2023.12.12 // mid twenties, round 2

it's my birthday.

there's a lot waiting for me next year. nothing life-changing ever comes easy, and it comes with many caveats. it's tough to conceptualize that future on my own, when it feels so far away, but time never stops for anyone, not even those who need to catch their breath.

there's many things worrying me about the future. most importanty my dog is getting grey, i'm officially off testosterone until the state takes pity on me. i know the end result of both situations isn't immediate, but my anxiety has been getting out of hand this past couple of months and the sense of impending doom is undeniable, undeterred.

i have so much good in my life, so much to be thankful for, and yet my days have me feeling like i'm burdened with routine. my future is uncertain, and fate anxiety has begun eating me from the inside out. there's ways i can remedy this--no, not anxiety medication, not when it fogs up my brain at best and gives me migiraines at worst--maybe with some kind introspection, or maybe with some books. determinism stuff, you know the drill. i don't know how common it is for people to undergo a midlife crisis in their mid 20s but whatever i'm going through fits the bill perfectly: my thoughts are consumed with the vulnerability of life, and the unrelenting march of time. as someone still coming to terms with chronic illness, every little decision that i make feels like it might have a myriad of unforeseen consequences and there is nothing i can do to prevent it other than.. not making choices.

it's a sordid, brutal state to be in. but you can't find beauty on this here earth without making yourself vulnerable, so i suppose that's exactly what i will do. maybe i can offset any future developments by walking a litle bit every day, and finding activities i can occupy my brain with so that i don't dwell on these feelings any longer. i am doing well, after all. i have a roof over my head, don't i?

2023.10.05

easing back into webmaking by re-organizing this page's code. it's far from perfect but it's functional, and now optimized for most resolutions! no more zooming out to un-break the code on laptops.

as far as personal updates go... it can't say i've been having a great time, but yesterday i received some wonderful news. i've been riding the ecstasy since, and a boost to my humor is what i needed to stop myself from spiraling into a depressive stupor again. still don't want to leave my home since i came back to brasil, though, and i think i might be developing some type of agoraphobia. i'm not smart enough to self-diagnose so i'll just ignore it until it goes away (or doesn't).

2023.08.29 // misery and safety in a tropical paradise

so, i'm home.

hold the applause, please! i have -been- home for over 20 days, and i still have some work to get to before i can accept any commendations.
it's tough out here, and the first couple of weeks made it borderline impossible to accomplish anything art-related. as a result, i now have an immense backlog to get to before utilities start piling up...

none da less. i'm back in rio, and i've had a lot of time to kill during my 24 hours of travel here from humboldt. I spent some time calling and crying with kota, but without internet on the plane all i could really do was think, or sleep. and i did plenty of sleeping too! but the thinking naturally stuck with me for longer.

in rio, i'm going to have to go out in the searing sun. i'm going to meet people, i'll have to look at their faces and speak portuguese. i haven't had to do that in three months, and even before then i was sort of isolated. not for any good reason.
belonging always feels complicated no matter where i go, and not just by virtue of being a "freak" for the way i look and act -- which is only marginally weird! i don't even dye my hair. in my opinion the brunt of it comes from cultural vacuums and what fills them. I became an immigrant at age 2, it shouldn't come as a surprise that my brain developed in a very specific way given the context i grew up in. my family moved across countries a lot, so all of my memories come to me like kinda like patchwork; personal, familial, and cultural/historical memories are jumbled together with no way to filter the language i spoke and heard, or where i was when it happened, making it very difficult to reconstruct a cohesive timeline of events. Impossible for someone like me, who has shit memory.

thinking of it, i'd be amiss if i didn't consider my specific upbringing and the resulting shit memory to at least correlate to each other. learning three languages simultaneously must have affected my development of language at least somewhat. i've always had so much trouble with accents in portuguese grammar, yet every time i have to think of the word for something, i think of the portuguese word for it first. i'm always so undeniably brazilian in the way i interact with people in spanish and english, yet i'm always such a foreigner when talking to brazilians themselves. I could never consider my portuguese good when i'm always self conscious of the way i talk to my brazilian friends in person. my accent might be on point, and i sound inconspicuously brazilian for quick interactions, but everything else falls apart if i linger on it too long. i don't want to make it sound like a big deal, but it's kind of devastating to me because i'm brazilian before anything else.

