thoughts

Idle thoughts and wonderings.

a tale of stranger fortunes

I am never, ever speaking about the weather, my mental health, my physical health, productivity, and level of creativity if any of those things are good ever again, because I just jinxed the living flip out of myself on all those levels, and then some. It’s miserably humid and rainy, I’m Extremely Sad™, my back is so painful that I literally cannot stand up for more than five minutes at a time, I have completed nothing since the sixth because of all those reasons, including my mother’s Mother’s Day gifts, which makes me feel like the biggest ass on the planet, and the most creative thing I’ve done lately is make two origami cranes.

Hopefully saying this is like…anti-jinxing myself and things will start looking up tomorrow. Or the day after, I don’t care. Can we at least do away with this BS back pain nonsense? Please?

Only good thing that’s happened: my brother broke up with his abuser. BIG YES. I mean, I doubt he’s escaped her hideous, nasty, malicious, manipulative little claws forever, but…who knows. We can always hope. I’m not happy that he’s alone, I’m happy that his abuser will now hopefully leave him alone…for a few weeks, at least. Vile cow. (Not sorry; I refuse to extend any respect towards that creature. I am sick to death of her, and people like her. I do not apologise.)

We have a new Pope! Or, er, I guess the Catholics do? I’m not quite sure whether the Pope is everybody’s big Catholic or just the Catholics’ big Catholic. Either way, he seems like quite a nice fellow, and he’s anti-MAGA (or as close as a holy person ever gets to being “anti-” something…again, the semantics!), so fingers crossed. It’s always just nice to have good folks in powerful positions.

(I also learned that the Room of Tears is literally called that because so many Popes end up weeping there, for many reasons. I don’t know why, exactly, but I did find that strangely touching.)

I’ve been deliciously devouring the McKinney translation of Shounagon-oneesama’s Pillow Book and have gotten to the parts I never reached before in my original interrupted reads, and…siiiiigh. ♥ She’s just…SO delightful. Ito wokashi, even. ^_~  I deeply enjoy Dr. McKinney’s translation “voice”, and I love that she chose to translate so much more of the text (or texts, to be precise — there are four main variants of the original text; the one that Dr. McKinney uses for the most part is the “Sankanbon”, considered one of the most accurate variants) than Ivan Morris did, and much, much more than Arthur Waley — not that I dislike either of their translations, mind you! Dr. Waley’s writing was poetic and beautiful, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Professor Morris’ translation, because it was so obvious in his translation and footnotes that he admired Shounagon, if not being outright fond of her — and it’s presumptuous of me, but I honestly have a silly dreamy thought that Shounagon would have been rather fond of him, as well.

And I’m so full of thoughts about Shounagon’s Empress…she seemed like such a sweet soul, and the love between her and the Emperor seemed so genuine. Plus, how close and happy her family was, and it was so obvious that Regent Michitaka was so, so proud of her — of all of his children — and he expressed himself in such a jolly, honest, playful way…it’s heartbreaking to think of how it all ended. I was planning to read A Tale of False Fortunes when I finish The Pillow Book (or even before), but I’m not sure how much more sadness I can take! Ah, poor Sadako…if only you could have had your fairytale ending in that life. ;_; 24 years is far too young to die, and far too young to shoulder all that tragedy all alone…aaahhh, I’ll have to change the subject or I’ll start crying!

Apropos of Japanese translations and whatnot: why do letters with a macron (ō, etc) look so ridiculously ugly in some fonts? Either the letter itself is weirdly bolder than a macron-less letter, or the macron itself isn’t aligned with the letter below it…it’s so frustrating! And let’s not even mention that ō itself doesn’t appear to have an ALT code that actually works? I suppose I can use a circumflex o (ô…ALT+0244, for the record) in a pinch, but using a macron for long vowels in Japanese transliteration is the universal standard, so why is it so ridiculously tricky to utilise?! ><;

the poison, the rot

Honestly starting to question if I want to be online at all.

For the past few days, my focus has primarily been on offline endeavours. While my head isn’t in what I’d describe as a healthy place — I think that ship has long since sailed and won’t ever be returning to harbour — I definitely had it above water, so to speak. There was room for improvement, but I didn’t feel all…compressed and scrunched-up, soulwise. Boredom was a slight problem (but there again, it always is, even at the best of times), but otherwise I was mostly okay.

