#next goal is to run on a rainy day

[baby-yongbok]

𝘗𝘪𝘯𝘬 + 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦

Hwang Hyunjin 𝗑 Afab!Reader

♡ Genre - Friends to Lovers

♡ CW - Explicit Sexual Content, Unprotected Sex, Nightmares, Alcohol usage by reader, Hyunjin calls reader rose as a nickname, One use of 'y/n'.

♡ Summary - Your avoidant tendencies have allowed the burn of pink and white to keep you Hyunjin at a safe distance until it all comes crashing down. Can the fire that kept you apart also be what brings you together?

♡ Word Count - 9.2k

♡ A/N - I went from not being sure if I liked this fic to being in love with it. I think that it's a very sweet fic and I loved writing it. I worked so hard on it and I'm so proud of it. The goal was for it to be 4k words.. then I almost posted it at 8k but now... yeah. I hope that you love this as much as I do!

♡ Playlist - Pink + White - Frank Ocean, Rainy Days - V, For Us - V, Beautiful Things - Benson Boone, Trajectories - Bruno Major

✧ Masterlist ✧

When you were six years old you punched a boy in the face on the playground. That was the first time that you ever felt the burn of genuine fear.

Your mom along with the many others came swirling around them. When your mother asked you what happened you cried. You clung to her running over to you and the crying brunette boy on the playground with a mix of emotions and explained the best you could through your tears that you didn’t like that he was chasing you, when you agreed to play tag you thought that you’d be the chaser not the one being chased.

That was the day that you learned two things about yourself, you have a habit of acting impulsively when you’re scared and you don’t like being chased. It's suffocating.

As you got older your friends described you as the avoidant type, especially in relationships. You developed a reputation for being an ice queen in your Sophomore year of university which led to you being one of the most sought after girls on campus. 

You’ve lost friends because of this. Their boyfriends saw getting close to them as a gateway to meeting you. Many guys took dating you as a challenge with an end prize of overnight popularity. Unfortunately, some of your closest relationships have been destroyed because of it. You learned not to be sad about it, you’ve come to terms with it, this is just the way that it goes. Of course your other friends were all important to you but you always told yourself that you’re alright with losing them as long as you have your best friend by your side. 

“More roses? Are you in love or something?” You weaved through the cluttered art studio that Hyunjin has claimed as his own. It’s on the dead side of campus on the second floor of a building that was abandoned last year. Your best friend refused to let the studio go when it was shut down, he says that it houses some of his fondest memories. 

“Always in love, never loved back.” He quips, eyes still trained on the canvas. “You’re early.”

You jump up onto one of the few clear desks in the room, right behind his easel. “Chemistry ended early.” Hyunjin stands straight, eyeing his canvas for a second before looking over at you. He knows that you’re skipping class. Your last hook-up is in that class and you're trying to avoid his attempt at getting you in his bed again. If you’re being honest, the decision to sleep with him was impulsive. You blame the beer, all eight of them.

“I thought that we could go to the exhibition early.” He starts another brush stroke and silence swallows you both. “I’m excited about it and if I’m being honest I just wanna spend time with you. I’ve barely seen you for the past three days.”

Hyunjin’s steady hand wavers and he thanks his lucky stars that you didn’t see it. “Aw she misses me. She loves me so much.” The sound of your feet hitting the ground as you jump off of the desk echoes through the dusty room of stacked chairs and forgotten storage items. 

Hyunjin stands and dips the paint brush covered in bright pink in the cup of water next to him. “You could’ve come to my place ya know.” You grab your stuff, swinging your bag onto your shoulder. 

“Your brother is there, you know how he gets.” You scrunch your face at the thought of Hyunjin’s step brother, Jeongin. The two of you get along perfectly, almost as well as you and Hyunjin until Jeongin starts flirting. He confessed to you on New Years and you’ve been avoiding him ever since. He’s too sweet for you, you’d hate to hurt him. “I’m gonna go change, I’ll meet you by your car.”

“You brought a costume change for an art exhibit?” He asks as he starts cleaning his space.

“Of course, I need to look like art too.” You smile at him but he doesn’t smile back, he rolls his eyes and turns his attention back to the mess of paints and rags on the desk in front of him. He waits until he hears the door open and close behind you to finally let the corners of his mouth turn up. He chuckles to himself quietly while his mind comes up with responses that he’d never dare to utter out loud.

“This one looks like you, rose.” The year old nickname slips off of Hyunjin’s tongue like silk. You’ve never fully understood how the name stuck. You figured that it’s because roses are his favorite flower and he thought it was cute. You’ve never asked for its origin but you don’t mind the name. It’s sweet.

You turn to view the series of pink, white and green dots making up a bouquet of roses on the framed canvas in front of Hyunjin. He studies it with smiling eyes though the neutral look on his face could fool those who haven’t experienced him like you have.

“It’s pretty.” You mumble as you lean your head on his shoulder. You wrap your arm around his and the sleeve of the brown oversized flannel shirt that you picked out a year ago rides up his forearm a bit, he blames the chills running up his spine on the breeze against the newly exposed skin. 

“I knew I’d see you here.” The voice of a woman next to Hyunjin startles you a bit. You stand straight and watch as Hyunjin smiles towards her. He’s cursing her in his head for interrupting the moment between the two of you but he learned a long time ago to just live in the moment when it comes to you.

“Of course, I had to see this exhibition.” He shakes her hand and you chalk it up to her being someone important though she doesn’t look much older than either of you. “You put it together beautifully.”

Ah, she owns the gallery. “Oh, please, it’s nothing. I just hope that you’re enjoying it. I actually thought about you when I put this piece up.” She motions towards the art in front of the two of you. The piece that Hyunjin says resembles you. “It looks like something you’d design. I’m still desperate to organize a local exhibition for you, ya know.”

Hyunjin laughs but it's stiff and polite. He’s being shy. He’s a very cautious person but he reaches a whole new level when it comes to his art. “I’m not quite on that level yet.”

“I disagree but I won’t bother you about it until you graduate. This is your final semester, right?” You can see her eyes smiling just like Hyunjin’s were a second ago as she checks him out. She’s shameless in her actions, the glint in her eyes is far from professional. 

“Yes, just three months to go.” She nods, dragging her gaze up from his lips with a smile. 

“Call me when you graduate, I’d love to have you working with us.” She pulls a business card out of her pocket and flashes one last smile before waving a reluctant goodbye towards your best friend. 

Silence settles between the two of you for just a couple of seconds before you break it. “She wants to fuck you so badly that she didn’t even look at me.” Hyunjin scoffs at your whispered words as he slips the card into his pocket. “Don’t tell me that you didn’t notice. How old is she anyway? She looks a bit young to be in charge of this place.”

“Her father owns it.” He mumbles as he grabs your wrist and leads you over to the next piece of art. 

“Oh, of course. She probably thought I was your girlfriend, ya know. She’s rude as hell for not even asking or looking at me. I know she saw me here, she’s clearly -” You’re pulled into Hyunjin’s side before you can finish your sentence. The sudden action cuts you off with a heavy thump of your heart and that painfully familiar burn rising in your chest. 

“Look at this one.” Your eyes are on him but his are on the art. “This one looks like you too.” You pull your gaze away from him to view the piece. The thumping in your chest doubles once your gaze meets your own. It’s a mirror with pink and white abstract designs floating around and over the glass. The paint is so messy yet strategic. It leaves just enough room for your reflection. 

“It’s messy yet elegant, don’t you think? You can’t help but to stare..” He’s visibly smiling now. The corners of his mouth turn up as he studies the art in front of him. As he studies you. “This one might be my favorite. It’ll be hard to beat it.”

“I don’t like it.” You mutter quickly, pulling away from Hyunjin and turning towards the next piece. You try your best to steady your breathing. You will your heart to calm down so that you can take a complete breath but it’s betraying you. “I’m gonna use the bathroom.” 

You’re walking away before Hyunjin can reply. He watches you with that smile in his eyes as you disappear around the corner. He knew that what he pulled would be a risk but it was one that he was willing to take. He doesn’t call you beautiful nearly as much as he should or as much as he really wants to. 

In the bathroom you’re slumped against the door of a stall while you try to catch your breath. You don’t like how Hyunjin’s words made that white hot burn in your chest kick up. You don’t like the way that his eyes being on you made you feel like you were the only two in the entire gallery. It’s suffocating. 

When you step out of the stall your fingers are busy on your phone screen. You find your friend Isa’s number quickly and take a sigh of relief when she answers on the third ring. You bypass reciprocating her kind greeting and get right to the point. 

“Get-together at yours tomorrow?”

You’re standing in the middle of the Pink and White art exhibition. Other viewers jumble together along the walls of the gallery and crowd the pieces. You can’t see anything but their blurred faces decorating the white walls. There’s a slow yet heavy beating in your ears but you’re comfortable. You’re alone in the middle of it all, watching everyone from a pleasant distance as you turn to study them all as if they’re the art on the walls.

 The beating in your ears skips as you turn and come face to face with Hyunjin. He’s standing in front of you wearing that brown hat that you love and the oversized flannel that he bought just to share with you.

 Suddenly the others in the room are quiet. All eyes are on you but Hyunjin’s gaze is the most piercing. His brown eyes are smiling at you with a softness that makes the flame in your chest burn brighter. 

“Why are you staring at me like that?” You look around at everyone else but they’ve vanished along with the art on the walls. The beating in your ears picks up, it’s deafening but Hyunjin’s voice can be heard loud and clear over the noise.  

“I like staring at you.” He takes a step towards you but you take two back. He frowns and steps forward again. You repeat the process until your back is against the wall. “Why do you do that?” 

“I’m not doing anything.” You swallow hard as you try to push him away but he’s stronger than you. As strong as stone caging you against the stark white wall. “I can’t breathe.” You’re pushing as hard as you can but it’s no use. You’re stuck under him.

“Why do you do this?” He’s still staring down at you, a burning gaze setting your skin ablaze. “Why do you keep running?” The beating in your ears drowns out all sensible thoughts. You can feel your veins swelling with fear and the blinding white burning in your chest puffs up with the crushing pressure of having him so close. Too close. 

“Back up.” You inhale the thick air, feeling dizzy. “Move.”

“Stop running.” You try to inhale but it gets stuck in your throat. You want to scream. You need to escape. You need to get out of here. 

You lift your heavy arm the best you can and pull back enough to punch Hyunjin. You aim for his face but your fist goes through him just as your lungs start to burn, you take one last look at him before the wall behind you gives out and you’re falling backwards. Hyunjin watches you, his eyes are void of that sparkling smile and guilt consumes you right before you hit the ground.

You jump up with a gasp as your eyes frantically search the room around you. Your chest rises and falls heavily and sweat beads at your hairline.

It was a dream. 

Friday is a late day for you with your last class ending at nine in the evening. Hyunjin always waits for you in the abandoned art studio, he waits for two hours just to walk you to your dorm across campus. It’s become a routine for the two of you but you told him not to wait up tonight. He was reluctant at first, he insisted on waiting for you but you were adamant about breaking your routine.

He agreed eventually but you could see the dejection in his eyes as he hugged you goodbye before your last class. He watched you walk away just like he always did but this time his heart was heavy in his chest. Did he do something wrong? 

That question haunted him throughout the day. It was loud in his head as he collected his stuff and made his way to the abandoned studio. It echoed in his ears as he tried to finish the painting of his vibrant rose that he’s added notes of dusty pale pink to. But it was the loudest when Jeongin called him to ask if he was going to the get-together at Minho’s place tonight.

He knows that you and Minho’s girlfriend Isa are close so you have to know about this, hell, you might’ve even helped plan it and you kept it from him. You’re avoiding him.

You skipped your class to head to Minho and Isa’s place. They share a small apartment right off of campus that you often use as an escape. Isa is one of the few friends that you still have from sophomore year since her boyfriend has never once tried to get in your pants. 

You sat on Isa’s bed clutching a bottle of soju that is not at all meant for one person while you laid your head in her lap. You loved being with her because there was never any pressure to fill the silence. She understands you in a way that other people just don’t. Not even Hyunjin. 

“So, he called you pretty?” You’ve been telling her everything from what happened at the art gallery to the nightmare you had last night. “And now you’re avoiding him?”

“I’m not avoiding him.” You take a swig from the glass bottle and gulp hard to rush the alcohol into your system. “I’m just being careful.”

“You’re being careful by avoiding your best friend… because he called you pretty and you had a nightmare about it?” You sit up with a groan, lifting the bottle to your mouth again with a sigh. She’s not getting it. 

“You didn’t see the way he looked at me. You didn’t feel the way he pulled me into him, his arm wrapped around my waist and he just stared at me with that smile in his eyes. You know the one that makes his eyes shine when he sees something pretty? He was looking at me like that and he told me that I looked elegant. Messy but elegant and that he couldn’t help but to stare. There was a softness in his voice, I swear, and he just wouldn’t take his eyes off of me. It’s like he was looking into me instead of at me it was… it was..”

“Sweet?” You tap the bottle in your hands with your nails. 

“Suffocating. It was too much. It made my heart skip and it made me feel hot.” 

“That usually means that you like him, ya know.” She takes the bottle from you, drinking from it a bit herself. “ You know that he’s a romantic and this isn’t the first time you’ve felt like this with him.” She hands the cold glass back to you while you think back to the other times that you’ve felt this. The latest being your birthday three months ago when Hyunjin whisked you away to the next city for a mini getaway. 

You stayed in the same hotel room and on the night of your birthday you had a bit too much to drink. He carried you up to your room since you were too out of it to walk but you weren’t too far gone to forget the way that he handled you with such gentle care.

He brushed your hair out of your face when he laid you on your bed and took your make-up off with such a tender touch that it made you want to kiss him. You almost kissed him. 

“I don’t like him like that.” You shrug and she sighs. 

“Whatever you say, ice queen.” That damned nickname makes you cringe but Minho is bursting through the door before you can rebuttal. 

“Jisung and Bin just got here, come on.” You stare at him with confused eyes and he crosses his arms as he stares back at you. “Well? Get up, you wanted to do this.”

“Do what?” You look over at Isa who’s already getting up from the bed.

“Did you not call her asking for a get-together? People are getting here so come on. I’m not hosting this by myself.” Your heart drops and you stare over at Isa who looks back at you with her own look of confusion until it all sinks in.

 “You meant for it to be just us, didn’t you?”

Hyunjin is a cautious person, anyone who knows him knows that about him. He doesn’t like when things go wrong because of him. It eats him alive until he can fix it and if he can’t he lets the anxiety consume him until a part of him dies with the memory of it all. 

His cautious nature is what prompted him to drive home after he got that call from Jeongin. It brought him right to his bedroom where he dropped his bag by the foot of his bed and laid back against the mattress with a death stare set on the dull ceiling. It stared back at him, reflecting his thoughts back to him for him to analyze. 

His brother left for the get-together as soon as he walked through the door and Hyunjin was tempted to follow him down to Seungmin’s car.

He was tempted to drop his bag and turn on his heels and come straight to you but he knew better. He knew you better than you knew yourself. If he shows up at that get-together you’ll avoid him like the plague. You’ll feel trapped by his presence and any hope that he has of fixing this situation will die right in front of his eyes. 

His cautious nature is what’s keeping him on his bed. It’s what’s grounding him to this spot and sating the burning desire to chase you. The problem is that the fire in his chest is bigger than he can handle. He’s seen how you treat the men you want to avoid on campus, he’s seen you take the long way home just to avoid a conversation and the thought of you doing that to him makes him wilt. He can’t let that happen. 

His feet are carrying him across his room before he can even fully process it. He opens his closet and pulls out the brown flannel along with his brown beanie. They’ve become comfort items for the both of you at this point, especially the flannel. It feels like a thread connecting you to him and him to you. He needs to save that connection.

 He sloppily throws on the items while he checks the clock. He’s nearly two hours late but there’s still time. 

Hyunjin has never gotten a speeding ticket but he was nearly positive that he’d get one tonight. He made it to Minho’s place in record time but he’s panting when he knocks on the door like he’s ran there. His heart is hammering when Isa answers the door and the look on her face when she takes him in only makes his heart beat faster. 

She forces a smile, inviting him in and telling him where everything is but he already knows all of that and she knows that he does. “She doesn’t want to see me does she?” Isa sighs, giving him a look that answers each and every one of his questions all at once. 

“Thanks for letting me in.” He walks past her with a nervous huff, making his way into the small party and searching for you immediately. He finds Changbin and Chan before he can find you and the two quickly drag him into a conversation about gods know what while wedging a glass bottle of mystery liquid into his fist. 

Hyunjin’s eyes wander in an attempt to find you as he ignores his friends' conversation. Luckily it didn’t take long for the sound of your loud laughter to echo through the room. His eyes were on you in an instant once he heard it. You’re right in front of him sitting in the truth or dare circle with a can of something strong in your hand. You’re always the loudest in the room but right now you seem to be the drunkest too, you shouldn’t be playing that game you’ll do something reckless.  

He wants to go over and pull you up, he wants to tell you that you’re going home and that you need to sober up. He wants to get you to talk to him but he ignores everything he wants and watches you instead. He stays cautious and keeps his distance. 

“Y/n, truth or dare.” One of your few girl friends, Harvey asks from across the circle. You answer ‘dare’ with a wide smile, it’s no surprise, you always pick that. The raven haired girl looks over to Mingi for assistance since she’s known for picking terrible dares. After a couple seconds of deliberation the blonde perks up with an idea.

“I dare you to kiss whoever this bottle lands on.” Mingi dares with a nonchalant smile and you shrug, the alcohol in your system is surely boosting your confidence but it’s not like you’ll remember any of this tomorrow so who cares, right?

He spins the bottle in the middle of the circle and everyone watches with quiet anticipation as it lands on the copper haired boy sitting three people away from you. It’s Jeongin. 

He stops in the middle of sipping from his cup and flashes you a small innocent smile but what you return to him is nothing less than a look of raw seduction. You’re on your feet in an instant, making your way over to him with low and hazy eyes. You straddle him swiftly, getting comfortable in his lap like you’ve done this a hundred times. 

“You sure about this, noona?” His hands rest on your thighs, he brushes his thumbs over the bareskin and you can feel a shiver down your spine. It almost reminds you of how Hyunjin touched you on your birthday. 

“Do you not wanna kiss me?” You tease him with a slight slur to your voice. You know he wants to kiss you, everyone does except for Hyunjin, right? 

Just as that thought passes your eyes flicker up and meet those of the very man on your mind. He’s watching you with an angry gaze as he fists the neck of the glass bottle in his hand. Your mouth goes dry as you take him in, when did he get here? You feel stuck staring at him, everything around you is suddenly muted and the people around you disappear. It’s only you and Hyunjin.

Both of your hearts are pounding in your chest. 

Both of you feel like you can’t breathe. 

Both of you are about to do something that you shouldn’t.

“Kiss her already!” Ryujin instigates from across the circle and you snap out of your haze and blink down at Jeongin. You both share a smile, one more genuine than the other, before he’s leaning into you. His lips just barely brush against yours before you’re interrupted.

A firm grip on your shoulder startles you and the man under you. You both look up to meet the eyes of the angry Hyunjin above you.“Get up.” He practically growls with a slight tug on your arm. You stare up at him with glassy eyes though you are feeling a bit more sober now. “Get. Up.” 

You’re being pulled up before you can process it. Your feet fight to keep up with him as you stumble towards the bedroom he’s leading you to. You can feel all eyes on you, you can feel the room getting smaller once he locks the bedroom door behind the two of you and pulls his flannel off to drape over your shoulders, something that he does to comfort you. 

“What the fuck?” That’s all you can manage to get out of your mouth as you stare over at him. He stares back with his arms crossed and his chest rising and falling with what you perceive as anger but he would describe as anxiety. Pure fear. 

“Do you understand what you were about to do?” Hyunjin tries to be mindful of his tone. He tries to limit the waver of his words and calm the frantic thoughts in his head. He’s trying. “Why would you kiss him?”

“I didn’t.” The alcohol in your system takes over again and you thank the ridiculous amount of soju you’ve consumed for coming to the rescue. You tug on the flannel resting over your shoulders, pretending that its warmth would protect you from the buzzing in your head and inevitable burning in your chest.

“You would’ve if I didn’t stop you. What happened to you not being into Jeongin? What happened to you not wanting to hurt him?”

You groan, stomping your foot like a child being scolded by their guardian. Like the little girl who punched the brunette boy in the face for chasing her. “Why don’t you mind your business?”

Hyunjin scoffs, his anxiety grows in his chest and he takes a step back. “You are my business.” 

It’s silent for one, two, three heartbeats before the dizzying emotions burning in your chest fill in the silence for you. “Well maybe I shouldn’t be. You’re way too attached to me.”

Hyunjin feels frozen even though he’s stepping back from you. He’s creating more space between the two of you just like you seem to be doing. What do you mean by that? You’re rambling on before he can ask. “You do all of these things that make me feel like I can’t breathe. You call me pretty and you touch me softly and you hold me close and… and you just make me feel hot. You suffocate me.”

Hyunjin whispers through the bubbles forming in his throat. He’s gentle with the way he speaks, he is a cautious person after all, especially when it comes to his art. “Is this about what I said at the gallery?”

His question goes in one ear and right out the other. Your brain formulates words quicker than you can process them, creating a violent episode of word vomit that threatens to spill over your lips and onto the carpet but you swallow hard and condense it all into one simple yet seering sentence. “You keep making my heart race, it’s not fair. You need to go, just go.”

Hyunjin’s blood runs cold and his temples throb like you’ve hit him. Like you’ve punched him in the face. Anxiety bubbles in his veins and swells behind his eyes. It’s his turn to ramble, the word vomit seems to be contagious. 

“I’m not leaving.” His gaze is frantic, cautious, scared. “I am too attached, you’re right. I have been for a while. I’ve loved you for a while and I tried to hide it but I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t be scared that I’ll lose my best friend if I tell her that she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

 “No, you are not confessing to me right now. Don’t you dare do that.” You pace to the left then the right in a hurried attempt to escape his words before they could reach you. He can’t be doing this right now. You needed to get out of here.

“I am. I am confessing to you. I need you to hear me say that I love you because I do and it scares me just as much as it scares you but you are the reason that it’s scaring me. Losing you is the reason that I’m afraid and I need you to tell me that that isn’t going to happen.” His voice is shaky just like your hands. He watches you like a dog being dropped off at the pound as you physically try to escape him. He knew this would happen, this is what he was afraid of. 

“Stop. Just stop it, Hyunjin. You’re doing it again, I can’t breathe when you’re this close to me.” He stares over at you from the other side of the room and you stare back at him. This doesn’t make any sense. He isn’t next to you but you still can’t breathe. It doesn’t make any sense. “I have to go - I have - just… just leave me alone.” You turn towards the bedroom door but he speaks up before you can make your escape. 

“I’m not going to chase you.” Hyunjin is unmoving. His feet are still planted to the floor like a statue as he slips his fists into his pocket. “I don’t want to push you further away but don’t you dare go home and convince yourself that I don’t care just because I let you go.” 

You listen to him over your hammering heart with your back turned to him and your unsteady gaze trained on the worn door knob. “I’m letting you go with the hope that you’ll come back. You know where to find me.” 

Your feet threaten to betray you, they try to turn you around and drive you over to him but your heart is screaming. That white flame is burning in your chest and begging you to run. Run as fast as you can and find safety, but your safety is standing behind you. It’s watching you with teary eyes that are desperate to meet yours. 

A tear slips down your cheek as you grab the doorknob and pull it with a quick twist. You follow your heart and rush out of the room with tears decorating your face and your hand over your mouth. You let the burning win again.

You rush past everyone, Isa tries to stop you and Minho even catches you for a minute but you fight him off of you and make your way to the front door. You don’t get too far before the last layer of your resolve snaps, You turn onto the next dark block and sink to the ground. Sobs rip through you as Hyunjin’s words hang in your head. He loves you. He wants you but you left him. You left everything you’ve ever wanted behind you. 

A heavier sob escapes you as the truth of it all comes crashing down. You love him too, don’t you? You’ve loved him for so long. Since your birthday and beyond that but you’ve been avoiding it. You’ve avoided your feelings just like you have everything else. You’ve punched yourself in the face, you’ve chased yourself into a corner and now you might just lose everything you have left. You might lose your best friend.

The storms over the next two days swirl the skies into mysterious clouds of pink and white as rain soaks the grass the same way that you’ve soaked your pillow for hours. You’ve opted to stay in, avoiding anything or anyone that could remind you of Friday’s catastrophe.

 You’ve debated texting Jeongin and apologizing for what you remember of the situation. You almost called Isa to spill the fears bubbling in your lungs to her so that she could help you sort through them but she can’t. This is up to you. You need to make a choice. Will you run away from the fire or towards it? 

On the other side of campus Hyunjin sits in the abandoned studio with paint stained hands and dried tears on his cheeks. He’s left his previous painting incomplete. The bright blushing rose sits across the room with the others just like it while he touches his brush to the canvas and smears a smoky mauve to the pristine white flesh. His lines are messy and uncalculated. Far from cautious. 

For a moment he considers that he was only ever careful because of you. Your lack of control over your emotions inspired him to fill in the blanks for you. Now there’s no need for caution without you.

The rain carried into Monday along with the emptiness in your chest. You’ve typed and deleted paragraphs to Hyunjin who has done the same as he sat on the studio floor.

He stayed in the dusty room until midnight each day that he was without you and you stayed up well past then. He poured himself into painting and you poured yourself onto the carpet of your dorm room. You made lists and mapped your emotions until it all started to make a bit more sense. Until the love that burned alongside your hot white fear was glowing pink in the mirror. 

You skipped your classes on Monday, your feet drove you over to the dead side of campus through the violent rain. You stood in the hallway outside of Hyunjin’s studio. The worn copper doorknob stared back at you like it knew what you were here to do. Like it was daring you to go inside. You suck in a breath as you grab the metal, you’ve never been one to back down from a dare.

The studio is empty when you walk inside. The fading warm light of the lamps that you and Hyunjin bought and snuck in illuminate the space the best that they can given the dull pink skies. Your eyes catch on the new piece sitting up on his easel. It’s dark and runny, it’s raw and it feels like it’s calling your name. 

“Hi.” Hyunjin’s voice snaps you out of your thoughts. His voice is small and surprised as he stares over at your frame clad in that famous brown flannel and sweatpants. 

“Hi.” You whisper back. He looks like a mess. Brown hat, pulled too far over his head and his hair spilling from every exit it can find. “More roses?” 

He stares passed you and over at the wilting petals on the canvas with a sad smile. “It’s like I’m in love or something.” 

Your guilt tinged heart beats a bit faster when he steps further into the room and closes the door behind him. He drops his bag next to the door and stares at the dinghy tile with his hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry. For everything, for the party and everything with your brother and for everything that I said.” 

The word vomit is back. It spilled over your lips before you could attempt to swallow it back but you’re almost thankful for it. You have no clue how you’d get your words out otherwise. “You just made me feel… I just felt..” You kick at the cracked tile as if it holds the answers you’re looking for but Hyunjin beats you to it.

“Suffocated.” His eyes are on you now, they’re low and shadowed in a longing sadness. “I’ve seen this happen a million times to other guys and I thought that I was being careful enough to avoid it.” 

“This is nothing like the other guys.” Your bag slumps off of your shoulder and you carelessly allow it to hit the floor. “Your confession just -” He cuts you off with a tight smile.

 “I know. It ruined everything.” He sighs, sad eyes examining the space between the two of you. “I ruined everything and I’m sorry for that, rose. I really am.”

“It didn't. It didn’t ruin anything, it just scared me. I felt suffocated, yes, but not by you. It was by what I felt for you. That’s why this isn’t like what happened with any of the other guys. I never wanted them. Avoiding them was easy but you… avoiding you..” Hyunjin watches your heaving chest with the caution that he thought had abandoned him. He’s quiet, allowing you time to gather your thoughts. He doesn’t want to corner you, he just wants to hear you. 

“Why do you call me that?” You whisper once your breathing has steadied. “Why did you start calling me rose?”

Suddenly he’s looking past you then down at the tile under his feet. He leans against the door behind him, a faint smile decorating his sad face. “You were wearing one in your hair on the day that I realized I love you.” He looks over to where his easel is set up. “We were sitting right there and you had a pale pink rose behind your left ear. You picked me one to match and I told you that it was my favorite flower because in that moment it was. It was beautiful but you…your beauty is hard to beat.”

Your heart is thumping in your ears, it’s a sound that you’ve grown comfortable with over the past few days. The clutter of the abandoned room almost seems to disappear as you process his words. The burning in your chest makes itself known along with the newly identified pink flame. The white walls of the studio almost seem brighter as you receive Hyunjin’s confession. You let it sink in and drown out the tension little by little. “So when you paint them…”

“I’m painting you. I’m always painting you.” The thumping is deafening but Hyunjin is clear over the noise. He has always been the only one who can cut through it all, even in your dreams. 

You can feel yourself falling just like in your nightmare only it’s forwards. You’re falling forwards as your feet carry you to him. You run. You run to him and you fall into his arms that have been desperate to catch you for months. The burn in your chest is paralyzing, it’s seering and fighting the pink flame for dominance. 

You cry into his chest, you sob as the pain of running into the fire engulfs you. It swallows you whole and you stand in it with him, you cling to him before you burn to ash and he holds you like he knows it all. He cradles the back of your head like he can feel the fire ripping your flesh apart. 

You’re flush against him, tears soaking his shoulder and burning all over until he does what no one has done before. He puts it all out. A simple kiss to the top of your head dowses the flame and reduces it to a measly spark of fear overshadowed by an uncontainable pink and white glow of love in your chest. 

You gasp at the cooling effect. Air rushes into your lungs and you can finally breathe, he’s the oxygen you needed. He’s everything you’ve needed but now you want to give your air away again. You want to give it all to him. 

You pull away from his shoulder in one swift motion, your eyes are shut tight as your lips find his and you pull him into a hard and messy kiss. The sound that escapes you both is desperate and beautiful. His lips move with yours in an uncoordinated rhythm that makes your lungs burn comfortably. They burn the way that they’re supposed to. 

Hyunjin cries into the kiss. Tears stream down his cheeks as he cradles you against him like you’d vanish if he didn’t. He drinks it all in, he allows himself to live in this moment that he’s been dying to have with you for what feels like an eternity before he reluctantly breaks the kiss. 

His eyes are still closed when he pulls away. He whispers to you, careful not to crack the shell of this delicate moment. “I thought you -” 

“I don’t want to keep running. I can’t, I need you. I can’t lose you.” Your eyes flutter open at the same time as his. He stares down at you with that smile in his eyes. That smile he has when he sees something beautiful, when he’s utterly enamored by the sight before him. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to do any of this, I only know that I want to do it with you.”

He’s quiet for a couple of seconds before a smile sneaks up on him. It fades just as quickly as it came and his eyebrows pinch together. “You want me?” You nod and the smile shows itself again. 

“I want you.” He leans back in, cupping your cheek as he kisses you hard. His body pushes against yours and you move with him as he walks backwards towards one of the few empty desks and lifts you onto it. 

