16.11.2025
I made chocolate banana bread with this recipe which Leena shared with me. However, I lessened the amount of semi-sweet chocolate chips which the recipe called for, instead opting for dark chocolate. I think that is why the banana bread was not that sweet and even a little bitter, with an after taste which was kind of sour. I substituted the 1/4 cup unsalted butter with oil and I think it did not change much. We only had a pinch of baking soda left, so I think the texture of the bread was not the best and could have been much much better. I could not really taste the banana, except some of the chunks here and there. Overall, it was fine and I loved how crispy the exterior was. It tasted the best while it was warm out of the oven. I might make some changes next time. Also, I do want to try making a banana bread without chocolate + cocoa powder.
17.11.2025
On the way home, I was seated beside the open window after a long time. The winter air feels new but empty. The entire sky felt washed under the warmth of orange and every single tree looked like it was preparing for something to happen. I looked at the watch of the person sitting in front of me. I wonder if we say things after we are influenced by others or if the things we say are truly ours. I keep rereading sections from c&s; obsession goes well with non-chalance. I ate the last chunk of sweet potato today with salt and red chilli powder sprinkled on it. I wanted to eat a persimmon but it can wait for tomorrow; the riper the sweeter and pulpier. I keep slowly reading the short story Visions which is a part of the anthology Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo. How memory cooperates and is coordinated around space and presence of what is within space is always fascinating. What if everything is not just a superimposition of everything that has come before.
19.11.2025
In my dream last night I was in a train and it was strange yet comforting. I slept in the train and felt the weight of everything slip away from me. It landed where I had not been. I want to sit in that gloomy and insincere train again. The train stopped when it wanted to and looked into the faces of everyone who stood on the platform. I was with Ibrahim on that train and our parents kept looking at us from beyond the windows. While in some sense it felt familiar, it felt like I had gone back in time to the wrong place and with some misplaced emotion nudging its way in. Abstract talk gets me nowhere, but the darkness of that train, its difficult seats and its eating up my memory will stay with me for a long time.
22.11.2025
I had a strange dream yesterday, I was standing at a window and I kept looking at the snow that was piled up at the edge of every window away from me. It looked like the back of nano's house, and it was cold, so cold that it never felt like I was standing in the cold and everything around me kept fluttering onto my face. I was looking and yet everything was obscured. I was hidden behind the clothesline, as I hung all the cold clothes in a winter dawn, the damp clothes wet against my face as I leaned my chin on the clothesline, smoking a cigarette. It all held a feeling of wistfulness and melancholy, something out of the film Maborosi (dir. Kore-eda), the purple outlines, the grey long landscapes, the small burn against the vaster and opening skies. It kept swaying around me, and the cigarette burned, for long, and it kept furling around its straight edge without falling away. I have been reading this for the past few days before going to sleep, and it fills me with unutterable melancholy, something to hold onto for a long time, that feeling of slipping away & slowly gathering everything in one place and then to let it fall away in that place itself. For how long can one rely on dreams to keep the love going, for the fantasy to remain, the emotion to linger and stay?
02.12.2025
I have been free from assignment obligations for the past 3 days. I have watched 2 movies; the innocents (1961) & late spring (1949). I cannot stop looking at what failure one brings into the family being a part of the family, wanting to emulate the part of a family, having to socially amend your life so it fits the narrative of the family - in its violence and resignation, in its deception and abuse, in its suppression and detestment. I wonder where one is trying to reach when reconciling witn the socially acceptable form / structure of the family. The savior, the wife, the mother, the fitted, the vase, the candle, the falling petal. Why do we insist on losing ourselves because of our suppressions? What guilt holds us back? What self-sacrificial nonsense do we think we are a part of?
03.12.2025
I keep thinking about Noriko's bowed body and head, her pushing her body into itself, moving downwards and inwards as she keeps accepting the, perhaps jarring to me, words which her father keeps saying -- almost a circulation of words than a coherent expression of what he wants to say. I keep thinking of resignation and the fear of submitting to something that comes from this impatience that is impossible to explain. I keep thinking of how my self-imposed reflections distorts how I see the movie. I keep thinking of lines from the poems I have been reading and listening to: Agnes' Song, saw an angel kick a snail and Still. I keep thinking of all the violence and beauty that is intertwined in all our lives. The filth which follows; the love that creates, the gutting, the defining, the molding. I keep thinking of the beautiful vases in the innocents and late spring, they give a clarity to the people, the object gives meaning to the subject which has turned away from it, hasn't seen it, does not see it, keeps away from it. What objects are we all controlled with? Each time I listen to Agnes' Song I cannot stop my tears; all that we notice in life comes to an end. All that we have seen has an end to it, even if we continue to see it or seek it.
31.12.2025
It is the last day of the year and I am not sure why the watery tiredness in me, the separation from language, the want in me, the imagined inside me, all won't become suppressed. I wish they could, I wish there was retribution for the things which have left an impact on me; I wish the things which have swayed me would go otherwise. I am always waiting for myself to write the way that I used to and yet it has become tiresome, I have left this place thats blank in my head and it lays inside me untouched, unscathed, unrefined. It doesn't have any language or image, no object sits in it except a vague feeling that can never become a word. I have regretted a lot, I regret still. I have lost a lot of myself, I don't wish to bring myself to another year and it keeps feeling more hollow the more I fix myself to get onto the next day. I am nothing. I am everything that has ever happened inside me. All that exists outside me becomes transparent.