• facebook,  slice of life

    besties

    i hear people describe their spouses as their best friends all the time, but i don’t think they mean it like i do? because my spouse and i are best friends like. relentless mischief makers. second graders who live on the same street. should be supervised by taller adults most of the time kind of best friends.

    we got a halloween decoration with a glass ball on it last week. we realized that it does that thing where it captures sunlight and it gets hot. then we spent an hour in our backyard seeing how much we could set on fire using our new halloween decoration, while our 13yo stood back and said, “i don’t think this is a good idea?”

    today i rickrolled him on the stereo while he was trying to do dishes and he responded by banging the floor under our bedroom with the pole of a broom

    the other day my kid and i built a towering giant with a balloon head and big looming arms and put it on a rolling chair and stuck it in the kitchen so my spouse would be startled by it when he came home from work. and then we left it there so he would forget about it (spouse is very adhd) and get surprised by it every single time he went into the dark kitchen for something later that night. it is SO SATISFYING to hear the “ughghghgh” from the kitchen when it scares him again. (it’s still there.)

    he’s said to me before “our house should look more like a space ship” and my reply was “YES IT SHOULD” and we’ve been putting up like, random cargo nets

    we’re 35/36, for the record. lmao

  • Diaries,  facebook

    lemon, baby

    Behold my MIGHTY LEMON TREE! In summer ‘22, I was gifted a gigundo lemon that I didn’t remember to eat. When I cut it open, I found a seed already germinating. Zut alors! I took that seed and a couple others and put them into tiny cups. I don’t know which survived, but only one survived, and I moved it into a cup in mossy organic substrate. It *exploded* this summer.

    I’ve been trying to prune it in a tree shape (obv the lower leaves need trimming) so it looks like a proper little tree in my kitchen windowsill. Did you know lemon trees wanna stab you? They bite! It’s made me bleed several times from those majestic, citrusy thorns. I think I’m going to turn into citrus at this point, like the werewolf curse, but lemons.

    There is some common street moss in there (like pulled off the side of the road, that’s not actually what it’s called) and a couple little succulent florets so it also looks like a forest in the cup. The grass grows out of the sphagnum moss. I keep trying to pull it out but that shit is ROOTED so now I just mow it with kitchen scissors.

    Yesterday I moved my tree from the McDonald’s cup to a bigger maverick gas station cup. The roots had wrapped all around the bottom of the cup and much of the inside, too. It didn’t stay damp long. Do you know where the soil goes when you’ve had a plant for a while? THE PLANT EATS IT AND TURNS IT INTO MORE PLANT. All these big bushy leaves are like 90% substrate probably. Anyway, they’ve got more substrate now.

    I get to visit with this bad boy in my kitchen every day and it makes me happy, even if I do get bitten a lot.

  • Diaries

    another walk in darkness

    had a really nice walk this morning before sunrise. it was warmish despite being late-October and very dark, pitch black but maybe 45f with barely a breeze. i could actually feel the knots inside my skull coming undone bit by bit. walking through utter darkness in autumn is a purgative act.

    my head’s been messy lately. nothing is meaningfully wrong. i am struggling with isolation. i’m homeschooling, parenting, crocheting, writing, drawing, programming, gardening, and therefore always busy, but almost never leave the house. it is painful somehow.

    i’m far from idle in this idyll, no wordplay intended, but even when i’m doing a lot of really happy fulfilling stuff, it is psychologically difficult to be confined. i am immune compromised. i’ve been socially distanced a long time. haven’t really traveled. just at home, being domestic/artistic.

    it feels like there should be absolutely nothing to complain about, and yet my head gets twisted up in all the ugliest knots anyway unless i actually physically move my body around, go outside, walk, exchange casual greetings with neighbors. I don’t even need that much! but I get so agoraphobic.

    i like walking in the dark. it eases my agoraphobia. i didn’t even wear my glasses. there wasn’t anything to see except some distant street lights. just kept to the sidewalks/paved trails and moved through space, unseen and unseeing, under blurry starlight

    a couple livestock guardian dogs heard me and came to bark at the fence along one part of the trail. they were VERY BIGUNDO SCARY BARKS. but i used my soothing baby voice to say good morning and praise them for being such good guards and then they got quiet and followed me to the end of the farm lol

    i love dogs!!!! they are so good to their goat friends. those goats have nothing to worry about with such great big scary shaggy protectors.

    it is those small moments that break up my day that my soul absolutely *needs* and yet i often find so hard to get ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • Diaries,  facebook

    small sources of wisdom

    Ahhhh I miss having little kids. Tonight I sat outside while kids were playing with my youngest, and a couple of the wee ones came over to check me out. One was so tiny I could cry, with his tiny bicycle. Smaller than our pumpkin.