His hands explore every inch of you that he can reach. He balls his fist over the baggy flannel hiding your body from him while your fingers tangle in his hair and scratch over his shoulders and up his arms.

 He breaks the kiss to run his lips over the flushed flesh of your neck, he whispers into your skin between each kiss “Tell me to stop.” He pulls at the collar of the flannel to kiss the curve of your neck. “I’ve waited so long for this, please tell me to stop. Tell me to wait.”

You push his head further into the crook of your neck as you tilt your head further to give him better access. “I don’t want you to.” He sucks a mark into the skin right below your ear and you pull his tucked in shirt from his pants with an elated moan. 

His clumsy fingers fight to unbutton the oversized flannel as yours attempt to unbutton his jeans. You reach your goal before he does and waste no time capitalizing on your victory. You dip your hand in just enough to fish his growing erection from his briefs and wrap your hand around it. 

Hyunjin moans at the stimulation, leaning his forehead against yours and squeezing his eyes shut as you stroke him slowly. “Fuck, please don’t, I wont - I can’t last.”

 You kiss his temple softly, whispering reassurance that you don’t care to have him last, you just want to have him. Once he’s centered himself again he continues his struggle to expose your body to him. The final button falls open like the curtain to a play and he stares down your scantily clad torso like an audience in awe. 

His hand moves on its own as he admires you. It dips into the waistband of your sweatpants and swipes over your clothed clit.

 Your head falls forward to rest on his shoulder with a quiet moan as he groans into the air. Your grip on his cock tightens a bit in response to the sensation and he hisses. “Please tell me I can feel you. Is it okay? Can I?” 

He doesn't want your first time to be here but he wants you. He needs you. 

Hyunjin hooks a finger into the damp gusset of your panties and pulls it to the side just enough to slip a finger into your waiting cunt. You pant in his ear, wanton moans bubble over the brim of your lips as his free hand cradles the side of your neck. “Look at me, please look at me, baby.”

 He runs his thumb over your cheek, brushing over the path of your dried tears. “So pretty, this must be a dream.” You shake your head. Speaking between moans. “Not a dream, baby.”

 He slips in another finger as you circle your palm over the head of his cock and you both moan. “Please tell me I can.” He leans his forehead against yours, his desperate eyes reflect the look in your own.

“You can. Please, I want you to.” 

“Have you ever thought about it?” He’s asking before he can process it and you’re shaking your head before he can even finish his sentence. A shy glaze washes over your desperate gaze as you watch him undress you.

 “You’re all I ever think about.” He whispers as he hooks his thumbs into the band of your pants. “You’re all I’ve wanted for the past year.” 

“I’ve loved you since my birthday.” You blurt out, vulnerable eyes peering into his. “Maybe even before that.” He runs a finger over your clothed cunt and you shudder under the touch.

“I wanted to kiss you the night of your birthday. You looked so beautiful but you were wasted. You wouldn’t have remembered. I just stared at you, I took your make-up off and I brushed the hair from your face and you stared back at me. I was just dying to kiss you. I was dying to confess.” Your hand runs slowly up his shaft and he swears that he feels electric. 

“I wanted to kiss you too.” He’s quiet, staring back at you with a smile. “That’s why I was staring”

“I kissed your forehead when you fell asleep.”  He pulls your panties down your legs, allowing them to pool at his feet with your sweatpants. “I knelt by your bed and whispered my confession to you.” 

His fingers are filling you again and you gasp while staring into his eyes. “I wanna hear it.” You whisper through a moan.

 “You want to hear my confession?” You nod, your gently fucked out gaze stares into his like your hypnotized by the moment. He scissors his finger into you, stretching you out just a bit before you’re gasping from the stretch of him replacing his fingers with his length. 

“Fuck, you’re inside of me.” Hyunjin stills with a groan. His forehead rests on your shoulder while he silently begs himself not to come undone just yet. He sucks in a breath before he recites all that he can remember. 

“You’re everything that I thought it would be to fall in love.” He whispers as he pulls back, thrusting into you slowly. “You really snuck up on me, I don’t know what I expected though.” He lifts his head to look at you as he sinks back into you. “You became my world so quickly. So effortlessly.”

 You cup his face with both of your hands as you bite back your moans. You want to hear him loud and clear. You want to remember every word. “I should’ve known that I’d fall in love when I first met you.” He picks up the pace, falling into a messy rhythm that’s accompanied by a fit of moans and grunts. 

He struggles to keep his eyes on you. They flutter shut with each thrust as he feels himself float closer and closer to his climax. “Baby, I won’t last.” You wrap your arms around his neck and one of his wraps around your waist while the other rests on your thigh before creeping over to softly pinch and rub your clit. 

“Hyune, you’re gonna make me - gonna -” He cuts you off with a sloppy kiss, his tongue brushes over your parted lips to request access before making room for itself against yours.

“If you tell me that you’re gonna cum I won’t last another second.” He whispers against your lips and you moan against his.

“What if I tell you that I love you.” Hyunjin’s eyebrows pinch at the confession. That’s way worse than telling him that you’re close. “I’ve loved you back for as long as - as long as you’ve loved me.”

“Rose, baby, you’re gonna -” It’s your turn to kiss him now, it’s a mess of teeth and tongue but you love it. You love him and him you.

 You both pull away in tandem, twin moans ripping through your chests as you both announce yourself to the other. 

“I’m cumming, I’m cumming.” Hyunjin pulls out of you, painting your thighs in his sticky white release while his fingers toy with your clit to ride you through your orgasm. It’s loud and messy and beautiful. A romantic elegance that you want to live in for as long as it’s available. 

Once you’ve both come down from your high Hyunjin kisses your sweaty forehead and you kiss his. He pulls his bottoms up before grabbing the cleanest paint rag he has to clean you up. A comfortable silence settles around you as you ground yourself and take in the space.

“You didn’t finish that one.”

He follows your gaze over to the painting of the pale pink rose. The middle of the canvas contrasts the rest with nothing but dull line art to show the completed picture. It looks like a work in progress. “I know, but I think I like it like that.” He looks back over at you and you at him.

“It looks like you."

It’s been seven months. Graduation has come and gone in the middle of your blooming relationship with Hyunjin and you’ve dedicated each and every second of your budding love to taming the flame. 

Each kiss from him has kept the spark of fear at bay and each touch has taught you how to stop running. It’s been a slow and cautious process that he is more than proud to be a part of. He takes pride in it. He takes pride in being with you.

The smooth breeze of late summer brushes against your skin as you step out of your car. The white dress that Hyunjin picked out for you sticks to you like paint on a canvas as you make your way up to the art gallery. 

It’s buzzing inside, people stand and stare in awe at each piece while whispering and pointing to their favorite details. You stop and stand in the middle of it all, taking it all in with a slow spin on the balls of your feet. You take in every corner until you turn around completely and you’re met with the face of the artist himself. 

“Hi.” Hyunjin smiles down at you, brown baggy flannel hanging from his shoulders. 

“Hi.” You stare back at him with a gleaming smile in your eyes. You take in every inch of him, scanning him like he should be framed and hanging on the walls around you. 

“Why are you staring at me like that?” Hyunjin wraps his arms around your waist, pulling you closer to him. “I like staring at you.” Your response makes him beam a shy smile. 

“You should be staring at the art. The artist might get sad if you don’t.” He kisses your forehead before letting you go. Some people around you stare over at the two of you with curious eyes. They’re eager to put a face to the muse of the showing artist. 

You take his hand and lead him over to the piece that a couple is walking away from. You stand in front of it hand in hand as you study it for what feels like the millionth time. “This one is my favorite.” The incomplete pale pink rose stares back at you.

“And why is that?” Hyunjin has that smile in his eyes as he stares up with you. The memory of this piece's origin plays behind his eyes like a memorized movie. 

“I’ve been told that it looks like me.” You lay your head on his shoulder and wrap your arm around his. A chill runs up his spine and he blames it on you. You and the love he feels glowing pink and white around you. 

“There you are.” History repeats itself as the lady that you’ve come to know as Dalia interrupts the two of you. “I wanted to check in with you, how does it feel to finally have your own exhibition?” 

Hyunjin smiles at her politely, turning towards her a bit with his fingers still threaded through yours. “It’s amazing. Thank you, you’ve done a wonderful job putting this together.” 

“Oh, please, it’s nothing. This is all you.” You watch her as her eyes smile just as they always have. Her hand brushes over his arm in a carefully calculated move. She’s still shameless and unprofessional. “This piece is my favorite. The unfinished look is unique and raw. What inspired this one?” 

You grin to yourself as you listen to her. She’s trying so hard that it’s difficult not to laugh. 

“Actually.” Hyunjin pulls your hand a bit, leading you forward so that you’re right next to him. It’s impossible for Dalia to ignore you now. Her eyes scan you reluctantly and the smile on her face falters for a second before she pulls it together. Gosh, that's gratifying. 

“My lovely rose here is the inspiration for it all.” Hyunjin looks over at you with a glow that is unmatched even by the largest of flames. “None of this would be possible without her.” 

It’s like Dalia disappears once Hyunjin looks over at you. You’re the only two in the room as far as you’re concerned. “Oh, well that’s just - that’s wonderful.” Her staggered speech pulls you both out of your loving haze. 

“Such a … sweet profession of love.” She glares over at you though you’re sure that in her head she’s doing a wonderful job at hiding her contempt. “I should make sure that everything is running smoothly. Please excuse me.” 

She clears her throat awkwardly before she departs, you and Hyunjin both bid her smiling farewells before turning to each other with wide smiles. “Show off.” You push his shoulder playfully and he laughs.

“I didn’t do anything.” You roll your eyes as you both wander over to the next piece on the wall. You stare up at the two pink roses in a lone vase, a shadow of sunlight casts down on them both as they rise towards its shining glow. 

A comfortable silence blankets the two of you while you listen to the soft buzz of the people around you. You squeeze his hand softly and he squeezes back just as you open your mouth to speak. 

“She still wants to fuck you.” He smiles 

“Shut up.”

Thank you for reading! I'd love to know what you thought about this fic! Leave a comment or send an ask to let me know! ❣️

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[psychicreadsgirl]

Pick A Coffee Reading: How will you meet your next S/O?

Pick the coffee that draws you most. Remember if you are drawn to 2, then you can feel free to look at both readings. Take what resonates and leave what doesn't behind. This is a general reading so not everything will apply to you!

#1

You will likely meet your next S/O at some event or party. You will probably be introduced by someone or know each other from a mutual friend. You will likely meet in a more crowded/public area, so unlikely somewhere that's at home or familiar to you. This will feel more like an unexpected event as you probably had no plans to meet someone new that day.

#2

You will probably meet on a colder day, perhaps not the winter but perhaps on a day that's oddly cold for the season. It could be windy as well, but it's definitely not the typical day for that month/season. The weather could also be rather bad like rainy or storm or thunder or tornado or hurricane. It's probably not the most ideal setting/time for the meeting.

You'll likely look not your best on that day. Perhaps you also had a bad day too. This will likely be one of those random encounters, possibly at a school event/field trip/work related event like a conference. It could also be like even at a grocery store/convenience store where you're just running errands. It seems to be a "typical" day but then the meeting is rather atypical.

It's possible that after the meeting you won't even get connected to them properly until later on. You might even forget about this meeting and think they are annoying. It seems like this meeting's first impression is not so good.

#3

You will likely meet virtually/online. You will probably get connected through some interest or some activity online like they DM you on IG or you DM them on Twitter or something. You're also likely to befriend each other due to some common interest/goal like you might be wanting to study English or some other language so you become pen pals with them. You might be gaming and meet a fellow gamer friend who later becomes your S/O. You could also be introduced from a mutual online friend.

It's more likely that you will be friends with them first. The romance may also be slow burn, so even if you were to meet them online at first you might not even feel attracted to them at first. However after being friends for a while, you'll realize that they would be a good s/o.

#4

You're likely to meet them while travelling abroad or going out somewhere in the city. You're likely to meet them while having fun abroad so it could be a club or maybe a restaurant or a mall even. You could even meet them at a hotel/hostel/cruise. It seems like you're on some adventure when you meet them.

This may feel like a whirlwind romance as you feel instantly drawn to them. They may even show you around their hometown or place or they could be travelling abroad too so you guys explore the area together.

This romance could perhaps end as quickly as it starts though. However, for some it may even lead to marriage and your love story would be quite interesting to others. You might even start an IG/Youtube or something that features your romance abroad.

#5

You're likely to meet them at some place you often frequent. It could be a library where you often study or some coffee shop you often go to. The setting will be rather familiar to you.

The meeting could be either from an older person introducing you to them or from some mutual colleague/friend. It might even be like a blind date set up by your friends/family/parents. There seems to be some sort of "forced" situation here, and you likely already know you'd be meeting someone that day. There's some reluctance on your part to go this meeting and you will be pushed to go. You might even already have heard stories about this person and already made judgments about them before meeting them in person. It's sort of a situation where you already know the person's name but you don't know them personally.

This meeting will feel rather awkward at first. You will also probably be with someone else during this meeting so like a friend/family member will be there. It doesn't seem like a one-on-one meeting. It's unlikely that sparks will fly during this first meeting but I would say to give this person a chance and don't disregard them completely. While for some it is possible that this may not even turn into romance in the end, this person will be very beneficial to you somehow like could help you open doors for careers/give you a lot of advice/help you in some way/be very close to you.

#6

You will likely meet them while you are attending a concert, theatre, movie, ballet, etc - some sort of arts-related event. You might also have a bad impression of them when you first meet like they cut in front of you or they talk really loudly during the performance or block your view. You're likely going to either be by yourself at this attendance or with a group of friends. If you're with a group of friends then you're likely to join their group of friends. If you're by yourself, you could confront them or someone in their group somehow. They, on the other hand, will likely attend this event with a group of friends.

It's even possible that you will have attended the same event but don't realize until much later.

You're unlikely to keep contact with them after this attendance or even realize they existed then, but then you will somehow bump into them later. It could be like days later, months later, or even a year to a couple of years later. Somehow they will be in your life later like they could become a new employee at the firm you work in or a new student at your school or your new boss or somehow work at a place you often frequent.

[thehypnone]

pls pls pls plsssss im begging for a part 2 of that raindrop fisting

please and thank you sir hypnone

(from here) “It’s actually a wonder you’ve never tried putting your whole hand into me,” Dewdrop whispers, moving his claw up Rain’s forearm as he shakes. “We should try later. Wanna see your wrist buried inside me while my slick is dripping down this pretty veiny forearm all the way to your elbow.”

“You–you’d let me do that to you?” Rain whimpers when they go outside, the first thing he’s said since the movie has ended. Dewdrop is confused for a second—heaving nearly forgotten what he had said to the water ghoul already. When he remembers, he nods. “Promise?”

“Yes, Rainy,” he chuckles, “there’s not many things I wouldn’t let you do to me.”

The water ghoul takes that to heart and asks Dewdrop to let him do it the next day. He hasn’t changed his mind, so in no time at all he ends up spread out on Rain’s bed with him kneeling on the edge and three of his fingers buried in the fire ghoul’s cunt.

“So pretty,” Rain sighs, his face resting against the inside of Dewdrop’s thigh as he fingers him. It’s slow and indulgent; both so he’s properly stretched out, but also because the water ghoul simply enjoys having his mate’s soft and hot walls wrapped around his fingers.

He’d stay like that forever, if he could.

“Do four,” Dewdrop orders. He is enjoying it, but the knowledge of what their goal is makes him impatient, “put four in.”

Rain hums in acknowledgement and obliges, sliding his pinky finger in alongside the rest. There’s no resistance or pain—Dewdrop is perfectly loose and wet.

And that is why it’s only a moment before he demands more. “Do it. I’m ready, Rainy, get it all in.”

“Are you…you sure?”

“Please,” Dewdrop whines and Rain is powerless. He pulls his fingers back and tucks his thumb in.

“Deep breath, droplet.”

The water ghoul gnaws on his bottom lip as he pushes in.

It’s tight, so tight. He’s almost scared it won’t fit.

He’d be heartbroken.

But then Dewdrop lets out a gasp and Rain’s knuckles pop in and it’s in.

“Oh, Lucifer,” he whines, “you did it, it’s in. My whole hand is in.”

“Uh-huh,” the fire ghoul can’t choke out anything else. He’s so full, it’s as if Rain has his fist against his lungs. Dewdrop rises up on his forearms, he wants to see—he needs to see—but when he does look, he can only fall back limply with a moan on his lips.

“Rain…Rainy,” he cries out, “look up h–here.”

It’s nearly painful for Rain to tear his eyes away from the way the fire ghoul’s stretched around his wrist and a single droplet of slick running down his forearm, but he does. He complies; he looks up and his mouth goes dry.

“You’re so deep,” Dewdrop groans as Rain reaches out with his free hand, tracing the outline of his other hand on the fire ghoul’s stomach with gentle fingertips.

“Can’t believe you’re letting me do this,” he moans with his eyes wide and glassy. 

“I’m all yours,” the other pants, “all yours to play with and use.”

[saekkas]

For your Blue Haze ask game! 💙 #41 your hair is really soft - with Kaiser! Please 🙏.

prompt: "your hair is really soft." tags: f!reader, kaiser is a simp, fluff. note: i'm sorry this is so short and that it's taken me so long to write it :< writing's not coming easy to me these days. i hope you enjoy! <3

"your game is in five minutes, what are you doing here!?" you hiss, the whisper turning into a shout when kaiser runs barreling into you. "michael kaiser!"

everything is oddly silent; the birds aren't chirping, the soccer fans' shouts only a distant murmur— it's as if the world's slowed down, stopping into a freeze frame.

even your boyfriend, the renowned star player, is quiet. he leans forward to place his head on top of yours, his arms wrapping around your waist.

you can only sigh, knowing this weird outburst is caused by the petty fight you had earlier.

"i'm sorry, alright?" the words catch, his speech slightly stiff, so unlike the smooth drawl kaiser's known for. it's as if his pride has bound a leash on his words, pulling them back down into the crevices of his heart.

your lover hides his face in your hair, sniffing the scent of your shampoo every now and then. he waits for your reply, and you can feel his heart hammering against your own chest with how tight he's holding onto you.

"i know i'm an asshole for apologizing this way, and i'm sorry," he whispers, his lips moving against your forehead. "can you forgive me, liebling?"

you stay quiet, watching as he slowly moves to face you, his hair a mess and his eyes tinted red.

your eyes trail over his face, taking in his tired visage. and maybe it's the doubt swimming in your eyes, or the hesitance plastered on your expression but kaiser sighs, lifting his hand only to drop it back to his side the next second.

"i know i can't undo the things i said," he mumbles, lips downturned and eyes plastered to the ground, "but i couldn't go out there pretending like everything's fine when the person that matters most isn't cheering for me in their usual spot."

you bite your lip, trying to keep the smile that's threatening to bloom at bay. even if it's only an excuse to be let off the hook, kaiser's always been creative with his words. a closeted romantic under all that suave and charm.

"what do you say, mein liebling?" there's a hint of a smile on his face, his eyes molding into your beloved puppy eyes. the piece of resistance he always uses, knowing you can't resist. "you can hit me all you want back at home. just cheer for me, please?"

please isn't a word kaiser normally uses and when it slips past his lips, you come to understand just how desperate he really is.

"okay," you whisper, body instinctively leaning forward in search of his warmth. "but we still need to talk after your game."

kaiser nods, his expression clearing like the sun after a rainy day. he doesn't move, doesn't walk, doesn't talk, and the silence that comes after is nothing but a loving embrace.

"you didn't braid my hair this morning," kaiser says after his eyes trail from the tip of your hair to the end of your toes and back. "you skipped out on our routine."

you snort, chuckling a little when he tilts his head, indirectly asking for you to braid his hair.

"i could barely look you in the face without punching you this morning," you mumble. the strands of his hair are smooth in your hands, and your fingers pull them into braids as if weaving through the finest silk. "your hair's really soft."

"i used your shampoo," kaiser grins shyly, like a giddy schoolboy who's just confessed. there's a hint of a blush on his cheeks, the skin reddening the longer you braid and compliment his hair. "missed your scent and all that."

you laugh at his words, indirectly letting him know whatever storm was brewing has passed. you press a quick kiss on his cheek, letting his hair fall down his back in braids. "go get 'em, hotshot."

kaiser goes on to score five goals in the match, blowing multiple kisses to you after every single one.

[mikoyamisheadcanonblog]

Kid’s Relationship Question (1)

🌷Who Wakes up first in the morning:🌷  His S/O does, Kidd is the type to sleep in. Killer is running the ship while he rests. He isn’t lazy he just enjoys sleeping in and cuddling close with his S/O he is a big guy and he loves wrapping his body around his S/O’s small frame and taking in their warmth on a cold day. Sometimes it is a little suffocating, but it feels amazing on cold days, and on hot days it is hard to breathe, but he is just looking for comfort.

🌷Who’s the first to fall asleep at night:🌷 It depends he works hard on his ship maintaining and making sure his crew is protected and they are sailing in the right direction. He cares about his crew and his goal to reach the OnePiece, on hard days he falls asleep first. A hard battle, a difficult storm that had passed, he will be the first to fall asleep early. But on calmer nights or nights the crew is celebrating he will be the last to fall asleep. He is taking in the calm atmosphere and holding his S/O close in his arms. He needs his S/O in his arms to sleep better and will not let them sleep without him even when they are mad.

🌷What they playfully tease each other over:🌷  Almost anything, he is a fan of teasing his S/O he loves seeing their cheeks red. He will be a bit more sexual, trying to get a rile out of his lover. But of course, he is into soft teasing then making comments on how cute they look together or joking about marriage. Something he never thought about till he met his S/O but that is a long way away. His S/O depending on could be just as sexual just to get a rise out of him, petting his leg during important business conversations or whispering sexual things. It would get him more excited and his arms around their waist. If not sexual just soft teasing on trying to get him to eat food, he doesn’t like or admit embarrassing things.

🌷What they do when the other’s having a bad day:🌷  Kid is simple he would want a drink and a good cuddle from his S/O bring him some sake and a large enough blanket. He will hold on to his S/O and take in their warm temperature and love the feeling of their body next to his. He probably wouldn’t share about his day but instead ask about his S/O’s day Hearing about it distraction when he feels more comfortable, he will share what bugged him throughout the day. For S/O he is willing to do anything for his S/O as well as his crew helping them through their bad day. If it was someone that was bothering his S/O he is more than willing to bring that person and have them begging for forgiveness.

🌷How they say ‘I’m sorry after arguments: 🌷 Kid isn’t one to say sorry, and apologizing is difficult for him. He is always right, but chances he does wrong, he does hurt his S/O. He will spend most of his day grumbling before he misses his S/O’s presence before he brings them random flowers or chocolate, or he will crawl into bed with his S/O and pretend nothing happened. If it is really bad, he will apologize under his breath while grumbling.

🌷Which one’s more ticklish:🌷  His S/O is more ticklish than him, he loves brushing his finger on his S/O skin and seeing them squirm in his arms. He will gently brush his fingers on where they are most sensitive and feel the goosebumps on their skin and leave light kisses on their neck just to have them squirm in their arms if they make a little sound that is a plus.

🌷Their favorite rainy day activities:🌷 Cuddling, he wouldn’t admit but he loves cuddling his S/O his giant frame wrapping around his S/O while they listen to the rain outside. He gets great pleasure in hearing his S/O talk about their day. He is sensitive to the cold so he wouldn’t really want to do many things out outside with his S/O. If his S/O is reading he is reading over their shoulders, or they are watching a movie together. He just loves holding his S/O on those cold rainy days and doing nothing.

🌷How they surprise each other:🌷  Kid doesn’t like surprises but surprising his S/O is another story. He will plan romantic dates as he isn’t the most romantic person. It is once in a blue moon where he will surprise his S/O by being less brash and taking them out for a romantic date. But other than that, he would surprise them by less aggressive towards a suiter who was eyeing his S/O or being kinder to people that pissed him off. He would be trying to work on himself a bit but not too much.

🌷Their most sickening show of public affection:🌷 Kid isn’t too shy with public affection and will grab his S/O’s hips whenever he feels threatened by another person. He will rub circles on their body or exposed skin to show off that he owns his S/O and is in control. It gets annoying during meetings with his crew he will have S/O on his lap petting their leg while his S/O plays with his hair. Or petting trying to get away. Sexual comments will escape his lips and what he wishes to do with his S/O when alone. He doesn’t care who is around to hear. He has no filter.

Other Relationships Questions 1 Zoro, Ace, Nami, Law, Sanji, Kid, Sabo, Killer, Shanks, Doflamingo, Crocodile, Luffy, Robin, Usopp, Koby, King, Smoker,

[blingblong55]

Peace- Simon 'Ghost' Riley

A/N: Not much dialogue but I hope you enjoy it:)

GN!Reader, fluff

Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?

Simon knew best, that a man like him doesn't deserve a life with you. Your life is so calm and steady and if he were to walk into it, nothing would be blissful. The dark empty hallway that adorned his soul was met with you, a warm candlelight, calling his name. Come home it said to him and that is what he did. Danger was his closest friend and it even slept on the same pillow as he did, he could never offer you more than danger, for that he did not afford. It all started with a lilac flower that you handed to him on one of his usual gloomy days. 

What scared him the most was not death for he had faced it multiple times rather his fear was you, the calm waves after the storm. Skies are clear, brave words said, a bouquet in his calloused hands, shaky words, night terrors and you, that is what he now has. Many times he found himself roaming town alone, wondering if it would be enough if he could never give you peace or all the love this world had to offer. No sanity on his part but maybe here and there he could be sane for you. Tears, whispers, the little kisses you give him, warm hugs and the sacrifices you'd make for him. Peace, a word for those who aren't him. 

Many times, during storms or the nights his PTSD got the best of him, That's when he understood you didn't want peace, you wanted the storm, hail, thunder, snow and heavy waves that came with him. Because life is boring without danger, risk and adrenaline. Life is more than peace and warm hugs, for him life is you, all of you. The doubts and the laughs, silly arguments and the talks after said arguments. Honour to be the man you marry, honour to be the one who runs into a gunfight with a knife and comes out victorious, to be a soldier and your lover, that is his life. 

Peace, after the argument, the silence when you finally understand the other, the family he made with your family, it's enough. 

"R/N," he tries to stop you.

"It's rainy today, let's go out!" 

Silly dances, the fall to the muddy ground, the kiss on the bruise he gave you. That is peace even if thunder falls. It's enough. You handed him sunshine and in return held storms in your soft and delicate hands. You built a fire to keep his soaked clothes warm, kissed his scars, all of them and with each one whispered how much you love him. The shaky cry he gave you after, like a mother to his child, is the hug you gifted him. "I miss them, I miss them so much, R/N." 

"I know, Simon." A kiss on the top of his head, "Please don't leave me." he requested to which you held him closer. "I could never leave you, my dear," you respond. If he falls, you fall too. Never one without the other, that is the silent promise you gave the other months and years ago. There will always be unspoken words said in the relationship but it's the presence, the actions that say the words neither of you dare to say.

He will never be one to believe in god or any mystical beliefs, but you to him are the greatest divine, the one to bless his brittle heart. 

"And now, I pronounce you, spouses for life." His friend from the military, John Price said. He looked into your eyes, his once sad eyes filled with the life you gave, teary but with life, one thing he can brag to his best mate, the Scottish man who was too persistent, the reason you and him now walk down the aisle together. 

He was the hunter for so long in his life, running toward the goal, of living life and dying. Now the only goal he has is to grow old with the one who doesn't see right through him. Anyone will walk away but you stayed and kissed all the scars, and bruises and listened through his mistakes. The unspoken words that turned into three hand squeezes, an 'I love you.' a little thing you two made when in public. The once weak love he could offer is now the strongest love the world will ever have. As long as you are next to him, rain or shine, he is a lover, protector, soldier and most importantly, the vulnerable being that you hold close to your chest every night. A world of beauty, one he never had the privilege to afford now in the palm of his hands. It truly is a wonderful life for Simon Riley. 

[ryansosilly]

Could the sinner really be redeemed? Can he be saved or just lulled to temporary rest? Is peace of mind an achievable, realistic goal for the truly wicked by heart?

Nikto was by all means a good soldier. An unstoppable force once on the field, the only thing that could possibly stop him from finishing this mission was a bullet in the head, point blank.

As proof that he has yet to be stopped, he was still there, alive. Here and there would be a better thing to say. He couldn't keep himself down by any means of the word. All of Nikto, every one of them had differing views and nobody around him could really guess who they were speaking with. Only you. To your surprise it was not that difficult. The contrast between his different 'selves' was pretty prominent, it only takes actual care and to pay attention to notice. Something nobody else was willing to put. Of course, there were those mandatory therapy sessions Nikto was forced into just to still be deployed but they were nothing but a legality. Even his therapist understood that in how..broken, twisted of a man Nikto is, laid the true strength he had. Frankly? He wouldn't be 'Nobody', 'Nikto', if it weren't for the trauma. He knew it, they knew it, his teammates and therapist..nobody stopped to think further. It made everything simple for him.

But sometimes no matter how simple ones life is, nothing will stay the same. A change here and there, an unexpected switch, break, snap or trigger and everything goes back to shit. Nikto constantly needs to be knocked into his damn place. A wild rabid dog punched and kicked into place by the higher ups just for him to bite them and run away for a day or two. Childish, he knows. Stupid decision, he knows.

But he made him do it. Nikto wasn't at fault for running away.

It was a pretty damn unlucky time for that to happen. Everything piled up in his head, the voices being louder than before during a night at a safehouse. He has actively been going through a manic episode for the past days, he had lost track of it. Gripping his mask as he violently shook his body. He hated feeling like this but oh it felt so good.. his only peace of mind was the possibility of a death, of a redemption or some sort of magic potion to revert everything back to how it was. He couldn't handle this state he was in, so, to prevent himself from being seen like that, he ran away.

A stormy, rainy middle of the night, even the bustling highway had almost fully emptied out, leaving nothing but a foggy semi visible road with bright yellow signs. How did he get all the way out of the forest to the highway? He didn't have a clue but he felt so...good. The rational part of his brain was screaming that was a horrible idea!!! If they catch him out, disregarding orders and doing as he fucking wishes, he'll be in a really damn big trouble he doesn't need right now but the mania had other plans.

He... they? Who? Nobody was still in full gear, believing that anytime now, someone, or something, will come out and try to catch him, so might as well be prepared! A gun prepared in the ready as he stood in the middle of the street, staring at one same point. His body was still shaking even if he could hardly feel it from the cold.

Nobody was coming. There was no-one there, not a single car. That ruined Nikto's mood even more. What did he even want? Why would he want someone to catch him? Is that a game for you, Nikto?

Well, lucky for you..

As Niktos body started to give up from the unexpected rush of adrenaline and the freezing cold started to creep in to under his gear. No amount of gear can keep the cold out when he felt it inside of himself long ago. His legs freezing. To him, all of this had happened in the blink of an eye.

To you? The worried you? It has been almost 2 days. Nobody managed to find the man. Why? They weren't on a search. Only you noticed. So, doing the responsible thing.. you took an umbrella during the very next night of Nikto's disappearance and went out.

