this time last week i was with h and the fact that i'm not there now is tangible. i miss him achingly and i can't wait to be next to him again. i've started a countdown to remind myself of how soon the move is and how soon it is until i'm with him again. 49 more days. 49 more days until i'm near him again
my body wants change and it wants it now. in my preemptive desire to move and leave the city i switched to apple music from spotify, though this is equally also due to the fact that spotify keeps sending me ads about upcoming concerts and how i should be listening to drake or taylor swift. i don't care. i don't care about drake or taylor swift. i don't even go to concerts anymore. i can't hear them. if it's not someone i know or a show with nice loud drums, i can't guarantee i'd be able to enjoy it much. stop sending me ads on something i pay for.
i'm so ready to move my body gets itchy from it. my body wants to be out of this city so bad. i'm ready to move. i'm ready to leave. i'm ready to skeddadle. i'm no longer happy with the life i'm living in this city and its becoming increasingly apparent day by day.
having a difficult relationship with your own mental health over the span of a whole life gets difficult. i just told my mom that i'm going to be moving soon and her first reaction to it was asking if i was manic. that's been sort of a lifelong thing, and it's disheartening every time to think that so many of my choices since the bipolar discussions started get trivialized and are, to my parents, justifiably questionable on account of "oh she might be manic" "bipolar people can't make choices for themselves what if they're losing their marbles how am i supposed to trust that any of these big life choices are made with sound mind!" shut up shut up shut up shut up you're hurting my feelings !! i'm perfectly capable of making my own decisions! i'm perfectly capable of deciding what i want to do with my life and i don't appreciate my decisions being questioned or doubted on account of my mental health! i'm in control of my thoughts and actions!! i'm an adult who can do hard things! i want to cry! stop doubting my ability to do things! stop owrrying that i'm gonna derail my life because of a few very early instances of not knowing how to manage my feelings! i want to cry! my family makes me want to cry!
my birthday is a week from tomorrow. historically i don't particularly like celebrating my birthday because growing up my parents would usually find some way to make it about them, if they even remembered it (my dad very frequently did not), and i get uncomfortable with all the attention it puts on me, and historically the day has a bit of a streak of being one of my more-likely-to-ideate days. my parents were always more preoccupied with the fact that they made me, or, if we had money, they'd get me gifts that i wouldn't ask for but would be flashy enough that they could guilt me into feeling bad for not being excited about it. one year my dad got me a silver coin and assured me that if i held onto it it'd be worth something someday. he still fucking has it. in college he gave me some fancy ass painting of john lennon, not because i like the beatles (i despise john lennon) but because he likes that i was at one point into rock music and he accredits that to him (it wasn't you you deadbeat narcissistic fuck it was guitar hero 3 and my gay cousin evan).
this time last year i was losing my mind because i had recently moved out of the apartment i lived in with my abuser and the friend group i had throughout the whole thing was growing increasingly distant and insisting that they weren't (they were) (they all owned up to it and said that they were) ("we didn't know how to talk to you or how to help" fucking be there for me and absolutely do not withdraw from me and then tell me you're not withdrawing from me). last year a week from today will have been my most recent near-attempt. (author's note: i took a long pause from typing after that last sentence.) i feel better now. i'm doing better now. i think if ari from a year ago could see me now she'd be glad that she stuck around. that's all i can ask for i guess, is just knowing that some past version of myself would think i'm cool and be glad that things get better. i spent my life always wanting an older sister and i guess part of transitioning and working on yourself is becoming your own big sister. i don't miss being who i was a year ago but i know she was trying her best, and i know that she needs a hug. maybe a year from today i'll think the same thing about me now. i'm trying my best and i need a hug.
i’ve just been notified by the flight attendant that there aren’t any more free in-flight snacks, which means no more biscoffs, which means hungry ari, and i think that’s a pretty suitable summary of how i feel going back into the usual city. i feel stagnant there. i’m tired of the life i have there and ready to move on.
meeting h changed my life. he’s completely altered the course of my life in the most beautiful and right-feeling way— better than i could have ever dreamed of or imagined. i spent my whole life dreaming of you. dreaming of you and manifesting you and wanting you, and i consider myself infinitely lucky to be able to share in the joy of transness and existence and the unending beauty of life with you. you are the love and light of my life, and i am yours forever, and forever after that, and forever after that. i miss you already.
words cannot possibly express the beauty of time spent with h. i want an eternity with him.
sf is a gorgeous city and i count myself blessed to be able to witness it and explore within it. oakland as well is a stunning city in its own right. the rose bushes and lemon trees smell like the only geographic home i ever knew, and i was treated mercifully with the gift of a nearby enough mourning dove that i was able to hear. the architectural diversity of the bay is unyielding and storied and i don’t suspect i’ll ever quite have enough time enough to appreciate its full range. i love you california poppies. i love you lingering smell of the sea. i love you temperate humid coastal desert climate that cultivates a wide array of flora and fauna.
there are wild parrots in a tree outside of the transamerica pyramid, which h and i gleefully watched for a good long while. little italy is busy but its cathedrals are home to some of the most captivating archways and ironworks. h and i took pictures of each other in front of one of them. the building above cafe zoetrope is one of the most stunning examples of architecture i’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing, and i appreciate it allowing h and i to take pictures with it for so long. caffe trieste in little italy is a silly place, and i’m thankful for the patience of the fellows working there who seemed to be okay with how exasperated and hot i was and how hurriedly i made my order. why are there so many palm readers in the chinatown-little italy thoroughfare? i love you san fransisco. thank you for keeping safe so many happy memories of mine. i can’t wait to make more within your city limits.
i love you h. i miss you. i promise i’ll be back soon, and in less than two months it’ll be to stay. i love you. i love you. i love you.
it's 6:46am at the airport and last night i more or less successfully staved off the urge to spend the night at said airport, despite the fact that the primary reason for my hesitation was the realization that the last time i was in a transit port overnight was on my horrible manic greyhound trip to utah in 2019. realizing that was just the right amount of bodily horror to scare me out of getting to the airport 10 hours early. hehe ariport. my airport.
i'm so excited to see h ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i feel so close to him i'm literally at the ariport i'm literally so close to seeing him ohhhhhhh ohhhhh ohhhohohohohoho hhhhhhh
since last night i've been feeling sort of strongly like i have a really hard time making friends and keeping friends. growing up my parents never had any friends. my dad's paranoid and can't keep friends because he'll end up consumed by the idea that they're trying to use him for something or conspiring to take something from him and my mom just doesn't really know how to make friends to begin with. i think i follow much closer to my mom in this regard because i really don't harbor any conspicuity towards my friends (unless i have reason to like last year that was kinda fucked up guys). i just don't really know how to have friends. i don't know how to make friends or have friends, and i feel unequipped to be human sometimes because of that. i want friends. i want a group of friends and i want a community and i want a family. i just don't really know how to do that or how to really keep it after that, which makes me sad. i feel inhuman, and not just in a vampire bunnygirl way, but in like a fundamentally isolating way. it's easy to feel like i can blame my parents for a lot of that because they never set a very good example for it or encouraged me to make or hang out with friends (or really encouraged me to do anything. or raise me. they didn't really raise me at all) but i also just blame myself for not putting very much of an effort into it. sometimes i don't think i like myself very much and that makes me sad.
allen was cool. shoutout allen. he was my only real friend for pretty much my entire childhood, enough to the point that for the following few months after i moved out of florida he'd call me, and he stayed in touch in various ways for a while after that. i hope he's doing well.
i feel silly and i feel inadequate and i feel inhuman and i feel difficult and i feel hesitant and scared. perpetually and infinitely scared. ari living is ari fearful and if i am not in service to someone in some way i don't feel worth people's time. i'd like to work on that i think.
sometimes i get spiteful and angry and i half-assedly dislike things just because i have some sort of irreconcilable gripe with it but i don't think that's an aspect of my personality that i like very much. i want to make friends and be better at keeping friends while also feeling more comfortable about expressing my boundaries and comforts and discomforts and what i need from other people. i feel very receptive to criticism whenever someone else has something they need me to be better about doing but unless it's a matter of immediate comfort i have a hard time feeling justified in being able to tell people what i need from them, which i guess is what happens when you grow up with parents who fundamentally Do Not listen to you, but i'm getting sort of tired of blaming my parents for all the way s i'm a little fucked up, despite it largely being rooted in their sizable parental shortcomings. mmmm.
this isn't exactly the mindset i'd like to have while i'm at the airport to see my husband but i'm also running on four and a half hours of sleep and am simply just generally exhausted by life during this lil period of existence. things will get better. i'll get better. i need a hug from h. good thing i'm seeing him so soon
i think i'm going to sleep over at the airport tonight, i'm too excited to see h to not be even just a little bit closer to him and i want to make sure that i'm there on time even though the flight doesn't board until 7:20 the next morning but ohhhhhhhh i wanna be near him even if it's just a bit closer and oooohhhhh i love airports i love being one of, if not the only person in the airport that isn't there for work or for travel or for anything else except simply just being there oohhhhhhhhh ohhhhh i'm so excited i'm so excited i'm so excited
i'm feeling thrown-off at work today because the parking lot they usually have us park in is closed so now i have to have lunch in a different place and account for different windows of time and also there was a fire drill so a lot of the normal parts of my day are funky today which is resulting in a lot of tension and anxiety in my body. i don't like when my routine gets disrupted
all i can think about is how excited i am to see h and hold him again and have him close to me i love him so much
i think while i'm at the airport i'm going to try to get some reading done and also i'll probably lose myself to the continuing swirling desire to get sucked into working on my silly little website more. next steps are making my utah shrine work again, followed by making a shrine for h so that we both have a little digital place to go to whenever we wanna feel sappy about each other
this lil website project has turned into a really fun way to spend my time. i like being able to feel like i'm pouring my industrious energy into something constructive and sorta tangible and certainly easy to share and show people, and i like how personal i can make it and how free i feel to make it into whatever i feel like
it's been a little over a week since i first met c, the guy i've been seeing who likes steely dan. i feel like enough time has passed that i'm starting to be able to put my feelings into words a little bit better. he's cute and fun to spend time with and i feel like in terms of media interests we match up pretty well, which is nice, but i worry (ari? worrying about something? never would've guessed) that it'll get uncomfy or sad or messy when i move. either way it's nice to have the company now. last year when everything with my old "friend group" imploded and shattered it left me feeling lonely and insane and ultimately very friendless. when s broke up with me it felt like i just didn't really have very many people in the city left to keep me company. i have my sister and i love spending time with her but i didn't feel like i had any. idk intimate physical nearness to anybody since the last time h visited, and that was months ago. h has his other partner and i'm glad that he had someone to hold him and keep him warm and safe and give him attention, but i think i was getting cold and lonely. three months is a long time to go without seeing the love of your life. i hope he and i never have to spend that much time away from each other again.
c is nice to be around though. she smells like campfire sometimes but not all the time. other times she smells like a grandma.
my autistic little body is feeling a lot of things right now, primarily excitement to be with h again and discomfort at the fact that so much of my day to day work routine has been thrown off. this time tomorrow i won't have to care though, because i'll be with h and i'll be holding him and being held by him. maybe we'll go for a walk or he'll take me to one of the shops he's found for me. maybe we'll watch a movie and eat kibble and trail mix together.
turns out there's this condition called persistent mullerian duct syndrome where someone with externally "male" organs also has internal "female" organs. i've never had an x ray but my gut tells me that i have something in there. otherwise my tummy wouldn't do the thing it does. i'm maybe a little scared to ever get an x ray though. what if i'm right? what if i'm wrong? ever since i learned what intersex is i've sort of suspected that i might be intersex. i'm already trans though, and i think i'm bi? i don't feel like i need another label i guess but i'd love to have a uterus. maybe i could fix it up and get it working. maybe my husband can get me pregnant. maybe i could get health insurance and convince them to give me free bottom surgery as an act of reclamation. i want my husband to get me pregnant. am i bisexual or am i a lesbian? am i straight in a lesbian way? gender doesn't exist to begin with and by extent neither really does sexuality but i don't know if the "queer" label fits me anymore and i don't know if i identify as bisexual because honestly i'm only attracted to queer mascs. which is still lesbian but like. hmm.
i've been up since 4 this morning because my cat beans decided it would be a grand old time to wake me up and do things that would keep me awake. plus i keep having dreams with the recurring element of my mom appearing and deadnaming me in front of a group of people that i either actually know or that my brain labels as someone i know. i think subconsciously i'm afraid of being outed at work and the lingering frustration of not having supportive parents is the cause. right before i was about to leave for work beans decided to pee on the floor. i have a hard time frequently feeling like i'm a bad mother to her because of this. am i not taking good enough care of her? ky didn't treat either of us very well and i'm worried that beans being raised around someone so violent and volatile made things stressful for her on a fundamental level. i get worried that my cat is more like me in some aspects than i like to admit or acknowledge, but i'm trying my best to be caring and parentally supportive in the ways i never was. i'm glad we're not living with ky anymore. she wasn't good to us.
a continuing thought in my mind for the past week or so has been the fact that i simply just wasn't raised. i think part of me still has internalized guilt about blaming my parents for all the ways they failed to raise me, and i catch myself feeling bad for thinking about or talking about all the things they simply never told me to do. the internal dad that lives in my head and refuses to die and the internal mom who is too self-conscious to actually own any criticisms or commentary on her parenting style like to get defensive and guilt trip me for saying things like "i grew up eating a lot of mold" and say that wasn't true but it was. i grew up eating a lot of mold. my dad, both in my head and in real life, likes to say i'm lying when i think about or talk about how often he'd hit me or yell at me even though i know that if i were lying then i probably wouldn't have such prevalent lingering issues of it. if i were lying i wouldn't have memories of it, right? i think i find it easy to doubt myself or second guess myself on a lot of things, even when i know they're real and valid. i think my parents liked to gaslight me and make me doubt things more frequently than i really have yet to realize. i trust my memory and i trust my knowledge of myself, so why does it so easily get questioned? why have my parents always regarded my thoughts and opinions and memories as debatable? i feel weak and angry and hurt when i think of them. i feel defensive and scared and vulnerable when i think of them. i feel weak and angry and hurt and defensive and scared when i think of ky too. i think some of my more unpleasant memories of her are starting to bubble back a bit. i don't like thinking of her but my body feels like i need to. a few months ago i broke down a bit talking to sis about her and basically said that i was having trouble accepting that my memories of her actually happened and detailed a lot of the things she did to me. it felt good to feel validated externally and i think it's gotten to a point where i'm aware of it having happened, and i know that it happened and that my memories are real, but my body is just. idk remembering it i guess.
