sweet-grass

[sweet-grass]

18/04/2025

My questions for the universe:

Where will I live this summer?

Is it worth it to buy a few pieces of furniture for a room I'll only stay in for a couple of months, if the place with the unfurnished room is really nice and the rent is cheap?

How long will it take to plan my album rollout properly?

Who should direct my videos?

Will I be sexy to someone who's sexy to me?

Will I be able to see my naked body without seeing ugliness?

[sweet-grass]

17/04/2025

Part 2 because I missed yesterday. It isn't totally separate from part 1, because it's another wish. I want a good, sure change. When people ask me how I've been and what I've been up to, I tell them I'm trying to build something and I have a lot of things in the air. I want one of those things, at least, to land in my hands. I don't want to be able to give it back, and I don't want to wish I could. But isn't that always the risk you take?

[sweet-grass]

17/04/2025

A wish list

A furnished room to sublet for June and July in Little Italy or the Annex, under $1100/month, nice and low-key roommates, natural light.

elf Glow Reviver tinted lip oil

the perfect spring perfume

new slippers

the grant I applied for

a cute boy to talk to

A zillion streams

[sweet-grass]

15/04/2025

Literally sharing my diary. Putting a lot of trust out there

[sweet-grass]

14/04/2025

[sweet-grass]

I watched the finale of Yellowjackets and it was breathtaking. I don't know whether I am doing the right things to find an apartment to live in this summer. I feel suddenly urgent about it.

I want comfort and for things to be nice. I am a girl who hates for things to be messy or dirty or ghostly. I have been sheltered and coddled and yet I have kissed death. I know nothing of how to build a life where I can be both happy and autonomous in a world like this. The world seems very cold. I don't think I'm making sense...this doesn't feel like it counts as writing. It feels like "posting". I'll do better.

[sweet-grass]

Had a perfectly miserable day. I don't feel like writing.

[sweet-grass]

11/04/2025

I almost always think of something that makes me sad on my way home late at night, even when I have a nice time. This time I have the thought that I'll never make a body of work that resonates as widely with people as my first EP. Or that nothing I make will ever be as good. And I don't even think it's that good.

I'm happy with how my evening went. I'm frustrated that I didn't get much work done today at all, but I'll try to discipline myself to work on a Saturday, even though I always find it difficult. I spent the evening with my newish friend Sarah Elise. We made dinner, shared a box of strawberry Pocky, watched the music video we made together, then my favourite movie "I'm A Cyborg But That's OK", then more music videos on her CRT TV. She sat on the edge of the tub while I did my makeup. I grew up with sisters and I want friends who will hang out in the bathroom.

At 10 I went to the Monarch Tavern alone to see More Eaze and Claire Rousay. I was standing next to a man who was having a very outward emotional time about it. There was a small judgmental voice in my head but I truly felt it was a blessing to be experiencing the show with someone who was feeling it so deeply. It is awkward to hear a grown man whisper "fuck" in the throws of nonsexual passion multiple times throughout a set but it's beautiful to reflect on what that means for him. And it was an absolutely stunning show. The crowd didn't clap until the hour was done, just listened in rapt mostly-silence. The music was prayerful and alive.

I made an appearance at Juice Fest - more events should be free so I can "make appearances" without feeling I've wasted the cost of cover. What a thrill to put on a silly outfit and go dance for such a short time you don't start to feel silly in a bad way. I love dancing with Gel. She always makes me feel so welcome. I feel bad that I used to be mistrustful of Jenny because she's always been sweet to me. I am just terrified of pretty girls. I tend to think they're out to get me. I have a lot of work to do on my self-image. And my others-image as a result.

