#mostly i just haven't fucking dusted anything since i moved in and there's a bunch of corners the vacuum has never touched

[vamptastic]

everything else is fine at least 😭 i went back early to do spring cleaning and for once in my godforsaken life i actually feel motivated to do so

[frogsandfries]

Getting out of the house today was kinda nice. It was nice to work in my sketchbook somewhere other than the living room or office. We picked up some stuff for the house--we had to leave a couple things at the store because I didn't know if they'd fit in my bag. They wouldn't have. I got some regular shading brushes and decided to try some brushes that are meant for gluing. I looked for the mermaid paper, like what I used for my enamel pin board.

They didn't have any. I saw a book recently on reddit that used a paper like that and I was inspired.

I got a bunch of lineworks inked today, so that was pretty cool.

I wish this city catered more to the arts. It's so hard to find like, cool papers for book making or--like, I asked the cashier at Michael's if they had Derwent colored pencils. He didn't think so. I mean, even if the next city over had a Blick or like, even a Utrecht, anything!

Anyway, I guess I should get some sleep. Looks like I'm sleeping alone again, for the second time this week.....I can't stay up all night playing video games--I can't even stay up all night working on my graphic novel. I have to try to stay mostly diurnal.

Speaking of which, between the medication, the apple cider vinegar, and the kombucha (and maybe finally upping my SSRI), I've felt a lot better--my digestion is closer to normal than it's been since I moved to New Mexico, I haven't had the same need to nap. I do feel a little guilty though: I feel like I've been given permission by several doctors to indulge my ARFID, and whenever I try to mention disordered eating, I feel like it gets completely blown off..... So I'm just over here patting myself guiltily on the back for feeling hungry most of the day...... which is probably fine? Eat less, poop less?

Like....... when does disordered eating become a problem? When I'm so used to living that way, that I'm down to 125 pounds somehow? When I'm clearly wasting away?? When I'm too fat to take the bus?? Honestly it's fucked up: I tell doctor after doctor that I would just rather choose not to eat and because I'm obese....... that's like, not concerning?? I'm not over here bingeing, I'm really not. I think being given basically permission to indulge my disordered eating will make it easy to lose the weight but...... it's not okay to willingly, easily choose hunger..... and I know this? But I'm being told..... it is? I mean, I guess luckily, I have been forced to face that it is disordered eating and as such, I've been working on overriding it. Perhaps to my detriment, as it would turn out..... Anyway.

It'd be nice to take my headphones and my sketchbook and just go hang out tomorrow, maybe at the library or a favored café. That'd be cool. I'd also love to get ahold of just a ton of cool end papers and fabrics for book binding.

I'm also starting to collect decent paper, mostly from our junk mail, so I can add it to my paper making hoard. At some point, I'll probably start by shredding it, and eventually I can pulp-ify it, dehydrate that for later, and so on. I want to make at least a sketchbook worth of paper and there are a bunch of paper making tools that I don't have: a frame and deckle, screen of any sort, a tub for the water, cloths for drying the paper, blender for blending the pulp........ probably other stuff. And I mean, I'm always complaining about how plain my paper is. As much as I scoffed about adding shaved crayon to my paper, I could grind up some water color and maybe dust that over my paper for example.

Thinking about making paper reminds me of experimenting with papier mache clay, when I would do an initial blend of my paper shreds, wring that out and crumble it, leave it to dry and then soak it back down and blend it again. I think that's really how I'm going to get a finer paper like I want.

I'm clearly obsessed with almost every aspect of bookbinding.

[dukeofriven]

I feel you on criticisms on John. Dude certainly has his flaws and his relationship with other people, particularly Roxy, have clearly been unhealthy. But the guy have apparently been depressed for years, and he haven't actually ever had much experience with real life on person relationships. He got issues he needs to work on, but he is not a bad person.

