casualbird

alright, this is a BIG SECRET, so none of you can go telling my mom, okay?

i have a pothos plant whom i love with every fiber of my soul. i've kept her for years and she just keeps truckin along. i have to repot her every six months or so because she is so big and strong!

i live at university, and i think my mother misses me a lot. i come home for the weekends, but she's always calling me during the week, always planning what we're going to do when we're together. so i want to give her something that she can keep and fuss over that will remind her of me.

so i'm going to take a cutting of my plant, wait for it to root, then plant it and give it to her! i'm planning on decorating the pot that i will give it to her in--does anyone have cool ideas as to how to do that? i was thinking of maybe painting it or knitting a cozy for it. but i only have two weeks!

So my friends have coerced me into trying Dark Souls... mostly because it's Not My Kind Of Game At All and they think it would be funny. (I prefer more character-driven stories and Turn! Based! Combat!)

I spent a few hours working through the first couple of areas last night... and I learned a bunch of things. It's been repeated to me over and over that Dark Souls is 'A Game About Learning,' and that's true, but for me... Dark Souls is also about manipulation.

Namely, cajoling my friend who is MUCH better at these sorts of games than I am to do the hard parts for me, after I try and fail a few times.

I really like the feature where other players can leave notes for you! I like the unified tone that they're written in, and I like the game of trying to figure out whether the person writing them is trolling you or not.

I've been having some trouble with the controls, too... especially since I'm using an XBOX controller for the first time. The A and B buttons are switched!!??? Plus, I keep finding myself trying to use the controls for BOTW or Smash by accident.

Even though Dark Souls really isn't my thing, I had fun with it last night. I think I might try to keep going with it for a while! I spent a while on my character, and I love her and want her to be happy! Her name is Agnes, and she's a gentle country washerwoman who just happened to be tangled up in all of this. She wants to gut through all this scary nonsense as quickly as she can, so that she can get home to her beloved baby niece! Her favorite thing to do on her adventure is to look for flowers.

I knocked up a picture of her really quick.

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questionoftheday asks: What is the most expensive thing you have ever broken?

My answer: sat on my fuckin 3ds and broke the hinge... it still works but you can't tilt the screen anymore and it flops all over the place. unfortunate.

questionoftheday asks: What is the most ridiculous thing you have ever cried over?

My answer: Was on period. Dropped spoon. Yelled at spoon.

Came to senses, cried about having yelled at spoon.

is college a time of romantic mistakes for everyone, or is that just me?

i feel like i've done a lot of that.

i'm so excited for fic_rush today and tomorrow! i hadn't even heard of it until the other day, but it really lines up with what i'm working on right now!

i'm writing a fic right now that is turning out to be way bigger than i ever expected it to be. the longest story i've ever written was maybe 4k words long, and that was for school, so i had a deadline. my wip is currently sitting around 8.8k words, so it's twice as long as anything i've ever finished before.

i think i'm actually over the hump with this one--not because i don't have much more to go, i'm definitely expecting it to blow past 20k, but because i already have the plot more or less figured out and plotting has always been very difficult for me. plus, in the past couple years i've been working on my creative writing degree, so i've been learning a lot craft-wise. i just need to put in the work to make this thing happen!

so, this weekend i'm going to work to get my fic over 10k words! then i'll really feel like i'm getting somewhere.

ps: if you're into fire emblem (awakening!) and are feeling charitable, let me yak about my fic to you!

so. it has been a strange week-or-so span of time.

i started a class at school, for the january term. only a month long, but the same as any other four-credit class. and i was really enjoying it, but i dropped it anyway.

i have so many things to do, all the life things that i hadn't managed during the past semester. and trying to do that all at once, with school on top, was making me sort of, uh, completely fractious to the point where i was, like, gonna have a real-ass panic attack in a way i haven't in years. so i dropped it and i apologized very much to the professor who is kind and understanding.

so. here's a list of things i want to get done with the rest of this month.

1: clean my space

i've been watching that good tidying up show on netflix, with marie kondo. if you haven't seen it, and you can get a hold of it, do that. it cleanses the soul and motivates you for a really good clean. but even if i hadn't seen that, i needed to clean anyway because my room at home was a damn disaster. and i've made some headway on this, but now i'm going to have to go through all my clothes (which means a dreadful amount of laundry) and all my books as well. i want to make this work but esp. with my ocd it's really stressful.

2: apply for internships

fuck me RUNNING but i hated the applications process when i was trying to get into customer service at the MALL, and now you're telling me it's the same, but for my whole-ass career? and i might not even get paid for it? that is the shittiest deal ever. also cover letters are a very special brand of bullshit and i hate them and this entire disingenuous process.

3: write my fic

this is a good thing! and i'm excited to have time for it, but i'm having a lot of trouble. i can't motivate myself to write, because this is a new thing for me, writing longer pieces, and i'm afraid i'll fuck it up and nobody will like it. which, of course, is ridiculous, and i'm generally very pleased to have a project working away that i actually like. so whatever. i can buck up on this one.

4: find a therapist

i live in a major goddamn urban center but somehow nobody is taking new clients?

i dunno that's the entire inside of my head right now. really sorry to any of you sad sacks who read all this.

In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.

I suppose that what really makes me happy these days is spending time with my loved ones at the end of the day. There's nothing better, in my opinion, than taking time to decompress and have a laugh with people who really care about you, and I'm fortunate enough to have many people in my life who do. Whether I spend the evening at home with my mother, or pile on the couch and watch TV at my friend's apartment, this sort of thing always helps me to relieve the stress of the day.

Failing that, I like to spend a lot of time in the shower or bath, or on a long walk by myself--especially if it's cool and maybe even a little rainy. 

hello hello! it feels like it's been a million years since i've posted anything, and i don't like that, so here i am!

i've had a wild-ass week, really. here's a short list of things i have done:

• went to a christmas gathering with loud children
• prepared to host another christmas gathering with loud children
• spent a million years fiddling around with The Casserole Recipe From Beneath
• made myself vulnerable to illness from exertion
• took ill from exertion, like some kind of dainty 19th century novel character, only i didn't become consumptive and die and nobody proposed marriage to me in that oddly casual way that people do in those books.
• spent three days in bed
• got better
• saw les miserables
• cried about les miserables
• finished my plot outline for my fic!

and that's about it. it was nice, in its way. except for the part about being sick.

leaving homework until the morning of is a bad idea

i am the god-king of mildly bad ideas