...But it was a beginning
In pursuit of the fangirl sob
Wild Fox (“Foxy”) Prances Through Snow to Hear a Banjo Tune!
The irreverence of completion, and an agitated recovery
The title of my diary entry after I finished reading The Wheel of Time:
It is finished.
An excerpt from the next morning’s entry:
it was a very uneasy sleep, and i woke up at 5 and couldn’t fall asleep for an hour or so; i watched the sunrise, unwillingly.
One day later:
trying to distract myself by doing boring ass homework... flashes of a series i read once–it took me two years–keep coming back to me…
When my eyes very delicately flutter open every morning, the first thing I see is a Vampire Diaries poster. It can be unnerving to wake up staring at four sexy vampires, especially considering I despised the ending of the show, but for 8 months I’d persevered. The morning after finishing The Wheel of Time, however, I felt more than unnerved. I felt dirty. The mere ownership of this TV poster was a real insult to the grandiosity of The Wheel of Time. In a daze, I took the poster down.
After this wall-baring, I was surprised to find myself unable to mark the 14-volume series as complete on my various book-logging websites. It felt irreverent to the characters and their tribulations. I’m going to Mark-as-Complete a series that allowed me escapism like I haven’t felt in years, and then, what, the gamification robot of Goodreads excitedly tells me I’m one book closer to my yearly goal? Pfaw!
Fine, I log the book. Now, I must figure out where to put this emptiness. I search “wheel of time” on Etsy; I scroll through the sub on Reddit; I indulge in the offerings of DeviantArt; I fail to resist the urge to look up fanfiction; I barely resist the urge to write it. For a pathetic moment, I even flounder on social media, desperate for someone to relate.
I lay on my stomach, in whimsical agony, staring at a space on my wall where vampires used to loom over me, and feel something oddly familiar well up in my chest. Oh, yes, there it is. I am about to commence the fangirl cry—nay, the fangirl sob. Within seconds, I am overtaken by a cry so visceral, so cathartic, so 2013, I have no choice but to dry heave.
I am brutally reminded it is not passion we are missing as adults, but naive obsession, which begets low-stake, high-velocity tears. To answer your question—no, I wouldn’t recommend this series. It’s pretty sexist.
A single-instrument album, and what that means for autumn
SK Kakraba’s Songs of Paapieye (2015) is an album made with a single instrument that is traditionally played at funerals: the Ghanaian gyil, which is a “...wooden xylophone, with generally 14 keys and a range that spans almost three octaves. The instrument’s unique buzzing sound is created with a system of calabash gourd resonators placed under the wooden slats; the gourds have holes in them, which are filled with spiders’ egg sacs…”
Kakraba makes his own gyil, which requires wood from different trees found only in Ghana’s forests. The more you know about the beauty of the gyil, the more this album resonates. Learn about it here!
Frantic and meaningful, Songs of Paapieye has held my hand as I, with trepidation, slip into autumn. There’s an unease that comes with drastic changes in weather, I think, and the unpredictability of rhythm in Songs of Paapieye accompanies—and lessens the anxiety of—this palpable passage of time.
Like a slat of the gyil vibrates after a hit, leaves shudder after obediently falling to the ground. Polyrhythmic drops of rain, random rushes and hushes of wind, ebbing birdsong, a sun imminent and gone—all reflected in Songs of Paapieye.
From SK Kakraba in an interview: “[The gyil] is very serious in our culture. If someone passes away and no one can play it, the funeral can’t happen.”
I archive, therefore I am
I am addicted to online archives of my personal interests. It’s the hot new form of hoarding, and I’ve made myself sick with an excess of accounts: Twitter, Instagram, Substack, my portfolio, my Cargo site where I upload the albums I’m listening to, Rate Your Music, Goodreads, StoryGraph, and probably more.
For me, at least, the endless online logging of things—here a deep cut ambient album, there a classic Egyptian novel—is just hoarding. I am needlessly cluttering digital space with “I read books” and “I listen to music” under the guise of introspection, community, and self-expression. I am not leaving the earth the way I found it; I am leaving for the earth a jumbled, worthless mess of (esoteric!) digital waste, not to mention some condemning and embarrassing evidence of vanity.
It’s not exactly that I want to be seen consuming these things—I have two followers on Rate Your Music and one on StoryGraph. I’m practically invisible. Instead, my obsessive archival is a form of hoarding because I need to see my past consumptions in order to have an up-to-date identity. It’s like refusing to throw away a faulty pair of earphones, just in case. My collections feed the baseless hope that one day someone might ask, “What’s every album you listened to in December 2020?” and I will say, “Hold on, I have them right here,” and I will rummage through my online presences and I will pull up those albums and that person will also fall in love with me.
Without meaning to, I force visibility on these archives as if they’re emperor penguins at a zoo in Dallas, Texas. They don’t belong, and they would be happier where they did: in Antarctica, not a glass enclosure; in my journal, not a web browser. When the penguin goes on display in the humid subtropics of Dallas, its purpose shifts from “Be alive” to “Be admired.” The same can be said about the music I listen to and the books I read.
When I shove these songs, poems, and sometimes thoughts into a corner of the Internet, I foster even less discussion and fellowship than if I had just brought them up with friends.
Sometimes, before I go to a “We totally need to catch up!” dinner with a casual friend, I make a list of things we can talk about, and I memorize it. In an effort to be above things I have always been below, maybe I will start doing this with my, like, normal friends, and the memorized list will consist of things I usually log on Rate Your Music or StoryGraph. Key word: maybe!