skin and song of the day:
☆ skin: RE: code: veronica
☆ song: orrery by FLEET
a very brief recap to keep things short: kira's eyes are fully healed! well, until about two days ago! the vet cleared her to be spayed, and we brought her in for her appointment, and while she was knocked out, the vet called and asked if i would authorize a minor corrective surgery to her right eye. for some reason, the person who originally did her eye removal surgery left her tear duct intact on her right eye, which could someday lead to yeast infections or other bacteria sitting in there making it icky. so not only was she spayed that day, but she also had an additional eye surgery! she's spending the holidays in a cone (she hates it lol) but thankfully this should be the last surgery arc for little kira!
my mom got tattoos on her leg for medical reasons (she has a device that helps her with sciatic nerve pain that she has to put on a very specific weird place on her legs) and they look great. she also just sold her house and is officially retiring!! i can't wait to help her move to her new town even though i'm going to miss her tons. she's going to have a great time being in nature and the woods and she's a great mom and deserves her retirement! i randomly went in for more tattoos too and got some more work on my leg done, and my birthday is in a week (the 27th!) so i have my big bokuto tattoo scheduled for my bday! it's going to be so great having the character i've been roleplaying for the past 6 years on me forever because i kin him (in the loosest use of that word) and he's just special to me.
bot finished their first lolita coord and it looks gorgeous. we were in a music video for the dollheads after my cousin invited us! we went to my sister's house and marathoned silent hill 2 remake for as long as possible, and we also did a photoshoot outside pepper lunch lol. other than that i spent november working a bunch since all the advertising clients needed black friday promotional materials! really it was a pretty busy month, which is nuts because this is the lead-up to christmas. i had like NO free time in november and december honestly. then i had some events for work- our company christmas party and the holiday party my coworkers do together! also, my sister's bday and jules' bday are on the same day, and i'm an irish twin, which means my sister and i get to spend a few weeks every year being the same age. here are some fun pics from the goings on, work christmas parties, birthdays, and random stuff!
lovely christmas season living room area
hasebe rosette i made myself!
start of a gingerbread houses!
my tamagotchi pix looks crazy lol
my eyes are always closed in pictures because they are always closed in pictures
happy HOPlidays!!! we were opening skz albums at the work christmas party LOLLLL
kira gave them a pat
my work's toy donations for the southern nevada burn foundation!
merry acmas!!!
cool building outside the dollheads music video set
james was having a mental breakdown but we put spice cake mix in the bubble waffle maker and we were all having a great time tbh
this is my "i dont need veneers because i have huge oversized rabbit teeth" image
my beautiful bot!!!! omg!!!
way's bday! we had japanese bbq! i was so tired but it was so fun!
beautiful boongalus
on dec. 3rd, i got a phone call that made me burst into tears. jules' father passed away.
jules and i have been best friends since 2009. i consider her like one of my platonic life partners, a person who is my soulmate who i was absolutely DESTINED to meet and know my whole life. i'm so glad when met when we did, though, because i got to befriend not just jules, but also her dad, jim.
in 2009 i was a kid with no real discernable future, but jim took me in and basically as soon as jules and i became attached at the hip, jim was there. he would feed me by cooking roasted chicken with crispy skin, or by taking us out to winchell's diner, and he would drive me to school with jules during the week. he would buy met dr pepper and donuts (my preferred breakfast lol) with no questions asked. i've mentioned him buying things for me because this was a pretty big deal to me then, i had no money to my name and my family was poor and living in low income apartments on the opposite side of town, and jim was so nice and accepting of that. he allowed me to come into his home and build legos with jules and debate about star wars all day. we used to go shooting together (he was a veteran and a big gun fan, but he was never judgemental of jules and i being queer, accepted jules as transgender when she came out, and was never like a red-hat wearing maga-pilled weirdo, he was just accepting of everything and everyone) and he always set us up at the range with all the coolest stuff. he was so proud of us when we'd shoot well. and i just can't stress enough that he was just. wholesome. like he just wanted to do what made his daughter happy.
he worked in a good job but lived very frugally. jules has lived in the same house since i met her because her dad bought it and paid it off as an investment for her. he worked and saved all his money from the day she was born so that she would be safe and have a home and money someday which i think is INCREDIBLE. he was also blessed to have his line of work (something to do with IT based on what he learned when service in the air force) and we all know it. he had a great hand in life. he also stood up to his own father, a raging alcoholic and horrible person, and sort of became 'man of the house' when it was needed. jim also took care of grandma kathy, who jules and i just called grandma, until her death a few years ago.
