Australia is doing very, very well. We might escape this in ways I know many won’t and still people will die and I am sorry for that. I’m sorry for the countries that won’t escape this as well. I know I have no grounds to complain. On comparison.

But… I live alone with a six month old pup. My parents live together, my sisters both live with partners. I lack friends.

And they will not take the hint that I need some face time (Skype, Houseparty, etc.). Or they don’t care.

I can do this for a bit longer but not 6 months. Eefgggggfff

KDrama Review: Save Me (2017)

Old but brilliant. Korean Drama Save Me shows how a good thriller must be done
Check out its review on the blog now!!

Title: Save Me, Rescue Me

Episodes: 16

Genre: Drama, Thriller, Friendship, Family, Cult, Action, Mystery

Story: out of 10

Characters: out of 10

Cinematography: out of 10

Korean Drama Save Me shows how a good thriller must be done

Poster of the Korean Drama Save Me

Story

After her brother’s tragic death, Sang Mi is forced by her parents to join with them the local cult. And for years, she…

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What was your family Easter drama this year?

gender-nightvale:

So you have survived another holiday season….

What do you do now?

Your hands are shaking from the coldness of relatives…

You stomach aches from avoiding dinner’s canabalism…

You have waded in pools of familial blood and found it thinner than water and running fast away from your heart…

You are the last leaf in winter, hanging to the tree. You are trembling in the winds of life you cannot avoid, but are forced to weather through until they break you.

You cannot change your family tree. You cannot change anything. Only be changed.

And yet when you found yourself in that downward spiral to the earth you realized it was not the end.

The ice of your father. The howls of your mother. The torrential clawing of grandparents and sibblings. None could break you.

Only set you free.

And I will not tell you winter will not come again… After spring is another fall.

But I will remind you that after fall is another spring.

And one day you will be warm with the love of chosen family. You will be somewhere you chose to be. With people you chose to let change you.

One day you will not be a leaf ever falling through external forces. You will be a person.

Beyond metaphor.

Beyond poetry dressing pain.

Beyond your tree.

Free to roam and move against the breeze and enjoy allseasons.

Do not feel guilt if this coming year does not deliver what last year’s could not. Your love is not an infinite distance or time away.

You are moving against the breeze, and

You are closer than you think.

We have survived another holiday season…

What do we do now?

.

Whatever our winds allow.

so last sunday I was meant to have lunch with my parents to celebrate graduating, and then they changed it to the next sunday cause mum decided they needed to deal with something… just found out they did the thing on saturday meaning we could have had lunch on the sunday as planned and I’m mildly annoyed by this development

so just realised mothers day is on a Sunday, my dnd is on a Sunday meaning I’m going to have to miss the session to go to a mothers day dinner or my mum will get stroppy with me, I know on the surface this sounds petty but at the same time I have very few things going on in my life especially ones that involve getting me out of the house and socialising and the times where I get stopped going tend to be family related things like looking after the house and they decide to spend a little bit more time away just enough time to cause me to miss something and when they’re the ones always telling me I need to get out more and do things it gets very annoying when basically unavoidable “because its family” things stop me from getting out there and doing things like they keep telling me while I have to act like I’m super happy to be there when I had plans

Christmas is an odd time of year, my brother won’t be home cause of work my sister won’t be home because she’s throwing a huff two of the meals we’re having are gammon and turkey which I don’t like, yesterday had a meal I didn’t like cause despite earlier agreeing to go to whetherspoons mum decided she wanted to go somewhere else so we went there, I’ve already had a funny anecdote turned around to be a lecture of why everything’s my fault, the room I’m in is cold to sleep in as is everywhere else in the house and it continues to be a thing that I am forced to spend one on one time with my mother who is once again complaining about some ache or pain she always has and I’m starting to wonder whether my enjoyment and excitement about Christmas is a forced emotion that’s gone on for so long I can’t just stop, guess we’ll see in a few days if my family has even bothered getting me something I like or have expressed want/interest in or if its going to be another year of random unwanted items

Book Review: Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent

Lately I’ve been reading mostly crime thrillers. And after finishing Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent, I’m still trying to decide if that is what it is or not. Heck, I’m still trying to decide what I thought of it. But that’s not a bad thing, is it? Books that leave you thinking are usually really good ones. 

Plot Details

The Drumm brothers, William, Brian, and Luke, are only a few years apart.…

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P E T R I C H O R

Petrichor /ˈpeˌtrīkôr/  (noun)

“a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather.”

Summary: You had been working at Bangtan Corporation for almost two years now, and not once have you ever laid eyes on your bosses. That was, until you met them when out with some of your coworkers. Now, you almost wish you hadn’t. Almost.

