“You’re on a train, Lauren, and your fear—instead of being something inside of you—exists outside of your body. Imagine it now. What do you see?”

I closed my eyes and imagined myself on the D.C. metro. I scrunched my eyelids together, hoping the pressure would force me to visualize something. “I’m…I’m just having a hard time picturing it.” I let out a frustrated sigh.

My therapist was patient. “Let’s try one more time. Don’t force it. Try imagining that your fear is something that lives outside of you and has a tangible presence. Can you see it?”

I tried to imagine my fear as another passenger on the metro, a muted specter with her head in her hands, shoulders rising and falling with her sobbing.

“Okay, it’s like a ghost. It’s crying.”

“And what would you say to it?”

“Uhh.” Even with the vision in my mind, I was finding this silly. I couldn’t get over how stupid I felt. “I’m just…I’m really having a hard time with this exercise.”

“It’s maybe a little experimental. If it feels weird, let’s move on.”

And so we did.

This was in the fall of 2021 and my therapist was guiding me through a “parts therapy” exercise (admittedly with a lot of rigidity on my end). I don’t particularly care to get into the specific basis of my fear then–as consuming as it was at the time, it has nothing to do with my life now. Though I’ve since relegated those circumstances to an unattended graveyard of things that no longer concern me, the spectral presence they have cast across my life is a long shadow, indeed. In the time since, I still sometimes struggle with the feeling of not being enough (as in: maybe if I were skinnier, less busy, smarter, harder working, more easygoing, less shy, more into BDSM–then none of this would have happened).

In spite of the silly place where that feeling started, it spread well into this year. It touched parts of my life it had no business touching. And so it was that for the better part of 2022, my comprehensive exam essays languished on my laptop. Which isn’t to say that over the course of the year, I made no progress on them, but that in that time, I really struggled with organizing my ideas and making the sort of cohesive changes that really would have pushed those essays forward toward completion.

By October, I had started to look toward other ways of measuring my productivity for the year. Beyond my academic work, I hadn’t published any public writing since the fall of 2021. I thought if I could publish in the months left of 2022, I’d feel better. But even my pitches that were accepted left me feeling like less of a “real” writer: most mornings that month, I woke up early to chip away at a story pitch about a couple of scary movies and found myself plunging my central argument into holes about Derrida, Toni Morrison, and my childhood. That story stayed in my files–a similar meandering mess as my exams essays–for weeks. At this critical juncture, my therapist went on maternity leave. Though I assured her (and attempted to assure myself) that I would be okay, the truth is I was scared.

In November, I was nearing the critical hour: the idea of moving into the spring semester without completing my exams essays felt impossible–surely there would be repercussions in my department, not to mention the toll it was taking on me to have them looming so large in my mind. Still, night after night, I’d open my laptop and sit in front of its glowing, blue light feeling paralyzed. On one such November night, I decided to pull my tarot cards with the hope of foreseeing all my impending academic woes ahead of me and bracing for them.

I reached for Jessica Dore’s book, Tarot for Change, after pulling three cards. Immediately, I recognized the first card, the five of coins, as a warning about my forthcoming failure. (For the uninitiated, the five of coins card in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck depicts two destitute and disabled people slogging through a snowstorm. Behind them, the stained glass window of a church radiates warmth. There is no door to the church visible, though, so our subjects are consigned to the harsh weather.) When I opened Dore’s text to the section on the five of coins card, she wrote about the possibilities that might open up for us if we invite in the parts of ourselves that we most fear. What if, rather than banishing them, we invited them inside by the fire and acknowledged them and the good things that come with them?

I remembered the parts therapy exercise my therapist attempted with me a year before and exhaled deeply. I still felt really silly, but decided anyway that it was worth the try. I closed my eyes and again imagined myself on the D.C. metro–the same metro rail I rode alone in my twenties when I’d visit my dad for Christmas break. My fear still presented herself to me as a ghost. This time, we were riding on opposite sides of the metro and I stood up, crossed the train, and sat down in the seat beside her. She didn’t stop crying or even look up to acknowledge my presence beside her, so I put my hand on her shoulders. I felt my hand rise with her sobs.

