capricorn diary: NOBODY'S FOOL! ✧˖°

✧˖°

A June Jordan poem will govern my actions this year. Lately I’ve learned that my love and attention is a very potent thing and I must exercise judgment before emptying the clip. At almost-25, I am reaching the age where nothing is happening to me for the first time anymore. By now I have language for most feelings. What will I do?

✧˖°

I opened my year being ritually uncursed in a small village in South India at the behest of my mother. She believed a female ancestor put a bad mark on me and had to be appeased. (The curse might just be homosexuality: only time will tell.) How old will I be when holidays with my mother no longer feel like an A24 film... Later that evening, I opened my phone to see that Doechii (!!) read and liked my writing about lesbianism. It feels like a career milestone, to have a sexy rapper acknowledge your work. God works in mysterious ways. Perhaps I was blessed after all.

✧˖°

I am fighting a love hangover. I hate a hard feeling I cannot think my way through, especially one that roots deep through your body, runs all the way down to your toes. Sometimes when I am struck by emotional pain, I chant in my head: LOBOTOMY, LOBOTOMY! until it subsides. My ancestors invented yoga but this is the processing mechanism I devised. There has to be a rational psychosomatic explanation for why it works — it just does.

✧˖°

Pyaari Azaadi’s solo exhibition in New York City, “Talking ‘Bout a Revolution,” is perfect and vicious. It addresses caste and race supremacy in our diaspora, and is a visual love letter to the artists and activists working to heal those wounds. I have seldom seen Asian American artists write towards their womanhood through the language of guilt and complicity, as opposed to victimhood. There’s a crazy sculpture of a wilting lotus that shames its namesake, Kamala Harris. There are paintings that implicate our mothers too. I want more art that treats brown women as knives.

Pyaari’s collection of photographs from queer South Asian NYC nightlife from 2003-05.

✧˖°

Once a month I fall asleep next to my childhood best friend V. He and I started the sleepover ritual a few months ago: we make dinner, smoke some weed, talk our shit, fall asleep. While he’s at my house, he’ll handle heavy man tasks I can’t do myself. I love romance, but I have rarely encountered intimacy deeper than a friend who loves you washing your dishes, which you protest only half-heartedly because it is your least favorite chore on earth.

✧˖°

I am learning a new literary language, which is the long-form essay. Although the subjects are often hateful, my nonfiction voice is that of a lover. I want to express gratitude, almost filial piety, to the writers who came before. I want the reader to feel that I care deeply about their experience. I want to take them in and out of rabbit holes and open up to them and make them laugh. I write essays like a moodboard, but curated by a real live woman and not an algorithm.

✧˖°

A fat stack of books that literally have my name on them, courtesy of Brooklyn Public Library.

✧˖°

I’ve been thinking deeply about history lately. We are living in yet another “unprecedented time,” except I am not eighteen anymore so I’m falling for nobody’s tricks. I’ve seen lessons from our era drawn from Black and White Americanas who fought the Fugitive Slave Act. I went to a talk about attention activism where a scholar compared our era to the dawn of empire, when a small group of men declared the world open to colonization, except in the 2020s the frontier for conquest is our minds and attentions. I am thinking of the sixties, a similar time of youth discontent with American culture, whose visual language I explored at the Whitney’s Sixties Surreal exhibition with my friend B.

✧˖°

The more I read and study towards RAGE BAIT, the more I discover that I have never had a thought that James Baldwin didn’t already articulate half a century ago.

✧˖°

I have been living alone for three months. Only once did I call 911, after I got too consumed by a gripping nonfiction book (Zeynep Tufecki’s Twitter and Tear Gas) that I accidentally left my literal gas stove on for hours. I could have blown up the building! My neighbors had to wait outside in the cold while the firemen tested my gas levels. I am a lesbian but even I felt weak for these gruff and competent men. They told me to air out my apartment so I went with my friend A to a bar and cried. A drunk man asked me if I hadn’t actually been trying to kill myself. Sir, I will never kill myself. I have too much to say.

✧˖°

I’ve been lounging in my apartment, of which I am the sole creative director. My mom describes my aesthetic style as “kacha macha,” an onomatopoeic Tamil expression that means straight chaos and clutter, but I require material comforts. You could entomb me in my collection of paperback books. I would fistfight a man three times my size to defend my plants, many of them lovingly rehomed from neighbors. I have been a collector since I was a child and it seems too late to change this about me.

Street report from my mom, who decided to clean out my childhood bedroom…

✧˖°

What would it mean to be strong? Something I shelved in the LOBOTOMY! category from last year, that I am unshelving now, is facing numerous casual instances of transgression in nightlife. Not too recently I potentially got roofied. A woman grabbed my throat at the club. I am okay, I have the support system to deal with these indignities, but I have started using influencer perks to go to the gym. Not because working out prepares you for anything. But just for the reminder that my body is mine.

✧˖°

My goal this year is to become a better foe to fascism. The ICE takeover in Minnesota, alongside many books I’ve been reading, like Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, have convinced me of the importance of building stronger roots in my physical surroundings. It sounds obvious, but most people my age spent our formative years quarantined and/or online, and there’s a muscle that needs rebuilding. Some of my specific quests have included hosting more gatherings for friends to combat isolation, volunteering in my neighborhood, and befriending all the tenants in my building.

✧˖°

The girls vision boarding at mine. My crib is Fairytopia for femme lesbians!

A fuck-ton of fried rice, fried by me and not a shrimp, on shift with Feed the People Bedstuy

✧˖°

I hope you will pre-order my novel, UNPRECEDENTED TIMES. It is priced at $18.99, a full ten dollars cheaper than most brand-new fiction, because my publisher has correctly projected that my target readership is broke. What can I say, I write for the baddest bitches!