Tomes and Turpentine

  • Crimes

    I can’t wait for you to call
    And ask me to post the bail
    For some crime you committed
    In the name of breaking limits
    So that when I refuse
    And you demand an excuse
    I can laugh and say
    I’ve long since moved away

  • On Sex

    I have a confession to make, which will probably come across as a bit strange considering my line of work, but here it is: for all intents and purposes, I am a virgin. All of the guys I’ve kissed (none of the girls, mostly because I never felt like I had to tell them in order to get them to slow the fuck down) have been shocked by this information because, apparently, I’m “so hot.” The friends I told in college were also surprised, mostly because I talked about sex a lot (maybe to make up for the fact that I wasn’t having any of it).

    Now that I’m out of college and less prone to sharing my business (unless it’s anonymously to strangers on the internet), I don’t really tell new people I meet unless I feel like it’s absolutely necessary or we become very close and I trust them a lot. This is mostly because I think oversharing is a bad habit to get into. I also am very sick of hearing how “shocked” people are and receiving their reassurances that it’ll be easy for me to lose it if I just put in a little effort. I’ve literally had guys beg me to fuck them. I know exactly how easy it would be and that’s part of why I’m not interested.

    One of the best reactions I’ve gotten to telling someone I’m a virgin actually came from my co-worker Javi. He just asked me why. It was a very simple question, but it was perfect. It jumped straight past all of the surprise and the assumptions to get right at the heart of the matter. It was a response that showed he didn’t care about societal expectations and what was normal for other people. Instead, he cared about me and my personal reasons for not having had sex yet and nothing else beyond that.

    Of course, I’ve had other friends react to the information really well in different ways, but before Javi, no one had ever asked me ‘why’ so directly. This meant that I had never really been forced to articulate my reasons out loud before. What I ended up saying was, “I’ve just never really wanted to before,” and this is true, but that was certainly an oversimplification.

    The thing is, I’ve wanted to have sex in an abstract sort of way for as long as I can remember. I started reading romance novels when I was about eleven and I would feel tingly all over and then begin to touch myself when I got to the scene where the hero and the heroine finally made love. This should have prepared me well enough for health class, but all of the descriptions of sex in the romance novels were so euphemistic that I was completely unprepared to find out that sex (in the heteronormative sense) actually involved putting something inside me. My poor, prudish mother had no idea what to say to me when I came home a few weeks into eighth grade crying to her about penises.

    Maybe, if I had been able to put a tampon in when I got my period, this penetrative revelation wouldn’t have been so horrifying to me. However, all of my attempts to staunch the flow of blood with a tiny little cotton penis were excruciating, so I figured the real thing would be much, much worse. Around the same time, I also began having intrusive thoughts about being a lesbian which was confusing because I had spent my whole adolescence being obsessed with boys.

    I spent most of high school agonizing over my new found attraction to girls and avoiding any kind of sexual encounters with people of any gender. My parents rule about not dating until I was sixteen gave me a convenient excuse for this abnormally un-horny behavior. All of my further efforts to put in a tampon were met with painful resistance, so I saw no reason to engage in behavior that led to other things getting put in my vagina.

    When I was seventeen and a junior in high school, I started going out with a boy from the National Honor Society because we were sort-of friends and I figured that if he liked me, I might as well give him a shot. He actually asked me out to the Sadie Hawkins dance, which isn’t how that’s supposed to go, but he kind of had to because I certainly wouldn’t have done it. To this day, I think I’ve only ever made the first move by accident.

    Our relationship was so insubstantial that I hesitate to even call it a relationship. All we really did was sit in his basement and watch movies and sometimes hang out at school together. I think we went ice skating once. He attempted to kiss me several times, but only truly succeeded at initiating a make out session when he asked me explicitly. I was a nervous wreck for the entirety of our short relationship and I don’t think I felt a single sliver of arousal. When I finally broke up with him, it was the hugest relief I’d ever felt.

    After that, I finished high school with no further romantic entanglements and I still wasn’t able to put a tampon in. My whole menstruating life, my mom had insisted that I was just being a wimp about the tampons and I needed to try harder. I mostly believed her, but I decided that I wanted a second opinion before I moved away to college in the biggest city in the US with people whose body parts might want to find their way into my vagina.

    To my mom’s guilty horror, there was something wrong with me and it had nothing to do with my low pain tolerance (martial arts has made me realize my pain tolerance is actually quite high). As it turned out, there was tissue blocking my vagina with only a small hole in it to let out my menstrual blood. Three different doctors had to poke around down there and still, the nature of the tissue blockage and what would be required to remove it remained unclear. Unfortunately, I was leaving for college the next day, so there was no time for follow up appointments.

    Between that discovery and now, I’ve made out with quite a few people and found it at least somewhat enjoyable. The problem is that attraction doesn’t come easily or quickly to me. I think, in general, I find many more women to be aesthetically pleasing than men, but most of those women aren’t interested in women. Regardless of gender, I’ve never been actively in a situation where I’ve wanted to touch their genitals or have them touch mine (nevermind doing anything else with them).

    The closest I’ve ever gotten to sex was in the spring of this year while I was in California. I was staying in a hostel with my brother and we met this wonderful German boy and spent the whole day with him exploring the city we were in. Afterwards, he texted me to ask me out on a date. We went out on one date and then, the next night, we got a hotel. I really liked him. I’d told him all about my inexperience and the fact that I couldn’t put anything in my vagina. We had all of our clothes off except our underwear and I felt completely safe, but there was still no part of me that wanted to see his penis.

    A couple months later, after five years of attempting follow up appointments, I finally had my surgery. All of my friends were so excited for me, but, as relieved as I was to have it over with, I was scared. I realize now that having that obstruction was the perfect excuse for me not to confront my real reasons for not wanting to have sex. It’s not that I didn’t have sex because I couldn’t have penetrative sex and I didn’t want to have to explain my condition to people; it’s that I just have never wanted to.

