emily > Recent Status Updates

“I wrote: ‘the real benefit of travel is that you encounter the comforting ordinariness of everyone else.”

I always imagined my choice of husband would be like my travel-writing, unusual, but not so much as to alienate my parents. Somebody foreign, with poetry in his soul. Not a successful Igbo engineer who still polished his shoes with kiwi polish that everybody’s father in Nigeria had used. Where did he even buy the tin?”

“If I said he beat me, or he’s not actually divorced, or he is seeing another woman, Aunty Jane would understand. Real meaty reasons, with sympathy poured on me, and opprobrium on him. But she would never understand the truth, that I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.”

“My father was a shrewd and cautious man, but because there was a part of him that dreamed, he knew how to let others dream.”

“Yet New York City often featured in my imagined lives, maybe because it is the city that is supposed to feature in imagined lives. Paris featured too, another city I do not care for. Paris wears its badge of specialness too heavily, and therefore gracelessly;”

putting a tab for every mention of ingrown toenails

taking!! turns!!

In response to a journalist who asked him to "summarize himself in a nutshell," John Cage once said, "Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in." He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still, he urges out of it… We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

Perfect

I’ve literally found my new obsession HOLY

I don’t want any more. I want more.

Five stars off the bat HOLY COW

“But what good is a soul, really?” she muses, as if it’s the first time she’s stopped to wonder. As if it’s not the question that plagued her that first night, that still plagues her after all these years. “It lives in the mind. A piece you cannot see or touch. A prize you are told to shield for a time you cannot know. Easy enough to part with something so abstract when the alternative is freedom.

“But I am happy here,”
You will be happy there
as well,” she said. “Do you know why?”
Because you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And
who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.”
“And barring that,” she went on, “think of all the stories you’ll have to tell
when you get back. After all, there is no art without life to inspire it.”

now we are rolling!! Alice is so slow, but Sabine, and maybe Charlotte, are so interesting,,, i feel we are close

being offended at being called dead (as a vampire) OK HILARIOUS I'LL GIVE YOU THAT

Lowkey trudging thru

the third-person is an adjustment!

Very natural dialogue. Once again I wonder where this is going, though I liked the follow through from the hot tub convo. I miss the vibe of the balcony conversation, more.

no wonder she can’t finish her Jane Eyre dissertation and no wonder she can’t sit through Mrs Dalloway !! I am enjoying!!

Whirlwind.

Funny dialogue but where is this going??

Lily idk if you’ve seen Babygirl but I feel this could’ve been an alternative timeline for Nicole Kidman

"“This entire time I’ve known you, you haven’t been fully smiling?”" yikes worse than betrayal

"the only item in her closet she can honestly say she still
loves, probably because it was the one thing she had never worn." excellent foreshadowing i expect. i am enjoying this

off to an impressive start with the mrs dalloway quote. hmm yes yes

"I mean absolutely against your will, but until we understand as a population the responsibilities that our ancestors took on in signing te Tiriti and the importance of right relationships between Maori and non-Māori, that sort of personal crossover always runs the risk of ultimately breaking down into a melding of culture that represents a continuation of the loss imposed by colonisation