Blog
This is where I talk about stuff happening in my life and/or just about my day. Anything you see with a dropdown is going to be on the angstier/more serious side. I'll put content warnings when necessary.
2022-11-23. 10:00.
In lieu of actually writing a proper entry since it's been a MINUTE I'm just gonna post a highlight reel of my miscellaneous philosophical and personal shit I've been on about in my IRL journal recently. (Present-day interjections will be italicised like so.)
2022-11-09: I think people take things too seriously. And they oft assume malice when ignorance will suffice as an explanation. And I hate when people refuse to just have an adult conversation—lack of communication never solves anything. But, to each their own; the thing about having the free will to think and do whatever you want is that everybody else can do that too. (Honestly, between today and yesterday there's something I'm explicitly avoiding talking about because I feel like it'd just be better to not mention it, and I'm torn over whether I should heed my own advice here or not and talk about it anyways. But I'll give it some more time first either way...)
2022-11-13: Really looking forward to my time off in December. I took the first couple days of the month off for mental health and just to chill out for a few days; perhaps get to work on pinning my butterfly specimens that should be in by then. My great aunt's funeral is on the 19th and it'll be nice to see the family at least. (That day was devastating. I was out and about for like, eleven straight hours with family. But my cousin got me a new teacup—! I'll have to post it sometime.) I have tomorrow off and two of my locals and I are going to lunch and then bowling or something. (It was nice to get out and hang with them, but that was another high-socialization day for me; I ended up getting overwhelmed in the ramen place and I had to both get high in the bathroom and go sit outside to calm down. But I went to Staples after—! I fucking LOVE Staples. Even sober I'd be balls deep in the paper aisle going "oohh, look, 180 GSM." I mostly just stayed near the front of the store looking at the ink refill cartridges because I was deathly paranoid of getting lost for some reason.) Other than those days I'm probably going to be egregiously busy and overworked.
2022-11-16: I talk to my therapist the same way I talk to my acquaintances. SHe doesn't really know me. I can't even keep her up to date on all the work drama because so much happens there all the time and I only talk to her maybe 15 minutes every other week. It kind of sucks—I don't have the relationship with her I wish I did and I don't know what I can do about it. I don't really know what place she has in my life since I never really know what to talk to her about. I'm thinking I should bring up my anxieties about being a poor judge of character... I think that's partially because I'm a little out of practice with it. I pick one person I like and I blindly trust their judgement about other people. (That works better for making friends, I think, if you can surreptitiously slide your way into someone's existing friend group, but in terms of weeding out bad characters, that is something which is perhaps much better executed at the individual level.) Or sometimes I end up just liking someone too much for my own good, and I can't get myself to believe them when they show their true colors. (This is something I know on a conscious level but struggle to enact subconsciously: when people show you their true colors, believe them the first time. I.e., stop getting your shit handed to you over and over again by the same person in the same way. If they're capable of doing some fuck shit once they're capable of doing it again.) Frequently I just want to believe that some people are better than they are, but change in that aspect needs to come from within; you can't just will someone into making the right choices. That being said, sometimes I just can't help myself and I stick around the wrong types of people, maybe for nostalgia, maybe for my savior complex, maybe just because I think I'm different for some reason and nothing bad will happen to me about it. I'm not saying I'm the best or most morally just person in the world, but some of the antisocial ass choices I see people make just really take me by surprise sometimes. I just find it baffling how readily some will fuck someone else over for their own benefit.
2022-11-18: It's crazy to think that people can be in wildly different places in their lives given the same amount of time. On a related note: I'm pretty happy where my life is going right now. I've been learning a lot about life and human nature and it's not perfect information but it's a start. Life is all about learning how to live and learning how to appreciate the experience. It's all our first and last times on the mortal coil, after all. No one's going to be perfect in anything so we should all just give each other a little grace and understanding. (This is the main sentiment which I've been trying to live by recently. Compassion is definitely a choice, and not always the easiest one to make, but one need not put any more unnecessary malice in the world.)
2022-11-20: I'm starting to get this inkling of self-loathing—wanting to distance myself from the relationships I have because I feel a little bit like a burden or imposition on those I care about. It's the worst! I love my friends and I want to spend time with them but I don't want them to have to spend time with me. (I get in moods like this for a couple months every once in a while—I never really thought about it before but it might be tied to some seasonal affective thing. Or perhaps it just comes about when my social life's been going pretty well and I've had it a little too good for too long, so to speak. But it's whatever. It'll pass.)
To follow up on what I said in my last entry's post-script: I guess I'll do a name reveal. Not like the distinction even matters that much...
So anyways, hi, I'm Ev. It's not short for anything. Or maybe it is. I can never decide.
Sincerely,
Ev/FMG
2022-11-10. 00:00.
I'M HORRIFIED! Today (yesterday now) sucked. I was so socialed out that by the time I got home I'd be lucky if I could string a five word sentence together (I couldn't. I'm not exaggerating, either). I coped with all of the day's mortifying ordeals (of which there were many... long, and arduous things they were) by combining my hobby of looking at pretty insects with my task of getting my friends' Christmas presents all sorted. I'm planning on making butterfly display domes for some of my locals and so far I have two of three receiptents' specimens picked out for them (one person's getting Anartia amathaea and Papilio rumanzovia, another's getting Graphium weiskei and Siproeta stelenes, and the third person needs to hurry up, stop having a healthy sleep schedule and answer my DM about what they want) as well as the domes they're going into; my next missions are greenery, rocks and other miscellanea to fill out the landscape, so to speak. Then I have to teach myself how to rehydrate and pin these things. I've never done that before, actually. I've wanted to start for a couple years now, but... whatever, I'm gonna start now. Once all my bug paraphernalia comes in I'll obviously document the process that goes into these and make a page for it. I don't even have an estimate on how long it'll take... rehydration should be twelve hours to a day or so, pinning might be a couple hours altogether since I'm new and I'll want to be extra careful, assembly's probably gonna be the most arduous thing since I can be very particular about how I arrange things, especially if it's for someone else. This ought to be a fun venture, though.