but maybe not for long? i'll get married to dakota relatively soon, and while that doesn't necessarily grant me american citizenship i'll become American too, in a way. inevitably. it's a scary thought, i don't necessarily feel at ease in the US yet. in fact if i'm quite frank i'm fighting for my fucking life up there when i'm left to my own devices, and you'd think they dropped me there from the town-on-gorkhon with how out of place i feel.
for no good reason, really, because anybody can be american. i think. allegedly. i mean, i've seen all kinds of people in Eureka, and that's just Eureka, but i also saw a lot of big trucks, the least humanlike object on earth. i can say with 100% confidence that i've seen more trucks than people in Eureka.

scary as the trucks may be, that is where my beloved resides, and he won't be leaving for another 4 years after selling his body and soul to the government. so if everything goes as idealized, i'm moving to the other side of the world. i've been moving around since i was a toddler, as previously mentioned, but they never took me so far away. i have to haul my entire life across a continent, and everything could go wrong. friends have done it before, my sister has done it before, but i fucking hate flying. the whole process stinks, from packing shit i forgot last second to arriving 7 hours too early to the airport because they delayed your flight by 3 hours to sitting right next to a crying baby for 12 hours to landing and having to wait in the objectively worst airport in the entire world another 3 hours (IT'S NAMED AFTER GEORGE BUSH!!!!!!!) for a connection that takes 4 hours and by that point i'm numb to the pain so the diatribe doesn't need to continue.

getting there isn't the only thing about it that worries me, obviously. i have no idea if i'm equipped to adapt to the American reality, and everything costs an arm and a leg in California. but the main source of my worries is definitely getting Niko to the US. we've done our research and we already know the options, but either way it's not going to be cheap, and the cheapest ways are always more dangerous, so i will have to work like a motherfucker to guarantee the best possible scenario.
i was expecting this! and i would do no less for my dog son. but the thought of putting him in a cold cage and shipping him off for a 12 hour trip without being there to comfort him breaks my heart, i woudln't wish this on any dog owner that is unhealthily emotionally attached to their dog.

where both of us are right now, however, it's peaceful and boring. every day in Rio feels like it's the same day playing on repeat. but slowly, i get shit done, and i have my ouppy always by my side filling the dakota-shaped void in my life. he fills it poorly, he's a small dog [except when he lies on my bed and becomes the biggest dog ever], but he's trying his hardest.
it feels lonely here. secure, but restless. i do nothing all day yet i feel exhausted every night. and i know it's because i don't have my partner with me, taking me places and showing me things, reminding me every day what we're put on this earth to do.

it feels like it's going to last an eternity, but i know it's only a transient stage before i begin the next phase of my life. in a way, excitement for the future has finally caught up with me after years of fearing what might happen. right now it feels bittersweet, but it can't deny it's an improvement in the long run.

2023.06.11 // FOOD

it feels like a whole year has passed and at the same time it sort of doesnt. it's hard to explain. i actually haven't taken vyvanse for most of my stay so far despite many attempts at getting commissions done. I think i've finished 5 so far, which is comforting to take note since i was convinced i wouldn't be able to get any art done at all on my first month here. it's been about as busy as i imagined it would be, and i want to go into more detail about some of it soonish, but first i need to get some food ranting out of the way.

