#anyway it’s a tough topic and as per always please take my ramblings with the biggest grain of salt you’ve ever seen

[age-of-moonknight]

“For Now,” Phases of the Moon Knight (Vol. 1/2024), #4.

Writer: Fabian Nicieza; Penciler and Inker: Moisés Hidalgo; Colorist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo; Letterer: Cory Petit

[honeyymistt]

[1/2] hey, okay, it's me again. i feel like i'm treating you like an unpaid therapist but idk where to share this and how to get help (this is kinda lengthy, and i do apologise for that)

i think i'm running out of patience for myself on how to live with myself; all my favourite artists and fictional characters experience this same hollow loneliness but they just— keep going..... despite it all. i'm trying to keep busy with studying but that quickly led to an all-nighter and now i can't fall asleep despite my exhaustion. i think the goals i've had in mind for myself are too high, so i'm just going to spend the next week reading without shame or guilt and try to finally start learning russian. i don't really take care of my physical fitness bc i'm always tired and i feel like all my energy is spent on keeping in check with eating and taking care of my physical hygiene. i have so much time each day and yet at the end of the day i still feel like i did nothing even though i read and studied a lot. i just feel like i'm stagnated, still in my 16-year-old teenage mind bc i spent my youth numbing myself bc i couldn't stand my own thoughts. i havent talked to anyone really, besides my famil, in weeks, and i know loneliness is a common feeling most of us carry with us, but since i'm not very smart and don't know about a lot of things that matter, like history and art, i just feel so inadequate because all these people i look up to, and secretly aspire to be, are fundamentally different from me. they have rich inner lives even in times of despair, they know how to build their own lives in the rubble and just keep on going despite it all. i just feel like a shell of a human being (dramatic i know). i'm also aware that i'm highly privileged and don't have to worry about money and housing, etc. and i'm grateful for that but despite that I just hate myself and I wish I could be someone else and change; I've tried to over the past years but i never make any actual changes in my life? I don't want to die per se, I just don't want to keep on living like this.

[2/2] also, with the looming climate desaster and our world being ruled by capitalism i know a lot of worries and problems stem from that;;;; also i've had this very embarrassing conversation with my family a month ago; i was very drunk and ofc started talking about capitalism, etc. and lgbtq rights. they're very conservative, smart and well-read and i'm just the complete opposite— my point being, bc i feel so desperately lonely i'm trying to have these conversations with the people around me that are obviously only really meant to be had with close pals and not with 60 year olds who only care about the bootstrap theory etc. anyway my grandmother called me out on my bs and said "so what have you done in your life so far?" nothing. i shouldn't complain about other people, politics etc. and the patriarchal, white supremacist strucures around us bc i've never worked a day in my life...... it's just. i know she's right. but like i literally don't know how to hold conversations anymore and can never recall stuff i read accurately so i'm just talking shit the whole time. i'm so desperately trying to get their approval but i'm just not well-read and smart enough. i know being dumb is not the worst thing to be, i'm alive and living in a well-situated area, but it's the only thing i used to define myself with. my parents expected a lot of us as children and i couldn't deliver. so i pretty much forced them to stop pressuring me but i wish they did now. bc then i would be smart, worldly and have a bright future. i'm sorry for the long rambling. i also don't want to ruin your feed by my long asks...... anyway, if you have any advice i would be so glad to hear it. bc i feel like i'm going slightly insane. -💌 sorry for doing this <33 🤠 feel free to just delete this;;;

hi 💌-anon!!!

don't feel bad for sending this in. your long post is going to have a long answer and it ruining my feed is literally the last thing on my mind. if it bothers people, that's on them ;) similarly to the last ask you sent in, i kind of just pulled out a few things that you wrote and decided to give my perspective on it. i hope that reading some of my (very scrambled) thoughts will relax your mind and heart just a little bit. everything will be okay, i promise.

so the first thing that stood out to me was when you mentioned how all of your favorite fictional characters just keep on going when they feel lonely and i know how frustrating that can be because it's so glorified. they just keep going and then boom! things are better, right? i want you to remember that this is fiction and not an accurate representation of how hard the feeling of loneliness actually hits. so try not to compare yourself to your favorite character and beat yourself up if you're not dealing with loneliness as well as they did because everything in fiction is better and easier.