Anyways, in short, here's why today sucked: we were understaffed for the bazillionth evening in a row; I had some personal shit going on and was going back and forth between feeling homicidal when anyone got too close to me, and feeling devastatingly lonely once my buddies went home; then I had to go sit in this loud ass godforsaken bar for three hours with no earplugs nor illicit substances to dull the noise, and no friends nor sane persons to keep me company. When I tell you I literally couldn't even talk anymore in that environment and after the fuckin' day to end all days I already had, I'm not even being facetious. I could only like, nod and shake my head at that point I was so done. I was holed up in the corner alternating between looking at entomology stuff for my little project and fiending after Beetlejuice merch for myself. Anyone that knows me knows I have an unhealthy attachment to Beetlejuice. And I swear, following my next minor inconvenience that prompts me to buy all this crap, anyone that so much as looks at me will easily be able to tell you the same thing.
In other news, my site reached 5k views approximately the day before yesterday! I think that's pretty good considering I started this site just a little over 2 months ago and haven't gotten awfully far into it yet. I'm pretty proud of where I'm at so far. Logging on tonight and seeing that felt pretty nice, honestly. I'm usually kind of pressed for time to even write these blogs, but I'll have to start thinking about what I'll do to celebrate higher future view counts. ... Oh, I still need a button, too. And a button page. And more than half a dozen mutuals. And and and and and. And I need to redesign my whole site, anyways.
Ah, so much to do.
I might even tell yall my real name later. Cut out this pseudonym business.
Sincerelyyyyy,
FMG
(But not really FMG)
2022-11-03. 21:00.
Listening to: Well I Wonder - The Smiths
A big hello to all 0 people who read this! Hey there, no one; it's been a little while. The past two weeks have been profoundly busy and exhausting for me, but mostly in a good way. I've been hanging out with people after and outside of work a lot more which has been really nice. Honestly, previously I was lucky if I saw anyone in a social setting more than twice a month, now I'm lucky if I get one evening to myself a week. I guess the one downside to socializing so much recently is that I haven't quite gotten my bearings on what my limit should be and I've been tending to over-exert myself to the point where I'm dead tired by the time I get home. (Getting home around midnight or later is certainly a factor, but besides that, no matter how good the company I'm in, I'm still an introvert at heart and need some time to not have to talk to or think about anybody for a while). I'm glad more of my time is occupied now as it gives me less time alone to ruminate on things and stress myself out, but also I legit haven't had the time or energy to talk to everyone I've wanted to or should recently. (To anyone who knows me personally, sorry if we haven't talked in a while or if I go periodically radio silent or something, but just so you know, I've had my own grandma left on read for like three weeks.)
Recently I've picked up vaping HHC, an alternative cannabinoid, really mostly to (try to) quell my anxiety when I'm getting overwhelmed or socialed out on my increasingly frequent evening excursions. I don't particularly enjoy the high as much as "regular weed" per se but it's proved useful in the few times that my sensory sensitivity has become a nuisance recently. I'd rather be vaguely high and stay in the company of friends and sane persons than have to go sit outside of a coffee shop for fifteen minutes because the ambient noise inside was stressing me out (true story. And on a related note, I've never been able to tolerate being in a Starbucks for more than 5 minutes. Those places are so efficiently headache inducing). ... I do have to wonder if my being high at the mall on Monday contributed to my frivolous Beetlejuice merchandise purchases, or if I was destined to be rockin these "Never Trust The Living" crew socks either way. Anyways, I've asked around about this, and something I find interesting/a little surprising is that apparently people can't really tell when I'm high or not; they say at most I'm quieter and more contemplative and when I do talk I'm often interrupting someone else to do so, but that's something I often struggle with doing anyway.
I've had a bit of a resurgence of two of my "old" hobbies recently: journalling and playlist-making. The former's been really nice as it's given me a chance to modify and perfect my handwriting style, which in turn motivates me to write more since I'm unfathomably obsessed with my own handwriting. I picked up a couple Seyes ruled notebooks a few weeks ago, and it's kind of my favorite thing ever right now. It has the potential to be really versatile and I might even end up using it instead of dot grid ruling for bullet journalling. Anyways, as for the playlist-making: I complained on an earlier entry that I've become utterly sick of all the music I've been listening to, but recently I've been getting into, like, indie, I guess, and it's been so refreshing to not only be able to explore a new genre but have something that's on the softer or calmer side to listen to. I've been working on a playlist that's mostly indie songs with a little bit of new wave and black metal sprinkled throughout. Trust me, it works. It's got some Opeth, The Smiths, and a bit of Men I Trust and Strawberry Guy on there. Once I wrap this entry up I'm probably going to get started on a page for that playlist. I'm tentatively calling it Yodieland.
Earlier today I found a link to a bootleg of one of my favorite musicals (Ride The Cyclone), but specifically a different production to the version that I've already seen twice, and one I've been wanting to see for a while, so I'm really looking forward to watching that and perhaps making a page about my thoughts on the musical and my favorite moments in each production and so on and so forth.
And today marks the, like, fifteenth day that I've been working on a review of The Princess Bride (and the bazillionth day that I've been neglecting to write about The Commitments), so expect a book review page to be live in the hopefully near future.
Updates to follow. Hopefully at a sooner interval than this time...
FMG
2022-10-19. 21:30.
TL;DR someone in my family died and I'm handling it weirdly.
I'm fine, really.
So... I woke up to a missed phone call from my cousin and, um, when I ended up actually talking to him an hour or two later it turns out his mom (my great aunt) died this morning. It kind of goes without saying but on that call I really tried to put my own feelings aside and make sure my cousin was doing okay on the call (as okay as one can be in this situation...) and then still to get through work and everything I tried to just ignore it for the most part so I wouldn't be acting like a maniac too much around my coworkers and such. Now that I'm home for the night though it's been more on my mind and I expect it'll stay that way and get marginally worse over the next couple days and all.