i'm seeing h in two short days. this time two days from now i'll be in the same city as him. my heart is so full of love for him, and i love him so deeply and so much. i feel so safe and held with him and my love for him feels safe and comfortable. it feels good and right to love him and be with him and our relationship feels more secure and healthy and genuinely happy than i could have ever dreamed of, and i'm so full of gratitude for him and our love together. i want him in my arms and i want to be in his arms. he feels like home to me. i get the sense that maybe a little bit of him is having some difficulties reminding himself of all the things i try to make sure he knows, and i'm excited to be able to look him in the eyes and remind him of it all. i love him so much
i took yesterday off because i spent tuesday feeling incredibly distraught and emotional. yesterday i went on a couple of walks and deep cleaned my kitchen floor, which beans the cat peed on this morning.
the sun today is tiring in the same way that being out in the sun too long in utah and arizona will make you. it's bright and it's in your face in way that really just has to be felt, and it's similar here but less intense than in the desert. i want to take h to the desert.
it's another one of those stupid ass teacher-only meeting days today. i'd rather be curled up with my husband. i can feel how much he needs me and i need to be next to him and holding him.
i hate days at work that make it feel pointless for me to be at work. when i worked food service it was always really annoying to be at work just to be there on slow days when no one came in, even if i was getting paid for it. i need money, sure, but i'd rather have a day off to myself. they're currently showing a work of art with a girl and a bunch of animals walking through a neighborhood with a bunch of tags and gates over the doors and windows and all the french fuckers are talking about how it seems like a not-very-good neighborhood. one person said the girl was brave. i feel outcasted at work. my only trans coworker is a zionist and most of the other people are either rich, french, or both. the only people i would want to try to get along with just don't really seem like they want to talk to me much. whatever, i'm gonna be moving soon. note to self: i dislike the french. i dislike working with the french.
h says he's having a bit of a hard time and i'm desperate to hold him. 8 more days. 8 more days and then i get to hold him and keep him safe and tell him how much i love him and how much he means to me, face-to-face. the distance is getting to both of us i think. i want to reassure him and look him in the eyes and tell him how important and valuable he is to me. i want to keep him warm. i want to comfort him. i love loving him so much and it hurts to not have him closer so that i can show him through my actions how much i love loving him.
i'm drinking chamomille tea for the first time today. it's nice. i don't know how to describe the taste of it but it's a nice taste.
i want to cry. i want to comfort h and hold him and make things feel easier for him. i spend a lot of time feeling like an inadequate partner because i feel like i misplace so much of my energy and end up feeling so bad about not being as "there" for a partner as i can be. i can't solve everything for everyone and i know that and remember that but i at least want to be there for my partners and i just. i feel horrible when i can't be there for them.
last night i went on another date with c, the person i hung out with on saturday. we went on a little walk through one of the larger parks in the city and spent about an hour just looking out at the sound. it's a really beautiful view. overall a really nice night
i love being polyamorous-- i have so much love to give and it flows out of me constantly and without end, and i've deprived myself of so much love in my life that i hate denying myself the ability to feel and express that love. i get scared that i have a hard time balancing it all out though, and i get scared of that hurting the people i love. it makes me feel inadequate and unworthy of the love i receive. i want to be a good partner. i want to show love and do my best to make sure that the people i love know that i love them. i'm trying my best.
i'm trying my best
i'm in a meeting right now talking about adhd in kids and i keep chiming in about facts and figures regarding adhd. i feel annoying and i feel like a know-it-all. maybe i'm just feeling insecure.
car seat headrest has an album called "my back is killing me baby" and that's how i'm feeling now. my back is killing me baby. there's a song on that album where he says he wants to kick his dad in the shins and that's also how i'm feeling. the past few nights i've been having recurring dreams featuring my father. last night i dreamt i was on a road trip sitting in the backseat with my parents in the front seats and they were getting upset at me for whatever reason. they were frequently just upset at me for no real reason. i snapped and said fuck you to my dad and tried to ladybird myself out of the car but he stopped the car when he realized what i was trying to do and said he was going to take me to a special school where i'd feel so isolated and alone that it would knock me into shape. all of a sudden we were in france and i refused to get out of the car to go to the school and i started getting physically violent with him so my mom opened the door and my dad pushed me out. a couple seconds later they both realized what they'd done and tried to get me to get back in the car so they could talk to me but i had no interest in spending time with them so i ran away and tried to lose them in this big maze of a mall that was made out of brick. everyone was speaking a language that wasn't french and i couldn't communicate with anyone, which made me feel both hunted and alone. i ended up finding a corner somewhere in the mall and hiding in it, where i stayed until i woke up.
yesterday i woke up feeling an intense aching to be with h again, enough so to the point that i was getting physically anxious about it. i figured the best remedy to this would be to walk, so i ended up walking to a big park in the city that's about a 3- hour walk from my apartment. my body still aches from it which is fine because it distracts from everything else but god am i sleeeeeepy today. sleepy beepy over here. the park was really beautiful. it was nice looking at the water and imagining h next to me drawing and looking at the water and watching it reflect back onto him and in his eyes. i love him and miss him so much. 9 more days. that's one more sleep until it's a week's worth of sleeps
one of the kids at school just gave me a drawing he colored in and said i needed to give it to my husband i'm losing my mind at how sweet it was
ohhhhhh.......... oooohhhhhhhhhh .... . .. ........... ooooooooooooooooohohoooooooooo i'm so tired ooooooohhhhhh
look at this shark i found while i was digging around the old jimmy buffet web archives i'm gonna name him huggles he's huggles the shark
or should i name him cheeseburger? that'll be his nickname. huggles "cheeseburger" the shark
i hung out with someone new on saturday which went really well. we went for a nice walk and then went to my apartment to cuddle and watch the original suspiria, which was nice. nice time. it felt good to be held again and he's sweet and says i smell nice. i'm excited to hang out with him more. plus he likes steely dan.
i'm so sleep yi wanna sleep so bad
my zionist transmasc coworker needs to watch how he talks to the kids. they're four, you don't need to raise your voice if they don't notice that they just knocked over a book. take it easy n give em a break. stop yelling at the kids for being kids
for storytime today the kids asked me to read a book called the hickory chair in which a blind kid is raised by his grandma, who always says he's her favorite, and then she dies and he spends most of the book wondering why he didn't get anything from her will, until he ends up being her age and he finds the note saying that he was her favorite. i had to stop myself from feeling emotions for a little bit while i was reading it, it was a little too on the nose.
i'm feeling better today than i was earlier this week. i think it was good to finally be able to cry. i'm still feeling a little sad and detached i guess but it's less all-consuming than it was on like. monday or tuesday. monday and tuesday and even also sunday were not good days for ari. my body's been feeling weird too. since about saturday my face and fingertips feel weirdly numb, but in a latent and delayed sort of way? like if i'm scratching a bit of acne on my face i have to focus really hard on being able to feel it on both my face and my fingers and even if i'm focusing on being able to feel it there's a slight delay in how long it takes to feel it happen. if i'm doing something just with my fingers it feels like it takes a few seconds to register that my fingers are even moving or doing anything. the internet says it's a symptom of ms but i'm hoping it's just a result of taking expired nyquil and a cbd edible within 24 hours of each other. frankly i'd rather have liver damage than multiple sclerosis. it's feeling a lot better today and i don't feel as much of a delay or numbness with everything but as someone who's the type of autistic to be able to feel everything happening in my body at the same time i have to admit it's scary when that feeling suddenly goes away. it gets overwhelming sometimes to be able to feel all the aches and pains and gurgles and what not but suddenly not feeling them anymore is a jarring quietness i'm not sure i like very much. at least not when i'm sober. if i take a cbd edible because my back hurts at least i know that if i feel numb or delayed it's becasue i'm high but if i haven't had anything and all of a sudden i can't feel my fingertips or lips it's a little alarming. i hope it doesn't get any worse, and i hope it goes away soon.
the downside of this however is that suddenly all the sensations that bother me are suddenly things i'm feeling again. my back hurts again, as it always does, and when i get cold i get really overwhelmed. ari hates being cold. ari's autism hates being cold. being cold and feeling my skin shrivel up and hair stand on edge is insanely uncomfortable oooohhhh i hate even just thinking about it gross gross gross gross gross gross gross gross gross gross gross gross
in the future when h and i live together and go places together i'll always have snacks for him because he gets hungry and if he gets hungry he gets uncomfortable but in return if i get cold i'm going to need to steal his jacket or have him hold me because being cold makes me really uncomfortable. i'm excied to love him and hold him forever. he feels so safe
right now i'm telling h about how tomorrow i'm meeting a new person for the first time and how anxious i get before i meet people and he asked if i was anxious the day he and i first met. the answer is yes because i am not only a rabbit who is scared of almost everything to some degree but it's nice being able to think so warmly about how he made me feel when we first met :') i remember when he hugged me for the first time when we met outside my apartment that i felt so safe and so held and so warm. being in his arms i felt what it meant to be held and even though it only lasted for a little while it felt like such a beautiful forever of time. he held me and i felt like i had known him and loved him and held him so many times before and in so many lifetimes and in so many forevers. it all connected and i could feel it all right there when i was in his arms. every time i've hugged him since i've been able to feel it. it's better than listening to a favorite song that takes you to a place and time. it's there and it's forever and always and it's him.
i miss being able to pull him back to the door as he was leaving even though i know he gets anxious about being places on time and being able to leave smoothly. being the domme i am it felt nice being able to pull him out of his flow just for a second (i don't want to make him anxious or too stressed) just to show him i love him. i love pulling him back to the door. if you're reading this now i hope you're ready to account a couple extra seconds into your exits for the rest of your life because i'm going to expect a kiss or maybe also a hug anytime you leave to go somewhere. be prepared.
i want shake shack.
have you ever been to margaritaville.? have you ever had the good fortune of mr. james william buffett serenading you with a model seaplane flying overhead while you eat a cheeseburger from paradise? have you ever looked god right in the eyes, taken a sip of a non-alcoholic pina colada with way too much sugar, and realized that the divine being that brought you into existence is actually a country-rock household name with a song about a geographic location so mythical that he ended up theming an entire entertainment franchise around it? is jimmy buffett god? where is the nearest margaritaville location and how soon can i get there? where is the nearest margaritaville to oakland? can i take my husband to margaritaville? can we get married in a margaritaville? i don't know if i want to get married in a margaritaville but i sure as hell wanna know if it's an option. i think i'd prefer like a backyard sort of thing or mabye a forest or a beach or a desert or somewhere outdoors so that i don't only hear jimmy buffett while my husband is barking his vows to me. does margaritaville do wedding receptions? where can i get margaritaville party hats for the wedding reception? i want everyone in matching margaritaville party hats. no i don't. maybe i do. much to think about.
every time i help a four year old put a bow in her hair i almost cry. i wanted that childhood for so long that it evolved into wanting to give that childhood to the kids around me. they're coughing pooping sniffing sneezing yelling and loud little runts but they're my little runts even if i have to face the inevitability that not a single one of them are going to remember me by the time they're my age. do you remember the time i put a bow in your hair and told you how pretty you are? they can't even remember last tuesday.
where is the largest margaritaville restaurant? why isn't it within a 20-minute drive from me? fuck it i'd drive an hour for margaritaville. i don't think i'd be able to handle the largest margaritaville though. i went to the vegas rainforest cafe once after i graduated high school. i had the time of my life. sky and sg didn't seem to like it much but sg enjoyed the frequent thunderstorm effects, i think. where's the second smallest margaritaville restaurant? not the smallest i don't want like an airport version of it. that would be too small. maybe it would be just right. okay yeah where's the second smallest margaritaville restaurant and why isn't it within an hour drive of me? fuck it let's go two hours.
after a brief google search i've learned something horrific. the nearest margaritaville location to me is in fucking lake tahoe. a moment of redemption: the nearest margaritaville to oakland is a two hour drive (shoutout santa cruz go banana slugs). is oakland the city of my dreams? the one place where i can simultaneously be near my husband, be near the beach, be near a beautiful city, be near a desert, AND be within two hours of the nearest margaritaville location? i think the answer may be yes however if h decides to move to vegas at any point then technically speaking vegas would also qualify (shoutout lake powell) however i don't see him wanting to move to vegas anytime soon. he gets hot and vegas is nothing if not frequently hot.
i love you h. i love you margaritaville.
pouring one out for jimmy
i think the sound of seagulls and the smell of a body of mildly polluted water makes a restaurant's food taste better but that's just me. was jfk autistic?
one of the kids today just got back from disneyland and it took everything in me to not infodump to a four year old. as an act of disaster control i've linked my favorite disney park history blog in the "links" buttons to the left and will likely start a disney park shrine (ooo i don't like the way that felt to type i don't like the idea of a shrine to disney) once i finish my utah shrine (work in progress). the disney world magic kingdom attraction "monster's inc. laugh floor" abbreviates to milf.
i've got myself thinking about weddings. maybe i'll type more later. whenever h and i talk about it we usually end up getting too sappy about each other to plan in depth but what we do have so far is a relatively small sort of shin dig with non-diamond rings. i don't like diamonds much anyways. h's pinterest board has a lot of opal rings and i like that a lot more than any diamond i've ever seen. now that i've transitioned i'm actually thinking about weddings for the first serious time. what would i wear? what would i even look good in? i think i'd look good with something with the shoulders cut off but i'd have to think more about it to be sure. i'm not used to wearing full dresses like that but i think i'd look great if i did wear them more often. i wouldn't want it to be too flashy of an event. the important thing is that i get to be there with h. maybe a sweet lil boquet of flowers and a handful of loved ones and a life spent with the love of my life. that's all i need for it.
