It’s been one of those days when I do an incredible amount of creative work, but it looked like I spent the whole day just cleaning and unfucking my office while I watched and listened to the latest episode of The Record Junkies, followed immediately by the entire Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
Yes, to the untrained eye, it would appear that I didn’t do any writing work today. But! The creatives among us already know what I’m going to say next: the entire time, I was creating space for the writer’s assistant who lives in my brain (Damon Knight calls his “Fred”, mine is currently unnamed) to help me figure out how to get through this block that’s vexing me. He did a ton of work, pitched a lot of ideas (some of them were even kinda good), and threw away a lot of stuff that’s been cluttering up the space between my idea and a draft I don’t hate. We got a lot accomplished. Maybe tomorrow we’ll actually make words happen.
Then, at the end of the day, I went to the pharmacy and got my flu shot.
Thank you, science!
I’ve been getting the flu shot every year for as long as I can remember, and I can’t remember the last time I had the flu. I feel like these two things may be related. I have a lot of travel scheduled during cold and flu season, and I’d like to keep my streak alive.
Here’s a thought, that came up while I was getting ready to hit publish:
I haven’t written a blog post like this in years. Somewhere along the way, I decided that everything had to be just so, you know? I really got in my own head and in my own way. It doesn’t have to be huge essays or perfect, or some minimum length. It can just be my blog.
Writer’s Block and Creative Paralysis Hate This One Weird Trick!
I’m gonna try to remember that one way to just post more stuff in my blog (because it makes me happy to do that) is to just post more stuff in my blog (because it makes me happy to do that).
The idea of watching hours upon hours of video essay content over media I’ve never even seen sounds absolutely wild, and yet I have done it, and I am here to recommend the same to you. Specifically, Jenny Nicholson has an amazing talent of making the most random topics extremely entertaining, to the point where I literally laugh out loud and come back to the same videos over and over again.
Jenny has exceptional delivery, completely valid critiques of the media she’s talking about, her editing skills really contribute to the humor of the video, and she really commits to the bit by dressing up as whatever she’s talking about. I appreciate her thorough examinations of the media, and the amount of time and energy she puts into the research of the media before she talks about it.
Beyond the critiques and humor, I honestly just really like how she speaks. There’s a lot of good content on YouTube that is unwatchable to me because of the creator’s voice grating me the wrong way. I like Jenny’s voice and her soft-spoken-ness, I like the speed at which she speaks, and her general cadence. She is pleasant to listen to and even when I’m not watching her I like to listen to her videos when I drive sometimes.
My most favorite of her videos, and the one I’ve seen over a dozen times at this point, is her video over The Vampire Diaries:
I watched four seasons (well, three and a half) of The Vampire Diaries when I was a young teen, but even if you haven’t seen any of it, I can’t recommend this video enough. Not only is absolutely hilarious, but she goes over everything so thoroughly that you’re sure to be an expert on the show and all of its many, many flaws by the end.
I think the most interesting part of the video is that she doesn’t just talk about the show itself, but the books it was based on, the author and the company that published her, and even the video game. Yes, there is a video game, and yes, it’s just as bad as you’re imagining.
I also always crack up at her video over this very strange church’s theatrical performances:
She and I have so many of the same opinions, she says everything I think but says it better. She honestly just nails it, every time.
There are a lot of content creators that I feel like seem like really cool people and I’m sure are nice and all, but very few that I feel like I could genuinely be really good friends with. Jenny seriously feels like someone I’d really enjoy hanging out with, and seems super cool and nice. I love when a creator feels really personable and friendly, it just makes me enjoy their videos that much more!
I hope you’ll give her videos a try, and enjoy them as much as I do. They’re honestly comfort watches for me at this point.
Have you seen The Vampire Diaries? Or Dear Evan Hansen? Did you like The Rise of Skywalker? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
Most grandmas play bingo, but author Josh Rountree’s grandma had a more occult hobby. Come along in his Big Idea as he tells you about ghosts, Texas, and his grandma, and how it all led to the creation of his newest novel, Summer in the House of the Departed.
JOSH ROUNTREE:
I do my best to put my heart on the page with every book and story I write, but Summer in the House of the Departed is especially dear to me.
The Big Idea for this one was simple – I wanted to write a story about a boy and his grandmother, whiling away the last weeks of her life in a haunted house while she tries to solve the mystery of death. But there is more to it than that.
