So, I got my permit back in September, and have been slowly learning to drive ever since. And I hit a big milestone today!

So far, almost all my driving experience has been at night when there's few others on the road. Today I drove my roommate and I to the store during the day! :D It was also on roads with higher speed limits than I'm used to, but I did pretty well and I feel very proud of myself.

I know it might be a bit strange to be 22 and not have my license yet, but I've had an absolutely crushing phobia of driving for a really long time. I honestly wasn't sure if I'd ever learn to drive because I was so viscerally scared of it. I was really scared today to drive, and I wanted to cancel, but I didn't, and the drive went very smoothly. It honestly wasn't nearly as hard as I imagined. I just wanted to share this because I feel really happy and really proud of myself for making so much progress on overcoming my fear of driving. It still takes a lot of mental energy even for these simple drives on local roads, but it's getting easier and easier the more I practice.

General Warning: This blog gets personal. Perhaps overshares a bit. Be warned.

Recently I saw my psychiatrist, and he seemed very concerned about my mental state. He told me that the things I experience are considered schizophrenia. In the moment, that really upset me to hear, and it felt totally incorrect. I felt like I had misrepresented myself or the things I experience and accidentally made them sound worse than they actually were. Either way, I got prescribed an antipsychotic.

The super shocking plot twist here is that this medication has worked fucking wonders for me, LOL. It's actually astounding how rapidly and intensely this medication has calmed things down in my brain. I genuinely have not felt this good in a very long time. So, damn, maybe I do have schizophrenia. I'm not too worried about the diagnosis, though. All that really matters is that whatever symptoms I have improve when I take this medication.

It's kind of bittersweet, though, because I'm also realizing how many of my mental health struggles were psychotic symptoms without me even realizing. I was put on an anxiety med a few months ago that had done jack fucking shit for my anxiety. Turns out that this is because I was not experiencing anxiety but rather paranoia and delusions of persecution. My "anxiety" practically vanished the moment I started taking this new medication. This is only one example. Anyways, I know that it's normal for people in psychosis to not realize they're in psychosis, but I thought I was aware of it. I was aware of the things I experienced that were more 'bizarre', and I was aware of the fact that I was living in a constant fight to figure out what was real and what wasn't. It's really weird and distressing to live in a state of "I have these thoughts that I know are not grounded in reality but I still cannot stop believing that they are true." I'm really glad to be out of that.

Anyways, I wanted to share this because I've been genuinely feeling kind of emotional over how much this medication has helped me in just a few weeks. It is genuinely astounding how much better I feel. All these anxiety meds, mood stabilizers, etc. that didn't do shit and all I needed was a little risperidone. Damn.

Thank God, the sun goes down at 7pm again. I don't need therapy anymore.

The last few months have been a very mixed bag, and I don't want to get into all of that. I want to talk about fun things. Though this website layout is coming months later than I had hoped, the plus side is that I am very happy with how everything looks so far! I'm taking my time with it, but I've also been working very steadily on it. As of recent, I've been working on it every single day for at least a couple hours.

I also read two books this month: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Both are very different from each other, and both were fantastic reads. Breakfast of Champions is a deceptively easy read, and I honestly feel like I need to reread it to really let it sink in. I may write a blog entry about these books like I did for Leech, if I have the time.

I also played Chants of Sennaar last week—I bought it months ago after I heard someone call it "the Dark Souls of Duolingo," but I only just now got around to actually playing it. I would not consider it the Dark Souls of Duolingo, but maybe that's because I am very bad at Dark Souls and much less bad with language. It was an amazing game, though! I loved it so much. I absolutely recommend it.

I have kind of been in the trenches in regard to work some days — but ultimately, I am very grateful for this job and I don't really plan on leaving it soon. It's very lax, and it's remote, and I think that's the only reason I've been able to physically and mentally handle a 40 hour work week. The work I do is also very appreciated, which is a welcome change from my last job! Ultimately, though I've had a lot of bad days and a lot of struggles these past few months, I'm very grateful for the things I have going for me right now. I am in a better place than I ever have been before, and it's really nice!

Well, I have officially hit the part of year where I always feel like absolute dogshit. I don't know why I so consistently feel like shit between October/my birthday and Thanksgiving. Tried to prevent it this year but didn't do a great job :P I'm not doing awful though. But when I'm feeling bad I'm feeling VERY bad.

