#haven’t had transit since mid December

[northernpintail]

Haven’t been birding a lot lately, in part due to weather but mainly because of an ongoing transit strike that makes it much harder for me to get to my usual favourite patches. I had a great day birding today though, and sounds like transit will be returning soon thankfully!!

[bloomingtsayu]

Jakarta, 2007 I was a child who didn’t enjoy eating. Only certain foods could make me eat heartily, and one of those that I still remember is this nasi rames teri kacang balado. That day, I had already eaten. So had my brother.

Mama asked us if we wanted food from the nearest warung from our house. I can’t recall why she chose to buy her meal there while we ate something else. We both declined, so she only bought one portion for herself.

When Mama started eating, she offered us some again. My brother took a bite and, surprisingly, he ate with gusto. I couldn’t resist and joined in. Soon, the three of us were sharing that one portion, with Mama feeding us one spoonful at a time.

I was full and lay down on her lap in the TV room where we had just finished the meal. About 15 minutes later, Mama’s stomach growled. She was still hungry. I laughed and asked, “Mama, are you still hungry?” She just chuckled and said yes.

These two pricks wiped out the nasi rames even though they said they weren’t hungry

Dieng, March 2023

The mountain breeze swept across my stray hairs, standing on end in the cold. I stood beside a potato field, pondering the many twists and turns of life. Where am I, and where am I going? Those were the questions swirling in my mind.

Mama had just sent me a message earlier that day. It was simple yet heartfelt—how happy she was seeing me happy while traveling. I reread it a few times.

But what does Mama think about my life now? Is she happy, truly happy, knowing I haven’t achieved much? Is Mama doing okay knowing I still have so many things to figure out? So many questions filled my head in that potato field, left unanswered, carried away by the icy wind.

Jakarta, June 2023 “Ma, what if I don't get married, ever?” I mustered the courage to ask, hoping to release one of the weight that had been pressing on my chest. I wanted to start living without burdens, without unnecessary troubles I created for myself. I wanted to feel freer, but Mama’s happiness is important.

Mama paused for a moment, as if weighing my words and the emotions behind them. Then she answered calmly and carefully, “I just want you to be happy,” she said.

“Sedih sih, but if being alone—not getting married—makes you happy, I am okay with that.”

I cried. Not because of my frustration over not meeting a decent man in the 25 years of my life, but because this conversation was far easier than I had feared. Much easier than what had haunted me in that potato field.

And the relief I felt was far greater than I had imagined. It felt like casting off an elephant-sized weight I had been carrying on my shoulders for no reason at all.

It was a similar feeling from years ago that came from a single portion of nasi rames teri kacang that we shared among the three of us—that unyielding, unconditional love that required nothing from me in return.

And I'm sure there are countless sacrifices that Mama made that I’ll never be aware of, all to give me the best she could.

When I was a teenager, I assumed that by 23, I’d finally have it all figured out, that by 25 I’d stop questioning my decisions, and that by 27, I’d outgrow fear. Oh, I had no idea how naive I had been.

I wonder if I believed life was as simple as my unrealistic view because Mama always made it look that way despite the odds.

And I can’t help but wonder if Mama experienced the same doubts as a mother.

When Mama went back to work in her mid-30s after over a decade being a stay-at-home mom, when she navigated major life transitions while also supporting her children, mother, and siblings, and when she lived in a remote suburb managing a baby and a toddler with no help, Mama carried it all. She carried it so seamlessly that my childhood felt almost untouched by hardship. Yet, looking back now, I see the weight of those challenges. Mama handled it so well.

Yogyakarta, December 2024

Life has changed a lot since the last time I shared my thoughts with the wind in that potato field. Many questions I had about life have slowly been answered by Him the almighty. Some remain unanswered, but I’ve learned to embrace this uncertainty while walking this long path.

It’s the kind of uncertainty that only the Creator of the universe knows the answers to—the kind I know Mama prays about every day.

Thank you, Mama, for teaching me what unconditional love truly feels like and letting me carry its warmth through every corner of my life. The same warmth as a plate of nasi rames you shared even when you were still hungry.

Happy birthday, Mama.

[watsonphotog]

Self portrait. Nikon d300S. December, 2020.

Hey there, Tumblr. It’s been a while.

I had written SO much and then the draft decided to just... shit out for some goddamn reason. Glad to see this site still absolutely choogles ass.

Regardless, as much as I’ve been inactive on this website, and now as pissed as I am that I lost ALL THAT WORK, I really have been feeling the urge to start photoblogging again. This time, I’m feeling more blogging how I’m feeling along with my images, so a touch more personal than before. For some reason, I had sort of thought that was the original idea behind this thing.

But we’ll see.

Where do I even begin...?

So much has happened since that last post, and it’s nearly impossible to summarize almost 8 years in one shot, but I can probably gloss over it.

I, in fact, did not put my life back together after that last picture. In fact, I am pretty sure I fell into the deepest depression of my life a few months later. Like, only eating an apple, an orange, and two bananas each day because you couldn’t afford any more food nor did you feel like eating anything else level depression. Did wonders for my weight, but it just about shattered my ability to form and maintain memories. Seriously, my college years are kind of just a blur now, which is incredibly depressing, because I know they were some of the most important years of my life, but they’re just... gone. Not all gone, mind you, but there’s an overwhelming amount of fog there. It destroyed my relationship with a lot of people, or at least made me fizzle out in their lives... I lived for Loki, my family, and to do nothing but work. People would reach out, and I simply could not bring myself to respond. It didn’t get better for a long, long time. In retrospect, it’s honestly a miracle I’m still here... honestly, if it wasn’t for Loki or my mother, I probably wouldn’t be. I am better now, in a way where I at least am not at that level. Still haven’t gone to therapy, but I’m at least looking for one now and don’t feel like I’m at that rock bottom anymore.

To be fair, the drinking didn’t help the whole memory holes thing I mentioned, either. I wouldn’t call myself sober nowadays, but one very important memory I have in college is the time I had to work at a convention while hung over as fuck, and between hating working after a night of booze, working at least 5 days a week, and the fact I was making piss poor nothing out of college, I stopped drinking almost altogether. I won’t say no to a drink (unless I’m really not feeling it), but I think that I have a far more healthy relationship with alcohol nowadays.

Speaking of jobs and making piss poor nothing- I have been working at that same job since I got hired on a hail mary chance shortly after graduating. I am going to do my best to never name it by name on this blog (they have kind of a funny social media policy, and god help me if any of my management friends/cohort/coworkers ever find this), but I will say it’s a well loved convenience store in the mid Atlantic region and leave it at that. Nowadays, I am an assistant general manager, which is a hell of a step up from the like 8-something dollars an hour I started at. It wasn’t an easy path, and it certainly had some downfalls, but right now I am happy where I am at and I still believe in the company and what it stands for. Plus, it pays the bills, so that’s nice.

I’m still living in Philadelphia, in the same apartment I moved to after leaving The Lost World behind. It’s on a quiet(ish) little corner on the boarder of Fairmount and Brewerytown, with lots of trees nearby and some beautiful sights in walking distance. The rent is cheap for the area, my landlords leave me to my own devices, and it’s a relative hub of transit options. I’ve had a few roommates in my time here... most have not been great, but I did get to live with Luke (a highlight) and the one roommate I had here for maybe 5-6 years, Issy, ended up being one of my best friends. Right now, Loki and I are doing the solo living thing, and with my raises at work and some strict spending management on my end, it’s honestly not terrible. I’m really enjoying not having another roommate, and I hope I can keep it up for a while.

Speaking of Loki... my lil old man is doing alright. He’s had a few health scares over the years, a few bladder issues that kept him on medicated food, a heart murmur, and now thyroid problems. He’s like 13 or 14 at this point, so it’s to be expected. I think about how he’s old quite often as of late, and it fills me with a sense of dread. I don’t like that he’s in the twilight of his life, even though he still acts like a kitten with running and playing and being a little ridiculous goofball. I really can’t imagine my life without him.

As for brighter things...

I finally got over my fear of basic math and took a stab at playing Dungeons and Dragons a few years ago, and I am so glad I did. It’s honestly been a life changing thing for me, and a huge part of my social life nowadays. I started DMing in 2017 or 2018 on my birthday, and while COVID put most of the campaigns I run on hiatus, I’m slowly getting back into the DM saddle. It’s helped me make some amazing friends while also express some of those crazy story ideas I’ve had rumbling around in my brain since I was a kid. Truly a 10/10 experience.

I somehow ended up as a Twitch affiliate, and I actually get paid to stream nowadays. I was part of enough D&D streams on my own that it motivated me to start streaming games again, and shit, it paid off. I’ve been a key organizer in at least 5 fundraisers now, and helped raise a shit load of funds over the past few years for some awesome causes while doing some ridiculous things online. It’s been a great experience.

Perhaps the most shocking of all things, however, is that I finally made the discovery and come to grips with the fact I’m polyamorous. If you’ve known me for as long as I’ve had a Tumblr, this is probably pretty shocking, especially given that my first experience with polyamory was less ethical nonmonogamy and more my ex sleeping with whoever she wanted guilt free because she couldn't do long distance relationships and I was some sort of weird emotional crutch for her, and it traumatized me to the idea for a long time. However, in my last major relationship, I had this realization that I could probably happily be in a polyamorous relationship if the communication was there, and while I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my monogamous relationship to find that out, if there ever was a reason I was single again, I was going to try it out. Well, after we split and then COVID ruined everyone’s lives (and another pretty unfortunate relationship), I tried the solo poly thing for a while, because the person I needed to date the most at that point was myself.

Well, I kind of failed at that part a bit, as now I have not one but two girlfriends. Sarah, who is married, is the first, and Katie, who I am definitely going to marry, is the second. I met Sarah around August of 2021, and while I was supposed to be just a fun time bonus thing for her (she was in two other relationships at this point), she eventually caught the feels and we eventually talked it out. I met Katie in November of the same year, and it was like finding everything I ever wanted in a partner in a single human being. I won’t say it was love at first sight, but it was definitely love a lot quicker than I think I was comfortable with admitting. I’ve had a few missteps along the way, and it’s occasionally been a bit messy, but it’s been a great experience regardless and I am very happy with my relationships.

If I had to ask 2015 Ian, as he looked into that broken mirror on that October night, what he thought his life would look like nowadays, I don’t think he would have believed me if I had told him almost all of his expectations were wrong. But I think that’s probably a good thing.

I don’t really have much else to add to wrap this up, only that I am going to try my damndest to actually blog here a bit more and get some of the feelings and thougths I have off my chest. I don’t really think any of the followers I have on this Tumblr use it anymore, nor do I think many of them would really care what I have to say anymore. This isn’t for the notes or views, though.

This is for me.

Til next time...

[hanzajesthanza]

this is actually a very old headcanon back from when i headcanoned regis was a capricorn and also had a birthday*, but i like to imagine angoulême putting 429 candles on a cake and almost burning beauclair palace down, and it’s ironic because he’s the only one of them invulnerable to fire so he has to put it out as an emergency—

it would start with a brainstorm/share-out pressured by angoulême of when everyone’s birthdays are

cahir: mine is actually august 31st. … geralt and milva: [look at him from across the table] cahir: … yes, during the bridge 😅 i mean, i spent the last one in prison so… this was a lot better

geralt: i dont do birthdays. no, not for any spiteful reason, not because of any personal hatred towards them or poor past experience. it’s as simple as this. i’m a professional, people don’t expect me to age. people hire me to be a supernatural being. they don’t hire men who are born just like any other old man, who demand to take the day off just because— dandelion: [just walked into the conversation in a frilly bathrobe] it’s june 21st. geralt: … dandelion: [grabbing a piece of bread and is now sitting down and eating it, speaking with his mouth half full] and he’s going to be 56 this year.

milva: well. mine’s early december, but don’t— no, don’t start shouting “we missed it, we missed it.” i celebrated it very well, on my own. as i wanted to. dandelion: what did you do milva: went into the woods and hunted everyone: … geralt: maria, you do that every day. milva: AND????

geralt: while we’re all going, then, dandelion’s is june 9th. everyone: … ok geralt: [staring at him triumphantly, nastily, like “SEE I CAN TELL EVERYONE YOUR BIRTHDAY TOO” but no one cares, because only geralt was embarassed by dandelion telling everyone his birthday and age]

i haven’t listed angoulême’s birthday but it’s late march/early april because she’s an aries, i think it would be funny if her birthday was april 1st (because comic character + unfortunately her biological family treated her like a joke), but also it would be sad because stygga occured in early march so angoulême was so close to seeing another year but didn’t make it

anyways with the general idea of this is angoulême asking geralt if vampires celebrate birthdays (because she wants to surprise regis she’s not just gonna go and ask him) and geralt dryly responds “not in any diagrams i ever saw in kaer morhen” (the mental image of a serious life-or-death witcher class doing a book on vampires and there’s like a diagram of them like 🥳🥳🎁🥳🎂🎉🥳🥳🥳)

and asides from regis like

after the fire is put out he’s like :) cake and they’re all very curious now like so DO you celebrate birthdays or— and he’s like “well not usually but this cake is good” and angoulême observes “i think that piece is still on fire a bit actually” and he’s like “[mid-biting cake on fire] its good”

---

footnotes

* as for how the headcanon doesn't work anymore... actually i think it’s funnier if he’s like “i dont think i have a birthday” or "guys, my birthday was in october. we past it two months ago..." (since i headcanon him as a libra)

here’s my solution to the dilemma of how he both has no birthday but is also a libra: he still has no birthday, but attests that “october is his favorite month” or some other vague bs. and it makes sense that he’d like october, because october is a month of transitions — between fall and winter (at least as we can see in their journey, in that jaruga belt region’s climate) — he also leaves fen carn at the end of october and returns to dilingen — and for the elves it is the end of the year/beginning of the new year...

[damonsvftie]

𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐨𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐜✨

HARRY POTTER MASTERLIST

MEGA MASTERLIST

Summary: it’s that time of the year where everyone has been pulled under the mistletoe but what happens when your the only one who hasn’t?

Note: h2gkmo I love this Sm also it’s 3.8K WORDS

Warnings: none I believe apart from kissing

September, October and November, has already flew by so quickly as if it were a blur and I can’t seem to comprehend that its currently December.

Not that I dislike this certain month but it’s just the whole ‘mistletoe’ thing that I’m not quite fond of. Last week, some boy from Slytherin managed to get a girl he liked from Hufflepuff under the mistletoe, and let’s just say, the tension was absolutely incredulous.

