UConn’s last pure white husky has crossed the rainbow bridge…
I’m a fucking mess right now.
I can’t even deny it… tear tracks are running down my face and I haven’t been able to stop the tears for days. (Other than when I need to pull my shit together for work, of course. They can’t see how broken I am.)
A dog that wasn’t mine… that I wasn’t even close to… is dead and I can’t deal with it.
I suppose, all things considered, I should have seen this coming.
I’m past exhausted.
I’m not sleeping.
I’ve barely been eating.
And, I’ve been waiting for this day.
My complete and utter breakdown.
The day the depression brings me to my knees.
Catharsis.
Why was the death of a dog such a big deal? How could something like that move me to the tears I so needed to shed?
Easy.
Despite my… complicated… relationship with my mother, she was a UConn grad, too. There was always a little bit of me that wished - that still wishes, if we’re to be honest (and when have I ever lied here?) - that she could have been there for those years. She was already dead by the time I was applying for colleges. Didn’t know that UConn was the absolute last school I wanted to go to. Because of her. Didn’t know that it was the only school I applied to. Also because of her… and that’s a story for another time. I’m already fucked up enough without revisiting that time of my life.
Standing at the practice field, staring at the Towers dorms. Dating a guy who actually lived in her fucking building. Having to walk past what was her room. She had left enough of her behind in a scrapbook that I was able to find her fucking room. And I don’t think I ever told the boyfriend that… maybe in passing, but not in enough detail.
SO. UConn. It was a place where I was able to finally define myself as something other than Helen’s daughter (even if I carried that weight around for four years). I lived through so much craziness over four years and I don’t regret a moment of it. We always wind up where we’re supposed to be, even if we don’t know it at the time.
Going to UConn was the beginning of a wild ride… again, it was a decision I will never regret and I will always be proud to be a Husky… and a hussy, because we’re Bus 4, after all. And a white Jonathan will - even after all this time - be my husky.
And the last white one is gone. With a generic husky taking his place.
My UConn is gone.
My mother’s UConn is gone.
Replaced with an imposter.
And, while you may not understand why, it hurts. Badly.
To make matters even worse, I just finished a piece of Drarry fan fic that has brought me to tears over the past two days.
Fuck, I wish I could write like that.
Seriously.
It started with Draco in New York, recreating himself, working with at-risk kids and turning his back on all things magical and Malfoy. He ends up sharing dreams with Harry, and it is like the slowest burns of slow burns. Of course, I didn’t cry when Evan killed himself. I didn’t cry at the too real emotions that Draco was going through. Nope. I bawled like a fucking baby when Harry showed up in New York. And then I cried harder when he left. And then I cried even harder when he came back. It. Was. Beautiful. I love when fics break me like that. I really do.
Oddly enough, that level of heartache spurred me on to clean up the mess I made in the Otayuri fic I’ve been working on… until that vicious editor in my head decided to speak up. Yes, editor, I gave up on the slow burn. No, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. No, there won’t be any age-inappropriate scenarios. Yes, this is all Otabek Altin’s fucking fault. Three drafts, three fucking drafts, and he’s all ‘eyes of a soldier’ and Люди могут забыть, что вы сказали. Могут забыть, что вы сделали. Но никогда не забудут, что вы заставили их почувствовать.People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. (God bless Google and Russian language blogs for giving me the ultimate apology quote…)
But the editor did what they set out to do and, well, imposter syndrome.
So, I just wasted a bunch of time rereading all seven of my published fan fics, all the comments, and just started at my statistics.
I’m never going to be a Sara’s Girl, or bixgirl1, but they all did better than I would have thought.
For me, not you, I submit the following for those days when I feel like I can no longer make the words do the thing good because englishing is hard:
Assuming the new wave of Coronavirus doesn’t cancel the races, I’m running both Wine and Dine and Marathon weekends.
Yes.
THE FUCKING DOPEY CHALLENGE. #DOPEY2021 IS REAL (although a year late)
I have no idea what I’m doing - I had planned on skipping the race this year. But it’s the 50th anniversary of the House of Mouse and I plan to be one and done, so why not?
