Welcome to June. I am tired and newly obsessed with the first real look at Wicked: For Good. (Those fan-made “teasers” are so fucking annoying. You all know who you are.) The opening words of “No Good Deed” are already giving me chills, so I know this is going to be good. I also have a new phone because I upgraded last month and was even able to get the new phone for free when I traded in my old phone, and I celebrated by reshooting my Hunger Games cover photos because the original photos I took were terrible. Photography is obviously not the focus of this blog, but we do have some standards. And I don’t know how I managed to take so many bad photos of the original trilogy, but sometimes that just happens.
I have been very unwell recently for a variety of reasons mostly relating to what I now consider long-term unemployment, for which there is currently no end in sight. I have no advice to give, other than to hang onto your job if you’ve got one, which frankly seems rather obvious in our current climate. Today, however, I am not thinking about joblessness because the thing giving me angry fits at the moment is the three flies I found in my house when I got home from the bakery on Thursday. I managed to trap one right away in the living room window, and then yesterday I trapped the other two in the kitchen window after they rudely failed to get stuck in my light traps. I now have two unusable windows and I have to see these giant fucking flies in my kitchen window every time I cook or wash dishes or do anything else food-related, and I’m furious. I really wish I could’ve trapped all three in the living room window, but clearly I lack the patience and I have no one but myself to blame. It’s just as well I finally caved and turned on the AC for the first time this year, seeing as the windows will not be opened again until I am satisfied that all three flies are dead. I have been holding out without AC, which if you know me is quite an impressive feat, and for the most part I’ve been fine because the weather has been unusually chilly over the last month. Only now we’re in the 80s and the cat and I overheat with the speed of summer lightning, and now I’ve got these three flies keeping me from opening my windows, so I couldn’t resist any longer.
Update: OMG IT JUST GOT WORSE >:( There is a fly loose in my kitchen and I am Big Mad. The ones in the kitchen window are still there, but I didn’t see anything in the living room window, so either I have more flies than I thought or it’s an escapee. I hate my fucking life.
Update to the update: I went into the kitchen right before dinner to see if I could try to catch the rogue fly again and found it drowned in Circe’s dirty breakfast bowl. Well, we never said these things were smart. I still haven’t seen the living room window fly. I don’t know if it died in the window, or if the living room window is untrustworthy, or if the drowned fly really is fly #4. I do know that if I see another goddamn fly in my house I’m going to flip my fucking lid.
Update to the update to the update: I found another fly last night. The lid has been fucking flipped. I am setting out a vinegar trap.
The only thing that has been going well in my life at the moment is that I started a project I’ve been calling A Cat A Day, in which I literally draw one cat a day as an exercise to pry myself out of my now years-long drawing slump. This started in the middle of May, when I happened to be home for a car repair and decided to draw Hato while she was sleeping on the back of the couch, and now it’s been almost a month and I have drawn 23 cats, most of them Circe.
We’re at the point where I’m considering closing out this page, but I’m sure I can still squeeze a couple more cats in there. (Not pictured: the cat I forced into a teeny-tiny little space by the spiral last night.) The next project is to try filming myself while I draw and start posting drawing videos on TikTok or something. I have no idea how to film myself, so I’ve been putting this off because I haven’t had the energy to watch any tutorials.
As far as the car repair goes, it turns out I didn’t need one because after six years of driving Hector I apparently don’t understand his icon labels and I just know some icon designer is crying somewhere out in the great wide world. Anyway I thought his headlights were out but the mechanic said they were fine and I realized I was just putting them on the wrong setting when I was turning them on smdh at least it wasn’t a costly fix but goddamn x_x
May Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- The Lost World – Michael Crichton
Total Pages Read: 776
I have absolutely fuck all to report this month in terms of reading. The inertia and depression have defeated me. I couldn’t even get through my reread of The Stardust Thief (Chelsea Abdullah), which is really a surprise because I loved that book. I will still reread it at some later date because I need to know what’s going on when I finally get to The Ashfire King, but for now I’ve had to shelve it. Sometimes love means knowing when to step away, and I’m just not feeling it right now. I don’t know what’s next: maybe I’ll restart Mirrored Heavens (Rebecca Roanhorse), or maybe I’ll hop into Foul Heart Huntsman (Chloe Gong). At least I cannot say I am deprived of choices.
