Jan ’25

screenshot of the game Stardew Valley, the main character is ourside the house, in a black void

Ah, January, the drainage of months… even my cozy game locked me out of my house.

Started it with watching “Wicked” and ended it by seeing “Maria”.
Both movies were great in multiple and various ways, and did precisely what art should – fed my soul, poked and probed around it, asking questions and planting seeds. A necessary reminder that to produce art, one must also consume art. To feel. It’s so necessary to feel.
I also loved the discussion Angelina Jolie and Cynthia Erivo had on Vogue’s „Actors on actors“ series.

It’s been a weird January. An unexpected and validating one, in all of the wrong and right ways.
There were one too many days when my thoughts were too loud for my liking. I countered it with sport and * a lot * of reading. I carefully read the responses I got to my yearly email. It seems 2024 was a full year for everyone. (a lot of people got the email directly in their junk tho’)

I spend time with good friends. I had some good food and some good laughs. I made some last minute travelling plans.
"The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it." poem by Mikko Harvey
I met my favourite author – Seanan McGuire. I showed her my sleeve tattoo, inspired by some of her worl(d)s. I recreated and updated the meme thread I made a while back about my absolute favourite book – Middlegame.
I read some, I wrote some. I was lonely, and I was content.

I’ve been thinking lately about how many things are outside of our control, and how even if we happen to make what-would-be-considered the right choices, we are still a single chance away from reaching our goals. Or the exact opposite. How 95% of everything I know about computers was self-taught. How I am a combination of everything I’ve learned and done, and every person I’ve met.
How blogging was my first love, and yet I am struggling to go back to sharing myself with the world. How I am afraid (of being seen, of being known, of being remembered), but I am doing my best to remember that “a flawed story is still a thousand times better than a story never told”.

How there are things every creator should remember.

How words don’t come easily these days, how they don’t flow unless they fully spill, and how palpable and inevitable my silence is, how prominent.

Thinking about how freeing is to know yourself. And how exhausting. (The beauty of owning this place means I need not elaborate any further.)
About how proud would 9 year old me be of the fact we have friends. And how pissed they’d be if I told them people still choose to misinterpret the things we say regardless of the amount of care we choose our words with. 9yo me didn’t spend so much time with the dictionary to continue being misunderstood.

“How do you sleep?”, “How do you rest?” and “How do you manage your anger?” are my favourite questions of the past 4 months. My answer to all of them was unpleasantly bland in its simplicity – “I don’t.”
I hide behind “I am ok”-s too often when asked how I am doing, and while I am well aware this is not fully the truth, some habits are too hard to shake off. But if you ask again, and if you give me more time to find the words, I will tell you the truth, such as I see it, even in the moments I find myself more than sure you will not find it easy to hear.

And why write this in English? Because I can.
Because in English my words are raw-er, my eloquence – more tamed and my language – less flowery.
Because who you are and who you are becoming are two different things and splitting them apart with the thin veil of words in a different language is the separation you may sometime need.
Or because it’s easier to tell half-truths in a tongue that’s not your own – the lies you would spill are built-in.
One or the other, or neither, or whatever happens to be in between.

I think about poetry. And art in general. About the fact fascism hates the arts.
About the fact a lot of people refuse to recognise fascism because it’s not coming for them. About existing in this liminal space of needing to know what is happening in the world and not wanting to know just as much.
About survival as an act of resistance.
About how I’d prefer if you gave me your unfiltered thoughts and unpolished art instead of whatever an LLM can compute.
a screenshot of a tweet reading "Whenever someone tells me they used ChatGPT" and following a picture of Mr. Rogers in front of a computer, saying "You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful."

 

How, if you care to find me, I will still be here even if we haven’t spoken in years. How most people are not like that, and we lose each other as sand grains in the sea.

 

Zmeyche

Oslo, 02/02/2025