mobiusstripper | Entries tagged with life

As some of you may recall, I am based in Los Angeles, so things have gotten a bit crazy lately, and I have left the city for the time being. The area where I live has not yet been ordered to evacuate, but we are adjacent to one Level 3 (mandatory evacuation) zone, and another adjacent zone was recently updated to Level 2 (be ready to go). I was without power for two days, the air quality is terrible, and all business as usual was cancelled (several of my clients had to evacuate), so I ended up packing up my cat and going to stay with a friend in Las Vegas.

As of right now, my home is still unaffected and only categorized as red flag, but I'm still glad to be out of L.A. and far away from all the catastrophe. It's been wonderful to see my friend, whom I have been trying to find time to visit anyway. She is my main movie-watching friend over Discord. We actually met on Discord, although we have hung out in person before and both visited one another in the past. But we still do watch parties on Discord together a couple times a month because we have similar tastes in media. So yesterday, we had a big movie day. We went to the theater to see Nosferatu (my second time seeing it - I loved it, almost a perfect movie, will probably post meta about it in the coming weeks), then went back to her place, watched the original 1922 Nosferatu, and then watched The Substance, which both of us have been wanting to see. I heard mixed things about The Substance, but I really liked it and actually disagree with some of the criticisms I heard about its themes that made me expect going in to enjoy it less than I did. Probably meta coming in the future about that one, too. It had some of the most outrageously laugh-out-loud funny black comedy body horror I've ever seen; I had a blast. I'm hoping while I'm here, I can show my friend Videodrome and eXistenZ.

My cat has already taken over her home and asserted dominance over her cats. I have no idea how long I will be here, since I have no idea how long L.A. will be on fire. Or whether my place will burn down. Well, it is what it is. Again, glad to be out of there. I'm looking for a place to train BJJ here in the meantime. Ideally one that will let me borrow a gi, since they are too bulky to have fit one in my go-bag. I'm also trying to figure out how I'm gonna make income while all my shit is on hiatus. I will probably have to do some online short-term tutoring like I did during COVID. I guess I will also use some of the down time to focus on building my business website, which has been a project on my to-do list for a while. I can finish learning CSS and PHP. I've also been learning PyGame to do with one of my local programming students, so I can work on that and be ready when we (hopefully) get back. I wasted a lot of time the last few days playing FruitMerge on my phone and listening to podcasts about Ong's Hat, but I think it's time to get back to productivity now that I'm safe and settled.

I have tried to make this past year about building good habits and improving my life in small ways that ripple out. Today, I deleted my Twitter account, and I have no intention of going back. Should I have done this years ago? Probably, since using Twitter has always been like swimming in a public pool full of pee. But now it's also full of poo and algae and assorted pathogens, so I've officially put my foot down and called it quits. And all I was doing on there at this point was shitposting and getting into fights with people who might not even be real. So, fuck it, I'm officially done over there. I do have a BlueSky, but I'm probably going to focus more on cultivating healthy internet relationships in more intimate, old-fashioned spaces like this one. Tumblr is still raging like a neverending underground party most people thought ended years ago, and I also plan to stick around there until they manually unplug the servers.

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: Skating Polly

I finally tested negative for COVID on Sunday night and was able to go back to jiu jitsu the past few days, so I'm feeling much more myself again. I took it at 75% energy level just in case, but I don't seem to have any lingering effects in terms of fatigue or brain fog thankfully. Not that my stamina has ever been especially amazing, but I am more or less back to baseline. The gym will be closed for Thanksgiving weekend, so I will only have three days to train this week anyway. And I haven't heard about anybody else there having COVID recently, so that's probably not where I picked it up. Still probably going to avoid the evening classes whenever possible going forward and stick to morning classes where the mats are freshly cleaned, there are usually fewer than 10 people, and the gym isn't a fucking hotbox of sweat from probably 50 adults and 100 kids who have been there over the course of the day. Also, I finally got to see my mom in person for the first time in months, and she keeps telling me how toned I look since the last time she saw me, so that's good motivation to keep at it.

