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- Milk Fed + New Animal + Post-Traumatic + Hospital + Greta & Valdin + Saturday blues.
Milk Fed + New Animal + Post-Traumatic + Hospital + Greta & Valdin + Saturday blues.
She's bleeding on a man's shorts and this is what she's thinking about? She literally went from realising she was bleeding and then straight into an internal monologue.
Grace Iderima
June 15, 2024
Regular Programming.
The title of this newsletter should be “I really need to take out these locs”, because that's what I've been saying every 5 minutes. Now that school is over (hip! hip! hip! hurray!), I can no longer use the “I don't have time to sit down for this hair” excuse.
At the end of this newsletter, I guess we'll find out if I ended up taking out the locs. Today's Tuesday (June 11), it's currently 7:35 AM, so the time starts now, but not really. I have to go to the hospital, I'm doing my IT at the school's teaching hospital, I have to go there for my deployment something something, so maybe when I come back?
I'm a little bit excited for this IT (Industrial Training), I get to have real experience in a hospital. Whenever I think of areas I want to specialise in pharmacy, hospital and community pharmacy are usually my last two options, I don't think future me would be excited about dealing with people everyday, but that's what this IT is for, right? I would never know if it's something I would enjoy, if I don't experience it first (?). I would be talking about it here anyway, so I guess we'll see.
7:43 PM. Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
Surprisingly, I started taking out the locs immediately after I came back. There's a lot you can achieve when you're angry and trying not to think about why you're angry, so you don't get more angry.
I finished a book and I'm more than halfway through the hair, I had to stop because my hands hurt. I have to finish it before the end of tomorrow though, so I don't go to the hospital with half hair on Thursday.
Recently, I realised that my first course of action when dealing with a problem is to run away from it and isolate myself. That's the very first thing I do, which sucks because a problem shared is actually a problem solved. Well, not solved solved, but two heads are better than one typa thing or it looks less than the way it is in your head when you share.
For example, when I finally talk about a problem, I realise that the whole time, I was just making a big deal out of nothing, which is exactly what happened to me recently.
I had spent more than a year thinking about a particular thing and how I was going to deal with it, only for me to finally share it with someone (someone who could help me) and it was like, done. Just like that. Like, I've been thinking about this thing for more than a year now, if I'm being really accurate, since April 2023, I've had sleepless nights and soaked my pillow because of this and it was just done. Of course, it's not solved now, but it's in the process, and it's so relieving. All because I talked and tried to do something about it by involving someone else.
Now, to the original thing I was talking about, when I'm upset, I don't talk to anyone, I don't even want anyone to talk to me, and I allow myself to keep thinking about what's bothering me, and I've realised that most of the time, it's really not that serious, but I still wonder why I do that.
6:43 PM. Wednesday, June 12, 2024.
I guess this newsletter doesn't have to be titled “I really need to take out these locs” anymore because I have successfully managed to take out these locs, wash my hair, comb it, and weave it. Pain.
I also found out while making my hair that I really don't enjoy the process. I hate making my hair, but I like having my hair made. The sitting for long hours and going through pain is really not for me. Right now, I'm going through a lot.
9:11 AM. Friday, June 14, 2024.
The intern here wasn't joking when she said there's no network in this place, there's no service at all on my MTN sim, just my Glo SIM, and I don't usually use that one, now, I'll have to read my books after all.
Anyways, let's backtrack a little bit, I started my IT (industrial training, if you aren't familiar) yesterday and my first rotation is the bulk store. It's where the drugs are kept, stored, and taken stock of. Basically, they're managed and made sure they're in good condition (not expired or damaged), before they're sent to the various departments in the hospital.
5:06 PM. Friday, June 14, 2024.
I literally sat down to write what I started above and I'm just continuing it now. I'm at home and apparently, it's an 8-4 job. Lmao, I didn't know that, I got to work by 9am today.
I was typing and then I got called to do something with invoices and receipt vouchers which took a lot of time because there was a lot of recording involved. I think I finished by past 2pm, and then something happened, and I literally went “omg, I miss my babe”. It's funny to me because one minute I was doing something else, and the next minute, that was what I was thinking about.
Anyhoo, I plugged in my phone for the remaining period I was there, so I couldn't do anything with it, and I find the registered pharmacist there a little intimidating, so I was trying to be so careful.
You know, after experiencing this whole thing for just two days, I'm beginning to think a corporate job is not so bad. I kinda like it. I used to be a huge work from home/freelancer/remote worker activist, but I think I'm ready to switch sides—as long as I only go to work 3 days in a week, I'm all about flexibility and time for myself, so I don't [redacted].