he was just really the best dad ever. for those who don't know, jules has schizophrenia / bipolar I disorder, which we didn't know until 2021 when she had a pretty extreme psychotic break. i knew her for years and years not knowing that she had this, because she didn't know it either. she was "normal", as much as i hate that word, until she experienced trauma in 2020 that led to her having episodes of psychosis. at that time, we had already moved apart. we were apartment roomies for several years, but sadly the pandemic led to her being unemployed and i had to move somewhere where i could live with my dog. she had moved back in with her dad by the time she started showing symptoms of psychosis, but we still hung out almost daily.
i think it's important for people to be very aware that when you have psychosis, all your previous personality traits and opinions kind of go out the window. it's not the cutesy "omg im deranged" disorder that you see on pinterest memes with hello kitty locked in a padded room. psychosis is terrifying. psychosis turns you into a shell of a person, and you have no personal awareness of it. i grew up knowing jules as a trans baddie, outspoken leftist, workers rights advocate, mechanical engineering genius who worked in robotics. she was an honors student and had straight A's through college. she had depression but was medicated for it. she loved youtube videos about bad movies, binge watching anime, and was extremely well versed in star wars lore. she also ended up becoming a goth girlie. these are all foundational jules facts of life. but when her psychosis started rearing it's head, she couldn't even remember those basic things about herself. she couldn't remember where or when she went to school. she couldn't remember basic lore of the series she was obsessed with. she was unable to turn on the tv or listen to music because she thought it was some kind of conspiracy.
she thought the souls of billionaires (jeff bezos, elon musk, steve jobs, and walt disney primarily) were communicating to her through smoke detectors in her house. she would spend hours not sleeping, staring at the smoke detector as it blinked, thinking it was some kind of secret code being passed to her by the business elite. she would scream at me, and her dad, and even my dog, because she thought we were clones and body doubles that were puppeting her into 'losing money'. she didn't have any money lol. she became convinced that the "real me" was in korea, hilariously she thought i was BTS member kim taehyung and that the current "me" that was hanging out with her was just a double sent to distract her. she thought she was telepathically rearranging the city's layout under the order of god, and no-one else could see it. in reality she was getting lost in parking garages and talking to walls and pipes.
genuinely, it was so terrifying. i was mourning a person who wasn't dead. her spirit and soul were gone: the person i grew up with was no longer there. i thought, for a long time, that she was going to be like that forever. that the jules i had spent my life knowing was lost to the schizophrenia, the hallucinations, the delusions, the conspiracies. she had no knowledge that anything was wrong with her. how could she?? the world she was perceiving was out to get her, everyone she knew and loved were fake, she was receiving messages from the dead, she was the only human in the world able to teleport and move objects with her mind. it was a lonely, terrifying, powerful existence. she was angry, and at times soul-crushingly depressed. we didn't get it. nobody understood but her.
during these times, she yelled at me a lot. she came to my house and destroyed random things. she took my stuff apart, and threw random objects away. she thought it was cursed or speaking to her. she would always say she was "hit by a bus" or someone "attempted to kill" her, i think it was her mind's way of rationalizing the trauma happening to her brain at the time and putting her feelings into some kind of physical reality. she jumped out of my moving car once. it was so scary. i cried all the time thinking about her because i felt so bad for her.
the ENTIRE TIME she went through this psychotic break, her dad was the one who kept her housed. when i could no longer handle her being at my house and feared for my safety, he would come pick her up no questions asked. she berated him and would sometimes scream at him for hours, and he would just take it. this was his daughter, and he would never give up on her.
i often get told that jules would be one of those people on the street, talking to light posts and walking into traffic with bare feet, had her dad and i not lead the charge in getting her the care she needed. i give her dad the lion's share of the credit. really all i did was hangout with her and listen to her being delusional so that he could have a break for a few hours a day. when she once got outside and tried to run away (due to one of her airpods not working, she thought it was a personal signal from the ghost of steve jobs telling her that she was under a surveillance program and needed to get out), jim and i drove around together to find her. i didn't want her to end up as one of the random people on the street. i love her and she is my best friend, and as long as jim didn't give up on her, i wouldn't either. we cried together in the car out of love and frustration with the whole situation. we found her later that day at del taco but that's another story for another day LOL.
thanks to jim's persistence, she got on meds that stabilized her. what's amazing to me now is that she can remember everything from her psychotic episode. the meds started working within 48 hours, and i remember getting a call from her at like 10 at night. i picked up and she asked "...have i been acting sort of crazy for the past 8 months?" and i just started sobbing. she came back. jim and i would both randomly cry about it because we never expected her to fully come back. but she's sane now, in our lives and stable. she has a girlfriend and takes care of the two dogs at the house. she can recall in vivid detail what she thought each hallucination was, and how they all seemed to connect together on a deeper level that spurred on her psychosis. it's really amazing.
