amtrak to boston

i write this on my phone because my laptop is once again so broken. i need the robots to come in and repair it. but for now i have an hour left to boston as i sit with my two sleeping best friends. we all woke up too early.

i feel like i need to embrace writing again. i need my life to slow down. i need to be creative. that’s why i brought my travel scrapbook with me to boston so i can stitch together these moments and enjoy them too. i’ve been reading We by Yevgeny Zaymatin and writing more music and watching a lot of movies. albeit bad movies but they just make you appreciate the good ones more. my favorite movie i've seen in the year of our lord 2025 so far is Twelve Angry Men. i am the thirteenth angry man because i was really hoping it was not that good and it’s just pretentious people praising it, but it was really good unfortunately. it makes me want to go to the theatre and watch a play. maybe even write a play one day, but i need to write a movie first.

i am on a break from school, and i intended to start writing my short film but instead i’m going to boston. a lot of great films take place in boston, so maybe inspiration is nigh. i think my film will be about microscopes because i have 5 of them and i think they could be utilized. maybe it’s a drama about a boy who wants to live life at the microscopic level. maybe it’s a psychological thriller about an obsessed lover who must observe every millimeter of their girlfriend. maybe it’s a low budget sci-fi about a rapidly multiplying alien cell, so rapid that 5 microscopes are needed to look at it. i am not sure yet but i have ideas.

i went to the metropolitan museum of art in december and took lots of reference images, but this one sticks with me. i want to replicate this, maybe not in the microscope film, but another. or maybe all of the microscopes assume the positions around jesus and the mad scientist lays in the middle. i am not sure.

i took a lot of pictures in the met anyways, mostly of reflections and windows. there’s too many to dump here so take 3.

maybe the rest will be revealed later.

this post was to express my hope for the future and my creative endeavors. a lot is happening in my life now but also nothing at all? are things closing up or opening i don’t know. i will find out soon enough. maybe the answer is in boston written in the harbor with tea leaves. maybe the answer is from my pair of friends. maybe my answer is asleep at home. 

boston vlog coming soon? 2025 is the year of youtube. only 3 months until the blogaversary

8 ball

things have been different in my life lately. i don't want to get to mushy gushy on here but i have entered a relationship and so much has changed in my social life. i have gotten something i have always wanted but at what costs. i will not talk about it because this aint a gossip column. but it has kind of been overwhelming and new and my thoughts are discombobulated a lot. so today i will try to combobulate them via a photography dump :)

in the recent weeks i have played a lot of pool. i am so bad at pool but i love to play it because it is a very magical game to me. i feel like the balls call to you, and tell you which one to hit. sometimes the 7 ball just sticks out to you even if it seems impossible to score with. and then you aim for the 7 ball and nothing helpful happens but it still felt like the right thing to do. its a very intuitive game for me. i don't know if this is a shared phenomenon but i appreciate it. even though i never win i still feel in communication with the balls. i feel like we lose together. i know this makes no sense but i've been relying on my intuition a lot lately. and not to brag but i am almost always right. 

maybe i will write a poem or song or something about my new loves and losses. but i gotta lock in a little first. so maybe next week.

P.S. club i have made the executive decision to attach this site to my vassar application. i know this blog is a cool little secret but i want them to see it because i work so hard on it and i love my club

P.P.S. you can not guess who i am dating from these pics loooool

icarobot

 my return is nigh. life has been very hectic i'm sure you understand. but I think about the club every night and every day. happy halloween by the way.

today i want to speak on the stop motion film I made in 4 hours a couple weeks ago. its called icarobot and the search for sun and its on my youtube right now!!!

i honestly already wrote all my thoughts on its production when i was making it so here are my notes from my sacred notebook:

everything that needs to be said has already been said. except for this: i enjoyed this spontaneous act of creation. i had no real reason to do this on a random thursday night. but i did it anyways, alone in my room, only accompanied by Sufjan Stevens and my little robot actor. i think more people need to do this. I think i need to do this more. it's different because it was inconvenient. when art is inconvenient and you still do it, it means you really like it. this was weirdly affirming in the moment. i feel like other artists, especially film makers, are more real than me. after I uploaded this video i admit i felt a sense of pride. maybe to be good you just have to like it? or maybe being good doesn't matter as long as you like it? i'll get back to you on that. 