It's not so bad, I think. I don't know. I guess I'll really know at the end of the IT. I'll be rotated across each unit, so I'm looking forward to that, I'm honestly glad I started from here. Although, I fear I will lose the enthusiasm when school resumes (which is next week, btw. What a wicked world) and I have to attend my classes and do the IT side by side.
I have to prepare for a presentation at the hospital, I didn't know that was part of the job description. I have to read about two drugs, their mechanism of action, and compare them, basically, what I do in Pharmacology.
I keep wondering what it will be like having to do a presentation alongside people who have studied this course already. On the first day I started (which was yesterday, btw), I was telling the other IT student (she's from another school and she's been here longer) about how it's easy to feel intimidated and stupid because you don't know a lot of things.
Yes, I know I started there yesterday, but still. It's funny when people are calling the names of certain drugs and saying certain things and you have no idea what they're talking about and they're like “they have not taught you this one?”, it's almost like I feel ashamed that I'm still a student and well, I don't know. It's funny, but I guess it's part of the process.
Another funny thing that happened to me today was when I was talking to the other IT student, we'll call her ‘C’. She was playing songs from the ‘Wish’ Disney movie playlist and I liked it.
We started talking about songs and artists and I asked her about her favourite artists and she literally went “I don't have one that I'm a huge fan of, but I guess I'll say Taylor Swift”, I literally went “omg”, like she could have said any artists in this world, but she said Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift!
I know you might say Taylor Swift is popular and all, but you don't understand and you never will! I can't explain it.
She also loves reading books and watches vlogs on YouTube too, and the part where she said she watches vlogs was such a bonding moment because in my head, I was like, “if this girl says [redacted], I'll stop talking to her this instant”, but turns out, we feel a similar way towards the person I had in my mind, so everything was alright with the world again.
Of course, I don't judge people for following a particular person (I am judging), but there are certain people someone can tell me that they follow and I just know that we can't even be friends. Well, maybe it's not that deep sha, but I just wouldn't get it and whenever I see you, I'll judge you. So, it's not a deal-breaker, but I just wish better for you. Lmao.
Well, it's not a deal-breaker as long as you're not trying to imitate that person and you don't idolise that person so much, because if you do, it means you're getting those traits of the person I don't agree with which makes us incompatible. So, the incompatibility is coming from the fact that you're imitating the person and living their life out, and not because you follow them? I'm done, if it doesn't make sense at this point, I'm so sorry.
I can't believe today is Friday, tbvh. One minute it was Monday and I was writing exams, next minute, it's Friday and I'm typing this newsletter. Exams feel so last month and I feel like I just sent out the latest newsletter 2 days ago.
Anyways, I think I have yapped enough and I should stop now, you should yap back to me, I'd love to read it in between blowing bubbles and fighting crimes.
1:30PM. Saturday, June 15, 2024.
I ought to have sent this out since 9am, because that was the plan, I'm already done and nothing is exactly holding me back, but I've been feeling a little meh today, so I don't know. I've just been telling myself “you’re just sad, Grace, your life is not bad and you don't need to change anything”.
It's necessary because since this morning, I keep wondering, “maybe I have to do this, maybe I should do this”, but maybe I don't need/have to do anything, I can just sit with the feeling. I don't exactly feel like watching or reading anything, I don't even feel like doing anything, but if there's anything I know, it's that I need to move and do something, probably after I take a nap.
Books.
I'm creating a reading list for the rest of the month, mostly for the fun of it rather than the fact that I'm actually going to follow it, but we'll see. There's going to be 10 books on the reading list, so there's room for me to read something else, if I want to.
There are 8 books in the list, so it's remaining 2 books. I'm currently reading New Animal and Milk Fed. Surprisingly, I've not opened New Animal since last week. Flirty Little Secret was a book I wanted to read some time ago, but I forgot about it, so when I saw it in my library, I decided to put it on this list.
I'm only reading We Were Girls Once because of a review I saw on bookstagram and I've read the other book by the author (Tomorrow I Become A Woman) and I didn't exactly like it, so I'm wondering if this one is different, which reminds me that I'm really looking forward to Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi, I think I might like this one (hehe), I like the synopsis, or rather, it looks interesting, so why not?
