neon anima

last weekend i went to the goth dance night with snek and margot. it wasn't really goth music, everything either had or was remixed with the appropriate amount of thumpy-thump. we met some young gothlings who were enamored with margot and snek. one of them said she was an actress who was in a karate movie, one was a programmer, another asked snek for life advice and showed off his trilingualness. the karate actress asked if margot and i were sisters. no one has ever told us before that we look alike. i wonder if it's possible we've adopted each other's expressions and started to resemble each other like long-term couples do. we left talking about how strange it still feels to meet new people.

i finished all night pharmacy, a not-terribly-written but tiresome book about a girl who thinks a lot about her russian immigrant jewish generational trauma, describing her own coping mechanisms while being deeply uninterested in and self-aware of them. it was on a list of books i made when i was fantasizing about which books i'd compare my novel to when i was pitching it. so far, both the novels on the list were like a lot of contemporary books i've read by female authors. tales of flawed young women that are boring despite the spooky and semi-supernatural events that happen to them. somehow, no matter what these women do, they seem so passive and impossible to care about. the authors are trying to capture a sense of malaise and late-capitalism hopelessness, i guess, but they're afraid to give these first-person narrators any real, deep flaws that don't arise from extremely sympathetic circumstances so as not to undermine whatever larger message they're trying to convey about Trauma or Injustice and i'm just. so over it. i decided not to read anything published any later than 1985 for the rest of the year.

i started an audiobook of crime and punishment, which is the antithesis of all that. things have mostly happened to the main characters so far vs. him taking action, but it's still vivid and rich and interesting. i just finished the scenes where raskolnikov dreams of an old mare being beaten, then overhears a conversation about how an old woman about to bequeath all her money to a monastery should be killed and robbed. i love the way the dream imagines violence as so senseless and cruel, conflicting with the cool and dispassionate way he's reasoning himself into murder. the dream is a way to make this conflict tense, immediate, and gruesome even before raskolnikov has done anything. this is what i want, what's missing from all these "women's wrongs" books i've been reading. astounding things happen to them and they're numb to them. i don't know who decided that these characters who can't relate to each other and respond to tension with avoidance and introspection are the best way to convey the mood of our time. i know it's an unfair comparison, crime and punishment being regarded as one of the best books of all time, but something to keep in mind. things happening is always better than things happening in the past, things almost happening, or things not happening out of dread and anxiety and disassociation.

i scheduled a solo vacation. i had a blast when i went to portland by myself, but there's so much to do there that i made it through about half my itinerary. i'm worried that i'll just be lonely on this trip. all i want to do is sit in cafes and read, sit outside and read, lay on the beach and read, take one or two long, scenic walks. hopefully write. i desperately need the time away from work but i'm dreading how much work will have piled up while i'm gone.