In writing news, I have been gripped by the sudden drive to do a full rewrite of my very first fanfic - one that will probably also end up being a vast expansion of the story. I'm not sure where the urge came from because the fandom it's in is both pretty dead and not exactly a hub of seriousness in terms of both the original content and the transformative work that largely came out of it, but I think what happened is mostly just that I became caught up in my own web of headcanons and storytelling back in the day, and now I'm still just riffing with that. There's probably real potential for a lot of what I'm doing at this point to be reworked into an original story, so I'm just gonna roll with it and see where it goes. The timing seems fitting as well because I am coming up on 10 years since I wrote the original (published January 2015). At the time, I was several years younger than the characters I was writing, and now I am several years older. My perspective is very different, and my writing has matured a lot (it's also taken a sharp turn away from the maudlin and into the...well, grotesque, I suppose). Fanfiction has always been my main vehicle for writing prose, and that story was one of my first forays into longer-form creative writing, so it will be cool to have a side-by-side of how my writing has changed over a decade. Especially if I can take something novella-length that is very character-focused and spin it out into something novel-length with a whole, like, plot. I'm really shit at writing plot, so I think trying to write something that piggybacks off an existing story but still has its own full arc could be a valuable exercise for me to eventually segue into writing more robust original stories.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Blind Mountain Holler

Well, I am feeling better already one dose into Paxlovid. I decided to cheer myself up a bit by watching Aniara (2018).

Well, it looks like I have Covid. This is my first go-round with it. I got a prescription for Paxlovid sent to my pharmacy, and I guess it's just gonna be warm liquids until it goes away. I feel like ass, but also I'm lying in bed and drinking cocoa and reading, so there are worse things. So far, the symptoms feel like the flu or a bad cold that has lasted longer than colds usually do. I am really hoping it won't get any worse.

Current Mood: sick

I'm still sick today. But also...I have Her.

Absolutely sick as a dog today with what feels like a cold. Woke up with a slightly sore throat, and it only got worse over the course of the day. Now I have sniffles, a headache, and full body muscle aches. I thought I could use the day to get some peaceful reading done (currently reading: The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson), but I ended up mostly sleeping and rolling around uncomfortably in my bed. And forget about making any art or writing progress. My friend brought me a banh mi from Lee's sandwiches, though, so that was nice.

I really hope this is a 24-hour thing that will be gone (or mostly gone) by tomorrow. I have an online meeting in the morning that I should be able to do from my laptop in bed even if I still feel like hammered shit, but I really wanted to go to open mat either today or tomorrow, and that's probably not going to happen. Even if I feel better tomorrow, I shouldn't because I don't want to get anyone sick. Maybe tomorrow can be an art day.

Current Mood: sick
Current Music: Saint Mesa

Remembering that there is still Expanse fandom stuff happening here so maybe I should try to hang around more. I've been hanging around other corners of the fandom (Reddit mostly) and find them a little frustrating (I got DOWNVOTED for suggesting that book fans who wanted to see additional novellas try their hand at fanfiction), maybe things are better over here.

Also lol I forgot my last post was about missing BJJ. I'm happy to announce to anyone still following that I'm BACK. Six days a week, baby. Bruised as hell. Loving every minute of it. Let's GO!

Also my mental health is out of the toilet so while there will still be a lot of navel-gazing from me, at least it won't be as ungodly WHINY as whatever I had going on in 2022.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Kelli Schaefer - Black Dog

When I was a senior in undergrad, I told one of my philosophy professors that I was considering taking a year or two off and then applying to graduate school for philosophy. I asked her if it was a path that she would recommend, and her reply was, "Only if you can't imagine yourself doing literally anything else." This was not an uncommon response. Many people I've known who went into academic philosophy, including my own academic advisors, tended to recommend against it. It's thankless. It's competitive. It's elitist. It's culturally obnoxious. It's "male-dominated." It's hard to get a job. You'll have to go through 5-10 more years of people who think they're hilarious asking you if you plan to open a philosophy store.