    After my surgery, I decided that it would be a good idea to put myself out there more. Start flirting more openly with people and see where things went. Dating apps were and always will be out of the question (I am incapable of developing an attraction to someone based solely on their pictures and a couple clever captions), so I knew I would need to try harder to make things happen with the people I meet in person. My experience with the German boy had made me more confident that, if I communicated my boundaries, I could have the kind of experiences I wanted to have.

    Shortly after developing this new outlook on life, I met Josh. Amazing timing (or so I thought). For the first time in a long time, I was instantly attracted to a man. He had dark hair and tattoos. He was tall and incredibly fit. When he came up to talk to me he asked if the church we were standing across the street from was open. I told him I didn’t know and then asked if he was trying to go to church. He said, “Nah, I just like looking around in old churches” and I was done for. Even my friend (who I was waiting for when I met him) took one look at the guy and said, “Scarlett, if you’d made your perfect guy in a computer, that’s what he would look like.”

    When we finally went out, I was so excited to be this new woman who didn’t get nervous on dates and didn’t blather on about her inexperience. I planned to set my boundaries without explaining myself at all. I should have known better with the way he was touching me already at the bar–on my legs, my thighs, my ass–but I really thought it would be like it was with the German boy. I didn’t stop him from touching me and I kissed him and held his hand with abandon because I was having a good time, he was beautiful, and he hated air conditioning just as much as I do.

    When he asked if I wanted to go to another bar or go back to his place, I thought that the fact that he was giving me those two options meant he cared about what I wanted. I told him I wanted to go back to his place. On the way there, I told him I didn’t want to have sex. In my mind, that was enough to cover all the kinds of sex. Or at least enough to prompt him to clarify before attempting any of the ‘other’ kinds of sex.

    At his apartment, I peed and then sat on his bed while he washed his hands. I suppose I should have sat down on the couch instead if I’d wanted to slow things down a bit, but I wasn’t thinking like that. I was so captivated by him and by his apartment (which was decorated exactly like some dark academia manic pixie dream boy’s bedroom from some indie movie would be), that it didn’t occur to me to be cautious. I thought that he would listen when I said no, no matter where were sitting.

    One second we were making out and I was explaining that I haven’t done much and asking if we could just keep things there. He asked if I could take off my dress and bra and he could take off his shirt. I said yes. The next second his head was between my legs and he was pulling the crotch of my underwear to the side so he could go down on me. I was so shocked that he would ask about the clothes but not about this that I froze. I watched him do it like I was watching him do it to someone else and this thing that I had heard so much about, this experience that I’d been excited to have sometime down the road when I knew the person doing it to me really cared, felt like nothing. He might as well have been licking my toe for the amount of pleasure it gave me.

    At that point, I figured that I might as well let him keep trying because he’d already started. I didn’t try to hide the fact that I wasn’t feeling it and when tried to stick a finger inside of me, I shook my head and pulled his hand away. He backed off and I thought that would be the end of it, but after a couple of moments, he tried again. And he kept trying, even when I told him about my surgery, even when I told him how recent the surgery was, even when I told him I’d barely even put my own fingers inside me. Eventually, I rolled onto my stomach and just lay there, completely shut down, unable to believe that this was really happening to me.

    While I lay there, he took his dick out of his boxers and essentially tried to get me to give him a blow job. When that didn’t work, he got on top of me. I started to roll out from under him, but he pressed down on my shoulders and told me he was just giving me a massage. Everything in me wanted to believe him, believe that everything before had just been a misunderstanding and this was his apology. When I felt his dick between my legs, I knew I was wrong. I freaked out and started to get off the bed, to tell him I was leaving, but he begged me to stay, so I laid back down for a few moments and let him tell me he was sorry and hold my face and tell me how pretty I was.

    The worst part of that whole thing is that, even after everything he did, even now, three months later, there is still a part of me that wants things to work out. That part of me is tiny now, but it was huge the night I left his apartment. It took all of my willpower and me repeating ‘he will fuck you in your sleep if you stay’ over and over again until I convinced myself to get out. What I felt for him was so rare that I would cut off a finger just to have had that night go differently. Yet, even with how attracted to him I was, I still didn’t want to see his dick.

    The fact that somebody wanted me that badly was incredibly erotic, but what that desire turned into was terrifying. I know that a lot of people say that sexual assault and rape are about power and not attraction. Maybe this is the case a lot of the time, but I don’t think that this was the case with Josh. I think it was a case of him wanting me so badly that he sometimes forgot to see me as a complete person. Or, he thought that he was doing the poor, scared virgin a favor by introducing her to the delights of oral sex and fingering. Probably some combination of both.

    Sometimes, when I masturbate (which is rarely now, for obvious reasons), I can’t help but reminisce about the moments with Josh before I realized he was well on his way to sexually assaulting me. Even some of the moments after. I hate that this happens because it’s confusing and makes me feel ashamed even though I know that all the ways of processing sexual assault are valid blah, blah, blah. In another way, however, it’s enlightening because it’s helping me to understand what I actually need in order to want to do the things that Josh forced on me.

    Usually, when I masturbate, I take inspiration from erotic literature, hentai, or my own life (although that doesn’t offer much). Watching most live action porn does almost nothing for me because it is so emotionless. If you’ve read my erotica, you know I’m into some pretty kinky stuff, but that alone doesn’t get me off. What gets me off in the end is imagining all of that disgusting, brutal stuff being done to me by someone I love who I know loves me.

    For a long time, I thought that there was something wrong with me. I thought that maybe I’d read too many romance novels or maybe I was psychologically fucked up by my tampon trauma. Now, I think that I’m probably somewhere on the asexual spectrum, probably demisexual. I’ve decided that I don’t care anymore what other people think about what I should be doing and I’ve decided that I want to wait until I’m married to have sex: any kind of sex.

