December 2020

In the midst of all this chaos there's only a few things keeping me sane and happy. One of those things is my cat!! Usually she's not the cuddly type but ever since the earthquake hit it's almost as if she's trying to comfort me. She's always next to me when I'm at home, and during the night she cuddles up close to me and my mom. She purrs me to sleep and in the morning she wakes me up by laying down right next to my head. She has never been this affectionate and I wonder if it's because she can sense we're still stressed and uneasy, she's probably scared herself. Even right now she's laying next to me on my mattress on the floor, snoring. I love that creature!!

In other news I visited my sister and stayed over for 2 days. I was so happy to see her and hang out with her, she's the best. Also she gave me the clothes she bought when sales started, I got so many cute sweaters, they're cute af. Funnily enough while I was with her another stronger earthquake hit my town but we barely felt it. That night I slept well.

Mentally I feel like I still can't totally relax but I'll have to start doing all of my homeworks now so that will be interesting. I can't focus for shit but I'm trying to kickstart my brain by writing this diary entry, hopefully it chills me out a bit. Another thing that chilled me out were engineers that came to take a look at our building, they said we'd be able to withstand strong earthquakes which is great to hear. One of my sisters friends lost her home. She lived in a building and apparently it's in such a bad state that her and her mom were only allowed to go in with firefighters and take the most important things. They lost everything. And of course out of all people my sis talked with, that girl was the most optimistic and positive. I'm not really materialistic nor do I have a lot of things but the thought of losing my home sounds so traumatic. But then again, when the strongest earthquake hit I was just lucky to get out alive and I didn't really care for my belongings.

2021 here we are. I never talked about where I live precisely because I wanted to remain as anonymous as possible but this impacted my life so hard I'll have to mention it. On the 29th my town was the epicenter of a massive earthquake. Well, massive for my area, magnitude of 6.2. So many people lost their homes and are now traumatized for the rest of their lives. I still have troubles falling asleep but luckily my building seems to be in a decent state. We will find out more once the engineers come to take a look at it, slowly they're looking at all of the buildings and houses in the impacted area. For the first two nights I slept in my car but slowly I'm getting less tense and now I'm sleeping in my living room on my matress, with my mom. My sister was in another town when this hit, so thankfully she didn't feel it as hard as we did. Apparently half of Europe felt it. Recovering from this will take years, and much longer than it would in other countries because ours is very incompetent. Bleh I don't even want to talk about it much anymore. I might volunteer soon, I'll look into it. Currently all I can say is I'm hoping 2021 will be the most monotonous and uneventful year of my life.

What the hell how did so much time pass since my last entry? I entered lazy mode it seems. Past month and a half have been pretty hellish for me to be fair. I finally watched Haibane Renmei, I remember watching the frst episode like 6 years ago and then forgetting about it, but now I binged it and it was so good. Definitely one of my favourite anime, can't believe I was ignoring it for so long. The whole time I was watching it I was heavily reminded of Team Ico's games, the general atmosphere, colors and architetcure are so similar, even the music! I love that.. I guess you could call it aesthetic. Empty/abandoned buildings and a lot of nature remind me of my childhood, I used to spend a lot of time exploring a street in my town that's like that and I still enjoy taking walks there. The story was very well done too, I was perfectly content with the lack of explanations for some things, I noticed a lot of people online complaining about that but not every story has to explain things 100% especially if that's not the point of the story? People are weird, not every story has to be told in the same way.

Other than that I've done pretty much nothing but I think I had a well deserved rest, my boyfriend started playing Persona 3 portable on his pc and I'm watching him play it, I'm glad he's getting into smt games. We tried emulating nocturne first but because our pcs suck it was too laggy so we had to give up on it. Luckily p3p is a light game because it's for the psp.

Christmas/new years food will absolutely kill me, my mom and grandma made so much cake and cookies I'll definitely be gaining some weight... Ah I need to be more physically active, maybe in the spring? We will see.