basically kota has been dragging me places and ive been happily trotting after him at a hurried pace on account of the shorter legs. discounting the times i'm walking too fast for him because i come from a long line of fast walkers and every once in a while my monkey brain will relapse and let it show while it runs on autopilot. but i try my hardest to avoid that. in any case we've been striding at a normal pace in relation to each other and he's taking me places. first week felt like pure chaos because we had like every friend and family member in my partner's life visit us for his graduation on saturday of that same week. thats ok because i had a [classic artery-clogging american breakfast] at pantry family/family pantry [editorial pending] and it fucking smacked to put it simply.
food is absolutely my favorite part of visiting america and i'm not one of those people who think that of every country. i think italian cuisine was ok. food in germany was disappointing and i was only excited by 1 frozen meal at the local market. im not saying its like this all over the country, i'm painting with wide brush strokes because were you to throw a dart at a map of italy at any given time wherever it lands on its probably going to have a cutesy rustic round/square pizza with the toasty (crumbly ass) crust with all the cheese and that big leaf. and i was over that and all the pastas on my first month living in turin. i didn't start liking pesto until years later my mom made this amazing manjericão pesto sauce she probably got off of some brazilian instagram recipe repost page. anyway i digress. what i'm trying to say here is that food in north america feels special to me, maybe because i'm from south america and in many ways the cuisines of both continents mirror each other, but on top of getting to taste all of the 20938492859 different brands of cheese whiz* (*not actually doing this) i get the honor of enjoying a lovingly crafted burger. it is known there are no burgers in europe. not like these.................

anyway, let's kick this off with the fate of the haul form my previous entry.

beautiful, isn't it?

on non-food related news, um... we ordered some indian to celebrate dakota's celebration. that's food related. fuck, honestly, i don't know, there's some more stuff i want to talk about on the food end. kota made this amazing pozole and i feel like my every waking moment is spent chasing that pozole in my dreams. i should've taken pictures of it. it just looked like putrid puke soup to be honest but it was so fucking good. i think it was just missing jalapeño slices which i'm hoping to address next time. (Editor's note: i forgot.) We went to the japanese market a couple of times to buy a bunch of fancy snacks, i avoided injuring myself with the ramune again. For our anniversary we went to Trinidad and had some delightful seafood, we did some yard sale shopping which yielded me some priceless* finds i'll be sharing in a future blog post. We saw a bunch of banana slugs, but you can't eat those. i think. and i still haven't had any wonton since i got here!

it should go without saying that all of this has been punctuated by irresponsible snacking on our parts. now that our anniversary and kota's birthday have both passed, we are allegedly entering a more wholesome and healthy chapter of our lives where we only eat snacks some of the time instead of all the time. wish us luck.

2023.05.07

busy couple of weeks, i'm about to fly to the US in a couple of days and haven't felt motivated to log any life updates because everything has been pretty boring busywork. just medical bullshit and loads of commission work, interspersed with spur of the moment Homestuck fanart i couldn't stop myself from drawing.

i have something to share though. in preparation for my imminent trip to norcal, i've been stockpiling sweets for my beloved (and myself) that you could only find on my side of the globe, exotic stores notwithstanding. The list goes as such:

• 5x Beijos by Fini; i can read your mind. i know what you're going to say. you can get fini kisses in europe. but that's only a half-truth, i want you to google 'kisses fini' and 'beijos fini' and you can see it for yourself: you don't even have to taste them to know these are two entirely different products fabricated in different conditions, under different federal food laws.
  all of this is to say that brazil kisses are a vastly superior product and my all-time favorite candy of all time, and not even the european version of the same company can recreate the magic we have in BRASIL (which stocks all over South America), let alone the disgusting half-baked wretch that Haribo Kisses are. borderline unfair comparison that could cost lives.
• 1x Large Brigadeiro Tortuguita Box; got my boyfriend hooked on these when he was visiting, and since I can't bring him a genuine overpriced shopping mall gourmet brigadeiro, the least i can do is bring him some brigadeiro in the shape of baby turtles ready for decapitation. (it's the most humane way to eat it.)
• 1x Assorted Bonbon Box by Nestle; i could only get one of these because they keep jacking up the prices on this piece of garbage. i don't even like nestle but i really wanted kota to try one of these and i can't for the life of me remember which one it was.
• 2x Assorted Bonbon Box by Garoto; this one's special. it's cheaper than the nestle box and made by a brazilian company, and it has much more to offer in terms of variety. kota's favorites are eclipse and serenata, two of the truffle-kind bonbons, while i immediately go for the coconut and banana chocolates, both the most infamous of the batch. since kota visited, they have added two new varieties, and i'm very excited to have kota try [REDACTED] the pão de mel truffle!
• 1x Party-sized BIS with 32 (!) units; i can't wait to pull out this one and whack him over the head with it.
• 1x Cachafaz Alfajores Box and 2x Unit of Alfajor Terreabusi Clásico; mom just flew in from Argentina last week and i made sure to ask her to bring some turrones and alfajores, the latter for Dakota and the former for yours truly. i eradicated the turrones within three days but the Alfajores stand strong, unopened. i'm also throwing in two units of the cheaper brand of Alfajores because you never know when those fancy fucks are going to miss the point of a good old working class treat.
• 5x Assorted Tortuguita; of many different flavors for him to try, with duplicates for myself of the more interesting flavors.
• [REDACTED] and it's a very good surprise. A chocolate shaped like a frog!!

