Hello Goodbye April
I feel like I can breathe again for a moment. April is nearly over and it feels like I skipped through all of it. I am familiar with how stress affects my memory. I thought I had attended my friend's art show the other day, turns out it was at the start of the month. I can't help but feel this is a bit of a blessing and a curse. I definitely felt stressed during my finals this year, but now it's done, I have a gapped memory of that time and hardly feel the stress anymore. As if I woke up from a dream.
But yes, I did survive my finals. Doing my best to optimize my study times, I only managed to hand in my last dead line some 3 hours before the close time. I was genuinely a little worried I would not have been able to submit on time. One of my last assignments I accidentally handed in with highlighted draft notes all over the document. Still got a good grade on it somehow. All I'm after is the pass and that is good enough.
It snowed on my birthday, which was weird because last year I was wearing shorts and sunbathing on my birthday. Things have been getting so varied that I can't let myself get comfortable with the weather of any given day. I rush to maximize the sun when it is out - probably for the better.
I missed reading and writing. Not that I wasn't reading nor writing in April, in fact it is probably the most I have written ever in a month long period, but it was not of my own accord. My last couple assignments combined were around 12,000 words. An impressive raw number, but by any qualitative metric, my sloppiest most rushed written works. I would frequently complain about the subject matter of writing and the amount of effort it takes to pull words out of my ass for things I generally do not care about. I got a couple "why don't you use A.I. for it?" type of questions, but I am diametrically opposed to those tools, so I wrote those 12,000 words myself.
And I am reading again. It had been quite a while since I have felt the mental bandwidth to handle reading just for fun. I was pretty disgusted with words after having to read constantly for academia. I've had a breather and now I am reading Brother Karamazov for the second time and loving it. The written word, when applied, really is amazing.
I am working on beautifying my space. New prints, artwork, flowers, plants, arrangements. I want to make my space a desirable space again. For a while I really resented how much I had to stay inside. If I am to stay indoors again for long times, I will have beautiful things that look at me, not just white walls.