i give jim the credit for the fact that i still have jules in my life. a LOT of people- most people, i think, would have said "you know what, i'm at my limit, i'm done" with her at certain points in there. i think you know someone is truly family when you would never reach that limit. it doesn't matter how far down the rabbit hole they are, they are in need of mental health resources they would NEVER get if not for someone else assisting them. and jim stepped up to that, being a dad to her, even in the moments where she was screaming at him, jumping from cars, completely delusional. he was, and i say this with 100% absolute sureness and realness, the best dad ever. i have jules in my life because of jim being an amazing dad. i will be grateful to him forever for that!
we both miss him a lot. everyone who knew him misses him a lot. there's a ton of paperwork to be done, but there always is, after someone dies. i struggle a lot with loss and grief, after watching my relatives die over the years and losing some very close friends to DUIs and suicide. i have no grandparents left. my aunt and uncle passed away within 8 months of each other in 2021, and i had to watch my uncle pass away in front of my eyes from liver cancer. watching someone take their last breaths is horrible. losing my closest tumblr friend to suicide after relentless bullying absolutely changed who i am as a person. then just this february i lost my soul dog to cancer. i hate loss. i hate grief. i hate the empty hole that it leaves in your chest.
but i refuse to stop feeling it fully. i say this all the time because it's a quote from one of my favorite songs ever: the burden of love is grief. we only feel grief because we feel love. they are sister emotions. to love is to prepare for loss, to feel loss is the final, everlasting form of love. to sit in your grief and cry and scream with your whole body because you miss someone so profoundly that you can't move or function is truly truly its own form of love. i loved these people so much that my world stops when they are no longer here. it's our job as humans who are able to talk and write and pass down stories to continue telling the world about the people who we have lost, to keep that grief and love with us forever. this is getting weirdly profound but i think it's really important. never EVER stop missing the people who you knew who are no longer with us. never ever stop talking about them. the burden of love is grief.
i don't have any fun way to end this except that christmas is around the corner, and i'm grateful that i can be here in my house and healthy and happy with my family that is still on earth, and that i'm thankful for everyone who contributed to the life i have now, wether they are alive or have passed on. i don't have any pictures of post with jim because he wasn't a photo guy but i have his face in my heart forever!!
ACTUALLY WAIT- i do have something fun and exciting. one weekend this month we were able to make it out to the hypmic 7th anniversary cafe in little tokyo LA! it was so busy this month i almost forgot about this! through the work and the grief, this little thing made me so happy!! i ate fucking MAD TRIGGER CREW MACARONS BRUHH. i cant believe hypmic has been in my life for 7 years. i happily remember telling my sister about it when it was first coming out and her looking at me like bro what the fuck are you talking about. i'm so insanely thankful that my fiancee is as invested in hypmic as i am lol. maybe i'll make a little page for our insane crackship sometime soon lol. but here are some pictures from that, it was sooo fun to meet everyone and make new friends and connect over our fuckass gulp shittos!
our hypmic soyjak
breakfast- we got our mitsuwa curry buns and a bunch of touken ranbu biscuits lol
i got shiny hasebe first try!!!!
why is this picture so huge??? lol
MTC girlie til i die babeyyyyy<3
they are a BAT baddie!
I LOOK LIKE SHIT HERE LOL BUT I HAVE TO KILLLLLL HIMMMM
they were meant to be teehee
i ate the fling posse slop because it looked good (it was delicious)
im still thinking about these fucking macarons they were so fucking good lolllll and for why
he might even be in the building
my love!!!! the editing in these pictures is all so random because we both edited different pics LMAO
also, i have been trying to play chicken smoothie daily for the past week, while i still don't have time to do my art thread (which is SADDDD I WANT TO GIVE PEOPLE ART) i am giving away a lot of pets! i don't try to collect every pet on CS, but if you play CS in the collector way, please feel free to ask me for any pets in my trading free group! i simply don't want them and i am giving them away!
LOVE YOU ALL! i'm hoping to update more soon! and i'm making a shrine to our house lol! get all up in your feelings this christmas- feel the gratefulness and feel the love and feel the loss, it's all part of it! it's all part of what makes life so amazing! i'm so thankful you are all here with me!!! to grieve is to love. to love is to grieve. to feel is to be alive. it's all so beautiful!!!!!!