ee cummings slam poem


first - most recent - home

5 September 2022, 3:29 PM

When he smiles, it's like something peels open on the surface of a star or inside me. Like watching a line become a shape so sacred it turns the eyes of the devoted to jelly. Like being warm in bed and settled within the kind of deep half-doze that only happens when you are womblike content and a crack of light widening to the right of the door as your favorite person in the world returns home. Not like lightning scarring the sky, but like your whole living room flashed for a second with violet. Like a miracle. Like fresh air after holding your breath or like your first lungful on the crest of Denali if you'd been raised on Industrial Revolution smog. Like luck, or magic, or finding out you were right. Like something fitting perfectly inside something else. Like a flower that only blooms once every three years blooming for you, every day, just for you.

27 August 2022, 10:11 PM

Lord it has been hard. I miss actually updating this site beyond this one page but I have not had the energy to do more than watch youtube videos in my free time. Or just try not to drown. I honest to God do not know the last time it was this bad. Maybe when I was a teenager? Still, it's a different kind of bad from any other kind before. I'm still going to work, at least. I actually kind of laughed when I went into work the day after finding out       . Four years ago that would've been unthinkable. So in whatever way I have gotten stronger since then, or it's just different, or whatever.

But! Today I feel okay. There have been ups and downs over the last two weeks. This is the longest an up has lasted -- it's been going since yesterday afternevening. Mar and I hung out and his love moved something in me. I don't say that lightly. I am a very lucky person. Someone called me sweetheart on the street today and I told them not to call me sweetheart and then they asked me for money and I said "fuck no." I don't really stand up for myself like that, usually. I don't process the anger-for-my-own-sake until I've already passed by silently. Not today. They can say all they want about forcing yourself into a positive mindset and choosing happiness or kindness or whatever and they are usually right but the truth is that getting that little temperamental armor, that little boost of feelinggoodalready, that comes from just already feeling all right makes getting to whatever your sunlight zone is so much easier than when you're starting from zero or a negative. I wish I could put this in the bank for later.

I start therapy next week. I'm also high right now and not interested in writing more of this. I have felt more like nothing than ever before in the last few weeks but I have also felt more human. Shit sucks but I love and am loved. Thank you for reading, if you did. See you later.

13 August 2022, 11:07 AM

i moved in!!!! i love the new place. two of my coworkers helped and i think it was the smoothest move anyone on the planet has experienced -- one trip, no injuries, no catastrophes. i have so little furniture and i fall onto my floor mattress every night and sleep better than i have in months. (like, actually -- i went three, maybe four months without getting eight hours of sleep in one night more than once or twice. then i moved and slept eight hours three nights in a row. several minor health concerns i had immediately disappeared ... crazy how that works.) my plants get so much sunlight. the apartment triple-locks. i'm on the top floor and the door adjacent to mine lets me onto the roof. i eat dinner out there most nights, watching the stars.

when i was seventeen, preparing to leave for college, my therapist at the time told me that many people experience a dip/jolt/crash in their mental/emotional wellbeing once they Get Out. eg, once they physically, materially, geographically exit the purviews of their abusers, or their subideal circumstances, or their homes of origin (of stress of tension of misery). once you feel safe your brain starts breaking down walls. then, it starts to rebuild. it's the way a very young child will only scream and flail and hit their closest parent, because they are the one with whom they feel safe to uncover their strongest feelings. it is the paragon of things getting worse before they get better.

i expected that to happen when i went to ****. it did not. though across the country from what i was raised in and who raised me, the new situation was not a relaxation or a relief. i was a butch lesbian sharing a suite with nine straight girls. my younger sister was diagnosed with an illness that caused irreparable brain damage, almost killed her, and could still, as of today, kill her at any moment the first semester of my freshman year. college was four years of a new kind of stress, and the recurrence (did it ever stop occurring?) of an old kind as familiar to me as a bruise. in between those years and since those years i spent my time off living at home, for the most part, where thing were only marginally better. small gasps of air emerged in the weeks i spent in virginia, in georgia, with friends.

i thought maybe it'd happen for real once i moved back to ** for work. i figured i'd be fine living with a roommate, just one, who was bi and nice and worlds and years away from the nine (it's almost comical. nine!!!!) straight girls who regarded me with discomfort and revulsion. and the first few weeks felt like aloe on a sunburn. but she asked with laughing disbelief why i shaved my head and changed my name, and it turned out living with a stranger was not all that different to my poor wary brain from living with my family, and not at all like living with a friend.

so. now i have my own apartment. with thick walls, and a triple-locking door, and my own mattress on my own floor. as sandra cisneros wrote: a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go. and it's finally happening

enough sleep and solitude and peace and my brain is in turmoil, my brain is vomiting, my brain is crying out to be heard and held and just to cry out. so much is pouring out of me that it would be overwhelming were i not, to some degree, ready for this. floodwater is mostly feces and it's gushing out of my eyes nose ears and especially my mouth. i have cried so much these last three days. i am hesitant to ascribe great meaning to what could be a breakdown of the garden variety but it feels like a baptism. or like i am lowering my infant self into a warm, shallow bath. internally i am holding myself and shaking with rage and grief. i am reaching back through nearly two decades of loneliness and abuse and emotional neglect and grabbing it by the roots and screaming at it. i am recalibrating my anger. weeping for the safety i deserved from day one and did not experience until day 8,875, weeping because it is so difficult for me to feel safe, weeping because i am safe now. all the worst parts of me are standing up in technicolor. all the best parts of me are soaring back to life. i think about how different my life would be now if i were loved and supported growing up, and i think about how futile it is to dwell on the past like that, and i grieve for how good i could be, and i cry about the enormous potential i have to be good anyway and the enormous work it will take me to get there and how that work is shared among all members of my species and how we all hit 24 years old fucked up in some way and how life is the process of putting yourself back together, and, if you're lucky, building something cool on the refit pieces.

there was a bat in my apartment building when i got home from work last night, flapping desperately up and down the top two staircases in loops. i spent most of the evening trying to keep the roof-access door wedged open and hoping it'd find its way free. at one point i came back up the stairs to see the doorway i had opened and, above it, the EXIT sign. and, behind the EXIT sign, a little bat head peeking out. blind but staring at me. an inch away from freedom

4 August 2022, 9:01 PM

i cannot believe i have this one incredible life, this singular opportunity to participate in something so tremendous and unlikely and highly saturated and various and i have spent so much of it in fear. i'm not doing that again

