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Hello!

I’ve been having some times. Good, bad, neutral, the like. I had been feeling pretty flat lately, but the increased sunlight in our area is helping with that. I know winter happens every year, but that doesn’t change my subjective experience of it, y’know? It’s been a real cold, proper one with blizzards and snow on the ground nearly the whole time.

I’ve started working out more consistently and assertively. I’ve also started consuming the appropriate amount of food for the size I am. I didn’t realize how both imbalanced and vastly underfed I was until I started easily developing functional muscle mass after increasing my protein and complex carbohydrates.

With these functional changes in my body have also come some aesthetic changes. So I have been putting more effort into my appearance. The clothes I have fit me, and they fit together into cohesive looks that I think are nice and feel empowering. I haven’t been able to to get all these things to happen at the same time in the past. Maybe part of it is I am acquiescing to a degree to particular “formulas” or “styles” more so than I ever have. But that’s not true because once I was finally in control of what I wore, I had a long period where I followed extreme versions of femininity to every detail I could. It probably never felt good or empowering because it wasn’t an authentic representation of who I was or what I did in a day.

Anyway. I’ve been trying out acrylic nails for the first time. I picked them over nail polish because they’re durable and reusable as long as you don’t lose them and there are way less VOCs involved in their application and removal. The first time I put them on, I felt like some sort of fancy drag performer or droll vampire, even though on my daily hands in the body I have they probably don’t look too out of place. I’ve also started using styling products in my hair because I’ve been growing it out on the top and the type isn’t consistent across my head so it doesn’t lend itself to leaving it be or styling while wet. I’ve also been doing bits of makeup here and there. Subtle things. I realized I can do the slightest bit of contouring to masculinize the shape of my face using eye shadow. I’m going for owning the least number of products and flexing what they do because I can’t actually afford to get super into makeup at the moment. I have other priorities.

I needed some simple wins recently, so I took to DIYing some items that I wanted to get. I braided a tan leather belt for the shorts I wear during the summer. It was quick and easy. I just need to get a buckle for it. I got some translucent jewelry cord to repair a small natural pearl and coral bracelet my uncle brought me from Beijing decades ago. I got some cheap fabric paint so that I could put a copy I made of my favorite graffiti I found in one of the cities I lived in years ago on a worn out shirt I have. I found a neat graffiti design while I was in New York visiting one time, too. Maybe I’ll paint that on another shirt.

I also repaired the leather band of my watch. It was the first thing I bought with money from my first job that wasn’t “necessary”. It was a relatively cheap one for the time. The backlight and the day counter don’t work anymore, but I just want a watch that tells the time to reduce my reliance on my phone for so many things. I also don’t want to get a smart watch. It’s not in the budget and I feel like it would be caving to peer pressure at work to get another thing I don’t need. There was a hole in my cadet fleece that I repaired with some relative aplomb, if I can toot my own horn for a second.

I’m still wondering if I have the DIY chops yet to reupholster my $5 thrifted couch myself. It’s perfectly fine as it is, I’m just in a camp, decadent mood lately and I think it would be really cool with cyan, wide tooth corduroy. Or something similarly whimsical that would fit in with the other colorful things I have.

Anyway, I scheduled some time off, and I’m going to use some of it finishing a sewing project from last year and hopefully completing one I got the pattern and fabric for recently. It’s much more “frilly” than things I have been wearing lately. I think I’ve finally let go of a sort of reactionary sense of trying to assert my masculinity by eschewing anything feminine that I adopted as a confused young queer person. Specifically because I was primarily brought up by a delusional, hypocritical separatist feminist and a pathologically contrarian existential nihilist. Both living in their own minds, never in the real world.

It was a strange mix of competing non-values and defeatist attitudes. It’s funny to me when people make being against things rather than being about /different/ things their modus operandi. Then those “anti”s become a set of rules, and look—you’ve made your own set of rules you expect people to live by! You replicated the rules-based system in your own image! You lived long enough to become your own style of villain by not reflecting on anything and your rules are defeatist and suck ass! Congratulations!

