Excerpts

I felt that it might be an interesting idea to share some of my unpublished diary entries from the past few months. I do find it hard to stay consistent but there is something a little intoxicating about the detail. The exactness of the day, hour and minute. So, please, enjoy!

23/1/25 5:18pm

A constellation of acne has bloomed across the left side of my face - morning sweats, maybe? I changed my sheets but to no avail. Maybe I am purging something that has been left festering for years, maybe this is a New Years Resolution, a rebirth. 

I’ve been thinking about that period of time at 3pm where you can see the faint blush and glimmer of the moon in the sky. Wrapped in atmospheric tulle of blue, soft and lustrous among the parading clouds. That’s how I feel about M. Part of me wishes I met him earlier, and then another part of me thinks about him like one thinks about an unassuming coin in the middle of the street. Luck. Good timing. This reminds me of something important. I need to go ahead and redraft his letter, and spend a good $20 securing a tracking number, too. I can’t believe the U.S. postal system is this pathetic. But then again, divine intervention could be real,  and maybe my words needed a rework. Maybe I needed to marinate in it.

24.1.25 8:04pm

Laid in bed for a bit. Thought about M. Thought about the feeling of sand falling through my hands. Thought about the weather difference. It never really gets cold in Florida, at least not as cold as other areas, so I wonder if the people who live there have a sense of liminality about the whole thing. Almost-coldness. Maybe the necessary twin to people in the depths of Norway wishing for an almost-warmness.

26/1/25 2:09pm

Felt strange to walk around, literally with a weight off my shoulders. It felt right. I unbuttoned my striped, white linen shirt and felt the late summer breeze on my skin. Felt the blood rush to my cheeks and ears, felt sweat precipitate from my forehead. Walked up. Jogged back as fast as I could. Got my ankle stuck in a thin strand of metal fencing. Thought about garottes. Realised it wasn’t one. Kept jogging.

1.2.25 7:21pm

Thinking about friends is a weird thing for me. Like, I know people but I don’t know people. It bothers me a little bit. There are only a handful of people (maybe around 3) that I have genuinely connected to in my whole life, and so this means that 99.9999% of the population is not fitting these really narrow standards I have set for ‘friends’. Well, it isn’t as though I set the standards, it is more like my brain is wired in a way that doesn’t have a sturdy Bluetooth connection - I’ve got like, TEMU brain. Like a strange knockoff of bundles of human neurons.

13.2.25 10:23pm (Melbourne time)

Supernormal is beautiful and not like anything I have witnessed in Perth before. I am seated at a bar, between two men, one reading quietly on a Kindle and another ordering rounds of herb butter scallops while nursing a dirty martini. Throughout the evening, I got the chance to speak to both of them. The scallop lover, Crispin, is a hospitality worker in Melbourne who I believe tends a bar, or at least, he recommended what he deemed to be ‘his bar’. We spoke about a variety of things, from which cafes are best in Perth, to whether print is dead, and all about the ups and downs of hospitality and psychology research, in their uniquely contrasting ways. The conversation then flows into an ethical discussion about Ozempic and pharmaceutical advertising in general, and it all goes up from there.

14.2.25 sort of (10pm perth, 1am melb. Yes I am cheating)

The soft glow of neon lights, small glimpses of chefs grabbing at utensils and paper, waiters and waitresses roaming around like Roombas on a carpet, gentle red tulle draped around the private seating areas. I have never felt better about waiting. Eventually I got a drinks menu, and my waitress introduced herself. I immediately had a question. “Sorry, but what is ‘white coffee’?” I rightfullly asked. She smiled and paused for a second, “Well, it’s just a coffee with some sort of milk. You see, all these places have different ways of complicating it, but we decided to just differentiate into black and white”. So, coffee segregation, I thought. A strange and reductive way of looking at my beautiful Java especially in a coffee-obsessed place such as Melbourne. I ordered a pot of Genmaicha instead.

I then, with more bravado than I had ever heard from my voice in my life, ordered an array of dishes. Kingfish sashimi, seaweed salted fries, and a beautiful dessert that was plated as if a heavenly goddess had to arrange a garden, or maybe like how an artist maps out his canvas before laying on paint. Simply beautiful. And very rich, too. I think I am going to start a post or article about my culinary experiences here, since I could go on forever, but this is a diary entry, so I would rather keep it simple, stupid. Anyway, the waitress comes back and I ask for the drink menu again because Genmaicha is gone, and wasn’t cutting it. Not for dessert. So I get a beautiful, umami matcha latte - also, everything was served in the most beautiful dinnerware and teaware! I couldn’t believe it. I mean, everything in this restaurant was thought out probably a million times, from the decor, to the plating, even to the personalities of the waiters and waitresses, bantering with me even when I probably should’ve just been direct and decisive with the way I approached the food. Once or twice, I was tempted to get some Japanese whisky, but decided against it. Maybe back home I’d get away with that, but in an unfamiliar city, I would rather not. And I already had sparkling wine earlier, so I try not to have too much alcohol in my system at once.

7.5.25 9:27pm

Right now I’m jumping back into some Japanese ambient music, followed by a bit of Portuguese bossa nova and some of the classical music I have on repeat as well. I am finding other music a little too overwhelming for the time being. Like my brain is reforming itself and understanding silence and craving it more and more. The strange percussive triangle and jungle sounds are okay, though. I can imagine myself as a small red panda walking up a tree like a fuzzy model on a catwalk, watching the forest beneath me and all the happenings. Maybe a marten is running and scuttling by, mama birds are tending to their babies in their nest, snow leopards walking down from the snowy mountains. All that’s on my mind is people-watching, getting enough bamboo to fill my tummy, and looking for a potential mate. But other than that, the red panda has a relatively solitary life. A bit like me.