Being a Hufflepuff, she kindly made up an excuse and hurried out of the the great hall. If that were me, I would probably shove my plate full of food down their pants. I mean the audacity though?

It’s that time of year again where Hogwarts is practically covered in a blanket of snow and every single student walks down the corridor with a soft knitted sweater hugging their bodies tightly to stop them from catching a cold. Well mostly everyone, since Malfoy wears very extra stuff during this season.

The last day, I saw Harry snogging Cho Chang under the plant. Okay maybe it wasn’t snogging, but they still kissed! And Hermione had told me all about some oaf from RavenClaw who tried to do the same to her but it didn’t really work out since she smacked him across the face with a heavy book.

—

“I’m so glad no ones tried that on me yet,” I mumbled le as I tucked into a plate full of food.”it’s absolutely ridiculous! I mean the audacity they have to think I’d want to kiss them. I have to puke,” complained Hermione, her facing saying it all. From the corner of my eye, I saw Ron Weasley gulping hard as he tugged at his collar. “You know.. sometimes both of you are very scary,” making me roll my eyes at him.

“It’s not even that bad, it’s just a kiss,”. The way Harry blatantly blurted that out as if it’s the tiniest thing in the world while he drummed his fingers on the table. “You can’t chat! I saw you snogging Cho Chang a day ago,” I argued. Harry’s cheeks were beginning to flush a shade of crimson as he swiftly diverted the attention onto me again.

“And? At least it was Cho and not someone like Pansy Parkinson, besides even Lavenders after Ron,” he mumbled looking annoyed. “Bloody hell I almost forgot! She can’t seem to stay away from me. She’s like a leech,” he complained, his lips curving into a frown.

Hermione shut her book and put it down. “Y/n, hasn’t anyone tried to get you under the mistletoe yet?” Her lips curving into a small smile, preventing me from shoving a forkful of food down my throat, my hand in mid air. “Uh- no,” my cheeks slightly blushed in embarrassment . For some reason my response made Ron giggle to himself.

Irritated, I smacked him behind his head causing him to yelp. “Ow! What was that for?” His brows furrowing as he rubbed the spot I had hit him in. “You dare laugh at me Ronald Weasley and I won’t hesitate to curse you!”

“Both of you please! I’m trying to finish this book off,” Hermione’s facial expressions exasperate as her eyes bore deep into our souls, intimidating us until we both shut up. Huffing under my breathe I continued to pick at my food until someone spoke once again.

“Hey! Give me my book back!”. To my surprise, Draco Malfoy stood towering over Hermione, his book in her hands as he held it high. Her attempts to try and grab it back were failing as she jumped high on the spot. “Malfoy give her book back,” spoke Harry through gritted teeth. “How about no? Besides Potter, this is between me and her so stay out of it,” he sneered.

“Come on Malfoy, stop being such a git,” defended Ron. Whatever the boys had said didn’t really matter to him because of course it went through one ear and out the other. “Oi! Give. Her. Book. Back,” my nostrils flaring as I folded my arms against my chest.

Unexpectedly, he started making owl noises just like the day he was attacked by Buckbeak, slowly striding towards me as his eyes darted up and down at my figure, supposedly ‘checking me out’. “why... what are you going to do y/l/n?” His face inches away from mine. I felt his cool,minty breathe fanning against my face causing my eyes to flutter rapidly in intimidation. Everyone in the great hall had fixed their attention onto the commotion we were causing, making owl noises every time one of us firedback. “Gone silent now have you?” The tone in his voice mocking as he took a step back and swiftly turned on his heels.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I pulled him back towards me, one of my hands cupping his face as my lips pressed against his instantly. My other hand, smoothly grabbed the book out of his palms, shoving him back once I got what I wanted. “You were saying?” My voice sarcastic as he stared at me, mouth hung slightly open In awe.

Tossing the book back to Hermione, we all sat back down, the golden trio gasping under their breaths. “Did you just KISS Malfoy?” Rons voice exaggerated as his eyes shot wide open. “Yes- Yes I did,”

—

As we walked the hogwarts grounds, Harry and Ron didn’t stop annoying me about Draco. “So let me get this right, you kissed Malfoy to get mione’s book back? Blimey you have some guts don’t you?” A giggle trailed behind his irrelevant question.

I was down right agitated. I paused in the middle of no where, my lips pursing into a line. “I don’t know why both of you think it’s so funny and or hard to believe I kissed him? It’s not like I like him or something!” My voice slightly laced with anger as I strided off into the other direction, ditching the trio.

I could heard Hermione calling after me but it was too late. I was gone. If I were being realistic, I didn’t know where I was headed to as I entered hogwarts, twisting and turning through the dingy,dark corridors until I bumped into something rock hard, resulting in me too lose my balance and collapse.

“Look where your going,” I groaned as I sat up on the cold floor. “You bumped into me, not the other way round,”. It couldn’t be. I recognised that same bitter and unpleasant voice. My eyes trailed up to the figure that looked upon me from down below as I whimpered underneath him in pain.

It was Malfoy.

He stuck his hand out in offer for me too take it but of course I didn’t. Pushing his hand out of the way, I scrambled to my feet my teeth gritting. “Why are you ALWAYS in my way?!” I yelled, although I was lucky enough that the corridors were deserted.

“Me in your way? YOUR the one who keeps getting in MY way! Don’t get too ahead of your self y/l/n!” He firedback immediately, his face scrunched up.

My hands found their way to his collar, fisting at the material, pulling him close until our noses were almost touching. “Listen here Malfoy, stay. Out. Of. My. Way,” I protested my breathing heavy.

His serious face turned looser as a small smirk spread across his face. His hands travelled up my visage, his thumb lightly grazing my lip, tugging it down, the flesh of my lips revealing.

What was he doing?

My breathing hitched, while my heart did a flip in my chest. My grip on his collar slackened as my hands fell by my side before I walked right past him.

—

I should have known better. The more I added fuel to his fire, the more frustrating he was going to become. It was slowly starting to become a very common thing for the two of us to have an argument with each other, while everyone just rolled their eyes at us, since it was starting to get out of hand and become a regular thing.

Something inside me told me that he thoroughly enjoyed bickering with me even when I had at least tried to be civil with him.

“I just wanted say.. maybe we should be civil,” my words sincere as a half grin crept up across his face. “You want US to be civil? Why.. you think I’m going to stop?” He taunted as his smile dropped, his face serious than ever. “Yes- you know why? Because I’m mature unlike you. If I’m honest I don’t understand what pleasure you find in fighting me all the time,” my eyes turning a darker shade as I clenched my fists by my side.

His facial features turned soft almost as if it were putty as I finished my sentence with a sigh. His body instantly loosened up as he took a few steps away from me. “Your right. I’ll leave you alone-“ he muttered before disappearing in the dark.

Was I seeing things or did Draco actually agree with me for once? Was he actually going to put an end to his daily dose of torture?

—

“Did he actually offer to stop and leave you alone?” The confused looks on their faces. “Yep... but it’s quite unbelievable,” the look on my face twisting the more I thought about it. “Wait Wait Wait! Let me get this right... Malfoy’s going to leave you alone for the rest of your life? Bloody hell thats fabulous!” Ron’s lips transitioning into a wide grin as he took a sip out of his cup.

“Why are you so happy? He said he’d leave ME alone not YOU,” I answered back , trying to put Ron off, making his face droop. Within seconds I decided to change the topic so I didn’t have to fight Weasley.

“Anyways- So- hows your defence against the dark arts thing going?” I questioned Harry as he swallowed his food. “Well- we haven’t come up with a proper name for it but we think it should be named ‘Dumbledores army’ and I guess it’s going alright,” he sighed right after causing me to raise a brow. “Somethings off- what’s wrong Harry?” My voice gentle as I glanced at the other two.

“Harry’s worried someone’s going to bail out on us to Umbridge,” the fearful expression on hermiones face explaining it all. Did I mention that Dolores Umbridge was claimed to be the headmistress of the school? We were all lucky enough that she hadn’t created any sort of ridiculous rule in which we were no longer able to talk to our friends.

Everyone apart from a bunch of slytherins, who were named the ‘inquisitorial squad’, including that evil little cockroach Malfoy, loathed her. The trio had managed to gain access to the room of requirements in which they all hosted sessions where they practised spells such as how to unleash a patronus charm.

“Y/n why don’t you join? The more the merrier besides we need to prepare incase anything happens,” the tone in hermiones voice soft. “Guys.. I don’t know.. what if you know.. Umbridge finds out?” I asked wearily, fingers drumming the table.

Disappointment smeared across their faces. I couldn’t disappointment my friends like that. “You know what? Fine, I’m in!” I blurted as their mundane facial expressions changed into goofy smiles and wrinkled eyes.

—

“Expecto Patronum!” The tip of my wand unleashed a faint sort of white vapour which slowly transitioned into a p/n. “Blood hell y/n! You got that right on the first try,” remarked Ron as he stared up at my patronus in awe.

Suddenly, the chandelier started to swing and the floor beneath us was shaking under our feet. Everyone huddled together as it stopped. Then another loud bang came from the door as it crumbled, leaving a tiny cracked hole in which we heard Umbridges voice.

With one last swish and flick of her wand, she blasted down the door completely, walking in infuriated with the inquisitorial squad following behind her. Draco Malfoy stood on the side, his hand gripping Cho Chang’s arm tightly as she hung her head in shame. She had betrayed us.

My eyes met Malfoy’s as I lowered my wand. Each member of the squad practically forced us all the way into umbridges office however Malfoy shoved Cho to the side and came headed in my direction. “Do as I say,” he muttered under his breathe, his hand gripping my wrist causing me too flinch.

“What- What are you doing?” I whispered frantically. “Don’t question me y/l/n,” he replied, his lips barley moving as Umbridge yelled at us all.

One by one, each army member was escorted by a slytherin however Malfoy waited for everyone to leave. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he mumbled, peering out the door making sure the coast was clear. His hand slowly slid down my wrist, intertwining his fingers with mine.

I didn’t dare speak of it, besides I felt safe with him for some reason as if I were able to trust him. Quickly, we ran down the corridors hand in hand making sure no one spot us. “Wait stop,” I panted as i breathed heavily, leaning against the wall. He stopped for a moment, his hand on his hip as he patiently waited for me too regain enough energy to walk back to my dorm. “Let me walk you back to your dorm,” he insisted.

—

“Goodnight,” he mumbled before turning to walk away. “Draco Wait-,” I called for him reluctantly as i leaned against the door of my dorm room. He turned to face me once again, one of his brows raised in confusion. “Why did you help me? I mean you could have just turned me in like the others,” I questioned hesitantly. He seemed to have straightened his posture as he looked down at the floor before glancing at my visage. “Don’t question it y/l/n,”

—

“What? That’s not possible.. how did Malfoy not turn you in?” Harry exclaimed, his face distorted as he gave the type of look when something was brutally unfair. “I bet he likes you, I remember when he came back and made up an excuse about his whereabouts,” chimed Hermione plainly as she stuck her nose into her book, causing me too flush red.

Running towards us was Fred and George Weasley as they explained what Umbridge was currently doing. “You lot might want to check this out,” their voices weary as they glanced one another. Within seconds we all made our way outside the great hall where the rock solid walls were covered with every stupid law she’d had every created. A new one of her ridiculous educational Decrees was being hung by Filch as he tried balancing on the highest step of the ladder.

My eyes trailed from above all the way down, now examining Draco’s face as he looked up, a smirk painted across his face, after all he was part of Umbridge’s clan. I don’t know why but he looked immensely alluring and it really bothered me. Why did he look so perfect? I didn’t like him did I? No of course I didn’t What type of dumb question was that?

—

Tonight me and the army decided to sneak out after curfew and meet up in the Gryffindor common room. I slipped on my robe as I softly shut the door behind me, trying to make sure it didn’t creak. I tiptoed down the corridors because we were all aware that the inquisitorial squad members were lurking around, keeping an eye on us. I couldn’t risk using a lumos spell because I knew that if I did someone might see the light at the tip of my wand easily so I attempted to guide myself in the dark, sticking my hand out incase I bumped into anything.

Unexpectedly, I tripped over my own feet causing me to fall frontwards, straight into somebody’s arms, my hands flung around their neck, clinging onto them for dear life. We stayed like that for a good few seconds, my breathing hitching as my chin laid propped up on the mystery persons shoulder.

Pulling away from me the person chanted a ‘lumos’ spell, holding their wand between our faces. “Draco?” I shrieked, my face distorted since I knew I had been caught. “What are you doing after curfew?” He interrogated. “Nothing I Uh- I was trying to sneak out to get some fresh air,” I lied, the tone in my voice making me sound sheepish. “Don’t lie to me y/l/n you were going to another one of those meetings, weren’t you?” He snarled, his grip on his wand becoming tighter. “Uh.. okay fine! I am, but please don’t tell on me I beg you,” I pleaded my lips curving into a frown.

His facial expressions changed and became softer than ever, his irresistible,grey eyes glimmering from the tiny source of light as he parted his plump lips to say something. “Go,” he whispered lowly. “Thanks Draco,” I muttered. For some reason my feet were glued too the floor as if they weren’t willing to move. I had the sudden urge to kiss him but I held back until he himself leaned a little closer, his lip ghosting mine before I took steps backwards and disappeared into the darkness.

Was I developing some sort of feelings for him? All he did was save me from landing into trouble twice and actually leave me alone for once. Did he feel the same way?

I had to at least thank him for how humble he was being over the past month so that same week I went to Hogsmeade and bought him a ring with a snake wrapped around it. After all his help, this was the least I could do to repay him.

It was Christmas Eve today and I told one of the sweet slytherins (who I knew was trustworthy) to go and put this perfectly tiny box wrapped up in black paper under the tree in the Slytherin common room.

—

Today was Christmas Day and I ran down the stairs to my common room early in the morning to open up my gifts. Harry hurled me a handful of presents as I struggled to carry them all. “Merry Christmas y/n!” They sung in unison as I started to unwrap them all. Ron had given me a perfectly knitted sweater with the first letter of my name on it. Hermione had bought me a stack of muggle books that had very interesting covers and Harry had bought me a box of assorted sweets from honey dukes because he knew I had a sweet tooth.