i think that's all of the sweets. i'm also bringing some toys for the cats, i can't wait to have fucking cats again, jesus. even if i'm going to miss my dog more than anything.
i might add a photo of the haul once i unpack everything at kota's, and i'll edit in the redacted bits after he's seen it. for now i'll leave you to ponder south american sweets on your own time. wish me luck on my travels, last time TSA hogs gave me a hard time at IAH for no fucking reason, as they do.

2023.04.20 // wheat day recap

burnt some toast today

when you stray from the path (weed + coffee) you find yourself a stranger in a strange land ..

2023.04.08 // Poem WIP

life has been happening. whatever. i'm not here to talk about that right now. the blog needs an update and i know just the thing.

"Sollux's blood is golden
like the tip of my blunt after i'm done abusing it, like that first morning piss that feels like it couldnt come sooner.
like biohazard cautionary tape that will not keep me out"

2023.02.22 // being taught in South America

i picked up 'the demon haunted world' by carl sagan for some light reading to add to my hoard of unfinished books last night and i'm not too far into it, barely made it past the introduction even, but as we all know my boy carl is known for stirring emotions in people. in the preface that he opens up with, title "My Teachers", he writes:

"I wish I could tell you about inspirational teachers in science from my elementary or junior high or high school days. But as I think back on it, there were none. There was rote memorization about the Periodic Table of the Elements, levers and inclined planes, green plant photosynthesis, and the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal.
But there was no soaring sense of wonder, no hint of an evolutionary perspective, and nothing about mistaken ideas that everybody had once believed. In high school laboratory courses, there was an answer we were supposed to get. We were marked off if we didn'tget it. There was no encouragement to pursue our own interests or hunches or conceptual mistakes. In the backs of textbooks there was material you could tell was interesting. The school year would always end before we got to it.

You could find wonderful books on astronomy, say, in the libraries, but not in the classroom."

ok needless to say this is a very universal experience but also very personal to me. he goes on to tell us that even his most capable teacher was still "A bully who enjoyed reducing young women to tears", and i couldn't help but think of one of my least bad physics teachers, someone i don't even remember the name of. we had a rotating cast of clowns for teachers at my defunct highschool so i only remember their faces and interactions with me and other students.
but this physics teacher, during my first year of EM [junior year of highschool for you gringos] when i was starting to become genuinely curious about the technical aspects of space and the sizes of the massive celestial objects in it, i asked her "what do astrologers do?", to which she replied "astrologers don't do anything. that's not a real profession." and cut the conversation there, not even bothering to correct me on the word astronomer.

how humiliating that is aside (very!! maybe i should have known the difference at 14, but i was raised bilingual and i've been winging words my whole fucking life!!!), her reaction as a professional was to limit the 'time wasted' with these huge fundamental questions at my expense even though i'm confident that the entire rest of the class also had no clue what the fuck astronomers do, which admittedly sucked more for me than for them.

but even if most of them didn't care about space or scifi as much as i did, which is dubious at best because everyone thinks space is at least a little cool, i know all of them had the potential to be influenced into caring about it by approaching it from a bigger-than-life perspective.
my physics teacher, like all my other teachers around that time with the exception of 1, saw her teaching position as a jumping stone to a better career. i don't know if in her case she was fresh out of college or was going through a rough patch, she seemed very young, but she was dedicated to one thing only and that was to meet material quotas per semester have us take the exams and fucking booking it out of that shithole. my physics teacher, bless her heart, could not give less of a shit whether we learned anything and actively resented us for disrupting the class with the questions of kids fresh off of elementary school.

