bookish dreamer

People have horrible taste.

I know because I read the fanfiction they recommend. And it's true that my tolerance for shitty fanfic has lessened the more fanfiction I've read (there's a great Japanese grammatical expression for this as a verb ... yomerebayomeruhōdo or roughly if you read, you read too much though it can be used in a positive sense). But I just had to nope nope nope out of a fanfic that used given names every single sentence the two men uttered to each other. So sad. It's my own fault for reading a hooker-au I suppose.

I was weirdly depressed yesterday. Not that I mean there's no trigger or that it's weird to be depressed, but more that the depression itself felt different than other depressions I've felt in the past - almost as if I was on the edge of crying even though I was having quite regular conversations and laughing with my friends who came over the other night. I was both at a remove and totally present... performing laughter and interest and engagement at the same time that I was ready to close my eyes and hang my head. I know this is actually a pretty common sign of depression, but it's the first time I've felt it quite like that, a sort of visceral tingling around the edges of my eyes and a heaviness to my limbs. The brain is a curious thing, isn't it? If it doesn't recede (emotions, like tides, arrive in a wave in my brain and body, sometimes rushing up and sometimes sneaking in until the entire shore is engulfed) soon I'll go talk with someone and get some help managing it. For right now I'm chalking it up to holidays and seasonal changes, with a added parental visit and phd/job market pressure thrown in.

It may also be that my current closest female friends in LA are all pretty big emoters themselves right now - one is pretty much in constant job-related turmoil (job-related but world ending, everything is crucial and precariously balanced on a knife blade), one is learning to manage her anxiety but still having pretty extreme anxiety ... loops (they're not sudden so i hesitate to call them attacks), and one who just got back into town and who likes to fall head first into two-week great love affairs with men, or jobs, or plans to return to school, or friendships. The thing is they're all brilliant, caring, and kind of awesome, but it feels a bit like juggling with explosives sometimes. And that's even when I do a lot of self-care.

Hey, such is life. Like tides.