The thing is, I haven't really felt anything at all about her death today at least which seems weird to me even though that was by design in a sense; I simply did not have the time nor space for it today and really just tried with marginal success to ignore it. Even now I still haven't really been afforded space to process it which is partially what I'm doing or trying to do now... Anyways, I know there's the whole thing about every death and grief experience being unique dependent on the situation an individual finds themself in at a given time, their relationship to the deceased, so on and so forth. So on that level I know I need not feel weird about how I'm dealing with this right now (or rather, intentionally or otherwise, not dealing with it) but I still just feel weird about it. It's just so many weird conflicting feelings to navigate. Like, I miss her but I'm also happy she's not suffering anymore? But really this whole day I've been more worried about her kids and closer family of that caliber and how they're handling things rather than myself. Her son in particular, the cousin I said called me today. He has so much going on in his life already and now there's the death of his mother and he's got to handle all the funeral arrangements, and contacting the family, and estate and inheritance shit eventually, I don't know... but it's got to be a lot for him right now. It'd be a lot for anybody.
I imagine having to call up countless people and hash and rehash the same conversation over and over again about something so painful happening in your life must really be a special kind of hell to go through.
If I were him I wouldn't want to talk about it at all, let alone do so with every single person his mom knew and would need to hear about her passing.
I told him I'd tell my dad so he would have one less phone call to worry about.
I mean, I don't regret it, obviously I'm more than willing to do that for him, the circumstances considered, but I have to wonder if he's going to find it a little weird finding out his aunt died from his own kid of all people. Ugh... he's home, I haven't mentioned anything yet; I think it would be best to tell him tomorrow morning. BUt since we're both here and home right now I kind of feel bad for, sort of keeping it a secret from him right now. This is probably the most selfish thought I've had about this whole thing all day but I wonder if he'll get mad at me for not telling him sooner. Then again it is the middle of the night, or thereabouts.
I'll tell him tomorrow.
This is all so weird.
I don't suppose death is something one necessarily wants to be prevalent in one's life enough to even entertain the possibility of getting used to it, but just... this is just so weird to go through every time something like this happens. I never know what to do or how to act, or right now in this case, how I even would want to act given I had the freedom to express anything instead of just maintaining this facade that everything's absolutely and perfectly fine and there's not this person that was such a big part of my life for the vast majority of it that now I'll never see or speak to again. Again, it's just weird. I feel so weird about it. And since right now I'm much less impacted by the loss than some others in my family I partially feel like I won't be entitled to that same level of grief should it come about in the next few days or if or whenever it does. But yeah, mostly I'm just worried about how everyone else is doing with it right now. But I'm fine. I think. I'm tired and I wish I had another day off coming up soon so I could really focus on this and force myself to get it out of my system just in the case that I'm not fine and just suppressing this so as to not act like a maniac and be diabolical at work and around the rest of my family but whatever I'll live.
Anyways it doesn't quite feel real to me yet. Maybe once it really sinks in I'll have some more to say about the whole thing. But 'til then... this is just so weird. And I hope my cousins are doing marginally okay right now.
FMG
2022-10-18. 00:30.
Listening to: Face Down in the Meadow - Eggs Over Easy
Happy news! Happy news. It rained today! A little bit this morning and horrifically so this evening, which was, as much as I love the scent of petrichor and knowing the lichens and such are properly hydrated, kind of a dramatic condition under which to test out whether or not my new jacket was at all waterproof. Anyways I've been home and settled out of the rain for a couple hours now, and as it turns out some stickers I ordered a while ago had arrived. I'm thinking I'll put a bunch of jack-o'lantern ones in my phone case for this month or perhaps longer. And I'm going to need to make a page on here eventually to showcase my sticker collection—it's fairly small, but I just want a way to save them in some manner before I go around using them.
Speaking of my collections, I also picked up some gorgeous Bavarian china online recently and once those pieces come in I'll make a page for my teacups and everything too.
Other than that, the past week or so has been fairly uneventful (albeit long and arduous) and I feel like I've worked a million hours and will probably sleep til noon tomorrow. Next week and the following one, however... I have tentative plans with some people to hang out at least twice which will be really great for me should we end up going through with said plans. It's been one hell of a while since I properly socialised outside of work, and goodness knows I'm only ever there or at home trying to sleep. So. Yeah. It'll be a good change of pace and all that, and perhaps we'll hang out more in the future and I'll complain about only ever seeing people I like and/or tolerate at work a little less. My one reservation really is like, what if I can't find anything to talk about and it's just weird and silent? (I can't really stand pauses like that. I always end up rambling about something-or-other. I end up talking a lot for a self-identified introvert...) Logically I don't think this ought to be an issue with such a decently large group of people, but still it crosses my mind from time to time...
Anyways, I've unfortunately been hating on almost all of my music for a solid week now, and one of the only things I can get myself to listen to are exactly two folksy, country-esque songs (the one I linked at the beginning of this blog, and Old Man by Help Yourself). I'm not particularly obsessed with either one (well, maybe the former, just a little bit) but I just can't seem to tolerate anything else at all. It just feels tiresome and grating. Which means I guess it's time for me to find a new genre to get really into for a couple months or longer. And I am taking recommendations. You know where to find my site profle or chatbox, so if there's something you like and feel like sharing, ... by all means, do so.
I have a lot I want to do here, but it can wait til tomorrow—later today... I'm gonna go sleep for one million bazillion years.
Exhaustedly,
FMG
2022-10-09. 21:45.
Rambling about a self fulfilling prophecy.
Pardon my evasiveness if you're one to clamber after juicy details, but tonight's thing is more for my own sake than anyone else's and I don't exactly feel like posting my business all over the place tonight. Basically, I want to talk about what happened but I also don't.
If you're the type to worry, I will say it's really nothing serious; I just have a slight innate flair for the dramatic and an unfortunate tendency to overreact. I wouldn't say having anxiety helps, either.
