that seasonal depression got me like

what is this, three days in a row of posting? it’s easier when i can make a post right before falling asleep. it feels nice, even if the rest of my days don’t.

work is the usual blah. i’m having to make my own work to do even when my brain is screaming that i’d rather be anywhere else, getting to choose my own shit to do while there’s time and daylight. of course, we know if i had that time and daylight to myself i’d probably just sleep in and jerk it, and then take a really long shower and oops it’s already the end of a would-be work day. I’m totally doing the thing where I feel restless and shitty so I’m starting some new projects, which feels like attempts at being a Real Person, but I don’t have ANY follow-through. So dishes are piling up, there’s dirt on the floor, I’m overloading firefox with tabs about robotics as I fall into a rabbit hole I don’t know if I’ll even remember, I add “should”s to wunderlist that i intend for the same day but never get around to because I don’t “feel like it”. I can’t tell where the line is between not feeling like it bc chores suck, and not feeling like it bc i have no energy or interest in losing my evening to mere subsistence tasks. And the longer I leave hobbies and interests alone, the more particular steps feel like things I should’ve already completed, therefore making them not “real” progress if I manage to do them after a while, and falling into the “subsistence” pile.

and if i go to bed rn i’m only getting 6.5 hours, and my lower back/butt hurts from sleeping in this bed and possibly specifically from falling asleep with my laptop last night.

I want to be better at musical exploration because I remember enjoying music more than this. It seems like most things I encounter these days are easy listening, you know, enjoyable and talented and fresh but not with any sharp edges that catch me. It’s time-consuming and breeds impatience, though. (more subsistence/hobby tasks hidden in this one)

I want to know more about world history and politics because I want to be able to talk about it more in-depth and understand current events more in-depth than I currently do. Like, I keep up on the news (somehow) but am terrible at supporting my positions on the spot, instead tending to blank out and/or immediately see the other person’s perspective and quickly agree in a panic-fueled rush of trying to keep the convo going.

I… want to go to bed instead of attempting to lay out all of my motivations for myself, because sleep is currently more important than some long-term bullshit. maybe if I WAKE UP ON TIME I can think about it more and also not be late out the door! Fuck.

the ephemeral uuuugghhhhh

first, yeah. I didn’t go running this afternoon because, on the way home from the grocery store, there was a guy in a black Honda sedan behind me, maybe slightly older/dirtier/more beat-up looking than the one driven by the dude who followed me around that other time, but he was like….. signing? or gesturing? while driving, and I couldn’t see anyone else in the car with him. He formed an ‘o’ with one or both of his hands and put it up to one eye, so it was like a telescope or something, and then made an almost windshield-wiper-like gesture with both hands–one hand flat/horizontal, the other rotating up and down repeatedly. Then he turned off and I had to pay attention to other things… but yeah, for a reasonable amount of dissimilarity between the two people in appearance and car specs, I was still kinda rattled. I felt restless right up until m and I lost ourselves in a round of Don’t Starve Together.

which, speaking of, we played until 9:30. kind of a total waste of a night when I spend my days imagining how I could learn about ukulele and robots and languages and take the bus to downtown on my nights, but … it was good to drown my anxiety with. (some tennessee honey and a cucumber sour helped with the drowning.)

echolalia of the night (-lia): uranodioning. uranodioning. uranodioning. uranodioning.

i know in my last post, i complained that sleeping with m affects the quality of my dreams. well, last night proved that i might be kinda … suffering from confirmation bias on that one. i dreamed that richard and i were in a competition to be the first one to find a logo in the logo room. oddly, the logo room and the entirety of work felt like they were inside a school building, like, a mashup of my elementary school and high school. but i never actually explored outside this room so idk why i think that. there was a definite high school feel to the room, though. there were people judging the competition and giving hints to us who i’d never met before anywhere, but still gave off a distinctive “upperclassman-ier than thou” vibe reminding me of how it felt to be a sophomore, looking up to the cool indie kids a few grades ahead of me. anyway, they were there off to the side, judging and making sure we followed the rules. one such rule was that the floor is lava–don’t touch. we had to improvise and use empty logo boxes to throw down as stepping stones, but it was slow and felt limited somehow or like i wasn’t sure i would get away with it. i also remember just barely managing to balance on one foot at a point when I had no boxes to put down, and hearing the judges deliberate over whether that was okay.

