back up blog

Up he popped one morning on my commute, saying hi via an online dating app on the cracked screen of my iPhone. The chat was i nstantly quick and witty ; he didn’t shy away from rolling with the punches. (My punches.) I asked him if he could be any mythological creature what would he be, and he gave three reasons why he’d be a Chimera, and I didn’t know what a Chimera was, and I liked that I had to Google his answer to understand it. When I revealed my taste in music he said, “GOODBYE FOREVER.” Just like that, in all caps locks like he already knew the way to my heart was through excessive typed yelling. He took no shit, didn’t get put off by a girl saying, through delicious sub-text, penetrate my frontal cortex, big boy. He operated that way as standard, and it gave me a total boner. He introduced himself by telling me what he was reading. Told me he only listens to classical music. I spent a four-hour meeting at work pretending to use my phone to check emails in order to message him,...

I don’t subscribe to balance. I don’t believe in allocating 30 minutes a day to exercise, 20 minutes to meditation on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and a book a week (alternating between fiction and non-fiction). It’s not equilibrium maintenance to assign one night dancing til dawn a month, bi-weekly friend dates, and five portions of fruit and vegetables every day, all of which must be a different colour and preferably organic. It’s fucking dull. I’m full immersion: jumping in with both feet and swimming, inhaling, for as long as it feels right. Living and breathing the thing my brain wakes up with, the last thing on my mind before I drift off to sleep to dream it. I am that which excites me, Sylvan Tompkins said, and it is true. Single-minded obsession feels so painfully good. Prioritising, by definition, means focusing on only one thing, and so doing it well. For two and a half months my priority has been applications to graduate school , consuming every thought, every choice, e...