But, fuck me, it's been eight years since I graduated, and I've tried a lot of other things. And I think maybe I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I think it's time for me to get money (or at least course credit and a "Doctor" before my name) for overthinking and reading abstruse texts when all this time I've been doing it for free. Yes, it's competitive, but so am I.

Current Music: Angelfish

Changing meds this week and I am for real the messiest bitch right now. No energy, crying over everything and nothing, watching a lot of TV and lying on my bed listening to my noisiest music with headphones like a teenager. My brain feels like a rotten fruit that got dropped on the floor.

Fortunately, I have been able to avoid completely neglecting work and art, though my productivity is down. I also found a new covid-safe rage-channeling activity, which is going to the batting cages. Took a baseball to the tit yesterday, but I was really brave about it.

Current Music: The Gits

I have this one student, maybe 12 years old, who is learning to code on Scratch just for himself for fun. Since it's not a school assignment, I don't have to have a stick up my ass about academic honestly and not "giving him the answers." If he is stuck on a problem, I can show him how to fix it if I think that's the best approach or I can implement my own code and then explain it step-by-step instead of painstakingly hot-colding him through every step. This makes the lessons a lot more fun because nothing is more annoying for both me and the student than when I have to endlessly prompt and prod lest I accidentally do too much work myself, especially if they are super lost. Lots of kids learn better by example, so it's nice when you can show them how to solve the problem and then have them recreate the solution themselves afterwards (I do this a lot in math since it's usually pretty easy to make up an example problem of my own, but in programming that's a LOT harder because you often need the context of the whole program to demonstrate ).

Anyway, he reaches out to me every day or two, and then we just play around on Scratch together for a couple of hours. He has half a dozen different games he is working on, and sometimes he gets an idea for a new game on the spot and decides he would rather work on that and come back to whatever we are currently working on later, so we just jump over to something new. No rules, no discipline, just carefree sandboxing.

The experience reminds me of when I taught an after-school robotics course for middle school kids. I loved hanging out with the kids (even though they were annoying as fuck sometimes), got to play with all kinds of expensive gadgets, and it was probably the last time I actually enjoyed a job (though it paid crap). Between the intellectual stimulation of low-stakes problem solving and the vicarious excitement of a kid who is learning stuff (he gets so amped when something WORKS), I am thinking maybe I should make teaching kids to code my full-time career. It's crazy, but this is the first thing in several years that has made me feel less dead inside.

Current Music: The Rural Alberta Advantage

I've been slamming paperback thrillers like shots this week, and it's been really good for my health to step away from the philosophy.

I have been terrible about art the past few months. Between moving and having to send my computer in for repeated repairs, I didn't even bother re-installing my tablet driver and drawing programs until yesterday. Outside of occasionally doodling and some practice exercises, I haven't done any art at all since November. Yesterday, I finally re-installed all my programs and started painting one of my Karen Russell illustrations. It's just the base colors so far, but I'm looking forward to detailing it. It's going to be an interesting lighting challenge to do a dark, moonlit scene, so I will need to do some research and step up my coloring game.

Current Music: Pine Box Boys

I could never go back to a mandated 8-5 schedule, but one of the annoying parts of setting my own hours is the gradual creep toward nocturnalism that I repeatedly go through. Start waking up a little later, start staying up a little later until I'm rolling out of bed at 1 PM every day and turning in at 5 AM and experiencing symptoms of seasonal depression in the middle of March. Then I have to force myself to go to sleep early one night, which means either sacrificing several hours of a day off or losing several hours of work time so that I can reset my schedule. Anyway, I got my ass to sleep at midnight last night and managed to wake up at 9, and I forgot how lovely the early(ish) morning is.

