Periphery

I moved and everything's fine now lol, I won't have wifi until tomorrow or so but besides that all is well

more negative stuff and mental health, this is my last one though after this I’m going to start packing for real

big negative sorry (and mention of suicidal thoughts)

where’s the post about straights that’s like “they can’t. they don’t. they shouldn’t. and they won’t” except it’s better than that bc I can feel the stress pattern of it in my head like - /. - /. - /-. - - /. and it’s driving me nuts that I can’t remember the exact words. I Googled it and had no luck

I also need to buy a car but that’s much less motivating

someone’s selling an upright piano kinda in my area that sounds really nice, for a good price, from the same maker as my (family’s inherited) current living room grand (Steinway), but they’re like 45 minutes away??? but I’m thinking I’ll go out and see the piano and if it’s good I don’t have to go out again, I can just send movers out there to get it and take it to my apartment, so it might be worth 1.5 hrs of driving, especially since I play piano for like an hour every day so it would be nice to have one I really like

I sent an inquiry so... we shall see

I’ve revised like 14k of my novel this weekend... 23k left to go... unfortunately I just got through a long stretch where there wasn’t much rewriting required, but large parts of the ending are getting scrapped and completely redone, so wrapping up is going to take much longer than this rate would suggest

dank memes for Gaelic speakers who grew up on Veggie Tales

The other day on my drive home from work I thought I saw a man biking in full black winter gear including a black balaclava, but when I looked again I realized his beard was just THAT dark and thick and I’m still thinking about him

Yunnan Sourcing’s 2014 Ai Lao Moutain raw puer comes in 5g mini-tuos for a reasonable price in packages of 10, and it reminds me a LOT of White2Tea’s Boat Captain, which I also really liked, but Boat Captain comes in 8g mini cakes sold individually, so this is a much better tea situation!

Today’s drawing is just not working out (well, today’s two drawings, because I already abandoned a different one this morning...). I’m going to stop banging my head into it and try again tomorrow instead :P

it’s weird how much small proportional errors can mess up a drawing... I’m doing another portrait and I was just not feeling it, it didn’t look like the person I was drawing, and I’ve been moving all the facial features around and changing the face shape constantly and just not getting it, but I scooted the eyes and eyebrows down like 1/2 cm and suddenly it looked fine

just locked down snep@mastodon.social, if you follow me/I follow you here pls join me there I don’t know what I’m doing

I still feel weird from my little crying jag yesterday. I hate feeling sad and hopeless because I know it’s normal to feel that way sometimes, in moderation, but it feels like it’s going to be the start of me being depressed again and I’m so not about that. 

It’s also always weird to remember that I used to feel that way literally all the time. yesterday i was so sad I could barely get off the floor for like half an hour. but that whole time I was relentlessly thinking, I don’t usually do this. this isn’t me. I have dreams and goals and a life I need to pursue, and tomorrow I’m going to feel happy and I need to lay the groundwork for that right now by working through this and like, making myself a lunch and stuff. by the time a half hour had passed I was ok enough to start on my regular evening activities

on the other hand when I was in high school I felt that sad literally all the time. when I was in that situation i couldn’t say to myself, tomorrow I’ll be happier, because I wouldn’t, I had zero happiness brain chemicals to work with. there was no point in setting up things to be better for tomorrow me because tomorrow me would be physically not able to enjoy them. yesterday me would have screwed today me over by putting off doing homework, or by self-harming, or anyone of a number of other self-destructive behaviors, so I was already dealing with that, which  made it harder not to then screw over tomorrow me in return...

I think people who have never been depressed don’t understand that being depressed does feel just like being sad--like, most people who have never been depressed have probably, at some time or another, say when a relative died or they were in a devastating personal situation like getting laid off, felt the magnitude of sadness that a depressed person feels (especially since depression feels like numbness most of the time, punctuated by intense sadness, in my experience). 

but it’s a completely different ball game to feel that said while having felt that said continuously for months or years, knowing that it will probably continue indefinitely into the future... to be  living a life that was designed by someone who felt that sad, while they were feeling that sad, and to know that whatever you do now, the person who will reap the rewards or punishments of it in the future will be equally sad and hopeless... it’s soul-crushing.

one of my liver enzymes (alpha phosphatase) is high-ish on my recent bloodwork and was on my last one two, and it was almost definitely the T because I can see in my records that it was in the normal range before then, but my doctor didn’t say anything about it when we went over my bloodwork and according to the ol’ google it’s in the normal range for like an 18-year-old guy, but it’s supposed to be lower in adulthood and lower in women? so hopefully this is happening bc I’m biologically a pubescent guy at the moment rather than bc metabolizing T is putting strain on my liver

forbiddenarchives replied to your post “I had a meltdown today bc my dad was needling me about publishing my...”