Weird, this rain hasn't stopped for days now? If anything, it's only getting stronger..

The umbrella did a surprisingly good job at keeping you dry and resisting the wind but your vision was still ' impaired ' from the neverending fogs taking over the entire street, maybe the whole city. This horrible weather hasn't moved and does not seem to be planning on leaving. Nikto found it fitting, you not so much.

Ah. Could you guess..

By the street, against a tree with an injured leg covered in dry blood lays Nikto. You found him. Slowly stepping closer to him, your grip on the umbrella remaining as tight as possible. If this was some sort of a cheesy movie, you'd say that Nikto might just be the direct source of this heavy rain and strong wind.

Nikto..Nikto?

In front of his eyes..from his very eyes, he could swear that he saw an angel, perhaps an angel of death, coming to claim him already. That umbrella above you, your clothes.. he could swear there were black wings right behind you as you stopped your steps right in front of him.

Eyes barely open, he took a deep breath, letting it out. There was no longer any little amount of warm breath showing from his 'mouth' as his body was colder than the very cold streets under him.

'it matches me' he thought to himself. Matching his heart. The heart that felt..ever so tiny bit warmer now that an angel as beautiful as you came to claim him. For once, he didn't want to fight. The dog did not bite anymore.

You spoke, spoke again and asked questions but weren't met with any reaction or answers. Was there a point in speaking?

Moving your umbrella from protecting you to being above the injured soldier. You weren't the one who needed protection even if Nikto may not view it as such. Maybe you really were an angel and he wasn't just deluded man who had given up to his insanity. Maybe..

Maybe.

Maybe..

The rain 'stopped' . It felt..a little less cold for Nikto. The only thing he could remember before passing out for who knows which time now was..how close you were, how..warm you felt just from getting closer. If he could ever believe his eyes again, he couldn't hope for anything but you in front of him until the end. Maybe it was just the mania speaking for him.

Maybe it was just the need for love, the need to be known, felt and seen that spoke for him. Maybe.

Before he could reawake and be greeted by the heavenly kiss he didn't think of being worthy of, he felt himself being picked up by the arms. After so many years, no matter your state, a soldier must remain awake. Calling him a light sleeper would be an understatement.

"Let's go back."

He could so vaguely hear your voice. Who..were you? [Redacted], are you an angel? A good or a bad omen? Why would you help a man like that? Did nobody teach you to let the weak die?

His eyes, once again, betraying him, falling back short. He couldn't hear your voice anymore. Only the loud loud rain that sounded like gunshots, deafening his already hurting numb ears. All he could hear was...?

?

Breathing..soft breathing. The one of a calm person. A person..not one that lives inside of Nikto's head. But someone else. He was being saved for once. Of course, when in the battlefield, he was brought up to his feet a couple times before, patched up but..never has he been saved.

No strength in him was left to think, to fight, to respond. He was at your mercy and instead of finishing the job, you took him 'home'. If he was awake, able to speak, he would be yelling at you to finish him off. You should've killed him when you had the chance. Were you stupid or just too soft for the army? Was he disgusted or thankful? Answers for which he couldn't think right now.

All he knew for a certain was that he wasn't alone and that everyone within him had involuntarily accepted your help. For which..as much as he hates it, he'll be indebted to you. He'll be nice for a day or two, maybe a week then everything will go back to normal.

That was the plan.

Oh..but the plan.. the plan was ignored, the mission unsuccessful.

He let you help him. Again. Again..again. and never repaid you. Every time he felt like he was losing himself, he'll subconscious limp to your room, his mind going back to that rainy night. When he was saved. He wanted to be saved. He wanted to be saved more than he wanted to be alive, to be alone.

Tonight, being especially tough on him. Everyone and everything was so loud. Earlier a bomb exploded so close to him, his ears were still bleeding but he refused to get himself checked out due to panic. What if he hurt himself badly enough to never be able to hear your voice again? He surely deserves it.

He 'deserves' it. He believes he does. Yet.. he is limping to you after the mission, shaky hands on the walls, leaving bloody prints all across it without a single fuck left in the world to give.

He needs to get to you. To the one who makes it ever so slightly closer to bearable. His saviour.

Stumbling down the halls, ignoring the nasty looks he got from other soldiers and just..focusing on the ground, his feet. Left foot, right foot.. he remembers how you helped him get on his feet so many times. Was it just something you did for everyone? Of course it was. Teamwork was a main thing for everyone here..yet.. you felt gentle to him.

Too gentle for him to consciously want to get close to. But now? That ' consciousness' was no longer there. What remains was only the broken shell of what used to be a man, a walking upcoming suicide, a living Ghost.

Closer to a zombie, a corpse that moves and growls in pain, he made his way down to your office. Once again, it was in the middle of the night. He got lucky that you took a night shift, finishing some paperwork. (Some of which, was meant for Nikto to fill but without telling him, you took most of the loads of work.) That's when you heard the thumping, the stomping and dragging of feet coming up to your door and stopping abruptly.

You spun your chair around to look at the door just in time to see it being kicked out open.

There he stood, once again, a broken mess. There was nothing visible in his eyes. No life, no ideas, no thoughts. Truly, a dead man. Yet, he walked. Walked..stepped right inside your room, walking up to you.

The desk was directly in front of the door with only the chair in between. Perfect set up for him if you ask. A simple room, he quite liked it. (Which was his excuse he used to justify sleeping in the office when you did work because you made his nightmares less worse just be being there.)

The silence was deafening, only the drops of blood hitting the floor along with the heavy sounds of his dirty boots that were muddled by a carpet making a sound. You understood, he understood. Nothing else was needed before he collapsed down on his knees right in front of you. One of his arms grabbed the armrest of your chair and the other one grabbed your ankle, pulling you and the entire chair closer. He was in no means gentle. Nikto didn't even think he was capable of being gentle. Maybe you'll get a bruise on your ankle for that grip but it was completely irrelevant.

His grip lessened immediately when he saw you didn't fight. Both arms releasing what they held as he rested then on your lap instead, his head laying down on his arms. From then, he was completely motionless. He could barely breathe with the mask on and in that position but to him, being close and not alone was far more important than any stupid amounts of air.

Your hand slowly put down the pen on the desk, making sure to not spin the chair around while you were putting the pen back on it's place. No need to wake him up now.

You stayed during his worst times. You stayed during his best. You stayed.

So, he'll stay. For an hour or two, he'll cry unknowingly. Most of his disfigured face could not even feel such sensations anymore. He needed you to look at him and tell him that he is crying. The water droplets were too gentle, too insignificant to feel against his bruised up, mostly skinless face. The face you still caressed so lovingly when you decided to help him. When you were nice enough to suggest him vaseline to make his face less itchy. When you cleaned and put on his mask.. a damn privilege for which you waited literal years to get. You waited for him. You were patient and careful. You understood.

How could he not cry?

A hand softly petting his back in a calm soothing manner. Ever so slowly, you leaned down to fully embrace him in a hug while still letting him let his pent up emotions. His ears felt muffled, his legs sore from running, crawling and hiding. Arms sore from carrying all those heavy weapons around, his face..his face simply just always hurt. Something always hurt. Mentally and physically.

But now? Yes, everything still hurt but..now there was a reason for him to want to make it stop hurting. To get the help he needs. His shaking only increased as you caressed him, eyes shut tightly, his teeth clenching, jaw sore. This feeling of vulnerability was sickening to the very core but his core couldn't be more glad than it was now that he got this. That now..he wasn't alone.

You weren't an angel, a god or a therapist but you were his saviour. His angel and his god. The one god that he could pray to and not feel betrayed by. Someone who heard his cries and helped. He couldn't be more thankful. Spiteful, hateful..so many conflicting emotions. Things he couldn't deal with alone.

He felt like the luckiest person alive. He finally felt like a person.

Nikto was no longer just a nobody, a killing machine. When with you, he was someone. He was someone. Someone with a reason to be. And treated as such.

For now, this someone will enjoy your time together. Worshipping the ground you step on for as long as you allow him.

The poor rabid dog has finally been taken to a shelter. Shown love. Shown care. Even if he still bites sometimes, he still has a home.

[benkyoutobentou]

31 Days of Productivity Reading もう一回！: Day 10

Before: I don't have a proper before, since I didn't get to write anything before I started reading and I just needed to finish ポーの一族 today anyways. But I can still tell you about my day before I started reading! I usually run errands on Saturdays and thus don't usually read too much. In addition to my usual errands, I also went to the craft store to look at their Halloween decorations and get some yarn. My next door neighbor is pregnant and I'd like to crochet her a baby blanket as a present! And then for dinner I made myself some chickpea tikka masala that was delicious.

After: Now on to the good stuff. I finished the last 90 pages of ポーの一族 and it hit the spot tonight. I've been in my usual late summer Halloween mood lately and the aesthetic of ポーの一族 was perfect. It's not very gothic in story or plot line, but the aesthetic is wonderfully gothic and just feels perfect to read on a rainy October day. It was just what I needed! The language in this series so far isn't very difficult, but I do find myself getting lost in all the hiragana. Sometimes I have to really think to be able to parse the words and separate them from each other, whereas I wouldn't have an issue if it just used kanji. I also noticed this in BASARA, but it seems like older shoujo series don't use the 々 marking. So for example, 日々 was written as 日び. I think ベルサイユのばら did it too, I'll have to keep an eye out for it next time I read a volume. If anyone here is into older shounen manga, I would love to know if they do the same thing!

Now, you might be noticing that ninety pages does not fulfill my goal of reading 100 pages of manga per day. I didn't really want to start something new knowing that I wouldn't have the time to fully get into it, so I decided to just continue on with 憎らしい彼 (a novel) which is on my tbr for the month. Because I started it in March and still haven't finished it. Don't look at me. So here's my ridiculous math: if my goal was to read 100 pages of manga per day or 25 pages of a novel, then one page of a novel is worth four pages of a manga. Therefore, if I have ten manga pages left of my goal, then I could substitute that for 2.5 pages of a novel, in this case 憎らしい彼. So that's what I did. After a little brain break, though, because I don't usually like jumping immediately from one thing to the next.

In the end, I read 8 pages of 憎らしい彼 for a total of 98 pages across both manga and novels. I'd say that fulfills my goal nicely. I would have read more, but it's getting late and I really should be getting to bed. Also, I've noticed that Nagira Yuu's writing tends to be a bit harder for me to parse. It's never bothered me too much, given that certain authors have writing styles that are easier to read regardless of language and even in my native English, but I didn't really feel that with this little excerpt I read tonight. Hopefully this means good things for my Japanese and wasn't just a lucky break. I've been feeling pretty solid with my Japanese level during this challenge, I can't wait for a book to come along and prove me wrong this month.

[sapientiiae]

@hyruleanlegends asked: "I'm terrified of thunder/lightning." Stated incredibly reluctantly. rainy day sentence starters

When dark clouds began to roll towards Hyrule, it was a sign that a storm was coming. When the wind picked up and a damp scent filled the air, it was a warning that the storm would be here sooner rather than later. 

Zelda had dressed in the most basic gown she owned, her cloak with the Sheikah’s Eye of Truth embroidered into it over that, and the cloak’s hood lifted to better conceal her face. The goal for the evening had been to blend in with the rest of Castle Town’s residents when she accompanied Shi, needing a break from her royal duties and seeking an evening of fun with someone she was close to in an area she seldom had the chance to visit.

Shi, however, had seemed a bit on edge once the storm clouds had started to build, his attention shifting to the sky every so often. He’d even made a suggestion, more than once, that they return to the palace. Once the wind started to howl and the vendors began to shut down their stalls, he became adamant that they return right away.

They made it past the fountains and under the next set of stone arches when the rain came, a torrential downpour that soaked everyone and thing in its path — them included. Now forced to run the rest of the way, Shi urging her to quicken her pace, they’d just slipped back through the door they’d snuck out of when a snap of lightning cracked, illuminating the entirety of Hyrule’s dark sky.

She swore Shi had nearly jumped out of his skin before he slammed the door shut, the impact of the door nearly rivaling the thunder’s boom that echoed down the stone corridor.

When asked, Shi hadn’t bothered giving a response, simply brushing the situation off. It wasn’t until Zelda brought up a platter of tea and tea cakes to the fireplace he was currently perched in front of that he finally confessed what had been bothering him. She’d barely even heard the words, spoken so soft and almost begrudgingly. 

“Shi….why did you not tell me before? I would have left as soon as we noticed the dark clouds, had I only known.”

[gaviicreates]

Why I'm starting my 2024 "temperature" blanket early...

I like October.

That could be the most basic of answers, and I definitely could leave it there. But that would not accurately explain the heart behind the year long project I'm about to start. So buckle in, if you like. Or don't; you do you.

I've known for awhile that I wanted to do a variation on a temperature blanket for 2024. The last time I did a temperature blanket was in 2017 - and it was my first! I knew for my next one, I wanted it to be a project to honor a special year. 2024 was planned since I got married in 2019. This is all probably starting to make more sense now.

So yes, I got married in October - for the sake of not putting too much of my information online I won't share the exact day, but it is mid October. And 2024 will be our 5 year anniversary. I debated working the project from January to December for the whole year, but I changed my mind to running it from Anniversary to Anniversary.

There's a couple advantages to that:

For one, I selected Toni Lipsey's linen square stitch pattern (it's also the one she is doing this year), and I worried that in effort to try to stay up to date, I'd end up cramming the largest sections in at the end of the month. Running the months from mid-to-mid, I've inherently made it more loose and forgiving of the deadlines. It's normal to get a bit behind and need to catch up, but it'll hopefully help me to not have looming end of month deadlines constantly.

The pattern

The second advantage is that I'll have a new blanket by the end of 2024! With October as a final goal, I'll have two months to catch up if I need to, make a border if I so desire, and sew the squares together. There's a lot of grace in that timeline, and I'd love to have a special afghan to gift my partner on Christmas or New Years. I mean he'll see it in progress, that's inevitable, but the finished object in its final presentation? That's so special. Right in time for cuddling up by the fire too since we are in the Northern Hemisphere.

Oh, I am also not exactly doing a temperature blanket either. I've set up daily reminders for myself to look at the sky, and I plan to use the alert not to check online for a number. I want to connect with our Earth and create a special moment each day to admire the planet we call home. My color palette is to be based on the weather and color of the sky each day - whatever the overall vibe feels like since of course it can change from hour to hour. From sunny to cloudy to rainy, and in between, the final piece will be a blend of blues and greys. Because I do, in fact, love the colors of the sky.

The yarn

It's a much smaller color palette than the first time I tried one of these, so my hope is that each of the shades will have a decent spread - certainly not equal to each other, but definitely not lost among the others. I'm adoring the greys. 😍

It's Stylecraft Special DK. I looked around out a few other acrylics and some wool and cotton blends, but ultimately it came down to care instructions and spread of colors. I most especially wanted the blanket to be easy care. We have three dogs so washing and drying were preferable in this case. I also really wanted to use a Sock-DK weight yarn so I didn't end up with a blanket the size of a house.

I did however take a gamble, buying this yarn without trying it first. I've only heard good things, which is promising. And I've received my initial shipping notification, so I am super excited for the skeins to arrive!

I've shared my color scheme above. Each square is going to be 32 rows, and at the end I will have 12 squares for that final assembly part of the project.

Project Tag is going to be #SkyBlanket2024 for any updates along the way.

I'm VERY excited for this one.

[fangbangerghoul]

Okay, I've been cooking trying to come up with a banger prompt Sensory Prompt: Lighting a candle while you run a warm bath on a cold rainy afternoon Emotion: Anticipation Object: Bath Tub Give us some Ghoul x Halsin x Astarion goodness. ;)

The room was expensive but with their constant travels it was worth its weight in gold. Astarion was in a foul mood completed with snippy comments and complaints about the dirt and blood that caked him. Ghoul did not hold it against him, but she was growing tired of hearing how upset he was. Halsin even lightly mentioned he would appreciate a bath in the nearest stream but with much persuasion from Ghoul and Astarion, he finally agreed to settle for a bath indoors. The city seemed to make Halsin restless, and she caught the anxiousness roll off his body in waves as the three of them pass the crowds of refugees. The cold rain did not help her mood either. It drenched her, seeped into her bones, giving her the same chills she felt when she talked with the dead. Ghoul went into the room that held the large underground tub. It was surrounded with cobblestone to look like a mock hot spring and decorated with vibrant green foliage. She looked at the sitting water, though clean, a dip of her finger told her how chilled it was. Ghoul sat on her knees and focused as she remembered the incantation to make steel burn in the hands of others. Her goal was to heat up the water and thankfully it worked with much success. Suddenly she was starting to feel excited about the bath herself and the anticipation was giving her a slight manic feeling.             “Boys!” She called out to them, inviting them to her. It did not take long for Astarion to come and his frown started to ease as he realized what he was being called over for. His body slinked into the room like a cat and his crimson eyes set on the bubbling tub.             “You shouldn’t have.” Astarion said coyly as if he had not spent half the day being bitter and bratty. Ghoul rolled her eyes and gave him a small smirk but she did not wait for him to say anymore before she begun to peel off her clothes. The fabric sticky and covered in dirt, blood, and sweat. The urge to leap into the pool of water was enticing.               “Silvanus' blessings for to those who get to gaze upon your beautiful flesh.” Halsin’s deep purr filled the room as he stood towering in the door way. He was already halfway undressed, ahead of Astarion it seemed. Astarion noticed he was the most covered of the three and immediately started to tear off his clothes as Ghoul settled herself in the water. The heat warmed her through and through and she felt the tensions in her muscles relax. The water rippled as Halsin joined, a hum of gratification came from his chest and he slid himself next to her. His arms took her in so he was settled behind Ghoul. Without asking Halsin gently started to cup the water and release it slowly onto her hair, his fingers softly detangling her ratted strands full of filth.              “Make room for me.” Astarion commanded and Ghoul smirked at his snippy tone. She knew he just wanted to have just as must contact as Halsin was giving her. Halsin didn’t argue and as he moved to the side he lit a few candles with a soft whisper. Ghoul’s arms opened, bringing the vampire spawn close to her. She wrapped herself around him, her fingers gently combing his loose strands and speaking soft words of how he should allow himself to relax. The dimming sunlight gave the room a relaxing aurora as their shadows danced within the candles flame. The day was over, and they only had to focus on their shared needs.

ooooh maaaan I sat on it too long T.T

this is 100% more than 200 words but I couldnt help myself

Word Count: 616

I hoped you enjoyed it! Thank you so much for sending in a prompt for my 100 Follower Celebration! I have always appreciated your support and I will always look forward to your content as well!

[murdcrofcrows]

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full name: sebastian 'bash' ashley owens nicknames: bash, baz, zebby gender / pronouns: trans man, he/him age & birthday: 27, december 27th occupation: dealer, con artist, thief gang affiliation: the jade tribe, soldier orientation & status: bisexual kinsey scale 3, single strengths: witty, bold, resilient, charismatic weaknesses: mischievous, reckless, manipulative character inspo: ziggy sobotka (the wire), ashtray (euphoria), jesse pinkman (breaking bad), stiles stilinski (teen wolf), carl gallagher (shameless us),

diving deeper -

*     ◟    :    〔   elliot fletcher ,      trans man  +   he/him   〕  SEBASTIAN ‘BASH’ OWENS,      some say you’re a  TWENTY SIX YEAR OLD  lost soul among the neon lights.      known for being both   WITTY and RECKLESS,  one can’t help but think of  CHOKE  by   I DON’T KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME when you walk by.    are you still a    SOLDIER, DEALER    at    JADE TRIBE ,     even with your reputation as the THE DIRTBAG?     i think we’ll be seeing more of you and    PICKING FIGHTS THAT HE CAN’T WIN, A HEALTHY DISTATE FOR AUTHORITY, QUIET CONVERSATIONS AND TRANSACTIONS IN DARK CORNERS,    although we can’t help but think of ZIGGY SOBOTKA (THE WIRE), ASHTRAY (EUPHORIA), and JESSE PINKMAN (BREAKING BAD) whenever we see you down these rainy streets.   

BACKGROUND.

tw: death, drugs, body dysmorphia

he crawled straight out of the trash piles of fresh kills landfill in staten island, new york. at least that was the running joke in the family. it wasn't a broken home, nor were his parents bad. his sister was normal. as far as he knew, his father was a good guy firefighter until he passed away. anytime bash thinks about it, he has to wonder what the hell was wrong with him.

from the moment he could walk he was causing trouble. constantly doing stunts, climbing things, fighting with whoever was available, making messes, etc. this only got worse as he got older, constantly exhausting his widowed mother even more. he loved her, don't get him wrong, but he couldn't help it - he lived for the rush of it all and he loved to party.

to their mother's benefit - she tried to get him some help and it worked for something. he found out why he'd always felt wrong in his own skin and one of the reasons he felt off all the time. that counselor helped set bash on the path to come out and begin hormone therapy and puberty blockers. however, that didn't change his rebellious and overall mischievous nature - though it did give him confidence and esteem where he didn't have it before.

eventually he graduated high school, the one thing he promised his mother and he had to admit he wanted to give her at least one thing to be proud about. it was likely the last thing. for his eighteenth birthday she gave him boxes, wishing him the best but it was time for him to be his own problem and learn some responsibility (that's yet to be seen)

he fell in with the jade tribe quick, to be honest it was the first place he felt like he fit in. bash loved it. he feels like he's on the top of the world and every time he does a job it only adds to the rush.

bash is good at pushing product, he's been doing quick change transactions with cash since he was a teenager so he's only gotten better at that. he's always trying to take it to the next level, constantly out and about, at social events, making sure he's always available.

he still does a lot of stupid stuff to get laughs out of people. also has a bad habit of picking fights with people that he won't win. he's a scrappy kid but he's well aware that he looks like a sick victorian child on the best of days - that's why he's gotten really good at running. he's often cracking jokes, he's aggressive when it comes to selling product, and he loves to push buttons.

currently he doesn't have an end goal, he just wants to do his job well and keep having a good time. he still drops by to see his mom, give her some money when he can but she knows it's coming from somewhere suspicious so she often turns it down. other than that he's living his best life and trying to raise a little hell everywhere he goes.

QUICK CONNECTIONS.

people he annoys

people to get in fights with

childhood friends

casual relationships

platonic sleep buddies

places he crashes when he doesn't want to be alone

clients

party buddies

squad

HEADCANONS.

doesn't like to sleep alone so if he isn't able to get someone home with him (platonic or not) he will sleep on the couch or try to crash at a friends house.

not great at fighting but he tries anyways - part of this comes from struggling to build muscle mass consistently due to a high metabolism

in the same breath, he is almost always eating - talks about food a lot

more to come

[00towns]

the practico-inert and you: an experiment in attention

I’ve been thinking a lot about place recently. It’s the beginning of the rainy spring in Mie; I fumble with my mask and glasses as I shake off the drizzle I underestimated on my bike ride to school. When it’s not too wet on my way home, I ride past my apartment to the small cherry blossom orchard next door to check on the blooms. They’re in varying stages of pink and white flowers, and they’re all wet. Mesh baggies of oyster shells hang around the lowest branch of each tree. I have yet to figure out why, but a friend floats the idea that the minerals from the shells might serve as fertilizer that runs down the trunk of the tree at exactly this time of year, when the rain is constant and the peak bloom is any day now. On days like recent ones, I watch the rain flow for a little bit, and think about the craggy surface of the shells, miles and miles from the ocean, feeling the water in their crevices. I think of how they might feed the tree, helping it push out every last flower, stretch open every pink bud. This, too, is place. 

This porous, soft body has me somewhere in it, but I am just its occupant. I am made from place in every breath, every step, every night when I lay my head down. Henrik Karlsson described this in the broader sense as milieu¹, or the culture contained in your unique set of connections. It is an individual configuration of connections to flows of information, emotion, art. In this way, it is beyond the blanket term of ‘culture’, and hones in on individual relationships with all nodes of information. He names a few examples: your Twitter feed, your friend group. To me, milieu as a framework for understanding input attempts to put name to the Sankey diagram of an individual’s relationship to information: what comes in from where? How much of the whole does it make up? Where does this input go? Karlsson takes this term and uses it to the curation of taste, but I was compelled by the milieu as an environment, a physically and digitally mediated place where words become the substance of skin, music leaves behind spotted freckles on it, someone’s unkindness makes bones ache like incoming rain. Undoubtedly, place is just one element of a milieu, but recently, it seems to have been making itself the most clear to me. I live in a place, as do you, and that place lives in us, too. 

A few years ago, I read Marxist Andy Merrifield’s formulations on the bounds, both physical and metaphorical, of urban space. Merrifield argues that the city is a practico-inert, a Sartrean concept described as a set of material conditions created by intentional human action towards a set of goals, ‘praxis’, with which new, continuing praxis must contend. This idea argues that the outcomes of action are not built on neutral foundations of naturally arising systems; rather, they are often in tension with the results of past action, even that of supposed social progression or development. In the contemporary era, an obvious example is climate change, the conditions under which processes of capital, industry, and production towards an ostensibly ‘better’ life have exponentially sped up the decline of the environment, turning its decay into the new arising social condition that the most urgent innovation and intervention must address. Whether intentionally created or not, these conditions frequently become the site that new, immediate intervention must attend to, usually working in contradiction both morally and practically to the initial set of goals or ideas. The site that most urgently demands action is the result of past action for change. 

Like this, Merrifield says, the city no longer serves the needs of the people it was created for. Namely, the labor of the dead is dominant over living labor as manifested in the physical structures that govern urban spaces, like bricks and mortar, systems of transit, and what he describes as a ‘million-fold mass’ of people “such as never existed before, a flow of dynamic people who soon become passive vagrants, unemployed, sub-employed, and multi-employed attendants, trapped in shantytowns, cut off from the past yet somehow excluded from the future too, from the trappings of ‘modern’ urban life; instead, they’re deaded by the daily grind of hustling a living”.²

When I read this, I was finally able to understand what Sartre meant when he said that the practico-inert is necessarily physical. To people like my parents, the city and the practico-inert are fundamentally inseparable ideas of outdated labor, alienation, and dispossession, to which they responded with finding another built prison of potential action – moving to the suburbs. To young, socdem art-type people graduating debt-free from elite universities, the city is a place of infinite potential, a place to simultaneously revel in and revolt in the fact that thousands of others are attempting to experience the same jungle gym of guerilla living promised of early-twenties urbanism. This difference, which had previously always been a funny musing, transformed into a slightly unsettling realization that the way that the built structures of the city impose themselves on people are always totalizing and neutralizing, and the difference lies instead in the individual’s attempt to contend with some sort of urban future. In both cases, the city’s characteristic inaccessibility is so fundamental to its continued operation that they become the terms that most urgently need attending to: the housing crisis, landlordism, displacement, wealth disparity. In short, the city is practico-inert: a structure arising from human action towards a goal that is no longer attentive to the needs it was originally created to serve. 

The city would then come to be a place I found myself thinking about a lot. After reading a little more about the practico-inert, I had originally set out to use it as a personal analytic with a focus on attentivity, the core of what makes the praxis active or inert. I began this exercise attempting to make a list of metaphorical structures that I’ve identified in my life that no longer serve me but I remain tied to, essentially aiming to strip the practico-inert of its economic foundations and just use it as a tool for a thought experiment. What are some values that I’ve worked to embody that no longer serve my needs? How do these values capture my attention in a way that is not useful? 

The metric of ‘values’ worked easily on the personal level – I could already imagine discussing my former extroversion, my once-diehard belief in the project of diversity, my relationship to the Internet. But these felt flimsy, and easily dismissed as a thing of the past based on my own whim to decide whether or not I still ‘felt’ that way, a sentiment that could be assessed in a single moment and change from one to the next. Their effectual presence in my life was a yes or no. Any true structural prison – to Sartre, only then truly revealing the conditions in need of urgent praxis; to Karlsson, only then acknowledging the new relationship to place beyond merely people or things – would take more effort to reveal and would be much more threatening because they are not easily demolished, just as bricks and mortar, steel and I-beams, manhole covers and sewers.

I don’t currently live in a city, if taking the conventional definition, but I certainly used to. Merrifield’s analysis of the city as a prison of past action resonated more than I had anticipated. Power, capital, and governance in the city are already overwhelmingly powerful to the average person, but what about miles and miles of metal, stone, and steel? What about eons of highways, cables, and displaced space? Are these not equally as immovable and totalizing? From here, I turned towards the material analytic. The material condition demanded consideration just as much as the patterns, behaviors, and practices that came from it. Essentially, doing this project had to suck, otherwise it wouldn’t have really been done. I had to be mean. 

Like any good researcher, I began at the archive. I started by flipping through old journals, scrolling through old Tweets, finding fragments of thoughts in my Notes app, even combing my Google search history. I meditated. I read Trick Mirror. I went to White Stone. What I found by actually gathering some thoughts is that any pattern that I could identify was eerily iterative of the city’s role in my life, sub- and sub-sub-categories of my experiences in the city stemming from both time spent living in one and time spent in a stratified relationship to one in time and space. I ended up with a handful of spare-change reflections, none really satisfying without the context of the built environment(s) that raised them. It wasn’t possible to take on the analytic of the practico-inert as a metaphorical, abstract reflective project because I kept returning to the same handful of undeniably physical structures, all grounded in my relationship to urbanity: motions, places, things, a cruel version of all roads lead to Rome. The items on the list that I will attempt to articulate occupy both the purely economic, physical, built environment prison of past action, and the self-helpy, ‘bad habits’, abstracted trap of habit where all afflictions are deeply individual – a flagellating look both inward and outward. What places live under my skin? What do they do there? Are they welcome? 

Ad Reinhardt, from 'How to Look at Art, Arts & Architecture', 1946

I identified these based on the criterion of physicality and attentivity, both important to the analytic of the practico-inert with the former being material conditions and the latter being the ability of those conditions to change and respond. In other terms, I forced myself to choose objects or practices that are a) strictly material, b) I spend a lot of time thinking about, either willingly or unwillingly, and in order to keep this grounded in some sort of personal reflection, c) I rely on for a non-essential project of identity, self, or general indulgence. This exercise in itself – listing, writing, reflecting – is an attempt to reorient the attentivity of these structures.

Karlsson, 2022 – First we shape our social graph, then it shapes us https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/first-we-shape-our-social-graph-then (thank you, P)

Merrifield 2011 – The right to the city and beyond: a Lefebvrian re-conceptualization 

The city

I’ve already gone on about the city, but I make the most sense to myself when speaking in specific terms. My dad is a born and raised New Yorker. My mom was born in Singapore to immigrants from Southern China, who then immigrated again when she was sixteen to settle in the Bronx. I was born in Hong Kong. My family moved a lot as I grew up, and I spent a handful of years each in Guangzhou, northern Virginia, Bangkok, Beijing, and Seoul. I went to college in a medium-small city in central Virginia, and visited my parents in Tokyo once a year. 