I've always wished I could be one of those people who is up with the sun, but after almost 30 years of being alive, I have to face the fact that that's never going to be me. I can do normal work just about any time of the day (in fact, earlier is usually better if I've had enough sleep), but the creative juices rarely start flowing before 10PM so I depend heavily on those late night hours for work that is in any way...ya know, meaningful. Valuable to me in a non-monetary way. I actually aspired to a biphasic sleep cycle for a little while. I'd wake up around 7 or 8, get all my work done by 3 at the latest, then take a nap for several hours, wake up and make dinner and be creative, then go to sleep around 2AM. But that sucked for my sleep cycles and didn't work for very long. I'm not even going to get into how my ADHD medication throws this all off. Grumble.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Omnia

Something I just noticed (but realize I have unconsciously experienced for a while) is that I find entries on this site very hard to read for some reason. I've chalked up my tendency to merely skim through my reading page to laziness, but it's hitting me now that I don't experience this issue on sites like Tumblr. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it's definitely something to do with the layout and how close together the lines of text appear to be. Serifs probably aren't helping either. I need to experiment with my layout.

In other news:

I've written twenty pages of my play. For most of it I've had no clue where I was going and felt I was coming out with some really aimless, meandering crap, but my mentor LOVES it so far and keeps chiding me for doubting myself when I'm writing. I tend to be really judgmental of myself during the process, and she's pushing me to let go of all that, which is wonderful. I always feel like I have a duty to aggressively guard against all types of self-indulgence or at the very least be self-aware and self-deprecating about it. Which is actually pretty unlike me, since I'm quite unapologetic in most aspects of my life re:self-expression. But I've somehow wired myself up to believe that I am violating the harm principle by subjecting a reader to something pretentious and/or masturbatory, like putting shitty art out into the world is somehow morally wrong and requires a pre-emptive apology. Or that I'm so afraid of being arrogant (which is something I have been accused of at various points throughout my life - both rightly and wrongly, in my opinion) that I have developed a neurotic compulsion to check myself constantly. Even now as I chide myself for how worried I get about coming off as up my own ass, I am feeling the urge to joke about how "Well, I am pretty far up my own ass" in a Bojack-y "Well at least I know I'm a piece of shit, which makes me better than all the other pieces of shit" way. But now I have someone actually telling me that not only should I not do that, but I'm not allowed to do it. I'm not allowed to second-guess myself, so I am able to write without worrying so much because every time I think I'm writing garbage, I can remind myself that she gave me permission to write garbage. So that's been very freeing, and she also actually likes what I have so far.

I've been exposed to covid, so I have an excuse to not go anywhere for ten days now. My aunt, uncle, and cousin all have it, most likely due to my cousin picking it up at school. Hoping I won't get sick, but mostly worried about my grandma, who was also exposed. Thankfully, we're all triple vaxxed.

I've started reading like eight books in the past month or so and haven't gotten very far into any of them. I've decided to put all my focus into reading The Expanse books (currently on Caliban's War) because my brain doesn't seem able to process much more than page-turner-y fiction lately (then again, my other recent reading attempts have included Sartre and Kristeva, so I can't be too harsh on myself for not being up for it).

My little cactus is budding again. She has three little pink buds coming up. I'm not looking forward to spring/summer because the heat during the days is intolerable, but I am looking forward to all my plants coming back/flowering and sitting outside with them on balmy nights and writing. One day, I would like to have a real garden. In the ground, not in pots.

Current Mood: ADHD AF
Current Music: Mirel Wagner

I finally got my new health insurance set up so I can go to therapy again. Yaaaaaay. Much-needed since the nausea has cycled back on me again & I spent the last two weeks in the bottomless pit. This country's healthcare system is effing ridiculous, but I'm still one of the lucky ones.

Current Mood: anxious

My brain has been completely exhausted lately, so despite the long reading list I've set out for myself, it's not really coming along, I've hit pause for now on my attempted cover-to-cover read of Being and Nothingness at page 100 (out of 800) and am instead reading Caitlin Doughty's latest book Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, in which she answers children's questions about rotting corpses. For whatever reason, reading about death and decay always puts a girl's mind at ease.

