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Feel the impulse to speak in monologue stronger than that to write these couple of days. Wanted to just speak and have someone transcribe my speech - we have an AI tool for that at work, which I realized is garbage (pretty sure it's the accent effect too, it probably works much better in the states).

No one was in the office today so it was driving me mad to have to work normal hours in a claustrophobic environment (no open window facing the outside too), had a friend swing by the office after lunch and she could understand my frustration... I guess I prided myself on being one who keeps her complaints to a minimum and only when it's absolutely necessary but now I think I just haven't had time to properly digest the medium-long term implication...like a lot of things I can tolerate very well in short term but it's silently eating me alive when left longer, and I don't realize what a fool of myself I'm making. I'd like to think my awareness/realization comes faster though, nowadays.

So I started talking to myself, also started singing to one of my songs on spotify and then realized that there were three people in the room directly adjacent to me, thought oh. They could definitely hear me...

So wrt monologues I started listening to Brad Listi's otherppl podcast again and holyhell is it brilliant. I feel like...a lot of podcasts that people like seem so tedious to me, like those crime or "how things work/happen" podcasts but literature podcasts feel very refreshing. Not necessarily a podcast where you read off lit works but more like those in an "interview" format, and the people he interviews, these authors...sound sooo relatable. I don't even read their works lol.

I discovered Lynne Tillman this way and enjoyed one of her books, tried to pick up another book but there's just too many references I don't get so I had to put that on hold for now. That's the thing right, you like a certain author/artist's work/thinking but it's based on/solely centers around other artists' certain works so it feels like double work, like you have to know/read/watch the original work they're talking about in order to get some context and sometimes you can't be bothered, you're more interested in the analysis rather than the actual work itself...Is it a cardinal sin to just look at the analysis? I have a tendency to do this and try to stop it, either because I realize I can't reap the full merits of the analysis (I'll always miss out on something, even if I finish & thoroughly enjoy the analysis, it's almost like an inside joke that is still funny to an outsider - but still not as funny as it is to someone who has context), or it's just too much, I'm losing it, I don't know what she's talking about anymore lol.

Anyway today I was finishing the episode with Azareen van der vliet Oolomi (Brad: your name sounds like...you're just destined for greatness) when I slipped into heaven aka ultrasmooth bus-on-the-highway slumber, and woke up not realizing the next ep with Elif Batuman had already been playing (why do authors all sound so buttery on air???). Anyway, there's this part whereby they were talking about the shame that stems from when you start on a project/a book and then slowly...when you finish, the shame almost dissipates because the beginning, the base of the form seems so different from who you are now, eg when you write about the dynamic between a student and a professor, you start out by relating more with the student, the frustration at the professor who seems to...not be able to live up to the student's expectation. As years go on....draft after draft...you start relating with the professor more, so in the newer drafts you tone down the professor's character (comparison between 24yo Elif vs 38yo Elif - not sure if it's to scale, time-wise, wrt The Idiot). I think this is a very interesting observation...

But then Brad put the icing on top, saying something along the line of "when you revisit your old text you start realizing... oh my god, the stuff I'm preoccupied with...were there. It's almost like there's a red thread. The stuff I was confused about then, the stuff I'm confused about now." Relate with this 1000%, when I read my old text I'm like dude. I've always been like this! In a different format! I was like what - 15 and was thinking about love like this? I thought I only started my 'obsession' with love 3 years ago! Oh well, anyway I thought it was a very good observation and I liked it a lot, there's still more but I'm gonna stop and sleep for now