from what i've seen so far, this is probably one of the longest sg posts ever. but i'm afraid i just tend to just pour it all out like that... feel free to skim.
***long section about my dying fish***
my fish, kudos, is dying. he looks absolutely terrible - his lower fins are all ripped and torn, hardly even there anymore, and his underside is stained. it looks like the paler mark that's left when you spill water on contruction paper. at first i thought that it was my fault because i hadn't cleaned his bowl enough before we moved him in with fatespawn's fire-bellied newt, ifrit, but it turns out to be a more interesting story than that. i like the story as a story, which makes me feel all the worse that he's dying for having enacted it, but better at least to die an interesting death, i guess...
when we first moved kudos into ifrit's tank, we were worried that they might fight. it went well, though - they were both really wary of each other at first, but after awhile they stopped keeping their distance and seemed to coexist fairly happily. ifrit, who had up until then lived only with guppies, which he occasionally chased and/or ate, seemed less enthusiastic about the living arrangement, but for kudos it was his first time (1) being in a tank so enormously large and (2) being with any other living creatures. he seemed to like it a lot. he wasn't particularly affectionate towards the guppies - like ifrit, he'd bully them shamelessly though i don't think he ever intended to eat them. but he'd also he would swim over by ifrit (who seemed always to pretend not to notice him) and lie on top of him and just sit like that awhile. was like he was trying to feel some camraderie with the other large inhabitant of the tank. they looked very sweet.
we think that's probably how he got this horrible case of fin rot... it's not effecting all his fins, it just seems to be eating him from the bottom up, where he used to be in contact with ifrit. fatespawn figured it out - chinese fire-bellied newts secrete some kind of toxin from their skin sometimes, and we think that maybe kudos' cozying up to ifrit made ifrit anxious, and he secreted poison that got onto kudos' fins and damaged them and the damaged fins got horribly infected and it was really hard for us to tell that anything was wrong. the way it started out, his bottom-most fins just started looking slightly stringy, and i couldn't tell if perhaps they'd always looked like that and i hadn't noticed so much in the smaller tank, or if kudos was getting old (i know nothing of the life-cycles of betas) or if there was actually something wrong. we finally realized something was definitely not right when a snail attached itself to the kudo's lower fin and wouldn't let go. kudos couldn't swim very well with the snail on him and so he just sat in the upper corner of the tank, drooping. we poked the snail off and you could just begin to see the stain on kudos' lower half. it spread very quickly, though - now his lower fin is just a tattered remnant and the disease seems practically to have eaten into his flesh. he's a very strong fish... i've moved his bowl next to the keyborad and am keeping an eye on him... he isn't going to last the night, but he's definitely putting up a battle for it. he keeps drifting gently, slowly onto his side, lying there a moment breathing heavily, and then righting himself with his wilted tail and raising his head to the surface to take a gulp of air. he's back in his old bowl now - we've taken him away from ifrit and the guppies and put him in a bath of saltwater and antibiotics. it's too late to realy do anything for him though, i think.
i'm surprised at just how sad i am... i really thought that all the goldfish i had that died when i was little had rendered me incapable of feeling emotions toward fish. but i really though that maybe this time he wouldn't die. he's been really cool this whole time. i didn't buy him myself, because i have so little faith in the lives of fish, ever since grade school - i won him as part of a costume party and was so glad he was a hardier type than a goldfish. (the race of goldfish has grown weak...) he's been very smart, too - fatespawn trained him to come to the surface when he wanted food, which made him seem so much more friendly. i'd never known that you could train a fish to do anything at all. he'd sleep up near the top of the water, too, and sometimes seem to perk up in response to people being around. none of my goldfish ever perked up for much of anything - they were more like screensavers, no matter how hard i tried to make them love me. i also wonder if kudos really did feel some enjoyment at being near ifrit. if he did then it's a really sad story that ifrit's skin toxins should kill him. it struck me that possibly kudos was not that innocent and maybe ifrit's toxic secretions were giving him some kind of high or something and that's why he liked to lie so close to him sometimes (i wonder if fish can hallucinate) but i doubt it somehow because kudos must have had some reason to go so close to the other big animal in the tank in the first place, and a desire for friendship seems more likely. i suspect that i have come to anthropomorphize my fish to a foolish degree, but i'm still very sad. i hope that the saltwater isn't making his ripped fins hurt more, but it doesn't seem to. he looks very calm, and he stays upright for surprisingly long periods of time, but the he starts drifting over again. one of the snails started swimming over to him, a little while ago, when he was lying on his side, but then he struggled upright again and the snail turned around and swam back away. i was glad, because that snail had become the object of my sudden surpring fury. a little while later kudos started to tip over again, and the snail set off once more in his direction, but i poked it good and it swam back away and hasn't come near again since. instead the snails are eating kudos' food, which kudos seems utterly incapable or uninterested in eating right now himself.