Pairing: CEO BTS x Chubby MC

Genre: werewolf au, ceo au, soulmate, polyamory relationship, angst, fluff, omegaverse, a/b/o dynamics

Warnings: smut, violence, mentions of knotting, heats, ruts, workplace discrimination, fat phobia, sexism, insecurities,

Some warnings may be added to the beginning of individual chapters.

Masterlist//Taglist

COMING SATURDAY JUNE 4TH: 5PM PST

————————————————-

Your life in your small hometown was not the best, in your opinion. If someone were to ask your siblings, or literally any other person who resided in the small mountain town, they would say the exact opposite.

You were more or less deemed the “black sheep” of the family within the first ten years of your life, never fitting in anywhere, even within your own family. You had an older sister and brother, as well as two younger sisters, making you the middle child. 

When you moved out of town to go to university, you didn’t hear a word from your family, not even on your graduation day, which was fine with you.

However, one they heard that you were working for Bangtan Co., your family suddenly wanted to know how you were doing, what you were doing, and if you could send them money. 

They suddenly acted like you existed now that you “made it big”, even though your mother still complained that you weren’t ever going to get married or give her any grandchildren.

And just like that, not even 15 minutes into waking up on this seemingly wonderful Sunday morning, you were suddenly reminded of your entire childhood of invalidation.

“Heyy! I know we didn’t call or anything, but we need a place to crash for a couple of days and you were the only person we know in Korea.”

You had opened the door only to come face to face with two people you were hoping never to see again.

June 6, 2020

So I think I’m just going to jump right in. A lot is going on in my life. My dad had a stroke recently and now everyone (meaning my family) expects me to take care of him. I’m constantly ridiculed and criticized about how selfish I am. But am I really selfish because I don’t want to take care of a man who barely took care of himself? Before he had a stroke I would suggest he go outside and take a walk or tell him to stop smoking but I always received extremely hostile backlash. I tried to help him before any of this even happened and now it’s my responsibility to be a caretaker? My family basically told me to stop living my life to take care of my dad. MIND YOU I’m twenty fucking three!

Star Rating: ** (2/5 Stars)

I didn’t expect this book to be very good, given the blurb on the back, so at least I wasn’t disappointed.  It took me about two hours to read, and I was bored for most of it.  The story is told in the first person present by Lane, a seventeen year old high schooler obsessed with serial killers.  When a killer called The Decapitator comes to town and starts contacting her directly, Lane has to keep it a secret for fear of her family getting hurt.  

I liked Lane.  She’s reserved and quiet, and feels isolated from her peers because she doesn’t enjoy the things they like.  She observes everything from an unemotional point of view.  She doesn’t see the point in getting riled up over things like breakups and crushes.  At the same time, Green does a good job of showing how Lane is emotional.  She clearly isn’t a sociopath.  She has one close friend, she cares deeply for her family and the animals she takes care of at the local vet’s office, and she dotes on her little brother.  She herself feels abnormal, but the reader sees her as merely introverted, not cold.  She also has a strong sense of justice, even if it’s not always justice as the courts define it.

The book’s major failing is the writing.  It’s clearly a debut novel, and the writing is simply not very good.  First person singular throws me off immediately, and if you follow that up with mediocre supporting characters, a plotline full of potholes, and unrealistic reactions from basically every character to every situation you’ve completely lost me.  Killer Instinct is essentially a murder mystery, but I had narrowed the list of suspects down to two people by the halfway point because all of the red herrings were so obvious.  

In summary: It wasn’t awful, but I wouldn’t recommend it.  Not good enough to be worth it.

I feel like an absolute bastard. (cw gender stuff, names, pronouns, family drama)

As a way to update my parents about Janelle Monae saying in an interview that their pronoun is “free-ass muthafucka” (because gender goals x infinity!!!), I casually led into it by mentioning that my new therapist wanted to know my preferred name/nickname and pronouns—all as a means of getting to my stupid punchline, “they/them seems so much easier now, doesn’t it!” ha ha ha I thought we were cool, I’ve been making pronoun jokes since I came out to them last September because I know it’s weird for them to go from having a daughter to having an adult child / offspring / neither daughter nor son. I get it. And I’ve really tried to be cool about them continuing to Female me while also trying to gradually/gently push them with things like… my Kirk haircut, sharing trivia or articles about NB stuff with them (e.g. the Janelle Monae news), etc. Anyway, I didn’t think any of that would come up again, but I’m clearly an idiot because I’ve spent 32 and a half years with one parent who Never Forgets Anything and Never Lets Any Little Detail Go Unnoticed.