I remember receiving two clues: one was a logo that I don’t remember at all, and the other was a pack of cheese slices that we somehow knew was *printed* with the clue, not *containing* or *being* the clue. i wonder how wrong i might be about that “knowledge” of the dream. anyway, neither clue helped either of us figure out where the logo we’re supposed to be finding is, so we run out of time. they decide the winner by who’s in closest proximity to the goal logo. it’s richard. i lose, and the penalty for losing is execution.

it gets hazy here, but i escaped somehow because there was a convention near or in the school building. i sneaked into the con where i could blend in with lots and lots of people, and i got away. next thing i remember, i’m walking down dark, construction-spotted city streets that look like a mashup of the road just north of my old apartment, and Broadway. It gets hazy again but I think i met a girl and some people and just kind of talked and walked at this point. it never felt particularly dangerous or scary tbh but even so, this part was nonchalant.

melissa and i made zuppa toscana last night and it turned out pretty all right. i used whole milk instead of cream and it was less overwhelmingly rich. mm, leftovers for daayyyyss. google music came up with a pretty decent instant mix for Rodrigo Y Gabriela’s cover of Orion, lots of 2007-y artists, and good drunk cooking was had.

i’m really bad at letting myself have feelings for melissa. i can literally feel my brain tamping down the lust sometimes, the attraction i can feel, and i don’t know how to ask why. Not to sound super clinical, but we’ve been kissing more lately.

coke relationship thoughts – i hope she really is moving on, hope she filters him instead of feeling lonely and desperate after years. oh look here’s where i fell asleep on the keyboard last night bye

..

Sleeping alone makes me dream like I want to dream. I don’t know if I can remember any of it now, but I remember it was full-length, and plenty absurd, with lots of people and talking and plot. M was there. Cute work dude was there. There was… a game? There was water. But no, I think that was my more recent dream, after I briefly woke up. The one I want to remember was before I woke up that time. … eh, it’s hopeless trying to remember in here.

I need to go get my flu vaccine today before the storm sets in (more than it has). I wonder if Melissa is scared and upset today or if she’s just chilling. I wonder if I can avoid feeling expectations that she may or may not actually have of me, and therefore avoid the resentment that comes with the pressure of those high expectations.

at all

why I always gotta get on here with a lot of thoughts and feelings when I’m probably gonna fall asleep in 5 minutes

so like the day after the last post I wrote, I had one (1) day of feeling somewhere close to how I should feel for Melissa. It felt real. It felt normal. Apparently I didn’t write about it here (thought I had, but maybe it was somewhere else). Important thing to document… I can’t remember the last time I felt like that and there’s no reason I can discern why I happened to be capable on that particular day. I’ve decided to frame it like I got a shipment of feels and used them all up in one go, and now I’m out until the next delivery. whiiiiiiich looking at my past could be a while.

this week sucked, tbh. Literally every day I didn’t want to go to work, I felt useless and unwanted, and I felt fat and ugly in my skin and clothes. oh, and my uterus was doing its thing, which always makes life easier. But then every time I was like “yeah I want to eat differently” I’ve followed up that expression of desire and goal-setting with “oh, just this once” and bullshit I can’t remember bc here come the tireds

the other thing I wanted to mention, if my brain will just hang on a few minutes… is tonight. I didn’t go to Austin’s housewarming party. I wanted space. I wanted to be productive. Weeelllllllllllll, I drove for an hour in the shitty weather to get M there, then wasted hours on tumblr + drinking warmed cider, then more tumblr, then finally some laundry folding. So at least that’s more or less done, going into the weekend days. But UGH it’s so frustrating to not use my time effectively! A scant few hours without her reading over my shoulder or inspecting the books I bought recently without actually engaging me in conversation about them or tiptoeing around me somehow… I no longer have the brains for this.