what else has been happening since october 14? too many things. i fear I've been writing in a real diary instead of my favorite online void. i don't want to get too much into it, but in a quick bulleted list i can give you my creative pursuits:

• performed at an open mic with Xenophon (check my projects page) and will be releasing some demos soon -- possibly tonight?
• hosted and organized a show with 7 bands
• was the cinematographer for a student film about spies and detectives and briefcases
• got back on my photography grind finally!!!!!

the last bullet is half true. i mean that i started bringing around a casual point-n-shoot again and I've been capturing my lovely life again. i went to the park and saw my friends and celebrated Diwali this weekend. let me show you:

i've really missed this... but i miss my camera more. you see, these pictures were taken on some random fujifilm camera that i never use. i broke the button on my lumix dmc lz3 and now in order to take a picture i must stick the needle of my earring into a hole and push down. this is very annoying. so i'm thinkin I do some real engineering tinkering robotics shit and remove the button of my OTHER lumix dmc lz3 that doesn't work and put it on my current lz3. are you following? 

i have a lot of things on my mind but they aren't blog-appropriate. honestly I think a diary has been really helpful lately and everyone should consider getting one. i also started a dream journal which has been quite reflective too. i realized I have this reoccurring dream of having too many cats. usually there are clones upon clones of my cats and they are covering the floor of my house and jumping out windows and i can't keep them all inside. they are leaving and I can't protect them! i think this dream appears when I am overwhelmed in my life. stress dreams are weird.

i leave you today even when I don't want to. i have other matters to attend to. before I depart i leave you with my favorite lyric as of late:

Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut

(Drunk girls)

It comes back, but it's never the same

Drunk Girls by LCD Soundsystem

This doesn't really relate to my life at all but i just like it. 

lock in o clock

 Hey club... I feel like i haven't been giving you any attention lately. that's because its Lock In O Clock.

i have been so locked in. I have so much to do and i am doing all of it. but today I extra locked in and I have no immediate homework to do right now and I have like an hour to kill and I am in a fancy tea shop so I figured i would get back on the blog.

thus, I am going to talk about myself for a while. and media and art and stuff.

I have been reading Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011 by Lizzy Goodman. it is a super thick oral history of the rock age in NYC (think Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, etc.) and I love it. as a biproduct I have been obsessed with electroclash, like Ladytron and Peaches, even though in the book everyone hates electroclash. I also love Karen O all over again. Y Control is probably my song of the year. I am only like a third through the book and I fear it is preventing me from reading other things. I really want to read Dante's Inferno because of Virgil and Hell. 

I also really want to read The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson because I overtranslated Book 9 for Greek class and now I feel on par with her skill (jk). I met her in May and she was so cool. She was covered in tattoos and did an amazing impression of Priam in the Illiad, reading in the dactylic hexameter and everything. I have been generally obsessed with Greek mythology for a long time, but right now I really want to watch mythological movies. I think this is because I binged Kaos (2024) on Netflix and the Eurydice song is a new guilty pleasure of mine. Hopefully soon I will leave Locked In Land and watch some movies. I especially want to see Gladiator (2000), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Elektra, My Love (1974). Classics fans love to be picky about movie adaptations, but what is the fun in following the myth to a tee? Then you know exactly what happens.

last obsession for today is my film camera. my grandparents gave me 2 cameras last year: a Pentax SP500 and a Nikon N2020. both are super old. the pentax is ancient. But i asked my friend to check out the N2020 and fix it for me and he did. I got very excited and bought a roll of film for like $18. and then i go to try it out. and it does not turn on. Apparently my friend forgot to put some essential parts of the camera back into it. so then I try the pentax just for fun. but it also does not turn on. and I can't even open the battery compartment. and then i google the manual and it is so old. i am going to show pictures from it after this. but through the manual I find out it only takes mercury batteries. so I was about to open this compartment and get mercury poisoning probably. hopefully tomorrow my friend will give me the parts to my camera. and I can take some super cool film pics. 

i will never betray my digital camera. even though I accidentally broke it this week and now to take a photo I must use the wiring of my earring to push down on the shutter. but one thing my friend said was that he likes film more because it is much more intentional. I reject that notion. i love digital because of how accessible it is, how i can capture a moment so effortlessly. after all, why would I want to remember the moment for how hard it was to take? when you live through moments, they should not be hard.

