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my blog december 8, 2025
Hello!! I have been extraordinarily busy between work, fun, hobbies, and family, hence the long gap between posts, but so it goes. What have I been up to, you ask? In order of excitement...
I saw Magdalena Bay play the Mad Soul festival yesterday, and OH MY GOD THEY WERE SO GOOD!!! Imaginal Disk is an album made for a live show. I love their thrown-together aesthetic, their ornate and multilayered sounds, their dynamic on stage—ah! But I'm gushing. Here's a picture I took of the lead singer, Mica, towards the end of the show:
Here's another pic from earlier in the day:
The whole festival rocked. The artist before Mag Bay was a cumbia DJ, and let me tell you, psychedelic cumbia plays VERY nicely with the devil's lettuce. Jeez, I was straight up floating during his set. Oh, and Maxwell Frost, sitting congressman, played drums at one point, and played them pretty dang well. What a memorable night...
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Next up: I finally pulled the trigger and bought a film camera. I picked up a really sweet Minolta XG-1 from Ebay, and I've been having a blast with it. I haven't had the time yet to take it around town and take lots of pictures, but I intend to do that this weekend. It's such a cute little camera! I can't wait to find out if my pictures are any good.
Obviously I will be sharing my photos here once they're developed. I have another roll of Kodak Gold 200 and two rolls of Ilford HP5 B&W; maybe after my first couple rolls, I'll get them developed somewhere. Orlando is a great place for shooting film because we have several local film labs and a huge photography store. I recently attended a short film showing at Not Another Film Lab in the Milk District, which was a blast, and which gave me the nudge I needed to pick up a camera.
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I've been reading ferociously, on account of my goal of reading 52 books this year and entering December with just 43 books read. I need to pick up the pace!! I finished Virginia Woolf's The Waves (it's true what they say, it's a masterpiece) and started on her book Orlando, which I have been thoroughly enjoying—with the rather large exception of the book's surprising amount of imperial racism, an attitude that Woolf at once skewers as a component of English masculinity and casually accepts as a reality. I will be keeping a close on this theme as the book goes on—I've only just parted ways with Orlando the man...
out and about!
I'm pretty doubtful about getting to 52 books before the new year, but no matter what, I have read WAY more books this year than last year. Next year I will read even more! I have struggled throughout my twenties to establish a consistent practice of reading, but I feel that I'm finally starting to overcome that strange blockage in my brain that has long prevented me from sitting with a text for more than a few minutes at a time. I attribute this partly to my new regimen of ADHD medication (I cannot believe I lived without treatment for so long, like wearing ankleweights on my mind), partly to reducing the amount of social media in my daily life (now, I only have this website, a barely attended Tumblr, and Pinterest), and partly to good old fashioned habit formation (which is much easier when you aren't halfway dead by 2 o'clock every day; thank god for methylphenidate).
That about sums it up. Besides that I've just been working, working, working, and no one wants to hear about work. Work is like a dream: it always seems more interesting to the person who experienced it, and it's almost always a terrible topic for conversation...
Calling it here. Bye bye!!
—Savannah
november 25, 2025
Hiya!! This will be a shorter one. Not much of significance has happened since my last post, except that I've continued to update this site here and there, especially the media page. All good personal sites should have a "dump" page where you put all the stuff you enjoy. What do people usually call that 'round these parts? A "shrine"? I guess that's what the new page is, a "shrine".
I also won't be committing to any particular frequency of blog posts, partly because (1) I'm also trying to get back into writing morning pages every day, and having two consistent journals at once (one entirely private, the other slightly-but-not-fully public) sounds utterly exhausting, and (2) there's nothing more fatal to a blog (in my limited experience) than an early commitment to an arbitrary number of posts every [x] days... At this point I could fill a cemetery with all the blogs I've made and later abandoned. My internet history is an empty shopping mall of accounts, sites, and pseudonyms.
Oh! Yesterday I read a few good articles, namely this, this, this, this, and this. They were all great, but especially the third one; I didn't know any of that about Liverpool and the Hillsborough disaster, an event I only vaguely know about through watching soccer intermittently; it seems like every new fact I learn about the Thatcher years is worse than the last; what a truly evil and uncaring person. But that's enough about her. I don't like to dwell on evil people. It makes me want to see the evil in people who haven't quite earned that title yet, an ugly way to think. I won't ignore evil, but I won't go looking for it either. Evil is an odorless gas that slowly, very slowly, poisons your mind, making you bitter and spiteful...
