Happy August! Well, not really a happy August right now, I'm a bit sick today... currently writhing in pain waiting for the medication to kick in. You know how it is. Anyway, being sick and in pain does mean I suddenly have six hours of free time on my hands, so... hey, let's catch up!
Mid-July, I took a vacation to Wisconsin. It was fun, genuinely, I think I really needed that! I got to visit the Dells, which I probably would've gotten some pictures of if I wasn't afraid of my phone getting wet! I was also able to meet my friend's cat Moochi, who is ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE-- like, I didn't think she was that cute in pictures. Yeah, it's just a cat, big whoop. No. Moochi is the best cat ever made. Fight me.
To get to Wisconsin from my home state of Michigan (with my car) I took the car ferry for the very first time. It was my first time going through anything like that, so I was a little anxious and awkward, but the staff were very nice to me. I ended up getting seated late on my first ride, so I got to sit next to a guy who talked like a mobster from New York. Fun stuff! But, somewhere along the way, I lost the transgender button that was on my tote bag...
When I finally returned to Michigan, it was like, midnight...! I felt possessed to stay a bit longer before driving the rest of the way home, so I booked it to the nearest beach and sat by the waves in the dark for a while. Took my earbuds out and everything, just sat there and listened. That was probably the most calm and in control of anything I felt in a while. It was nice. It probably would have been nicer if I had the time to stay longer.
Anyways, I blasted Fall Out Boy the whole 2 hour drive home and made it back at around 2, promptly conked out, and called in a vacation day the next day because I was soooo sleepy.
Okay, so, slight pivot. I gotta explain this thing I do. So... y'know how ADHD is, right? Time-blindness, memory problems up the wazoo. I've been charting my activities by the half-hour on a spreadsheet for a while to see if I can cut down the time I spend mindlessly scrolling and watching YouTube. It's also kinda like a digital bullet journal, I guess? Makes it easier to remember what I was doing on any given day.
After vacation, I spent a couple hours emulating this one format I saw in a Reddit post where the days are represented by small cells in a row, and each activity corresponds to a number rather than what I was doing before, which was listing the activity by name in a vertical format. It's more concise, and assigning numbers to different types of activity helped me narrow down all the classifications I was using. I also hooked this new sheet up to a graph and time tracker, so by the end of the year I should be able to see how much time I spent from 7/18-12/31 on everything! Wow!
(Here's what it looks like in practice, for the record.)
Between then and now, I've been fixating pretty heavily on this SMG4 fanfiction my friend Gummy and I are writing called "Playing the Long Game". After a pretty lengthy break and a couple revisions, we released both parts of "Episode 3", which means we can finally get to the really exciting stuff. No spoilers, of course (assuming you care about my silly Gay Mario Recolor Fanfiction, which chances are you might not!) but I'm excited to see people's reactions to key moments in literally every upcoming chapter from 4 to the end.
There's a lot of the both of us in that fanfiction, I think. Not even just "how we would hypothetically write the characters in this show if we were hired by Glitch Productions and also allowed to make it incredibly homoerotic", but the inherent absurdity of it all is genuinely special to me. The perfect piece of SMG4-related art (hyperspecific category, I know) should strike a balance between being entirely heartfelt and real AND also utterly absurd. It's a comedy show. Animated in GMod. Mario from Mario is there. You get me.
Ugh, I could say so much more, BUT I SHAN'T SPOIL IT ALL! I must commit myself to making sure we can both see this through. (And then afterwards, we can work on the 5 other fic ideas about the same pairing that popped up WHILE we were writing PLG!)
Continuing on the SMG4 train, though, I've been putting out a lot of fanart on my Twitter (well, Elon wants to call it "X" now, but I'm not calling it that. My X? Really? My fucking X? What the hell does that mean???) and I've been meeting a lot of cool mutuals through doing this. It's always been hard for me to stay in a fandom, my interests change at the drop of a hat... but it probably helps that I'm actively writing something about the series to keep my interest in it.
The whole mutuals thing is a bit bittersweet, though. You may or may not know that Twitter is rapidly dying (or rather, someone keeps shooting it and it keeps twitching and somehow bleeding out MORE but it never seems to just DIE), and a lot of my interactions on that platform are marked with a distinct feeling that one day this will all disappear. I hope that I'll be able to find them again, if that day comes without warning. I hope we'll all be able to pick ourselves up and find a new place to go, y'know?
...Well, I've always got this website! And my email! So, my beloved mutuals, you know where to find me when Twitter explodes! I LEFT ALL MY CONTACT INFO IN ONE--
...You know the rest.
This is Medley, signing off. Writing this has been a welcome distraction from my pain, at least. I think I should go get some water, though...