one of my favorite pics I've taken is this one:

because it feels so much like that day and that memory. as I type this I am like 2 blocks away from where it was taken, and i think about whenever i walk past it. i wont lie the picture is better in my head and definitely better on my phone but whatever.

not only have i been locked in, but there has also been a lot of drama in my life. i got into a fight over film. i have been invited and then uninvited and then reinvited to a party (i didn't go). there was a bomb threat at my school and we were evacuated for 2 hours?? this was all in the past week.

i have to leave this tea shop. i have sat here for a long time with a $5 lavender lemonade that I was 5 cents short for and the barista had to bail me out. i have to meet with my cousin to get some clothes from her on E Houston. and i have to go to a meeting to plan out an epic Halloween show at 6:30. 

i have other topics to type about including but not limited to:

• my guitar teacher moving to nashville
• videos of 1950s alaska i have found
• whether or not to put this blog on my college apps
• my waste of an adobe subscription

coming soon ;0

senior year start

i am five days into senior year. i am enjoying myself so far. i am not stressed yet.

at school classes are still easy so I have just been taking videos on my camcorder and doodling. I love doing these doodle dumps so here is one now. Except i am trying to format them better this time because Blogger sucks with sort of stuff. I only have something to say about like 5 of them so...

this one is a short comic i made based on the story of Dido and Iarbus i learned in Latin class where Iarbus told Dido he would give her all the land she could cover with a bulls hide, so she cuts it into strips and outlines what would become Carthage. i love comics. I also drew my characters from the other comics that I made over the summer.

here they are except I gave the boy a tan and a different outfit and I forgot the robot's main body design and also what his eyes looked like. it's fine because designs change. I don't think i ever gave the boy an actual name. i think Androkles stuck with me though. Andro for short? and then its like man and robot wowwww right. one day a comic about them will actually be made.

these are the last doodles by the way.. as you can tell I like to label my drawings. I will make more comics in between classes. 

other things going on..... the photoshoot! i learned a lot about taking photos. for one, i know what ISO is but I don't know how to change it on my camera. one of my struggles was shooting in the day and the night. one of my models (friends) woke up at 2pm and the shoot was delayed to 6:30. so half of the pics are a totally different vibe than the other. let me just show the pics.

this is my example. i also experimented with editing but i just can't get them in the same ballpark (pun intended). 

I am really tired so i will write more on the shoot later. i loved it though.

august overwhelms

as the summer wraps up, i have no time but also too much, and i feel like I'm drowning in everything i have dedicated myself to. i will have a full day with no plans, and knowing all the things i could (and have to) do, my mind starts whirring like a dell laptop downloading minecraft and my head blows up and then i do none of my things. not only do i need to do a 1500-word research paper draft, a 650-word personal essay draft, my greek summer homework, and edit a video for my internship,,, but i also have tried so many new things this summer and i want to do all of them all the time too! 

i made this post specifically to talk about all the media i have been meaning to absorb lately because I can't really bring myself to do it for some reason. i think I am just like,,, tired and overwhelmed, and all i can do is mindlessly watch Gossip Girl instead of doing all the things i want. today (aug 18) was especially hard because i awoke to a pounding and unsuspecting headache that distracted me from everything productive I could've done. I mostly just prepared food that didn't require an oven, not because i like cheffing it up but because I like chopping vegetables. the sound of a knife hitting the cutting board feeds me enough. anyways on to the point of this post. with pictures from pinterest so its not just a wall of text.

however as i began to write my lists of media, they sounded more like this:

"Movies:

the only movies I have watched this summer were on the 14 hour flights to and from japan. last summer i would watch like 8 movies a week (i find myself comparing this summer to last summer). some of the movies I want to watch most are..."

notice how idgaf about the movies and more about myself and my own problems! i think part of the problem here is that i am letting my summers lie back to back when they are entirely actually separate entities with their own thoughts and feelings. i think about how last summer i hung out with my best friend at least 3 times a week and this summer have seen that girl twice. i think about how i had enough pictures to fill gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, and this summer i can keep them all in a singular google drive folder. and as the weeks in august dwindle i wonder about how i have used summer this time around. 

