neon anima

two people in my writing group are working on memoirs. one has led a fascinating life—met muhammad ali and the jackson 5; attended a martin luther king jr. rally; told patty labelle she would never make it on tv with her writhing wildcat performance—to such a degree that i asked if if people constantly tell her "you should write a book!" she said yes.

the other is writing about the long-term sexual abuse she suffered from her older sister. it's a struggle to critique memoir involving such deeply traumatic personal memories. i suggested exploring her family members as characters, and not plunging the reader right away into the eye the abuse and all the emotions surrounding it. she said she wasn't sure how to portray another person's feelings and thoughts, not being that person.

the group is very diverse both age-wise and in how much experience they seem to have writing, in varying formats. yesterday my first submission, the first half of a short story, was on the agenda and am i little disappointed with the feedback i got. it mostly consisted of "writing is detailed," "descriptions are vivid." i need and miss the merciless viciousness of competitive writing majors. i'm flushing at the thought that i'm accomplishing some of what i'm trying to, but if i don't get my feelings hurt soon i'm going to have to go looking for another group.



over the last few days, a blunt, hot pain has been showing up to gnaw at my hip/groin area. sometimes both sides, but usually the right. i might have pulled something at the gym, or i may need to stop napping on my not highly sleepable sofa.

speaking of the gym, i've noticed an uptick in my endurance on my last two trips. i even gently jogged for a minute at a time on the treadmill. the longest i've been able to maintain a jog was five minutes, several years ago. i do solid twenty-minute batches of cardio, i just don't have a runner's lungs.



i'm trying to make a decision on finally changing my surname. someone on the internet somewhere mentioned changing their last name to break generational trauma, and that swayed me from the plan i'd always had to take my mother's maiden name. i found a strain of distant cousins with dark eyes and dark hair, professorships, and an absence of violent crime or accidents that i could find. i found someone who'd invented a solar cooker and giddily emailed him to see if he was the same person i'd unearthed from a late-1800s marriage on my mother's side.



i finished brave new world before i put down any thoughts about the audiobook i finished before that, the master and margarita. i wasn't in love with either. margarita had many stretches of undeniable delightfulness and i love a highly sarcastic, magical-realism misadventure. maybe if there had been more of the talking cat and more of the relationship between the master and his pontius pilate novel, i would have been fully converted. i've run into this issue with stanislaw lem, nabokov's bend sinister, and some russian films: i don't enjoy russian political satire. i can't tell if this is because i don't relate to it or if i find it uninteresting. yet i'm fascinated by russian culture and propaganda. maybe more of the latter before i try more of the former.

brave new world didn't make an enormous impression, either. the prose was much weirder and more interesting than i expected for such a widely loved novel. it would take a supernaturally talented writer to create an engrossing book about a sterile and untroubled dystopia-utopia, to be fair. where late the sweet birds sang was written decades later and is about cloning rather than a highly calibrated test-tube society, but i seem to remember it being preoccupied with similar things that, to me, didn't seem as scary or concerning to me as disinformation-fueled corporatocracy. it's hard to appreciate dated dystopia fiction outside of the ultimate nightmare prophets, orwell and philip k. dick. (maybe this is the year i finally get through a william gibson novel.)

current internet ambiance

• Glumlot - Jean Rollins-esque, eerie and surreal AI videos


• "The Argument of Afro-pessimism" - Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2020


• 6 hours of disturbing unsolved mysteries


• Something Was Wrong S20 - catfishing/manipulation podcast


• Chappell Roan

a shutter blew off one of my windows months ago and my neighbor politely asked me to fix it because she's selling her home and might have to "crop out" my home. okay. i agreed to do it but it's been slipping my mind. the hoa who normally jumps on my ass about anything as soon as they get the chance has been silent on the issue and i've seen other shutters missing from other windows in the neighborhood so of course the accomplice of time blindness and procrastination in my brain covertly pressed "pause" on the problem.

last night there was a trailer hitched to a pick-up taking up three parking spaces, including both of mine, so i knocked on my neighbor's door. there were about four people there moving my neighbor's things out. a guy called down to the girl who'd answered the door "can't they just park somewhere else?" my temper flared at the entitled dismissal and i might have let it go if it looked like they'd made any attempt to use only the space they needed, but they were straight up diagonal like they were trying to take up as many spots as possible, so i yelled up "can you please move your truck? you're taking up three spots and two are mine."

