Cunning Curiosities
First blog post of 2025. Pip pip.
Time and time again I return to this dear blog of mine. I have no obligation to do so for anyone other than myself. I like sharing things about myself, letting whoever reads this know about the details of my life. Of course, these details are only the details I want to share. I have begun hesitating before sharing details of myself to people, a practice called thinking before speaking, something very foreign to me. My awareness of my online presence began at some point within this past year. I have minimized my posts on instagram, removed posts from my tagged, and removed my school from my bio. Nonetheless, I have kept my blog linked in my bio. If anyone really wanted to find out information about me with a quick instagram stalk, they have a readily available resource linked for their convenience. I'm sure I'm in the minority of people who think about their digital presence this much, but once you realize you don't have to share everything on your social media all the time (I'm looking at you people who share every thought in their mind using the instagram notes feature), choosing what to share becomes slightly more important. But then again, it's just social media, it's not that serious. But also who hasn't gone through all of their posts and all of their highlights and looked at their tagged posts to see what other people might see when they look at your account.
Tumblr is back I think. I know a few people who actively use tumblr, curating their blogs or whatever. I have not (re)downloaded that app for I believe it would take up too much mental space in my mind. I can't have this blog AND a tumblr. This blog and pinterest fulfills the purpose of a tumblr blog in my eyes. I can share photos I like here. For example.
I feel like this sometimes. 
Don't mind the formatting. Blogger hates me and doesn't want me to be happy. God forbid I want to make some photos look nice on my blog.
I am also taking a different approach to my spotify playlist making. In the past, I have tried to stretch out the longevity of my main playlists—as in the playlists where I put allll the music I'm listening to for those months and play it on shuffle—because I thought it was important to keep listening to the music I liked to not be constantly jumping around artists without fully familiarizing myself with their music. I say thing because I used to listen to music very not-album focused, I would play a few songs by an artist and only know those few songs. I would listen to a lot of artists, but not in depth. Thus, I began prioritizing listening to the discography of an artist I liked listening to, to find more songs that I liked, not just the first few that I found. I wanted to keep my main playlists for at least a few months, I've had main playlists that last a whole year (jan 2022-jan 2023), but I also thought 6 months was also sufficient. I would make a new playlist when I got sick of too many songs on the old one, and this process occurs naturally.
Recently, as in within the past year, I have been heavily prioritizing albums. Listening to albums and taking all those songs as a whole instead of, as I did before, listening to an album just to find individual songs to put on my main playlist. Also, over the summer I devoted a lot of my time in Greece to listening to the local nyc bands to get familiar with their sound. The combination of these two elements led to me getting sick of my main playlist a lot faster than usual. I made my most recent main playlist at the start of september and even though I used it until january, I was sick of it by mid-end december. I have made a new main and just added all the songs off albums I like and decided to just make a new main once I get bored of my old one, even if not enough time has passed. Here is the link to my current main if you are interested.
I have also realized that all of my recent main playlists have been titles something along the lines of change and evolution. "I welcome it all" "evolution adapation incontinuity" and "everything is happening." Upon this realization I titled my most recent one "change, of course (typical...)." Thing is, the titles of my playlists come from what I was feeling in that moment I was creating that new playlist, and my life has changed a lot since october 2023 (when I made "everything is happening"): new friends, transitioning from high school to college, and mostly just new friends and friend groups is the only thing I can think of. Friends dictate the experiences I have, and I have had a lot of new experiences within these months (years?). And of course things are still changing. I don't know what will await me in my second semester of college, but I am excited to see what will happen. When my life falls stagnant I get bored, when I fall into the same routines I get sad, as evidenced by the title to my playlist "an established personality" which I made at a time when I felt like I was forced to stay the same person by the expectations others had of me. My next main playlist was titled "honesty is the best policy" where the description reads "i have nothing to prove to anyone. things are looking up." If you want to learn about me, read the descriptions of my playlists. They are for myself, the fact that anyone can see them is a happy coincidence. The actual songs I was listening to don't matter, I don't listen to the lyrics. The only playlist where lyrics matter is my playlist "my bible" because those songs are biblical to me. They were significant to me at specific points in my life, and I can see the context for each moment as I look at each song on this playlist.
Lots of big chunks of text. May be hard to skim. Sorry. Here's a text break.
