what a fine year!

in Scotland the 2nd of January is a holiday called "2nd of January". because New Years Day falls on a Sunday this year, the new years day holiday is Monday and the 2nd of January falls on 3rd of January in Scotland.

i've been in incredible form today, so for my future self reading this: week 50 really does work!

this week i was off sick most of the time, but i did get some good work done on Friday.

for my new years celebration, i woke up at 8am and ate some mushrooms and had a bath. then i lay around thinking about stuff for a while. once i could operate my body again, i started tidying my apartment. i spent most of rest of the day cleaning and tidying. and i fixed the leak from the washing machine! which is great. at about 11:45p.m. i drew myself another bath. a CBD bath bomb from Lush. then i got a big chunk of vintage cheddar (the tickler) and lay in the bath eating cheese and vibrating until the new year had come. it will be chinese year of the rabbit. i drew my yearly tarot, the tarot agrees it will be a good year.

i'm relaunching today on this domain, doing it by myself this time. look forward to those! there's no atom feed for it (yet?), but i'll post here when i make new ones. the first one is up, i like it.

let's do art on-line, on websites, together! art that is websites. remember when you used to have to find a specific pixeL?

thanks for being around this year.

2023 is gonna be a banger.

Merry Christmas!

I'm still sick! It's gross!!! weird goo!!!!! from my chest!!!!!! texture of grated carrots in cream!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm doing a low-carb diet until March, which also probably means no alcohol for a while.

In late 2017, a low-carb diet was an eating disorder for me. My body weight dropped by half in a crazy short period of time doing keto and starving myself eating chemicals for dinner. It wasn't healthy, it was bad for my mind. Hoping I could disconnect my self worth from my size, I let myself gain weight again and stopped thinking about it. Then my hands and feet started tingling. I started seeing rainbows in the white light from lightbulbs. I got diagnosed with diabetes. Knowing I'd given myself a chronic disease by getting fat tested my self esteem.

Some early studies were showing signs that you could reverse diabetes with a diet that helps burn fat and sugar build up around the liver. Low-carb diets. Essentially the same diet that morphed into the eating disorder that I was trying to recover from when I got diabetes. This was not something I could navigate mentally or spiritually at the time. Recently, though, well... i haven't felt lonely for months; i've got that amour de soi; i don't want for anything emotionally; comfortable with myself; confident; happy. And more studies have been done, 12 weeks low-carb can put it into remission. 12 weeks! That's nothing! I deprive myself of things in private for months just for fun all the time.

I'd like to take this moment while I have your attention to recommend that you get off Twitter, don't tweet, avoid reading tweets. And i don't mean go to Mastodon, don't do that either. It's the same but worse. I'm begging you, for your health, for everyone's health. I implore you. Do whatever you need to. Act like avoiding twitter is your job, track your progress if you need to. Delete the apps, the tiktok, the instagram, the rest of them. Avoid nutrient-poor culture. Join a magic order, join a club, go to the cinema, go to the pub, read sci fi, draw a picture. I'm not saying "log off", the internet is great and really cool, but don't you want to be around the people you love? talk to people who understand you, love you, know you? rather than a world of trolls and scolds and the impulse to say the worst thing you can imagine because that's what gets the most reward? Social media is a high school we never leave.

Merry Christmas!

I'm going to get super high and watch movies now. Maybe i'll play a video game later. And I'll definitely be going for a classic Christmas walk.

i love you, good bye, see you next year xo

well, it's nearly over! the year, i mean!

everything's going pretty good. the week was normal. messed up on Thursday night by staying out too late, Friday and Saturday both absolute write-offs. found out there's a part of London where if you go there at 5am a security guard will come and tell you to watch out for "robbers and somalians". saw Avatar 2 on Friday morning. it was great. i fell asleep a few times but every time i woke up there was something exceptionally beautiful happening on screen. i didn't sleep the night before so my falling asleep is not a comment on the movie.

i'm studying the first paragraph of my last weekly to see if it's possible to get myself back on the straight and narrow by following my own advice. Next week's post will tell us if it was. I said some things when i was out on Thursday... i don't remember what they were but i remember regretting them immediately. hopefully that will just pass by without me having to do anything about it but i should probably pay attention to this fact and make some effort to stop that from happening in the future. I'll have to find some fiction to read tonight and come up with some recipes for the week.

percussion is very different when you play it vs program it. this weekend i spent my time researching electronic drum kits and how they work. my father has agreed to mail me my old drum kit from when i was 6 years old, which i'm going to set up in the corner of my flat and reversibly convert into an electronic kit. the kit was owned by John Wilson, the drummer from Taste. he sold it to my parents at low price on the condition that if we ever got rid of it we'd only ever sell it back to him.

my hand is bleeding for some reason. i seem to have wounds on my body that aren't quickly healing. anyway. I did not finish the work i intended to finish last week because my days were spent in meetings. the meetings are important, and they are on a time limit too. there's just not enough time in a day, or a month, or a life.

Let's be honest, it's not the end of the world.

The week: working, walking, reading, cooking, sleeping. Sleeping before midnight and eating healthy meals at regular times has kept me in good spirits. Occasionally of course one must get drunk and read sci-fi to prevent popping. This all seems very sustainable, but it's seemed that way before. Hopefully having this record to refer to will help me later. Getting ready in the morning as if I'm going out even if I'm not; working at the desk; keeping a notebook (md paper) and a good pen (copic multiliner sp 0.3) by me when I'm working; cooking, eating; tidying, cleaning; sleeping before midnight; going outside; limiting television and podcasts; avoiding social media; and above all closing the computer or switching off the phone the moment my task is done (do not think about the next thing to do while looking at the screen, even if the next thing to do ends up including the screen.). It's all normal stuff, really.

