october 2025
october 6th hello. i don't know if anyone's said this before, but grad school is hard??? the work i have to do is simply endless. i'm lucky that i even get to go, because it's work i find interesting, it's just a lot. for someone like me. who does things like revamp this website instead of researching for the paper proposal due this friday. i had a really good time in europe. we went to italy with my dad and my grandfather, visited the family hometown and saw everyone and reminisced over everything, and then went with my mom to greece to do the same thing. i'm really really lucky to have these family ties. and i hope my niece grows up knowing she has the same deep roots. but right now i have to get back to reading research articles because on top of all this i need to come up with a thesis and aaaaaaaaaaa
august 2025
august 18th hi hi. i'm leaving for europe for 3 weeks now. bye bye
june 2025
june 4th ummm june the fourth be with you?? it's been a while but my life has been both busy and good. babies get SO big so FAST, yknow? my niece is already squealing and trying to bite things, and it feels like literally yesterday that she was just a little potato they brought home from the hopsital. its only been a few months but i can already feel those days of holding her in my lap and watching star trek late at night becoming a warm crystalized memory. kids, man. i had a super big adventerous weekend two weeks ago which included new friends, the anime north convention, crashing six people in a hotel room booked for three, day-drinking, walking around downtown toronto while high, and being gently turned down by the girl i
march 2025
march 31st whoo boy, this last month and a half has been eternal and yet entirely too short. helping to raise a newborn is a lot of work, but she is objectively the cutest thing on earth and i love her so much that im only occassionally irritated when i have to hold a crying baby for two hours instead of blogging about anime (and i'm lucky that i get to peace out and go to bed because i'm just the aunt). there was a rotation of immediate family members staying with us for the first few weeks to help out my sister and her husband, and then a rotation of extended family members coming to see the first baby of the new generation. and in between all that hustle and bustle and the crying and the pooping there are prolonged moments of quiet observation and long stretches of balancing a bottle in one hand and hitting play on the next episode of Deep Space Nine with the other. some mornings are so idyllic, so bright and cozy and familiar, that its kind of cliche. but then they're balanced out by the friction of normal life when theres a baby in the house. and so amidst all of this, i made the little uh-oh oopsie mistake of forgetting to accept my grad school admission offer until the deadline had passed and it marked me down as declining. so i had a good three days of raw unbridled panic this weekend as i frantically emailed various departments begging for my life to see if i could still get in, because i literally couldn't think of anything more humiliating than having to tell my parents that i got in to the master's program and then forgot to accept the offer and got declined. but as of today it's officially all good, i'm fully accepted and now no longer have to ritually kill myself on the campus lawn as a show of penance. yay.
february 2025
february 10th my niece was born yesterday :-) february 6th
january 2025
january 25th believe it or not i'm still procrastinating on that application, but i'll probably actually get it in. hopefully. maybe. fuck. my sister's having a baby some time in the next two weeks. i feel like just saying "my sister's having a baby" doesn't get across why this is so big. she's the closest person in the world to me. i live in her and her husband's house and i've been here since i started university, i hang out with her and her friends, we joke about living the same life. she's like a sister-best friend-roommate-third parent type deal. she's the constant in my life. she's sitting on the other side of this hallway typing on her computer while i type this. so like this baby is a big deal for me. but it's also such a harsh reminder of the movement of time. she described it once as the "generational clock ticking over", as our great-grandparents have now passed and our grandparents become great-grandparents and everything moves up one rank. it's sad, for one, because even predictable loss always is, but it's scary for me because i still feel like i haven't grown up. i'm some sort of 13 year old in arrested development and you're telling me i'm gonna be an aunt any day now? i'm the youngest in the immediate family, so i've always been The Baby, so I don't really know how to feel about the firm delineation of generational lines cementing that i'm not and never will be The Baby again. this infantilization is definitely doing me more harm than good but it just feels so comfortable. but the years start coming and they dont stop coming, just like smash mouth said they would. resisting change is always more painful than the change itself, or whatever. i am also pretty excited for the chance to be a cool gay aunt. i'm gonna buy them toys and show them anime and they're gonna love me :-) january 9th
december 2024
december 19th i'm employed now, which is the only thing worse than being unemployed. its not a very good job (im cleaning at the climbing gym my sister goes to) but they pay way better than being a cashier did. i just need to get over the insurmountable wall of my own anxiety. saying "i have social anxiety" always makes it seem like i'm just shy or awkward when actuality it had me hiding in the bathroom because i was scared of being seen by my coworkers. le sigh. but confidence can only be gained through experience and having a job is yknow, important. so i persevere. anyway, that locked-in energy got redirected into revitalizing my comic book obsession brain fungus so i continue to live in the shadow of all the tasks i have yet to do. but we persevere! december 9th
