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I'm unexpectedly happy. It feels like a freak accident, but at the same time it feels bizarre that I haven't always felt this way.

I feel like I'm reconnecting with the parts of me I like most. Like... they have been buried for some time and I'm delighted to see them again. It's wonderful to be this person again.

Here's a pleasant light track to go with my mood.

"Girls Like Zephyr" by Oleg Kostrow.

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"The Dark of the Matinée" by Franz Ferdinand.

I time every journey
To bump into you accidentally
I charm you and tell you
Of the boys I hate, all the girls I hate
All the words I hate, all the clothes I hate
How I'll never be anything I hate
You smile, mention something that you like
Or how you'd have a happy life
If you did the things you like

This part of the song resonates with me more as I get older, and I increasingly find myself in the position of the one mentioning what they like. I was pretty moody and cynical as a teenager and it took me awhile to come out of the "positive thinking is stupid delusional bullshit" mindset.

I mean, it really is pretty useless to tell other people to just focus on the positive, because that dismisses their problems, but when it's a choice you make for yourself and you don't do it by ignoring the negative in life, it makes a difference. So it's more about... prioritizing the positive? Making an effort to acknowledge it and be grateful for what's there? The cynical framing of it as making things up and denying reality feels like a strawman to me. Or at least, that's how I see the way I used to understand it. I can't speak to how other people perceive it.

Changing your mindset doesn't fix all your problems or magically grant you happiness, of course, but it does take the edge off of existence enough to make it worthwhile to me.

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I keep feeling like my brain has short circuited.

So much time keeps passing somehow. I haven't written back to my penpal in three months, and every day I think I'll do it and then somehow the whole day is gone. Feelsbadman.

"My Best Friend" by Alfie Templeman.


I'm not sure what I'm doing with my time. I've been babysitting again, which is nice, but that's only a few hours a week. Started at the crisis line again too, but again that's not a big time commitment. School is on hold at the moment and I can't go out and do much, so aside from the few obligations I have during the week I mostly just... sleep, I guess. It's often more interesting to dream than it is to be awake.

It never feels like I have enough to say to write a blog post anymore. I want to write but nothing comes. Can't even write about my feelings because I don't feel much most of the time.

Tonight I listened to "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure on repeat though and I did feel something. It was a sort of beautiful sadness, deep, tender, painful, alive. It was like the old sadnesses I used to have. The ones that you are grateful for because they remind you that you can feel, that this is what feeling is. I miss feeling things deeply. So much badness in the world and the news, and I try not to absorb it but it still gets to me, and I'm burnt out on it. I've emotionally shut down to some extent to protect myself-- not intentionally, but against my wishes. It's all too much.

Nothing has ever been perfect or fully okay, but I feel less able to carve out some small space for myself to appreciate beauty and life now than before. It's a privileged position I guess, to have had the experience of life without inescapable awareness of injustice and immorality. I don't know that I've ever tried to ignore things though... Before it just felt like I had a choice on what to focus on, and I could put more weight on things that might lift me up. Now it's like the bad parts constantly intrude on my inner world and there's no respite.

Maybe we're all feeling this way though. The pandemic and politics have been burning out a lot of people.

I remember a clip from a movie-- some Japanese film I think-- where a mother is preparing food for her family. She has some kind of condition where she can't sleep or she'll die, so her family is trying to keep her busy so she'll stay awake. They plead for her to cook for them, and she finally finishes preparing the meal and then collapses. I have no idea what the context of that scene was but something about it resonates with me.

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I took my birds to the vet today. It's a contactless operation now, so the vet called me on my phone to discuss what they found.

"You are the proud owner of a morbidly obese budgie," she told me.

This was not truly a surprise, as I had noticed that one of my birds was indeed quite a lot heavier than the other. He just loves eating, and thanks to frequent treat offerings from my brother he has swelled up to a hefty 58 grams. That's nearly twice the weight of my other budgie, who at last weigh-in was somewhere in the 30s range.

The vet was quite colorful in describing how fat my budgie is.

"He's so fat that he's got a layer of fat making it difficult for him to poop, and he's so fat that he can't reach around and clean himself. He's probably had poop stuck down near his vent, what we call a butt plug. If he gets much fatter his legs and back won't work and he'll have to scoot around with his belly on a skateboard."

As hilarious and horrifying as this report was, the light at the end of the tunnel was that we just need to get him to lose some weight and he should be okay. The vet offered to put him through budgie fat camp for a week and I agreed. I was worried it would be thousands of dollars but it was actually under $600, which felt quite reasonable in comparison. Anyway, this is my brother's favorite budgie (and it's also his fault that the budgie is so fat), so he can foot the bill.

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