This little boy was me. And the grandmother was mine.
Sort of.
I grew up in a small West Texas town. Way out in the middle of nowhere would not be an inaccurate way to describe it. My grandmother was a high school teacher in that same town who never met a stranger, and was beloved by her students. She taught English and Spanish and Folklore. And, sometime in her middle age, she started hunting for ghosts.
That wasn’t really something that was done in that place, in those days. But soon enough, she became well known for collecting stories. People would write her, call her on the phone, come knocking on the door. She was the “ghost lady” and people knew she would listen if they reached out to her with their weirdest stories.
Soon enough she was going on ghost hunts of her own. I recall her telling me a story about her hanging out in the middle of the night by a lake, looking for La Llorona. She had tons of cassette tapes with subject interviews, people telling their stories, and in some cases, ghostly noises she’d captured. She shared all of this with me, apart from anything she thought too frightening for a kid my age.
The scary stuff was the good stuff, though.
She planned to collect a lot of these stories in a book, but she passed away when I was a teenager, and was never able to finish. For many years, I had the Big Idea that I’d pull all that together some day. Finish that book. But I’m not much of a non-fiction writer, and I wasn’t sure where to even start.
Still, the idea of doing something with her stories, and with those memories, hung on through the years. And eventually I decided to approach it through my fiction.
Let’s be clear – Summer in the House of the Departed is entirely a work of fiction. Nothing in this story really happened this way, or at least not much of it. But the book is alive with my memories of my grandmother, and the little boy in this book bears a pretty striking resemblance to me, way back in 1981.
The portal in the sky. The occult rituals. I added all that stuff.
But the ghosts? Those all belong to my grandmother.
We left the door open to the room in which the kittens are staying, and Charlie came up to the kiddie gate, wanting to see what was up. The kittens saw her and were understandably curious. It was all polite! No kittens were unduly freaked out, or eaten!
(Not that Charlie would do such a thing. She lives with cats already. She knows what they’re about.)
Big day for the foster kittens today, as they are off to the vet. I expect they will pass their examinations with flying colors.
I know. Take all the time you need to absorb and deal with that. It kinda snuck up on me, too.
We filmed Stand By Me in the summer of 1985, mostly in and around Brownsville, Oregon. At the end of production, we moved down to Burney, California, where we filmed the train trestle sequence. Then we wrapped, we all went home, and waited a year for the movie to be released. During that year, they changed the name from The Body to Stand By Me, and recast Richard Dreyfuss as the narrator.
During that year, I just waited. It never occurred to me to consider that it wouldn’t be released, though that was a very real possibility. In fact, when Stand By Me turned 25, Jerry, Corey, and I sat down with Rob Reiner and Richard Dreyfuss to revist production, Jerry told us that he didn’t think it would ever come out, because his dad had told him that most movies that are filmed don’t actually get released. I can’t imagine that year for him, feeling like all the work was going to go into a warehouse to be overseen by top men. I can’t imagine what all of our lives would we like if it had.
I’ve been thinking about production a lot this summer, because it’s wild to me that I know pretty much exactly where I was and what I was doing 40 years ago to the day, when I had no idea that … everything that happened would happen. It’s wild to me that I turned 13 FORTY years ago. It just doesn’t feel that far away.
STAND BY ME: The Film and Its Stars 40 Years Later A Night of Reflection, Connection, and the Friendships That Shape Us with Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and Wil Wheaton Some stories don’t fade with time—they grow deeper. For 40 years, Stand By Me has spoken to something timeless in all of us: the wonder and heartbreak of growing up, the bonds we form in childhood, and the way those moments stay with us long after the journey ends. Join us for a deeply special evening honoring one of the most beloved films of a generation. Experience Stand By Me on the big screen once more, followed by an intimate, long-awaited reunion and live, in-person conversation with the stars who lived it—Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, and Wil Wheaton. Together, they’ll revisit the summer that changed everything—on set and on screen—sharing memories, laughter, and secrets behind a film that still brings people together after all these years. The evening will also include heartfelt reflections on working with their friend and co-star, the late River Phoenix, whose iconic performance continues to resonate with audiences around the world. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.”
This night is for anyone who knows exactly what that means.
These two events will obviously be extremely special to me (I don’t want to speak for the other guys, but I strongly suspect they would say the same thing), and we are doing them with an eye toward doing screenings in a few different cities next year. These screenings will tell us what we need to know, so we can plan accordingly. I have SO MANY ideas to do some genuinely special things, so cross all your fingers.
