reverie v. reality

https://reverie.bearblog.devreverie v. reality2025-09-12T23:56:40.479875+00:00reveriehiddenpython-feedgenhello there, wandererhttps://reverie.bearblog.dev/weeds-in-the-garden/weeds in the garden2025-08-07T14:03:39.058420+00:00reveriehidden

When I find myself shying away from writing again, I try to go back to my first few posts and remind myself of my reasons for starting.

When I first began, I felt incredible: so creative! so excited! & so in touch with a piece of me that I thought had shriveled up and died. Still, life gets in the way and I am - unfortunately - highly susceptible to changes in momentum. It only takes a small stone underfoot to trip me up and send me tumbling back down the mountain of self-assurance, right into the pit of doubt.

So, I've been thinking a lot about where the flinch comes in. I could write a hundred thousand posts about the long line of hurdles I place in front of myself in an effort to circumvent disappointment, but in the end it would just be another small way to stall: psychoanalyzing myself into oblivion; looking at her through a frame and saying, Oh, Eve, yeah. Well, she does this and that and this because of X and Y and Z, you know? without ever really getting to ...but what does she do about it? I know I'm avoidant. I know I'm self-flagellating. What to do, though? Where to go?

In my mind's eye, it goes like this: the curtain pulls up and I'm not on stage. In fact, I'm not even in the theatre. I freaked out three hours before and decided to stay home, in case I fucked everything up and made a fool of myself. So there's the flinch, right? It's early on in the game. If I can keep myself in longer, get myself out of the house and in the room, I'm that much closer to my goals and it's that much harder to make a run for it once I'm in the building and everyone's waiting for me. (Not that I'm saying anyone's waiting on me. This is something else.)

I come back, again and again, to what I've said before:

All this to say: I think this thing, this feeling that I am some insubstantial wisp of a person is a key component in what is holding me stagnant in my life right now. I feel substanceless, I therefore act substanceless - lose passion for my hobbies, talk to friends less, hide from new experiences...

A lot has changed - in the past six months, let alone the last two years - and I've chipped away at this feeling in many places, but in others it grows and clings and suffocates. It doesn't help that I'm a slow writer in the first place. Even if I have the spark of an idea, a lot of the time I need to let it sit and percolate. That natural lull in my writing process is just enough of a crack for my flinch to creep in and start sprouting little mean-spirited weeds all over my creativity garden, and I'm really not much of a gardener in the first place.

I'm desperately curious to know what other people do if and when this feeling appears. Bulldoze through it? Wind around it? Sink beneath it? How do you get out?

I texted Shrimp (my soon-to-be sister-in-law, who is an accomplished artist) the other day to ask her for her advice, because I knew she would be real with me:

\[sort-of transcript, with edits for brevity\]

Me: how do you put art out into the world without feeling so miserably embarrassed? when I post writing online, I feel kinda mortified afterwards!

Shrimp: It took time, but when I got to be proud of my work it was easier to post about it. Grow your ego a little bit.

Me: okay, I will try to grow my ego a bit!!!! I randomly get struck by the “nobody cares what you have to say & ur dumb to think they do” laser beam and freeze up, which I recognize is a fear-based overreaction

Shrimp: This is totally a canon event that every creative goes through. It also helped me to show the work to people I know care about me. What are you scared of sharing right now?

Me: I just post my thoughts or poems or whatever, so it’s not like I’m writing anything that I think is life-changing for anyone reading, but sometimes when I put something out there, I have to log out for like 48 hours so I can’t think too hard about people reading and perceiving me

Shrimp: “You have to lower your give-a-shit factor." I say those words out loud to myself often! You have to really really actually believe your work has value, which is the hard part imo. Especially because your art should NOT be for everybody. there will be people who don’t care for it! If everyone cared for it, it’s likely too easily digestible!

Grow my ego, grow my little self-esteem garden, and take the time to weed out those little, nagging thoughts that grow into the thorny flowers of my flinch.