2 August 2022, 6:49 PM

had my birthday (on the 29th, turning 24) -- it was very good. got my disco elysium tattoo. drew a meet the artist because i hit 1,000 followers the same week as my birthday. stayed up late watching mar start playing disco elysium. called out the next day to sleep in and do laundry and watch movies and work out and smoke weed and be happy. in the last couple weeks i've watched fallen angels, happy together, and nope (!!!!). nope i saw after picking up the keys to my new apartment yesterday. the movie theater is a ten-minute walk from my apartment. work is a ten-minute walk from my apartment. indian, falafel, thai, and sushi are fewer than five minutes from my apartment. i spent some time in my apartment sitting on the bare floor with my ipad, sketching possible layouts on top of a photo of the main room. i called to get my electric switched over from the old apartment and the call center lady (from austin, texas) asked if my east coast town was a college town (it is) and remarked that every call she'd gotten that day was from my town, so she assumed there's a wave of pre-school year move-ins (there is). nope was really good. i loved how many and how much it was. and the power and the victory. i had the theater to myself, which is always awesome.

i've been reading the writing of thich nhat hanh. it is helping. sometimes i feel more like the individual frames that make up a movie reel than the whole rectangle of buttery moving light. my response to this is a battle between the nonexistence of the self as it's commonly understood and my desire to feel like something warm and real. i am still so bad at choosing to believe in something that i see as contrary to "the truth." i haven't reconciled with the utility, sometimes necessity, of "acting as if" when you know it really is not as if. i try to frame it as defiance, because that helps. "i am doing this in spite." in spite of who or what? no one, nothing. myself? sometimes it feels like trying to believe in santa again. sometimes i feel like my ankle is going to be stuck in quicksand forever. sometimes i want to lie down on my back in the rain until it degrades soft pits into my surface and then me into nothing

mostly i want to be as bright and stable and ready to move as i cast myself capable of being. there's been a lot of frustration lately. i am trying to be kind to myself about it all, and remember that i am bright and stable and ready to move, even if it's not as much yet. the one time i can easily accept "acting as if" is when it's founded on the knowledge (the truth!) that repeating something unnatural will make it habitual with time

i've been unleashed on my workplace's online chat service. i am very good at it. i like helping connect people with information. i've received three of the optional ratings patrons are prompted for at the ends of their chats and all of them were four stars out of four

22 July 2022, 6:24 PM

I'm an atheist, but when God closes a door, he sure does open a window.

My landlord informed me 30 days before my lease ended that he wouldn't be renewing it. (This was four days ago.) I had every intention to stay -- had been interviewing and touring potential roommates for when the current one left, had relaxed my savings enough to buy the new PC since I thought I'd be stationary for another six months, minimum, etc. So that sucked.

But I hopped on the housing Facebook groups immediately and three days later had secured literally my dream apartment. A studio. Top floor. Ten minutes' walk from work (my current commute home is an hour and 15 minutes). Nestled between a highly-rated Indian buffet and my favorite falafel place from undergrad, across the street from one of the city's most lauded bars, kittycorner to the art museum. Separate little kitchen room, bathroom with a shower AND tub. Fire escape with roof access that the maintenance guy told me often has chairs set up on it by tenants, has hosted a full cookout at least once before. Six hundred dollars cheaper than the average studio apartment in this city, and four hundred cheaper than any other apartment in the building, just because it hasn't been renovated with new tile and granite countertops. Utilities included. And I can get a cat.

I aggressively marketed myself to the landlord's wife the day I found out I'd be moving (like, "I make 3x rent and my credit score is over 700" aggressive), heard back from her the next day, secured a tour for the next morning, was invited to apply by 11:30 AM after the tour, was approved by 1:30 PM, lease signed before 3:00. I have a place. My own. For a year. I'm giddy about it, I can't stop daydreaming about it, planning, talking, just thinking. I was so stressed when I found out I was expected to move in a month (I mean, obviously!) and I alchemized that shit into the most exciting development in my life since I got my job within three days. I am INSANELY proud of myself. Say whatever you want about me, but I bounce back like a motherfucker.

I'll buy a mattress. Later, a bedframe. The landlord's putting in a fridge -- he texted me today and was like, "Sooo how do you feel about a red one?" -- it's this one, and it's literally one I had been looking at myself when I thought I'd have to provide one myself. He put in a new window AC unit too. I'll buy drawers for my art supplies. A wheeled cart for a little more counter space and a surface for snacks, lighting, books, whatever else, wherever I want to put it. If there's space, a couch that becomes a bed, for when friends visit; if there's not, an air mattress. Maybe even a real TV. And everything will be colorful. I will inject my home with so much color that walking in at the end of the day feels like coming to life.

And oh, my God, I am getting a fucking cat. Not right away, since I need to be responsible with regard to finances and settling in and making sure I can handle potential vet bills and the miscellaneous incidentals of pet ownership, but as soon as humanly possible. I didn't realize how badly I missed having one until I learned I'd be able to get one again. The cat I got when I was six is living his best life with my parents -- pampered to the utmost -- but I miss him, and I'm so excited to get another. The apartment has broad internal window ledges, broad enough for me to sit on. They face the busy street and the sun. I can see a cat lying on them so easily.

13 July 2022, 8:25 PM

I read an piece in the Washington Post, older than I am, about the celebration of ordinary days. It's not any shining new wisdom; gratitude has been lauded, occasionally pressed, over the last few years as something between religious rite and life preserver. For me, though, it slid into place. Clicked the optometrist's second lens true, sharpened.

I wake up. My heart pounds or it doesn't. I look at one window with the blinds drawn and one with a blanket dampening the light. I determine whether to put acid on my washed face or just moisturizer-with-sunscreen depending on whether and how bad I picked it the night before. I text my boyfriend, full of love. I make it to the bus stop ten minutes early.

I fix my wallet chain while riding the bus with pliers I keep in my bag for that purpose. Someone a few seats behind me laughs or sings. I step off into warmth. I descend into cold. People wave as I walk in. I have coffee and oatmeal, or Greek yogurt from the tub I keep in the fridge with my name on the lid in red Sharpie capitals. The overhead fluorescent shines the red ghost of my name onto the glisten of the yogurt. This is beautiful. I ruminate and then stop myself from ruminating. I'm getting better at this. Bitter coffee. Hot chocolate powder in it, most of the time. I check the schedule. I work.

Sitting, typing, staccato bursts, names or titles. Walking, wandering, tunnels and shelf-alleys, storerooms, blocky caves of concrete and dust, leaded glass, cardboard boxes, different-colored sheets of construction paper, everywhere codes. Arteries, channels, grooves, byways, hot pipes, carved wood, colossus. Elevators, staircases, powered doors, all manner of nook and cranny. I run up to the fourth floor to check a patron's work. The book is not on the shelf but as I turn the corner to discover this I face a window that screams me blind with the unreal orange of sunset over the city. It holds me where I stand. This is beautiful.