“That’s okay, you don’t have to stop. I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad you’re here. I know you don’t believe me because I feel frustrated with you sometimes, like when I can’t organize my thoughts, but I know you’re here to protect me. I think I first brought you around to help me a long time ago when I felt scared I might fail: like, if I acknowledged that I could and probably would fail, I could anticipate how failure would feel. And if I planned for it, when I failed, it wouldn’t hurt so much. That has really helped me a lot and some of the time, I have really felt protected by you.”

I placed one hand on her knee to emphasize this next part: “Thank you for protecting me. Thank you for showing up for me every time I needed to scale something scary.” I felt her shoulders stop rising and realized that her sobs were now just sniffles. I moved my hand from her shoulders and ran my fingers along the top of her hair. No one but my grandma ever touches my hair, and this sort of touch is instantly comforting.

“I think somewhere along the way, we got off track, though. Don’t you feel it? You used to help me plan for the worst case scenario, but lately I haven’t been progressing toward things that are important to me. I think you have a part to play in that–maybe somewhere deep down, we both believe that if I never try, I can never fail. And maybe I’ve been putting too much pressure on us, so you’re always here with me. I think it’s time for you to rest–you’ve earned it. Why don’t you get off on the next stop and take some time for yourself? I’ll call you again because I still need you to protect me sometimes, but right now, you can take a break.”

My fear nodded and wiped her eyes. She put her hand on mine that was resting on her knee. As the metro train slowed down, she gave my hand a squeeze and I squeezed back. When the metro stopped at Dupont Circle, she stood up, pushed the hair out of her face, and got off the metro. I turned to wave goodbye to her through the window as the train pulled away.

I opened my eyes. I was sitting in my bed, my laptop open and resting on a pillow across my thighs. My comps exams drafts blinked back at me from the screen. I felt silly, but I also felt lighter. I put a hand in my hair, remembering my own touch and felt something crack open inside of me. It’s cheesy, but I felt the space created by her absence and in that space, I felt like I could finish. I opened a new document and started my exams essays over. Two weeks later, I was finished. Not only had I moved on from those essays that hung over for me for a year, but I felt like I had the mental space to write again. A couple of nights after finishing my essays, I opened up my scary story pitch draft, deleted eighty percent of it, and started writing it anew. The editor loved my new draft and it’s on track for publication at the top of the new year.

None of this is to say that *you* should personify your coping mechanisms and leave them at the Dupont Circle Station, but if you’re feeling stuck like I was, maybe there’s something to acknowledging how your coping mechanisms have been useful (even if they’ve been harmful, too). I think what I like best about the exercise is that it gave me room to imagine having compassion for myself, even the parts I deem the worst parts of myself.

I saw my therapist for the first time since her maternal leave this week and told her about how I revisited this exercise and how it helped me. She was happy for me and said that one way therapists measure success is by their clients thinking about the therapist’s advice and implementing it. It felt good to know that our work together can be measured this way, because when I let my fear take up so much space, it feels like I have so little to show for 2022.

I know this is a lie. In 2022, I earned the fellowship I coveted at the Blanton Museum and was selected for a seat at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Afro-Latino Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. I was also awarded seats at the competitive Studio Museum Institute’s Museum Education Practicum and a defending democracy fellowship through the Western States Center. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote for the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid blog. It may have taken me longer than I liked, but I did complete my comps essays, after all.

In 2023, I will enter the second half of my museum education fellowship and start a new job that I’m excited for (as well as a new 10 hour role on campus). In the fall, I suspect I’ll have to return to teaching, but I believe I can juggle it. I love teaching, and so I’m excited to get back to it. I’ll enter candidacy next year and lay out a map of my dissertation project. I’ll publish at least the two essays I have lined up for the top of the year, but hopefully more. There’s so much to look forward to in the coming year.

Where I’ve been particularly hard on myself for feeling that I was academically stagnant in 2022, in the spirit of being kind to myself, I want to acknowledge the high premium I put on joy this year. I have really enjoyed working at the Blanton Museum; I saw my dad more than I have in any year over the last decade this year; and I spent a lot of time making Colby laugh (a thing I’m excited to do more of in 2023). I helped my friends celebrate their pregnancies, babies’ births, and new jobs. I connected with old friends and made new ones. I learned how to spend less time with people who are not nice to me. I kept my sweet Shakespeare alive for another year and am excited to see how much longer he’ll stay with me on this side of the veil. I watched more professional wrestling than I ever have. I sat down to dinner with Colby hundreds of times, and we found spots and meals that feel like ours. At least half of those meals took place at Colby’s kitchen table, where he’d learn how to make my favorite dishes and set them in front of me on days when he knew I needed a pick-me-up. One truly special meal he made this year was for my dad, where he learned to make Puerto Rican pernil for Thanksgiving and we sat around Colby’s kitchen table eating his roast, my tostones, and my sister in law’s arroz con gandules, all washed down with parcha y rum. I traveled more in 2022 than I have in recent memory, going to exotic places like Orlando and Seattle, and glamorous places like Las Vegas, and places that actually blew my mind like Pittsburgh and Chicago, and places where I feel the most home–like my grandmother’s patio.