obviously most of us who could not afford tutors cheated on the exams and got away with it, infact i got really good at cheating during highschool because so many of my teachers were just like her and worse. i never cheated during elementary school because i was afraid of getting caught but the hazing i went through with highschool teachers had turned me into a gruff 40 year old 14 year old by the end of first year. i, too, learned to stop giving a shit.

but i lost a lot from that. i grew bitter and resentful of authority, sure, but later in life i got to channel that resentment into understanding politics. but what i lost is the wonder of a 7 to 13 year old who wanted to become a scientist of some sort. after being punished by my teachers for having questions i decided to focus on getting the necessary scores to finish school without having to waste a single extra year on it. i suppose it helped me decide to become an artist for a living, and i'm not doing half bad with that i think, i'm more financially secure than i could ever dream to be as another unemployed brazilian with a biology degree. but everyone who knows me knows i wish it hadn't worked out this way deep down.

i think my teachers were entirely capable of harnessing that wonder of life i came with into a desire to understand and learn. if they had done that instead of approaching me and my classmates with a borderline resentful work ethic, i think my classmates would've been less rambunctious as well in the following years.maybe if they approached us from our perspective and for our sakes instead of The Curriculum they could have prevented the growing insecure and stray complex south americans are taught from birth.

i ranted about this to kota, but as an example, i would've genuinely loved portuguese if our teacher had opened with the literary legacy of brazil in the world stage. south american kids grow up thinking theyre in a shithole that is utterly irrelevant in global politics and culture and whatnot, wishing they could move to anywhere in the first world. we didn't care about the books produced by what we perceived as dead end culture and the first world's backyard.
but in reality, south america changed the fucking world, and there's traces of it in the politics and humanities and sciences everywhere else in the globe. this concept that was unthinkable to me as a child is so obvious in retrospect, after reading the thoughts of revolutionaries: of course south america changed the world! look at the size of the damn continent! its colonial history, its resourcefulness, its threat to the first world. All of the conditions for it to be a massive game changer were always there. But we couldn't see it.

a lot of people still don't see it, even in adulthood.

i thought i was born in a forgettable part of the world and that i had to become something in spite of it, and i only realized how special SA is after i was out of school, when i grew an interest for our history and literature out of my own curiosity after being exposed to foreigners and what they see of good in my continent. this is like borderline embarrassing obviously, but the thing is that in my generation was the result of centuries of reaffirmations of the complexo de vira-lata, especially in big cities and non-traditional communities. with globalization and western imperialism came impulsive comparisons between the first and third world, and this deeply influenced education. to this day brazilians are taught to think of brazil as a "developing country" in order to attain a closer spot to the USA than the rest of the global south. it's an obsession in media, education, economy, politics. you'd be pressed to find a brazilian who doesn't recognize this as an ever-looming influential factor in brazilian history.

the language barrier makes it feel isolating and lonely, but i've had a peek at the other side of the curtain too, what with the bilingual. and it's not an uniquely brazilian phenomenom, this is prevalent in every latin american country in one form or another, even if its in varying degrees of intensity and the responses to it emerge in drastic different forms. one could say this latin american inferiorty complex was channeled into Peronism in Argentina, and rather than trying to emulate americans in their nationalism like in Brazil, they openly scorn yanquis.

but i'm getting off track. carl sagan was an american, how could his description be so similar to the reality of education in south america? it might seem counterintuitive but when you think about it it makes loads of sense. with how impovirished the american educational system is, all of its worse qualities are reflected in Brazil with a much smaller budget. american imperialism in this country has been, on top of physical resource extraction, vastly cultural, and the pre-existing mongrel complex means anything american kind of looks like it could work here, because it's attached to the world's biggest superpower.

coincidently, we never learn about such imperialism in schools. in fact, for my generation, it was unheard of to be taught about the dictatorship, arguably the most high-profile case of imperialism since the founding of the republic.
i'm likely going to be talking about this dictatorship as well as the "dirty war" in much more detail some other time.

for now though did you know carl sagan was taught astronomy in college by fucking g p kuiper? like from the fucking kuiper belt?