I got a job, though! Just a temporary one while I build my portfolio for a writing job, but I really like it so far. The only issue is that they're not giving me any Fucking Hours. Love my job. Would love to work more than two shifts a week.

I moved into an apartment with my friend, and it's been really great so far. I have my own bedroom!! I've never really had my own space before so I'm really happy to have that now. It's slowly getting decked out with very cool things. Mainly things I already owned, because I have no fucking money right now, but y'know. We're getting there. I am in a constant oscillation between "I finally feel hope for my future and am so excited to be alive" and "My life is falling apart before my very eyes and I don't know how much longer I can keep going." Working on staying more towards that first one most of the time lmfao.

Also, I'm learning how to drive! I got my permit! Parking is SO GOD DAMN DIFFICULT. I'm slowly getting better at driving tho. I spent a few weeks practicing in parking lots but I recently upgraded to neighborhood roads. I have only scraped the curb ONCE. Which is one more time than I was hoping for, but y'know. It was during a stressful moment where I was trying to pull over to let a car pass me and I was getting Overwhelmed. But there were no marks on the car so it's fine. Like it never happened. No one has to know about it except for anyone who reads this and me and my roommate.

 A lot has happened since I last updated! I graduated college, first of all. I still can't believe it to be honest, I spent so long convinced I would end up dropping out but now I've done it and I've got my degree. I also got an apartment with one of my best friends! We haven't moved quite yet but we move in about a week and a half. I'm really excited.

 I've also been doing this online course called Project Odin to help improve my web development skills. I'm still not that far into it, but I'm learning a lot! I've learned that my neocities probably has a lot of accessibility issues. I don't quite know enough to confidently fix those issues yet, but as I learn more I plan to recode my website to make it more accessible! And to just improve the quality of the code in general. Project Odin is truly fantastic, and it's completely free, so I really recommend it! It's especially great if you ever want to apply your coding knowledge in a job, because it is structured specifically to prepare you for website development as a career.

 I've also gotten very into Project Sekai, and I also put like 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom. I've been wanting to update my neocities for so long, but I really don't have many ideas for things of substance that I could add? I've been working on a CRAZY and absolutely ridiculous Pokemon project, so I'll probably make a page dedicated to that as I make more progress.

 I don't know how much time I'll have for this website, since I'm looking for a full-time job right now, but I really want to keep working on this! I love this little website.

 I'm a boy with no wisdom teeth! Woohoo! The surgery went surprisingly well and I was in very little pain the whole time and now it's been three weeks and the dentist says my mouth is healing very well :)

 I'm also in the midst of finals season :( I'm almost done though! I really felt the power of Vyvanse this quarter because all my finals but one were due BEFORE FINALS WEEK EVEN STARTED, and what did I do? I started on them early!! I turned in one five days before it was due!! I somehow got through my most stressful finals week to date with almost no stress (for the most part). I still have one more essay and one test but those will be fine and I've already started on the essay.

 I've been playing a lot of Project Diva recently, not sure why. But something clicked in my brain and I've been going beast mode because I'm suddenly so much better at the game than I used to be? I was always pretty bad at the game, but now I'm okay? I can clear almost every single song on hard!! :O The only exception are the most difficult songs, the ones that are like 7.5 difficulty. But I can (JUST BARELY) clear 7.0 difficulty songs. And I'm able to get 90% plus on some of the easier hard songs B) I'm not sure where that puts me in comparison to the average Project Diva players. I don't really care where it puts me but I feel like I'm the shit right now.

 I was gonna say "Sorry for the lack of updates," but then I remembered that it hasn't even been a month and I also make this website exclusively for myself, so I am actually not sorry. A lot has happened this month, though. For one, my emergency dentist appointment ended with me being scheduled for wisdom tooth removal, so that's happening on the 27th. I'm being fully sedated for it, thank God. I also got deep cleanings done and my teeth are all nice and clean and I have been very good about flossing because I am a BIG BOY who can do BIG BOY THINGS.