I want it to be easy, though I fear that the line between weed and wildflower is non-existent here. How can it be easy, when I care too much about what I make, what I write, what I love? Caring brings doubts, I think. Regardless of the fact that I’m just on here blogging for the hell of it, I feel a sense of responsibility and a sense of vulnerability when I write. A poem, a diary entry, a list of things I've seen - these are all little pieces of me, curated and carefully displayed. Even if only one person¹ sees them, I want that connection to feel important. That desire makes it impossible to ever really stop all of the doubts from creeping in. To flinch might better be written as to care. If I care too little, the garden is barren. If I care too much, it’s overgrown.

Still, I want a garden and I want to see it lush and vibrant and full of color. There are fears I have to overcome in order to have these things, much like Shrimp said, and there is more than one skill to build on within those fears. I have to make myself tough, hardy, and difficult to pierce, for there are weeds with sticking thorns to carefully pluck out. I must learn to keep a warm, discerning eye, for there are dandelions that I should let thrive.

You tend to these things a little at a time, I suppose — learn what to keep and what to let go of: chickweed or yarrow; clover or crabgrass.

Good luck out there,
Eve

• • • • • • • •

• • nine • •

I try too hard to make the words pretty; lose the truth in the shine of my polished poetics. A time and place for that. I need to be present to make it real.

Less romanticizing to the point of rose-tinted-ness. You have to love the boring parts, the ugly parts, the crying-shrieking-empty parts. They come back into a beautiful line of days, again and again.

• • ten • •

The slouching, withered stick in my yard is a rose. One week of consistent watering, and I stepped out into the morning sun to find a perfect, deep-pink bud tucked up and sleeping. Just a little bit of love to make some things thrive.

Why does that surprise me? A sprinkle of effort and attention - a faulty garden-hose worth of love - to reap endless rewards. Why do I find myself in the same stage of forgetting? Water things to see them grow. It’s as simple as that.

• • eleven • •

I dearly love the shoreline between sleep and waking: that perfect liminal space where I am tethered or floating in equal measures. The waves of dreams crest lightly over me on the sun-warmed sand, which is made up of pillows and sheets. Nightfish - soft, crystalline, blue - crawl or swim ashore, then vanish into the light of day.

The waters do not threaten to pull me under. They pass over me in slow, chimeric spirals.

• • twelve • •

Notes from observing the house I pass by on the way home: frequently, a curious and ever-revolving cast of stray cats. Chickens, sometimes, or goats. At times, I slow down to talk to them through the passenger window, though they rarely acknowledge my interruption of their earnest foraging.

There’s a hammock strung from the center-most tree. When it rains, I see a silhouette beneath, arms folded thoughtfully behind their head as they gaze up at that grand canopy: their homegrown umbrella, their green-tinged oasis.

I dreamt the moon fell
from the sky, into
my hands, and you
were in it: little lightning
bug in a clear jar. I shook
you once, twice; cried
and kissed the glass
as apology; said sorry
in my mind, but not aloud;
looked for the catch or clasp
and - finding none - set you
in my purse (unzipped)
and walked us home.

On the drive home from work, the deep greens of the roadside ditches are flush with pale orange stars: day lilies, my online search tells me. Herald of summer, perhaps.

As June trickles into July, the trees grow lush, and the days grow long here. The lingering sunshine energizes me, but I miss the quiet light of spring and the cooler morning air. Now I sit on the porch in the evenings and fan myself with my book, sipping desperately at a quickly-condensating¹ glass of water. Drinking tea on the porch at 9 AM on the weekend is an exercise in frustration and overheating now; a far cry from the perfect equilibrium of hot-cold I enjoyed in March.

I switch to cold brew with breakfast and eye the ever-encroaching dog days of summer with trepidation.

Despite working a 9 to 5 for almost five years, I still feel the anticipatory build left over from a school-schedule idea of Summer: the speeding slope of May leading up onto the hill of June, over into the crest of July, and down through the denouement of August. And yet, the feeling never falls into line the way I expect it to. Oh, what’s that quote?

I wait every year for summer, and it is usually good, but it is never as good as that summer I am always waiting for.

