terabient

title: The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi Kawakami

started: 1/1/22

ended: 1/8/22

thoughts:

- aimless, but not in an unpleasant way. captures some of the intense lonliness that manifests in your life when you're young and barely supporting yourself, ending is not exactly neat but doesn't have much impact either.

title: Shadow Theatre, Fiona Cheong

started: 12/19/21

ended: 12/28/21

thoughts:

- has an unusual narrative structure that's hard to describe. at the heart of the novel are two incidents that occur in a Singapore neighborhood during a time of transition/gentrification: a mentally disabled woman disappearing, and the night an unwed woman gives birth. the story is told through several characters who recount what they were doing in the days leading up to these two events, which are implied to be related in a vaguely supernatural way. all the characters "speak" to the reader, and the overall effect is that you are a participant in this neighborhood gossip. often the characters meander on, relate events out of order, make assumptions about others--no one is a reliable narrator here.

- really delves into how...suffocating Asian mother-daughter dynamics can be. even the positive relationships display some toxic codependency. hit uncomfortably close to home in many ways, but i appreciate how real these relationships felt.

- i really enjoyed the book--it captures the very specific tone of southeast asian conversation that felt familiar to me. i think the somewhat abrupt ending and its deliberate lack of clarity and closure was a little unsatisfying, though.

★ i have the dubious distinction of living in the state with the highest rate of new COVID cases in the country. i would like to say this has made life here difficult, but even with ICUs filled to capacity across the state absolutely nothing has changed. No state-wide mask, testing or vaccine mandates, no changes made to school attendance rules--this means that parents of high-risk children don't have remote schooling as an option until they're in close contact with a confirmed COVID case, but also, they're still defining "close-contact" as literally less than 6 feet from someone w/o a mask on, so even WHEN a child has COVID the rest of the class is *not* tested and then people act shocked, SHOCKED that schools have multiple COVID clusters :) :) :)

So anyway I haven't gotten COVID yet but I feel like it's only a matter of time, now, and I'm...resigned to this reality. i'm terrified that i'll be completely asymptomatic, the tests won't catch it and i'll end up infecting the children i'm working with--that's been my fear all year, but now it feels...inevitable? Maybe not inevitable but it did go from "somewhat unlikely" to "extremely fucking likely" and i would say my anxious brain is not handling this well, but honestly, i think it's holding up well enough, all things considered. i haven't quit working, for one thing. i even enjoy it! but my mind and my heart are exhausted.

★ i temporarily deactivated my twitter account. it just felt like it was eating up all my free time, and even some of my work time--I kept opening it up and scrolling through it mindlessly, with very little of it making any sort of lasting impact. i can't even call it doomscrolling because that would imply feeling, you know, a sense of fear or frustration. "i am numb, and i am also staying here for hours" describes most of my time on twitter for the past month, which feels an awful lot like uncontrolled depression and/or internet addiction, neither of which are good things, so i deactivated. i am not sure how long it will stay deactivated; i'm forcing myself to wait at least a week, to see how i handle the change and hopefully clarify what i want twitter for in the first place.


★ i took a trip down to Boston last weekend to check out the SoWa Winter Festival and also to just...walk around the city and enjoy the bustle. i miss living near the city, even though it's been *sigh* 15 years since i last lived in MA.

All of the places I used to hang out in the early 2000s have gentrified a lot. It's so strange seeing the blocks around the Pine Street Inn turn into expensive art galleries selling solid chrome shark sculptures for $4800 and boutique clothing shops. The vaguely terrifying building that once hosted raunchy dinner theatre productions was demolished and has been replaced with like a luxe apartment. Virtually every arcade I used to visit has been bulldozed down or bought out and replaced with businesses that are far more generic. But also cleaner. A lot cleaner.

Man, this was a downer entry, huh? But it's been a downer of a year, so.

My brother lent me his Shudder account! I've been making my way through a long-ignored recs list while I unbind and scan artbooks. This has proven a very effective way for me to actually watch entire movies, since my biggest issues with movie-watching is that i get too bored or too spooked while watching...but now when that happens I just concentrate very hard on the book scanning process. X)

Anyway here's some spoilery thoughts on what I've watched. I've liked everything I've seen and would recommend all of them, unless you really like gore because these are fairly light on that front.