These are all facts, but like many truths, they contain sub-truths and technicalities in droves. In Bangkok, and Beijing, my family didn’t live in the city-city. My brother and I were still in school, and most of the large, expensive international schools were located in the outskirts of the urban core, where they could comfortably house sports fields, swimming pools, and big homes for rich expatriates. In Beijing, the school even housed a huge structure known aptly as ‘the Dome’, an enclosed, airtight mega-facility where students could play tennis or soccer, run laps, and use the gym without worrying about the cardiovascular threat of heightened air pollution levels thanks to a state-of-the-art mass air filtration system not yet even seen in hospitals. My parents elected to live out there so that we could be close to our school and participate in the expatriate community that came with it. They instead would make the commute into the city every morning and evening. Going ‘downtown’, as it was usually referred to, was a rare breach of the expatriate bubble that surrounded my international school and happened so infrequently it was in itself a vacation. There, the ‘evidence’ that we were not the West wasn’t limited to the selection at the local convenience store or the language spoken by the service economy attending to expat whims. It was everywhere – public transit, visual culture, attitudes towards each other, urban organization, fashion, etiquette, pop culture. Notably, it was not in us. A family of Chinese Americans in Asia took on an odd quality, one that was hazy at best in our expatriate bubble but sharp and unforgiving in the city. At this age, in these places, the city was supremely unfamiliar – we literally did not even breathe the same air. 

The most recognizably urban experience I had in any city I grew up in was Seoul. In Seoul, we lived on the army base¹ in the middle of the city located right next to a bustling city center of shopping, restaurants, and cafes. My commute was almost an hour by private bus provided by the school to an equally bustling part of Seoul closer to its northern boundary. As I came into my independence as a late teenager, I came to know the city in two distinct pockets, categorized into ‘places near home’ and ‘places near school’. It was between these two frames that I started to negotiate the extent to which I was recognizable to myself – at home, I was among my family, my parent’s coworkers, and other expats, exchanging Americanisms, but at school, I was with friends and classmates, made up of mostly Korean Americans that tended much more to Korean than American. There was an invariably small overlap between these two groups, the residents of which I avoided desperately. I wore these two hats with a sense of urgency.

Everywhere else in Seoul, I was free to be no one, helped along by a growing allowance of independence and a determination to shoulder my way into becoming a real person. In the winters, I rode my longboard along the Han River to catch the early sunset over Dongjak Bridge, dodging old men on in-line skates and expensive bicycles, and be back home in time for dinner. In the warm spring, my friends and I would cut school early, make a Ghibli-esque trek across a wooded back-area of the school grounds, beg the guards who video-monitored the back gate to open it for us, and emerge onto the campus of Yonsei University to eat cold noodles, button-mash at arcade Tekken machines, and play pool. Unlike previous experiences of living in cities abroad, I felt like I could say that I really lived in Seoul, despite barely understanding any Korean, never working, and attending an English-speaking school. To this day, I remember Seoul so fondly it stings; in college, I called it my hometown for an embarrassing amount of time before realizing that most people took this to mean I was an international student, and dropped it. 

My first time moving to a place that was both a non-city and a non-suburb-of-a-city was when I moved to the US to go to college. In my first year, I was less than 100 miles away from the place I had just finished spending eighteen years of my life telling people I was from, and had never been so homesick (and insecure about being homesick) in my life. That first fall, despite my desperation to enjoy college, I put a countdown timer on my phone that ticked away the days until my flight to Incheon and laid in my dorm room until it got to zero. At home, it was like nothing had changed. The unpleasant growing pains of first year were literally an ocean away; I drank, ate, and played pool with my friends like the last four months had been a glimmery hallucination. Despite seriously considering otherwise, I returned to college for the spring semester, and things shifted slightly into a more tolerable peace. In the summer before my second year, my parents moved to Tokyo, but the feeling remained that I was returning to something that was home, or a gossamer, refracted version of it. When I started to look forward to winter break, it was a desperation to get back to the city and reconnect to myself in a way that I was starting to rely on having regular access to – home was meditation. This, combined with the rare experience of being so near my parents again after a while, shaped these weeks and months into a time outside of time. When it was time to leave, the semesters that stretched in front of me felt measured in gaps between ‘now’, and ‘the last time it was now’. A few weeks of acclimation back in Charlottesville later, I wouldn’t have even known what you were talking about. 

Now, when my friends talk about the city, they do so with a hint of reverence. Seattle is like this, the Upper East Side has that character, LA is so that, the Bay Area is this way. I’m guilty of this too². When a certain urban quality comes to precede a city, and the urban quality precedes the self, staring yourself in the face seems a lot less necessary³. Even a certain outfit set in different backdrops can say wildly different things about a person’s personal wealth, sense of self, educational background (think Dickies overalls, an hour south in Orange or in a boba shop in Annandale). The things that set cities apart from one another innately present some information about the gaze that is taken upon it, which in turn shines out of its residents in equal abundance. To know these differences and be able to talk about them in the weird sort of lingua franca of the well-traveled coastal elite is to learn an entirely different lexicon, and it’s one of money. These qualities have been intentionally scrubbed from the suburbs to create a uniform experience where everyone can be white, everyone can be American, and everyone can forget where they might have lived before. In contrast to urban character, suburban character seems more insidious. I don’t know anything about the history of the house, neighborhood, or county where my family lives. There’s no character to take on, no place to project identity, and no reason to. I cannot help but feel that this is intentional. Do the senators and politicians who live in my neighborhood and surrounding areas know the history of this place, as they govern districts and states miles and miles away? 

Here is the point I am leading up to: in the aftermath of this pattern of visiting home, where I was neither really just ‘visiting’ nor ‘going home’, the city – any city – feels like pilgrimage. It is a grand return both to the place itself and the person that I am while there. In my winters in Tokyo, surrounded by the concrete jungle gym of a city that positioned itself supremely important, I felt, at times, like a torso. If I kept moving, didn’t become a regular anywhere, and didn’t make any huge social faux paus, being in the city let me feel like I could have no identity at all – if I kept my mouth shut, I wasn’t even a woman or an American. I revel in the feeling that I, too, could be absorbed into the fabric of an ever-changing urban entropy that had always been intimidating, and through this even become unfamiliar, new, enticing to myself. I was entranced by the idea of feeling or acting like I blended in, as if a certain urban character was as much a resident of me as I was of it, and it would shine out of me even when I left just as long as I absorbed enough of it, learned to take it on. At the same time, any wrong move would expose the ugly tourist living beneath my skin, the embarrassment of non-belonging, the disjointed transplant. Being from nowhere in particular is a familiarity with many places, but it’s also a deep disfamiliarity with every place, home or not. This is what I will call practico-inert: I crave the city for its anonymity, centrality, encounter; I am impassively estranged from the relationship that people have to place despite being desperate for it. 

It’s wishful thinking to imagine that this is a unique feeling. And just as everything is embarrassing, I am embarrassed by how much I feel like myself in the city, and yet how self-absorbed my obsession with the ability to not be self-absorbed is! I’m more than aware how much I sound like the joke about the ‘returned from study abroad, or the ‘just moved to Manhattan undergrad’. But the truth remains that I like who I am more in the city, and the unrecognizable me(s) that still live there even after I have left. I can be an orbital cloud under balmy blue skies in Apgujeong or a vampire flitting around bookstores in Meguro, all in the same pair of sneakers. These people feel like reflections of my inner life, like I can start to match up the person that I’d like to feel like I am with the character that precedes a place. However, it’s also not lost on me that Korea and Japan are some of the most homogenous countries on Earth, and I happen to match the dominant look in either place, affording me a certain privilege and baseline ease that I don’t experience in America. In a roundabout way, the anonymity of the city is an escape from the exact type of narcissistic self-hate that I suffer from: I don’t have to stare down the barrel of everything I have decided that I am and am not if I can put on a hat and go for a walk and not be that person in public for an hour. It’s a respite from the project of identity. 

That summer was the last time I will live in Tokyo for a while. I spent some of the hottest days of the year on park benches devouring words, steam-pressing images into the back of my eyelids, and downing conbini ice cream and canned beer. That month, I made three friends. I didn’t learn much Japanese. It felt like worship. 

“Instead, centrality is always movable, always relative, never fixed, always in a state of constant mobilization and negotiation, within and without any movement. It’s a kind of centrality that is the nemesis of centralization with its totalizing mission of domination and control; it’s not so much about occupying a center as creating a node, a node that represents a fusion of people, and overlapping of encounters, a critical force inside that diffuses and radiates outwards; rain that creates its own tidal wave.” (Merrifield, 2012, p. 276)

This is an entirely distinct experience of neo-imperialist American shame that requires its own piece, and probably another few years of percolation.

I’ve always been amused by the difference in thought in regards to the city as exemplified by young people, for which the city can be a sandbox of art, food, fashion, and drinks after dinner, and my parents, one a born and raised Chinatown Manhattanite and the other a product of the Bronx, for which the ‘city’ represents the impoverished foundations upon which bootstraps-were-pulled-up-on to the suburbs of Northern Virginia. I reveled in this disparity in some part as self-soothing mental stimulation to erode the reality that I could not independently afford to live in New York City, even if I wanted to, for years, and that if I ever do move there I will be just another young privileged face in the wave of gentrification and displacement, another inconsequential neuron firing in the empty head. 

I called C the other day, from the break room next to the teacher’s office at my school. I jotted grammar points in Japanese as we talked about our lives. When I tell her that the honeymoon period of Japan is starting to wane and I need to look for a new hobby, she laughs. She says that living somewhere new is just being annoying about that place for six months and then moving on. I feel seen. 

In the car

Thanks to the great endeavor of my parents, I was never truly in charge of my own life or death in a meaningful way until I got my first car at 20 (not coincidentally, also thanks to my parents). My mom recalls that time as the most nervous she had ever been in the four years we lived across the world from each other. She told me she was often unable to sleep if she knew I was driving a long distance until I sent a text that I had arrived safely. My burgundy red Honda Civic and I would drive almost thirty thousand miles together in three years in a variety of settings, ranging from rush hour Manhattan to the one-light towns of central Virginia. 

In that car, I experienced three traffic incidents (two at-fault and one not, only one requiring any repairs) and three tickets (two speeding, one parking). The traffic incident I remember the most took place in the early spring of third year, while I was making the long Sunday evening drive back to school from Fairfax. I had spent two hours either white knuckled behind the wheel in NoVA traffic or bored to tears on the long straightaways of 29. As I pulled onto JPA, a police car turned on its lights and started following closely behind me. Without a street space to pull into, I drove until I could pull off onto a side road and turned on my hazards with my hands on the wheel. The middle-aged white officer berated me for taking so long to pull over until I was crying silently (‘Do they teach you that in driving school? To keep going like nothing’s happening when you see police lights behind you?’), and then wrote me a ticket for $50 which I was too scared to go to court for. Over the next two years, JPA would prove itself to be a site serving many strange purposes (the resting place of a decaying skunk, the setting of a poorly executed hate crime, the open-air hallway of a never-ending house party), but it would always make me prickle with nerves when driving. 

The car is a practico-inert in many senses. It’s an urgent site of intervention in climate justice, urban planning, civil engineering, the average American household. But I’ll add a personal analytic to this as well, and argue that the tyrannical rhythms of the car – both concept and object, on both the micro and macro – are engraved into wide highways and country roads in my skin, and I’m only just now polishing them out months after leaving my car behind in America.

The role of policing almost feels too obvious to include here, but it’s the most logical place to start. The car, and the American place sitting in its driver’s seat, is the constant, slight yet looming, threat of police confrontation that is designed for the average driver to forget about. The traffic stop is the biggest initiator of all American contact with police¹, and is the start of one in three police shootings. In the car, I find myself uncharacteristically anxious over potentially interacting with police to the extent that it impacts my ability to drive safely, always keeping an eye out for speed traps on Google Maps or a squad car tucked into some trees on the highway. Outside of driving, I can’t even think of a close call to police interaction I’ve had in the last three years². Speeding on American roads is almost a granted, especially at just five to ten miles per hour over the limit, but it’s not lost that this makes it so that a police officer is constantly justified in pulling over any vehicle on basis of their own judgment, and any other risk beyond that an automatic double jeopardy. 

Double jeopardy almost feels like the goal of highway policing. A litany of bad decisions make themselves available to me when I have access to a vehicle, including driving tired, driving while others are drinking in the car, driving through inclement weather, speeding if I’m late. A larger slice of the pie chart of possible decisions also become ‘bad ones’ when I am driving: using my phone, having a snack, getting distracted. It is so much easier to be irresponsible when operating a car than at any other time; it takes an even smaller slip of concentration, a much briefer lapse of judgment for things to go south. In shorter terms, I am never leaving more up to trust in my soft, weak body and squishy force of will than I am when I am operating a car. It’s terrifying. When I was driving regularly to commute or see friends, I started noticing how miserable it was making me because of how it primed my mood to be oriented towards complaining: there was never enough parking, I always missed a green light, traffic was always crazy. I was trying to shift from being acutely aware of every ounce of my mortality to being a relaxed, cool, fun person. This was becoming the entry point to my interactions with the world and started to take an actual toll on my attitude and footing in many socially demanding situations of both work and leisure. My car slowly filled up with junk from work, junk from eating shitty food, junk from overthinking. 

I continue to be blown away at how casually friends, family, and often strangers drop their lives in my hands at the door when entering my vehicle. It’s a heavy feeling that I found hard to shake at first, and would last even after arriving at a destination safely. Part of my mind would stay outside, parked on the street, occupied with the trip home, or stuck on the things my car demanded to consume – time, attention, gasoline. Any trip on which I took my car was a trip on which I took with me the most expensive thing that I own and every subsequent liability from that. I’m a good car owner in that I’m very up to date on the maintenance and safety of my car, but I’m also aware how much of a task that is even as someone who considers themselves relatively organized. Often, it’s one that I simply can’t believe that the average person is up to all the time, making other people’s cars and driving sometimes more stressful than my own. It’s made me unnecessarily paranoid, strict, and anxious, not in a way that I think is unjustified given the reality of traffic mortality in the United States, but in a way that makes me hate myself. 

In Japan, like a huge portion of the population here, I don’t own a car. There are clear outcomes to this: I’m in better shape without doing much at all, I chew through books and podcasts easily while commuting, I have not once thought for even a second about parking³. My average daily step count has more than doubled. I own a cute bicycle. It’s all very characteristic of any high-functioning train-based society, and I’ll sorely miss the clockwork of the transit systems here when I leave⁴. It’s the strongest system of public infrastructure that I have ever had the privilege of experiencing. On the other hand, I live in the prefecture of Japan that is home to the Suzuka circuit, Japan’s premiere F1 destination and a well-known attraction for car enthusiasts. The city I live in is known for its petrochemical industry and its subsequent pollution; the sidewalks are narrow and the streetlights are sparse. The auto industry in this area impacts life here down to our classrooms. Migrant workers are a strong community even in smaller towns, and many English teachers, especially in middle schools, have a handful of students who they are teaching English to at the same time as they learn Japanese by brute force immersion. Honda’s manufacturing presence in Mie and Toyota’s just a prefecture north in Aichi has made all of the Chubu region surprisingly mixed-race and multiethnic. While I may not drive one anymore, the presence and impact of cars is something that I feel every single day at work, while walking or cycling, when sleeping. 

I’m not entirely sure what to do about the car. I’m certain I’ll never truly escape it. Rather than just complaining, however, there is a reason that I consider my car practico-inert, in the sense of a physical prison of past action. The material necessity of my car isn’t even something I would put up to question. Despite my overwhelming hatred for it, ten times out of ten, I would choose having a car over not having one. 

In Virginia, I live in a typical American suburb where leaving my neighborhood is nearly impossible without a car. I was able to access pretty much everything that kept me sane through college and the year after through my car – my friends, work outside the home, food. I made a little money on the side during the quietest weeks of winter on Uber. I traveled up and down the East Coast with friends, alone, with family. A huge part of my job in public programming required having access to a vehicle that could haul huge pull-ups, posters, and tech equipment. My car probably saved my life ten times over when COVID shutdowns first began in Charlottesville and I was suddenly, curiously, without a place to sleep. Learning to drive the summer before and getting my car literally weeks before March 2020 saved me probably a lifetime’s worth of stress. My car made itself indispensable. It’s arguable that there’s always another direction to point fingers in – the built environment of the suburb and the lack of public infrastructure to respond to a health crisis come to mind – but I’d sooner find myself grateful for having had a car in a difficult situation than I would stick to my anti-car principles and have been totally fucked. In times where a car makes itself absolutely necessary, do you know what a little relief feels like? It feels like a lot⁵. 

Yet, I still can’t quite characterize my relationship to my car as practico-inert for the reason that ‘I don’t really like it, but it’s handy!’. The truth remains that a lot of the time, I really enjoy driving. I have an emotional attachment to my car in the same way that children love stuffed toys for keeping them safe. I take pride in taking good care of my car and being a good driver. What is it exactly about the car that appeals to me so much? Why do I feel empowered by driving at speed, at operating a car smoothly, by the alone time spent driving? Why do the cultural imaginations of the great American road trip stir something in me, anxieties and dangers and headaches of the highway and all? This is what feels the most endemic about my infatuation with the car, the road, the act of driving. It’s the constant return to it and its needs, the inevitability of the car. I could accumulate hundreds of hours on foot and on bike, feel the effects on my health, environment, and attitude, and still find myself instinctually tending towards the car if the option was given to me. 

At the same time, I have to ask what the next point of practice on this site might be. Does having moved somewhere with fantastic infrastructural support for non-drivers count as taking actionable steps towards escaping the totalitarian car? I would argue no, but I will add that escaping the car has not subtracted cars from my life, but instead opened up new ways of locomotion. I don’t blink at a thirty minute walk any more, know my neighborhood’s bus schedule like the back of my hand, developed an eerily familiar pseudo-social relationship with my bike (albeit a bit more wary of each other). 

Not driving has brought a sense of attunement to the world that I hadn’t even been conscious of until I visited home for Christmas. Japanese people are known for their timeliness, reflected in both individual approaches to life and public transportation systems. but there’s also a more constant awareness of time that comes with living here. When the difference between getting home at 5 and at 8 is catching a bus that leaves once an hour, which is likely the first leg of several extremely on-time transports, time doesn’t slip away as easily as it would if deciding to leave was just that. There’s also always the faint threat of straying too far from home with no public transit to get home, like missing a bus that’ll get you a train that’ll get you the last train to the only station walkable to your house. While at times stressful, getting home is often as much as working backwards from a desired destination and a given time, and I’ve found myself surprisingly attuned to the spatial relationship between places, the time demanded of such movement, and the suddenly much larger consequences of losing track of time. 

Attunement, in another sense, has also been to the world on the exterior of a car. Urban studies essayist Garnette Cadogan noted in an interview on the podcast The War on Cars that “[walking] was a place in which I continually meet people. I’m invited into worlds in which there is one pleasure or delight or discovery, or an encounter with another that just kept enlarging my sense of myself and the possibilities in the world. And I began thinking of walking as possibility. Because that’s what walking was—it was social possibility, it was emotional possibility, even spiritual possibility.⁶" I’ve found this, too, to be characteristic of my life on foot. Some of the things I’ve seen while walking in my neighborhood include a family of tanuki living in some bushes near an empty lot, a beautiful cherry blossom orchard with oyster shells scattered over the soil, and an outdoor tomatillo plant that I can get a decent harvest from if I can get to the fallen ones before the birds do. It’s gotten to the extent that I occasionally balk at even riding my bike, which can be too fast to catch onto the finer details of possibility⁷. 

This sense of joy, encounter, surprise is irreplicable by the logic of the car. It’s a mechanically necessary slow-down, a forced thoughtfulness, a proximity to mindfulness through an organic rhythm, the ultimate relationship to the earth. I grow gratitude for each step my body allows me, stem curling up from the ground into the sole of my shoe, through my spine, and blooming out of the top of my head to shelter me from the sun. 

Henry Grabar in Slate, The American Addiction to Speeding https://slate.com/business/2021/12/speed-limit-americas-most-broken-law-history.html

In November, someone stole my bike from the train station in my neighborhood (punks!!! hooligans!!!). A nice detective drove me to the police station, put my groceries in the refrigerator while they took my statement, and then took me home. He asked if I liked Shohei Ohtani. The bike was back by the next week. 

 I went to Costco in Gifu with my coworker and her friends a few weeks ago. We forgot where we parked and wandered the lot eating hazelnut chocolate soft serve. The familiar will make itself clear, I guess. 

In the heat of August last year, there was a typhoon in my prefecture. The principal instructed us all to stay home, so I sweated it out in the disgusting apartment I had been assigned to as the storm rattled my windows. I was surprised to find out upon coming back to work that I had been charged a day of PTO. When the Ishikawa earthquake caused a runway fire at Haneda Airport and I missed my flight from Tokyo to Nagoya, I spent an extra 24 hours playing tourist, shopping, and eating in my favorite city. I got the day off for free and received plenty of old-lady cooing over my misfortune for the transportation incident. 

https://www.tumblr.com/jb-blunk/677813547138498560/in-this-terrifying-world-you-continuously-have-the

The War on Cars, Episode 83: The Pedestrian. https://thewaroncars.org/episode-83-the-pedestrian-final-web-transcript-2/

Like staring at the mountains and wishing I was hiking, or seeing a cute dog and wishing we were hiking together, or feeling a nice breeze and wishing I was feeling it on top of a mountain while on a hike

My relationship to East Asia

I’ve already talked about my not-like-other-girls tendencies, but perhaps this is where that strange feeling of extremely internal, quiet insanity of girlhood comes to light: I genuinely believe that I have one of the worst cases of carefully managed, suppressed NLOG-ism possible. I will push myself to be specific. 

I sometimes relish the fact that other Asians are surprised to find out certain things about me. One such thing is that I am a fan of K-pop, another is that I was in an Asian sorority in college, one more is that I’m ChinAm. It makes me feel like I’ve done something right, like I’ve successfully dodged tropes and have emerged as uncategorizable and unrecognizable, the Best Asian, made up of vagueness and blurry cultural lines that I can keep in my pocket until it’s the right type to deploy them. I enjoy this feeling. It makes me feel important. In much ruder terms, I think I have a tendency to like to be right by means of other people being wrong, to derive some of my sense of self-worth from not being the person that people perceive me as. I joke with my friends that the worst part of being a K-pop fan is other fans, and there’s more than a grain of truth here: some of the most fun to be had in K-pop fandom is pointing and laughing at people who are crazier than you, including, sometimes, past versions of yourself. There is something so evilly satisfying about not being other people. These people, more often than not and including myself, are Asian Americans who for some reason I cannot help but judge for being Asian Americans in ways that are exactly predictable: in fandom, in social organizations, in friend groups, online. Terms like boba liberalism, all-Asian friend group, soft cultural power whiz through the ticker tape in my brain like the endless, hungry feed that it is, algorithm-ed and gameified to either like or hate, be or not be, participate in or reject. 

If this entire tirade screams of internalized racism to you, fret not; the thought has occurred to me, too. I understand that tropes about types of Asians are meant to take them down and make them understandable, even ones that circulate internally to those groups. My distaste for parts of Asian America is a hatred of something that I see reflected at least partially in myself. However, instead of internalized racism, I’ll offer this indictment of myself that I believe is much more accurate, and to me, much more cruel: I have clung onto my relationship to East Asia for years past its expiration date. 

Again, I will push myself to be specific. There is something shiny, brief, and shameful buried in the heart of the way that I think and talk about my experiences in East Asia. I am deeply, fondly attached to the years that I spent there as a teenager. Perhaps it is the red-cheeked shame of still feeling like I struggle to talk about privilege despite a plethora of examples and opportunities that would lend themselves to my case; perhaps it’s also the neocolonial conditions under which I’ve been able to gain intimate access to so much of East Asia. The fact remains that I can attribute so much of who I feel I am to the way that I was raised by these places, and I don’t know if I like that about myself. This sense of self feels very extractable; like it’s something that can be taken away if I were to settle down, or pursue something I find uninteresting, or let those times fall away in importance. I feel deeply, weirdly protective of the years and months that I spent in Korea and Japan. I don’t know if it’s the typical yearning for places that I once loved, or a specifically pathologizable dependency on that time as defining characteristics of my personality¹. Something about the times that I spent as a high schooler feels like the last time that I participated in something wholeheartedly, fully believed in something (the future, perhaps, or maybe myself), and wasn’t nonconsensually critical about my relationship to the world. I don’t know if this is more defined in contrast to a subconscious, post-COVID mourning, being a femme, or another casualty of being an NLOG, but I cannot tear my eyes away from these memories, experiences, and places as something that is possible; I find myself thinking of them in the same way that I used to let influencers, friends, and celebrities worm their way into my head on the pipeline to obsession. Sitting around and idealizing about that time is it’s own activity at this point². The thought makes me feel like my teeth are rotting. I think that this nostalgia is what feeds the flames of discomfort I feel about my place in Asian America. 

My interests in pop culture coming out of East Asia are a big part of what I feel like my time growing up in Asia left me, along with a sloppy fistful of a few different languages. But, I’ll also acknowledge that these interests are entirely aligned with current Western media consumption fetishes focused on Korea and Japan. I’m a die-hard K-pop boy group stan who has been in it for so long that I’m stronger in Korean than I am Japanese several times over (and I only live in one of those places!). The time I spent living in Korea was on the occupied land of the American military, both representative of a history of imperialism and actively participating in it. I went to an expensive private school on the government’s dime where the vast majority of students were the anchor babies of eye-wateringly rich Korean American families who wanted their kids to have a better shot at entrance to American colleges. I’m currently a first year participant on the JET program, sending thousands of Westerners and English-speakers to different cities and towns across Japan to work in public and private schools in the name of soft power cultural exchange. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a vast majority of people on this program are people whose interest in and understanding of Japan began (and frequently, ended) with anime, video games, and other post-war mass cultural exports. I, myself, won’t try to pretend that having spent time here before makes me any better. For me, to have lived in Korea and Japan was to consume them, and the taste is unpleasantly reminiscent of the metallic, violent things that America and Japan have consumed too. In this way, too, my relationship with East Asia feels unsatisfying, but perhaps to wish otherwise is to wish for ignorance. 

If I attempt to cut to the heart of what I feel, I think it is this: I have hung my laurels for so long on a specific, personally-and-politically fraught experience of living in Asia and the experiences that it has provided me that I’m not sure how to be a version of myself that I like without setting that person against others. I understand what a terrible thing this is to say, and at the same time, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to meaningfully articulate how much I mean it. 

It feels silly to say, but my parents leaving Asia to move back to Virginia last year left me with a pang of uneasiness. My own position as a diasporic subject has always been defined by space; when I was younger it was by living in Asia in places I both did and did not have a diasporic connection to, in college it was by visiting my parents frequently and the small but strong Asian American network I was building. I would always have my ties to the physical land of Asia as my leg-up experience, somehow always orienting me differently to the core of Asian American discussions and topics. It was a huge part of who I was. Since my parents moved back to Virginia, I find myself wrestling with the thinner, ground-floor terms of diaspora that I haven’t had to before. What once felt just like discourse is now the reality that my family is learning how to deal with – microaggressions, regular aggressions, language loss, access to traditions, aging relatives, changing family structures. It was easy to think of smelly Asian food in the cafeteria tropes as just that when they were only ever happening miles and miles away, in a culture that I knew was supposed to be very much like my own but was not. Now, I worry about my parents when they FaceTime me from their drives up to New York City Chinatown, I don’t laugh when my dad tries to tell me a funny story about a racist guy in Wawa. I feel like I’m experiencing a delayed puberty of the very basic ‘growing up Asian in America’ – my NLOG factor has evaporated, if you will, and I’m left to define what it means to be like exactly other Asian Americans when I so often (problematically) set my stance against them. I’m occupying the position that I so often intentionally misunderstood. 

It feels cruel that my mind is so occupied with a place that I no longer have a neat, agreeable relationship to. My family belongs to the early end of Chinese immigration to the United States, pre-1965 and working class. We have no family or holdings left in China – the farthest extent of my family network now lives in Long Island. Since my parents moved back to the US in the summer of 2022, I’m struggling to renegotiate the new geographic, spatial, and familial terms on which my personal experience of diaspora rests. I find myself craving words from others who have tried to make sense of their relationship to homeland, which read differently than they used to as I flounder to find something that feels satisfactory. This is what I would come to identify as practico-inert: I developed so much of who I thought I would grow up to be off a relationship to East Asia and my experiences in those places that I’m no longer sure how to not fall back on the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘time’ to think about who I am, and by extension, how I relate to other people, especially now that that relationship is changing. 

I wrote much of the above before I moved to a small industrial city in central Japan on the JET Program this past summer, which slowly helped hammer back many of my NLOG tendencies back into their comfortable, sun bleached spots, hiding that there was ever anything wrong to begin with³. I’ve enjoyed myself immensely during my time so far, but I still find myself drawn to the same questions of place. I don’t see myself living in my area long term, but also can’t fathom going back to the US anytime soon – there is still so much to do here. Japan is safe, convenient, and easy to live in. I enjoy the pop culture and have been given opportunities I couldn’t even imagine back in the US. In the same breath, I miss English speaking friends who I feel like I can match in every sense instead of just a few and a language, I miss my family. I want to make more money, I want to be in community with more queer people. I want to live five thousand different lives. In short, I have no idea how I’d like to sort my relationship between home and home, a refrain repeated over and over in the body of Asian American literature and media. I have a hard time treating my time in Japan as real, and the life that I am building here as an actual reflection of the way I will shape my twenties and beyond. This, too, is part of the escape of my relationship with living in EA that I have to contend with now that it is of my own choice and volition to do so, and now with the experience of the US under my belt. 

As I transitioned out of working in Asian America in the referential sense and into what feels like working in Asian America in a literal sense, I’ve come to realize that to me, Asian America is much more interesting as a stance than as a subject matter. I’ve gone on a strange personal journey from finding Asian Americans cringe when first encountering them en masse at UVA to really staunchly standing by standing by them (to the extent of taking not one, not two, but four jobs in AAPI), to finally settling on a begrudging acceptance that the sometimes interesting, sometimes embarrassing fabric of being Asian American in public is just the way that things are. I’ve felt more moved by the kinship that being Asian American has allowed me, both here in Japan and in college, than I did in my year actually working in the field. Asian America can feel flimsy at times; my friends and family are perfect, robust, eternal. This, too, may be borne out of some unsettled place: I’m afraid that the subject matter approach will spend too much time trying to sift through the clumpy litter box of identity and come up with the slightly scary notion that the material of Asian America is, in truth, not much substance at all, a mosaic of borrowed difference that doesn’t reveal itself as nothing until the dust is blown off, and the tradition itself floats away with it. 

The idea that I might have dedicated my life’s work to something that I’m not really sure if I really care for is both a reassuring and frightening thought. After having moved, I keep looking over my shoulder at Asian America, as if playing red light, green light. If I don’t look, will it change? Will I turn around one day and find myself staring back? Will Asian America catch up to us? On the other hand, my job now feels like the most derealized I have ever been from any concept of complex public identity: I am an American talkbox who has a mastery of the English language, and for that, this box must talk⁴. 

“Remember: home is

not simply a house, village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.” 