As for this situation... it's over with. I should be able to just leave it at that. I can accept that everything's fine and squared away and trust that no grudges are being kept, but a part of me is still horrified that that all happened to begin with. I just hate, loathe, even, feeling like I've upset someone, regardless of whether they're done being upset or not. I can't even apologise profusely about it since after a certain point, that, in and of itself, would become aggravating.
So I'm kind of just stuck in this perpetual state of wanting to talk about it but not wanting to make things worse. Things are okay but I haven't really gotten the chance to say my full piece and really clear the air like I wanted to. Which is... fine. You can't have everything. But on some level I still feel like there's some tension and resentment there and, y'know, with the whole anxiety thing, it's impossibly hard to convince myself otherwise.
Anyways sometimes when I have anxiety about a particular situation it just kind of multiplies itself until it's a pervasive entity in my life. So right now I feel like I'm on terribly thin ice with just about everyone I regularly interact with. Like, I kind of feel like I'm really good at pissing people off without noticing right now. I have no actual reason to think any of this but I just feel like lots of people secretly hate me and just won't tell me whatever it is I did. Which is crazy! This is crazy. It's just a bunch of paranoid nonsense. And it's so annoying! I'll be having a completely normal conversation with someone acting plenty happy to be in my company and still in the back of my mind I'll be thinking some crazy shit like "wow, this person's really good at hiding that they can't stand me...". Like I said: crazy! I only really seem to snap out of it once I'm away from everyone. So, recently I've been having to spend quite a bit of time alone or at least minding my business and not talking to a number of people I'd have been completely fine with like three weeks prior, before my paranoia started setting in again.
I really hope this phase doesn't last too long. I don't remember how long it was the last time this came about, I just remember that it really sucked. I'm gonna have to figure out how much reassurance I can get away with asking for without getting too annoying about it, because I feel like just being as direct about all this as I possibly can might be the best thing for me right now. Perhaps at a temporary cost of being mildly annoying to whomever I have to talk to for a minute or two.
Oh, but the worst part goes something like this: step one, I think someone's hating on me. step two, I assume I must have done something to upset them. (I don't know what it could be; also, it's literally nothing, I'm just being anxious). Step three, I end up feeling like the worst person in the world for... implicitly doing Something that I don't even know what it is but am still going to be upset about anyway. Basically, "I don't know what I did (nothing) to upset this person (they're not upset) but it must have been really bad (IT WAS NOTHING) so now I'm gonna feel miserable about it". And that's colored every interaction I've had with almost everybody for a hot minute now. You see how that's kind of hell for me? Yeah. Yeah.
I did also want to add that the particular situation isn't necessarily at fault for my acting like a maniac in the broader sense that I've talked about here, rather I think this whole paranoia business was just kind of inevitable and this particular thing just set the theme for what exactly I was gonna become paranoid about. So, that's fun. Especially because social stuff is kind of a sore spot for me. I have a bit of anxiety around how I interact with people anyways due to, ahem, poor social skills. So, again, this is kind of hell for me.
Oh, but also, I was off my meds for a few days (not on purpose, I just forgot too many times in a row because I'm dumb), so if I'm very lucky I should be feeling better once I force my brain chemistry to work in my favor again.
Updates to follow. Of course.
FMG
2022-10-07. 00:30.
In this one I talk vaguely of some OCD-adjacent anxiety I've been experiencing.
It might be a little rambly because this is basically in lieu of having a therapy session to talk about it in.
In an effort to getting it all out of my system for once and for all I want to give myself this opportunity to overexplain as to why I've been acting like a maniac. Mostly so that I myself can begin to understand it.
So, my paranoia's coming back a little bit.
(Actually... the more I think about it, I've spent the majority of my time the past few years paranoid like this, so I'm not exactly sure that "a little bit" is the right phrase to use. So, a slight revision: My paranoia's back, and my life might kind of suck for a while going forward. On the plus side, I had a good streak of several months without it so hopefully a time like that will come again eventually. Whatever. C'est la vie, I guess.)
I don't know exactly since when, or how long this bout of it will last, or if there's really anything I can do for myself about it besides tread carefully around things that might set it off. The thing about it that I am certain of is that I simply haven't had to live like this is many, many months. So I'm simply not good at navigating it right now. I'm a little out of practice. Perhaps that skill will surface again in time if I'm lucky, or I won't be paranoid long enough for it to get the chance to, if I'm even luckier.
Anyways, the thing is, when I'm like this sometimes I get so hung up on what people think of me that it becomes unbearable to interact with them. Part of me thinks that everyone has some secret beef with me that they don't want me to know about and thus carry on completely normally, and the only way I can really think to remedy this is by more or less directly asking them something like "Everything's okay, right? You aren't mad at me?".
I don't think anyone particularly enjoys feeling like they've upset someone, but I hate even more to think that I'm too unapproachable to bring that issue up with if someone did in fact have a problem with me.
Then there is this issue of my being perhaps far too conscious of the fact that reassurance- and validation-seeking are OCD compulsions... remembering that makes me feel like I'm giving in to something I shouldn't when I do have to get reassurance over something. Like, is this helping me in the moment but making me get worse over time?. There's a lot to unpack with that whole scenario. And I'm no psychologist nor do I want to go around saying I have OCD when I don't know that and then speak out of my ass about it so I will not be the one to unpack that. But anyways, because of that little paradox, I more or less feel like I have nowhere to go with these feelings. I can't, or rather shouldn't, go around dragging other people into my business to calm my own anxieties temperarily when there's a chance that will add to theirs. That, and of course no-one has an obligation to help me; it's my brain and thus my problem and all that. And another reason I shouldn't go around asking silly questions like that is because the askees themselves, in 99 percent of these situations, have done nothing to actually warrant how I feel about a given situation, or assume they secretly hate me, or what-have-you... Rather it appears that whatever's wrong in my head more or less indiscriminately makes people the subject of my paranoid delusions through no fault or action of their own. That is to say, I could take a look at pretty much anybody and become convinced that they're beefing with me, they're praying on my downfall, and so on and so forth. It's a whole horrific mess. But reminding myself of the inherently random nature of most of my anxious thoughts is what (usually) keeps me from making them everybody else's problem. Granted, it doesn't always work, but... I'm making an effort.