i'm mostly sad at the thought of maybe not being around whenever it is that he finally dies. i don't want to just come upon him being dead. i did entertain the thought of pre-emptively flushing him down the toilet - i don't know if that'd be kinder. the fin rot medicine says it "rapidly repairs damaged fins, ulcers and open wounds," though it won't repair him, so much as he's lost. but just a moment ago, looking over, i expected to see him lying on his side barely breathing, but he was entirely upright again. he really is strong - i hope he's numb and doing it by instinct, i hope he isn't in a lot of pain. it's just the strangest thing ever to me to see him breathing now and know that pretty soon he'll stop doing that.
***end long section about my dying fish***
***everything else***
in other news, it's been an eventful weekend for me already and besides. my mom and sister xie came up to visit me yesterday - i wrapped up the special effects and cleaned my room in the nick of time and then fatespawn and xie and ariel and my mom and i went out to see eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. was an excellent movie, and much luckiness in our getting to see it on time - the trolley arrived just when it was needed and the movie theater showed commercials before trailers, which is a travesty but meant that we didn't even miss the trailers. which were largely unpromising - the first movie looked god-awful, the second muddled, though the third was intriguing. i enjoy trailers.
i think kudos is using the glass of the fish bowl to try and help him keep himself upright. smart fish...
i made two copies of the run lola run soundtrack - one for xie and another for my mom.
long silence on the walk home from the bus ride back from the movie theater. even when we were just waiting for the bus things felt a bit awkward, and i never know quite what to do to make it right. sometimes i feel like nobody's willing to say anything so that they can't be held accountable if something doesn't work out, which leaves everything in my lap, but all the same they're at my place so it's my party so it makes sense that they should look to me. i wish i had the gift of light banter - i never quite know if the awkwardness is merely situational or a thing centered upon my mom or some emanation of my own or just a passing mood that i could lift if only i were to say something and break the silence. i just find myself walking at the front of everybody and feeling odd, like i should be walking with them, but not wanting to slow down or stop because it seems like if i do, the whole group will falter and we'll stop getting anywhere at all. it got better as we neared the dorms again, though, so that was good. fatespawn sped up a notch and walked with me and ariel noted in passing how quiet we were all being and i'm not sure why but everybody seemed to loosen up a little and we became spread out more side-by-side-ish rather than in a row. so that felt better.
then my mom went to sleep and the four of us hung out in fatespawn's room and watched batman. was the first time i'd seen it, and i enjoyed it. and i ate 3 small kit kat bars. everybody else only had one each, but then they were all far more interested in the banana bread and tootsie roll pops than i was. then xie went to bed and we drove ariel home (and ariel gave us lindor truffles! which i was very excited about but as we drove home it crossed my mind how much easier it is for me to show my excitement about chocolate than about people, and i hoped that ariel knows i like her even more than i like her chocolate
. incidentally, ariel looks so very much like an anime character, nowadays - it is very cool. coming up to the bus stop i noticed it especially. and i've had two white chocolate truffles tonight, which is absolutely like eating the sweetest of butter. strange but fantastic.
and then i slept downstairs since my bed was full of mother and my floor was full of vacuum cleaner box and xie. i dreamed about my family - we lived in a cluttered, cramped little house, all full of possessions, and were somehow waging a war *through* them. somewhere in that house was a bunch of potato people straight out of the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. and at some later, disjointed point, i bleached my purple hair out again, and suddenly i had this vast length of light, light white-blond hair with just a few bright pink and purple streaks. i realize now that the length and style were both like ariel's...