Reading Deming's Out of the Crisis to prepare for next year. Most of the content is familiar due to lectures on the material conducted by my port-filled father between the morning hours of 2 and 5. Apart from that, in mornings and in evenings I wander around outside listening to music (Broadcast, Soundcarriers, Stereolab, Cocteau Twins, Natalie Imbruglia, Garbage, Britney, No Doubt, pop and dreamy jangles y psychedelic miscellany); reading sci-fi; consulting the tarot; cooking; cleaning. Also reading several tarot and magick books at the moment and been writing quite a bit. This will no doubt blossom into something eventually, but for now it is what it is.

Soho on Saturday, I've been going often since I learned there is a train from near my apartment that goes straight to Charing Cross. I went to the Atlantis book store and bought a few books (DuQuette, Wang, Foster Case), but not the books I was looking for. I got home about 9p.m. with such a craving for curry chips that I got some and ate them and went straight to bed and slept until 9a.m.

On Sunday I was reading a biography of Pixie and it mentioned that Yeats introduced her to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (including Eddy Waite) at the Watkins book store, which it turns out is still open. So I hopped on that cx train and took a look around there. Opened in 1894, Thoth logo, Thoth carpet. It has a lot of cool stuff but not the books I was looking for. Still, I bought quite a few items and a couple of new tarot decks and a couple books and some incense and a dragons blood and white sage smudge sausage. I asked the person behind the till how come they don't make any fuss about it being arguably the birthplace of the pixie deck and they said "there are many stories with no survivors". I've never heard a smudge stick be called a "smudge sausage" before and I hope that I die before I do again. She died, Pixie, in Cornwall. She'd been living in Lizard, but she died in Bude. She's buried in St. Michael & All Angels Churchyard and nobody knows exactly where because there was no grave marker and the records were burned in a fire. Apparently local memory says she's "beside the wall next to the woods in the churchyard". Buried in an unmarked grave. Well, at least she got to be a Cornish Catholic lesbian for a while at the end. We should all be so lucky.

Tonight I'm super tired, but it is a good tired. My self-imposed schedule has me finish most of this year's work by Thursday. Friday morning will be spent on Avatar 2 at the Odeon. Now I will stop writing this post and head into the kitchen to hoke out something that can be done with chicken. The most exciting dish I've made this week was probably dolma with lamb mince and mint and vine leaves. This will probably be a sandwich. Can't remember who I'm writing this for. Is it for me?

woooooo!

feelin' real good! on one hand, i'm kinda super duper anxious about work because i don't know what i'm doing AT ALL. on the other hand i'm feelin' real good!

yeah, don't tell anyone but i have been working this weekend on job work because i'm so anxious about it. but i've also showered more days in a row than i can remember, and cooked nearly every meal i've ate! though i did also lick a lamb burger and then eat it from at some banker's Christmas party which resulted in a lady telling me she would "end" me and calling me a ponce. i haven't been called a ponce since i lived in Liverpool and i went out to the shop for a can of tizer one day with pyjama bottoms on.

i've been reading a lot, and writing too. going outside nearly every day. found a big Sainsbury's near my flat (10 min walk) that i'd somehow not noticed for the first year i lived here. i got the brewdog advent calendar, but i am yet to drink even the first beer from it. i can't really drink until i've solved this particular work problem. just the part where i understand what i'm actually going to do. once i've solved that i can drink all day like normal.

what else... what else... oh yes! i joined a hermetic order. can't talk much about it right now but i did the induction in my kitchen and it was quite the event of fire and light.

oh also my dutchie lid got stuck in my frying pan for a week but i managed to get it off by cooling the dutchie lid down with ice while heating the pan up with fire.

there must be other things... maybe not. glad to be reading again, glad to have a challenging problem. nervous, very nervous. drinking a lot of tea. still a bit sick, but i think it's more the evidence of how the virus has ravaged my body than any sign it remains there still.

i fear i may have offended someone, but i don't remember who.

The rest of Sunday evening in Brighton was lovely. We listened to music on the beach, drank wine and beer, went to the train station. At the station we booked an hotel at the last minute. This is tradition now for trips out of town. It was a hotel in a gay bar, we were tired and tired of drinking. In our room we listened to music and played cards with the union jack backed deck we'd won at the arcade on the pier. The kebab shop around the corner from the hotel has an item on the menu by the name of "Mexican Surprise". Sofia got that. It was just a normal hamburger. A Mexican surprised. It wasn't long until we went to sleep.

On Monday we woke early but skipped the hotel breakfast, leaving the room and hotel just before check-out time. Rain was pouring heavily and we both got soaked through, seeking refuge in the arcade by the pier. We had a lot of fun throwing balls at clowns and shooting dinosaurs. The wind was blowing very strong, even for the sea. One time, trying to leave, we found the rain so cold and the wind so strong, it blew the wooden shutter off the window of a concessions stand and it took all of both our strength to get it back into place. When the weather that had held us prisoner seemed to wane we made a break for the station. It caught us and drenched us.

On Tuesday we went to the Tate Modern and the Twinings shop, and then the Harry Potter shop at King's Cross shopping gifts for her sister. We made it to the airport on the Elizabeth line, and said goodbye over airport pub fish and chips next to security. On my way home some dude started following me around the underground which I found unpleasant.

Wednesday was the day of the work social, but I was not feeling great so I skipped it. Thursday saw me wake with a chest infection. Friday it was worse. A couple of days spent reading and taking notes was good, though. I joined BOTA. I made an Irish Stew on Saturday. I made a lasagne on Sunday. Still have a chest infection. Feeling happy, though, and relaxed.