Here's the synopsis:
A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning Akwaeke Emezi, about five friends trying to outrun and outmatch a powerful, underground world
One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A breakup that starts a spiral. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Little Rot is a whirling journey through the city’s dark side, told through the eyes of five people, each determined to run from the twisted powers out to destroy them.
Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell.
Sucked into the city’s corrupt underworld, they’re all looking for a way out of the trouble they’ve instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals. Little Rot tests how far these five will go to save each other—or themselves—when confronted by evil, culminating in a shattering denouement.
With each novel, with each creation, Akwaeke Emezi shows their genius as a storyteller, as a visionary force who has created a thrilling tale of sex, power, and deviance in Little Rot. You won’t be able to look away.
I saw this review while I was looking for the synopsis and I'm even more excited now. I need to know if this review is accurate and the only way to find out is by reading the book.
Moving on, there's Ghost roots on the list because I read a little bit of the first page and I already think it's weird. I'm looking forward to a lot of mindfuckery—I don't know where this word came from.
8:47 PM. Tuesday, June 11, 2024.
This is the complete list. I'm done with Milk Fed, I started it when I was taking out my locs, although, at some point, I abandoned the locs and just only read the book. It was about this girl with an eating disorder, her relationship with her mother (the cause of her eating disorder) and a Jewish closeted lesbian. Nothing mind blowing happened, I guess I was able to get through it because I was upset and it was less than 250 pages. 2.0 stars out of 5.
Here's the synopsis:
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control through obsessive food rituals while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.
Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.
Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans try to compartmentalize these often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and darkly hilarious meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.
I'm currently reading New Animal, and it fits my mood right now, because I feel really tired and just out of it. I'll probably read it till I become sleepy and just go to bed.
One of my highlight from the book,
"I want people to see my pain and to be so alarmed by it that they check books to see whether it’s normal. I want to know if it is actually normal to feel so much and so little. I want people to tell me it’s okay. I want the whole crowd and the entire world to tell me that I’m doing what I should be. That it’s not too much, and that this is as hard as it will be. I want to be told I will survive my own feelings. I want.”
I'm done with the book and I'm honestly like “what the hell did I just read?”, the first 50% of the book was alright, but the other half was just off and it felt really pretentious, like the writer was just going on vibes at this point and saying whatever they think is smart.
For example,
"What no one tells you about grief is that your memory is completely short-circuited, and life becomes just a series of surprising incidents. I should write a book about this. I should tell people how far you travel from the self after grief hoists you out of it." (she's bleeding on a man's short and this is what she's thinking about? “shet, i'm bleeding”, *launches into internal monologue. )
I'm not even joking, this is what was happening before the highlight,
“I feel blood gush out of my vagina and stop briefly at the crotch of the leotard before steadily seeping through. I accidentally clench in response and a large glob of it begins to sink into the fabric of his pants. Holy shit. I am losing it. I forgot to change the tampon I put in last night.”
Make it make sense? This text was just before the first one. At this point, I couldn't take in whatever was happening in the book anymore. 2.0 stars out of 5.
Here the synopsis:
…most nights I find myself trying to combine with someone else to become this two-headed thing with flailing limbs, chomping teeth, and tangled hair. This new animal. I am medicated by another body. Drunk on warm skin. Dumbly high on the damp friction between them and me.
It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her; she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too.
Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.
And then something happens to her mum and suddenly Amelia's got too many feelings and the only thing that makes any sense to her is running away.
It takes the intervention of her two fathers and some hilariously wrong encounters with other broken people in a struggling Tasmanian BDSM club to help her accept the truth she has been hiding from. And in a final, cataclysmic scene, we learn along with Amelia that you need to feel another person's weight before you can feel your own.
Deadpan, wise and heartbreakingly funny, New Animal is a stunning debut.
11:54 AM. Wednesday, June 12, 2024.
I recently posted on bookstagram about how I wanted to read more books about “joy, happiness, rainbows, and romance” and I just picked up a book that's nothing about any of those things. It's so funny, because this is the exact type of book I didn't want to read for the time being, but it's so good.
I've been reading books about people going through existential crises and books that are usually exploration of something, although most of them always fall short, “exploration of social media and the effects on our life as people living in the middle of wars while still trying to make a living and be happy”, something like that.
See the synopsis of a book I added to my TBR,
In an age driven by desire, what happens when you want two different things? Set in the pristine, precarious world of MoMA, The Modern is a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place.
