can someone help me find a secondhand laptop on facebook marketplace or ebay. i’m overwhelmed by all the options. my budget is $200 and i want something that can run a couple cute Steam games and do word processing, that’s really it. parker says lenovo thinkpad is the way to go but i would like as many opinions as possible

scattered thoughts today:

-jealousy is a teacher

-there is no real reason to be jealous of anyone right now because we're all stuck in the same embarrassing AI slop climate crisis timeline and will all generally meet the same fate. trying to be less doomer-pilled these days but this is what feels true to me

-i saw an instagram reel awhile ago where this woman was talking about her ex-husband, how when they were married he never wanted to do anything and she dragged him to dinner with their new neighbors and he stared at the wall the entire time because he wanted to watch a baseball game. not even for his team or anything, there was just a baseball game on the tv and he was sulking about missing it so he ruined the dinner and embarrassed her. the neighbor came over later and asked if they could have a girls night and she was like oh no my husband wouldn't like that, if i went out then he would make an excuse to stay out all night later to punish me...and the neighbor was like hey that's weird, it seems like he's controlling you. when someone acts in a certain way to discourage you from doing something because eventually you decide "it's just not worth it" then that is controlling behavior. i never really thought about it that way but it's illuminating to me and i keep thinking about it. if i ever asked to have friends over i would have to clean the house top to bottom before and after they came over and then ofc i wouldn't do it right so my mom would huff and puff about cleaning the whole house and she would make me feel bad about the whole thing so it made me not want to have friends over. thinking about it this way is so helpful to me idk

anyways i put in my two weeks notice this morning and i'm planning an epic little weekend trip for my first free saturday off i'm so excited. said i needed to "focus on my full time job" but mostly i need more time to write my free articles and hang out with my friends. which is VALID!!!

recorded an hour and a half long podcast about east of eden with @foreverdirt and i started transcribing it yesterday and i got up to minute 6 and there’s already so much writing is this a crazy thing to post…i think the answer is yes but i also think it’s important for #resistance to just post what you want without tailoring it to the common person’s desires and interests. like most voices online are generally homogenous/generic and you should be posting stuff without thinking about it too much bc that’s what’s refreshing. there’s so much pressure to smooth everything down to be quickly and easily consumable for everyone and that’s not what i’m interested in. it’s special to me to be like no you just have to read this 600 page book to understand this podcast. if you do read it then you will be rewarded with a rlly juicy episode by 2 geniuses but otherwise i can’t help you

for some reason it is really important for me to think of Esther Greenwood as separate from Sylvia Plath while reading...even though it's pretty heavy-handed that it is semi-autobiographical (like when esther starts writing her book and intentionally gives the main character a 6-letter name just like herself) there's just something about it where i have to keep them separated. maybe because sylvia plath has been plucked from her cultural context and situated within the "esoteric sad cool girl" sphere like joan didion, thereby stripping her of any nuance at all. when i was a teenage missionary in costa rica i cried almost every day and read the bell jar over and over and over and it's strange to revisit it and resonate with the same exact things, just with even more clarity this time. bc she's spitting she really is...the motif of the looming Rosenberg electrocutions in a deliriously hot summer is so brilliantly executed i can't stop thinking about it. there's a writer on substack that i like named Ilana Bean and she wrote this article that resonates with the fig tree metaphor in a fresh & compelling manner:

on the limits of my beauty, intelligence, and likability