#was severely impacted by the pandemic and chronically online shit

[emeraldelysium]

will wood is a genius and his peak popularity was wasted on like chronically online pandemic-era teen girls with status-quo neurosis and adhd who loved him for his "quirkiness" and how his music "scratched their brains"

[not-poignant]

you mentioned that Piranesi hits different if you're disabled, could you like expand on that? if you feel like it <3 I'm always interested in your thoughts on things :3

For me, knowing that Susanna Clarke had - after writing Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - been affected by chronic fatigue syndrome, and had to stop writing for years because of it, and change her writing style, made me really curious to read Piranesi in the first place, because I know both the style of the writing (simpler), the length of the book (shorter), and the actual book itself all actually came from the experience of someone stuck inside a fatigued/chronically ill body, and also the experience of someone stuck inside themselves and therefore inside the home and inside their mind more often than they used to be.

So I actually picked up the book specifically as 'person with chronic fatigue hearing about another person who developed chronic fatigue and wanting to see how that's impacted them.' Clarke also said in interviews at the time that the book was influenced by her own perception of her illness and ways that she'd found to cope.

Which makes the story of Piranesi in some ways even more tragic, and even more hopeful. Because Piranesi is essentially the story of an impoverished man living trapped in a supernatural giant unending building, who has concealed his trauma beneath a naive, hopeful, 'it will be better tomorrow' attitude. It is a story about someone who finds joy in the small things because he has no other choice. And that is something I think many people with severe or serious chronic illness - especially with a fatigue or pain element - really understands well. If you don't learn how to do it, you will probably end up wanting to not be alive at all, because life can seem very difficult when you're trapped, and you know it's permanent and inescapable.

People think they have a concept of it from lockdowns and the pandemic, but the fact is, chronic sufferers of fatigue have been living this way in some cases all their lives, but in many cases certainly for many years or decades. It's inescapable. And it's one of the things we lament as people come out of lockdowns is that...well other people get to, but we don't.

Some of us chronically ill folk and disabled folk have had more accessibility for years because of the pandemic (online classes, telehealth, online conventions), bitterly knowing that the world will move for healthy people locked inside, but they won't make the world accessible for us in general (and some of that accessibility is already dropping away). After years of telling us 'no we can't have an online element for conventions it's too hard' and 'no we can't do telehealth it's too hard' you find out just how much you've mattered all this time. It's a cruel blow.

And Long Covid behaves very similarly to CFS and elements of Fibromyalgia, so when people seem surprised that something can be so cruelly life destroying it's like 'hey buds, we've been here all along, actually - welcome to the club where doctors won't give a shit about you, it'll be impossible to get unemployment or disability benefits, etc.' (Though some of us do kind of hope that 100 million people having Long Covid at once will hopefully cause breakthroughs for all chronic fatigue illnesses).

Piranesi was significant and meaningful to people stuck inside because of the pandemic, but it was a book written by a sufferer of fatigue and it shows to me a journey of a character trying to comprehend how to find meaning and process grief within a locked in body, or mind, or home. So the character of Piranesi for me is like... yeah, I feel like I get him.

The whole book itself is written the way it is, in part, because the author needed to drastically change their writing style because of CFS. So I guess, for me, that's some of the reasons why it hits different. I can't go any deeper than that, because then we'll be getting into spoilers though, lol.

[serendipitous-magic]

Question Game - AKA Oversharing Hour

I was tagged by @the-angry-pixie​! And I’m a chronic oversharer, so this was fun. I’ll put most of it under a read more line because there’s a LOT.

1. Do you prefer writing with a black pen or blue pen? 

Black. Dunno why.

2. Would you prefer to live in the country or city? 

City city city city city city city city. I’m already going fucking batshit as it is, trapped in suburbia. I want to be able to actually do things, anything. Anything other than just being around the house and / or work. (And I felt like this before the pandemic started.) If you live in the city you can walk out your door and be somewhere else within like 5 minutes. A city park, a cafe, a train/subway, a local attraction, a museum, an artist’s booth, an outdoor market, etc. etc. 

