Adventures du jour!
Today was Ray’s birthday. Happy 21st! I went nuts on the food and made ramen and designed a cocktail (taki margarita) for her. It was nice to do some non-basic cooking, but I don’t think I’ll go back to doing it as often as I used to. I just don’t need it.
We of course played Left4Dead (a zombie-killing co-op game that we’ve been playing for years), then started on a rewatch of Marimashita Iruma-Kun, an anime about being nice and BECOMING KING OF HELL. It’s one of those shows that are fiercely, subversively sweet.
This morning, getting up to do yoga was an effort. Some dude was right outside doing yard things for an inordinately long time. Just when I thought he’d buggered off, he was back again with a weed wacker. Fffff. I ended up doing yoga indoors. Last night, some of the throat/knot at the back of the neck stuff had crept back in; I managed to release most of it. It was definitely tied to wanting to say something and knowing it would be wiser not to. Be patient! What has patience ever gotten me? WAH! [Neck tenses up.]–That sort of thing.
The traps get tight over matters of anxiety; the throat gets tight over not using my voice; the solar plexus gets tight over…what? I’m not sure. Bitterness? Resentment? Limitations? The hips/spine basket gets tight over seriousness? Lack of play? Routine? I’m not sure about that one, either. The muscles at the top of my neck lock up when I’m going “I have to do this all myself (me me me).” –Yeah, just the thought of that made them lock up and now I have a headache.
Meds taken!
I did a bunch of work on the foam roller for the first time after my solar plexus released. I’m not sure why this didn’t cross my mind, but the solar plexus in front is the bra strap area in back. I still have a bit of a knot there on the back of the spine, but it’s mostly gone. Hot shit! Serious boobage comes with a cost in back pain, among other things, and it’d be AMAZING if I could let most of that go. I just did a back bend over the chair seat. While it wasn’t as far as I could get in high school, it was a good sight better than my previous two decades.
Walkies: the characters haven’t come out lately; I think they’re at a touchy spot and are not willing to let me distract them at this time. I did get a good line from one character while I was doing yoga, but he didn’t come all the way out to talk to me. The scene they’re doing was tense enough that one character ditched the other two (and the scene) to go pet a dog and get some coffee.
While walking, I found an abandoned baseball diamond, by a place that I’d passed half a dozen times but hadn’t noticed. It was near the One True Hill in Tampa area; the baseball diamond is on a terrace below street level. Sunken. The dragonflies were out zooming around, but never when I was trying to photograph or film them. I hadn’t seen dragonflies around here before. I wonder if it’s a seasonal thing. I didn’t get to explore anywhere new today; I suddenly felt like I was going to pass out from sunstroke. I found some shade to hide in, drank some water, waited it out. Florida does NOT get as sunny as Colorado; it felt like I was back in Colorado trying to walk around in the sun in July. Which is weird for Florida. Fortunately there were ten thousand tiny little flowers either in the shade or adjacent to it, so I stopped to rest often. I was wearing a black shirt in the sun, which may have been part of the problem (although I do have other black shirts that I wear on walks). Dunno. I think I’ve lost weight since walking/yoga daily; that black shirt is one I tend to avoid since I feel like a bit of a sausage in it. (I’ll wear tights all day long but I like baggy shirts.) Anyway, it was much looser.
Me: I think I lost weight!
Ray: Maybe you’re just standing up straight.
Ahhhhh…I’m both annoyed and glad that I still can’t find my scale.
–The ex tried to send Ray a gift card for her birthday yesterday, the same guy who told me countless times that if he wanted to insult someone, he’d send them a gift card. I told Ray that she didn’t have to accept it; she could file or delete the email and just ignore it. When a person has fucked someone’s life over that badly, a “gift” of money is little more than a fishing attempt, an attempt to purchase a personal connection. Fuck him. She was little more than an inconvenience to him while we were married. She doesn’t have to convenience him now.
I’m trying to figure out whether I should move daily notes onto email or what. I think I’ve done what I, personally, needed them to do, which was make it so that I was practicing handling being more open in public. I know that regardless of where I put the writing, I have to write it. If I don’t achieve some level of babble every day, I start curling up like an ingrown toenail.
Some of what I write is personal and should stay inside a circle of friends; some of it is speculative and should get shared to other nerds so we can co-speculate. I’m thinking about how to handle it so I can friend more and nerd more, but paperwork less. Until I get it worked out, I’ll probably just keep writing here.
I had a talk with a friend today who had gone quiet lately, and who dropped a comment in a mutual friend’s post that hinted that she might be feeling ooky. I checked in with her. Definitely ooky. I told her good things about herself; during the worst of the stuff with the ex, she was one of the people who did the same for me. She is a fucking FONT of good things, though, so it wasn’t hard.
I’m still pissed at Midjourney for barfing up such horrifically awful Asian men. I had to shut it off tonight again. “How could you give me such awful stereotypes?” On the one hand, I know it’s useless to ask an AI that question at this point; on the other hand, euuuugh. Just no. If the designers aren’t screening for the awful stereotypes I got tonight–if they can cover their butts re: nudity reasonably well–that says something. I’m going to give it one more attempt tomorrow, when I’m not tied up doing All the Birthday Things, and try to determine the edge of where the bullshit is. If it’s not just system weirdness, then I think I’ll try taking it up with the Midjourney team. There are other things going wrong, so I don’t know that it’s solely a matter of prejudice, but I’m seeing other people’s results that aren’t as fucked up as mine. We shall see.