My newsfeed was packed full of people wanting to register so I didn’t think I had a hope in hell of making it in.
Yeah… my luck is never that good. LOL
One more time for those not obsessing over these races with me:
Wine & Dine - 5K, 10K, Half Marathon - 4 medals - one for each race and one for the two course challenge (10K + half). That’s 22.4 miles over three days. The 5K is optional, but why the fuck not? It’s a practice run for January.
Dopey kicks it up a notch - 5K, 10K, Half, Full Marathon - 6 medals - SIX! - one for each race, then the Goofy Challenge (half + full), and then the Dopey medal. None of the races are optional. That’s 48.6 miles over four days.
There is something wrong with me.
Speaking of things that are wrong with me…
I get lost in video games when I can’t get lost in my head. There’s too much noise in there right now as I start to approach being stable.
The mood swings are lessening. The depression is no longer such a heavy weight on my shoulders. (Still there, still affecting the day-to-day, but there is finally - FINALLY!!!!! - a light at the end of the tunnel. AND it’s not a train!)
All because we hired an AP person…. and now I don’t know what to do on the weekends.
But, anyhoo, all that to say, I’m addicted to the Sims 4 again. (I’m also oddly into watching speed builds on YouTube and I still can’t wrap my brain around how that’s a valid form of income…)
One of the Simmers uses two mods that I was really interested in and I decided to try them. (MC Command Centre and UI Cheats) Then I fell down the rabbit hole of custom content and other mods.
There is a bipolar mod. A BIPOLAR MOD.
And one that brings drugs into the Sims. You want to grow weed in your place? OK. You want to sell weed? MMDA? Coke? Heroin? Yup. All of it.
You can even make your sim an alcoholic / stoner / addict. It shows the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of a chemically altered life.
Of course, I had to check that shit out.
So… I made a sim that highlighted the “best” parts of my mother:
Bipolar? Check
Smokes weed from time to time? Check
Constantly drunk? Check check
Yeah… that sim didn’t last too long before I cheated to get rid of the bipolar and and make them sober.
Plus, you know, I play to escape reality… not live it in a virtual world.
I haven’t looked too deeply into the 18+ mods and custom content because… I don’t know… they feel too dirty for the Sims. But if I were into that… my sims could be a prostitute, run a strip club, be a porn star, make sex tapes, and leave dildos and condoms all over the bedroom. Like seriously… if that’s your cup of tea, you’ll find everything you want and more.
Yeah… that’s not really for me.
It was kind of eye opening to see just how much content is out there, though. I’ve never been into mods and custom content, but I downloaded a bunch of “safe” things - just boring, vanilla, game play modifications.
I’ve got a bunch of things to do this weekend, so I’m going to end it here.
Please, someone, make sure my tombstone reads “... and she went off into the sunset shouting, NO BETA! WE DIE LIKE MEN!”
Life does not need to take direction from some stupid question asked by a stupid teenager on a stupid Facebook group.
Besides, didn’t I say I was the deadest of doves?
A few nights ago, I decided to do Camp NaNoWriMo, because why the fuck not? I’m not working weekends any more and torturing myself sounds like a perfectly good idea.
I set a lofty goal of 500 words during the month of July. Not a typo. 500 words. That’s a whopping 17 words a day.
Why such a low, totally achievable in one day goal?
Because. Ukrainian.
I am going to blog a minimum of 20 words a day in Ukrainian and NOT rely on Google Translate. I’m hoping that I can remember more words than I need to look up, but it’s already day two and I’m out of ideas.
Blogging. In Ukrainian.
Nope. This isn’t a bad idea in the slightest. (The fuck-it factor comes back to haunt me…)
There’s one teeny, tiny, little issue.
My current webhost HATES Cyrillic. For whatever reason, too much Ukrainian causes them to shut my site down. Some sort of protection against Russian bots, I guess.
Despite that, I decided that I would use a domain already set up on this host to blog from and use WordPress. I didn’t want to recreate the wheel, after all. Blogging in Ukrainian is going to be hard enough. No reason to drive myself crazier by needing a whole new blog.