“Thanks guys I really appreciate it,” I gave them a warm smile. “Y/n I uh- there’s another gift addressed to you,” Ron fiddled with the present in his hand, taking a close look at it. “It’s not addressed from anyone though,”. He tossed me the dark green wrapped gift as I glanced at them unsure. My hands began unraveling the box taking a peek on the inside. To my surprise, there was a immaculately beautiful necklace with a dark green gem in a pendant. Holding the necklace between my fingers I gave a glance at it before putting it around my neck, trying not to overthink it.

—

“I wonder who gave you that?” Questioned Ginny as she squinted her eyes. Walking into the great hall was a certain blonde haired boy with his annoying group of posse following behind him like a bunch of lost puppies. He looked incredibly charming as he wore a dark green sweater with a black scarf wrapped around his neck as he tugged at it too loosen it a bit. I could just about see the ring that he wore around his finger.

Something about the way he accepted my gift made me smile to myself. “Bloody hell y/n are you blushing?” Joked Ron as I pursed my lips. “Totally not,” i responded as I bit the inside flesh of my cheek too stop myself from grinning.

From across the hall my eyes met his and I felt a unknown spark run through my body. A toothy smile crawled across his face causing me too smile back at him. Oh god I thought to myself, I couldn’t do this. I hid my face in my hands embarrassed as my friends laughed at me. “Y/n are you sure you don’t like Malfoy?” Teased Fred Weasley. “Yep it’s confirmed she does,” added George. “No I don’t,” I mumbled as my voice was muffled by my hands.

“If you’ll excuse me I have somewhere to go,” I muttered before leaving the table in embarrassment. I could see Blaise Zabini and Goyle patting Draco on the back in what seemed like encouragement as he got up. Was he going to follow me?

I strided down the corridors when I saw him calling after me. I swung my head around as I continued walking and he disappeared. Walking backwards, I tried looking for him when something bumped into me from the front. “Where do you think your going?”. I recognised that same tune that use to annoy the hell out of me.

“Draco? Where did you come from? You were right behind me,” I asked curious, trying to change the subject. “Took a shorter route,” he explained. The gap between the two of us was at the point of closing.

“You uh- wore the necklace I gave you,” his cheeks flushing slightly as his rough demeanour vanished. “You were the one who gave this? Why?” My voice cracking at the end. “And you gave me this ring- why?”. He was trying to use my own words against me as I giggled to myself. “It’s more of a thank you gift than you know-,” I elaborated as I crossed my arms.

“So why did you gift me this necklace?” The curiosity in my voice making him pause for a good second. “Let me guess.. don’t question it? That’s what your going to say right?” I giggled to myself. His face slowly dropped his lips parting as he looked above the two of us. “The mistletoe,” he choked. Above our heads, was a magically growing mistletoe that rained glitter.

He scratched the back of his head as i hung my head. “You don’t have too if you don’t want-,” I quickly cut him off by placing my lips against his, savouring the sweet flavour. Initially he was shocked, his eyes wide open until his lips moved in sync with mine, his eyes fluttering closed as he cupped my visage, my body flushed against his.

Pulling away, his eyes fluttered back open, his thumb drawing circles on my cheek as he pulled me back in one last time,his plump lips on mine before pulling back making me admire his enticing face. “Merry Christmas,” he whispered as my hands wrapped around his neck pulling him in for the tightest hug ever.

—

Taglist: @summer-writes @gryffindors-prefect @harry-pottery-barn @adderallanimal @voldygonemoldy @reemusluupin @chaotic-fae-queen if you want to be added or removed lemme know

[hopeloading563]

Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out! Crack

4.1: Sign into your steam account that has Oxygen Not Included and been accepted into the Alpha. 4.2: Go to the steam library, right click on Oxygen Not Included on the left hand side and select properties.

Klei Entertainment are expanding their fabulous space-colony simulation game with the first full expansion in Spaced Out, which enters Early Access on December 8. I fear for my free time, as Oxygen Not Included sucks it away so easily.

They've said like any normal DLC it will require the base game (it's not a standalone) and be priced at $14.99. When it leaves Early Access, the price of Spaced Out may rise based on the growing size of it.

I saw in the patch notes that they mentioned something about how geysers might not fully be implemented or there might not be as many.Are there geysers on the starting planet? I feel like I've scoured almost the entire asteroid and haven't noticed a single one yet.

Hello everyone!Green Gemini here and finally its here! The long awaited Oxygen Not included DLC! Well, its not the full DLC, it’s a DLC in early.

You’re welcome to stream and make videos of your Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out! Gameplay according to our player creation guidelines. We do ask that you make your viewers aware that Spaced Out! Is still in Early Access and is not yet complete. Feel free to let your viewers know that we welcome their feedback as well!

Currently the store page is not live, there's no trailer or any shots they've shared but they did give an explanation of what to expect from it:

In Oxygen Not Included: Spaced Out! you'll spearhead space missions to new and undiscovered Planetoids, transport resources between bases, and manage multiple worlds on the fly to build a megacolony that not only survives, but hopefully, thrives.

New Multi-World Gameplay Put your colony management skills to the test by juggling the needs of Duplicants in multiple colonies simultaneously. Switch between planets in real time and secure rare resources on other worlds to supply your home base.

Expanded Rocketry Customize new modular rockets to your liking, then explore the expanse of space with the newly overhauled Starmap. Huge expansions to the Research Tree provide new mid-game Rocketry options, giving your Duplicants an edge in the asteroid space-race.

New Critters Get acquainted with some new fuzzy friends - if you're nice, they might help you out around the colony!

New Resources, Biomes, Tech and More: Tons of new biomes to explore, tech to research, and resources to mine. There's a whole new universe out there - discover it all in Oxygen Not Included: Spaced Out!

While Klei have yet to put their own footage up on it, they have let a few YouTube Channels take an early look like Biffa Plays Strategy which you can see below:

YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences. Direct Link

Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out Cracking

If you missed it, they also released an update to Oxygen Not Included in late November. Along with a tech upgrade to the Unity game engine used, it also pulled in something many players had been asking for with Cloud Saves. So you can now have them synced between machines, so you can also now keep your colony going on the go if you decide to take a laptop with you somewhere. Additionally, a bunch of performance improvements and bug fixes also made it in.

Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out Cracks

You can buy Oxygen Not Included on Steam. The Spaced Out DLC arrives December 8 in Early Access.

Oxygen Not Included Download

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Klei are back with their great space colony sim with the Oxygen Not Included - Spaced Out! expansion now available in Early Access with Linux support. Easily one of my favourite games from 2019, and now you're telling me it's even bigger? I didn't need much of a push to get back into Oxygen Not Included as Klei had already crafted a fantastic game.

Spaced Out is a big one, adding in some pretty huge new features! What to expect from Spaced Out? Here's a quick overview of what Klei say is already available:

New Multi-World Gameplay! The Starmap and space program have been completely redesigned to allow you to span your Duplicant civilization across multiple planetoids, each with their own resources to contribute.

Brand New Starting World! The Swamp start, along with its supporting biomes, provides a new, different mixture of resources to exploit as you nurture your fledgling colony.

Mid-Game Rocketry! The rocket mechanics have been completely redesigned to make rocketry part of your colony's core infrastructure, rather than just an end-game goal.

Rocket tech is easier to research and is more integrated with the rest of the tech tree.

The surface of the starting planetoid is a lot less hostile, and new early-game tech is being added to ease the transition into space.

Multi-Colony UI Improvements! The Diagnostics side panel and redesigned Resources screen have been expanded to manage your attention across planetoids.

Oxygen Not Included News

A lot more is planned too, since it's Early Access and not quite finished. Klei mentioned how they've now got a solid foundation so it's ready for players to buy, test and hopefully enjoy it but they're going to push it further. Their ideas coming to the DLC include a Radiation / Nuclear System, Late-Game Planetoids and Rocketry, Rare Resources and Global Sustainability and eventually modding support for it hooked up properly again as it's disabled for it while it's not finished.

Check out the new trailer:

YouTube videos require cookies, you must accept their cookies to view. View cookie preferences. Direct Link

As for how long to expect it to be in Early Access? That's not clear. Klei said they don't want to rush it, so they will develop this DLC just like they did with the base game - out in the open in Early Access, pulling in plenty of feedback. Once they get together the initial feedback they will be sorting out a more official roadmap of what's to come. The price is likely to go up as more features go live too.

You can buy Oxygen Not Included on Steam. The Spaced Out DLC is here.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

[sad-boy-mono]

Character and Relationship Backstory and an update from me

Hey y'all! I have an update on where I've been at the end of this post for those of y'all who have been following Highschool Casualties and are wondering where I went, but if you've just stumbled across this I don't want to throw a long and random explination at ya!

Haven’t read the main story yet?

Heres the Tumblr Masterpost and the Ao3 link!

The characters

Damien Haas

16, sophomore in high school. Hardcore musical theater kid from grades 4-8. Loves to sing and shit. Got quite a few bigger roles early on. Things got busy freshman year, so he had to put things on hold.

(Favorite musical is probably falsettos or something idk I'm not a theater kid.)

(That's a lie, I'm just a bad theater kid XP)

Fucking loves superhero movies and shit because haha irony.

Favorite class is Drama, least favorite is math. Because math is hard and temporary but Shakespeare is forever.

Has an irrational fear of doctors, dentists, and needles due to some surgical mishaps that occurred when he was young. Also has a fear of the ocean.

Deals with anxiety and frequent panic attacks.

Shayne Topp

15, sophomore in high school. Really fucking loves football, but not on the team. He wanted to be, but he use to be friends with some of the people on the football team. And they... weren't the best to say the least. They were bad influences and caused Shayne to do bad things. He's no longer friends with them, but still goes to the games with Courtney and Damien to cheer on Courtny's brothers who are on the team.

Favorite class is probably woodworking, least favorite is math. Because math is hard and temporary but birdhouses are forever.

(Though he's actually really good at math, like he has the capability to take honors and do well. It just isn't fun.)

Doesn't know how to ride a bike and can't swim. Deep water freaks him out.

Has a huge fear of hurting other (because haha irony) and always puts his friends before himself.

Courtney Miller

14, freshman in high school. Loves writing and art. Has a lot of sketchbooks, but most of them are half filled. At this point she just collects cool sketchbooks.

Also love film/acting/drama but has a lot of anxiety around performing, so she ends up being on her school's tech crew. She's really good at editing, and has a passion for behind the scenes work around productions.

Favorite musical is Heathers.

Favorite class is her painting and art history class, least favorite is math. Because math is hard and temporary but art is forever.

Struggls a lot with school. Doesn't have many friends outside of Shayne and Damien, even when it comes to her tech crew. Generally on bad terms with "friends" (bullies) from middle school.

Doesn't enjoy the other people in her class. A few of them are former (or current) bullies from middle school.

Relationships

Damien and Shayne

Met in the first grade, became friends in a very first-grader-like manner.

Shayne: Hey I like your pokemon shirt

Damien: Oh thanks, you wanna play with trucks?

Shayne: Yeah sure.

They’ve been best friends ever since.

They had a bit of a falling out from mid 7th through 8th grade because of the guys Shayne hung out with. They were your average middle school douchbags but a lil worse.

Things got sorted the summer following 8th grade.

When they started high school, Shayne’s older brother would pick Damien up and give him a ride to school every morning; even though Damien was in walking distance.

But a month-ish before their freshman year, Shayne’s family ended up moving closer to Damien’s, because a tree fell through Shayne’s house during a terrible storm that hit their town. Even though it hypothetically could've been fixed, the house was old so they took it as a sign to just move.

Shayne is the only person who knows about Damien's anxiety outside of his family, and is who Damien goes to when he's having heighted anxiety or a panic attack.

They also bond over their fear of water strangly often.

Shayne and Courtney

Courtney’s family moved across the street from Shayne’s family when Courtney was in the 7th grade and Shayne was in the 8th. And after the initial family intoductions when the Millers first moved in, Shayne never talked to Courtney. Until about a month later, when he was home alone and Courtney knocked at his door.

After Shayne asked 'what's up?' Courtney asked if they could be friends.

“Do you know how to play smash?” Shayne asked.

Courtney sighed and let out a defeated ‘no’ and began walking away from the door.

“Ok, I’m gonna teach you how to play.”

They would hang out quite a bit until Shayne moved, but they still talked a lot.

Shayne later found out that Courtney would go door to door asking for friends. Shayne was the first and only person who had actually said yes.

Most people mistake them for siblings and when they find out they aren’t related, they assume they’re dating.

Shayne treats Courtney like a little sister and is very protective of her.

Shayne was fucking LIVID when he found out Courtney was being bullied. As much as he wanted to fight them, Courtney talked him down from doing so.

He still did the whole 'don't fuck with Courtney or I will fucking kill you' big brother thing. It did the trick for a while. When you're a very athletic 15 year old, it's easy to intimidate people that are younger than you.

Courtney hasn't told him about... the current bullies though.

Courtney and Damien

Met through Shayne. He made a group chat with the 3 of them that Shayne named “Operation Friendship”. Since Shayne and Damien weren't on speaking terms when Shayne and Courtney became friends they never had a chance to meet.

But they didn’t meet in person until Courtney’s first day of high school, where the 3 of them had their first class together, conveniently...

Anytime they play video games, a conversation along this happens.

"Courtney where did you learn to play this game?"

"...Shayne"

"Explains why you suck"

"HEY!"

(Shayne) "HEY!"

------

Hey! Thank you so much for reading! It's been awhile hasn't it. Yeah, I'm sorry. My life has been all over the place for the past few months and I've been struggling to find the motivation to write. I don't want to specifics because it's not only very personal, but a long story.

But to summerize why I sorta dissapeared, I had a lot of personal issues going on with both school and home and as my mental health was on this steady, but consistent, decline, it was at its very lowest in December. My home issues had reached their peak, and with the end of the quarter coming up after Xmas break and my weeks worth of late work coming back to bite me, I was too stressed to work on anything I found enjoyable without losing motivation immidiently.

Things didn't start getting better for me until some time early in semester 2 of my year. My school was transitioning back into fully in person with covid rates at their lowest in my area and things were finally feeling consistant again, but I was still getting my bearings. School still felt draining, though much less than before, and I didn't have much energy to work on things I was passionate about. I don't think I even made a new document for chapter 6 until mid-ish March.