Living in suburbia is like, well, to go literally anywhere you have to get into your car first and drive like 10 minutes minimum to get out of the neighborhood, and then if you want to go anywhere that’s not the grocery store you have to drive 20 minutes to get to another area of town, and then once you get there that’s the only place you can be without getting into your car again and getting a nice shot of anxiety from having to drive in traffic and have aggressive drivers roar up on your ass because you’re going 5mph above the speed limit and they want to be going 15mph above, and god help you if you have to merge, and oh by the way this is your only option to get around because public transit doesn’t really exist in any useful way in Big Suburbia, and nothing in within walking distance of your house except like 2 playgrounds and maybe one (1) gas station. (I hate it here lmao)

If I was trapped in the country I’d probably be chill with it for about a week, and enjoy the break, and the on day 8 I’d snap and go on a murdering spree out of stir-craziness.

3. If you could learn a new skill what would it be? 

I want to learn German and eventually be fluent in it. But since I’ve already started trying to learn and I don’t know if that counts, I’ll say cinematography. As in the actual working of the camera and lighting and all that. I can dream up some pretty striking images but actually getting the camera to do the settings needed to capture them is another story entirely.

4. Do you drink your tea/coffee with sugar? 

Nope. I drink coffee and tea both, and I don’t put any kind of sweetener in either of them. I used to put a shitton of sugar in my coffee and honey in my tea, and then I had some mild eating disorder struggles in college and I never got back in the habit of putting stuff in my hot drinks after that. It just tastes wrong now, after being used to plain black coffee.

5. What was your favourite book as a child? 

Either the Harry Potter series or The Hobbit. My grandma would take care of me a lot when I was really little because my parents both worked full time to support us, and every single time I was at her house she’d sit us down at the dining room table and read something to me. Not Junie B. Jones or anything, either, but real, big, thick books. I loved the shit out of Harry Potter and The Hobbit; I would request them repeatedly. We pretty much went back and forth; we’d read Harry Potter, and then The Hobbit, and then when a new Harry Potter book came out we’d read that, and then The Hobbit again, and so on and so forth.

6. Do you prefer baths or showers? 

Showers. I love baths, they’re magical, but ain’t nobody got time for that unless it’s a special occasion. I got too much shit to do to spend an hour lying in the bathtub.

7. If you could be a mythical creature, which one would it be? 

Vampire. Purely on the basis that if I was immortal maybe I’d finally have time to get my to-do list done and accomplish things. I’d miss the sunlight though.

8. Paper or electronic books? 

Paper. Here’s the thing, I really want to enjoy ebooks, but they just don’t hold my attention at all. Maybe I’m too conditioned by the internet to have a short attention span when I’m looking at a screen, idk.

9. What is your favourite item of clothing? 

I have a dark gray hoodie from the Seattle Aquarium from when I went on a road trip across America with my BFF a few years ago. It’s still my absolute favorite thing. I also enjoy my hiking boots a lot. (I wear them all the time, really they should just be called “everyday boots” haha)

10. Do you like your name or would you like to change it?

I like my name and I would also like to start going by something different. Probably just because I’m a restless soul and I feel the best (and least trapped) when I’m on the move or when things are changing. The second I get somewhere I want to be somewhere else. That’s just how I am. Gwen is a cool name (I’ve personally met maybe 3 people in my whole life with the same name, face-to-face), but there’s a lot attached to that nickname that I don’t necessarily want to carry with me when I eventually escape my hometown and start down a new path.

11. Who is a mentor to you? 

A friend and former professor whom I usually refer to online as Producer Man. He’s a producer (as you may have guessed) who kind of took me under his wing after I was in one of his film classes in college. We work together on film projects now and he’s teaching me bit-by-bit (usually by way of long, rambling, tangential stories / lectures) about the industry. He’s a really good guy. Like, he for sure has a case of Old White Guy sometimes, but his heart is absolutely in the right place. “He’s a little confused, but he’s got the spirit.” He’s always leaving $10 tips at coffee places and working himself to the bone to get his students connected to jobs and internships that will help them with their careers. 

