floor trash, midnight corn, alice the cat

nighttime

Floor trash: It may interest you to know that I haven't been responsible for cleaning a bathroom since 2018. Then I moved to college, and had dorm bathrooms. I like to think it's not making me a worse person.

I bring that fact up only to state that apparently the best way for me to get myself to write is to have something else to do. I need to straighten my room and bathroom before tomorrow. I am writing this instead of doing that. My room is an absolute disaster right now. You can see it a bit in the picture above-- my floor is more clothing than carpet, my bed is unmade, there are bits of embroidery thread and yarn basically everywhere, and my nail polish set up has just exploded all over everything. I'm also a destructive fidgeter, so there are bits of torn up q-tip and cotton pad covering a good amount of my floor as well. I made some art (not good art, mind you) out of a bunch of floor trash earlier this week:

Isabella Solis (U.S., b.2000), Floor Trash, 2020. Biore pore strips, q-tips, makeup sponges, nail polish, cotton pads, embroidery thread, and mode podge on cardstock, 8.5 x 11 inches. Collection of the artist.

I'm probably going to throw it away, because it's ugly and I feel like there is too much of my old skin on it.

Midnight corn: 
The following is a list of things I've eaten at about 12:00am recently:
1. Two to four fudgesicles
2. Some folded up pieces of salami (pickles and cheese if I'm feeling fancy. Call that charcuterie).
3. Quesadilla/grilled cheese/grilled cheese, but made with a biscuit
4. Instant ramen
5. A peach (another peach, and also then another peach)
6. A bowl containing of golden raisins, dried cherries, granola, peanuts, pretzels, and sour gummy octopuses
7. Corn on the cob, but as I went to take the corn on the cob out of the microwave, I checked the butter dish and the butter drawer and there was no butter to be found. I, scandalized, asked my dad how? he had served my family corn on the cob without butter. He told me they put mayonnaise!! on the corn. This is horrifying. I got a jar, filled it halfway with heavy cream, and shook it for like 15 minutes until I had unsalted butter. I salted the butter and washed the butter, and then I had cold corn. So I heated up the corn again and enjoyed it with what my dad deemed "the world's most expensive tablespoon of butter." It was good, but I'm not quite sure it was "15 minutes of shaking a jar full of cream" good.* I went back into the kitchen to wash the plate, looked at the oven and the espresso machine to make sure they were both turned off before I went to bed, and sitting right between the stove and the coffee grinder was a butter dish full of butter; that nobody in my family had seen all night.

Alice the cat:

Alice, Malice, Meowlice, Al, Al pal, Palace, Wee Alice Big Chin.*

Til soon, Blog <3

Listening to: Austin Weber, The Words


*I completely refused to eat anything that I knew had butter on it until I was about 16 when I started being ok with it on toast. I have since come around and am a giant butter fan, but it took me until early this year to be ok with mayonnaise. In fact, I only will eat mayo if it's already on a thing, and even then I would probably prefer butter in its place. 
*I love you so much if you get this reference.

me, blogs, the rubber menagerie

Hello.

I have kept a blog a few times.
1. Elementary/middle school. That blog was mostly silly jokes or just pages full of the word "meow" repeated several hundred times.
2. The fall of my sophomore year of high school, when I was very alone and very lonely in small town Argentina, trying desperately to figure out what plank in reason broke
3. Blogs were required for my high school English classes in junior and senior years. All those sites are still up if you feel like finding them...

I like blogs. I remember reading and loving people's blogs during their heyday, though that was a little before my time. I was a true child of YouTube, too late for MySpace and Livejournal, and just straight up blogging. The Vlogbrothers, Kristina Horner/5 Awesome Girls, Meekakitty/Nanalew, Charlieissocoollike, ItsWayPastMyBedtime, and their kind of webworld was my whole everything when I discovered them-- though maybe I misremember. I was a really busy kid. Tumblr is a whole other story, and maybe I'll tell you that one someday.

But I like blogs. I like how they're long-form, because looking through Twitter and Instagram makes me want to forget how to read. I like how they're personal, how I don't feel any pressure to post about my Takes, or my accomplishments, or even really my life events, and I can just put my thoughts down for the reading. I appreciate not having to see everything everyone is thinking all the time. A blog, though, is infinitely more public than my journal, which is kind of reserved for the long long mental-illness-y ramblings to which I'm prone.

I also think there's a really pleasant retro feel to the blogosphere now.

I wonder if I'll outgrow social media?* Or maybe if I already have?

I don't see myself leaving YouTube, certainly not in the near future. My friend Solomia put it well, I think, when we were talking the other day, she said (forgive me Solo for paraphrasing) that she likes YouTube because it doesn't "require anything of me." Social media demands your attention, in a way that was engrossing, enthralling, when I was a kid. As I grow up, though, it feels more and more like drinking the last beer I shouldn't've and passing out on the couch; staying in a conversation for far too long, so I'm bored and "mmhmm"-ing my way through the next hour; or trying to walk home after I've been lying in the sun all day-- the steady creep of nausea up my throat. I'm bored, but I can't stop. I feel uncreative because I never spend any time idly living in my own head.

Part of that is the unhealth I've been in. I've been in some state of active depression for the better part of a year right now-- that's right, it started before all of this-- and boy does that illness make it hard to spend time with yourself. I was recently diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Ehlers Danlos syndrome (it's less of a big deal than you think it is) as well, which has thrown just how much my body is also me right at my face.

And the current situation has also kind of ripped away my main thing from me as well. I'm an aerialist-- a trapeze artist primarily. I have done trapeze a total of one time since March 14th, 2020, and that's, um, been hard. I'll write more about how that feels, but suffice it to say it sucks.

But I don't want to dwell in the negative. There are a lot of good things in my life right now, and I'm happy a lot of the time. While I feel the stress and fear that come along with being 19, and the pandemic, and my anxiety disorder, and fears about the future; I also can't let those be the things that swallow me up. So, a List of Things I'm Into Right Now:

1. Painting my nails. Oh my gosh, why didn't anybody tell me I could do art and then wear it on my hands until just about a month ago? I love it.
2. Feist!! I fell in love with her fourth album, Metals (2011) in May of this year and since then I can't stop listening. Literally all of her albums are no-skips for me.*
3. Contortion and handstands: the only circus arts you can do from home (don't come at me with juggling).
4. Bringing back 2005. 
5. Kids clothes. Apparently I wear a size 10-14 in girls clothes still? Kids clothes are cute and also cheap. I'm having fun with that.
6. The Sims 4.
7. Top Chef. I can't wait to make a blog post about only Top Chef, if only to save my friends from my rambling.
8. Singing very loudly with my family in our house.
9. My cats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10. This menagerie of little rubber figurines I found and bought at Beachy's Bulk Foods in Arthur, IL.

I wonder: are they all sized in proportion to the pig, the lion, the chicken, the bear, the sheep, the cow, the horse, or the baby??? If it's the baby, that's a lot of small ass animals. If it's the cow, I'm seriously concerned about the size of that baby!!!!!

Til soon, blog. Til soon.

*the major ones, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I know blogs are social media, as is YouTube.
*also: Rilo Kiley, Metric (first band I ever loved),  Frances Quinlan, and Lady Gaga.