From Off-Island Chamorros, Craig Santos Perez

I’ll also recognize that I haven’t had quite the amount of years beyond them that I will have after I return from Japan for a second time, so it’s a bit hard to tell if I will romanticize these years specifically or just constantly yearn after my late teens and early twenties until I mold over.

See Liz, on yearning. 

The NLOG factor, here, is one that I was raised in: it is being a foreigner who doesn’t look it in Asia, what I once saw termed as a ‘hidden immigrant’ (ew) in a book about third culture kids that seemingly was trying to give people a term to rally around. 

 I was asked to put together a presentation on fall activities in America, and found myself haphazardly Googling Virginia tourism websites. I ended up showing a historical reenactment video of a bunch of kids fake-dying from plastic rifle wounds in Jamestown, just because I thought it would make the kids laugh. It feels weird. 

I am determined to deserve something

Recently, I was at an event that I considered myself exceedingly fortunate to be at – perhaps one of the only things I’ve ever participated in that I could truly consider a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The entire time, the two things that I felt were close to tears and why me? What could I possibly have done to bring me to this point? How did the spaghetti of life choices and decision trees have led me to this point? I’ve never thought of living this way. 

I don’t not believe in cause-and-effect relationships, but there have been more than a few moments in the past year that have left me questioning if there is really such a relationship that can define two abstract items in time and space as a ‘cause’ and as an ‘effect’, in matrimony of opposition to each other. It feels vain to imagine that a mental connection that I might draw between two things could be anywhere near a reflection of a reality that often feels too complex to even participate in, let alone draw conclusions about. Attempting even more than two things feels like a farce. Infinitely many things are true at the same time, and these things are often in contradiction, in moral opposition, producing outcomes where it seems like none should occur and withholding them when they should be obvious. To leave the job of attaching red yarn between events to humans is a Sisyphean cosmic prank, frankly, and I’m sometimes left gawking at my own daring to even try. 

I’m not sure where this instinct to believe in a logical world comes from, where karma functions like a machine, actions have direct consequences, and the idea of justice can be followed to a T. This has never really been true on the personal nor public scale. This ambiguity can be beautiful, and the gaps between truths are the spaces where poetry grows. Here, too, is where I’ve found meaning out of injustice, celebrated undefinability. But I can also identify that I am a type of person for which this ambiguity – where fault is shared, where forgiveness is granted with two hands – has made a faint sense of cloying guilt that I’ve received much more than I deserve, have been forgiven many more times that I should have, and have escaped the consequences of my failures in a way that has made me fat and happy, complicit in my own excuses as to why I live the way that I do. 

This, of course, isn’t to say that I don’t want an environment where I feel as if I will be supported if I fail or allowed to make mistakes. It is, however, an inquiry into the perhaps more damning notion that I haven’t really ever truly deserved anything, whether ecstasy of the everyday, the opportunities I’ve had, the people that I can call my friends and family, the way I’ve been able to move through the world. Why do I have these things? Is it even possible to imagine a ‘cause’ large enough, pious enough, unquestionably virtuous enough that could result in this elation of my delight for my everyday life? I have received so, so much. My gratitude overwhelms me constantly, I feel like I am always failing to say thank you. 

In this logical version of the world, my sense of thankfulness is nourished by work in all senses. My attunement to the karmic flow of the world manifests in my personal life, and I am able to reciprocate my joy by an inner sense of extended satisfaction and openness to work, effort, commitment. Work comes easily and naturally, and feels like an equivalent reciprocation to the universe for its gifts. Instead, I don’t feel satisfied by work at all. I think that fulfillment in life isn’t constructed off of work is true for most people. But again, perhaps more insidiously, I don’t find myself satisfied by hardly any work at all – in the capitalist definition, but also in the personal and descriptive. Even the things that are supposed to feel the most actionable, personal, self-serving – working out, taking care of my home, reading, writing – feel like work. How can I even begin to think about a real, genuine gratitude for the life I’ve been allowed to live when living well, even for just my own sake, feels like work? Is it possible to feel satisfied with anything I accomplish when that accomplishment feels unnatural and uncharacteristic? Is there such a thing as the feeling that I believe that I deserve a result that I actually get? Is it vanity to think that my joy is something I could have possibly endeavored to deserve? 

As I, like many young adults, slowly realize that my work will never be a true reflection of what I am passionate about or interested in, I’ve struggled to look towards new hobbies to fill up my time. It’s not often that I understand the satisfaction of something well done, but when I do, it’s like the machinations of a world that I’ve felt like I was wired wrong for are suddenly, overwhelmingly obvious. The times I catch glimpses of that satisfaction are magical, like taking the first bite of a really good meal that I perfected, the view from the top of a difficult hike. I learned that the term for this is called complex leisure, and it’s defined by its scalable nature. Complex leisure differs from passive leisure by way of being something that one can improve at, participate in in different measures, and invest variable amounts of money in. Most adult hobbies are complex leisure, like climbing, recreational sports, cooking. The idea that sustains this type of leisure is that continual and self-implemented challenges lead to the same type of effort-result gratification relationship that is usually structured by school, traditional jobs, and capitalist institutions. This type of satisfaction is deeper, more meaningful, and leads to tangible outcomes for the practitioner. 

I’ve always considered myself someone with a rich inner life. I’m grateful for it – I can spend time by myself well, entertain myself, make myself laugh. And yet, I don’t know why complex leisure evades me. I can’t quite bring myself to understand the type of sustained pleasure that complex leisure over a long period is supposed to bring. I’m afraid that deep down, I’ve never really worked towards anything in my life, and the ends of my pleasure receptors have been fried off permanently, not even from short-form content or the Internet which both definitely play a part, but from years of instant gratification, overlove, and community. I have been given so much and have done shockingly little to deserve it. I take, and take. 

I think my indulgence in quick-fix dopamine – friends, the Internet, music – is actively preventing me from the revelation of gratitude, actual embodied gratitude that shines out from my chest without trying. Is it really possible to develop a dopamine response to real life, complex leisure, and work that can match the ecstasies of sugar, the Internet, sex? Even beyond that, what about my friends, nature, or music, my appreciation for which I have done absolutely nothing to cultivate? These things may not be given, per say, but my enjoyment derived from them is something I again have done nothing to deserve. I think there do exist people who have gotten close to perfect on their regulation of joy milieu, but I also think there are people who cosplay complex leisure in order to mine satisfaction from the Internet and sex, which brings me to my next thought, which is just how superficial attempting to understand all of this is. Trying to draw circles around things like satisfaction, joy, rhythms, feels like implementing a slow feeding schedule for an overenthusiastic dog, who will eat and eat until they throw up. I am both owner and dog, and when the hand and the mouth belong to the same beast it is quite, quite easy to fall into patterns of excessive stimulation. Perhaps the answer, just as it is to the dog, is a Kong filled with peanut butter¹, a slow drip of emotion controlled just enough to tame envy and ugly, jealous thoughts. 

Some on the Internet call one such response to an overloaded brain a dopamine fast, where a break from social media and interactive technology is taken to reset the receptors of dopamine from instant gratification and addictive behaviors. This approach imagines the experience of instant feedback dopamine addiction to stem from the cyclical algorithms of the internet as much as the content itself. However, I was surprised to learn that the original concept of a ‘dopamine fast’ included fasting from things beyond the digital age: social interaction was one of them, another was eating for purposes other than basic sustenance². The aim of this practice was to abstain from not just quick dopamine fixes, but any at all. After a period of dormancy, brain receptors are supposed to recalibrate to the joys of daily life. Beyond dopamine, I think the necessary fast extends to other people. The cause and effect logic that I want to attempt should belong to my own body, start and end with me, remain something close. Maybe quick-release dopamine is avoidable, as are imaginary audiences with enough time and distance. But is it possible to abstain from place, even just for a little while? Can I extract these things – the city, the car, East Asia, beyond – from under my skin? I’m not sure it’s possible. 

In a way, I’d like to do a system reset of sorts, one that brings the solution to this ennui down to eye level, like inputting ‘hello, world’ into a supercomputer. I’m trying to rediscover the clean boundaries of an effort and an outcome, like maybe the sharp edges will shoulder some logic back into me. In the face of absurdities in droves and joy so easily reveled in, there’s something sacred about an action and a consequence, praxis and its outcomes, a push and a fall. In short, I am determined to deserve something, to create the perfectly weighted outcome from the ultimate infallible action. Perhaps this an effort to assuage the guilt of my joy, as if by demonstrating that I am capable of working without immediate gratification, or that if I am able to say with my whole chest that I deserve an outcome, just one, that all the other ecstasies of my life are things that I can have also deserved, even if by less direct measures. I’m looking for proof of concept. 

As I reflect on place, the practico-inert, and what no longer serves me, I think this guilt of incessant ungratefulness may one day take its place in these ranks. Guilt, too, is a node on my milieu, and I fear it will spread to eat at more of my being. I’m infinitely thankful for what the places I’ve explored in this project have given me, and it has taken a great deal of guilt to say that they no longer provide the joy, solace, and comfort they once did. As much as I would like to be the sole progenitor of my logical reset, these places will push their way into my blindspots, both material and emotional. They are a part of me. 

As I challenge my place(s) to be more attentive to my needs, I, too, must think about how I curate it. I soak up the rays of my desk neighbor, my brother on Facetime, the blue of my water bottle. I am relentlessly tiraded upon by the fat clouds that hang over the parking lot of my school, the yellow flowers that bloom in the sidewalk cracks. They take their places in my soft body, and I carry the tastiest ones like a secret stash of snacks. I’ll break one in half. Perhaps this, too, can be gratitude. I hope you’d like to share.

 See also: frozen grapes, the last few pearls at the bottom of a cup of boba, anything describable as a ‘team-building exercise’, trying to book-club something with friends online

 Lol this is just called going to work 

[acacia-may]

Secrets and Sugar Mice (A Secret Garden Future Fic): Chapter 3

Story Summary: After many bumps in the road, the newly-licensed Dr. Colin Craven is finally fulfilling his long-time goal of running his own cottage hospital in Thwaite thanks to guidance, assistance, and generosity of the most competent doctor he had ever known, the Grand Doctor from London, Dr. Louis Cartwright. Even the generally pessimistic Colin can admit that the future looks bright, but there are still a couple of matters that have thrown a wrench into his plans--a certain medical supply cabinet, in particular, and Dr. Cartwright's daughter, a nurse with whom Colin did not get off on the right foot.

After a particularly frustrating day, Colin turns to his one of his oldest friends for help and advice. Perhaps Dickon is right and all it takes is the magic of friendship to turn this whole situation around...

Fandom: The Secret Garden

Genre: Friendship, Slice of Life, Developing Friendship, Post-Canon, Future Fic

Relationships (in order of appearance/mention): Colin Craven & Dickon Sowerby, Colin Craven & Dickon Sowerby & Mary Lennox, Colin Craven & The Grand Doctor from London, Colin Craven & Original Characters (Julia Cartwright), Colin Craven & Martha Sowerby, and Colin Craven & Mary Lennox (A little bit of Mary & Martha friendship at the end). Colin & Julia (OC) Centric.

Characters (in order of appearance/mention): Colin Craven (POV Character), Dickon Sowerby, Mary Lennox (POV Character), The Grand Doctor from London (Dr. Louis Cartwright), Dr. Cartwright's Daughter, Julia (OC) (POV Character), Martha Sowerby, and Mrs. Susan Sowerby

Rating: G

Warnings: Colin being Colin (I guess?) but honestly this is just friendship fluff and slice of life.

Word Count: 5331 [Out of 11,636 Total]

Link to original post on AO3. Please do not repost to another site.

Chapter 3 of 4. Link to previous chapter (Chapter 2) and next chapter (Epilogue).

Story Below the Cut! Thank you so much for reading!

CHAPTER 3: A Walk in the Rain

As they stepped out into the freezing rain, all Julia could think, a bit sarcastically, was that she hoped her father was happy. She had tried to keep an open mind, but all that had really done was confused her. For the few months she had known Dr. Craven, or she supposed ‘Colin’ as she was to think of him now, he had always carried himself with an air of aloofness which, she presumed, was a product of his posh upbringing and lifestyle. Honestly, she had found it rather snobbish, but he seemed different today—still curt, yes, but a bit softer somehow. It was almost a little unnerving, and Julia wasn’t exactly sure how to feel about it. However, it still didn’t change the fact that they had nothing to talk about. Their walk through the rainy streets of Thwaite village was filled with rather awkward silence, but at least they were dry. It was almost fortuitous that Colin happened to have an umbrella especially during such an unexpected storm—unless of course, he, as a life-long Yorkshire resident, knew something about the local weather that she didn’t.

“How did you know it was going to rain?” she asked curiously.

He tilted his head. “I didn’t.”

Julia’s eyes narrowed. “But you brought an umbrella with you even though it was so sunny earlier.”

“I like to be prepared,” he explained very matter-of-factly.

 “For the worst, it would seem,” she quipped.

Colin’s mouth turned up just barely in the corners. “I actually rather like rainy days.”

Julia paused—a bit taken aback by this attempt at polite conversation—but she managed to add, “I don’t mind them when its warm, but they’re dreadful when it’s cold like this.”

Colin nodded. “We don’t get a lot of snow here so it mainly just rains in the winter. I’ve been thinking of bringing a couple of umbrellas to the hospital just to have on hand in the event of inclement weather.”

“That would be nice,” Julia replied with a nod as the conversation fizzled again. She sighed. At least they could talk about the weather. Though she didn’t know much about high society, she was of the impression that the weather was the default conversation topic among the posh though she wasn’t at all sure why, seeing as it was so dreadfully boring to talk about. Even so, she conceded, it was something, and something—even the weather—was better than the awkward silence that followed for the next several blocks as they walked along—huddling under the umbrella as the rain beat against its dark leather.

Excess water pooled in the streets and soaked through Julia’s boots as she walked through puddle after puddle. Even with the umbrella, they would both be drenched by the time they got home—Colin likely more-so than her seeing as he had a much farther walk. Julia began to turn at a corner, but Colin stopped. She turned to stare at him confusedly.

“I usually turn here,” she explained though she didn’t think she should have to seeing as he had lived here all of his life and surely knew how to get places—though, she admitted, she wasn’t sure how much time he had spent in the village.

“That road curves,” he countered and motioned straight ahead. “This way is a bit faster.” He paused and Julia could have sworn she saw him smile just barely, “and you get to look in the shop windows.”

Julia sighed though she knew she couldn’t argue with “faster” in this storm so she followed him down the other way. “I suppose I’m still new here,” she conceded.

Colin nodded. “Perhaps a map would be helpful?” He said it so seriously she couldn’t tell if he meant it genuinely or condescendingly.

“Perhaps,” she answered curtly.

After a few more steps, Colin’s asked in a softened tone, “Do you like it here? I suppose it’s very different from London.”

 “Very different,” Julia agreed watching the raindrops make ripples in the puddles on the ground. “It reminds me of the Lake District.” She paused then added, “where I grew up” for good measure even though she was sure he already knew that. 

“That’s a very lovely area.”

 “You’ve been?” asked Julia tilting her head.

Colin nodded. “A couple of times—in the summer.” Julia was about to say something more when Colin stopped abruptly and exclaimed, “Oh look! They’ve put out the sugar mice.”

Julia leaned slightly to the right to peer into the shop window where there was a shiny tray of sugar mice candies. Colin turned back to look at her with bright eyes and a gentle smile. She wasn’t sure if she had ever really seen him smile before. It made him look much nicer—almost handsome. She felt a blush rising in her cheeks at the thought. He didn’t seem to notice, however, as he explained excitedly, “We have sugar mice every Christmas. When I was younger—around 7 or 8—my father,” he paused before adding quickly, “well…he wasn’t around very often, but one year, he was home right before Christmas, and he asked what I wanted. I was surprised and didn’t know what to say, but I had just read about sugar mice in a book and had never had them before so that’s what I asked for. And on Christmas day, in the afternoon, a white box with a red ribbon came from my father, and it was filled with sugar mice. We’ve had them at Christmas ever since—even though we generally spend it together now.” He chuckled lightly. “My cousin Mary and I used to have fights with them—though I know it’s terribly dreadful to play with one’s food.”

Julia tried to keep her jaw from falling slack. Of all the many things he could have said, this probably surprised her the most. She couldn’t think of what exactly to say, and he must have noticed her confusion as his face seemed to fall or at least return to its usual coldness. “Oh, I…” he began to explain or perhaps apologize.

“No,” Julia interrupted. “It’s”—She paused—“It’s only…that’s the first personal thing you’ve ever told me about yourself.”

“Is it?” Colin seemed to take a step back, and his mouth opened just barely. “Oh. I…um…” his voice trailed off, and he pursued his lips.

“It’s nice,” Julia admitted before she could stop herself. “Why don’t you talk about yourself more often?”

Colin shifted from one foot to the other. “I…” He paused, and his pale cheeks turned the faintest pink. “I didn’t think it was relevant.

Julia couldn’t stop herself from chuckling a little and felt a bit bad for it as she could feel him pulling away again. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never had sugar mice,” she added quickly hoping to keep the conversation going. “We have caramels at Christmas though.” She paused and smiled. “I don’t have a special story about them, but I did have a friend growing up who used to say they suited me because they match my hair.” She chuckled lightly. “And I’m rather fond of them—but you already knew that.” She turned to look at him adding, a bit teasingly, “It was rather forward of you to buy me some before we had even met.”

Colin’s cheeks turned pink, and he stammered, “My apologies. It was not my intention to be forward. You see, your father and I were taking a walk once in London when we passed a candy shop, and he asked if we might stop and go in so he could buy some caramels for his daughter because they were her favourite. And when he invited me for dinner, I picked some up because I thought it might be nice, and I was trying to be polite—I thought you were…” He paused. “If I had known that you…” He paused again. “I would have never…”

“It’s alright,” interjected Julia a bit perplexed by Colin seemingly sudden change of character. “I suppose my father still sees me as a little girl.”

“Please allow me to make it up to you,” he answered earnestly and motioned to the shop window. “I can buy you caramels now that I know you and perhaps some sugar mice.”

“Oh no,” protested Julia as a sheepish blush rose in her cheeks. “You don’t have to do that. I was only teasing—really.”

“No, please, I insist.” His eyes softened, and his mouth turned up at the corners. “It will be good to get out of the rain anyway.”

“Alright,” Julia sighed conceding once again that she couldn’t argue with Colin’s logic so she followed him into the shop and out of the rain.

The door had just closed—jingling behind them—when an excited voice called, “Master Colin?” Julia watched as Colin turned and his face brightened again into a smile.

“Martha, what a surprise!”

A wide smile spread between the freckled cheeks of a tall, hardy young woman with red hair. She answered with a hearty laugh, “I’m more surprised to see thee out and about. Miss Mary’s near convinced tha lives in tha’s hospital.”

Colin chuckled lightly to himself. “I was just on my way home, but we stopped to pick up some candy.” He paused and glanced over at Julia quickly. “Oh, Martha, this is Miss Cartwright. She works at the hospital as a nurse.”

Martha’s smile widened and something seemed to flicker in her laughing eyes. “Hello, I’m Martha,” she introduced shaking Julia’s hand.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Julia.” It wasn’t until after she had said it that she began to think it may have been rude to be so informal, but Martha seemed so kind and friendly it felt natural to introduce herself by first name and Martha didn’t seem to mind.

“I work for him t’ up at th’ big house,” Martha explained with a hearty chuckle. “It’s my day out today an’ I’m doin’ a bit of Christmas shopping for my family.”

“Have you been to see your mother?” Colin asked.

“Not yet. I’m on my way there now.”

“Please tell her that I’m sorry I haven’t been to visit,” he added sincerely.

“I’ll be sure t’ tell her, but I’m sure she knows tha’s been busy. She’ll be glad t’ hear tha’s been out an’ about though. Tha’s so rarely ever home, everyone is wonderin’ what tha’s been doin’ with thysel.’” She paused, and Julia could have sworn she glanced over at her. “‘Tis quite a mystery.”

Colin didn’t seem phased at all and answered, “I’ve just been very busy with the hospital. There is lots of work to be done. Nothing mysterious about that.”

Martha raised her eyebrows just slightly, but she smiled and laughed again. “No, I suppose not.” She sighed. “Well I won’t keep thee, but ‘twas nice seein’ thee out in th’ world an’ all.” She turned to Julia. “An’ nice to meet thee, Miss Cartwright. I hope we’ll be seeing more of thee around Thwaite. We’re right glad t’ have thee though I’m sure Master Colin has told thee tha’ already.”

The honest answer was no, he hadn’t, but Julia decided it would probably be rude to admit that to Martha so she just smiled and said, “It’s nice to meet you too. I hope we will meet again.”

Martha’s smile widened, and Julia could have sworn she glanced over at Colin before she added with a bit of a twinkling in her eyes, “I’m sure we will.”

As she watched Martha returned to her shopping, Julia found herself nearly frozen in place—almost perplexed. To her knowledge, it was very unusual for the aristocrats to carry on in such a familiar manner with their servants. She did not know much about the politics of the posh household, but she began to wonder if Colin’s estate was somewhat of an exception and simply rather strange. Not to mention the fact that he himself was acting rather strangely, very different from his normal character and behaviour—treating Martha in such a warm and almost familial way. However, she did not think it was her place to ask any questions even though she had plenty of them.

“Miss Cartwright?” he asked pulling her out of her thoughts.

“Yes?”

“What would you like?” Colin turned and motioned to the counter behind which were rows of shelves some of which were full of candy jars and others which were filled with various items one would usually find at a shop. The candies all looked lovely, but it wouldn’t be practical to spend too much money on them.

“Perhaps just a few caramels,” she answered, and the shopkeeper nodded at her.

“I hope it’s alright, but I’ve taken the liberty of ordering you some sugar mice,” added Colin. “You must try them at least once in your life.” He paused staring at something in one of the jars behind the counter. “And a maple sugar candy please,” he added to the shopkeeper.

Julia started to rummage around in her bag for her money so that she could pay, but Colin held out his hand in protest.

“Please I insist. This is to make amends for being forward.”

“No. I can’t”—she paused—“I’ve got it, really.”

Colin tilted his head just slightly. “Please. Allow me—I’d like to get it for you.” His face seemed to flush just a little before he added hurriedly, “It was my idea anyway, and it’s not very much. Consider it an apology and a gift.” He smiled just barely in the corners a bit sheepishly, and Julia sighed but conceded.

The shopkeeper began to box the candies, but when she got to the maple sugar candy, Colin said, “Leave that one out, please.” He took the candy in his hand, and Julia was quite certain he was going to eat it. However, as they made their way towards the door, he stopped and handed the candy to Martha. Julia was not trying to eavesdrop, but she overheard Colin say, “Please—for your mother. I know it’s her favourite. Please send her my regards and tell her that I will try to visit her soon.”

It was a very kind and generous gesture—one that Julia would not have expected from him even two hours earlier. She was incredibly intrigued by it, but she thought it better not to press the issue. After all, this was the first time she had ever had a proper conversation with the man, and although she was honest, sometimes even to a fault, she did not want to be so blunt as to destroy their newfound agreement.

As they returned to the street under the umbrella, he held out the box of candies to her. “For you.”

“Thank you. This is far too generous. I’ll buy next time” she added though she wasn’t sure if there would be a next time. She thought she would have to make one as she hated owing people things.

Julia reached into the box and took just one caramel—she didn’t want to seem greedy or some sort of a glutton. She unwrapped it and popped the candy into her mouth and waited for Colin to take some for himself. When he didn’t, she asked, “Aren’t you going to have any?”

Colin tilted his head. “That’s very kind, but those are yours.”

Julia’s eyes narrowed. “You bought them. You ought to have some.” She pushed the box toward him, but he shook his head and sighed. 

“Miss Cartwright, I’ve bought these for you as an apology…” He paused again. “I couldn’t.”

Julia tilted her head. “Is this what you do—go around buying sweets for people without ever getting any for yourself?”

Colin chuckled lightly—almost a little sheepishly—as he ran a hand through his thick, dark hair which was getting a little damp from the weather. “Truthfully, I’ve had a box of sugar mice sent home.”

“And here I was thinking you were just being altruistic and generous,” she teased with a chuckle.

“My apologies for disappointing you,” he answered though he was so matter-of-fact, Julia couldn’t tell if he was genuine, condescending, or teasing her too. She couldn’t really imagine Colin being a teasing type of person, but he was surprising her today. Still, she thought it would be best to reassure him, “I’m only teasing you. You’ve been very generous. It was very kind of you to buy candies for me, and for Martha’s mother too.”

Colin’s cheeks turned a bit pink. “Oh, you saw that…?” 

Julia sighed. She hadn’t meant to mention that, but now that she had, there was nothing she could do about it, so she nodded and asked, “Do you know Martha and her family very well, then?”

Colin nodded. “Martha has worked at Misselthwaite for almost as long as I can remember. She was a housemaid, but now she is acting as a bit of a lady’s maid for Mary though Mary doesn’t seem particularly concerned with those sort of things.” He paused as if thinking for a moment. Then, as if he had somehow decided more explanation was warranted, he added, “Her brother, Dickon, was a particular friend of Mary’s and I’s growing up. We used to play together out of doors almost every day, and their mother used to pack picnic baskets full of foods for us.”

“That’s very kind of her.”

Colin sighed—twisting his hand around the umbrella handle. “She’s a very kind and generous woman. Mary is an orphan and…my mother died…and so Mrs. Sowerby was a bit like a mother to us, I think.” He stopped and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck almost awkwardly.

Julia could scarcely believe she had never known that Colin had lost his mother, but he did so seldom speak of himself let alone his family. She wondered if the loss of his mother had something to do with that, but she was not going to press the issue. It was often a difficult thing to talk about—she knew that better than anyone.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” she answered sincerely, before she sighed. “My mother is gone too.”

“I’m sorry.” 

“It’s alright,” Julia brushed off. “It happened a long time ago.” She stopped and tilted her head just barely before she sighed again. “But you already knew that, from my father, I’m sure.” She tried to smile slightly. “You know so much about me, but I know so very little about you.”

Colin seemed to stop for a moment and tilted his head slightly as if he were thinking. His brow furrowed. “What do you want to know?”

Julia stopped. This was not at all what she had been expecting, but he seemed so earnest somehow. She sighed, realizing she wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. The truth was she wanted to know lots of things about him—to understand his perplexing contradictions. Why did he, the heir to a great estate, decide to spend his time running a hospital? Why become a doctor in the first place when he seemed so critical of the profession? What did he say to her father which caused him to drop everything in London and move here? As much as she wanted to know, she didn’t want to admit that she did, and she didn’t think it would be right of her to ask—at least not right now when they were just getting to know each other—so she decided to ask him something more innocuous.

“What’s that book I’ve seen you reading?” she asked, and she conceded it was probably about time she did as, if she was being honest with herself, she had entertained the idea of striking up a conversation about books every time she had seen him reading which was rather often, but she had always thought better of it.

Colin looked a bit perplexed at her question and choice of conversation topic for the slightest moment, and he pursued his lips together almost pensively before his mouth curved into a small smile. “Which one?”

“You read more than one at a time?” she asked before realizing that he always seemed to have a new book in his hands every time she saw him and that was probably what he meant.

Colin chuckled lightly. “Sometimes,” he admitted. "It depends on what they are.”

Julia narrowed her eyes, but she smiled a little in spite of herself. “Which one…or several”—she chuckled a bit teasingly—“are you reading now?”

“Just one. A Christmas Carol. I read it every year around Christmas—or at least try to anyway.” He chuckled lightly. “It’s not my favourite of Dickens’ works, but it puts one in the humor for the Christmas holiday, I think.”

Julia smiled. “Which Dickens’ novel is your favourite?”

Colin sighed and stared off thoughtfully—his grey eyes softened almost wistfully before he answered, “The Personal History of David Copperfield.” Julia jerked backward just barely and tried to keep her jaw from falling a bit slack. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. Colin sighed again with a breathy, almost awkward chuckle. “You seem surprised.”

Julia’s cheeks flushed, and she twisted to her mouth to one side. “I suppose a little,” she admitted. “It turns so romantic in the end.”

He sighed, but answered a little stiffly, “I didn’t mind that much.”

“I suppose it was rather satisfying to see David finally stop his dreadful obliviousness,” conceded Julia. “But that didn’t make it any less insufferable as it was happening throughout most of the book. I wanted to give him a good whack about halfway through—knock some sense into him for being such a dolt.”

 Colin laughed aloud—almost timidly as if he were trying to stop himself. He covered his mouth with his hand, but his eyes seemed to shine behind his dark, fluttery lashes. Julia stopped. She had never really seen him laugh before—not like that anyway—not with the lack of control of the polite chuckle he usually used—if he laughed at all that is. It was so brief that Julia scarcely had the time to register that it was happening let alone to think that it was rather perplexing and yet somewhat pleasant somehow. Colin cleared his throat and uncovered his mouth saying, “Forgive me.” He cleared his throat again and sighed with a stiff nod. “I agree.”

 “That’s a first,” quipped Julia with a smile.

  “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted almost sheepishly, and Julia could feel that distance between them returning as he squared his shoulders and looked off down the road.

 “I shall have to try David Copperfield again. It has been awhile since I’ve read it,” she said in an attempt to fill the silence. “Though I’m not sure I have it anymore.” She sighed. “I’m afraid many of my books have not survived two moves.”

  “You may borrow it from me if you like,” he said politely.

 “Oh no, I couldn’t.”

“It’s no trouble,” he explained. “Misselthwaite has an extensive library, and we’re happy to share.” His face softened into a kind almost excited smile. “People are always borrowing books. We have a bit of a system. Just sign your name in the ledger and write the title of the book you’re borrowing—and be sure to return it.” He paused. “Or I suppose, you could be like Mary…she has had Moni the Goat Boy for years, and I don’t think she will ever give it back.”

  “Moni the Goat Boy?”

“Oh, I think it is her favourite book. It’s written by Johanna Spyri—who wrote Heidi—and it’s about a goat boy named Moni.”

“You don’t say?” Julia quipped though her mouth turned up in the corners. Colin seemed to try to stifle to a smile. He sighed.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember it. It didn’t make the same kind of impression on me that it made on Mary. I remember that Moni took the goats up and down the mountain and that he could sing, but something happened or was going to happen to one of the goats so he couldn’t sing anymore…or something like that…”—his brow furrowed in concentration—“and I think there was something about a necklace, too.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. You’d probably have to ask Mary about it—she could tell you.”

 Julia laughed. “Is she particularly fond of goats?”

 Colin pursued his lips together thoughtfully. “I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think so. I don’t think Mary has ever had much experience with goats. Dickon…Martha’s brother…had a lamb once when we were growing up”—he tilted his head and sighed—“But I suppose lambs and goats are rather different. Why do you ask?”

“Well I suppose, I was curious about why she was so fond of Moni The Goat Boy,” Julia sighed. “I think our favourite books often say something about us—especially our favourite books from our childhood.” She paused and then decided she ought to explain. “For instance, I have a friend whose favourite book was Treasure Island.”—She paused chuckling and smiling almost nostalgically. “He once took all of our dining furniture and rearranged it into a pirate ship. He was the captain naturally, and his sister, Lizzy, and I and Tommy…our friend…were the crew.”