If I could say something to everyone who personally knows me right now, it would be this: Thank you so much for bearing with me. And I can't possibly put into words how unendingly sorry I am if I bother you with my anxious nonsense all the time.
I would probably not add this little footnote which definitely does not go as follows: Sorry. I can't control it. Because I probably can control this, I'm just really really bad at it right now. Like, how hard can it really be to shut up and keep your thoughts to yourself? Pretty damn hard, apparently. But anyways once I learn how to can it and just suffer in my head at least I won't have paranoid thoughts about making people hate me for not shutting up about my paranoid thoughts. That was meant to be half a joke but I don't even know which part's supposed to be funny. Ohh, internet, I'm not gonna lie, I'm really going through it recently. Social paranoia is like, the second-most isolating thing I've ever experienced in my life. Second only to being so traumatised you feel like no-one even knows you anymore, but that's a whole different story.
Anyways. Something I have yet to satisfactorily explore is why asking for reassurance feels so, so morally wrong. I mean, I know it's mostly because I feel like it's not quite right to drag everyone into my little paranoia moment with me and make them responsible for reversing it, but... still sometimes all I want more than most anything is for someone to sit down with me, listen to everything I have to say, and tell me that it's okay. Now, that doesn't sound so wrong, does it? I don't necessarily think that there's anything so grievously terrible about just needing a little bit of help right now.
I still have to be careful about making it everyone else's problem though, so most of this shit I kind of just have to sit with alone, regardless.
Another thing is that sometimes there's these moments when I'm just big chilling and all my anxieties feel so unrealistic and absurd—those are such nice moments. I wish I had moments like that more often these days. The thing is, though, that's just glimpses into normalcy. So really what I mean to say is that I hate how pervasive paranoia gets to be in my life sometimes. It's so disrupting to everything. The minutes where I'm afforded a chance to forget all about it make me feel oddly jealous of the times in my life where paranoia hasn't been such a central issue of mine; or jealous even of what I imagine the daily life of a mentally well person is like.
I know things aren't always supposed to be great and perfect all of the time, not even for the luckiest of people in this world, but right now it feels like things just suck for me so much of the time it gets to be close to unbearable sometimes. Like I was saying, this whole paranoia business is one of the most isolating things I've ever gone through. And I've had it off and on for years, and... I'm not thrilled that it's back again. I'm just not. I really thought it was over for real. After all the therapy and the soul-searching and the medication management and everything I genuinely just thought I was better for once. So, I'm a little pissed.
It's whatever.
I want to say I'll be fine, but I don't know if I can even get myself to believe that right now.
"That's how it is on this bitch of an earth."
FMG
2022-10-07. 21:30.
Listening to: Star Tripping - Kevin Atwater
So the short version of what I've been going through the past couple of days without traipsing into basement dungeon territory goes approximately as follows: I've recently been thinking everyone secretly hates me. This, as I'm sure you can imagine, makes being around people for extended periods of time a little excruciating as I feel like I'm bothering them by being there, so on and so forth. Anyways this has me really looking forward to my next day off so I can just be left alone for a whole calendar day for once.
It would be great if that calendar day happened as soon as possible, like, say, Sunday...
So I go up to my manager today like "heeeyyy... did you do next week's schedule yet..?" with the feeble hope that I could maybe secure myself a day off as soon as humanly possible.
"Yeah, I already finished it. I'm having you come in at 8 a few days next week. Sunday and Saturday."
8 to 7. On the one day I really don't wanna be there. And then Saturday which is always THE WORST. Fascinating.
I mean, it's not the end of the world. I was only mildly devastated. And very tired. Anyways I was like "Oh :') great :') see you Sunday then :')". Whatever. So now I've gotta wait until Tuesday for a day off. I'll live. I'm still gonna complain a bunch though.
So with this everyone-hating-me paranoia business, one matter I'm really torn over is whether or not I should bring this up with people and clue them in on what's going on. A sort of "if you see me acting weird I'm probably just fighting every demon known to man". The thing is though, I feel like bringing it up is kind of paradoxical in a sense because the more I mention it and perhaps ask for reassurance the more potentially intrusive and bothersome I'm being to whomever has to hear about it. Ironically if someone did that to me I wouldn't think much of it nor get annoyed or anything, I think, but y'know, being an imposition is a big concern of mine, so, I tend to always err on the side of caution; in this case assuming people would react worse than they probably would. Which probably in turn makes my anxiety worse. But anyways I'll ... I'll consider dealing with it. It'll be fine. It always is in the end.
Today wasn't the worst but still kind of sucked because of this whole self inflicted psychological terror business; and I was getting sick of reading my actual current book (Roddy Doyle's The Snapper; I only have like 40 pages left anyway) so I started rereading William Goldman's The Princess Bride. I've only read it once before but it's my favorite fiction book that I've ever read, I think. It makes the movie look like shit! Which is saying something because the movie's still really great. But seriously, the book is so excellent that it actually kind of ruined the movie for me a little bit. So, I have that to look forward to for now. That and a series of very weird and difficult conversations with most everyone whom I interact with socially with any degree of regularity... Oh, and I forgot I'm also supposed to be reading Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series right now as well. I have too many books going at once. I also started Red Dragon by Thomas Harris ages ago and then promptly forgot all about it. Oops.
It's been a day, and a week, and so on and so forth. I'll update once my weird talks with the gang go well or spontaneously backfire.
FMG
2022-10-04. 17:30.
Current mood: Fine?
Listening to: Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths
"I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour
But heaven knows I'm miserable now
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I'm miserable now..."
Oh. My. Goodness. What have I gotten myself into.
