arlita

august 29 2022

personal

today i was looking through old notes and found something i wrote a while ago, which was my idea to write down, at the end of each day if possible, a memory that i had that day. it's like, a pinch ironic that i forgot about that idea haha. but that would be cool to do, have a dated log of memories remembered, you could even record what triggered the memory. now, i know myself pretty well to know that i would over-think it and ruin the fun by worrying too much about remembering memories to have one to write down at the end of the day. i couldnt even remember that i had written that.

i think a lot people can relate when i say i have lot of empty notebooks and no idea what to use them for. i do have a few active ones going, my personal journal, my skethbook, my spanish notebook, my cocktail recipes book. one that i dont keep up any more is my photography journal, i would write what worked and what didnt after a photoshoot. but i just love bound, emtpy paper. for all of the normal reasons first, yes, like the potential to transform an empty unassuming five dollar notepad into an interesting, multifacted handwritten piece of my life. sure sure. but besides that, paper just calls my name. new paper, used paper, soft paper, unbending paper. oh my god i am boring you. i am so sorry.

moleskines, unfortunately, are really good and nice. we know this. i am obsessed, sensorially, with the way the paper waves a bit when you write in one, and when you write on both sides how it waves the pages a bit more, and once you have quite a few full pages, the wavy written-on pages brush up against eachother and make pleasant little noises, and cushions the whole notebook with a bit of air, so even when it's closed the profile of the pages reveals it's loved-ness by that who used it. i say that they are good and nice unfortunately because they are so expensive.

anyways, i don't have much to write down on paper and more notebooks that i can realistically fill, so when i get an idea for one, i frantically write it down. at the same time, i am almost constantly overwhelmed with how little i actually record. i can't weight every moment of my life with importance, but i desperately want to. like, today on the highway i watched a group of birds divide into three groups, all landing on three different parts of a mystery side-of-the-road structure. it was cool and if i hadn't just written about it, my memory of it would have fizzled away with all my other memories of cool bird moments. then, they all flew back up into the air, off of the structure and into the big group again. that few seconds of my life, my brain had little to no thoughts, just birds, not taxes or school supplies or did i put deodorant on, just birds. and i find that to be important. actually, more important. category five bird moment, no time to worry if my arm pits smell. did you see the birds.

what am i supposed to do? fill an entire notebook with neat things i saw while playing passenger princess on the highway? when i became old enough to realize that you can't possibly hold on to every moment forever, it ruined my life. when my friend's mom quantized how many months are in summer each year it ruined my life. when i was taking phone calls and had two minutes to notate the conversation in-between calls and one thirty minute lunch in which i spent one tenth of that time waiting on my frozen burrito to microwave, it ruined my life. i guess i just have beef with the passage of time; and hoarding paper products, as romantic as i force it all to be, doesn't solve it.

written july 23rd 2022, posted august 22nd 2022

personal

cw: child grooming

almost 3 months ago my friend messaged me to let me know my ex uncle died. by ex uncle i mean, he wasn't related to me in any way, but i considered him an uncle because him and his wife were very close friends with my parents. they knew each other for a pretty long time. they are who my parents had me move in with when money was tight and my brother lived with my grandma, and my parents lived with some other (shittier) friends. it was a whole thing lol. but after that chapter closed, i stopped talking to him entirely, making him my ex uncle.

when i lived with them, i preferred him over his wife. she's alive and i'm thinking about writing an "open" unsent letter type of thing about/to her idk. but i quickly looked up to him, watching him with his hobbies, listening to him rant about politics, even going to him and telling him about school and life which i didn't even really do with my parents. he was a geek, and kind of a nerd lol. his main hobbies were cb radio and electronics. he talked on his cb radio day and night, he had one mounted in the kitchen and he would lean on the counter and just talk to people in the area. i don't even remember his handle. i bet it will come to me at some point. i would watch him work in the inside of all sorts of electronics; watch him saulder, measure resistance, and clean up all the little nooks and crannies. he would tell me what he was doing and why but i never really absorbed it. i just like watching men at work lmao.

their house had three bedrooms, one was their bedroom, one the wife's office and one his own office. he moved his office into his wife's office and she eventually moved her computer out into their bedroom into a corner. he helped me feel really settled and comfortable. i had mostly clothes, a few books, and a cd player when i moved in. i expressed to him i didn't even have enough stuff to fill up a bedroom and i remember him saying things will accumulate. it made me feel better idk. the weird part of this, is that before i was in that room, i was literally sleeping on a thin mattress under the stairs in a closet. i know harry potter i know. i'm totally ok with small spaces, but yea i outgrew it.