    This probably sounds crazy coming from someone who is not religious (although I was baptized Catholic, if that counts for anything), but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense for me. I see no reason to go around having sex when I don’t want to have sex and I think it’s unlikely that I will ever want to have sex with someone who I don’t also want to marry. Now, just to get it out of the way, I’m going to go through some of the reasons why people oppose waiting for marriage and rebut them:

    1. Would you ever buy a car without test driving it? Okay, first of all, I’m not a car. My future partner is not a car. I understand the point of this analogy which is that you should try having sex with someone before you’re married in case it’s terrible and you hate it. I guess it is conceivable that this happens to people if they literally don’t do anything before they’re married, but that’s not the kind of ‘waiting for marriage’ I’m talking about. When I imagine ‘not having sex,’ I imagine doing everything else. Mutual masturbation, tying each other up, dry humping, cuddling naked, having long conversations about our kinks and fantasies, watching porn together, etc. There is a whole lot you can do without any kind of sex taking place. I like to think of it as a really long edging session.
      Besides, there is no way to prepare for every possible scenario in a marriage. Just because you’re ‘sexually compatible’ at the beginning of your marriage doesn’t mean you’re going to be like that forever. Things like depression, injuries, and pregnancy can make it so you have to start all over with your sexual relationship anyways. At many points in the relationship, sex will be the absolute last thing on both people’s minds, so everything else had better be really solid.
    2. You’ll regret missing out on sexual experiences with other people. I can still experience sexual things with other people without having sex. Since I can count the amount of times I’ve actually wanted to do a sex act with someone in the heat of the sexual moment on exactly zero fingers, I don’t think I’ll be missing out on much except for sexual experiences I don’t want and won’t enjoy.
    3. It’s going to be difficult. Maybe it will be difficult to wait when I meet someone who actually makes me want to have sex, but I doubt it will be so difficult that I give up. I enjoy a good challenge.
    4. Waiting is an anti-feminist, archaic vestige of purity culture. Maybe this is true if the reason you’re waiting is because you believe you lose your value as a person if you let yourself get penetrated out of wedlock. However, that isn’t why I’m waiting. Yes, there is a part of me that finds the idea of saving certain experiences for the person I’m going to marry very romantic, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that if I’m doing it because I want to and not because I feel pressured by religion/patriarchy. Besides, my idea of virginity is much more complex because I’m bisexual and I could end up marrying a woman. I think this automatically makes my style of waiting a bit more subversive, because the way I’m defining sex for myself is not based in heteronormative ideas of virginity loss.
    5. What if you change your mind? One benefit of doing this for personal reasons and not religious or cultural reasons is that I can change my mind whenever the fuck I want. I think that what I want right now is to wait for marriage, so I’m going to communicate that. If for some reason, I decided I don’t want to wait anymore, then I won’t. And I won’t feel guilty if I change my mind because this whole waiting for marriage scheme is more about making sure that I don’t get myself into situations where I am having sex that I don’t want to be having than it is about keeping myself in packaging so I’m more valuable later.

    The point of sexual liberation isn’t to stop pressuring people into abstinence only to pressure them into promiscuity instead. I’ve spent so long thinking that there must be something wrong with me, but I’m done thinking that. Regardless of my reasons behind it, there is nothing wrong with me for wanting to wait to have sex and for not prioritizing romantic relationships at this point in my life.

    None of this is to say that my way is the right way and other peoples’ way is the wrong way. I am a huge advocate for approaching romance and sex in whatever way makes you feel happy and doesn’t fuck up your life. If you want to sleep around, go for it! If you want to be in a committed relationship with five people at once, do it! I just think it’s important to really take the time to make sure that the choices you’re making are because you want to make them and not because you want to please your parents or impress your friends or feel cool.

    Regardless of your strategy, I hope that all of you are able to cultivate a beautiful, fulfilling love life (or lack thereof). If you feel like you’re struggling with this, just know that you are not alone; everyone is dealing with a crazy amount of baggage and everyone has a unique timeline for figuring this stuff out.

    Thanks for reading.

    XX Scarlett

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  • On October and the Joys of Cooking

    WHAT I WROTE YESTERDAY:

    October is my favorite month because it brings me my favorite weather (crisp, rainy, colorful), my favorite foods (pumpkin pie, soups and curries of all kinds, pears, squash), and my favorite holiday (Halloween, obviously). I am so glad it’s finally October. The changing of the month hasn’t suddenly relieved me of my depressive tendencies, but it has gotten me to start treating myself a bit better.

    For the first time ever, I am going to get to celebrate Halloween exactly how I want to. Every year from when I was born to when my mom met my friend Tiago’s mom at a PTA meeting, I spent Halloween with my parents. After that, I still spent Halloween with my parents, only, instead of spending it in my neighborhood, I spent it in Tiago’s and counted out my candy from trick-or-treating on the carpet in his basement. I did this until I was seventeen.

    After that, I went to college, and I spent every Halloween working or going to sleep early because I had work the next day or both. The Halloweens when I was still able to do something, I was living with S, and it was just a given that whatever plans I made would involve her and therefore would have to be something she enjoyed as well.

    None of this was really all that bad from an objective standpoint. There were fun parts to working on Halloween. Last year, I was at the coffee shop and I got to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. Towards the end of the night, there was still a lot of candy left, so I started giving out big handfuls to any kid that came in. One boy looked at the candy I dropped in his bag, looked back at me and said, “I fucking love you.” Then he ran back out, screaming to all of his friends about how awesome I was and how they all had to go back and get candy from me.

    There are also a lot of pros to having someone who is ‘your person’ to do things with, even if it does come with a sort of obligation. As unhealthy as a lot of parts of S and I’s friendship were, when it was just us, doing almost anything with her was fun. Even though I have a lot of close friends, I haven’t been feeling as at ease around them as I used to, I think because I’m scared of what happened with S will happen again. The kind of closeness I had with her took so much time to build and having it ripped away was so painful that I don’t want to try again. At the same time, I know I have to risk that pain if I want to experience all of the good parts of that closeness with my current friends. If I want to actually fall in love and have the kind of passionate relationship I write about, I’ll have to risk even more. Going into October without a designated partner in crime does feel a bit lonely.