Hell yeahhh I passed with an A in my Web design course, everything went perfectly. My birthday was yesterday and my sister visited over the weekend. Yesterday my mom and I drove my sister to her workplace in the mall and we visited our favourite stores and tried out clothes. I found so many cute sweaters that are going on sale soon so I'll get my sister to buy them for me then. I didn't buy proper sweaters for a while, my main characteristic in high school was that I loved sweaters but then I kind of grew out of it. Now I'm enjoying the baggy sweater + flared jeans combo so I'm excited to buy a few new ones and renew my sweater collection, since the old one is mostly gone. Oh also, I'm kind of enjoying the fact that weeby tshirts are kind of trendy. Sometimes I'm not sure whether I like the fact that anime is becoming more of a "normal" interest but this is one of the upsides for sure. I can wear a cowboy bebop shirt and it will be from bershka, kind of less of an embarrassment then? Well the main appeal to me is the laziness, I don't have to go out of my way to find a design I like online and then order it. Who am I kidding, I never shied away from wearing merch from things I liked, it's just that when it comes to weeby stuff I was always worried it would look like... a bit too much. I had 2 shinee shirts in middle school, damn my koreaboo phase was so long ago.

Now that I mentioned high school, I wonder how much I've changed since I finished it. It's only been 4 years and looks wise I don't think I changed too much, I think I style myself better now though. Some of my former classmates already have families and kids which is weird as hell, and I'm not in contact with any of them. Maybe next year we will have a meetup, it's a thing in my country to have meetups every 5/10 years with your former hs class (wait.. it's a thing everywhere right?) but I'm not sure if it's done after 5 years or 10 years for the first time. Even though I met a few decent people in high school I didn't really form close friendships with any of them. I think I'm much closer with my uni friends, especially because I think I'm being much more honest with them. High school me was kind of weird. High school experience wasn't traumatic for me in any way but I'm much happier now than I was then, I don't think I'd want to go back to that time. Although the most miserable period of my life was definitely my first 2 years of university before I switched majors. Only good things in those two years was me meeting up with my boyfriend, aside from that I was a depressed, confused and anxious mess. And I kind of kept it to myself a lot, which just made it worse. I don't even think I was aware of how messed up I was feeling until after it passed. What a weird experience those 2 years were.

I've been so tired and overworked for the past few days but now that the holidays are coming I think I'll finally update the site and add new things. I have a few ideas already, I want there to be more to explore.

Ah finally I have a moment to write. Past few days have been hectic. I had to write a term paper and make a powerpoint about it and then present it in class. It was due today and of course I stayed up late last night to do it, because of course I had to procrastinate. I talked about it for a bit with my boyfriend but I really do have a problem sometimes. I'd set up sources to read, prepare the document and then just stare at the blank page for days on end, until the last day when suddenly all of the inspiration pours out of me. It happens way too often with term papers and big essays, I just find it hard to motivate myself or think of interesting ideas until the pressure is there. It's extra silly because this topic I wrote about is super interesting to me and I could talk about it forever but putting it on paper was so hard because it's such a difficult and complex theme to cover.

I managed to write the paper before 3 am so in the morning I struggled to make the powerpoint during class. Presenting this stuff in class was something else though, it was my first time doing it online. Usually I don't have huge anxiety when doing this irl, but online? Wow I was so stressed. There were no cameras which I'm not sure if I should be thankful for since not seeing peoples faces makes presenting so hard. I'm not sure when to pause, if I'm speaking too fast etc. Usually I can notice this stuff when doing it irl so it makes it easier to adjust. I was a trembling mess, in my head I sounded like I was about to cry from how often my voice quievered lol. Now I understand why teachers like cameras to be on. By the time I was done my body was so wet from nervous sweating but I was so tired I just went to eat. I had to read another text afterwards but it was the essay I wrote 2 weeks ago and I had to read through it fast so it wasn't as nerve wracking. After that I just collapsed in bed and napped like a baby. I'm still tired though, and I'll be going to sleep late cause my sister is coming over to visit. We will probably be talking until pretty late. And I've got work at 8am tomorrow. And then a small family birthday celebration. Currently all I'm fantasizing about is getting good 9 hours of sleep.

