hauntedblograffiti

Everyone is doing end-of-year lists of their top faves. I’ve been engaging with so much media this year it’s almost hard to keep track of what I’d consider the best for me. That’s not a bad thing! It’s been nice just sitting back and experiencing some stuff, and I keep hoping something will inspire that creative spark in me to get back into making art myself sometime. Anyway! Here’s a bunch of things I picked up this year and I wanna ramble about in a place that’s not just in my groupchats or my media journal!!

Continue reading ›

Patrick Wolf’s newest album came out a scant few months ago and I’ll be honest when I say it felt like my soul was healed a little thanks to it. There’s something about an artist from your youth making a comeback after over a decade away and it’s a feeling that’s almost like coming home, I suppose. Music—for me at least—serves as dots that connect my life from one point to the next, and there are very few musicians/bands that I listen to that tend to stick around this long so it’s a bit reassuring having a constant like that throughout the years.

The day rolled by of losing my sweet pug, and coming up is the 2nd anniversary of losing my dad. Grief is a weird thing in life; it’s like you’re in turbulent seas at first, afloat on a miserable little lifeboat, but after a while the storm calms down. Sometimes though, a big wave comes by and it feels like you’ll capsize again and it makes you remember the storm that got you lost at sea in the first place… but then, as every other big wave has, it passes by, and you can keep drifting along a little longer amongst smaller, more manageable waves.

I finally finished up the journal I’ve had for years (since I was 17!). Inconsistently writing entries, my tiny-ass handwriting, and my younger self’s tendency to smoosh as many entries onto a single page as possible meant that thing endured a lot of time and wear and tear (there was also the fact I was separated from it for months on end several times…). I still remember the day I braved the hot as hell summer heat to walk to Target back then to buy it, the walk back, and then settling down to write the first entry. That thing’s gone through a lot of big life changes with me, so it felt a little weird cracking open a new book to start fresh… but it was long past the time to do so. The funny thing about reading through ancient entries in a diary or journal is seeing how much some of you changes, but how much parts of you still reflect that same person.

Mononoke movie releases on streaming at the end of the month ✨ The leak got dropped late in summer which I totally didn’t rush off to find. Anyway, I’m super excited for it and I hope everyone goes and watches it!! I’m super hype knowing I’ve got two more movies to come, and I’m going to absolutely collapse waiting for them both to come out.

I am shooketh, I actually had spam messages to clear out. Where did they come from, how did you find this place??

For a few weeks after pug’s passing, you could still find me trying to step around the spot he laid on the floor beside me, or slowly opening my bedroom door to avoid accidentally whacking him in the face (he liked the lurk right in front of it if I left the room ahaha). It really hurt clearing out all his stuff, but I gave a lot of things like face wipes, treats, and ear cleaner to my sister and BIL for their dogs. I also gave a small dog bed I was planning to lay out for him to my BIL’s mother to use for her tiny dog. It’s kind of weird still sitting here without hearing him snoring beside me… I do miss him a lot, and I think I will for a long, long time. I’m not sure if I’ll ever wind up with another pet because I do get his by losses really hard.

I actually got all dressed up for Halloween this year for handing out candy (first time I’ve done it since moving out here, kinda whack). On that note, I JUST learned that telling jokes when trick-or-treating was like, only a thing in the city I grew up in. My world view is shattered!! Anyway, I had like three different teens compliment my fit lol My sister also couldn’t get over it, but I did go all out with an outfit and even put on a wig (she thought it was real ahaha) and makeup. It was fun!

We got hit with snow right after Halloween! It was absolutely freezing on the days around it, and the dramatic temperature difference absolutely killed my sinuses (when aren’t they dying, though?). I’m personally enjoying the drop in temperature after how ridiculously warm last winter was. I actually had my window wide open to make my room an icebox because I’m an absolute weirdo like that.

The niblings all have birthdays within a week of each other, so I ended up baking a spring fling cake at my sister’s request for all of them (the twins got mini cakes~ they were super cute!). It was really fun and tasted delicious, though I really need to learn to make double the frosting/icing/whateverthehell whenever I make cakes because it’s always never enough. I feel really honored I got to make the very first birthday cake for the twins and see their cute reactions to it, hehe.

DST’s regular ending absolutely destroyed my soul and I am suffering these days, but we’re fine. It’s all fine, I’ll be okay. On the bright side, it’s making me feel tired much earlier in the evening so I do end up crawling into bed a bit earlier than I normally would, but on the downside my insomnia still exists and makes it impossible to fall asleep in good time. I was using a sleep tracking app for a while (now that I actually could as pug used to interfere with my data), and my average time to fall asleep tended to be no less than 40 minutes most nights.

p.s. may I drop the newest card of my blorbo on you. His hairstyle!!!! Wear that more my guy plz

I’m pretty sure if you look up ‘exhaustion’ in the dictionary, you’d find my picture right next to it LOL For real though, I’m absolutely drained—been feeling this way for a solid two months now, really, and it’s awful because I feel like I’m not even running on fumes anymore. I keep chanting to myself, “gotta keep rolling til [things I’m looking forward to] happens!!” It’s kind of working but hooooo boy, it ain’t as convincing as it used to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Speaking of said things, I’ve been hearing so much about the backer-only releases about the new Mononoke movie and I am going to go feral. Please someone leak that shit I am BEGGING. I’m deeply unhinged about Kusuriuri, like literally words cannot describe how far gone I am about the guy lmao

Anyway, SMTV:V comes out in just a handful of days!! I had a lot of intentions to finish up my level grind in FFXIV over the next month but alas, I have been terribly lazy and unmotivated to even login for anything, much less leveling pains. So once that comes out I may or may not vanish off the face of the earth as I go into full grind mode to experience everything. The original game was such a letdown in basically all but terms of the battle system, so I’m hoping this fixes a lot of the issues I had with it (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