    Despite the drawbacks, I am not going to let the prospect of spending Halloween (and the days leading up to it) alone scare me. That’s what watching horror movies is for. My plan is to make a list of all the Halloween-themed things I want to do this month and do them. If having someone with me would enhance the experience and someone is available, amazing. If not, I will happily do the activity by myself.

    Some of the things I’m considering doing, in no particular order, are: carving pumpkins with my little sister over video chat, going to Halloween parties (I’ve been invited to one so far, but we’ll see if some more pop up), going apple-picking, going to a pumpkin patch, doing a corn maze, going to creepy themed bars/restaurants, going to a haunted house, watching classic horror movies that I haven’t seen before, going to the Village Halloween parade, making pumpkin pie, making Halloween decorations. Some of the things I’ve already done are: started reading The Dead Romantics, bought pretty much every vegan, pumpkin-flavored product that Trader Joe’s is currently selling, started watching The X Files for the first time, and started writing some spooky erotica which I might share on here as a free Halloween present.

    Obviously, the list of things I have done is much shorter than the list of things I am going to do, but it is only the sixth of the month, so I think I have some time to catch up. There’s another thing I’ve been doing recently that I’m very proud of and, even though it isn’t exactly Halloween-themed, I think it is a direct result of the power that October has over me.

    There is something both relaxing and invigorating about October. The cozy sweaters, the hot cups of tea, and the scent of pumpkin spice make me feel like I’ve been swaddled in warm blankets, but the chilly air and feuille-morte awaken a sort of primal urgency in me. October reminds me of my own mortality and that of the people I love. With Halloween so close, cheerful memento-mori are all around.

    Far from depressing me, these ponderings make me feel more alive and more human than I do any other time of the year. While I more easily give in to the urge to curl up in bed with a good book and a steaming mug of apple cider, I am also overcome with the urge to create and to hold (secular) communion with the people I care about. The activity I’m proud of, is the perfect outlet for these conflicting urges. You’ve probably already guessed what this thing is because because it’s in the title: cooking.

    From the day after Ash’s party (when I started feeling ‘sick’ and ordered food twice in one day), I was seriously abusing my credit card and my GrubHub app in a way that I never have before. At the time, the idea of cooking my own meals felt as ridiculous and undoable as making a new outfit out of old bed sheets to wear to work everyday. Anything I thought about making for myself sounded disgusting and my appetite was virtually non-existent. Then October came, it got cold, it started raining, my vegan cookbooks came in the mail, and Trader Joe inspired me to go shopping with all of his pumpkin-themed products.

    Suddenly, I was hungry for my own cooking again. Although I know I live in New York City and, barring the (second) apocalypse, I don’t have worry about ‘preparing for winter,’ that primal October feeling started to get to me. I needed to stock the pantry, I needed to learn how to cure (fake) meats, I needed to provide for my … roommates? In all seriousness, there is something really beautiful about cooking, especially in October.

    In the summer, I’m so hot I want to die and all I’m really hungry for are sandwiches and salads and cold slices of fruit. In the summer, cooking is a horrible chore. In October, the heat pouring off the stove is a blessing and the early darkness makes me grateful to be inside laboring over a pot while I listen to a podcast.

    I’ve never really cooked with cookbooks before because my mom never used them (sometimes to the whole family’s detriment) and I thought I was happy with the handful of meals I could make well. Now that I’ve tried cooking from a cookbook, I realize how wrong I was. The process of cooking is so much less laborious and brain-melting when you have a set list of ingredients to add to your shopping cart and instructions to follow once you get back from the grocery store. The likelihood of success with a new dish is so much higher when the execution is based on something more than what I think probably goes in that thing I had that one time.

    It isn’t just the logistical part of the of the cooking process that’s better. The emotional and intellectual components of cooking are so much better with a cookbook. Following a set of instructions turns cooking into more of a meditation than frantic dash into an unexplored forest. Going back and forth between the book and the stove gives the process a witchy/medicinal/academic quality which makes cooking feel like exactly what it is: a sacred human ritual. Maybe all of this sounds completely unhinged, or extremely obvious to every normal person who didn’t grow up with weird hang-ups about following recipes, but for me, all of this is a revelation.

    I’ve decided that I’m going to go through one of my cookbooks at a time, so that all of the food I’m making sort of goes together and I can fully immerse myself in one cuisine. The cookbook I’m starting with is called Provecho, and it’s full of veganized recipes for Mexican staples. The first recipe I made was pozole rojo, which is a mild red soup filled (in the vegan version) with hominy, onions, and meaty oyster mushrooms. It’s topped with cabbage and radish, and eaten with tortilla trips. Often it’s used to cure hangovers.

    Keelie, one of my coworkers got Provecho from her friends as a birthday present because she’s Mexican and lactose intolerant. She was excited when she found out that I’d actually started cooking from it (apparently a lot of people buy cookbooks and then never use them) and was fake mad when I didn’t bring in any samples of the finished product. Today, I ended up bringing in the pozole rojo and she liked it enough to eat it for lunch! It’s just really cool to be learning about/cooking these foods and then getting to hear about how they’ve played a part in her life. Her suggestion to squeeze a bit of lime on the soup was invaluable. My other coworker, Vince, said the soup tasted like SpaghettiOs, which I hear are amazing, so that was pretty cool too.

    WHAT I WROTE TODAY:

    I stopped writing yesterday so that I could go make arroz amarillo to go with the frijoles colombianos that I’d already made. Sadly, this effort was a complete disaster. First, I undercooked the rice. Then, in a misguided attempt to fix this mistake, I overcooked it. I don’t know why this upset me so much, but I was actually on the verge of tears. I think the only reason I didn’t start crying is because my roommate Lis was in the kitchen and I didn’t want to subject her to that.