as for feeling exhausted because of the goals you've made for yourself, i know what you mean. i'm such a perfectionist and workaholic (i suffered from such bad burn out this year). i'm learning how to lower them as well. it's good to be ambitious. it's amazing to have big dreams and goals but you have to prepare yourself for setbacks and failure. so from now on, it's decided that you and me, are going to be accountability buddies. no more unrealistic goals and deadlines. i will hold you accountable, you will hold me accountable and we'll improve together 🤍

so you don't know about things like history and art and you claim that these are things that matter. but matter to who? are you genuinely intrigued by these things? if you are, then study it. read about it. ask questions. but if they just matter to your family, then i really don't think you need to know about these things extensively. it's always good to know things generally but if you aren't interested, then don't waste your time learning about it just to please others.

i could be completely wrong, but from what i understood from your message, you feel really lonely and you're starting to feel a bit stuck. you're surrounded by people who are different from you and that sometimes makes you feel suffocated because the conversations you want to have aren't wanted by others. the first thing i noticed in your message is that you repeatedly call yourself stupid or dumb. you need to stop that, okay? if you keep telling that to yourself, it will destroy a lot of opportunities for you. trust me, i know. you will turn down opportunities thinking that you're not smart enough for it but it's not true. you don't need to be smart to have a bright future. you can be creative, you can athletic, you can be selfless, you can be funny. maybe you just need to embrace who you are and trust that you will have a bright future by just being you. i'll tell you something: you don't need to be exactly like your family to have their success. you need a determination and a good work ethic. where do you start? stop underselling your intelligence. believe in yourself!!!

P.S i can tell that you're smart because your vocabulary is out of this world!!! and oh my god, can we talk about your punctuation? like bestie, you're ahead of the game. i also had to google what the bootstrap theory is. you are smarter than you give yourself credit for!!

another thing i would encourage you to do is to avoid "deep" conversations with your family. if your family is very conservative, there are going to be certain topics that they just won't understand and it might make you frustrated or feel misunderstood; it might make you feel more lonely. i would advise you to just stick to more lighthearted conversations with them. it's not that you don't know how to hold conversations, it's just that the people you're talking to aren't the right listeners.

my sweet 💌-anon, times like these are normal! we all feel lonely at times and i know it's tough and it's frustrating and you feel like nothing in your life is going to work out but i promise you, it will. the universe has it's way of doing that. if i could, i would give you the chance to see yourself the way i see you - full of potential, warm-hearted, and so so deserving of a good life filled with love, caring people and success. times are tough, but so are you. you haven't made it this far to only come this far!! remember that i'm here for you every step of the way and you can message me any time you need to. i will never delete it or ignore you. i love talking to you <3

[ttkusfic]

Chapter 1: Dasein Denied

Professor Bochs looked like Sartre as an old man. He was composed entirely of sharp angles except for a pair of frameless half-moon glasses that sat on his face like two fishbowls holding toad colored eyes. Professor Bochs was one of the few professors at Saint Sebastian’s who still conducted his classes entirely in lectures, and this was fine with most of his students who found him tough and intimidating and preferred to say nothing at all. Whenever anyone did speak in class, his eyes widened as if in fright that he might hear something stupid, making the top of his irises rise above his glasses, giving his eyes a fractured look from the right angle.  

My roommate, Meg was terrified of him, but (though I would have admitted it to no one) I liked Professor Bochs. I liked that he was tough, and I liked that he gave me the space to figure things out on my own. I liked that I was able to mull over the contents of his class in silence without breaking into groups to talk about it. I liked that it was enough for him that I turn in an occasional paper to prove that I was still alive.  

In senior year, on the day I was rejected by the only law school I applied to, Professor Bochs canceled the Existentialism class Meg and I were taking together. He was there in the classroom when I arrived, writing with a silver pen in a leather bound notebook, but he didn’t acknowledge us at all except to point to a note written on the board over his head without looking up or pausing in his writing.

Happy Good Friday!

Class is canceled. You will spend my lecture period in the library researching your final paper. The list of available topics is on the assignment sheet that you will find on my desk. Before leaving this room, please, write the name of the philosopher you have chosen on the board with your name.

One student per philosopher.

I took an assignment sheet from the stack of papers I found on his desk and sat in the nearest desk to read it. The assignment was to write a paper summarizing the major contributions of one philosopher we’d studied that term. It must have been an assignment he gave all his classes because there was no list to choose from. This was the first test, to collectively remember everyone we’d studied so far, but it didn’t matter to me. I knew immediately that I would do my project on Heidegger.