One wrong turn doesn’t mean you’re going the wrong way entirely, and in author Deva Fagan’s case, her wrong turns ended up steering her exactly where she needed to be. Follow along in the Big Idea for her newest novel, House of Dusk, as she takes you through the winding path that led to its creation.
DEVA FAGAN:
I’ve had a thing for labyrinths ever since I first saw and fell in love with Jim Henson’s movie Labyrinth (and not just because of the possibility that I might find David Bowie prancing around one of them).
Part of what I loved was the word itself. We often use labyrinth and maze interchangeably, but they can also have very different meanings. Mazes are composed of false turns meant to confuse, to lead you astray, to entrap you. Labyrinths are slow spirals leading you ever towards the center, often used as a meditative tool for self-reflection.
In other words, you lose yourself in a maze, but you find yourself in a labyrinth.
And that’s where my Big Idea came from: a vision of an underworld where the spirits of the dead must navigate a seemingly endless labyrinth where they face all the emotional baggage that they brought with them from life. If they can leave those hates and sorrows and regrets behind, they find the center and are set free. If not, they risk wandering forever or being devoured by soul-devouring demons.
I knew it would be the key ingredient in a bigger story, an epic fantasy with a rich, complicated world and flawed but loveable characters. I just needed to find the book it belonged in.
Today, over twenty years later, that book, House of Dusk, is finally out in the world.
Why did it take twenty years? Apparently I had to walk a creative labyrinth myself, in order to find the center of this story; to give up the baggage of bad ideas and refine the good. Though honestly it felt more like a maze, most of the time. I kept taking one wrong turn after another. And by wrong turn, I mean writing entire full-length book drafts that I ultimately had to throw away. Here’s a summary: Wrong Turn #1: The Blade of Atropos
The story of a warrior princess with daddy issues trying to rescue a tithe of young people being sent to an enemy nation (à la Theseus and the Minotaur, in keeping with the labyrinth theme). It wasn’t a terrible book, but the worldbuilding was more interesting than the characters, and I was drawing too directly from actual Greek mythology, rather than building my own cosmology.
Wrong Turn #2: The Obsidian Shield
The story of a warrior princess with daddy issues AND a bunch of emotional baggage and regrets. I honestly can’t remember what her goal was, which probably means it wasn’t nearly as exciting as I thought it was. But I’m glad I went down this wrong turn, because it’s where I found a pair of characters I loved: a brother forced to become a brutal assassin in order to safeguard his sister, a sibyl being controlled and manipulated by powerful men.
Wrong Turn #3: Poison Maid
The story of a poison-skinned nun who has to team up with an enemy prince to bring about the long-awaited rebirth of the Phoenix-god and the downfall of an ancient evil. In this version the sibyl is the prince’s sister, and is mostly comic relief. Also there’s an adorable sphinx! This is the first version where I finally realized I ought to have one of the characters actually go into the Labyrinth of Souls rather than just talking about this cool thing and never showing it on the page.
Wrong Turn #4: Tears of Blood and Ash
In this version, the sibyl is now the nun (and brotherless!), and she’s watched over by a maid who is secretly a spy with a lot of emotional baggage. The two women end up having to ally to thwart their enemies, and ultimately travel together into the Labyrinth of Souls, where they each must confront their demons (and I finally realized that they were secretly in love with each other).
Finally Finding the Center: House of Dusk
At last! I found my two protagonists: Sephre, the aging war hero who fled to a monastic life seeking redemption for her past misdeeds, and Yeneris, the spy posing as a bodyguard, slowly falling for an enemy princess whose prophetic visions are the key to her brutal father’s power. So that’s how I finally found my way through the labyrinth. It was a long and often disheartening journey, but I know that House of Dusk would not be the book it is today without all those wrong turns. I worked hard to make this big idea into reality, and I’m so grateful and proud that it’s out in the world now.
Yes, yes, I know, you don’t care about anything I or Athena might have to say about anything else, you want to know how the kittens are. And the answer is: Pretty good! They are comfortable in their room, they are eating a ridiculous amount and pooping an equally ridiculous amount, and their socialization is coming along very well indeed. The black kitten and the calico kitten are absolute snugglebugs at this point, and the tortie, who was initially reluctant to let any human near her, has come around to liking being petted and snuggled, but wants to give the appearance that she is under duress as you do so. Your purring gives you away, Tortie! We’re on to you!
