kizamis | Reading

Draft from yesterday:
I hate days like these. Waking up late and wasting so much of the day always sends me into a mental tailspin. I feel more empty + less human than usual. Just so... off. I don't even know exactly what's wrong either, I can't tell what's going on in these moments. My whole body, brain, and soul just feels displaced and disconnected from everything and everyone. Very uncomfortable... I'm going to try and work on my to-do list until I go to bed; maybe being a bit productive would help resolve this.

And today, the next day:
I ended up staying up way too late last night working, but I made some good coin, so it's not all bad. I did wake up a bit late for my volunteer job at the cattery, but honestly I'm way more relaxed about that now that they've expressed that even if I'm later than usual, they know I'm coming in unless I call ahead of time LOL. I guess I've become fairly reliable in that sense which eases my mind. Afterwards I went home and heated up some leftovers to eat while cleaning up the kitchen a bit -- two birds, one stone. I have a lot I want to do and finish today, but as long as I finish the most pressing task before dinner, I think I'll be satisfied. I feel calm and locked in. I'm gonna get a snack of apples with peanut butter and then continue.

I think, in comparing these two days, it's very weird to me how drastically different my brain feels depending on the structure of my day. Yesterday I was so miserable, and today I feel really okay, if not a bit tired (but that's typical). I know one of my things is extreme emotional volatility & instability, and how drastic that can be even hour to hour, but I guess it's just strange to reflect on what small or mundane differences can affect it. I think I thrive best when I have a proper structure and schedule to my days... AND when I don't wake up late. God I fucking hate waking up late. There's always too much to do!

( Sickening sentimental musing )

Current Mood: working
Current Music: Me and Your Mama - Childish Gambino

nausica

Local gal shirks responsibility of classwork to continue to fuss with HTML and CSS learning.

I got myself into a bit of a funk I really need to wiggle my way back out of it, I'm just not sure how. I feel like my best bet is to ride whatever wave I'm feeling right now and get important tasks in order (laundry, school assignments). I'm definitely stressing a little bit but I know I've made it work in the past, I just want to stop relying on this fight or flight to make deadlines response I've been leaning on for years. I shudder to think how many grey hairs I could have spared myself.

I do feel like I've just been really lazy versus it being normal executive dysfunction. Although I'm really starting to wonder how much the weather is messing with me. We got confirmation that humidity is basically not being cycled out of the rooms for most of the year I feel abysmal during peak daylight hours in my current room. Plus it wouldn't be the first time I've had a living situation completely sap all my strength because of the weather and formerly untreated health issues. Hopefully, though it's just a matter of sleeping regularly because I can do it for a week and feel phenomenal, then I just eat shit and its back to old habits.

Outside of that I've been listening to more new music and thinking about shows I really love. I started a decent amount of books and some manga re-reads, just getting my brain to stick with it. I also have some RPGs in progress, however I have just not had the energy to boot up any of them.

One show I've been thinking about a lot is Elementary. I just finished re-watching the first season again with a friend of mine and I have a lot of thoughts about it. It's crazy that the show is over a decade old now because it still feels very relevant. Even if certain elements date it, it makes insanely good cultural commentary on many topics in the US. I thought I might tack it on here, but my thoughts on the Season 1 finale really deserve their own post because it's nuts how tight and satisfying that seasons story and direction were.

Well it's almost four in the morning for me so I'm going to go ride the wave like I said and shuffle laundry around and hopefully get some of my stuff re-organized.

Current Mood: :thinking:

nausica

Weeeeelllll, my weekend wasn't all that great. Really emotionally letting myself process a lot of stuff, but I do think I feel better now than I did a few days ago. Calmer, less stewing in my own shit about things that have happened.

I did talk to one of my friends because I was really having a miserable day on Sunday and she thinks I'm finally starting to heal. I hope she's right because all the crying I did felt more cathartic than anything.

I've been toying around with the idea of covering some songs to feel more confident in my singing and I might finally have some choices.

Actually one of those choices is a BBNO$ single that released the same year as my break up (and ironically on the birthday of 2 of my favorite characters lol). It suuuuuucks that so many people regard him as "cringy" because honestly hes pretty harmless and fairly thoughtful in what I've seen. Anyway, the song is called "meant to be" and its probably like my absolute favorite from his discography because of how much it means to me. The shared experience and the resonance of similarity drive so much home.

Potentially doing some gut-wrenching covers aside, I got to svg in the HTML course I'm working through and wanted to see if I can go ahead and sleuth out how to work out applying them to things like blog decor or bullet points.

Okay actually its wayyyyy to messy without a stylesheet LOL. So that's a treat for future me to think about.

Farewell for now, hopefully things will chill out and I can triumph over these end of semester projects no problem!

