here’s everything i thought about in 25 minutes by Teresa J. '26

i’ve been in a perpetual state of writer’s block recently (i.e. the whole entire school year), so i’m going to set a timer for 25 minutes because that’s when my laundry is supposed to be done and just continuously write for the entire time. every so often i go through a phase where i become furiously obsessed with monkeytype, stemming from my 5th grade typing class where i first learned the joys of nitrotype and home row typing. i’m pretty sure my blogger bio says my words per minute (wpm) is 150, which is true – but i can only really push into the 150-160wpm range for maybe a minute max.

theoretically, if i were typing at full speed for the entire 25 minutes i should end up with like a 3750 word blog, at least i think, i hope i did the math right, i think the awkward thing with me and math is that it’s not necessarily as if i’m bad at math or i hate it but my fundamentals are just really poor. i never learned any tricks on doing mental math (my friends and i had a brief zetamac stint and i think i was capped at like 23 which is kind of sad) and doing computations with fractions kind of scare me but i still really appreciate how beautiful math can be when linear algebra exams aren’t kicking my ass!

that was a tangent !!!! sorry !! ok, so, in a vacuum and assuming no fatigue or pausing to think⁠01 in hindsight this is such an mit way of phrasing things... my friends love saying things are “trivially true” or casually dropping “o(n) time” into a conversation or otherwise treating normal conversation like a proof. nerds !!! i would end up with 3750 words but obviously that isn’t possible so let’s just say if i type at around 110wpm (and i pause for an embarrassingly long amount of time to do these calculations in my head) for the entire 25 minutes, i’ll have about 2750 words which, ok, that’s kind of a lot but maybe that’s doable! i guess we’ll see at the end

anyways this is an exercise i learned while i was at the kenyon review summer writing program or something like that and the idea is that you’re just supposed to follow your stream of consciousness and continuously write for as long as you can in the hopes that you’ll be able to generate new ideas to play off of. i’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to use any punctuation or line breaks and we were also supposed to write it out by hand so i’m already not quite following the rules, but since i probably won’t be doing any editing after i’m done writing, other than to maybe add in links or pictures, i’m going to try and preserve the legibility of this blog as much as possible with some line breaks here and there.

anyways (come on teresa find another transition word please) writing is hard. writing is so freaking hard !!! ⁠02 this is where the meta part comes in! i think i’m a decent writer, or at least i’m good at using big fancy words and writing an excess of words to say something that could have probably been conveyed in just a few, but overall the issue lies in getting started in the first place. writing is an intimidating process for me, i subconsciously put a lot of pressure on myself to get things right the first time and i get frustrated when i’m unable to write exactly how it feels in my head so i refuse to write “rough drafts”⁠03 even while writing this it pained me a little to write without proper capitalization and grammar and then i procrastinate until the last minute and spit out something unstructured but at least it usually sounds pretty. lipstick on a pig type of thing.

in fairness i did give somewhat of a disclaimer when i was applying to be a blogger ! in my application i talked about how i honestly don’t like writing all that much, or at least i find it really difficult, but i did say i would work on that and i guess this is me working on that. so far it has been pretty cathartic to just word vomit so that’s good!

writing in this way, entirely unfiltered and loose is similar to the merit i see in writing poetry. i will always gravitate towards writing poetry over writing short stories or essays. it’s just a less rigid art form. if i don’t want to use full sentences or correct grammar or arrange words in an order that makes sense i don’t have to. and i think there’s something special about trying to capture the same meaning or image without using outright prose. i think when you have less words to work with you’re forced to be more particular about each one

i think i forget that my blogs don’t have to be some kind of deep and complex piece of art⁠04 i'd say the blogs i've published so far don't achieve this anyway, so i'm not so sure why i beat myself up about this before i even start writing every single time. they can and should be silly or simple or whatever i want! having such an unrealistic standard for myself is just stressful and unhelpful and it’s usually better to put something out rather than nothing. i think this is applicable to every aspect of my life