A lot's been happening. In lieu of talking about the specifics I'll just say that up until about 20 minutes ago when I decided to knock it off I've been horrifically stressed out which has just been getting things even more complicated and—it's not important. It's over with. But over the course of this whole situation I've been having, like, two points-of-view: the first from the perspective of the part of myself that keeps pulling all this insane behavior and making a fool out of myself, and the second from that of some higher and vaguely separate part of my mind just watching all this shit happen and not doing anything to stop it.
I get really weird when I'm stressed. Who doesn't, really? But I get, like, certain specific kinds of weird that I wanna detail here just to poke a little fun at myself and to give whomever reads this thing a little insight into how this site's webmaster's mind works out in the wild. To make me seem a little more human than just a faceless pseudonym-having site curator.
So. Anyways. I'm always a little bit out of it; that's what I would call half the fun of having an anxiety disorder. I would say normally I seem a little flighty or agitated; I make quick movements—I'm always running; I'm always worried about offending people in some manner. Or being taken the wrong way. That's my stress level 0.
Stress level 1 for me is like, I just get a little quiet, more serious, I stop running around everywhere, I'm not necessarily doing bad but I'm not feeling great.
Level 2 makes me take on what I've recently been calling a "fruity affect"; my voice gets a weird lilt to it and really just my speech mannerisms kind of completely change. How exactly I sound changes over time; months ago I'd sound a little like Meowth from Pokemon and I was all but powerless to stop it. Nowadays, the fruity affect entails kind of a transatlantic thing going on, I pronounce things a little more distinctly and with—I'm so sorry, I hate to say this—with, like, a kind of mommy dom drawl. I've been approximately this stressed most of the time for a little while and almost everything I say sounds like I'm saying it as a slightly mentally unhinged phone sex operator.
Level 3 is where shit starts to get serious. And heaven knows I'm miserable now. When I get too stressed out I just get exhausted. Like my body's trying to escape itself by trying to force me to take a nap. I'm not exaggerating when I say sometimes I can hardly get so much as a single sentence out without yawning. And the lethargy is truly something else. I basically just all but shut down.
This whole level system I came up with is actually a pretty decent help to me, as it's been aiding me to sort of mentally check-in with myself about where I'm at and to hopefully do something to intervene and calm down before it gets worse.
Anyways! Let me now change the subject entirely: I've been hearing a lot about this great musical called Ride The Cyclone and have been meaning to watch it but haven't quite gotten a chance to yet. I'm watching it right now... But as I was saying, I'm not too familiar with it yet but it looks absolutely stellar from the few clips of scenes and songs that I have seen; my favorite of which has got to be The Ballad of Jane Doe. I'll have more to say on that and probably some other things later.
But that's all I have for now,
FMG
2022-09-22. 11:00.
Current mood: HEARTBROKEN!
My favorite musical's being taken off Broadway :((. Beetlejuice's last show is on January 8th. So, I don't think I'll ever get to see it live. Not that I was necessarily planning on it any time soon, but something about the concept just not being a possibility anymore sometime soon is really sad. I don't know an awful lot about the situation beyond the fact that the show's closing but I will say this: from its inception it faced a tremendous amount of backlash and went through basically every problem a show could go through and still managed to come out on top up until now. And its fans go really, really hard for it. Maybe this show wasn't destined to last forever. But if this is the end then it lasted a good long while and the cast and crew made a lot of memories and brought joy to an uncountably large amount of people Really, I'm beyond distraught to hear this news but I'm trying to keep my view on the matter more along the lines of "it was good while it lasted". In fact, it was GREAT while it lasted.
Well, there's still the cast recordings and hopefully, perchance, maybe there's a bootleg out there without some random bald guy's head blocking half the stage in the way... if not, I'm praying someone seeing the show in the next couple months takes the bullet for the rest of us and makes one. But in the words of Jorge Luis Borges (kind of), "If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a show are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell". JK. I need to stop being so dramatic. But this show means a lot to me. It got me through a tough time in my life by making it worse. <3
Well, I have to head out for now.
FMG
2022-09-20. 09:00.
Current mood: Tired?
Listening to: NOTHING I left my phone at work.
I feel a little out of it this morning but I can't quite tell if I'm still feeling the effects of Shiftageddon from Sunday, where I worked pretty much from a little before 5am to nearly 8pm (hear me out: the overtime's gonna be CRAZY this week), or if it's just because I just woke up and I'm not really a morning person, so to speak. But at any rate, I got to sleep like ten hours and didn't even have to wake up to an alarm for once so I think I should be ok for today. My ADHD was so bad yesterday, I couldn't for the life of me stay focused on one task. In my defense... there were a lot of tasks... Whatever.
Today I'll hopefully be talking to my manager about not having to close with this one maniac I work with (I like him as a person, but oh my god, he sucks to close with.... he hardly does anything! My favorite (that is to say: KILL ME NOW) moment with this kid was when I went up to him and the other closer for that night to ask them to do the same thing I had already asked one of them to do twice already (and they hadn't), and before I could even say anything he went "Francis, if you want something done you should just do it yourself." I fell dead silent. But he was right. And I was already kind of doing this but from that point on I basically just started working around him rather than with him, like, shit, if he wants to be on his phone his whole shift then more power to him. Whatever I'll just get him the hell out of here and then finish closing after he leaves.
I've mentioned this talk I wanted to have with the manager to a couple other people and they both think it's a good idea to go through with; I was worried this aforementioned kid would get shit from her because of what I'd say, but at this point it really doesn't matter, he's already put his two weeks in, so, like, what's she gonna do, fire him? Anyways, it's that, plus I have to stop trying to look out for people that don't give me the same energy, plus I just desperately don't want to close with him, he stresses me out so bad.
Anyways, as I'd mentioned in my little status thing, I left my phone at work, along with my notebook, and my other notebook, and my book that I'm reading, and my oreos, which I really don't mind because besides for the alarm function on my phone I don't use any of those things too much outside of work. But still, if I come in today and I start hearing AAH THE STORE WAS A MESS LAST NIGHT, AND SO ON AND SO FORTH, AND YOU LEFT YOUR SHIT EVERYWHERE I think I'd just walk out. I'm kidding. I would never. Or would I... Nah, I'm kidding.
