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The Lurking Fear
Apr. 7th, 2025 05:50 pmTo be eligible for a Fullbright scholarship for a Master's program in Chinese culture and Sinology in Taiwan, I need to be at level B1 in Mandarin. I think I can achieve that level in reading by next summer and in aural comprehension too if I bust my ass a bit. But speaking? I'm not going to have many opportunities to speak. I can do the same thing I do with French: speak to myself. But the results will be limited.
I have been sleeping about seven hours per night for the past three nights. I don't feel as rested or as energetic as I thought I would. Proper bowel function, however, is returning, just not to the extent that I'd anticipated, probably due to the side effects of progesterone, which I've been taking every other day.
The Asian grocery store had only one package of mung bean noodles today and no shittake mushrooms. I was disappointed about the noodles because I'd gotten there early and waited around in the cold for them to open. I will try the other Asian grocery store, the one I found the same morning I found my mobile phone.
That one package of mung bean noodles is the best I've ever had. They are made of pure mung beans, whereas the others were cut with potato starch and water. The texture is much nicer.
Instead of spending a fortune on miso, I decided to try a cheap Korean fermented soybean product from the discount grocery store even though it contains wheat. It is quite tasty. That small amount of wheat shouldn't pose problems, and maybe it won't pose any, assuming Korean wheat isn't GMO, as usian wheat is. I'm not actually sure whether I just have problems with all wheat or whether it's something to do with GMO wheat.
Outside the discount grocery store, I saw from the back a womon who looked attractive. Not only was she wearing something comfortable-looking and neutral (meaning not typical women's clothing), as I sit here remembering it, she wasn't overweight. Usually when I think about so many people being overweight, I think about it in terms of a public health crisis. I can't recall having thought much about how widespread weight issues limits attraction.
Anyways, she looked tasty in her sweatsuit and I was somewhat struck by how automatic the physical attraction was. I don't have that kind of reaction to men. With them it starts in the mind and makes its way to the groin. I guess with womyn it's more like something in the solar plexus, if we are going to body-map it, then it radiates outward to mind, heart (meaning emotions), and groin.
What if it's not enough, that attraction that flows from mind to groin. What if I cannot make it work, can't sustain a relationship, get bored with whatever hapless guy I might be with? What if i can't sustain a relationship with anyone who is available to me? Not psychologically attracted enough to womyn, not physically attracted enough to men. What a bleak prospect.
I treated myself to some moisturizing hair gel I found at the discount grocery store today. I cannot afford to pay my next energy bill installment and I'm kind of beyond caring today. Juggling expenses with no money is just too difficult.
Today I finished Lovecraft's short story The Lurking Fear. Now that I'm reading him again, what stands out is something that seems to have barely cracked the surface of my consciousness: the guy overuses horror-specific adjectives. Sometimes, there are so many "morbid"'s, "hellish,"'s, "sepulchral"'s, and "otherworldly"'s in a row that the phrase loses all meaning. Today I got bogged down in a whole paragraph that seemed to contain almost nothing but a string of these adjectives. The passage started off making sense, and then it didn't anymore. It was like a glimpse of insanity in print form. Maybe that was the point.
And via the magic of the Internet, here it is:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70486/pg70486.txt
I have been sleeping about seven hours per night for the past three nights. I don't feel as rested or as energetic as I thought I would. Proper bowel function, however, is returning, just not to the extent that I'd anticipated, probably due to the side effects of progesterone, which I've been taking every other day.
The Asian grocery store had only one package of mung bean noodles today and no shittake mushrooms. I was disappointed about the noodles because I'd gotten there early and waited around in the cold for them to open. I will try the other Asian grocery store, the one I found the same morning I found my mobile phone.
That one package of mung bean noodles is the best I've ever had. They are made of pure mung beans, whereas the others were cut with potato starch and water. The texture is much nicer.
Instead of spending a fortune on miso, I decided to try a cheap Korean fermented soybean product from the discount grocery store even though it contains wheat. It is quite tasty. That small amount of wheat shouldn't pose problems, and maybe it won't pose any, assuming Korean wheat isn't GMO, as usian wheat is. I'm not actually sure whether I just have problems with all wheat or whether it's something to do with GMO wheat.
Outside the discount grocery store, I saw from the back a womon who looked attractive. Not only was she wearing something comfortable-looking and neutral (meaning not typical women's clothing), as I sit here remembering it, she wasn't overweight. Usually when I think about so many people being overweight, I think about it in terms of a public health crisis. I can't recall having thought much about how widespread weight issues limits attraction.
Anyways, she looked tasty in her sweatsuit and I was somewhat struck by how automatic the physical attraction was. I don't have that kind of reaction to men. With them it starts in the mind and makes its way to the groin. I guess with womyn it's more like something in the solar plexus, if we are going to body-map it, then it radiates outward to mind, heart (meaning emotions), and groin.
What if it's not enough, that attraction that flows from mind to groin. What if I cannot make it work, can't sustain a relationship, get bored with whatever hapless guy I might be with? What if i can't sustain a relationship with anyone who is available to me? Not psychologically attracted enough to womyn, not physically attracted enough to men. What a bleak prospect.
I treated myself to some moisturizing hair gel I found at the discount grocery store today. I cannot afford to pay my next energy bill installment and I'm kind of beyond caring today. Juggling expenses with no money is just too difficult.
Today I finished Lovecraft's short story The Lurking Fear. Now that I'm reading him again, what stands out is something that seems to have barely cracked the surface of my consciousness: the guy overuses horror-specific adjectives. Sometimes, there are so many "morbid"'s, "hellish,"'s, "sepulchral"'s, and "otherworldly"'s in a row that the phrase loses all meaning. Today I got bogged down in a whole paragraph that seemed to contain almost nothing but a string of these adjectives. The passage started off making sense, and then it didn't anymore. It was like a glimpse of insanity in print form. Maybe that was the point.
And via the magic of the Internet, here it is:
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness
chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple
fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a
ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks
with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; moundlike tentacles
groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane
lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with
fungous vegetation.... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me
unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that
slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70486/pg70486.txt
