Me, In Real Life

I stayed up late last night trying to eke out some time out of a busy day to pull on all the kigurumi gear and do a video. I decided that I should start using the full hadatai instead of just the torso one, and even though it takes a bit longer for me to zip myself into it and even though it’s a little hotter, I think I’m okay with the overheating issue, mostly. I spend a lot of my day in front of a hot pizza oven, so I think I’ve built up a tolerance for heat. It’s still uncomfortable, but I haven’t gotten dizzy or nauseous from it. yet.

Also I did get a migraine aura about a couple of hours before I had planned to kig, but i think putting on the blorbo suit actually helped me feel better and fight off the general badness i feel during a migraine attack. Though, over the past decade or so, my migraines have gotten less frequent and less intense. It’s as if they’re giving me a respite as a reward for making it to menopause (but then my lower back decided to herniate itself this year so…trade-offs). The headache wasn’t bad enough for me to get into bed, and I managed to take video for nearly a half an hour in the cosplay.

I still really love becoming Anime Boi. It’s one of my life’s greatest pleasures right now, though I guess it’s a commentary on how desperate I am to excape my mundane life and this ridiculous current America that I’m forced to exist in. As a POC, I worry that I won’t survive this current administration, but I damn well will exist in it as an anime boi sometimes just so i can feel something other than despair. Overdramatic? Sure. Cringe? Definitely. Free? You bet.

And who am I doing it for? Myself, mostly. I’m still surprised and amazed that some other folks enjoy pictures of me in my dumb blorbo suits. It’s kind of like the icing on the cake. At this rate, I don’t know if I want to be a part of the community at large. They all seem at least a generation or 2 younger than me, and I don’t put out my actual age unless someone specifically asks. And again, I’m coy about it. I’ve given the “I’m only a few years younger than Green Day” answer multiple times and that seems to surprise people. Whatever.

I know there will come a day when I won’t be able to do such things anymore, so I’m trying to enjoy myself as much as I can. I think the back thing was a wake-up call, along with the infection scare/hospital stay I had last year. I’m taking time to be selfish, after so many years of being the dutiful, obedient daughter. It’s fucking fantastic.

It’s been a tough slog through this workweek because a couple of people have been on vacation for the past couple of weeks. At least the missing people will be back next week, so things will be back to. normal for a bit. But I’m losing a couple of people thanks to school starting up again so they’re dropping to part time instead of full time and it’s a whole thing.

Also I’m going on vacation during the first week of September. I really want to go to SacAnime but I’m still not 100% certain I’d be able to go. I have the tickets and a hotel room set up, and dammit I really want to bring my Nagisa kigu for a formal debut at a con. But who knows at this point? Well, there’s still a month to ponder things, and I still haven’t told J that I wanted to go.

But travel still makes me anxious, even though it’s less than 2 hours drive away. I’d also want to go to other places as well, but it’s difficult because this os going to be Labor Day Weekend and a lot of places will be crowded and hotel rooms will be pricy. I should’ve planned everything sooner but i was so focused on trying to heal my back, I hadn’t pondering anything for when my back actually got better.

But like I said, I still have a month.

I’m just looking forward to not going to work for a while. Hopefully the place won’t fall apart without me.

I was given a task at work today, which I guess only I’m able to do because, as a former office worker and a Gen X-er, I have just enough Excel knowledge to get myself into tons of trouble while using it. The store’s inventory is next week (as it is every end of the month) so the inventory sheets needed to be updated. They haven’t been updated in a good number of years, and there are items on the list that we’ve not sold in years. So, enter me, my serviceable Excel skills, and the fact that I don’t mind working at a computer for long periods of time because I’d done so in a previous lifetime job. I must’ve been on the computer for nearly my entire shift. it was a nice change of pace from having to deal with customers all day, and I felt very accomplished by the end of it. At least, I hope everyone’s happy that I updated everything

Other random thoughts:

• my prescription sunglasses from Zenni Optical arrived in the mail, and I’m looking forward to using them. I haven’t had a proper pair of sunglasses in years.
• My new hadatai also arrived and I tried it out. I’m at this point, just collecting them now, in the event of some catastrophe, I will still be able to dress up in my kigurumi best. It was an off-the-rack suit, pre-made, not custom. And it doesn’t fit perfectly, but I think it will be useable in a pinch, at long as I’m wearing clothes. The torso is just a little too long and loose. I know you’re meant to have a custom suit made to your exact measurements (and I have). I was just curious to see how well a premade one would fit. And…it’s still not bad
• It is finally my Friday. My weekend will be filled with catching up on anime movies. The Zombie Land Saga movie and the Assassination Classroom movie, along with the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle movie. I’m going to weeb out.
• all the SDCC news is making me excited, even the Marvel stuff.

Work was kind of a shitshow today (for some reason a lot of customers were being extra ornery) so I made myself a root beer float just so i could enjoy something that i made without anyone else judging how I made the thing that they ordered.