(Oh, so, update: I just got here, closing was fine, no one's being mean to me about it; except the manager isn't here so I can't talk to her about that one thing today, I guess. Anyways...)
Oh, what else, what else... I finished reading The Commitments. It was a pretty fun read; short and fast-paced; the dialogue formatting was a nightmare gettting used to, though. And I think I actually enjoyed the movie better than the book for this one. But I'll write more about it in an official review where no-one will read about it. Not here where still no-one will read about it.
So, bye for now while I go work on that,
FMG
2022-09-13. 09:00.
Let me get my obligatory work venting out of the way then I'll talk about some miscellaneous stuff I've been up to, and my plans for here.
One of my closers last night was really going through it. Like, he didn't want to close in the first place but it was clear as day that the anxiety we all get around closing was really starting to get to him. (Really all I could do besides go "haha, that's closing for ya" was more or less walk him through the store again and be like, "see, we did everything, it's fine"...) Not to have a savior complex but that anxiety's the one thing pretty much completely out of my control that I can't really help these guys with. I for one am starting to get used to it (plus those meds I got are helping) but it breaks my heart a little bit seeing what this job does to people sometimes. It shouldn't be this hard; in fact, it's not this hard, but some days the psychological effects are diabolical. But really. It's just not that fucking serious.
I don't now what it is about this place that it manages to have such a profound effect on people like this; maybe it's that we're given too much responsibility, maybe it's just been the low staffing recently (which comes back around to us having to do the work of two people or more sometimes), maybe we just have an unhealthy fear of what morning crew's gonna say to us about the previous close on any given day...
Whatever. I think I dwell on it too much regardless.
Anyways, I've been working on some alternate color palettes and such for this site (by "working on" I mean thinking about, occasionally; and not doing). I like the blue, it's one of my favorite colors after all, but it feels too bright on the eyes for how frequently I work on this site between like 10pm and 2am. So, perhaps some aesthetic overhauls will happen in the near future.
I also found out a few days ago that I had been using <br> incorrectly for, like, four years... oops. So, I had to go back and fix the absolute formatting mess I made on all the poems I'd uploaded.
I've been kind of getting back into a bit of a musical phase, which right now means I spend an inordinate time listening to Beetlejuice, thinking about Rocky Horror and asking anyone who gets in a 20-foot radius of me if they've ever seen Little Shop of Horrors. In the 6-ish years I've been a fan of RHPS I've still never seen it performed live, with the whole shadowcast thing. Maybe in November, depending on how far it would be to get anywhere that's putting the show on. The thing about my "local" shadowcast group is that they manage to travel all over my state and two neighboring states, yet somehow never actually near where I live (the closest I've seen them do is like, 50 miles away???). I'm beginning to suspect they have some vendetta against me in particular.
I'm kidding. Or am I...
FMG
2022-09-10. 21:00.
Anxiety: Not too bad.
Dick: Out.
(I am forcibly removed from the website.)
It always feels like such a crime when I spend my own money on myself; I have some internalized guilt about it, maybe from growing up poor or something. But whatever, it's not important; what is important is that my new sick ass jacket came today, and so did an old bankroll of pennies I bought. You may be wondering: Huh? What? Why would you buy old pennies? To which I would answer: I collect coins. Leave me alone. Anyways, the results are in; of the 50 pennies, 3 were Indian Head cents from 1902-1909, 4 were 1943 steel cents, and the rest wheat pennies ranging anywhere from the years 1909 through the mid-fifties. A pretty cool haul if you ask me. And perhaps it'll motivate me to make a coin collecting page for this site sooner rather than later...
The jacket's pretty sick, too, as I mentioned; it's a mostly red NASCAR racing jacket with black-and-white checkered sleeves. I like it a lot. I'm gonna be honest, I don't really care much about NASCAR as a sport, except for Chase Authentics always putting out sick ass merchandise for it. Really though, I kind of consider myself a bit of a jacket slut. I'm well known in my social circles IRL for my myriad of huge, borderline goofy, weather-inappropriate coats and jackets that I wear year-round. This one's a bit showy for my typical tastes but I kind of fell in love with it and it's somehow still less visually obnoxious than the original style I was planning on getting.
Anyways. Besides all that... today's been pretty alright for me at least. Closing went fine, I'm not agonizing over every little thing again tonight thankfully. However. This one guy I work with was having a pretty rough time of it today and honestly I think they're winding up to fire him. Last I heard, our district manager was just gonna not have him come in tomorrow (God only knows about the rest of this week or if she found anybody to cover his shift tomorrow morning or what). But that's future me's problem. And by future, I mean immediate future, because I'm supposed to be closing with him on Monday (knock on wood).
I hope everything turns out alright with him. He's ... he's a good kid. My other coworkers think I'm too nice to him for the attitude he's been giving people recently but I really wanna believe he's just been having a hard time recently and that things'll get better. I told them if it were any one of them I'd look out for them and defend them just the same. ... I don't know, maybe I just try too hard sometimes to see the good in people. I've been doing a bit of damage control on both sides, partially telling this guy to knock off how he'd been acting around my closers a while ago, partially being like, ohhh, he's still new here, he doesn't know how everyone reacts to certain things, maybe today was just a bad day for him, so on and so forth. In summary: shit's been crazy.
I guess all I can do right now is take things one day at a time and see how tomorrow goes.
Antici... patingly,
FMG
2022-09-09. 08.30.
Nothing happened... or, at least, not yet, anyways.
But please just remember that your words have an impact on people.
Anxiously,
FMG
2022-09-09. 22:15.
Back again. Today wasn't too bad (I've been reading The Commitments a little bit more and it's starting to not suck); in fact I was having a pretty good day until I got home and then my anxiety started getting to me. (I just want to be clear that I don't even have anxiety, like, the disorder. Shit's just been stressing me out recently.)