1006

by which I mean 2000late

for a few solid days now I’ve been feeling… not enough. For Melissa, specifically. Enough not-enough that I’m questioning (in a very low-key, just checking in with myself kind of way) whether I love her or if I fell out of love, whether I should be in this relationship or not, if it really is just about space.

Same damn pattern with which I tore myself up with my previous ex, except… I don’t think I was ever in love with him. This shit is made 100% wonkier and harder to understand d/t my trauma. To what do I attribute my lack of feelings? And how do I move forward, with or without an explanation? The lack of feelings is real and I can’t, won’t deny it. How do I not get trapped? I’m trying (…. eh….. starting to try?) to act less on it when I feel that shitty contempt and desire to hurt her to try to push her away. I… think our relationship is worth saving, I remember feeling like she and I were an unstoppable team. But now it’s all ‘braird’s and her bitching to me about work. And drinking. And baby talk. And me holding onto everything that’s ever happened to me and refusing to let go. (aka not knowing how to do otherwise). Just… when did it get to the point of needing to be “saved” by any definition? How do I unravel all my shitty power hangups? Were they secretly there from the beginning?

Well, here’s something: last night one of my mutuals on tumblr messaged me to say they were re-following and weren’t sure how they’d unfollowed in the first place. I… was completely bad at knowing what to say, but M had some good suggestions that actually incorporated me as a real person in the scripts for each carefully deliberated message.

I bought like $100 worth of books online tonight. Quite a mixed bag, should be entertaining and informative, and/or look good on my bookshelf. so tired…

Yesterday I did another tarot reading, this time about problem-solving wrt how I spend (waste) the weekends, and got dragged again. I’ll have to make a graphic when I have the time and energy… today I was going to sort papers, but I didn’t even do that. I watched Leverage and helped M make dinner for about 2 minutes on 2 separate occasions. It’s not even that big or daunting a stack… i don’t know. At least I was able to close one tab in Chrome, as a result.

my tits hurt and my uterus hurts. what the fuck happened to those at-home blood-vacuuming parties, maaaaaaaaan let’s just get this over with

tomorrow, yeah. I’ll accomplish everything I need AND want, tomorrow, right after I sleep for as long as I want.

playing undertale + being kinda alone

slept in my own bed last night. that was nice. went for a longer (hah) run this morning, also nice. things still awkward and full of avoidant fear w/M… less nice. I get that it’s at least partly if not fully on me that knowing she’s acting afraid of me makes me feel angry, i just… gah. When she tiptoes around me and only does stuff when i’m in the shower or out on a run, i feel helpless + powerless. I’m afraid she’s going to use that time against me somehow, maybe by going through my things or data.

(although, as she was happy to remind me once when i expressed discomfort with how she was using that whatever radio antenna to check out nearby planes, if she wanted to fuck with my electronics, she could do that anytime. and to some extent, she does–checking network + fileserver traffic through her router, knowing things about what I’m doing and probably only sometimes mentioning it back to me.)

given that fear, I then feel like it’s my responsibility to protect myself from the potential for her to do that, and because I want very much to do things for myself like running and showering, where I am turning my back on her for a decent chunk of time, I feel frustrated that I can’t protect myself without also hurting myself. And because I feel like I can’t ask her to change what she’s doing without also taking away a coping mechanism she probably learned from being around her parents, it only really surfaces as an issue right after she’s done the thing. And then I’m angry and feel helpless and want to lash out.

