Syzygy

 I am always performing. Once, I was talking to my friends, and we were passed by a common acquaintance. I switched to talk to him and then switched back to talking to my friends. It was very second nature to me. I didn’t even think about it or think through it, it came subconsciously to me. But my friends immediately pointed out how different my tone was. And for the first time, it came to actually notice something that was present all along, but just not ever pointed to, and I started to actually think about how much of social interaction is just performance, especially for me. It’s so much of a performance that I wonder: do I even exist outside this performance? Who am I if I am not performing? Everybody probably feels this way, and that’s okay. I, in classic Tania fashion, will now switch the topic abruptly, to perspectives, and how Jain philosophy talks about how we can look at the same thing from different perspectives, and the summation of all that is reality. I witnessed th...

  Lately, I’ve been loving Conan Gray a lot—his aesthetics, his life, the way he carries himself, and everything he does. It’s all so inspiring to me, so deeply inspiring. I even got an existential crisis because of him over CAT, because I know that even if I succeed, I’ll still fail—since it will be the second time I’ll do a degree that I don’t enjoy anyway. I love Life of Pi, Irrfan Khan, and his movies, and I mourn the movies I will never watch because he is no longer here to make the ones I would have watched if he were alive. I also love Paul Mescal and his movies, like Aftersun, where it all connects. The multiverse of madness, for me, is Conan Gray’s new album. There’s a song called Conel. The moment I saw the title, I just knew it would be my Conel—from Normal People. I felt both happy and sad: happy because two people I love loved each other too, and sad because it made me wonder if my interests were so obviously aligned that both of these people, from different contin...