It’s been a moment since I last came here (or anywhere, for that matter) just to sit down and write. Partly, that’s because I’m at the point in my program where I have to prepare for candidacy–which involves so, so much writing. And partly because when I’ve sat down to work on my candidacy materials, I feel anxious and then I wind up feeling so guilty about my lack of progress that even trying to digest the possibility of writing for pleasure or writing editorials and personal essays has had the effect of plunging me deeper into guilt. I’m not quite finished with feeling all of those feelings, but I think I’m finding that I’m someone who *needs* to write. Not only in the sense of producing tangible materials to move forward in my program, but also in the sense of all the things I need to do to keep from unraveling.

That said, here is an essay I’ve been tinkering with on and off for about a month:

Almost everything was pink—the shag carpeting; the walls with their hand-painted accents of fig branches and peacocks; the scalloped pillows; and yes, even the velvety sofa in the conversation pit where we sat. The room had high ceilings and was built such that we could make out the shadows of my grandmother’s guests upstairs. Had any of them wanted to, they could have looked over the upstairs railing and directly down at us in the pit. In the center of the ceiling, a crystal chandelier sparkled and swayed, casting little rainbows here and there.

This was Colby’s first time meeting my grandmother and the sight of her marvelously decadent mansion left him with questions he was too polite to ask. But I could sense that having never mentioned my grandmother’s Waco, Texas estate wasn’t sitting right with him. I placed my hand on his arm and drew myself closer to him, “I guess I have some explaining to do.” Just then, a group of people joined us in the pit, one of my grandmother’s staff trailed behind with a silver dish of champagne flutes. “This isn’t a great place to talk,” I said. Colby and I stood and I paid my niceties to the crowd now in the pit, giggling and consumed in their own stories. As we passed my grandmother’s domestic staff, he took the empty glass we each held and replaced it with a fresh, full, bubbling glass.

I led Colby across the parlor’s lush, pink shag carpeting, through a set of heavy and opaque glass double doors, and into a room with alternating black and white floor tiles and ivy plants crowding the large windows. We sat down on a wicker bench and just as I was about to tell him all about how my maternal grandmother built this place off of her earnings running a brothel and selling drugs in Waco, Texas between the 1940’s and 1980’s, another group of happy party-goers entered the room, filling it with the sounds of their clinging glasses and booming laughter. We were just about to leave the room when another of my grandma’s guests stopped me, “You’re Maria’s youngest, right? I just met your brother in the other room! Say, all this champagne is great but it’s not really my style–any beer around?”

I looped my arm through Colby’s and began guiding him away from the crowd, “If you’ll just follow the hall, you’ll either come to a set of black French doors that lead to the kitchen, or you’ll bump into one of my grandmother’s staff who can assist you. Nice meeting you, sir!”

Colby and I opened another set of glass doors onto a sprawling patio. We walked down the patio stairs and toward the pool where I slipped off my shoes and rolled my pants up to the knee. I dipped my feet into the pool’s cool water. In the distance, twinkling strings of light signaled that the party had spread out to the garden. Colby took my champagne glass over to a long table offering a buffet of elevated party snacks. He was setting our glasses down when my grandmother came onto the patio and patted Colby’s shoulder. She reminded us to save our appetites for dinner, which would be served shortly.

