#lmao i’m on deadline i have to write a book by april

[st-louis]

man i’m just really sad today. thinking about some of the stuff i’ve read over the last few years (laura robinson’s crossing the line and kristi allain’s thesis work with juniors players and alexis n. peters’ thesis) and how nothing’s really changed since in a meaningful way. and even knowing what i know about the culture and still, this. i’m like kind of obligated to keep engaging with hockey to a certain extent but also sort of want to just. not.

[bangtann-bangdamn]

Was that it? Am I still alive? Lol

But omg I can’t believe Nocturne is over!!! I’ve become so invested in their lives that now I don’t know how to feel because they got their happily ever after!

Will we see any epilogues of to how they are years later? Will the crew get back together! Will Hyejin stop trolling Jin? Will Y/N ever bake for JK again? Lol.

But Kate, you did a great job with this! Cant wait to see what you have next but take your time and stay safe and stay healthy!

I honestly cannot believe it’s been nearly 2 years and you’ve stuck with me the entire time 🤧

Other than hye-Jin’s side story (which ends before the shit show annual trip in which everything goes wrong) I haven’t got anything else planned for the nocturne universe.

The way I see it, Yoongi stays for a week in london. His intention was to actually use the hotel room alone to sleep because he didn’t want to make YN uncomfortable (we Stan respectable men in this house), and, like I’ve said in previous asks, he wasn’t sure how things were going to turn out between them and he wanted to make sure he had somewhere to stay in london.

Turns out the hotel he booked is actually around the corner from where YN lives lmao. Of course, YN and Yoongi would drop off his stuff and then proceed to go explore london. She would take him for a walk along the Thames and maybe visit winter wonderland in the evening. Yoongi would be jet lagged so he wouldn’t survive very long in the evening and yn, not wanting to say goodbye to Yoongi (and also not wanting to deal with the new sex maniac roommate lmao) would pout and Yoongi wouldn’t even ask her up. He’d just take her hand and continue talking about whatever it was as he leads her back to his room and they would fall into their usual routine. Whether or not it goes further than that, I’ll leave that up to your imagination 😉

Either way, yn ends up spending the duration of Yoongi’s visit staying in his hotel room and who can really blame her?

Yoongi would go back home but they would then start talking daily (twice a day, tbh. Every morning and evening so they can talk about their day and wish the other sweet dreams - they’re that couple uwu). Yn would finish her final year around the end of April/beginning of May and would fly home ASAP. Like, we’re talking the day after her deadlines because she is h o m e s i c k.

Yoongi travels with all of their friends to greet her. At the airport he’s the first in line and you just know that as soon as yn walks out into the arrivals bit, Jungkook is pushing him out the way so he can hug his sister - and yes, our boy is crying. Hye-Jin would be the next in line to greet YN, along with Jin, Hobi, jimin, taehyung, and Namjoon (who’s low key only there to make sure it really is YN and not some robot replacement sent by the British to spy on them lmao). Finally Yoongi gets his chance to say hi and hye-Jin moves everyone off to the car so the love birds can greet each other in peace.

By that point, Hobi would have grown tired of living with the chaotic couple, and Namjoon would have grown tried of jungkook and Jimin, so they decide to move in together. Hye-Jin offered YN her old room back but she declines. Instead, after a lengthy discussion about how soon was too soon to move in together and ultimately concluding that despite the first few months of their relationship being fake, neither of them for a second considered it such, yn and Yoongi decide to move in together.

Wow, there was me thinking I had given no thought to the future of the characters and I just wrote that in one go 😂

Also, hye-Jin will stop trolling Jin when he stops being so trollable (aka, until her dying breath lmao). And are you kidding me? Not even 24 hours after she’s returned and Jungkook has her attached to his kitchen counter baking him cookies (the ones she left him in the freezer lasted him maybe a day lmao).

Thank you so much for reading! I’m trying not to stress about writing, trying to stay calm about not updating at least once a week but the truth of the matter is that I love writing. I just get so down when I’m not surrounded by it and I struggle to jump back into the worlds I create when I’ve been away from it for so long (which is partially why nocturne took so long to write - because I didn’t have the time to write). I’m so, so grateful to everyone for being so supportive 💜

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

[nordic-language-love]

Language Plans For April

Spanish

It’s Easter break now, which means I don’t have any Spanish classes until the 30th of April. I then have one lesson of revision and then it’s my written Spanish exam on the 6th of May. I’ve been leaving the written exercises out when I’ve been using my Spanish Tutor book because I’m too lazy to do them, so I think it’ll be a good idea for me to go back and do them all now. I’m 11 units in and I’ve got 4 weeks until I go back, so that means 3 exercises a week. Totally manageable. Of course, I’ll need to revise some grammar and vocab too, so I’ll need to work that in.