woke up early to go upstairs and lie in a sleeping bag on the floor so my mom and xie wouldn't wake up by themselves and awkwardness ensue. we had a pretty good morning, was very relaxed, i blabbed on and on about my various classes and xie showed me her music video and we talked about ideas for her next project, a commercial. her digital art classes sound so very superior to mine... i think we both dream about a beautiful place where digital artness doesn't suck. i think we have the potential of making such a place, someday - with our knowledges combined...
went downtown and ate at marco and luca's - cold sesame noodles with a big cup of chai tea. first time my mom had ate there, and i want to say third time for xie? so good. and then we went back to my room and did some film stuff and i gave xie adobe after effects (which hopefully she'll get a chance to use sometime... is a nifty program but not hugely intuitive to start out with). talked with my mom a bit in the hallway while we were alone... she sounds sad. she talked about how david and koryn are kind of being jerks a lot of the time and how she and my dad aren't getting along very well at all it sounds, and how she's going to have a hard time seperating from people at work who are her friends, because none of them are going to be there much longer, and she won't get to see them much after they leave. right now i think she's finding it almost as painful to make friends and be close to people as it will be to have to go seperate ways. i told her that she can feel free to come up and stay a weekend with fatespawn and me whenever, and she started crying. i think she really needs a place she can go to... i hope things start going better for her soon. and i hope that if she does come up during the summer (and i have a feeling she'll need to, in which case i very much hope she actually does) that things go well... it worries me a bit. they're not in a good situation. we spent a good amount of time earlier while mom and xie were here looking up information on telescopes online... mom's thinking of getting dad a telescope for his birthday so he can do astronomy, hopefully with david and koryn some... she's looking at getting him a $600-$800 birthday gift. and it's a technical enough present that she has to stress over whether she'll make the right decision... she's thinking ultimately that she'll just have to present the idea to him and let him research out the choice himself. i'm concerned that that, too, is another fight in the making. i don't know where all this stress comes from... it's like they're electrical rods sometimes. i continue to have the latent, nagging suspicion that they should be divorced. in fact, i'll be bold and say that i believe it. bah.
luckily, with any luck xie will also be coming up to stay some weekends this summer, and i'm really looking forward to that. i hope that both she and mom come up seperately - would be cool to see them both together a couple times, but i also don't want mom trying to tag along whenever xie comes up. and really, if mom ever really needs to come up alone, i hope she does what she needs to because sometime i think she really lives on the edge lately, in a wholly interior kind of way.
but yes... any xie visits will be *awesome*, and there will be so much picture-taking and eating of dumpings! and maybe digital art-ness as well...
after that went shopping - got fish medicine and rubber cement and stuff to watch out my evil-smelling refrigerator. and got bodos. yum.
and then came back and tried to heal my fish and hung out with fatespawn.
fatespawn is really really ridiculously wonderful. i've been what you might call emotionally constipated for much of my life, and it's so good to be able to be near someone who makes me feel all right about openly mourning my dying fish. i'm not usually able to do stuff like that around people. i'm not always even able to do stuff like that around myself - i still almost can't help but try and tell myself that it's only a fish, and on whatever level i should have and must have known it was going to die when i first got it. but it feels a lot better this way, to just go ahead and be really really sad. fatespawn found four new baby guppies in the big tank when he cleaned it, and that's cool... we're both a little worked up about our animals right now, and he was so concerned about ifrit that he cleaned out the entire tank, taking care to find and save even the little clear bunches of snail eggs before he rinsed it out. i dunno, it just makes me glad that even when i'm sad or stressed out i still feel better about everything when i'm around him. it's so nice to be able to feel things... just really feel them. i've never been one to trust people easily, and it's the most amazing relief. i still feel like i'm not quite communicating it all quite right, but i'm just really, really glad.
i'm so emotionally overloaded tonight, and tomorrow we're driving out to spend easter at fatespawn's parents' house, and i've still got homework to do somehow asap, so i need to go to bed now. big hugs for all my people, and especially for xie, who i miss a whole lot. i'm so glad i got to see you today...
goodnight, everybody.