2023.02.20 // about neocities, and the web

i've been going back and forth on how to approach having a new journal and it's weirding me out. at the start of the year i got a planner (snoopy themed, cute as fuck, refer) but as of late february i have used more pages for sketching layout ideas than. planning. infact i think i've only written a total of 5 lines on the whole book so far.
that has something to do with attention deficit and the thing in question becoming part of my environment or such shit so i'm hoping that being focused on webcrafting will help keep this one actively in my mind. i have higher hopes for it also, ideally it would replace my need for tweets, but i'm trying to be realistic. i've been tweeting since 2015 and it's a harder habit to kick than my addiction.

so more or less, i came to neocities to try to ignite something in me. or reignite, in a way. i've been online for most of my life and half of that was spent on an internet before facebook, those who were around know how different things were back then even if it might be hard to remember nowadays with twitter and tiktok and whatever else. i don't really care about preaching how much better the past was but my fondest memories as a kid on the internet are the time i spent on neopets and deviantart because i got to see other people's creativity and get inspired in turn.
coincidentally my worst memories are of the time i spent on orkut and tumblr. and i'm living worse future memories every day, every time i compulsively open twitter and it lands me on the new feed of the week they added shooting content that was lab engineered to enrage me directly into my blood.

so this sucks right? everyone agrees that existence in social media is miserable. but i think i've had one too many social media-induced migraine to sit around and wait any longer for things to magically get better for me online. i beat myself up too often for being inactive, for saying more than doing, so this year i want something a little different.

my dearest boyfriend convinced me to channel my restless energy into something productive for my own benefit: a website, mainly to catalogue my own characters, and i really didn't need a lot of convincing! toyhouse freaks me the fuck out, and i've been complaining about it for almost as long as i've been on it. its not really the platform itself and moreso the insane people on it, for the record. but i needed somewhere that i could store my characters with much more control and autonomy than layout presets behind a steep paywall.
The fact the content that is going to be hosted here exclusively won't be getting added to peoples "dreamies" or "to buy" folders is just a bonus on top of that. if a huge, titanic, gargantuan bonus.

neocities [and other personal website hosting platforms] has impressed me with what it has to offer so far: a blank canvas, and a community eager to share knowledge. not only that but starting my quest to relearn the ropes of HTML since i last coded a petpage has shown me a side of the internet i hadn't seen before, people doing shit with code i couldn't even dream of just a few weeks ago, and it has also stoked the fire in my passion for computer science history that i've been keeping on the backburner for the past couple of years because the available body of knowledge seemed so vast and overwhelming.
personal websites make it seem so... easy and attainable. awesome people have been doing incredible archiving work on platforms such as neocities of the parts of computer history that are obscured in formal encyclopedias: the most human aspects of it, the way we talked back then, what we cared about, the lenghts people would go to connect to one another and share.. everything.
even if most of it is from a context i couldn't relate to [anglophones in their mid 20's in the 90s and 2000s], it makes me feel as if i was there; living through it as they have. only a portion of it is applicable to my real lived experiences, as a very young child in the mid to late 2000s south american online playground, but all of it is helping me understand my past on the internet with some sort of newfound whimsy and hope. and the web revival movement that i'm pertaking in right this moment has been reviving my hope for the future of the internet, as well, even when everything else seems to be falling apart.

as corny as it might sound, i feel like this is what i need to be doing right now for my sanity. every platform has been encroaching on my autonomy as a creator and even as just a human being trying to socialize and find community, and that freaks me the fuck out. you can't even post porn in peace anymore, it fucking sucks out there. so i'm trying to make a comfortable little home for myself, and i hope you can find something inspiring hidden in these pages, if not now then in future if you decide to check in on my little pocket on the interweb.
it's going to be a long complicated trek to transfer everything i care about to this place, but it'll be done with love! and so much weed and vyvanse!

2023.02.17

i REALLY need to get that placeholder out of here before hussie sues my ass. so i guess this is my first journal entry since i started on the webside.
so hello world! i guess i am officially a human being behind the code, finally having a direct conversation with you. kinda exciting!
but enough of this because i have to get back to fixing this page's code. bear with me while i personalize it a little bit better, then brace yourself for the posting.