[sweet-grass]

10/04/2025

Things I liked today: coffee, writing in my journal, oatmeal with raspberries, focusing well on my tasks, designing my mailing list e-mails, having nothing to do but read while i waited for the doctor, good news from the doctor, the doctor i usually hate being decent toward me, my family and friends being happy for me, an idea I had for my + Annie's website, slow yoga, chamomile tea

Things I didn't like today: Not realizing my appointment was in person until the time it started and having to frantically call an uber, the weather, seeing my mom in a sad mood, feeling ambivalent about making art and music, thinking my work is quite mediocre, waiting a long time to see the doctor (hearing the odd cold hum of the office, feeling claustrophobic in the square room with so many boxes labelled Biological Material - what the hell was in those? - vague body memories of so many anxious times), failing to resist urges to chew copious amounts of gum and to spend copious amounts of time watching Instagram Reels, getting overstimulated at choir by the noisy kids

[sweet-grass]

09/04/2025

Technically it's the 10th but I haven't slept yet so it doesn't count. And I didn't write here on the 8th but I did write. I shared so much on the 7th I should get a pass.

Today was funny because on the way to Toronto I got fined $50 for forgetting to tap my card and I spiraled out until I knew for sure my whole life was wrong wrong wrong. And then I got distracted and I was alright. I came into the city to meet with someone about planning a party, but we rehashed the same conversation we had on Instagram and said little else. I stayed in the city to go learn how to DJ from a friend and I picked up very little from his instructions. In the time between I met up with Ana just because we happened to be talking and she happened to be free and that made the trip and the $50 worth it to me. We talked about true things in a romantic wine and coffee bar and met a beautiful, friendly, soft and exuberant American Staffordshire Terrier. I felt like myself.

I feel weird about partying and I feel tired of going to things out of a fear of being forgotten. When I connect with people without masking myself, I just want those opportunities all the time.

[sweet-grass]

07/04/2025

Continued from my first two entries.

You want to linger here forever, to create a perfect unchanging image of the sweet in-between. All the potential of a life outside lays before you, distantly benign, abundantly hypothetical. The automatic doors hover open only a few seconds. You must make a choice.

The undeniable scent of springtime fills your awareness, reminds you of a perfume your sister once wore. She will come to pick you up from the airport, and changed as it is, she will recognize your face. The thought gives you courage.

When the doors slide shut behind you, your body panics. For a moment, it cannot remember how to hold itself in relation to the infinite stimuli whose collective logic is a matter of blinking faith. All the data points you have been hoarding spill from their delicate framework like beads from a snapped plastic cord and roll downstream into the order that looks so much like chaos. It will be a good, long while before you fully stop trying to collect them again. In the meantime, their scattering will lead you deeper into the woods and wide across the city, finally emptying you with the river into the great swallowing lake.

And moment by moment you will be filled again.

There is no return to the garden. You will never find the time or a good enough reason to rinse the remaining silicon dust from behind your brow, but the sweat that glistens over it in the summer will come to easier agreement with the reality of change. You will love apartment buildings and subway systems as deeply as you wonder what once grew wild in the space between. I will never be the same, you will tell yourself as the glass facade recedes behind you, and you will repeat it until its syllables synchronize with the fluctuating rhythm of your heart. In time it will feel light as air and true as ever.

[sweet-grass]

(meta-writeblr post) feeling very embarrassed + vulnerable at that last one...i feel like i should not have let other people see something so long and personal and silly. but writing it did help me commit to a small but meaningful decision. feeling humbled...no need to read my posts when they're very long like that!!

[sweet-grass]

06/04/2025 (2)

Two entries today, because I didn't share one yesterday. I like to write in my notebook best, and to transfer it over on my computer. It's the easiest way to intuitively edit a little as I go. I hate editing, but want to practice more. This might seem like a perfectionistic behaviour, but in fact I think it's my perfectionism that makes me fear the process so much. I fear how hard I will be on myself, or that it will never end, if I really dig into my writing. The unintended consequence is that I often feel the first draft must be perfect to evade my own criticism. I like the compromise of sitting down at my laptop with the intention of copying my writing over verbatim, and allowing whatever tweaks feel right in the moment to alter the digital version. My past few entries, however, I've made directly on my phone without so much as reading them over. I'm on the subway to Union now, so I fear this one will be the same.

