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I thought I had therapy next week, but instead it's tomorrow. And I'm sitting here at work like...I don't know what to fucking talk to her about. It feels like there's both absolutely nothing and way too much going on inside lately. I've got nothing.

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As an adult you must cultivate the skill of “Gross! Oh, well. Not my business.”

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I did it. After a lifetime of using light mode on all my devices, I switched to dark mode. My eyes just can’t take it anymore, and after a few days of using it, I decided dark mode was actually kind of cozy and nice. So it was time to update my light mode art with a new version!

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Absolutely wild to me how sometimes you don't even realize the way you'd been taught to perceive things as a kid was kinda fucked up, actually, until decades later.

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

Right. Of course. Right.

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My "problem" (if you want to call it that) is that when I'm around, I don't have anything to fucking say to people.

How am I doing? I'm alive. I'm breathing. I'm endlessly moving forward.

How are you doing? Probably the same.

What's new? I don't fucking know, I show up to work or bark orders at the other idiots in my head until I'm allowed to slip back into peaceful oblivion.

I could talk about the minutiae of it all, how I'm cooking dinner as I write this, how there's chatter about how I'm a pretty good cook and how that's like Mal. I could talk about how I cornered Razael earlier and crossed a line too far. I could talk about how I've gotten better in some ways and worse in others. I could talk about how I'm losing grasp of who I am and what my purpose is because I'm just here all the goddamn fucking time.

But what would be the fucking point.

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question: how does it feel to watch people you care about be mistreated? how would you describe that feeling?

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Before anyone gets concerned that we let the kids feed us Friskies, this is "cat food":

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Cat food my beloved

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Cat food my beloved

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human brain angiogram / young bare-branched oak /

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sometimes self-care is consuming a piece of media for the 174th time

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Self control

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Can you make something good again please.

Aw anon! I didn’t mean to be such a disappointment of an artist to you. Here you go

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can you imagine how freaky shark mermaids would be like unlike sharks, shark mermaids would have actual arms/hands and could rely on touching things with their hands to see if they’re prey rather than having to bite like sharks do. like youre just swimming in the ocean and suddenly you feel a strong grip on your leg, you freak the FUCK out because uh what????? the fuck??? youre swimming alone in the ocean??

a head pops out of the water, dorsal fin pointed from its back and it just points at you and says in a low whisper: “i thought you were a seal. please dont swim alone like this, im sorry i scared you i just wanted to see what you are” and then disappears back into the depth. what the fuck.