I know that many of you are wanting/hoping that these delightful kittens will be foster fails and that you will have three more official Scamperbeasts rocketing around the Scalzi Compound, but I’m happy to say it looks like we have found homes for them, so after their vet visit to make sure they’re as healthy as they appear to be, we’ll make arrangements for them to be off to their new and loving families. This is happy news for the kittens, who now will have better lives than just hanging around a parking lot.
This is the true harbinger of the change of the season. Not the cooler temperatures, not the kiddos returning to school, not the imminent arrival of Labor Day weekend; no, it’s when the Pumpkin Spice Cappuccino powder mix is added to the flavored coffee machine and the little sticker slapped over the usual “Skinny French Vanilla” sticker.
The Pumpkin Spice sticker will remain there until mid-November at least, when it will be replaced with the Candy Cane Cappuccino sticker, or whatever the hell they’re calling their holiday-themed coffee powder this year. But until then! Pumpkin Spice shall reign supreme!
August 23 is WWdN’s official birthday. It was 24 years ago last week that I finished building a website from scratch (in notepad, using raw html), after about 6 weeks of intensive study, and many late nights of trial and several errors, and turned the lights on here, for the first time. Sadly, the earliest capture I can find at the Internet Archive is from 2002, but this is pretty much what it looked like for most of its first decade:
You’ve come a long way, baby.
Almost a quarter of a century, man. Twenty-four years. And to think that it had only been a few weeks earlier that I used Geocities to make my first website that I called Where’s My Burrito? I started my blog with this:
So the votes are officially in. Out of the total of 4 votes I got, all of them said it would be cool to have an online journal, so here it is.
Extra special thanks go to loren who directed me to blogger, a website that will hopefully make this whole weblog (the cool kids call it a “blog”) easy and painless.
I’m off now to make dinner for the family. You know what we’re having tonight?
Burritos. No shit.
I could have sworn I made my first posts in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2001, a few days before my birthday.
“The cool kids call it a blog.” Heh.
What a journey, huh? From there to here, in so many ways, even if I did have total access to the part of me that puts words together, I don’t know that I could fully communicate what it has all meant. I guess it’s a quarter century of growing up, becoming who I always wanted to be, and all the joys and sorrows along the way. I mean, I don’t have to tell you; a lot of you reading this today were also reading that, all those years ago.
I’m going to pause a moment to clearly and loudly say thank you to everyone who supported and encouraged me, then and now and in between. It’s been about 8300 days since I cut the ribbon here, and looking through my archives, I saw that I wrote this in on my blog’s birthday in 2019, after about 6500 days:
28 year-old me was struggling so much, in those days. He was trying so hard to be a good husband and stepfather with pretty much no support from his narcissist parents who weren’t thrilled about him marrying a woman with children. He struggled with undiagnosed depression, Anne’s vindictive and destructive ex-husband, and not meeting the extremely high expectations he had for himself. He has some real painful days ahead, but he gets through them with the love and support of his phenomenal wife, who he still can’t believe picked him, out of all the humans on the planet. He doesn’t know it, yet, but writing this blog is going to change his life, save his life, and make it possible for him to find his own dream, instead of trying (and failing) to live someone else’s.
I have grown and healed so much since 2019, in spite of the chaos, trauma, and cruelty we have all been subjected to since 2016, and I’m almost as proud as I am grateful.
I wanted to write something last week to mark this moment, but just couldn’t find the words, so I celebrated the moment quietly, which is how I’ve been doing basically everything for the last couple of years, while I am intensely focused on my own recovery. I don’t think I even mentioned to Anne that the date had passed.
That’s kind of where I’ve been, creatively and energetically, for this entire year. I mentioned in an Instagram reel that I haven’t had access to my creative self all year, I think largely because of the shock and trauma of America’s dumbfucks voting to put a fascist tyrant and his administration of incompetent criminals back into power, after we all saw how incompetent, evil, cruel, destructive, and violent they are.
