“he never had carnitas, he never had cheese from spain, he never had fish”

-lorena on her husbands veganism

hi. its been a while since i’ve posted anything here. like way too long. i’ve changed a lot, my life has changed a lot. i’m really happy about it all. i got engaged to the love of my life while watching the arno river in florence. there’s a new member in our family and i love her and her soft cheeks. i never could have imagined the love i feel for her. her smile man. i started collecting glassware. i drink less wine (cant afford it(god damn you beer)). i haven’t killed my monstera. i’m having a show air on NTS supporter radio soon. i got a bed frame (its still a twin). i’ve grown apart from friends and i’ve made new ones that i love a lot. i still haven’t spilled anything on my white rug. me and my friends threw one of the biggest and coolest parties grand rapids has ever seen (btw we’re all in our mid/early twenties). i still haven’t released any music. i still love charli xcx and me and dove got tickets to the brat tour in chicago. they sold out in two hours so we were really lucky. overall i feel pretty good. but every day i feel the urge to better myself in a way that’s really hard to achieve. maybe saying “better” myself is not accurate. but like, i want to buy a house, and i want to pay off my student loan, and bunch of other things that i need money for lol. 

i started assisting a really cool photographer in his studio and seeing all the expensive gear we use makes me feel really weird. of course i can take a good photo with my extremely humble setup. it’s a full frame canon with a kit zoom lens and two flashes that were given to me for free by my old roommate. the flashes work sixty five percent of the time. i think i do a great job. but the way we shoot in this studio is mind blowing. camera tethered to a computer so i can hit cmd + k to take a photo. like we barely even touch the camera. and i look around and there’s four thousand dollars worth of lights around. need a little velcro strap to hold a cable down? its in that top drawer. need a little wooden block and some gummy substance to keep this congratulatory postcard upright? second from the bottom. every little thing you would ever need to smoothly photograph anything is there for us. i mean, this guy is a career photographer who has done a lot of problem solving so it’s no surprise he has everything he needs, but there are no holes. there’s no jank ass jerry rigging like there is when i shoot photos at home. i still have a lot to experience. 

a really important thing i’ve been thinking about the past few weeks is the way we (mostly i) consume music. i mean i would like it if everyone considered this but its mostly for me. the problem is streaming. i scroll through my spotify library and see so many albums i’ve never listened to or have listened to once. i’m sick of doing it that way. it takes a lot of emotional strength and preparedness for me to sit and have a focused listen to an album all the way through. so instead of listening to a shit ton of music once id rather sit and spend a good deal of time with it, learn its intricacies, understand what its really about. it took me over a year of listening to realize charli’s CRASH is about her self sabotage as a cheater, even though she states it so plainly. i want to better immerse myself. so, to combat this gen z tiktok brain behavior, i’ve been downloading a lot of music, a lot of it not on streaming. it takes a lot of work to download something and load it onto my phone that it begs for me to pay attention to it. 

to quote my friend november… “realizing a lot lately that i am over saturated in too many things, in not an intentional enough way… but a sort of sporadic and anxious way…”

everything in my life must be intentional. there is no such thing as an accident.

• this morning i’m sitting in the laundromat because the basement where our shared washing machines are is full of wasps. it’s peaceful, i’m thinking about what my next food project might be. anyway, last night dove made meatballs with red sauce and i got this bottle of the most textbook red wine i’ve ever had. we both thought at the same time how this wine was so regular. not too much body, not too much fruit, not too much tannin, just standard Red Wine. it was good though. can’t go wrong with red wine and red sauce.