last night i finally cried
i get consumed by fear sometimes. i don't know if i can call those times panic attacks because they feel different in my body but it's like an obsessive consuming fear that overcomes me. it's smothering and makes it hard to breathe and interact with people. i'm already feeling kind of reclusive as is and i don't have a lot of spare energy as of late. yesterday i said i'd hang out with a couple friends i hadn't seen for a while and it felt good to get myself to go spend time with them even if i didn't really have the energy to but by the time i was home i was physically and emotionally exhausted and just sort of broke down. i'm scared of h leaving me and i told him about my fear of it. he did a good job of reassuring me that it's not based in evidence and that he's not going to leave me and that he wants to love me forever and that was reassuring to hear. my body still feels fearful but my brain feels at least addressed and reassured. i feel insecure about myself and my ability to be loved and it's bleeding into how i interact with loved ones, which doesn't feel great. it makes me feel like a bad partner to ask for so much reassurance and support and i worry that i'm being overwhelming or triggering in some way by bringing it up so much and often in such a panic. i want to feel better. i want to get better.
i want to hold h and be held by him. i want to go on walks with him and feel him next to me. two more weeks as of today.
last night i spent an awful lot of time updating my website-- to the left you can find a button that takes you to my shrine of Leonard Cohen (it's a work in progress), a list of neocities "neighbors" that i've decided consists of neocities mutuals (you can click their name to view their cool websites :3), and to the right there's a webring widget that takes you to the transring, which is a community of other trans oldweb site creators (which i think is neat. it's nice to have community). anyways
i slept in a little too much after having a stress dream in which i was being chased by a bear near the local light rail station. i was with some friends who i didn't recognize but my brain told me were friends, and i saw that there was a bear with an unnaturally long tail, and i got scared and started running. no one else believed me when i said that there was a bear and i started getting more and more scared and frustrated that no one believed i was being chased by a bear. the bear followed me and so did my friends, who were confused as to why i was running, and eventually we got to the light rail station closest to me and there were a bunch of people all around me with really bright stadium lights above, and i was trying to escape the bear by running through the crowd and down to the light rail, but people kept stopping me to talk to me. i woke up and ended up being 15 minutes late to work because i forgot to set some of my alarms. oh well. it's a bunch of french-speaking four year olds at "break camp" and there's more than enough substitutes present to help out my zionist transmasc coworker. of all the things a trans person can be the only other trans person at work is a zionist. what luck. when he found out i was jewish he got a little too cozy calling himself a goy. i don't talk to him about my judaism anymore. i don't really talk to him in general much.
for the past few days i keep getting little visual flashes of this specific area near heber, utah that's basically just a hilly plain with a few sparse trees every here and there. the heber creeper is an antique train they've upkept since the 1800s that is still operational, and you can get tickets to go on a lil wild west jaunt on an old timey train. it's kinda neat tbh but i'm also autistic so of course i think a train is cool. anyways it's been popping up in my mind lately. maybe it reminds me of springtime or maybe springtime reminds me of it (note to h-- when i take you to utah it has to be in the late summer otherwise the cottonwood trees act up and make my allergies bad).
oh and i added an omori textbox and battlebox to my homepage. shoutout lilith thank you lilith!
i wonder if my gay cousin evan ever learned html to code his myspace. i just know he had a myspace. i wish i knew what his username would've been so i could find it. i wonder how he's doing. i wonder if he still works with my uncle at that company that makes blenders and dishwashers. i wonder if he ever thinks about me. does he know i'm trans? maybe i should reach out. much to think about.
in an ideal world i'd have all my belongings packed up and ready to go and right now i'd be roughly about 4 hours into my move down south to be closer to h. 4 hours would put me a few miles south of portland (i dislike portland) but if i'd woken up and left an hour earlier i'd probably be about halfway through oregon, likely around bend if i was taking the 5 or spending an extra hour to cross from bend over to the coast to take the pch. i've done both drives a few times before and frankly i can't decide which one i like more. pch is nice because it's coastal and you get to drive along the ocean and pass by that giant paul bunyan statue (and the much smaller statue that inspired the cover of my favorite beach boys album, surf's up) BUT taking the 5 takes you through inland california and wine country, which imo is pretty in its own right. much to think about.
pet sounds is my favorite album of all time and that one is pretty hard to beat. i don't know if any album will ever get placed higher in my personal "all time favorite albums" list (although marvin gaye's "what's going on" gets really close) but i don't think pet sounds is my favorite beach boys album, if that makes sense. my favorite beach boys album is surf's up. i like that it's weird and uncharacteristically depressing. i like that mike love only has like. one and a half songs on it. i hate mike love. fuck you mike love. the next shrine i make on this site will be a hate shrine dedicated to mike love. fuck you mike love. mike ock. anyways yeah it's just a good album. that one student demonstration time song sucks though. i hate you student demonstration time. if i had it on vinyl i'd use a rock to make it so that side a of the album ended right as student demonstration time was starting. gross song. does not fit the album. fuck you mike love.
i feel sad today in a less all-consuming way than it was last week. something something eclipse but i'm still feeling downtempo and maybe even a little morose. i miss my husband. i want to hold him and hold him close to me. i want to keep him safe and warm. he deserves safety and warmth and i want to bring as much of it as i can to him. 15 more days. that's one more sleep until it's two more weeks. so soon, so soon.
i wish i didn't speak french. french is a silly language.
i really like my new glasses but my face in relation to them makes me a bit dysphoric. i think i just need to get used to them a little more and figure out how to make them work for my face.
last night i dreamt that i took h to my grandpa's house where i used to live. we had taken a road trip to southern utah, or at the very least somewhere in the southwest, and h wanted to stop at my grandpa's house. in real life his neighbor charlene owns the house because it's still full of most of his belongings, and my uncle evan is still emptying it out. the biggest claim to any land i will ever have the possibility of inheriting from my family is the slim chance of talking charlene into letting me have grandpa's old house. i digress. in the dream charlene recognized me and i introduced her to h and she let us look around the house. i showed him around the basement room i lived in and it looked the same as it did when i was there, but more spiders and spiderwebs. my grandpa's collection of musical toothbrushes in the half-downstairs bathroom were still there. the mirror was still dirty as shit and the shower hadn't been used since i lived there. the hats he used to hang up near the kitchen-back entry-stair door were still there. all of my grandma's cast irons and old spices and stale noodles that never got cleaned out or refilled and the slightly sticky spanish tile floors and all the drawings i did and "do not resuscitate" orders on the fridge were still there. my grandma's collections of colored glass vials and birds, arranged by color along the kitchen and dining room windows, were still there. i showed h the handprints all of my uncles and aunts and cousins had on his hallway walls and all of the ties in the hallway closet and all the scraps of poetry he had taped to his bathroom mirror. when he started going blind he memorized all the poems so that when my grandma asked him to read her favorite poems to her he still could even though he couldn't see. that's when i learned what love is.
all of his dvds and vhs tapes were still on the bookshelf wall in his den. everything was still there right down to the entire series of "northern exposure" that came in the dvd-shaped puffer vests that were impossible to fit into the bookshelf but aesthetically very entertaining (and people wonder where i get my collecting tendencies). the living room was still the same except all the mirrors were covered (jews do this in the house of the person who's died until the shiva is over but in my dream apparently the shiva never ended-- a partial tradition in my family when the person mourned is still mourned. the mirrors in my grandma's room where my grandpa slept never got uncovered). the piano was still there and so was the painting and wooden angel that my grandma had above it. the colored window panes and dangling crystals on the top of the window were still there and shined the same wasy it did whenever the sun hit the living room just right. i think some of the first moments of genuine peace i ever felt were whenever the sun was shining through those windows and the heat of the sun plus the heat of living in a desert made it so cozy and warm.
if an alien ever abducts me and replaces me with a clone, h is the love of my life and my favorite band is the cure.
i miss grandpa's house. i don't think it's very likely that i'd ever be able to talk charlene into letting me have it, and frankly i don't know if i have the gumption to offload 101 years of hoarding tendencies (everything in his house were things he "used" or at least made it feel like a home-- everything in the garage basement was from 1940 and before, everything on the ground floor was either mechanical equipment or things from 1940-1980, and everything in the garage attic was from 1980-1990. he generally stopped accumulating things other than dvds and accessibility equipment after about 1995. the other members of my family have equally hoarderish tendencies and would probably find some excuse to keep everything in the house exactly as it was forever but if i'm being honest i think if i were given the house a lot of the belongings in the garage would end up either at an antique store, estate sale, or the nearest DI (utah's magical goodwill equivalent although even comparing it to goodwill does DI a disservice. goodwill doesn't charge $7 for everything in the store. DI does. anyways the nearest DI is on the other side of one of the local mesas about 15 minutes north kinda by the costco where all the local polygamists shop).
in southern utah there are a lot of polygamists because the offshoot of the mormons that still does the polygamy thing is based in southern utah about 40 minutes east of st george, so whenever you went to costco you'd see one guy that looked like a cowboy and like 5-10 women all dressed like they just escaped the dust bowl and their two dozen kids all dressed the same running around buying the next month's worth of costco goods. i don't know why i felt like i needed to explain the dynamic of southern utah polygamists and costco. long live the $1.50 hot dog.
i miss h. i want to hold him and be held by him. the eclipse is fucking with everyone's astrology, i can smell it. i'm ready for it to be done and over with. i want to hold my husband again. i want to go on road trips with him and explore with him and experience everything with him. if you're reading this, i love you so much
i've been on a nyquil comedown all day that's been making me real uncomfortable and frankly i'm not doing well mentally however i'm watching the 2002 syfy channel "dune" miniseries rn that i got for free from work and it's just the right kind of cheesy low-budget silly sci-fi show i think i needed. the cgi reminds me of 90s computer games and the soundtrack sounds like early seasons of survivor. also pomegranate juice is tasty.
i think i have the tendency to understate how i'm feeling a lot of the time, especially when i'm not doing well. when i was still living with my parents i got really good at knowing that if i showed any emotion to my dad he'd blow it out of proportion or use it against me, and i think a remnant of that is the fact that when i'm doing well i end up shorthanding it to like yeah i'm doing pretty okay and if i'm doing bad i just say i'm fine. as a practice of being better at actually saying how i feel, i gotta say, i'm not doing very well. i feel isolated and lonely and like i need to prepare to be left even though there's no evidence that anything's going to happen. i'm seeing h in almost two weeks, so why am i feeling this way? why do i feel like i'm being withdrawn from? no one is withdrawing from me. h reassures me so well that he loves me and sees a future with me and that nothing is going wrong with him and i but i just. i'm scared. i'm scared and i feel lonely.
in the dune universe the people who live on arrakis (the desert planet also called "dune") are canonically descended from actual-earth egyptians so why are all the fremen (people who live on arrakis) in this show white
last night i ran out of cbd edibles and had a hard time falling asleep so i took one of my emergency doses of nyquil. i'm almost out of it, which feels important and good, but today's been a difficult day to balance it with. i woke up still groggy and all day i've been feeling the distinct comedown body numbness that got me attracted to it to begin with. my throat doesn't hurt anymore and i'm not coughing as much which is great because for a minute there i thought i was gonna keel over but it's unsettling to go about my day not really being able to feel my body. i don't like being high anymore but whenever i have to take one of my emergency doses it ends up being hard to ignore what was so appealing about it in high school and college. today's been one of those days and that combined with how isolated and scared i've been feeling this week is just making for an uncomfortable day. i still haven't cried but i'm becoming desperate to. beans is sleeping really cute right now.
in the new dune movies chani (zendaya) is a badass warrior who isn't afraid to kick the shit out of the fuckwad main character paul and she's more of an independent "i'm gonna think for myself and what's actually good for my people" sort of person but in this show and the book she's more of just a generic "oh paul i know that you become a genocidal white savior dictator but i love you anyways" which is annoying. it's cool to see that this version has a lot more visual inspiration from moebius though, and he's my favorite comic artist. he does a really good job at coloring and making funky eco-sci-fi environments and wastelands, and i have like 4 of his books. currently thinking about how in the dune books paul and chani's son decides to become semi-immortal by turning into a half-human-half-sandworm monstrosity that rules the universe with an iron fist for 3000 years. currently thinking about the illustrations of him there were when the books first came out. i think if if a massive sandworm the size of vatican city decided to run for president under the platform of "i'm a worm" i'd probably be hesitant to vote for him in the fear that giant sandworm-human hybrids follow a general tradition of being evil.
distractions are nice for the most part. sci-fi and fantasy movies are what got me through a good chunk of my life, most notably lord of the rings and dune. i don't think i could read either book now because they're long and reading is hard for ari but they were valuable when i needed them.
the other day my zionist transmasc coworker drank a cup of milk and then said something about me not judging him for it. buddy i got news for you it's not the milk or transmasculinity i'm judging you for.
i want to be held. i want to be next to my husband again and i want to feel like my brain can rely on the trust that he really does want a life with me and that we feel the same about each other. it's weird- i know he loves me and i know he loves me as much as i love him but the feeling of it all feels,,, disconnected. i know it's there and i know it's true and that he means it but the like. clicking of it, the understanding, the "i know love :')" of it feels disrupted, like there's a staticy radio or a broken wire or something. i feel alone but i know i'm not alone. i feel isolated from the people i love and from the future i know is gonna happen because me and h both want it to happen. i feel like life is moving on without me and i'm getting left behind. i feel slow and stagnated and hard to want and hard to love. i don't feel worthy of being loved. i'm so full of love and so full of capacity to be loved but i have such a hard time feeling like i deserve it. i don't want to be like this. i want to feel worthy of being loved. i want to hear reassurance from my partners without being consumed with fear that i'm just getting my hopes up or investing more into it than anyone else is. i know h feels the same way about me as i do about him. i know he's invested in our future together and i know that our forever love exists and is and will be so incredibly beautiful. i want the wires to reconnect. i want the static to go away.
