waify happenings; aka ree's blog

Election Day in the United States. Feeling sick at heart and overcaffeinated. Experienced a polite and sincere rejection this morning. Got coffee, birthday presents, picnic foods, charcuterie fixings. My roommate and I shared homemade vegetable soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. Reflected on dreams, started a diary. Made plans to host faraway friends. Submitted an old story to my advisor for review (I feel guilty about not making more progress on the novel). So much lethargy on Standard Time. Idle dreams of making bold confessions.

As predicted, this project has already lost a bit of its luster for me. I think that the prospect of sharing anything with anyone makes me apprehensive. At some point, I'll send Waif Space to a few folks. And then this site will be perceptible...! Unless strangers are already poking around here, in which case: hello! How terrifying!

Some updates from the past few weeks: I went to a friend's queer wrestling showcase. The next night, I spent some late hours by the sea watching algae bioluminesce in the Pacific Ocean. Two of my friends invited me last-minute, so I hopped in a Lyft with my roommate and her dog around 10 pm. It was lovely swishing our fingers in the (filthy!) water and casting glimmers of electric blue everywhere.

And just a few days ago, I went to Big Bad Con with two more dear friends. We shared a hotel room and spent the weekend playing narrative games/TTRPGs with kind, queer, silly strangers. It was truly one of the more affirming and fun experiences I've had at any con. Being around so many idiosyncratic creators inspired me to revisit this website, actually.

I've also been wrestling with raw, limerent tides of feeling lately. My thoughts are getting stuck on shared moments and sense impressions. I feel my focus on schoolwork slipping. I'm spending too much time on unserious MBTI and relationship subreddits. I'm trying not to milk all my dopamine from these obsessive thought-feeling loops. I'm also trying not to place too much stock in fantasy. Maybe it's more reverential to take fleeting, beautiful moments exactly as they are. I guess I'm afraid that if I stop ruminating, stop meaning-making, I'll lose some essential part of myself as a creator.

Anyway. I know I'm lapsing into abstractions here. Part of me is pre-empting the fact that people might read this. I guess I always risk being too transparent, too messy. To sum it all up: crushes make me giddy, friends make me happy, and I'm not getting too much "academic" work done. Now to go back to luxuriating at my parents' house. I can feel winter in the air as I type on my childhood bed. It's one of my favorite feelings.

I put a few more pages on this site yesterday and today: the guestbook and the current loves page. Will be slowly updating everything over the next couple of days. It feels great to have a new hobby, though I didn't sleep very much at all last night. Something delightfully teenage about staying up until 4 AM to work on a website.

I watched Anora with a friend last night. It was such a fun time: bombastic and deeply-felt and funny. Sean Baker is 2/2 for me (I loved The Florida Project too). I might check out his other films if I ever end up in the mood to watch something. (Also, the theater was giving limited-edition posters away but ran out when we checked in. My friend and I went hunting through the theater post-movie to see if anyone left theirs behind, and lo and behold! We now have our very own Anora poster, salvaged from the AMC.)

I will definitely work on putting a few secrets in this website. It occurs to me that even though this is supposed to be my space for self-expression, I am constantly nitpicking to make things just right. I would like to give myself permission to be less intentional about creative output. I guess that if someone enterprising were to go scrounging around, they'd be able to get to some kind of messy core that I've been meticulously hiding.

This is my very first post on this website. (Who will read this?) It's always thrilling to start a new project.

A lot has happened this year. In December, I broke up with my ex-partner under less-than-ideal circumstances (maybe one day I'll write more about this). In May, I passed my qualifying exams and became a PhD candidate. In July, my grandma died of pancreatic cancer. I'm doing pretty well these days, all things considered. Life is moving at a slow, contemplative pace. I feel deeply loved by my family and communities. My PhD advisor is keeping me accountable to my novel-in-progress; I've written 10-20 pages every week since the beginning of the semester.

I've also been doing virtual EMDR therapy every week. My therapist uses a bilateral stimulation webpage with a ball that moves from one side of the screen to the other. I stare at this moving ball while thinking of some of my worst memories. After a few minutes of this, I'm called upon to share how I feel, which sometimes feels cathartic and sometimes feels fraudulent.

I'm still into Homestuck, though the technicolor, obsessive love for it has faded. What lingers is the melancholia of the Vrisrezi dynamic, I think. I can see glimmers of that dynamic in almost every romantic partnership I've had, particularly when it comes to women. Toxic codependent yuri really is a Thing.

My desk is cluttered with queer novels and poetry collections I got from Taiwan, small press Asian American work that I'm (supposedly) studying for my dissertation, and some books I'm trying to get through before bed: God Emperor of Dune, East of Eden, Harrow the Ninth (rereading), and the Collected Works of Hildegard von Bingen. I'm also listening to The Light Eaters on audiobook. I've been into narratives around dreams and collective consciousness these days. So it makes sense that I'm tapping into mysticism (von Bingen), dream bubbles (Harrow/Homestuck), and plant networks (Light Eaters). Not sure how Steinbeck fits in.

I am continually grateful for my friends in this life. It's not a small thing, being surrounded by kind and thoughtful people. Just last weekend, my book club friends in LA threw a belated "welcome back" party for me, since I'd been visiting my family for the entire summer. They gifted me a skeletal corvid with a black balloon attached. The balloon has mostly deflated by now, but Skelecrow sits proudly in my room.

It feels nice to have a modest space like this site. I think that I've been intimidated by journaling/blogging projects in the past. Even my main Tumblr is very carefully curated. I guess styling my website like this is another form of curation (e.g. deliberately leaning into lo-fi aesthetics in a way that could be performative). Really, though, my self-expression on this platform (and probably will always be) limited by my poor handle on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. So I guess I'm looking forward to tinkering around in a playground where limitations lead to emergent forms of creativity. If nothing else, this project will be a low-stakes opportunity to learn some new skills.