I caught some kinda sickness a couple of weeks ago, it’s been miserable. I’ve still got a cough after fighting off a fever for a solid week. Is this aging. Is this the pain of getting old. I feel so weak. Give me back my wasted youth. Anyway, I’ve had practically no time to rest to actually fight it off (lame) and I’ve practically been chugging flu medicine to get by. May my liver survive the ordeal 🙏

You know. I was getting exhausted after cooking basically 4-5 days a week for like, 3 years straight. So my BIL’s family (moved in with us) volunteered to take that over and I was like, fuck yeah! But they make the most unseasoned white people food I have ever encountered. I’m pretty sure his mom cooked a pork roast in straight water in the slow cooker one night. I could not save that shit with any amount of seasoning. Monkey’s paw successfully curled, I guess. Like, bro, I’m depressed enough as-is and these miserable meals ain’t helping.

It’s not even officially summer but the weather has been scorching so much lately! We had a couple of 90∘F days. Because of the disparity between how cold it is in the basement and the main floor, my sister likes to have a bit of a fit over the AC being on… but it gets miserably hot up here, and there’s an elderly lady now to consider! My room alone tends to be a good 10∘ hotter than the rest of the house because it has practically no airflow and I do have my desktop in here, which doesn’t help… regardless, I know I’m gonna be miserable this summer.

I did a fresh layout on Killer Loop and I’m really fond of it. I decided to poke around with using grid layout to get it set up, rather than falling back on the junk I’ve been using since I was a teen like usual. I feel so much like a dinosaur trying to code these days; I know in theory you can do things so much easier than back in the day when we were just hacking junk together to work around limitations, but I am an idiot and it’s a lot to learn. One day I’ll master responsive layouts, but until then I am going to perish trying to search up everything each time I slap a layout together. On that note, I know I just changed up my main site like, this last winter, but I’m not really feeling it now and I want to do something a bit more clean. I need to hunt down an image that inspires me and go for it!!

It’s funny how ‘small web’ is having this revival with personal websites to fight against the era of social media, but then you get sites like Neocities where it’s still that. Everyone’s there making whatever site to appeal to the nostalgia factor (of which most of the people making these sites weren’t around to experience the heyday of personal ones). You can tell me it’s all far more intimate than socmed, but the fact that there’s view counts on sites and popularity sorting means it’s the same old shit you can find anywhere else, it’s just now people are able to flex some coding skills as they try their best to imitate the feel of ‘the old web.’ I dunno, it’s just weird. Even as far back as the earliest years of the ’10s you’d find people still crafting sites for themselves using things like freewebs (webs now I think? I ain’t keeping up with this crap).

Anyway. Someone revive more MP3 rotation-style sites with me. I miss those days the most. I miss finding new music that way!!

For an academic study, I was offered twelve weeks of therapy paid for by the researchers. I gotta say, twelve weeks isn’t nearly enough to dig into everything that’s wrong with me, but it was an insightful time digging into my younger years and how they’ve impacted my life today; I struggle to form genuine connections to people and have a deep-rooted fear of intimacy because of the abandonment I experienced while a teenager, and I never had time to really process through all of that because I was stuck in survival mode for so much of that time. There was so much validation of what I’d been through and reassurance that I was doing what I had to get by and that it wasn’t bad, because it was all I was capable of.

And so we worked on my grief. She shared a video with me fairly early on; it’s only a few minutes long and more in relation to children, but it really gave an image to how the grief I’ve been carrying with me all these years has felt:

If only I could afford to keep doing therapy :’)

A good while ago I got a copy of Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore. I forgot I even had it, honestly, but as I was digging through my ebook folders I stumbled upon it and realized that it would probably be as good a time as ever to start tackling it. I’m not that far in (around the 35 page mark? Hard to tell with this ebook reader I’m using), but so much space in here is given to talk about how we are not given enough time to grieve.

“…when we are pushed by our culture, this cult of pleasure, to heal on a fixed timescale or to somehow “choose happiness” over grief, when we are socially constrained and unable to give expression to our emotions, we feel unsafe, misunderstood, and isolated. And when this happens we may, to the detriment of humanity, retract from the world as we begin to, quite rightly, feel frightened and mistrusting of the way our honest grief will be met.”

I’ve had to face another type of grief in losing my father two months ago. In a way, it still doesn’t feel real; I never got to see his body, which is still languishing in a mortuary nearly two-hundred miles away, waiting for me alone to gather the funds to finally afford to cremate him as he wished. (It’s funny how I remember that; he told it to me so, so long ago, how he wanted that so he could fit where mom is buried back in St. Louis.) It isn’t the same as the grief I still carry from losing my mother; that one holds Sadness, with Regret and Longing mixed in. The grief I hold for my father has Regret, mixed with equal parts Sadness and Anger. A lot of people feel anger when going through this, you know, but I think I’m mostly angry because he didn’t take care of himself. He could’ve lived longer. He could’ve seen the birth of his two other grandchildren.

I had to wrap the birthday presents he got for my niece. He brought them on his last visit, just a few days before he died. Do you know how that feels? I look at my niece sometimes and think, you will forget him. You will not remember how happy you were when he visited. But I will remember.

I saved his last voicemail to me. “Hey. Call me back. Love you, bye.” It’s seven seconds long. I backed it up on five separate cloud storage spaces. I wish I had called him more often. He often told me it was lonely down there. He would have turned 58 in October.

It has been 18 years and 9 months since I lost my mother. It has been 2 months since I have lost my father. I now carry two balls of grief inside of me.