Norwegian

I’m still thinking about that crazy idea I had before, and I’m seriously considering trying to push myself to take the Bergenstest. I do think part of the reason I’ve not made as much progress with my Norwegian as I could have over the past few years is down to not having a goal or a deadline, so maybe setting myself this goal will be a good thing. I’m still a bit hesitant so I need to figure out why that is - probably because I’m scared of failure and because I don’t think people will understand and because I will actually have to try speaking Norwegian to other people and reveal how utterly shameful my speaking is lmao.

So yeah, I’ve got my Spanish exam at the start of May, so for April I think I’m gonna continue what I’m doing - immersion, writing my journal (I love writing my Norwegian journal!) watching grammar videos and reading articles, but trying to do as many of those things as possible every day. Then after my Spanish exam I’ll commit properly. Book myself onto an online course, start daily speaking practice, get out all my Norwegian books and start learning.

Yes, it’s a crazy idea, but the last time I tried something I considered to be crazy and impossible it led to a year of travelling all over the world to compete in a sport I love. You know what I said in my massive long end-of-year facebook post I made that year? “What scares me is that I probably wouldn't have regretted not taking that chance, because I never could have envisioned where I'd end up going [...] I've achieved so much more by taking chances than I ever did sitting around wishing I was the sort of person who took those chances.”

So yeah maybe I should listen to myself idk.

[your-local-loon]

~Quarantine Ranting and Me Yelling Into The Void Despite My Thoughts Racing Too Much To Be Documented~

So. I remember never thinking this would happen, lmao. And they advised us to document these experiences, and that the time we’re in right now will go down in history books because no one else has had to deal with it in this way before. They say kids will ask us what we did. Like we asked our grandparents about their Dust Bowl experiences or surviving World War Two. It just seems so... no to me. I don’t have a word at the moment to describe the thought I have on that other than no. In comparison to other crises, this just feels so... numb. Hollow, empty, plain, unfathomably normal but completely alien and dystopian and fictional and as far from a real global problem as possible, that I find it so hard to compare them to that. Maybe that’s why they [the people telling us this, that it’s going down in history with us] call it so unique, though— it’s true and they’re right, but it doesn’t feel like we’re surviving a damn thing— not like they [other disasters] did. It is April 28th, 2020, 11:07 AM CDT and let me tell you.

I am wholly fucking overwhelmed. For so many reasons. (Many of which I did to myself.) I started documenting this experience so so so late into it, but I promise you I can remember it all like it was just from yesterday— and maybe it was. There’s nothing cementing time for us anymore. Anyway. I just wanted to say that I’ve done my first TRULY productive, self-motivated, NOT self destructive/sabotaging lazyass thing since it began (and perhaps for a little while beforehand) and I am SO PROUD OF MYSELF FOR THIS OMG.

As I laid in bed last night, I made myself lose all contact with my friends, drank the better portion of a pot of tar-strength coffee (think nearly 12 cups), stressed until violently ill, and cried, and cried, and cried, and cried. And then I felt something soft and quiet and painfully soothing tell me in my chest: “You’re going to be okay. You are going to be okay. We will be okay, you’ve got this. One moment at a time. One piece at a time. Work in the morning.” And stuff like that, repeating, and for some reason I just decided to trust the strange suspicious voice that came from my chest instead of my head. Not from my heart, either, but I know It was close by there. The very direct center.

Perhaps I was just losing my mind, and in the midst of it my own raging insanity calmed me. Or maybe I suddenly got very good at my coping skills. Or maybe I was briefly possessed by the ghost of a therapist. Maybe God is real. Whatever it is, I’m thankful for it because it worked better than I could imagine.

And now that I’ve mostly derailed myself about 7 times over within the span of 16 minutes, I’ll finally say this: I am here, writing this, as a reward to myself for being successful for once.

For context, I am racing to meet 3 deadlines: registration for an important event and the cutoff is May 1st and we’ve put it off for months and I have someone depending on my answer, pass all 7 of my classes by May 15th (some of them by May 4th actually), and to retrieve my Alligator head from my art teacher, also by May 15th.

Now In case you can’t tell, I have severe Attention Deficit Disorder and even worse Executive dysfunction. This is not to say I don’t take responsibility— I am 100% aware and willing to accept that I am a horrendously lazy, uncaring, self-centered bastard that’s been doing Fuck-all while I could have been doing something useful, productive, or at least been more considerate of the efforts of those around me including my teachers. But I am trying to get better.

So I completed two rather large assignments my US Gov/Econ. Teacher had begged me to, and I apologized for being inconsiderate of his time. I am now passing that class. I am now one step closer. And for once, I’ve motivated myself to keep going, and keep working. Alone. I am so, so proud of myself for taking a step in the right direction that I had to put it somewhere because no way in hell could I say that anywhere in real life.

I know I’m probably just bragging about something that should come so naturally to me at this point, but thankfully it doesn’t matter, no one really reads these to my knowledge and if they do, they’re probably bored of my generally boring, irrelevant word vomit. If you’re still reading this, however... I am so sorry.

So keep going, you. You’ve got this. :)