I lead the closing shift at my job. It's not the worst. In fact, most nights I almost enjoy it; I care about my closers a lot, there are certain customers I look forward to seeing every day, so on and so forth. But it's just ... sometimes it's a lot of pressure. So, the evenings are my problem. I get that. But then, so are the mornings, somehow; people like to blame anything going wrong before like 7 AM on how last night's close turned out. Okay. Sure. I'm fine with that too. So long as they're nice to my other closers they can say anything they want about me. Whatever.
I'm writing this as a way to talk myself through what happened tonight so I can calm down enough to get to sleep before midnight, hopefully. As a vent of sorts, I guess. Anyways, what happened of import tonight was nothing. I had a completely normal close, everything was done that needed to be, I ran through my procedure lists more times than I can count, (at home, too...) double- and triple-checked everything... I think.
I hope.
I'll have to find out tomorrow if anyone in the opening shift found anything to complain about.
I wish I worked mornings, actually. I say I tolerate and even like closing (when I'm there, at least) but I hate what it does to me the second I leave. It's like I can't just go home and turn off the work part of my brain for even a couple hours. I'm always worried about what's going on in there when I'm not there.
One night when my coworker and I were on our way out for the evening—he was just about to leave and I just had a few things I wanted to double check—he turned to me and said, "This isn't healthy. What you're doing."
Half feigning ignorance, half knowing where this conversation was going, I asked him what he meant.
"Worrying about this place so much."
"Someone has to do it."
He left. I finished what I needed to and went out to grab some dinner. I think that was the same night I Snapchatted him asking if he'd done some trivial thing I had forgotten to quintuple check before I left. ... But anyways, he made a good point.
Yesterday I met with my psychiatrist and brought up this anxiety issue I've been having. Tonight I'm testing out a new medication for it for the first time. I think it's working? It's a little hard to tell. I guess I don't feel as bad as I did 45 minutes ago.
Okay. I think it's working.
Anyway, I think we were both right; I do care about this place too much and it's kind of eating me alive sometimes but I still feel like I have to. Someone really has to haul ass and do it. I care about my closers too much to let anything befall them so I just make it my problem, and likewise I respect the openers too much to tolerate causing them to have a shitty morning, if I can help it.
Often I feel like I'm held to a nigh impossible standard. Or maybe that's just something I impose upon myself. Also that I have no-one left IRL I can complain to about any of this since I talk about it too much as it is. Hence the blog post about it instead. And I don't mean to just rag on these people unpromted, but nearly everyone I work with has this little problem where they have an issue with someone and just... don't ever tell them about it and proceed to get and stay mad when the person in question never fixes what they're doing since they never hear anything about it. What this means for me is that if I go too long without having heard any commentary about myself I just assume that everyone secretly hates me and are all winding up to throw me out of a window or something. Shit, maybe I do have anxiety.
Whatever. So long as it either goes away eventually or I have something I can do about it (drugs) then I'll be fine, I guess.
Anxiously again,
FMG
2022-09-06. 22:40.
Name: Frankie.
Age: Old enough to know better.
Went out to this local bar tonight; I don't even drink anything there besides ginger ale, but they have the best pizza I've ever had in my life (pineapple and green peppers, made marginally worse by an instantly regrettable amount of red pepper flakes). Sometimes I look forlornly at the pool tables and think about how I really should play 8-ball more (if I could find the free time every week I'd maybe consider joining a league once I've had a decent amount of practice). This place has open tables on Wednesdays; they take the door off the side so you don't have to pay to re-rack the balls... I suppose if I really had my heart set on the matter I could maybe haul ass down there more often on those days and play a round or two for free, except I don't know with whom that would be, since the only person I know who plays pool and/or has offered to play pool with me on a semi-frequent basis is my dad. If I mentioned it to him he'd probably tell me to go ask out the guy I like and play pool with him instead, and I'd be like, nooo, how about I don't, and continue not talking to him yet talking very frequently about him.
Another issue I could see cropping up would be the noise in there if it got too crowded or if whomever happened to be fucking with the jukebox started feeling overzealous. I've been dropping in here occasionally just to gauge the popularity of the place on certain days over others—weekends aren't what I would call my favorite—tonight was pretty mellow, though I expect a lot of that maybe had to do with it being the day after Labor Day. But at any rate. getting to chill there with only a couple other patrons scattered around and some refreshingly tolerable music (if any played at all) was a nice end to a rather busy day at work. Busy in terms of I personally had a lot of stuff I had to do there, though the customers themselves proved infrequent, but honestly my biggest concern was making sure my other closer got to leave relatively on time tonight. I, on the other hand, may or may not have stayed an hour late (and listened to the Beetlejuice musical on full blast alone). Fun night. No, really. I did, however, have a couple hours before work to read my book (I'm rereading the Hitchhiker's Guide series, and am about halfway through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe right now).
Anyways, completely unrelated, but I really like knives, and I saw the most gorgeous little balisong for sale last night that I'd like to get. I'm not certain of it just yet, but I'm highly tempted considering that it comes in my very favorite color. It's on the smaller side (blade length is about 2.3 inches, and the whole thing opened is just over 6 inches in length) which I feel would make for a great EDC for what I'd be needing it for. And, again, it's in my favorite color. I don't know about you but I don't see knives in that shade of, or really any shade of green, too often. If it were just a bit bigger (say, around a 3.5 inch blade) I'd be absolutely sold. But for this guy, right now, I'm not sure. It is pretty, though. I need to wait another week to finalize the purchase anyway, so I have time to think it over, whether I'd like to or not. On one hand, I know it's kind of a frivolous thing to spend so much money on. On the other hand, I buy dumb things like this exceedingly rarely so I feel like maybe I deserve to fuck around a little bit. On the other other hand, that's a pretty dangerous minset to have around money. Which is probably, like I said, a good reason to have some time to think it over.
That's pretty much the extent to what I've been up to, recently, just working and wishing I played pool more often and the knife thing... there's been some interesting personal drama here and there but I might get around to posting about that stuff if I feel a little braver later. I'm still warming up to this whole website business.
I guess that's all for now. Catch you on the next one,
FMG