bucolics anonymous

[bucolics-anonymous]

6/3/26

My father and his partner got into town Saturday morning and dropped by work before the end of my shift. Showed off some David Tudor plucked at random and the transparent scores for Cage’s Variations. “I discovered this stuff in my late teens and that’s why I can’t read music.” Yoko Ono, heavy sandwiches, Hollywood queens, quips, crypts, cryptids. The weather was cool and sunny. A. sez he can always tell I’m relaxed when I begin making up stories about animals. The rat hotel in the palm tree. The seal that howls at the moon.

Cancelled the meeting w/ HR and muted former boss’s texts on the advice of my dad’s partner, who worked in HR until Friday. Either side might try to get info from me in case of lawsuit, so it’s best to document everything but keep it to myself unless/until it gets any weirder. Is there anything more pathetic than someone trying to exert authority they no longer have? I pray I’ll always be able to resist that level of vanity, but I wouldn’t put it past me.

[itsmissing]

ice cream truck blasting gymnopedie no. 1 while a bunch of really forlorn children chase after it

[tyrannosaurus-rex]

[bucolics-anonymous]

[bucolics-anonymous]

5/29/26

Work remains a mess. “Have to” (encouraged by interim supervisor) to go to HR on Tuesday to record that our former boss is still texting us after we wished her well and politely declined her invitation to meet off-campus off the clock. We’re not even trying to communicate our displeasure—who wants to take a train on the weekend to be pressed into letting someone off the hook? I’d be happy to move on; this is all for her. She sent us another message on Saturday and I’ve had three nightmares since, all about her being rehired. In one she was young, with dark hair, and I didn’t recognize her until it was too late, whatever that means. Still no confirmation on our move to a 12-month workyear. No promotion up for discussion until we get a new library director and the job still hasn’t been posted. How can we be “senior library assistants” w/o anyone to assist!! Everything is stupid including/especially me!!!!!

[vrtualdreamgirl]

we can’t talk here contact me in my dream tonight

[johnnycrass]

dudes will worship the beast all day. And then be like. Who can be greater than the beast 🙄 who can speak against it 😂🤣🤣

[bucolics-anonymous]

The subject of my research paper:

The gist: maybe historians should use reproductive coercion (increasingly applied to describe structural conditions) as a heuristic to analyze medieval consent bc it doesn’t require ascribing understandings, emotions, or motivations to individual historical actors. Test case Margery Kempe bc when John’s not exacting the conjugal debt she describes him with notable and moving tenderness. Kempe scholars seem reluctant to address this tension specifically, also tend to look at reproductivity in terms of symbolic resource even tho the woman had fourteen children.

Also, I just love how familiar it is!! The argument walking back from something, the hypothetical question, the childishness of a recurrent marital disagreement.

[thirdity]

“Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.”

— Susan Sontag, “Sartre’s Saint Genet”

[bucolics-anonymous]

5/20/26

Turned in my paper on the 11th and slept through the 12th. Prof says I should submit to journals, but it doesn’t pass peer review yet (I’m peer) and I’m not sure how much more work I want to put into something so strictly historicist. Maybe Comitatus tho?

Usual birthday blues. Boring. Read Sontag’s “Double Standard of Aging” to celebrate.

Had an exchange of disclosures with a student worker in April that I’m still processing (writing). Lots of anxiety surrounding authority and boundaries—what a shock.

No Career Move to speak of unless I count the proposed “expansion of my role” from a 10-month year to the full 12, which I don’t. My income would increase more than if I were actually promoted, but I have been running the library for 2.5 months in the absence of a director and they haven’t even posted the job yet so god knows it’ll be at least another 6 months of this, best case scenario. If nothing happens in the fall, I’ll know for sure that I have no future here. I hate having to give a shit.

Going to Athens in June-July, staying in friends’ apartment for 3 weeks again. If my 12-month is approved, this will be the last time I can do this. I think the trip in 2023 was the happiest I’ve been since covid.

All extra energy gets thrown at the project. I’m losing faith in my ability to finish. A. sez perfectionism, but it isn’t.

[bucolics-anonymous]

Birthday is Saturday + the paper is due Monday + then I get to binge all your personal posts + tell you a thing or two about Margery Kempe 💞

[bucolics-anonymous]

3/27/26

Maybe if having my words harvested is the cost of 2020s communication and if I don’t have the spare cognitive energy to say anything well anyway, I should feel free to type boring, poorly-worded garbage right into the app as it occurs to me instead of keeping a shadow-blog in my Notes. Welcome to my GRIPES.

Today we got an email notification from a database vendor that the library’s account has been placed on hold for non-payment. The rep has been emailing our former boss since 2/24. It’s rly starting to look like she peaced out as a fuck-you to the upper admin she’s been feuding with and simply did not care about how it would impact us. Realizing along with my coworker the extent to which we were walking on eggshells for 8 (me) and 20 years. Wild to have the “oh noooooo that sounds fucked up!!!” experience in a meeting with HR and not while telling A. about highschool. Boiled frog yet again!

[bucolics-anonymous]

3/25/26

The situation at work is too complicated for a paragraph, so let’s just say it is only as if my boss, the head librarian, disappeared off the face of the earth at the end of February. We are down from 3 to 2, no notice given or arrangements made. Every single day I am faced with some piece of information (or lack thereof) that leaves me stunned, like quite literally dazed and dopey. It boggles! Doing a ton of extra work just explaining to upper admin how much extra work I’m doing. Trying to wrangle a Career Move but I have the horrible suspicion that they will be able to extract my expertise w/o compensation simply by taking advantage of my desire to prevent my environment from becoming fully chaotic! See ya at the end of the semester, I guess!

[bucolics-anonymous]

I’m growing so much rn!!!!! 😩😠

[bucolics-anonymous]

From Satie’s letters.

[deathandmysticism]

The Joviall Crew, or, the Devill turn’d Ranter, 1651

[marypickfords]

The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984)