I used to be such a bitter, spiteful person. I still have those tendencies sometimes. I'm trying these days to root it out of myself, to only react with bitterness when the moment calls for it, and not any sooner...
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I'm thinking about getting a cheap film camera, just for fun. I do love to take pictures of things!! Here are some pictures I've taken recently on my phone:
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My bicycle has allowed me to move around much more freely, and it takes much less effort to stop and take a picture—and my phone gallery has become bloated as a result. I'm really drawn by the delayed gratification and physical scarcity of film. You can't just take 1000 pictures, you can't see the result right away, you're forced to learn how the camera works instead of just trying every photo 10 times... I love learning things!!! I'm tempted by the basic SLRs like the AE-1 or a Pentax, but damn, the Canon demi EE17 looks so freaking cute AND it's cheap as hell. Decision paralysis!! Arghh!!!!
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Ok that's it for now!! Bye, love you, mwah!
—Savannah
november 12, 2025
I'm back and my allergies are WORSE THAN EVER!! The weather decided Sunday night to drop 20 degrees and stay there, and my apartment building has ZERO insulation and no central heating, so I woke up this morning a snotty, sneezy, goopy human popsicle.
Before that, I spent three days in Savannah, and they were three of the best days I've had in a while! We did a ghost tour (obviously) and a boat tour on the river; we walked River Street and explored the city's lovely, creepy squares; we wandered Bonaventure cemetery and hiked through Wormsloe; I flexed my jaywalking skills as my friends wisely waited for the light to change; we ate delicious food and savored ice cream from Leopold's; we navigated crowds of extremely well-dressed SCAD students and stared open-mouthed at the beautiful avenues lined with live oaks and Spanish moss...
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I am grateful for my friends and full-hearted, and sore-footed, and sleep-needing. The past year has brought so much joy and growth, and also challenge; I had an uncomfortable moment once on this trip, something involving a man and a predatory stare—but my friends, in their gentle but honest way, consoled and warned me that this sort of thing is part and parcel of womanhood. In that respect, there were good moments too. Lots of good moments. I cherish those.
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I started and finished Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness on this trip. It's the sort of book you always hear about and that everyone agrees is a Classic, so when I spotted it on the shelf at the library, I nabbed it for the train. It lives up to the hype for sure, although it left me with many questions, not just about its world and characters but about what Le Guin meant by it all. In particular, Genly Ai's comments on women, and his general presumption of masculinity; at times, Ai even comes across as outright sexist, and seems more willing to grant full humanity to a subspecies of hermaphradites than to women. At the end, when asked by a Gethenian if women are inferior to men, Ai doesn't give a straight answer. I'm sure the rest of the books in the series would clear this up, but I constantly wondered if the Ekumen was more ideological, more politically and culturally charged, than what Ai let on: an interstellar government more akin to Warhammer 40K or Dune than to Star Trek or Foundation...
finishing the book...
I'm going to return to The Hairdresser's Son now, and I have a few other books I've been slowly chipping away at that I want to finish. I'm about halfway through Doctor Faustus, the old play, which I picked up after watching Angela Collier's incredible video on Faust. Angela is one of my absolute favorite YouTube people. I'm so inspired by her work ethic, her focus, her interesting perspectives, and her ability to remain humble and unpretentious.
There are so many amazing YouTube channels these days. Aside from Angela, I have to recommend Kendra Gaylord, Nisipisa, Memoria, Lily Alexandre, and Cool Uncle Marisa. Channels like those give me so much hope for the internet. Maybe all the bullshit of the last decade is just prelude to a beautiful online future. Maybe the internet is a five-act play, and we're not even out of act two yet. Maybe September will finally end, after thirty years of awkward growth and messy mistakes; and thirty years is hardly "eternal"...
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That's all I've got for today. I should probably get back to work (and I should stop writing these during work hours...).
See you later alligators!!
—Savannah
november 7, 2025
Guess what... I'm going to SAVANNAH this weekend!! That's right, I'm visiting my namesake. Ghost tours, River Street, Tybee, museums, art... I love Savannah and its Southern gothic flare, its haunted alleyways and swaying Spanish moss, the strange sense of being watched by spirits, the gratitude that General Sherman chose to spare the city for its beauty. I haven't visited as an adult and I look forward to experiencing a bit of the night life...