With my reading plans largely not happening, my greatest accomplishment was finally watching The Secrets of Dumbledore several years after its original release. My Harry Potter reread has predictably stalled out after the difficulty I had finishing Goblet of Fire and I have no plans to start Order of the Phoenix anytime soon, though hopefully I’ll get around to it before the end of the summer. But I have been enjoying the Fantastic Beasts movies, though they’re such a mess that I’m considering including them in my Harry Potter review series. I definitely want to review the original three Jurassic Park movies now that I’ve finished the book series.
My other great accomplishment: realizing Netflix is dirt cheap if you sign up for ads and reviving my account so I could watch The Brothers Sun, I blame my parents for this. I’ve been missing GBBO of course, but the main motivator was to rewatch The Brothers Sun, though I keep getting sidetracked and have only rewatched the first three episodes as of this writing. And the ads actually aren’t as obnoxious as I thought they would be; certainly they’re nowhere near the level of the YouTube ads, which have grown astronomically worse over the years. The Pete Davidson Verizon ad is currently at the top of my shit list because I hate it, and because it plays several times per video every time I watch Jimmy Kimmel. Either way, the Netflix ads are quite tolerable and they’re supposedly programmed to run during non-crucial moments – I actually have seen very few Netflix ads, and none during the more dramatic scenes – so I’m quite happy to keep my cheap Netflix, which is less than half the price of the ad-free subscription.
Currently Reading
Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No progress this month.
Unemployment Update
Well, here we are yet again. I just got rejected from another job and I think I’m being ghosted by another, and now the process has to start all over again. That first job wasn’t the greatest match, and it would’ve meant a significant pay cut and a daily commute. But to be honest it’s still gutting, because I love the company and I think I could’ve learned a lot from the role, and I let myself plan my whole life around it even though I always try so hard not to hope too much. It’s the hope that kills me every time. I can’t help it. I wish I could say I’m hopeful about the future, but I’m not. I haven’t even learned anything from the job hunt, except the sheer number of companies that don’t want me.
I can’t even say the bakery is going particularly well, though I had so hoped that it would. The longer I stick with it, the more I realize I am not built for foodservice. I don’t handle rush periods well, and the generalized stress and anxiety are not helping; neither is my inability to use my free time productively. When I was first laid off, I thought it would be the most productive period of my life. I hadn’t accounted for the depression and inertia, the financial anxiety, the general effects of the part-time jobs I’ve been taking, which act as a paralytic even on my off-days. It’s been eight months and I haven’t done any of what I was supposed to be doing, and I’m no closer to getting a job than I was at the start. On the other hand, we’ve had some major changes at the bakery and these changes are positive, and I am getting better at the job despite what I say, so I have reason to believe that things will improve. I also took these changes as an opportunity to adjust my availability, which I think will help a lot.
In conclusion, I am working all day at the bakery tomorrow and I’m closing alone because for some reason I keep getting solo closing shifts and I am getting takeout after work because my life is stupid and I hate everything but at least I have some money coming in so I guess that’s good??? Meanwhile, here’s Circe being completely unaware that my frequent disappearances are paying for her food and the apartment that she loves as much as I do. (She also hates the flies and is extremely bothered by their presence in the kitchen window, because she is her mother’s daughter.)
The good part about the bakery: the food. I like to tell myself I’m conducting on-the-job research, and in fact it is helpful to be familiar with the product so I can sell it to the customers. The other day I finally had the chicken avocado melt, which I have admired every time I’ve carried it out to a customer. To say it was life-changing would be an understatement. I will be ordering this again.
