2024/03/03 ☆*: .
i return! trying out a slightly different way of formatting posts this time, using a lot more of the random images i have saved :D hopefully it both looks cool and also does a better job of communicating who i am or something
back to school, bought my plane ticket home (july 1), had to reject the same guy again.
read 19 more books (including dungeon meshi, the last herald-mage series, and two different catholic school shojou/proto-bl manga), working through the 20th (boswell's same sex unions in pre-modern europe).
been doing slightly less drawing, and what i have been doing has been mostly in ms paint.
looking forward to going home, but enjoying my time here.
what do i want to do with my life? how do i convince an elderly couple of farmers to adopt me as their own? if i want to be a farmer, why the hell am i going to school for an astronomy degree? should i learn piano? write a book? which book do i write? or is a comic a better medium? what about a series of greek vases? is my favorite book not good? will my mother ever be proud of me? will i ever remember the difference between perfect and imperfect tense? will the world collapse in 10 years or 20?
i've been playing a lot of minecraft recently. i think it's a game that shows the inherent goodness of humanity. our desire to build. our ability to collaborate. that we don't need governing systems to care for each other.
i think a lot about rodrigo of caledon. what is love? boswell says that humans usually don't even properly understand what they are feeling at a given moment, and are therefore much less able to accurately identify emotions in another person. rodrigo loves rustin. is it different than the way he feels for tresa, his fiance? yes. is either of those feelings inherently more 'true' or 'meaningful'? i don't think so. tresa and her relationship to roddy admittedly feels a bit more one dimensional than the relationship with rustin, but she can't help being a woman in a 90s fantasy novel. catullus once tells lesbia that he loves her "not only as a mistress, but in the way a father loves his sons." i didn't get it for a while, but when i was picking out quotes for this post, i reread the paragraph that drives me insane ("was this love? would i feel so for tresa, were she mine?") and finally took the time to think about the sentence proceeding it: "were he a child of my own flesh, i could feel no greater pain." ohhh. this. this is what catullus was talking about. i see. i get it.
i like reading and talking about love, but i've never experienced genuine romantic attraction in my life. or maybe that's not it, but i love everything to the point where singling out one person to love the most seems ridiculous. i think this is the monk/nun grindset. maybe i should become a priest. hmm.
iphis and ianthe is so underrated despite being the only surviving greco-roman myth about sapphics...
i'm nearly done watching lotgh! only 9 episodes (out of 110) left... maybe next post will be about why it's so good. maybe.
pax!