ultimately, i am okay with this summer. this year i realized how perfectly placed my birthday is-- right in the middle of summer, the cranny between july and august, allowing me to live half of my summer as a sixteen year old and the other half as a seventeen year old. these halves fell very differently, and as I live through the second half I can't remember what it felt like to be in the first. and although I said i am overwhelmed, i mostly feel at peace. i feel like i am running to myself, and not from myself. i feel this intricately crafted solitude to be helpful, i feel myself being colored in. more on that later. but anyways, being submerged is mostly a good thing. I believe the worst thing that can happen is to be bored. and there are worst things to be overwhelmed with, way worse than writing essays and wanting to read too many books. even as I type this out I think: why didn't I just do that today?

maybe tomorrow. I say that all the time. and I am stuck in this perpetual motion of I have no time (2 weeks) and so much time (2 weeks). not to mention that I have the rest of my life to play with all the hobbies I've picked up, even if the next few months are going to be busy. i might just be typing all of this stuff up because I have not been on the grind the past couple days and I am feeling all crunched up. maybe if i write my schedule on a website I will follow it... here are my plans for tomorrow:

wake up at 9am

read on the subway

volunteer at the food pantry from 1030 to 2

eat lunch in the area

go home 

now we have a little choose-your-own-adventure because these things do not have an order to them

1. write the introduction to my research paper

2. edit the interview footage i took

3. send my portfolio to the organization I'm interviewing for

then finish off the night with a movie, or gossip girl, or i could finally finish one of those WIP songs. maybe even dump my brains out here again. i have more to say about all that media i was gonna talk about. 

so i end this long typing session with this: i love Gravity Falls. i really want to rewatch it in its entirety because of all the book of bill stuff and new lore dropping. that show is summer in a bottle, it reminds me of being thirteen and alone. those characters are like distant cousins and i want the family reunion. i always come back to you, escapism. but I guess that's the point. there's always something to run from.

summer song - jackalope

hey i really love my blog. so I should post on it right? yeah i know. but this summer is swallowing me whole. it is rushing over me like a wave that i refuse to dive through. in general i don't know how to feel about august yet. july passed so slowly, everyday was holepunched. but august is quick. so far. i think i am okay with this. 

i think this is because i turned 17 at the very end of july. 17 is so different and I love it. that is like a whole different post. this post was meant for the song I wrote at the beginning of july. i think i may have wrote it with someone in mind but that person no longer matters to me! also for another blog post. but I love this song a lot. it is played with only fingerpicking like 2 chords but it is so sweet. its called "jackalope" right now but i am open to changing it. i hope to record it and post it on my bandcamp (also called robotics club). 

summer sinks in 

like a dragonfly bite

don’t know why it hurts so bad

skin pierces

it’s just a small thing

but get used to

it being around

summer crawls in 

like a baby bear

it walks on all fours

time will pass and

it will mature

get on two legs and roar

summer seethes

like a leech

stuck to your leg

from the pond

scrape it off

with a playing card

never knew you needed

the six of hearts

summer swarms

like a cicada

every 17 years

i think it’s time for the brood

but don’t be scared i got you

we will stay inside together

summer hides away

like a jackalope

was it all even real

should i mount it on my wall

so big yet so small

let it return to the wild

i think this song aged really well for how my summer is going. i wrote it on july 2nd and its now august 8th. this summer has been kind of transformative yet i am the exact same. i feel like it is a return to my old self. i turned 17 but i also turned 13. i am excited to meet myself for the rest of this summer. but I also want this summer to end immediately and start my senior year already. i think this summer might be the perfect length actually (excluding for my summer homework). in conclusion i have a lot of feelings about these 2 months. i hope they only get richer and more complicated.

i have so much to blog about. all 400 pictures from japan. the 30 page scrapbook i started in tokyo and finished in my bedroom. my other feelings about 17. my feelings about him. and her. and them all. the book I've been reading, Severance by Ling Ma. my new obsession with Cansei de Ser Sexy. the other songs I've written. but I don't know if I will get to it because I'm binging Gossip Girl. and i'm about to binge the new season of the Umbrella Academy. i think i need to just blog more casually. write more reviews of mundane things like the coffees I try and the days I live and the youtube videos I watch. i want to start reading magazines and comics and more books please!