Phone call and email and online chat. I work to become an affable constant. The rock the river flows around. People present to me their moods and sweats and self-consciousnesses, the darker sides sticking out for their new partners to judge and for me to treat with gentle indifference. I practice patience and empathy. I practice distance. Professional courtesy and processional disregard. It's not easy. In between all of this, I draw, write, read, joke.

The day ends. I wait forty minutes for the bus or I wait twenty minutes for the bus and then walk twenty minutes after the bus or I pay $10 for an Uber with a $5 tip on top. I reason away or cringe from the expense of the Uber. I usually end up imploring myself to "own" my decision to pay $15 for an extra hour of night. I ride the exercise bike. I shower. I don't like my roommate very much. I have split cuticles or a stomachache. I need to shave my head again. I wasn't kind enough today. I was.

Weed or electricity. Evening. Fireflies. Romance. Work groupchat. My big stable boots. Dishes in the sink. Wikipedia. Meal prep from Sunday. Masturbation. Self-construction. Forgot my rings again. Forgot the measuring tape. Forgot my meds. The jeans stained pink on the back of one thigh. Troubleshooting. A difficult conversation, which is really just a conversation. Many breaths in and out again. Taste and feeling. A rock in the river. Three days left before the weekend. No days left before today.

5 July 2022, 7:25 PM

i built a pc!! i've wanted to for years. eating the cost made me nervous and i am definitely going to keep my spending under tight reins for the next few months to make myself feel better, but i could handle the expense and i'm glad i did. she is beautiful. radeon rx 6600 and a 12th gen i5 -- nothing super cutting-edge but more than enough to handle everything i want it to do (plus i have 11tb of storage if you count the external hard drive i've been using to store various backups and torrented movies since like 2019). my boyfriend's sister helped me choose parts and gave me advice for the building process; it was lovely to have the assistance and i value having pleasant experiences with people loved by the ones i love. i hung a little disco elysium charm inside the chassis.

the brain scoop is that i discovered that i do, in fact, still have pmdd. in recent months it's just been a few days of bad anxiety but this time it was a full week of abject misery. it is HELL in the moment but i'm not always ungrateful for it afterward, really. sometimes it has the benefit of shaking loose some shit i didn't realize was clogging the psychological pipes. plus i treasure being one of the lucky few who's actually relieved when their period finally comes, and not because they're hoping they're not pregnant.

i'm looking for a roommate, since my current one leaves in a month and a half; i posted the room this morning and had seven responses in the first hour. THAT was a relief. i watched chungking express the other night. it had been on my list for years and i loved it even more than i expected to. (i had been reading about kowloon walled city recently, by coincidence -- chungking mansions, the building upon which the movie was based and half-filmed, has often been related to the former due to their similar living conditions and social environments.) i've made my way up to hegel in the western philosophy textbook i'm reading. always fascinating when someone has some really good ideas and is also tremendously sexist or racist or a eugenicist or something. the tree in our backyard has unexpectedly burst into bloom

my partner got a cat! also i am stupid in love with him. (not the cat, she's great too though) i can't express how wonderful it is to be in the relationship i'm in. to be both comforted and challenged, at peace and excited .... overjoyed with the way things are at present and moving closer towards the person i want to be. and just so happy and proud to be partnered with someone so brilliant and funny and sweet and strong.

i hope you're all having good days! i'll probably start red dead 2 tonight, or something. it might rain, it might not. dinner will be eggs

25 June 2022, 11:56 AM

After work yesterday, after the news struck and we talked about it with drawn faces, after I'd picked up movie posters I had printed at Walgreens and rode the bus home, after I ate leftover enchiladas and looked at some video games and tried to practice not thinking about anything: I looked out the window, noticed the sky darkening towards my favorite part of the evening, and decided to go vape a bowl of indica outside.

The house I live in has a backyard which abuts a shed that faces a rough-paved alley that reaches halfway in front of the sheds of all the houses on our street, and on the other side of the alley is a fence that borders the elementary school parking lot. I like to smoke sitting on the ground with my back against the shed and a view of the fence and the stars above it. They weren't out yet when I sat down yesterday, but the leading lady of the sunset had sunk below the horizon; the distance was washed with thin minty non-colors, deep periwinkle following leisurely. It deepened as a I finished my bowl and sat watching. Shortly after, the fireflies came out.

I saw fireflies for the first time in the courtyard outside my workplace while on an evening-break phone call with Mar about a week ago. (They don't have them in Alaska, and this is my first summer living anywhere else.) A single firefly, actually: one brief gasp of yellowgreen a couple feet above a manicured lawn. It amazed me. Last night I looked on as little lights smeared the parking lot, beyond the fence. Three or four, maybe.

It occurred to me that I hadn't caught fireflies before.

The parking lot was ungated and empty. I noticed as I walked that the temperature was so middled as to be completely unnoticeable. No sense of warmth or cold, just perfect envelopment, like swimming in the saltwater they use to fill sensory deprivation tanks. The bugs were interested in the strip of grass between the raised stone lip of the parking lot and the fence I'd just been on the other side of. They moved slowly, sleepily. There was not a force in the world that could cause them to hurry.

Catching them was so easy. They were patient as I took them in my hands. I imagined living on a space station and reaching out to pluck the severed heads of flowers floating in zero-g. That covered the gentleness and easiness and the soft tickle in my palms as they butted against me. I never trapped them; I held my hands loose, and eventually they found the exit and walked out, every one, not flying in desperation, just meandering along my thumb and turning slowly in consideration before taking off.

I caught and allowed to leave two this way, then decided I'd catch one more before heading back. The third one lit up inside my hands. This was what I'd been hoping for. I couldn't stop looking at the calm, miraculous light of its lower body, so different against my own warm flesh. After climbing out, it rested on my hand for a little while before commencing the revolution they'd all performed, as if deciding which angle of egress sounded best today. It paused while facing me, then flew directly into the bridge of my nose.

I laughed, startled, delighted. And I took the thirty-second walk home alive with wonder and joy. Summer felt heady and magical when I was a child; Alaska's summers are renowned for days that stretch towards infinity, no true sunset even in the south of the far-north state but rather a pause for breath as the sky colors lavender and then lightens again an hour later. There is no other way to describe how I felt catching fireflies for the first time on a summer evening at almost-24 than heady and magical. I was right, I thought as I settled back down against the shed to watch the lights dance and the stars come out. It doesn't have to end.