ok i’m kind of losing steam here i don’t know what to write about so i’m going to talk about monkeytype again. so actually my current hyperfixation is monkeytype but on mobile. for people my age it’s much more common to find people who can text on their phone without looking at the keyboard than it is to find people who can type on their computer without looking at their hands. the discrepancy between me and my friends is a lot smaller when it comes to mobile typing speed. actually i was shocked the first time i tried it on mobile because my wpm was like 60 and i was typing as fast as i possibly could, but then i realized that my accuracy was just horrendously low and bringing down my score

um, hyperfixations, hyperfixations. so many. yesterday i relapsed into my tetris hyperfixation. i’ve never been as big a tetris fanatic as my friends but i did spend about an hour and a half just playing 40 lines on tetr.io so that’s something. i tend to hyperfixate on mobile games or consuming some form of media and then sometimes i’ll get burnt out of consuming any media at all and i just have to sit there, wanting to watch netflix or start a manga but not feeling particularly inspired by any of the ones on my to-watch/to-read list.

hyperfixations is a fun word to type – it has a nice flow to it, unlike words with double letters like yellow, or words with too many letters in a row that force me to use my ring fingers, which are probably my least agile fingers. subway surfers is a recurring hyperfixation. pinterest saving sprees is another one. reorganizing my entire spotify playlist setup. saving easy 10-minute no-clean-up recipes on instagram reels. buying enamel pins off etsy en masse. i was recently obsessed with peaky blinders and before that i was obsessed with watching every single film that had joseph gordon-levitt in it and before that i was obsessed with reading psychological horror manga.

this is a habit of mine that is mostly not that harmful but i’d say is definitely somewhat of a problem, especially when it trends towards retail therapy and just impulse buying stuff that makes me momentarily happy. i just watched a video about someone doing a no-spend challenge for a month and it kind of made me realize how there is still a lot of room for me to mature when it comes to valuing what i have and prioritizing spending on experiences rather than material possessions. it’s definitely not the first time i’ve been made aware of this part of myself but hopefully it will be the first time i actually successfully do something about it

there are a lot of things about myself that i want to change and improve and i think to some extent i have both changed and improved a lot in college. my sleep schedule has slowly been recovering this summer and i’m learning to cook and overall being more intentional and introspective and whatnot

my friend (who really loves to ask questions, which is super cool and also nice because i don’t tend to do this and if i do it’s usually a stupid question like what’s your favorite fruit or something inconsequential) asked me the other day when i thought i had first become conscious or rather since when do i think i’ve been the person i am today (if that makes any sense?) and i kind of floundered about trying to answer this because on one hand, i like to think i’m truly the same person i was in middle school, maybe just changing externally or in my tastes, but at the same time i do think i’ve changed a lot

i don’t actually know whether stuff i’m thinking about is stuff i’ve written in blogs before or stuff i’ve said to myself in my head and thought about writing down in blogs or stuff i’ve talked about with friends. sometimes a girl’s just gotta plagiarize herself. my friends and i have been talking about this kind of stuff a lot lately, actually. about how sweet it is to be a person living in a world and being surrounded by other people who are wholly themselves and distinct from us. about friendships and the newness of college and the newness of ourselves and aging and everything. i don’t know why we’re all suddenly thinking about this kind of stuff now that our freshman year is over but. either way i (spoiler!) have a blog that’s sort of about this that’s been in the works for a long time now so i’ll find something else to write about

i don’t actually have any metric for how long 2750 words is supposed to be so i have no idea how close i’m getting. the google doc i’m writing on right now isn’t times new roman size 12 double spaced, i’m actually typing with trebuchet ms 11pt font right now, so i have no idea if i’m supposed to be on my sixth page yet or something like that. right now i’m coming up on the end of the third page so hopefully that’s good???

to be completely transparent i’m supposed to be writing this all continuously but i’m lowkey just going with the flow and starting a new paragraph whenever a new thought pops up⁠05 i've started employing this strategy whenever i write anything, because a lot of times i'll think of a specific string of words while i'm in the middle of typing something else, and think oh that's a banger, but then i forget it if i don't write it down right away so that’s why this all feels so disjointed, probably. it doesn’t help that i’m typing in pretty much exactly the way i would say things out loud so

oh actually just kidding the timer just went off !! good timing

note from editing teresa: i think i ended up with 1778 words! so, not even close but regardless this was very fun and i will perhaps be trying it again!