I want to like WordPress. I really, really, do. Shit, I know the person who named it.
But I’ve been with ExpressionEngine since it was still pMachine… and now that it’s on version SIX(!!!) and FREE(!!!), I figured I would try to use EE instead of WP.
Well.
The EE install went bad. Terribly.
I had to update the PHP version and then this thingy wouldn’t work. I downgraded PHP and then that thingy wouldn’t work. The permissions wouldn’t stick.
It was a fucking nightmare.
I decided to go back to WP, because why not. A 1-step install. Even I couldn’t fuck that up.
NO BETA! WE DIE LIKE MEN!
I didn’t need to do a back up. How badly could I fuck up my site?
Badly, in fact.
So badly that I was in tears waiting for tech support to find a backup for me.
So. Yeah.
I ended up installing WP in the wrong directory.
Lost UGCU. Lost GA. Lost WAE.
I don’t even know how I took out Good Advices and With an E considering I installed WP in the UkieGirl directory…
WordPress overwrote my ExpressionEngine index.php file.
I uploaded the original one from the EE download folder.
I uploaded the one from Good Advices and fixed the one setting that I changed.
I uploaded the one from With an E.
*crickets*
They found a backup and GA came back to life. UkieGirl came back to life. With an E has never seen the light of day, but the test page loaded OK.
After that, I decided to move to a new webhost.
I did the 1-step WP install and began to hate life.
I still hate life, but there is no way in fuck that I am doing any of that again.
So… that was randomly fitting. Not amused that it showed up today, though.
Yesterday, I was talking to a coworker about a coworker that left. Former coworker once told me that I wasn’t as tough as I thought I was.
I never told him that the scar between my eyebrows is from a cigarette. I was five or six when my mother chose to use my forehead as an ashtray.
But. Yeah.
Just because I don’t talk about all those “that which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” moments, doesn’t mean I don’t have them.
Back to the scar through, because that was the trigger.
Current coworker said that he’d be willing to go back and fix his mistakes. I said I wouldn’t change a fucking thing.
When he asked why, I didn’t really have an answer.
I just wouldn’t.
All the shit I went through - the chance to fix things - to have my father live longer - all of it… nope. Wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.
(Which makes me question my mental health, but that’s nothing new.)
There’s no way I’d trade my scars for better ones
Yeah.
I had this dream last night about my mother. I NEVER dream about her. When I dream about family it’s always my father… and it’s always the nightmare of finding him dead in his apartment.
I can’t even remember all the details, but it was upsetting.
LIKE SUPER UPSETTING.
I am obviously not as tough as I think I am if that dream rocked my world… and not in a good way.
Other than the dad-mares, I’e never woken up crying before.
I was back to being young me, pre-divorce, pre-death…
I’ve been lost and I’ve been sinking / Broken, coming back together / I’ve been stalling, slipping, falling…
Fuck, dude. You have no idea.
She fucking broke me and I relieved some of her greatest hits (yup, I went there) last night.
It took moving out and her dying before I could finally start to heal.
I’ve been lost and I’ve been broken / Finally coming back together
I’ve never been suicidal, but I’ve gone to dark, dangerous, places. She sent me there. Often.
I don’t wanna be afraid of my thoughts / I don’t wanna be scared of my shadow
It’s taken a lot of work to put her behind me… but, of course, I’m not free of her. I doubt I’ll ever be.
The part that I always come back to, the part that I can’t shake, is who my mother was before she became a monster.
She graduated from UConn with a degree in something like Home Ec - child development or some such nonsense.
She was a social worker.
A perfect PTA mom.
Everybody looks for love where it’s not // Everybody wants to know they matter
I don’t think I was ever truly loved.
I don’t think I ever mattered.
The pull of the bottle was stronger than the pull of her only child.
Sooooooooooo…
I’m already in this stupid bad headspace because of the fucking dream and my iPhone decides to play this during my commute.
I better dream of fucking puppies and unicorns tonight.