( Scare Me )

( Host )

( Hell House LLC )

( Housebound )

On my to-watch list:

V/H/S
Noroi
Medium
Werewolf Within
Poughkeepsie Tapes
whatever this unlisted youtube found footage film is

On the fence about watching the sequels to Hell House LLC. The summaries and trailers look...kinda dumb tbh. Not really big on horror sequels that clarify the mysterious horror that lies at the heart of the initial story...but at the same time, I want to know what's in the basement, lol.

★ I achieved my goal of finishing A Thing and posting it by the end of October. I had the fic drafted earlier in the month but editing and managing my own anxiety around both writing and sharing it took up, well, the rest of October, lol. But at least i got over it within my self-imposed deadline. Two years ago, I don't think I'd have done that.

★ I have been thinking about where want to spend my internet time this month. I was pretty happy at the beginning of October when I was focused on meeting word count goals and occasionally screaming half-formed opinions into the unseen void that is this blog. I dropped off in the second half of October, and while a lot of that was due to a real-life work emergency, some of it was also due to ...becoming numb to the way fandom activity occurs on Twitter. There is just so much being shoved into your eyeballs at all times that at a certain point you just look at stuff without it making any sort of impact on you. Trying to curate your feed feels like a lost cause, i'm never remotely happy with the results. it's just become easier to not look at my feed at all then try to work it into something i like seeing again.

So I want to use the time and energy i was spending on Twitter shitposts on something actually enjoyable...i just don't know what that entails, yet. it might mean more fandom oriented posts here, it might be trying to make a home over on pillowfort (...eh) it might mean trying to use discord as a community tool instead of ignoring it. i dunno.

★ I committed to finishing a rough draft for at least one more fic and getting through an outline for another at writethisfanfic. I've never used an outline for fic before, but some of the ideas i'm working out are too complicated for me to just freeform through, especially as I've started to write scenes out-of-sequence. I don't think I'll have anything in a finished, post-worthy state at the end of the month but getting one fic to rough draft status would be great.

Today at school:

CHILD: *comes up to me with a baby doll*

ME: Hello!

CHILD: *holds up baby and shakes its arm* HIIIIIIIIIIII!

ME: Is this your friend?

CHILD: *stares, then hurls the baby to the ground* HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!

ME: Oh, is baby all done?

CHILD: *cackles, then runs away*

★ Most of the children in the classroom I work with are non-verbal. We have one student who is verbal; we know this because he will sing "Uptown Funk" when he needs to go to the bathroom. If we need to convince him to go to the bathroom, we only have to sing or play "Uptown Funk" to get him to go with no complaint. So you'd think that's great, the kiddo LOVES a fun song and it motivates him to do things he needs to, BUT one of the therapists is insisting he shouldn't be using *this* song for motivation and has come up with a "more appropriate" song we should use. frankly it sucks but if the therapist is outlining it in the care plan we're supposed to follow it, sooooooo :/

★ 600 words during last night's writing session which is a high for me! \o/ Getting close to finishing the first draft of the most PWP fic. Which is great as far as reaching goals is concerned, but not so great when that means all the porn with plot will be left, waiting to be...plotted. which, honestly, i don't think i've ever really done lmao. Fanfiction is funny like that.

I've been trying to be gentler with myself as far as setting and meeting daily goals are concerned. The only hard rules I keep are "if you haven't written by 8pm, sit down and write 200 words." i don't always like what i've put down but it's a goal i can hit consistently and i'm more likely to exceed it which makes me feel more productive rather than "you only wrote 300 words? lol bad"

I used to find the actual act of writing very exhausting and unpleasant, but i've learned to be less harsh on myself in the past few years so it feels mildly cathartic now. it's not a bad feeling.