EVEN MOAR UPDATES
lol. Literally while I was working on this post I got a call from Barnes & Noble – not the one where I used to work, a different location – letting me know they were rejecting me. That would’ve been fine if the reason was that I interviewed badly, which I did, but no. The reason was that I didn’t open my schedule enough, because I only offered them three days a week. I have four days set aside for the bakery, which is far more conveniently located. They asked if I could work partial shifts on other days, but there was no way in hell I was going to work a full shift at the bakery and then drive for an hour to work at BN for another several hours. I’m not a fucking robot. For context, BN would have offered 15 hours a week, and it wasn’t clear to me if that was a consistent number, or if it would vary from week to week. So, no, I wasn’t going to go out of my way to keep my schedule open for a job that very obviously would not have paid my bills. It’s a relief in a way because this particular BN is pretty far away and I wasn’t enthusiastic about the commute, and the interview indicated that the PT bookseller and barista jobs are interchangeable, but I’m still annoyed because, to be perfectly frank, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect me to keep my week open for a job that taps out at 15 hours. The search continues, but I will not be reapplying to this BN even if my schedule does open up.
May Social Diary
The bright side of May: I might not have managed to claw my way into a job, but I did manage to get out of the apartment for purposes other than work. The first outing: Mother’s Day! This year we had pizza. The restaurant offers a three-pizza sampler, which turned out to be the perfect amount of food. I think my favorite might’ve been the clam pizza, which is their specialty.
The second outing: a Silver Diner/BN dinner date with two of my oldest and dearest friends. We have been plotting such an outing for months, and I’m so glad we were finally able to make it happen. I happened to have hash on the brain godDAMMMIT Coriolanus and then I wanted apple pie but there wasn’t any so I ended up with bread pudding instead, but, you know, I’m not mad. This is exactly the dinner I had before I went to see Ballad in the theater, because I am nothing if not consistent. At BN afterward, I managed to cut myself off at three books but also got suckered into two non-tasseled bookmarks at the register. I have been building my non-tasseled bookmark collection because of a certain fuzzy somebody who just loves to destroy the tassels on my prettiest bookmarks. Last time she left the tassel on top of the book like the psychopath she is. Naming no names, of course.
The final picture is the Animal Crossing apron Diane got me in Japan because she knows me well, plus a cute eraser and the candies that were provided as favors at her wedding. I designed the stationery and signage for the wedding but was unable to go, which makes me so sad. But by all accounts the wedding went great and my work was a hit, which softens the sadness somewhat. I have that little jar of Frooties next to me on the desk right now, and it is taking a monumental amount of self-control not to go crazy and eat them all.
The third outing: my parents’ anniversary, for which we went to a tapas restaurant and ate EXCELLENT chicken and chorizo paella which I completely failed to photograph because I left my phone at home on the arm of the couch. T_T It was amazing. I rolled out of that restaurant like a barrel. I’ll take pictures next time.
The fourth outing, ish: I didn’t leave the apartment, but Michaella came to visit after I got home from the bakery last Saturday and brought me this amazing bag!
She even got it printed with my name, and I am so excited to take it out and show it off. She also brought me an adorable sea otter keychain – I adore owls and sea otters, so maybe I’ll put the keychain on the bag – and a sticker that I want to include somehow in my Kindle case arrangement, and a lovely green necklace.
Cooking Corner
My home-cooking kick continues despite a moment of DoorDash-related weakness. From left to right, as always: the Korean potato soup, made this time with dashi and miso; Chris Cho’s kimchi jjigae, which was good, but I think I prefer Future Neighbor’s tuna kimchi jjigae; baked mahi mahi and pappardelle alfredo with peas, which finished off the frozen mahi mahi and the open jar of alfredo sauce in the fridge; my grandmother’s creamed tuna, cooked with Michaella; and stir-fried pork belly and kimchi from Cinnamon Society, which finished off the second of my two expired jars of kimchi, and hopefully finished off the frozen pork belly that’s been sitting in my freezer for probably years. It’s crazy to realize I’ve been following Cinnamon Society so long that I remember when it was still called Appetite for China. And, of course, the Korean potato soup made yet another reappearance with the pork belly, because I’ve decided that I definitely like it best with chicken broth. Lessons learned: I will not be buying frozen mahi mahi again. It’s not bad, but it is meatier than I like my fish to be, and it took me a while to get through the bag I picked up on a whim at Sprouts.
Of course, it wouldn’t be my kitchen without some kind of mishap, so here it is. Always check the garbage disposal before you run it. Clearing all that glass out by hand was not fun. =_=