I'm very nervious about coming back to this story after so long for many reason. First being, although I am feeling better mentally, things feel very off with writing this story. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of passion to write this story and want to see it to completion, I've just had a fluxuating interest in smosh aswell. I enjoy the channel, just not as much as I use to. And my hyperfixation on Smosh was a big drive for me writing the story. Second being that I have so much writers block around the sixth chapter of this story, and I'm worried that as soon as I try to work on it, that block will make me lose my motivation again and I'll put it off for another 6 months.

This "chapter" (idk what else I'd call this) has probably been fully finished in my drafts for about a month now, and I've been putting off posting it because of those listed anxieties, but I really want to continue writing this story so I hope you enjoyed!

Also sorry if this explination was all over the place, I just got my first covid vaccine today and am feeling kinda bleh.

[queenlokibeth]

I wanted to mention a couple of things about mental health that I think are important.

I'm doing relatively well at the moment. I've managed to go to bed before 2am most days, usually at midnight, and I've gotten 6-7 hours of sleep every night. I've eaten at least 2 full proper meals at reasonable times every day. I haven't turned in any homework late. I have to consciously fight off executive dysfunction but I do manage to win. I'm doing relatively well, which is how I notice just how badly I was doing just a month and a half ago.

What I want to say is that, when you're going through a rough mental health patch (especially if that patch is like a year or more) you might be aware that "sure, yeah, I'm not doing well" but it can also sort of feel like that's just... the way it is.

In December I consciously knew that I was having an awful time, quite probably the deepest hole in terms of mental health in my life, but I had also already been living like that for almost a year, and I transitioned into this hole more or less slowly. So last December I knew that I wasn't feeling or behaving the way that I did a year before that, but it wasn't a drastic change, I eased into that pit. Think about that metaphor about dropping a frog into boiling water and it will jump out, but slowly boil it and it won't notice and die.

I was conscious about the big things: for some reason I physically couldn't get myself to start tasks. I was distracted all the time. My sleeping schedule was something like 4am-10am when I wasn't pulling an all-nighter. I was showering once a week, did laundry every 6 weeks, and lost a lot of weight. I didn't want to do anything and I had no will to go outside. I wanted to read a book but not out of real pursuit of fun, but because I felt like I desperstely needed to catch a break and force myself to do something nice for myself. What I was obviously not conscious of was what was causing all of this.

Being in a pit of terrible mental health feels somehow even worse when you are fully aware that you're completely unhealthy, and you can pinpoint all the things that aren't working right, and you try to do all the correct things to "go back to normal", but you can't, and after a year you don't really remembers what your normal feelings or reactions to things were. In this awful state I was trying to manifest a version of myself who got her shit together and showered regularly and turned homework in on time and did laundry without it taking the same effort as hiking up a mountain, but this version of myself still had the same mental state, numbness, and mental fog, since that's all I knew at the time and I couldn't remember or understand that that's not my default state as a human being. And under that cloud of malfunctioning mental connections and chemicals I was NEVER going to manage to start functioning like a healthy person again.

Why am I pointing out all of this? Because it can be hard to realise how different things can be when you start getting healthier. There are factors of my personality that I hadn't even identified as altered in December.

I'm noticing this now because I did somehow transitioned into recovering extremely quickly. While it took me a few months to fall into a shit state of mental health, and then stayed there for like a year, now in about 3 weeks to a month I flipped my life around and everything is so much... brighter.

I don't mean for this to sound like an ad a la "you can, too, flip your life around!" But as reassurance that getting better is an option, and even a "quick" one, but obviously not without help, and not without PHYSICAL aspecrs. During that month I spent time in warmer weather, seeing sun semi regularly (I had not been outside for longer than 15 minutes at a time every few days in extremely cloudy weather for a few months at that point), I didn't have school so I didn't have to stress about a destroying amount of deadlines, I "recovered" sleep (the first day I slept for 14 hours, then 10 for a few days, and then dropped to 8 consistently), I ate healthy and hearty food, and I had conversations daily with my parents, after having been completely alone for about 7 months of not talking to anyone. During the first 2 weeks I still felt like a mess, the third week was better, and by the end of the month I felt vaguely functional.

By now I'm in no way fully better but Everything Is So Different. Now I'm realising and coming back to the way I always used to behave and feel about things. I find real joy in things and I hadn't even noticed that for a year I had NOT felt joy about ANYTHING I was merely using things to cope! And I hadn't noticed because I could no longer remember that a different feeling beyond "neutral" existed!

I'm excited about going outside now even if it's so so cold, I realised the other day that I needed something from the store and I just... put on my coat and went to the door? And i surprised myself mid step that it was just... that easy. I wanted to go somewhere and I could just... go. I didn't have to psych myself up for 3 days and then end up delaying my departure by 2 hours because that's how long it took me to find the will to put my shoes on.

Anyways I saw a candle and it was only $2 and it smelled really good and I just bought it because I deserve things that make me happy and then I bought some cinnamon flavoured coffee because I WANTED to try it and I also bought this coffee creamer that I saw because suddenly it was easy to just reach into the grocery store fridge and pull it out instead of planning it a week in advance and then overthinking it because do I really need it do I have space in the fridge am I going to finish it or will it expire first only to get overwhelmed and leave the store without it only to immediately regret it and get sad about not getting it once I arrived back to my room. I enjoy drinking my coffee now, I'm not just doing it to stay awake. I can actually get out of bed at the right time even if I'm still a bit tired because the sun is coming up and it looks pretty outside. It snowed yesterday and everyone was out at night playing with it and a stray snowball reached me while I was on my way to get dinner. This poor guy that I'd never seen apologised profusely and it was so funny! There was something about everyone in masks and standing 6 feet apart taking advantage of snowball fights as a way to interact with each other that felt straight out of a Hallmark movie.

Bottomline: at your worst there isn't anything that looks tangibly better, but there is, and you start to realise it afterwards. While you should definitely go to therapy if you can/need to, and that meds can be necessary, there is so much that you can start slowly fixing (with a lot of effort, I know) that will seriously, seeiously help. I know that it might sound like bullshit or like an oversimplification, but it's true and it's stuff that you'll never truly believe will work until you're doing better and you're like "oh shit damn".

Please sleep. Please sleep at night time and have a semi regular sleeping schedule. I know that it sounds like it won't be enough (and true, by itself it probably won't heal you completely but it will sure help a lot). I would always "understand" that sleep was important and "yes mom i know that I need to sleep better" but I never interiorised how DRAMATICALLY sleep affects your entire life. Regular, good, nighttime sleep helps regulate all the hormones and chemicals that we need. If your fucked up sleeping schedule shut down production of serotonin, congratulations now you have all the awful symptoms that come along with lacking an essential component of your functioning. And I know that it's often a terrible vicious cycle of not being able to sleep properly or procrastinating sleep or being unable to just go to bed causing mental health problems which continue to prevent you from being able to fix youe sleep pattern. Please take it from me, someone who a month ago felt like she'd genuinely never be able to function semi properly again, that forcing yourself to fix your sleep is a HUGE MEGA STEP towards fully recovering. I know it now because I can see the contrast, but a month ago I didn't understand it because I was like "well yeah I need to sleep better but what's the point I'm fine it won't change much" yeah well my brain is an asshole and I was not in fact fine but rather completely empty inside and just going the fuck to sleep semi regularly has made me feel like a real person instead of a weird cryptid for the first time in months. Just go the fuck to sleep, PLEASE.

[bearingwater]

January Forecast for Aquarius

Ease into the new decade, Aquarius. January’s energy comes with a concentration of planets in Capricorn and your twelfth house of rest, healing and escape. While others are busy making plans and resolutions, you’re in a much more receptive space. While your experimental sign can go with the flow, you also have a Type A side. This month—and this year—you may have important lessons about letting things happen.

Aquarius is the sign of the future, and you always have at least ONE eye on what’s next. Take a breather from all of that, especially if it’s making you nervous or neurotic. Not sure what plans and resolutions you want to make this year? Let it “come to you” instead of forcing an agenda. This is a time of transition, when you need to talk less and listen more.

That also means tuning in to the universe and your own intuitive guidance system. Not so fast with the eye rolls, Aquarius! With FIVE planets in your spiritual twelfth house as January begins, the Law of Attraction is governing 2020 for you. Not only is the Sun making its annual visit here until January 20, but you’ve got communicator Mercury, risk-taker Jupiter (through December 19), responsible Saturn and transformational Pluto all gathered in this zone as the decade begins. Prepare for a year unlike any you’ve had in a while—if ever!

Your best bet is to tune in, meditate or just be STILL now. Your intuition’s been knocking loudly for the past month, and now’s your chance to finally download that divine data. And you’ll have a huge chance on January 12, when Saturn and Pluto make a historic alignment in Capricorn for the first time since 1518. While these two meet up every 33 to 38 years, they haven’t united in THIS sign in over five centuries.

As materializer Saturn brings Pluto’s creative, spiritual or unconscious ideas into tangible form, you could have a huge breakthrough emotionally or intuitively. Is it time to let go of something that’s been weighing you down? The Saturn-Pluto meetup could come and sweep it away, sounding the call for forgiveness and closure. The inner work you do now will have a reverberating effect for months to come. With the bold Sun and expressive Mercury both pinging Saturn and Pluto, you’ll find the courage to express what you’re feeling too.

As within, so without—that could be your mid-month mantra thanks to a January 10 lunar eclipse in Cancer and your sixth house of wellbeing and organization. The decade’s very first full moon happens to be a potent eclipse, which will sweep away the old and usher in space for the new. This spotlight moment could reveal a health matter that’s been plaguing you (and the proper treatment plan, at last!), or it could be THE day when you finally commit to kicking a self-sabotaging habit. Eating well, exercising, working with a coach: These affirming moves could help you feel anchored at a time when you need it most.

Of course, this isn’t exactly breaking news. This is almost the final eclipse in a series that’s been rippling across the Cancer/Capricorn axis since July 2018, turning your attention the health and healing. You’ve been learning important lessons about impeccability and mastery in your work as well as other ones about letting go and receiving support. When was it time to lean in…and which moments were best to lean back? In addition to spotlighting your work and wellness, these eclipses have helped you fine-tune that balance.

It’s been a lot to take in, and you might feel a bit off-kilter. Good news: On January 20, the Sun shifts into Aquarius and your first house of self for a month, bringing you back to YOU! If you’ve been making too many sacrifices or feeling overwhelmed for the past four weeks, you’ll be thrilled to feel your energy return.

Watch out for family or household drama interrupting your me-first groove on January 23, when the Sun locks into its semiannual square with disruptive Uranus in Taurus. A volatile or argumentative loved one could demand your attention, interrupting you right as you’re getting into a groove. Set firm boundaries and don’t take the bait. It will be all too easy to get hooked into the drama and button-pushing games. Don’t waste a second of your precious time on this emotional blackmail if you can help it! Beware getting suckered into playing the hero or fixing a needy person’s problems today. Try pointing them to resources before you roll up your sleeves.

Besides, your REAL New Year arrives on January 24 with the decade’s first new moon—which happens to be in Aquarius! You typically get only one new moon per year in your zodiac sign, and it’s the ideal time to power forward on a personal goal. Efforts started now will culminate at the corresponding Aquarius full moon, which will arrive on August 3, 2020. Plot a course for where you’d like to be by then.

You’ll have help thinking strategically because this is also Lunar New Year’s Eve, a night to bid adieu to the chillaxed Earth Pig and welcome the sharp-minded Metal Rat. Pro astro tip: The Chinese New Year always falls at the Aquarius new moon, which is why Aquarians are often split between two of the animal signs. (Those born prior to the new moon will be part of the previous year’s sign.) For the next 12 months, you’ll have an easier time putting your ideas into action—and doing so with your signature aplomb!

Love & Romance

You’re in your frisky and free-spirited element until (at least) January 13, Water Bearer! Sensual Venus has been in Aquarius and your house of self and identity since December 20. Hopefully you’ve saved a few sprigs of mistletoe to park under because you’ll still be in demand for the first half of the month. Actually, who needs mistletoe when you’ve got Venus in your sign? Start the new year with the makeover you’ve been craving or maybe a refreshed attitude about love.

Over in your friend zone, spicy Mars is dancing through Sagittarius from January 3 until February 16, igniting sparks with a pal or creating a strong attraction to someone you meet online or through mutual contacts. You may feel conflicted about whether to give into temptation (and allow yourself to get obsessed) or decide from the get-go to keep it casual. Good luck with that! Couples can look forward to a lively month of double dates, outdoor activities and maybe some volunteering together or getting involved in a cause that’s important to both of you.

On January 13, Venus relocates to Pisces and your second houses of financial and emotional security. You may be ready to lock down a commitment or take a budding romance to the next level. If you’re happily off the market, take a forward glance at your savings and shared goals to make sure you’re on pace to achieve them. On January 26, Venus forms a rare (once-a-year) square with indie-spirited Mars, which can fire up your rebellious streak. Stop and contemplate anything rash before you do it. This is just a passing mood—not necessarily anything to act on.

Key Dates

January 26: Venus-Mars Square Venus in your practical second house wants something concrete, but it’s at odds with lusty and libertine Mars in your independence sector. Don’t make any fast moves in or out of a situation! Dueling desires for novelty and security are completely normal. The key: Can you get a dose of what you’re craving without overturning a relationship?

Money & Career

Flow into January, Aquarius—it’s okay to pace yourself! With five planets in Capricorn and your twelfth house of rest and healing, you could be a little exhausted. This coming year, in fact, is one to devote more to self-care and a slower speed. Your creativity and imagination will run high, and you could have breakthroughs of major magnitude this month. Lean into your quirky “genius” side and color outside the lines.

Is it time to let something go? The twelfth house rules endings, and when structured Saturn and transformational Pluto make a historic meetup here on January 12, you may have to rip the Band-Aid off. Resistance is futile, so let the chips fall where they may. If you’ve been micromanaging too much, this Saturn-Pluto conjunction will force you to confront any control issues. What’s really driving this anxiety, Aquarius? Get to the heart of it.

Major changes could be afoot on January 10, when a Cancer lunar eclipse sweeps through your sixth house of systems, employees and helpful people. The coming two weeks are ripe for hiring and firing or switching up your processes. Unpredictable Uranus also wakes up from a five-month retrograde backspin today through your domestic fourth house. As the side-spinning planet corrects course, it could bring a sudden relocation or new cast of characters under your roof. A surprise job opportunity or family fluctuations could shift your lifestyle.