however how much of this will actually happen. because i have to write 2 huge essays this summer. and translate a lot of greek. and edit a documentary under my film internship. and volunteer at the food pantry in the mornings. and apply to colleges :[ I have approximately 27 days left to do all of that (fuck i should not have counted that up). yet after all of that i am excited. i am excited for those 27 days. i am excited for senior year. i am excited to live out this 18th year of my life. and i am excited to blog all about it i hope.

for realz I am going to try to post casually. the dude who inspired me to make this blog literally writes a singular paragraph or posts a painting he likes or whatever. im actually gonna do that right after i press publish on this one because I saw some real cool shit in okayama. but i also love to pour my brainz out and write 6 paragraphs that only sort of tie together. so I guess this post is worth like 4 of that dude's posts!

okay I think i am done with this one. let me just add oneeeeee little picture to top it off.

the summer vibes in kyoto are quite strong.

hiatus incoming

i have to take a hiatus. for two reasons:

1. my computer is so broken right now. I am struggling to use it. I can't really upload anything with it.

2. im going on a huge trip!! so i wont even be with my computer! 

i will be back in august. with lots of stuff to post

hopefully i will fix my computer very soon but i am starting to get worried because i also have like real work I need to do on it. i will be sending it to another robotics club to solve this problem.

this all saddens me because I feel like i have so much to share and i am being restricted so bad.

bye club for now :( i leave you with two pictures and a song of the week.

p.s. i might be able to post on my trip but it will prob be long long paragraphs of text and writing with nothing else because it will be from my little iphone

notebook

hi club!

I think today is the last day I will be posting on schedule. i try to post every monday but I think it's making me less creative. I want to post freely and consistently, but not strictly. sometimes I get on this site and my mind flows but i know it could flow more without this monday schedule stuff. just saying it right now.

anyways here's what I've been doing. i went to the park two days ago with my notebook and pastels and doodled a little while listening to Pure Heroine by Lorde and Nocturne by Wild Nothing. Not sure if those albums are influential in these drawings tho. i definetly want to do this again. I had so much fun. tomorrow I go to the beach and im thinking I draw on the way there. either that or read Stardust by Neil Gaiman.

I drew on that little half scrap first as practice. I want to use this notebook up to the fullest. this was starting at the back of it because the first half was drawings from when i was in elementary school. none of them were remarkable. My favorite thing, though, was this list I wrote:

I've known Brodie since I was 3. she was my ride or die in elementary school. She still is. but I don't still write lists of things to talk about on facetime because I want to make the best of the time I have with my mom's phone. I wish i still loved someone this much. I wonder if anyone will make a list like that for me. I wonder if, back in the day, Brodie made a list like this for me too.

the other cute thing I found was a poem I wrote. My favorite poem used to be This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams:

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

I wrote my own version apparently:

I loved aliens as a kid. this poem doesn't entirely accurately mimic the original, but maybe next blog post will be a revised version. i love how it says "If you have feet" like the alien is not familiar with the anatomy of the human species, but is with slippers. the second stanza just says "thunderously into/your bedroom/window" without a verb. You fill in the blank I suppose.

this was all very sweet to find. My birthday is coming up and I can't help but feel so old, especially reading these back. but maybe putting new entries into these notebooks is my way of coming back to my youth, especially doodling with this crayonesque style. I love being teenaged and i am not ready to be over with it so I am trying to go back to the start I suppose.

in fact I've been watching raunchy old movies about american teenagehood, specifically Wet Hot American Summer (2001) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). i originally watched Wet Hot American Summer because it was during the NY/NJ heatwave and i was like yeah, my summer is wet and hot and american right now. then I watched Fast Times because it's classic and I literally got it at the library as a DVD, in the way it was meant to be consumed. i liked it a lot. bring this shit back please.

the best I've got are my flicks from this week, when i went to the beach with my teenaged friends.

I love them. I love brodie still.

challengers = life

I can't believe this post is so late. I apologize profusely. 

The theme of this week is tennis.

I have a lot to say but I am so exhausted from strumming a guitar very hard all day so I'll just drop some shots and come back or else I will certainly forget.

I have a lot of other pics/art/music I want to share also but not right now. I'll update this post soon