According to my app, I've done about 3 hours of cumulative plank in the past year, and I'm working on getting my daily plank up to 2 minutes (currently averaging 1 minute and 30 seconds). I went for a hike the other day, which felt really nice for my muscles. I'm upset about how online I have become in the past few years due to COVID and the effects it is having on my mental and physical health. I miss being able to go to my martial arts classes and roller derby and have a job that had a strong physical component. I know I can make my own exercise routine, but I haven't been very good at coming up with one that I can stick to other than doing my daily plank exercise. Otherwise, I am quite sedentary and, given that I have poor eating habits and am staring down 30, I don't like it.

I need to find a new therapist because of the move, and I am going to start working on restricting my internet time. It's hard when all of my work is being done online, but there is also plenty of time I spend online when I'm not working, and I want to work toward reclaiming that time for myself. There are many wonderful things about being online - meeting new people, being exposed to new ideas, especially in a time when I've restricted my in-person interactions so much - but I'd be dishonest with myself if I didn't acknowledge that I use it primarily a source of instant gratification and dopamine hits. I genuinely worry about the effect spending so much time online is having on my brain. I so rarely am truly alone anymore, and I need to get back to being able to just be with myself. I need to renew my focusing on meditating (something I am admittedly shit at with my ADHD but that is still good for me), private journaling, and doing my art without something constantly going on in the background. My self-discipline is truly terrible when it comes to things like that, so I'm going to need to put my foot down with myself and develop a system.

Now that I've settled in after the move, I am going to start seriously considering looking at going back to school (again), although I really don't know 100% what I want to do. I have been considering MFA programs in creative writing, but I don't know if they are worth the time or money. I continue to be interested in law school, particularly going into labor law. Human rights law of some kind as been something I've imagined going into since high school, but the truth is that I don't know if I have the emotional wherewithal for it, which is what has kept me from pursuing it so far. I do believe I have the mind for it, but I struggle with bureaucracy and burnout. I have always suffered from being more thinker than doer. It's still up in the air with COVID because I do not want to be in a classroom environment when things are still as they are, but I also don't want to get ripped off for inferior online classes. I want to go to the best school I can get into and get the best experience I can out of it. But maybe that just another excuse for me not to shit or get off the pot and avoid taking the next step in life. I'm going to be getting in touch with the career office at my alma mater, since their services are available to all alumni, and hopefully talk to somebody who can help me pick a path and start working on it. The fact that I don't want to attend school now doesn't need to stop me from applying. I can always defer an acceptance.

I reached out to a playwright friend of mine recently - an old friend of my mother's who I got close with after I did graphic design for several of her shows back when I was in high school - and asked her if she would be interested in mentoring me. She said that she would love to, so now she is going to guide me through the process of writing my first play. I need to come up with a few pitches before our first meeting next week, so that is what I will be spending this weekend on. I am trying to decide if I should try adapting one of my existing stories or write something completely new. I will probably write up pitches for both and then talk them through with her and see what she thinks. I'm not worrying about the possibility of getting something produced because that would be premature when I haven't written anything yet, but I will admit I have daydreams about it.

My damn laptop is going in for repairs again. Fortunately, I dug up my old HP Stream, and it seems to still work well enough for me to do basic things. But this puts a wrench in my art because the Stream doesn't have enough memory to set up my tablet and usual art programs on. So I will probably have to wait until my main laptop comes back to be able to do much digitally. That's okay though because I haven't worked on my traditional art much recently, and it wouldn't kill me to do some practice there, even if it means I won't be producing anything polished or portfolio-worthy.

I also need to get my ass in gear about submitting poetry to journals. I said I would do 100 submissions this year, but so far I've only done four. I have no excuse but my sheer laziness for that one.