It’s just frustrating sometimes when you repeat an order back to the customer, they say “yes that’s what I ordered” and when they pick it up, they’re wondering why the order is missing a thing that they never said they wanted in the first place? Listen, this is why I always repeat an order back to the customer. So that they can listen to what I say and then correct it if I say the wrong thing. But I have a feeling that some people have selective hearing when they interact with someone in the service industry, so that when we get something “wrong”, they get to have a free meal. And the industry is tailored towards helping those people. I don’t like to dwell on these negative interactions very much, because if I did, I would never crawl myself out of that negative spiral. But sometimes putting stuff like this down is helpful. And reminds me how to be a good customer. The best customer. Ever. I should get an award for all the good customer interactions I have. hah. No.

I just know this person went to the customer service booth to complain about me. Joke’s on them, though. All the Customer Service folks know and love me. So any customer going to the booth to talk shit about me will not be taken seriously. I’m also very protective of the crew I supervise. It’s just the way I am. My crew all work damn hard and I won’t tolerate anything negative said about them.

But even the worst workdays and I’m able to come home to relax. And then post it on my blog like it’s 2006. Heh.

Thinking about my kigurumi obsession again, and how much it’s anchored in my own struggles with identity. Who am I? And who should I be to others in the world? Like, almost no one in my real life circles knows that I like to pull on a body suit and a plastic mask and cosplay as an anime character, of the opposite gender as my real self. And when I present my kigurumi self to the world, they’re (probably) not aware of my real life self either. I like to keep the two separate. I imagine it will become more difficult to do this if/when I go to more public events, but i’ve never been interested in doing a face reveal on my kigu social accounts. Anyway, anyone with a modicum of detective ability should be able to connect the dots and find out what I actually look like.

But that’s neither here nor there, I guess. I mean, I do have this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that someone somewhere might be angry that I’d presented a version of myself to the world that doesn’t match my real identity. It’s a weird thing to worry about, i guess.

But dammit when I pull on the blorbo suit and see this guy in the mirror and in the photos it gives me a bit of a thrill. More than a bit, actually. It just amuses me that identity and gender can be upended so easily. And I hope it doesn’t come off as deceptive. I don’t want to come accross as that. I want to hink that anyone who has enjoyed my weirdo cosplay wants to share in the pretending.

Where am I going with this? Not sure, really. I just know that pulling on all the kigu gear gets me close to the anime figure I’d wanted to see myself as. And it’s fun. In the same way regular cosplay is fun, but to actually disappear behind the mask so no part of my real life self is visible is such a remarkable, life-changing thing. It’s the death of the self, in service to the creation of a new entity. I’m getting philosophical. I shouldn’t. But I guess that it’s late so my brain is pondering weird thoughts. Ah well.

Hello, blog.

I’m attempting to update a lot more often, because I already have WP installed and this thing has been sitting there unused. I used to update my LiveJournal pretty often, and I often go back and read through those entries. It’s just nice to have a chronicle of one’s life that I can look back on, and see how much I’ve changed, along with how much I’ve stayed the same.

Since payday is on Friday, I decided to treat myself a little by doing some less-than-smart purchases on the internet. I bought a new hadatai (kigurumi bodysuit). I got curious about a pre-made one that my preferred hada maker offers, so I got a small, along with some…fake boobs.

Ah yes, I have finally decided that my next kigu (if there is a next kigu) will be a female character. And because my own cleavage isn’t ample (and because the hada will flatten me a bit anyway), I decided that there shall be boob pockets. Get excited.

Though I still haven’t decided on who this character will be yet. I’m leaning towards someone from Genshin Impact. Hrm…indeed.

But I also bought a new portable fan to keep me cool during the rest of the summer. I don’t feel like the SF Bay Area has had its intense heat wave yet. That usually comes in August or September. But I want to be ready for it, so now I have a small neck fan.

Also since SDCC is this week, I’m eying some of the stuff that Mattel is offering for sale during the con. Specifically, I want to get this set from KPop Demon Hunters, of Huntrix slurping down ramyun. The drop is tomorrow morning, but I don’t know how exclusive it will be. I’ll just have to get on the site at 9am and see how long it will take me to secure the bag.

Oh and I also ordered a new pair of prescription sunglasses, along with contacts, but since I have a Health Spending Account, this didn’t actually cost me anything. I’m just happy that I’ll be able to see better than my vision right now.

So now I need to ready my Mattel account for tomorrow morning.

Within the past few weeks, I’ve heard very bad news about a couple of friends I know/knew. Both with cancer. One had passed on. The other is in the midst of yet another round of chemo but the cancer has upended their life to the point that it all just seems Sisyphean in the end. One step forward, two steps back.

