1-16: hi my brain hurts 1-15: my does my brain hurt. netflix said i should watch notting hill so i did, partially, then went to acupuncture where we criticized joe biden. great acu sesh i fell asleep for most of it. anyway back to the movie. i love julia roberts. unfortunately, she's very boring in notting hill, which is sad and weird to say. hugh grant's character reminds me of my first college crush except not precisely. my first college crush had a british accent despite being from spain. he was very cute, all the girls loved him, and he was a huge flirt. in hindsight i think he may have been a creep, as most men are. also what kind of name is hugh?? 1-11: love me a goudy font 1-5: back in philly. i think this could be a great city -- almost as great as chicago, if that's even possible. but i must be honest. the airport is janky 🤡 1-3: we're off to hang out with dad 12-31: entering 2025 wholesome per usual. it's another day; 12-29: my sister once asked me if i use botox and i remember being offended by the question. i think she was trolling because she laughed at my reaction. i told my friend faisal about it and he sounded like he was offended that i was offended. i think botox makes people look weird i donno! 12-26: watched this with mom & she loved it https://youtu.be/OPzbHEvlvKQ 12-25: bumping elton john on my flight to phoenix. i was supposed to arrive yesterday but delays prompted me to spend the night in nashville (where i connected), which was kinda cute. i owe some folks mail. more soon and sorry 💗 12-12: happy birthday dad, i love you 12-7: this season's fragrance mix: tag sandalwood oil, unnamed body spritz, diptyque tam dao, le labo rose 31 lotion, chanel no. 5 l'eau. aka cyute ;p 12-4: i was close to spiraling today. i was about to fall apart, and maybe i did. i'm glad i did. i'm so used to acting like everything is fine when it's not, because i'm not allowed to be anything less than fine. i'm not allowed to fall apart and be flawed, but i couldn't help myself today (alhamdulillah). people see someone like me who performs relatively well at day-to-day things and they can't imagine why i might need support. they prefer the masked version of me that supplies them with what they need, at the expense of what i need. i've gotten so used to doing this that i've almost lost sight of myself. but a light switched on between my two eyes tonight and i finally found a moment to detach and let go. 12-1: finally reading essays from alice wong's _disability intimacy_ and absolutely love leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha's contribution: "Sometimes staring out the window, longing for so much more, is still a place of freedom. Because the longing for so much more means not accepting the little they've given you. Means using your brain to hack out an imaginary safe space where you can be touched and loved and still have all your weirdness and delicious solitude. It's perhaps the most safety you will ever know." "I wasn't my mother. But I was still running hard from the specter of her life, trying to prove I definitely didn't have it. I wasn't my mother, but there were still years of longing and pining and being terrified that maybe I was her." "The luxury of being able to be curious, to taste life. To choose, and to choose again, something different. "Here you go, mama. One gift I managed to give us, blooming fully now, just after your death. I am your freedom dream, and my own. "Never ugly. Always worthy." 💗 12-1: installed co-star and created an account last night. my first observation is that the typography is annoying; difficult to read and stale -- this app looks like it was designed 10-12 years ago with that small gray paragraph text. would be ok if they let you customize the type size and color contrast but i don't know if that is possible (if it is, those features are not obvious enough for an app that is primarily textual). i paid for the extended "reading." not sure how that content was created but the vibe was pretty anti-virgo, almost violently so. i couldn't get over the small, underwhelming type and mean-spirited content and deleted my account this morning. i give co-star a D+, written in red ink with the words "nice try" underneath. ☁️ my covid test is negative. i need to pack a few boxes that are going to philly. feeling rested and weird. i am not sure if i want to leave phoenix just yet but i will. ☁️ this year was not a good year, in part because i have been holding back on a lot of things. amazed at how cruel life can be and also want to believe that there is something on the other side of that cruelty. big hugs ❤️‍🩹 11-24: the space between my dreams and my awakenings feels much lighter than what i feel right now, and maybe that's because that space is less tangible than the present here & now. when i begin to wake up, there is no muscle pain, no tension in my neck, no weakness in my legs, and no pressure to power through the fog. gone is the prerequisite to persevere; i am only asked to tune in or out as desired. if only i could capture these moments in a jar for future application. then again, the outcome of doing that may be like a pickle -- sour and consumable, scarce and kinda ugly. 11-18: i'm on a flight & the guy next to me is a graphic designer working on a brochure of some kind in adobe indesign. type treatments look good and he is better at incorporating unique color swatches than i am. but the teacher in me wants to talk him out of using the essentials workspace AND dark mode 😭 11-18: a thousand ways to say i'm sorry and you matter to me 8-25: this isn't always a bad thing but i notice that many people tend to discuss sudan and congo at the same time even though the countries are suffering very different atrocities etc. other cases of genocidal violence and abuses of power appear to get more individual attention while maybe the black/african regions are often discussed as a group & lumped together. not sure what the answer is because i remember when sudan and darfur got a lot of focused & individual attention and while the efforts were impressive the whole thing turned out to be an overly performed and ill-informed campaign that didn't result in less violence in darfur. don't feel like elaborating but i will add that a few months ago i saw a tweet featuring a picture of ryan gosling wearing a shirt that said "darfur." i found the pic to be very cringe but the person who tweeted it included a caption that said something like "what happened?" -- i.e., why isn't this the energy right now? i donno if the ppl who post these things actually lived through that era or know about the organizations that were behind those campaigns. if they did, they might have another opinion of gosling, who is kind of a joke regardless. macklemore, on the other hand, receives his flowers 💐 8-16: it's been a month and i'm still not sure what just happened, how it could have happened, why it had to happen to him. part of me wants to run off and do a million things that would make him proud, and another part of me wants to sleep in and divest from all things laborious. everyday is a little different but there are some consistencies and interesting observations. things that used to bother me don't really phase me at the moment. pain takes on a different meaning, and most challenges that i have witnessed or experienced are nowhere near as painful as seeing him fight for his life and not win. i don't know what else to say. i tend to do a lot of things on my own -- something i inherited from him. i told my therapist about that and she asked me to picture a group of friends helping me with something. i closed my eyes and imagined it and broke down. 8-14: 🤎 8-11: just noticed that my location references the sudanese province of kurdufan. my dad's family is based there and that's where he was born. i've only been to kurdufan once, when i was 16 maybe, but i think of it more than i think of khartoum and omdurman. kurdufan has a different vibe that i like to think i carry with me. less noise and less static, more room for thoughts to unwind and more beautiful sand on the streets. 🎶 my dad always kept things intact when family affairs turned stressful, often without us knowing. he was a very perceptive and quiet person who held us together and more specifically helped my mom process her complex emotions. not entirely sure how he managed. 🎶 i miss him everyday. 🎶 dad and i watched and listened to this in the hospital the week before he transitioned, and a couple days before, too: https://youtu.be/lsQ9cxM36ig