Current Location: off in the clouds but trying to get present
Current Music: Tejon Street Corner Thieves

I've finally mostly finished unpacking, and I've got a nice little work space set up for myself that is better than what I had at the old place, so I can get back to my projects. The cats have been a problem. Or, more specifically, Helena has been a problem. Jacques, who was supposed to be the problem, has been surprisingly well-behaved. Meanwhile, Helena has taken to shitting on the floor, and yesterday she bit my foot deeply enough that I had to call the doctor and ask for antibiotics. Hopefully it will pass once she gets used to the new place. At least the two of them have not beaten each other up at all, which is a relief, because this space does not allow for them to be separated at all times.

I haven't worked on a serious art project in a few months because I was focusing on work and writing and didn't feel particularly inspired to draw, but today I did a few sketches that I am planning to turn into illustrations. I've been wanting to do some illustrations inspired by St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell, a book of short stories that has been very close to my heart for about fifteen years now. I'm looking forward to working on this series over the next few weeks. I've done sketches so far for three of the stories:

The Star-Gazer's Log of Summertime Crime

"I guess that's what growing up means...phosphorescence fades to black and white, and the facts cease to be fun."

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“You have ruined it!” my sisters panted, circling around us, eager to close ranks. “Mirabella has ruined it!” Every girl was wild-eyed and itching under her polka dots, punch froth dribbling down her chin. The pack had been waiting for this moment for some time. “Mirabella cannot adapt! Back to the woods, back to the woods!”

Ava Wrestles the Alligator

“When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: Theodor Bastard

I am finally moving tomorrow, by which I mean in about four hours. I got a few good hours of sleep tonight, but now I am up and can't seem to get back to it, which is unfortunate because I have a seven-hour drive ahead of me with a cactus and a vocal, mentally ill cat in my passenger seat. It's been fun trying to scrub myself from this house. I plastered the place with Bernie 2020 stickers during a brief period of uncharacteristic optimism about electoral politics, and now I'm having to track down and remove them all. I also just rediscovered the giant burned portion of the living room wall that caught fire several years ago in a freak candle incident, which I covered with a book case and promptly forgot about. And the roommates have already bought out my security deposit. Maybe nobody will notice.

This house really couldn't wait for me to leave before it broke again. It was raining and snowing all last week, so it took us god knows how long to notice the giant unnatural puddle forming in the side yard, courtesy of our main water hookup line being broken (again). This already happened two years ago, and the landlord had to dig up the whole front yard to fix it. Now it's happening again. This time, he is bringing in a professional plumber and an excavator to completely redo the pipes since the reason this keeps happening is because everything was installed wrong in the first place. Because of the time that will take, I will not have running water again before I move on the 14th, outside of the one hour a day we turn it on to shower and do dishes and flush the toilet and refill all the bottles and jugs (during which we will continue to leak water into the side yard at a rate of half a gallon per minute). At least our landlord is a decent guy who is managing all the repairs and also said he would eat the water bill for us this month. Very much first world problems (boohoo we only have running water when we have to go outside and turn it on), but I'm glad I won't have to deal with this janky place anymore.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Location: my janky house

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Wintermute

March 2026

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Shit's on fire, yo
Sayonara, Elon
The bitch is back
Update from the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Still Sick
Torties are the best medicine
Sick
Still here
I didn't choose the philosofuck life, the philosofuck life chose me
Depression is a dirty rat bastard
Coding like a kid
The Latest
Musings from a Reasonable Hour Whose Existence I Had Forgotten
Memo from the Department of Unproductivity
Dispatch from the Bowels of Moloch
Some reports on my silly little life
Settling in + new art project
On The Road Again
No Water!

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Page generated Mar. 6th, 2026 07:15 pm

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Entries tagged with life

Shit's on fire, yo

Sayonara, Elon

The bitch is back

Update from the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Still Sick

Torties are the best medicine

Sick

Still here

I didn't choose the philosofuck life, the philosofuck life chose me

Depression is a dirty rat bastard

Coding like a kid

The Latest

Musings from a Reasonable Hour Whose Existence I Had Forgotten

Memo from the Department of Unproductivity

Dispatch from the Bowels of Moloch

Some reports on my silly little life

Settling in + new art project

On The Road Again

No Water!