Crying and Laughing and Laughing and Crying
Entries from my "2024 journals" doc that is currently 40 pages long.
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I can’t believe it’s been a month since I’ve sent the last newsletter; thank you all for being patient (assuming anyone besides my mom took notice that I wasn’t in their inbox). I took some time away from certain projects to write about my grandmother and archive my memories of her, which has been healing in many ways. Eventually, I’d like to form a book around the shape of her life. Right now, they are just memories; a place to put the love that has nowhere else to go (my friend Lewis said that’s grief: love that has nowhere to go).
Instead of writing a short piece for this edition, I wanted to share some random thoughts from my journal. I tend to journal very sporadically — sometimes every few days, sometimes every week, sometimes every other month. I have a lot of thoughts that don’t fit into the clean format of an article. I also don’t think that everything is supposed to go into a book.
So here are some flashes, questions, crumbs of thought. I feel like as I grow older, I feel less convicted to come to a conclusion; sometimes the crumbs are just crumbs.
When did I become afraid of death? I don’t remember thinking about it before. It only ever used to appear in soft, timid shapes, like the white paper moon in the sky that we notice and admire without surprise: We will all die at some point. Life is fleeting. This is something that we all carry on some subconscious level. But lately it has appeared in my active conscience, an urge that borders anxiety, whispering: Hold on tight. Don’t Let go. Make the most of this moment.
But for as long as I am attached to this moment, “the most” is never enough. I look at the people I love and feel an intense urge to crawl out of the dimension we live in, to unwrap it and examine it from all angles. My love for Mijael and his love for me. My love for my mother and her love for me. My love for my father and his love for me.
Is it possible to miss something before it becomes the past? I want to squeeze this life, and be squeezed by it, until we are no longer matter, until we escape time.
I have been in my grandma era lately, meaning that I have been inside, not outside, going to bed at 10PM after a cup of decaf coffee and a few pages of a book, as opposed to collapsing on top of my covers as the sun rises with the decadent buzz of house music still ringing in my ears. I chose to enter my grandma era around eight months ago.
There were three reasons for this: 1) I wanted more time to write, 2) I wanted more intentional time with friends (more park walks, less clubs), and 3) I wanted to spend more weekends alert and rested, not worn and recovering.
I love the grandma era. At first, I was concerned that I loved it so much it might last forever. A friend, however, told me that this is a natural cycle: we party hard in our early twenties, become elderly in our late twenties, and party hard again in our early thirties. I am not sure if I will follow that cycle, though, because being a grandmother seems to suite me.
I love that I can show up every day as myself. I can do so many things with the energy and mind that I want to give the people around me. Today I noticed that the airline worker at the check-in desk was tired, overwhelmed, frustrated. I asked her if she was okay, she laughed and said no. We chatted for a bit, laughed together, and in a matter of minutes her mood completely changed. I don’t really do those things when I’m the person that’s tired too.
We’re all kind of playing a game, to make money, to live, to be happy. There is no really “escaping” the game, even if you reach the career or social or personal accolade you’re striving towards. In many ways, this can be suffocating; in other ways, it can be freeing. Just think of how many people played the game before us, how many people fell in love, had their hearts broken, lost their parents, lost their partners, wanted more, needed less… It’s our turn to play the game, to be alive. That is special. So many people did it before us.
Sex takes up so much cultural and mental real estate. What the world look like if we spent our time thinking about other things?
How many people waste their lives because of a pretty body or a pretty face? How many people suffer because they have less pretty bodies or less pretty faces; how many peoples’ lives are ruined because of their pretty bodies and pretty faces.
Tech is obsessed with money, not innovation. Everything we consider innovation is directly tied to power, as well as the abuse and exploitation of it. How do we move away from this, though? It seems like everyone is pretending to do good.
How is anyone innocent when one person makes $200,000 a year and one person makes $1,000 a year, both of them contributing the same things to society? No one needs Apple Vision glasses. People need food, water, and shelter.
And yet, at the same time, everyone is just trying their best, to make a good life for themselves. I guess that’s the problem; we’re not raised to look out for each other, we’re raised to look out for ourselves and our in-groups.