today my neighbor texts me at 2 pm on a sunday asking when i can get my shutter fixed, vaguely threatening to contact the hoa about it. i can do nothing about it at 2pm on sunday and i suspected this might have been because of the encounter with the moving-helpers last night, plus my nephew just asked me for money because he and my grandmother can't pay their bills. i know it was needlessly and stupidly hostile, but because of all this i impulsively texted back "call them then."

it felt like such an accomplished and grown-up thing, to have a good relationship with my neighbor. i warned her about roll cart thieves after mine was stolen. she alerted me to a problem with my outside drain that i was completely oblivious to. i offered to keep her boxes of delivered clothes till she got home so they wouldn't be stolen. it was nice to know this person was going to leave the city with a pleasant memory of her former neighbor, fellow bachelorette. and still i got a little thrill out of snatching back my good will. it felt good to invite her wrath and my hoa's to rain down on me. i've suffered so much bullshit from them in my time living here, i want them all to know that i expect irrational vengeful tedium from them and i don't care.

wednesday i drove from savannah to jekyll island. i went to driftwood beach, where it looks like there was a war between the trees and the waves but everyone lost. the trees are all dead and gray, most toppled and half buried in the sand. the wind or water or maybe the saltwater wind carved thin, delicate, swirling lines into the bark. the exposed roots spiral and splay out like they're trying to become tentacles. it was astounding, alien, and melancholic. it seems hard and carved out, ancient and fossilized. even the water seemed dry.

i would have stayed for hours, but it was so hot. the short walk from my car to the shore was a muggy ordeal. i tried to lay in the blue beach tent i brought and read the oresteia, but even inside with shade i was soon soaked in sweat and could only bear it for about 20 minutes. i really want to go back when it's not so unbearably hot.


after, i went to the sea turtle rehabilitation center. they had a snake inside a tube on an operating table observation area, but i couldn't tell what they were doing to it. one of the employees said they might be grafting the skin of another animal (frog? turtle? fish? i can't remember) onto its infested wound and that this was significant because it hasn't been tried before.

most of the turtles in hospital tanks were there because they were underweight and/or weak. one of the rehabilitators fed chunks of seafood to a green sea turtle named olivine. normally they have a plant-based diet, but they were trying to get olivine back to a healthy weight with protein.

i drove from there to harris neck wildlife refuge. by this time it was late afternoon, after 5. there was no one there, but i took a map and started down one of the trails toward a pond. it was miserable. my chafed thighs were burning. the flying insects were gigantic and nosy. i couldn't go more than a few steps without having to violently swat them away, only for two or three more to buzz in my face and my hair, so i went back to the car. i did see a racoon peek out from the road, and went onto a dock with a beautiful view of the hot blue sky and a vast marsh. i saw a long, thin creature rise up out of the water as it glided along the surface, swiveling its head like a periscope. it must've been a snake, but from where i stood it had the eerie silhouette mystique of loch ness monster pictures.

there were a few billboards i wish i'd gotten pictures of. one was a set of three, each giant pictures of blue sky and white clouds. nothing else. the other was a big white sign saying only "coming soon," half torn off and flagging in the wind.

before going back to the airb&b, i stopped at roadside place called peach world. they got me with their many billboards promising all kinds of peach-flavored things, namely peach smoothies. i really wanted something cold and sweet after all that sweltering nature. they had all kinds of peach-infused things like peach hot sauce, peach candy, peach keyrings, and peach bread. i got a peach smoothie in a plastic cup with little peaches printed all over it, then left.


my last day there, i planned a few more things before leaving town. i tried to visit another wildlife center, with owls and cougars and alligators. it was a very similar experience to harris neck, though. i'd only gone out onto an empty dock and looked in on the aquariumed turtles and snakes in the visitor center before i gave up. i'd started down a trail when a bug flew into my mouth just as three schoolbuses of elementary school children showed up. i got back in my car.

i ate at a lovely, tiny place called café taureau where i had an iced coffee with quiche fromage and fruit and a cinnamon scone.


i almost made it home without buying new books, but then i decided to see if there were any 2nd & charles stores around, since the last one near me shut down during the pandemic. i decided to go a little out of my way to stop at the store in augusta. it was much better than the last few i've been to. a lot of college and high school kids must be offloading their syllabus books, because i've never seen so many copies of the red badge of courage or thomas hardy works in one place. i bought last and first men, portrait of the artist as a young man because they had the norton critical edition, and a volume of transmetropolitan.