I step back online, and within a few hours of operating within the circles I’m in (largely out of lack of knowing what else to do, truth be told), I start feeling horrific again. Tears, anger, annoyance, and zero patience for what may be innocent mistakes. And I’m right back to feeling like a worthless outsider, to boot.

This…will require fixing.

It’s not being online as a whole — I like keeping in contact with friends, I love to code, I love to spend hours with my eyes glued to tutorials, and I love organising and planning different static sites. But there’s a certain…realm…I guess…I kind of have to keep up with, due to the content I create, and honestly, it and the majority of people in it, their careless actions and flippant attitudes have just crushed me.  (And I do realise I’m being vague here; I have my reasons. Chances are you know precisely which sphere of the net I’m speaking of, but if you don’t…don’t worry. What it is isn’t really important; what it does to my is what matters here.)

I want eyes on my sites, but I don’t want to be under the constant eye of a digital equivalent of a homeowner’s association with a penchant for favouritism.
I want to make friends and forge connections, but I don’t want to be flavour of the month to someone and snarked about behind my back when they get bored. I don’t want to be carefully put into a place where I can’t defend myself from outright lies.
I want to create, but I don’t want to force myself to fit into a mould that crushes my heart to do so.
I want something real, not just lip service and an “affiliate” link.

This should be fun. This crap? Is not fun.

I think it’s time to quietly just step away from the whole poison lot of it. Maybe it’ll cost me visitors. Maybe that’s actually a small price to pay for not feeling like dirt on the bottom of someone’s shoe and stress headaches. I won’t feel this way in all communities I ever participate in…right?

Maybe it means I’ll always be alone, no matter how much I yearn for that connection.
Maybe even being alone would be better than trying to keep myself from falling apart in a mean place.

Or…well, no. Because I’m not alone on the Wired; I have real, genuine, decades-old friendships that with people that I would honestly die for.

When I was a little girl, I could play for hours and hours with my school friends. I was more than happy writing little storybooks just to distribute amongst them, I loved all the made-up worlds we spent hours building together; I didn’t feel lesser because I didn’t have an audience.

I shouldn’t feel lesser now, just because the only people who ever see the things I create are my friends. If only three people ever read Akayoroshi, that won’t make it unworthy or a waste of time.

I would rather feel real appreciation and joy in a tiny world, than tear myself to shreds in a huge one for the merest chance of someone giving the things I cherish and throw my whole heart into just an idle glance. If I created and played just for the sake of joy and the sake of my friends as a child, I can damn well do the same thing now as an adult — and the friends I have now are worth a thousand times more than any I had as a child, to boot.

over&over

“I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart… I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.” — Sylvia Plath

I never tried to reach

I sent a letter to my ex, apologising.

(Not the rapist, and definitely not the Pink Bitch. Not ever. I’m a pushover, but never that much of one. I’m more likely to join the Family First Party than I am to ever contact either of those two nuclear waste pits.)

I don’t know if they’ll get it, because I don’t think they check the address I sent it to anymore — and I don’t know what their current one could possibly be. I don’t know where they are, or what they’re doing, or anything. But I couldn’t just…not. I had to at least spit the words out into the Wired somewhere.

I don’t still have feelings for them, I don’t want to be with them, I wouldn’t say no to talking to them once again if they wanted, but if they didn’t, my world wouldn’t fall apart, and I would understand wholly. I just wanted to let them know that I feel bad about…well, as Phildel puts it, for the times I behaved like a switchblade / for the blame when I should have just forgave.

There is someone else I love. It’s not about chasing them. It’s about making amends, even weakly or uselessly. With my health being what it is, I just want something to be…right. Or as right as possible.

I don’t know. My head’s full of cotton wool at the moment, and I can’t think straight, but.

Everything is, everything was, everything is all, everything will be.

the cavalry is here; mist and shadows all

 Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

— J.R.R Tolkien

stars

The stars are astonishingly gorgeous tonight; they’re like aurora crystals scattered across a swathe of the darkest ponson velvet in the world, with a single glowing pearl placed at the very zenith.

