Met up with that dude. Saw some birds. Walked around for a couple hours. It was a thing. He has ADD and told me about how he spent a year at a school that specialized in handling disorders like that, so he learned a lot of focusing techniques (but still needs medication for work). Didn't take any pictures of birds. We saw some gophers or something though, which was interesting. Also failed spectacularly at identifying birds, but it was fun to try.

I've been reading about rare fruit gardening on this website and it seems really interesting and like something I might want to check out? Between the birding and ECS though, adding gardening to my list might push me too deep into old people hobby territory. >.> Oh well. Sadly it looks like the next meeting for the local chapter of this organization is right when I have to be at the intensive for my grad program, so I guess I can't go. Maybe I'll be able to check it out someday, though.

It's interesting to be... interested in doing things. To have hobbies again. I think the last time I was able to list hobbies without difficulty was when I was a teenager. I mean, I've been interested in plenty of things since, but only for a few days, really. Things just don't stick. I really like birding though, and I want to get better at it. I should get a birds of Northern California book to help me out... Might have to wait until I have more money though.

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Started talking to a guy and we made plans to hang out in less than 24 hours. Whew, speedy. I'm not expecting this to go in any particular direction, but the conversation was decent, so we'll see how it goes. Gonna go walk around and hopefully look at some BIRDS.

Have been feeling kind of sad lately, but I'm usually able to scrape together some social energy for meeting new people, at least for a few hours.

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OKC has become super duper broken, so I'll probably shut down my account there soon. Can't even access my messages or most of the pages on the site. I did have a fun little back and forth with a dude briefly tonight, but I don't anticipate that kind of thing happening much. The site's so cancerous now that I don't think it's worth keeping around. Eight years and it's finally too much to stand!

Ah well. I've gotten a lot of experiences out of OKC. Some friends, and more recently some unfortunate connections... but maybe it's just time to move on. Gotta try the IRL thing. Not really sure how to do that just yet but I'm working on it...

In better news, I think my hair is finally long enough to not look completely stupid when it's down. I still want to go get it trimmed and re-layered so it looks nicer, but I'll probably have to wait until next year for that, because of holiday plans.

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I had a dream about him last night and woke up feeling sad. The feeling persisted throughout the day.

My weekend was... sort of eventful? On Saturday I went birding with a group for the second time. It wasn't quite as fruitful an expedition as the first time, and it was very cold and windy, but I got a few decent pictures. This one of a black phoebe is my favorite:

I chatted a bit with one of the ladies in the group, and she gave me some tips on how to find more birding opportunities/outings. Something to look into!

On Sunday I went to ECS for the annual winter festival. It was an open mic/potluck deal, kinda low key. I shared a short story from one of my books, and I think it was well-received. At the end of the open mic part, one of the founders of the group put a bunch of instruments (drums, tambourines, maracas, etc.) in the middle of the room, and we all selected one and participated in a drum circle. I guess it's kind of a pagan thing, and it made me think of The Righteous Mind. The music was very organic, and everyone was making it together in this interesting, coordinated but unplanned way. I felt a bit awkward about it at first, but I actually really liked it and I feel like I would enjoy doing something like that again. The appeal of having a drum circle and dancing around a bonfire or something is making more sense to me now, although the drum circle we did was indoors, during the daytime, and I don't think it lasted long enough for anybody to be seized by the desire to dance. The guy who set it up said that drum circles often go all night. I guess I don't quite know how to describe how it felt, but we were all synced up, and that sense of being part of something was very cool.

I think I like ECS so much because I'm tired of feeling like I'm alone. I mean, I have my family, which is very important to me, but I haven't really had a community to be part of, not in person at least. I've had online things, including Nutang, but actually being with people in real life, doing things with them, hearing their voices and seeing their faces... it's a different experience. It's nice to go to something where it doesn't feel like people are just treating it as a stepping stone to something else, where I feel welcomed and safe. The IRC channel where I hang out is kind of like a virtual form of that, but it's not consistently active, and it's online. It made me really sad a couple months ago when RD disrupted that. I felt like he had set fire to something that was a safe space for me. Don't think he understood what it was to me. I'm relieved that I feel okay going back there now, though.