    Apparently the kids think our house is scary. I think we have a bit of a mystique for a couple reasons… My eldest used to play with kids on the street but no longer does (just not interested anymore, kinda grew out of it) so they’ve ascended to myth. youngest seldom goes outside to play. i keep some halloween stuff up year round. big barky dog. black cats in every window. etcetera.

    the kids don’t even know about most of the creepy shit in my house, but they definitely caught our vibe. i love it. i can’t help being sweet with kids tho, i probs ruined my dreams of being the scary neighborhood witch.

    they were sooooo cute, on their bicycles, just climbing over my porch like it belongs to them. no boundaries!!! boogery and wearing very small shoes. then they ran home and weren’t my problem anymore, which is kind of even better than having little kids of my own honestly

    i also always think it’s so funny how neighborhood kids swarm me every time i go outside. i am not sure if it’s Just a Me Thing or if they do this to all grownups but it’s like, they want to hold entire conversations with me, directly. about random kid things like roblox.

    i’m like, this is adorable, but also you’re all frolicking out here to play with each other. go forth. frolic with humans similar in mass and cognitive development to you. (but of course i cannot stop them when they are giving me all their best prison escape tycoon tips)

  • Diaries,  facebook

    tabula rasa

    I think if I ever interviewed for a job again, and they asked me, “What’s your greatest weakness?” It would be, “I get so excited about a particular project that it fills me up and pushes everything out, until suddenly I get excited about another project, and in order to finish the first project I will someday have to collapse sobbing over my work to figure out wtf I was doing, relearn everything, and wrap it up.”

    Just saying, I left the worldbuilding guide to my epic fantasy book unfinished – and I haven’t finished editing the second half of the book, either. I decided to set them aside because I wanted to grow a little before revisiting. But also I got *really* excited about crochet. And then interactive novels.

    I have to fully reread the worldbuilding guide (and realistically the book itself) to finish it off at some point, so I’m going to have to study myself to figure it out, lol. I was just poking around in there again going, “Wow, this is incredible, and incredibly esoteric, I sure Made Some Decisions that I no longer recall.”

    Also I spent a couple days away from my interactive novel because I’ve been going hog over crochet again, PLUS I had to repot/replant a bunch of plants for the shift from summer to winter conditions. Now I’ve come back to code chapter 7, and I’m like, holy crap, what was I doing? Where do I put the autosaves? How do I determine the location of journal entries? Whaaaat monstrous abomination of a logic chain have I crammed into the end of every chapter in order to track character development for a dynamic narrative?

    I spent my twenties furiously writing fiction, and it got hard in the end because it felt too repetitive – like I wasn’t learning anything anymore – like there were no more surprises. Trying to Just Write a Book got to be excruciating because it was understimulating and too easy, as weird as that sounds. I made Mood Management my problem in that case (working even though routine murders me). Now I’ve thrown routine out the window so I can focus on having fun, but oh boy if it doesn’t spawn about a thousand different problems.

  • poetry

    feminine beauty rituals

    I made myself pretty today,
    as nice as I can be,
    in your favorite mask, my dear,
    so that you’ll let me leave.
    The skin I stretched is dewy fresh
    The clips all match my dress
    I know you want my back exposed
    and that you’ll be impressed
    I’ve woven this with warp of flesh
    And wefts just like your brother.
    His tendons feel like luxury
    You’ll never want another. 🙂

  • facebook

    4am walks in the rain

    I haven’t been sleeping real good. Nerves, I guess. We kept my eldest home for much of last school year to attempt home school, but we’re off to 7th grade today and *so anxious*. We’re dealing with anxiety in our house the way that Los Angeles is dealing with a light drizzle, in terms of scale.

    It doesn’t rain much in Northern Nevada, although you may be surprised to hear that I am near enough SoCal in this spot that our rain is from the tropical storm too.

    On the bright side, not sleeping well during such a rainy time period means that I can take walks in the rain, at night. I took a 4am rainy walk just now. The coyotes were out again. They sound like babies the first time they cry, every time.

    Streetlights are on, but they aren’t real bright, and they don’t go down the trails between houses. It’s pretty black down there. You only get the shape of things from ambient light reflected off the clouds. The geometry of tree copses, overgrown ditches, and split rail fence, but not the colors or textures.

    What I enjoyed most about the rain in the dark was the way it paints an audible landscape. It’s sprinkling just a bit, but it’s been going a while, so the gutters are full and everything is dripping. You can tell from the echoes down a drain how wide and deep it is. The patter against roofs can tell you what your neighbor’s corrugated awning is made out of, exactly. The mix of quiet-hiss to drumming-tap communicates how much sand vs concrete you’re walking around. The bushes don’t rustle with lizards when I pass; they’re already hunkered down. There is no movement but mine and the rain.

    Do you ever think about how your tongue knows how everything will taste when you look at it? Look at the wall, look at the carpet, look at the bush outside. Your tongue can imagine the flavor. Can you imagine the flavor and texture if you don’t see it, but you hear the rain bouncing off of it? How many senses do you need? How different is the world when you perceive it in different ways? Can you taste the corrugated plastic composite on that gazebo? Can you taste the plum tree leaves?

    Almost everyone is asleep at 4am, but it’s quiet enough that you can hear everyone who isn’t. A mile away, I could hear the whisper of a car going to the gym. But otherwise it’s empty. Bustling suburbs turned liminal. Nothing but patter-patter and coyote baby cries.

    Except I’m back home now with all the anxiety, the closed air, the litter boxes that need scooping. My hips hurt from the walk. I’m going back to bed.