Current Music: Love Me Different - Hayley Williams

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

nausica

Today was a lot more productive than I thought it would be when I woke up. I think I'm so used to not being able to process the stress that there's still a persistent fear that I'm going to fail. I also had my psych follow up today and the earlier start always trips me up a bit. But, I still managed to do even more than I initially set out to do!

Quick summary of what I got done:

Psych Appointment
Got through class
Did all my history assignments (4 total)
Practiced html completing an unguided exercise
Modded my MP3 Player with Rockbox

(^^ literally learned that today and now im putting it into practice :D)

I did remember that if I start using html on these entries I'll have to make sure everything is marked out, but that's just more practice. I don't wanna let skills get rusty anymore and it's fun to chew on something outside of my usual focuses.

All in all I'm really, really proud of myself. I don't normally have days like this where I can really get a lot of things I want to do done and I want to keep working on making this kind of day the norm for me. I know I've still got a long road ahead, but each day gets easier to manage. Plus, I'll never face another day alone. Funny, I didn't think I'd use this as a kind of diary but I am now and it's definitely letting me get over the rules and rigidity I was trying to lock myself into for what to post. I find myself yearning for authenticity online more and more and my drawing professor always says we have to start in our "circle of power" to make change and help others (she says it during every critique and it really resonates with me). This is just another extension of my own circle of power, a little change for myself and maybe someone else to leave the world a little bit kinder than it was before.

I've got more to do tomorrow so that's all for tonight! Hopefully the pollen count isn't as miserable tomorrow as it was today.

Current Music: Metallica - Ride the Lightning

nausica

While I've definitely been inspired by an artist I stumbled across recently, I just spent my time after class pouring through resources to code websites. I didn't muddle around with stuff as much as I would have liked to as a kid, but between Neopets and the middle school computer classes I think something has stuck. I found one solid website with free tutorials so I should be able to mess around and re-learn what I've forgotten and hopefully get some new skills under my belt with CSS and JavaScript!

With how much I've been marinating on something like this, I'm surprised it took me this long to pull the trigger on learning. That's just how it is when you get pressure cooked by life I guess.

I don't know if it will fix all my problems with how I navigate online, but I'm so sick of the look of sites like carrd and other site builder hosts because there's really just an illusion of expression on these pages. I cannot keep looking at the same five rounded boxes with slightly different gradients that are sold as "professional". As a creative it's just so much more freeing in theory to express yourself in other aspects too. If someone sees what I do, I want to put both my best foot forward and show who I am as a whole person.

I've really been contemplating how to host all my art and other projects for a while, too. I never really could gel with tumblr's side-blog system and maybe if I just posted art directly to my side-blog it would be more functional, but I am also a horrible lazy little creature of habit and pre medication me would get stressed out at having to manage more than one social media page per website. Hell, I still barely remember to cross-post art. I don't even really wanna deal with posting on Twitter or Instagram either because it's just impossible to actually connect with someone on those websites now. As much as I've purged numbers from my brain, I know its a pain in the ass to get any kind of traction unless you post like it's an 80 hour a week job. Now that I'm back in school (and because of some other events that spurred me to go back) I realize how much more valuable it is to have people you can actually talk to about your craft, your hobbies, your passions. Forging lasting connections with other people is far more valuable than like any algorithm jackpot will ever be.

Don't get me wrong, I knew this with friendship, but being on-line with the advent of social media and being unemployed for such a long time did a lot of damage to my relationship with art and I could barely get myself to remember why I loved art, and why I loved drawing for myself. People make it seem like you gotta do all this crazy shit to "make it" as an artist, and I just don't believe that. I won't deny I'm in a slightly more privileged position to be able to go back to school and to go for an art degree, but I did not grow up with the same paths I have open to me now. Meeting people in school, though, it's really shown me why the experience is important. Meeting others, learning whats out there; there's opportunity tucked away in places you might never think. All someone really needs is the courage to reach out, to try.

I started rambling for a bit, but I think starting to set up my own sites is a really good step for me to find my stride in presenting myself, and my work. Especially since i want to share way more than just visual art. It'll be nice to have another place I can use as a blog or a portfolio or whatever I want it to be! I think it will be good for me to take the time to build it from scratch like this, too. I want to slow down and enjoy more of the process behind everything. Be it art ,or webdesign ,or making a game ,or anything: the process is everything!

This is way longer than I thought it would be, but I'm excited to take the time to chew on this more and hopefully I'll get to share a funky little webpage soon!

In other news I wrangled last.fm to let me in on the chance I decide to make character playlists again. My music player on desktop lets me scrobble there so it'll be nice to try since I dropped Spotify like a rock. ^_^