“What did your father think when he came home?”

Julia laughed. “Well Aaron…our captain…he brought Papá into the game, and he played Long John Silver.”

Colin chuckled lightly. “It’s hard to imagine your father as a villain.”

“Even with your distaste for doctors?” teased Julia quite without thinking.

Colin’s brow furrowed, and he sighed. “Not your father. He’s the best I’ve ever met.” Colin stopped abruptly and shrunk backward a bit, sighing pensively. He changed the subject. “Your friend who loves Treasure Island, is he a sailor now?”

“No, though it does suit him,” chuckled Julia. “He’s very adventurous. You can never get him to stand still or settle down. I doubt he ever will.” Julia laughed, and Colin smiled slightly.

“What was your favourite book growing up?” he asked.

Julia hummed thoughtfully. “I read many books growing up so it’s hard to decide on just one, but,”—she paused for a moment then smiled—“I think Little Women was probably my favourite.”

Colin smiled widely. “Oh that’s excellent.”

“You’ve read it?” she asked almost incredulously, and Colin’s cheeks flushed.

“Yes, I’ve read a lot of things.”

“Did you like it?”

Colin chuckled lightly. “More than I’d care to admit.” He paused and looked down at the road. He added in a softer tone, “I think it suits you…if I may say so.”       

Julia’s cheeks felt a bit warm, and she twisted her mouth to one side before she smiled. “Thank you, I take that as a great compliment.” She sighed. “What was your favourite? I know it is hard to choose, but if you had to pick only one.”

Colin’s brow furrowed, and he stared off pensively again—deep in thought. “I have many favourite books,” he admitted. “But I suppose if I had to pick only one from my childhood as my favourite…“ He paused and an emotion Julia couldn’t quite place seemed to pass over his face. He sighed. “Probably…The Little Lame Prince.”

“I’m not familiar with that one. What’s it about?”

Colin sighed again and stared off almost wistfully. “Well Prince Dolor is the heir to this great kingdom, but when he is a baby, he is in an accident and he can’t walk. And his mother dies and he has an uncle who wants to take over the kingdom so he tells everyone that the prince is dead and locks him away in a tower.” He paused, and his tone softened as his mouth curved into a gentle smile. “But Prince Dolor has a fairy godmother who comes to visit him, and she gives him a magic carpet so he can leave the tower and go on adventures.” He stopped almost abruptly, and his cheeks turned pink.

Julia tilted her head just slightly. She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but there was something about the way he talked about this book that intrigued her.

“I’d like to read it,” she said with a smile. “If you wouldn’t mind lending it to me.”

“Not at all,” he answered, turning away almost as if he was embarrassed though Julia couldn’t imagine why he would be. “You can come visit the manor and the library anytime you like and borrow as many books as you want. If I’m not there, someone will be and just tell them that I sent you and that you want to visit the library.” He paused, and his speech began to speed up a little, “But I should be there, probably, if I’m not at the hospital. Perhaps you could come on the weekend.”

“Perhaps,” she answered. “Thank you.” She paused and looked over at the front steps to her house. It seemed they had arrived at last, and she couldn’t help but feel just the slightest hint of disappointment over it. “Well…” she began. “Thank you for walking with me and letting me use your umbrella. I’m sorry you’ve gotten wet.”

Colin brushed a little bit of water off of his coat but shrugged with a half-a-smile. “Oh, it’s alright.” He paused and glanced at the ground as his pale cheeks turned a bit rosy. “It was my pleasure.”

He nodded politely at her and turned to go, and Julia was so surprised she didn’t know quite what to say. This whole evening had been rather perplexing. To think that not two hours ago, she had thought that she would never have a conversation with Colin that did not involve arguing over that cabinet—but here she was seeing a completely different side of him and the truth was…it was actually rather nice. She almost blushed at the thought, and it reminded her of something.

“Say,” Julia began to call after him, and Colin turned around to look at her. “Why didn’t you make a mess of the cabinet today?”

“I don’t make a mess of the cabinet,” he answered. “I reorganize it.”

“Why didn’t you reorganize it then?”

Colin sighed, and his pale cheeks almost seemed to blush a little. He glanced up at her but stared over her shoulder. “I didn’t want to give you the wrong impression,” he admitted though a little stiffly. “That…I only meant to argue with you, I mean…” He sighed. “I didn’t”—he paused—“I don’t.”

He seemed so earnest and sincere that Julia answered, “I don’t always mean to argue with you either.” She sighed and added quite without meaning to, “In fact, I’ve rather hoped we’d be friends.”

“I’d like that very much,” he said quietly with a gentle smile. His grey eyes seemed to almost light up as they met hers and they were so soft and sincere, Julia felt an almost swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach and a blush rise in her cheeks. She looked away and cleared her throat.

“Well then,” she said. “As your friend, I feel I should tell you that if the cabinet is not rearranged by the end of the week, I shall consider it evidence of your concession and shall accept victory graciously.” She flashed a teasing smile at him that reached her eyes.

He glanced away from her, but his mouth turned up in the corners when he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to rearrange it tomorrow.”

“I look forward to it,” she answered stifling the smile that threatened to break her playful smirk. Though she did so enjoy teasing him, the truth was she did look forward to it—but, of course, she would never admit that.

[jodilin65]

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2014 I have been lazy all weekend. Or at least I feel like I have been. I did decide, after all, not to worry about working much during the weekend. There is not only not as much work to be done at that time, but why not work Monday through Friday like most people do? I don’t have to work 7 days a week, do I?

Next week I will get back in sync, not that I’ve necessarily fallen out of it. I’ll get the house cleaned thoroughly and get more work done. I’m only about $50 away from my goal of $150.

I waited till almost midnight to go out riding. It was 82°. That would’ve been too warm for running, but was fine for biking since you’re gliding through the air so much faster. This winter’s gonna be a bitch! Sailing through the air at 3-4 MPH is one thing, but 8-10 is another.

Heard strange sounds after 1am. I guess some animal got under the house. Hopefully, it’s not in the walls or vents, but I doubt it. What was strange was that I swear I heard something fall in the laundry room. Everything was fine when I checked it, and I doubt Tom would’ve been up dropping things. Is the house haunted all of a sudden? The other day I stepped out of the bedroom and Tom said, “You were in there? I thought I heard the back door close.”

I’m also not happy that the “panel bees” are back. In less than a week I’ve looked up to find two of those bastards in the kitchen light panels. I’m glad they were both deader than dead, but they shouldn’t be getting in here in the first place.

Poor Nane. She not only returned to cold, rainy weather but she and Askim broke up. I’m guessing this time it’s for good, though for her sake I hope not.

Last night I had what seems to be a common dream for me lately. Tom and I were renting some old dump and were preparing to move to another old dump. The landlord was an older guy, but it wasn’t Jesse. The three of us were standing in what appeared to be a bedroom. First Tom said something about seeing a spider somewhere and I told him to kill it. Then he slipped the key to the place off his key ring and handed it to the landlord.

“You have a key too, right?”

I said I did and started to pull it off my own keyring. He said he’d “help me get it off later.”

I started packing shit again and looked out the window right in front of me. It was raining pretty steadily. I looked at Tom and said, “We won’t be able to see the rain this well in the new place.” The windows in the new place were to be up rather high.

Later…

Although I didn’t get up till late in the afternoon, I’ve had a very frustrating day so far. The only good in it is that the anxiety is helping me lose more weight and the car won’t cost as much as we thought. He was expecting to pay a mechanic $400 - $600 to fix it, but they said it’d cost $1700. Tom said that was too much so he’ll buy the parts and fix it himself. At least they isolated the exact cylinder when running diagnostics testing on it. The parts will cost around $200 and it should take him two hours to fix it. He’s going to fix it here because it’s not like having the hood of the thing open for a while is going to attract any attention. He won’t have parts and shit scattered all over the place or anything like that.

At around 6:30 pm I turned the kitchen light on to see if any more bees were present in the drop-down ceiling panels, and not only was there one in the kitchen window, but just over my head were half a dozen bees smiling down at me.

Fortunately, Tom was here and is about a foot taller than me. He could lift a corner of one of the panels and spray the shit out of the area. He went to get some expandable foam spray from the workshop to seal around the edges of the pipe vent, but one was ancient and another was clogged. So now he had to decide which broken car to use to go get some more. He chose the old Ford and it amazingly brought him to and from the store! That car is awesome considering it has a busted radiator, busted AC and a few other ailments. As I told him, if there are any more Caddy problems all too soon, it’s outa here. I’d rather an old car with a shit stereo and a dead AC that’s reliable than a faulty luxury car. It’s too soon to say whether or not the Cad’s gonna give us more trouble than it should or not. Fords are awesome. Our next non-lux car will definitely be a Ford.

Anyway, my brave and intelligent hubby sealed the pipe vents, saying that being bit by a fly hurts worse than being stung by bees. Well, the bee I last got stung by in Maricopa didn’t tickle. It burned like hell but after 10 minutes I’d never know I was stung. Didn’t know flies could bite, though.

Anyway, 90 years old or not the people that last lived here were not only very lazy people, but they withheld info from us along with the inspectors we paid hundreds of dollars to. The gap we found couldn't have appeared the day we moved in. The last owners had to have known about it and I’m sure they had problems with bees as well. And how the hell did the inspectors miss it?

I will write about my other problem later.

Later…

As for my other problem of the day, well, I get a notification that I have an update at the health site. So I log in and even though it’s the 30th, the last thing is dated the 28th. On the 26th and 28th, which I just noticed today, the doctor said all was normal with my pap except for vaginal flora, so I need to schedule a biopsy. Right away my mind’s spinning with questions – what the hell is vaginal flora? Why am I learning of this now? Why are there no visible updates on the same day I get a notification? Why is a biopsy necessary on top of an ultrasound? Why can’t they just call in a prescription for either antibiotics or a cream? WHEN’S IT EVER GOING TO END???

I have gone from poverty to medically cursed in a sense. It sure seems that way at times. We all have problems as we age, but I’m 48, not 78. I know that most of what I have is common and easy enough to deal with and that my health has been neglected for many years due to being uninsured, but still, who needs the hassle? I’m about ready to throw in the towel and say, “fuck it.” Enough is enough! Especially since I’m not in pain and I’m not dealing with anything deadly. It’s just a bacteria of sorts, from what I had to research on my own since the doctor didn’t explain it to me. Every time I think I’m nearing the last of my appointments, new ones have to be made. I am still having burning and itching at times, so I guess I gotta deal with it. If I don’t there’ll just be something else. :(

SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2014 Circled the perimeters on my bike in 18 minutes. It probably would’ve taken 15 if it weren’t for the speed bumps. The flashlight didn’t do much good as far as lighting them up. Fortunately, I know where most of them are. They should cut grooves on the sides where car wheels don’t go just for bikers.

Speed bumps or not, biking is sooo much more fun than running. Not only is there not as much joint impact, but the type of clothes and shoes don’t matter as much and I love how I can put the smartphone in the basket with the music going which I can just about hear well enough. I don’t like loud music when working out and I don’t care for earbuds much either.

Our motion sensor light is worthless, too. I turn it on when I’m on my way out and can see just fine when getting my bike out from in front of the storeroom, but when I come back it’s too dark to see me so it doesn’t light up.

Made up some Bertolli lobster ravioli that you heat up in a skillet and damn is it good! I even cut a piece of ravioli in thirds to share with the rats. I’m sure they loved it. It’s a bit pricey, though. I ate half of it and would love to have the other half before bed, but even with a working metabolism (or the medication to make my body at least think it works), I still have to put effort into not overeating.

Andy’s neighbors moved. The ones that just had a baby that he was tired of hearing cry for hours at a time. He’ll miss them but not the brat, he said. I hope he doesn’t get anything worse in there! Meanwhile, he can enjoy the time it’s empty.

Alexa, how much time? SATURDAY, JUNE 28, 2014 Happy 57th to Tom, even if he’s gotta spend it playing fix it.

The troll was nosing in LiveJournal the day after I made it public. She spent 3 minutes going through the calendar no doubt looking for her name. Again, it was never about what was going on with me, but about her. I won’t give her that satisfaction, though. I will go private again, however, if she starts coming around more. What’s going on with me should be none of her concern.

I’m really amazed she hasn’t mentioned Alison and I in her blog, but I can thank Brad, Josh and Julie for that. They’re her latest obsession. If it wasn’t for them and Marbridge, nothing would change as far as her coming around constantly and whining about how we abandoned her in her own blog, and trying to “figure out why when she’s been so nice to us.” rolls eyes Yeah, well, she can’t figure out why no one’s talking to her on Thoughts. Like, gee, maybe it’s because you’re batshit crazy and you don’t even know it. But that’s what makes crazy crazy; when it doesn’t know it’s crazy.

In between constant complaints, Crazy still talks of saving up and running up to Iowa to be with Josh. I hope she does and that this time he kills her.

Later…

Welcome back, metabolism! I've missed you. I'm glad the levothyroxine convinced you to return. Now my body can start looking like it's SUPPOSED to look when you eat healthy and exercise. Because of you I can once again pick things up off the floor in a split second, climb up pool ladders with ease, run up walls, fly over buildings… JK about the last two!

When I first tried K-cups I loved them. But after time I’ve gotten sick of the mess they can make even when you poke holes in their tops to let the pressure out, and the way it’s easy to sometimes overestimate the amount of water needed depending on the varying sizes of my mugs. So I’ve decided to go back to Instant, which is cheaper anyway, and got an electric kettle. It was the same cost as a stovetop kettle and is better to use during hot weather. It’s to be over 100° next week.

I’ve had knee pain for a few days now and finally took something for it. I probably shouldn’t but will probably go out riding after dark. Around midnight or so. That way the streets will be pretty dead and I can really test out the bike light.

When it’s hot, like yesterday, I just go round and round the circle not just for exercise but to keep my color going. I don’t like to go far from home in the heat in case it gets to me. It’s a good thing I stayed close by yesterday cuz my heart was booming. Exerting myself in the heat can do that to me unless I’m swimming.

Tom’s having a semi-relaxing 57th birthday. He had to run some errands earlier and pick a place to get the car serviced. He found a place about a mile and a half away that has 60 reviews and nothing under 4 stars. He decided they’d be cheaper than a Cadillac dealer, though it would still cost $400 - $600. It will be worth it, though, as he said, to invest in something good rather than an old piece of junk. It’s like spending a few grand on carpet for this place vs. Jesse’s old trailer. The parts will be under warranty for a couple of years, too.

He went to a Walmart close by that he rarely goes to, and all cylinders fired just fine and rode well till he got there. Coming back, though, that cylinder misfired, so now he knows it has to do with it getting all hot inside.

Since it doesn’t cost much, he decided to rent a car while it’s being worked on rather than trust the old Ford. If it were winter he would trust it just fine. But because it’s summer, the radiator is more likely to leak.

He’s spending most of the day relaxing and enjoying sweet treats.

I welcomed my nieces to their new home, and as usual, I got nothing in return. One of them thanked me, but neither of them reached out to me on their own. No messages, no “likes,” no comments. Perhaps it’s time to stop giving a shit about those that don’t give a shit about me as I usually try to do anyway, not that I don’t wish them well.

It’s a shame the cock that fathered them is still well enough to drive. Maybe it’s not that sick after all? Either way, the girls aren’t staying with the piece of shit, but with other relatives instead. I guess one will go to the cock’s mother while the other will go to the cock’s sister. Then they will have to get jobs before they can apply for an apartment, which I’m assuming will be together not only to save money but because they’re probably never going to have BFs due to how huge they are.

you were 17 years left on a 30 minute timer on the clock. FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2014 My day was initially off to a good start when I found online that my TSH levels were now within a normal range.

Then Tom got a message to call my endo’s office and was told that they couldn’t give him any information cuz he didn’t sign some paper. He’s my husband and they can’t give him any info? rolls eyes So then I call the nurse and she tells me the same thing I read online. Then the nurse calls back again to say that the doctor asked if I felt that I felt better and should stay at the 75 mcg I’m on now, or if I’d like her to up me to 100 mcg. Even though 100 would probably help me even more with losing weight, I don’t want to get jittery or lose any more hair, so I’ll just see where my weight’s at when I see her in the fall. Yeah, that’s another reason she called; I have to see her on October 16th and have blood drawn the week before. Meanwhile, my weight’s down a few pounds, but I won’t know for another month just how much my metabolism might be improving or not.

So there I am feeling a bit frustrated that I have to add yet another appointment to my growing list of appointments, and then Tom gets home to report that the Caddy already has a problem. It started running rough on the way home.

Ugh! I will NOT let God tear down all we worked so hard to build up. I will NOT! Tom assures me all is fine and that it can be dealt with easily enough, though. One of the 8 cylinders won’t fire, a common problem in vehicles. It should be cheaper to fix than restoring the old Ford and that’s not counting its dead AC.

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, 2014 Got an update at the health site, but am no closer to finding out what type of female problem I have going on. They told me what I don’t have, but not what I do have. So what’s wrong down there? I guess I have to wait till the rest of the test results come in.

Was up for 19 hours yesterday and slept for 8 hours. Got up at 2pm and headed for the lab an hour later. At first I couldn’t figure out why this little girl of about 7 or 8 was crying on and off like a 6-month-old, but she was obviously terrified to have blood drawn, even though she’d been through it before. When they finally took her in she SCREAMED like nothing I’d ever heard before. You would literally think someone was killing her. My mother would’ve kicked the crap out of me for carrying on like that, but of course the 60s and 70s were a lot different.

The black chick did a better job than the Asian chick I saw today, though she was nice. She was just a little slow and she bruised my arm.

We’re now signed up for this thing that lets you do video chats at any time of day or night with live doctors. Can’t imagine we’ll need it (I hope not) but it’s nice to know it’s there and that I can consult with a doctor in just a few minutes or less.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2014 This entry might gross some people out, just to warn you up front. Unfortunately, Tom and Andy were wrong and I was right, regarding today’s female exam. Andy said he “had a good feeling about it,” and Tom thought they’d probably tell me the itching and burning I’ve been having was just part of my age, and that my pap would be too bloody to read. Turns out, though, that they can now read paps even during periods. I guess a lot has changed in the 15 years since my last pap. As for the burning and itching, she could see the irritation down there right away as well as the discharge I didn’t even know I had. The exam itself was very uncomfortable but tolerable. Boy, was my heart racing at one point! My initial BP was through the roof at 144 over whatever and I told the nurse she could do it again after the exam when I would be calmer, and it was then 124/80 or something like that.

Both my weight and height are down. Guess we really do shrink with age. I’m four ten and a half. No wonder I can’t reach shit.

Anyway, I wasn’t surprised at what she found. We know our bodies better than anyone else and my intuition is usually right on. No one wakes up itching whether they’re 48 or 28. So I knew it wasn’t normal in any way. It’s definitely not warts, though, and I’m hoping it’s just a stupid infection that can be cleared up with a round of antibiotics.

Here’s what did surprise me. She couldn’t feel my uterus. That’s a first. I may be fat but I’m also fit so maybe the years of building up muscle from working my abs is the issue. She said it could be, but couldn’t tell if anything was cancerous until the lab runs the cultures, of course. I’ve never heard of cancer-causing discharges and irritation, though. Because the DES my chances of cervical cancer are a bit higher, though I haven’t any dreams to suggest serious trouble is amiss, which is something I almost always have.

The only “cancerous dream,” I had was talking to someone about someone else’s cancer. Something about leaving a Valleyhead-like place I’d been in for years too, and realizing Kathy was next door late one night and wanting to wake her up on my way out for being such a shit.

Meanwhile, they want to do an ultrasound on my uterus. sighs with frustration When are the appointments ever going to end, I wonder? It’s at the same place that did my thyroid ultrasound that I have to return to in September. Tomorrow, though, it’s off to the vampire for a TSH level check.

Sometimes I wonder if something up there is punishing me for finally getting what I want in life or if this would’ve happened anyway. Everything I’ve got has been festering long before we moved in here, after all, especially the thyroid thing. Thyroids don’t fail overnight.

Andy was right to tell me not to let that one bad review the physician’s assistant I saw had, pointing out that the mop he loves for his business has tons of lousy reviews while he feels it’s the best one ever. She was very friendly, took her time with me, and didn’t make me wait forever.

Later…

Tom’s going to sign us up for this thing that lets you do video visits with your doctor so you don’t always have to go in and see them in person.

In the lobby of the medical building, they had the same stickers I have in the bedroom by the bathroom. Gotta laugh at how much this house has become a realtor’s nightmare, haha. I’m sure they’d tell us to get the stickers off the wall and white out some of the crazy colors.

Speaking of stickers, my tall purple flowers arrived today and all that’s left for now are the semi-tall purple flowers. There were 3 large flowers and a bunch of mini flowers. I thought it would look kind of crowded if I put all the little flowers around the big flowers, so I put some along the base of the shower stall in the master bath. I’ll add them to the second bath tomorrow.

We treated ourselves afterward at the grocery store and I splurged on candy and hot Chinese food. The rice is good but the fried chicken was dull.

I also got a beautiful pink and purple wind chime with shiny silver accents that was on sale for just $7.

We went to the pool yesterday and it was gorgeous. The air and water temps were perfect and not a single brat was in sight. Just a couple of old guys. Love the feeling of that hot sun and then instantly cooling off as soon as I jump in the pool.

Been watching a series called Flashpoint on Amazon Prime. Think I’ll go watch an episode or two before I get into bed.

TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2014 Made $10 in 7 minutes on the Turk yesterday. Wish I could do that more often!

It’s been a very quiet day today so far even though I didn’t get up till almost 11am. The only intrusive sound I’ve heard so far is the loud car at the yellow house, but that’s fine because they only go out once a day.

Could be in for landscapers at the gray house unless they hit the place before I got up.

The closer my female exam gets the more nervous I become. Finding what I found last night didn’t help either. I got an email notification reminding me of the appointment and finally decided to run the doc’s name and see what turned up. She has one 1-star review. Ugh. The person gave her 1 star for everything and said they had to wait over 45 minutes to see her. Why does my primary doc keep referring me to shitty docs, or are there just that many out there? Don’t they even care how they get rated? Then again, if I made as much money as they do I suppose I wouldn’t give a shit either way. I hope it’s just one person who had a bad experience with her, but if most people had good ones, where are all their positive reviews? Hopefully, she’ll be like my endo doc. She also has a few single-star reviews and while she wasn’t the friendliest, she didn’t make me wait long, she spent enough time with me, and she seemed to be pretty thorough.

Hoping Tom will be up to a swim when he gets in. It’s the perfect weather for it and since it is a weekday there shouldn’t be any kids at the pool, assuming people know they’re not supposed to be there after 1:00 anyway.

MONDAY, JUNE 23, 2014 Last night I visited my sister and the girls in my dreams, but they were all still living in Connecticut. Sarah was over 6 feet tall, LOL. I was standing on a step somewhere and commenting on how she was still a lot taller than me.

Back in 2000, Tom started getting chest pains so he went to the doctor to get it checked out. He was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma. I just looked up its symptoms and I don't have the other symptoms that go with that. Tom does, though. I don't cough, wheeze or get short of breath or feel out of shape despite being in good physical condition.

I had a little discomfort after today’s workout but am pretty sure it’s not heart-related. This time it was on the right side, lasted longer and didn’t feel sharp and cramp-like. I will sometimes feel it if I move a certain way so that’s got to be a pulled muscle.

Someone just drove by playing their music a bit too loud. sighs I thought we were done with that shit? Well, if I see that car regularly, I will be headed down the street. I’m not going to tolerate that shit here. I swear I’m not. And I don’t care what kind of connections they may have either.

Anyway, before my train of thought was rudely disrupted, I was going to say that Tammy said that Larry did have heart problems. I didn’t know this. Not sure how serious it was, though, or if he was on medication. I guess that answers my question as to whether or not his heart would have gotten him in the end if the liver cancer hadn’t.

My weight is strange but inconclusive. Meaning that the 4 pounds I lose during the weeks after periods that started to come back are back off again, and while it’s a little unusual for me to be this low 11 days before a period, it’s not enough to assume the meds have boosted my metabolism back up to normal. I need another 2-4 weeks to know for sure, what, if anything, is going on.

Later…

Fucking mother-fucking blacks! Everywhere we go. EVERYWHERE! I saw a black car with music blasting head down the circle and said to myself, “Bet it’s black and going to where the blacks live. Sure enough, a few hours later it blasted back out and I saw the blackie with my own two eyes. So it’s no longer an assumption, knowing how loud, rude and obnoxious the vast majority of them are. Oh, but please don’t tell anyone I said so! Wouldn’t want to be called a racist even though the problem is THEM and not their color.

I tried to tell myself, who cares? It’s no louder than a delivery truck, so why does it bother you? Because it’s rude, that’s why. It’s not only a reminder of the shit I went through in the past, it’s wrong. Just plain wrong, unnecessary and uncalled for. Just because granny may be too deaf to hear it, well, I can. And it’s just one more rude and needless distraction, so that’s why it bugs me. I shouldn’t have to know it every time this punk visits just because he’s got security issues and doesn’t feel it’s getting enough attention in life.

But like it or not, he is black and this isn’t the 50s. I can’t just go complain and risk them crying discrimination on me, knowing damn well that they’ll be the ones to automatically be believed, and then things could get worse for me. They take things so damn personally and act like the most simple, reasonable request is utterly rude, unfair and downright outlandish. I can’t take a chance. I know I shouldn’t give a shit what they cry and I know this isn’t Phoenix, they’re not welfare bums, and even if they’re friends with every pig on the local force, they probably wouldn’t spite me for complaining. Worst case it just wouldn’t do me any good. Blacks are some of the most defiant fuckers on earth. Push them left and they tug right.

If they were white I’d go directly to them, but I wonder if I should either leave a note on their door late at night instead simply saying: Please ask your visitor in the black car not to play music so loud upon coming and going.

I’m not sending a letter by mail. I’m not going to pay to ask them to do the right thing. We lost enough money to the blacks of the ’90s.

Why would these shits want to live here anyway in a place that’s predominately white and that’s supposed to represent peace and quiet, which means respecting your neighbors and having your company do the same. Really, it’s their company so shouldn’t they be responsible for them?

My only other concern with leaving a note is them going door to door to try to find out who left it. I wouldn’t want Tom to know, should they come by when he was home. Retirement community or not, older and non-welfare or not, they’re likely to get pissed, not understanding.

sighs I’m just so sick of getting Mexicans and blacks on every city street I ever lived on, and yes, it’s because of their BEHAVIOR. I shouldn’t give a shit what others think or how people are going to handle things and take a stand for what I know is right, but for now, I guess I’ll just be glad the fucker doesn’t live here and doesn’t come around every day. Really wish others would speak up too, for once, but maybe they did and their request fell upon deaf ears… unless I anonymously complained to the office. Really, I should NOT have to be dealing with this shit in a retirement community!

SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 2014 Last night I dreamed my mother was going off on me in a VM for saying something nasty to Tammy in a VM, though I don’t know what either of us said. It seemed to be connected to some legal case Tammy had going on with her.

Then I spoke 3 languages in 1 dream. I was talking to Nane and her father. I don’t remember what we said in German, but for some reason, I asked her dad if she’d ever been to California… in Spanish.

Was surprised to find myself down a pound when I got up. Oh, so you mean all I have to do is eat a whole bag of candy and an entire box of breadsticks and I’ll be down the next day? LOL, guess this week’s Saturday junk day paid off.

We waited till just after 1pm to go to the pool. Kids aren’t allowed after then. Sure enough, what should we find there but a couple of young boys. They did leave shortly afterward, though, and while mommy didn’t give a damn, granny at least had the decency to tell it to stop bouncing its ball before they all left. I would have turned around and left myself if she hadn’t. I came here to escape this shit, not to have to live with it.

Then what should happen next? Oh, just someone else bringing their grandbrat to the pool with its mother, another young boy. But they were new there so they probably didn’t know the pool rules. Hell, I didn’t even get them at first. I thought the pool opened at 6am along with the clubhouse, but it actually opens at 8:30. Still, I wish most people here were in their 40s and 50s instead of their 70s and 80s when more people had kids. One closer to Tom’s and my age is a lot less likely to have had kids. Thank goodness for the women and work movement even if it came a bit too late and it means I have to be insulted at times for having the nerve to work at home.

If the things could act civilized without the screaming and splashing, I wouldn’t give a damn. But with so many of them acting like wild animals that are beyond loud and obnoxious, it doesn’t make for a pleasant swim. Since the first two grandbrats left shortly after we arrived and the last grandbrat arrived as we were leaving, it wasn’t too bad. The pool was a bit chilly, but it felt so nice to relax in the water with the pool noodle, and then soak up some sun as I was letting myself dry. I forgot just how draining the sun is, though, and had to fight the urge to take a nap afterward so as not to screw up my schedule for Wednesday’s appointment. Poor Tom got sunburned, haha.

The pool was a lot cleaner than it was the last time I was in it, though there were a few bees in it.

Later…

One of my followers liked my bike so much she got the exact same one. Cool!

Romeo is a little devil at times, which goes to show once again just how smart rats are. They’re not allowed in the laundry room. I hadn’t shut the laundry room door just yet after letting them out when he was just about to cross the threshold into that room. I could see his tail. I hurried over to him and he quickly doubled back and ran back into the living room when he heard me coming, LOL. He knew he was going out of bounds.

Got some things done around the house today. Tom blew some leaves off the patio in front and rearranged things in the carport. Then we squared off the bed’s platform and touched up the paint in the bedroom.

That’s pretty much it. No questionable chest pains, no neighborhood racket, no nothing.

It’s too early to get in bed and start reading till I crash, so I’m not sure what I’m going to do now. I could do a little more online work, make up some drafts by coding future entries, or I could find something to watch. Maybe I’ll even proofread some old stuff.

SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 2014 Another weird dream last night. It was late at night and I was with someone shopping at a store somewhere. Next door there was a high-end beauty store of some kind that they left unlocked. I walked over to it and was amazed at some of the insane prices on the tubes of lipstick and other items. I carried a tube of mascara back to the store, held it up to the person I was with, and said, “That doesn’t say a dollar.”

It was really a thousand dollars. I then returned the thousand-dollar mascara and walked back with the bike I now led with one hand while I carried my purchases with the other. I wished the bike had a basket so I could get back faster.

In real life, a woman who was out walking her dog said, “That looks like fun,” when I rode by on my bike the other day. She wants one just like mine.

The Hispanic girl who came to the door with her power wash special did not return. We figured she wouldn’t. Tom and I have come to suspect she probably really was looking for work. These homes, like most homes, have deadbolts on the doors. To break in they’d have to kick doors or windows in and that would make a ton of racket in a retirement community where most people are home all day.

We finished assembling the dresser Thursday evening and it’s so nice to have a nice, new modern dresser that I chose and that no one else used before!

Applying the lavender flowers and leaves took some time because it had so many pieces. My first thought, as I applied the first stem, was that it’d look totally ridiculous. But the more of it I applied, the better it looked. I’m happy with the way it came out.

