#hush pen
I just… guys I just tried to zoom in on a painting by pinching the air above it
I. I. I’ve ONLY been doing traditional art lately i have NO GOOD EXCUSE
how did my sweet faced horrible son ghost the cat manage to so LOUDLY and CLEARLY project the awful wet crunching sounds of him chowing down on an enormous apparently super juicy palmetto bug while in an entirely different room from me????
every time I see pips post about the primal satisfaction of Following Sheep I think about the time that we, while walking together across the yard one evening, spotted a toad
and without pause, without exchanging a single word or meaningful glance, with no communication whatsoever between us,
we both smoothly split up into a pincer formation to capture it (briefly! for admiration!!)
it is both the Creepiest Human thing we’ve done together and also the gayest
the thing about when Helen is being pissy is she will act SO ferocious and put on a whole dramatic show of pretending to viciously eviscerate my hand or whatever, but all the while being super super gentle and not inflicting any actual scratches or bites
She does this while playing, ofc, but she ALSO does this when she’s genuinely annoyed or frustrated. Pip and I never had to teach her kitty bite inhibition, she just came with the software already loaded??
every now and then one of the cats will decide my Work Chair is clearly the most high value, luxurious seat in the whole empty house, and will take any opportunity to steal it from me and then act VERY harassed when I need it back
Helen gets pissy about this but is easy to redirect by setting up the heating pad on a rug or towel somewhere. Ghost is more inclined to get fixated on ME or my art supplies than the chair.
But whenever mink is in this mode, all I have to do is pull up a second chair and make it nice for her with a cushion or towel… if I try to forcibly move her out of my chair, she’ll make herself SUPER HEAVY and resist all efforts to be picked up, and then be really grumpy if I force her out anyway, but if I offer her another nice seat right next to me, she’ll happily change places on her own and be obviously pleased about it
anyway I love her and successful nonverbal communication with pets makes me emotional
Also whenever I do have anxiety-induced bouts of insomnia (thankfully uncommon, but hhh) the things that help me sleep the most are things that would be discouraged by sleep hygiene proponents- turning on color changing led lights (I just find rainbows soothing!!), putting on podcasts or audiobooks or shows I’m already familiar with (wtnv got me through the bad grief times when I was full on terrified of dreaming and I still sometimes go back to early episodes of it when my brain is in a bad place… the magnus archives also works these days, lmao),
sometimes even changing my sleeping location if that’s an option… I have NO idea why that last one helps but I suspect all of these things just give my overactive brain something else to fixate on rather than Looming Dread.
Rather than cutting out all potential sources of mental stimulation, giving myself something for my brain to latch onto OTHER than its own dysfunction lets me calm down enough to sleep… lying in the dark in total silence doesn’t work for me at all,my brain is too much of an eager, practiced expert at filling in empty spaces
Daylight savings is maybe a useful tool for explaining non 24 sleep wake disorder in a more widely viscerally relatable way
Like, the factual explanation is that my circadian rhythm is slightly longer than 24 hours long, and (despite me being fully sighted) doesn’t respond in any way to light input or sleep ~hygiene~ techniques, so my sleep schedule slowly but inexorably rotates forward through the days
But what it feels like is EXPERIENCING THE END OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME EVERY DAY. Every day my internal clock does not match with external clocks! Every day the times are different from yesterday! Every! Day! Every day! And I get off so, so easy because I work from home and can set my own schedule, so it’s inconvenient but fine for me… but there are many others who are just.. constantly sleep deprived :s
MELT CHEESE ON YOUR TTEOKBOKKI
my mom keeps looking at me and saying, without any meanness or unhappiness, “where did this beautiful boy come from?? When did I get such a pretty son????”
my soft butch little heart is SO flattered
(Enormous disclaimer this is about how I handle a specific flavor of brain problems, this is NOT about passively dealing with current external events)
I grew up in and around water to the extent that as a child I was deeply confused by the concept of people needing swimming lessons (…I was a child!!). I learned all about water safety, what to do when caught in rip tides, how to dive through big waves, etc.
It wasn’t much help the one time I was bowled over by a fuck off big wave. The waves behind it were perfectly spaced such that every time I managed to reach the surface, another wave would crash down over me again. This was before my chronic illness became severe- I was 19-20 or so, living in Hawai'i and swimming and hiking regularly, so I was a strong swimmer, but since I never surfed, I didn’t have any experience with wipeouts. I couldn’t do anything.