 I also had all my midterms last week and the week before, and I did very good! I've gotten an A on all the ones that have been graded so far, and I probably will not get an A on the last one because it was an essay, but I am hopeful that I will get a B. I'm very happy with myself. :) I was also on the biggest fucking Stardew Valley kick for a couple weeks there, like every second of my free time was spent playing that game, but I'm basically out of that hyperfixation by now. Now my hobby of the week is reading! I've read like four books this week, and granted some of them were fairly short, but some of them were very long. I'll write reviews about them if I have the time. Right now I'm reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami because he is one of my favorite authors ever and this book is so good so far. I'm not very far in though I'm like 130 pages in and it's 600 pages long. It'll take me a bit to read.

 I'll update this website... Eventually. I want to change the layout into something less variable so that the CSS doesn't looked fucked the moment I change anything. I was working on that a while ago and made decent progress but I haven't touched it in a couple weeks because I'm not that motivated to right now. I'm being zapped of all my energy by college because I'm taking 17 units which is a special kind of hell that's actually not that bad beyond leaving me tired AT ALL TIMES. I also want to make custom graphics for this site but I'm not that good at that and I'm easily frustrated so my attempts so far didn't go that well. Someday! Someday ...

 Been having quite the FUCKING week, lads. My wisdom teeth have been growing in, and that had been fine for a long time, but I had set up an appointment for early February for the consultation for wisdom tooth removal surgery. My teeth, however, had other plans, and now I have an urgent dentist appointment tomorrow because I am in Pain and one of my wisdom teeth seems to be pressing against a fucking nerve, so every time I move my jaw it's like playing Russian roulette with my body on if I'm going to have a jolt of elevtricity zap through my face. (I am being a little dramatic, because I'm the littlest man.) So I hope that goes well tomorrow, but I'm pissy about this because I had to miss a lot of work from being too in pain to even talk, and so my paycheck's going to look like shit on TOP of me having to take the hit of paying for this dentist visit. I need to find some old man who's willing to send me $50 for literally nothing in return.

 My week's been kind of fucked for other reasons, too, because my brain has decided to keep me permanently in Bite Mode for the past week, and I am not equipped to handle life like a normal fucking adult in Bite Mode. I have cried a lot and eaten very little. The latter is moreso because I cannot fucking afford to buy snackies in this economy, which is frankly very fucked up, because I want a strawberry fanta and a chocolate bar. And some sun chips!!! I've been on a sun chip kick.

 I am rapidly approaching my college graduation. Granted, my graduating is still contingent on me passing every class I take during these next two quarters, because I am graduating by the skin of my fucking teeth. Like, my grades are fine, my GPA is a 3.1 or so, but I am just barely meeting the unit requirement.

 Well, right after typing that I went to double check that I am, in fact, on track to graduate, and I just about had a mental breakdown because my transcript said I needed 4 more units than I thought I did. Thankfully, that's just because one of my classes from last quarter is temporarily marked as "Not Reported" for reasons beyond my control. Once I get that grade, I'll be exactly where I'm supposed to be (assuming I pass, but I'm pretty confident that I did well in that class). Crisis averted!

 The point of me writing this, though, is because I'm having a crisis over how close graduation is. I've spent these last two years barely staying afloat, convinced I was going to drop out eventually. But, now graduation is so close, and I know I can do it. My GPA is high enough that I can do really poorly in my final classes and be totally fine, so long as I still pass. I honestly never envisioned myself making it through college, and I'm feeling proud of myself but also full of dread. I don't really know what I'm going to do after I graduate. I want to be an editor, and there's a job with my college I'm planning on applying for, but I don't really have a concrete plan otherwise.

 I feel like I'm six months away from being thrust into adulthood, but I'm so far from prepared for that. There's no use in worrying myself sick over it, though, and I'm trying to enjoy my final quarters at this school.

 Happy new year! I hope your 2023 is off to a good start. I'm having a crisis because it's officially the year I graduate, but I am excited for the new year. 2022 was a good year for me overall, despite a lot of really terrible things that happened. I'm hopeful that 2023 will be good too.

 I've been working on this website a lot, and I'm making good progress! I'm finally really happy with how the home page looks. I just got done updating the layout for the blog page, and it's an improvement, but I'm still not that happy with it. I don't know what I want to do to make it look better. I'll probably leave it be for now and come back later. My winter break has been mostly good so far—I've actually loved sleeping on a mattress on the floor because it means my dog cuddles with me every night. And she wakes me up by licking my face only sometimes. A day or two ago I woke up to her standing on my face. It's fantastic, I've missed her so much. I go back to college this weekend, and I'm actually not looking forward to it. Only because it means leaving my dog. That's really it.