14 June 2022, 1:31 PM

i came here to write a full entry and then realized i didn't feel like writing a full entry and then realized i did feel like writing a short one. i saw crimes of the future and have many thoughts about it but won't be sharing them here atm as my beloved boyfriend reads my blog and hasn't had the chance to see it yet. i really want to try the cake batter latte from dunkin but the dunkins i've gone to so far have been out of it on the days i've gone to them. today and tomorrow are my last days with this name. i finally planted this tiny terrarium from a kit my mom gave me when i was 18. i am so happy.

the significant anxiety-handling breakthrough i made last week has changed everything. i have not been nervous, at all, for days. i feel expansive and warm and limber. i feel grounded and resilient. i have realized that i am only at the beginning of myself. i have realized that i do not know the limits of my potential yet. i feel alive in an explosion of intake and output, breathing in information and experience and novelty, learning and synthesizing, exhaling action and love and art. i'm holding my little kid self's hand and walking us up the stairs, the ones by the playground that form a shortcut to the bike trail, with forest on either side, shot through with sun.

i made an appointment for my disco elysium tattoo last week -- as i was coming down from the dissociation. i snagged a slot with a steadyhanded artist who's really good with text, which is perfect, because this is going to be the tattoo. the slot -- the artist's next availability, not chosen by me -- is on my birthday.

for a really long time i did not think my life would ever be this good. it was fact, not cause for anguish; i didn't know what was out there, what was possible for me, and i lived in ignorance and pain, as docile towards my circumstance as a cow. i keep getting this image in my head of me living the first 23 years of my life in a narrow hallway. i could maybe imagine living in a room someday, maybe something nice, with a window. i did not have the faculty to conceive of the life i live now: unwalled

10 June 2022, 2:15 PM

The court date for my name change is next week! Holy shit! Six years in the making and it's almost here!!! I had to file the paperwork three times before it was accepted, due to errors on the court's end for both failed attempts. I'm going to a Kraftwerk concert the night before, and the day after is Mar's and my six-month anniversary, which is insane. I feel like I've known him my entire life and I feel like I meet him for the first time every morning. Anyway, what an awesome three-day midweek celebration. I can't wait!

Last Monday I finally made the trip to [a nearby town, across state lines but easy to travel to and from in a single day] to buy weed! I say that because it's the functional purpose of the trip, but really, ever since I turned 21 my junior year and could buy from dispensaries in legal states, those little pilgrimages have been so much more: escape from the city, joy through train rides, time actively taken for myself, and afternoons at rest. Going back for the first time in years felt incredible. I spent an hour and more money than anticipated in a used bookstore, coming away with so much I'm excited to dive into, and came home sunworn and sleepy and happy.

Writing this entry is difficult; the words feel awkward in the mouth of my hands; the voice doesn't feel like my own. I'd say I'm too busy living to write, but that's not true. I journal daily, fire off work emails, take thousands of words of notes a day on fashion and philosophy, plan out creative projects, write poetry, text my loved ones paragraphs at a time. I find myself less unified than ever as I pour down new and plentiful avenues, and it's wonderful. In rediscovering myself in a dozen dozen places I feel more comfortable with him than I ever have before.

I had a wretched period of dissociation three days ago. The day after was a shaky aftermath. The day after that was beautiful, and I surmounted an obstacle I'd been ramming my head against for years. Resilience and acceptance and humor and love have catapulted me forward into a wide-armed embrace of the range and variety of things I will experience in my lifetime, the texture of a week or a month or an hour, and my own ability to get through it all.

1 June 2022, 9:41 PM

Affiliation with the university I work at nets you free subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post. I was instructed to set up accounts with them so that I'd know how to walk people through setting up their own. Consequently, I've been more in touch with current events recently than I had been in a while, and I get more recipes with ingredient lists that are a shopping trip unto themselves in my inbox than before. And I also read a lot of advice columns. Agony aunts, they're sometimes called, though the term connotes other misogynistic shorthand a little too closely for me to enjoy it, and the writers themselves range from gay men to someone self-branding as a therapist. (Despite this, the majority -- and particularly the ones with NYT and WaPo -- appear to be sensible, funny women who are more or less grounded and self-aware enough to know just how ungrounded they are.)

So I've read a lot about bad relationships and people who refuse to be let down gently and mothers-in-law distraught over not getting what they deem their fair share of the first months of their grandbabies' lives, and I've rubbernecked and mulled over and outraged enough that it makes me self-conscious. But more relevantly, I've read a lot about adult children trying to navigate boundaries with, and distance from, their parents. And parents trying to make sense of or push back against or just lament their adult children's boundaries/distance. Every response I've read from a columnist has been enormously gentle, sympathetic in all the right places. In voice after playful, word-count-restrained voice, the message is the same: You, the child, have to do this, and you're right for doing it. You, the parent, need to respect your child's right to personhood, even when the schism inherent to the holistic existence of personhood (being someone implies not being someone else!) is upsetting or alarming. You, we all, live years or decades of your lives under the living, blood-filled illusion of one self shared among many, the psychological and social and emotional and even physical commonality between you less strands knit into a cloth from which you all must one day be cut and more a confusion carried forward to school plays and soccer games and dinner tables as fact because for so long, it is. But it must end. And the ending must be defined. You are lucky that it may be negotiated.

Adolescence is a critical period in the individual's life for many reasons. One of the more salient is differentiation. It is what lets you become an individual, a phenomenon so important it has its own verb. You individuate by pushing back against your parents (or other caregivers, guardians, upbringers), pushing away. You do things they don't like. You do things you don't like, because they also don't like them. You find out what you like. You find out who you are. You discover values and character features and favorite movies and through the assemblage thereof you find yourself, blinking startled under the upturned rock, both larvally nascent and there all along.

And if you don't? If you're not allowed to? Then it happens later, or not at all. "Not at all" leads to situations of permanent enmeshment that are painful to watch. "Later" means you're an adult and the rebellion your parents wrung out of you before it had a chance to blossom suddenly cries out to be born and you realize that you are, in many ways, still just a budding polyp on the family coral reef. Attached, not merely by last name or shared history, but by circulatory system, umbilical cord. So you have something to sever, and parents who are so averse to excision that they disrupted your natural momentum, and you are in your 20s or 30s or any other decade of your life and you do not know who you are.

When I was 17 and in my last year of high school, Room (2015, with Brie Larson, not The Room, of Tommy Wiseau) came out. I watched it. I really liked it. I promise I wasn't so solipsistic as to think my own experiences resembled the characters' in more than a handful of superficial ways, but one line of dialogue carved itself against the inner walls of my skull. It's spoken by the little kid once he and his mom are outside for good. I'll paraphrase: "Mama and I don't know what we like so we decided we get to try everything."

It was like I needed permission.