When the Sun moves into Aquarius on January 20, your “2020 vision” returns. You can really set your resolutions on January 24, when the Aquarius new moon—the first new moon of the decade—illuminates your first house of fresh starts.

Key Dates

January 2: Mercury-Jupiter Meetup Read between the lines! With the two most expressive planets teamed up in your twelfth house of hidden agendas, clue into body language and subtle messages. Sometimes it’s what they don’t say that speaks volumes. Play a little mysterious today with your intel, rather than being an open book.

Love Days: 7, 12 Money Days: 17, 27 Luck Days: 16, 24 Off Days: 10, 14, 22

[haberdashing]

The Fall That Kills You

Statement of Matthew Gordon regarding his fear of heights and the aftermath of breaking his leg. Semi-autobiographical.

(Alternate title: I Warned You About Stairs Bro)

on AO3

Statement of Matthew Gordon regarding his fear of heights and the aftermath of breaking his leg. Original statement given December 30, 2016. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

I’ve been afraid of heights ever since I can remember. I think the story is that when I was two or three my parents took me on a plane ride that had a really rocky landing for some reason. I don’t remember the landing itself, though, at least not consciously, though the fear’s still there. It started as sort of a general fear of heights, but over the years it turned into more specifically a fear of falling.

I maintain that fear of heights, and specifically fear of falling, is one of the more rational common fears out there. People fear snakes, but they usually won’t go after you unless you provoke them; people fear spiders, but the amount of people killed by them annually is low enough to be a rounding error; people fear getting ambushed by a random murderer, but despite what you see on the news, the odds of that happening are slim to none. Falls, on the other hand, kill hundreds of thousands of people every year, but most people ignore that for some reason--maybe because it’s mostly the elderly who go that way, maybe because that just isn’t as exciting as getting stabbed by a serial killer or bitten by a wild animal.

When I’d explain my fear of heights, even before my accident, I tended to use the example of stairs. Planes don’t bother me anymore, even though they were the initial seed of my fear--hell, I sat in the window seat on the way over here, and the view from it more interested than frightened me. But the rickety wooden stairs at my local swimming pool? Those were what always scared me. I think it’s the lack of feeling supported that does it. On a plane, you feel like you’re on the ground, even though logically you know better; on those stairs, with no handrail and only flimsy, shifting wood standing between you and a nasty fall, you’re all too aware of the danger.

It wasn’t the rickety wooden stairs of my local pool that got me, though. It was the stairs in my own home.

The funny thing is, I still don’t know what caused me to fall that morning, though I’ve run through the events in my head over and over. I was rushing a bit, as I was late for a doctor’s appointment, but that doesn’t seem like it should have been enough to make me fall. There was nothing on the stairs to trip me up, I didn’t miss a stair, I’ve been up and down that set of stairs hundreds of times over the years, and yet, one moment I was going down the stairs just fine and the next I was on the ground, with my leg in pain and refusing to support my weight, though I didn’t know for sure it was broken until the doctors told me so.

I don’t even remember the fall itself, really, though I know I must have turned mid-fall, perhaps to grab a handrail--that’s what made it such a nasty break, apparently. Broke my leg in two places just going down my stairs at home, and I was only about four from the bottom when I fell. And that twist mid-fall made it what’s called a spiral fracture, I guess, though I don’t know many details beyond that. I’m not usually the squeamish sort, normally I’d be all over details like that, but I suppose it’s different when it’s your leg that’s broken.

I’d never broken a bone before, and this one required surgery to put metal in my leg--always fun when going through security, that--and then a month sitting around doing nothing, stuck on the first floor of my house, another month of physical therapy... but this isn’t really about that. It’s about what came after.

Once I could go up and down stairs again, every time I prepared to go downstairs, I’d get this vivid mental image of me falling down the stairs, head over heels, until I’d collapsed in a heap at the bottom. Which isn’t even how my fall happened, but that doesn’t stop my brain from imagining it just the same. I go down stairs extra slow now, and I always feel like I have to work at it, to make a choice not to fall like that, every single time. I don’t know what difference that choice makes--after all, it’s not like I chose to fall in the first place--but I always have to say, no, I’m not falling today, not this time.

And then there were the dreams. I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes at this bit, but I don’t think it’s normal, even with trauma, for dreams to work like they did here.

It started with weeks where the only thing I’d dream of was falling. Not falling down the stairs, specifically, just... falling. Not sure where, not sure when, not sure of much of anything besides the wind pushing against me and that plummeting feeling deep in my stomach.

Then I started to go back to normal dreams, but they were all nightmares--some dramatic, boogie monsters and such, but more were mundane, failing a test in high school despite having graduated or turning up to a job interview and realizing I’m stark naked or... well. You get the picture, I trust.

But then midway through those nightmares, I would start falling. I wouldn’t trip, wouldn’t fall over anything, no cliffs or ledges or stairs, just the ground giving out beneath me and falling until the details of the original nightmare were just twinkles far, far in the distance behind me.

And I don’t lucid dream, exactly, don’t know that I’m dreaming when I am or that none of what I’m experiencing in my dreams is actually real, but I’d usually be lucid enough to recognize that this meant whatever nightmare I was in before was over, that I’d just be falling for a while now. And falling isn’t pleasant, exactly, but I wouldn’t call it a nightmare, not like the bad dreams it interrupts. It doesn’t kill you, doesn’t hurt you, doesn’t harm you in any way really. 

After all, as the old saying goes, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.

And the only stop in those dreams is when I wake up. Before that, I can’t even see the ground below me, let alone hit it.

You’re probably thinking I’m wasting your time, and honestly, I can’t entirely blame you for that. I am sort of killing time in a way--my kid brother Nicky studied abroad in Moscow, we turned it into an excuse for a big family trip to Europe, and now I’m here while Nicky and my parents are at... some famous garden or another. I’ve never been big on gardens. All that hard work and effort, put into something that won’t even last the year. Hardly worth getting dirt under your nails for that.

Talking about it’s helped, I think. It seems a bit more real, now that I’m writing it all down. I’m not sure if that should be reassuring, but it is, somehow.

After I finish up here and the rest of the family finishes up at the garden, we’re meeting up at the London Eye. Nicky’s been teasing me about it for the last couple days, asking if I’ll pass out or have a panic attack or something at the top--he’s always been a bit cavalier about my fear of heights, maybe because he wasn’t around for that plane landing that sparked it in the first place. And I’m a little afraid, maybe, but not for the reasons he thinks.

I haven’t been anywhere higher than a couple stories since breaking my leg. There’s the plane, I guess, but that’s different. Staring down at the ground from thirty thousand feet, everything’s more an abstraction than a real landscape, if you can see it at all past the clouds. Ferris wheels aren’t like that, though. The ground is the ground, just further away than normal.

And this whole trip has felt a little bit unreal from the start. I’d never been to another country before this, let alone an entirely different continent, and here we are, waltzing from one foreign nation to the next. And we’ve had more than our fair share of difficulties along the way--hotel bookings that fell through, unfriendly locals, struggles to navigate unknown public transit systems, getting to major attractions right as they close...

I guess I just... hope that this isn’t just another elaborate nightmare, hope that the ground’s still there at the end of the Ferris wheel ride, hope that I don’t start falling again.

Or if I do start falling, I suppose I’d just hope that I don’t stop.

Statement ends.

[putschki1969]

Magic Moment Self Liner Notes

Notes: Finally I had some time to translate these self liner notes. It’s great to get some insight. I always appreciate a song more after having read the thoughts behind it. There is lots of precious content here so please be sure to read it. I recommend you listen to the album while going through this post.

SPECIAL ~ SELF LINER NOTES

Source: https://www.jvcmusic.co.jp/wakana/special/

-- Your 2nd album 『magic moment』 is officially completed. Did you create this work while having an overarching theme in mind?

Yes. Throughout this entire album I wanted to express a “magic moment” - hence the title. This theme first came to life when I released my EP 『Aki no Sakura』 last November and it appeared once again during my live tour in December. Back then when I was just starting to work on my EP my director and I originally came up with “magic hour” as our central motif. 

-- “Magic hour” is the time just before sunrise or just after sunset when the sky’s colours are changing from orange to purple and everything is drenched in beautiful light.

Exactly. From then onwards we were tackling the theme of “magic hour”, after all, this kind of transitional moment can be applied to many situations in life. I thought it would be nice if we could turn all moments of life into music.

-- The album seems to overflow with many such “magical moments” of life. Please introduce each song individually.

01. breathing Lyrics: Wakana; Composition / Arrangement: Yumemi Kujira

-- This is the full sized version with lyrics of the instrumental piece "eve" that served as intro for your EP 『Akino Sakura』.

When we were working on the 『Aki no Sakura EP』" we decided to record a full sized version for the album

-- There is a sense of gracefulness and natural vitality.

The song is basically made up of a chorus that is repeated a total of four times but listening to the music written by Yumemi-san many different sceneries are being conveyed, you will notice bird-like sounds in the interludes between the different choruses, you will hear a waterfall flowing, you will feel flowers blooming in profusion. Also, one day the wife of our 1st violinist came to visit us at the recording studio, she is a flutist so we made use of her talent and added some flute to the song. Adding this raw and fresh sound really broadened the world views presented in the music. When I listened to the melody for the first time the movie "Avatar" came to mind. So I let myself be inspired by that film while writing the lyrics. The protagonist of “Avatar” was injured on the battlefield and became paralysed. But when he was syncing with his avatar, he was able to walk again. Watching the scene where he is in sync with his avatar and steps firmly on the ground for the first time always has a great impact on me, I wanted to include this special feeling in my lyrics. 

-- The line “土を踏み生きて行く者 | beings who live stepping firmly on the ground” is very reminiscent of that scene.

Yes. With Earth’s gravity most creatures live on the ground, some in the air or in the water. The same goes for birds. All of us are breathing and living here united by our beating hearts. We are living an ordinary life on this earth until some day it is time to say goodbye and go to another place, “楽園へいざゆけ | let’s go to paradise”. “Paradise” is an unknown place, in a sense this lack of knowledge is very harsh. Yet, you dare to set foot into this new world, there are still so many places to discover. 

02. Yureru Haru Lyrics: Wakana; Composition / Arrangement: Miki Sakurai

-- Compared to the first song, the tempo is increased considerably. The piano in the beginning is very refreshing.

This song has had a huge impact on me ever since Sakurai-san first sent it to me, I especially love the beginning of the chorus. It conveys a dazzling light, it awakens a sparkling sensation inside of me making me feel like I am looking up at the sun while riding my bicycle. I really wanted to do a warm spring song like that. I also like the change of atmosphere between the cute verses and the rather cool chorus. I wanted to have the hero of this song shout out their emotions during the chorus. There is an image of movement rather than stillness, I wanted it to be powerful.

-- The phrases “駆け出した | you broke into a run” and “���の叫び | your cry” tie back to your intention.

Those words represent impulses, an urge to start running, a cry that can no longer be contained. There is excitement and nervousness. You have a clean canvas in front of you, you can just follow your urges and draw freely. The line in the second chorus “睫毛に触れたのは 昨日の自分の欠片 | fragments of yesterday’s me are touching my eyebrows” is supposed to be about tears. When tears are hitting your eyelashes they will linger there for a while, you are releasing fragments of yourself which you have gathered and contained inside of you. There are so many things you have to deal with, all kinds of feelings, you cannot help but cry. Nevertheless, you think it’s best to break free and start running. 

-- Before you start running and follow your impulse you are experiencing many feelings. This sentiment comes across well with the use of “sway” in this line of your lyrics - “春の香り揺れてる  | swayed by the scent of spring”.

As spring comes you will notice that along with spring’s unique scent your thoughts and feelings are also being swayed. That’s why I didn’t use the words “spring’s scent” but instead I decided on “swayed by the fragrance of spring”.

03.where Lyrics / Composition: AlbatoLuce; Arrangement: Akihito Takahashi

-- This song leaves a strong impression with its speedy acoustic guitar strokes and four-on-the-floor rhythm.

The intro melody with its "oh ~ oh ~" felt very different to anything I had ever sung before, I thought it was nice and a catchy tune. The lyrics are also very meaningful, the messages carried along the words are beautiful.

-- Speaking of meaningful lyrics, I felt like the protagonist of this song is turning into an adult and slowly learning to love all the wounds and scars that have gathered throughout the years, they are finding themselves and a place where they belong.

You can definitely interpret the lyrics like that during certain passages. However, rather than trying to find a story for the whole song, I think it’s more important to look at the individual lines, every single word is meaningful. That's why the song is easy to listen to. In addition, I have never sung a song that’s completely in midrange. I wanted to give it a try.

-- The contrast between the sharp music and your soft whispery singing provides a nice nuance.

While recording I was very conscious of my vocals, I sang with a breathy voice. It almost sounds like I am talking, like a recitative style. I would like to do more research on this approach, there is still a lot to learn. 

-- Within your airy singing, there are certain key points that you are emphasising with your voice, it almost feels like an attack. Those words will leap at you and touch your heart. For example, the line “構わない | it doesn’t matter” in the second verse starts with a very powerful note. 

I received some direction and advice while singing, it’s meant to feel like an attack. The chorus rhythm was specifically chosen to invoke a sense of charging ahead.

04. 442 Lyrics: Wakana, Airi Okamoto; Composition / Arrangement: Koichi Ikekubo

-- That title makes you really curious.

Apparently the frequency of a baby's first cry is 442 Hz, so that’s what inspired me to choose the title.

-- Interesting! A mid-tempo song with a powerful rhythm. I think it conveys a very passionate and slightly forky atmosphere.

Originally the song had a strong Indian touch

-- Now that you mention it, it really does sound like someone is playing the sitar?

Yes, yes it does! Initially I thought it would be difficult to sing Japanese to this kind of music but Ikekubo-san told me I could do whatever I wanted with the song. We chose an approach that would match a baby’s crying. The lyrics are co-authored. First of all, we discussed what the song could be about, we talked a bit and decided we wanted to make the song about moments when you feel the need to sing and the reasons behind wanting to sing. Then Okamoto-san provided a lyric draft and I felt immediately inspired, the words just kept flowing out of me. Especially worth mentioning is the first chorus line “愛の声が聴こえた | I heard the voice of love” , Okamoto-san came up with that. Inspired by this line, I wrote the following “最後の碧に終わりを告げた時でも | even when the end is announced for the final blue sky”. In a way it feels like the only reason one was born was to listen to the “voice of love”. This singing voice is echoing through your entire body. When we are born our cries are creating the same sound, isn’t that strange? Why is that? While contemplating this one realises that we are all born to do something, our first cry is like a singing voice giving expression to that purpose. We are born for this very thing, it’s like it is our mission, our fate. It’s going to be different for everyone but each of us will be living in order to do and achieve SOMETHING. Which is why our first cry, our first song if you will, sounds the same for all of us.