Things seem to be working out for Sophia in New having come from Australia to be at the centre of modernity, she’s working at the Museum of Modern Art, living in a great apartment with a boyfriend interviewing for Ivy League teaching positions. They’re smart, serious, dine in the right restaurants and have (a little unexpectedly) become engaged just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail. Alone in the city, Sophia begins to wonder what it means to be married – to be defined, publicly – in the 21st century.
Can you be true to yourself and someone else? In a bridal shop she meets Cara, a young artist struggling to get over her ex-girlfriend, and the two begin a connection that leads Sophia to question the nature of her relationships, her career and the consequences of being modern.
Both playful and profound, inhabiting the gap between what we feel about ourselves and how we behave, Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel is a sparklingly insightful queer exploration of desire, art and her generation’s place in the world. It announces an exceptional new literary voice.
6:00PM. Friday, June 14, 2024.
I'm currently at 23% of Greta & Vladin. I'm enjoying it so far. Hopefully, I'll be able to finish up the book this weekend, and start another one and maybe finish that one too?
The characters in this book have russian names, Greta's full name is literally ‘Greta Svava Valdinova Vladisavljevic’, there's this scene where she goes,
“I would like to buy one bottle of pre-mixed gin and tonic, but they only have four-packs. I buy a four-pack. The guy checks my ID for a really long time, as if I would have gone with “Greta Svava Valdinova Vladisavljevic” if I had been in the market for an inconspicuous fake ID. I try to glare, but my face smiles of its own volition, probably because of sexism.”
It made me laugh.
Another highlight (and my note from the app),
"I call her again and she doesn’t pick up, so I call her a third time. I think of a meme I saw that said, Double text? I’ll quadruple text you buzz buzz it’s me again bitch. Honestly, what the fuck is she doing? Did she die? Did she throw her phone out the window? This is ridiculous."
(nobody:
me, when someone doesn't answer my call on the first ring or reply my messages immediately:)
1:37 PM. Saturday, June 15, 2024.
I DNF Greta & Valdin, I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't do it. At some point, it started looking like a lost cause and giving me a headache, why are two people answering the same names? I remembered the golden rule; there's no reason to force yourself to read a book, it's never that serious and life is too short for that.
Here's the synopsis though, if you want to check it out:
For fans of Schitt’s Creek and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, an irresistible and bighearted international bestseller that follows a brother and sister as they navigate queerness, multiracial identity, and the dramas big and small of their entangled, unconventional family, all while flailing their way to love.
It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maaori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.
Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop intruding: her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.
Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings’ misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.
I forgot to mention that I started this book this week, but I didn't finish it; Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson. I don't know, it was looking like too much of a commitment at that point and I just wasn't feeling it, and if I'm being honest, the cover drew me in, I was curious.
Synopsis:
A “deeply original” (Elif Batuman), “violently funny” (Myriam Gurba), “brilliant and unforgettable” (Deesha Philyaw) debut about a young lawyer finally confronting her dark past.
To the outside observer, Vivian is a success story—a dedicated lawyer who advocates for mentally ill patients at a New York City psychiatric hospital. Privately, Vivian contends with the memories and aftereffects of her bad childhood—compounded by the everyday stresses of being a Black Latinx woman in America. She lives in a constant state of hypervigilant awareness that makes even a simple subway ride into a heart-pounding drama.
For years, Vivian has self-medicated with a mix of dating, dieting, dark humor and smoking weed with her BFF, Jane. But after a family reunion prompts Vivian to take a bold step, she finds herself alone in new and terrifying ways, without even Jane to confide in, and she starts to unravel. Will she find a way to repair what matters most to her?
A debut from a stunning talent, Post-traumatic is a new kind of survivor narrative, featuring a complex heroine who is blazingly, indelibly alive. With razor-sharp prose and mordant wit, Chantal V. Johnson performs an extraordinary feat, delivering a psychologically astute story about the aftermath of trauma that somehow manages to brim with warmth, laughter, and hope.
I'm not even going to lie, at this point, all I want to read are “stupid books”, the type that people say will damage your brain cells, that's exactly what I want to read. I've had enough. I want to read mafia romance that's like 10 books long with different POV of 5 people, this is a cry for help (😔).
5 MINUTES LATER!
So, guess what Grace decided to pick up? Good Material by Dolly Alderton! I saw a review on bookstagram and I added it to my library, and after updating this newsletter, I decided to just “check it out”, and now, I think I might like it, because another break up book is definitely what Grace needs.
That's a wrap for this week, this week flew by so fast, I'm not even going to lie. Chat back to me, it's always a pleasure to see your replies. It makes me giddy.
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Bye x.
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