i lived there from about 7th grade to before high school. i became a teenager and became anatomically correct (as tina belcher puts it) during those years. i should have been with my parents. but i can't change that. there was one night i was up lightly sobbing to myself (i rarely cry lol sobbing is the best i got) and the next day he told me he heard me. the walls were not that thin and i immediately convinced myself he listened to me through the door. i didn't make a peep past bed time after that. during the summer, i would sleep downstairs and fall asleep watching t.v. before they set one up in my room. almost every summer night, he would be up in the dead of night, playing on his cb radio, sending out distorted sounds or talking to whoever else was awake. and every night he would stand at the threshold of the living room for... god i don't know how long, and then walk off. i pretended to sleep each time. one time i decided to just sit up and watch him turn the corner and see what he would say when i was awake. and he didn't even act surprised; he told me he knew i was fake sleeping based on the face i made. i made sure to look more asleep after that.

neither of those things were red flags to me. i just adjusted how i acted around him and thought literally not much of it. i felt safe. he never made me feel unsafe. soon we became best friends. we stayed up late in the summer and talked about nothing, ate snacks, drank pop, said goofy shit into the cb radio. i am reminding you he was an uncle figure to me, and i a child, and it was cool in my brain. i was his shadow, i watched star trek with him, went shopping with him, tested the backyard pool water ph levels with him. sometimes we would play wrestle, i was small and could easily weasle out of his arms but he would just pick me up and tumble me on the couch again. we would do that until i couldn't giggle any more and he noticed i was worn out. the wrestling stopped for two reasons, one i was getting older and had grown out of rough-housing. two, he was obsessed with cesar millan and one time he told me, while he had me pinned, that he could out-wait me and make me submit and lose. i was like 12, i only knew the words submit and dominate from the show the dog whisperer, but that freaked me out, it was like he was training a dog like cesar millan, and i stopped letting him wrestle me.

one of his favorite things to talk about was all of his girlfriends that he'd had. he had a box of photos he would pull out every now and again, and talk about someone new each time. embarassing moments, who they ended up with, why he liked them. i liked hearing all of the stories, i was a teenager and was interested in tales of love and loss. and i thought he just didn't have anyone else to tell. his friends might not be close enough to talk about those things, and i doubt his wife would want to hear about exes.

at some point, my dad built me a pc and gave it to me while we lived apart. i used the living room pc, but wife would log into my email and read my personal messages, read my personal blog posts, and just in general breathe down my neck while i was online. so when i got my own pc, i set my password on it and only i could use it. it drove her nuts but it was so satisfying. i installed yahoo messenger to talk to my friends easier than email and added of course my uncle to my friend's list. one night we were sending each other music to listen to, i laugh at this notion now because i would listen to like 20 seconds of a song he sent me and expect him to listen to the whole song of what i sent him. anyways we got to talking about the day; we had company over, and i hung out with a boy i had gotten to know during the time i lived there. we were pretty awkward around each other but we hung out in my room, and while he was playing on his ds, he told me "my friends would think you are hot". i laugh about this now but that wrecked me in a hormonal, teenager way and i couldn't get it off my mind. i immediately had a crush on him after that. so, i told my uncle about it. and he responded that he had a crush on someone too. and i was like oh haha your wife. and he said no guess again. i kept guessing other women in his life, until i gave up. he told me, it's me! he has a crush on me of course :) i was immediately disgusted, and i sent him a mad emote, to let him know i didn't like that. he messaged back sad, crying emotes and i brushed it off and went to bed. we never brought it up again.

by that time, thankfully, i finally saw the red flags. i was still best friends with him, but i spaced myself from him. when school started back up, wife went to work really early, and he was the one responsible for waking me up and making sure i was getting ready. he would come into the room, say nothing, sit himself on my bed (by that time i was awake) and then talk to me to wake me up. i hated it, i had finally seen all of the red flags blemishing my memories, but didn't ask him to stop. i was afraid he would just brush me off and be offended that i didn't appreciate him getting me to school on time. finally, my parents moved in as well, just long enough to get back on their feet to move us all out. my mom walked in at the exact moment he had sat himself in the crook of my body, gave him a what the living fuck?? look, and scared him off for good.

