arlita

july 27th 2022

personal

one good thing i have been doing is going on walks with my baby. well, he's more of a toddler but that's none of your business lol. anyways, at first it was kind of difficult, i wasn't used to walking that much. but i quickly built up a bit of stamina for it and i am finding them very satisfying. i have a little route that i do each time, i even have a little path of desire through this pebble-y area where i have pushed the stroller over it enough times you can see where the stroller wheels have worn it down. i wonder if my neighbors anticipate me. probably not but i'm going to romanticize it anyways. i imagine they look at their clock, know it's about the time i go out, wait at their windows, and watch me talk to me baby about the birds and trees and sky, and drink my water like i'm only tasting it for the first time. to me, i'm famous to them lol. because i have people i see out of my window every day that i have named and make up stories for. one of my favorites i call guy. he's just a guy. he wears a guy hat and guy shorts and sometimes has his lil guy backpack. and he walks in the same direction along the same side of the street at about the same time every day. he politefully throws his empty beverage can away and just keeps walking. i love guy. there's also babygirl, she goes on walks early in the morning. she's an adult but she's babygirl to me. sometimes she does squats and brings dumbbells. she must have the smoothest hair in the world because no hair tie can contain it.

when i'm near the end of my route, sometimes i gotta push myself a little more. i have found that thinking about forward bodily motion helps. i am a human who is meant to navigate this world physically walking facing forward, bipedally. i plan my next step and the tender earth remembers my last. until it forgets and the pebbles scatter again. then i'll go on another walk and remind her. it's not a measured competition but i plan on winning. earth remains neutral, my blood continues to pump, and i am home.

so, that personal thing i spoke about a couple blogs ago is written up, but i metaphorically have it folded in eighths and tucked near my heart. i have to let it conform to my body and absorb my sweat before i unfold it, edges softened,and can determine if it gets taped up here on my website, or tucked into the back of an unread book that i will incidentally toss into a donation box and forget about someday. when i was a sentimental middle schooler i would write long confessional notes to people i like-liked and wear the note in my bra before throwing it out. i guess i felt like getting the words out on paper made them real, and re-internalizing them through my skin was easier than simply telling them i like-liked them.

july 24th 2022

technical

hell yea i have added two new pages to my website! one is a page all about my husband, that i linked as lovemail, and paintkiller made me realize it is a shrine lol, and another page about a feeling i get i've named somewhere nowhere ☺️ i really like them which is most important, but i also hope other people like them!

i have a list of other page ideas, but i don't want to put them on my plans/to-do list because they're just ideas that might not materialize. one of them is a thrift store finds page, but i don't always find interesting stuff at the thrift store so idk. i did find that cd player tho, literally the exact one we had. i don't own any cds any more but if i did i probably would have bought it just to see if it works. but i love finding ugly things at thrift stores too, one category i looove is middle-aged-woman-basket-of-kittens-t-shirts. there's a t shirt featuring a basket of kittens for everything. miami, florida? basket of kittens on the beach. fourth of july? basket of kittens watching the fireworks. those kittens have been through everything. i have no idea what store is producing/produced them but they are an inevitable find. maybe it's a midwest thing lol.

ANYWAYS. today i'm going to a new food truck, a new ice cream place, and potentially target with my fam, so i might blog about it or record something we shall see 😏

july 22nd 2022

technical

yesterday i added a page that goes more into depth about myself. it felt good to write about myself. the image i drew for the image map was inspired (obviously) by religious imagery but i don't talk about religion at all in those pages lol. i'm not religious if you were curious and i don't have much to even say on the topic. i think a lot of people experienced going to church and learning about god and having their natural questions dismissed, i don't have a unique voice to add there. but i love the aesthetics of churches and angels and stuff. all the best things, clouds, marble, stone, colorful glass, stained wood, velvet, etc. all trapped in churches worldwide lol. so i drew a simplistic angelic me among the clouds with a halo because it's pretty 👼 i purposefully made the pages feel different, i excluded the sparkly gif that's on all my other pages, and only have a return link to go back to the image map, and the header is linked to index.

writing all that tho reminded me of more stuff i wanna blog about, which i probably will write another long personal blog at some point. maybe idk. it's stuff i've never written about that has been threatening to bubble over. once it does i'll decide then if it goes on the internet or in my physical journal.

another thing i have been thinking about is making my index more interesting lmao. it's on it's, like second and a half iteration, the first version behing placeholder text, the second version with meaningful text and no updates box, and the half being the updates box which i added a couple weeks ago. i want to have a current or now kind of section on the front page. this could mean adding another div and the nightmare of arranging divs. well, nightmare to me because i am not very good at html. and i thank you for your patience lol. but yea my index begs to be more interesting.

