sunday, 6pm
7/13/2025
i’m feeling GREAT! and i’d like to change the nature of my blog a bit, at least for the time being. today i realized the distinct scent of a fragrance ad in a magazine will soon be completely behind us. perfume, paper, glue. when i’d visit my extended family as a kid, my cousin and i would always ask for magazines in the checkout line — teen magazines, fashion magazines, or tabloids — and flip through them in the living room with our cotton candy sodas, pretending we were teenagers, aka the coolest people in the world.
various ex-lovers are crossing my mind less and less. with a few of them, i’ve had a sort of pity for their new girlfriends. i think this robs them of agency, though. it’s an easier narrative to digest: oh girls, get out of there. you’re too smart for him. and you’re too cool for him. break free! but the more discontenting reality is they truly love these men in a way i never could. unlike me, they do not feel trapped, occasionally mortified, et cetera. they do not observe these men the way i did, they do not challenge the repulsive thoughts, behaviors, biases and perversions they are subjected to regularly because they either do not detect them or do not mind them. happily, they play the girlfriend role well. i now understand that i never will. thank god!
i haven’t been listening to a lot of music lately. i have found a handful of cool electro records to add to my dj library, and i’ve been working on a mix to burn for a friend. i’ve been playing lungs by big black on my drives home from work because i feel cool blaring it from my car in the summer heat. i’ve mostly been listening to old episodes of rupaul and michelle visage’s podcast to be honest! i’m still wincing through lolita. i do enjoy nabokov’s writing so i might check out something else by him later on. i started boogiepop phantom and i hooked it up to the CRT, which looks freaking awesome. i might have to abandon fraud by david rakoff because his vocabulary is distracting and it really just makes me want to read david sedaris instead.
it’s the start of my weekend, usually, but i am working a rare tuesday this week (right after a doctor’s appointment that i finally scheduled) and got my saturday shift covered for a lake day of which i actually haven’t quite worked out the logistics yet. i consolidated and cleaned up my makeup earlier and i’m craving a visit to Ulta… i am choosing to not acknowledge how my recent efforts to feminize myself coincide with the current political zeitgeist. frankly, i don’t really care.
tuesday, 2:30pm
7/8/2025
something i’ve come to realize this year is that my intimacy issues are far worse than i thought. up until this point i was confusing male validation with intimacy. in my romantic experiences with the opposite sex i have never truly been known. this illusion of intimacy in my relationships is something i’ve been denying, something that subconsciously has felt safe for me. to the opposite sex i am one-dimensional, mystifying, arousing. things only ever seem to go wrong when i find myself no longer satisfied with this half-known Other that i exist as to my partner. it is often abrupt, and it is always a buzzkill. the Cool Girl/Boy/Girlboy bubble bursts and the ugly, jagged interior is revealed. i am more likely to be received as a complex, entire human being in platonic relationships, which is why friendship makes me far more uncomfortable, why i often keep myself at a distance. i have a lot of peers. i have few close friends. i was a very weird kid — my formative memories include attempts at socializing met with looks of judgment, my gullible nature being the catalyst for elaborate pranks, and being left alone at the park by other kids, which is almost humorously pitiful.
i was also raised by white trash parents with a taste for the sensationalist tabloid culture of the time, reinforcing the meticulously hateful rhetoric that TMZ fed us over dinner on the couch, training me to resemble the same kind of detached bully that insecure lower-class people such as themselves often become. it seriously repulses me how distinctly American the trajectory of these intimacy problems has been, from being alienated as a clearly autistic child not keen to the fierce niceties and social cues of our culture, to my family lapping up and regurgitating the self-hating-poor-person protocol that the State depends on to maintain power, to the further fear of alienation brought about by the increasing weaponization of language and identity politics adopted by the pseudo-progressives i am surrounded by now as a young adult, the tech hellscape exacerbating this hostility each passing year.
i’m not exactly sure where to go from here, but i’m proud of myself for making it this far. i do want to have more intimacy in my life, and now that i know where to find it, i am pursuing it slowly, patiently, with grace. a quick fix of male validation will never curb my appetite for intimacy. it will starve me of it.
tuesday, 12pm
7/1/2025
as i’ve grown older i’ve become more in touch with the seasons and i expand and contract along with them. this year, it really felt like spring up until the summer solstice, which is rare. i’m feeling a shift in myself as abrupt as the heat wave. nothing too unfamiliar, though. another thing about getting older is that (if you’re lucky) you start to get a clearer picture of who You are and you become more comfortable with how that can ebb and flow. each summer i return to Summer Me, each winter to Winter Me, both a variation of Me, which may have become slightly altered or further realized after another year has passed, but has more or less relaxed into a pretty consistent state. with summer i find myself more creatively ambitious and a bit more masculine. the unrelenting heat (which i really rub elbows with since my car has no air conditioning) evokes a kind of primal energy and acts as an aphrodisiac (which is quite compatible with creativity, as a majority of art derives from, in some way or another, being horny). it is also a reminder that the world is going to end which gives me a sense of urgency.
i had a panic attack at work two days ago because i forgot to take my meds twice in a row, so unfortunately i do still rely on them and have not been miraculously cured of my dysregulated nervous system. the next day, i had a dream that i’d murdered someone and thrown parts of their mutilated body into a dumpster. shortly after waking from this dream, i realized i was scheduled for work and was already an hour late. fortunately, i did remember to take my meds this time. later that night i was craving nachos from taco bell, which is strange because i never get them. i had some and finished watching rear window, which i enjoyed and rated four and a half stars. i’m disappointed that i didn’t finish a book in the month of june, but that is an arbitrary goal fueled by receiving a badge of achievement on goodreads.com. edit: just realized that i did in fact finish a book in june, if you even care.
at the st. vincent de paul outlet store i finally found the coffee table of my dreams: a low, rounded rectangle, made of real wood (that i cannot confidently identify), scratched and dinged up with squeaky peg legs joined by an inset scalloped edge, $12. i also found a novel by clive barker (which i later found out is a middle-grade novel, but perhaps that’s more my speed as i’m struggling to read books made for grown-ups). another thing about the summertime is that it strangely conjures my interest in the spooky, the novelty and halloweeny. i first watched blood feast (1963) in the dead of summer, and i wouldn’t have had it any other way. at the goodwill bins, i found a pair of white baseball pants that fit like a glove (no pun intended). i’m excited to wear them with my Punk Boots, maybe even at the Punk Bar, which i discovered last weekend serves a $5 old fashioned.
that’s pretty much all that’s going on in my world. i am working, i am thrifting, i am creating, i am trying to continue nurturing budding friendships through the exhaustion of the foodservice industry and hot, wet days. in 72 hours i will be in a body of water, with my brand new striped bikini top and a belly full of hawaiian rolls.
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