Feb 26, 2026
Eyes:
The Hull House Museum and Archives
The Traitors Season Finale
Summer internship application hell
Doomscrolling Facebook Marketplace
Ears:
Big Cloud, Radiator Hospital
Blue Hair, TV Girl
The Love Club, Lorde
hangar, 8485
God Only Knows, The Langley Schools Music Project
Beginner’s Mind, Bright Eyes
Mouth:
$3 slices and vodka sodas at Big Gay Sal’s Pizza
Cheesy scrambled eggs on sourdough toast with a drizzle of honey!?
Curiosity as Care: Early Practices of Collecting
Long before museums, databases, or digital clouds, the urge to collect was already shaping how memory could materialize itself. Objects were gathered, studied, and arranged as a way to understand the world, but also a way to situate oneself in it. During the Renaissance, this impulse took physical form in the intimate spaces known as studiolos and then cabinets of curiosities. These early collections were carefully constructed expressions of identity, curiosity, and longing. They reveal how collecting emerged as both a personal and cultural practice, one rooted in the desire to organize and commemorate experience, narrate the self, and give permanence to fleeting encounters with beauty, knowledge, and the unknown.
Apothecary Calzolari's Cabinet of Curiosities
During the Renaissance, the studiolo acted as a private study room designed for reading, reflection, and retreat. These rooms stand as one of the earliest forms of the personal archive. This is where scholars and nobles would carefully curate an assemblage of books, works of art, antiquities, scientific instruments, and rare objects. Each item in these collections functioned symbolically and contributed to a visual language that worked to present the collector’s intellect, virtue, and worldliness. The studiolo became a space where objects spoke of class, education, taste, and engagement in classical heritage and global exchange.
Collecting within the studiolo was a creative practice where the owning scholar aimed to present to the world how they wanted to be perceived. Objects were chosen for what they represented about history, scholarship, or philosophical reflection. Eastern artifacts expressed worldly curiosity, libraries demonstrated intellectual authority, and artistic fragments signified timeless ideals. Through carefully curated selections and arrangements, the collector shaped a cohesive portrait of their identity through an environment where material culture became narrative form.
An example of this appears in the Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio, where intricate cabinetry frames representations of musical instruments, scientific tools, armor, and symbolic emblems. Painted images of books mirror a renowned library, blurring the line between the real and the represented, and emphasizing that the studiolo was not just a container for objects, but a space of intellectual performance, an archive used for self expression and invention.
Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio
By the mid-sixteenth century, this instinct to collect expanded into the cabinet of curiosities, also known as the Wunderkammer. Unlike the studiolo, the cabinet presented a more encyclopedic and diverse scope. Common objects included natural specimens, minerals, taxidermy, ethnographic artifacts, scientific instruments, devotional objects, and artworks that coexisted within these dense displays. These collections were organized less by discipline and more by wonder and curiosity. The Wunderkammer aimed to present the world through fascination, spectacle, and juxtaposition.
Cabinets served as early public/private spaces of learning and fascination. They functioned as precursors to modern museums, though without the classificatory systems that museums often impose. Here, order existed beneath chaos: objects were sometimes grouped according to categories such as natural versus artificial or sacred versus scientific. Yet the overwhelming density of the displays resisted clarity, inviting discovery and curiosity rather than control.
In these cabinets, one could often see signs of disarray, such as a casually placed note or an object out of alignment, suggesting that these collections were not static archives but evolving ones. Cabinets invited continuous revision, being constantly re-shaped by new acquisitions and shifting interests. Symbolic objects linked to mortality, including preserved remains or memento mori, often punctuated the displays. These reminders anchored the pursuit of wonder to the inevitability of loss, presenting collecting itself as a response to time’s passage.
Together, the studiolo and the cabinet of curiosities reveal a shared human impulse: to gather, order, and preserve as a means of understanding both the world and the self. These early archives were not just repositories of objects, but a method of actively shaping memory and identity. What was collected gained importance, as what remained outside the collection disappeared from the narrative. Archives became systems of meaning, tools for constructing histories and defining whose experiences endured.
