Today’s deck is the Official Grateful Dead Tarot.
I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know anything about this band. I know it’s a band, and I know it exists, hell I might know one of their songs. But kinda like with Aerosmith if you told me on the spot to sing a song of theirs I’d be lost. In fact my first instinct would be to start singing Pretend We’re Dead by L7.
Wait, no, I do know Shakedown Street is a song of theirs thanks to Jojo but I couldn’t hum it for the life of me.
The deck itself is frustrating in the sense that there’s so much care put into the imagery and there’s clearly a very consistent underline to it beyond LOOK IT’S THIS ALBUM DO YOU REMEMBER THIS ALBUM???? but then the backs aren’t symmetrical so I’m left like “so close, you were SO close…”
Today’s reading feels like it’s reflecting a general concern I’ve had sometimes as of late of “am I putting all this effort into [whatever] only to be ignored?”.
That’s a work in progress at least.
So since I’m gonna start typing this on the 22nd making it the proper anniversary post beyond the entry’s date stamp, here’s the most boilerplate question one can ask in such an ocassion: Why?
That’s a question with multiple layers and I can simplify the most complex one by just telling you that I was born to write things. I could wax poetic about the drive behind expressing the inner world, or how it was a coping mechanism for loneliness that soon extended into a tool to reach out to others, but that’s not specific to daily blogging and sadly for anyone wanting me to get all sentimental and poetic: My Concerta is in effect so I’m not gonna get derailed on that.
The question of why blog daily is interesting for a whole host of other reasons. While I’ve had the drive to express how I feel in writing all my life and have put stuff into the internet for over 10 years now, The idea of a daily blog of some kind… or rather, of this style more specifically, is something I’d been on and off about for… at least since 2022 in some form, and in those iterations the format isn’t actually too different from what I already do here, posting whatever’s on my mind with photos of something cool I saw.
This is the part where one can, again, ask WHY and the simplest answer is that when I say I like writing, I do mean I like writing, the act itself of typing words is fun.
That’s one of the more abstract bits of making things that has… for better or worse, come into relief thanks to the AI nonsense as of late. When you don’t have that creative bone in you, you only focus on the end result, but when you do it’s because every part of the process is a delight. You see someone paint and you don’t think “I want that end result on my wall” but “man mixing those paints looks so fun, I wanna try that”.
An example with something else I dabble on sometimes is woodcarving. I do it not because I really REALLY need that spoon but because the act of whittling wood feels good in a tactile way I cannot explain, and if I happen to end up with a neat shape by the end hey! Not bad.
Hell, my first ever carve was literally “I have a cube of wood and I wanna turn it into a smooth sphere”.
Quick sidenote, part of the reason why I wanna get back into drawing is precisely that the act of making lines or coloring things is fun. Last year I remember that urge got to the point where I got a spirograph and but colored the resulting pattern.
So I like writing, and the thing about writing is that publishing something out there puts an end to whatever you did, it’s out it’s done now you can see what you did right and wrong.
Some people do fanfics, and I do encourage fan fiction as an excercise precisely because of all the aforementioned reasons of being able to assess what you did. Same with TTRPG campaigns and even just general roleplay.
But for me, I have a condition called Being A Bitch With Too Many Ideas. I’m not against collaboration (hell, I NEED someone to bounce ideas off of as part of my own creative process) but I also like to set my own pace. I’ve tried to write fanfics but two pargraphs in I end up going “why keep it as a fanfic when I can extend it into my own thing?”.
This blog basically gives me… not even a “writing RKGK” outlet (that would be my webnovel) but more like a “post sketches for fun” outlet, the writing equivalent of it.
There ARE personal self-improvement-type reasons also, mind you.
Around the same time I was thinking about starting this blog I felt like I needed some sort of outlet for a bunch of resentment and grievances, but I was worried about how it might come across if I vented to friends (mind you, friends I already had trust to vent in, it was just my doubts flaring up) so I made a folder on google drive and I created a “disclaimer” file with something to the effect of “know that the thoughts expressed here aren’t the totality of what I think” written on it.
On one hand I realized that I was making something private and I still felt the need to add some clarification in the odd chance said privacy was disrupted. On the other writing that down made me feel like I said to myself something I needed to hear. The original plan was to keep this blog and have that folder for the things I felt unvomfortable talking about in public but I ended up not using the folder after that admission/realization combo.
And… yeah, you can tell I’ve made some strides in self improvement big and small here and there. I still get defensive about some things, but having this outlet made me calm down a bit. I still have anxieties about expressing parts of myself, but sharing about it helps. And while it’s not seen, the fact that I choose what NOT to share for whatever reason or outright admitting “that’s too personal” or “it involves others so I’ll refrain from commenting” helps me build that personal boundary some more.
I’ve also noticed that whenever I DO have to go back to writing things, the muscles are warmed up and it’s easier to get back into the saddle. Because when you get down to it, trying to turn washing dishes and taking out the trash into something more than just a list of stuff done but a small tale is one hell of an exercise I’m doing on the daily.
On that note, one of my therapists told me ages ago how journaling helps fight off that feeling of having done nothing because even if you just write “I showered”, you can look back and go “well, I DID shower” and trust me, that does wonders. So writing this blog has had that effect also.
On that note, thank you to everyone that decides to stick around. Seeing that even me just writing about my day can catch people’s attention helps my morale. There’s nothing more fun than peeking the website’s stats and seeing a spike of 40+ hits because someone opened the latest entry and then just kept reading the others.
Thank you also to everyone that comments about the dolls’ pages, it makes me so happy that people see the love I pour there.
As for my day it was very uneventful. The most noteworthy thing was that I went for my regular cleaning at the dentist.
I got served by a new technician so there was a lot of chatter in between procedures. When I paid my old technician was tending the reception and when I made the appointment she was like “next time will be our last time”, she then pointed at her belly to indicate she was pregnant “So don’t miss it! Even if it rains!!”.
Well damn now I really can’t afford to miss that, huh?