    In an effort to somehow make the overcooked rice edible, I mixed it with a bit of flour to make dough and pressed it into my waffle iron to make savory waffles. At the time, I really thought I was being innovative. This morning, I ate three of the waffles with some of the frijoles colombianos and now the thought of eating either of those things ever again (at least the versions of these things currently waiting to grow mold in my fridge) makes me sick to my stomach.

    My experience trying to make arroz amarillo has compelled me to make a couple of amendments to my opinion of cookbooks. I still stand by most of what I wrote yesterday, but I will say: I think my rate of success with cookbooks vs just following my instincts in the kitchen is actually higher with just following my instincts. I think that cooking with a cookbook is still an incredible learning experience and I plan to continue doing it, I just think I need to do it while keeping my wits about me.

    Several times while I was making the arroz amarillo, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to work out, but I proceeded full steam ahead anyway. In the future, I’m going to listen to that voice inside me that says “maybe the heat should be a little higher” and “maybe that’s too much water.” It’s also entirely possible that I didn’t follow the recipe as closely as I should have because I was talking to Lis while I was cooking. Despite all of this, I still stand by the fact that cooking with a cookbook is amazing: I have a place to write down all of my notes and I can always try again with slight twists on the same independent variables.

    I have faltered a bit today in my conviction to enjoy October because I failed at arroz amarillo, I’m on my period, I have a horrible headache, and today was far too warm for fall. However, now that it’s dark, I can already feel my mojo coming back. I am still excited by the prospect of walking through Prospect Park at dusk, shopping for sweaters, crocheting, sketching dragons, writing spooky erotica, going to bookstores, sightseeing in Sleepy Hollow, and using Halloween as an excuse to show the people I love how much I care about them.

    The lessons I’ve learned just over the course of writing this blog post are: 1. when you try something new, it’s okay to be excited about it, but don’t become so excited that you blind yourself to its faults and start acting like a brainwashed groupie; 2. October might make me feel better, but it’s not going to hold my hand and do my work for me; I have to actively tap into that October energy, use it as well as I can, and make it last as long as possible; 3. Periods fucking suck and they’re sexist. God is sexist.

    Thanks for reading.

    XX Scarlett

  • On Being ‘Sick’ and Figuring Out What the Fuck to do with my Life

    The day before yesterday, I went to Ash’s going away party, which was both incredibly fun and incredibly exhausting. Fun because I love Ash and I got to see a bunch of her other friends who I get along with quite well. Exhausting because I had spent six hours at work just before getting to the party and by that point I was running purely on autopilot.

    Even though a part of me just wanted to go home and crawl into bed, the rest of me got off a bit on getting to watch myself be so social on such a small amount of fuel. I talked to people at the party for four hours straight (including an especially fraught conversation about men and feminism which I might write a different post about later) and I was able to spin some embarrassing mishaps (such as splashing a bit of White Claw onto another girls’ sweater) into funny moments. This success also made me realize that I don’t need to worry so much about social interactions; my instincts seem to serve me just fine when I let them take over.

    After the party, I caught a ride in an Uber with Ash’s friend Di and her other friend Chanel. The Uber ride ended up being an hour long due to traffic and thunderstorms and the three of us talked the whole way. The conversation was glittery and sharp, but my brain felt fuzzy despite how quick my replies came. Chanel and I left the Uber and took the train together because we lived along the same route.

    When I’ve decided it’s time for me to leave a party, the last thing I want to find out is that someone who is also leaving at the same time is taking the same train as me. The only exception to this rule is if the person is someone I’m infatuated with. If I’m not trying to get someone to kiss me, all I want at the end of the night is to sit on the train with my earbuds in and listen to Death Grips or some sad indie music. There is nothing less appealing than trying to make conversation with someone you don’t know very well and aren’t attracted to at 2am in an empty subway car. Although it was only about 9:30 when Chanel and I got on the train and the subway car wasn’t empty, I think that getting off the subway without having had my earbuds snugly in my ears blasting whatever the fuck for even a single second directly contributed to my current state of unwellness.

    To be clear, I wouldn’t take it back. I think those extra moments together may have turned Chanel and Di into real friends instead of just friends of a friend and I am always grateful to have more friends. In the future, however, I will be much more careful to not be so open about exactly which train I’m taking until I know more information about which trains everyone else is taking and I can be strategic about my exit.

    Honestly, I don’t mind being sick. Being sick is pretty much the only way I can ever lay in bed all day without feeling guilty. I have a bad habit (as most people do) of saying vicious things to myself when I feel like I’m not accomplishing enough. Being sick is almost like a medal that says, “good job, you worked yourself so hard you made yourself sick!” Calling out of work and getting to lay in bed binge watching ridiculous Netflix originals and YouTube video essays is my reward for winning that medal.

    The show I ended up watching all day yesterday was Partner Track. I am a huge sucker for anything cheesy and romantic, so of course I was going to watch it. The show is fun, but that is pretty much all it is. Most of the acting is terrible and the dialogue feels like it was ripped straight of a chronically online, liberal millennial’s Twitter feed of hot takes. The characters themselves are pretty unlikeable, mostly because of their moral hypocrisy. The show seems to treat cheating as a sloppy behavioral quirk rather than the serious betrayal it is and its attempts at social commentary, while admirable, come across as shoe-horned and insincere. The only two characters I found likeable were Z, the environmental crusader, and Justin, the paralegal.

    I have pages worth of thoughts on the show, but it wouldn’t really be worth my time to put them all down or worth yours to read them, so I will refrain. The one good thing about the show is that it was comforting to see people approaching thirty and still not knowing what the hell to do with themselves. It makes being almost twenty four and feeling completely lost seem less like the end of the world.