also look at this sky picture i took the other day!! click to enlarge (it's only 800px tall tho)

july 19th 2022

technical

yesterday i added the button wall to my site, i'm kind of obsessed, i love seeing all of the buttons lined up, colorful, some flashing; it's so fun to admire. i also added my opinions on seasons lmao. i saw a post about the fall on facebook and it made me want to write about how much i hate the fall. today i am going to photograph all of my eyeshadows palettes i think. i want to have a makeup page on here and eyeshadow is my favorite, so i figure it would be the best place to start. also now that my desk is cleaned up, i might do a what's on my desk/pc setup page, i LOVE looking at other people's desks and setups. if you have pictures of yours on your website lmk i wanna see!! i'm nosey. i'm also starting to think about how i want to "paginate" my blog, because it can't just be one long page... it could but it can't lmao. i will probably do it the cheap, non javacript way. and i will sort by year and month, so one month gets it's own page. but that will come way later when i will have written blogs in multiple months 😗

july 14th 2022

personal

i have the case of the debilitating sads today. ok maybe not debilitating, but enough that i am going through the motions instead of making conscience, aware, intentional decisions. i can feel my eye bags in my soul. i don't have anything to be sad about. i think it has to do with trying to lose weight. content warning for unDx eating disorder. i have been eating less, not drinking pop (soda or whateva you call it babes), and pushing myself to go on a walk every day. and it has been working lol i have lost weight. i have a bit of history with my body (dont we all lmao) and how i feel in it. i started disliking how i looked in middle school, and when i started high school, it plummetted worse than ever. i skipped lunch everyday, stomach rumbling in the silence of algebra 2 class. i never ever wore clothes that were too skin tight especially on my stomach. and people told me all the time i was little and frail, wrapping their entire hand around my wrist and waggling it around like i was made out of cooked spaghetti noodle. i didnt see myself as having a disorder, i had a terribly wrong idea about what eating disorders look like. i ate like a sheep, grazing slowly over the day rather three big meals. and i was able to go hours without eating. it was wild and i was so non chalant about it like it was normal.

after high school, just a few months, i became pregnant, and ate like i had never tasted food before. i ate everything that popped into my head. even cliches like pickles and ice cream haha. i remember one time i ate dinner that was left out on the counter over night because i was so pregnant and hungry and didnt feel like making a proper breakfast. after i had my baby, i accepted my body as it was, cherished and thanked my body for what it gave me. when i moved to the first apartment that came crashing down.

when i turned 21, i didnt care much for alcohol, but around 22 i loved it. i still love it lol. but i was hanging out with people more and going out to drink and worried about my body again. and i was gaining weight pretty fast, eating fast food, drinking, not exercising literally ever. so i haulted everything, cooked more often at home but ate less food, only drink water and snapple (lol not exactly healthy but having the e.d. in the driver's seat does not = good decisions), weighed myself every day, and checked my body in the mirror everytime i walked by it. at this point i knew my habits were terrible. i didnt have that voice in my head in high school. but i did now; hearing myself think the more i look the more i'll hate myself, the more i weigh myself the worse i'm going to treat my body, etc. i knew. and my best friend knew. he never missed an oppurtunity to give me the knowing look when i turned down food or only ate half or made a comment about myself. and my husband also knew, telling me all the time he loves me no matter how i look.

but, i ended up losing weight. i dropped to my pre-pregnancy weight, i got a job, we moved, and i maintained that weight for several years. and i still had those toxic thoughts, that i wasn't skinny, i looked bad in dresses, i'll never be able to wear certain things etc. but, i got pregnant again. and the love came back. i ate like it was going to solve world hunger. i ordered large meals, paid for the extra guac, and snacked on anything within reach. i joked that party size amounts of food was just pregnancy size. and when i was breastfeeding after the baby was born, i drink enough water to fill an ocean, ate enough food to feed an army. i don't know what clicks in my brain when it comes to my babies, it must be ancient maternal instinct. now my baby is older and i am back teetering over the e.d. cliff.

this time it's even more self aware. i have new habits i didnt have before, like counting calories, which i hate doing. i hate standing in the kitchen doing math holding all the ingredients to a sandwich it's just not natural. but i'm doing that. because my e.d. is driving again. last week i lost 3x more than i predicted, so this week the e.d. voice in my brain decided i'll cut even more and maybe i'll see what i want on the scale even sooner. but i am so drained. i ate a brownie today, so soft, so pleasant. i was ok for the 30 seconds that lasted haha. but then i logged it as 150 calories and felt like shit again.

i am not at all capable of stopping this. i can't. once i'm on the path of seeing more of myself than there actually is in the mirror, it's over. i have dialogue in my head when i look at myself. "wow i can't even see past my gut when i look down." "you never really could that's how you're shaped." "i need to lose 20 pounds to feel ok again." "bitch where."