12. Would you like to be famous and if so, what for? 

Yes, my stories. Actually, “famous” is not the right word. It’s just that fame is so tightly associated with success in our society. I want to be successful. Whether I’m widely known or not is pretty inconsequential to me. I want to make stories and I want them to have an impact. Books, film, etc. It’s about as simple as that.

13. Are you a restless sleeper? 

Oh yeah. I have trouble  sleeping as much as I should because I usually kind of jerk awake in the morning with this vague feeling that I forgot something or that I’m late for something. Also I stay up later than I should because I’m a night owl, and yet I like being up early because early mornings are great. And usually if I dream at all it’s something kind of stressful, like I dream that I forgot something important or did something wrong. I’m a Stressed Bean. 

14. Do you consider yourself a romantic person? 

I think so, yeah. I’m pretty obsessed with the idea of romance (I mean look at my OTPs), but heteronormativity got me fucked up enough that I’m bad at actually navigating real romantic feelings or relationships because society never prepared me for The Gay.

15. Which element best represents you? 

Fire, probably.

16. Who do you want to be closer to? 

My mom. We fight a lot and there tends to be a lot of tension between us. It’s a long complicated story. It boils down to, she really hurt me when I came out as not-straight at 15 and she lost all of my trust and even though she’s working on being less homophobic we’re still kind of trying to repair that divide seven years later.

17. Do you miss someone at the moment? 

Dude, I miss everyone. I’m an introvert and I’d love to be at a big party right now. I miss socialization. (As does everyone.) 

18. Tell us about an early childhood memory. 

The first time I experienced deja vu, I was about eehhh 6? And I legitimately believed, for several years of my life, that I had future-predicting abilities. Like, supernatural-level future-predicting abilities. Because I didn’t really know what deja vu was, so I thought, every time it happened, that I had already ~seen~ that moment in my dreams or something. 🤣

19. What is the strangest thing you have eaten? 

Hm. (My immature ass brain yells “DICK.” No, brain. Those were dark heteronormative times. Also, grow up.) 

Probably some of the sushi in Seattle. I actually love sushi, it’s just that when it has full-on legs and eyeballs I start getting a little squeamish. I like the rolls and the kind where there’s some fish meat laid out on a nice little bed of rice, that’s delicious. But when they brought out the whole shrimp with legs still attached, I was like “How in the (redacted) am I going to chew / swallow that.”

20. What are you most thankful for? 

That I happened to be living with family when this pandemic hit. I was supposed to move out (and across the country, actually) as of... like 4 days ago, as it happens. That was the plan. Plane ticket was gonna be booked for 7/15/20. Obviously, things didn’t quite work out that way, because of the pandemic and a few other reasons. But I can’t imagine if I had been in an apartment living with roommates, or in an apartment on my own struggling to get by, when this happened. A lot of people couldn’t pay rent and lost their homes. I was very, very lucky to be where I was, when I was, and very lucky that I have family who let me stay in their house pretty much indefinitely while this clusterfuck of a year happens.

21. Do you like spicy food? 

Yes! I looooove spicy thai food especially. I miss the massaman curry from a local Thai place so much 😭

22. Have you ever met someone famous? 

Um. Maybe? I met Veronica Roth once at an author talk in the library where I work, although it was before I worked there. And I met some guy from New Zealand who’s famous for his sword fighting skills because my dad does sword fighting stuff. Don’t remember his name though.

23. Do you keep a diary or journal? 

Yep. I have to write down everything or I forget. (I often say I have the memory of a goldfish.) Also, I have this compulsion to record and preserve my experiences in life, because I feel like our time on Earth is so fleeting and if I don’t write down what’s important to me, I’ll forget it and lose it.

24. Do you prefer to use a pen or a pencil? 

Pen. Pencil gets smudged.

25. What is your star sign? 

Scorpio, which is ironic because they’re supposed to be ~hyper sexual~ I guess, and I’m like gray-ace or something in that zone.

