february 2026
events: stephen’s birthday ² , third space crush show, playboy manbaby show ³, weekend of beautiful chaos with drag ball (at work) then treehouse girls’s sleepover then paddy on the binge.
thought themes: illusion of past stability ¹
soundtrack: thunderhead by kinji, a couple harumi hosono albums, petal rock black by willow ⁴
so the second version happened with my room, see
because at first (january 2025 when I moved in) it was just a matter of looking for furniture and such, so of course it was going to be messy. then that lasted a little too long and i was busy in various ways throughout spring. then at the beginning of summer i took a bunch of stuff up from irvine and it all floated around for too long, and then when my art show grind ramped up naturally it was going to be a bit of a nightmare in there, and then right after my art show I swapped out my old centerpiece rolltop desk for one with zero dressers, so there was a bunch of miscellaneous shit floating around until I caved and bought some storage solutions, but even that didn’t rehome everything and then around the holidays i took a huge final irvine haul up and everything was just moving from box to box to box all the time.
but the point of this is not any of that (and if there was a spoiler-free way to spoil that at the beginning and save you the trouble of reading it while preserving the cumulative and exhausting vibe of all my tiny burdens, i would have opted for it, but instead i’ll just say: hah, gotcha!). the point of this is that every phase was a different version of “this isn’t the norm because of xyz,” and i used those excuses to avoid considering if there was an underlying reason i was no longer keeping a clean room.
so after some thinking i came to the conclusion (spoiler: this is only important to me) that my room is just smaller now and i have too much stuff. then i came to the conclusion that i like this room and don’t want to move so if i want to continue to identify as someone who keeps a clean room i just have to do a lot better. so i started doing better. voila.
² stephen, if you are reading this, your party was genius. if you are neither stephen nor an attendee that night, the reason for this is that it was an evening of group storytelling. party hack make a bunch of really good and reflective story prompts and then sit all your friends down in a circle and make them use the prompts. kind of a recall challenge for me though tbh.
³ playboy manbaby and diesel dudes are both bands pushing boundaries in parallel but different ways. diesel dudes was such an over-the-top gross performance of masculinity, but the kind of masculinity that no one finds attractive? so viewers can do what they will with that. i like anything freaky and fun and big. it reminds me that rules are fake.
playboy manbaby was tapping into a very current and ironic and campy vibe that’s somewhere between protest and gleeful jesterish amoral acceptance. but above all i think their music and performance style provides a certain relief in just openly venting about capitalism and how fucked we are while making it fun. a lot of their songs were based around one catchy/clever line, and despite there being plenty of important content between the earwormy parts too, it got me thinking about how art really only has to serve as a jumping off point. it’s more important and often more meaningful to provoke thought (ideally with some pointers in the right direction) than it is to deliver a complete opinion package for someone to simply accept or deny.