during the ride home, i finished listening to the house of mirth. sort of like how succession is the american interpretation of english dramas of court intrigue and royal politics, house of mirth is the american interpretation of a hardy, forster, or bronte novel of manners and society. the manners are infused with the sort of exploitation and greed those novels are too polite to touch on, though. you can see in lily bart some of the future's flawed, listless novel heroines-- those ones i was just complaining about, who trifle with shitty men and self-destructive behaviors, but lily is legitimately a victim of society's expectations and breeding. it's normally hard for me to sympathize with these "beauty is a curse" takes, but there was really a time when a woman's beauty was a kind of medusa's gaze that turned them into an object.

next i started a voyage to arcturus, which was immediately weird and wild. an interstellar adventure by way of dusty alchemical potions and a spiritualism-era séance. my decision not to bother with post-wwii literature for a while continues paying off.


i'm glad i took my detour, because the drive from savannah to augusta was gorgeous. georgia really is a beautiful place. i thought about how many hours i've spent on georgia roads and how the verdant layers of plush, green treetops always impresses me. there was a moment where it seemed surreal and ridiculous that this is possible: i can drive through these places, through towns where strangers live, past crops that strangers tend and land that strangers and their families have owned for decades. even just a large, empty field of wild grass moves me sometimes. there is so much life happening there with nothing to do with me or other people. just greenness soaking in sunlight, food chains churning, tiny specks of life living just to procreate.

i went to the gym with margot and snek monday. i took it easy because i still have a cough. it's still deep and rattling. i have to bring something to spit in on the drive to work because so much phlegm is still coming up. this happened at least once before, a few years ago. i remember going to a doctor telling him i was mostly over a cold, but couldn't quite kick the phlegmy cough even weeks later. the mold inspector came on monday and said he should have results back in a week.


i was right. i want to write again. the little signs were there. i was opening up chapters of my novel and thinking "that wasn't as bad as i remember" or "this is actually good" or "wow well said" and wondering what would happen next. i even want to try to finish more short stories. i need to find a way to stop thinking of them so negatively. i think of them as these tickets into your creativity you have to compose. you sell enough tickets, then maybe someone will let you write a novel.

most short stories i've read are all about the ending. at least, that's why they're renown, as far as i can tell when i finish them. i think of short stories as practicing endings and it's true that's where i need the most help. i've written so much to have written so few endings.

i'm reading ashley's blog again. his actual writing is so full of inane, petty cruelty that i get absolutely zero intellectual or emotional nutrition out of, but his journaling is gentle, humble, and jagged with delightful jabs of vicious humor. i can tell he reads criticisms about his work. he's specifically generous toward other writers. he tells all the tricks he knows. he wants more writers in the world. i think he must be a great teacher.


the people were right. twin peaks season 3 is weird, weird. i'm on episode 6 or 7, i think. now that i can see it's kind of the spiritual re-composition of dale's consciousness, i'm starting to fall in love. i hated the dougie thing at first, maybe because he was introduced in such an obnoxious way. a lot of male directors have this thing where they think, i guess, any scene that has a prostitute in it is hilarious. maybe this is a bad taste still left in my mouth from when these scenes were more like "anytime a prostitute is hurt/killed, it's hilarious" because nothing problematic happened and unproblematic scenes with sex workers are great, but still. it felt like sitting in the theater through a nude scene while a 12-year-old boy snickered in the next seat.

but after dougie at the breakfast table with his kid and the coffee, i'm fully charmed. i've always loved dale and laura's connection, so ever since someone on reddit likened what dale is going through (lost, obviously in need of help to the point that multiple people he encounters point it out) to laura's crisis, i'm even more bought-in. i was hoping for more of the creepy glass ghost-box. wally brando is great. dana ashbrook aged gorgeously.

I've been getting so much done at work that it's really unlike me. Lumberpunk sent me a screenshot of a tweet that said something like "You ever catch yourself working too hard and think 'I gotta chill, they don't pay me enough for this.'" That's been me for the past two weeks.

I even entertained a little paranoid thought the other night that maybe they put something in the water and air after they finally cracked some kind of chemical way to make people more motivated and productive without paying them more.

I was telling Margot it's so bleakly hilarious how all businesses seem to be suddenly speaking with one voice about the wonderful company culture and productivity benefits of going back to the office, making no effort to hide that they only let people work from home to begin with because it was that or lose their employees, and they never actually cared who died or developed lifelong health problems during the pandemic.

