riyah

yesterday was a good day for me! dare i even say i was just the tiniest bit happy? and all i did was stop doomscrolling on my phone and instead started doing practice quizzes/exercises on grammar. which is embarrassing to say, but whatever. i’ve been so reliant on grammarly the past 5 yrs, and i’ve regressed so much in forming my own complex sentence structures without help. it’s just so embarrassing that i was more articulate as a high schooler than i am now. my writing from back then to now is night and day.

so i decided to push past the embarrassment and self-shame and have been using noredink, khan academy, and grammar bytes. i just need to take baby steps to get my brain more active. i’ve been in constant brain fog since 2020 and feel like i genuinely  have zero brain cells left, so i need to do something—even if it’s embarrassing to admit to myself how dumbed down i’ve become.

so i did that pretty much all of yesterday and then stayed up for txt cb! which omgggg, the cb and all the content leading up to it lowkey brought me back to being a fan in 2020?? like when they would do ot5 practice room vlives right before cysm... i finally felt the same emotions from back then watching them make lemon cheong on weverse.

taehyun and yj keep saying that they’ve approached their 7th year with a rookie mindset since they’re in their first year of the new contract (txt 2.0), and i guess i’m feeling the same way. because i’m telling you, the last couple of days have felt like pandemic-era riyah watching rookie-era txt. the same giddiness.


 

made eggs in purgatory for a late breakfast/lunch. i opened a costco-size jar of pasta sauce yesterday since i was craving pizza toast, and now i have to find ways to use it. so today i just heated it up with olive oil and a bunch of italian spices and then cooked eggs in it. i know they’re supposed to be almost poached and runny, but i overcooked them since some days runny yolk gives me the ick, and today was just one of those days. so it basically turned into an tomato and egg stir fry dish (which for some reason i craved all of 2021 even though i’ve never had it, and watched countless videos of people making it... i really am getting back to early 2020's riyah)

its getting slightly cool here... though i feel like i'm gonna jinx it and it'll turn back to the 90s in the next couple of days, but i'm enjoying it. it always reminds me of childhood. this cool, dim, slightly even overcast sky... like when the leaves would still turn orange and red on our front yard tree and they’d be scattered all over the ground. i don’t think i ever had the stereotypical movie experience of making a big pile and jumping in them, there was never enough, but still... it reminds me of that. fond memories.

i also always think abt tea. my dad loved tea when it got even slightly cold. he’d fill up his thermos and take the entire day to finish a cup. meanwhile, i’m the opposite, I drink hot drinks in a minute but savour iced ones all day haha. i also think of an older girl on my street. her name was michelle. she was one of the only older kids on the block, in high school already when i was just in elementary. but she was so kind and still hung out with us. we would always gather up at her house and jump on her trampoline, and she was super creative, so she’d use us as her lil guinea pigs for her art projects. i remember one where she was practicing stop motion and made me and a friend into aliens with the green face paint and all, and filmed a video... i wonder how it turned out? wish i could see it again.

anyways, i think abt her with tea, bc i remember a day when it was just me in the house and she made me a cup of tea with popcorn. i think it was my first time trying it... and yk how when other people cook for you it just tastes so much better? so yeah, she just pops in my head whenever i think of tea. along with my dad.

 

i think i just have a lot of fond memories associated with fall. and i know summer is all i talk about, but i actually used to hate summer as a kid… maybe because part of me was always bitter that i never got to celebrate my birthday in school like the other kids, and then there was the looming doom of starting a new school grade hanging over me the entire break. but when i look back on it now, i obviously had a good time and feel really nostalgic. still, fall used to be my favorite season.

realizing a lot of my immediate family was really into spooky stuff probably explains why. my dad was (i wrote is at first and thought long and hard about changing it… i really didn’t wanna correct it) a huge horror fiend. he had so many dvds and books. i was probably exposed way too early lol—I have a very vivid memory of my first nightmare as a kid, and it was all about chucky. he was really into bad, campy scary movies. even my older sisters, or at least two of them, were kinda… emo? at least all they wore was black (just like me), and they were horror movie buffs too. they used to beg me to go to knott’s scary farm with them, but i was always too chicken shit. i regret that now.

even my brother’s mom (he’s my half-brother from my dad, so i have no blood connection to her) was super into vampires. she had this true blood wine? she still does, actually. she sadly passed in 2020, but my brother kept it, and it’s still on the high shelves in the game room. she even had a perfume and lipstick that went along with it.

 

and it’s getting closer to october, so my brother is already starting to decorate and buy stuff for his haunted house. he goes all out every year, as you can guess. it’s his favorite holiday too. i have mixed feelings about it… we don’t have a good relationship, and it would—and still does—make me envious and bitter how much he spends on halloween decorations every year, but gets angry with me over a vet bill that was way lower, even though i paid more than half. anyways, i don’t need to rehash that… i think the anger also stems from a place of longing. i wish i could decorate freely, y’know, be a part of the process like i did in our childhood home.

we actually didn’t decorate that much outside besides lights, but we went all in on the inside as kids. i can still remember the specific decorations too… we had these big rubbery rats. the texture is still very vivid in my head. i tried to look for them, but none of the results look like what i remember. we had a couple of those, and me and my sis would play with them like stuffed animals lol, instead of putting them up. all the fake cobwebs… the ones that suck to the glass windows… the led pumpkins…


anyways, it seems autumn is very close to being here… well, as close as it can get in socal. i want to drink hot cocoa and wear fuzzy socks and just be in my childhood home again </3

and they get so drunk. drunk people, especially men, make me deeply uncomfortable and anxious. the first few years here, i was convinced i had developed a phobia of drunk men. that’s how much dread i felt just being around them. i guess i’ve gotten a little better now. if i just try to ignore them.

but i know my brother will get all pissy and guilt trip me into going outside to see the fireworks. which i hate, by the way. i’ve never liked them. too loud, they smell terrible, and i can’t help but think, what could go wrong with a bunch of drunk idiots lighting things on fire.

and then there's the pressure to drink. that started the second i turned 18. i’ll never forget my older sister saying she wanted me to drink with her because then we’d have something in common. like… okay. if that’s the only way we can connect, what does that say about you?

sometimes i really think they just hate who i am. my personality. i need to accept that. and i don’t think there’s anything wrong with me. not even with this. not liking strangers over. they act like it must be because of something our dad did, but no. i think, at our core, my dad and i were just the same. he was private, reserved, someone who loved his own space. and so am i. i wish they could accept that. instead of giving me these condescending lectures where they tell my life story back at me and go on and on about how my dad didn’t raise me right, maybe they could just understand that it was different — not worse, just different from how they were raised. and that’s okay. my dad and i speak the same language, but instead of recognizing that, they just berate it. like there’s something fundamentally wrong with us for being introverted and shy, unlike them. like there’s only one way to be, and it’s theirs.

and honestly, i’m not happy. there’s nothing to celebrate in my life right now. my dad is gone. this is the first holiday without him. in a couple of weeks, it’ll be my birthday. then it’ll be his. and i’m pretty sure i just got cut off my insurance because of the "big beautiful bill" that was signed today. but i think i’m too numb to even care anymore.

like, okay. just kick me while i’m already down.