You walked into the classroom and I was instantly peeved. Who does he think he is? Why is he smiling? How does he have friends already? What’s he laughing about all the time? The more energy I wasted hating you for no reason, the less I had left to focus on more important things. School, all my extracurricular music, anything but you.

Remember when you were young?
You shone like the sun
Shine on, you crazy diamond

Now there’s a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on, you crazy diamond

My youth was spent in…

Pluto moved into Gate 60 today. Limitation — The Gate of Acceptance — The acceptance of limitation is the first step in transcendence. There’s a passage about it in the Gene Keys that illustrates perfectly what was happening in my mind today. Gene Key 60 — The Cracking of the Vessel, my conscious Earth:

People with the 60th Gift understand that for anything new to take root in the material world, it must follow certain laws. The main law of manifestation in the material world is based on structure. Innovation without structure simply will not last. The seed needs its…

It’s ten-twenty PM. You just had a nice, good, full-body cry for no good reason on the bathroom floor. The kind that makes you feel your abs. Your mind knows what this is about, it’s just some old shit getting swept up to the surface so you can feel it one last time. Let it go, this is a good thing. The heaving hurts a little bit. You think about all the crying you’ve done since your son was conceived — four years ago. You think about how its quality has evolved. It’s visceral now. Guttural. It comes from a…

74 half-finished drafts waiting for completion. Even more fragments of stories waiting to be threaded into their true purpose, or anything at all. I don’t know if this is a lot or comparatively little, it doesn’t matter. I can’t concentrate. My mind is scurrying between tasks and stories and levels of thought of equal magnitude like a sad puppy on coke. Lost, looking for home.

I ate two bags of chips. They were small bags of chips, but I was watching a movie while I ate. …

It feels like the ultimate sin and sign at once, to be a millennial and publish this piece. Who am I to complain? I had an upper-middle-class upbringing. I currently live rent-free in my late grandparents’ home, with an en-suite bathroom at that.

Yes, even writing about me, about this, my personal, ultimately self-made jail, is so icky I want to barf into my… you know what? I don’t have any “millennial things” to puke into. Because I am broke as fuck. My account hasn’t shown a positive balance in months: I’m twenty-eight years old and I have never earned…

I’m a 28-year-old single mother on welfare. My kid is turning three soon and a spot in kindergarten is nowhere in sight.

In Germany, this is just the way it is, and has been for years: if parents don’t bust their asses leeching up to twenty different facilities when or even before the child is born, they can basically kiss all hopes of preschool goodbye.

I knew this. At least, I was aware. But I didn’t do what they said I should. I thought I’d rely on my previous “experience” in “just kinda winging it when the time comes”.

Obviously…

My mother is an avid believer in homeopathy. I grew up almost entirely unmedicated, with glucose-based Arnica tablets and Belladonna globules standing in for real pills.

These two, I recall, she employed for anything and everything. Grazed knee? Arnica. Flu? Belladonna. Nosebleed? Arnica. Scarlet fever? Belladonna. I can’t say they worked, can’t say they didn’t.

I’ve since come to view homeopathy with a critical eye, seeing its benefits mostly in the fact that I can soothe my kid with a fake sugar tablet when he’s suffered “grave” injuries.

But one aspect my mother used to stress about it has been…

At 16, my youngest brother could not tell a slight simmer from a decent boil.

I had asked him to cook some pasta. A straightforward task:

Fill a large-ish pot, around one quart capacity, with water, a sliver more than halfway. Set it on the stove. Switch on the heat. All the way. Put a lid on the pot. Make sure you have a nice, good container of salt at the ready.

Open your packet of pasta to spare yourself the stress of trying and trying to open it with your bare hands and giving up and looking for scissors…