Martha Gellhorn

I’m chasing a shadow in time, I think: something I see before me that remains just out of reach, whether running or walking or standing still. The image of myself cast at the slightest angle ahead of me — like the sense memory of bicycle tires rushing over the pavement in a dizzy spin, reflected in umbra from the evening light; I race to recall what the sun makes of me.

A futile effort. Even if I catch it, I cannot hold it in any way that feels real. So what then? Look for ways to dream new Summers? Wash them from the driveway like chalk, to make room for new marks? I try: read more poetry, ritualize sunscreen layers, sit in the gloaming and watch fireflies wink in staccato.

Does the magic come from the attention I pay, or just from memory itself? I have to ask myself poetically, so it doesn’t feel so pathetic to be longing for a thread of a feeling; a string on the pinky to help me remember that place in time once again.

Good luck out there,
Eve

• • • • • • • •

Last night, I dreamt of a movie that doesn’t exist: The Long and Slow Unpeeling of an Orange.

The dream comes apart in layers. In the first, I am within the movie, watching the characters pass by - ghost in the narrative. A layer up: telling a friend about the plot (more than a little perplexed and irritated with it…"Why would they name the movie something so unrelated to the main storyline?"). Even further up, I find myself in a space where I’d already awoken and was trying to explain the first two layers of the “dream” to my mom over the phone.

I always feel disoriented in the mornings after waking within a dream. There's a series of hours after I surface where I have to watch things closely, worried that I'm in yet another tier of dreaming. (Perhaps Paprika (2006) or Inception (2010) has contributed to those fears a bit...?)

I pay close attention to my dreams. This is mostly because - in the instances that actually I remember them - they are incredibly vivid and cinematic. I find this humorous, considering I don’t think I have a good internal sense of visualization when I'm awake. On the Aphantasia Apple Visualization Scale, I think I might say that I fall somewhere around a 3. (I've always struggled to imagine a perfect picture of what characters and clothing look like when described in books, for example.) Yet my dreams, when I look back on them, are full-scale, movie-level 1s. They feel just as real and tangible as these keys beneath my fingers; a world I could surely interact with, for how detailed it seems.

I can see sunlight pooling like molten oil on a river’s surface, and the mottled reflection of a train on the bridge crossing over it. I can see the distinct shading of the undulating darkness in a hallway as I creep towards a distant light; the chip in the egg-brown coffee mug next to me in the cafe; the freckles and blemishes on my friend's flushed face as she greets me in the cold outside of the theatre, wrapped in her puffy blue jacket.

Does it mean something, then, that my imagination in sleep is so daring? Why can I see an old friend for dinner in a dream, but fail to remember the color of her glasses and the line of her nose when awake? It feels, in some ways, like lighting a match in the day versus the night: just a flash of color, when the sun is up; but a stark illumination in the dark.

I'm not the type to read too deeply into my dreams. In most ways, I know that they're the reconfiguration and consolidation of data that our brain has picked up over the day, so when I wake from something that feels a little too close to 'a meaning', I try to let it pass over me without letting it consume me.

(My mother is a 'meaning' person. She can find a line of connection in all of my dreams - even the ones I'm sure she'll consider the absurd firings of my neurons in the night.

Me: This odd little character kept stealing into the house to try to marry me and I ended up in a screaming match with it in the driveway telling it that I wouldn't accept its proposal while it howled, "NooooooooooOOoooooOOoooooooooo," with its fingers in its ears. Weird, right?

Mom: Well, that's obviously about Set-Up.

Me: NO! I think it was just a movie I watched the night before!)

Still, sometimes I wonder what my subconscious is trying to tell me. Does it mean something; a dream of a movie about a train line that takes the dead to a place between life and death? Is life the orange, unpeeling? Is death? I wasn't afraid in the dream, just present. I see, so clearly, the platform between worlds: a perfect, lush forest. So quiet and speckled with light, and filled with the gentle shadows of other people who are waiting on someone to arrive.

What is the lesson? Is there one?

To quote Alice Notley's "The Poetry of Everyday Life" (1988)¹:

I'm saying: we dream stories and scenes, but we don't live them. \[...\] What about the fact that we dream while we're awake? And why can't I be better at that?

