AHHHHHHH LET ME OUT LET ME OUT I WANT MY THESIS TO BE DONE

my journal has seen a lot of me recently ! gonna start writing here again soon

on attraction

(5/12/24) i think greater self-acceptance has also made me see beauty in a richer way. i feel like deep okayness with the way that I look has detached me from being obsessed with the beauty of extremely beautiful people and also made it easier for me to see it everywhere in the people I care about. they just kind of glow

• does this mean that it’s harder for me to find people attractive? no but actually yes, I think. from an aesthetic point I think it’s still just as easy as before for me to find [anyone] beautiful. but on the other hand I notice more the people that I love have such a deep beauty to them, in the way that I want to keep looking at them forever and getting to see them in all the different times and places they go through. e and a to me is the prettiest girl in the world. no person looks as beautiful as s

rest in peace kinefox. you made the strangest parts of me feel like home

what is this

welcome to my Stream! in here i share my thoughts and occasionally edit them into blogpost-resembling entities :D

here’s a quick guide to getting around this page :)

• scrollables is a collection of short thoughts and everything my twitter (@aka_topo) wishes it could be. the closest thing to a stream of consciousness and probably this platform’s intended purpose
• Topo Stuff is my weekly newsletter! listen to me tell unserious and sometimes less unserious stories from my life in a format bearing a suspiciously high resemblance to everyone’s favorite financial newsletter
• long posts are longer-form thoughts. these read more like blogposts and are often better formatted. i think there’s a charm to scrolling through a page of virtual sticky notes that’s lost or at least made clunkier by having long walls of unskippable topo lore. these pieces are usually meant to be more standalone anyways, whereas i believe the individual scrollables really take on a life of their own when they can all be seen together at the same time
• --help is a friendly page for when you are lost. you are here!

happy reading! cya around :)

Topo Stuff: The Consumption Edition

disclaimer: this was written and indended to be distributed the week of 1/15. clearly, I did not succeed. many details are no longer true, most notably my Kind Bar diet.

1. Intro
2. Consumption: I. Kind Bars
3. Consumption: II. Music
4. Things Happen

hi everyone!

if you’re reading this, you’re either on some list of people that I immensely look up to and consider very dear to myself, found my Curius, or both! Inspired by the blog posts of my numerous extremely talented writer friends, my extensive substack stalking of 20-something-year-old Twitter personalities, and my lovely big who I completely sacked this idea from, I’ve challenged myself to write and maintain a weekly newsletter about my life for my friends. I want to do better at keeping up with the people I really like being around, so I’m experimenting with combining that desire with my amateur writing skills into this textual proof of life.

Send me a note! Whether it be just saying hi or starting an r/Aritzia-level flame war over a questionable take, I'm most excited to hear from you:) I'm currently testing out hosting these on this microblogging platform called Streams but open to switching things up! (agh i feel like my one gripe with Streams is that it doesn't seem like there's a way for other people to comment/me to comment on other people's content in the first place? and i feel like feedback is a pretty important part of my own writing process but i digress)

note from the future: I originally planned for Topo Stuff to be an unordered newsletter, but this week's stories happen to be both related to consumption. Not sure if this will be the norm, but there'll definitely be more themed posts in the future!

Consumption: I. Kind Bars

I’ve been lucky enough to be given a stipend of $125 in TechCash for each week of IAP to spend on food and groceries at a select number of locations. However, the first day of the stipend was Sunday 1/7, giving me an entire five days of figuring out my food situation on my own, where I came up with the brilliant idea of spending absolutely $0 on food until I got my TechCash stimmy in the spirit of cleansing my consumption habits for the new year. Unfortunately, the only lasting consequence of this challenge has been my brand new Kind Bar overconsumption problem.

For some context, one of the girls in my sorority was in charge of handling and distributing snacks for students during final exams period last semester and accumulated around 30 ginormous boxes of semi-healthy individually packaged food, one variety of which happened to be these Kind Bar breakfast/granola bars. I was able to swipe a box of Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Kind Bars at the beginning of finals week from her haul and two more boxes of Kind Bars after commiserating with Sabrina over our final grades.

Thus, ever since January 2nd, I’ve been eating a diet involving what can only be described as an inappropriate amount of Kind Bars. During my first week before TechCash, I ate around 23 Kind Bars. Some of my days would consist of nothing but 7 Kind Bars and armfuls of random Chinese snacks. Most embarrassingly, my Kind Bar consumption actually peaked on the first day I received my TechCash. It had been snowing outside, which I took as an excuse to finance my caloric needs with 9 Kind Bars instead of groceries, but then I went on a run anyways? so that doesn’t even make sense? And now even with my MIT money and yummy food, I still find myself unable to not eat my Daily Kind Bar. What the fuck?

For some reason, last week the same girl ordered a billion more boxes of snacks to our sorority AGAIN and this time explicitly left out 9 more boxes of Kind Bars for communal taking. There has not been a single day where I haven’t eaten at least one Kind Bar. I pledged to myself yesterday that I would not eat a single Kind Bar, and I was sitting in Maseeh dining and so proud of getting through the day until I realized that the oatmeal cookie I treated myself to as dessert was just the dining hall equivalent of an Oats and Honey Kind Bar.