So anyway. Presentation is part of how others make sense of us, but it doesn’t impact me so much internally now if people misunderstand me based on how I look. I don’t expect most people to get it or to care enough to get it. It’s actually lovely if most people don’t want to understand because who has time to comprehend the full internal workings of strangers and acquaintances, let alone their own entire selves over the course of their lives? Best to keep that work for a handful of people that are important to you.

I rearranged my living room, and as part of that whole thing, I had to take all my files out of my filing cabinet to move it because it doesn’t have wheels. Since I had them out anyway, I went through them and reorganized and recategorized everything. I came across some things I missed in my initial “shred everything from before” silent tirade. I put them in my shred pile and still need to shred them, but I feel better knowing the files are fully cleared out now.

I was surprised by some of the other things I found. When I was in high school, one of my college course English teachers had us write one nice thing about every person in the room at the end of the course. After writing our nice things, we were to place them on the respective desks of the other students in a way that none of us would know who wrote them—unless you recognized the handwriting, of course. I kept my little stack in a binder since then, apparently. There was one that struck at a core part of me that hasn’t changed for as long as I remember, but I haven’t always been aware of it. I am shocked someone saw me so clearly when they couldn’t have possibly known me well, and I don’t even know who it was! >:( I am doing my best to see people clearly so that I can give them these types of writing as I am able, because that torn little piece of paper means so much more to me now than the giver likely meant it to.

I also found some letters and other small tokens from a friend of mine that I haven’t spoken to in much longer than I would like to consider. I tried reaching out through social media, but as far as I can tell their account is just sitting there and they don’t actually log into it. I’m considering reaching out through email now—which is publicly available, I didn’t just have it—but it’s been so long I don’t know what it would be like to be on the receiving end of that.

I’ve had people (specifically men) I was interested in as a younger person that rejected me at that age change their tune up when I became an option in their minds later. I always wonder, were they horny and got their yearbooks out to thumb through who they could hit up? Did they just break up and need a rebound? Were they secretly into the specific type of queer I am all along and were too afraid to admit it until that moment? I’ll never know because I delete the messages when they come in because I don’t believe it could be any deeper than their physical needs.

I’m in a sort of nostalgic mood in general. I got spotify, but the free version. From what I’ve put in, they’ve recommended a lot of new-to-me stuff that I’m enjoying a lot, but they’ve also pegged me, properly, for the time period I was illicitly listening to music at friends’ places because I couldn’t listen to these genres at home. I don’t actually miss those times specifically; I miss the unshakable feeling that I was going to get out of it all somehow. I did, eventually, but it wasn’t how I thought it would go down. Now I’m burnt out from the process and trying to reconfigure it all.

Some of the songs are bringing up the confused feelings I had for the friend of mine from high school that I want to reach out to. We would go off-campus to eat lunch together often, without anyone else, even though other people wanted to go with us. We competed with each other in our Chinese classes. I joined teams I probably wouldn’t have otherwise to spend time with them outside school hours. We started a study group for one of our college courses. They would neg me in a way to get a rise out of me and I would play along. It was a mutually enjoyable game. We were emotionally vulnerable with each other. They showed up to my concerts and left me notes. Mutual friends claimed at the time that they liked me, but they never said so themselves. I didn’t consider them as an option because they were so busy pursuing honors classes and other things to go to a fancy college in a way that I was not. I just wanted to get into college, it didn’t occur to me that I could get into a fancy one. I didn’t think I was good enough for them at the time.

One of the friends I’ve made at work is very much a you-only-live-once-it-doesn’t-matter-how-long-it’s-been-call-them-up-if-you’ve-realized-how-you-feel and another friend I’ve had for a very long time is a oh-my-god-that-was-so-long-ago-move-on-and-there-are-way-better-people-out-there-for-you-and-you’re-too-cool-for-them and I dunno. I agree more with my go-for-it-friend because I have evidence that the emotional connection was mutual and based in respect. But my other friend has a point that I can reason out from that it is misguided to fall backwards in time to look for something I’m not finding in the present currently.

