Susan Sontag, personal hero/one true love, has an excerpt in her journals in which she starts simply listing her likes and dislikes.

This concept came by me through a feature in Synonym Journal:

“The feature is based on two things: an excerpt from Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980 and another from Roland Barthes’ autobiography (trans. Richard Howard, 1977).
The exercise, while gratuitous, is rooted in ideas of pattern, construction, specificity, and memory.”

The idea struck me, and since then, I’ve been keeping a very intermittent google doc of likes and dislikes, categorized by time period.

(I am increasingly organizing my life by states: of mind, of time; as I have gone through rapid periods of change, I’ve felt like I’m no longer guaranteed to be the same person, month to month, and so I began organizing myself and expressions of my self — my pinterest, for example — by short segments of time).

All that being said, here is a short selection of my likes/dislikes, created entirely by whim and intuition, as an exercise in current states and self-analysis and drawing from my last few weeks having finally begun to settle myself in Curitiba, Brasil.

L I K E S :

summer rains / every single palm leaf / overusing the “acquaintances” list on facebook / libraries / reading about the lives of Fields medalists / courtyards / Sundays that precede Mondays that hold no requirement of you / weird exotic tropical flowers / monotonal outfits / tints and shades of peach / afternoon “chopps” / “papelarías” (paper stores) / white light / Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” / wild orchids / in-home karaoke / type columns / “love hotel” neons seen at night from the highway / Miranda July’s Somebody app / dark lips with thick eyebrows / brightly patterned rugs / the idea of Chile / the cactus emoji / tiny green birds / medium-sized dogs / finding plants that are native to both Austin and Curitiba / “azulejos” (ceramic tile) / brass and marble / writing “number” (numero) as the ordinal № / typøgrâphíc açceñts / late-morning rituals / the swashing sound of cars going by when it’s rained all day / people-watching the line outside an art exhibit / hiking the Estrada Graciosa to Morretes / trylons and perispheres / sparse book covers / shift dresses /

D I S L I K E S :