So now it is five years later and my parents are staying in a hotel next to the Ikea on the outskirts of the city where I went to college and where I've settled for the time being, and I'm spending time with them, moving around them slowly, watching how they meet my stable, established, separate self. It's not like locking two cats on either side of a bathroom door and letting them swat it out through the crack. It's more like locking two humans on either side of the choice to be free. I am so, so painfully aware that my mom, despite her constant rebuffing of my requests for healthy closeness throughout my childhood, did not ever want me to leave. I see the contradiction in her and I accept the contradiction in her and I see how much it hurts her that I've left. She is not an unintelligent woman, and she's not malicious. She wants the best for me. But she also wants me near and dependent and safe within the twin cones of her purview.

I am not allowing her that. That's no great crime. It's necessary. The advice columnists told me I have to do it, and I'm right for doing it. There would be absolutely zero moral ill in my accepting the effects of my actions and allowing them to lay without arousing any great feeling within me. But when the nervous system internal to the body is shared between two past necessity and into overgrowth, the uncoupling of synapse and synapse and impulse and impulse and cry and cry does not come gently.

From kindergarten I have known her discomfort better than I know my own. From kindergarten, that is, until about a year and a half ago.

I wrote her a long text yesterday, thanking her for coming, telling her how much I love her and spending time with her, telling her I'm proud of her for raising me to the best of her abilities within circumstances hostile to the raising of a child, telling her I'm proud of her for letting me go. None of that's a lie. All of it is haunted by the equivalent and unworded craving to change my number and run as far as I can, to move and not tell her. To cradle the infant me I found under the rock -- this impossibly, inexpressibly wondrous and special thing -- to my chest and scream and scream if she tries to get near.

There's a concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis of the moment a baby realizes she's not her mother. It's called the mirror stage, because it theoretically (metaphorically) starts when the baby sees herself in the mirror and registers that that's her! Her, the baby! which means that there are things that she is not, and she is not Mom. The breast in her mouth isn't a part of her. The thing that responds to her needs isn't a part of her. The baby does not think deeply about the implications of this. The baby is busy falling in love with firsthand perspective and sensory experience and finding out that she can put her toes in her mouth.

I imagine my mom standing in front of the mirror.

P.S. "Aunt Agony" would be a great drag name.

25 May 2022, 3:34 PM

Well, I graduated! My feelings were mixed to the same degree and in the same ratio as I predicted. Parts of the ceremonies (all four of them, over the course of two days) were good, and I am glad I decided to go. But there are not words to carry the bitterness I felt alongside anything sweet. I've come to terms with the last six years of my life, but I'm still mourning them, in a way, and the language used to describe our presumptive collective undergraduate experience felt almost farcical in lgiht of that, at times. I did at least get to hug and cry with the one person at school who really helped me while I was struggling -- that made everything else worth it.

My parents visiting has gone exactly as I predicted, too, and I don't want to talk about it.

Otherwise, it's beautiful outside, 65 today which is cooler than it's been in a week, and for the last two days I've woken up feeling good. My body is so used to its tension that its relief is far more noticeable than its presence. I keep tuning in to my unclenched jaw, my loose arms and hands. Incredible feeling. There are again times when I find myself with nothing in particular to fixate on or ruminate about or worry at with my tongue like a cherry pit, and in the spacious quiet that remains my brain starts growing ideas again, impressions, pleasures. This is a cycle I'm familiar with -- daysweeksmonths of stress and pain and a life condensed into a tunnel too small to crawl through without parts of me scraping off on the wet stone walls, then daysweeksmonths of peace and a resting heart rate 20 beats lower than before -- and thankfully, blessedly, I remember it now. Even in what I could favorably call the rough parts I have a sense that they're only temporary. And even when my emotions loom larger than any of my other faculties I still act, slightly more often than not, in the way I want to.

I still refuse to accept that this will be my entire life. Maybe it will. But I'm young, I'm only twenty-three, and I have converted/repurposed/erased self-obstacles I thought were permanent before. I believe -- I would say that at this point I even know -- that my ability to grasp that this cycle is temporary and act upon that knowledge will soften the wheel as it turns, soften the transitions between long night and long day, soften me towards stability.

But that doesn't matter today. Today I am alive, and being alive feels good, and I have a delicious lunch and a functioning body and a partner I love very much, and things to learn, and movies to watch. Today I am proud of my developing patience and confidence and calm. When I move, I move forward.

20 May 2022, 10:15 AM

My parents and siblings arrive today ... they'll be in town for two weeks. They're coming for my graduation ceremony, which is mostly on Monday (there are some additional events with equivalent weight of tradition behind them on Sunday). All in all I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. I adore my family, but we're not free from the issues that can arise between anyone related by bond or blood, and I've been enjoying the distance and independence my adult separation from them has afforded me. As for graduation ... I'm excited for the chance to officially commemorate the last four five and a half years and to have my achievement recognized; however, the university recognizing my achievement is the same that degraded my life enough that the achievement stands grimly taller than just the completion of an education. I expect to feel proud, happy, sad, embraced, alienated, relieved, and a little angry.

But, if nothing else, it really will finally be over. After so much time and so much money and so much stress about so much more than word counts and due dates. And then life will resume as normal ... It's not lost on me that I've been working full-time for two months now while most of the people I'll be graduating with are freshly returned from Myrtle Beach and have spent the interim week getting daydrunk.

Otherwise! Things are okay. A little darker than usual, but not enough to blot out the sunshine of early summer, or the proliferation of textures & types of green on the street where I wait for the bus. Or the joy of spending time with my favorite person or drawing or biking. I submitted my legal name change paperwork the other day. I'm a couple dozen pages into a book about a psychologist's approach to spiritual possession ..... it's as senseless and inane as I expected it to be, in many ways, but then occasionally the author will explain that she doesn't necessarily believe in possession (or reincarnation or life after death etc etc), but sees the therapeutic benefit her spirit-aiding/past-life-regression-under-hypnosis techniques have on her clients, and decides to continue practicing it because it works. (Which I respect!) And then will go on to discuss that she thinks the aid to her clients that those techniques provide amounts to clinical evidence that possession is real. We'll see how the rest of it goes.