Really great work, everyone. Especially everyone who was really worried about the cost of living, you know, the milk and eggs crowd? How’s that working out for you? And all the Walk Away people must be sleeping so well these days. Just fantastic fucking work all over the place, you fucking chuds. They are planning to ban the Covid vaccine, so those of us who want to protect ourselves from all the stupid conspiracy theorist dipshits who think bullshit and science are just “opinions” are just fucked, now. You’ve doomed us all to the world you alone deserve. I, for one, will never forget what you did to us, and I will never forgive you. I hope you spend the rest of your miserable lives ostracized, alone, and afraid. May you never know a moment of peace. May you wear your support for this petty little tyrant like a scarlet letter, so everyone knows who you are and what you did.
Anyway, as you can see, I’ve been distracted and preoccupied with all of this endless horror. I’m just exhausted by ten in the morning every day, and try as I might to find other things for my attention and time, I keep getting drawn back to the news, hoping I’ll see The Headline, or some indication that the entire Republican party, its punditry, and its media echo chamber have finally stopped being singularly focused on protecting and covering up for a pedophile rapist and his child sex trafficking pals. And I haven’t even touched on the endless attacks on innocent people who have been declared Enemies of the State because of who they love or the color of their skin. It’s fucking disgusting, deplorable, infuriating, and has ripped the mask off of much of America. It’s been really hard for a lot of us who grew up reciting and believing “liberty and justice for all”.
That’s my head, every day. I’m worried for the people I love, I’m sick to my stomach as I watch six unelected, transparently corrupt, Christian Nationalists issue unsigned decrees that overturn the will of the voters as they hand more and more unchecked power to a criminal and his criminal organization.
It is so hard to tell stories, to find the joy and release in creative writing, when I feel like the world outside my window is on fire. Sure, my privilege currently protects me, but Timothy Snyder pointed out that if we have to remind ourselves of all the ways we are currently safe from political lawlessness, we are already living in an autocracy. That’s scary as fuck to me.
For a lot of us who are survivors of abuse, every day with this motherfucker making everything about him and his fragile little ego is jabbing a finger into a deep bruise that can’t ever fully heal. For a lot of us who have worked so hard to leave and overcome our abusers, to live our lives as fully as possible in spite of our experiences, it is an endless struggle of flashbacks and nervous system dysregulation, while we remind our bodies that we aren’t trapped with our abuser anymore. Thank god for EMDR. Thank god I can afford regular mental health care. Thank god he’s going to die and hopefully soon.
I haven’t wanted to write anything in my blog because what I just wrote is all I have been able to write. When I want to tell a fun story about playing Mysterium with my family, taking my son axe throwing for his birthday, celebrating my son earning his Master’s Degree and starting his PhD, or any of the things I couldn’t wait to write Before All This, I stare at an empty document while I write and erase ten words over and over again, hoping these will be the ones that grant me access to my Creative Self. And the harder I try to find them, the more effectively they hide from me.
I have also felt like I shouldn’t write in my blog, while I have been struggling to write and turn in two pieces that I agreed to write last year. One is an introduction to a book, and the other is a short piece of fiction. Last week, I finally broke through on the introduction. After almost a full year of struggling and failing, I found it. It was so much fun to work on, so deeply satisfying to finish, and such a relief to turn in. I have never been this late on anything. I hope I’ll never be this late on anything again. I hope nobody notices that I’m writing in my blog when I haven’t finished the other thing, which I have started and abandoned too many times to count. I have probably written ten thousand words or so, trying to find the approximately 700 or so I committed to assembling into a story. I’ve tried to come at it so many different ways, from big ideas to small ideas, from limited points of view to omniscient points of view, and nothing is sticking. It just feels like I’m writing with someone else’s hands that don’t fit quite right. Maybe writing here today will help me find my own fingers again.
Maybe I needed time away, and that’s why I didn’t write anything in my blog for over a month, not even on the day that was a cause for celebration, the anniversary of the moment I took my first big step into the world that had always been hidden from me, or made inaccessible, by my dysfunctional family and abusive parents.
And I know that it is weird to hear a 53 year-old man talk about his parents and his childhood so much. I see pretty cruel commentary about that online, and while I don’t take it personally, I do compassionately hope that the kids who are saying it only do so because they haven’t experienced what I have, so they can’t understand. I get it; in a lot of ways, I feel like I’ve only been living my own life since I quit drinking in 2016 (hell of a year to start rawdogging reality, wil), and I’ve only been doing the work to recover from and manage CPTSD for a couple of years.
I don’t know how to do any of this, but I’m trying to figure it out. I know that writers get stuck and find their way out of it, and I’ve been doing my best to give myself patience and grace and space to figure it all out … I’m just growing impatient, is the thing.