Like. I should be happy that she’s taken the trash out, and made food for herself, or at least glad or relieved or something… but because she’s obviously creeping around me to do it, I just feel angry and critical.

mm. that’s better.

–

my dreams last night were… aight. i don’t remember feeling much in them except maybe nervousness and disappointment. I remember there was sports junk involved. Basketball? There was a local basketball team called, like, Highline or something. Their colors were white with a pale minty teal + purple for accents. My family and I had jerseys, for some reason. We were in the youth group basement. at one point, at least. Or maybe in an office. Maybe the youth group basement was an office. . . ? And there were newspapers! Newspapers in like every part of my dream. The Highline basketball team was on one of them… I wish I remembered more. I was too worried that if I didn’t make myself go on a run first thing, it would never happen (probably accurate).

it’s so cold and i am so boring

pre-sleep blogging

today was…. a lot. i probably won’t get through most of it.

Woke up at 7:30 to get M to her DOL test thing. Was immediately grouchy at both of us not knowing where to turn in, causing me to have to find a place to turn around. came back and was grouchy that m needed help knowing how to cook eggs in the pan–well, no, it was less that she needed help and more that she was also complaining to me about it while she did it in this particular way that’s like an excuse disguised as a complaint, like. I don’t care! I wasn’t gonna judge you for not knowing this shit, and I feel irritated when you then bring this shit to me + lay it at my feet like it has something to do with me. I cannot handle being the emotional support and the didactic teacher or guardian at the same time, honestly.

Then we had to go back out for more DOL shit, and due to a wait time that she and I should have expected (but didn’t because she didn’t do ANY research beyond cursory location info before bothering me to go anywhere and because I’m thoughtless and didn’t remember that would be worth checking) I went home before she did, but without my damn house keys. So… I hung out in the rain for 20-30 minutes, dressed in my garbage pajamas. Yay.

Since then, it’s been a mildly fraught household. The usual tiptoeing and tea-drinking and avoidance/shrinking away. Just gotta try to give her the chance to be a “big girl,” as she tries to improve on things.

I went shopping for roasted veggie ingredients, so that was nice.

yep already falling asleep and i haven’t even gotten to the list yet

the list

of things i want to do tomorrow but probably mostly won’t get to

  • run
  • laundry
  • take rest of pics for TCE
  • organize stack of papers on/under my desk

kbai before i fall asleep

fucking delicious

whoops, hitting enter in the title text box doesn’t skip to the body box.

I got the Cosmos oracle + tarot deck today, and it’s been fun. I did a simple reading with both decks individually (there were spreads in the booklet that came with the decks that contained both, but I wanted to get to know the oracle deck by itself first since I’ve never owned one such before)

past present future

… wow. I just spent way too long on a bunny trail to get that image sized down to below 2 MB so it could upload. There’s another spread, too, but now I’m out of time. Fun to get to use Illustrator for that, though!

Time to do laundry late at night and hate myself and be super bored while I do it.

say whatchu want

Tonight’s going pretty decent so far, like… peaceful and productive. How rare! 😛

I made a pot of kava + chamomile tea for myself and M. She has a massive 22-24 oz. mug (it has an image of the “ctrl+alt+del” keys with the text “#SELFDESTRUCTING” below–pretty fucking great all around) and as a result, one very full teapot only equals three mugs of tea. I’d totally have another mug of this, otherwise…. it feels like… a gentle depressant? And it doesn’t taste half bad, especially with the chamomile.

Other accomplishments for the evening… actually, wait, let’s just say the last 24ish hours bc I’ve been productive: built desk from IKEA, built something that’s supposed to be a stepstool but I’m going to use as a “shrine”/”altar” kinda thing, put white string lights on walls (even though they don’t connect to each other! am disappointed but still managed to make them look cute and not cover the walls in excess cable) and hung up Mettaton poster. Possibly more. Technically, I also unboxed and put a trash bag inside a new garbage can that isn’t a deep pink mesh anomaly…. definitely less effort there, though.