I just don't know.

Good luck out there,
Eve

• • • • • • • •

Trout, Fawn, and Pepper¹ are coming over tonight to celebrate Fawn's birthday. Originally, I'd thought that F&T were going out to dinner with her family, so Pep and I had made plans to watch a double-feature of Yellowjackets episodes, since we had to rain check last week's drop.

I ran around today and yesterday getting some items together for a relaxed birthday celebration: chocolate cake mix, chocolate and cream cheese frosting (I want to see if we can layer the middle with the cream cheese and make the top chocolate), and all the fixings for mojitos, since Fawn likes them! I think F&T are going to bring stuff over to make spring rolls. Not sure if I have all the ingredients for the peanut sauce, now that I think about it....wuh-oh.

(A pause while I called them to ask if they have sesame oil. They do. Crisis averted.)

I'm beyond happy that I get to celebrate with them, and I've really been enjoying hosting, too. I've had two friends in town in the past two weekends who stopped by and I feel an unexpected sense of pride in my house, especially now that I've had some time to settle in and make each room feel homey. I have a comfy couch for all my friends to relax on, and some couch-side tables I can pull around to make an area for board-gaming and conversation. I have cute plants and mugs that my friends have gifted me, and I've made sure Willow and Algernon have a dozen places where they can supervise or hide, as they see fit.

I wondered, when I moved, if I would feel lonely after all of the time spent with other people, but I've been enjoying my solitude so thoroughly - so voraciously - that a new part of me wonders how I managed without the quiet and time to myself before. I like the quiet. I like waking up and falling asleep when I want, without worrying about my roommates' schedules. I like sitting on the porch on the weekends and drinking cup after cup of tea, with the Moomin (1990) TV series on for background noise. I like letting Wil and Al have free reign of the space all the time, so they can come cuddle on the couch with me whenever they want. These things seem so simple, but wowza, am I learning to appreciate them now that they're possible again. And my weekends are still full of the people I love, so I never truly feel alone.

I feel very grateful that I have a space for my friends. A place where I can host birthdays, and - maybe, some day - dinner and holiday parties! I've always dreamed of having a Summer Solstice picnic in my yard (though it gets hellishly hot here in June). There are so many things to plan; so many possibilities! It's really exciting.

This entry isn't really going anywhere, I guess! But I've been wanting to write more, now that I've settled into my new job and home. Today, I feel full to the brim with happiness. Maybe it's the spring sunlight outside, or the knowledge that I will see several people I adore this evening. I try to treasure that feeling and capture it where I can.

Good luck out there,
Eve

• • • • • • • •

Thank you, Kayla, for the tag on Ava's Bear Blog Question Challenge (+ Silly Questions for Fun from Dabi)!!!

• • • •

bear blog questions

why did you make the blog in the first place?

Oh man, haha. I mean, I have it mapped out a bit more neatly in my restoring my sense of self post, but overall, I just felt really like I didn't value my internal dialogue at all; I didn't think I had anything to offer and was really just floating through life like a jellyfish or something! I wanted to reconnect with myself. I really admired some of the people who I'd been following on here in the way that they were able to make their daily lives so relatable through words. I wanted to feel like I could matter a little bit, too! :)

why did you choose Bearblog?

I like that Bear is a smaller platform. I know it's already grown a LOT, just in the year since I've joined, but it still feels more personable & cozy than some of the other options I’ve poked around on & I enjoy that. I have terrible stage fright, so it made me feel a little less like I was stepping onto a stage in front of thousands of people. Sort of the difference between going to a Broadway show that's making the rounds versus your local edition of the same play. Still something you love, and often performed well, but a little less intimidating and hopefully the concessions aren't $30 a pop. I've lost control of the imagery, but you get what I mean.

have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yes! I had a Xanga back in the day (don't laugh) and I tried Blogger and Tumblr at one point. I think I tried another platform during undergrad, but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. None of it really stuck! I lasted maybe two months before bowing out, so this is the longest I've lasted! (A year now, as of August 31st - though I missed my one year blogaversary due to settling in to my new medications. What's a girl to do? Life gets in the way.)