Went hiking today with that guy I met on the plane. It was nice, and pretty platonic I think (whew). I'm pretty sure I saw a phainopepla on the trail, although I couldn't ID it until I got home. No picture of it, but it basically looked like a black cardinal. Also maybe saw a mockingbird? The call it was making sounded familiar but I didn't get a good look at it because it was really high up in a tree.

Yesterday I went running with my mom. I did 2.5 miles and walked... uhh... maybe like 0.37ish of that? Not really sure. I forgot to stretch afterwards though, and didn't eat much yesterday, which I think is why my legs hurt today. >_> Also, I think the running activated my allergies, because I was sneezing a bunch yesterday night. Stupid exercise-induced rhinitis. >:C On the plus side, I felt fine about the distance/my pacing, and I think if I hadn't been dead bored by running around a track, I would have gone for longer. Kind of a relief, since I was worried I'd lose a bunch of stamina from not going to the gym regularly for like two months because of that awful cold.

"No one's around to help." by JerryTerry.

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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I guess I haven't really felt much like blogging lately. Most of my blogging gets done late at night when everybody's gone to sleep and I'm alone with my thoughts, but lately I've been kind of occupied late at night chatting with a new friendish person. He works nights, so he's around when nobody else is.

I like talking to him, but he seems pretty emotionally stable and that's kind of weird for me. It's not bad by any means, I'm just... not used to it. I don't think I've ever had lengthy conversations with anybody who didn't have some kind of emotional problems. Having a hard time wrapping my head around the concept that this dude is just... normal.

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Whoa. On my flight back home, I sat next to a guy and we actually had a conversation instead of just completely ignoring each other. He asked if I'd like to get coffee sometime and I gave him my number.

I'm honestly shocked. I've thought about this scenario happening tons of times but didn't think it ever would, what with people being glued to their smartphones. Anyway, I don't expect it to go anywhere, but it would be nice to make a new friend.

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I'm at Kyle's house right now, visiting for the weekend + Monday. Yesterday we did a whole bunch of stuff. My flight got in pretty early, so we went to get breakfast at this strange cafe that was located in a business center. The front of it was a vape shop, and it seemed like it had just been set up temporarily, but also kind of looked like a Chinese restaurant. The dishes they gave us our food on had a "grandma's china" feel to them, and were strangely ornate compared to everything else. Both of us got omelettes, and the omelettes were weird too. Not bad per se, but they looked like they had been prepared in a circular mold, and instead of being folded over like a normal omelette, they just... had all the ingredients kind of suspended in the middle of the egg patty. Mine looked like it was injected with cheese.

After that, Kyle took me to this awesome bird store nearby. It had parrots just sitting out in the store! Realizing now that I was so wrapped up in looking at the birds that I didn't take any pictures... The birds were friendly though, and you could pick them up. I held a Hahn's macaw and it climbed up my arm and bit my ear. >.> It also bit Kyle's ear, so... I guess it got both of us, haha. Despite the pain, it was a cute experience.

Met up with a friend from IRC in LA once we were done at the bird store. We visited the Museum of Death, which was... kind of weird. Very graphic and gory. It wasn't quite what I was hoping for, but it was still interesting. They had conjoined twin turtles! Honestly that was kind of cooler than seeing all the horrifying pictures of dead people. We also walked around Hollywood a little. Nothing too exciting there, but it was somewhat enjoyable.

On the way back from LA, he and I stopped at Chick-fil-a because I had never been there. As it turns out, they have almost nothing to eat for people who don't eat chicken, but we both got an order of waffle fries because we were hungry. That took the edge off the hunger until we got to the Indian place near his work that we'd been planning to try during my visit. For... whatever reason, in between chill electronic songs, the restaurant played the Ghostbusters theme song.