-- It seems like your own mission and the meaning behind your singing are taking shape through the worldview presented in the line “喜びも哀しみもひとつに繋がって、溢れ出したものが歌である | both sadness and joy are united and overflowing to become a song”.

That final chorus block is very important because that’s where I tried to put all of my thoughts and feelings into the lyrics. This is the point where I have no choice but to convey what I haven't been able to convey at the beginning of the song. That’s why I wrote it like that. As a result, things slowly fall into place while you are listening to the song, at this point everything starts to make sense. That's also the reason I wanted to end the song with just my vocals to bring the point across.

05. Hirari Hirari Lyrics / Composition: Sairenji!; Arrangement: Mine Kushita

It's a heartrending song. The sadness is palpable during certain parts of the melody when I am using falsetto. 

-- Yes. It is a beautiful and sad medium-slow track.

It's a song about people who want to meet but cannot meet. There are many reasons for that...Maybe someone leaves and you cannot see them again or you desperately want to see them but lack the courage to approach that person... Lyrics like this which are written by someone else are very refreshing, it’s nice to get a completely different point of view, that also affects my singing style.  I wanted this song to sound breathy, I would for everyone to listen to it during a quiet moment. 

-- The song starts with just your vocals, from your first breath onwards there is a special depth, your breaths become part of the song. There are only two passages in the first verse where the quality of your voice changes considerably, it’s when you are singing “静けさ | silence” and “優しさ | tenderness”..

Those two phrases are reminiscent of the melody. The word “静けさ | silence” is meant to sound transcient, almost like a hallucination, a nuance that’s barely there and you have to strain your ears to pick it up. I wanted to sing every word clearly, I want everyone to understand my Japanese easily. As with 「where」, it was necessary to change the way my midrange singing sounded. For example, in the second verse there is the line “時が止まったままもう君は... | time has stopped but you...”, it’s all sung with the same note but it serves as melody. When I thought about how to sing those parts I realised that I wanted the melody to guide my singing.

-- Also, there is a beautiful and ephemeral vibration in your singing voice when you sing the line “夕暮れにかすんだ | got hazy within the dusk”.

That's right. I emphasised “kasumu | to become hazy” with a breath . This way it can sound either sexy or slightly scary. I think the word “kasumu” is very beautiful. I also really love the lyrics in the final verse. “たやすく愛と名付けないで | never call love easy”.

-- Is this supposed to emphasise the importance of the feelings that still remain inside of someone despite being separated?

I personally never take the word "love" lightly, it is not just a simple word but in this case the phrase is actually supposed to express the feeling of not wanting to be reduced to a single word by other people.

06. Aki no Sakura (Acoustic ver.) Lyrics: Kei Saito, Yoshitaka Taira; Composition: Kei Saito; Arrangement: Toshio Uchida

-- You recorded an acoustic version of 「Aki no Sakura」, which was the title song of your EP.

I really loved the acoustic arrangement of the song at my December live with the participation of percussionist (Nakakita) Yuko-san. I wanted to include it in the album so we made that happen. The song’s tempo has been decreased slightly compared to the original and it’s just my vocals, the percussion, an acoustic guitar, an accordion and a violin. I know Uchida-san who made the arrangement for this song from my Kalafina days, he played the guitar at Kalafina’s Otadama performances. It was nice to meet him again, it’s thanks to him that the song become warmer and more tragic. There was also someone from Uchida-san's agency who suggested we include some scat singing in the interlude. Combining the sound of the guitar with my scat singing was very refreshing and fun.

-- There is a phrase in the song where you sing, “笑い合ったね | we shared laughter”, the “i” in “warai” felt particularly warm, it’s like we are getting a new look at the lyrics with this version of the song.

Yes, I tried changing the nuance of my falsetto. I performed it live a few times ever since the release of my EP so my understanding of the song has changed quite a bit. This is how new nuances come to life.

07. myself Lyrics / Composition: AlbatoLuce; Arrangement: Yoshifumi Ise

-- A slow number that progresses with main focus on your vocals, the piano and some strings. Your comforting singing voice is very pleasant.

Initially, the arrangement was very heavily focused on the piano, there was a sense of quietness. When I listened to the track for the first time it left a strong impression on me, it reminded me of sublime songs like “Amazing Grace”. I was very adamant about keeping the song tranquil and calm, I didn’t want it to become too dark or too emotional. I used my breath consciously and expressed my lines with a singing voice that’s very close to my speaking voice.

-- This song is mostly low to midrange. The first and second verse are warm and comforting, the chorus on the other hand is very emotional. 

The chorus is definitely more powerful than it was in the original version during pre-production. For the pre-production I was using falsetto during the chorus. But once I had decided to speak most of the lyrics, I thought it would be best not to include falsetto. This kind of song is really difficult because every aspect of yourself is laid bare, that was quite the challenge.

-- When confronted with this type of slow song and small ensemble isn’t it necessary for you as a vocalist to provide the rhythm with your singing?

Yes, the most important aspect of my singing was how to create the rhythm. During one recording we used the clicking sound of a metronome to double the tempo. Then, once I had gotten used to the song, I was able to sing without the help of the metronome. 

-- In the lyrics you are touching upon the subject of weak hearts, weaknesses we all have in common. You are singing about times when you are not able to reveal your trembling heart. Is this possibly about looking back at one’s own own trajectory, about overcoming such times?

The “You” in the lyrics can be yourself or a specific someone. The song is actually less about overcoming hesitation, fear or weakness and more about learning to live with these things.

-- I see. In the final chorus you are singing “愛してた事 | the fact that I loved you” in past tense, what is the meaning behind that?

I thought about that a lot. We are reborn every day, you loved yourself back then just as much as you love yourself right now. Among all the versions of yourself, there ought to be one that is weak - yet that version of you still deserves love. 

08. Kimi Dake no Stage Lyrics: Wakana; Composition / Arrangement: Satoshi Takebe

-- Finally 「Kimi Dake no Stage」 is available on CD, we have only heard it live before!

I have been singing this song live ever since October 2018. The song and lyrics were produced around September of that year. Amazing musicians participated in the recording of this song. In particular, I wanna mention the drummer Kasuke-san (Noriyasu Kawamura), just like me he is a person full of longings. The feeling of being wrapped up by the music is wonderful. I had been singing the song for a long time already so when the band recorded it I felt comfortable going into the vocal booth and singing at the same time. It felt like we were performing live. I had to sing the song all by myself a second time that day but the feeling of being accompanied still remained inside of me.

-- You are using a clear singing voice here.

I had a clear image of the song and while performing live, I experienced so many great things. That’s the reason why I aimed for a clear singing style, I simply wanted to match the clearness of the song.

-- When I read through the lyrics, I felt really drawn into the song from the very first line, “列をはみ出して 泳ぐ魚が見えたよ | I saw fish swimming out of line”. It’s very Wakana-like since you love aquariums so much, the message within that phrase is also incredibly strong. 

That first part of the song is depicting someone standing in front of a water tank. Imagine a group of sardines swimming in the tank and all of a sudden one of the fish is breaking away and swimming in the other direction. The little fish that chooses a different path stands out. Watching the fish you start wondering what it might see, what it might experience. And now have a human child take the place of this fish. Everyone in the group is at school while a single child is deciding to skip class. 

-- It’s not always a clear line, sometimes life is about breaking away even if there is no clear intention behind the action.

It’s not so much about breaking away from everything, rather it’s about taking on challenges so you can try things you want to do. I had that kind of experience when I was a  young student, it took a lot of courage, many times I felt very uneasy and frightened but it was also very refreshing. Even now that I have grown up and I am an adult I can still say with certainty that I do not regret my thoughts and decisions from back then. Therefore I think if you want to do something you SHOULD do it, be straightforward and honest with yourself. That doesn’t only apply to teenagers ... You should also live by that philosophy in your 20s and 30s. Even when you are getting older you might feel the urge to break free and do something new. 10 years from now I will surely be in a completely different position having to deal with all kinds of worries. We are all the heroes of our own stories, of our own lives so we need to take responsibility. However, I also included parts about falling in line in the lyrics. For things to go smoothly we can’t just break away all the time, it’s also about cooperating with others in school, at work or in other situations of life.

-- That's why you are also singing about how everyone - strangers and acquaintances alike - is always breaking into a run to do something.

That's right. The second half of the song is about remembering the place where I grew up. I was raised in Fukuoka but back then all I wanted to do was move to Tokyo. Now I love Fukuoka. I guess you don’t realise what you have got until it’s gone. I feel the same way about my family. Back then I was impatient and itching to do something, that's why I want to tell my past self, “it’s okay, I understand if you want to leave.” Even now, all I want is my passion to bring light to my life, I made it this far thanks to my family and my friend, I am here because of them. That’s how I came up with the line “初めて誰かを守りたいと思ったとき 自分を愛してくれる人のため 今があるんだ | the moment you first want to protect someone you realise that you exist for the sake of those who love you”.

09. Orange Lyrics: Wakana; Composition: Ryota Iwakoshi; Arrangement: Kazunori Fujimoto

-- 「Orange」 was included in your EP 「Aki no Sakura」, it’s now part of your album.

Someone from the A&R division of my record label really loved this song so they suggested I should include it. *laughs* I am also very much in love with the song so their words motivated me to add the song to the tracklist.  

-- The positioning of the song in your album is very refreshing. For example, 「Kimi Dake no Stage」 is all about the warm embrace you feel in the place you were born in. That transitions nicely to a sense of nostalgia which is conveyed in 「Orange」.

The tracklist order can strongly influence your perception of a song. When I was a student, I was itching to do something new and came to the city. Now I am living my life here and watching orange sunrises while thinking about [blank]. This “…” part consists of all kinds of crazy feelings, feelings from my past, my present...being able to listen to 「Orange」 on this album makes things more real and brings back all these memories and feelings much more clearly.  

-- The lyrics of 「Orange」 and 「Kimi Dake no Stage」 are also somehow connected. The “あなたの笑顔に逢いたいから | I want to meet your smile” sung in 「Orange」 seems to be tied together with the “笑顔を届けられたら | I would like to bring a smile to your face” in 「Kimi Dake no Stage」. The driving force of your singing is conveyed very well.

Yes. If possible I would much rather see smiling faces instead of sad ones!

10. Happy Hello Day Lyrics: Wakana; Composition: Akihiro Kasuga; Arrangement: Shu Kanematsu

-- This song starts with overflowing feelings of gratitude and happiness.

We are celebrating the day of our birth with a “Happy Birthday” song so I thought, “why not write a song that celebrates the day we met?” While listening to the melody I could see myself singing this kind of song in front of my audience. “Thank you, I am glad we were able to meet today”, it’s these feelings I wanted to put into words to make lyrics out of them. The sound of the string quartet is beautiful, and Kanematsu-san piano playing is incredibly smooth. His playing during the recording was super cool, he went wild *laughs*

-- The song picks up momentum during the final chorus with the included clapping, that’s quite quite the grand scale.

That’s Kanematsu-san and my own clapping you hear, all the staff members and my manager also joined in on the clapping *laughs*

-- I think this song will have an even greater scale once you perform it live and the clapping of everyone in the audience will be overlapping. In that sense I believe your feelings will come across well during the chorus when you are singing about “you” and “us” in lines such as “君と逢えた | kimi to aeta” or “手を繋ぐよ | te wo tsunagu yo”.

When I am singing at a live venue in front of a large number of people, it feels like you and me - all of us - are talking together. Of course we each have our own regular lives with our own problems but in that moment all we are doing is enjoy music together That’s why in one chorus I chose “手を繋ぐよ | we are holding hands” and in the final chorus I wrote “手を繋ごう | let’s hold hands”. Thank you for coming to meet me, let’s hold hands! Surely we will be able to meet again in the future and then our hands will be joined once more.

-- Is it that feeling that makes you sing the final chorus with such a more powerful voice?

Yes, it’s crazy how much heart and strength I put into that part. When I sang the line “今生きている | ima ikite iru“ the “ikite” ended up sounding savage *laughs*.

11. magic moment Lyrics: Wakana; Composition: SIRA; Arrangement: Shu Kanematsu

-- The title song is the final track on your album 

I asked SIRA to compose a song related to the theme “magic hour,” when I got the song, its temporary title was actually “magic hour”. After I wrote the lyrics for the song, I decided on the current title and simultaneously made it the album title since I felt it best symbolised the essence of the album.

-- The 6/8 time signature of the song makes it sound very grand and magnificent, its evocative nature seems to lead right into the future. I feel like 「magic moment」 being the last track provides a fitting conclusion to the whole album.

I think so too. The song makes you feel like your journey will continue, there’s a sense of embarking on a new journey. In a way it’s closely connected to the first song of the album 「breathing」, it’s nice to have this little call-back.

-- The words you use in 「magic moment」 and 「breathing」 are also connected. The line “高鳴る音さえ | even the throbbing sound” in 「magic moment」 seems to be tied to the “高鳴る胸 | throbbing heart beat” and “鼓動 | pulsation” in 「breathing」.

That's right! Everyone is always saying how they need to take responsibility and that they are gonna be an adult from now on but when are you really an adult? Can you not be an adult and still live your life enjoying yourself? Shouldn't we be allowed to dream? I wrote the lyrics with these feelings in mind *laughs*. It’s like reading a fantasy novel that invites you to explore a foreign world. The rhythm changes during the chorus which gives the song a very mysterious vibe. That's why I thought it would be nice to use frivolous and floating phrases instead of real words

-- Frivolous and floating, what do you mean by that?

A sense of recklessness maybe, not knowing what’s ahead of you but still wanting to continue forward *laughs*, I guess a responsible adult would call it, “to lose your footing and float away”...the lyrical subject of this song just wants to dream. 

-- For me both the melody as well as the lyrics convey a strong sense of “human life”. There is a line that says "最後の場所は決めたよ | I know where I will die" and later in the song you mention “何処か遠く | somewhere far away”. This person might not have decided on the road they will be taking but they already have their sights fixed on a specific goal?

