sometimes i think gravity is a pity

WELL. I suppose it's probably a good thing that I didn't realize DreamWidth doesn't save post drafts. I started a post a few days ago about living without Oliver, but it's, like... I don't even know what to say about it. I think I was getting somewhere... about how I feel his absence in every door I realize I don't have to close, or every wrapper I find myself hiding, but it's not in any tangible way. I keep touching the fur I took home and his little bow tie, trying to conjure some memory of what it felt to share my life with him, but I can't, and that kind of scares me. Like, at what point do I become completely hollow?

BUT. All of that disappeared when I closed the window, and I can't even seem to bring those feelings back either, so I guess onwards we go, to the land of bullet points, because that's apparently all I can manage.

1. I am newly obsessed with Woo Dohwan. Did we see it coming? Absolutely not. Should we have? Y-yeah. Probably. He is beautiful. He is weird. He is soft. He has a freckle on his nose. He cries really beautifully and makes the most wonderful sad little noises. I just. I am not used to being this feral. I want to eat him up and lick the crumbs off my fingers. Ahh.

2. I can't stop watching K-Dramas (see above). My favorite so far is My Country: The New Age, which has major Chengxian vibes, but, like, elevated and deepened and fulfilled. These two fuckers carved me out, and I'll never be the same emotionally. I also really enjoyed Mad Dog despite the copious amount of corny dog puns and really bad German. It's a great story of trauma and found family, and I think the character development was well-paced. Who knew life insurance was so exciting!

3. I'm taking a writing class, and our first assignment was to write a list story. I tried to explore a relationship from meet-cute to divorce through a list of the things they might have named their children. I really like the idea of a list story, but I think I ultimately failed in execution, which is such a bummer. I got too distracted, adding details and trying to develop characters for the main couple, that I lost the original structure of the list. So I'm kind of disappointed in myself, and it's really hard to share it with the class knowing I didn't do a good job. But I did it anyway. Because I'm a brave little toaster.

4. I accidentally deleted my Tumblr account as I was trying to cull old side accounts and unfollow people from college, which ironically created the opposite problem on the new account I had to create. Now I'm only following one person, because I don't remember anyone's username, and I feel like it's sooo weird if I use Tumblr to talk about or share anything, because it's like I'm sending it directly to them... Which. The whole point of posting art/writing/whatever on social media is because I'm too chickenshit to share it directly with friends! Like, yes I will get sad when my friends don't see what I post, but to ask for feedback in an emotionally-mature and direct way? What? I could never!

On that note!

I'm away.

The thing about being diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma is that people love to tell me it's Not That Bad. This is both true, and meant to be reassuring. But it honestly isn't reassuring, because I really don't know how to process this whole thing. Even though it's not an aggressive type of skin cancer, and I'm having it removed soon, it's still skin cancer, and I'm only 32. It's a totally mind-boggling thing to have a very Adult Disease when there's so much about Being An Adult that I haven't done yet. I've never been in a romantic relationship with another person. I don't own a house. I can't cook to save my life. I haven't started a family/found family. I can't even define my own sexuality. And yet. And yet...

Even though it is true that this isn't really a big diagnosis in the sense that it will hugely alter my life or future plans, I still want sympathy. I still want people to bring me food or send me mail or take some burden off the chaos of living or just generally feel bad with me!

Anyway, I guess where I'm struggling here is trying to hit the emotional nail on the head somewhere between minimizing a cancer diagnosis and giving into my melodramatic tendencies. It certainly hasn't helped that the medical anxiety I'd tried to rationalize away was literally exactly what I was worried about!

I got the biopsy results just a few days before heading to Pittsburgh for a trip I'd been looking forward to for months, and I did my best not to let it hang over everything. On Sunday, I saw Ray Chen perform with the PGH Symphony, which was the main point of the trip. He played in Chicago in 2021, and I'd just had my car accident, so I couldn't attend that concert. When I saw that he was going to be even closer this year, I had to snatch a ticket.