17 May 2022, 6:24 PM

13 May 2022, 9:57 AM

hello! this update comes late because [CHANGED MY MIND, REDACTED]

[REDACTED]

really, i want to change the way this blog works in its entirety, and also overhaul most of my website. it's exciting!!! I knew from the start that I wasn't going to want to keep a layout based on someone else's visual design for long (like the Pip-Boy body of my main site), but i didn't expect the dissatisfaction to happen so soon. i anticipated a return of my own creative impulses and ideas and here they are. feels good. I'll repurpose the Pip-Boy theme as a subpart of the site, possibly an "about me" section or just a fun little art piece in itself, because I still like it and am proud of it (even if some of the code makes me shudder now ... i'll probably fix that too). no timeline for this and no particular direction yet; it'll happen when I get to it. (I am so glad organic growth is shaping my website. it's exactly what i wanted going in.)

on the real-life side of things: nothing much to report! still stupid in love, still going to work. deep back into Breaking Bad (keep your eyes peeled for a page related to that, too, in the coming weeks ...). jesse pinkman is a transmasc lesbian, shocking nobody who knows me even a little bit. I've been playing rune factory 5, the latest entry in a series that i've loved since i was a kid. it's flawed but I'm having fun. ordered my moms flowers and a gift card to their favorite date-night restaurant for mothers' day -- they were delighted, and I felt good about it. signing a short lease on the apartment ... it's been in the 60s (F) through both the day and night here; I need to get my hands on some fans.

6 May 2022, 2:23 PM

old and new! (bauhaus edition leuchtturm1917)

3 May 2022, 4:27 PM

I'm not sure how effective this update is going to be because I'm profoundly in love. I'm not used to the passion and energy and singleminded focus of first feelings amplifying with time, not fading as a crush touches down on reality but strengthening, growing as the days weeks months pass, the landscape in me brightening further with the sunrise every morning, the dozens hundreds thousands of buds of currents of flames of color of feeling of light multiplying and not dying; I am not used to joy that does not alchemize into fear. I think everyone in the world has the right not to settle for anything less than what I have. Now that I know it's out there I want to grab everyone by the shoulders and say, keep going, keep looking, oh my God why would you accept anything that isn't this? If someone had planted the exogenous knowledge that love could feel this way into my brain I would spend my whole life looking for it, I'd scour the world. And somehow I was so lucky that I just found it, stumbled upon it as if by accident, chance.

Uhhh what else. I got a stationary bike! I've missed having access to one ever since the school gyms closed for COVID last fall. Cardio is part of my daily routine again, which is extra great because over the last few years I've incorporated exercise into my life thoroughly enough that not exercising now feels wrong; I get restless and can't sit still at work. Discovering that my body loves moving has been instrumental in healing my relationship with it, so I'm glad I'm back at it. I'm currently reading a couple Asimov novels. My belated graduation ceremony is in a few weeks, and my parents and siblings are visiting for it. And I'm in love.

There is no room for cynicism, doubt, or hesitation in me anymore. I don't interrogate my joy or wonder if I'm being irrational or compare what's living in me to written reports of similiar experiences from peer-reviewed studies or anecdotal evidence or all of history. All around me is the answer before I ask the question. My heart was an egg for 23 years and now it's hatched and grown and it's flying away. Ever since I was little, there have been moments when I've been so happy that I can't help but break into a sprint: light sings in my body and my body understands and it runs. It happened once when I started talking to him, at the intersection near the pharmacy. It happened in the snow around midnight the first time I told him I loved him. Now it is always. I have to make myself walk most places for obvious reasons but if you let me go, I could power a city, I could cross the Atlantic. I'd shout the whole way, breathless, "Keep looking! It's beautiful!"

26 April 2022, 4:33 PM

I had, I believe, the platonic ideal of a weekend. Saturday night after work a beloved coworkerfriend and I went to a bar I hadn't been to since I snuck into it when I was 19, for a "Trans Night" which involved local artists displaying their creations and the coworkerfriend introducing me to some of the coolest people in the local trans and leftist scenes (heavy overlap, naturally), including a couple of the higherups in my union, which all seem to be wonderful people. I bought a woodblock print of an anatomical heart with an eye blinking upward in it, little jets of blood coming out of the aorta branches. It came with a frame patterned with tiny butterflies and flowers and is absolutely delightful. I also got drunk for the first time in a while, which was an excellent experience in that it was fun enough to remind me that I enjoy drinking with friends, but unpleasant enough to remind me why I don't do it very often.

Sunday was the local cherry blossom festival! The blooms had mostly fallen by then due to the weird weather we've been having, but the bright side to that was that I was able to collect petals without harming a living thing. They softened the ground like snow in April. The petals are so fleshy, the tiny dark streaks like veins under skin. A handful are being pressed inside that horrible murder mystery novel now, on my side table at home. I bought food, listened to the live music, sat under a tree for two hours reading a book cover to cover, and got sunburnt. The book was Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a fantastic incident of Latin American magical realism that I read first in high school. I've been revisiting things I first experienced in high school a lot lately -- this book, another book, Breaking Bad -- and reveling in/marveling at the fact that I'm noticeably smarter, wiser, and more curious than I was when I was a teenager. (My responses to the books and TV show are SO different from what they were when I was younger, and I understand and question so much more!) The difficulty of my college years often leads me to feel that I've backslid. But I've grown, even when I didn't feel like it.

Afterward, I came home with so much energy that I did the weekend's housework in a few hours (usually I'd do it all over the course of Monday, the second day of my weekend).

Yesterday I went to a nearby Goodwill Bins (is this the official name??? Googling it turns up nothing but it's what I've heard everyone call it), which, for the uninitiated, is a Goodwill where the willed goods are in giant, shallow, waist-high bins on wheels that are periodically cycled out with new bins from a massive back room (every hour or so). You pay by the pound, and you can find some really cool shit. I went for clothes and was fairly satisfied with my catch, and I also found an old medical book I'm going to cannibalize for collages, but the real highlights were the DVDs: House of 1000 Corpses (!!!!), the Blade trilogy, several horrible obscure horror movies, and ... the Chinese releases of, among others, Master and Commander (!!!!!!!!!), Hellboy, Revenge of the Sith, one of the Narnia movies, The Pianist, 21 Grams, etc etc etc. My DVDhead boyfriend's definitely been influencing me re: physical movie collection; I'm a torrenter with an 8TB external hard drive both in heart and in practice. But God, those movie covers! And the little booklets inside!

Aaaand then I made some INCREDIBLE homemade tomato soup from scratch. Which would have made the weekend good on its own, honestly.

All told, very good. I'm in a MUCH better mood on this, my version of a Monday, than I usually would be. The moral is that I feel better rested and rejuvenated when I spend my weekend doing things than when I spend it "relaxing" and inactive. Looking forward to some vegetative evenings during the work week ahead, though.

