the time for their whole twenties or thirties. Don’t they get tired? I feel like ever since I turned twenty (or even before then) all I’ve wanted to do is pick one place to stay for five or ten years. I hate flying less now that I have to do it all the fucking time to get to college and back, but I still don’t like it. I don’t like choosing which things to pack and which things to leave behind. I don’t like being in the sky. I don’t like tearing down everything in the room I just spent months making less plain and sad.
Here’s the dream: I have someplace. A house or an apartment or anything, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that I live in that one place for ten years, and I have a living room, and a kitchen, even just a little one. I can host a party. There is art on the walls. There are groceries in the fridge. There’s one of those multi-disk CD players, and I’ve got my collection on a shelf.
The place changes with me. I live in it long enough to change, to change it. I get used to it. I memorize exactly how the light through the window hits the furniture. I replace the outlet covers with those decorative ones. Hell, I wipe the baseboards with Clorox wipes. Anything.
It’s not that complicated of a dream. It’s not that hard to accomplish, I don’t think. With any luck, I’ll have it someday. The only problem, really, is that I’m impatient. This is a very twenty-year-old problem to have, I imagine. But it still sucks. It’s not fair. I want to live somewhere.
This blog post doesn’t have a message. I’ve been getting increasingly less sober over the course of writing it. Tomorrow, I have a flight. I’ll work on my finals in the airport. Hopefully my suitcase isn’t over the weight limit. Sorry for the downer. Such is real life.
-- C.S.
monday, may 5th, 2025: i am starting a blog but the blog post isn't just about that.
listening to: daylight, june henry
Things are looking up for me. Is it bragging to say they keep doing that?
It’s a high of 75 today. (Fahrenheit). It’s the perfect time in what-still-feels-like-early-spring-but-probably-isn’t for it to be 75 degrees. It’s the warmest I feel like we’ve had yet this season, in my undisclosed college town, somewhere in Minnesota. A lot of people are finishing up their semesters, but I go to a school that for some insane reason doesn’t let out until June, so I’m still here for a long time. I’m happy to be here, but I am also jealous of people who are already on summer break. But I am happy to be here while the weather is nice. It would be annoying if I had to leave just as it was getting warm.
This spring, I’ve been trying to focus on myself, kind of. Everybody says that, but for me what that has meant is mostly doing less things that I was doing just because my friends were doing them, and doing more things that I really want to do. Not that I was getting peer pressured into anything I actively didn’t like, but I’m trying to be more intentional with my time, and part of that is not spending hours of my life doing theatre when I don’t really love doing theatre that much, and stuff like that. I’ve been painting, and I’ve been doing my homework at a non-stressed-out pace, and I’ve been going to math talks, and I’ve been volunteering at my college’s record library, playing CDs and pretending to do my homework in the basement of our student center at 9:30am on Saturday mornings, when mostly everybody who isn’t an athlete is asleep. I’ve been burning CDs, talking to my friends who make music about helping them do stuff. I"m kind of managing at least one of my friends’ musical endeavors now. I’m going to send some emails. I’ve been trying to be better about calling my mom and texting my grandma.
Things aren’t perfect, obviously. I’m not going to share all the details on the Internet where anybody could find them, but I feel the need to say that for the record. I wrote up another two paragraphs about this, and then decided they felt too private. I’m gonna keep those for myself. I think the good things are more interesting to write about anyways. I have more to say.
So, back to the good stuff. This is important to remember for me: there’s a lot of good stuff. I’m excited for the summer. I work as a cook, and I’m gonna try and get a remote part-time internship on top of that doing some cool math education stuff. I’m gonna play a lot of Magic: the Gathering with my dad. Like a lot. I’m gonna do art with my sister. And one of my other sisters is getting married, and I get to go to the wedding.
And again, I’ve been having a good time now, this spring. That’s the actual truth, I’m not just saying that. I’ve been getting into throwing parties. It’s a good thing for me to put energy into that is different from school or art. There’s something about creating a space with other people, about curation, or something. I like making people have a good time. I like having fun. I like loud music. Like everybody, I think especially everybody who’s twenty, I get overwhelmed thinking about how I’m gonna contribute to making the better world we keep talking about. But I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s important to keep the goal in mind, to remember what we’re all trying to get to. There’s a room of people who care about each other, and everybody’s talking, and everybody’s eating and drinking, and there’s a world in that room, and if we just keep stretching out the walls, that world can be the world. I feel like that sounds naive or corny, but I’m going to say it anyways. And, like, not everything I like has to be radical and stuff. Sometimes things are just good and you like them. That’s how I feel about throwing parties. (I want to write more about that later. Maybe an essay.)
I keep getting sidetracked. I’m not sure what else to put here. Okay. Well, I hope you all are doing okay, whoever ends up reading this. I hope you can have fun with people you care about, today or even just this week. There are a lot of scary things in the world, but there are also other things.
Recently, I spent a bit of time making a simple syrup out of rose petals I got from a local grocery store. I’ve been putting it in my tea. It feels fun and fancy, and it only cost about three dollars to make accidentally way more than I will use before I go home for the summer. Would recommend.
With love,
-- C.S.
P.S. Today’s a pretty fun date! 5 times 5 is 25. According to my math, the next time that the numbers of the month and day multiply to the number that is the last two digits of the year is 1/26/26, or January 26th, 2026. If we decide that having one of the numbers be 1 is cheating (it kind of feels against the spirit of the idea), then it’d be 2/13/26, or February 13th, 2026. If we want to go further and specify the two digits of the year being the square of the number that is the month and the date, then it’d be 6/6/36, or June 6th, 2036. By that time, I will be 31.