26. Do you like your cereal soggy or crunchy? 

Crunchy. Who eats soggy cereal? Are you okay? Do you need help? This is an intervention. 

27. What would you want your legacy to be? 

My stories. Life and sentience, as we experience it, is made up of just that: experience. And I read somewhere that, on some level, the human brain doesn’t differentiate that much between real life experiences and fictional experiences. I think that’s true. If you read or watch or hear the right story, it can really touch you and change the way you see life, or even change the way you live life. Stories have an incredible amount of power, both in individual people’s lives and in larger society. A huge amount of power. I want to be able to give people experiences that will Enrich Their Lives (do I sound like a lifestyle coach yet? 🤦🏼‍���️), but also stories that actively do good in society. Positive representation, body positivity/neutrality, diversity, healthy relationships (Hollywood has a real problem with that). Hope. It’s the best thing I can think to give society, and storytelling is what I love to do.

28. Do you like reading, what was the last book you read? 

I love reading. I wish I did it more. Part of my problem is that I get caught up in the hectic Rat Race of modern society and I never feel like I have time to sit down with a book for hours. Another problem of mine is that I start too many things at once, meaning I currently have like 5-10 (I lost count) books that I started reading, and I want to finish all of them, which means no progress ever gets done on any of them.

I last finished The Goldfinch, and I am currently working on The Secret History, Good Omens, Dune, a book my dad wrote, Directing Actors, Shot by Shot, The Way of Kings and I forget what else.

29. How do you show someone you love them? 

Physical affection, acts of service, words of affirmation, quality time, and gifts, in that order. If I’m close to someone, whether romantically or not, I want all the affection. And I’m kind of dying in quarantine. 

30. Do you like ice in your drinks? 

Depends. I usually don’t put any in, because it’s just gonna water down the drink and get in the way of drinking it (you know when the ice attacks your face?), but I don’t really mind ice in my drinks.

31. What are you afraid of? 

Helplessness. I Have Control Issues. ✌️ Also stagnation.

32. What is your favourite scent? 

Amber. Or any scent that’s kind of autumn-y. You know what I mean. Some other examples include dryer sheets, wood smoke, cigarette smoke (my big sister used to smoke a long long time ago, and although I never saw her do it, I still associate the scent with her), pine resin, rain, that Mahogany Woods scent from Bath and Bodyworks.

33. Do you address older people by their name or surname? 

If they introduce themselves as Pam I call them Pam. If they introduce themselves as Mr. Brown I call them Mr. Brown.

34. If money was not a factor, how would you live your life? 

 If “money is not a factor” means I have an infinite amount of money to spend as I wish, then: buy land, build film studio complex on land, found company, hire fellow creatives, make movies.

If “money is not a factor” just means that I don’t have to work 40 hours a week to afford rent, then: move to Chicago, rent a nice studio apartment, write stories, maybe work 15 hours a week at a used bookstore or coffee shop to get me out of the house and socialize. Go to museums, go to the park, walk along Lake Michigan, go to gay bars, ride the train, brave the Illinois winters, own a cat, paint, play guitar. Build my actual career on writing / storytelling. Probably also do some filmmaking.

Alternatively: buy an RV (not like an American Trailer Park shitty RV, I’m talking the NOICE ones), buy good film equipment, be a freelancer, live in RV driving around to wherever the next filming location is. Life is a road trip and I’m doing what I love. Writing, storytelling, filmmaking. My home would travel with me. Writing in cafes; roadside attractions; early mornings on the road with coffee in the cup holder as the sun comes up; being able to go anywhere to film; always experiencing something new.

35. Do you prefer swimming in pools or the ocean? 

I’ve lived in a landlocked state my whole life, so I guess swimming pools. And, listen, I CANNOT get water in my mouth at the beach without wondering exactly how many kids have peed (or worse) in that water. (I know that’s a thing with pools too, but pools get cleaned.)

36. What would you do if you found £50 on the ground? 

Wonder what some poor European is doing in America right now. But if it was $50, I’d probably yell “DID ANYONE DROP THIS?” and then take it if no one speaks up.

