May 19. Durham. (Patreon)

I've had a difficult time finding time for longer written updates over the past week. I arrived in Washington DC on the 2nd of May and got back to Baltimore on the 4th. On the 6th, I went to Frederick, MD for a couple of days. I got back to Baltimore very late on the 8th. Then I hosted a model for a few days. I was in DC again for a few days on the 16-18th. I got back very, very late last night due to inclement weather that affected all northbound trains. Finally arrived home last night and then left this morning and am now in Durham, North Carolina until the 22nd. 

And then the 23-24th I'll be in Washington DC again. And then the 27-28th I'll be in Delaware. And the 30th-June 1st I'll be in California. 

Even planning it all has been a bit exhausting. I'm very, very tired of buying bus/train/airplane tickets - much less getting on buses, trains, and airplanes. Traveling is nice, but sometimes after doing it this much, it begins to feel like a series of buying tickets for different transportation methods. 

I took some photos with my bebes while I was home though! (Text continues after the photos)

I've recently started trying to figure out ways to relax. I'm a very bad relaxer. One of my friends suggested to me that I am very preoccupied all the time, and that is very accurate. Just sitting and watching movies is very difficult for me, or taking a bath. I kept seeing (and still see) all of these things on instagram with bath bombs in bathtubs. Now, that is fine and everything, but I don't know what they do in there - though the phone taking video of the bath bomb always seems ill-advised (what if the phone falls in the water?). But I decided to get some of these things from the store and see. And while I will say that watching them fizz out into the water (I highly suggest finding them and trying this, it is mesmerizing), I still don't really know what you do besides read while doing this. That being said, I've started reading more now, so I have that going for me. 

Seriously though, I stopped reading for a while after I got my degree and burned out on grad school. I got a philosophy degree and Russian language and literature minor when I was younger and was working in a library as a grad student archival processor while working on a graduate degree in library science after that. And then I suddenly realized I didn't want to be a librarian or archivist, so I withdrew from my program. I'd read so much over the course of 7 years in university that I just stopped completely for a while. Every now and then I'd start reading a bit and get so bored - and fall asleep all the time. So I essentially took a reading break. 

But I finally have started reading books again, and it's been good. It's been nice. And, as an adult with no educational requirements, I've realized that if I hate something, I can just stop reading it. Before, that wasn't an option that entered my mind, and I'd force myself to finish everything. Even when I desperately hated the book. I also no longer read things out of some strange sense of obligation - ie "this book will make me a better person!" (yeah, but it probably won't). Not that I think books don't have an effect on a person, but forcing yourself through frustration to read something for no reason is a bit much. If I had to go back and redo my degree and read Kant or Leibniz again, I likely wouldn't have my degree. If I had to sit through one more metaphysics class and discuss whether a hole is an indentation of space, or an absence of matter, or what constitutes a hole if anything, or can you fill a hole if it is "made" of something, or if you can't does that imply that a hole is just an absence of something, or what is the difference between a hole and a tunnel then, and on and on? 

I might not have my degree.

And yes, that was an actual class discussion - for 3 weeks. Twice a week. For 2 hours each time. It was brutal. 

I have been, more recently, trying to consider what I will do for grad school. I'd like to finish a graduate degree at some point, and I'd like that graduate degree to be in something that does not garner laughter and "so you do something else not related to that!" after I state the degree out loud in general conversation. I spent all of my time in school hearing "So you'll work retail!" in response to my naming my degree, so it might be nice to eventually have one that doesn't have any response like that.

But then again, I can be a bit impractical in certain areas, so doing something like that seems entirely foreign. I think it's to the point that, if I did get a degree in, say, business, I'd be shocked to hear anything else as a response. I had a professor in undergrad who would ask students in the class what their degrees were in, and when one would say "business" he would always say, "That's a terrible idea. You need to get an economics degree and study philosophy. That way you can tell your parents over the holiday breaks about whether the sky is really blue and what saying the color blue means or what blue even is." He did not win over many students.

I feel like I've gone on a huge tangent, and I'm a bit tired so am not likely to go through to edit it. But I was talking about reading. So I've been reading five books this month. One is called Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite (which is not safe for work reading), another is the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Machado. I have another short story collection (I love short story collections) by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a book about how the FBI spied on the Aryan Nations, and a book about the intersection between gender and menstruation and poverty by Anna Dahlqvist. 

I need to get on finishing them. I have a terrible habit of starting out a bunch of books and then taking forever to read them all because I try to read them all at once. It would be a better decision to focus on one at a time most likely. It's also a rather weird collection of books to combine together. I had to take off the cover of the one about the Aryan Nations though. Because, though the book is about trying to take the organization down, on the cover was a white supremacist with a big burning religious symbol! You cannot carry something like that around! They really should have thought about that when designing the cover. I'd look like a crazy person carrying something like that around with me.

In any case, I feel like I am rambling quite a bit and don't want to bore anyone. I'll be in Durham working for a few days as mentioned above, and I'm taking lots of travel photos! There are flowers everywhere and that makes me very happy. 

And if anyone wants to, list your favorite books below! Since I just wrote so much about reading - I like recommendations. I started using goodreads, and it's a wonderful website!