***end everything else***
***long section about my dying fish***
my fish, kudos, is dying. he looks absolutely terrible - his lower fins are all ripped and torn, hardly even there anymore, and his underside is stained. it looks like the paler mark that's left when you spill water on contruction paper. at first i thought that it was my fault because i hadn't cleaned his bowl enough before we moved him in with fatespawn's fire-bellied newt, ifrit, but it turns out to be a more interesting story than that. i like the story as a story, which makes me feel all the worse that he's dying for having enacted it, but better at least to die an interesting death, i guess...
when we first moved kudos into ifrit's tank, we were worried that they might fight. it went well, though - they were both really wary of each other at first, but after awhile they stopped keeping their distance and seemed to coexist fairly happily. ifrit, who had up until then lived only with guppies, which he occasionally chased and/or ate, seemed less enthusiastic about the living arrangement, but for kudos it was his first time (1) being in a tank so enormously large and (2) being with any other living creatures. he seemed to like it a lot. he wasn't particularly affectionate towards the guppies - like ifrit, he'd bully them shamelessly though i don't think he ever intended to eat them. but he'd also he would swim over by ifrit (who seemed always to pretend not to notice him) and lie on top of him and just sit like that awhile. was like he was trying to feel some camraderie with the other large inhabitant of the tank. they looked very sweet.
we think that's probably how he got this horrible case of fin rot... it's not effecting all his fins, it just seems to be eating him from the bottom up, where he used to be in contact with ifrit. fatespawn figured it out - chinese fire-bellied newts secrete some kind of toxin from their skin sometimes, and we think that maybe kudos' cozying up to ifrit made ifrit anxious, and he secreted poison that got onto kudos' fins and damaged them and the damaged fins got horribly infected and it was really hard for us to tell that anything was wrong. the way it started out, his bottom-most fins just started looking slightly stringy, and i couldn't tell if perhaps they'd always looked like that and i hadn't noticed so much in the smaller tank, or if kudos was getting old (i know nothing of the life-cycles of betas) or if there was actually something wrong. we finally realized something was definitely not right when a snail attached itself to the kudo's lower fin and wouldn't let go. kudos couldn't swim very well with the snail on him and so he just sat in the upper corner of the tank, drooping. we poked the snail off and you could just begin to see the stain on kudos' lower half. it spread very quickly, though - now his lower fin is just a tattered remnant and the disease seems practically to have eaten into his flesh. he's a very strong fish... i've moved his bowl next to the keyborad and am keeping an eye on him... he isn't going to last the night, but he's definitely putting up a battle for it. he keeps drifting gently, slowly onto his side, lying there a moment breathing heavily, and then righting himself with his wilted tail and raising his head to the surface to take a gulp of air. he's back in his old bowl now - we've taken him away from ifrit and the guppies and put him in a bath of saltwater and antibiotics. it's too late to realy do anything for him though, i think.
i'm surprised at just how sad i am... i really thought that all the goldfish i had that died when i was little had rendered me incapable of feeling emotions toward fish. but i really though that maybe this time he wouldn't die. he's been really cool this whole time. i didn't buy him myself, because i have so little faith in the lives of fish, ever since grade school - i won him as part of a costume party and was so glad he was a hardier type than a goldfish. (the race of goldfish has grown weak...) he's been very smart, too - fatespawn trained him to come to the surface when he wanted food, which made him seem so much more friendly. i'd never known that you could train a fish to do anything at all. he'd sleep up near the top of the water, too, and sometimes seem to perk up in response to people being around. none of my goldfish ever perked up for much of anything - they were more like screensavers, no matter how hard i tried to make them love me. i also wonder if kudos really did feel some enjoyment at being near ifrit. if he did then it's a really sad story that ifrit's skin toxins should kill him. it struck me that possibly kudos was not that innocent and maybe ifrit's toxic secretions were giving him some kind of high or something and that's why he liked to lie so close to him sometimes (i wonder if fish can hallucinate) but i doubt it somehow because kudos must have had some reason to go so close to the other big animal in the tank in the first place, and a desire for friendship seems more likely. i suspect that i have come to anthropomorphize my fish to a foolish degree, but i'm still very sad. i hope that the saltwater isn't making his ripped fins hurt more, but it doesn't seem to. he looks very calm, and he stays upright for surprisingly long periods of time, but the he starts drifting over again. one of the snails started swimming over to him, a little while ago, when he was lying on his side, but then he struggled upright again and the snail turned around and swam back away. i was glad, because that snail had become the object of my sudden surpring fury. a little while later kudos started to tip over again, and the snail set off once more in his direction, but i poked it good and it swam back away and hasn't come near again since. instead the snails are eating kudos' food, which kudos seems utterly incapable or uninterested in eating right now himself.