Admittedly, the new office is exponentially nicer and there's more of a sense of community with the no-cubes floor plan. There's a little nook with four bean bags that they've been using for "Thirsty Thursdays" where people can have a glass of wine around 4pm, and three restaurant-style booths next to the kitchen so you can have lunch without leaving the office but not feel obligated to keep working through it. They got a Bevi machine, which dispenses your choice of flavored water with caffeine or vitamins, hot or cold or ambient.



The latest CMO absurdity is that she (a white woman) refused to take her huge, dark sunglasses off when filming a video about what Black History Month means to her. All of us on the marketing team agree it was an off-putting choice. The Art Director verbalized something I was thinking, that it makes you think about being shady or throwing shade on Black History Month. I imagine it also gives the sense that she's filming it under duress, somehow, or she doesn't want to be recognized saying positive things about Black History Month on social media. The social media manager even directly asked her to take them off when he was filming and she said no, she had a migraine.

I'd rather we just not post it but I'm also hoping the internet scoops it up and roasts her for it.



I started watching True Detective Night Country. As hardened as I am on horror, there are still moments in the show that shock me and creep me out. There was a part at the end of the third episode, though, which was so glaringly a missed opportunity that I have to script doctor it here. There's a guy on the verge of death, and he tells one of the detectives, "Your mother is here. She's waiting."

It's such a silly and generic piece of dialogue, totally undermining the moment. It would be so much more interesting if he said something very specific that her mom used to say. Maybe not speaking in her voice, as that would be a too demon-possession tropey, but something that was deeply, disturbingly meaningful.



I fell in love with a sample of the Parfum de Marly perfume Valaya a while back. It grew on me so much, I ended up liking it more than Delina or Oriana, which I bought full bottles of. It's softly sweet with a breezy peachy floral musk. Clean but not soapy, uplifting without being loudly fruity. I couldn't find it anywhere for less than $300, though, and I'm imposing a rule that I won't spend more than $200 on a bottle of perfume. I got an email this morning that Aura Fragrance had it in stock for $169. I bought it immediately. All day I was half-anticipating an email from them cancelling the order, saying the pricing was a mistake, but they just sent me the shipping notice. It's really made my week.



I have a teal velvet couch arriving tomorrow. I'm not sure how many pieces it will be shipped in but I can't imagine sofas come detached other than the legs on the bottom. I'm so excited. I haven't had a couch since the water damage was fixed and I moved back in last Christmas. I'm really tired of hanging out upstairs.

Horrid mood Sunday, not sure why. Could've been that it's the end of our long WTH period, as the new office is ready. Could've been that I was excited about cancelled plans to thrift and see Poor Things with Margo and Snek.

I was excited to see my team today, though. I missed them. I helped put together swag bags for our welcome-to-the-new office event. There were so many names on the list I didn't even recognize, much less those whose faces I could place.

The new office is nicer. We're on the second floor of a three-store building covered in reflective, blue glass. It's only exit past the old office so .

They're taking away one of our WFH days. They were so pro-WFH at first, or at least supportive, but now they really can't stand the idea of us working from home. My CMO who was the first to tell me all about how much more productive she is at home, tells me our team has been less productive. We're not less productive, we've just had managers between us and her, so less of us all dropping everything to work on whatever new thing popped into her head that she's decided we need yesterday.

My feet were concerningly dry the other day, to the point that I thought I might have athlete's foot. They're not itchy, though. I bought foot cream, a pumice stone, and a foot scrubber. While I'm at it, I'm going to try to get rid of what I think is a corn. Ever since I got back from New Orleans, pain in the arches of my feet has been randomly flaring up. I thought it was only because of all the walking we did, but that was three months ago. Also there's a weird misshapen red spot on the arch of my left foot. It seems to be burst blood vessels under the skin but of course I'm thinking "cancer???" so I'm keeping a close eye on it.

I've been listening to true crime podcasts as I go to sleep. One night I dreamed I was part of a play and as I was reading my lines onstage from a book, because I hadn't memorized them (this is always the way it is in my recurring stageplay dreams), my Lead Gen Manager was in the audience having a conversation with someone else onstage. They were talking over me so loudly that I stopped and I and the audience both just awkwardly listened to them. I don't usually remember the things I listen to in my sleep influencing my dreams, but this must've been an insertion the two podcast hosts I was listening to.

I wish I could say that I developed an interest in fragrance because I was a sensualist, because smelling the world was experiencing it and I couldn't get enough of that. But I associate my first bottles of perfume with a sudden, brief explosion of conformism from roughly ages 11 to 13. By chance, a popular girl was my neighbor and an outgoing little Aries jock. We hung out all summer before I went to middle school. I must've seen it as a chance to reinvent myself and I wanted to wear the uniform—American Eagle, Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap.

