teenageengineernight-blog

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How reading Anna Karenina gaves me a Linguistic Existential Crisis Part. I

Since "We Have To Talk About Kevin" is a difficult read and I’d probably finish that book by the end of the year, I thought YouTube could help me gather information for my next read, and that’s when the worst thing ever happened. Aaron Taylor Johnson as Count Vronsky was brought to my FYP, and Keira Knightley infested my FYP with the most well-fitting edits of Young and Beautiful, Sad Girl, Million Dollar Man and Born to Die. I am a simple woman, and I was going through other people status on Instagram and I though that beautiful hand scene in Chloe Lukasiak’s status was everything I needed to start watching the movie. Joe Wright made an absolutely beautiful and engaging movie, that closed my 2024, and since I happened to have the book on my bookshelf, I decided I’d give it a try to Tolstói, another mistake I made.

4% into the book, I knew Anna Karenina was an absolutely beautiful written masterpiece who makes me realized how much I’ve abandoned my mother tongue. I’ve been raised all my life with Spanish as my first language, everything I used to read was in the language of my colonizers, and suddenly I fell in love with ChanBaek, and needed more quality fanfics (PWP, actually) and ended up losing the grasp of reality because at the old age of 23, I suddenly noticed I’ve been colonized a second time when I couldn’t grasp the meaning of the sentences in Spanish, and I have to open an eBook English edition to actually understand what was being said. I’m just 4% into the book, and I realized I can speak Spanish, but I am not able to understand it anymore. I felt disheartened, because on my journey of trying to perfectionate my English I lost my roots.

I couldn’t believe what was happening to me, because how the fuck could you lose your mother tongue when you speak it every day? And here comes the problem: I don’t like to talk, better yet, I don’t like to speak on a daily basis. I could be one of those girls who could pulled out a selective mutism phase, because I have a lot of things to speak about but at the same time I’m not interested to say it all. So I would rather not speak.

And my flawless vocabulary was ruined thanks to the Pandemic, because I was at home all the time, and my vocabulary was reduced to the most B2 level. I can communicate in Spanish but my C1/C2 Vocab was lost in the battle and replaced by slang thanks to TikTok, but not the cool slang, if not the worst kind, which is terrible. I can’t fucking read on my own language because I can’t grasp meaning, words are string together and formed sentences that are not coherent to my brain. EVEN WORST, I have an advance Spanish Vocabulary because I used to read National Geographic Magazines because I love them, and watch their documentaries because they were relaxing, and read very centric books written by Spanish Speaking Writers because they were cheaper than English speaking writers, but Pandemic happened, and they stopped selling the physical copies and I wasn’t very good at the internet downloading's thing for a while. And the class that could have helped my case, was just one day a week and because it was online, I would listen to my professor spoke while reading a fanfiction on the side. Now, I’m far behind on my native language situation because I made English my whole world.

The music I listen is in English, the reality shows I watch are in English, my thoughts are in English and I read the The New Yorker and listen to my Documentaries in English. English is so ingrained on my brain that I can’t comprehend my own grammar. Much worse than that, I need to study French in English because I can’t comprehend Grammar terms or explanation in Spanish, at least that it’s a very specific case. Reading Anna Karenina made me want to switch major to a focus on Spanish, and now, I decided 2025 would be the year this whole bullshit stop.

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“The dead appear to us in dreams because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star...” The Secret History by Donna Tartt

At this point, I just want to marry rich and study English Literature without worrying about a side work or how I would pay the next semester-

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This is too beautiful to not share.

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"Nathaniel was different; he always would be. He wasn't a Raven, but he was, same as Jean. He was Jean's misplaced forever partner, an unfulfilled promise Jean had stopped believing in years ago."

"Nathaniel was his broken promise; Neil's life was none of his business."

"He honestly had not expected Nathaniel to survive the consequences of that ferocious defiance. If not for Jean's own weakness, maybe Riko really would have kill him that night. Holding Nathaniel down while Riko slowly waterboarded him meant he couldn't cover his ears against the noises Nathaniel made..."

The Sunshine Court by Nora Sakavic.

Jean's thought about Nathaniel hurted me so much in this book, like... I need the second book in my hand by yesterday. How can this hurt this much???? Everytime Jean said something related to Nathaniel and how he was promised to him, it breaks my heart a little more. All those years thinking who four would be just for Neil to come by, and left in less than one month... I have mixed feelings, I need to digest this book...

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That hurts even more.

Riko and Kevin are the sons of Exy, Jean Moreau is son of no one

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I love Andrew so much, but Wei Wuxian is my beloved. I can't just betrayed him like that.

