Hey y’all, I’m about to try blogging again, which if you hadn’t guessed it: it can be really hard, just like any other habit, to remember to do, to motivate myself to do, but when I remember to do it and do it on a regular basis it’s really beneficial to my own personal mental health because it makes me feel like a productive human being and to be reflective about what I’m choosing to spend my time doing (which generally leads to me doing more fulfilling things with my time). Now that that run-on sentence epitomizing my struggle is into the world, here’s what I did today:
At 7:30 I rolled out of bed, completely exhausted because I hadn’t been able to fall asleep until two in the morning which is very unlike me. I got dressed, made myself a smoothie out of frozen strawberries, bananas, chia seeds, a giant dollop of Nutella and milk and chugged that as fast as humanly possible because I needed to go to class. Now, Emona is about half a mile from where all of my classes are which is X, Y, and W block. It takes us about ten minutes to walk there and it’s always blazing hot.
In my Introduction to Ecology class, we have a substitute for the week who had some very interesting opinions about the world. It was strange because he took a very ‘nature’ stance on the ‘nature vs nurture’ debate but it was all based on philosophical and ideological beliefs. He kept saying things like: ‘you have a copy that is exactly your mother in you’ and ‘you can remember the faces of your ancestors that you have never seen before’ but said it was all based on genetics. In case you haven’t taken a genetics or a psychology class: neither of these things are true. It was hard not to get frustrated that somehow my professor had not only gotten so off-topic that he was discussing his ideological beliefs but also that he was discussing these beliefs as facts in front of a group of students that takes what he says seriously as an authority figure and as people who have no knowledge to counter these statements. And so, I countered them with questions that challenged the basis of his bullshit storm.
In between Introduction to Ecology and Mycology I had a one-hour break, which wasn’t enough to make it worthwhile to walk back to the dorm, but also there’s not a whole lot of places to hang out. I sat on a bench and tried to read ‘Sapiens: a history of humankind’ by Yuval Noah Harari, which I am loving so far, but was interrupted by someone named Winston. Is it just me or is the most annoying thing ever when you’re reading a book and someone interrupts you reading to ask you absolute nonsense? See, Winston wanted to tell me about how the Coronavirus that is currently tackling international borders and completely freaking out the media is actually a biological weapon being used to wipe out Asia and Africa. I pointed out that there are more cases of Coronavirus in the United States than in the entire continent of Africa which was shrugged off. I couldn’t help but be incredibly distracted by the whole conversation by the gold Nike checkmark he had glued to his tooth. Like, did you at least get paid by Nike for that?
When I got back, I took a long ass nap because I don’t do well on less than eight hours of sleep. After dinner I set up a projector I borrowed from Martha, the professor who taught our History of Namibia course, and selected a bunch of really cool patterned backgrounds for a photoshoot. I choose a photo of pool water, a colorful abstract painting, black and white leaves and a black and white close-up of an eye. We had a dance party to some loud music and snapped some photos with the images projected onto our faces and bodies. It was one of the coolest shoots I’ve ever done and the images turned out looking like they belonged in an editorial.