when we moved out, there was a lot of interpersonal drama between them and my parents, so we all cut them out of our lives cold turkey. i didn't speak to him but one time, when my mom invited him to a christmas party years and years later, after i became a mom and had my own place. he had divorced the wife, and was in a relationship with a woman he snuck around with during his marriage.

when my friend messaged me about his death, i checked her facebook wall out of curiosity (i don't follow a lot of my own friend's pages lol i have a low tolerance for facebook political bullshit) and on her post about him, a woman commented about how she will miss him, he was such a great uncle, and how they had spent late nights talking to each other. that was kind of a wild thing to see honestly. he's gone now, so she's safe i suppose.

yea, sometimes i miss him. i miss the late night chit chat, i miss asking him questions about star trek, i even miss helping him find all of the little tiny washers and screws he had dropped in the floor while working on something. listen i bond easy i guess lol. but i'm glad i made it out relatively unscathed, telling the tale on my personal page, for strangers to potentially read. it feels good. i finally got all of that off of my chest. oh my god.

august 17 2022

personal

during our trip, i did not track my calories or walking distances, or meals or snacks or anything like that. it was nice to take a break from it but i felt like it all came to catch up with me on monday when i started counting again. i usually weigh myself one day a week, rarely twice. i decided to not weigh myself this sunday when we got back. i weigh myself on sundays in the morning and have a stupid little graph in a stupid little google sheets doc. but i do not want to see the graph show if i have gained. so far i have not. i have plateau'd a couple of times, but it has yet to crawl back up in eight weeks.

on my stupid little tracker chart, i have a color code system for if i eat or don't eat enough. it's green if it's within my goal of how many calories i want to eat a day, yellow for over (ate too much, labelled 'oh well'), and red for under (ate too little, labelled 'eat bitch'). in my stupid chart i put placeholder numbers for the days i wasn't able to track, so last sunday is yellow because i put the max number.

and somehow every day since then, so monday tuesday and today wednesday, the days have been red. i have had three "eat bitch" days in a row. to put this into perspective, i have never had more than 2 eat bitch days in one week, and i have never had two eat bitch days even next to each other.

ok i am stating a lot of facts... um because i havent figured out how i feel lmao. a tiny little stupid cheerleader is going nuts right now, because eat bitch days are secretly a victory. but i am not stupid and i know in my cognizant brain that i should not be having any eat bitch days, especially in a row.

and like, not knowing how much i weighed on sunday, means i can just imagine any number, and i just feel like i know i have gained. but i can't tell lol. i know i can't tell. you can not see when you are up or down a pound or two. but i look at myself and i am like, yup, i gained 3 pounds it's all right here. and there. and... oh and there. when it's probably not.

one weird thing i've noticed is i'm not constantly hungry. i am not sitting and craving and wanting something all day. but when i am hungry, i am very hungry. i can imagine in high definition the flavors and textures of foods i want. they are hard to ignore.

i will be weighing myself next sunday, but not the sunday after. my brother is having a birthday party and i am definitely going to drink. alcohol is like, the worst for immediate weight gain lmao so i do not want to see that number the next day. i mean, i don't need a lot of alcohol to get drunk but i tend to nurse something during parties to attempt (and usually fail) to maintain a level of drunkenness i like lol.

at the end of day, i'm torn. i fantasize grabbing that tiny cheerleader who celebrates unhealthy victories by her hair, bloodying her, and leaving her in the ground. but i also, unfortunately, really want to weigh less.

august 15 2022

personal

well we did it!! we went to see the stars! we also spent our second day seeing another sight, but i'll save that for my next blog. now, i did not personally see any of the meteor shower, but snow (my husband) did! i was actually recording the moon rising over the horizon on my camcorder when it happened. it's like a 5 minute video that i will probably upload unedited at some point to the av page. im going to be real with you, i do not entirely feel inspired to write, but i have so many fresh memories i want to record so i'm pushing through.

so! once we dropped the kids off, we immediately began our trip. our first stop was snow's favorite diner called porky's in mansfield, ohio. his grandparents took him there a lot as a kid so it's mostly a nostaglia stop. it is good food, but i don't dare peak into the kitchen on account of the dusty floors and couple of flies buzzing around. i really enjoyed my sandwich and onion rings so i will continue to turn a blind eye.