do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

I write in an iOS app called Runestone. I am inordinately fond of one-time paid apps and will shell out a flat price with a little less hesitation than I might with a subscription app, if my test drives go well. I really like Runestone, though. It has a lot of option for Language (i.e. Astro, C++, Elm, HTML, Julia, etc. - many of which I've never heard of), and when I utilize Markdown, I can set my color scheme so I can more easily see my Markdown commands in-app. Only wish is that it transferred to PC, but since I generally write on my iPhone or iPad, it really works well for me 99.9% of the time.

when do you feel most inspired to write?

Ahhhhh, I find this question so hard to answer! Let's see...when I'm sad, when I'm happy, when the day has been really interesting, when the day has been incredibly slow, when I want to talk to someone, or when I wish everyone would leave me the fuck alone. Sometimes none of those occasions move me at all! I guess, mainly, I'm most inspired when I feel real and in touch with myself. When I feel out of joint, everything I write feels like a joke; like I'm some amateur play-acting in the big leagues and everyone knows I'm barely managing to make it onto the field. And then, at other moments, the smallest things make me want to write down every little detail, like: Today, I was walking into work, and the sun was so bright - catching, crystalline, in the plume of my breath - as I crossed the lot, and my heels clicked so crisply & rhythmically on each stride that I felt the moment fossilize within those three points: my breath, the sun, the sound. And other times, it's like I can have the best, most memorable weekend ever with my friends and yet I can't get a word out! Um, so, to summarize: I really don't know! The inspiration comes in flashes!

do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Hit or miss - ramblings, I usually post pretty immediately after finishing them, but anything without that tag has often sat & marinated in the drafts for a bit. I keep three "stages" of formulation in my writing app: drafts, edits, and published. (Easy enough to keep track of, right?) Posts that are "d • title" in my app are the messiest and most disjointed versions of a post. Those could be torn to scraps and made into new posts, or scrapped outright, if I feel so moved. It’s only once I have a general idea of where I'm actually going with the post that I change it to "e • title" so I know it's closer to publishing. Generally, I just need to rework a few sentences or reorder a paragraph or two. And once it's all done, I change it to "p • title" and drop it into the "Published" folder!

your favorite post on your blog?

I'll go with today i am miserable, but tomorrow i won't be (litany against recurrent woe), because it helps me make it through hard days & hopefully helps someone else, too.

any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

Yes - probably a light scrub and bubble on the design, but not within the new few months! Maybe once stuff settles down at work and at home. Right now, I get in the door and put on Leverage in the background to relax and turn my brain all the way off. I cannot fuck with my blog setup right now, haha. She stays how she is until the stars align once more!!!

• • • •

silly questions for fun

do you believe in aliens?

Yes! Maybe not in any way we would conceive of, but I think there's some form of intelligent life out there, even if it's just a repetition of us à la the Poincaré recurrence theorem. (This was the closest thing I could find to what I’m trying to describe.)

if you had to dress in just one color for the rest of your life, what would it be?

I'm going to say blue, because it's my favorite color and I feel like there are so many different shades (that I actually love and would not avoid), so the monochromaticness of it would be variable????

favorite random fact that you know

Some patterns of damage to the visual cortex (part of the occipital lobe) cause something called "Blindsight" — meaning that someone might believe wholeheartedly that they can't see, but can still avoid objects in their way or "guess" what an object in front of them is, if pressed.

childhood dream

To run a huge, farm-sized rescue for animals. To be honest, this dream has definitely followed me into adulthood. Would love to see it to fruition if the means ever become possible one day...(fingers crossed).

if you had to be a teacher, which subject would you teach?

English Literature (favorite class in school) or Psychology (my graduate degree). If I could Frankenstein the two together into a combo class similar to a few of the more specific EngLit classes I took in Undergrad, I would be in heaven - pure and simple!

if you were an astronaut going to the space, which items would you bring with you?