Someone gave me a set of Bonne Bell's Bottled Emotions. "Shy" was my favorite, or maybe "Mello" - a little vanilla-y with warm, calm spicey sweetness. I wore them accordingly and aspirationally. "Flirty" or "Playful" if I was going to see a boy I liked, "Crazy" if I was hanging out with the Aries friend, etc. (These are going for absurd prices on eBay now and I can't even find "Shy." Tragic.)

It's uncomfortable thinking about the reasons I wanted so badly to wear the Tommy Hilfiger brand. I don't remember any special love for the aesthetic and I'm pretty sure I've always thought the colors and logo were boring and generic, so it had to have been all about class for me. No more Social Security House in the Woods, no more boys saying I looked like a "hooker" because I wore black tights under ripped denim shorts, no more the neglected and unloved, unlovable whelp. I would be the clean (white), cared-for (rich), preppy (white), comfortable (white, rich), pretty (white, skinny) New Girl. This New Girl who wore Tommy Hilfiger smelled, of course, like the Tommy Hilfiger fragrance Tommy Girl.

I haven't smelled it in a while, but I think I'd still find Tommy Girl a nice scent. Fragrantica says the top notes are apple tree blossom, camelia, mandarin orange and black currant; middle notes are lemon, honeysuckle, grapefruit, rose, lily, mint and violet; base notes are magnolia, jasmine, cedar, sandalwood and leather. It's not a preppy, WASP-y smell, which is what I associate the brand with in retrospect. I remember it smelling fresh, youthful, not like any one particular thing in its notes — like the fragrance itself doesn't want to neglect any of the popular sweet scents of the time. The oranges and apples big at Bath and Body Works at the time are all represented. The prettiest and most classic flowers are all there.

The less racially-socioeconomically loaded scents from my adolescence were Bath and Body Works, and these seem to be the first run of products that made them a Thing. My grandmother, my sister and I all loved there lotions, so there were always bottles of Country Apple, Cotton Blossom, Sweet Pea, Cucumber Melon, and Freesia around. Cotton Blossom seems to be the one that I ended up using the most often, my I-don't-like-this-but-my-hands-are-dry go-to. I think because this is the scent I wore around the house, to bed, and not so much when going out, it's the one I associate the most comfort with. It was cozy and cool, not breezy and light so much as it was a douse of wet but clean linen.

I don't remember many natural smells from this time. It was all new clothes, rank department store Paloma Picasso, powder foundation, the plastic and glossy booklet paper of new CDs. The one organic scent that stands out is the pungent, sulfur stink of overcooked collard greens. I remember them hitting me as soon as I walked in the door after school and crying out my offense like I was entering a sewer.

I've entered a perfume hyperfixation. Started reading a book Snek got me called Scent and Subversion that details popular modern perfumes. I wish it went more into the history of scents, where ingredients were sourced and how/why they were used, but I'm sure I can find other books for that.

I'd ordered a bunch of new decanted samples right before Christmas. Lamb recommended Dioramour and Parfums de Marly's Delina. I got those along with Oriana, Meliora, and Valaya by Marly, Versace's Bright Crystal, Bvlgari's Omnia Crystalline, and Guerlain's Insolence.

Delina is a current perfume community darling (my hyperfixations usually come with plenty of Youtube content) and it smells like the beautiful, powdered pink princess crown it's said to. Not saccharine, but very delicate, sweet, and doll-like. It's a sweetness that's neither gourmand nor fruit, which I'm always looking for. Call me uncouth, it's a little reminiscent of VS' Lovespell—but grown-up and sophisticated. If Lovespell were a wine instead of fruit juice.

Marly's Valaya and Oriana were much more intriguing to me, though. Oriana is sweet, rich, and velvety. Gourmandish but it doesn't smell like a straight-up dessert. I'm really not about smelling like food right now.

Valaya is ethereal and alluring. It's clean, softly musky/ambery, a touch floral. I find that all this brand's scents round out and blend smoothly together in a way that makes them smell abstract, like their own little self-contained universes. I don't want to smell like food or a flower, or like any thing, apparently. I want to smell like a mood, a feeling, an aura.

Insolence and Dioramour are nice, authentic florals. I like florals, I don't love them. They make me want to lie down in a cloud of them and daydream, but they don't feel like "me" and I don't feel compelled to wear those scents. I keep buying floral samples mostly because want to get better at telling florals apart. I know I can identify honeysuckle and rose, but everything else just smells like A Flower to me, especially when there's more than one.