i want there to be more people of color in this adaptation of dune
i want my husband to get me pregnant. that's for another time though i'm getting sleepy
i think this lil gif divider is my favorite one but i'm always afraid of using it too frequently and i think that that says something about my general hesitations surrounding interpersonal relationships.
i'm not having an easy week or, if i'm being honest, a particularly good one. highlights of the week include getting a ticket to see h later this month and celebrating my anniversary with k, and it's always a nice time calling h or spending time with my cats, but i'm not doing particularly well.
i don't know what's wrong with me but i feel broken and unlovable, which i factually know is untrue, but my brain likes to say it anyways. i feel like i'm doing everything wrong and i'm paralyzed with fear that anything i do is going to be a massive misstep, which makes me not want to do anything at all. i don't feel worthy of love. i don't feel like i love people very well and i know thats not true because the people that i love love me too and they wouldn't love me if loving me was painful for them but i still feel unlovely and i still worry so much that the love i give people, particularly partners, is suffocating and painful and burdensome for them. it makes me afraid to talk to people and makes me hesitant to do all the things i would normally do to show love for people and i don't know how to stop feeling like that without asking for reassurance, and i'm scared to ask for reassurance because i don't want them to feel like i'm asking too much of them or being too emotional. i want comfort and i need comfort and i need to know that i'm not hurting the people i love but i've spent my whole life asking for attention and affection and being met with either anger or being ignored and i don't want to be ignored and i don't want to make anyone angry. i want to cry but my body won't let me. i want to cry but my body won't let me. i want to cry but my body won't let me.
and on top of all of this my fucking throat still hurts when i swallow. also my tummy hurts and frankly i'm tired of being brave about it. i don't have the bandwidth to be brave about it right now. my tummy hurts and that's that.
have you ever seen those videos where it's a dog getting rescued and it keeps showing body language that it wants to be held and wants to be cared for but when the rescuer gets close the dog snaps at them or runs away?
i'm not a dog though i'm a bunny. so imagine that but bunny. and the bunny is also a vampire.
i want to cry
my mom's birthday is on saturday and i'm feeling a little strange about it i think, but also i kind of just am feeling strange in general this week. my emotions and emotional regulation have been spectacularly out of wack and i'm needing a lot more comfort and reassurance from the people in my life than i normally feel like i need. i think i'm tired. i think i'm tired and anxious and sad and feeling progressively more and more and more exhausted with the whole working-six-or-seven-days-a-week-i'll-rest-when-i'm-sleeping approach. i'm tired and i'm scared and it's getting to me. i want to cry but my body isn't letting me and anytime it thinks about letting me, it stops after a few brief seconds. last night on the phone i asked h to tell me if his feelings ever changed all of a sudden and asked for his reassurance that i wasn't a burden or holding him back from the things he likes and wants to do and he said he's sorry that anyone had ever made me believe all that. i cried for a minute or so but it didn't really feel like crying, and i think i need to cry. it felt like something i needed to hear, though.
i'm scared of being abandoned. i'm scared of being replaced. i'm scared that someone i love will actively seek out someone similar to me for the purpose of them taking my place and leaving me with a lot of confused feelings of why i wasn't enough for them, or, more accurately, why i was too much for them. that's kinda what happened with m. they dated me because i was a replacement for their ex before me and then they dated someone like me because they were a replacement for me. they used to verbally compare me to their ex and say i wasn't doing something as well as their ex did, and then after we broke up they'd tell me about how their partner after me wouldn't do x or y as well as me. made me feel frustrated and confused at first but i think the lingering effects are just that i'm worried about being replaced. my dad always wanted me to be replaced. the kid next door, dylan, would come over to hang out with me and afterwards my dad would ask my why i couldn't be more like him and, on a couple occasions, mentioned how nice it would be to have a son like dylan. i don't think i have an individuality complex because i fully grasp the fact that there are so many wonderful people similar to me in so many ways but i get scared and upset when i feel like i'm being replaced.
nothing in my life is telling me that i'm about to be abandoned or replaced but my body is yelling at me about it anyways. i think it's a body memory. a year ago this season i was moving out of the apartment i lived in with my abuser, immediately followed by losing a large portion of my friends, which then spiraled into one of the worst mental health bouts i've had since i got sober. it wasn't a good time for ari. i'm doing so incredibly much better now, and i think i'm doing such a good job at having a life i want to live, but my body is remembering and preparing for the worst again, which makes me sad. being tired isn't helping.
h mentioned this morning the possibility of going on a road trip to the grand canyon with him and his family. i don't know if i adequately expressed when he mentioned it just how happy it made me. i want a lifetime of adventures with him
i want to be held and reassured. i want to be comforted. i want to be held.
i'ts me and k's first anniversary and that feels really good :') it's always nice celebrating pleasant anniversaries it's nice to be reminded that good things last and keep going. bad anniversaries aren't much fun at all but good ones are pleasant and soft and make things feel good.
my throat is sore and i swear to god if one of the little runts got me sick again i'm gonna melt into a puddle not unlike car oil when it drains onto pavement. speaking of, i need to change the oil in my car.
the sun + the wind + the temperature + the slight dust in my eyes is reminding me of so many road trips i'd take while staying within utah, and i'm missing it greatly. i miss getting in my car and being able to be in a flat, plains-y nowhere within a fifteen-minute drive. i miss stepping out and immediately getting dust blown into my eyes and dirt on my shoes. i miss driving up a canyon and having to pop my ears periodically becuase the altitude changes are so abrupt. i miss utah. i want to take h there and show him all the places that mean something to me.
i bought plane tickets to see him last night, which i'm vibrating with excitement for. i love my husband and i can't wait to be in his arms again. he feels like home and he feels like safety and i can't wait until i've saved enough to just drive down and be with him. he makes me divinely happy, and i feel so safe and comfortable in my ability to be myself when i'm with him in ways i've never felt with anyone, romantically or platonically. 23 more days !!
another cloudy day the same color and texture as yesteray, but today it actually started raining.
i forgot to mention in yesterday's blog update that in 2019 i took my mom to disneyland for the holidays because she grew up going there (her family lived one city away back in the day when tickets were a crisp $2) and i wanted to do something nice for her given the fact that 1: her memory is going and 2: she has to deal with my dad every day. anyways. it was as nice of a time as time with her can be, and i think she had a fun time with it. it was raining that trip too, which we thought was nice because it reminded us of the time i mentioned in my last post. i digress.
one of my favorite kids that i work with told me i was her best friend today and she's started wearing a mask at school because she wants to be like me. working here has made irreparable changes to both my estrogenized desire to have kids and also my constant desire to be the older sister figure i always wanted but never had. as a kid i had an imaginary friend that was my older sister and she always wore beanies. i wear beanies. am i my own older sister? i'm sure my sister has some thoughts.
the past few nights have been really bad i think. not like bad bad i'm not in danger but my brain is being mean to me. the ed that lives in my head that i've spent years trying to evict usually starts repeating things he's said to me before, which sometimes leads to me forgetting that i'm a person, and that i have qualities that make me a person, and if left unchecked, like how it got last night, my ocd likes to latch onto and obsess over for a while in a feedback deathloop of personal insecurity. it's still kind of echoing around today but i think i'm attributing that to autistic burnout today. maybe last night was also just autism. it gets tiring to be a constantly operational diluted shell of who i understand myself to be around people for so much of the day. sure yeah it's better than the fragmented, "i have to copy aspects of other people in order to know how to interact with people" sort of masking i did in high school, but it's still tiring nonetheless. my brain likes to tell me that constantly analyzing my own behavior makes me a robot, which internal ed likes to grab onto to justify that i am indeed inhuman and that i'm never actually feeling things, i'm just repeating the feelings i've seen in other people. this thought made me cry.
i don't hear them as voices but i don't not hear them as voices. it's all my voice and it's all just me talking to myself but sometimes there's like a little profile pic or icon of whoever i think the thought i'm thinking spawned from. the only exception to this is h, who is a fully visualized miniature mental version of his real self, and whose voice i've heard so much and with so much love that i can like. auto-generate things i think he'd say and then think it in his voice, which is a great source of comfort to me.
i don't like feeling robotic or computerish. it feels like internalized anti-autism (fuck you ed) just as much as it makes me feel even more like i'm just not a normal human being. i have enough troubles reminding myself that i'm a person who exists and is real and it doesn't feel great to think that all of my thoughts and feelings are just collected replays of things i've seen from other people. that's how everyone learns how to be people, right? we're all just collected rehashes of things we've seen and heard before, right?
i'm a collections autistic. i like movies and there's never been a time i haven't liked movies and i've literally, since childhood, enjoyed collecting physical copies of movies and then categorizing and sorting them. this is one of the few constants in my entire life. i think i get it from my grandpa, who was also a collection guy. he had the full series of "northern exposure" on dvd and could recollect entire books from memory and tell you, with words, how to reconstruct an airplane engine from scratch. i think he might've been autistic.
i like having collections not only because some of them tie into my interests (though this is a major driving force) but also because they remind me that i exist. that's normal, right? to have physical tokens of things i enjoy so that i remember that i enjoy it and thus if i enjoy something then i'm a person? hmm. .. did you know that if you ask me to draw you a map of disneyland from memory i can, in such specific detail that i can even correctly label where the the bathrooms are? i once took up a whole school whiteboard drawing it out. disney should hire me for novelty maps.
i think i might be autistic.
i often forget that i took five years of chinese in middle school and high school until one of the kids at school starts speaking it, and apparently i still understand it pretty damn well. whenever people asked if i was fluent my answer was usually "about as fluent as a 5-year old would be" and i'm learning that i was actually right about that. much to think about.
my lower gut is doing the same thing it was a while ago where it gets hot and painful out of nowhere. was the last time i mentioned that happening last month? around this time last month, even? am i having a period? have i always had a period? am i intersex?
one of my astrology friends told me that the eclipse this week is gonna throw me into the shits. was she referring to the fact that i've cried for the past like. 3 nights? or is there more of this to come? i don't think i'm neurotic i think i'm tired. i feel tired. i want to stim and be nonverbal and consume my special interests with no barriers and organize my movies and hug my husband i want to hug my husband i want to hold him i want to hug my husband. i'm tired and i miss him.
i think i'm doing my best. i'm tired and i'm sad and i'm lonely i think but i'm trying my best. do i want mac and cheese for dinner again or do i just want more spicy food? much to think about.
i miss my husband
earlier today it was the same color cloudy as it was the day my mom took me to magic kingdom. i think she saved up a lot over time or got a free ticket from school or something because we had the ticket way far in advance but when the day rolled around a tropical storm started and we were maybe two out of thirty people in the whole park. very little was open but we stayed as long as we could and went on as many rides as we could because it was the only time my mom and i had ever gone together and we wanted to make the most of it. the drive there i remember we were listening to radio disney and the only song the whole drive that i could hear clearly was 1985 by bowling for soup and even nowadays i still like listening to that song whenever it gets real rainy on a drive.
the only other time i went to magic kingdom was the time karie, my dad's ex who he'll never not be in love with, took her family to go and paid for me and my dad to come with them. it wasn't very enjoyable for me becuase i did not like karie's kids and one of them lost one of my guide books to disney world (an early-life object of special interest information) in the big moat that goes around tom sawyer's island and didn't seem very thrilled about having to apologize to me. somewhere out there frequently reposted onto ed's facebook is a picture of the whole group, me included, during this particular trip. i think ed likes to look at it and imagine that he was successful in getting karie to marry him. i don't think karie liked me much. when we moved to utah sometimes he'd drag me over to karie's house in the hopes that i'd get closer to her kids but i would always end up just sitting and not talking to anyone because if there's one thing i'm good at it's selective mutism and having opinions about what i spend my time doing. i remember one time he kissed karie out of view from everyone else but i saw it. later that day on the drive home he literally begged me to marry makenna, karie's daughter closest to my age. i never liked that he did that and i never liked makenna. she was always way too energetic in a way that made me intensely uncomfortable. i don't think karie liked me much either. she'd offer me snacks and one time she gave me a box of shrek twinkies (the cream was green inside and i never ended up eating them because i didn't like the idea of green cream) but i don't remember her ever actually talking to me. as much of my mother as my dad probably wanted her to be, if it had ever become reality i think i would've been the kid getting left at the gas station on the family hiking trip. on the third gas-station-leaving i probably would've gotten tired of it and just started walking back home.
i took apart two broken ps4s over this last weekend while i was sick and put them back together to make one fully functioning ps4, which i feel really cool about doing. it was kind of the same approach i took when i built my first computer out of scrap parts i found at the DI (goodwill for utahns) and i was always pleased as punch about having done that. sometimes the software engineering kids in college would make comments about me not being able to figure my computer out but joke's on them i bet they have no idea what a capacitor looks like or how to un-solder a bunky microchip.
thinking about karie always reminds me of the first time i ever thought about killing myself because the therapist my parents made me see immediately afterwards was recommended to them by karie, but she sucked. she kept trying to get me to use colored pencils and paper to draw out my thoughts and i kept very insistently telling her that just because i was 11 didn't mean i couldn't describe my feelings with words. i kept trying to talk to her and be like "please don't make me draw i am perfectly capable of talking" (i wasn't) (i had a really bad stutter) but she kept! on! insisting! that! i draw! !! anyways we could only afford the one session and i told my parents (and karie) that i didn't want to see her again so that was that but i think they interpreted it as "my child is no longer suicidal" (i was) so they dropped the whole therapy thing until i had my onset-of-puberty-psychotic-break that almost hospitalized me because i didn't want to have a penis or become a boy. that ended up with me seeing brandon or brendan or whatever the fuck his name was who kept trying to get me to do music therapy until i flat out told him that i hated him and we started doing actual exposure therapy and dysphoria therapy etc etc until he quit being a therapist to pursue music full time. he had me on the wrong medication for like 5 years. lithium sucks. don't give lithium to a 14 year old.