Bless you for giving me the actual publishing angle on that! it’s true that the one time I did submit a novel (like four years ago) the letter I got back was like four lines long and wasn’t exactly the kind of feedback that would be useful for future improvement. (It was like, some general praise that readers enjoyed it, followed by a polite rejection.)

I’m fine now, I think I was having a rough week in other ways and that was just the final straw :P 

I do need to find other mechanisms of getting external feedback, though. I wish I had other friends who wrote long-form fiction, because if I had someone whose expertise I trusted I would totally be willing to trade beta reads with them. It seems so hard to find someone who both knows enough about writing to identify specific problems in a novel, and also is into the genres I write (whatever the hell those are... gay magic angst??? slow-burn paranormal polyamory?????)

I had a meltdown today bc my dad was needling me about publishing my novel again yesterday. He went out for dinner with his friend, and the friend’s daughter is apparently writing and submitting short stories, and my dad was like “You need to start submitting--” I was like “Hold on, I don’t need to do anything. I’m working on my writing, I’m happy with what I’m doing” so it was good that I said that (not that I haven’t said it before, but anyway...) but he went on and said that the friend’s daughter had recently been to a writing workshop where she was given the advice that writers “can’t improve/can only improve so much without submitting” (I suspect that may have gotten exaggerated in translation somewhat...), and of course being a clinical perfectionist I was like oh so all my writing is shit now huh. the 8 novels I wrote are worthless now, is that right. i see how it is

so yeah, last night I was like “whatever I’ve heard all this before” and brushed it off, but this evening it just got to me for some reason and I came home and cried for like a half an hour because I was so upset at the idea that all of my writing has been a waste bc I haven’t been submitting manuscripts. which is insane, because for one thing, comparing me with friend’s daughter is ridiculous because she writes short stories which are a) short and therefore fast and b) way easier to publish because costs are far lower and 200 people can get published in the same literary magazine! and for another thing, I know I’ve learned a ton about writing even though I haven’t submit much yet because I read and write enough to recognize good writing and I can judge my own and tell that it’s improved.

yeah I’d probably get more specific targeted feedback by submitting, but that also takes a lot of time. I’ve gone through the process of looking for agents and publishers before, and it takes a surprising amount of reading and digging to find ones that are accepting, and then you have to write and tailor your cover letter and summary, there’s a lot of different skills involved that are orthogonal to actual novel-writing and it’s sort of its own project. (dad also always tells me like “just shoot it off to a few publishers! who cares if you get rejected, it doesn’t have to take a long time to submit!” like ok thanks dad, I spent 6 hours writing a three-line email the other day because my perfectionism got the better of me but I’ll definitely just put that aside and go for it huh)

it’s especially frustrating because the few times i’ve shared anything about my writing with my dad, he’s been disparaging of it--I still remember that when I was an actual child and he monitored what I posted online he once said that he was sick of reading my angsty bad poetry on my blog (yes, it was angsty and bad, I was 14 and suicidal at the time...) and more recently when one of  my novels came up his first question about it was like “are all your characters gay” in a tone of voice that made it clear that he thought representing gays was juvenile and there was no like... idk.... questions about the actual plot. which was especially not helpful because one thing that worries me is that publishers will still be shy about publishing books with queers even though it’s 2018 and it literally does not matter

so it feels like he doesn’t even care about it unless I’m monetizing it somehow and it’s just frustrating since my writing is one of the like five things that I usually feel good about even when I’m down on myself, and I hate that I’m suggestible enough that when people suggest that my writing is bad or make it clear that they consider it pointless, I go through this whole process where I get so upset about it that  literally everything seems horrible and I hate myself and have to convince myself back out of it again before I can do anything productive

Here is some info I put together from the survey about trans dating specifically for gay trans guys, originally a comment elsewhere:

I have a real post to make after this but like I’m actually really sad about this whole tumblr situation and not really sure what I’m going to do about it. the anonymous-but-personal nature of tumblr, where i can talk about my real life and my stupid niche hobbies and be a person in a little niche where basically nobody I know irl will read it, is really freeing and like this is one of the few outlets where I can be totally open about my gender which I really value, and just... I guess I’m going to have to learn to emotionally open up to people irl or something disgusting like that. or take up solo journalling where nobody will read what I write which is pretty much what I do on here anyway but still it’s different

I wanted to get a better translation of Hong lou Meng so I looked up one of the popular ones (The Story of the Stone, trans. Hawkes & Minford) on Amazon and it was like $12 and I was like that’s not too bad, I can do that, and then I realized they broke it up into 5 books at $12 apiece, which is kinda bad. So I’m sticking with Mr. Joly for the moment who is really, REALLY trying his hardest

It does make sense that they broke it up a little since the story is over 800k words long