The hero of this song doesn’t need guidance or a map. He or she has already found a perfect place for their final sleep. And that place is actually not too far away. However, until that very last moment of your life you want to travel far. One should be living with the goal of wanting to experience one miraculous moment after the other. Life is not about trying to reach that final place, it’s about living your life to the fullest until you reach that place. That’s what this song is about.

[fandom-star]

Transgender Pride Month Challenge

So, I'm an admin on a trans meme/info account on Instagram, and one of the guys on there sent this to our chat, so I thought I'd do it on here.

1. My name is Elliott or Ell. I am asexual and bi/panromantic (both fit me so I use both) and I am a transmasculine non-binary person.

2. The only proper coming out I've had was with my mum. I don't feel like putting it here, it's somewhere on my blog. Most of the time I've either given my friends my Tumblr knowing they'd figure it out or I've just dropped a thousand hints in group chats! I dunno, I just prefer coming out like that with people I know will be okay with it.

3. I've probably always had an idea, at least since I was about 8, but after the age of 10 I kind of went into a fair bit of denial and threw myself into being a fangirl. I eventually realised I should look into it in May 2018, when I first identified as a demigirl.

4. I am not on hormones. It's probably something I'll look into doing maybe in my mid twenties for half a year, maybe a year, to get the extent of the effects that I want, but I don't think I'd stay on for much more than a year.

5. My support system is mostly my friends. 

6. My chest, my deadname (mostly seeing it written), sometimes my voice, sometimes my height.

7. When I decided to change my name (July 2018 when I was exploring the possibility of being a trans guy) the one thing I knew was that I wanted to still be able to feasibly use the nickname Ell. So I basically looked around online for names with that sound in them. I ended up with about five or six and wrote down the pros and cons of them all. The only con on the name Elliott was that there was a guy in my form class with the same name (Elliot), whereas the others usually had about two. So I chose Elliott.

8. I haven't had much of a transition journey. I had my hair cut short in July 2018. Had my first irl coming out in September 2018 as non-binary to a friend who figured it out. July 2019 I changed my name. July and August 2019 I came out to my mum (if you followed me then you'll know what that story is and why it was over two months). November 2019 I went to a comic con with my friends which was my first time being openly non-binary in public, and I also bought my first pronoun badge there. Later in the month, my mum bought me a pronoun badge. December 2019 my best friend bought me my first binder. And some point before September 2020 I will have come out on my personal Instagram.

9. I don't think I have any regrets. I feel like I shouldn't have any, because everything I have done has brought me here, and I'm happy where I am. Maybe I regret backing out of coming out on Instagram last month, because I was gonna try coming out on 1st of July, but with everything happening I felt like it was a really inappropriate time.

10. My binder is a blue half tank from GC2B. His name is Robbie. I can't be bothered to take a photo!

11. My definite transition goals are to legally change my name and gender (but only when the UK legally recognises non-binary people, until then imma confuse people by having a masculine legal name but being legally recognised as female!) and have a chest reduction. As I said earlier, I'm definitely considering testosterone, but the two effects I definitely want from it are facial hair and a deeper voice, both of which I could probably achieve to an extent without the involvement of T. (I basically have the ability to grow a beard naturally, but I never have because mum's worried about me being bullied or whatever if it gets too much.)

14. I am single and have never been in a relationship. I know, I know, the shock and the horror of a 16 year old having never been in a relationship, but I'm permanently anxious about everything, and I don't develop crushes very often and the last two I've had have been on friends, one of which doesn't live near me and I've never met in person, so.... Yeah, and that means I can't really say whether people knowing I'm trans or not has had any difference in them being attracted to me.

15. Obviously, I'm not completely out right now, but when I do come out I will be quite open about it. There's no real way to be stealth as a non-binary person, so that's not really a possibility. Even on the trans masc side of things, I don't think I'd ever be able to be stealth nor do I really want to be. For one, my transition plans don't exactly allow for it particularly, but also, while being referred to as male is highly preferable to being referred to as female, if I can have control over it, I won't be seen as strictly either.

16. I think I stand with the majority when I say that the only concern I can think of around transitioning is transphobia. Especially with my classmates, because while some of them are amazing (hello the whole five of you here) there's a lot of casual transphobia and explicit mockery of non-binary people at my school. It's one of the reasons I really hope our pride group continues when I start back at Sixth Form in September, because I feel like we could do a lot to combat that.

17. I mean, I guess I basically went over fear of rejection in 16, but I guess I could extend on that by explaining why I don't really mention my dad in regards to all this. Basically, I haven't come out to him about anything regarding my queer identity. This isn't necessarily because of him being explicitly homophobic or transphobic (he's never said anything homophobic ever and seemingly supports my going to pride events), it's mostly because our relationship is somewhat distant. We don't have an awful lot to do with each other outside of sharing interests. And he tends to be averse to anything "new". So, yes, I fear that if I came out to my father about being non-binary he would react by either ignoring it or me or not believing me.

20. September 2016 vs Today, June 2020

21. Something I'm most proud of relating to being trans... ooh! Probably the time I went out for lunch with my mum and my granny (who is basically deaf) and being called "sir" and "young man" by two different waiters while mum went to the toilet. The reason that's such an amazing moment for me is because I was feeling extremely dysphoric about how long my hair was getting, so I wasn't even making any attempt to look at all masculine. 

22. Things that make me euphoric are binding, people saying my name, listening to recordings of my voice (a lot of the time it sounds a lot more androgynous than I expect) and seeing photos of myself in cosplay.

23. Music. Very generic! Um... I have a Spotify playlist of songs to listen to when I feel dysphoric. Speaking of Spotify playlists, most of them are based on ships or characters. My username is seltudoor. I have a rather large record collection and an old record player/radio/cassette player that used to be my dad's that I think is from the 80s. Everything else you know! Classic rock, Sinatra and all that.

24. Freddie Mercury is the love of my life (HA!) and my role model. I have put into words why somewhere on my music blog, but I can't exactly remember. It goes a bit deeper than that he wasn't afraid to be true to himself. I also have an entire post about my trans role model Lou Sullivan that I made last June. In short, he was the first trans man to medically transition as an openly gay man who was also a badass, though I mainly say that because towards the end of his life (he died from AIDS complications) he wrote that, although the medical system didn't recognise him as a gay man, it seemed as though he was going to die like one.

25. Weirdest fact about me. Hmm... not sure I have any weird facts. My bookshelf organisation has two aspects to it that I don't think I've seen anyone else have. I group them by genre and order them by publication date from earliest to latest.

26. Things that cross my mind a lot. The fact that I should really be doing some writing instead of reading another fanfiction or watching another YouTube video that spoils most of Merlin for me. I don't know really.

27. You can win my heart by having a presence that makes me feel like I can happy stim in front of you whilst we watch something together, by accepting the fact that you will probably come second to my fandoms/obsessions a lot of the time, by allowing me to be touchy and clingy at random moments for often a long period of time, by not judging that I can't do "normal everyday things" and helping me with them and by being weird. 

28. My mum, @maestrowave​, @in3ffable-husbands​, @fandom-0bsession​ and everyone else in my active group chats on Instagram, @britpop-bowie​, @esperata​ and some other people.

29. I don't know what I'm most scared of. 

30. I think I'm mostly happy. I have great friends, my education is probably headed in a direction that will allow me to progress into an industry I've wanted to work in since I was 9 and in two years' time I will hopefully be at uni and able to experiment with my transition without worrying about what my parents think.

[unfortunateleigh20]

november 14

Hi! I’ve been gone for a long time, and I’ve been very stressed and overwhelmed so I haven’t had a chance to post any updates.

My school had about 50 COVID-19 cases, and as a result, decided to make all classes online. We were supposed to return home on November 24th to continue classes virtually until the end of the semester (somewhere around mid-December). However, since it was confirmed that we would not have any in-person classes for the remainder of the semester, many people decided to return home early. I’m one of those people.

I think I came home around November _, which was pretty early; many didn’t come home until the following weekend. But I only live an hour away from my school, so I decided to it wasn’t necessary to wait another week.

Things have been both good and bad since coming home: I’m happy to be home, but my relationship with my schoolwork has become kind of rocky. I cannot do work at home---I couldn’t in high school, and I certainly can’t now. For obvious reasons, this has become a problem now. I don’t have a place to study, I don’t have a consistent place to do work, my house is small so it’s basically impossible to get peace and quiet, and I already struggle with motivation and focusing to begin with. In short, it has not been going very well.

Almost immediately after coming home, I decided I was going to completely re-do my bedroom. It has been in its current state for a very long time---I’ve only changed/painted it twice in my life: once when I was much younger and the wall-colors and theme matched my personality (or what I thought my personality should be), and the second time when I repainted the walls blue and brown to more-so fit with how I felt as a teenager. Now that I’m in college---a completely new chapter in my life---I am aching to re-do it.

I’ve got a mattress (it’s a twin, my older one was a full, I believe), and I’m doing something more creative with my bed frame. I’m repainting the walls a light grey, with an accent wall that will likely be a dark green (possibly blue). I’m putting shelves up because I’ve never had any, and I’m hoping to get a new bookshelf because mine is ancient, and I have no clue how it hasn’t collapsed in on itself the moment I put books on it. (It’s been going strong in its current condition for at least five years!) I’m hoping to create more of a study space that will better promote studying and learning. I’ve always struggled in school with focus, and it because wildly apparent at the end of last year that it is unbelievably worse when I’m doing school from home. So now that I’m back in the same situation, I am aspiring to make it a little easier.

Let’s hope this works. ( ╥︠ 𝆒 ︡╥)

Anyway, my classes are going okay for the most part. I really need to figure out what I’m doing for my final (I’m going to write a short story), but so far I’ve been unsuccessful with ideas. My professors are going really easy on us during what they keep calling “this transition period,” which is really nice, and has been a great deal of help. I think I just can’t think when I’m at home.

But that’s it. That’s basically all that’s happened lately. Thanks for tuning in. :)

[anachronisims]

my potential culprits:

A list for my own edification, not pointing fingers or saying don’t use these things - just trying to identify the ways in which I’ve made the game behave not as intended most egregiously.

- Adding a multi-PT hack + multi-ideal plantsim hacks mid-game.  It is clear from my backups that, if nothing else, this is what created 12 unknown sim files in the neighborhood package (8 PT and 4 IP) and several unknown relationship ties.  I don’t know for sure that I had already installed a multi-PT mod at the beginning of Meraki, but if I did, I certainly didn’t keep any piece of it around, and that’s apparently a Very Bad Thing to Do, even if you haven’t had any abductions.  In the process of actually recreating fresh Meraki, I’m coming to suspect this less.  The empty unknown sims spawn in the neighborhood package as soon as a lot is placed in a neighborhood that has access to a downloads folder that contains multi-PT/multi-IP hacks, as far as I can tell.  If I had a previous one, then, it would stand to reason that I would have had some preexisting mystery unknowns, but I don’t.  So.  That’s weird.  

- Using CH’s updated Community Time mod without testingcheats on.  Crammyboy’s original version required testingcheats but CH’s didn’t mention it, so I’d turned it off. Next time around I’ll have it on in userstartup, just to be safe and also get better logs of what’s going wrong.

- Using CH’s updated Community Time mod + Walk to Lot instead of Taxi,  Again, on Cboy’s original, this wouldn’t work at all, and CH’s update was supposed to be a fix for this.  It seems to have been working seamlessly and I really appreciate not having to use telephones/see the taxi, but who knows.  In an abundance of caution, back to the taxis.

- Using CH’s updated Community Time mod + sending preggos to community lots without also using CH’s pregnancy controller.  CH says this is safe to do, that the pregnancy will just be paused, unlike with Cboy’s version, where it was allegedly very dangerous to do. It hurts to lose this newfound boon, but, abundance of caution... it must be so.  Preggos will have to stay home on their rotations in New Meraki.

- Pikiwi’s Mood Swing + Mid Life Crisis mod, specifically, the Mid Life Crisis portion.  At one point I removed it because it seemed like it was happening way too frequently, but that was Bad so I immediately rolled back, then modified the package so the odds would be a lot lower (basically nil).  Nonetheless, by the time of the BFBVFS, half the adults in Meraki had a LTW to grow up but I could not find any record of at least some of them actually starting a midlife crisis.  It’s not worth it to me to keep in the pregnancy mood swings, just in case there is something else wrong with the way midlife crises are programmed even if I have the odds zeroed out.  In recent gameplay in the past week, several Sims have started getting thought bubbles of the midlife crisis symbol - again, regardless of whether I had a record of them starting a midlife crisis.  Meanwhile, I had never seen the symbol before even though there were legitimate midlife crises going since late December.

- Fucking around too much with graphics?  Possibly?  Insofar as texture-related crashes occurred mid-save during lot transitions, this might have created some snowballing crashing problems.  New Meraki is starting with some lower settings than Meraki Classic, so this ought to be mitigated from the start.

- Screwing up tuning attempts on Sun&Moon food sources.  I don’t want to talk about it.  All I know is the number of food points that showed up in the fridge when a deer carcass stocked post-tuning was exactly the same as before.  Going to redownload fresh copies of all the shit I touched, just to be safe.

[vyraxhaalas]

Hello, my old Tumblr blog. Haven’t used you in a while. But Twitter is getting increasingly difficult to look at with the way my mental state’s been lately, and I want to write about something that I definitely would not be able to fit within 280 characters.

I’m quiet and Tired™ almost all the time anyway, so I don’t know how obvious it’s been, but something pretty traumatic happened to me in November. I’m still getting hit with aftershocks and probably will be for a while.

The gist: I was in my first car accident in November, it affected me deeply, and things haven’t yet been sorted out.

I don’t expect anyone to read the ten-thousand-character write-up I spent this morning getting out of my head, but if you want to, here it is:

So.

It's mid-November. Daylight hours are short now, so I've been habitually leaving work as early as possible so I can avoid rush-hour freeway traffic in the dark. But I can't do that today. A bunch of work has gotten piled up—I don't know how; other people were supposed to be handling some of the stuff, but it didn't get handled—and it needs to get done today. So I stay an hour overtime to make sure we meet our deadlines. It's dark when I leave, and it's started to rain. This will be the first night this year, actually, in which I’ve had to drive home in the dark.

My usual route home involves getting on I-405 and then almost immediately getting off it again to get onto WA-520. Soon after my lane joins WA-520, it turns into an HOV lane. I'm a single driver; I need to get out of the lane. And I don't have very long to do it before the HOV lane starts and I could be fined for being in it.