I have no idea why I’m still eating them. It’s almost like I’m addicted to the action of eating Kind Bars. They’re not good. They aren’t even bad. They’re just extremely okay. They’re technically healthy, but nutrition-wise they’re extremely mediocre (2 grams of protein for 150 calories?? the macros are officially worse than Goldfish) so they’re not even good as a post-workout snack. I guess they’re pretty innocent as a quick breakfast, but knowing how much of them I’ve eaten makes me actively upset every time I realize I’ve endured another Kind Bar start to the day. I’m now actively seeking out breakfast alternatives, but I fear that Kind Bars have entrenched themselves so deeply into my lifestyle that it will take me a long time to unwind my new proclivities.

I guess the lesson here is that sometimes the value of frugality is not worth the cost of developing cheapo habits. I am going to buy myself some nice with the money I’ve saved.

Consumption: II. Music

I think listening to hip hop made me fall in love with music again. Utopia is one of my favorite albums of all time and got me back into listening to music after a long dry spell of not enjoying music like I used to before my concussion. I remember being so in awe of how an artist was able to string together so many different samples and beats from so many different influences to make a completely new sound with a completely different feeling that such was a fucking banger. If you have had any amount of music education you are probably rolling your eyes right now at me discovering the Fundamental Theorem of Music (and fuck you), but coming from a place of having once looked down on rap as "not real music" in the past, it really makes me feel so appreciative for just how musically well-read and literally genius these artists are for being able to “hear the music” from fragments of a bossa nova line or pull together sounds that had been previously never heard together in human history into this.

Unsurprisingly, my tastes were severely dominated by hip hop for the last two-thirds of 2023. For a second I wondered if my taste evolution had finally reached an end, but I’ve recently started listening to a lot more music and especially found myself going back to some of my favorite indie artists and leaning into more melodic rap. Gorillaz, for one, has pulled off an entire career of their own crazy sample flips (eg. the melody for their arguably most famous song is actually a keyboard preset), which might explain why I’ve been drawn so much to them recently. Kali Uchis’ new album is also out and extremely good and also sounds almost exactly like all of her other stuff haha. I have more thoughts on this, but overall I’m excited to welcome in an era of listening to supernatural women and artistic men. Oh, and also The Bottom 2.

I used to care soooo much about having cool, well-curated Spotify playlists (that I hoped would tug at the heartstrings of my Spotify followers and garner a bunch of likes) but now when making new playlists I truly dgaf. I am an unsophisticated normie through and through and I love it. It's really cute to me that my Spotify playlists have kind of become another way for me to time-encapsulate my life, and this particular chapter is lucky enough to have a lot of Glorb. It's always made me a bit sad to visit my high school friends' Spotify pages and see that they haven't made any new playlists since freshman year or even whenever they graduated from college. I hope I never stop making playlists.

Things Happen

One of my quarterly resolutions is to keep up with Matt Levine’s Money Stuff, which is a newsletter about exciting things happening in the financial world written by the leader of the sassy man apocalypse. At the end of each newsletter, Matt gives a rapid-fire coverage of news bites that are either too small to be expanded into a full section (yet) or having nothing to do with the financial world at all in a section called 'Things Happen'. I always really look forward to this part, somewhat because it signals that I've completed the day's newsletter. Thanks to Things Happen, I’ve learned about GPT getting confused about a giraffe without spots and scientists finally discovering why pee is yellow. I have no idea if there is anything to be learned from my Things Happen. But thanks for the inspiration, Matt!

• I started training for a half marathon! It has been really hard but I think the structure has been really good for me ngl. I started running a lot more (read: not zero) in my last 2 years of college and finally started to non-perversely enjoy it in the last 6 months, but a single 30 minute treadmill run this week wiped me out so badly I started to reconsider everything. Some things never change I guess.
• Despite my Travis Scott fangirling, I have never given into the temptation of buying tickets to the Utopia concert. For one, my first impression of Travis Scott was in hearing in high school about how people have literally died at his concerts. More importantly, FE!N is a good song, but not good enough to sit through 15x in one night. I will not be feining for more.
• This guy built out an entire simulator for the Pokémon Trading Card Game after only learning to code 3 months prior. Holy shit.
• Someone told me last semester that I switch between machines too quickly during my workouts, so I started playing the NYT Spelling Bee in between sets. Unfortuantely, after a few funny pangrams and one day of hitting genius level, my NYT subscription I accidentally bought (and quickly cancelled) last year finally gave out and started kicking me out after three sad words. As a replacement, I've been playing the NYT Sudoku, but it at best is okay-ishly satisfying to solve the Easy and at worst makes me want to rip my teeth out after I bail out for a third time in a row on the bicep curl machine and realize that I made an irrecoverable Sudoku mistake somewhere during diverging lat pulldown break number two 30 minutes ago. I am now considering buying a real NYT subscription. tl;dr please give me suggestions for what to do between sets lmao

That's all from me for now! Thanks for reading everyone, and see you soon!

-anka

ha ha it looks like the notes app

hello stream