Six hours later, my mother asks me what my answers had been when my therapist asked me to pin them down more concretely than “either way, whatever you prefer.” ((Aside: apparently therapists want to know the Real You? and having other people decide who the Real Me is… is not what they mean by that??)) I knew I was trapped but I never want to lie to my mom, right? So I told her honestly that my therapist will be referring to me as “they/them” and “Jim” (aka Not my legal name/what my family calls me, as well as a name which traditionally is given to people who are the “opposite” of my agab). (I also reminded her that my previous therapist knew me as Jim, too, hoping that might soften the blow.) Again: I get it. I knew before I said it that it was going to hurt her because I’m choosing to have certain people call me by a name that’s not the one she and dad gave me when I was born. I understand that it’s hard for them. I understand why it’s hard for them.

(And this makes no never mind, but… it’s hard for me, too. But I know, that’s beside the point.)

After a long, very uncomfortable silence, she said, “Is it okay if I keep saying she/her?” So I counted to five in my head and said it’s fine, because I honestly never expected her or my dad to be fully understanding of any of this. But now (and not for the first time) I’m very much wishing I’d just never come out to them at all, because at least that way I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up when they responded by claiming that my being NB was fine and claiming that they would be totally supportive/accepting of it. My expectations were low before they knew because I assumed they would be honest with me about how it made them feel, which I assumed would be along the lines of “betrayed,” “inconvenienced,” “confused,” “disappointed,” “skeptical,” “disrespected,” and/or “we failed our child.“ It seems that when they were so chill about it up front, I forgot to keep expecting those reactions in delayed forms, and I guess I let myself believe that they would actually make the effort to shift some of their thinking about me, maybe even start using they/them for me, etc.

Turns out they were enthusiastic to declare their support (which I greatly appreciate, don’t get me wrong) but putting that support into practice has proven to be harder than I think they realized. “Too much has changed too fast” is what I’ve been told now… even though I’m not transitioning to male, I’m not doing HRT or having surgeries, I’m still dressing the same on a daily basis (just changing my “fancy” wardrobe), and the only thing that’s physically different is that I’ve stopped shaving my legs (which neither of them has even noticed because I only wear long pants).

Anyway she just happened to ask me all this as she was on her way to bed. So there was another awkward silence before she said goodnight, and if 32 years’ experience has enabled me to read any of her moods correctly, then she started crying as soon as I was out of earshot. (I would have confirmed and/or tried to get her to talk to me about it but I’m running, like, a spoon deficit at this point.)

So is my lack of much visible change the problem, then? Is this breaking my mom’s heart because I’m not different enough from my “old” self? Would this be easier in some way if I was transitioning and she could, idk, genuinely mourn the daughter she no longer has? And despite losing a daughter at least she would have a “replacement” kid whose gender still Made Sense to someone entrenched in the gender binary for almost seven decades? Or would it just make things worse?

Should I have simply lied and said I’m going by my legal name with my therapist, because how will my mom ever know that anyway? Has this name thing crushed her so bad because not much else has changed about me otherwise, so she didn’t see it coming? Or am I genuinely the asshole for expecting her to be more supportive/validating too soon, and I just need to be more patient?

((Tangent: she witnessed a really bad impostor-syndrome meltdown of mine a few months ago. I was trying to figure out what to wear to a church function and eventually got so frustrated—and convinced that I’m not really NB, just a pathetic ugly female who hates herself/her body—that I told her to pick out a damn dress for me and take me to a wig shop so I could try and undo everything I’ve done to try and hate my biologically female body a little bit less. And she responded by telling me to wear the pants/button-down/sweater aka “masc-ish” outfit I’d started with. So… is it only if I’m in crisis/panic mode that she can get on board with my being NB? Did my meltdown help her put her own misgivings about this aside? Or was she only okay with my being NB before it included having new people in my life call me by a different name??))

I keep trying to pinpoint what I’ve done wrong, and every time I re-do the math I still can only come up with, “…I was born.” But that wasn’t even my fault. I just feel incredibly selfish for trying to get them to see me the way I see myself. I keep thinking that if I don’t feel female, that’s my problem and I should have kept it to my damn self. If my identity is, in fact, Jim + they/them + non-binary, fine, but I feel like I should have known better than to reveal—to the people who named me and raised me—that I don’t really feel, and never really have felt, like I actually am the person we all assumed I was for 31 years because there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

And this is precisely why I started things off with my new therapist by trying to make her decide whether to call me she or they, Jim or my real name. More than anything—more than being sane, healthy, or alive—Iwantnotto be a burden on others.

But that’s all I ever seem to be able to do without fail.