20 April 2022, 1:43 PM

p.s. happy 4/20 everyone! the cashier at the smoke shop i buy delta 8 from had actual thc edibles hidden under the counter and sold some to me for cash. lmao

19 April 2022, 6:02 PM

sensory experiences of the last week:

i finally feel as if i've really settled in. my sleep schedule has accepted its partial nocturnality and i've relearned how to do things other than sleep and housework on my weekends. things are starting to make sense! yay. i've recently read The Prince, The Stranger, and the first ninety pages of a really bad food-themed murder mystery that, unfortunately, i'll probably finish just to be able to say i did. excitingly, i can feel my clarity and quickness of thought returning to me, concurrently with if not caused by my return to literature. when things are bad, and especially when i'm not sleeping well, it takes me significantly longer to process written information, and i have significantly more trouble expressing myself; parts of my vocabulary go dark and my brain churns in place. i spent my last semester of college in that state, which was unfortunate. but it looks like it's finally lessening.

i've uploaded recent quotes to the quotes page. (it takes half an hour to an hour to copy them all over these days!) it'll be really funny if i get copyright dinged somehow in the future. for now, enjoy! and warning for suicide as i make my way through camus and his associated works.

12 April 2022, 4:14 PM

Another exhausting week behind me, hopefully a less exhausting one ahead. My sleep schedule's slowly adjusting. For today, at least, I feel on top of things. Have recently: received and built a gaming chair, read five years of Achewood, drawn a butch lesbian fairy and Mar's sister's dog, caught up on RLM's Best of the Worst, hung out with friends. Now that things are (fingers crossed, knock on wood) settling down at work I'm looking forward to partitioning off more time for creative and intellectual pursuits and fuck man even just like, watching movies. OH I've been learning Javascript too! Nothing worth showing yet but I have big plans, especially for a means of transferring my OC sideblogs to this site. It feels good to be learning a coding language again, and particularly to be learning it the way I learn best -- the computer science class I took in undergrad and dropped halfway through the semester didn't really agree with me.

The cherry blossom trees are nearing full bloom, here. We have a lot of them! I'll get to enjoy them in a way I never have before, since their season always coincided with the horrible last few weeks of my academic year. My home state didn't have much by way of springtime, let alone flowering trees.

4 April 2022, 7:33 PM

short entry this time -- i have to shower and put laundry away before my date with the boy

first and foremost, i coded a page in tribute to the eggs i made in my electric kettle last fall as goofy stress relief fun (h/t to the coworker of mine who showed me a page on their website where they housed their conceptually very similar photo series of deformed spongebob ice creams they've bought over the years)

second & secondmost i have a LOT of quotes to add to the quotes page, as i finished a biography of mark rothko last week (mark rothko: towards the light in the chapel -- honestly not great, pretty dry, author makes some theoretical leaps i cannot make with her and several major details of rothko's life including his entire first marriage and his suicide are barely touched upon. but i have a good sense of the timeline of his life & work now which will be useful as i continue reading about him) but have not had the chance yet, because

thirdly and of third-level importance, the last week at work was utterly insane ... except it actually wasn't ... but apparently starting a new job is just near-universally an exhausting experience?! even though the responsibilities and my colleagues are all fairly familiar to me i came home from work every evening drained & braindead, with barely enough energy to feed myself. (both my manager and hanna were like: no yeah, that's normal, it goes away eventually.) i have been even worse at texting back than usual. also had my first handful of minor conflicts with managers & higherups; i handled them well but it's still taking some adjustment. next week should be better!

i made biscuits, ordered some books, nailed a work project, finished memorizing the alphabet in international morse ... lost interest in writing this update right about now because i got distracted thinking about spending time with mar tonight. i'm going to go be young and in love, goodbye

28 March 2022, 10:26 AM

25 degrees after hitting 60 multiple times in the last week; an inch of snow on the ground; standstill traffic on the street on which I've nearly been vehicularly manslaughtered multiple times. Thus begins another week of work.

My first week was good, if chaotic. Lots of settling in and adjustment to do -- probably won't be complete until I've switched to my actual schedule once I've been mostly trained. But the people I'm working with are (for the most part) so wonderful that even in the initial tempest I'm finding some peace. I did realize -- rather forcefully -- yesterday morning that my habit of shelving little complaints instead of speaking up for myself, in the workplace and within friendships, is not sustainable. It's manageable once in a while, but holy shit it piles up; just four days at work (and a month of living with a roommate) and swallowing myself has already led to utter exhaustion & half a breakdown.

I don't think I even realized I was doing it! I'm not uncomfortable with confrontation by any stretch! It's more like I kept deciding in the moment that those little frustrations weren't worth confrontation. And if they came from people I only saw twice a week for class, or occasionally when our student-worker shifts lined up, they might not be. But now I'm sharing my living space with someone and interacting with the same people every weekday, eight and a half hours per -- clearly my threshold needs to be adjusted accordingly. It was a good lesson, in any case, and I'm quite prepared to act on it now.

I finished City of Illusions yesterday. I liked it more than I anticipated, given that it's one of the older and less-discussed works in the Hainish cycle. It's not as thematically sound as The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, but it's more coherent than Rocannon's World or Planet of Exile, and several moments and images have stayed with me (the mad king whose subjects elect to be ruled, stooped over his patterning-frame in a room lit by a small sun). The Shing had promise as villains but weren't convincingly developed (apparently UKL herself has acknowledged and commented on this), and I'm not taken in by the presentation of ambiguity as inherently evil ... especially not in the vessel of an alien race who mostly crossdresses. But I'm a sucker for matters of identity and pseudopsychology, so I found the novel's final stretch arresting. Again, I'll populate the quotes page (now housing all my highlights, not just EPUB ones, since I'm reading more physical books than I anticipated and I also found a PDF of Emily Dickinson's collected poetry that's highlightable somehow?!) once I'm done with this.

Parting words: fuck yeah Will Smith. Chris Rock has had that coming for a long, long time.

24 March 2022, 10:52 AM

I've finally started work!! my first day was really good. like REALLY good. when I got here there was a sign on my desk that just said "YAY! Alex! YAY!" and some Dove chocolates from the coworker I've known the longest. (as a reminder, I worked the student version of this job for five years before being hired fulltime -- so I already know everyone, and I have relatively little to be trained on.) training was good, getting everything set up was good; as anyone who speaks to me regularly knows, I'm delighted to have my own desk. I'm at work again currently, updating this page during an all-staff meeting that really does require only half an ear.