( the sound of dreams coming true )

I did other things on my trip, too, even though I was plagued by anxiety and fatigue. The rental unit I'd booked turned out to be in a super convenient location that made driving in Pittsburgh (something I was afraid of) easier than I'd expected. I set up a networking meeting at Phipps and enjoyed seeing their beautiful bonsai and orchid exhibit. I spent Valentine's Day with my friend, and we hit up the History Center (I'm inexplicably obsessed with Heinz as a brand), got crepes for lunch, walked around some parks, then got dinner at a cute Korean restaurant downtown. I drove home today, but managed to walk around the Mexican War Streets and hit up the Mattress Factory before leaving. Proud of myself for Doing Stuff when all I wanted to do was sit in bed and feel bad.

I have work tomorrow, and I'm not looking forward to returning to the stress of this big event I'm planning. There are only 10 days left, and I'm honestly completely out of stamina. But I suppose I'll write more about that later.

Today was tough. Overall, I think I'll remember the better things, like daffodils in the sun, wearing my pretty new mask, being on campus again, my first mocha in a year, blooming witch-hazel, a rare leucistic squirrel, a breakthrough in my research project, etc. Objectively, those things were all very nice. But they didn't fill me up enough to make it through four hours of research in a museum basement and then a 1.5 hour long, in-person interview for a part-time temp job at a park. I was flagging by the time I got home, and it all just went downhill from there.

I tried taking a bath, but the water came out disappointingly cold. 

I tried making dinner, but I'm out of cooking oil.

I gave up on everything and decided to work on my embroidery project, and then I ruined it. 

I honestly think I jinxed it by being so pleased with how it was going and assuming I'd already finished the hardest parts. Faces are hard, and so is trying to figure out the right direction of stitches in jet-black hair. All of that had gone so well that I truly thought I could finish all the filler colors tonight and have it in the mail by tomorrow afternoon...

Alas, the fabric had other plans. I can usually forgive a little wrinkle here or there, but I ended up with a huge wrinkle right across his neck. So, I cut out all the stitches and tried again, but it just kept happening. I'd already cut out those same stitches multiple times due to poor color choices, so maybe the fabric was just fed up with me. I was certainly fed up with it. The seventh or eighth time I went to cut the stitches, I cut too much, and I just couldn't keep going. The stabilizer was shifting and everything was a mess.

I should have known not to work on this tonight. I work better in the morning as a general rule, and I was feeling the same buzzing, frenetic energy I felt when I ruined Jiang Cheng. I was just not in a calm or patient headspace, and I ultimately ended up committing a devastating act of violence with a pair of sewing scissors. 

(And then I absent-mindedly brought those same sewing scissors into the bathroom with me and put toothpaste on them instead of my toothbrush?) 

Anyway, I won't commemorate this tragedy by posting a picture of Xiao Xingchen in my trashcan. It's really horrible. I'm obviously upset. So little good has come up this past year that I rely (probably too much) on finishing these projects and the nice attention they get. It's been especially neat using embroidery to create fanart, because there's that extra layer of feeling like you're giving these characters a spa treatment or something. It requires such close, detailed care, and I just think they deserve that.

But the flipside of that very real emotional high is that every failure hits so hard, and I don't have any solid coping mechanisms at my disposal right now. (All my coping mechanisms are busy with, you know, the Big Stuff.)

It's all going to be fine tomorrow. I just need to talk it out somewhere so I can move on and try again. I'm still really excited about this thing. I still really want to surprise my friend, even if it takes a little longer than I'd hoped. The benefit of using a stabilizer is that I still have the original pattern, so it's not a total loss, and my second Jiang Cheng definitely came out better than the first anyway. I'm gonna drink some water. I'm gonna get some sleep. I'm gonna re-up my supply of the proper greys/whites/silvers. And then Xiao Xingchen is coming back to life whether he likes it or not.

(Xue Yang would be proud.)