It’s the rampant hypocrisy that’s eating at me. “Let they who are without sin cast the first stone” y’know? Roxy and John are the only survivors of Game Over - even given the trauma that everyone went through those two went through more. Even Rose, with her vague sense of her alt-self in a doomed timeline, experienced what it was like to fail on such a profound scale: and to know that your failure is the one which the alpha timeline was aiming for all along. Your utter failure was not only pre-ordained, it was requirement for existence to go as planned.Both Roxy and John experienced this, but Roxy got to move to a universe where her friends were still alive, and their formative experiences were identical: Roxy lived through, what, 24 hours that Dirk and Jake and John’s Hot Mom didn’t? Less? Dirk is still hurtling through space when John and Roxy arrive in Post-Retcon world, just as he was before Game Over broke bad. Roxy has to live with the horror of seeing her friends die - but her ‘replacement’ friends are functionally indistinguishable from the old ones. Which I’m not saying to be callous, but to contrast her with John. John moves to a universe where his sister shares almost none of his memories of years spent together on a golden ship, growing up together, bonding as closer friends, as siblings.We don’t talk about that enough, I think. Jade gets shafted in several ways in the final hours of Homestuck: she gets no chance to speak to John and say “you were dead” - to come to some kind of understanding, some beginning of healing. What must that be like, to meet someone - your own brother - who mostly knows a you you never were? John has all these memories of Jade and Jade has only a fraction of the memories of John.And for John there are those issues that he would have encountered anyway in the OG timeline had things gone well. His other close friends (heck, I’d argue he was closer to Dave and Rose pre-Sburb than he was to Jade; he calls Dave, at least, his best friend) had all spent years forming closer bonds with one-another and new people. In the OG timeline, had Game Over not happened and they’d won, John would still have had to bridge that gap of space and time: but he would have had his sister there for support, and companionship, and close bonds. The Jade he instead ends-up with is practically a stranger who spent three years mourning him (AND HER BOYFRIEND BIRDFRIEND WHO IS PART BOY (thanks @technicallynotanon for the reminder that retcon Jade didn’t date)) alone save for a bunch of none-too-bright animals and her ghost clown grandmother.It’s tragic - and to make it so much worse things seem to have been easy for everyone other than John. They all fell in to new things. Relationships, mostly: Dave and Karkat made room for Jade, Rose got married. Relationships tend to tax friendships: the singular I struggles to compete with the plural we. Only Terezi - with her endless capacity to understand the paths of mind - might have understood him: but she left, taking the blackrom crush with her as she did so.John was isolated. John was more isolated, more alone than any other person: even Callie, who had an intermission of eternity being dead, returned to a world full of friends who remembered her well, and she snagged a don’t-yet-have-the-label-for-it-partner in the process. She too had someone to turn to, and that someone was the only other person John shared his trauma with.Sometimes its hard to talk to people. Sometimes it is harder still when the shadow of a life-partner looms over everything.So John didn’t talk to Roxy. Why does that shock us? Why are we the least surprised? Why are we acting like his actions are so unconscionable? For all that they were so darn cute together that cuteness comprised a relation of several hours over which one of the top two greatest traumas of John Egbert’s life occurred.The other was the death of his father, who was murdered, and whose brutalized corpse John had to witness. A murder - as far as we know - that never had any closure. A murder - as he may have come to realize with some reflection - that occurred largely through the manipulations of the same troll girl his only other crush fucked-off to go find and be with.We keep minimizing John’s trauma. We keep not putting it into perspective. We do him such a disservice.We say, instead, that his not talking to Roxy - that brief surge of anger and shame that threatened to break through his crushing anhedonia, his envy of one person who found another when he did not - we say it is some appalling moral failure. I’m a depression sufferer with a life of regrets and an embarrassing number of long years full of singledom and opportunities that were missed accidentally, but just as often avoided on purpose because self-sabotage is a way of life for people like me.Self harm can be as simple a matter as seeing something you want and letting it slip away, watch it slip away, watch yourself watch it slip away