37. Have you ever seen a shooting star? 

A few times, yeah.

38. What is the one thing you would want to teach your children? 

Grades are not the end-all-be-all. Skip some homework assignments to spend time with friends. Skip class sometimes. I’m serious. If you make school your top priority, even over your own personal life, you will come away with good grades and a lot of regret and missed opportunities. Learning is HELLA important, and very very little of it happens inside a school building. Get a 15 hour weekend or after-school job in high school, befriend your coworkers, and have fun with it. Use your paychecks however you want. Join a school club - one that you’re actually interested in. Do stupid shit. Light your textbooks on fire after graduation or go to the 24 hour Wendy’s at 2am with your friends or kiss that person you met at summer camp or sleep on the porch because it’s too hot to sleep inside. Be smart and safe, but follow your whims. If you let yourself fall into routine, apathy will poison you.

39. If you had to have a tattoo, what would it be and where would you get it? 

I already have a couple small ones, but the one I want next is a four-leaf clover. Don’t know where. Maybe my right inner wrist or maybe an ankle. Or like behind my ear. Luck has saved me so many times. (See above, with how I happened to be living with family when COVID hit.)

40. What can you hear now? 

Swamp cooler downstairs, the clock ticking in my office, cars outside, people moving around the house. I’m surprised the neighbor kids aren’t shrieking their absolute heads off as per the usual. 

41. Where do you feel the safest? 

When I’m alone and unobserved. 

42. What is the one thing you want to overcome/conquer? 

TMI warning, but I absolutely despise public bathrooms. How am I expected to pee when there’s somebody sitting like three (3) feet away, with only a partial wall between us, hearing everything that’s going on? My fight or flight response simply will not allow it. It’s too awkward and therefore Not Safe. Either that public restroom has to be empty except for me, or it has to be so loud and bustling that ain’t nobody hearing anything. Anything in-between and I’m in hell.

43. If you could travel back to any era, what would it be? 

The ‘80s. Let’s be honest, even that far back makes my life (as a woman, and as a gay person) hella difficult. But, consider this: it’s the ‘80s. Furthermore, consider this: a part-time job might have actually supported me and paid rent back then 😱 Holy fucking shit. Sign me up. I just wouldn’t want to go any further than than like 1980, because again: lesbian. Being a woman in the past = even harder than it is today, being gay in the past = even harder than it is today, being a gay woman in the past = oh no.

44. What is your most used emoji? 

In order of descending frequency:

😂🙄😊😁🤦🏼‍♀️👀😬🌈🤷🏼‍♀️😙

45. Describe yourself using one word. 

Creative

46. What do you regret the most?

Wasting my entire teenage experience. (See #38.) I did quite literally nothing with my life except homework for like 18 years. If I had taken even a tenth as much time for myself as I did for school, I would be so much farther along as a person today.

47. Last movie you saw? 

In the theaters? ........ uh. Shit, I don’t actually remember. It’s been like 5 months. (As it has for everyone.) But the last movie I watched was Lights Out, because I’ve been watching the director’s youtube channel. You could tell it was low-budget and that the director was still kind of finding his stride, but it had a lot of heart behind it and the creators clearly gave a fuck, which made it enjoyable. I am firmly in the camp of “not everything has to be a Magnum Opus or have a multi-billion dollar budget to be a good movie.” If I engaged with it and got some sort of emotional experience out of it, and if it had a good message, I consider it a good movie.

48. Last tv show you watched? 

I don’t usually watch a whole lot of TV shows (who has the time?) but I think the last thing I watched was either The Witcher or that new Unsolved Mysteries miniseries on Netflix. Oh and I was watching Dead to Me because I just love Linda Cardellini’s face and I want to wrap Judy up in a blanket and cuddle the shit out of her and protect her from all things 🥺 My precious beautiful unstable sweet murder baby.

49. Invent a word and it’s meaning. 

Apapanic. It’s where you’re so stressed about things that half of your brain is panicking but the other half is so overwhelmed that it circled all the way back around to being calm to the point of apathy, so you just kind of sit there like