Kyle bought a smoker recently, and wanted to try smoking fish, so we bought some salmon and mackerel after dinner.

Surprisingly, I didn't pass out at any point. I barely got any sleep the night before, but I stayed awake all through the day (got kind of sleepy sometimes but not badly). Was even awake enough to watch The Matrix at his house together and go for a walk. It was Kyle's first time seeing The Matrix somehow, and it had been a long time since I saw it, so that was fun.

Today was more laid back than yesterday. We got some wood chips for the smoker and some cheese from Whole Foods to try smoking, then got pizza for lunch. Man, that pizza was really good. @[email protected] Hard to go wrong with spinach, garlic, and feta. After eating, we seasoned the smoker and played a game, then watched some movies. The first movie was really awful and cringey and had three separate scenes within 30 minutes where women surprised a guy by stripping to naked when he wasn't looking. After the third time it happened I'd had enough and we switched to a different movie. Ended up picking Grave of the Fireflies, which neither of us enjoyed. It just dragged on and on and one of the main characters was annoying... I'm starting to think I just don't like Studio Ghibli films. Kiki's Delivery Service was similarly boring and unenjoyable to me.

I guess we stayed in more today because we were smoking fish and had to stick around for it. The salmon turned out pretty good though! The mackerel... eh, not so much. It was too salty, I think. Shouldn't have put it in the same brine as the salmon for so long. It's okay though, it was a learning experience.

We walked again for longer tonight, and went to a playground nearby. All the equipment was slightly damp, which surprised me. Kyle said it's probably because we're closer to the ocean than where I live, which I guess makes sense. We wandered over to a shopping center after the playground, but barely anything was open, so we got Choco Tacos from a weirdly upscale gas station store because I'd never had one before. It was pretty good, but I think mine might have been defrosted and refrozen at some point, because the shell wasn't crunchy at all. It reminded me of Drumsticks I'd had that had that problem. While we were headed back to his house, we passed a big fenced off lot that had a former car dealership on it. Kyle mentioned that he'd thought about climbing the fence to go see if the building was open before, but had never done it because he didn't want to get in trouble for trespassing. I suggested we go in anyway (there was a huge gap under the fence we could have crawled through), but he was very reluctant. We ended up walking around the fence and finding that it was open in a certain spot, so we just walked right in and looked in the buildings, a couple of which turned out to have open doors. Given the trash and stuff we found, it seems safe to guess that someone had been in there not too long ago. There was mostly just debris and abandoned furniture inside, and we didn't have flashlights so we couldn't see everything anyway, but it was cool. He took a picture of me in the second building we went into, which smelled gross. It had that San Francisco/homeless person/old urine odor. Didn't stay in there long, though if I'd had a flashlight and it didn't smell disgusting, maybe I would have wanted to?

Once we'd returned to the house, we melted some of the cheese we bought on pretzels and ate them. I don't think either of us was particularly hungry, but he'd realized that he wasn't sure if he could smoke cheese in his smoker, and we wanted to try the cheese if we weren't saving it for smoking. The pretzels were good with the cheese (New Zealand white cheddar and three chili Gouda), but I'm not sure if I thought they were significantly better than microwave nachos.

I've been asking Kyle a lot of hypothetical questions while I've been here. Mostly "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who ___?" format. That's been fun, haha. I used to love asking people hypothetical questions, but I toned it down a lot after high school... I think my favorite one this trip was "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who had a badly done full back tattoo of your face and they only wanted you to do it with them from behind with the lights on?" He said he wasn't sure, but maybe. Somehow though, when I asked "If they were otherwise perfect, would you date someone who played Candy Crush for three hours a day?" he said no instantly, hahaha. Apparently he wouldn't be able to respect someone like that, which I can't blame him for. I don't want to date people I can't respect either. Anyway, I've had a good time visiting him, and I feel... pretty good in general.

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