Innocently being creepy and dancing like a drunk white girl having an epileptic seizure in a full body cast…

Dear Diary,

So there I was, innocently being creepy and watching my big brother working out in his personal little mancave gym. My arms were crossed, and I was leaning against the doorframe, just standing there and thinking a million miles an hour (as usual) about Nephilim: Prisoner (book two of the Nephilim heptalogy and my current work in progress). I’ve given myself until the end of the month to finish it, and there are so many things I need to add thanks to my recently released Exitium Mundi series… I was watching him, but not watching him. If that makes any sense. I was more deep in thought than anything else.

Anyway, out of nowhere, he goes, “Come get some,” in that slight country twang of his.

My initial reaction was to raise my eyebrows. See, my mind is *way too corrupted* by the internet, but I know he isn’t like that, so I just laughed and asked what he meant. Here’s how the conversation went down.

“The weights. Don’t just stand there, put em to use.”

“I don’t lift weights. I do cardio. Running and calisthenics. You know that.”

“And? Get your dainty ass over here and give it a try.”

Now see, my big brother knows one of the ways to get under my skin is to make fun of my diminutive size. I get little woman syndrome. 😅 I’m not even that short – I’m 5’0, 100lbs! Not exactly tiny. I’m huge. Practically a monster compared to most five-year-olds.

So I gangsta-strolled over to the weights and told him to bring it. Mind you, I wasn’t even dressed to work out: I was wearing a baggy cookie monster shirt and light green man boxers (so comfortable, don’t judge me). The first thing I approached was his deadlifts. After calculating all the weight he had on that thing (five times my body weight!), I quickly gave up on that option. So I went looking around for something a bit more realistic.

He ended up having to adjust the weights on this weird monstrous contraption he was sitting at just so I could make it rattle. 😅

I am not a weightlifter.

But I wasn’t about to just let him one-up me. So I challenged him to a dance-off using Just Dance 2019 on my Switch. I’ve never once seen him dance, so I felt confidant in this (even though Anne tells me I dance like a drunk white girl having an epileptic seizure in a full body cast). (Bitch.)

In the end?

I smoked his ass. It was so much fun, too, especially watching him struggle through the more feminine moves. I almost peed myself. 😭

I also realized halfway through his dance-murdering that it had been forever since we spent time together like that. I mean, thanks to the lockdown situation, we’ve spent a lot of time together, yes, but we were both kind of doing our own things, not truly enjoying each other’s company. That’s going to have to change. We have such a rare opportunity here to be all up in each other’s business, and we’ve been kind of wasting it. I mean, he’s the most important person in the world to me, and I can probably count on one hand the number of hours we’ve actually spent together together.

The pandemic is horrible, yes, but it’s given us a once in a lifetime opportunity.

So tonight? I’m kidnapping his ass for some movie watching: a supernatural horror flick a friend of mine hipped me up to called V/H/S. It’s supposed to be scarier than Anne’s hair when she wakes up in the morning, so I’m really looking forward to it.

What about you? Have you been fully taking advantage of this lockdown by spending time with the people that mean the most to you? What have you done? I’m really curious. Let a hood rat know!

#Alexa

💡 The More You Know 💡

Mrs. Caroline Squires of Cincinnati filed for a divorce from her husband in 1949 on grounds of desertion. She testified he’d stepped out “for a beer” on the Fourth of July 1917, and had never come back.

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Anxiety… and letting go.

Dear Diary,

I’m not going to lie: last month was a hard month for me. I took the latter part of it off, largely secluding myself from the real and digital world to cocoon myself with love and positivity, and when I came back from my glorious vacation… I was hit with all kinds of strangeness I usually don’t have to deal with. Online trolls. Losing someone I thought was my friend. Senseless death. Violence. Looting. Almost every single tweet and interview from our president. (🙄) I think the best word I can use to describe everything would be pandemonium.

I even tweeted about my mindset on my favorite social media network, Twitter:

This was not me throwing in the towel, of course. I’m far too stubborn for all that. I was venting. I had to. More on why in a moment.

See, when all of this first started, I admit I was largely caught off-guard. I wasn’t fully prepared to maturely and intellectually process everything as it seemed to spontaneously manifest. In truth, that is one of the few ways someone can truly upset my equilibrium: by catching me completely off guard. That is harder than you may think, as my mind never seems to shut off (even when I’m trying to sleep), but most of this did.

And it pisses me off. For several reasons.

The first of which is because it ripped me out of my creative zone and made writing almost impossible. Writing is my therapy, you see, the way I vent all these chaotic emotions swirling around in my crazy little head so they don’t become toxic to not only myself but the people I care about the most.

And I found myself unable to do it. I tried. I really did. I sat down, put my headphones on, and tried to find my writing Zen, but… it just wouldn’t come. Day after day. No matter how hard I tried, it just would not come. It felt like trying to force yourself to go to sleep – you know you need it, you know it’s good for you, but you just can’t make it happen.

So I quit trying.

I let go.

I calculated all the writing/author time I would typically do for the week (35 hours, in case you’re curious), set a countdown timer for it, and just kicked back and said fuck it and played around on social media. And watched some anime. And read. And ignored bedtimes. And, of course, played the hell out of Skyrim.

And then my eyes started drifting to my timer…

I figured, OK, let me just knock a few things out really quickly and I’ll get back to my fuck it vacation. So I turned on the countdown timer, knocked some things out… and then a few more things… and wrote some… and wrote some more… and knocked out tasks that weren’t even due yet… and played around with Patreon content… and wrote again…

And before I knew it, my time had all run out.

Interesting how things like that work, isn’t it?

I guess there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in there, but I dunno. I’m no teacher. Just a student. Always a student.

Hopefully, the month hasn’t been too bad for you, and you’ve managed to keep it together. This will all pass. It really will. You just have to hang in there. Or not: you can do like I did and just, you know, let go. Accept your feelings for what they are and just express them. Vent them out. And then see what happens. It may do you some good. I know it did for me.

Just a thought. ✌💖😷

#Alexa

“I really think that people’s right to happiness shouldn’t be dictated by some policymaker in Washington, D.C. I’ve come to know a lot of people that – sexual orientation is such where they’re in love with people from the same sex, and I just don’t think it’s our role in the government to say, ‘No you can’t be married.’”

– Jon Tester

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. This is because I’m a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.