our next stop was sheetz, this time in pennsylvania. we had to pee and grab more snacks lol. it was hilarious tho because our immediate shared reaction when we got back into the car was, why was everyone in there so ugly? i only know one person from pennsylvania and she's not exactly the prettiest, and i actually hate her guts, so i am extremely biased lol. it was just an anomoly tho because every other pennsylvanian was normal looking haha.

the transition of the landscape from flat-ish land to rolling tree-covered hills was probably one of the most memorable pieces of the whole trip. snow and i just could not get over how many hills covered with trees there are in pennsylvania. there are so many. they are endless. and the way the hills and trees and distant roads layer over each other as you drive by them?? simply unforgettable. a lot of my camcorder footage is just me zooming into hills and trees. and frankly i'm still not over it. my ears swelled and popped as we rose and dropped along the roads so many times and i don't even mind.

after several more hours, we got to the hotel, and we finally got to plan to head out and see the stars. we knew the moon was going to be full, and i was personally excited for that, also i knew it would obstruct the view of the stars and possible meteors as well. but once we got there, it was just hitting dusk; blue and pink tones washing over the field, and there was no moon or singe cloud to speak of. when we parked we noticed a lot of people with coats and blankets. lil old me wore a thin cardigan and tank top. luckily, snow kept his coat in the truck, so i bundled up in that. we found a good grassy place to set up our chairs, and stared up.

at first, it was all sky. but then as i was looking off into the horizon, i saw the first hint of a celesial body. then a moment later, another one. and amazingly, as it got darker, that continued to happen. snow and i kept track of our favorite clusters, pointing them out and updating each other on more points in the sky as they appeared. in ohio in the city, a certain amount of stars and planets show themselves then that's it. maybe if you stand outside long enough your eyes will allow you to see more, but there's always a halo on the horizon of pollutive glow. i remember saying several times, wow, more just keep appearing.

i was just getting sleepy, staring off, not really looking at anything in particular, when snow pointed out the moon peaking through the trees. it was a small little wave hello, until it rose higher and higher and became the night's celebrity. as i was recording it come up, a meteor flew nearby; i missed it but we heard a few gasps and snow was able to see it. honestly, i love that he got to experience it. i would have been disappionted if i had seen it and not him. i grew up in a rural area (i grew up in lots of areas but i spent 3 years in a rural area lol) so i had an idea of what the milky way looks like on a clear night, and i have been teasing snow for years that he's always lived near cities with lots of light pollution, too much to see the clouds of our galaxy. it's honestly perfect that at least one little streak of meteor burned up in our atmoshere at the time that it did.

before you could really make out the milky way, the moon interfered. but right before it did snow was able to see it. just a few slightly brighter clouds and clumps of light made up the view, and i don't think snow would have been able to distinguish it without me, but he did confirm seeing it!! thank goodness lol.

after the moon was fully above the tree line, we took off back toward the hotel. we grabbed some fast food and went to bed. we were extremely lucky with the cloudless sky, and i personally enjoyed seeing the moon's pretty little face, tho it did wreck the unadulterated starry speckled sky. you know what, she's a queen and it's the attention she deserves, mad respect to our moon haha

august 11 2022

personal

so!! a few hours ago my mother in law let us know she will be watching the kids while we go on our trip!! i had a feeling we were going to have to cancel so im glad she came through. but since i was mentally prepared to not go, i didnt even start packing until i got that news lmao. i hate when plans change so i just prepare myself for the worst then pay for the consequences after. not a great tactic.

when i did start packing, i realized i didnt know where my camcorder charger is. i get like my mom when i lose something, it consumes me and the whole house will be combed and turned upside down while i go on my rampage to find it. it's really rare that i give up on a search. i will be mentally and physically torn up over something so small being lost. i have 2 hours of charge on my camcorder so its not that big of a deal, i take like 2 min clips at a time. but i tore up my room looking for it, it ended up being under a pile of dirty laundry. how and why idk but im just glad i could finally sit down and relax lmao.

my next task is packing clothes. i have lost weight so i feel more confident to wear my cute stuff, so i might bring it and force myself to wear it haha. i have a shirt from omighty that cost me 40 dollars that i bought like 3 or 4 years ago that's i've never worn, so i might bring it and see if i can convince myself to wear it. it's super cute.

