Monday, December 27th, 2021, 17:24

Mood: Accomplished

First day off from the holidays and I have so far accomplished a lot. I did all the dishes; cleaned out my pantry, which had a lot of like old food and stale shit or moldy stuff, yeah I'm gross come at me you prob are too; reorganized my clothes to fit the extremely flattering jeans Pat's mom got me for Christmas; jQueried a navbar, sidebar, and footer for on here; started my new recipe section; and did a session with my EMDR therapist. And I still have to at least do a little work on my thesis, like beginning writing the methodology section, but I'm putting it off like crazy. For one, writing about research methods just bores me. I prefer to utilize the methods and write about the results. I have no interest in writing about the results. Second, conducting research is kind of a mindfuck in the sense that, eventually, your research becomes you and you become your research. There stops being a middle ground between you and your research. But I tell you if you'd have told me four years ago that I would be taking a break from sociological research to code a website I'd have straight slapped you.

EMDR is super crazy btw if you have trauma and want to work through it. When I do the sessions, I'm going through things that I hadn't thought of in years. For some reason, a lot of relics from my childhood like shows on the Disney Channel, Bratz dolls, and going to mass came up in the session. At the end of it we talked about how I think in a lot of ways I'm using my adulthood as an opportunity to give myself the childhood that all children deserve. My childhood was generally decent, there were just parts of it that were inarguably traumatic and notorious. Those who know me close probably know what I'm talking about, but I don't think I'll discuss it on here out of respect for the other people involved. But EMDR has helped me begin to look past those isolated incidents in childhood that were so terrible, as well as just the more overarching stuff, and begin to rediscover the parts of my childhood that were happy. Lying to everyone at Huegel and Toki and saying that I was above watching Lizzie McGuire, while watching it lowkey in secret after school. Playing with Bratz dolls. Sneaking into my mom's closet and trying her shoes on. Playing for hours and hours and hours in the green field that separated the condos and the projects in my mixed-income neighborhood. Like, yeah I had to survive some shit back then, but there was a lot of it that was good too.

I would guess that a lot of people here on Neocities probably feel as I do. I've noticed there's two age cohorts on Neocities. There's people who are currently kids or teenagers who want to see what it would've been like to be born 10-20 years earlier, and then there's people who are my age who were on the original Geocities, Myspace, Xanga, etc. and learned front-end deving back in the day. I think Neocities is like inner child work for me. I get to enjoy the fun and the novelty of building my own website and writing my own code, before it was all taken from us by social media apps and mobile tech, but without having to actually have it be 2003 to do it.