Today I got home and made Mijael dinner (okonomiyaki that was kind of gross lol). He got home and was happy and energetic as he usually is, and I was too, and I asked him if he wanted the cold beer I brought back for him from Denver (which I had envisioned drinking with him all day) but he said “maybe during the weekend” and for some reason that somehow shattered my entire reality – the idea that now we were just eating gross pancakes without the nice beer and the whole experience was ruined and now it didn’t make sense to watch anything or do anything and I couldn’t rely on him for my happiness so maybe I should just make music or do the things I am “supposed to do” every day to fulfill my dreams (which also seems overwhelming and too demanding of myself but it offered some salvation), so I went into the little room that my friends call call “Dobby’s room,” the one we have attached to our room, and I just laid on the guest bed and looked at my phone and felt so so so sad… FOR WHAT? And I thought “wow he isn’t even coming to check on me” and then I walked back into the living room and saw him on his phone on Instagram (or TikTok) on the couch and I kept walking back and forth in front of the door so he’d see me and check on me but he didn’t, which made me even sadder. I laid on the floor in our living room and thought that he’d eventually come check on me because I am the center of the universe so someone should recognize when I’ve been laying on the floor for longer than a minute, but four minutes passed and he never came, which made me think of the next solution (to make him notice me). Simultaneously, amidst all of this behavior, there was a voice in my head saying HAHAHAHAHAHAH WHAT IS HAPPENING TO YOU, YOU ARE NOT LIKE THIS, GO TO THERAPY, but anyways I got up and stood in the doorway and glared at him, but he STILL didn’t notice so then I thought “okay fine I’ll be an adult” and walked into the room he was in and stood a few feet away glaring at him which finally made him notice. He laughed and asked me to tell him what was happening and I sat and said I didn’t feel cared by him — while also laughing because I know that is ridiculous — and then I explained what I was feeling and thinking but it all came out in inaccurate manifestations focused on him; we talked for a bit but I could barely explain what I was feeling because I know it is not him and it has nothing to do with the fact that he didn’t drink the beer. I said that I felt weird today and just wanted to play with someone and that made me feel lonely, and then he got home and didn’t want the beer which I guess I associated with playing and spending time together; I said “we never make plans” (even though it’s been one day since I’ve been back) and that it made me sad that I got home from the airport yesterday and he was still at work, and there wasn’t even a note or a chocolate or the stuffed animals arranged in a cute way (which made us laugh also; he said that’s something I usually do, he didn’t think of it and was just excited to see me—although I am aware he always does this too and he sent me a five minute video of our stuffed animals talking to me as if they were excited for me to come home). He suggested that I go co-working during the week because working alone can be isolating and that we should set a day to have a couples’ date each week which are both great solutions but I just felt like it wasn’t fixing “it,” even though I didn’t know what “it” was; and that whatever “it” was I was feeling wasn’t meant to be fixed; then I said I felt like a housewife waiting for him to come home and then I started crying and laughing at the same time because I didn’t understand why I was crying and I said “I miss Harliv” (one of my best friends who just left the city for good) while I was crying and laughing and then I said “I miss my family” and in that moment I realized of course I am probably still processing that my grandmother is gone, and that we all have limited time here, and that I care about my parents so much that sometimes I just want to be closer to them, and it’s confusing that I live in a country I can’t fluently speak the language of, and he held me and pat my stomach and told me that it was okay that I was crying and that maybe I needed to release some stuff because I had been through a lot over the past couple of weeks, so I just cried and laughed and cried and then I said what I was feeling at that moment which was: “I don’t know who I am,” which made me laugh a lot and he laughed too and he told me who I was: he said “you are Travis, a social and loving person who loves to make new friends and spend time with people, you love to travel and write and express yourself through writing and your relationships, you love to explore and see the best in people and play and think and enjoy life, you are excited to see the world and all that it has to offer.” And he just held me until I was okay, he held me on the couch and we fell asleep.
This is the year of slowing down, processing, and living with intention. My body and my mind are telling me things that I will be forced to stop and listen to at one point or another; I’d like to do it now, as opposed to ten or twenty or thirty years down the line, acting on something I’ve known this entire time. I don’t even know what that is or what I am saying lol but the moral of the story is that I’d like to find out, I’m excited to find out! There are things I am still processing in this life and ways I’d like to live that are more honest, genuine, and authentic with myself. Maybe that is in my work or my relationships or the way that I carry myself every day (or all of the above). I am just grateful that my partner, Mijael, is a patient, loving king who gives me the space to process things naturally (including having moments where the little child inside of me throws a tantrum because they don’t understand what is happening in their life—why they can’t have ice cream exactly when they want to or, at this point, why someone they love so much can’t live forever).
BILLIONAIRES. SHOULD NOT. EXIST.
Art doesn’t save us, people do.
HAHAHAHAH I just realized that if I were a different kind of person I’d make that thought my entire identity and have it in my Instagram bio which is so cringe.
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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