Character, book, and author names under the cut

Wei Wuxian- Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Harrowhark Nonagesimus- The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir

Andrew Minyard- All for the Game by Nora Sakavic

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This was actually really beautiful to read.

you will always be in your mother’s house, no matter the time that has passed between now and when you first left it. you find that your arms take precedence to all the rest of you, for she never stopped needing to be held. she comes to you in the night like a child begging to crawl into your bed: your mother, your daughter, your burden, your burden, your burden, your fault. you can’t remember the last time you saw her smile. your tongue is the only muscle that works harder than your heart, you need it to break her down just as she does you, to level the playing field before inevitably letting her win again. she’s screaming I CAN’T HELP YOU RIGHT NOW as she slams the door in your face and you’re screaming back YOU NEVER COULD, YOU NEVER COULD as you throw it open again. you both draw lines and then cross them. you’re both afraid of your rage. you wonder how much of her resides inside you, how many pieces you can pull out of yourself if you just keep pushing at them like loose teeth. you call her on the side of the road and she tells you i can’t deal with this before hanging up the phone. she calls you from her 300k house and you leave your second job to drive her to rehab. you clean her house, pack her things, let the air out of her goddamn tires & manage to avoid looking at her like she’s crazy; five hours of labor and a termination letter just for her to pick a fight over a joint as you’re finally backing out of the driveway. she’s slamming her hands against the window, ripping at the door handle, screaming that you’re trying to force her to go, saying IT WAS MY IDEA, IT WAS MY IDEA, LET ME OUT so now you’re both getting out and you can hear your roommate say get your fucking shit out of my goddamn car then as you walk to your own. you scream and you cry and you slam your fists against the steering wheel, the ceiling, the window, again and again and again and again until you’re tired of feeling like your mother, until there’s nothing left in you to feel at all. so now it’s 5am and you’re watching in silence as your roommate tosses your mom’s belongings into the driveway. your heart is the facilitator of forgiveness, it’s what she’s going to play on when you think you’re finally going to stop picking up the phone. you think my mother has made mistakes, but so has god. she crawls into the passenger seat with tears in her eyes and asks you to help her carry her things back inside, asks you to drive her to go pick up her boyfriend, or at least just buy him a tank of gas. you pretend the rest of your body is insignificant, immovable, completely stationary and absolutely incapable of walking away. you let rigor mortis set in.

anatomy of the eldest daughter, Joan of Envy

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They are just... French's.

the paris catacombs are 1000x more fucked up than i imagined

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I'm literally trying my best to not throw up in this last episode of 180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through us... because they're hurting me so much. I wanna cry and I just keeping nervous smiles because all the thoughts I'm having right now. And I just asking God for a nice ending. I'm trying my best to not hurt myself with all their feelings, but can I get out clean and unscathed by Wang's raw emotions?

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when you want to go home, but home doesn't exist yet

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I just love this chain of thoughts.

it's absolutely outrageous to me that humans can't easily reattach body parts. most of the time when someone "loses" a finger (for example) that finger is not actually lost! it is briefly separated from the body but it's usually still THERE in the same room! you should be able to pick it up and pop it back on like a mr. potato head accessory. there should be a time limit--if you reconnect the vacationing body part in under say 15 minutes then that's a freebie, no harm done. i am livid over this state of affairs. i am starting a petition

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“The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognize that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”

— Jacques Derrida (trans. Alan Bass), The Postcard: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond

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I often see people talk about red flags in relationships but no one really talks about the red flags in friendships. Let’s put an end to that shit too.

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Nunca había pensado en eso, en cierto modo, cuando acabé de leer el libro, pensé en la escena anterior cuando hicieron la estupidez de colgarse de la escalera y la recordé con cariño. Pero ahora, pareciera que todo tiene sentido. Hanya sabe lo que hace con sus lectores y duele, duele mucho.

When it's 10:30 at night and you realize the symbolism behind the last page of A Little Life and the first section of the book (Lispenard Street) and how it relates to the characters.

Late night thoughts but I just realized the symbolism behind Jude telling Harold the story of the rooftop scene at the end of the book. Both parts (respectively named Lispenard Street) end on that said street, they end with Jude being in the proximity of the apartment he and Willem had lived in when still being new to NYC.

Because of this, the book starts and ends in the same place. It starts where it ends, if you'd like to call it that. Not only is Jude telling Harold the story of how stupid (but stupidly smart, albeit) they had been to lock themselves up on the roof, implying their youth, and the symbolism behind Willem always being there to catch Jude when he's slipping away from them, always grounding him and making sure he stays safe, that he's always got him, but Jude is also telling the story of how everything began. How everything started. The calm before the storm, if you'd like to call it that. And not only does it bring you back to that scene but it brings back the emotions as well (for me, I had found the scene as emotional, intense, but maybe a little funny situation at hand) and makes you reflect on EVERYTHING that's happened in the book. It makes you think back to the times where the four lived so simply, with little to worry about, back when they really were living their "little lives."

After Lispenard Street part 1, it never was the same again. He's telling the story, the beginning of all the events that were about to unfold, but in a time where none of that existed; where everything had been perfectly okay, where nothing could ever go as wrong as they had.

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I don’t know what’s more enchanting, that songbirds dream of their songs or that humans use their advanced scientific capabilities to find out what birds dream about.

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this blog is actually me dissecting my own corpse in an anatomical theater and you are all standing up on the rows looking down at me cheering and booing