Yesterday: mostly crashed, post-move.
Got up in the morning because someone was shouting outside the front door.–There goes the peaceful streak. I’ve had my share of shouting matches, just not at five a.m.
Got up, did yoga, went for a walk. It was deeply foggy, dark and dreary, which is exactly the sort of thing I like. I bandaged up the spot on my foot and brought extra bandaids.
Back was not, and is still not, happy. Not as bad as it was before I started using the foam roller regularly, but augh. It was a lonely morning yesterday, very abandoned-feeling.
I did talk to a guy at a bus stop who just wanted to know if he should see a doctor about something on his foot. I wasn’t sure whether he was homeless, but I didn’t just want to fire off and tell him to incur an expense. So he showed me his foot. There was a green spot on the bottom of it. He said that he’d stepped on something that “bit” him, on Clearwater Beach, about six days ago.
I said, “If it spreads or get worse, go, but it looks like a bruise that’s healing. It’s not red or swollen, and it’s been six days and you’re not dead yet, so I’d just keep an eye on it.”
He said, “Not dead yet?”
“Yeah. You know. Six days is a long time for something to poke or bite or bruise you and not get worse. But if it gets worse, go.”
He shook his head: “That’s right. Not dead yet!”
He was still chuckling about it when I walked off toward the apartment.
We went to a place with sushi and pho. I ordered the kind with the tendons and whatnot and they left out the tendons. Do white people around here not know how to eat? They were stressing about other things, though, so I left it. NEXT time (because it was yummy and they upsized me for free) I will be like, “I hereby certify that I, a white person, want the tendons in this, no shit.”
Ray got a fried roll called a bagel roll that did not involve any bagels but sure looked like it. She said it was yummy. We also got crab rangoons and they were well fried. I didn’t think about taking pictures, though, because I was sooooo hungry and tired and grumpy.–Not pictures of the food but of the restaurant and staff.
I picked up the unlimited subscription for Midjourney yesterday and went nuts with it. I’ll probably back down to free or $10 in a month or two, but yesterday it was a fair trade for my brain just wanting to play with something fun.
One of the things that fascinates me about it Midjourney is the fact that it’s language-driven, almost search-engine-optimization driven. It’s not just about describing the thing you want, but thinking about how that description will be perceived, which in turn is influenced by how people search for things and tag things online. How do we interpret a web of meaning like that, and produce interesting results? I ended up spending a fair amount of time popping back and forth between google search bar and Midjourney: type one element into search, check results, type another element into search, check results, then type the combined elements into Midjourney to see how those types of results could be combined.–Midjourney isn’t Google Search, but if both Midjourney and Google Search are doing their respective jobs, then on average the technique should be informative.
One of the more interesting experiments I did yesterday was try typing “colors that taste sour” into Midjourney. It worked! I tried smells, too, but you mostly just get pictures of the things you’re smelling, as in, “the smell of jasmine perfume” just gets you a bottle of perfume. “The smell of jasmine” gets you jasmine flowers.
I worked on the WIP later last night after my brain calmed down and it went well. The POV character (Marina) hates being around crowds; she was really uncomfortable during one of the conference sessions and felt stared at. But at the other character’s aunt’s restaurant she was fine even though everyone was staring at her.–I know I’d be more comfortable at a restaurant than moderating a conference session. At any rate, there were more people then I (the author) expected, and I’m relieved that she’s handling it well. The male lead is covering his eyes and trying to fend off people giving him shit in Korean, which thankfully I don’t have to translate at the moment.
This morning, I got up late, did more Midjourney (Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities seems like a REALLY rich vein to experiment with styles and textures), did some brief yoga, then out for a walk in the opposite direction. No fog, just bright sunshine this morning. I didn’t take too many pictures, because the character I was mad at the other day came back out and demanded I pay attention to him.
We talked it out. He’d changed; other influences were getting drawn into his character. The shift was subtle, like he’d just relaxed. He’d basically been abandoned as a little kid and was torn up between wanting to push people away to protect himself and wanting not to allow them to leave. He didn’t think he had anything to offer. He didn’t think he was attractive; he thought people just said that because he was “close enough” and were just using it as a handle to manipulate him. His sense of worth was about what he was able to provide others, and that was it.–This is the Batman/assassin guy. He’s been thinking about what I’d said and doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to change that, and he doesn’t know if he wants to. *Shouldn’t* people define their worth by the value they bring to others? That value isn’t nothing. It’s worthwhile.
I think he’s right and wrong at the same time. If you’re a psycho or narcissist or something, you value people for whatever use they are for you. If you’re not a psycho, etc., you also have this sense that anything that exists that has thoughts and feelings–awareness or intelligence?–has intrinsic value. This isn’t an objective sense; we can devalue people or we can give this value to inanimate objects that we interact with regularly (like personifying a roomba). The point is, most people see other people that they’re close to and go, “I’m just glad you exist, whether or not you make me feel good.”
The character isn’t a psycho. He doesn’t see other people as useful objects (although he is rather manipulative). And yet he sees himself as such an object.
He says, “Well, and you? Don’t you see yourself as an object? Or as a service?”–Sometimes I do, although not as much as I used to.
He also wanted to know something about me: Why do I always turn away, avoid, or cover my face during conflicts? Why not just do what it takes to clear the air?
I explained that when I get too emotional or stressed out, I get sick. (Both Ray and I are fighting off colds due to the move right now.) I need breaks. Like five breaths will do it. I can either keep pushing forward and melt down and get sick, or I can stop and calm down and reset.–The ex used to play that against me. He’d pick on me until I lost my shit, then yell at me that if only I could say what the problem was he would listen (he wouldn’t). Fights with him never ended until I was groveling, sometimes literally, even as he accused me of wanting him to grovel. If I didn’t back down from a problem I was being unfair; if he picked on me until I lost my mind and started shouting at him, he was being noble for staying with me in the first place.
The character managed not to offer to assassinate someone, but instead gave me a hug: “Then I’ll wait five breaths for you to calm down. I don’t want you to feel stressed out and sick around me. But you have to talk to me. I freak out when it feels like you won’t listen. It feels like I’m being abandoned.”
When stuff gets confused and I’m going, “What really happened in my marriage?” I go back to therapy and the fact that I went and listened and changed, and he only went (twice total, sabotage efforts both times) to check a box so he could continue to say things were my fault and the only way to fix it was to do what he wanted.
It’s weird having healthier behavior being modeled by my characters than by my ex, but okay. I’ll take it.