i have written up an itinerary with addresses and times lol i have never done that, but this will be the longest trip we've ever taken so i wanted to have a plan. it's a loose plan tho. im trying to find a balance of relaxing on vacation and doing things to make the most of it.

our goal with this trip is to see the meteor shower. my husband has never seen the milky way galaxy so hopefully it will be a super clear night. i used to see it most summer nights out in the rural areas of ohio as a kid. he didn't even know that it was visible to the naked eye because he's always lived inner-city. i am so lucky to be the person in his life to show it to him. hopefully he's not underwhelmed lmao but he won't be. he's sensitive 😌

so yeah, i'll probably have a vlog of some sort to edit and upload to show y'all our trip, hopefully!! i'll see you when i get back 🥰

august 6th 2022

technical

wow!! i have been on neocities for a month. it feels like i've been here a week. my website is wayy more filled out than i thought it would be at this point, and i think my brain is letting me have this one. usually my interests come and go and i just have to mourn each loss, but this one seems to be sticking so you can't get rid of me yet.

another anomoly is i don't mind watching the follower count. i usually make myself crazy with follower numbers but i feel like i have finally realized to be ok with the idea of winning some and losing some. so in that spirit, i put a hit counter code in my front page, i'm using statcounter. i'm doing an invisible tracker and i will have to go out of my way to check the number etc. statcounter used to be completely free but i see they've gone the way of shitty free version and fancy pay model now. ugh.

this weekend i really want to at least get some pages up of my husband's website, there is absolutely no content lol but the layout is looking nice, and idk why i am just really itching to have it holding it's place on the internet. the biggest probem is we don't know what to name it lol. coming up with website names and usernames is something that i feel like i am always doing. i rotate through a few nouns and numbers at this point haha. either way, once it's up, i will link to it!

anyways i hope my next month on neocities is just as fun as this first one has been!!

august 2nd 2022

personal & technical

futureme emailed me to test their app, which uh i probably won't do? i mean maybe? i havent sent a letter to my future self in a while lmao so maybe. anyways it reminded me of when my english teacher when i was a senior in high school, she had us write letters to our future selves and she promised to mail them 5 years later. i one hundred percent believe and trust her, this isnt about that. but i had never lived in a place for more than 5 years in my life (actually... still don't think i have LMAO) so i was like?? i will not be there. and i was not. i did not write a letter to myself and give it to her just for her to send it to some randos living in our old place. five years after high school i had moved twice. i've moved twice since then. i am a moving target, even from my own aim. that's why i like futureme lol this feels like a cheeky ad but it's not.

while i was at the grocery store a few days ago, i found a crumpled up grocery list discarded in the off-brand pop-its bin. i don't remember where i saw someone who collects them, i think it was tiktok? anyways, inspired by that i decided to keep it. i looked sus putting in my fanny pack but whatever lol. i want what they're having tho for real.

i had an old person moment at my brother's house the other day. he elected me to dj the music while we played board games, and i was in the mood for mid-00s pop/hip-hop. when the infamous song G6 came on, my friend's younger cousin said "oh, this song is old" (not in a mean way, more like amused) and i told him it came out when i was middle school. he was like, for real? and i said yea, it was the best of times. i was also a little confused but didnt express to him, that all of the songs i was playing were old lol. but i digress.

next weekend my husband and i are taking a small road trip to try and see the perseid meteor shower. i'm no astronomer, i'm not that smart, and i'm also no good at night photography, so if i come back with no evidence of seeing it (if i even do) you'll just have to believe me lol. i'm excited tho. it's been a minute since we went on a trip ourselves. we did go out at night across the street to lay on the hill and watch a meteor shower that happened within our view recently, and it was amazing. i over-use this word but it was truly cosmic 💫

on a technical note, i have been working on a little side project, nothing is published yet and it is still very much a sprout, but i am making a website for my husband. when i hyperfixate on something, i take no time to rush through it. with this project being dependent on my husband sending me the content i need at his pace, it will take longer lol. but when it's up i will share it. don't get me wrong, he hyperfixates too i think, based on how much he talks about the trials and tribulations of 100%-ing binding of isaac, and how he literally will forget to go pee.

anyways, lol, for this website, i have been trying to allow 24 or more hours to pass between each update. i have a "sticky note" open on my desktop full of page ideas i want to make, and stuff i want to add to existing ones. my big goal is to have lots of pages, each one interesting, and many of them inspired by other people i found on neocities.