Anyway, I am trying to unstick myself from the familiar guilt of yet another mundane daily decision about food. I have my choice of leftovers in the freezer, and as I began my journey home my mind wandered to which of them I'd reheat when I arrived. I took stock of my options, and the first to come to mind felt "correct" in its balanced-meal shape but uninspiring.

I thought then of half of the contents of a can of lentil soup I'd been saving for a few days in a frozen Tupperware. I bought the soup as part of an orderly, self-enforced Challenge Schedule in which I randomly choose foods my brain tells me I "shouldn't eat" from a jar of folded paper scraps, and make a point to eat them. The dilemma this particular soup poses to my eating neurosis is highly specific. It's mainly composed of lentils, potatoes, and vegetables. I used to avoid eating white potatoes at all, but I've made some headway with that one. The real sticking point is made up of a complicated crossroads of arbitrary rules I will embarrass myself by explaining here.

To my eating disorder, there is a correct serving size of soup I should be eating. That serving alone, I know logically, is not enough for a meal. Typically, this is no problem: I make a sandwich to go with it and I get on with my day. However, a sandwich is TWO slices of bread, which is two "starch" servings (Thanks exchange-based meal planning for that one), which is apparently all the carby food I "need" (read: am allowed) to have at dinner. Add that to the fact that lentils, while technically acceptable as a vegetarian protein source, are also composed primarily of carbohydrates, and I am committing a massive Carb Sin against the killjoy that lives in my brain and controls (let's be balanced here - gradually less and less of) my life.

There is probably a way here that I could, at least mostly, follow the rules, eat some version of what I want, and avoid the full extent of the food guilt, the sense of wrongness, the discomfort. The consequence of that would be that next time I venture to decide which of my leftovers to reheat on a Sunday evening, my choices would run through the same exhausting checks and balances, and nothing would ever change. But here is an even more unspeakable secret: I don't just want lentil and potato soup and a sandwich. I would like the sandwich to be on a bagel: another food which was absolutely off the table save for one specific diet brand until about a month ago. This is massively audacious. I ate lunch out today. I ate the protein bar that is supposed to be reserved for the evening this afternoon. As far as the rulekeeper is concerned, I have already stepped significantly enough out of line that I should be playing it very safe for the rest of the day.

But what does that serve?

In spite of my rumination, I can't deny that "I'm having lentil soup and a bagel with hummus for dinner" is a very simple sentence. It does not inherently call to mind all the considerations which have taken over my focus for the past hour. It is not a statement any friend of mine, or anyone whose life I'd be interested in living, would raise an eyebrow at. It would not be normal to ask me how much soup, whether there are potatoes involved, or if I am aware how carb-heavy of a meal I just contemplated. In fact, if I were the person to whom that sentence were spoken, I would think nothing of it. Soup would just be soup. A bagel would just be a bagel.

That is the mindset I want to have, and I can only develop it by acting as if I already do.

I have this intense sort of nostalgia and longing when I pass by one of those cafe/deli spots you see in train stations and office buildings. It makes me weirdly emotional. I cannot call to mind any special memory of a plastic-wrapped egg salad sandwich or paper cup of minestrone soup. I did not receive the best news of my life or bond with a lifelong friend over a cheap hazelnut-flavoured coffee and a blueberry muffin the size of two fists. My best guess about the pull of these very average establishments on my heartstrings is that they remind me of the deliciously casual, the delightfully transitory. They are places to eat while you are doing something else, places to eat when life is going on, places to eat where eating is not the point, but one is still welcome to enjoy it. I dream of bagels and soup before a long ride to a charming beach town with friends, bagels and soup during a long day of work, bagels and soup tired from something other than thinking about them, excited about something other than allowing them for myself. I dream of bagels and soup that are just bagels and soup.

[sweet-grass]

06/04/2025

I am having trouble recalling last night's long and strange dream. I know there are things I'll be embarrassed to write here where people can read them, but I might say fuck it and share the uncensored recollections anyways. I will put in fake initials where real names should be.