knowing you could do something and then… just… not. And afterwards struggling to explain your actions to other people, and even to yourself: if only I’d… if I had just…why didn’t…?You let it happen because, deep-down, you know you don’t deserve it. The paths not taken, the paths heavy with bitterness, shame, self castigation - paths such as these I have in spades, and hearts, and clubs, and even diamonds.But I, of course, could NEVER see myself acting like John does, and I am sure that no one on Tumblr calling John a creeper has ever done something like it either. I am sure their reaction is born of pure and moral rectitude, and not fear and revulsion at seeing themselves reflected so completely in so unflattering a manner.Surely not they. Surely not I.John Egbert doesn’t need a reason to be depressed. Nobody does. But his depression is not solely an accident of brain chemistry: it is rooted in his sense of self, and his sense of self is a failure. He couldn’t save his dad. he couldn’t save his friends. He couldn’t win Sburb and he couldn’t build the universe he was allegedly destined to build. All of that happened only because Terezi knew how to use him: left to his own devices, nothing would ever have gone right. John couldn’t save anyone.Or so it must seem in the haunting privacy of his thoughts.John has lived with that failure circling around and around in his head since… oh, I’d say about thirty minutes after everything settled down on Earth-C, about an hour after the party ended and his friends went to their new homes and their new lives and he was alone for the first time with the things he had done and the things he failed to do. It probably started the moment he first noticed the silence of his house, the house that was essentially an exact replica of the house he had lived in on the very day his father was murdered and his litany of failures began. It probably began when he sat on the couch in that big empty house and stared at the door that his father was never, ever going to walk through and listened to deafening roar of being the only person there.That was when it started: with a hollow emptiness in the stomach. With a skull that every-so-slightly seemed to be pressing in on his brain, a feeling he’d never felt before. The sudden, sharp, jarring flashes of memory: his father’s body ripped eight ways to Sunday, Rose breathing her last in the dust of LOPAN, that awesome expanse of Skaia local alight with burning worlds and desecration. It began when the Heir of Breath found himself short of his own element for no reason at all, save that he simply found it hard to breathe, hard to make his body continue to breathe.He didn’t say anything at first.He made excuses.He didn’t want to bother people - told himself he was actually enjoying the alone time, enjoying having nothing to do after what felt like a lifetime of doing: although, really, the events of his life comprised little more than two sets of 24 hours spaced three years apart. And that bothered him too - “all things considered it’s not like you went off to war, John, and spent years away” he told himself. Retirement after two days of solid work? Most would kill for that. These and other good reasons not to say anything came and went: there was always a good reason not to say anything, and even those times when some semblance of human feeling  burned hot enough to produce genuine emotion he quickly suppressed it. It’s amazing how quickly depression is something you normalize, how quickly you find reason not to disturb it, to upset the status quo.By the time he realized even dimly that he should have said something to someone, anyone - about Roxy, or about that hollow feeling that now comprised his insides, about how nothing caused him joy or distress, that he could feel his youth rushing away from him in a torrent of time that he could do nothing to stop - it was too late. Perhaps it was always too late. This too, perhaps, was something that always had to happen.Perhaps.There is a moment at the end of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead where Guildenstern, standing on the gallows, faced with his impending doom and the absurdity of his existence muses “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said ‘no.’ But somehow we missed it.”Then he dies.That line echos with me. I suspect it echos with many people like me. That’s the worst part of depression: the sense that no matter how much your condition explains your past you are never free of the feeling that there was a moment you could have done something about it all - but you missed it. The moment was lost, and everything since has been one long, unending chain of payment for that mistake.John Egbert doesn’t need our pity, and nor do I mean to say that he is free of criticism. Our depression contextualizes our actions, but it does not excuse our frailties. John Egbert, however, deserves better than the disapprobation of sinners throwing stones.