I have a great story just sitting here, inches away from my fingertips, and I can’t figure out how to grasp it.
So I guess I’ll remind myself that I’ve been putting words together in public for about 8500 days, I’ve written a bunch of books — including a New York Times bestseller! — and that whatever it takes to do it is in me. It’s just doing a very good job of Not Being Seen.
But this feels like something of a start, anyway. I forget that it’s okay to make short, silly, 50 word posts here. I forget that I don’t have to follow up every long absence with something profound and carefully edited.
I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and I still forget. But today, I remembered.
A few weeks ago, my friend invited me to come to an amusement park with her. If you are an Ohioan or even in the neighboring states, you know that we are top of the game in the rollercoaster world. We were heading to Kings Island, which we both have gold passes for, so it was no trouble to drive a little south and ride some coasters.
The night before going to the park, I looked at the weather forecast and saw that it was going to be a brisk 90 degrees outside. Obviously, I would need to wear shorts and a t-shirt. However, it had been like, two weeks since I last shaved my legs, so obviously I was going to have to do that beforehand. But truth be told, I really didn’t feel like it. I didn’t want to shave my legs, but I had to if I was going to wear shorts the next day.
This thought process made me uncomfortable. Why was I so convinced that it was something that I had to do, a qualifier to meet if I wanted to wear shorts? Why was I telling myself that it was unacceptable to wear shorts unless I did something that I really didn’t even feel like doing?
For as long as I have been shaving my legs, which has been about fifteen years, I have always felt that it was something that I wanted to do. I don’t like having body hair, and I’ve always said that it’s just a personal preference for myself. Not having hairy legs is what makes me more comfortable in my body, and that’s just how it’s always been. So shaving my legs always made sense to me because it was something that I wanted for myself and for my body.
This was the first time I had thought to myself that I didn’t want to do it. And it was immediately met with, “well, I have to.” I do not like how that sounds! I don’t like my brain telling me that, because it made me question if the decision to shave was less of a personal choice than I thought all along. I also started to fear that everyone at the park would see my two-week-unshaven-legs and think I was some disgusting beast, some radical hippie that didn’t shower, all sorts of negative things.
I had been convinced that I had been shaving for me, not for others, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think I was, in fact, shaving for society. I do still think that I was shaving for me, too, because I really meant it when I said I don’t like body hair on myself, but how much of that “personal preference” is bias from society in the first place? Would I dislike body hair on myself even if the societal views on women having hairy legs was completely different? How many of our choices are really just society’s choices that we’ve convinced ourselves are our own ideals? Who’s to say?
I didn’t like that I felt obligated to do something, so I decided the best course of action was to not do it. Off to Kings Island I went, in shorts, with unshaven legs.
It made me uncomfortable. It was genuinely difficult to move through the world in a way that I felt was going to cause me to be judged by others. All day, I kept looking down at my legs, thinking I should’ve just shaved and then I wouldn’t feel so bad. But that’s not right, and I knew it.
I had to keep telling myself that it’s not my problem if other people are bothered by my leg hair. It’s not my responsibility to shave to make strangers more comfortable. If someone doesn’t like looking at me, they can avert their gaze.
I do not have to make myself uncomfortable to make others more so.
Having leg hair is harmless. I’m not hurting anyone by having it. In fact, it comes naturally on just about everyone. And we would never expect a man to not have it, or to shave it to make others more comfortable, so why the fuck should I have to? If men can walk around in their too-many-pockets-cargo-shorts with leg hair longer than their head hair, so can I.
Even though I just said all that, I think the hardest part for me is that I don’t actually want to have long leg hair, I don’t want to dye my armpit hair, or anything “radical” like that, I just want to feel okay with myself if I haven’t shaved for a week or two. I just want the option to not have to, without the self-consciousness that comes with it. I want to wear shorts when it’s hot and have stubble and not feel like there’s something inherently wrong and disgusting about me. I want to shave for me. Actually for me.
It’s not easy to change over ten years of mindset, thinking, and habits, but now’s a good time to start. Won’t you join me?
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jlpt4_feed) wrote2025-08-28 07:49 am
The idea of watching hours upon hours of video essay content over media I’ve never even seen sounds absolutely wild, and yet I have done it, and I am here to recommend the same to you. Specifically, 