    I think the sickness I’m experiencing has more to do with the fact that I feel like my life is spiraling out of control than it does with a virus. Spoiler alert: I have not been doing any of the things I said I would do in “On Productivity.”

    The sneezing is just seasonal allergies. The horrible panic I’m feeling is a mixture of existential dread, burnout, and depression. I’ve become disillusioned with my work at the coffee shop, and thinking about having to go to the boxing gym to stand behind a desk and roll hand wraps for six hours every Friday makes me fantasize about getting pushed onto the train tracks. I was warming up to the service industry, but it’s all starting to feel a little too Sisyphean for my tastes. All I want to do when I get done with work is sleep and I can barely force myself to eat anything. Even food from my favorite restaurants has started to taste like cold, unseasoned tofu.

    My persistent headache started yesterday, but I think I’ve made it worse by oversleeping and wallowing. The only worthwhile things I’ve managed to do between today and yesterday are change my bed sheets and do two loads of laundry. I haven’t left the house all day and I haven’t applied for any jobs. I still haven’t done my taxes. It’s 5pm and I haven’t left the house once. All of this is making me want to finally read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but I think that book might just enable me.

    What I really need is a change. Something big and dramatic that will wake me up from this haze. Every time I think of something to do that might excite or inspire me–going to a movie, taking a pole dancing class, going away for a bit–the notion is crushed by the reminder of all the debt I have to pay off. Anything that costs money is a non starter unless I want to make my financial anxiety worse (which can sometimes be a fun self harm tactic if I’m really down in the dumps). The free things I feel tempted by often become unappealing because of the sheer amount of time and energy they require.

    I think one of my big problems is that I am trying to figure out what I should do next in the short term without having fully decided what I want in the long term. No decision I make about what job to apply for is going to make me feel like I’m going in the right direction if I don’t even know what the right direction is.

    Sometimes, I wish I was like my friends who have always known that they want to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other professions that come with a pre-made life plan. I’ve always known that I wanted to be a writer, but the path to getting there has never been clear. I had other career aspirations as well, but they changed with every person (real or fictional) who I fell in love with. I read Percy Jackson and the Olympians and wanted to be an architect because that was Annabeth Chase’s dream. Later, in college, I wanted to study International Relations because of a captivating boy I met at freshman orientation. I’ve wanted to be a fashion designer, an astronaut, a teacher, a cowgirl (still not sure if this is a real career), a psychologist, and many, many other things.

    If I was smart, I would have either fully pursued writing with the viciousness of someone whose life depended on being able to entertain an easily bored king with their words, or I would have chosen a “smart” career and saved the writing for later. Instead of doing either, I felt compelled to choose a major that wasn’t writing, but was still something I was passionate about. Why not writing? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it felt to me like getting a degree in running or speaking. Sure, a class here or there might help, but a full for years seemed excessive. Writing, to me, is mostly about just doing the thing and either people like it or they don’t.

    I chose Environmental Studies because I care about the environment and it seemed like the major would at least help me learn some things that I couldn’t learn on my own. I’m still not sure if that was the case. I am pretty sure that most 18-20 year-olds are in no position to be deciding what subject is worth spending $70,000 a year to learn about. I wish that just one person would have sat me down and said, “Look, Scarlett, you’re an idiot for moving away and going to an out-of-state school and taking on all of this debt. But if you’re going to do it anyway (and I know you will because you’re stubborn and really don’t want to live in the Midwest anymore), at least major in something that will get you a nice, cushy job when you graduate.”

    When I think about all of the poor decisions I made in college because of how mixed up my priorities were, I would go back and shake myself, hard. Maybe even slap myself around a little bit. Since time travel is (at least for me) impossible, I am going to go to have to forgive myself for being young and stupid and try to move on with my life. There might even be parts of that stupidity that I can’t see the value of now but will be grateful for in the future.

    As for what I’m going to do next? Well, first, I’m going to start with what I want my life to look like. I want to be able to write a lot, to travel, to do martial arts, to learn different languages, to read, to learn to dance, to fall in love, to afford an apartment on my own, to basically do whatever I want when I want without having to explain myself to anyone or worry about money. To have that life probably means being a successful author. In order to be a successful author, I need to write as much as possible. In order to write as much as possible, I need a job that let’s me keep relatively normal hours so I’m not exhausted all of the time and I can see my friends.

    I have a bad habit of wanting to have everything and wanting to have it now. I want to be good at violin, but I can’t be good at violin in a couple of years when I’ve established myself in my career and actually have time to practice, I need to be good at it now. I know this is utterly stupid, but I have this feeling that if I don’t accomplish all of these things while I’m still young and hot, I won’t be able to properly enjoy them. Maybe it’s because of society or because I’ve read too many romance novels about hot successful people. Who knows. Either way, I have to snap out of it.

    Right now, my only two priorities are going to be finding a job that pays well, and writing. I will also allow myself to spend my time on learning to cook new recipes because I just got a bunch of new vegan cookbooks and a Ninja instant pot/slow-cooker/air-fryer/dehydrator/yogurt-maker that I need to take out for a spin. Martial arts can stay too, because I know I’ll go crazy without it. Learning to draw well, getting better at French and Japanese, practicing violin more–all of it can wait until I no longer feel like my life is falling apart.

    I just got a lead on a job from my friend Iya’s that seems promising, so I am going to try and apply for that and hope it gets me going in the right direction. I called out of work for tomorrow as well, just to be on the safe side, but I’m starting to feel better already.

    My advice (which should be taken with a grain of salt), to anyone who is going through a similar post-college, post-pandemic, post-service job crisis of faith, is to come up with a plan. Even if the plan is a bit half baked, just figure out what you need your day-to-day life to look like so that you’re not fucking miserable and then make a plan to get there. Treat that plan like your Bible/Koran/Torah/Communist Manifesto and follow it until it either works or something changes and you are forced to make a new plan. Whatever you do, don’t mope around aimlessly and don’t start questioning yourself in the middle of the plan. Believe that the plan will work. Until it does, at the very least, you can walk around in your current circumstances feeling smug because you’ve got a plan and you know you won’t be there for very long. Also, watch Struthless on YouTube. I swear those videos will help you.