i'm looking forward to having the same over-spiced extra spicy mac n cheese that i made for myself yesterday. shit was immaculate.
dear diary
earlier today i was thinking briefly about my first irl boy crush gabe, who was best friends (possibly boyfriends? much to think about) with my favorite cousin evan. he was taller than evan and had swoopy scene kid hair and a hello kitty belt. at one point while i was spending some kind of vacation with evan and his family gabe came to hang out with evan, which of course also included me because evan was my favorite cousin, and we linked up our gameboys to have a pokemon battle. a couple days later i named my charmander after him and i never saw him again, but i know that he and evan were going to prom together because evan would practice dance dance revolution on his ps2 to learn how to dance every day for the rest of the time i was there, and when i called him to ask him about pokemon cards and how to beat super mario 64 levels over the next few weeks he'd tell me he was still playing dance dance revolution. at one point my mom and my aunt and i went to lunch at some americana-themed diner and i mentioned thinking gabe was cool and both my mom and my aunt just sort of gave me a "why do you like gabe so much" look before changing the subject. whenever i was feeling sad evan would get on world of warcraft and make his griffin do loop de loops into the ground and would say "shwoop" every time it happened, which always gave me a giggle. sometimes he'd let me beat him in super smash bros on his 64 or he'd help me play through final fantasy on the emulator he had on his computer while we listened to afi and flyleaf and other low-intensity intro-to-screamo music. i always told him he kind of reminded me of snorlax, which i think sort of offended him, but i think he knew i meant that i knew he liked snorlax. snorlax is still my favorite pokemon because of him. i found out he was gay when i was 11 because he and his family came to visit my grandpa and i and he brought his brony boyfriend who tried to introduce me to panic! at the disco but evan had already done that a few years earlier because "nine in the afternoon" on rock band 1 was easy to play on drums, which is always the instrument i wanted to play.
i think one of the runts at school got me sick again. my left nostril keeps feeling gooey. fingers crossed that it's nothing.
my dad got me my first game console, which was a gameboy advance i'm pretty sure he just found somewhere. it was the orange and green "shrek" edition and every day of my life i regret ever selling it. the only games i had were the finding nemo game and a shitty (but incredibly difficult) pirates of the caribbean licensed game that had nothing to do with the movie besides the names of the characters. once i moved to florida with my mom she got a nintendo 64, a gameboy color, and a haunted tv at a garage sale for real cheap. only games i had for any of it were super mario 64, spider-man, bass fishing 2000, and pokemon blue. over the next couple of years and amidst my progessively worsening acting-out i saved up enough points on the "i'm being good" reward pyramid my mom established to cash it in for a used ps2 my mom scouted out on craigslist that had kingdom hearts 2 and a couple racing games. pretty much all the other games i played as a kid were either through evan playing them with me or letting me borrow them, me saving up couch change (which is how i bought the copy of pokemon emerald that i refuse to ever let go of), or playing them on fridays at school because on fridays we could bring in our game systems to play them during extended day. some days, my best (only) friend allen and i would play pokemon together but on days when his mom picked him up early i'd end up playing final fantasy on my gameboy, always real hopeful that no one deleted my save since the last time i played it. joke's on everyone-- "final fantasy legends" is an insanely difficult and confusing game and it's a miracle that i managed to ever get as far as i did over the span of 4 years of friday extended day video game time.
allen's mom was sort of one of my adoptive moms while i was living in florida. she was a single mom of allen and his little brother austin, and she and the boys had moved down from manhattan after allen's dad left her. she was always really nice to me, and i think she knew more about my family's situation than i really had the comprehension of knowing at the time. sometimes she'd be able to tell when i was sad and she'd give me a kiss on my forehead when she was picking allen up or while i was hanging out with him. one time allen invited me to his family's christmas party because as much as allen was my only real friend i was his. i wanted to make sure i got him a christmas present but i didn't have any money to so i photocopied a bunch of my pokemon cards and cut them out, then stole a roll of tape from my mom with the idea that if allen taped the pokemon to his wall and moved them around it would be like a little paper pokemon playset. i talked to him a few years ago and he said that he still had it, at least as of 2021 or so. allen's mom was puerto rican and very proud of it and i distinctly remember a bedazzled camo peurto rico trucker hat she would always wear while she was driving. a hat like that is kind of hard to forget. sometimes i think about reaching out to him again, and technically we still follow each other on twitter and letterboxd, but i haven't talked to him since i transitioned. i think i'm scared that talking to him again and having to come out to him would end poorly and soil the memory of the friendship, but also he's definitely interacted with posts about me outright talking about estrogen, so maybe i'm just neurotic.
after a brief instagram search i've learned that he has a goatee now and his bio is a quote from ratatouille, so it's nice to know that he likely hasn't changed a whole lot.
i'm feeling emotional today. i think it started last night.
missing my hormone shot for a few days always leaves me feeling a little emotional and i'm sure that that's part of it but i think in general i'm becoming preoccupied about the idea that i might simply be "too much" for the people i love and care about. i try really hard to like myself or at the very least find things to like about myself but at the end of the day i really have a difficult time with it. i've been told that my affection is suffocating and overwhelming. i've been told that i'm "too nice" by previous partners and i think there's very little that makes me sadder as fast as my partner telling me i'm too nice to them. too nice too much too overwhelming. my ocd loves thinking about that. my ocd likes telling me that the way i love people is poisonous and unrelenting and that by loving people as much as i do i'm actually exhausting and degrading them over time until one day they give up and say that loving me and being loved by me feels like a chore. nobody ever talks about the gross parts of ocd like that. i don't think i'm taxing or exhausting. i hope not at least. i hope the people in my life now don't feel that way about me. turns out if your parents don't really make it known that they want you or love you and you go through a series of relationships where someone is verbally telling you that they'd rather be with someone who isn't you it kind of gets hard to re-write once you're in the "i'm trying my best and i think i'm doing an okay job at taking care of myself" phase of life.
i think i maybe feel lonelier than i've admitted to myself so far. i want to be held. i haven't been held in a while. hugged yes. hugs are nice. i want to be held though. i miss h. i miss the way he holds me and how safe i feel when i'm in his arms. i miss his arms. i miss his warmth.
i've been sitting in the bathtub for almost 4 hours now. i should get out. i want to cry i think. i wish i had more nutella.
i'm turning into a car dyke
i really want to start going to bed earlier because i like sleeping and i generally feel much better when i get enough sleep but i got distracted thinking of ways to change up my website (i feel like it could be more fun! maybe i'll change the colors) and also i started watching "there will be blood"
don't ask me why an almost three-hour-long movie about an oil tycoon is a comfort movie. i can't give you an answer. maybe it's the fact that the scenery is all just sagebrushed desert or the fact that the son is deaf and i think the accents are silly. if you looked at my letterboxd you'd assume it's my comfort movie becaue i think paul dano's character is a subby lil puppyboy and the giant metal oil spike is worthy of so much love. i wish i knew how to make fan cams. i'd make one for the big fucking metal spike. i've abandoned my child. loooouuuderrrrrrsay it say itttt I've Abandoned My Boy-louuuuderrr the lord cfan't hear you-I'VE ABANDONED MY CHILD I"VE ABANDONED MY CHILD I'VE ABANDONED MY BOY hehehehehee what a silly movie this whole movie is just people in the desert with funny voices slapping each other and getting covered in oil and dirt
"!!!DO YOU ACCEPT YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR!!!" "yes i dooOo :333"
today at work i got to pick up a bunch of kids and hold them until they felt less sad. i think i'd be a good mother but i don't know if i'll ever actually be a mother. i guess i have my cats. sometimes i have friends that call me mama.
if there's one thing about ari it's that they'd rather learn everything there is to know about something and do it herself before she ever, ever consults a professional about the thing. in today's episode i've found divinity in the revelation that i can save like. thousands of dollars by learning how to repair my car myself with very minimal experience required and also i can save another couple thousands in uhaul costs if i attach a trailer to my car. oh the magic of car repairs !
i'm getting tired and i miss h and i want a hug. i want two hugs actually two really big hugs.
i cleaned my apartment today, and that feels good.
edit: i did my taxes today and feel like shit i swear to god nothing makes me ideate faster than money i feel so stupid i feel so stupid and silly and incompetent why am i so bad with money why does everything cost so much i'm so upset at myself blah blah blah i tiptoe the line between starving and impoverished and manically spending money i don't want to be spending on the silliest most stupid fucking things i am!!! finding it so difficult to not say that i hate myself!!!
i think anytime i tell someone close to me that i spent money on anything that isn't groceries, rent, or bills i should be shot in the foot with a 9mm
someone outside just fell on a lime scooter i hope they're okay. it's nice to see everyoone run to check on them. they look like they're okay.
i had so much more to type that i just deleted i'm going to shut up until i calm down a bit.
edit 2: technically it's march 18th now but i'm not asleep yet so i'll count it. i miss h more than i know how to put into words. he's sick right now and i want desperately to take care of him. i want to hold him and fix him tea and dinner and give him massages or rub his sinuses the way i do whenever i get sinus headaches. i've spent the whole day daydreaming about moving. i want to be closer to him and i'm excited to see him in the specific sunlight the bay area has again. i wanna see it reflect on his skin. i wanna watch how his ears glow with the sunset behind him. i want to take him to all the most beautiful places i know.
i smell like sunscreen and it's still the same tube of sunscreen i was using when h and i were still living in the same city. i can still smell him in it. we have a picture together that i think he still uses as his lock screen that we took at one of the local swimming spots he likes and i'm sure that in that moment i smelled like this sunscreen. my phone says it's 67 degrees out right now but you could convince me it's in the 70s. it feels like it's in the 70s but it's also the first genuinely un-winter day we've had since i guess before it was winter. my scoliosis is bad today but not as much as my yearning. in a way i think i'm glad that so many sunscreen products smell the same so that if trader joes ever decides to stop making their sunscreen (the orange tube lotion thingy one) then at least i know that the smell will more or less be able to be found elsewhere. it smells like the drive home from the first time we went to the beach together, literally i think the day after or the day after the day after our first date. it smells like hanging my head out of his window worried that my glasses would fall off but generally just pleased to feel so happy to be somewhere. it smells like dryly saying bark woof bark bark awwooo bark bark in the most monotone and un-doggish way i could in the hopes that it would make him giggle a little bit. i like to think it worked because he still brings it up sometimes. it makes me smile to think of all the different things i'll have in the future that smell like sunscreen.
for the past year or so i've tried to keep a disposable camera or a polaroid with me and take pictures of things that make me happy or at least that i notice. it took about a month and a half to finish the one i had last summer. the one i have now is taking a little longer but i've noticed i've been taking more pictures of myself or of myself in front of things on this one. i think there's something to be said about there being more pictures of myself but it's also taken twice as long to fill it so far and i'm still not done with it. a lot of my last disposable boiled down to pictures of my partners and pictures of flowers and not a whole lot else. it's nice to know that i was so physically surrounded by so much love last year. part of me feels a little lonely thinking about the comparatively more isolated film roll i'm currently working on but the other part of me is trying to be a little more optimistic in thinking about how many more film rolls i'll have in the future and how nice it is to have been loved so geographically close then. i miss my partners. i'll see them again soon.
second shift at third job today. spent most of the time adding price tags to records, which was fine. i like having mindless tasks. the last hour or so of the day he had me working the register, which was stressful on two fronts (some other sunscreens smell like bananas i'm smelling them now)— firstly, i fundamentally don't comprehend numbers so if the register isn't telling me how much the change comes out to i'm shit outta luck. secondly— he gave me a paper with all the price codes to memorize and i, being the busy goose i am, did not bother making time to read it over the last week. i jokingly asked if i at least did a 4/10 job on the register and, giggling, he said i did a solid 4/10. doesn't feel great but doesn't feel awful. i think i tend to be hard on myself when i don't learn things quickly, and it bothers me that i just got so paralyzingly startled by numbers and price codes.
went to see dune 2 with sis last thursday. my initial thought was that it was simply a fine movie but considering dune lore has been consuming my mind for two days i think i might regard it a little more highly. from a visual standpoint i thought it was great. 10/10 would own on blu-ray. i had a bit of a meltdown about the elevator/escalator situation both going in and going out of the theater. FUCK whoever put a theater at the top of a 4-story mall. i'm insanely and pathologically afraid of elevators to an almost debilitating extent. anytime i have a nightmare, like an actual honest-to-god nightmare, it's one of two things: being prey or being in an elevator. i can't control my dreams but i've had multiple instances where if i see an elevator in my dream, dream me will think “oh i know what's gonna happen if i go in here it's gonna fall and i'm gonna die” and sometimes i'll avoid the elevator or i'll be forced in somehow and it'll happen that way. i hate elevators. especially don't make me decide between an elevator and a series of escalators where i can look down four stories. i don't trust floating elevators and i don't like having my back towards drop-offs. out of nowhere sometimes if i have a staircase or something behind me my body will remember that i'm in front of a drop and i'll jerk forward.
i feel a little bit bad for saying it but i'm almost a little disappointed that what i thought would happen yesterday didn't, and there's a part of me that kind of hopes it might tomorrow. i feel a little out of my mind for spending so much time thinking it would happen, but i think it's more of an ocd sort of fearful obsession with the idea than any kind of delusion. i've had delusions before and they feel differently than ocd obsessions. i don't like wishing death on people but i do often think that i'd be less sort of subconsciously anxious if i knew that i didn't need to watch my back for my dad being there. if anything else i feel.. some kind of way about the fact that i let it get so consuming and scary. anyways.