I think I was thinking so much about my digital presence at the start of this blog post because I've been on instagram a lot more in the past few days because I posted photos from the roll of film I just developed on my photo account. I got like 50 followers on that account and a few on my main because everybody was reposting those photos. It was and still is so bizzare to see these big name accounts with 10k+ followers that I've known about for years following me back. Being mutuals with awesome photographers always gets me so giddy. I had redownloaded the instagram app to be able to check the notifications on my photo account easily on my phone (I won't get intp the whole process of trying to log into my photo account on browser, all you need to know is it take too much effort so on browser I'm only on my main. I check my photo account through my laptop). Seeing all these people that I know (about) who kinda or barely (or don't) know me liking my photos and sharing them is exciting. There's a show tonight and I'm still not sure if I'm going to be taking photos there or not. When there are too many photographers I opt to not take photos because I don't want to add on to the excessive amount of cameras in people's faces. Whats that one meme about there being too many photographers, "we need plumbers!" Yeah... I always keep my camera on me (I stay strapped.) but I only use it at opportune moments. I respect street photographers heavy, I would like to get there some day, but I can't right now.
Posting on instagram makes my screen time go way up. I am constantly checking my notifications. I have notifications for the app off because it gets excessive so I am always opening the app. It's a disease. I am just constantly searching for that rush of dopamine I get when I see a new notification. It's bad. It's why I haven't posted on my main in months. I hate the feeling I get afterwards. It ruins me for the rest of the day, and in this case, ruined me for like 2-3 days after posting photos. I hope one day I can develop a less parasitic relationship with instagram, but that day is not today. I'm glad the notifications on my photo account have died down, but I still get some stray likes and follows. Within a week I hope my notification bar is empty again.
The above characters are from greek shadow puppet theater. The one on the left in particular is the main character in these performances, Karagiozis. I want to get a tattoo of karagiozi or one of the funny side characters. I've been watching episodes of karagiozi from the 80s that some channel uploaded to youtube, here's the playlist if you so choose to inquire. It's really entertaining and actually funny, Evgenios Spatharis (the puppeteer of these episodes) has got that humor of those old greek movies which of course are also funny, think Stathis Psaltis movies.
I am a big fan of leopard print. - In november the only movie I watched was Suspiria (1977) and that was good.
- Before winter break, the only movie I watched in december was The Blue Caftan, which I watched in my Queer/Trans Cultures class.
- Winter break hit and I was on a movie grind. Watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (disliked), Gremlins (alright/good/fun), The Holiday (mid), Good Will Hunting (good as always), Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (good as always), all the harry potter movies (the early movies are crazy cuz why is a 12 year old doing all that...), We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (don't get it, dislike), The Brady Bunch Movie (less fun than I expected), Freddy Got Fingered (my high hopes got shattered, it sucked), Possession (really good), Wicked (musicals are fun, it was alright), Challengers (alright), You’ve Got Mail (fine), The Muppet Christmas Carol (AMAZING thank you Ainsley for telling me to watch this), Blue Velvet (I watched this a day before Lynch died... is it controversial to say I don't care for this movie... cuz I don't, it was alright.) We shall see if I watch another before classes begin.
- Aaaaand here is the link to my letterboxd....
- Greek. I'm taking a Greek language class because I've always been insecure about my Greek vocab and taking this class is the perfect opportunity to get good Greek. Though my language requirement for NYU is waived cuz I got a 4 on AP French, I still wanted to take this cuz its awesome that NYU has modern Greek (I would NOT be taking ancient Greek). When I talk to my mom in Greek I can already feel my Greek getting worse because I'm not speaking Greek at home everyday. Thank god I can take it in school and upkeep my Greek.
- Shaping the Urban Environment. An urban studies class I am excited for.
- An introductory anthropology class called "Culture, Power, Society" aaaand I'm gonna be in the same lecture as Jesterrrrr. So excited about that, that's gonna be fun. And the recitation is going to be taught by the same TA I had for my Global Hip Hop class and she's awesome and she thinks I'm smart so it's gonna be awesome.
- A general writing class, Writing as Inquiry. Freshmen have to take a seminar class one semester and a writing class the other semester. Hopefully the prof is chill for this.
- In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis by David J. Madden and Peter Marcuse. I finished reading this on the train heading back to Astoria to have dinner with my mom this past Thursday (Jan 16th 2025). I borrowed it from the NYU library at the start of the semester and it was technically due on Jan 6th 2025 but overdue books don't start getting fines until after 30 days of being overdue sooooo I kept it til I finished it. Overall it was not that good, very general and not action-oriented. It gave me some informative historical context, but the only salient part of the book was the conclusion where the authors provide potential courses of action, but because they are generalizing it to an American (if not, global) context instead of just to NYC, they can't be specific. There are better books out there, do not spend the $26 to buy it from a bookstore.
- Guys I FINALLY finished reading Cruising Utopia by José Esteban Muñoz. I finished it last night (Jan 17th 2025) but it was a loooong time coming. I bought this book literal years ago. Jesus, took me long enough. It's not even a long book, but I was just reading it alongside reading other books so my attention was never fully on finishing this one. A thought provoking argument, and there are some paragraphs in there that I really loved. I underlined and wrote in the margins of my copy. I would recommend it I think.
