The Birds Have Vanished Into The Sky

"Death is the Mother of Beauty"

Hi, and thank you for taking the time to read this message!

For creative, personal and work-related reasons, your resident ethereal, sparkling and chonky aesthete is relocating from Chicago to New Orleans this summer! A cross-country move is expensive, so my goal with this gofundme is to cover the costs to transport my belongings, as well as have a head start on the rent for my housing as I transition and begin to work.

Donations via via gofundme, as well as via Venmo (@iridessence), cashapp ($iridessence) or PayPal are welcome.

Thank you for considering and/or sharing!

one day my bookshelves will be filled with penguin classics. one day.

'Amicus Plato — amicus Aristoteles — magis amica veritas.'

"Plato is my friend - Aristotle is my friend - but my greatest friend is truth."

Isaac Newton, Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae

for days of hauling books

I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall — like seeking love in a whorehouse.

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964 - 1980

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.’

— The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

(Henry Winter)

“for someone who doesn’t want to lose me you’re not acting like you want to keep me”

- j.b.

dark academia but STEM

- pinning the most difficult equations you solved to your wall. Or just the ones you find beautiful

- lots of plants, their names written in the pots. Trying different ways to grow them.

- always having lab gloves in your bag or pockets.

- writing ideas for projects in messy notes, putting them between the pages of your notebooks and forgetting about it

- hands dirty with black ink because you’ve been writing for too long too fast

- massive books under your arms, laptop full of carefully tagged papers while the printed ones are a total mess

- insane eyes and absolute euphoria when you finally understand not only the concept, but where did it came from and how it applies on your daily life

- hair always in a bun or ponytails, short finger nails and none jewelry because ~lab rules~

- searching until late at night the exact equipment the scientists used long ago, what methods they used and imagining how would it be to be in their place.

- Feeling as comfortable in the lab as in the library.

- you hate Victor Frankenstein but legit understand why.

- sore eyes from microscope or screen light, aching backs, still not wanting to leave

- looking at people and thinking about how they truly are: organs, cells, molecules, atoms, protons, eletrons, quarks, leptons…. nothing as one would think,  everything, all the same, too big, too little, all pieces from a big puzzle

- dreaming about the topic you were studying last day

- having an idea about a paper while talking to your friends. Remembering that is not your field and going crazy because SOMEONE needs to research it.

- you are crazy to read some fiction but there are too many papers waiting for you 

- You should be used by now but sometimes still get distracted about how graphics changes according to compartments added.

- finishing a big problem and just staring at it, amazed by how it was unfolded and reorganized until you get to the final answer 

- “we don’t know….yet”

- ethics committee?? How about just test it myself, uh?(that new receipt that later comes out a absolute disaster)

- suddenly knowing how to solve a problem in the middle of a lunch

- notebooks margins filled with equations or formulas vs pages almost blank, with just one note or two

- mental breakdowns after classes thay change your perspective completely

- knowing that the truth depends on how further you can see. We’re always getting closer. Never there.

- Looking at an art piece, wondering what kind of ink was used, how it was when it was made, how time has affected it

― Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

[text ID: I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.]