(05) A physicist, a painter, and I walk into a coffee shop
finding footing in a new place and what "home" should look + feel like.
🧠 first draft emotions:
I moved to Pasadena during a strange season of life. It’s now been over 3 months and I’m still not 100% settled, which marks a first for me. I’ve tried on new lives like sweaters and moved on by week’s end, but this time it’s not been so. Still, in only 100 days or so, I know more of my neighbors than I ever have before, and I’m now an official regular at a local coffee shop, which isn’t groundbreaking by itself, although three things stand out:
I’d endeavored to do the exact opposite (to actively NOT be a regular) and never visit the same coffee shop twice before visiting all of them. As someone who’s broken life-long commitments a couple times, I remained confused by my permanent desire to still commit. In any case, I made a Google Map about these Coffee Diaries, and if I thought about you while sitting there, you probably made it into an entry.
In this coffee shop, I’ll have a painting of my face hung on the walls before long (seriously). I made friends with a retired painter and there are a handful of his portraits hung up in there already. He took about 14 photos to “get the right amount of light and dark” for his reference photo.
I became friends with a very darling 94 year old physicist who could pleasantly and informatively talk about everything. Including inventing certain types of lasers, and how to curse in Hungarian.
Parts of Susan Sontag’s “The Double Standard of Aging” has made me weep with despair. I’m envious of people who have figured out accepting aging as a normal part of life – I’m not there yet. And, as a society, we have not come that far either.
It occurred to me that all of my saved images, screenshots, poems, videos inspirations on Instagram and TikTok and various platforms likely won’t be around when my 4 year old is a teenager and [insert bold assumption] starting to show interest in these things. If you have a smart phone, this also means you have a digital diary that will inevitably get lost. How do we archive these things in meaningful ways? How do I share with my future teenager daughter [again with the bold assumption that she’s interested] the things that held my interest, once upon a time? I am obsessed with the idea of archiving – and it remains in my head, waiting for AI to assist the outcome I find interesting. I wish I knew these things about my parents, but I don’t. Not only did they experience the majority of their lives well before the digital onslaught of perpetual record-keeping, they weren’t into journaling or documenting.
I care deeply about the mundane details that remain in my phone / the cloud. Will iCloud even be around? I recently heard of a friend-of-a-friend losing over 10,000 family photos due to a corrupt hard drive. Do we trust Apple + Amazon servers to house our entire memories? For how long?
What about video? I recently discovered about 20 VHS from my high school days. The frustration of not being able to open it on your phone and watch it immediately. The joy of searching for used VHS players on Facebook Marketplace.
✨ flash obsession
If you’ve ever wanted witty banter mashed up with Zillow Gone Wild, you’ve found it in McMansion Hell. That it’s powered by Tumblr makes it even more special.
⭐️ the delight of archived content
~ how to archive + present life’s content? ~
I’ve long fantasizing about using a sabbatical to organize all of my life’s content. My memory is getting worse, and I have this urge to go through *everything*. I imagine this is the feeling early retirees feel when they have nothing to do for 8-10 hours a day anymore and compulsively deciding to scan all of their photo albums to save to CDs’s, in hopes of extending their legacy another 5 years before that technology becomes useless, too. And we’re not quite there yet with AI… although I wouldn’t trust all of my content it her arms, anyway.
So much of my life is captured, and I’m genuinely proud of so much of it. Weekend stories, weekly breakthroughs, life’s triumphs, big work things, and the pain and joy of witnessing your toddler grow up. So little of it is is smartly archived and organized – I trust 80% of my content to some iCloud backup, and the other 20% to various boxes, VHS, external hard drives, and bulky Apple desktops that I know have *things* on them but who knows what. Maybe 1 solid entire percent would go to my screenshots folder. Sometimes for fun I go through it, laughing and cringing at versions of myself past.
I’ve long been obsessed about online bloggers who have methodically arranged their thoughts + content for years, down to the month. I supposed this stems from knowing very little about my parents lives before they embodied that role – documenting everything was not something they thought to do, and the mystery of who they were before me plagues me. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to assume my kid will want to know everything, but I’d love to rest easy and eventually die knowing I did what I could to represent whatever questions she one day may have.
💌 notes from the archives
~ that i’ve never really shared before ~
🚧 disclaimer: these are snippets of thought, throughout the many years.
some born from me, some borrowed, some real, some made-up.
there is no order, or timelines, or dates, or names – on purpose.
⤵️
The highest orders of love? What is the highest order of love? There is debate of this in history.
Is it a mothers unconditional love for a child
Is it two friends that put each other first
Is it obsessed lovers
Is it a combination of all the things
Is it a friendship with sexual desire, or without it? Does that pollute it?
Is it love from a heavenly father / loving god / loves you in spite of your sins - Christianity might say this
* * *
How long until a discomfort becomes another blacked out memory, joining years of disassociations I can’t bear to recall?
Years of regrets I successfully pretend not to have.
* * *
Exploring new relationships is a part of life. So is ending them.
* * *
Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.
* * *
Ok that google map tho