i'm mostly sad at the thought of maybe not being around whenever it is that he finally dies. i don't want to just come upon him being dead. i did entertain the thought of pre-emptively flushing him down the toilet - i don't know if that'd be kinder. the fin rot medicine says it "rapidly repairs damaged fins, ulcers and open wounds," though it won't repair him, so much as he's lost. but just a moment ago, looking over, i expected to see him lying on his side barely breathing, but he was entirely upright again. he really is strong - i hope he's numb and doing it by instinct, i hope he isn't in a lot of pain. it's just the strangest thing ever to me to see him breathing now and know that pretty soon he'll stop doing that.
***end long section about my dying fish***
***everything else***
in other news, it's been an eventful weekend for me already and besides. my mom and sister xie came up to visit me yesterday - i wrapped up the special effects and cleaned my room in the nick of time and then fatespawn and xie and ariel and my mom and i went out to see eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. was an excellent movie, and much luckiness in our getting to see it on time - the trolley arrived just when it was needed and the movie theater showed commercials before trailers, which is a travesty but meant that we didn't even miss the trailers. which were largely unpromising - the first movie looked god-awful, the second muddled, though the third was intriguing. i enjoy trailers.
i think kudos is using the glass of the fish bowl to try and help him keep himself upright. smart fish...
i made two copies of the run lola run soundtrack - one for xie and another for my mom.
long silence on the walk home from the bus ride back from the movie theater. even when we were just waiting for the bus things felt a bit awkward, and i never know quite what to do to make it right. sometimes i feel like nobody's willing to say anything so that they can't be held accountable if something doesn't work out, which leaves everything in my lap, but all the same they're at my place so it's my party so it makes sense that they should look to me. i wish i had the gift of light banter - i never quite know if the awkwardness is merely situational or a thing centered upon my mom or some emanation of my own or just a passing mood that i could lift if only i were to say something and break the silence. i just find myself walking at the front of everybody and feeling odd, like i should be walking with them, but not wanting to slow down or stop because it seems like if i do, the whole group will falter and we'll stop getting anywhere at all. it got better as we neared the dorms again, though, so that was good. fatespawn sped up a notch and walked with me and ariel noted in passing how quiet we were all being and i'm not sure why but everybody seemed to loosen up a little and we became spread out more side-by-side-ish rather than in a row. so that felt better.
then my mom went to sleep and the four of us hung out in fatespawn's room and watched batman. was the first time i'd seen it, and i enjoyed it. and i ate 3 small kit kat bars. everybody else only had one each, but then they were all far more interested in the banana bread and tootsie roll pops than i was. then xie went to bed and we drove ariel home (and ariel gave us lindor truffles! which i was very excited about but as we drove home it crossed my mind how much easier it is for me to show my excitement about chocolate than about people, and i hoped that ariel knows i like her even more than i like her chocolate
. incidentally, ariel looks so very much like an anime character, nowadays - it is very cool. coming up to the bus stop i noticed it especially. and i've had two white chocolate truffles tonight, which is absolutely like eating the sweetest of butter. strange but fantastic.
and then i slept downstairs since my bed was full of mother and my floor was full of vacuum cleaner box and xie. i dreamed about my family - we lived in a cluttered, cramped little house, all full of possessions, and were somehow waging a war *through* them. somewhere in that house was a bunch of potato people straight out of the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. and at some later, disjointed point, i bleached my purple hair out again, and suddenly i had this vast length of light, light white-blond hair with just a few bright pink and purple streaks. i realize now that the length and style were both like ariel's...