I want to say my cats, but I feel like they would hate it in space, so I'd let them hang out with Trout & Fawn while I was away. Depending on how long I was going for, I think some answers might change, but let's say a month, for now. Definitely some books; maybe two that I already know & love, and two I've been eyeing for awhile. Some way to listen to music. Puzzles (sudoku & crosswords, probably). A notebook and one of those fancy pens that let you write in space.

only being able to run, or only being able to walk?

Run! I have PLACES to be. Maybe I can bring it down to a jog, if I need to be in the moment, but it would send me into a tailspin to have to stroll everywhere. I wanted to say walk for the atmosphere I think it would create of "learning to embrace the moment" but also I know I would be kicking my own ass up and down the street every day because I would end up running late to any and everything if I had to walk.

favorite letter?

I actually love all vowels ferociously...but in particular, E and A. E feels more "crystalline" and A feels "warmer". I think I have to go with A as my favorite. Also, it's so fun to write AAAAAAAA.

a memorable song that has impacted you in some way?

This question makes me break out in hives, haha. It's so hard to pick a song and justify the way it's impacted me.

• a song that makes me incandescently happy: Don't Stop Me Now by Queen

don't stop me / 'cause i'm having a good time

• a song that makes me weep: Get Lonely by The Mountain Goats

and i will try to find / a little comfort in it

• a song that reminds me of people I care about: Orange Sky by Alexei Murdoch

that's when i miss you / you who are my home

• a song that makes me feel real: Stop this Train by John Mayer

stop this train / i want to get off and go home again / i can't take the speed it's moving in

• a song that I would have on “Eve's OST”: No One by Aly & AJ

so open all the blinds and all the curtains

favorite celestial body (planets, stars, constellation, galaxies, etc)

The moon, most definitely, and then the Witch Head Nebula. She's so cute! & I often wish Laika had a constellation of her own.

• • • • • • • •

tagging: misu

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, morning, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

I toss and turn in my sleep; if I don't make my bed every morning and tuck the far corners in, I find myself in a tangled coil of sheets and duvets in a matter of nights. There's something about it that I don't mind. I like the twist of it: a comfortable cocoon of blankets as opposed to a flat layer. I try to find forgiveness for my lack of bedmakingness within this enjoyment. Sometimes I wonder how much of life is just letting some things roll off your shoulders.

I get tangled in intangible things, too. Feelings, patterns, ideas, perceptions: old versions of self; lines I draw between my life and other peoples'; the paths between one moment and the next. You know, the usual. All of the time, I am unraveling layers and layers of life. It's like one big rubber-band ball, or a knotted skein of yarn, but it never ends. I can never find the center.

Something in the beginning of a new year makes me all the more aware of these messy, overlapping parts of myself. Most likely it's the sudden, glaring beam of unmet resolutions shining down upon me. Oh, hey, remember us? What the fuck happened, huh? I smother those thoughts as tenderly as I can manage, but the guilt is still there.

I get scared a lot, in a lot of odd & incomprehensible little ways. Often about things that really don't matter. If I think too much about what waits in the heart of all of the matters I need to pick apart, I go cold all over. I make a maze of myself and then refuse to move through it.

I moved recently. I'm changing positions at my job. Objectively good things - yet, I lie in bed at night and take deep breaths to ward off the chill of fear that touches me quietly on the sides of my neck. So, again: the forgiveness. I'm coming back to that, is what I'm saying. I get scared. I twist myself into knots. I try to look at them kindly; try to work around or through them.

Yesterday, I made hot tea and wiped down the sink. I ran a load of laundry and folded all of it while I listened to the same song on repeat. I watched House while I played Sudoku, then swapped to Teen Titans because all of the medical emergencies were making me want to pull up Web MD. I woke up early today and read for thirty minutes before I went to work. I read a Youtube comment that made me smile on my lunch break. Over Christmas, I painted a rock to look like Snoopy. The rock was perfectly shaped like his head. Fucking incredible. I feel happy, like I'm finding some measure of joy in the little things that I'd momentarily lost.

I wonder what I'll find next.