Tom got a couple of 50-foot hoses for watering. He said he’d rather not use the underground system cuz too much water goes where he doesn’t want it to go.

He also got a couple of pool noodles too, a blue one for him and a pink one for me. People often bring pool noodles to the pool, so we figured we could, too.

Later…

Not sure I should mention this in public as I just don’t want people getting the wrong idea and thinking I’m either just trying to get attention or worry people unnecessarily if it turns out it’s no big deal. I assure you I’m anything but hard up for attention, and it probably really isn’t any big deal.

Well, I sometimes get pain in the left side of my chest, particularly after workouts. I didn’t think much of it, but then when I had a sharp stabbing cramp-like feeling yesterday, I did some online research that says it could be angina, which my dad had. It described the exact cramp-like feeling I sometimes get, along with this burning, aching feeling I also sometimes get.

Tom was concerned because that’s usually a precursor to a heart attack and I jokingly said, “Maybe you will be right and I will die first. Just remember to post to my Facebook wall letting people know what happened.”

Seriously, though, if I had to guess, it’s no big deal. I know I could be wrong, but unless it gets to be a regular thing and starts interfering with my life, I see no point in worrying about it now. I may mention it the next time I see my doctor, though.

Not only does Andy think I’ll live to get old, but I’ve always believed Tom will die first (probably in his 80s). On the other hand, I did have a nagging feeling that something up there would “punish” me, so to speak, for finally getting what I wanted in life and that’s a home of our own. For now, I will start logging any time I feel anything suspicious and see if any pattern emerges. It’s one of those things where you usually don’t know what’s going on or have much warning until it’s too late. I don’t see what going to a doctor about it now would accomplish or that I’d even need additional medication. Statin drugs usually help with that sort of thing and that’s what I’m already on. Again, frequency and severity are what matters at this point and what I’ll be aware of and keep track of. I worked out earlier and was fine afterward.

No left arm pain or numbness/tingling in my hands, but the article I read mentioned that neck pain I sometimes get. Because I’ve only felt that on the side my bad ear is on, I figured that was probably due to the inner ear clogging up like it sometimes does, but who knows? As always, I’m going to just keep on living my life. Hell, a meteorite could fall from the sky and kill me right now. Until I’m actually dead, I’m not going to worry about anything unless I’m in pain or unable to do things as I normally do them. But I’ll be paying closer attention to those strange aches and pains.

FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2014 Molly updated her blog today. The question was too early for Kim (assuming there was no delay in the notification) and yet Molly shouldn’t know what’s up with me. So I don’t know what to think, but it seems likely it was connected to one of the sickos.

Went out riding at just after 10am. It was 75° and sunny. It should be a good way to keep my color going, especially on my arms.

Last night’s dreams went from sad to strange. Norma, myself, and some other woman we both seemed to know for a long time were all in the hospital. I don’t know what Norma and I were in for, but the other woman died of a heart attack and Norma was just devastated. I tried to console her so she wouldn’t get sick herself.

Everything is ok with her, but ironically enough I had some chest pains earlier today. I’m almost sure they were from working out since I had my heart listened to a couple of months ago. I’ve had this type of pain before. Sometimes it’s a burning, achy sort of feeling, other times it’s a sharp cramp.

In another dream, I had stayed at a hotel with Jessie. She and I suddenly got word that we had to leave and head to the airport. I immediately went to pack, but it seemed like there was so much to pack and the more I packed, the more shit there was that needed to be packed.

So I ran out of the room and to a nearby store. I was going to ask the lady at the register for some garbage bags to throw things in, but she was busy with customers and I didn’t want to miss the plane. So I returned to the room and decided what to take and what to leave behind since there was no way I could pack it all up in time for our flight.

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2014 I am completely and utterly baffled right now. How do you ask someone a question on an account they have deactivated?

I got up this morning, stumbled over to my computer, and saw I had an email notification from my original ask.fm account saying that an anonymous person asked how old I was when I learned to ride a bike. My first thought was: I thought I deactivated that account again months ago!

But then I figured maybe I did but it didn’t go through or something. But sure enough, when I went to that account it was in fact deactivated.

Had it not been for someone asking a question on my deactivated Formspring account several months ago I'd think someone hacked in, asked the question, then put my account back to sleep. But because some stranger with a real account also asked a question on Formspring, I think it truly is a glitch. Meaning, it probably was a real person who really asked that last night, but I think a glitch is what enabled them to do so as opposed to being hacked.

It’s ironic that they asked about bikes when I just got one. Like maybe it was someone who’s been reading my journal? Do I smell Kim in that one or not? I’d hate to think this nutjob could STILL be following me, but if it was Molly then why hasn’t she updated her blog? Just after 5am her time is a bit early for her, and in her last entry, she was ranting that her mother’s trying to get her off Facebook and to shut down her blogs. Why doesn’t the bitch just take her damn laptop or phone away!

Ok, I just figured it out. It is a definite glitch and not that anyone hacked me. I looked in on that account from the one I use with Andy, and sure enough, it’s perfectly visible. I’m going to just ignore the question in case it is Kim, and I think it is. I’m also going to remember that it’s very important not to mention her or Molly in my blog and give them what they want, even though no amount of time or lack of mentioning them is going to shake them totally and permanently. Remember, Kim isn’t able to tell fact from fiction. She’s not thinking, “Let's contact this person that doesn’t want anything to do with me and that I fucked over.” In her mind, we’re either best buds or I’m the one harassing her.

I wonder, though, does she know of my Prosebox account? My other Ask account? And what if I mention High Street on my page? LOL

I was glad to hear from Aly yesterday just when I was beginning to think she had yet another new problem. I guess she’s still recovering but is not ready to work yet or drive too far.

Later…

Just when I thought I was done falling offline, my connection hiccupped for a few minutes yesterday. I guess this is normal for at least most people. Anything’s better than what we had to deal with in Auburn.

Last night I was plagued with nightmares all night long. Something about him being laid off and us about to lose the house.

Uh-uh. No fucking way! We lost one home and two parcels of land. We don’t leave here till we either grow old and die, or we choose to leave.

For two people who are used to these types of projects, it’s amazing how long it’s taking us to assemble the dresser. Part of the reason we only got two drawers assembled yesterday was that he worked OT and we both got up early.

Sure enough, even though I’ve been sticking to my diet and exercise plan, the weight is slowly returning. When am I going to learn that I’m never going to lose weight no matter what medication they give me? Ever. On the bright side… I might as well eat when I’m hungry. :)

Later…

I hear a knock on the back door, go to answer it, and a Hispanic female who was perhaps in her 20s says they're doing a special on power wash or something like that. I told her I was not interested and that soliciting isn't allowed here. She says she's sorry and tells me to have a nice day, goes and gets into a car in front of the house driven by a white guy, drives around the block, then leaves WITHOUT stopping at any other house. The guy was eying the house intently too, as he drove away.

Naturally, my first thoughts go to those who tormented me in Arizona. But if any corrupt cop was going to pull any shit, wouldn't they come to the FRONT door, and wouldn't they ask my name to verify my identity?

Hopefully, they weren't casing the place with home invasions in mind. The woman even waved goodbye to me when she got into the car. I was standing at the front window not thinking I could be seen cuz it's lighter outside than in here, but that's ok. IDK, both home invasion and soliciting doesn't make sense. Given the position the car was in and the layout of the circle, why not try the next house? Why drive around the circle and leave?

Later…

Now wondering if the bike question could've come from Molly given that she's an early riser and Kim's not, as even Aly suggested. Last Aly knew, Kim often stayed up till 2am.

But why didn't Molly update her blog while she was at it if that was her, or did Mommy Dearest kick her out of Bloggyville? Besides, Molly isn’t supposed to be able to read my blog unless she’s occasionally disabling cookies or having someone else read it for her.

There’s also a possibility that the notification was delayed. If Kim sent the question before bed, the notification might’ve been emailed an hour later. Things don’t always happen right away, though when I did log into the account the question did say it was asked around the time the email was sent.

Aly’s guess is that it was random, though also safe to assume it was someone who both reads my blog AND knows about Ask.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18, 2014 Last night I had a dream I was in a fairly decent size building of some kind and a couple of guys were determined to kidnap me and take me to Hawaii with them because they were sure I could speak Hawaiian. I tried to tell them that I only knew “aloha” and “mahalo,” but they kept tugging me by the wrist.

I was screaming for Tom and for me to at least be able to say goodbye and let him know where I was going if I had no choice. Not sure if they managed to kidnap me or not in the end.

I’m listening to some relaxing meditation music on Amazon Prime Music right now. I usually find this sort of thing boring as opposed to relaxing, but the song I’m playing now is both relaxing and pretty. It’s from the Tibetan Chakra album.

It’s been very quiet here today. No landscapers, no coming and going next door.

Yesterday we managed to assemble half of the dresser in 2½ hours. We’ll do the drawers later on today, depending on how much OT he does. I can’t wait to set it up! First I’ll have to apply the decals that are going behind it, stemming up close to the ceiling.

Ok, I’m sick of this New Age stuff now. Time to dive back into the Pop section. Is it me, or does it seem there isn’t much new in the way of music these days? It’s like people are putting out fewer songs/albums.

Later…

A rather attractive young lady told me that her mother is like me in that she doesn’t believe in prayer. Then she told me she prayed to God to get this guy she likes to take her offer of getting together, but didn’t get the job she prayed for. Then she asked me what I think. Here’s what I told her:

I’ve seen what you look like. If that’s really you, then why would any red-blooded straight man NOT take your offer? You asked me what I think? I think that’s a rather easy prayer. Funny, though, how people believe in God when they get what they want from Him and they still believe even when they don’t. Why is He still such a great guy when you don’t get what you ask for? Oh, because “He had his reasons?” Well, you can tell yourself that if that’s what you want to believe, but as far as I’m concerned, if prayer was for real we’d get EVERYTHING we asked for and not just some things. But the fact that we do at least appear to get some things granted and some things not granted is proof enough for me that it’s all about fate and what’s meant to be vs. what isn’t, and not about some God picking and choosing what things we ask for to go ahead and give us. Not saying there isn’t a God. Truthfully, I don’t know if there is a God or not. That’s why I’m agnostic and not atheist. But prayer? Come on! If I pray for the sun to set and rise is that God “answering my prayer?” Ok, to each their own and all that but sometimes I find it rather sad that people can brainwash themselves so easily or be brainwashed by the religious fanatics of this world. They’re only kidding themselves in the end. On the other hand, if it’s something that makes you happy then go ahead and believe what you want so long as you don’t force your beliefs down the throats of others. I actually worry more about those kinds of people than what people actually believe.

Lastly, and again this is because YOU asked, I could never lower myself to turn to the very being that allowed me to be abused the way I was in the past. We teach women to have enough self-respect for themselves not to turn to abusers or abuse enablers, so why shouldn’t I give any possible God up there that’s supposed to be all-knowing and all-powerful the same treatment?

You can tell yourself God loves everyone equally when evidence shows otherwise. You can tell yourself God is good while innocent people are dying in an earthquake. You can tell yourself He loves YOU when you’re robbed, in a car wreck, or diagnosed with cancer. But… you can never escape reality. THAT’S what I think.

Later…

Ok, I’ve officially killed my original my-diary account. Every 1000 entries I’ll delete the old account and create another like I did today. This is because it starts running slower than slow the more entries you have.

For the 'about me' section I simply put it like it is: I write from the heart whether my words are “politically correct” or not.

TUESDAY, JUNE 17, 2014 Wish I had something interesting to update on, but I don’t at the moment. I’ve now lost 4 pounds and am expecting my dresser to be delivered today.

Other than that, all is quiet and all I’ve heard are the landscapers and next door, of course. Hopefully, the rest of the day will be peaceful.

I did today’s housework (dusting/master bath) and the usual things I do. Waiting for the robot to finish vacuuming the bedroom for me.

My days start off full of energy and then I am hit with fatigue. The lack of food from the diet?

Later…

My new dresser finally arrived – yay! The FedEx lady left it in the carport. Tom will carry it in when he gets home. It’s super heavy. I could probably get it in here myself, but he asked me – practically begged me – not to attempt to carry it in unless it was in multiple boxes. It’s just in one, though, as I expected would be the case.

It can wait out there until he gets home in a couple of hours and we can assemble it together then. Those things are always easier with two people. It still would’ve been nice to have gotten it last Friday, but this works out better. My schedule is better for it and today was the robot’s scheduled vacuuming day. It’s nice to vacuum an area that is about to be covered with something. The carpet looked so lovely afterward that I almost didn’t want to walk on it, LOL. The other carpet was so old and worn that you’d never know it was just vacuumed.

For now, I’m just glad this isn’t south-central Phoenix! The dresser would be gone in no time.

UPS brought me one of the floral wall stickers I’ve been waiting on, too.

Called (Tina?) to check on the exact date and time of the August dentist appointment I at least thought I had, but she couldn’t find anything scheduled. We made one for the 26th at 5pm. So if all goes well with my pap, I shouldn’t have any appointments for July. Still gotta see the eye specialist, though, at some point, but we thought it would be best to wait until they got my medication adjusted.

MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2014 Last night I dreamed that I was flying in a helicopter or a small plane. I don’t know who was flying it, who I was with, or where we were going. We passed over a canyon at some point. Grinning, my mischievous side came out and I visualized it suddenly filled with everyone who ever pissed me off and then taking a giant cup of water and filling the canyon with it.

Sounds like next door’s getting their AC worked on from what I can hear and see. Again, I’m glad these people are muttless and don’t have a ton of company, and kudos to them for being so healthy and active so late in life, but I really wish the 3-4 trips in and out each day except for Sundays could slow down a bit.

While it saves us money, we’ve been having a cool spell and it makes my morning bike rides chilly. It’s still pleasant once I get going. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to beat the pedestrians much longer.

Making better money online doing mostly surveys and I’m not sure if it’s because there are more surveys or I have developed better strategies for finding them. Probably both. I’m into erotic sculptures these days so my next goodie is going to cost $150 with shipping and tax. Less than a month and I’ll easily have the money.

My collection has really changed throughout the years. It started with mostly porcelains and Barbies. Then it stopped for about 5 years due to being broke and not having room to put them. Now I’m more into vinyl and erotic dolls/sculptures. I’ve always been into the realistic look, though. I don’t care for anything cartoonish-looking. I have a handful of erotic pieces in my Amazon cart ranging from $25 to over $100.

SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 2014 Happy 20th anniversary to us!!! :))) No matter how many crushes I may have along the way on other women – and a few guys – there is only one Tom!

That one Tom and I are going out soon, so I’ll make this brief. I hate long entries anyway.

Tom fixed my ankle bracelet for me yesterday (ain’t he sweet) and he read an interesting study they did that shows that rats have regrets.

Things are great here and the only pisser is that my new dresser that was supposed to be delivered Friday isn’t coming till Tuesday.

Later…

In last night’s dreams, I was inspecting these dolls some people were hoping I’d purchase. They started off as being life-size but headless male dolls. They were very heavy but I was still able to lift them.

“The benefit of working out… muscle,” I said to a young girl who stood by watching me. She smiled shyly.

I said something about almost buying one, but then I moved on to inspect female headless dolls with Tom that were about 20” long. Tom pointed out that one had these strange marks on her but I told him they weren’t marks, they were part of a tattoo she had. Next thing I know the doll with the tattoos turns into a rat.

Got some blueberry lip balm, some scented body sprays, a pink and purple mini wind spinner, and some candy at Walgreens earlier. We blew our diets today. After all, you only have a 20th anniversary once. Well, most people do anyway. We also got some light bulbs that should nearly outlive us.

On the way back Tom turns up the music and starts bopping his head to the beat. I was cracking up. “Did you ever think we’d be blasting music in a Caddy in Cali 20 years later?” I asked him.

We still should’ve skipped Oregon and California and gone straight to Florida.

Once back at the house, we enjoyed some sweets, then went bike riding. For some reason, I thought both bikes had 24” wheels, but nope. My old one’s a 26”. No wonder it was so fast, high, and scary for one as short as me. I’d rather my new 24” that struggles to get uphill but doesn’t get up to insane speeds going downhill like the other one will on the slightest decline.

Tom trimmed the hell out of the Cypress trees yesterday and saw Bob get dropped off with a golf caddy in hand. I swear these people in their 80s have the energy of one in their 20s, though it does seem that only Bob is active. They both come and go the same amount in the SUV, but I’ve never seen his wife walk, bike ride or do anything physical. Maybe her weight or some health issues are a factor in that.

On Tuesday Tom will be going to a sports park with coworkers. Hopefully, the food and activities will be good, and he’s even more hopeful he’ll win something this time around in their raffles.

In other news, Tammy was ill after having to wait a few weeks for oxygen. The move probably fucked that up like it does with most things, but she’s better now that she’s set up with new doctors and all that. It was scary for her being all alone and not knowing anyone well enough that she trusts to take care of Max and have access to her place. The girls and Mark will be down soon enough, I guess. The house is up for sale and Mark is officially retired.

I was a little surprised she’d go to Dad’s grave. This is, after all, the man who allowed Mom to abuse us, and I’m sorry to say that his own “I’m sorry” came a bit late. I just can’t see having any respect, worshipping, admiring, defending or praising anyone who is either abusive themselves or who sits back (along with the bastard above) and lets it happen. But just because I feel a particular way doesn’t mean she has to, too. :)

I would still rather have him and Larry in my home for an hour before I’d have Mom in here for a minute. I’m normally anti-revenge because it not only makes you look just as dumb and immature, but it’s a great way to get in trouble. However, if there’s such a thing as getting even with no consequences in the afterlife (if there is one) I’m going to rip that woman to shreds limb by limb. Guaranteed. :)

She took a picture of the gravestone, which despite my hard feelings, was cool to see. Didn’t realize he’d been in Korea when he was in the Navy.

SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 2014 Went riding with Tom this morning. It was fun. He put lights on our bikes so I’ll do a night run sometime and see how well it lights up the road. The key is being able to see the speed bumps in advance, even though I have a pretty good idea of where they are.

The moon was so big and bright yesterday morning. It is this morning too, but not like yesterday. As soon as we finished, Jim came out to make his rounds.

Got good news from Paula. She’s cancer-free! Yay! I guess they killed the ovarian cancer that had returned and they found nothing scary in the uterus biopsy. I’m not surprised the news was good because the bad dreams stopped. I think the last dream was about the doctor’s discovering the suspicious spot.

I have aches and cramps in my neck and my ear still bothers me at times. I’m getting sure it’s an allergy thing and that my inner tube is clogging up as opposed to the canal needing cleaning. Maybe I should try Claritin D again, even though it used to give me nightmares.

Love that Amazon Prime members can now get free music. Been having fun checking out playlists, even though most of it can be heard on Jango and other places.

I should start taking notes as soon as I get up, on what dreams I remember. I sometimes remember them at first, but then forget them later on when I go to do my journal entry. All I remember was ruining something I cooked at too high of a temperature, and eating at a picnic table with lots of people around at some resort when I realized I was naked.

Later…

Tom said that while he hates to admit it, cutting out the sugar has helped give him a lot more energy. He was able to go for a bike ride, trim trees, run errands, and help me change the rats’ cage all before noon. He’s Superman!

As for me, he still thinks my body hasn’t adjusted to my meds yet, nor are the meds themselves adjusted, and that in 2-3 years I’ll be around 120 pounds, but I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m more worried about ensuring that I don’t gain any more than I am with losing right now.

The uptick in ab work has helped not only ease up my backaches but has flattened my gut a bit and made mobility a bit easier. You’d think I’d know better by now than to slack off on these exercises.

Unfortunately, I think I have a new cavity, but I’m not surprised. I just think the word cavity and I get them.

How do spiders manage to appear out of nowhere? Just like that. One minute there’s nothing there, the next there they are. I got up, checked the walls by the toilet, parked my ass on the toilet, did my thing, then as I’m flushing the thing, there was this spider that was NOT there 30 seconds ago.

So, since they seem to like to pick on the master suite the most, there’s no sense in bombing the whole place as we originally planned. First we’re going to spray the insides of the windows and under the sink. If that fails to back the creepy things off, we’ll do a full-fledged bombing.

Since it’ll smell a bit for a while, we’re going to go out shopping. Just to someplace like Walgreens or something like that where he gets AARP discounts.

While Molly still says a lot of crazy-funny shit in her blogs, it's rather sad and scary to hear her speak of wanting a baby. The bastard above would let a psycho like her breed, too. Mommy Dearest is trying to stop her from eloping with Josh, probably the one smart thing she’s ever done where her daughter’s concerned, besides tossing her in Marbridge.

I’m just so glad that right now she has fellow group homies preoccupying her time and others to obsess over. I think that’s a big part of why she doesn’t visit my blogs every day. What I wonder is what’s going to happen when she finally does leave Marbridge? Will she go back to focusing on Alison and I then? I’m hoping that by then she’ll have a big enough “collection” of people to stalk and that she’ll never go back to being as fixated on me as she once was. Only time will tell.

FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 2014 I’m excited to get my new dresser today! We just won’t have the time to assemble it until tomorrow.

Went out riding for 19 minutes and then spent another 10 or so doing ab work.

Hopefully, next door won’t be coming and going so damn much today and puttering around in their garage doing whatever it is they were doing yesterday as it gets a bit distracting. These people are way too active for being in their 80s!

Ordered the last of the wall stickers this morning and next I’ll be working for some erotic figurines I like. Still got my eye on that $87 doll, too.

THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2014 Now I see why they described the sheets I won as “thin and slippery” They are sort of tissue paper-ish and almost have a satiny feel to them. No wonder they felt light in the package. Surprising for Macy’s, but still not bad. I still prefer flannel sheets to regular sheets. That can eventually be something I work for doing Turk work. I love it – I work, they pay. They pay for all my goodies. Nothing comes out of Tom’s checks, though I know he wouldn’t mind if I wanted to quit the Turk.

My latest goodie, Jasmine, arrived yesterday. She’s a cute one. Not sure I’m going to get any more 18” dolls, though, or spare outfits. I was going to re-outfit Jasmine but instead, I kept her in it, took out her white hair ribbons and then put her ponytails in green elastics that matched the light green trim in her top. Then I polished her nails the same color. I was going to add a brunette, a redhead and a black doll to the two I’ve got, which are Asian and blond, but nah. There’s another more expensive doll made by the same company (Adora Friends) that I’m considering. She’s a 20” vinyl doll.

I also want to grab the last of the wall stickers I want once I earn another $5, which will take no time at all.

Later…

Since beginning our diets, Tom’s up and I’m down. That’s a first, LOL. My skin has been softer since trading in the soda for water. Coincidence?

Glad to see the sun finally poking through after a cloudy, windy morning. We went from intense heat to a cool spell. It almost looked like it might drizzle this morning and I was chilly as hell even in a sweatshirt. I almost wished I had gloves!

This is my third run around the park and each time gets easier and takes less time. Maybe I should add some additional side streets. It’s just that there are some blind corners and unless it’s the middle of the night, there are lots of people and traffic I could run into during the daytime. It takes 15 minutes to go around the perimeters when mutt walkers, joggers, walkers, and bikers aren’t in the way. Traffic has to go around me, but I’m the one that has to go around the pedestrians, so they’re more of a pain than the traffic. If there were no speed bumps I’d make the circle in about 10 minutes.

Biking is spoiling me! It’s so much more fun than walking and running that I haven’t done so since getting the bike. With the bike, I can go out in warmer temps because moving faster makes it seem windy. I don’t have to worry about any undies that may be loose, body parts or joints being jarred, and it doesn’t matter what shoes I wear. Hell, I could bike ride in heels. I really need to run at times, though, because some impact is actually good. Keeps the joints strong and works the hamstrings better than riding.

Tom’s going to put bike lights on our bikes, though I don’t see when he’d ever ride at night. He crashes so early.

Anyway, I hate stationary biking but love riding outdoors. I’d choose the treadmill over a stationary bike if those were my only choices. I almost never use the treadmill anymore, but if biking is going to be my main source of exercise, maybe I should run on it for at least 5-10 minutes a day.

I’m not doing the ab challenge anymore because it’s way too intense. Maybe my core isn’t that tough or maybe I’m just too lazy to stick it out. Either way, I’m still doing the sit-ups, crunches, leg raises, and planks; just not in such extreme degrees. I do it till the muscle fatigues and don’t worry how many reps I did.

Later…

Finishing up with the laundry now. Fortunately, they haven’t turned our water off yet today. They did yesterday. This shit is escalating and it’s really irritating the fuck out of me. They said “occasionally” they have to turn it off, not “often.” I’m at the point where I’m afraid to shower in the daytime.

Added about a hundred “memories” on Histofme consisting of pics and info on my dolls and collectibles.

On the 25th I’ll have my first female exam in about 15 years. Not looking forward to that at all. Really hope the problem I’ve been having in that department is no big deal, too. It’s definitely not a yeast infection, whatever it is.

As a kid, I’d often spend time at my cousins’ house. Their names were Lori and Lisa. We were around the same age. I liked their mother, my former Aunt June, but hated my Uncle Ronnie, my mother’s brother. Later I would come to lose my fondness for Lori and Lisa as well, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

The point is that last night I dreamed I was in their old ranch home in Massachusetts. I was in what was Lisa’s room, only the bed was by the window and they weren’t living there. I awoke alone one morning, and then heard a car pull up into the driveway. I pulled a corner of the shade up to peek outside. Then I heard young adult male voices and my dream self knew they were June’s grandsons. They were saying it was cold and that they thought the heat may be broken. Having just woken up, I wasn’t sure if it was really all that cold.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 2014 Nothing exciting going on right now. Well, other than the goodies I’m expecting in the mail today and the money I’m making online.

Rode my bike to the pool yesterday morning, which seemed to take just seconds, and while the water temp was gorgeous, the pool itself was surprisingly dirty. Debris was on the bottom and the surface was littered with gnats. We pay an outrageous monthly fee. Shouldn’t they keep up on things like this for us?

Saw 5 spiders in here in less than 24 hours. Damn me for delaying the bombing!

Dreamt that I was at the beach in Hawaii and that Alison left a voice message suggesting I get psychiatric help, LOL.

As soon as there’s enough light to see where I’m going I’ll be riding around the perimeters. Not going to take the smartphone and run the app or music, though. I’ll just take my finger watch.

Made a nice and colorful chart of all my collectibles and knickknacks using tables/charts in Word. I only included pieces I still have and none that I’ve sold or given away. It doesn’t include every single piece I have, but close enough. Gotta add the animal figurines to it today.

TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014 I shot poor Askim in the foot in last night’s dreams. Nane won’t be too thrilled, LOL. I don’t know what country we were in, but we were all staying in a hotel somewhere. I left mine and Tom’s room and went to Nane’s room because, for some bizarre reason, my toothbrush was in her room. Believing the room was empty and planning just to open the door and grab my toothbrush (nothing I’d do in real life even if I did have the key), I unlocked the door. The room was super small and the bathroom was just inside the door. Behind it was the bed which the head of it was blocked by the bathroom wall.

I saw masculine legs from the knees down and knew that by the way they moved, there was no way I could turn around and leave without being seen. Sure enough, Askim sat up, peered around the wall, and asked what I was doing there in a highly annoyed tone of voice.

Saying nothing, I simply backed out of the room and left. Later on, though, we ran into each other in the corridor and he looked nothing like in his pictures. He wasn’t that big, but he looked mean and crazy with wild frizzy black hair to the shoulders, black eyes, and bushy eyebrows.

“What the fuck did you think you were doing?” he asked me, leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest in a typical Mr. Tough Guy stance.

“Getting my toothbrush,” I said. “Don’t worry. I won’t barge in on you again.”

“Damn right you won’t. If you do I’ll throw you on the floor, sit on you, and put your chest to the floor,” he said which I took to mean he’d crush me.

I felt my dream self start pumping with anger but since I wasn’t sure I could take the guy, I restrained myself from jumping him right then and there. Instead, I said, “Consider yourself lucky…for now,” and walked away.

The next time I ran into him he sort of came at me in a menacing way. I didn’t feel threatened at first till he started baring his teeth and growling like a dog, and I thought to myself, this is the shit Nane’s with?

Not wanting to kill the guy but just protect myself instead (and maybe teach him a valuable lesson about what can happen if you make threats against someone, even if they’re small and female), I pulled a pistol from my pocket and shot his big toe off.

“You still want to put my chest to the floor, you fucker?” I shouted as he hit the floor and howled like nothing I’d ever heard before. “Huh, tough guy? You still feeling tough and like you can just casually threaten people without any consequences? Maybe you’ll think twice the next time you go to mouth off to someone!” And then I walked off, leaving him to scream in pain and not caring that I’d probably lost Nane.

Later…

For our 20th anniversary on the 15th, I gave Tom the money I’d made working online to buy what he wanted on Amazon and he got some electronic and computer-related gadgets.

His present to me is the Asian Jasmine doll I’ve been wanting. She’s another AG type with a similar body type, so AG clothes would fit her. She’s an Adora Friends doll, to be exact. Her outfit is kinda boring so I’ll replace it with something else later on.

Just like I completed my animal collection I’m working on this type of doll, only there will be much fewer pieces (5). I have a green-eyed blond and soon I’ll have an Asian doll. I want to add a brunette, a redhead or an auburn-haired doll, and then a black doll. This will make for a nice variety.

Another thing I’m excited to say is on its way is the first dresser I’ve picked out for myself since 1999 when we moved to Maricopa. Since then we’ve been using nothing but old used shit. And I’ll be damned if I let any evil God have anyone or anything tear down all we’ve built up in the last few years!

The dresser’s as long as I am (about 5’) and I had my choice of black, white and chocolate. Dust shows up too easily on black, chocolate is hideous, so I went with white.

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 2014 It was this day 22 years ago since I left New England. Haven’t been back since and doubt I ever will. I left at 90 pounds with perfect vision, but I was still a smoker.

Last night’s run was a bust as far as tracking it with my running app. In fumbling around with the volume (I love how I can play music from the phone’s speaker and not bother with earbuds) I messed up all kinds of settings. Tom pulled me out of airport mode and other disasters I got myself into when we were waiting for a code from Yahoo. My pee was beating on my bladder wall by then anyway screaming, “Let me outa here!” Amazing how many people were still up at midnight, though. One woman was walking up her driveway. Senile? Broken AC? Bored shitless? Either way, I didn’t want to chat so I picked up my pace and breezed on by.

I created a new Yahoo! account for the first time in a few years so I could add pics to blogs that don’t allow for uploading. I’ll use them mostly on Prosebox but I’m not going to go back and add pics to old entries. Just to my current journal and maybe my Dreams book, too.

Noticed a dark circular stain about an inch in diameter under my chair. Apparently, it’s leaking hydraulic fluid. I’ll spray it with Simple Green later when the sun’s up and I can see better, though if it doesn’t completely dissolve it, it won’t matter much cuz my chair is usually over it. I only noticed it cuz I moved it to chase the furballs out from under the desk. Tom clamped a sandwich bag over the opening with an electrical tie. It was probably leaking on the old carpet too, but with dark brown carpet, it wasn’t noticeable.