I bought Oriana and Delina from a Canadian wholesaler that had them for a great price and in a Boxing Day sale. I probably shouldn't have spent it because I'm still drowning in car repair payments and my LEEP medical bills, but I did have a little Christmas money leftover.

started anne lamott's bird by bird last night, even though i'm in the middle of one other book and an audiobook. i like that she begins by describing the eagerness of her creative writing students to get advice on publishing, emphasizing that they have to write for the love of writing first, then publication may follow (unlikely), then maybe making enough money writing to live on (even less likely). fuck all those online courses that promise to teach you how to get published, how to write a best-selling fantasy series, how to sell your novel, how to get an agent.

lamott describes writing as an act still worthwhile—like a person you love, an exercise of emotional and mental fitness, a type of exploration. like stephen king, she recommends writing at the same time every day. king called it scheduling time with the muse instead of waiting for it. eventually, the muse learns to show up on time.

after the first chapter, i sat at my new writing desk for ~500 words of freewriting. a simple vignette about a woman who spontaneously buys a set of paints. i enjoyed it, though the baby-blue, plastic bic xtra smooth mechanical pencil was hard on my fingers. my sister used to get big pink bulbs of skin on the sides of her fingers from holding pencils too long.

i took friday and monday off to enjoy a long birthday weekend. my concentration's a wash. all i can think about is napping. at work they served hot dogs and cheddar flavored chips and grocery-store pumpkin cupcakes, on top of the pizza lunch my department ordered to see off our interns. the little ginger one who gets under my skin just asked if he could help me do anything in his last few minutes-- i said it would be great to have any progress he's made on the last writing assignment we gave him and he went back to playing on his phone. i would prefer a flagrantly shiftless do-nothing to this fake corporate-sunny shit from someone who doesn't want to actually do anything. i won't miss the sighing and staring at his computer with one hand in his hair as if these low-expectation assignments are the greatest burden. more likely it's boredom. here i am, after all, looking for any distraction from rewriting the content on a 5 year old website to reflect a product we're hastily putting out because leadership seemingly just realized that we've rebranded to promote things we don't actually offer, so here's a new thing we're offering to distract audiences from the thing we're promoting that we don't have, except the decoy product doesn't work as promoted either. god.

four visits into my planet fitness membership and i already feel a positive change in my mood. there's something about going to the gym that feels better and more effective than all my other attempts to get fit. maybe it's the simple neurosis of capitalism telling me the only reason to keep doing something is if i spent money on it, maybe the multi-step commerce ritual of it, maybe the diversity of activities that prevents boredom. maybe the sense of community. there's a 60-something woman with bleached blond hair who i've seen twice now on the same treadmill. this time i noticed she had one book open on the control panel in front, another book off to the side waiting, headphones, and water. it was like a tiny little office and i was surprised at how lived-in a machine like that could look. it seemed downright cozy.

low weekend, who knows why. i went to the new kinokuniya store with n and m, which was delightful, then we ate at a hotpot place, new to me and possibly even more delightful. got a pink pen and a spiral-bound notebook with pink jellyfish on the cover. i decided it'll be my notebook for media-watching notes.

i was going to go to n's and spend more time with their new kitten after that, but i asked m to drive me home, then cried for no reason and put myself to bed.

it feels like months ago that i started joking about how i always want to play video games when my depression is at its worst. wellbutrin feels like it's doing absolutely fuck all for me motivation-wise, and it's supposed to be the one that's really good for that. my libido did resurface for a while, i think because of my birth control (junel), but it was making me so nauseous that i stopped taking it and am going to ask for something else on my leep post-op appointment. my hormones might be all fucked up. it could be pms too. my period is late and i suspect my gyno will tell me it's the leep's fault.

mars had a minor birthday gathering. i commiserated with her about how using a keyboards for video games is so much easier for us than controllers. she can be delightful but my social awkwardnesses stumble over hers, like her tendency to say "so..." as a way to keep extending the conversation past its natural death and my tendency to trail off and avoid eye contact and never have any faith that the next topic i think of is interesting or relevant enough to jump to.

i kept walking in on mars' boyfriend necking s's ex in the kitchen and i'm sure everything is on the up and up but it felt like i was interrupting. i'm not used to the lifestyle of openly sexual polyamory anymore and i don't know if i'll ever trust enough people in my life to experience it again.

there were heavenly cupcakes and i restrained myself to one.