In other news one of the worst teachers we have finally gave us deadlines for our presentations. Our deadline is the 22nd. Of December. In 4 days. Luckily my teammates said they'll cover most of the stuff since my Saturday is full and on Sunday/Monday I have to finish my web design project. This semester is an absolute mess with how much work I have.

This diary entry has just been me ranting about uni, I'll try not to make a habit out of that because it's boring for me to read it and go over it honestly.

Past few days went by fast with me procrastinating again but today I visited my friends. More importantly though, yesterday was my boyfriends birthday! I forgot to wish him his birthday exactly on midnight because of timezones again, I'm an hour behind him haha. In a week I'll be aging up too. I won't hold a party, but that's because I haven't had a birthday celebration since 6th grade of middle school, outside of family celebrations. I generally don't like parties and any kind of formal get togethers, weddings are the absolute worst when it comes to that. When I eventually end up marrying my bf, I don't want a wedding. It just seems too tiring.

I had a nice time with my friends today, we talked about many things but I'm too tired to type it all out. They smoked so much today though that my hair and sweater reek of cigarette smell, usually I don't mind it as much but this tobacco they've been using smells exactly like the tobacco my grandma used to smoke when I was a kid and it has a really bad smell. Like it gets everywhere and whenever I take a deep breath I can feel it in the back of my throat, it's very bad quality. I remember sleeping over at my grandmas and coming back home and immediately taking all of my clothes off that I wore there because the smell was just so strong. It's weird because I wouldn't notice the smell at all at my grandmas place but it would hit me when I left her every time lol. Well now I can't wait to take a shower. Also lately whenever I visit my friends and come back home, my hair gets greasy fast. What's up with that? I think I touch my face and hair too much when I'm outside. Going back to the smoking topic though, my dad started smoking again a month ago. He's been a smoker for the majority of his adult life but he usually quits when he gets really sick because of his unhealthy lifestyle. Usually the cigarettes he smokes don't smell as shitty though. We also banned him from smoking inside so our house doesn't reek. Smoking ended up as one of our topics today and while personally I don't care much if a person smokes I just don't get it. Maybe because I'm a bit stingy when it comes to those things but I can't imagine spending so much money on cigarettes. It can look cool and elegant but it doesn't feel worth it. Man I sound like a middle schooler with these opinions but smoking never appealed to me much even though I grew up around smokers. I can't form coherent sentences because I'm so sleepy and this smell is getting unbearable so I'll stop for tonight.

Today I wanted to talk about a specific topic because this will certainly be an exciting read for the future me. That's mainly who I have in mind as my target demographic when I write in this diary. So a year ago I rediscovered a site I used to love as a kid and that I visited daily back in 2008. The site shut down some time in 2013 or a bit later, not sure. A year ago I got bored and decided to look it up. Lo and behold - the site was back! I started visiting it frequently again and I told my irl friend about it. She loved it so she made an account too. Since then the two of us have been visiting the site daily and enjoy reading its forums, we know all the gossip and who is who. Even when I was a kid, the site was mostly populated by older women. Last year, the situation was the same. Slowly however, younger people started joining. People that didn't use the site before it got shut down. And that's fine by me! But.. somehow the situation turned ugly. As I said, the previous main userbase of the site were middle aged women. Some of them were really strange, they had their quirks. But me and my friend mostly lurked and enjoyed reading some of their gibberish writings (most of them were esl because the site was made by an esl dude). We enjoyed their strangennes even though we didn't necessarily agree with their lifeviews, or morals or political leanings or whatever. The newer crowd at first also just poked fun at them and it was all fun and games for a while. I even took the newbies side because after all those women could get a bit strange. Suddenly though the whole situation turned into a witch hunt. Now there's a discord dedicated to changing the website, like make some terms less offensive (hot take but I don't really like how a new userbase is policing everything suddenly, just find a space that will accomodate you better because there are plenty of spaces like that!, but in the end that part doesn't bother me that much) and what used to be mild poking fun of the way someone wrote is now full on bullying. Judging everything those women say/write and mocking it in that discord etc. It just feels ironic how a group of "woke" young adults, most of them enbies and trans, most of them open about their mental disorders and the hardships they face in life are the most vicious, toxic and scary group online. Now they're chasing the original userbase away and why? Because they wanted to experience the vintage early 2000's like site due to nostalgia? But after you chase away its original userbase, change eveything you deem offensive, is that really the same page you wanted to experience in the first place? I honestly started to feel bad for the crazy ladies, and I didn't even like them at the start.