Changing lanes is the worst part of driving. Doing it in the dark, in the rain, during rush hour, and on a freeway is about the worst it gets. I turn on my blinker before I even move to leave my lane, and I leave it on while I check and double-check and triple-check that the lane I'm trying to get into is clear. It looks clear. I start to change lanes. I take half a second to check my blind spot one last time as I make the transition. I look back out in front of me and realize traffic is suddenly at a dead stop. I slam on my brakes. I am not fast enough.

At 5:52 p.m. on November 19, 2019, I lose the ability to say I'm a driver who's never been involved in a car accident as the front of my '05 Celica—my baby, my life-blood—slams into the back of a 2019 Volkswagen Atlas.

It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me. The Atlas makes it to the shoulder. My car won't move. It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me and my car will not move. I stumble through a 911 call, and then I just have to sit there in the middle of a freeway and hope I don't end up causing more accidents behind me, which could potentially involve someone rear-ending me.

Every moment feels like an eternity, so I don't know how long it actually took for the highway truck to show up to assist. All I remember, really, is how I didn't have power steering anymore and how crushing it felt that my car needed to be pushed off the road and how scared I was of how much damage it would take for the engine to be knocked out like it was.

The police report says the officer arrived at 6:10 p.m., less than twenty minutes after the collision. I'm not sure I believe it. The officer arrives, and she's decent enough as she explains that I'm by default at fault in this case and that I'm getting served with a ticket. It's hard to tell if the tiny bit of sympathy was real or just a practiced response to dealing with a woman who's clearly shaken and has obviously been crying, but I appreciate it. I don't appreciate that the law says someone must be ticketed. I'm notorious for bothering family members by leaving “too much” space between me and the vehicle in front of me, so despite the officer's gentle delivery, getting a ticket for “following too close” still feels like a kick in the teeth on top of the evisceration that is the knowledge of the state of my car.

Since I don't have a dashcam to figure out what actually went wrong and I drive a Hot Wheels car that you would look at and guess is never driven below the speed limit, I assume everyone else involved—the officer, the other driver, everyone who had to deal with my dead car blocking a freeway lane for a few minutes—believes that I'm a reckless idiot.

The officer calls a tow truck for me, and soon she and the Atlas are gone. It's just me then, sitting in my dead car on the shoulder of WA-520 while other cars zip by at freeway speeds less then ten feet away. I fill the time by being on the phone with family members who were probably five or ten minutes away half an hour ago, but now I won't be home until sometime around 8:00. The tow-truck guy is really pleasant, though. I appreciate that (and how he tries to give me a discount for, I guess, also being pleasant to deal with; his boss doesn't allow it, but it was still a nice gesture), so I make sure to give him a big tip. He says I bought him dinner, and I hope I did.

I take the next day off work, both because I'm still rattled as hell and because I need to get my car on the path to being drivable again. I send pictures to my insurance, and they estimate at around $3,000, which is fine, because I have collision insurance. My cost will only be my max deductible of $1,000, and then my car will be fixed, and everything will be okay again. I have a phone conversation with a guy from my insurance who gets blindsided by how much of my claim I've already handled, reading off parts of his script that involve things I already did and then laughing and apologizing as he realizes that. He says that he hears about accidents of the sort I described happening all the time and agrees it's unfortunate but unavoidable that I was declared at fault.

I'm feeling a little bit better about things at this point. The view to having my car back seems clear. I just need to find a trustworthy collision-repair shop. I get a recommendation from my mechanic, and we get my car dropped off with the recommended shop. They say they have a backlog and won't be able to start until the end of December, but I'd rather wait than get a bad repair, so that's fine. They also say that they might be able to start taking a look at it earlier if some time opens up before then.

Around 10:00 a.m. on December 17 (which, funnily enough, is the third Tuesday of the month, just like the day of the accident), I pull out my phone while I'm at work. I don't even remember why at this point. I'm distracted away from whatever I was going to do by a notification that I have a missed called from my insurance. I think, ��Oh, maybe the shop has been able to get started earlier than expected.” I get up from my desk and get into one of the noise-insulated booths strewn around the office that people can use to make phone calls. As I open up my missed calls, I see that the caller ID is not listed as just the name of my insurance, as it was on the notification. It's listed as “State Farm Total Loss.”

So now my mental state is completely shot. While I'm at work. At 10:00 a.m. I have to play phone tag and try very hard not to cry throughout my work day. At the end of that day, all I know is that State Farm will pay out about $5,000, but the total repair estimate is now “over $10,000.” I don't have any idea by how much, so I spend most of my day being terrified that it'll be not just “over” $10,000 but way over. I'm amazed I didn't go cry in a bathroom for fifteen minutes. (Instead I did that in the driver's seat of the truck I'm borrowing from a family member immediately after parking in the driveway at home.)

I call the repair shop after I manage to stop crying and get out of the truck. The final estimate is around $11,000. I tell them to go ahead with repairs. I think about how lucky I am that I have the ability to drop about $6,000 on car repairs. I think about how guilty I feel about how “privileged” I am to be able to drop $6,000 on car repairs. I remember how I was told soon after the accident by family members and a guy at the repair shop that I probably would have avoided the accident entirely had I reacted half a second faster, and I think about how bitter that tastes.

Things seem settled once again until I open some mail on the last day of my holiday break and discover that when a car is declared totaled by insurance, the state of Washington treats the car as if it's been destroyed, regardless of whether you repair it or not. Not only has my car's registration been canceled but so has its title. I'll have to redo the entire process of titling and registering my car before I can drive it again. It would have been nice if State Farm had warned me this was coming. I'm so tired.

On top of it all, it feels stupid to be so attached to a car, as if by virtue of it being an inanimate object I'm not “allowed” to be as attached to it as people get to a beloved longtime pet. Sometimes I feel like a bad person for wanting to drive a car at all, because of all the bad things associated with the American lifestyle of everyone owning and driving cars. But I'm a thousand-percent serious when I say that I was stuck crying for, like, fifteen minutes this morning, nearly two months after the accident, just because I was looking over the paperwork associated with things I still need to handle in regards to getting my car back.

Having to read the words “total loss” again. Know that my car currently is illegal to drive even if it were repaired. “Please see the enclosed notice of options available to you regarding the Insurance Destroyed Vehicle.” Looking at my car's title and thinking about having to write “TOTALED” along with the “date of loss” across it before I “surrender” it for “destruction.”

I feel stupid even posting this, because I expect people to read it and go “That's all? It's just a car. And you're wasting money fixing it—money you're lucky to have when a lot of people don't.”

But I've had this car nearly half my life. It saw me through the hardest times I've ever had. It is freedom, autonomy, escape mechanism, comfort zone. I've had breakdowns in grocery-store parking lots in this car. It's, like, a third of who am I. I feel like part of my soul has been missing since the evening of November 19, 2019, and I have been constantly two negative thoughts away from crying since then. I’m able to drive the stretch of road the accident occurred on, but rarely without at least feeling the urge to tear up. Hell, I can’t even drive the truck I’m borrowing without the experience being depressing simply because it’s not my car.

I don’t know how to end this off, because there’s no pretty pink bow to wrap it all up in yet. Things seem like they’ll turn out okay in the end, but it’s not the end yet, so who knows. I’ll just have to get through it, whatever happens. So, there you go, I guess. That's what's been going on with me lately.

[dream-easy]

Lindsay’s Complimentary Life Update

Hello!!! So my time spent on here has been dwindling down over the past few months for a few different reasons. The beginning of this year did not treat me very well, and I hit a very rough patch in February that sent me to a pretty bad place mentally.

 For those who don’t know, I just graduated in December and I didn’t really have a specific plan set for myself aside from the fact that I knew I had a dream company that I desperately wanted to work for, but knew it was difficult to get hired into. Around the same time of graduation, I also fell hard for someone I thought had fallen for me as well. At the end of January basically everything went downhill within a week. I got turned down from my dream company in their Denver office, one of my best friends moved states away, and I got my heart absolutely broken in a way I wasn’t prepared for.  Not to mention, I had also tried applying for a position with my dream company in their Boston office, and didn’t get a response after my first interview. I felt extremely lost and depressed and ultimately stuck in a place I didn’t want to be. Two weeks had passed since my first interview with Boston. Valentine’s Day marked the very last day I spoke with the girl I was broken over and things were not feeling great. I needed something to latch onto to keep me grounded, and I got exactly that the following day. I heard back from Boston and scheduled a second interview. Between then and the end of March was an absolute whirlwind. My mental health still wasn’t in great shape but I could feel myself healing from the heartbreak and getting more confident about my interviews. After the fourth interview, they asked to meet me in person in Boston. So I bought myself a plane ticket and made my way there and did something right because they called me a few days later with a “you’re hired!”. Which I’m still having trouble recognizing; I’m so grateful and I don’t take it for granted at all, but landing a job with my one, single dream company just three months after graduating is difficult to fathom.

I got the news about my hire towards the end of March, and had about three weeks to find a place to live and figure out my moving situation, as I’d be starting the new job in mid-April.  So I packed up my whole life in Ohio/Michigan and made the big move to Massachusetts.  Leaving the place you’ve called home your entire life isn’t easy by any means, and I miss all of my friends and my favorite restaurants and the places that hold memories for me.  But I’ve never felt connected to my hometown and I’ve been wanting to relocate to a larger city for a few years now, and this new job was genuinely the perfect opportunity for me to finally take that leap.  Starting fresh in a new city isn’t easy either though.  I didn’t know a single person here.  The place I moved into was filled with random roommates I met on Facebook.  Driving here sucked (still does).  I wasn’t familiar with any of the areas and it hit me pretty hard just how much I was going to miss the comfort of “home”.  My first main goal after moving was to make one single friend before June.  I wanted someone that I could enjoy summer with; preferably someone queer so I had someone to celebrate pride with.  So where do you start when trying to meet people?  Social media.  Social media has always been huge for me and it’s connected me to so many amazing human beings.  I began following locals on Instagram, one in particular who is a positivity and queer activist in Boston.  She followed me back, and I remember sending her a message just asking for advice on how to meet people and make friends.  And she recommended Bumble, which I had tried using in the past and wasn’t entirely impressed by it.  But I had nothing else going for me, so I downloaded it.  Mostly for Bumble BFF, but I started to use the dating portion again as well to try and figure out if I was ready to try dating again, or if I still needed time to heal.  

Long story short, Bumble BFF made my transition here so much easier.  In May, I connected with one person named Izzy, who I quickly became close with.  She became my road trip buddy and we got tattoos together after knowing each other for less than a month.  She was also queer, which meant that I also had someone to celebrate pride with, so my main goal of making one friend was successful.  It turned out that both Izzy and I had connected with another person on BFF named Shannon.  We all met in person at a pride event and the rest was such smooth sailing.  We connected so easily, and Shan introduced Izzy and I to a friend she had also made on BFF.  I got to celebrate my very first big city pride with a group of amazing people who have become very quick, amazing, and supportive friends.  This group of friends has kept me sane and so, so busy this summer and I’m so extremely grateful and honestly so blessed to have them in my life.  If I hadn’t met them at the time that I did, I’m afraid that my mental health would have started spiraling downwards again.  I wanted a community so badly when I moved here, and that’s exactly what I found through BFF.  

Just after pride, I came to a point where I felt ready to try dating again.  I was still hurt over everything that had happened earlier in the year, but I was no longer crying over her, and I could think about our time together without getting sad.  So I downloaded Tinder because what else is a queer introvert to do in a new city?  Dating apps have always sucked and it’s damn near impossible to connect with people on them, let alone find people that are actually looking for a relationship.  After some failed attempts, I hit a random low one night.  When things initially ended between me and the girl, I thought a lot about how I would never meet anyone as good as her ever again.  Which is stereotypical to think, but it’s genuinely something I was concerned about.  It’s extremely difficult for me to find people that don’t drain me and connect with me well enough for feelings to form.  Feelings are hard.  I’ve only ever truly fallen for two people, and that night those thoughts of never meeting someone as perfect for me as her started to creep back in.  And then, much like what happened the day after Valentine’s Day, I matched with a girl on Tinder the morning after those thoughts sunk in.  Fast-forwarding to now, we’ve been on three official dates, are spending two nights together this week, and already have a kayaking trip planned for later this month.  We’ve already established what we’re both looking for and I feel really good about things.  And I’m really happy.  Like..really happy.  

On top of all of this, my dream company is absolutely living up to the expectations I had set for it.  The company values are everything I could have asked for.  I’m not afraid to be myself in the office.  My coworkers, team and managers are all fantastic people and I honestly enjoy working with them.  Our Boston office celebrated pride and marched in the parade this year.  We have an LGBTQ+ club that meets monthly in order to continue celebrating pride year-round and creating a safe space for all queer employees.  Things are going so well, you guys.  It’s actually kinda overwhelming and I feel like I haven’t really taken the proper time to sit back and really think about how much my life has changed over these past three months.  It’s wild.  I’m the same person, but I’ve grown so much and I’ve accomplished so many of the goals I had for myself and my life after school.  Life isn’t perfect by any means, and I do miss parts of my life back in Ohio/Michigan.  I miss my friends still, and it’s weird not being able to take a quick hour drive back to my parent’s house.  It doesn’t feel like I’m states away; sometimes it feels like I’m just on a long-term vacation here.  I’m almost numb to it.  But I’m adjusting really well, and I’ve had a few really eye-opening moments that have made me realize just how amazing being alive can be.  If you asked me at the beginning of this year where I’d be right now, my answer would have been still in Michigan looking for a job that would pay me better than Home Depot.  I could have never predicted that I’d snag a role with my dream company, relocate to an amazing city, gain a great group of friends that enjoy road trips and travel as much as me, open myself up to dating someone, and find my own way without the help of others.  The truth is that you really never know what’s around the corner.  Just don’t be afraid to keep trying and pursuing the things that make you happy.  If you have a dream, don’t give it up.  Approach it from different angles.  Even if things are not going great.  Even if you’re not doing well.  Even if you haven’t been doing well for a long time.  Things are not permanent.  They’re constantly changing and sometimes you gotta go through all the rings to get there.  Words can’t explain how happy I am here.  I’m excited to go back to Ohio/Michigan soon to see people I’ve missed dearly.  But I’m also proud to start calling Boston home.  I’m conquering this city and all of New England one day at a time and I couldn’t have asked for it to happen any other way.