SO yea sorry this is, like, incredibly real, and probably the most open i've been on my blog so far haha. it won't always be like this. it's 1 in the morning as well, so the up-past-my-bedtime demon has possessed me. i'm sure you understand.

july 12th 2022

technical

hi im testing something ty for your patience!!! 😗 look i can use emojis if i please now!!! holy moly me oh my you're the 🍎 of my 👁️ or i can still use emoiticons that won't turn into emojis :D game changer. i am using the google font noto emoji to achieve this. i'll admit i was stuck trying to use the font without breaking to a new line because i was forgetting about the span tag LMAO that tag confuses me because my monkey brain doesn't apply meaning to the word span. p=paragraph, br=break, span=???confusion. but it's just an inline element you can style, such as assigning a font to it in your stylesheet for the sole purpose of having inline emojis in your blogs 😛

july 11th 2022

personal

i have experienced two absolute devastations today. one, i found out catgirls aren't considered furries because they are mostly humanoid, and don't have paws. here i thought i was kind of cool liking catgirls and being a bit into the furry fandom but no. nonetheless my micro obsession will remain. secondly, the most popular font of my brith year is called parchment according to fontspace.com and is a papyrus look-a-like, you know, the font i just dissed in my font opinions pages for being the creed of fonts. i take my birth year very seriously and it takes up a huge chunk of my personality. that being said, i'm not like, a "90's kid" because i was literally five in y2k. i don't have 90's nostalgia, i just see the events of my birth year as having the same birthday as me, therefor special. for example, toy story came out in 1995. in my head, i have decided as fact that i have the same birthday as fictional character molly davis from toy story (1995). speaking of which, i found out a while ago that the eight year old darla sherman is also my age because i was eight when finding nemo came out. finding nemo is my favorite pixar movie by far, altho soul is a really strong second.

anyways. i drew a catgirl today with paws >:3 i'm trying to get better at line art because i have years of drawing files that are just sketches, and i think it's really stopping me from improving :I the lineart i do end up doing is with the pixel fill pen in krita, it's just so easy and satisyfing. if i were to redraw this, i would put the tail under skirt i think, and fix her left arm. i allow a bit of wonkiness usually but that's too wonky for me haha.

july 9th 2022

personal

i just had a memory of myself when i was probably three or four, drawing a person on a piece of paper. i remember thinking i was drawing really well. when i had my own toddler, (she's older now), she used to draw loooots of little people just like i had drawn them. i recently learned this is a developmental milestone, when children draw proximations of people, that have heads, arms and legs, but no body. i forget what they're technically called, but you'll see them called tadpole people by some. when i realized that i was watching my daughter go through a development stage that i remember myself experiencing, it felt kind of cosmic. that was one of many moments that i had this "zoomed out" feeling on life just by watching my child grow and change.

july 7th 2022 but later

technical

i have been updating my website a lot today, and i have lots of ideas for pages that i'm excited to put together!! i'm kind of just exploring neocities right now and seeing all of the websites and pages people have come up with for inspiration. i added a links page today that i'm pretty proud of, i genuinely believe it's a great collection of resources worth checking out. i want to gather more little pixel art things to use throughout my pages, just so they're at least a little visually interesting haha. i have a habit of wanting to be minimal and reserved in my designs. i need someone to take a sharpie over my work and devalue it so i can cut it all op and mosaic it into something beautiful. but that's not really a thing o.o

july 7th 2022

technical

it is very early in the morning and this is my new thing so i am doing my new thing actively now, before i get bored and move on and forgot. hopefully i don't. i like it here. please brain for the love of god let me just do one thing and let it be this. this is free. anyways. i'll just read off the top of the pile here. i woke up today and didn't eat breakfast, had a little bit of coffee, got really stressed about something unrelated to eating, then realized how hungry i was, and still didn't eat. i had to take a nap before i ate.

then i saw a tumblr post about this website and have literally been doing this since then. before this it was dall-e mini, before that it was watercolor, before that it was scratch, and i don't remember what it was before that but i'm sure i was up to something.

i'm gonna be real with you dog, i don't even know what else to write. i have had a lot on my mind today and nothing to show for it. i'll have thoughts tomorrow, i can feel it. well it is tomorrow becuase it's past midnight. so, tomorrow as in after-sleep tomorrow.