above all else i miss h more than i know what to do with and i am tired
two more days until it's the day my dream told me my dad was going to die, or four more days if you're going by what his dream told him. if i'm allowing myself some unhinged ramblings that tiptoe along delusion, then i'd say that i'm right and it's going to happen this friday because my dad has incredibly sour luck with many things and incredibly good luck with other things and since sunday is the anniversary of his dad dying i'm of the belief that he will simply not be around to commemorate his passing because that's just how his luck usually turns out. i don't personally believe that any of this is in any way delusional because this has been a long-understood belief of mine and also my great-grandma knew that my grandpa (the one i lived with) was going to die soon because she saw it in a dream. roma will not steal your baby or read your fortunes but we will receive prophetic visions about emotional upheavals.
my therapist knows very well that i feel bad for thinking that i would be less stressed if my dad did in fact die. i'd worry less, i think. worry less about random texts from him and i'd probably be less jumpy around white cars. i feel embarrassed to say i'd almost be a little let down if my prophesy was incorrect, partly because of the disappointment of simply not being correct and possibly swayed by delusion but partly becaue i think knowing that he's sort of just... lurking in my life stresses me out. after his Incident when i was a teenager i became a little hypersensitive to his feelings in a way i don't think i ever recovered from. i've already prepared for the loss of a father because it's already happened, but i'm unprepared for the guilt i will likely feel afterwards. if it happens the way i think it will, could i prevent it? no, because i think interfering with whatever the universe has decided upon is silly. what i worry about is the blame i'll likely find it easy to place on myself for it being my fault somehow. if there's one thing he's good at it's manipulation and making things my fault, and having the guilt work. he raised it within me. whatever happens it is not my fault. whatever happens it is nothing i can prevent or change, and no matter what it's not my fault.
i don't think my coworkers like me much. i don't think i like my coworkers much. some are okay but i don't feel like any of them actually want to spend much time around me. i don't think they know what to do with me or how to talk to me or what to talk to me about. very few of them ever even ask me how i'm doing. the kids are sweet but sometimes they don't listen and after mornings full of being scolded to some degree by my supervisors or having kids simply not listen, sometimes i'll ask a kid if i'm invisible. i don't think they ever understand the question but shortly after, if i can, i'll usually escort myself to the bathroom and cry for a couple minutes. i am my mother's child. she's the second youngest of 6 kids and grew up with numerous stories about being conversationally stepped on and overlooked by her siblings. she was the quiet one of her family and it shows. i'm the only child and i still somehow ended up the quietest but i guess that happens when both of your parents are neglectful fire signs and one of them has crippling depression and the other is a narcissist with the emotional control of a 5-year-old.
it's 11:11. i'm wishing for h
i'm excited to move to the bay later this year. i think it'll be good for me. i like the color of the sun there. i like the smell of the air and the energy of the people. i like the trees and the color of the dirt and the variety of architecture.
i always wanted to be an architect growing up but architecture is hard to do when, on a fundamental level, you don't understand math. i still admire architecture. i like to take note of it when i find a building i like and i certainly have a lot to say about different sorts of architectural styles and histories and purposes. i own textbooks about it that i've actually taken the time to read (at least most of them).
good pal ron posted a thing on tumblr yesterday about patiently waiting for someone to ask about an incredibly niche topic you have encyclopedic knowledge of that just never manages to get brought up. i don't think anyone's ever asked me about the invention of the airport as a functional building and the direct pipeline it takes to the history of the disney parks as geographic locations. related to this, no one's ever inquired about the hours, if not days, of youtube videos and wikipedia articles i've consumed surrounding television broadcast networks, although if i'm being honest i don't think i can relay a lot of the information i've learned. i can tell you a lot about the history of disney channel, though, and i can tell you where i was when i first heard a variety of early-mid 00's pop hits from radio disney, and sometimes when i'm bored i walk around the almost perfect 3d scan of epcot (circa 2009) or disneyland (circa 2018) that i have in my head. am i a disney adult? i don't think i like disney characters or movies enough to be a disney adult. let me put it this way-- the way millenials feel about paris is the way i feel about disney parks. does that make sense?
did you know that the motion picture association of america (mpaa) took out an a from their name five years ago and now it's just the motion picture association. i don't know why.
after a brief wikipedia search i have learned that it's because they wanted to reflect their desire to provide global content and initiatives or something corporate like that. i don't think anyone told them that there are other countries that do movies. i don't think anyone told them that the united states is one of like. 3 countries that use the g/pg/pg-13/r/nc-17 rating system they came up with. did you know that the pg-13 rating was invented for indiana jones and the temple of doom? i don't care what you have to say about kingdom of the crystal skull-- temple of doom is the soggiest and hands down worst indiana jones movie. one thing i will say about temple of doom though, largely in part to the fact that i've only seen it maybe twice in my life (in contrast from the dozens of times i've seen the other three) is that it's a prequel to the first one. i didn't learn that until this year.
i think monorails are my favorite method of people-moving. they're fun and stylish.
i think i may be autistic.
today is my ex/one of my best friends' birthdays (happy birthday maps !) and if my prophetic dreams are correct my dad will die in a car crash next sunday taking the 522 back home through woodinville. one of the last times i saw him he said the same thing but that it was the 15th so who knows maybe it'll be two days early.
i'm preparing for the inevitable crushing weight of grief that is sure to follow as well as the eventual guilt of having not spoken to him in a while. i don't want to speak to him and he knows it, but there's a distinct sort of self-accusatory loneliness that comes from distancing onesself from a parent. after and also during the grief comes the rituals but the guilt will continue. make a ward, attend a cremation, comfort the mother/wife that once told you she frequently thinks about how easy life would be if you and your dad (in this scenario, dead) never existed. continue to grieve. continue to feel guilty. do everything you can to not lose emotional stability. write and write and create and create and do as much as you can to not ruin your life. upheaval is acceptable under proper conditions. things will hurt. it's okay if it hurts.
i don't think he ended up wanting me all that much anyways. there was a time, i'm told, in my early childhood, when he'd fall asleep watching tv shows with me on the couch, and he'd sit with me and try to get me to eat or watch me play computer games. i don't remember this. very few of my lifetime memories with him involve him actually listening to or paying attention to me. i was a reflection of himself and he hated me for it, but also loved that he could talk about himself and do everything he wanted to do without actually taking into account much of how i was feeling. in thinking of the best memory i have with him the only one that comes to mind is the two or three times he'd taken me to seaworld while i was living with my mom in florida. once every few months he'd have me for a saturday and if he had any money saved up we'd go to seaworld for an afternoon to look at sharks. this only happened twice and one of the times we went was the day i learned he smoked because he got so upset at the traffic that he started smoking. a disappointing day to say the least. after a while i think he just lost interest. once he realized i was my own person i think he lost a lot of his energy for being much of a parent.
i don't think i can say much about if my grandpa really liked being a father figure for me. i think he knew he couldn't be a father figure (on account of him being 96 some odd years old when i started living with him) so he focused a lot of his efforts on being my grandpa. he spent a lot of time telling stories and sleeping and i'd care for him as best as i could. i think he had a hard time relating to me but i think it was a mutual understanding.
i don't think i have a lot of very positive parental experiences, in the long run. my mom would help me with legos or toontown bosses sometimes and she'd take me to epcot after school just for me to get my energy out but i don't remember her ever really talking to me until high school when i came out to her and she said nothing could be done, so two days later i said i was just kidding.
i just told my coworkers that one of my top 20 movies is "nymphomaniac" which is a 6-hour very difficult movie to watch about a woman retelling her lifetime of sex addiction. i like that it's such a sympathetic and un-glorifying way of talking about and portraying addiction, intimacy, and emotional numbness. her dad dies in that movie. does it happen on march 17? i'll have to rewatch it.
i miss h dearly and if i don't see him by april 15 i'm gonna lose my mind. i'll have to take some time off to visit him soon. i miss his warmth and i miss holding him and being held by him. i want to be held by him again.
sometimes i get caught in a bit of a loop about people who haven't exactly treated me the best where i get reflective and mournful about experiences and time with them without fully checking back in with myself about how bad the bad parts were. i find it important to remember the good parts with the bad but it blurs together from time to time, i think. last night i got a little caught up in thinking about how peaceful and gentle a lot of the earlier times i would spend with ky would be. watching movies and tv shows together and playing through pokemon or mario games together is certainly ground for cherished memories but it kind of pales in comparison to daily abuse. it makes me happy to know that better things are already here and will continue to come. i'm trying to convince myself that i deserve it.
i forgot that the final fantasy 7 remake existed until yesterday when it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. i grew up playing a lot of final fantasy because i had it on my ps2 and even though i never got into anime or manga very much, i was neck deep in final fantasy games for a hot minute. seven isn't my favorite anymore but it was my favorite up until around college. there's nothing quite like a fantasy-sci-fi-role-playing-game where you play as a gang of anti-capitalist eco-terrorists. i wonder where i get my political views from. much to think about.
i miss h. my body remembers what he feels like and wants more of him. i want him next to me and every day i itch more and more to move to be closer to him. i think he knows. i hope he knows.
i bought a tiny lighthouse model at value village yesterday. exciting developments in the kitchen of ari. i love my tiny lighthouse.
i would maim and kill someone for a smoked turkey sandwich with dijon mustard and provolone right now. lots of tomatoes please.
i'm a simple woman. i love primary colors and infodumping and i dislike when people interrupt my infodumping to start talking about other things and then don't apologize or ask me to continue. did you know that the plot of "queen of the damned" revolves around lestat starting a nu metal band? no? oh well you would've learned that if you hadn't interrupted me.
i think i might have ovaries. this has long been a suspicion of mine. i started thinking i might in middle school, initially as a wishful begging that one day i might "wake up and be a woman" (tip: estrogen will do this faster than any divine intervention will), but i think it turned into sort of a genuine gut feeling (ha ha) pretty early on. i've never had any x rays or inspections done on my abdomen or waist at all and frankly i have no evidence to back this up but every now and then there'll be a period of 3-5 days where throughout the day i'll get this weird sensitive warmth in my lower gut where i imagine my uterus would be and it's an intense and sad sort of warmth. like when it happens i feel like i need to keel over in pain and also i need to receive a hug. sometimes it makes me cry, both from the pain and from just feeling intensely uncomfortable or sad. I know it's not the hormones, too, because it's happened since my first puberty. additionally i have some inexplicable marks and scar tissue along my genitals. am i intersex? much to think about.
thinking today about how viscerally uncomfortable i'd get whenever i had to wear a suit. i always hated wearing suits and ties, and anytime i had to, i simply would not. i'd refuse. sometimes i'd pretend to not know where the suit or tie was so i wouldn't have to wear it. i'd get so passionate about it that my orchestra and jazz band teachers let me wear cardigans and keep my button downs undone at the top two buttons just to avoid me putting up a stink about it.
i miss my deathhawk haircut and feel like i want to cut the sides of my hair again, but i'm trying to grow my hair into a bob. maybe i'll go to bed early or touch up some of my tattoos to help with the "change something" urge. maybe i'll say fuck it and cut my hair anyways. i really want a sandwich. i'm hungry and also i'm hungry. also i miss my husband. also i need a hug.
i'm in a meeting right now. said meeting began with three minutes of silence intended to make us realize how hard it is to sit still for three minutes without falling asleep or disassociating. frankly i had absolutely no problem doing this and even found the three minutes of silence to be quite nice. i think therapy took away my recreational dissociation. i used to do it on purpose for fun whenever i got bored and as a kid i'd call it time traveling because when i clocked back in it would be a different time even though i hadn't registered the time passing. i still dissociate nowadays though but it's usually a byproduct of getting activated somehow or starting to hole down into myself. i don't think i should ever try ketamine. this fact disappoints me.
i think i'm coming down from my almost hypomanic episode. manic episodes always scare me and they tend to scare me enough that it's hard for me to talk about them sometimes. i say almost hypomanic because i don't think it was hypomanic and it certainly wasn't fully manic but it was definitely a week or week and a half of feeling the same kind of phpysical feelings that i get when manic energy is bubbling. mania always makes me uncomfortable. it makes it hard to feel comfortable and safe in my own body, which then just feeds into the difficult impulse control. i feel good about being able to manage it and i think if what i felt last week was happening a few years ago it definitely would've been an episode, but i'm me as i am now and i'm so much better at controlling it ! so i'm pleased as punch with myself for having worked so hard on that.
manic and hypomanic energy in ari 101: it usually starts with diminished need for sleep- i usually try to be pretty good about getting 7-8 hours but if it dips below 6 hours for more than 3 days i've noticed that that usually means either i'm manic or i'm soon going to be. the only exception i can think of is when a few months ago i had a nightmare so bad i was scared to go to sleep for a few days, but that doesn't happen very frequently. after the sleep schedule changes i usually get a little more talkative or i talk a little faster, or i get more irritable and tend to get a little feistier in a more frentic and sassier way. i used to just be straight up mean but i've worked a lot on that. my impulse control gets a little harder and it feels easier to want to spend money, even though i really don't want to. i'll see things and instantly be like "ooh i need to buy that" and i've gotten a LOT better at managing that. nowadays i give myself allowances and think about how much i'd be willing to pay for a certain thing, and nine times out of ten the actual price is a lot higher than i'd be willing to pay for it, and that does a good job of dissuading me. i've found that redirecting my urges makes it a lot easier to cope with-- if i want to spend money and have the means to, i'll buy thing i've needed to buy for a while (underwear, socks, etc) or if i'm feeling manically energized i'll try to funnel it into learning things or creating and doing arty projects, and that always feels good. being manic makes it harder to ignore urges to self-harm or do my substances again though. my brain does a good job of telling me that if i can't do my substances i should get drunk or try smoking again, and that always annoys me a little because i like not being inebriated and i like being nice to myself. sometimes reminding myself not to be mean to myself gets hard but i feel good about distracting myself and using ice cubes and what not
i think my british coworker wants to get in my pants. whenever we work after-school together he spends an awful lot of time trying to get my attention. today the topic was the movie "akira" and the cool motorcycle slide they do in it. i've expressed to him multiple times that i hate the british, to which his reply is usually "fair." i have to hand it to him, he's suave, but i think if i was hatefucking him i couldn't get past the accent enough to make it very far. also i don't want to have sex with him. he does actually seem to enjoy talking to me which is nice considering none of my other coworkers really do all that much. i think the kids like me a lot more than any of my coworkers do. there's one in particular that i don't care much for. he talks about movies like he's an expert and shuts me down whenever i try to talk about them, but he only ever talks about marvel movies and blockbuster summer films like barbie or oppenheimer. i have him quoted as saying "the oldest movie i like is apocalypse now" which made me so upset i had to leave the room. talking to people like that makes me feel like i did as a kid whenever i'd try to make friends with people and i'd scare them off because i didn't know how to talk like a normal person. i've since learned to weaponize and sexualize my sass into a force to be reckoned with.