Anyway, I'm all for the y2k nostalgia, hell this site is major proof of it. But I really don't like the way people come into someone elses space and claim as their own. Learn to integrate, young ones!! Lurking is a major part of internet culture, especially early aughts netiquette. If you want to enjoy the nostalgic experience, get into it fully! And instead of giving money to someone you deem problematic and offensive why not find a site that has a better admin, mod team etc?

I don't want people reading this to think I'm a crazy right wing nutjob because I'm quite the opposite, I just don't like hypocrites and bullies, even when I'm on their "side". Feels like everything is black and white these days. Those older ladies barely mentioned politics in the first place, they were just a bit weird. But they didn't harm anyone and their weird posts affected nobody. Now they're targets of ridicule for a group of twitter zealots. I hate the cultures spawned by social media, I really do.

Been busy working these past few days, both at my job and on my site. Really happy with the secret page I added. I'm thinking of making it easier to find but I'll see. I ordered a cute x-files shirt for my boyfriend's birthday, he ordered me the same shirt for my birthday, our b-days are just a week apart so we always end up getting each other the same gifts as a running joke. Well the joke this time will be that it will probably take the shirts 2+ months to arrive and our birthdays are in December but it's alright, that doesn't really bother me. Speaking of online shopping I still have a ton of things I ordered ages ago that are yet to arrive. I ordered like 15 socks from a few different stores and I'm waiting for my last batch to arrive. Ordered it back in October and it seems the socks have been stuck in my country for well over a month now. I want to wrap my sister's Christmas presents damnit. Also I ordered the cutest shirt from ASOS, I'm not usually too impressed by their prices and shirts (crop tops galore, do fast fashion companies think everyone lives in california or something?) but I fell in love with this one, I think it will look great layered over a white turtleneck. This order should arrive soon considering asos shipping is lightning fast, compared to the usual sites I order from that is.

To vent a bit, recently a few girls joined this discord I'm a regular in. I like them both but they're both fairly rich and I always feel salty when I hear them speak about how rich their families are. Usually it doesn't bother me much but they mention it a bit too often and it left a bad impression I guess. Especially because they're both pretty young. I'm really not sensitive to that topic when people earn their money, they deserve to talk about it, but man talking about your rich daddy strikes a nerve haha.

Pretty chill day today. I went to the dentist to get a cavity fixed. Apparently it spread on the neighbouring tooth which kinda sucks. My dentist wouldn't have even noticed the cavity if I hadn't done an x-ray of my teeth because of a potential wisdom tooth removal. And I will be getting my wisdom tooth removed sometimes in January. Yay.

Yesterday I saw something that disturbed me. Don't want to go into detail but basically it was a girl talking so casually about her anorexia and portraying it positively. She never called it anorexia of course. Talking about her calorie intake, her goal weight etc. Freaked me out honestly. Especially due to the way it was portrayed. For some reason I thought pro-ana tumblr culture died out but I guess that kind of stuff will always exist in some way or form, but on a lower scale. It's a mental illness of course and I understand that, but I don't like when people portray it in a cutesy way without adressing how harmful it is, ever, especially publicly where everyone can see it. Speaking of eating disorders I remember this one girl in my town that had a secret pro-ana tumblr that I somehow discovered. She was super popular and basically everyone I knew wanted to hang out with her or be her. Anyway I remember her absolutely idolizing Cassie from Skins, her feed was full of her gifs. Since I was pretty young back then and haven't watched skins yet, I thought that show must be the coolest and edgiest thing ever. Well this summer I decided to watch the first season of Skins with my sister and holy shit we cringed from start to finish. Might be a hot take considering how much skins praise I see to this day. How did teens think this stuff was edgy or interesting? It reeks of the "adults making a show about what they think teens act like but it's not actually what they act like". At least Euphoria had some realism to it, despite it also being a "10 worst types of teens are somehow all in the same friend group" which barely happens irl but I get it, dramatic effect and all. Skins had some humor in it I guess, but most of the characters motivations, thoughts, actions and even parent interactions made no sense to me. Couldn't relate in the sligthest. Also that weird weed seller dude Madison Twatter plotline ended in such a dumb way. Instead of selling Jal's clarinet to get a portion of the money back he.. breaks it? 'Kay. I guess concerning myself over what some side villain druggie does is kind of silly.

