pisces | poet | wwu student
poetry & fiction & everything in between
IG: @katzumpano
Dear Donald, So this is it. In just a day, the United States of America will have a new president. A couple of years into your term, I wrote you another open letter. In it, I talked about the hate I have felt towards you and the members of your administration. I’m almost twenty-five years old, and I have known more hate than I would like. There are mornings I wake up and I can already feel it pulsing in my heart: rage, frustration, hopelessness. There are days I have to defend myself against personal attacks by ignorant people, questioning the kind of daughter/partner/person I am. There are nights I cry myself to sleep because I am exhausted and scared. Sometimes I struggle to find a balance between exerting necessary energy and wasting valuable energy. It’s been tricky to navigate my emotions during the last four years.
If you’ve been following the news lately, you probably already know that Donald Trump has been permanently suspended from Twitter. On January 8, 2021, the social media company posted the following statement to their blog:
I think it’s pretty obvious that this year was nothing like I’d anticipated. I had all these plans — people I was going to see, places I was going to go — that never came to fruition. I was unable to see my family or friends for much of the year, instead relying on iMessage and FaceTime to keep us connected. I started my final year of college online, desperately wishing I could wait in a long line for campus coffee or get lost in Miller Hall one more time. I spent August in bed, recovering from a surgery I never thought I’d need.
We live in a world of instant gratification: we want our purchases to be delivered as quickly as possible, we want the ability to search for literally anything on a single site, we want to be presented with the highest number of options so we can find the best one. Consumerism is all about convenience, and big companies like Amazon Prime have made that convenience the norm, leaving small businesses struggling.
I listened to a lot of music in 2020. Well, according to Spotify, I listened for 37,653 minutes, which seems like a lot. Much of my free time for the last nine months has been spent listening to music — playing an album while washing dishes or folding laundry has helped to break up the monotony of spending every day inside my apartment.
If you usually celebrate the holidays with friends and family, it might feel strange to spend the holidays at home this year. It's better to keep yourself and others safe, but you might feel sad without the normal busy activity of the holiday season this year.
The holidays aren’t complete without delicious, fresh-from-the-oven baked goods. Soft, chewy, sweet...everyone loves a good cookie.
I love making things. Whether it’s poems, cards, or crafts, I’m happiest when I’m creating something. A few years ago, I moved out of my parents’ house to finish college in another city. I was working ten hours a week at an on-campus job, so I didn’t have much disposable income for Christmas gifts. I started looking around online for inexpensive gift ideas and saw a lot of DIY projects – candles, bath salts, lip balms. I made sugar scrubs and bath salts that year, and was surprised by how much my friends and family liked them. It’s now a yearly tradition to whip up a batch of holiday candles, and I most of the gifts I give for birthdays and other occasions are homemade now, too.