today one of the kids i spend a lot of time with got sad that i was leaving so i jumped in and out of view of him from the window where he was standing sadly because i had to go, and that cheered him up. earlier in the afternoon i held him because he scraped his knee up a bit. i worry a bit that i'm getting too attached to these kids. i don't remember very much from when i was 4 and i doubt that any of the kids i'm interacting with now will ever remember anything about me, but sometimes i hold a crying kid or play with them when they get sad about me leaving and i feel the pang of wanting to help a kid grow and learn. i don't expect to have a child of my own. i won't be disappointed if i never do. but sometimes i ache a little.
i once came home crying to my mom because i couldn't play in the sandbox at school because there were too many ants and they'd all bite me and i'd get welts because i was allergic to ant bites as a kid. one of the only times i remember my mom going out of her way to save money and get me something was when i told her about moon sand from an infomercial i saw on tv and she saved up for a couple months to get me some. i'd end up playing with it while i watched tv. it was nice of her to get it for me since she knew i had a hard time playing with actual sand at school.
i think working with kids has me thinking about my own childhood a lot, which is fun when it's things i think of fondly but not so fun when it makes me realize how neglected i was or how difficult it was for me to make friends. there are a few kids who repeat a lot of things from tv shows they like, which reminds me a lot of myself. once i started talking to people i had a really bad stutter and one of the ways my school speech therapist said might help break the stutter is by quoting movies or tv shows in the voice that the character says it in. up until i went to college i didn't really know what my voice sounded like genuinely because i spent so much time replicating other people's voices. for the part of elementary school that i actually talked to people for and most of middle school i'd just repeat things i heard from watching tv. i think that's part of why i'm so fixated on the role of movies in my life.
anyways, i'm about to watch an episode of curb your enthusiasm. i got to talk to h today after i cleaned my apartment. a good night. goodnight.
Today in class I sang a song asking all of the kids how they were doing today and in between each break of the song I said a kid's name and asked how they were doing. It's sweet to hear kids go quiet when their friends are saying they're sad, and it felt good to help them learn that it's okay to be happy and sad at the same time sometimes.
One of the kids I end up spending a lot of time with asked to sit in my lap during story time, and after a while of sitting still he flopped over and said my sweater was really soft and that he really liked it.
I have a lot of things working against me here, mathematically: intense breeding kink + recent estrogen injection + tgirl period + sweet kid interactions is all equaling out to some insane brain chemistry gymnastics. The ovaries I wish I had but have never been fully convinced of Not Having are bursting at the seams. Motherhood brain go brrrr.
it wasn't until I got on hormones that I ever really thought about the idea of raising a kid. I was always scared of it to a very sincere extent but I've grown to realize that I was more scared of being a father than having a kid. I'm not a father and I never will be, but I could be a mother if I wanted to be. It's nice to think about sometimes but I have no real plans or intentions to raise a kid. I don't make enough money for that and don't quite feel like I've graduated therapy enough. Despite begging h to breed me and the estrogen-induced fantasies I have of teaching a kid how to cook or be kind to flowers or pointing at airplanes through the sunroof, it's not something I've put enough want into wanting to actually have it be labeled a "goal" in my life. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if some of the ways my desires to raise a kid manifest are really just me trying to heal my inner child. Maybe it's both. I feel like I've done a lot of work and put a lot of effort into spending time with her in the ways that she never got time spent with her. Maybe there comes a point where you heal your inner child so much that you start wanting to test your work and practice and effort in a practical way. Maybe it's not even that selfish. Maybe you know what it's like to not be wanted by a parent and, since you've only ever wanted to adopt anyways, there's a desperation somewhere in you to provide something for a child that you never really got yourself.
maybe it's just survival instincts. Maybe you just want to have a kid. Maybe it's the estrogen talking.
i missed the anniversary of me starting hormones (it was the 3rd). happy anniversary to me i suppose. every day i get more comfortable with being alive and being myself, and even though sometimes it gets really hard to feel excited about continuing to be alive or be myself, i'm glad to be here, and i feel safe in my feeling that i keep finding new reasons to keep staying alive.
i just got a youtube ad for intrusive ocd thoughts. fuck off i don't like being clocked like that. take a step back. i have enough therapy experience to know how to monitor my intrusive thoughts, thank you very much.
happy valentine's day. i used to be an avid valentine's day hater but my heart has changed and it's one of my favorites now. today one kid gave me a valentine that was meant for a different kid who wasn't at school, and another kid gave me a coloring page she had colored because i said that i liked that she colored the otter's tail in green. this past week it's been hard to distract myself from how i'm feeling about myself. i feel burdensome and unlikable, and i'm finding little, if any, beauty in myself as an individual with a body. i don't feel beautiful. i don't feel worthy of the love i know i have from others. i'm trying my best to remind myself that i'm beautiful and worthy of love, but it gets tiring to keep putting so much effort into it. it would be nice to just know it or believe it. frankly i have little to no doubt that a lot of it is just feelings of rejection in the wake of a recent breakup, and i'm proud of myself for remaining stable in spite of it, emotionally, but i'm tired. i'm tired and i don't quite know how to stop being tired. i want to be held, and i want to be reminded that i am loved by those who love me. i feel needy, and i feel tired. i want to be held and cared for but simultaneously i feel scared to be touched or held. i worry that if i would be touched i'd get uncomfortable and snappy at the sudden intimacy and vulnerability. there was a point in my life when i'd use sex and intimacy as self-harm, knowing that i'd get uncomfortable, but forcing the bastardized, instantaneous intimacy as a desperate and self-aware attempt at grasping for love anyways. i've learned over time that whenever i feel like this it's generally a good idea to work on my own self love (duh) but it's a cold period of time. worthwhile, sure, but cold. i think i want to be better at opening up to the people i trust to love me and who i trust to be vulnerable with. i think that would be a good way of being helped. it's hard for me to ask for help sometimes, especially if i feel like i'm already asking too much from someone, or being too needy already. i find it important that i'm able to take care of myself and keep my own needs met to some degree, but i'm still working on learning when i need extra help from other people, especially in terms of needing affection. i don't know if i'm quite used to having affection met. it's new, but it's here. h and k do such a good job of meeting my needs and providing reassurance and affection when i need it or want it, even when i'm already feeling like i'm asking too much of it. i'm trying my best. i like to think i'm even doing my best.
i'm watching a youtube video about the american idol experience that was once at disney's hollywood studios in the early 2000s. i don't talk about it much because i always feel like disney adult is something that not only feels inaccurate to how i feel about the corporation, but also just carries a certain....... connotation...with it. tl;dr i dislike disney the company i do not care about most of their movies i find their constant devouring of other corporations to be horrifying HOWEVER i am the conglomerated result of a variety of attributes that led me to where i am today: 1) i was a low-income child in the early 2000s who learned how to speak by watching tv, particularly turner classic movies and disney channel. 2) i spent the most formative years of my childhood in an apartment complex 45 minutes away from disney world with a mom who grew up in anaheim in the 60s who had a teacher-discounted year pass to disney world's epcot park which would be utilized by her simply driving me to the park, letting me into the park, letting me loose for a few hours, and then grabbing me again when i called and said i was done. 3) sometimes she'd come with me, and it would be the only time in my most formative years that i'd get parental quality time. 4) i think oswald the lucky rabbit is a cutie pie. 5) i'm very likely autistic and one of my most permanent and lifelong hyperfixations is urban planning, themed areas, and the intersection of the two. little autistic ari spent YEARS of her life making imaginary maps to theme parks, and would "play" by staring at maps and brochures for local tourist attractions.
i never had a chance.
i don't give a shit about disney as a corporation. as i stated earlier, i dislike disney as a corporation. but i will not stand idly by and be told that i don't know something about the disney parks. you don't KNOW my knowledge of the disney parks. i am a walking encyclopedia of ever-expanding knowledge about the disney parks. i can give you a full walkthrough of the entire epcot park (as it was in 2009) from memory by simply closing my eyes. give me a starting location and i can tell you everything in the local vicinity. i can give you an equally full walkthrough of the entire disneyland park (as it was in 2019) from memory after only having been there twice in my life. fight me about it. one of my greatest annoyances in life is when fuckers think they know something i don't about the disney parks. i digress. i find it comforting. say what you will about my autism allegations but autism be damned that girl finds a great amount of comfort from indulging in disney park history. it's a source of comfort for me. one of my biggest sources of comfort. it always has been. it's the most direct method i have of hanging out with and healing the child within me that needed, above all else, actual care.
it annoys me that disney adults (read: people who stand by disney no matter what, only listen to disney music, talk down on people who can't afford disney things/aren't interested in it) occupy such a large and villifiable space in american context. that's not what i am and it annoys me when i tell people that i have a hyperfixation with the disney parks. i don't care about disney. i don't like disney. i don't even really like that the parks are linked with disney because disney takes away their safety in my perspective of them.
autism brain go brr when intentional fluidity of the movement of persons through an artisanally crafted and thematically cohesive space.
don't call me a disney adult.
on one hand i get why nobody likes airports. on the other hand however, i like airports. if there are one hundred airport enjoyers in the world i am one of them. if there is one airport enjoyer it is me. if there are no airport enjoyers on the earth, i am in space. this has been a source of great contention throughout my life.
i consider the time i slept over at an airport willingly to be a spiritual experience in my life. i had a 7am flight, so instead of doing the normal person thing by leaving at 4:30 or 5a to get there on time, i instead elected to arrive at the airport at 6p the night before. i checked in, got comfy, and just sat. sat and looked and watched. flight in, flight out, flight in, flight out. the airport is a building that is, to every detail of its design, intended to get as many people in and out as fast as possible, and by sleeping in it, you are the only person in the entire building that is simply there. the workers are working and the people with layovers are either in a nearby hotel or getting ready for their next flight. just arrived? get out. departing? get out. you're sleeping over? why are you here? i felt like the building got defensive in the same way i do. it's happy to be known and apprecaited, but confused. i like to visit the airport when i want to feel closer to h. it's a safe space for me. i always love when i have a flight because it means more airport time for me.
this caused some trouble with ky once. we had gone to los angeles to visit her friends for her birthday, and i, being excited to be in such a famous airport, had asked that we get to the airport an hour or so early so that i could explore a little and admire the architecture (airport architecture is just so distinct!). she seemed okay with it at first but as soon as we got through security she had some issues with it. i don't really know what the issues were beyond just being annoyed at getting to the airport so early fair) but she ended up very publicly screaming at me in the middle of one of the concourses. i don't remember the specifics of what she said but i remember there being something about me ruining her life and how she was embarrassed to know me. people watched and stared for a while. i don't know the extent of the truth of her saying she was embarrassed to know me but i was definitely embarrassed to be in the situation. i feel a little bad about it i think, just because i could tell she was uncomfortable, and i probably wouldn't do that to or with another partner again, but i fondly remember the arching of the ceilings, the tiling along the walls, the color of the carpet squares, and the spaciousness of the windows. there was a piano visitors could play publicly just outside the entrance of concourse d.
i have a love-hate relationship with the accuracy of my memory, and sometimes when i write out memories like this i feel a little shy, even if i don't know for sure if anyone will ever read it. i worry that the way i present memories is too depressing, or generally just sort of somber. i promise i have happy memories. lots of them, even. i have my grandpa's memory. i talk like my grandpa--i ramble and i meander and if given the opportunity to continue a memory (such as writing a blog) into a more fully-fledged thought, i can go on for hours. gotta make up for the 9 years of selective mutism. we knew he was headed out when he started forgetting things. the last couple days he was around he couldn't remember what he had done earlier in the day, and that's when the goodbyes started. my mom's sort of the outlier of her family, i think. the rest of her siblings have pretty decent memories but my mom can't remember much. i think in her youth it was more of a distraction sort of thing (she thinks she has adhd) but now that she's older it's gotten a little worse, and she'll forget entire chunks of memory that i have to remind her of. for a while she didn't remember anything since when i was 14, and was confused at how i had gotten so old. that was a hard few months. i don't know what "photographic memory" means and frankly i don't think i ever will. figurative language is tough for me. my memory isn't like a photograph because it moves and has sound and smell and touch. it's more similar to a video camera, but with smell and touch. i can tell you the qualities of the smell of everyone i've ever loved, even from childhood. i can describe entire rooms or buildings, and can draw maps of areas or houses or apartments in detail after only being there once. it's nice being able to remember things so accurately but i get frustrated when i forget and i get annoyed when someone says i'm mis-remembering things, a frequent problem when i was still talking to my parents.
wow i really put some time into today's entry. goodnight
today one of the kids at work told me he thinks i'm going to die
ohhhhh i'm so tired. physically and mentally. yesterday i gave myself a machine tattoo that is without a doubt the largest tattoo i've ever done, and that, paired with the general fatigue and desire to not be working, as well as the hunger from forgetting lunch today, is adding up to one big ol grumpy ari. i'm receiving too much physical stimulation and i'm getting cranky about it. harrumph.
the general purgatorial air of wanting to be somewhere that i can't quite be yet is particularly dormant in my lungs today. I'm feeling lonely and cold and wanting to be held and to have someone to care for and to care for me, and above all else, i want to be in oakland with h. i'm ready to move i am ready to move i want to move i'm ready for sunshine and new cities i'm ready for new places i'm ready to go but !! i have to wait. i'm a patient girl. i can wait.