I stood up, ready to make my choice, but the board was already swarming with students. I stood in the back and waited like I always do, confident that Heidegger would be left for last, but when I got to the board all of the philosophers on the list were taken, and Heidegger’s name was next to the name of my roommate, Meg Bradley.

The room cleared, and I was left alone with Professor Bochs.  

“I’m looking forward to your paper,” he said as I stood there counting and recounting the philosophers in my head. There had to have been a mistake. Exactly one short? Should I say something? I wasn’t sure. What if he already knew?

“Most of my students start avoiding eye contact by the time we get to Heidegger,” he said, “but not you, Emily Stone. You will be writing about Heidegger, yes?”

“No,” I said, pointing at the board. “Meg Bradley took Heidegger.”

“Interesting,” he said and took off his glasses, as if they were just a prop, and removing them would help him see me better.

“You are not one of my students,” he said.

Since I was in his class, I hoped he meant that I wasn’t a philosophy major. I told him that I was a senior, an English major, and he asked me what I was doing in his class.

“Core requirement,” I said, and he sniffed, wrinkling his nose in disgust, “but I like it. I like philosophy.”

“You do.”

“Especially phenomenology,” I said, and this seemed to please him.

He asked why I like phenomenology, and that I like to think about things. Actual things, and that’s what phenomenology is, the object philosophy. I wasn’t sure I was right about this, so I started ramble about the thingy-ness of literature, repeating something I’d heard in a literature class about Homer’s delight in listing objects, as if he hoped that by listing all the things that were in the golden age of Greece they might come back again and the golden age with them.

“And, anyway,” I said. “I like the fact that philosophy gives me an excuse to think--”

“An excuse to think,” he said, and time stopped.

He was, as always, perfectly composed, but a steely intensity appeared in his eyes, and I understood for the first time why Meg was so terrified of him, but I said nothing. I just stood there doing my best to meet his gaze until my phone rang. I apologized, turned off the ringer without seeing who had called. When I looked up,  he was the impassive professor again.

“Which philosopher have you chosen for your paper?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “All of the philosophers on the list are taken. I was hoping to do my paper on Heidegger. What if Meg and I both do our papers on him?”

He shook his head and explained that the one philosopher per student rule was for our protection. “You don’t want me to be thinking about Meg Bradley’s paper while I grade yours, do you?” he asked, and I admitted that I didn’t, even though I was almost certain that against her’s my paper would almost certainly look better.

He considered me for a minute then turned to a blank page in his notebook, wrote a name on it, tore the page out, and handed it to me like a doctor handing out a prescription.

“You will write your paper on Hannah Arendt,” he said. “Heidegger’s favorite student.”

I started to argue that I knew nothing about Hannah Arendt, and it wasn’t fair since everyone else was allowed to do philosophers we’d studied already, but he interrupted me again.

“I know. You get the student when you wanted the teacher, but she was a great thinker in her own right. I think she will appeal even more than Heidegger to your love of the philosophy of things.” He trailed off, seemingly lost in thought. I took this as permission to go, but before I left I heard him mutter, more to himself than me, “Yes. Hannah Arendt is exactly what you need.”

Heidegger’s favorite student. I repeated the words to myself as I cut a path across the quad over the frozen ground. Until that moment, Heidegger had been a concept to me bound in abstractions and German vocabulary, but he had been a person. I knew that. Obviously. But something about thinking of him with students humanized him for me, a favorite student especially, and it made me want to write my paper on him more than ever.  

I skipped the library, planning to spend the afternoon in my dorm googling Hannah Arendt. Between Heidegger and law school, I wasn’t exactly in a social mood.

The fastest way from the classroom building to the dorms should have been around the quad, but I was forced to take the long way around. Directness seemed to have been one of the last considerations of the campus’s architect, who lived before the invention of airplanes and yet designed the place to look stunning from the air. The buildings were arranged in a perfect square around a courtyard and were connected by paths in the shape of a haloed cross. This arrangement would have been ideal if architect hadn’t dropped a tall-hedged labyrinth right in the middle of it. For a school made up mainly of Bostonians and women from the surrounding suburbs, the inefficiency of being forced to walk around the labyrinth was a constant annoyance. Despite the best efforts of the grounds keepers and their desperate pleas that we not walk on the grass, desire lines were permanently worn around the labyrinth’s evergreen walls.