All night, her guests had called her Maria, but we (her family) knew her by the moniker her twin brother, Goto, gave her in their infancy: Kine. Save for photos from the height of her youth and success–polaroids of her playfully running towards waves, showing off a new fur coat, or laughing at a man’s joke over dinner–I’ve never seen Kine looking so good. Her hair was dark and luscious and her makeup immaculate. She was wearing a fitted, white button down blouse with big lapels that was tucked into olive trousers. Around her neck, a vintage silk Hermes scarf rested elegantly. Her nails and lips were cherry red and she wore gold jewelry. Kine continued on toward the garden festivities, walking barefoot in her plush grass, she kissed the top of my head as she passed me and I smiled at the scent of her Dior perfume. An older man, though not quite my grandmother’s (or even my mother’s) age came running behind her, “Maria, I’ve been looking for you all night! I was hoping to have a chance to talk with you” he paused, suddenly aware of Colby and I watching him, “…alone.” Nervously, he ran a hand through his salt and pepper hair.

Kine stopped walking and turned to look at the man, her eyes twinkling flirtatiously, “well, my solitude fetches a pretty penny these days, but I’m sure we can work something out.” She grinned and waited for him to catch up to her. When he did, he put his hand on the small of her back. The two continued on toward the garden. I watched as he pushed her hair back to whisper into her ear and as she threw her head back in laughter. She gave him a playful push, “you little devil.”

Colby sat beside me at the pool and began taking his shoes off and rolling up his pants. I could tell we were shelving the conversation about how my grandmother built this place. “Your grandmother’s place is great,” he said, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.

“We could stay through the weekend,” I told him, running my fingers along the reflections of stars and strings of lights that danced along the water’s surface, “she won’t mind. But there isn’t much to do in Waco once we leave the property. That’s the only drawback.” We heard a commotion inside and looked toward the home, through the kitchen windows where my mom was laughing, like genuinely smiling and laughing, as she and her cousins tried to light the 90 single candles on Kine’s birthday cake. I’ve never seen her like that.

Next, I woke up.

Kine passed away quietly and nearly penniless in 2016. My mother, who maintained no small amount of shame about Kine and her past, invited next to no one to Kine’s funeral: my two brothers and I were the only invited guests. For my grandmother, we might as well have been no one: we were not the people who loved her. 

Perpetually in and out of prison between the 1950’s and the 1990’s, Kine took to the gospel after her final arrest and became a staple within her prison’s ministry group. She was released (after nearly fifteen years) in the early 2000’s on the account of a heart condition that threatened to eclipse any value she had to the state of Texas as an incarcerated person, or even as a cop-killer (which is really saying something).

She left no plans for her funeral. Had it been up to her, I’m not sure Kine would have particularly cared whether any of us were there, and she certainly wouldn’t have wanted the Jewish service my mother planned. (This may seem strange, but my mother began thinking deeply about Judaism when Kine came to live with us, and fully converted after my parents’ divorce. In both cases, I fully believe spite was the primary motivating force). After the rabbi left the gravesite, my mother passed a copy of the Robert Munsch children’s book, Love You Forever, for the four of us to take turns reading out loud to Kine’s coffin. This did strike me as strange: as far as I could tell, my mother did not like Kine, let alone love her (in fact, Kine’s time living with us came to an actual screeching halt as we drove home from a family get together in 2004, when—after confronting Kine about the irony of her newfound Christianity, Kine failed to give my mom the apology she felt she was owed and my mother pulled over the family car at a gas station in rural Texas and told Kine to get out, leaving her there with no money, phone, or discernible way home).

But still, my mom sobbed reading the book’s bare prose and passed the book over to one of my brothers. Kine’s life after incarceration was rich with friends from her continuing work with the prison ministry, family she’d reconnected with, and new friends from her work at a city-wide donation center. Just before her death, one of Kine’s nephews threw her a surprise birthday party for her 80th and so many people came. The party, though modest when compared to the one in my dream, was full of people dancing, grilling, and playing with babies.

Naturally, my mom caused a car accident en route to the party to try to get out of going, but after a quick trip to the ER, we (because she’d coerced one of my brothers and I into going with her) were deemed not injured enough to miss it. 

I was thinking of the happy strangers at Kine’s party when I felt the open children’s book placed onto my lap. It was my turn to read a page out loud. I was looking at the baby pink coffin my mother selected for Kine and the spray of pink carnations on top. It was all wrong—Kine wasn’t a soft woman; she loved Elizabeth Taylor, red nail polish, a red lip, cheetah print, and gold; she would have wanted big, red roses and a sleek casket. We heard footsteps approaching and the four of us turned in unison. As the small group of mourners approached us, my mother began grumbling about invitations and classlessness.