there's a comfort in a place being so familiar that you know what to expect and where things will be. i was driving to work this morning and realized that there will come a point when i inevitably miss how on rainy days the clouds cover most of the buildings in the city, or i'll miss knowing exactly what street a cute garden is on, or where the nearest teriyaki place is. i love teriyaki. in the movie "the last black man in san francisco" the main character says you're not allowed to hate a city until you love it. i don't think i hate this city. i don't think i don't love it. i think my feelings towards it are simply that i'm ready for something different. i'm going to miss the furry graffiti everywhere, and the way everyone comes out of the woodwork when it's sunny. i'm going to miss all the dogs and bumping into people i only know from behind shop counters or espresso machines. i'll miss it, and i recognize that, but i'm ready for something different.
from my letterboxd review of the last black man in san francisco: the first time i watched this was with my former roommate/lover in her family's home south of san francisco, endcapping a day spent posing like the sculptures in the rodin garden she took me to and eating her family's home-cooked lebanese food (labneh, fattoush, baba ghanoush, and manakish za'atar) with her grandma who only spoke arabic, taking pauses in the conversation at the dinner table to ensure that she could participate in the discussion. topics discussed included the family cat's favorite brush, the famous families of lebanon, the worldwide treatment of roma, my plans for life, and her plans for where to take me given that it was my first actual time visiting the city. we only watched half the movie and spent the rest of our knowing each other (relationship?) talking about how we had to finish it one day. we fell asleep cuddling each other but set alarms for the early morning so that we could go in our separate beds in case her mom came down to say good morning. the next day i witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets of my life. this isn't my movie to relate to, but it carries a gentleness in it-- within and the personal context surrounding. thank you, i miss you, and i hope things are going well for you. i finally finished the movie.
maybe i'm grieving. maybe i've grieved enough. maybe grief and love are my two favorite emotions. maybe grief is one of my favorites because even when it's in the past tense, it's nice to know that love was present.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhh so much has happened this week
i'm watching survivor now because it's my favorite show and watching other people have dramatic ass problems on a desert island makes me feel less alone somehow. earlier this week sab broke up with me, which doesn't exactly feel great. i can't say i didn't know it was coming, though. they seemed a little more distant and detached lately and for the last couple months they kept bringing up how different we were and just generally didn't seem like they liked me anymore. it's the first time someone else has broken up with me since high school (rather than me breaking up with them or it being a mutual sort of thing). it hurts to be broken up with but doesn't quite hurt as much as just spending months not feeling liked by a partner. i think i'm feeling more hurt than i'm letting onto, just because it's so easy for me to get distracted by "happier" things like watching survivor or laughing about my cats being silly. I'm finding it very difficult to feel worthy of love. i'm feeling like i'm someone who, for some reason, is just very difficult to love or maintain feelings for. i know it's not true necessarily but it's still how i'm feeling.
this week at work i had to clean up so many bodily fluids. earlier in the week one of the kids got a tooth knocked out and ran up to me with blood gushing out of his mouth, which was, to say the least, alarming at best. a couple days later one of the less potty-trained kids pissed and shat herself during naptime, and it was not an easy or small mess to clean up. I'm used to seeing blood, and my cat beans has some issues with the litterbox sometimes, so it's not, like. a difficult thing for me to clean, i guess, but still isn't exactly easy. here's to next week.
last sunday i took myself to h's favorite waterfall. it was a snow hike, which i wasn't exactly prepared for, but it wasn't at all disastrous or overly difficult. truly one of the most beautiful waterfalls, and hikes, i've ever seen. i miss hiking in utah. i miss the wilderness there, and i miss being able to just drive and drive and drive. I'm realizing i spend a lot of time on my lil blog here talking about how much i miss things or wish i was somewhere else. i think i'm feeling a little stuck with where i'm at-- in a period of waiting. i want to be in oakland, and i want to have the freedom to leave my current city.
i miss h and i wish i had the ability to move closer to him sooner. i've had a couple people recommend doing a gofundme or something but i don't know if i feel comfortable with that right now. i'd rather try to save for a while. in a similar vein, i'm starting to really consider getting bottom surgery, which is exciting but also scary to think about. i'd love to have my body feel more comfortable, but bottom surgery isn't cheap. more on this later, maybe. i'm getting distracted by survivor.
i'm having to write this at work because my hotspot is no longer functioning via my phone until the fourth. something something "oh we didn't like that you downloaded an entire mario kart dlc onto your switch using your phone hotspot."
i miss h and sometimes i worry that i have a hard time communicating the full extent of how much he means to me. i feel comfortable bringing it up with him, yeah, i just. i ache to tell him. i ache to ensure that he knows.
my most recent ex ky has a new girlfriend. i'm happy for her and i hope they are good for each other but more importantly i worry about kyra's own growth. i hope she knows how much she hurt me and i hope she's grown enough to know how much she needs to have changed in the time since we were together. i hope she's a healthier person to be with. in addition to this, i hope my other exes think of me kindly. i think i have a hard time with myself in general, and that makes it difficult to see past my own shortcomings long enough to analyze past relationships without thinking too much about it. i hope ar remembers me teaching them bass or holding them when they felt insecure. i hope s remembers our travels and laughs together, or the time we went blueberry picking. i hope m remembers how hard i tried to keep her comfortable and bring her happiness. i hope they all think kindly of me as i do with them.
i had so much already written and then the webpage refreshed and i lost it all. i should save more often, or work offline. lesson learned.
basic summary is that i miss my husband, and i miss utah. i hope my exes are doing well and feeel like they've grown. i hope they know that i've grown. i miss the stretch of highway 6 in utah where after you drove through a rocky canyon it would plop you out in the middle of a wide open field. keep driving down the field and you get to a train depot and, further after that, an abandoned grain silo that has its own wikipedia page. i miss the loneliness of a vast open road. keep going down highway 6 and you end up in nevada, on the "loneliest road in america." the last time i ever went down that road it started raining after i got out of the canyon. once i hit the field i pulled over, got out of the car, and just sat and looked at it all. i wonder if it misses me. i wonder if it knows that i miss it.
i'm still sick. h tells me about all the things he'd do for me if he was here. how he'd care for me and tend to me in my sickness. i miss him more than i know what to do with. i want to be next to him, and i need to be next to him. i wonder if he knows how important he is to me. i wonder if he knows how much he means to me and how sincerely i intend to spend my life loving him. all he has to do is tell me what he'd be doing to care for me and i already feel less sick. despite this, though, it would be nice to feel cared for by the partner i have that lives a little closer to me. i think things have been feeling... absent with them.
i wonder if drew is alive. i hope he's learned how to stand up for himself, and i hope he knows how much happier i am now than when we knew each other. i hope s is doing well in school, and that she's surrounded by friends who take care of her. she was always good at taking care of others. i hope she knows that she was right about everything. i hope she knows i think of her. i hope ar has found security and comfort in themself and that they know that i've found the same. i wish each of them well.
when i still spoke with my dad i always found it exhausting that he'd demand my pride. he'd share his accomplishments and his photography or his great fancy personal or business ventures, and expect that i applaud him for it. he never showed me the same approval. sure, dad, i'm proud of you for making it this far with your photography. i wish you would've cared enough to be proud of me for my accomplishments.
some days are lonelier than others. some days the loneliness is tangible and you feel it in the pit of your stomach, or your back, or along the back of your legs. sometimes it burns in your lungs and aches at the bottom of your feet and all you want to do is run. run towards where you know you can find the comfort you don't know how to express the full desperation for.
i miss utah, and i miss my husband. goodnight.
had to call out of work today-- i think one of the kids at work coughed into my mask a little too heartily. that line from the movie phantom thread is echoing in my head-- "kiss me, my girl, before i'm sick."
i had to drive to the city across the lake today for a fingerprint scan for a background checck, which really wasn't a big ordeal. the machine wasn't working and it took an hour to do the scan, but i had a decent enough time listening to the guy working talk about his favorite card games. he seemed excited to be talking about his passions with someone. i wasn't interested in it very much but i tried to show that i was interested. i feel like i get sensitive when i can tell that someone isn't really interested when i'm infodumping with them, and it ends up making me feel shy about infodumping, so i always try to put effort into listening when someone's telling me about something important to them. plus i might even learn something sometimes.
i've been thinking today about my chemical romance. they have a deeply-rooted history with the trans community-- in "destroya" there's a line that says "duct tape scars on my honey" and whenever they perform it live, gerard will motion towards their chest mimicing chest binding. the guitarist, frank iero, has for the last few months been working with transmasc fans on twitter to figure out how to make healthy, effective, and stylish mcr-branded binders. ever since the early 2000s, gerard has been outspokenly supportive of trans communities and has publicly mentioned on multiple occasions that he spent the first few years of college presenting as a girl. all this thinking brought me to a reddit post about mcr and transness, and a user was posting about wanting to hear people's trans experiences so that they could put it on a trans flag and bring it to an mcr show to display to the band. one of the comments mentioned mourning the person you thought you'd end up being before you transitioned. it kind of caught me off guard- i don't think i ever had any plans for who i'd end up being before transition. frankly i think transitioning saved my life, because before i transitioned i never planned on living past 21. every year i spend my birthday reminded of my prolonged lifespan, and sometimes that can get a bit rough, but i'm proud of myself to still be around and i'm happy to have things to look forward to in the future. i think of how many times i'd listen to mcr's "famous last words"and cry myself to sleep listening to the lyrics. i think the lines "i see you lying next to me, with words i thought i'd never speak, awake and unafraid- asleep or dead, i am not afraid to keep on living, i am not afraid to walk this world alone" saved my teenage life more times than i care to admit, regardless of your biases towards music's capability of inspiring someone to stay alive
on the drive home while i was listening to my chemical romance, the person in the car in front of me spent a long stretch of highway with their arm hanging out the window, playing in the air as the car drove. i wonder if they were doing it because they wanted to feel alive. i wonder what music they were listening to. i wonder if they had fun with it. i wonder if they did it and thought of their inner child and the airplanes their hands would become as the car drove. once they drove away i turned my own music up, rolled all the windows down, stuck my hand out of my window, and did the same thing. "vampire money" hits different when you're going 65 down the freeway that cuts the city in half, looking at the skyline and hanging out with your inner teenager a little bit. she needs the care and attention, even if sometimes she doesn't like to admit it. i think she likes feeling heard and understood though, and that's something my chemical romance always did a good job of doing.
in between all the running away, substance abuse and parental arguments, there was always a car, there was always loud volumes, and there was always my chemical romance.
today is a day of trying my best to counteract the bad with the good. i made myself some steak (vampires love steak) and am currently watching "dog day afternoon" while i work on my website. i'm hoping that i can keep updating the website-- it's fun to have a project and it feels fulfilling to have something so tangible that i can organize my thoughts, feelings, and passions on. i'm really hoping i don't lose interest in it later on. i'd really like to stay involved with it. h helped me pay my phone bill today, which i can't thank him enough for. i'm honored and happy to have a husband so sweet and generous and careful with me. if you're reading this, thank you again, and i love you with all my being, forever <3
ed texted today. i always hate when he texts me. no matter how innocent it is, it always ends up ruining my day just a little bit. all he said at first was "hi" which then, after a few hours of me not responding, turned into "not even a simple 'hi' to your dad? ok, whatever, have a good life." fuck you. eat shit, in fact. you're a cunt and you've always been a cunt and i know this because we share the same cunt blood. i don't owe you anything, firstly, and secondly, make up your fucking mind! a month ago you said you never wanted to hear from me again and now you're reaching out for attention because you noticed that i texted mom first the other day? go jerk off to your own fucking reflection. if it's not an apology for all the shit you've put me through i don't want to hear from you.
i'm trying really hard to be kind to myself. it's been a little hard the past week or so, but i'm really trying my best. sometimes my brain gets loud and reminds me of things i don't like thinking about or just generally makes it easy for me to be mean to myself. i wish it wasn't so easy. i want to believe that i'm beautiful and smart and worthy of the nice things i have. i want to feel deserving of love.
i think i've been eating too much nutella.
edit, 11:47pm- stop texting me stop texting me stop texting me stop texting me stop texting me stop texting me i don't wanna hear about how you're "sorry that i don't feel like i want you involved in my life" stop that stop that stop that i am going to taze you i am not joking the next time i see you i will stun gun your neck i swear to fucking god
this is my official coming out post-- i am a coldplay fan, and i am a bunnygirl, but also a vampire. a bunnicula sort of deal. a bunny with bloodlust. a cute sweet bashful little creature with floppy ears and an insatiable need to bite and to devour. let me eat you. let me drain you of all your blood. let me whisk you away to infinity by sucking all your blood and as you fade away i'll let you pet my fuzzy ears. i'll keep you alive and conscious just enough to keep petting me. love me? love me.
oh god, i first typed in 2022 for the year. this doesn't bode well. i'm in my second week at my new job and frankly it's a little difficult for me. i was basically hired to be a one-on-one for a particularly disruptive kid and, while i can handle him, it's a little overwhelming having other kids to also be keeping track of. that, plus the almost two-hour commute and general financial instability, leave me perpetually tired. i spend a lot of time daydreaming about when i'll get to return home to my husband's arms. i miss him.
i have to pay my phone bill in two days and frankly i have no idea where i'll get the money for it, which stresses me out. i think i have the tendency to understate the severity of my emotions, but this week has been difficult for me. i've been trying so hard to be gentle to myself, and while i'm proud of myself for being on top of not doing things i don't want to do, it's still a little rough. it's nice when h is reassuring to me about my physical appearance and his love for me. i think he knows i need it. i'm excited at the potential of this little website project. hopefully i stick with it and don't get bored of it a week into its existence. ideally, it'll be sort of a hub for not only my thoughts, but also my art projects, tattoo flashes, and a place to post my music as i work on it or record dj sets. so on and so forth. i'm trying my best to take care of myself.
for the past couple of days my lawyer ex (though i can't really call her my ex- we never went official) has been a bit in my thoughts. i hope she knows i keep the flowers in front of her house watered in the village i have in my heart. sometimes i see the light on inside. i hope she's well.