It just made me sad. I couldn’t see the stars very well back home; but after a little while I didn’t care, because…it was home. It didn’t matter, as long as I had my own space in the world, that I couldn’t see ancient light very well. There’s a line from an Onitsuka Chihiro song, 「流星群」 (“Meteor Shower”, or “Flowing Star Swarm”, to be very very literal and oddly enough, poetic — that doesn’t usually happen if you translate absolutely literally), that came to mind when I looked at the sky:

心を与えて　貴方の手作りでいい
泣く場所が在るのなら　星など見えなくていい

“Give me a soul, even if it’s just handmade by you
As long as I have a place to cry, I don’t need to see the stars”

I get that feeling, now. I really wouldn’t need to see the stars at all, if I could go home, or at the very least, have a place that is mine — a place to cry. But I can’t, and instead I have a flowing star swarm that I don’t know what to do with and makes me feel guiltier than sin. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be on this holy week, but alas, I’m not a Christian and really don’t want to be one ever again.) Why long for a place you can never reach when you can dance beneath a meteor shower, partially freely?

I get what the damn therapists and psychs say, honestly, I do. “Change your perception!” But I personally can’t; it’s not something I can do and it never has been, not even as a child. Because my perception is formed by things outside my control, and I don’t have the intellectual dishonesty required to lie to myself. Maybe it’s the autism, maybe it’s the HFß, maybe it’s just a fault in my code yet again, but that’s how it it. I can’t brainwash myself into thinking I’m happy here. I’m not. I never will be. That is what I have to come to terms with.

I don’t know how to do that. I’m not even sure it’s possible. (Pisces sun, Capricorn moon. What are we like.)

In other news, the neighbours are having a Party, note caps — the type with the worst possible bass-boosted music, hooning, random fireworks, and drunken shouting, and I hate them for it. 😀 Mostly because my noise-cancelling headphones just ran out of battery power, so the constant background noise is rattling me. Why do bogans always have the noisiest, ugliest-sounding cars available? What’s the point? (Of the loud cars, I mean. Hell, and the bogans. What’s the point of them, too. Please don’t tell me.)

Think I’ll go watch the ’92 Australian cast performance of Jesus Christ Superstar!. I mean, it is that time of year, after all.
Bets are on for how long it’ll take before I start crying over John Farnham never being able to perform again. That’s what killed me, in the beginning, so.
Oh, misery misery miseryguts. Happy Easter, everyone & anyone.

(I’ll be better soon…)

in which we thank all the Powers in the world for the word ‘queer’

It amuses me to no end when men try to be passive-aggressive in order to get me to do something. Mostly because nothing makes me more likely to shut down completely faster.

And I’ll be honest; that fact does amuse me. Keep trying, little boy. You think I’ll lower myself to spar with you? Like I don’t have anything better to waste my time on.

Maybe I’m not as Seelie as I’d like the world to believe. Probably not. I’m probably just outright evil and desperately attempting to swallow it out of some internalised shame, or something.

Not right now, though. Right now I feel…nothing. I feel like I’m speeding and floating at the same time. Unhinged. A little feral. A snarling fox. A black hole for a heart. Sucking up all the light I find because I can’t make my own.

Maybe my ex was right all along; maybe I am a dead star.
Or maybe I’m a new kind of light altogether, and only some people can see it. Or want to.

Also, I’m not going to define myself using any other label than “queer” from now on. Not because I’m confused — I’m not. I’m physically attracted to men, but never romantically or sexually (not if they’re not fictional). I’m romantically, physically, and sexually attracted to women. Trans women, cis women, just women. It’s how I’m wired and I’ve known it for a long time, but the world and its insistence on labels just complicates something that is, at the end of the day, very simple.

My Estel will be a woman, or at the very least, not a cis man.
That’s all there is to say about that.

today’s quotes…

Put here until I can find my commonplace book…which is in a box, somewhere…with all my other notebooks…heavy, heavy sigh…

“The problem starts at that moment when the value of a suit exceeds the value of the man wearing it.”
— “Εκτός ύλης (Ektos Ylis; Off-Syllabus)”, Κώστας Λεϊμονής (Kostas Leimonis)

“Gandalf, if he had the Ring, would be far worse than Sauron. Because he would be righteous…and self-righteous.”
— Christopher Tolkien