About that IKEA desk. The top is wood and I didn’t actually finish it or stain it with anything, and that may come back to bite me. Putting it together was a sweaty learning experience, though. Did you know: 1) that you can dip screws in petroleum jelly or roll the threads in a bar of soap to lubricate them + make it easier to insert screws that are too big for pre-drilled holes? 2) that some, if not all, IKEA furniture that looks like it calls for a Phillips-head screwdriver is actually calling for a Pozidrive head? Because. These two bits of lore made all the difference in my attempts yesterday to put the damn legs on. I wouldn’t have been able to finish AT ALL if M hadn’t done the googling while I screamed and wrecked my wrists on the screws.

End result: more surface area on my actual desk, and my file cabinet can fit under the adjustable legs. My room is turning into an IKEA display and I’m not sure how to feel about it. Damn, though. Even just starting to tack the string lights onto the walls lifted my mood and made me feel more at home. This room is really starting to shape up, even if it could use some soundproofing in the form of curtains, wall hangings, and rugs. (may or may not actually be plural in any of those cases.)

There’s one last thing I wanted to talk about, and I’m not sure I’ll have much success due to mental block, timing, whatever, but.. my feelings toward Melissa. Again. Two real-life incidents that particularly got me thinking. One, last Friday or so, she mentioned something about …. *checks the moniker? alias? I last used on here* mr. dude guy, and of course the conversation jumped to innuendo and the knowledge that he’s basically made a standing offer to come over whenever we want, and in turn that M is down whenever I give the word. so last friday when all this came up, I straight-up told her “Not to mention you and I haven’t really been anything and I feel kind of weird and guilty when the only intimacy we’re having is like, with [mr. dude guy]“. (side note: it’s weird and shitty how I’ve totally talked to myself and to her about this issue before but in my mind, when trying to remember shit surrounding this, I can’t remember sharing or working on processing this. It’s as shitty and lonely as ever.)

Her response… seemed calm and rational and like she was trying to understand my perspective/think through things herself, but then she mentioned she was crying about it on her lunch break, so ????? I don’t know how sensitive she is or isn’t on the subject. I do know that what understanding she offered was generally relevant, but didn’t directly mention one of the things that I’ve been framing as a catalyst for my end of things: this spring. With all the lying and cheating and going behind my back. I feel like that’s contributed to … well, it contributed to not wanting to be physically vulnerable with her, feeling like I can’t trust her or communicate with her w/o it turning into a Thing she internalizes + takes too far and I don’t know.  I also don’t know how much of present day issues still stems from that, or if it’s like… hold-over, a pattern I no longer know how to break. I thought about it a lot today, or at least tried to think about it… I think I could enjoy being with her, physically, but part of it is just that I don’t expect her to be able to meet my needs due to past experiences. I expect it to be an energy drain, not sexy,  and… baby talk. Ugh, how do I tell her that I don’t want to hear any iteration or conjugation of “bird” during sex? I’m not fucking a bird. I’m fucking a human being and when I say those words, I completely remove myself and any potential enjoyment from the situation. How can I tell her that when I know her language patterns are also spoon-dependent and she’s probably trying to talk as best she can without making her life harder/more of an energy drain? This…. is my pattern, I think. Expecting people to never change, thinking I have to move on and find a whole new person without X “flaw” in order to get over the issue. I just never thought I’d be thinking these things so much about Melissa.

Thing is, sometimes I can get into my memories just right, I can remember what it felt like to be In Love with her. It seems accessible. It seems like a matter of perspective and muscles. I want it to be more like that. I feel like our relationship should be more like that, emotionally. But these last few years, I’m bitter, contemptuous, always needing more space than I get or ask for, and all-around stagnant. Comfort zone. It’s scary to always feel like that and very rarely, very fleetingly feel the good things. And it’s frustrating to try to think of solutions and find that everything I imagine looks like her piggybacking off my energy, riding my coattails, not being her own person choosing to be there and be her own person but just following me around and using my energy and my decisions as a lead so she doesn’t have to think or use as much energy. How can I blame her for that, you know? And how the fuck do I find the line between working on being a better partner and trying to be authentic so that I can actually feel good things?

