Home Alone Snow Days 2/15/2021-2/21/2021

"snow falls on old memory" - hisperic

On the week of February 15th, 2021 I was 23 years old living with my parents in my childhood home in Illinois. My parents were out of town together on a Valentine's Day trip, so I was the only human in our four bedroom suburb house because both my sisters were away at college. It felt weird sleeping in my own bedroom because the big house was so empty, so I slept in the living room on the couch. The living room is where our two cats hang out when they want to be social, because they energetically sense that it’s the center of the house. I spent all my time there so I could hang out with them more. I wasn’t leaving the house because all I had to do during the day was my pandemic era work-from-home job and it was also really cold outside so there wasn’t much to do. So it was nice to have other bodies next to me.

A big snowstorm hit in the middle of the week and it was too much emotional labor for me to shovel the driveway so I just smashed my car through the unshoveled snow in the driveway whenever I needed to park. Eventually I shoveled, once the weather warmed and the snow melted a tiny bit. Mostly I was doing it so Mom wouldn’t be mad at me for leaving snow there when she got home.

Cryptocurrency prices were going up a lot during this week so I listened to rap music about making money on the bluetooth speaker in the living room and felt important. Most of my tweets from this week are cryptocurrency takes and they’re pretty bad. But here are some of the tweets that I think are better, and show what I was thinking about at the time.

80-10-10 was a trendy vegan diet type in 2017. “Mastery of space” is a phrase used in Bronze Age Pervert’s book Bronze Age Mindset, where he talks about physical domination of a space as the primary goal of organisms, more than reproduction, and sometimes it was used on Twitter as a phrase to talk about how viscerally pleasurable it is to be the one person in charge of a physical space.

God eventually did set me free of my parents’ house, although I think God would tell me I set myself free, and that’s probably true.

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this week now. It’s hot in New York City so it’s nice to think about the cold. My cats are becoming very old and may not be around forever. I miss them because they can’t visit me like my parents can, and they can’t understand the terms of the visits I pay to them. I’m also thinking back fondly on the pandemic work-from-home time, because I felt better when I didn’t have to be in an office quite so much.

The main thing that I feel looking back on my camera roll and my tweets from this week is that they’re still from same person I am now, just at a different moment, in a different situation. I get a little sad missing the problems I had then because they feel simple now, but they felt complicated then.

On November 30th 2023 when I moved out of my midwest apartment to my current apartment in New York City I tweeted:

just locked my apartment for the last time and i'm sad. the passage of time is so retarded, i want to exist in every moment i've ever lived forever, i want to meander through the fourth dimension like i'm hiking a familiar trail

and I guess that’s how I feel right now. Sorry for the r-slur but I was crying when I typed that originally and I’m crying a bit right now. I don’t want to return to the past, but I don’t think I ever fully wanted to leave it in the first place. I think I could exist in any moment from my past forever, and so sometimes I really miss particular moments. It’s nice that I have been writing small things down for so long because small moments are easier to remember, but writing doesn’t capture everything.