Tobi Kaito
Oof, I feel you on the charcoal. I'm ambidextrous, though I use my right more often, but I curl my arm over my work like a lot of left-handed people do. I have to be careful what clothes I wear when I'm working with charcoal or pastels or other messy media, because I always end up wearing it in the end since I get it all up my arm and it rubs off on my clothes. Ruined a good few shirts with charcoal in art classes. Paint was a danger, too; I still have an old shirt from my school days that has paint stains on it. >>; And then there's the problem of how to make it so you can keep a charcoal piece long term without it rubbing and getting all messy. I have a whole pile of old charcoal pieces that I didn't spray with any fixative and now they're all messy and barely distinguishable.
Oh wow, that's a lot of sad really close together, that's rough. ;w; And to follow it up with a jerk trying to mooch off you, when it rains, it pours, I guess... Glad you got rid of him, though, and were able to get some joy from that, even though it was hard to parse the feeling! (Joy and exhilaration feel so much like a panic attack to me sometimes, so I get it at least a little bit.)
I was basically a latchkey kid growing up. My ma worked afternoons at an arcade/mini golf/movie and game rental place, and my father could never be assed to pay attention to me even when he was home and awake (he worked nights most of the time my parents were still together, so usually slept during the days). So I was either figuring out how to entertain myself at the arcade with my ma, or was on my own at home after school. I spent a lot of time with books and the few local stations we got out in the boonies. Sometimes I helped out with work at the arcade, organizing game jackets and movie cases when kids and jerk adults messed them up, I got "paid" in soda for my work. (Though I did it without any thought of recompense, it drove me crazy when things were out of order, and it kept me busy for a while.) I wasn't allowed on the internet much, though; since it was dial-up and tied up the phone line, I basically only got it in the late evenings. I spent a lot of summers as a teenager up at absurd early A.M. hours just so I could get online, talk to my friends. (Especially after my ma and I moved, internet was literally the only way I could talk to my school friends.)
Yeahhh, once a bully, always a bully, for the most part. Plus high school never ends, the cliques and cattiness and petty fights and insults are the same even as an adult. My beau is always coming home and swearing that almost everyone in his workplace is still stuck in the mentality of a middle schooler. My motto with jerks has always been "don't engage." They're just not worth my time and they don't deserve to take up space in my head. (I can insult myself just fine without their help.) I'm also liable to get violent under certain circumstances (I slapped a guy in the library once for being a jerk), so refusing to engage helps head that off. (I'm not sure what kind of anime character I'd wind up being, either... Maybe something like the main characters of Gun Gale Online, so probably I'd be something of a terror.)
Yay for things getting better, though! There will always be struggle and hardship, unfortunately, that's just the way life goes, but if it's manageable, well, I'd call it a win.
Having a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia is hard, but it never changes the fact that it would still be nice to have them around. I really felt it with my grandpa, he'd have no idea who I was when my ma and I would go out to eat with him, and after a certain point we'd often find him sitting on his porch in nothing but his underwear (living in the boonies is sometimes a blessing, we could simply laugh about it instead of wondering how other people around us would take it), and it was especially hard for my uncle and his boy once my grandpa could no longer hunt, that was a family tradition for them to go out every year. There are things to appreciate about it, though; giving gifts to my beau's great grandmother was the best because she'd be so overjoyed every time she looked over and discovered the gift "anew." I spent a lot of time pretending to be my beau's sis for her because it would make her so happy (my first and middle names are the same as my sister-in-law, and we're about the same height, so I was a passable stand-in).
While generally we don't get a "direct" reply from persons deceased, that doesn't mean one can't get a reply at all. Sometimes the act of asking a question you wish they could answer and pondering over how they might have replied can, indeed, get a response, from their memory if not directly from the person. Thus, even if a person doesn't believe in the supernatural or any "great beyond" or whatever, you CAN get "replies" from the dead, anyone that would say otherwise is the insane individual, in my opinion.
Oh wow, that's a lot of sad really close together, that's rough. ;w; And to follow it up with a jerk trying to mooch off you, when it rains, it pours, I guess... Glad you got rid of him, though, and were able to get some joy from that, even though it was hard to parse the feeling! (Joy and exhilaration feel so much like a panic attack to me sometimes, so I get it at least a little bit.)
I was basically a latchkey kid growing up. My ma worked afternoons at an arcade/mini golf/movie and game rental place, and my father could never be assed to pay attention to me even when he was home and awake (he worked nights most of the time my parents were still together, so usually slept during the days). So I was either figuring out how to entertain myself at the arcade with my ma, or was on my own at home after school. I spent a lot of time with books and the few local stations we got out in the boonies. Sometimes I helped out with work at the arcade, organizing game jackets and movie cases when kids and jerk adults messed them up, I got "paid" in soda for my work. (Though I did it without any thought of recompense, it drove me crazy when things were out of order, and it kept me busy for a while.) I wasn't allowed on the internet much, though; since it was dial-up and tied up the phone line, I basically only got it in the late evenings. I spent a lot of summers as a teenager up at absurd early A.M. hours just so I could get online, talk to my friends. (Especially after my ma and I moved, internet was literally the only way I could talk to my school friends.)
Yeahhh, once a bully, always a bully, for the most part. Plus high school never ends, the cliques and cattiness and petty fights and insults are the same even as an adult. My beau is always coming home and swearing that almost everyone in his workplace is still stuck in the mentality of a middle schooler. My motto with jerks has always been "don't engage." They're just not worth my time and they don't deserve to take up space in my head. (I can insult myself just fine without their help.) I'm also liable to get violent under certain circumstances (I slapped a guy in the library once for being a jerk), so refusing to engage helps head that off. (I'm not sure what kind of anime character I'd wind up being, either... Maybe something like the main characters of Gun Gale Online, so probably I'd be something of a terror.)
Yay for things getting better, though! There will always be struggle and hardship, unfortunately, that's just the way life goes, but if it's manageable, well, I'd call it a win.
Having a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia is hard, but it never changes the fact that it would still be nice to have them around. I really felt it with my grandpa, he'd have no idea who I was when my ma and I would go out to eat with him, and after a certain point we'd often find him sitting on his porch in nothing but his underwear (living in the boonies is sometimes a blessing, we could simply laugh about it instead of wondering how other people around us would take it), and it was especially hard for my uncle and his boy once my grandpa could no longer hunt, that was a family tradition for them to go out every year. There are things to appreciate about it, though; giving gifts to my beau's great grandmother was the best because she'd be so overjoyed every time she looked over and discovered the gift "anew." I spent a lot of time pretending to be my beau's sis for her because it would make her so happy (my first and middle names are the same as my sister-in-law, and we're about the same height, so I was a passable stand-in).
While generally we don't get a "direct" reply from persons deceased, that doesn't mean one can't get a reply at all. Sometimes the act of asking a question you wish they could answer and pondering over how they might have replied can, indeed, get a response, from their memory if not directly from the person. Thus, even if a person doesn't believe in the supernatural or any "great beyond" or whatever, you CAN get "replies" from the dead, anyone that would say otherwise is the insane individual, in my opinion.