woke up early to go upstairs and lie in a sleeping bag on the floor so my mom and xie wouldn't wake up by themselves and awkwardness ensue. we had a pretty good morning, was very relaxed, i blabbed on and on about my various classes and xie showed me her music video and we talked about ideas for her next project, a commercial. her digital art classes sound so very superior to mine... i think we both dream about a beautiful place where digital artness doesn't suck. i think we have the potential of making such a place, someday - with our knowledges combined...
went downtown and ate at marco and luca's - cold sesame noodles with a big cup of chai tea. first time my mom had ate there, and i want to say third time for xie? so good. and then we went back to my room and did some film stuff and i gave xie adobe after effects (which hopefully she'll get a chance to use sometime... is a nifty program but not hugely intuitive to start out with). talked with my mom a bit in the hallway while we were alone... she sounds sad. she talked about how david and koryn are kind of being jerks a lot of the time and how she and my dad aren't getting along very well at all it sounds, and how she's going to have a hard time seperating from people at work who are her friends, because none of them are going to be there much longer, and she won't get to see them much after they leave. right now i think she's finding it almost as painful to make friends and be close to people as it will be to have to go seperate ways. i told her that she can feel free to come up and stay a weekend with fatespawn and me whenever, and she started crying. i think she really needs a place she can go to... i hope things start going better for her soon. and i hope that if she does come up during the summer (and i have a feeling she'll need to, in which case i very much hope she actually does) that things go well... it worries me a bit. they're not in a good situation. we spent a good amount of time earlier while mom and xie were here looking up information on telescopes online... mom's thinking of getting dad a telescope for his birthday so he can do astronomy, hopefully with david and koryn some... she's looking at getting him a $600-$800 birthday gift. and it's a technical enough present that she has to stress over whether she'll make the right decision... she's thinking ultimately that she'll just have to present the idea to him and let him research out the choice himself. i'm concerned that that, too, is another fight in the making. i don't know where all this stress comes from... it's like they're electrical rods sometimes. i continue to have the latent, nagging suspicion that they should be divorced. in fact, i'll be bold and say that i believe it. bah.
luckily, with any luck xie will also be coming up to stay some weekends this summer, and i'm really looking forward to that. i hope that both she and mom come up seperately - would be cool to see them both together a couple times, but i also don't want mom trying to tag along whenever xie comes up. and really, if mom ever really needs to come up alone, i hope she does what she needs to because sometime i think she really lives on the edge lately, in a wholly interior kind of way.
but yes... any xie visits will be *awesome*, and there will be so much picture-taking and eating of dumpings! and maybe digital art-ness as well...
after that went shopping - got fish medicine and rubber cement and stuff to watch out my evil-smelling refrigerator. and got bodos. yum.
and then came back and tried to heal my fish and hung out with fatespawn.
fatespawn is really really ridiculously wonderful. i've been what you might call emotionally constipated for much of my life, and it's so good to be able to be near someone who makes me feel all right about openly mourning my dying fish. i'm not usually able to do stuff like that around people. i'm not always even able to do stuff like that around myself - i still almost can't help but try and tell myself that it's only a fish, and on whatever level i should have and must have known it was going to die when i first got it. but it feels a lot better this way, to just go ahead and be really really sad. fatespawn found four new baby guppies in the big tank when he cleaned it, and that's cool... we're both a little worked up about our animals right now, and he was so concerned about ifrit that he cleaned out the entire tank, taking care to find and save even the little clear bunches of snail eggs before he rinsed it out. i dunno, it just makes me glad that even when i'm sad or stressed out i still feel better about everything when i'm around him. it's so nice to be able to feel things... just really feel them. i've never been one to trust people easily, and it's the most amazing relief. i still feel like i'm not quite communicating it all quite right, but i'm just really, really glad.
i'm so emotionally overloaded tonight, and tomorrow we're driving out to spend easter at fatespawn's parents' house, and i've still got homework to do somehow asap, so i need to go to bed now. big hugs for all my people, and especially for xie, who i miss a whole lot. i'm so glad i got to see you today...
goodnight, everybody.
***end everything else***
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
and of course I know you like me better than chocolate, silly
hehe. but thank you