    Now let’s see if I can follow my own advice.

    Thanks for reading.

    XX Scarlett

  • On Productivity

    Today is my one day off all week. It is nearly noon. What have I managed to do? Almost nothing. I got home late last night after walking around the cute Brooklyn neighborhood where I work with Iya, one of my friends from college. I showered, hung up the pile of damp laundry I’d put on my arm chair before I left, and immediately fell asleep.

    Somehow, I woke up naturally before 7:30am (when my alarm was set). When this happened, I should have immediately jumped out of bed and raced to get my to do list done. Instead, I laid around in bed for another half hour or so. Once I finally did get out of bed, I ended up flipping through the new vegan cookbooks I ordered on Amazon (I know, I’m a sellout) and crying because one of the chefs’ childhood cooking origin stories involved a dying family member.

    In my defense, I woke up to a violent thunderstorm complete with lightning that wasn’t even a full ‘one one thousand’ apart from the thunder. When there’s a thunderstorm, it feels sacreligious to do anything other than sit and read or write or draw. That’s where the cookbooks came in.

    As the thunderstorm ended, I entertained vivid fantasies of all the things I might accomplish today. I could go to H Mart and get all of the pantry staples the Korean cookbook told me I needed. I could go to a cute coffee shop (one I don’t work at) and get a lot of writing done, maybe finally file my taxes which are more than five months over due. I could call my doctor’s office and finally set up appointments to deal with the myriad of things that are wrong with me. I could actually apply for some fucking jobs.

    I haven’t done any of those things yet (except the writing, because this is technically writing) and I find it unlikely that I will. When the thunderstorm ended, I took a break from reading and did all of the dishes in the sink regardless of if they belonged to me or my roommates. I even scooped out all of the disgusting slop left over at the bottom of the sink with my bare hands and put it in the compost bag I keep in the freezer. Pretty commendable stuff, I think.

    I also made myself two sandwhiches. The process was interrupted by a brief trip to the store with my roommate, A, because she needed bananas and she convinced me it was better to go with her to buy some fake meat from the grocery store than to eat a sad sandwhich with only raw vegetables on it. It turned out to be a fortiuitous decison because the vegan lunch meat, vegan cream cheese, and vegan cheese slices were all on sale.

    My sandwhiches were delicious. They each had three slices of black pepper chicken flavored fake lunchmeat folded in half, overripe sliced tomato, sliced avocado, and a handful of arugula squished down. The bread was seeded, whole grain bread from Trader Joe’s, and I slathered each slice with a thick coat of vegan mayonaise. Liss and I talked about the perils of trying to force yourself to date someone you’re not attracted to while she ate her oatmeal (with bananas, of course) and I ate my sandwhiches.

    Now, I’m writing this and, although this does give me a bolstering feeling of accomplishment, it isn’t enough for me to feel productive. I wouldn’t trade Liss’s conversation or my sandwhich for an hour spent on job applications, but I still can’t shake the feeling of existential dread that creeps up on me every time I have a day off.

    On a normal work day, I wake up at 4:30am or 5:00am depending on how motivated I am to have some semblance of a morning routine and I work until around 12:30pm. By this time every other day except Thursdays (today) I have already completed a full day’s work. Anything I do after is just a bonus. Pulling shots and pouring milky white hearts into lattes isn’t exactly my life’s passion, but at least I’m making money.

    Sitting around at home doing nothing but letting waves of anxiety wash over me doesn’t pay the bills and it certainly doesn’t do anything to get rid of my crippling student loan debt.

    There was a time that I had the energy and joie de vivre to keep a strict schedule. I used to wake up extra early to do yoga, meditate, make breakfast, and indulge in a multi-step skin care routine all before leaving for work at 5:30am. I used to write in my journal every single night and write out an extensive to do list for the next day. Now, it’s all I can do to drag myself to work when I need to and arrange just enough social outings to maintain my friendships.

    Maybe this year has just been too much for me. Over the course of three wishy-washy months, my ex ‘best friend’ (I don’t really believe in labeling friendships, but she used to call herself that, so there it is)/roommate S, slowly decided to throw our friendship away and then move in with the shitty boyfriend who (I think) cheated on her. I was sexually assaulted by an asshole named Josh (yes, that’s his real name; he’s lucky I don’t include his last name as well). My good friend Ash is moving out of the city at the end of the summer. I am feeling crazier by the second. Maybe I’m just depressed.

    The productivity cult would say I just need to buck up, take a cold shower in the morning, and stop masturbating. I’ve tried both of those things and the problem is that I really hate cold showers and I really love masturbating. None of those gimmicky self-help strategies ever stick anyways.

    Honestly, I think the real solution is this blog. So much of life has trained me to think that the little things in life don’t matter. My mom’s inability to sit down and watch a movie without needing to work on her computer or crochet something or organize a cabinet. YouTube’s productivity gurus explaining how to optimize every single second of your life. No amount of multitasking and optimizing is going to save me from being miserable.

    With this blog, I’m hoping that I can make all of the little things matter again. I can write about my sandwich and the nice conversation I had with my roommate and instead of just letting those things disappear after they happen, I can give them to the internet. There’s still something unhealthy in the idea that, in order for me to be at peace with the ‘non-productive’ things I do, I need to turn them into some kind of product. However, I think that, of all the ways that you can commodify your life (Instagram posts, TikToks, etc.), an anonymous blog post is the least of the evils. You can’t see me and you don’t know who I am, so there’s no point in faking anything. All I really want is to feel like the little things I do are important. If this is how I make that happen, so be it.