“Rachel, this is wrong. You can’t send her off like this” one of my grandmother’s nieces said to my mother, authoritatively placing a hand on Kine’s pink coffin. The niece’s eyes landed on the children’s book on my lap and she sucked her teeth, “people *loved* her. You’re not just keeping us from saying goodbye, you’re keeping them from really knowing her.” She was pointing at my brothers and I now. The niece sat beside me and put a hand on my left knee. “Your grandma loved to dress! Her whole life she loved clothes. Before she died, we went shopping and when she went to pay, the check out man said her card was maxed out. And do you know what she said to him?” I shook my head. “She said, ‘give me my damn clothes, I’m dying any day now!’ And he did!”

One of my grandmother’s nephews followed, “I came to see her—had to have been 1985—and your grandma loved a good time. So I came in late and she said I should go straight to sleep because we were getting up early. And I thought, ‘oh, wow, we’re going to start partying first thing!’ And in the morning, your grandma had me get dressed and drove me out to the high school nearby. And I said, ‘what’s this now?’ And she said, ‘you’re going to go in there and tell the man at the desk that you’re here to take your GED.’ And I said I wasn’t ready. She said, ‘Yes, you are.’ And I told her I hadn’t signed up or paid or anything but she’d taken care of it all. So I went and took it and passed. I got my GED because of her.” 

There were maybe only six strangers total, but each of them had something to say about the haughty woman I barely knew in that pink coffin. At the end of the service, I went up to her coffin and whispered, “I hope that made you smile, they crashed your funeral to send you off right.” I smelled a pink carnation and patted the coffin’s top. Lifting my head, I heard my grandmother’s best friend chastising my mom for trying to bury her mother with so much secrecy and shame. After the graveside service, my mom, my brothers, and I went to Kine’s modest wooden frame house on James Street. We stood in her empty living room and silently drank big red out of solo cups and ate quartered pimento cheese sandwiches and conchas my mother brought. Standing there, I remembered how once, a long time ago, we’d renovated this house ourselves as Kine went up for parole—just in case. One of her old boyfriends, an old man who went by Roy, was driving by and saw us making repairs. He came by every afternoon after that to help and it was obvious that he was still smitten with Kine fifteen years on. I still remember watching him eat fried chicken on Kine’s patio, his dentures gently wrapped in a napkin he placed beside him.

My mom told me Roy was once a very handsome and wealthy lawyer, but after Kine’s last arrest, he’d been disbarred for his association with her. I knew, even at twelve, how powerful she must have been once to have a ruined old man still calling after her all that time later. 

Kine never did have a mansion. I saw her lavish life and birthday party in a dream one night after seeing Everything, Every Where, All at Once. I’d like to think it means somewhere a different version of our family grew up with Kine as the matriarch, going to garden parties, and knowing her well. Which is to say that somewhere, a version of me takes Kine’s fabulousness as routine. In my wildest imaginings, Kine still lived a life of poverty, but she was able to have a normal and happy life. In that world, at her funeral, I told a story about how she did my makeup for homecoming, or lent me her pearl earrings for graduation. 

I didn’t know I was waiting to hear it.

It’s not my mother’s warbled pronunciation. It’s not my dad’s low voice admonishing me in two syllables. It’s not my best friends shouting it to pull me away from a flirtation just as the lights come up at last call.

Until now, I liked it best when my grandmother would stretch out its e, and nestle it between mi hermosa and mi preciosa.

You say it when I make you laugh;

You say it when I’m drunk and sobbing in your bed, my mascara ruining my white shirt;

You’ve said it when you were mad, uttering it between clenched teeth and cracked knuckles.

No matter how,

when you say it,

I smell rain.

When you say it, something long neglected blooms between my ribs.

When you say it, it’s like no one has ever said it. I hear it for the first time and instead of resenting my American name,

for the first time

it feels like it’s mine.

Sometimes I, too, have nearly given in to the desire to run a needle and thread through my innumerable disappointments and rejections and pain and weave them into an impenetrable armor.

But, girl, I’ve watched the way you rub cuticle oil along the quick of your nails and have seen the vases of dried flowers on your desk where you write;

I’ve studied the soft lines of your elbows and how thoughtfully you tie up your baby’s breath hair even when you think no one else will see;

You’re nearly a Renaissance painting when we talk over FaceTime and you’re wearing your Emory crew neck and your sage green turban with your fairy lights and pothos plants crawling behind you;

Everyone sees the graceful motion of your wrists when you laugh and bring your hands together as if you’re going to clap or pray.