When I got to my room I found the door open. Meg was her bed with a cup of tea, her philosophy textbooks open all around her and a stick of her frankincense and vanilla flavored incense burning on my desk.  Most college dorms are like storage cabinets for people, but Meg was a witch, and living with Meg was like living in a one hundred square foot metaphysical bookstore. Meg’s desk was the first thing you saw when you walked into the room. It sat under the twin windows opposite the door, I swear, just like an altar, and like an altar it was practically impossible to do anything in the room without referencing it in some way.

The TV lived on Meg’s desk on my side of the room which would have made it convenient for bedtime viewing except that she kept it continually looping a video of a thunderstorm she’d taken from her back porch during our last summer vacation. Having a bowl of cereal meant digging a box out of her desk drawer that she’d coated with sheets of stainless steel because she was afraid of mice and insisted that plastic containers did nothing but weed out stupid mice with BPA poisoning, and nothing short of a cereal box-sized fallout shelter would keep the smart ones away. Opening a window meant leaning carefully over her desk making sure to not knock over a candle or piece of burning incense or the electric fire bowl filled with the ashes of the sins of her enemies.

When I first moved in with her it was magical to me that she was allowed to light things on fire in our room, but when I told other people on our floor about it, I quickly discovered that I was the last to know. Apparently, she had challenged the rule against burning things in freshman year, arguing that it was a necessary part of her religious observance, and the nuns, who regularly burned things as part of their religious practices, understood completely.  

The fire bowl was at the very center of her desk and was also essential, she claimed, to her spiritual practice. I saw her burn all kinds of things in that bowl. Poverty. War. Traffic tickets. A woman who cut her in line at the mini-mart and argued with the cashier for twenty minutes about a coupon.

“How am I going to summarize Heidegger in five pages?” she asked.

“You could have chosen someone simpler,” I said, “Like Rilke. You’re always going on about realness and authenticity. You could have read Malte Laurids Brigge in less than a day, everything he ever wrote, probably.”

“I didn’t take a philosophy class to write my final paper on a poet,” Meg said. “I need to be well-rounded if I’m going to be a writer, and, anyway, you like him so much. I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about.”

“So, you knew that I wanted Heidegger,” I said, “And you took him, anyway.”

“I didn’t know you wanted Heidegger,” she said.

“How is that possible?” I asked. “Existentialism is pretty much the only thing we talk about anymore. You know how obsessed I am with Heidegger.”

“I knew you were obsessed with him, but I didn’t know you wanted to write your paper on him.”

“Generally those two things go together,” I pointed out.

“Honestly, I didn’t think about it,” she said. “And what’s the big deal, anyway? You just said you could put together a paper on Rilke in less than a day.”

“I didn’t get Rilke. He was taken already. Everyone was taken already.”

“You didn’t get out of it then, did you?” she asked.

“No. Unfortunately.”

My phone rang again. This time I swore but checked to see who it was before I ignored it and put my phone on vibrate.

“Who was that?” Meg asked.

“My mother,” I said. “She called me when I was talking to Professor Bochs, too.”

“If she called you twice, shouldn’t you answer it?”

“No.”

I’d given my mother a copy of my class schedule, so she’d stop interrupting my classes, but she’d ignored it. Even though I wasn’t in class today, I didn’t want her to get the idea that there might be even the slightest chance she might catch me this way.

I took the piece of paper Professor Bochs had given me out of my pocket and handed it to Meg. “He assigned me someone I’ve never heard of before. Hannah Arendt.”

“Hannah Arendt. She’s interesting,” Meg said.

“You’ve heard of her?”

“Oh, yeah. She was a Holocaust survivor, taught at the New School in the early days.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I thought about transferring to the New School for awhile in Sophomore year.”

Emily was brilliant. She had a mind like a mouse trap. As far as I could tell, she forgot nothing.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I mean, I always wondered how you ended up at a Catholic school. Why didn’t you transfer?”

“It’s kind of awkward being here, but I don’t want to be one of those people who only ever knew her own kind. My academic advisor is a nun! I’m probably never going to be this close to a nun again.” She handed the paper back to me. “Do you know why he gave you Hannah Arendt?”

“I have no idea.”

“There is a bit of a mystery around her, you know. She died right before she was supposed to start her last book. It was part of a series, I think, but I know I remember that all we have of it is what was written on the page they found in her typewriter when she died, a couple of quotes and a title.”

“That’s creepy,” I said. “You don’t think that’s why Professor Bochs assigned her to me, do you?”

“No way,” Meg said. “I bet your love of Heidegger weirded him out. He probably just wants to make sure you’re not a Nazi.”