I think I’m sort of having a mid-life crisis because I didn’t do the things my peers were up to when I was in high school? I rebelled against my counter-culture parents by desperately trying to be the responsible one for everyone to keep the family together and above water. Other people my age were out trying to be “bad”, or just have experiences, and I couldn’t. The stakes were too high if I messed up. I just wouldn’t come home sometimes without saying anything because I was tired of it there, but that was the extent of my “rebellion” because the other thing I did was not considered culturally rebellious by—nor talked about in—the household.

Now I want to catch up and (responsibly) party, but the literal cost of entry is too high, or people already have their party people and don’t need another. I still go sometimes and have a good time by myself dancing and listening to the music. I’m just missing the social part of it. I haven’t worked up the social finesse to just talk to randos in that setting. The grocery store or anywhere else though, who cares, I’ll talk as long as the person doesn’t seem a particular type of off. I think that’s a whole lot of growth since I started this blog.

Relatedly, I’ve been feeling a sort of melancholic yet optimistic acceptance about life in general and my tiny place in the universe. Does that make sense? Something something I’m in the last part of the grief cycle about my childhood again something. It never goes away, it’s how I relate to it. Just like everything else. Like I’m just tired with all of it, but in a familially warm way? World weary? I expect that will subside as I keep going to new things. And it does, I mean with each new experience or new friend it fades a bit more.

Finding nuance in things like love and morality feels like surrendering youthful, passionate idealism, and through extension, youth, passion, and idealism themselves. I feel like I’m at risk of becoming one of those “I don’t believe in love because *sad stor(ies) in my past* and if it’s not like it is in {fill in series here}, I don’t want it” that attracts people that want to fix me or love me whole or whatever and I hate that. I don’t want to be someone’s pity partner or project.

Mainly I’m just tired and feel like I’m being pulled in two different directions. I feel like I’m trying to make up fuck around time relative to my peers that have been well-off all along while trying to keep my nose to the grindstone of looking for a long-term person to spend time with that also wants to spend time with me. I think the type of love I’m looking for is going to be a “boring” kind that grows out of friendship. It’s hard to accept that and readjust as a person with my history and dopamine-oriented neurotype.

ANYWAY ALSO DID YOU HEAR, fellow dopamine-oriented folks, there’s a new Metroid game coming out this year! I’m very excited about it. I’m going to listen to/watch the people that sum things up and extrapolate from the teaser(s) until my ears fall off. I dunno if I’ll buy it or get on the waitlist to borrow it from the library when they get a copy and play it myself or watch a playthrough. We’ll seeeee.

I’m considering getting some blue contacts to cosplay as buff late 80’s style Samus. I don’t look like her at all otherwise, I just think the contacts matching the suit would be neat. I would love to finally go to a con or something like that. I dunno. We’ll see haha. The quote that is ringing in my ears the most lately is, “in the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take”. I want to be more nuanced than doing the opposite of what I’ve done for my whole life. I have avoided most things that are uncertain that might bring me joy for most of my life so it’s hard not to literally see doing things for the joy of it as a diametric opposite of my past.

Anyway! I’ve consumed 2 tv series recently and I have thooouuuughts. I’m not ready to share them, but if I get around to it, because I am hyperfixated, not sleeping, 1000’s of pins on pinterest within a couple weeks of starting level of obsessed with them now, they might be dissertation-level nonsense. So that’s a thing. I hope to be less attached to consumption and more in the vein of creating, but in the meantime, here I am, watching old ass tv shows from the library.

I hope you’re doing well! I’m doing better than I ever have been and I think there is so much space for more growth. Seeya hopefully sooner than 7 months from now lol.