You a city of a woman, like Lucille said.

Nikki would have said she liked your voice and wrote a poem about you.

You have the kind of phenomenal grace Maya famously saw in herself.

And it would be a crueler, less beautiful world if you decided to lock all your softness and light away in a pretty box between your smile and shadow.

So, for heaven’s sake, don’t let them rob of us your honeycomb heart.

When I started this website, I imagined it being a place where I would primarily write about my grad program, my experiences as a doctoral student, and the texts I was reading (& also, a place to professionally flex). Some of those ideas went out of the window once the pandemic started, because having a semi-public outlet felt really good. That trend only deepened as the emotional stress of the pandemic was compounded by other things going on in my personal life.

But! If I can momentarily return to the old aims of this space, I have a little milestone to share: this past December, I was awarded my Master of Arts in African & African Diaspora Studies from thee University of Texas at Austin. Though I’d received an email from the graduate school saying I’d completed the requirements, it didn’t feel real until this week when my degree arrived in the mail.

When I saw the big envelope from UT in the mail, I laughed a little and realized that this meant more to me than I previously believed. When I started the program, I was dead-set against getting an MA. Like, what am I doing: collecting degrees? But about a year ago, the department decided they wanted me to complete the MA requirements and asked that I complete my thesis over summer 2021. At the time, agreeing to receive my MA felt a lot like checking a box. Okay, cool, fine, whatever you say.

But, honestly: summer 2021 was so hard for me. It wasn’t the summer I had planned at all. Actually, I can see now—in a way that wasn’t obvious (or even recognizable) to me then—just how much of an unhinged wreck I was up until like…November. During that time, there were days when the only thing I felt tethered to was the person I want to be—and that person had her MA. So in the midst of everything else, I sat down and plugged away at this. Seeing my degree in the mail, this feeling washed over me of how cool it is to have something tangible to show for that time.

My MA thesis is wildly flawed! For something that only recently exists in the world, I already see so much of it that I would like to change and places where I already disagree with myself. It’s in that spirit that I’ve made it downloadable on my digital archive tab. I’m really excited to see the beautiful toads these early thought tadpoles might develop into as I look toward my dissertation project in 2024.

Should you choose to go take a gander, you’ll notice the file is named something like “dumb fucking MA template dot jpeg” or whatever. There’s a story behind that! When I first submitted my MA thesis and the documents in support of my degree, the graduate school told me that though I met the requirements, I had to resubmit my report in the proper template. The user manual for the template was not intuitive at all!

Fortunately, Colby was with me while I attempted to figure it out. Which brings me to another thing: Colby, the new guy. On our first couple of dates, I was still in the window of being a crazy mess and somehow, Colby kept showing up. I was so much of a mess that on our first date, there’s a full 90 minutes of the evening missing from my memory, including how I lost the mask I was wearing that night. Having failed to chase him off with my antics, the day I was resubmitting my thesis, I’d decided it was finally time for us to have a sober date and invited him to co-work at my favorite coffee spot. Recognizing my frustration with the template and generally being so much better at tech and computers and whatever, he helped me work the template and was there when I hit “send” on my submission at last.

As I downloaded the completed file, I named it “dumb fucking MA template,” partially to make Colby laugh as he watched me over my shoulder. Though he’s not on my acknowledgments page (written long before I knew him), I would say there’s an implied but invisible, “& thank you to Colby W., without whom this submission literally wouldn’t be possible.”

Anyway, template frustrations aside, my MA thesis now exists out in the world. It’s largely about the visual resonances between the figure of the mammy in the plantation south and the religious figure of La Madama in Puerto Rican espiritismo. In essence, this thesis attempts to locate whether there are spiritual dimensions of the mammy.

Here’s a wild pivot: there’s an app called WOMBO that uses artificial intelligence to make an artistic rendering of the user’s keywords. I took the keywords from my thesis and these are the images it sent back. I hate giving AI too much praise, but I really do love these images.

So, if you’re so moved, go say hi to my thesis. If you want to make fun of me (and there’s plenty to make fun of), go ahead and download it!