november 2024
november 26th back from dallas! i had a lot of fun with my dad :3 we even went to a denny's. everyone was really nice, like people think canadians are nice but that's just because we say "sorry" instead of "excuse me". so many people in texas would say hello or help us with directions or ask about our day. also saw qanon people in real life at dealey plaza which was freaky. they acted like they were at an anime convention but for racism. a lot of the people at the jfk conference were surprisingly normal and down-to-earth. the only time my dad had to hold me back was when i overhead a guy being so so wrong about african history and european "advancement" that i got up to march over there and tell him how the malian empire had a university before most of europe. but overall i had fun. november 19th
october 2024
october 21st idk why i'm so bad at being a person. like, 'doing work' and 'having friends' have just always been a struggle for me. i'm turning 22 in like three weeks, i know i don't have any more time to spend bedrotting, but that's all i continue to do. literally every entry in this diary is about how i don't do things. i'm just clinging to the knowledge that when i did have a job last year i was, in fact, a go-getter at work. i just... don't have a job right now. and i haven't even started my grad school application. what i do have is 14 hours in Ace Attorney in 2 days and this beautiful website that i can never show anyone in my real life. whatever. moping isn't going to help. i just need to actually do something. october 16th
october 1st
september 2024
september 20th long time no anything. i continue to rot away. but anyway i'm almost done the epilogue for Soundless and this horror visual novel has kicked ass. i wish some of the exposition revealed was worked a little more into the story rather than as a text dump addedndum but i like the story enough to not mind. i want to read more visual novels, the last one i tried was Ad astra, and it was good but i didn't get very far into it because 1) as aforementioned im a historical pedant and ive taken too many classes on ancient rome to be able to enjoy a space opera set on a pseudo-rome planet without my historical criticism brain activating and 2) i knew going in that this is a gay furry vn (obviously) but the story kind of relies on you being sexually attracted to the main character in order for the MC's attitude to really work but i dont like men so when the big sexy wolf guy asks you to brush out his coat i'm like "fuck off i'm not your servant why would i agree to this". anyway. Soundless is good, listen to its warnings though, and i hope to find more cool studios like milk+ visual.
august 2024
august 31st the vocaloid song Iron Maiden and Dreamy Princess got me interested in the story of elizabeth bathory, so i've been reading Rachael L. Bledsaw's thesis No blood in the water: The legal and gender conspiracies against Countess Elizabeth Bathory in historical context and i like it a lot. it dispels the clearly hyperbolic elements of the tale (the bathing in blood, the hundreds of victims, her family being satanists) that were exaggerated in later folklore, but still goes over the accounts of her actual crimes, though it focuses heavily on the legal proceedings. the invented mythical figure of bathory fascinates me. as a lesbian who worries about being some sort of inherent evil pervert, i find something really unnervingly compelling in this (very homophobic) narrative of lesbianism as a symptom of sexual sadism and murder. like, this portrayal of her is a woman who desires women, wants they bodies and blood and bones, and as upsetting and homophobic that narrative is its also a little... freeing? i guess? not "freeing", but like... theres a recognition that this type of bone-chilling lust for women does exist. something something seeing yourself in the monster. but the problem is im also a historical pedant so i have to know how and where the folklore diverges from reality. and it seems like elizabeth bathory the person was a serial torturer but not any sort of lesbian vampire. anyway i wanna do more diary entries like this where i just ramble about whatever the thing im into is. venting about my life is boring and mundane but random history rabbit holes are exciting. august 24th
july 2024
july 29th found out yesterday that my cousin died. it still doesn't feel real. we just saw him last weekend. we went to the beach, i still have the shells i was going to put in a jar for him to give to his son. its just so unreal. he was (was, past tense, isnt that crazy) my great-aunt and uncle's adopted son, he was the same age as my older sister. when i was a kid i thought he was the coolest teenager ever, i used to follow him around and grab onto his leg and try to get his attention. as he got older he started doing more drugs and got involved with gangs and completely fell out of contact. during that time he had a son, destroyed things with his parents, and went to prison. it was just this past year, just a few months ago that he came back to us. he was really different--the substance abuse, the trauma of incarceration and homelessness had left him with new disabilities, blood clots and unexplained seizures. but he was trying so hard to get his life back. he was working on sobriety, living in a halfway house, going to church and trying to make friends. aside from his parents we were the only ones who visited him. he was always so, so happy to see us. he kept telling me i had gotten so beautiful and smart since he had seen me as a kid. he loved meeting my sister's husband, he said they would make amazing parents and he wanted to be the first to know when they got pregnant. she's been pregnant for a few weeks but hasn't told the extended family yet, and now she'll never get to tell him. he'll never get to meet the baby. he'll never get to reconnect with his own son. it doesn't feel real. we still don't know how he died. his parents had seen him just the day before, and then the next morning they got a call with the news. i haven't even cried yet. i've been avoiding my friends texts because i don't want to burden them with venting but i dont know how to have a conversation that isn't "my cousin died. he was just here, and now he's not." july 11th