That impulse continues today, as archives now exist more widely in traditional spaces such as museums and libraries, and also in non-traditional settings such as personal collections, family albums, social media timelines, and cloud storage. They operate across physical and digital realms, shaping how memories are curated, edited, and remembered.
What is chosen for preservation?
What is allowed to fade?
And how do those decisions shape personal and collective identities?
It is within these lingering questions that the archive continues to evolve as both a space of storage and a site of meaning, memory, and becoming.
Feb 23, 2026
Eyes:
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Oscar Vuong (ik im late)
In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl
Ears:
Down By The Water, PJ Harvey
Nothing Came Out, The Moldy Peaches
uuu, Field Medic
Missing Out, Maya Hawke
At The Beach, In Every Life, Gigi Perez
Mouth:
Iced salted jagger caramel latte and breakfast sandwich from Swadesi Cafe (the hashbrown in it is like a samosa YUM)
Feb 22, 2026
Eyes:
Funny Weather, Olivia Laing
The Heuretics of Deconstruction, Gregory L. Ulmer
^“I've never been sure about the need for literary criticism. If a work is immediate enough, alive enough, the proper response isn't to be academic, to write about it, but to use it, to go on. By using each other's texts, we keep· on living, imagining, making, fucking, and we fight this society of death.” Kathy Acker
Mouth:
A homemade, perfectly proportioned iced caramel latte (photo attached)…. Update TWO lattes
Feb 18, 2026
Eyes:
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Andy Warhol
The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, llya Kabakov
The America’s Next Top Model Documentary
Ears:
Dying for You, Charli xcx
White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter, Lana Del Rey
California, Joni Mitchell
Mouth:
Chocolate covered angel food cake muffin from Beatrix (what makes a muffin count as a muffin?)
Hands:
That one stubble of hair growing back on my chin I can’t stop trying to pluck with my fingers
Nose:
Salt and vinegar potato chips somewhere
Feb 16, 2026
Ears:
Weird Little Birthday Girl, Happyness
Should Have Known Better, Sufjan Stevens
Roses, Kanye West
Fable, Gigi Perez
Stubborn Love, The Lumineers
Call Me By Your Name audio book read by Armie Hammer (creepy but once you get past it dare I say… steamy)
Eyes:
On Photography, Susan Sontag
Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman
and tbh Summer House and Love Island All Stars
Nose:
The smell of 60-degree weather gracing my sinuses
Some breakfast place frying food in the distance
Today I saw a smushed rat, then a decapitated bird
It’s not going to be a good day
I want to avoid it on my walk back home, but it’s too cold out
My friends have asked me if I am superstitous and sometimes I don’t know the difference between superstition and OCD. For example, if my coffee in the morning is bad, I assume it is going to be a bad day, and it usually is. Yes, I am aware I am psyching myself out and setting myself up for failure.
Sometimes something happens that makes me feel a feeling I have felt only a couple of specific times before, and brings me back to that moment
Teleportation
The thing that triggers this could be an incident, it could be a certain smell, a sound, a vision. But it teleports you forcefully into whatever hazy memory you have left from those previous moments
Your brain is always trying to chase your heart. Follow your heart, your brain will catch up
If you follow your brain, your heart won’t survive!!!!!!!!!!
Why do I sometimes feel nostalgic for how I used to feel during a certain time, even though it felt so horrible? But I miss having access to that feeling. I miss those days still even though I was miserable?
Intro
I am sitting in a cafe, eating the most flaky, crumbly croissant falling apart everywhere. It is a 45-degree sunny day in Chicago, which, after this winter, has me feeling like maybe there is a God after all.
I have recently been inspired to start a blog-type-style-page-thing to start and materialize the chaos overwhelming my brain. I have been procrastinating this idea for years because of deeply rooted imposter syndrome and thinking who the fuck cares, but I am working on not caring if you don’t care!
My goal with this page is to share things that I have encountered or consumed that inspire me, or enlighten me, or make me feel something at all! I assume that this page will lean towards playlists, art criticism, rants, lists in general, things I’ve learned and found interesting, and completely incoherent thoughts.
I have been thinking about making this on Substack and linking it here, but my indecisiveness has stalled me from creating anything for too long, so we are moving forward.