 My resolution this year is to prioritize my happiness more. That's purposefully vague, because it doesn't matter to me how I go about it. I mainly want to be self destructive less often (which I already made good progress on in 2022!) and I want to stop pushing myself to the point of burnout over and over.

 I also want to tolerate less bullshit. I fell out with an entire friend group in 2021, and I was really upset about it for a long time, but I've realized now how much better I feel without them. I finally have friends who I don't have to worry if they secretly hate me, or if they're talking about me behind my back. Getting rid of that friend group has made my anxiety less intense and my self-worth much higher. This is what made me realize that life is too short to tolerate bullshit. Nothing was more freeing than muting anything related to those friends/their online presences and never having to see them again. I can't believe I stayed with that group for years just because I was scared of losing my "only friends." Not everyone in that group sucked, but God, I'm so fucking glad I'm far, far away from them.

 This entry is pretty nonsensical, but my head is pretty scattered today.

 I'm officially done with fall quarter of my senior year of college. I'm home for the next month, which I have mixed feelings about, but it's nice to get a big break like this. I've never had a winter break this long before.

 I normally love the holidays, but they're going to be pretty rough this year. My grandpa died earlier this year, and he was the biggest part of the holidays for me. I always spend the week leading up to Christmas with him, preparing Christmas dinner with him and spending time with him. I'm still going over to help prepare for Christmas, but it's not going to be the same. It is hard, because it happened so suddenly, and I didn't know last year would be the last time I got to do this with him. I'm determined to make the best of the holidays, though, because there's still so many other great things that happen that I want to enjoy even if it will be bittersweet without my grandpa.

 Cancer blows, man. There was 6 weeks between his diagnosis and his death. It's been rough, but I know he'd want the family to still have a good time this Christmas. I am very excited to see my relatives.

 This website has consumed all my free time, lol. I'm not complaining, because this is certainly more productive than playing video games all day. Gaming is fun until I start feeling bad that I haven't done anything creative in a long time. I think this website will be good for me, because it'll be an outlet for my all-consuming need to archive everything I love. I'm sure that entertaining that need isn't the healthiest option, but doing so through this website is healthier than what I was doing before, lol. I was diagnosed with OCD a few months ago, which explains a lot, and I think having a place that I have complete control over will help me deal with not having much control in real life. I've already found myself coping with OCD symptoms by working on this website, so that's a big improvement for me.

 I still have one final to work on, and I am once again procrastinating by working on this website. It's due in 7 hours ... I'm almost finished, though. I've been working on it all day, but writing this essay fucking blows, so I've been breaking up the Agony by working on this website. I only have one page to go! I'll go write more now. And once my head feels like it's going to explode again I'll come back here for a bit. Foolproof plan.

 I decided to make a page where I can ramble endlessly about random crap. Wahoo! I also made a dream journal, mainly because I've been keeping a dream journal for four years, and I had a scare recently where I almost lost the entire journal—almost 400 dreams total. So, I'm putting them here as an extra layer of security. There's a lot of dreams (mainly nightmares) that I won't share here, but I'll be slowly archiving everything else.

 A lot of my dream journal entries are nonsensical, and I add details to these entries if I remember them, but a lot of the older ones are doomed to stay nonsensical forever. Not that I really expect anyone to actually go through and read my dreams, but y'know. You're free to if you want to, lmao.

 Beyond that, I had a crazy night last night. My friend Colubrid and I were figuring out lyrics for every song in La Normalidad, and ... Long story short, Colubrid went down a massive rabbit hole that ended with him figuring out exactly what the album is about. He did all the 4000IQ discoveries, but I found the proof that he was correct! I found the exact audio clip that NBP sampled in "The Shape of a Brain," and the video the clip is from essentially proves that Colubrid was correct. At least, the connections he made are correct. I really want to write about this in detail, because my mind is absolutely blown, lol. I'll probably do that later, though. I still have one more final I need to write, and I've been procrastinating by working on this website ... Uh oh.