★ On pillowfort i have encountered a bug that makes images hosted on PiFo not display, which makes the whole site a bit difficult to engage with. this and several other factors have made me...less than enthusiastic about really trying to make it work as a personal OR fandom space for me. I still have this vague sense of duty to try and help it succeed, if only because the *idea* of a blog site with tumblr/twitter-like sharing capabilities and dreamwidth-style privacy settings is so appealing--but i'm not sure it's something even i'm looking for any more.

★ Today at school one of the speech therapists said an "unidentified child" had come to the school and needed specialist testing to determine their ability level. I'm guessing she means a parent who didn't do the proper enrollment process and just showed up at school with their kiddo, but the way she was talking it almost sounded like an unknown child had just wandered in, looking for a classroom...I do hope the kiddo ends up where they need to be. It's possible they'll be in our class tomorrow since we have the best (but still short-handed) staff - student ratio at the moment.

★ Kinktober update: Hit 5000 words which is not exactly a lot for two weeks of writing, BUT considering how the longest thing i've ever written was just shy of 10,000 words and that took, i think, almost a month? It's pretty good for me. I feel decent about hitting my very modest goal of "finish and post something...anything...in the month of October." 😁

And while I won't be able to post something every single day, I think it's possible to have enough to post something each week? Maybe not the first week, but everything after that? I'll have to be more disciplined with the way I use my free time next week, and i don't have much discipline or free time.

★ I played a very charming, in-browser puzzle game, Spell Blocks. It's based on an entry for METEOR's My Famicase art show, where people submit their concepts for Famicom game cases. I have a deep fondness for these kinds of puzzle games, and I enjoyed how tricky it can be to build the 4-block spells. Its become a go-to activity if I'm feeling moody and need to do something fun for a few minutes to mentally reset.

Thursday night I tried out Carrion, a game in which you are a very large mass of flesh and teeth trying to escape a research facility. My experience so far:

In my first major encounter, I scuttled about in one of the shafts above the room I needed to clear, roaring to watch the reactions of the people inside. One thing that people do in reaction is shoot where they think you are, even if the terrain means there's no hope of them actually hitting you, and for some reason this utterly shocked me--I had just assumed enemies wouldn't panic shoot, and thought they must have had some unseen angle and were capable of damaging me. So I plopped out of the shaft, and because I still didn't have a great grasp on the controls I sort of pinballed around the room in a desperate attempt to avoid bullets. This did not work perfectly, but I did manage to batter the humans enough to kill them before they killed me. Then I had to pick out their various body parts from the debris to eat them, which due to my clumsiness ended up taking a fair amount of time as I kept dropping limbs just before they made it to my mouth(s), and had to flail around for them again.

In one of my last encounters before quitting, I did the "roar and scuttle through the air shafts" again (it's fun) only this time I dropped a piece of the ceiling onto a human, which caused her to tumble off screen; I assumed she died. I killed her two colleagues by tossing them at each other until they, um....fell apart. After consuming them I heard whimpering off-screen: the first person was still alive. Just as she had collected herself enough to pull out her gun, I tossed her down into a sort of murky, rocky pool of water a few levels down. I think she may have survived that too, but it didn't matter since I ate her after that.

In summation, Carrion is pretty good at making you feel scary and dangerous even if you don't know what you're doing. Would recommend.

In 4 days i've written...about 1500 words... orz

That's still better than 0 words in 2 years, so I'm not beating myself up over it...yet. :p

I've never been a disciplined writer--even when writing for exchanges or challenges I spent most of my time procrastinating and the last few days trying to cobble together something respectable. So trying to write a little bit every day is...different. Yesterday I managed to write more than the first 3 days combined--hopefully that's not an outlier but a sign that the daily grind approach is having a positive effect.

I'm also writing out of chronological order; some years ago, I read some advice along the lines of "start by writing the scenes that are most vivid in your mind, and go on from there" which has always sounded appealing to me. I think one reason yesterday was more productive than earlier was brought about by hopping to something i felt more interested in...I do worry about my ability to stitch these scenes together later on, though. I normally deal with scene transitions by uh, not writing long enough things to require them. x_x

I wouldn't say it's been a FUN few days, but it has felt cathartic which is also good