#3 - Thesis Toads and the Obvious
I'm not sure what this is but I'm not being subtle about it.
Thesis Toads - a system my brilliant partner Rehan devised to help me remember which slides in my thesis defense presentation were incomplete. Requires the selection of one (1) image of a toad or frog from Canva’s eerie repository of images (some of which you get access to only when you’ve gone Premium) to be pasted in said incomplete slides, large enough to be visible by thumbnail. The name of the game is to work the toads away. We chose this guy:
My thesis toad is robust. It’s what I needed. My presentation is full of purples and yellows, a misused Lakers uniform, so the toad was visually distinct enough to serve as a reminder that I’m about to finish everything I had been working towards in this degree for the last year and a half and how much my life is going to change and how much my life has changed.
I read this profile on Elena Ferrante that Patricia Lockwood wrote after reading her account of when she met the Pope. I have never been so shaken by a singular voice before. I’m halfway through No One Is Talking About This and I’ll spend the rest of my life doing a terrible Patricia Lockwood impression until I recover the part of myself that spent many years doing a bad Donald Glover impression.
I’d like to think I’m Donald Glover’s worst nightmare: an Asian girl that does stand-up who can sing and is actually pretty good at writing television. I’m if his secret Tumblr became a person. I also really want to work on his farm even though it looks like a cult. I loved the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Please give me a job.
A lot of memories have been resurfacing for me lately. A side-effect of not throttling your body with uppers, downsers, stimulants, or sinus medication, I suppose. The clearest one has been of my father, early 2000s, when Kuwait was still mostly dust and highways, as he tries to calm me down after receiving a chain email. A friend at school (I don’t see a point in naming them) had anointed me one of her five forwards to protect her from the dead girl threatening to kill her if she didn’t forward this email to five of her closest friends. The girl had allegedly died in some horrific car accident and haunts the pixels and bits carrying these early electronic communications. My dad forwarded the email to himself. The dead girl never came for us.
A more recent memory of my dad: we were kayaking around an island somewhere in Indonesia. Two-person kayak. I was doing a decent job rowing but he kept rowing in the same direction as me and jokingly deflected that I was rowing all wrong. The dead girl never came for us then, either.
More flashes of water. A body rafting trip in Year 10 where Aly, Dre and I got wedged between two large rocks and a running current. Still no dead girls.
I had my thesis defense on Monday. Our department actually calls them ‘thesis conferences’, we’re not really defending our work, we’re having a discussion about it at a point where much of the project is too late to change. It went really well and I was showered with compliments I still felt like I didn’t deserve. There’s a part of my brain that says I shouldn’t say I’m a good writer out loud because it’s crass and untrue. It’s not untrue. I’m at a point where being ‘good’ doesn’t matter anymore. I just want to be able to write for a long time. I want to be able to keep writing. Grad school is done so I think I’ll be able to do stand-up again. Grad school and comedy was a hard mix for me. I’m not wired for both at the same time and I need to be okay with that.
I’m noticing more friends and acquaintances name the correct villain in their stories: capitalism and neocolonialism. Strength in numbers. I’m waiting for the precipice to bubble over, for the scales to tip, for the mixed metaphor to push itself into a world beyond my imagination.
We watched The Daily Show this morning. Jon Stewart had Christiane Amanpour as a guest on The Daily Show and I had this icky feeling in my stomach knowing what was to come and not being able to look away. Amanpour mentioned the Nakba but insisted on lack of strong leadership being the reason why ‘peace’ can’t be reached. Libertarianism is a disease. The rest of their conversation was vacuous and empty. No one comes to The Daily Show for Palestinian solidarity. I’m not sure why we watched it. I already know they’re not going to say anything remotely productive, controversial, or radical. What’s the opposite of a train wreck that you still can’t tear your eyes away from? I can’t stop thinking about how strange it made me feel.
I hate spending Eid away from my family.
I burnt my hand pulling out focaccia that didn’t have enough salt in it out of the oven. I’ve been reading the comments in every recipe I look up online and I wonder why I never thought of doing that before. Half a teaspoon measure of community.
Thesis Toad is obvious and that’s why it works. I don’t feel like this format is working, but it’s been nice to try. This is the fastest I’ve ever put together any newsletter. I don’t know what to write next, both for this newsletter and in general. I just found out about ‘untreated burnout’ but all my friends say that I have had it for a long time. I’m trying to fix it and it’s sort of working. Recovery isn’t linear and the same shit different day doesn’t really apply to me but I’m really enjoying 8 hours of sleep being a necessity and not a ‘nice to have’. I never want to hustle ever again. I want to work hard but not die. That said, I am looking for work. Please give me a job.
love the idea of thesis toads