Good luck out there,
Eve

I had therapy this afternoon - which I was dreading and wanted more than anything to cancel - and plans with Pepper to grab dinner and a movie, which I am really glad I had set up in advance, because I ended up needing the mood boost to balance out all of the crying. I got into a huge fight with my mom Thursday night. Usually, we call each other in the morning after a fight, but today it was radio silence on both of our ends until late afternoon. I cried the whole drive to my therapy appointment (partly my bad, because I should have changed songs the moment I started crying along, but I was kind of hoping to get the worst of the crying out prior to therapy, so I wouldn't blubber my way through the entire session...I am not a coherent crier). It was a little bit about the fight and a little bit about how I feel like I'm just fucking up any and everything I get my hands on these days.

Anyway, apparently I'm, like, therapist-verified depressed, instead of what I thought was just think I've been feeling low and a bit lost-depressed. I had my suspicions, I guess. I definitely haven't felt like myself. I just...thought it was a low point? The sudden apathy towards things I'm usually really passionate about maybe should have tipped me off, but it's always harder to see it from up close, right? So I'm moving forward with trying medication. I've been on anxiety meds before, which means I have an idea of what I'm in for. I'm having...a lot of mixed emotions about it all, I guess. Nice to have someone tell me that some of the behaviors and emotions I've been tearing myself apart over are perfectly normal and very much branches spiraling out from the same source. I feel sad, still, though. And, ah, disappointed, perhaps? A bit relieved? Hard to untangle. I guess in some ways I thought I would pop back out of this feeling any day now. Just - whoosh - sunshine again. Gotta deal with the leaky roof a little longer.

Needless to say, after that big whomp of an afternoon, I was really, really happy to see Pepper. We usually hit this one restaurant next to the movie theatre when we go see a film. We're definitely creatures of habit and this place has good margaritas. Then we walk over to the shop next door to snag some cheap candy before strolling back over to the theatre. Confession: I really cannot resist the siren song of a Cherry Slushee, so I'm always suckered into getting one when we go through the line for popcorn. Pepper has a system where she asks them to fill it halfway, adds the butter, and then gets them to top it off with more popcorn. I was unaware that this was something people were particular about, but we ran into some other friends tonight who were heading to a different movie and I got a good laugh out of Pepper and one of the duo very seriously discussing this system. I made eye contact with the other popcorn-butter-ratio-neutral friend and we both shrugged. I just like to eat Sno-Caps with my popcorn. That's about where my interest checks out.

I thought the movie was entertaining, although there were at least two narrative decisions that I was kind of surprised by? It was a good time, though, with a lot of big audience reactions. I blasted one of my upbeat playlists on the way home. Got pulled into a kind of heavy discussion once I got in the door, but now I've escaped and am enjoying a moment of quietude. Algernon is sitting next to me, which is kind of out of character for him? He's usually sort of an explorer, so I find it funny he's being a bit of a snuggle bug tonight. Maybe he knows it was a weird day.

Good luck out there,
Eve

Spent last weekend tucked away in a tiny cabin with my friend Pepper. We'd planned the excursion out tentatively in the spring, but decided to hold off on locking it in until we were through the majority of July, since it was a really busy month for us both. Luckily, our schedules worked out, so we hopped in the car Friday evening, loaded to the gills with coolers of yummy beverages and stuff for weekend meals, and headed up towards the mountains. It was rainy and overcast pretty much the whole drive up, but considering it literally poured buckets last time we went here (I think that was, like, two years ago?), a little sprinkle was nauttttthin and we managed to get everything unloaded into the cabin with only a little rain tracked in behind us.

There's a local spot to eat nearby, so after we got the majority of our stuff inside, we ran out for a bite to eat. Oh my GOOOOOOOOD, it was so tasty! We split the chocolate torte for dessert and it was seriously incredible. Then, we snuggled down into our pajamas and settled in for night one, for which our first priority was: watch some fun movies.