It seems like it’d be good to have some out of the house-type hobbies. Some separate and some together, ideally… not sure either of us has the time or energy.

I guess what strikes me when I remember how things used to feel is that she and I are very similar. I used to be better at finding that, and it used to be… more of a conversation-starter. Now it’s like everything is blah and not enough, to me.

This all seems like a lot of work, and doesn’t seem likely to all happen soon. Certainly not before we’ll have another encounter with Mr. Dude Guy. Hopefully… asking for more space, asking for more things I need and being clear about what I need will help. I hope it doesn’t just end up with us pushing each other away. For so long I always saw our relationship as something really… special, unique, untouchable. It’s scary and I feel guilty when I reflect now on how sublunary it really is (/has been). When I see how we are bad for each other (I still need to work on being happy for her when she’s happy instead of pushing away/being skeptical every time it comes from somewhere new (TM) that has nothing to do with me. That was something I experienced today with her new tarot deck.)

I don’t know what to do! I don’t know if writing any of this made a lick of difference. I think actions and communication are the only thing that can save me now.

She always seems so… unconditionally affectionate. Even when I’m aloof or mean or stubborn. And it doesn’t make me feel good. I feel guilty for not reciprocating, not being enough, not being what she deserves. It feels like nothing I do is real. Just a bunch of habits and patterns.

None of this is going to help me in the morning, is it? Ugh. It’s nice to at least have had the time to have gone through these motions uninterrupted, while having a nice mug of tea, in my new string light-decorated room.

so much… there’s so much I didn’t get to. Richard talking about his family, his homophobic extended family making his gayness abt them… we tried to have a discussion about weed, i TRIED, but every time I tried to say something I feel like it came out wrong, presumptive, badly framed, just… wrong. I don’t know why they put up with me. I guess they’re stuck with me and are just being nice, to talk to me so often. Somehow I don’t notice their effort to reach out to me, don’t reciprocate. I’m really not anything, huh?

Time to pick an outfit and get 7ish hours of sleep, maybe.

pax weekend

M’s taking a nap. The couch is all mine. Goddammit. Figures that I’d finally have all this space when I don’t have any Feelings readily available to let out. I guess it is just nice to be able to stretch out, to not feel watched, or like everything she does is currently being predicated on what I do. It’s still space, even if I’m not immediately using it. I just wish I had this kind of space when I would use it.

I smell like fast food lmao

I’ve got a decent-sized crush on this guy at work whose name I don’t even know. He’s got ridiculous scene hair and one time he complimented me on my use of rubber bands to keep my phone on my arm when I didn’t have pockets? Idk. I just think he’s got a nice mouth.

Something I should talk about is how shitty I’ve been to Melissa lately. I’ve been distant, felt vaguely angry as a result of wanting more space in general and not feeling like I can get it… feeling like she’s unreachable because she’s been so childlike/cutesy/patterned in her speaking, which generally happens when she’s scared and tired and low-energy, which leads to her following me around thoughtlessly bc it saves energy + she finds me comforting (for some fucking reason)… I don’t mind, right up until I do. And then I start acting mean because I suck at communication, like she’s supposed to infer “if you don’t like this short-term behavior then you should leave/not tolerate staying around it/etc” from my wordless passive aggression (or sometimes just regular aggression/hostility). Like. She has plenty of history taking the blame on herself, assuming it’s her fault. I don’t know why I continue to assume that this is a healthy or useful way to get distance. I guess I probably do it bc it’s easier… because I don’t actually care.

Tired and cold and enjoying hustle cat. I should be getting ready…