I finished reading Letters to a Young Poet on the bus this morning. I'm glad I read it. there's a lot I disagree with in Rilke's advice, but it's a fascinating look into his worldview, and there were absolutely some little truisms that resonated with me -- I'll upload everything I highlighted to the quotes page after this.

a little look into the future of my website: I want to make some cosmetic tweaks and improvements to the main pages, including some higher-def icons on the stats pages (I literally just color replaced the original icon PNGs); I have some projects in mind for my OCs/characters who had sideblogs on Tumblr that are going to require more coding knowledge than I currently possess, but should be a good next step in my self-education; and I want to make a nice little page to showcase my art! I'll probably never stop posting it on Tumblr, as I do want to get into commissions & merch eventually, but it'll be nice to have a non-social media place to upload it too.

re: quitting Tumblr: I literally do not even think about it anymore. it's incredible. the only remnants of it are the occasional 5 minutes I spend switching between apps before I realize I'm trying to fill a tiny void and move on. this was honestly the best idea I've had in a really long time

22 March 2022, 11:36 AM

My first day social medialess was rocky. I have to preface this by saying that my beginning work has been delayed YET AGAIN by the university, this time because they allegedly need two business days to get me a login and password that I already have and have had for six years. (I found out at about 11:30 PM the evening before what was supposed to be my first day.) So I didn't have work to distract me. In a way, I think this was a blessing; restructuring my free time without checking & scrolling is going to be most of the battle, so the practice was useful.

I say "a battle," but that's really not what it felt like. It felt more like a strong discomfort, a constant reawakening to just how entrenched my habits had gotten. At the beginning of the day I was accidentally opening the YouTube app once every ten or fifteen minutes because it occupied the place in my app lineup where the Tumblr app once stood, and I was hitting it on reflex. Horrifying!! At one point I actually typed the website address into Firefox on my laptop and hit enter before I realized what I was doing. And I caught myself finding alternative things to scroll through or check on -- articles, mobile games -- which isn't bad in itself, is a useful tactic, even, and certainly superior to looking at posts that make me mad, but isn't what I'm trying to do here. I don't want to replace my habits with better habits, I want to get rid of those habits altogether and supplant them with a softer, calmer, steadier way of moving through time. So whenever possible I'd throw my phone across the room and do something else.

I played Disco Elysium, did laundry, cooked, talked to Mar. By the end of the day the impulses had lessened by a lot. That evening, just before bed, I found myself deep down a rabbit hole into a topic I've been cursorily interested in for a long time but never set aside the time or energy to really explore. Just reading, finding things out, making connections and discoveries, getting excited. For hours! Completely undistracted. God, it felt incredible. My brain and my time, already returning to me -- just one day since I'd cut myself off from the shit they'd sink into, daily, hourly, without fail.

This morning, when I woke up, I checked my messages and my email (no news on an updated start date yet. Fantastic), then immediately felt bored. Put my phone down and pulled out my journal and started writing down quotes and summaries from what I'd learned the night before. For months now I've had to force myself to journal most days, doing it out of discipline rather than desire unless some event or feeling was strong enough to bubble over. Today, it's easy again, immediate, natural, and wanted. As I wrote I had the impression that my thoughts had lengthened (yesterday I would often notice observations coming to me in little bites with the diction I'd use if I were posting them, which was frankly alarming). I feel more myself than I have in years.

19 March 2022, 5:17 PM

Roommate made focaccia; it was delicious. I got the website as far along to (")completion(") (it is never going to be complete) as I wanted it to be before I go live with it tomorrow, which is exciting. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out so far, though there are a few additional tweaks and details I want to implement in the next week or so (and would have done already if I were really getting it to the point my perfectionism wants it to be).

I only got a handful of hours last night and was too excited by the idea of walking 40 minutes round-trip to the grocery store (???) to try for more, so I've been stringing myself along with instant coffee. This evening I'll take edibles and let myself knock out early, try to fix my sleep schedule a little in time for my week of early training hours. I feel good. About work, life, all of it. It's crazy that I can't remember the last time that happened.

15 March 2022, 9:30 PM

today was an insanely good day. i visited the dean of my residential college, who became a good friend over my time there, and caught her up on life and how well i'm doing now. really good experience. i took the bus there and back and it was fun and very easy ... one of the numerous surprising little good things about my apartment is that the 20 minute, no-transfers bus ride to/from work has a stop three hundred feet from my front door. i bought some d8 after the meeting and some watercolors and pens; while checking out at the craft store i remarked that they didn't have a student discount back when i was a student (i distinctly recall the cashier i spoke with in 2017 saying "if we had a student discount, we'd make no money" because the vast majority of their customer base was students from my school) and the cashier said, "i'll give it to you now to make up for it!" that was so sweet. i still smile thinking about it.

i also started drawing again today ... mar drew something we were both really excited about conceptually on call with me the other day and then encouraged me to draw my own version. that plus the matte screen protectors that had come in a couple days ago inspired me to get back into it, finally. it took an hour to get the screen protector on, as usual ... i always get rid of as many bubbles as i can. the only two left on this one are in the corners of the bevel, caused by little creases i had to make to peel those corners up to get other bubbles out. pleased with myself. careful attention to detail feels good and i like my drawing tools to be as well taken-care-of as they can be. drawing was amazing. i missed it so much.

i'm high now and eating one of my favorite meals at my desk as i write and listen to music. it's really awesome how i've gotten to feel myself start unfolding over the last few days and especially today. it feels like the last six years are falling off around me, piece by piece, like a large, heavy coccoon. it feels like i'm becoming something new. it is a momentous feeling. i'm ready!

edit: i guess i should get used to using this for actual life updates! i forgot to mention that everything i was waiting for, news-wise, is okay now.

8 March 2022, 6:52 PM

I meant to take today off from productivity (aside from planning out my bus route from here to ****, which took about fifty seconds, and buying bedding from Ikea), but it was beautiful weather outside and Discord was fighting itself for a couple hours, so I walked to CVS to shoplift something I needed and ended up spending $25 on stuff I didn't really need (the thing I shoplifted was $2.19). One of the things I didn't need was this little battery-powered desk fountain with five individual jets of water, backed with a blue light and a mirror, drilling down through a little mesh receptacle surrounded by rocks. I like water sounds as background noise, and I love small weird sources of lighting. It makes the very specific sound of something pouring out of a jug into a receptacle from higher up than is necessary. It's almost comical. I scooted a few rocks over to intersect the streams, and now the sounds are varied, but still intense -- loud enough that I thought I wouldn't be able to tune them out, but I have been, as I've been writing this.

The realization came over me that once I get news, no matter what news that is, these days or weeks will have happened all the same, and enjoying them or not enjoying them will not affect the outcome of that news, and when I look back from the point of news-receipt they will either have been a couple good days or weeks or a couple bad days or weeks. And I might as well let them be good ones. I lose nothing for it and I gain a couple good days (or weeks). The perspective has helped me relax a little, which is quite the feat. Every day I learn a little more.

Today I also realized that there is one state where most people know me by she/her pronouns, one where most know me by they/them, and one where most know me by he/him. Actually, now that I think about it, there's another one where the majority is approaching he/him, too -- a ratio unbalancing that pleases me. I'm going to go make a really good grilled cheese and play some Disco Elysium.