I'm actually not great at keeping up with movies (though getting a Letterboxd account has helped, since it at least lets me know what my friends are watching and sometimes moves me to give anything they rate highly a try), but Pepper is a movie fanatic and keeps me apprised of good ones. Unfortunately for her, I had panic-downloaded a random selection of stuff, since I didn't think we would have much internet connection...aaaaaaaand, I was correct. Fortunately for both of us, I somehow managed to secure a pretty good array. We finished one movie, started a second, and then paused to go to sleep.

In the morning, we woke up and crushed some mini-muffins (lemon poppyseed and chocolate chip, for me) and I drank copious amounts of coffee. Then we finished the previous night's movie. It was overcast and horrendously humid when I stuck my head outside, but the cabin had great A/C, so we were able to keep it cool enough to lounge around without overheating.

Last time we stayed at this same location, we rented out a different build and apparently that one does NOT have A/C. It was a meltingly hot 48 hours and we had to beg floor fans from the people who run the site, because otherwise it was waaaaaay too warm to sleep. Lesson learned. I checked our reservation about thirty times just to confirm this one wasn't going to turn into an impromptu sauna.

We waffled between a board game or a TTRPG. I have a few two-person TTRPG games I've been absolutely chomping at the bit to try and Pepper was really interested in a few of them, so we ended up playing a session of house and it was really, really fun. We fudged the rules a bit for our own purposes and we ended up rolling a six-sided die a few times to make some decisions that the deck of cards wasn't quite able to narratively satisfy, or where we were stuck on which way we wanted the plotline to fall. We played for maybe three or four hours total, with intermittent breaks for other stuff (like lunch! We made some delicious & super stacked sandwiches). I think we filled out seven or eight pages of a notebook! I want to type it up more neatly when I get some time. I think the game would be a really good lead-in to a longer-form Monster of the Week campaign. I'm gonna be thinking that over for the next few weeks, I imagine.

At the conclusion of the game, we tried to go out for a walk along the path that lines the cabins. The clouds, which had been mulling over the possibility of a rainstorm all day, took that moment to make their decision, so we pulled on our shoes to the sound of raindrops starting a slow beat against the roof of the cabin. Still, we figured we'd at least get outdoors for a minute; maybe the rain would stay light and we could meander for a little while. Picture me with my ankle-high rain boots, holding an incredibly flimsy umbrella (taken from the work lost-and-found, after no one came to claim it for a month). I gave Pepper the more structurally sound umbrella and we set off into the drizzle. Unfortunately, we only made it about three minutes down the path before the storm doubled down and we were forced to hoof it back. We gleefully settled in for resigned ourselves to more movies, in place of a walk.

The cabin didn't have a full kitchen, so I made microwave risotto. Wild experience, because the spinny-plate would NOT stay on track and I had managed to forget a measuring cup, so there was a lot of eyeballing measurements and hoping for the best. I told Pepper if she hated it, she had to forgive me for cooking her something terrible. It was a bit of a spectator sport for her, watching me try to wrangle the meal together. Still boggled by the amount of onion the recipe called for. I halved it and it still seemed like 85% onion??? It ended up being edible, though, so - whoooo! I win!

Anyway, we had planned to do s'mores outside over a fire to end the night, but it was still sprinkling and we couldn't find the firewood that we thought was provided in the rental, so we just decided to go full-microwave with it. I have not laughed harder over a s'more in my life. There were at least three points were I thought I might choke to death on marshmallow, because so many things were going wrong but also we were trying to eat them before they 1) fell apart or 2) coagulated into something horrifying. At one point, I opened the microwave and Pepper touched a marshmallow to check its meltyness. The only way I can describe the level of horror in her scream was, like, that moment in scary movies where someone touches a person and they turn to goo under their hand. Tears in my eyes the whole damn time. It was really awesome. I just have so much fun with Pepper, even when we're doing something so incredibly stupid.

We watched Twister (1996, dir. Jan de Bont) in preparation for going to see Twisters (2024, dir. Lee Isaac Chung) this weekend. So, that's something I'm looking forward to tomorrow! Though, I haven't seen the trailer for the new one, so I'm walking in blind in terms of what the plotline could possibly be. More Twisters, I would reckon. Guess we'll see!

Good luck out there,
Eve