Later…

Went out riding at 5:30 and wow, what a workout. My heart is still booming! I went just under 3 miles in about 25 minutes and at an average speed of 8 MPH. Tom thought it’d be too warm for me to work out, but I was actually chilly at first because moving through the air that fast makes it seem windy which makes you feel cooler. It’ll suck in the winter when it’s down in the 30s and 40s.

I first circled Radiance then I struggled up the hill to Oak Lakes, and it really took a lot of juice to get up there being a speedless bike with no gears to shift. Once I got over the hump, which is just about the highest part of the park, I could pretty much coast down that street. The rest of the park was pretty much up and down, though the hills were mild compared to what I had to battle up in Oregon. I needed my 3-speeder then.

I like how the bike doesn’t get up to insane speeds when coasting downhill. My pink and purple one would want to fly and it was very hard to control the speed on that one.

Before I even hit Daisy, my ass was sore from not being used to sitting on a bike seat for so long. On Astronaut I passed Bob who said hello and that it was a nice-looking bike I got. Jim liked it too, back on Radiance.

My legs were quivering when I got off the bike and my heart was pounding. I got much more of a workout than expected. I could feel every muscle in my legs working hard. I have a feeling I’ll be sore tomorrow. I definitely worked muscles that don’t get worked out when running and walking. In some ways, biking is even more challenging. When walking up a hill I can go at any pace. But if I slow down too much on the bike, I’m not getting up that hill, so it forces me to work harder.

Later…

Quick troll update, who says loud “noses” really brings on her anxiety, LOL. Aly and I agree she’s way too fucked in the head to live on her own. I was surprised to learn her mother is 67. Didn’t know she was that old. So who gets custody of the nut when she and her husband die, one of her sisters?

Another thing we agree on is that Molly doesn’t seem to be able to feel love or empathy. It’s all about lust, anger, hate and obsession for her.

SUNDAY, JUNE 8, 2014 Someone in NC has been diligently reading my bio. Maliheh? Right operating system, device and browser, wrong part of the state, unless she moved there or is temporarily staying there.

Went to Walmart early yesterday morning and found the PERFECT bike for me! It’s a Kent La Jolla gearless cruiser with just one speed. Even though it has 24” wheels like my old bike, the seat can go lower so it fits me well. :) It’s gorgeous too; light blue with yellow accents. Gonna take a picture of it when the sun’s up. I’ll shoot it just outside our carport so it will have the cypresses in the background and no street names, house numbers or license plates.

I was browsing through the racks of bikes looking for something small enough for one that’s short. Nothing with a bar in the middle that’d be too high. I considered one in royal blue and turquoise and even one in red and black. Then I glanced upwards and there it was. The perfect bike. I’ve never seen one so pretty and decorative, though my old pink and purple bike is still pretty. It’s got a blue and yellow plaid design on the seat and a matching one on the chain’s cover. The frame is blue and the spokes are yellow. I also love the basket it’s got in front because that way I can throw my towel and smartphone in it when going to and from the pool.

Because the Caddy has a trunk and not a wagon like the Ford, the guy had to take off the handlebars and front wheel in order to fit it in the trunk. Tom reassembled it for me as soon as we got home.

At first I thought it would be weird and take some time to get used to back-pedaling to stop the bike since that’s how it’s done on this one. There are no handle breaks at all. It’s no big deal, though. Tom said that was once how all bikes worked and that’s all he had as a kid. I don’t remember this, but he is 8 years older, LOL.

As my shit luck would have it, I was tired by the time we got back with it so I didn’t take it very far. It rides so silently and smoothly! It was like I was gliding over the road. I braced myself for those speed bumps and said to myself, “Hang on!” but it ran over them a lot smoother than I thought it would. I’d probably get jostled if I went over them at a faster speed. That’s the only annoyance I may face around here is all the damn speed bums in the park. They’re mostly on perimeter streets and busier streets. Circles, dead ends, and side streets don’t have them.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get out there again. I’m curious to throw the Smarty in my basket with the running app going and see how long it takes me to do my longest-running route where I don’t just go around the perimeters but zigzag through side streets as well. I was like a little kid riding her first bike on her own again, LOL, wind whipping through my hair, totally enjoying the sense of freedom the bike gave me, etc.

While the bike will mostly be used to take me to and from the pool, I may alternate between running and riding for exercise. It not only gives me better variety, but different activities work different muscles. Running works my quads better while biking will work my hamstrings more. What I’ll like better about biking is that I don’t have to worry about loose undies that may shimmy downward as I run, or jarring my joints and boobies, or what shoes I wear.

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2014 Right now, rather than having a will drawn up to leave our stuff to Tammy and the girls should anything happen to us, I’m content to let the state have our stuff. I’d rather some stranger, some unbiased person, get things like my offline journals. That way they wouldn’t take things personally. At least not like my sister and nieces would if they read all about how horrible I think they look or something like that.

If I die before Tom as he thinks will be the case, it will be up to him to do what he wants with my on and offline writings. If he goes first like I think he will, I can then be the one to decide before I kill myself. For the most part, I don’t care what happens to my shit after I’m dead because if I’m dead I won’t be needing it, nor would I be around to have to deal with any negative reactions to anything I may leave behind to whoever gets it.

Ugh, I don’t want to think about dying. I think about it way too much as it is, mostly thanks to what happened in 2007 and 2011. I am curious, however, as to why Lisa was at Tammy's house posing in a pic with her half-sisters if no one’s supposed to be in touch with her. Did everyone kiss and make up? Well, it’s none of my business and God knows I’m not going to get involved. That’s the biggest lesson Tammy taught me; never stick up for anyone, never take sides, etc. You just never know who’s going to turn on you and how it may backfire. The thing is, though, I had no idea Lisa was going to go crazy on me and viciously accuse me of lying about such petty shit to Dad without even asking me about it first.

Couldn’t see much of Lisa’s face, but she’s not nearly as tall and as heavy as the others. She’s not skinny, though.

Later…

As I said earlier, I’m tired of hiding from this one person – possibly two – whom I didn’t ask or invite to be a part of my life. I don’t give a shit anymore what she or her associates read so long as they don’t contact me or fuck with my friends. A part of me still likes being private everywhere and members-only on Prosebox with my 2014 journal, which I’d then make private come 2015 so no one could know too much about me at once. But I like the idea even more of seeing who comes around. If there weren’t such a thing as tracking then I’d probably keep a lid on things. But I love the fun and surprise of seeing what visitors I can see coming to my different blogs.

Nothing’s come in on Ask or my-diary, the only two places I can be contacted outside of Facebook that I know they’re aware of. Speaking of Facebook, I’m thinking of even going public there and just flipping things to friends as people “like” and comment on stuff.

Aly said she mentioned me in her so-called blog, but I didn’t find anything. When I told her I didn’t give a shit what she said about me so long as she left me and my friends alone, Aly said she’d go so far as to call her mother if she had to just as soon as she’s back to mentioning her full name, cuz she won’t risk having to explain her shit to some future potential employee.

At first we were doubtful that that account was really Josh, her physically abusive stud she’s still so in love with, but now we think it is. Molly went on to say they talked. Besides, the person created their account through Facebook which isn’t usually something an impersonator would do, and why ask her to call if it was Kim, Kathy, or a fellow group homie? I would think they would fling insults instead.

She also highly doubts Molly will ever be able to live totally on her own without assistance except for maybe after her parents are dead who I’m guessing are in their 50s. I can’t imagine it either. She’s too stupid and too crazy. She has no concept of how to handle money, no concept of responsibility, no sense of right and wrong, and she’s known to get destructive when she’s having her mood swings.

But someday, sooner or later, she’s going to get out of Marbridge and she’s going to have less structure and routine to keep her offline as much as she is now. Now she probably only gets an hour or two in the evenings. What happens when she can play online all day and all night?

Later…

Thought of taking a walk down to the pool, but would rather wait till I either get a new bike in the morning when we go to Walmart or restore my old bike. I don’t like walking back with wet hair, a towel wrapped around me, and my feet slipping in my wet flip-flops. It’s still too warm to go for a run, so I’ll probably wait an hour or two.

I really don’t like how my meds make my periods heavier and how I’m still up a few pounds. Aren’t I ever going to lose this water? I lost some, but not enough.

Despite fearing I’m destined to gain over time no matter what I do, I’m still going to drop to 1200 calories starting tomorrow and I might even consider joining Tom in an experiment he read about in a medical article. I was always taught that not eating is unhealthy and can damage your metabolism even more, but according to what studies are now showing, fasting 2-4 days twice a year has many health benefits and is actually very good for you. I read even more about it and was surprised to find it even helps those with allergies and asthma. The biggest thing is that it resets and refreshes everything sort of like rebooting a computer. We have many dead cells and what fasting does is help create new stem cells and all that. Tom was thinking of trying it on July 4th and 5th. He doesn’t want to do it while he’s working, figuring he’s going to be sluggish and all that. I knew ages ago I’d always be heavy no matter what, but I might try it out of curiosity. The question is – can we do it? It’s hard to believe we could! But we can’t know until we try.

Looked at the dump trailer on Google Maps and the pic must’ve been taken after we left because the shed’s gone. The last pic of the place showed our old Ford parked outside of it, so we were home at the time it was shot. Now it looks deserted. I’d think that if there were any renters there, there’d be at least one vehicle present, a mutt chained outside… something. He still has his shit pile of old parts lying around which totally spoiled the otherwise pleasant landscape.

FRIDAY, JUNE 6, 2014 Shortly before 11pm, I took a walk down to the pool. I could see a few people were still up watching TV, but there wasn’t a soul outdoors. I stuck my arm in the pool up to my elbow and found it to be gorgeous! It should be with all the triple-digit temps we’ve been having and will have for the next few months. Hoping to pick up my bike this weekend. I’d rather ride to and from the pool than walk.

My period is finally starting and so I’ll have to schedule that dreaded pap I’ve been neglecting since the late 90s. I still have burning and itching down there and would like to know why. The problem with this doctor is that you have to make a separate appointment for everything. Yes, everything. You can’t just address everything you want to address at once. People will do anything to make a buck, even doctors. I could break my arm in two places and she’d want me to make one appointment for one part of that arm and another for the other part of it.

Started entering sweeps on a site called UltraContest and it’s not bad. Pretty straightforward layout and friendlier staff, though it doesn’t have as many sweeps as OLS. There’s no premium membership or Shazam feature that pops open multiple sweeps at once, but I like how it tells you if you haven’t entered a sweep or Not Yet if it’s not time to enter again or You’re Done if it’s a single-entry sweep. I do it while proofreading old journals and that way I can listen to the electronic reader as I make my entries.

Later…

Perhaps I’m wrong for feeling this way, but it really annoys me when people butt into conversations on Facebook. Ok, so I know that’s what Facebook is supposed to be all about and that it’s ok to expect “likes” and comments from whoever, where it’s possible to get those. But still, something about leaving a comment for Jane Doe and then having John Doe come in and comment on my comment bugs me. Again, perhaps it shouldn’t and perhaps I’m the only one that feels that way, but sometimes I start off in a discussion with one other person and it ends up being a group discussion that involves 5 or 6 people and I’m like, “Hey, where did all of you come from and who invited you to butt in? I was talking to So and So!”

This annoys me in person, too. I’d hate being at school or at a bar or wherever and end up chatting with someone. Then someone overhears us and they rudely insert themselves into our discussion. It would be even more frustrating if the person I was initially chatting with was someone I really, really liked or didn’t get to see very often. It would be all I could do to keep from screaming, “Get the fuck out of here!”

Another thing that annoys me and also may sound weird is that it’s always the same damn people “liking” things and commenting on things. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate their responses. I do. But at the same time, I can’t help but feel a tinge of annoyance when I see the same people coming around while others I rarely or almost never hear from. But that’s what Facebook Housekeeping is for. I do it once or twice a year. :)

Later…

Woke up with cramps and a backache, but Tom’s hands and a couple of Ibuprofen got rid of both. He’s decided to start a diet and I was thinking of throwing myself on a 1200-calorie diet starting Sunday. Not that I think I’ll lose more than the same damn few pounds I regain before periods when my hunger levels are up, but because I think it may help other hunger that I can actually control. When we suddenly eat a lot like I have been on weekends, we tend to feel hungrier the next day because we’ve enlarged our stomachs. Well, I can’t prevent PMS hunger, but I can at least be more consistent with my eating habits and hopefully not be as hungry during other times of the month.

I was reading around in a fitness forum and found lots of people have lost weight on 1200 calories, even some around my age. But do any of them have hypothyroidism?

Sill doing the 30-day ab challenge but damn are those sit-ups hard! Yesterday I noticed the leg raises were easier and today I noticed that planking was easier. The crunches are the same, though.

We’re much happier with our new carpet than we thought we’d be. We thought it wouldn’t look so good being that it was cheap for carpet, but it looks fantastic. With the old, worn-out carpet you couldn’t see the Robo vacuum’s tracks, but with this stuff, you can. The brighter color also brightens up the room big time, but it’s not so bright that you would see even the slightest trace of dirt you may track in and all that.

Woke up from a bit of a scary dream where I was smoking this poisonous cigarette. I wasn’t trying to kill myself deliberately, but it was almost as if I was living in ancient times and was being forced to smoke it or something. Every time I inhaled a lungful of the deadly smoke I could feel my body shutting down.

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2014 Read today’s whines and rants from Molly and it bothers me to see she’s still using full names, whether or not Josh G’s account is real or not. That’s her on-and-off ex in Iowa. Is it really him? Kim? Kat? Aly? A fellow Marbridger? She doesn’t seem to be sure herself.

I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much about her using full names. I mean even if she wrote “Jodi S is a cold-blooded murderer,” what are people going to do about it? Hunt me down and kill me? It’s also sad that she would even think of communicating with a guy who she says abused her. Then again, she never did have much self-respect or else she wouldn’t spend so much time chasing after those who don’t want anything to do with her.

The biggest thing she said that has me going “Oh fucking no!” is how she can’t wait to get into her own apt. I’ll bet she can’t! Then she can be free to torture and harass anyone she wants without the slightest bit of supervision or restraint. Seriously, if she’s ever allowed to be her own guardian, how will Mommy Dearest block Josh’s number from calling her then? God, I dread that day! I hope that’s just a fantasy on her part and that Marbridge, her parents, and the state all wouldn’t be that dumb. As it is they haven’t always shown much responsibility and smarts where this nutjob is concerned, letting it go online, etc. I hope to hell she is at least stuck where she is for many more years to come. Maybe by then the “experts” will realize old dogs can’t be taught new tricks.

Amazingly, she continues to avoid checking in on me unless she’s doing it in a way I can’t see.

Later…

Someone blasted in at a noticeably annoying but not maddening volume last night at 10:30. Instead of turning down in front of our house, they headed toward the cemetery. At that hour I’d say it’s unlikely that it was a visitor. It’s sad that this shit is now a part of this park. Every place I move to that isn’t rocking off the bat ends up getting noisier within a year. It’s just that this usually happens by whoever’s closest to me becoming noisy or moving and then being replaced by noisy people. Instead, my park has become a home for these stereos. Most of them are still outside the park, though it’s been pretty quiet since I got up late this afternoon.

It was hot today and I want the temp down to at least 72° when I go out for tonight’s run. So I’ll be leaving around 11pm. I’ll try again to get my running details to post to Facebook.

The lady across the street got a new golf cart and this Sunday they're having some kind of activity where I guess you decorate your golf cart if you have one. Not sure if they’re going to be paraded through the park or not, but at least those things are quiet if they are, since I’ll probably be sleeping at the time.

As I mentioned before, I was pissed because the park doesn’t usually turn our water off twice in the same week. Then I was pissed even more trying to get water out of the hot side in the master bath. Usually, it only spits air at me a few seconds after being turned off, but this time it took forever! The air pressure knocked the massager right off its holder in the shower and I started to wonder if something was wrong. Just when I thought water would never come out, I heard it bubble up in the wall and then there it was.

I was supposed to get my period today and didn’t, so hopefully tomorrow or the next day. Yesterday was one of those days where I just couldn’t get rid of my hunger no matter what I ate. I ate and I ate and I still felt like I hadn’t eaten in years. Finally fed up and determined to try to figure out what to do about it when I have those days, typically before periods, I did some research. But I came up with the same general causes – pregnancy, PMS, diabetes, hyperthyroidism, depression and anxiety. The question was what to do about it. Knowledge isn’t always power if you know what the cause of something is but don’t know how to solve the problem.

Tom thinks it's part PMS, part depression because apparently depression is hunger. “But I’m not even depressed!” I told him, and he said that being depressed doesn’t always mean feeling sad and that it’s probably the PMS, which aggravates and enhances negative things in general, causing my PTSD and anxieties over the past returning to haunt us. Maybe so, but why would that make me feel hungry? When I get depressed – really depressed – like when a favorite rat of mine dies, that actually dampens my appetite. Back when we were so sure we were on death row I had to push myself to eat so I wouldn’t spend my final hours just moping in bed, drained of energy, and I couldn’t even do that. I’m still leaning toward it being connected to PMS. Yes, I have some pretty awful memories, and yes, I’ve lived long enough to learn we can’t always be 100% guaranteed to have escaped the past, but my life is the best it’s been in like forever. Things are absolutely awesome right now. I’m disappointed my meds aren’t relieving some of my hypothyroidism symptoms like my dry skin and inability to lose weight, but that’s easy enough to learn to live with as opposed to poverty.

Ah, poverty. One of the dream faves, along with captivity. Last night we were renting a small room in a totally noisy and chaotic place, despite the fact that in real life, they just hired 60 people at work, many of whom are temps, which lowers his chances of being laid off.

No hope for subsidies, though, LOL. A couple of years ago a regular employee at work was excitedly telling him how she got her utilities subsidized and that they’ll subsidize you up to 28k! He didn’t have the heart to tell her he made over 40k and that no utility or food subsidy program in their right mind was going to give us the time of day.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 2014 On Facebook, I statused: If I see one more post on racism I think I'll scream.

Really, this isn't the slavery ages. Why are we still feeling sorry for a group of people that to date have more rights than whites ever had, that play the race card as often as they do no matter who gets hurt along the way, and that can make any hateful statement they want against whites and get away with it??? Enough is enough already! There are more important issues to address in this world.

I don’t care how many people automatically label me as “racist” either because it’s not hip or politically “correct” to say anything negative on the subject. Some individuals still may get shit on, but so do those in EVERY single group on earth and even more so at times. Think Muslim women like living in a society where if they so much as dare glance at a man they’re not married to they know they may be flogged, or worse, hanged? So yeah, this “whoa is black” trip we’ve been on that’s oh so hip and “in” really does get old when they have so, so much going for them these days.

Alison said she learned of Molly’s blog through one of her fellow group homies who emailed her asking that she read and comment on Molly’s blog since she blocked Molly’s latest Facebook account and can’t ask her herself.

Before Alison blocked her she told little Miss Missy Rosen that if she were contacted again by anyone at Marbridge, she would let the staff there know just what their residents do in their spare time.

She sure will, even though Mommy Dearest will threaten her for it, then offer to pray for her.

I’d still like to know how she’s restraining herself from peeking in on me as often as she writes her immature posts I’d swear were written by a 10-year-old if I didn’t know any better – when will her mother stop controlling her? She’s not spending all her money on snacks like she accuses her of doing, and she’s NOT FUCKING DATING Brad. She’s not even flirting. Oh no, he’s dating someone else to piss her and Julie off. rolls eyes Like grow the fuck up, will ya? You’re almost 31, not 11.

Had to laugh at one post where she talks about leaving there cuz she’s “fed up,” and someone tells her that as Nike says, just do it! Only they obviously don’t know she’s a nutjob in a group home for the mentally fucked in the head who can’t “just do it” and leave, so fuck what Nike says, LOL.

Won $10 of Macy’s store credit last night so I used it toward a set of magenta sheets that were already on sale. We only had to pay $16 for them.

I don’t know why the details of last night’s run failed to post to Facebook, but I ran 1.9 miles in 37 minutes and supposedly burned 339 calories, which I don’t buy for a minute. That’s because a 30-minute walk on the treadmill says I burned 138. Why would adding just 7 minutes burn that many more calories? I agree with Tom who said it varies from person to person and that we can never know exactly what we burned. All I do know is that I can’t be burning much with a bum thyroid.

Saw one of the loose cats they’re so worried about, but it was just inside one of the perimeter walls, so it might’ve belonged to someone outside the park. At night when I’m walking by the perimeters that have two-story homes outside of it, I can’t help but notice some of the second-floor rooms that are lit up and open. Well, someone had these really cool tape lights. Pretty sure it was tape lighting anyway. Bright stars ran along the tops of the walls and onto the ceilings. Tape lighting would be a great way to even out the lighting in a room and may be cheaper to use, too. But we have enough lamps and overheads in here, so it’s not important right now.

Again they turned the water off, so I found when I got up. It was back on by then, but I would’ve been pissed as hell. That’s the first time I remember them turning it off twice in one week. I’ll never shower in the daytime for as long as I live here!

In last night’s dream, I was stuck in an elevator with some woman with long dark hair that I apparently had a crush on. Knowing it wasn’t mutual, I jokingly said, “What a nightmare, huh? I mean, after all, I gotta be the last person you’d want to get stuck on an elevator with, right?”

The elevator doors then parted and she stepped off ahead of me, ignoring me all the way.

TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 2014 Starting Thursday we’re going to be looking at triple digits pretty regularly. I’ll be running late at night or early in the morning, depending on where my schedule is. Running in a clean, safer, upscale, gated community has spoiled me. I don’t want to resort to the boring treadmill unless I absolutely have to.

Been using a running app called Runtastic and it’s pretty cool. Ran 5 times around the circle, which came to 1.6 miles in 18 minutes and 22 seconds, and burned 169 calories. With my condition, it was probably only 16 calories, but I love the strength and energy running gives me. I also love how it uses live GPS tracking and shows where I am on the road at that exact moment. Lots of ads and offers, though, because it’s their free version.

Been going easier on the eating this week. I got way too carried away over the weekend. Running makes it harder for me to gain, not impossible.

Gonna go around the perimeter later on, but first I want the temp to drop 15 degrees or so. As long as I don’t hear anything later on, I’d say we’re back to normal here stereo-wise. Thank goodness! I’d rather landscapers every single day than hear that loud, thumping base just a few times a week. It’s just too potent and penetrating a sound.

I remember two dreams from last night, though not much of them. In one we were living in our Maricopa house again, only it didn’t look like it. It had two floors and a house about 50-60 feet away. I’d already met the large Mormon family that lived next door when I was doing something in the house and heard those ever so obnoxious squeaky squeals kids make. I looked out the window and saw 5 or 6 kids at the edge of their property by a fence, which was a lot closer to our place than theirs. They peered over into our yard and I tried to tell myself they wouldn’t be so annoying because Arizona wasn’t the state you usually had windows open in for much of the year anyway. Even so, I hoped they’d see me glaring at them and take the hint about not coming too close to our property, fenced or not, and then I mentally cussed out God for putting so many kids next to us.

The other dream was one of those infamous captivity dreams I often have. I was in what must’ve been some kind of jail even though it didn’t look like one, because I didn’t seem to be there willingly. I was very cold and mistrusting after having learned that being kind and truthful didn’t seem to mean shit when it came to cops and courts. A female guard asked if I were some word I can’t remember. It confused me in the dream and I said, “Am I what? Last time I knew it was called restriction, and no, I’m not on it.”

Then I was admiring several other inmates who had long hair, almost wishing mine were long again, too.

MONDAY, JUNE 2, 2014 No views from Molly or questions on Ask, even though she just updated her blog with another bad day, admitting her moods go from good to bad in seconds. Yeah, we learned that years ago.

Nane’s mother is in Hawaii now and she’s in the process of picking out a 2-day stay in Hamburg for her birthday. Do these people ever go a month without going anywhere? Either way, I thought she was having problems with her mother? So then why is she buying her a present? Either way, that’s quite a lavish gift!

Got up to find the water off which really sucked. I hate not to wash my face when I get up. Not knowing how long it’d be off, I didn’t flush after I peed. That way I’d still have a tankful of water for when it was time for more than just peeing, plus the other bathroom’s tank as well. That was smart, Tom said. Yes, he married a smarty 20 years ago. Well, it will be 20 years on the 15th.

Finished the final proofreading of my book and shared a copy on Blogger and Prosebox as well to a few people via Blogger, including Maliheh. LOL, her first thought, no doubt, will be to wonder if her name was mentioned.

Yesterday was peaceful. No landscapers or loud music. No landscapers today, but someone did come blasting in back. Because it was in back where there are no windows I didn’t see them. Twice I heard music that was in the park. One definitely was, one probably was. The park needs to do something about this shit, too. Especially if Tom’s right in saying they didn’t start allowing loud car stereos. We were hoping there was just some kind of event going on and maybe just some visitors from out of town, since it started suddenly and didn’t gradually build up to this shit. But this is the second week, so what “event” could be going on, since most of the rumbling I’m hearing off in the distance is definitely the houses just outside the park, as well as the freeway. Just the fact that I’m suddenly hearing this so much more, inside and outside the park, is frustrating and worrisome. I didn’t come here for this shit. Loud music is way more annoying than barking dogs, screaming kids, and landscapers could ever be. It’s such a vibrant, penetrating sound even from a distance.

I’m not about to let it run us out of this house. There are only 4 possible ways out, as I’ve already decided. One is because we decided to move when he retires in 13 years. Two is because we decided to stay here for the rest of our lives. Three is because we lost the place and so we killed ourselves knowing the streets would kill us for us if we didn’t. Four is because we struck it rich and moved to Maui.

Got a clever idea to add pic folders within pic folders. After I post a pic on Ask or in my blog or whatever, I'll move it to that subfolder. By saving pics I've posted, I won't have to wonder if I've already posted a new pic I might like because I can then run the pics in that subfolder through my amazing picture-matching program that weeds out duplicates.

Got a thing from my dentist saying she’ll give her patients a $100 gift card for everyone they refer to her, and the person they refer will get $100 off their services. We can think of people around the park and at his job to recommend, only most people can’t afford her cuz she’s expensive. She doesn’t use those cheap old, crappy metal fillings that don’t last as long, and we have to pay extra to get the top-of-the-line, quality stuff that lasts.

Had a funny dream where I met up with several family members for a vacation in Hawaii, including dead ones. Either I or someone else was saying that my parents and grandparents who lived next to us shared the same garage when the houses were first built, not that that was true.

Then there was a large room with about 10 long benches or pews in it. Some were to the left, some to the right. Off of that room was a smaller room with several people in it. I was in the larger room when I spotted Norma and Milt sitting by themselves on the front bench farthest from the doorway to the smaller room.

“Hiya Norma!” I called out in a cheerful voice, then I fell over one of the benches on the other side of the room sort of behind her and Milt and felt like such an idiot. I tried to make a joke of it to cover my embarrassment and while I was still on the floor I held out my arm with an imaginary camera and said, “Hey, this would make a cute selfie.”

Then I got up and Norma smiled politely then said, “Sit in the right jail.”

I don’t know why she’d refer to the rooms as “jails,” but I then realized I was supposed to be in the smaller room.

I entered the small room and it opened to the outdoors where the shoreline wrapped around a small area where picnic tables were set up. Much of my family sat eating at the tables, including my parents, sister, and possibly grandparents.

I stepped into the water, admiring how warm it was. Then I got a little nervous when I saw a guy picking up some 3-foot snakes that were by the shore.

“They aren’t dangerous?” I asked him, and he said no.

So I picked one up and carried it over to my mother whose forkful of food stopped midway to its big mouth and said, “Nice huh? Ain’t he just a cutie?”

I woke up laughing at that one… till I found they turned the damn water off again.

When I go to change the rat cage I lift it off its base. When it’s not on the base, it’s just a wire floor and shelves, so piss can go through. Sure enough, Romeo steps out of his tube as soon as I set it down and takes a leak on the new carpet. The furry bastard couldn’t wait just 5 lousy minutes. Sometimes I want to take that rat, spin it by the ceiling fan by its tail, swish it around in the washer, let it take a tumble in the dryer, then drown it in the dishwasher!

Sugar, on the other hand, is amazing. Since his stroke, he hasn’t been on the upper levels of the cage, but that’s all changed now. He is one amazing rat! Getting down can be harder than going up for him, especially on the side that has no ramp. So I added an extra water bottle in case he gets stuck there when no one’s around to help him downstairs.

SUNDAY, JUNE 1, 2014 I’m still torn between going public and staying mostly hidden from the trolls that have stalked, followed, pestered and harassed me in the past with their craziness, delusions and paranoia sometimes to the point that I actually contemplated going directly to their door and making them go away since it didn’t seem to sink in in print.

I don’t want to feel like they’re controlling me by making me run and hide, especially when I’m not the one doing anything wrong, but I also don’t want to give them the satisfaction of reading my stuff either. IDK, though, maybe it’s time to stop caring about what satisfaction these trolls may be getting. After all, I don’t care about them as a whole, so why should I care about their feelings and desires? I’ll just keep it less than convenient to actually contact me. In other words, they can look but they can’t touch.

I just don’t like being controlled or feeling like I’m being controlled. The more society pushes me left, the more it makes me want to go right. The more this country says I don’t really have any freedom of speech, the more I want to speak my mind. The more it tells me it’s “politically incorrect” to admit or feel guilty for not liking certain groups or types of people, the more I want to admit that yes, I’m human deep down just like you. I love some people. I like some people. And I even hate some people.

I have, however, deleted some of the shit the trolls put me through from my blogs because I saw them as an unwanted part of the blogs. Everything stays in Word offline, but sometimes I don’t want certain people to have the honor of being mentioned in blogs. Especially those I never wanted in my life to begin with. Some of them aren’t people I was once friends with, but that I never wanted to be friends with. They inserted themselves into my life until I got fed up enough to remove them by pulling myself as out of reach as I could without turning my online life upside down and inside out.

Later…

Aly emailed me today and told me she actually had a herpes skin infection (at least the doctors are now pretty sure that’s what she had), and that that wasn’t something she felt comfortable saying in public. I can’t understand that much. Her doctors don’t know how the hell she got it, and she’s never heard of it before. Neither have I.

She floated me the link to Molly's pathetic Thoughts blog. I'm surprised this 2-year-old blog still exists even though it only contains about 30 entries. Same old miserable shit. She’s hopelessly in love with a guy who doesn’t want her, she wishes the director would kick those out that steal her snacks, she’s missing Alison, she doesn’t understand why she doesn’t like her, and she’s in a foul mood.

She's also online much more than I realized. How is she managing not to look in on me more often? That must take an amazing amount of strength for her. Could she be coming in undetected some of the time? Avoiding detection has never been her thing, but you never know. Definitely was her from her hometown who looked in on me and not her mother. She confirmed going home in her blog around that same time.

Nutjob has another blog on Blogger. I don’t know how old the blog is but it’s recently been updated.

Meanwhile, I reactivated my first Ask account just to see what comes in, though I don’t intend to use it, and figured out a way to find out for once and for all if Molly knows about my second Ask account. She never fails to follow any links I post, so on Ask I shared the link to a site she doesn’t know about which is Histofme. Then I tracked Histofme since I can’t track Ask.