There was a mass taking place at an unspecified school - with context, probably closest to my high school. The entire school was gathered in a large foyer. I noticed that this was unusual: in the dream timeline (it's so fascinating how dream consciousness comes with its own memories, sometimes different from our real lives) school masses usually took place in smaller rooms with one class or grade at a time. It took me a while to piece together that this was a funeral mass. My first clue was that we were singing a hymn typically sung at funerals, but I don't remember now what it was. I saw the funeral party carrying M (fake initial) in a casket down the foyer, but she was moving and obviously alive. She had makeup on to resemble one of the school staff, who we were supposed to believe had died. It seemed like a sort of pageantry : it was not important, at least to M, that she actually looked dead. It was not clear whether the person she was disguised as had actually died or not.

We had a new principal, who had arranged the service. I told her she had done a really good job.

The dream changed a lot from here, but I know they were connected. My best guess from fuzzy memory is that the funeral seamlessly morphed into some less serious assembly, and suddenly I was there with (fake initials) L, C, and E. C was creeping me the fuck out. After the assembly, I left with L and this really sexy fem woman and we went to one of their houses. I was dating L but planning to break up with them. The other woman suggested they - sorry acquaintances - simultaneously top me and I was into her so I was like sure. And it was really fun but I knew I would not be attracted to L at all if the other girl wasn't there, so I felt kind of guilty.

[sweet-grass]

04/04/2025

Notes to self: Get into the habit of asking people questions. It makes them feel good, and you'll learn more about the variety, commonality and reality of human experience. It also shines a light on who is in front of you and gives you a breath from your self-consciousness.

Say "thank you" often and with your heart. I know you think you take more than you could ever possibly deserve. When goodness is unexpectedly in your hands, remember the concept of grace. There are times when an apology is more apt than an expression of gratitude, sure. Use discretion and save the weight of your apologies for the places where they belong. "Thank you" doesn't wear out.

You will perform better onstage when you stop doing it in real life. Of course the thought of any more pressure to embody a character makes you feel terrified and exhausted. Without even making a conscious decision, you are already trying so hard.

It starts with noticing. If you judge yourself, you will already be reaching for a new mask before you have taken this one off. Notice. Slow down. Remember how long it has felt like a coat in the freezing cold. You did what made sense to for so many years. Now you get to choose when spring comes. It's never all at once.

            . . . . 

Once a man on the bus in Hamilton asked me if I was a dancer. I said I used to dance a little bit. On that same bus ride, he said to me or to a stranger - I can't remember - "It's about remembering who you were before you had to forget who that was in order to get what you needed in life."

I was wearing leg warmers, but that's beside the point.

[sweet-grass]

03/04/2025

It isn't my first or my second or third time trying to write something every day, but it's the first time I've made the attempt in the knowledge someone else will be reading it. It's harder. I almost always write for an imaginary reader: the fuzzy outline of a 20-something woman who may or may not be my daughter, or an older silver self who I hope will laugh at my jokes and mistakes alike. Both of them are far enough into the future and the hypothetical so as not to pose a threat. Reader, you are too real for me!

This will be a challenging practice for someone so obsessed with cataloguing my own life that I often fall several months behind it, jotting down a few more objective details from the trip I took two while the emotions and happenings of today tangle in a queue. I want to use writing in the moment more often, to process in real time, to be brave enough to leave the backlog incomplete. Do I use nostalgia as an avoidance tactic? The question has only just now occurred to me and the answer is of course.

I'm dissatisfied with today's entry, so it's imperative that I share it.

[sweet-grass]

writepril aprose day 2 02/04/2025

When the glass slides open, soft, silky air flows in and mingles in the threshold with the still, filtered atmosphere inside. In your lungs, they react and create something new. A distant sound, a stream rushing over stones or light traffic over concrete, swings gently between your ears, evading certainty.

Do you hear laughter, voices in casual conversation, or do you only anticipate them? Further still, do these sensations belong to the realm of memory?

The boundaries waver. A dampness refreshes the threadbare skin around your eyes with a breath of surprise you know you cannot simulate; still, its touch activates the tender ends of countless threads of collected meaning: eternal past and potential future alike.

They're all here now, moving through you as always, impossible to preserve or undo.