After I came home from work yesterday I spent the whole day in bed, trying to recover from my busy week. I'm way too used to being a homebody, so used to it that going out 4-5 days in a row kills me. Quarantine really made me into an even bigger hermit. I can't say I mind travelling for an hour by train to visit my friends but if I add work to that as well it really does tire me out.

Holiday season started today, christmas songs are playing in my store. Unlike a lot of people I know, I don't really hate christmas songs, I'm mostly indifferent to them aside from the couple of bops I could listen to any time of the year. However, there's one song in particular that always ticks me off and I don't know why for sure. I just googled the lyrics and it's "Happy Christmas" by Colbie Caillat. Never heard of her before but something about her boring voice and I guess accent bothers me. When she sings "remember the homeless" it makes me feel like she's nagging at me to go volunteer or something when I bet she doesn't do it either. Hello you have a net worth of 9 million go give money to charities and leave me and my miserable student job earnings alone. And should I only remember the homeless during christmas time? Every time I hear her monotone voice in the store I get a bit angry, honestly what's wrong with me sometimes. The song gives me middle aged christian american mom vibes. There's a lot of other songs I grew to dislike at my job, mostly because we only have a few cds that never changed since I started working (2 years now). My sisters place changes cds every month or 2 weeks I'm not sure. Ah, to work in a zoomer fast fashion store. I guess mindlessly stacking and tidying the shelves while answering the same 5 questions on repeat makes me predisposed to hate the music that plays in the background.

In other news, I watched Marriage Story yesterday, finally. Sometimes I'm super late with movies/shows that become massive memes and are really discussed throughly. The movie was alright, it made me dislike lawyers more if anything. I remember reading about how everyone was impressed by Adam Driver's angry acting and I thought that same thing when I watched Lena Dunham's Girls 4ish years ago. I really liked Adam's character in that show. Honestly while some good truth bombs were dropped in the movie it didn't make that much of a lasting impression on me. Still a good movie though.

So yesterday I went to work and decided to do my essay after work, at 10pm. What a bright idea that was. At least I'm glad I'm not a regular coffee drinker because of moments like these. I made some coffee and it kept me up and focused until 3am when I finally finished my essay. Even going to sleep was hard. I had to wake up early for class and we learned some js which is kind of fun. Two classes after that I was supposed to present my essay and read it outloud. Luckily for me I didn't get my turn so the embarassment is delayed for a week. Or maybe not, since the teacher said she might just grade our essay and she won't require us to read it infont of everyone. Theme of the essay was pretty cool though, I covered a chapter that talked about the internet and social media. The book itself is outdated (it's from 2008) so the theme of my essay was basically comparing todays online landscape to the one in that book. I managed to mention neocities and personal web pages as they're having a small revival because it was surprisingly relevant to the chapter of that book.

After that I had to go to work, one hour earlier than I was supposed to. I was planning to nap a bit in the afternoon but work took that precious hour of sleep away from me. To add to that we had an insanely busy day at work (I work at a drugstore), especially when you consider the current situation. Makes sense since st. Nicholas is soon but the sheer amount of people was something I haven't seen in a while, I don't remember last years beginning of December being this insane. Also I absolutely hate when customers try to ask me for help while I'm already helping somebody. Just wait for me to finish speaking or find another worker, Jesus. It's so damn rude. Now I can't wait to go to sleep so I'll do just that.