I will, however, be thinking about my cats the whole time. It's just a few days, but... they need me. They need my attention.
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the boys
Anyway, I finally finished Right Wing Women (great book!) and I'm onto the next book. Out of my towering stack of library books I plucked The Hairdresser's Son by Gerbrand Bakker, a book I only checked out because I liked the cover art. I read about 40 pages last night; haven't decided yet if I like it but we'll know soon enough!
On that note, I should probably link my Storygraph account here, huh? My goal for the year is 52 books, one book a week, and I might get there if I really commit to it in these last couple months of 2025. For the last—gosh, 10 years?—I've been trying and failing, over and over and over again, to establish a real reading habit. Like I mentioned in my last post, I'm not much of a habit person, but I'm working on fixing that.
I'm learning now that habits aren't just an addition to your life, they also require a subtraction, something to replace. In my case, and probably in lots of people's cases, that thing is social media. Insta, TikTok, YouTube, fucking BlueSky, all of it. I am Romeo and Mark Zuckerberg is the apothecary; I am the bug-eyed computer guy from Judge Dredd (2012) and Jeff Bezos is Ma-Ma; I want nothing to do with these men, but I also want to know what my friends are posting to their stories...
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Before I sign off, check out these sweet pics I took this week!
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That'll do it. Goodbye, au revoir, auf wiedersehn, ta-ta!!
—Savannah
november 4, 2025
I bought a bike last weekend and I have been LOVING it!! Here are some pics I've taken while riding it around town.
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My thighs and butt are on fire but so is my SOUL!!!
I've also been trying to journal again. Journaling makes me feel better every time, but I keep falling out of the habit. I'm not really a habit person, you know? I can never sustain a new habit for more than a week or two. I used to beat myself up about that, like it's a moral failing or something, but it's not. It's just a part of me that I have to work on and figure out. At least that's what I'm telling myself these days.
I'm sick as I write this. Last night something got in my eye and it's been there since then, this agonizing little thing I can't dislodge. Or maybe it's a cut? To add insult to injury, I woke up this morning all clogged up, and now I'm officially, fully, certifiably sick. I feel like a slimy lump of mud. I feel like a handful of wet bread. I feel like a human sneeze factory. I feel like I want to kiss the Mucinex villain straight on his lips.
papa?
We are now in DAY THIRTY FOUR of the United States government shutdown. Last week I received my final guaranteed paycheck until it ends, which could be tomorrow or next year or never. The trouble with this shutdown is that no one can say what it's really ABOUT. At first it seemed like it was about a bunch of weird ideological things the GOP was trying to slip into the budget, but then it seemed like it was about Jeffrey Epstein, and then everyone agreed that it was about the Affordable Care Act, but now it kind of seems like it's about Epstein AND healthcare, especially with all the Grijalva stuff, and if you only read the news you'd never know that one party controls every branch of the government, and... ugh!!! I'm ready to think about something else, anything else. I'm not stressed, why would you say that? Shut up!! SHUT UP!!!
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In lighter news, I tried my hand at sewing for the first time. My favorite jeans have this growing hole in the right knee that I wanted to patch, so I cut a square of fabric from an old flannel and gave it the old college try. It looked great at first!! But it unraveled after just a couple hours of wearing it. Turns out you have to TIE the thread at the end so it doesn't come undone. Wow...
Also! I finished a couple of books this week: the Satyricon by Petronius and Andrea Dworkin's Right Wing Women. Both of them were GREAT. The Satyricon really knocked my socks off; not the kind of the book to read in public (not because anyone can tell it's saucy, but because you're guaranteed to blush at some of the more... vivid... descriptions, particularly the ones involving putting objects where they do not belong). I really want to write something about it! There's so much to explore in that weird, horny, gruesome little book.
As for Dworkin... holy cow!! I only knew about Dworkin what I'd heard about her from other people, so I expected the book to be more, I don't know, disagreeable? Instead I found myself nodding along and going "hm!!" every few paragraphs as she hit me with revelation after revelation. She really saw straight through it all. What surprised me most was how empathetic Dworkin was towards her political enemies. I mean, these were people who hated everything that Dworkin stood for, everything that she was. But Dworkin (while still throwing a few hard punches) refused to treat them as anything other than human beings—awful ones, to be sure, but human beings nonetheless—which I really respect. What a book, dude.
That'll do it for today. Thanks for reading. Buh bye!!
—Savannah