[bgrobinson78]

Something New

Someone To Talk To

Chapter One, Part Two

TW: Homophobia, Physical Violence

After spending his lunch on his own, Gray longed to see his friends. He knew about the meeting of the band, but also knew they'd just want to make noise rather than practise. He wasn't ready for that particular cacophony.

He walked aimlessly down the open corridor of C Block; the heart of the school. The stairs behind him led to the main hall and help desk. Behind glass doors to his right were stairs leading to the library, social hub of the school. No-one read in there, it was mainly used as a hangout spot.

He considered going up and browsing the shelves for something to read. If nothing else, it would be a nicer place than the bare walls around him.

A distant laugh set him on edge, but he relaxed upon seeing a bunch of Year 7s heading in from the yard. He went on his way to nowhere in particular.

"Well, if it isn't our resident batty boy," said a voice behind him. A voice that he recognised. He sighed and turned to see Chris Collins leaning against an alcove wall. Chris was the same height as Gray but broader and stronger, a fact he knew all too well. His dirty blonde hair flopped over his left eye, allowing one sparkling blue orb to pierce Gray.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" Gray asked, turning away.

A firm hand on his elbow made him freeze. Chris was grabbing his arm, gripping tightly. His fingers dug into Grays elbow, making him wince.

"Want to say my piece, haven't seen you all summer."

"Let me go."

"And what're you gonna do, batty boy?"

Pain was starting to shoot through his arm as Chris' grip got tighter. Gray knocked his hand away and yelled, "Just leave me alone!"

He was hoping that Chris would give him some breathing space. Just a moment was all he wanted. He expected the bully to walk away...

But he didn't.

Chris grabbed the lapels of his blazer and pinned him to the wall. "The fuck did you say to me?"

"I said leave me alone," Gray retorted, choking through shock. Chris pulled him off the wall and pinned him again. Gray felt the back of his head hit the plasterboard. Chris brought his face up close to Gray's. Each word filled with hate.

"I'm never gonna leave you alone. Faggots get what they deserve."

Gray was scared. He could feel his palms getting clammy as he tried to push Chris' hands from his blazer. Something else, however, turned his stomach.

All through that homophobic outburst there were flickers of regret in his voice, tiny but still there. That and once he was finished, Chris kept glancing down at Gray's lips.

Chris pulled and shoved him back once more, making him fall to the ground. Gray watched, frightened and fuming, as Chris walked away. "Stay down there you fucking poof."

The past two years had been filled with this. Mostly insults rather than physical violence. He had certainly never been the aggressive before.

Even his friends in the upper years hadn't managed to get Chris to leave him alone. He was a dickhead, and the one person Gray could comfortably say he hated. He wanted to get up but found he couldn't move. He didn't even have the energy to pick himself off the floor.

"Gray!!" Shouted a voice behind him. He heard someone running down the steps towards him. Adam's messy ginger quiff came into view. For the first time since the carnival, Gray was relieved to see him. "Are you okay? What happened?" Adam asked helping him off the floor.

"Nothing," Gray lied. He found that, sometimes, lies were more comfortable to tell than the truth. "I got dizzy and must have fallen."

Adam gave him an unconvinced glance but didn't pry. Gray dusted himself off, feverishly brushing where Chris had grabbed him. His heart was racing from either rage or fear, he couldn't decide which.

Adam checked his phone, more from habit than concern and noted the time; 1:05.

"It's almost time for lesson." He announced, before helping Gray get rid of the dust.

Gray rolled his eyes and sighed. They walked from the corridor to the main yard.

Gray froze as they stepped out the door. Adam looked at him and saw that he'd gone pale. When he followed his gaze he saw Chris Collins, a friend of a friend, kissing his girlfriend, Victoria. Adam felt his heart sink, but he couldn't tell why. He placed a hand on Gray's back. "Are you okay?"

Gray looked like he was going to be sick. He felt like it too. The sight of Chris kissing a girl brought back all kinds of memories. Ones he wished he didn't still have.

"I'm fine," he said through partially gritted teeth.

When Adam looked again, Gray wasn't stood next to him. He was halfway across the yard, heading to E Block. Adam pulled his back pack properly onto his shoulder and jogged after him.

"Are you sure you're okay?" He asked as he caught up.

"Yeah, I'm good."

Adam could only think of how much he doubted Gray's words. He decided it was best if he kept quiet as they walked into their English class together.

Gray checked the seating plan, only looking for his name. He found his seat and headed over to the table.

Adam stopped and waved but found that Gray's back was turned. He sighed and went to his seat.

Mr. Black, the overenthusiastic and lanky teacher, had put him next to Ellie Banner. She had peachy skin, dark blonde hair and green eyes. Adam knew her. They used to have Geography together. He smiled and she smiled back. Something about their exchange felt weird, like they were meeting all over again.

He sat in the chair and took off his bag and blazer. Their eyes met and he blushed.

Gray reached his table and found he was sat next to Jordan. Gray's heart brightened on seeing him but wasn't present enough to let it show. As he sat down and got his pen ready, Jordan leaned in and whispered, "Are you okay?"

"Getting kinda sick of being asked that. No."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"After school." Jordan gave him an understanding pat on the arm before looking at the teacher, as the lecture began.