july 4th
july 1st
june 2024
june 26th the girl i was toiling over likes another girl, which i think has actually been good for me because it dispelled my self-centered fantasies. ive been in two relationships in my life and i was the problem in both of them so i think being single is the way to go lol. i should be more preoccupied with finding a job and surviving this heat. june 14th
june 1st
may 2024
may 21st MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: 1/3 BOCCHI LET'S ROCK: 1/1 super busy weekend! went to mikuexpo, which had many trials and tribulations (didnt get a lightstick, seethed with envy, spent hours waiting in the sun, they didnt play rolling girl) but was so so worth it, it was magical. and then for the next three days i was at Get On My Level 2024, a huge smash/fgc tournament in toronto. so every day for four days i was taking the 2 hour bus-train-subway ride into downtown toronto. but it was funnnn i didnt get to play any games because we didnt bring ps5 compatible controllers (RIP T-T) but i saw awesome games and hung out in a cool crowd and saw hungrybox throw a chair live which was cool. but now after my dreamlike extra-long weekend i must begrudgingly return to real life and to the job search grind... once i can tear myself away from mgs2 because oh my god its so good may 1st
april 2024
april 24th done my exams of my final year of undergrad. it would feel bittersweet but im already planning on doing a masters so i'll be back. now i need to go through the ardour of find a job for the next year OTL but for today im gonna do gay little chores and play metal gear ^_^ april 15th
april 13th
april 3rd
march 2024
march 27th i'm dressed up really femme today. i feel weird about it. a combination of "i'm going to be seen as a real girl and i dont like it, i feel better knowing that my weirdness is immediately communicated by my appearance" and "i'm betraying the butch that i am most days". which, like. its my life! its me! im at the end of my laundry cycle and ran out of pants so today i'm wearing a skirt and blouse, that doesn't change who i am and how i present most days. it doesn't make me a liar, it certainly doesn't make me straight. i guess i'm just... since in my head most days im fighting to be myself, my big hairy weird masc self, that when i am pretty its like, giving in. like i've acquiesced to the pressure that says pretty is how i'm supposed to be. a lot of my pride rests in how i've learned to love being the opposite of what beauty commercials think i should be; in not looking like the girls around me. but i don't think building my identity off of contrarianism is the healthiest thing to do either. so i'm trying to be more comfortable with like, just being me and wearing whatever and not trying to weigh it in the cosmic balance of gender identity and transgressiveness. i'm just me, i'm always me. i also still have a scruffy beard and unshaven legs because thats just how i roll so its not like ive decided to be gender-conforming or something. but even if i was: who cares! i look pretty and thats cool, and when i go back to jeans and a hoodie tomorrow that will also be cool. march 20th
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february 2024
february 29th HEAVEN'S KITCHEN: 2/12 i made a delicious grilled cheese and i mediocrely fried yams yesterday so i'm combining them into counting february 27th
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january 2024
january 28th i keep browsing secondhand goods sites staring hungrily at all the figures but im trying so so hard to resist consumerism. i have got to get in to weird niche creative endeavours to fill this desire for novelty goods without paying shipping fees (and contributing to the carbon death of the earth etc). i wish there was more like in-person subculture stuff like zines... i mean there are still zines (i have a bunch & there's one that i preordered out there somewhere) but when i go on suruga-ya and look at the resident evil doujins and the guilty gear cosplay photobooks i yearn to experience those fancultures i missed out on by being born late. yet i must look forward to the future and resolve to foster my own community experiences. like building a gundam with my university club like we did last week :3c january 24th
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january 10th
december 2023
december 30th after some deliberation here are my 2024 QUESTS MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Complete Metal Gear Solid 1-3 BOCCHI THE JOCK: Go rock climbing once a month despite my fear of heights BOCCHI LET’S ROCK: Attend one in-person fighting game tournament despite my social anxiety HEAVEN’S KITCHEN: Cook a meal for myself once a month LIVE LESS LIKE A DOG: Finish the Dostoyevsky short story collections I bought last year december 23rd
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december 2nd
november 2023
november 21st take a class on imperial russian history and take a shot every time someone says "backwards" or "asiatic", you'll die of alcohol poisoning. we've been talking about the 19th century intelligentsia this past week and i feel like i would have thrived as like a nepo baby intellectual. i could totally start a hegelian reading group, yknow? ...realizing that i am, in fact, a nepo baby intellectual. who plans on doing grad school. with my parents' money. at least i have the self-awareness not to call myself a communist? its still funny to me that mikhail "anarchist" bakunin inherited a huge estate, like, of course he did. ack, i have to finish this reflection on northanger abbey before my next class. and i ate my chicken fingers too fast T-T november 20th
november 15th
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