Yesterday was super busy and fun so I didn't have a moment to myself to sit down and write. Continuing with the theme of stuff I haven't done since I was 10, I slept over at my friends house. Well, her brother's apartment but same thing. All of my uni friends are from different parts of the country so when uni switched to online I kind of lost touch with them, irl. We still have a group chat we're super active in and if it weren't for that I probably wouldn't pass half of my classes. Having nice uni friends really gives me motivation. Well my boyfriend is probably the bigger factor, without him I don't think I'd even learn anything at my uni due to some teachers being so reluctant when it comes to actual teaching. Anyway, we decided 3 weeks ago that we should start meeting up more frequently to catch up with our homework since this semester is absolutely crazy. It seems like now, during online classes, teachers give us much more homework than before so every single class has weekly homeworks, term papers, presentations etc. Stuff I hate the most. Give me exams and some practical projects to do and I'd be happy. Because of that meeting up in real life (sorry corona measures, we're still keeping our meetings under 10 people though) became a necessity because it's much easier to do this in groups. No matter how nice video and voice calls are they'll never replace real life. I should know, I'm the one in an ldr. So basically these meetings led to me sleeping over today, my closest friend asked if I wanted to stay over at her brother's apartment and I thought why not. We were studying at a different friend's place so we got to her brother's at around 10pm. We had a great time talking with her brother, his gf and his roomate until 2am and I think I went to sleep around 3 am. Oh also my friend and I looked at blinkies to put in our descriptions of this dressup game we've been playing for a little over a year now. Topics of our convos were pretty interesting too, her brother's gf used to be a vegan and she talked about how gatekeepy the community is and we also talked about green capitalism. The pull out sofa was uncomfortable and I had troubles falling asleep because it was pretty cold. I felt pretty miserable in the morning too because my bangs got too greasy and I hate when that happens, it was probably because I wore an spf moisturizer plus a tight knit winter cap which stuck the bangs to my forehead. The train ride home was miserable as well because I had to wait around the central station for almost 2 hours, and the nice underground mall doesn't have any places to sit on anymore because of corona so I was forced to loiter around until the train arrived, absolutely horrible especially in this weather. Oh and it snowed yesterday. First snow this fall, quite early too. Especially compared to the last few years.

Another thing I forgot to mention regarding that web design assignment, I got a 100%. Pretty cool, my thoughts about the teacher giving us extra tips because we're knowledgeable were right. I was a bit too hard on her in my last entry. I also found out my boyfriend's mbti type, I know it's just horoscope for fake intellectuals but talking about personalities is always fun. I'll write about that more tomorrow since this post is already huge and I've got an essay to write, plus work. Help me.

This marks the first entry in my online diary! I spent a long time getting the site at least semi-ready before posting for the first time. I haven't written in a diary, physical or online, since I was 10 or so. Come to think of it I haven't done many things since I was 10. What inspired me to make this page in fact, was me looking at my old e-mail (the one I'm using here in my contact page) and finding e-mails of people asking me to help them with inserting images in their html. How crazy is that? A 10 year old web master explaining you the basics of html heh. I completely forgot I used to have a ton of online blogs, some of which I shared with my best friend, some of which were personal. I wanted to check them out but it seems the page that hosted those blogs did a wipe or something when they switched domains. To add to that I forgot my username and the "forgot your password" prompt requires both the e-mail and the username, which sucks.

Another major reason why I made this website is that I'm taking a course called Basics of web design at my university. The course is split into 3 parts (html, css and js respectively) and currently we finished the second part, css. After each section we have to show her the progress on our assignment and today was that day. My team's site was actually really good, especially compared to the other teams. We had everything the teacher seemed insistant on like breadcrumbs, readable html and css, good formatting, hierarchy, the website matching the company that the project was based on etc. yet she criticized our site the longest. I guess she's tougher on my team because we showed we really understood how html/css works so she was giving us extra tips compared to everyone else, but if she ends up taking points away from us because we didn't put the links to the forms in the same text where we added the job descriptions I'll be angry, since almost nobody did that and she didn't bring it up until it was our turn. Last time she took points away for having unmarked text in our html, which we didn't have. I'm a bit salty but it'll be fine I hope.