June 2025
6.27.2025: One month clean + some shitty poetry
Content warning: This blog post contains discussion of self-harm recovery and psychiatric hospitalization.
Addiction is hard.
After my hospitalization in February, I was doing a lot better mentally than I was before, but it didn't break my self-harm addiction. It took until the end of the school year for me to want to recover. That's one of the biggest things about addiction recovery--you can logically know that getting better would be a good thing, but you have to want to stop to actually be able to stop. I relapsed quite a few times after getting home for the summer, which was tough. But, finally, at the end of May, a switch flipped in my brain and I decided that I needed to stop, and after fighting the urge for a couple weeks, the need to stop turned into a want.
Well... I've done it! I'm officially one month (and one day--my one month date was actually yesterday) clean from self harm! That might not seem very long to some people, but it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I can't say I don't still fight the urge, but addiction is something that sticks with you. It's not like you decide to be better one day and after that, you're recovered. I think I'll consider myself to be in recovery for quite some time.
Now that I've finally committed to being clean, I want to get my tattoo. I'm planning on getting a dandelion on my left arm over my scars. Once I get it done, I'll explain the reasoning behind a dandelion, but for now, that's all I'll say on that. It's going to be a promise to myself to stay clean. I didn't want to get it done until I could actually genuinely make that promise to myself. And I've hit the one month milestone, and now I feel like that promise is real! (I am trying to save money right now, though, so I'm planning on getting it done maybe right at the end of summer? We'll see.)
Anyways. Here's a shitty poem about working on the farm and recovery.
PROSE POETRY SCRIBBLED ON A RECIEPT IN THE BATHROOM DURING A BREAK AT THE FARM
Sometimes you have a hard time feeling real. You've picked up a couple habits to remedy this. Drugs to blame the feeling on. Sleeping to avoid it. Making yourself bleed to check that you're alive.
People ask you how the farm job is going. "It's work!" or "I'm getting paid!" are your usual responses.
It's a hard job. Twelve an hour for the dirt to bruise you and the sun to burn you.
But you're real. You're real. You're real.
You wake up in the morning. You eat a real breakfast. You touch dirt and listen to the morning birds. You're grateful for the Amish deli's bologna sandwich even when they put tomatoes and mayo on it. And when Paul gets to work in the afternoon and brings the dogs, you're excited to see them. Your shirt is wet with sweat while you listen to the cicadas sing about the summer heat. You drive home exhausted. You go to bed at night.
And you're real, and you're happy. You're happy. You're happy.
Sincerely,
Sam
Tags: Mental health , Poetry
6.24.2025: Nervous about Artfight
Artfight is coming up really soon! For those of you that don't know, Artfight is an Internet event that happens each year during the month of July that hundreds of thousands of people participate in. It's hosted on artfight.net and works like this:
- All the participants are split into two teams (you can also choose your teams ahead of time). The teams vary year-to-year, but this year the teams are Fossils and Crystals. The goal is for your team to win by getting the most points.
- Everybody uploads references of their original characters to their account.
- When it starts on July 1st, everybody starts earning their team points by drawing the other team's participants' characters. Each drawing you do of another person's character is called an "attack" and it gets your team a certain number of points depending on the complexity.
- This goes on all month and whichever team has the most points at the end wins!
I've always watched Artfight happen from a distance. I've been following artists online since like... 2017 or so? and most of them participated. I've always been either too busy or too scared to join myself.
But this year, that changes!
I went ahead and chose my team ahead of time (I chose Fossils, of course. Who do you think I am?) and now I'm working on references for my characters. I'm gonna try and get five character references drawn up before July starts. That feels like a manageable number to me. I think I have maybe... 30 original characters that have solid designs? That number might be a little off. Anyways, I'm obviously not going to draw and upload 30 references in the next six days, especially considering the last three of those days I'll be in Iowa & too busy to draw much.
To be honest, I'm a little nervous for my first year participating! But most of my friends who draw are doing it with me, which makes it a little less nervewracking.
I'm going to try and get those references uploaded once I get the art section of the website up and running. I've been putting it off because I can't decide how to organize that section. I'll get a couple second opinions and see what works.
On the subject of coding, I think I'm going to try and get the tag system for the blog working tonight. I think I've figured out a good way to do it. It'll be a little tedious, but that's okay. It's kind of fun to try and work out coding problems like that with no guidance.
Sincerely,
Sam
6.23.2025: Coding and working and coding
This is my first blog entry! Hello! This is so exciting. I set my website up last night after looking at various Neocities websites for like... 2 hours with Kaia. They went to sleep at 11ish and I spent the next 3 hours coding my homepage. I'm pretty happy with how it's working, though the nyan cat header problem looms over me...
Anyway, today I woke up and immediately got to work on my code again while I ate breakfast. This morning I was able to make super bare-bones subsections for the blog, the about me page, the art page, and the media reviews & ramblings page. They're quite literally just blank white pages with the text "This section is under construction. Come back later!" in black, LOL. But it was nice to get that accomplished. It feels nice to work on this website because it's like a huge puzzle to figure out how to code things. I'm not following any tutorials, I'm kinda just fuck-around-and-find-outing.
I actually was 5 minutes late to work because it took me a hot minute to figure out how to code the site to redirect to separate pages for my subsections. I weeded all day long today. It was crazy hot. I think it might have been the hottest day this year so far. It got up to 92 degrees, plus it was crazy humid. Sheldon (my coworker/the guy in charge of the gardens) and I set up a huge fan that's normally used for wedding tents in the bunkhouse barn and just stood in front of it for our 15-minute break. By the end of the day my whole shirt was wet with sweat. I kept getting little chunks of dirt on my legs from the weeding, and when I tried to wipe it away, it would just turn into mud right there on my leg from combining with the sweat.
Heat aside, it was actually a really nice day at work. Me and Sheldon really hauled ass. The garden is super behind in terms of weeding, because it rained so much in the late spring. We can't get started on other projects until everything is weeded, so that's what we've been working on. On Friday, this is what the bed of onions in the cold crop garden looked like:
By the end of the day on Friday, I had weeded basically a foot and a half inwards in every direction, leaving a chunk of weeds in the middle, so that's what I had to work with this morning. Here's what it looked like:
Sheldon and I worked together today to get the rest of it weeded, and it only took 2 and a half hours with us both working on it. It was nice to finally get it done and out of the way. Here's what it looked like once we were done:
The photos aren't great. I took them with my flip phone. You can see, though, how much drier the ground is today in comparison to the ground in Friday's photos. I also weeded a bed of herbs (basil, dill, rosemary) and got started on a bed of chives. Those were easier since they're not so picky about the heat, so they're a lot less fragile.
I got off work at 4pm and once I showered I immediately got to work setting up the blog page. Obviously it's functional, since I've got this entry posted! I want to try and figure out how to add tags to my posts, so that you can also sort by tags. I might have to do it manually (like, make a new page for each tag and then add each entry into the code by hand), which would be annoying for me, but wouldn't make much of a difference to the viewer/reader. There's probably a better way to do it, we'll see.
Well, that's everything that was interesting in my life today. I'm probably not going to update this every single day, probably just when things are interesting or if I have photos to share. I'm gonna use it as a public journal situation to keep people updated on my life.
Sincerely,
Sam