    Of course, this blog isn’t going to magically give me a career and help me find the love of my life (enemies to lovers slow burn preferred), so I still have to work on some more practical strategies. I’m not going to stop masturbating anytime soon, but I am going to try a few other strategies that I think might help me not be such a depressed lump all the time.

    Here are the strategies:

    1. Stop bringing my phone to bed and looking at it right before I sleep. It’s honestly embarrassing that I still do this. I am not a teenager any more.
    2. Read a book in bed before I go to sleep since I am no longer allowed to look at my phone.
    3. Journal and make a to do list before I get in bed. Journaling helps me get all of the garbage out of my brain and I have a way, way higher chance of doing something the next day if I explicitly write down that I want to do it the night before. If I try to do this while I am in bed, I will just fall asleep.
    4. Set a timer for tasks, especially the ones I don’t want to do. I think what usually makes me not do shit is my concept of how long it’s going to take me. Often, once I start a task (like applying for jobs) I’ll get sucked into it and end up going for like five hours. That makes me feel like spending that amount of time on it is inevitable. If I set a timer and promise myself I’ll stop when the timer goes off, I won’t feel like
    5. Schedule specific times where I am just allowed to enjoy things regardless of how productive they are. Maybe I shouldn’t have to schedule in enjoyment, but scheduled enjoyment is better than no enjoyment.
    6. Try to stop being so goddamn hard on myself all the time

    So, there’s my list. I’ll do a part two at some point to let everyone know how it’s going. I’m actually writing this last paragraph on Friday morning because I got sidetracked last night by a phone call from Ash. She told me to basically chill the fuck out and think about going home for a little while. I’ll consider it.

    Thanks for reading.

    XX Scarlett

  • On Me

    Thanks for deciding to read what is certainly going to be a shit show of a blog. Hopefully, this will all get better soon. Before I get into the really juicy bits of why I’ve decided to try to romanticize my life to a bunch of strangers on the internet, I have a confession to make: Scarlett Sharpe is not my real name. I’m not going to tell you what my real name is, I just want you to know that it isn’t Scarlett Sharpe.

    Can you blame me for wanting to keep my identity a secret? I write erotica and I don’t make very much money doing it (yet). I’m in my mid-twenties and I have a college degree, but I’m working as a barista. To be fair, my degree is basically in tree hugging and the economy sucks right now, but it’s still hard not to feel like a loser.

    Sometimes, I think I should cut my losses and get out of New York before the rent increases suck me dry, but every time I go to a different city or visit my family in an unspecified location in the Midwest, I just feel like there’s something missing. Nowhere else feels as real to me as New York.

    On paper, it’s incredibly stupid. I’m drowning in student loan debt. I could be working at a coffee shop while living with my parents and saving money. I could be dicking around trying to be a writer (or find a career that can support my writing) with a gigantic cushy safety net underneath me. I’m incredibly lucky to even have that option available to me and here I am shitting all over it. There must be something wrong with me.

    Honestly, I know what’s wrong with me. New York is what’s wrong with me. I love the subway; I love the men peeing onto the street in broad daylight; I love the construction workers I see on my walk to work at 5:30 in the morning; I love the rats that run over my boots when I stumble home from the bar in the middle of the night; I love sparring with the weirdos in my amateur boxing group. I know I’m just a dumb (dirty) blond transplant from the Midwest with no real claim on this place, but I can’t bear to leave it.

    I could complain about these things to people I know, but most of my complaints would come across as embarrassingly out of touch considering how many people have it so much worse than me and are still somehow managing to make more responsible decisions. Since I want to keep my friends and stay in my co-workers’ good graces, I am going to document my *struggles* and record my inner monologues here, where they can be found by other burnt-out wannabe intellectuals and Red Scare podcast listeners.

    Right now, my most pressing issue is my utter lack of progress towards any semblance of a stable career. I’ve had my living situation explode in my face at least a few times a year since I’ve begun living in New York and although my current roommates are lovely, I’ve decided that living alone is what I need to not feel like my life might fall apart at any moment. Every cell in my body threatens to mutate when confronted with the possibility of living the corporate lifestyle, but it’s looking like I’m going to have to sell out if I want to afford an apartment on my own. Right now, I’m manically applying for nebulous consulting jobs while trying to convince myself that if I pull up my business girl pants for just a couple of years, I can spend the rest of my life being a frivolous bohemian.

    The second most pressing issue in my life is the love triangle I’ve accidentally wandered into. This triangle involves two customers at work, one of whom is two years older than me, the other of whom is twenty (ish) years older than me. I’ve spent a long time focusing on the stuff going on in my head and not the stuff going on in front of my face, so it’s been a while since I’ve truly dated. My goal right now is to keep things casual with as many people as I feel like keeping things casual with and wait to do anything more serious until I can choose the right person from my roster. I’m really not trying to be some kind of female manipulator. I’m just trying to be smart about dating, so I don’t end up giving my heart to someone who’s going to rip it out and nail it to their wall.

    All the potential pathways I have open to me in the form of career options and romantic prospects have been leaving me paralyzed with indecision. I want to try everything, but I know I can’t have it all forever. What I’ve realized is that I have opposite trajectories for my career and dating life. With my career, I need to just fucking choose something and stick with it. What I choose doesn’t really matter; I just need to stick with it and I’ll end up with way more options and freedom later (aka, when I have money). In my romantic life, I don’t need to choose or commit to anything. In fact, I actually need to avoid committing for a while so that I can make an educated decision about who I want to spend the rest of my life with.

    In the background of all of this white-collar angst, I’m still going to be trying my best to make it as a writer and jack of all trades style artist, so I’m going to dump all of that stuff on this blog. If you’re interested in hearing about my love life (which is distinctly less exciting than any of the erotic stories I’ve written), and hearing my thoughts on stuff I may or may not be qualified to talk about, please follow along. Hopefully, I’ll have some art to upload soon for those of you who aren’t a fan of long-winded blog posts.

    Thanks for reading.

    XX Scarlett