hello new world

the day is april 17th, 2025. a year ago, i was busy reading franz kafka's "amerika". i got to around 50 pages before the week-long loan was over. a painfully slow pace, i know. why so few? i'd say i have lots of trouble reading. sometimes i get ahead of myself and not process what i just glanced over. sometimes i need to read a paragraph out loud more than thrice before i can begin to comprehend it. sitting down and attempting to tune my surroundings out makes me feel sleepy. i've wasted many hours fighting through it, repeating the same sentence over and over. yet, i still own many books. so many, in fact, i fear i'm falling into excess. it's not that the money i'm spending is interfering with other necessities, or that they're occupying too much space. it's just that i'm not reading them. i recently bought a cheap pair of non-prescript glasses in hopes that they would take the distractions on my field of view away. i failed. there needs to be change.

despite not being old enough to vote (as of the moment i'm typing this), i feel like i've seen a lot of things. i remember an internet where, when thinking of ai-powered chatbots, cleverbot would pop-up inside certain people's minds. 2016 was the year where my grasp on the english language became strong enough to navigate the internet and understand most of what i was seeing (if you uttered a word as simple as "clover", you'd have me scratching my head in confusion, though). before that, the most i could do was mumble my way through the living tombstone's iconic fnaf song, mandopony's "survive the night" or maroon 5's "animal". that's just how it was for me.

the day i wore mascara for the first time, i told no one. i woke up earlier than usual to apply it. on the drive to school, my mom quickly noticed. she said i reminded her of robert smith and that her favorite song written by him is "fascination street". the next day, she bought me an eyelash curler. my parents met around 2001-2002, not so sure, after both of them applied for the same pyramid scheme, wanting to see for themselves what it was all about. before that, my father worked at a toyshop, and my mother was dedicated solely to taking care of my stepsister. she sold her car and bought the apartment we all now live in from her sister. downtown is 20-30 minutes away from me.

i'm 3 months away from beginning my journey towards a mathematics degree. i hope that by that moment, i'm in better shape.