If you’ve never been hit by a big wave, it’s not just like being knocked over. It isn’t just the force and weight of the wave hitting you. The water above doesn’t stop moving when it meets the water below- it spins you rapidly around and around underwater, and there’s not much you can do but wait it out and hope you don’t get knocked about into anything hard. It’s disorienting, it hurts, and you’re powerless.
Getting my head slammed into rocks or coral was my main fear at the time. I can hold my breath. I can go limp to conserve my energy until the right time. Other injuries could be survived… but if I got knocked out, that would be it. I had no control over that, though, so all I could do was hold my breath and go limp and hope that I’d get an opportunity to break out of the cycle of waves. It felt like it would never end.
Obviously it did, and eventually I made it back to shore uninjured, crawled over to my stuff, and went immediately to sleep on the sand.
The thing about this incident is, rather than being a traumatic memory, I find it deeply comforting and soothing to think about when I’m having a bad time. It’s not a technique I can really suggest to others, but it’s so helpful for me. Sometimes I get stressed about things that can be changed, externally or internally- then it’s important to work towards change. Sometimes, when it’s internal brain problems stuff, I need to actively manage things.
But sometimes my brain is a dumpster fire that is frankly above my paygrade to handle, and it’s overwhelming and I can’t talk myself through it and it feels like it will never end, and then I think about those waves, and how painful and scary it was, and how sometimes the correct action is to go limp and wait until the waves pass. It won’t be pleasant and I will hurt and I will be afraid of drowning the entire time, but eventually the worst of it will subside and I’ll be able to resurface and take a breath again. And then I’ll take a huge nap.
(also the ocean is beautiful and nice to picture, even in a scary context!!!!)
listen. I just think. if there’s gonna be a setting dealing with ppl turning into monsters or being afraid of turning into monsters bc of repressed frustrated desires boiling up, combined with themes of isolation and social othering/rejection
there should be queer ppl present. it should be written by queer ppl and there should be queer youth and queer older folk. obviously this could go super bad in the hands of the wrong writers but like.. it should be a queer story. also ripped firefighter lady is dreamy. thx for attending my talk.
it’ll be interesting to see how the already well established trope of, you know,
social shut in/hikikomori afraid of the outside world is thrust out of their room by Plot and must contend with the now Very Real Actual Physical Threats of the world beyond and in the process ends up developing meaningful social ties with other people… especially as combined with the often accompanying theme of social isolation in apartment/urban living
will surely PROLIFERATE as a genre after these quarantine times. haha. haa.
I wasn’t talking about the host specifically but NOW I AM
the scene where the family sits together in the aftermath of the monster rampage and wordlessly they each, in turn, imagine feeding/offering a different tidbit of food to the little daughter who was abducted and not actually there with them
is like one of the top movie scenes that haunts me forever, that scene is always in my brain
THIS ONE
the amount of feeling expressed!!! the complete lack of words or any acknowledgement that this isnt real! and then the abrupt cut to where she actually is
I wasn’t talking about the host specifically but NOW I AM
the scene where the family sits together in the aftermath of the monster rampage and wordlessly they each, in turn, imagine feeding/offering a different tidbit of food to the little daughter who was abducted and not actually there with them
is like one of the top movie scenes that haunts me forever, that scene is always in my brain
when korean horror/thriller/generally stressful movies n shows take a significant break from the action to depict a quiet mundane communal meal
(to clarify, my impostor syndrome is the result of my own stupid anxiety disorders, not snobby bad teachers. Needlessly mean and gatekeepy people give me SO MUCH SPITE FUELED POWER I LEVEL UP JUST FROM SHEER CONTRARINESS)
Illustrator (derogatory)
When I was in art school ages ago I didn’t do much with watercolors… there was a maybe 2 week watercolor section in my general media class that was very useful but not that in depth.
When I took a painting elective, I asked the teacher if we would be working with watercolor or gouache at any point, and she informed me, with a look of SUCH disdain, that watercoloring isn’t painting, just coloring in lineart.
(This was the same teacher whose main critique of my work was that it was too “illustrative”. Bear in mind I was an illustration major at an illustration and animation focused college, lmao. My friends, there are countless better painting teachers on youtube, no matter what kind of painting you’re into)
Anyway I’m grateful I’ve been able to make colored lineart my full time job during these times and despite my health issues. I did 70+ paintings this year!!! I’d like to do even more next year, and upload videos too! Honestly I still have ridiculous levels of impostor syndrome and my terrible brain likes to tell me I am no good at all, but at the same time, I’m really proud of the progress I’ve made!!