I’ve read the remembrances of the first friend on the socials. I struggled with my own. I didn’t know this first person super, SUPER well. We just met up yearly at a con, that’s it. But they were clever and kind, and larger than life in more ways than one. A person I would’ve been proud to have called a friend, if that’s what they’d consider of me as well. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I just know that I didn’t realize this last con would be the last time I’d see them. And now they are gone, and all I feel is that void that people leave when they die. That there’s something in my personal world that’s missing, that’s lessened. And everyone else who knew this person, I can see the loss in the way they interact with me.

Anyway the latter is still around, but I honestly don’t know what to do or say to this person, or if they even remember who I was. We had run through the same online RPG circles back in the day, when HP was all the rage and JKR wasn’t outed as a huge transphobe. We had fun together and eventually real life meant I didn’t have time to RP much anymore, and my connection to this person weakened. I still follow their socials, which is how I know about the cancer and the struggling and I feel a little guilty about not knowing what to do. But then, what can be done? I don’t live close enough to help physically. I just remember how much fun we had for those few years we knew each other, and now that’s all in the past. And those interactions really affected and influenced me to being a better person overall. To work with others, to take a compliment, to leave them regularly, and it all gave me a sense of self and accomplishment that I hadn’t felt before.

But now that’s all the past, and well, 20 years later, what’s left? Except a few pithy words on a comments page? A like? A heart? A hug emoji? It all feels performative and not enough. But this person is still here. I just don’t know what to do about it. And I feel selfish and wrong and helpless.

It was another oddly humid day in the Bay Area, but J had prepped the house to hopefully keep cooler by opening the windows at night and shutting them during the day. He also drug the portable AC unit out of the garage and set it up in the hallway, and then stuck a fan in front of it so it could carry the cooler air into our bedroom, where we had sequestered ourselves because it’s where our entertainment stuff is: his gaming PC, my PS5 and our big TV. I spent some of this afternoon building up my Ineffa in Genshin Impact. I main Chasca (because I am a weirdo and I like how efficient her playstyle is. I saw that Ineffa was suggested as working well with a Chasca team so I decided I should get my little robo maid to 90. Still working through that, however.

I also started watching the last season of The Bear, which continues to be a fascinating look at some broken people who decide to try to fix themselves (maybe) by running a restaurant together. But it looks like the resstaurant is on its last legs if Uncle Jimmy can’t figure out how to sell the property. Anyway, again, it reminds me a bit too much of my real life work at the high-end grocery store which will not be named. So I can only watch a few episodes at a time. The fact that this season is all one evening, however, feels like the anxiety is slowly ramping up. I got through a few episodes, and they’re just about to open the house. Knowing how many nights I’ve had to close at work with not enough people on my team, I can’t really handle seeing another version of that anxiety for too long.

I’ll finish it up, eventually, though.

I also caught up with My Adventures with Superman. I delight in the whole anime-ness of it all, and dang it Jack Quaid as Clark is as perfect a casting choice as I can think of. He’s just so…dang…nice lol

I also took a couple of hours to unfuck some of my paid webhosting stuff, reminding myself that I have a blog I should use more often, and also setting up the SSL for my domains. I can’t run a website without having it secure. Webhost stuff is always a struggle for me, but I think I’ve figured out most of it, so far.

Dinner was leftover pancit, which I’d finally learned how to make after years of thinking that I should learn how to make it. I added the other half of the cabbage i thought I didn’t initially need because the recipe I used only called for half of one, but I like my pancit with lots of veggies anyway.

Tomorrow starts another workweek, and I think we’re still understaffed because someone is still on vacation, but at least busy workdays go by fast.

This is a test to see if I can get my blog to play nice with blorbo.social

a little over 2 weeks ago, i was suffering from a ridiculously high fever (103) and swollen lymph nodes on the right side of my neck. I had experienced this sort of thing before. Sometimes my saliva glands got infected, and sometimes that made my lymph nodes swell and ache, but i was usually able to ride out the infection without medical intervention, and it was fine.

Until this time, when it wasn’t.

I had picked up that my body was suffering on a Friday night. Saturday morning, i was supposed to go to work on an earlier shift than normal. I got through about half of it before telling my manager that I was not feeling great and I wanted to go home. My manager, being awesome, said that I could take Sunday and Monday off, get through my usual off days of Tuesday/Wednesday, and then hopefully come back for my regular shift week.

Honestly, i never made it.

By Tuesday morning I felt awful. Nothing I was doing made me better, and I asked J. to take me to the Urgent Care Center in town.

The Urgent Care folks took one look at me, and said that I should go to the ER. This was beyond the scope of what they could deal with. As it wasn’t COVID, the flu, a cold, or some simple infection. It was serious. And cue me being panicky and anxious because, I DON’T THINK I COULD AFFORD GOING TO THE HOSPITAL

But I went to the ER. Got blood drawn to figure out the infection. They could not figure it out in the ER so they had to admit me.

Wednesday was a bit of a blur as I was poked and prodded while the doctors and nurses tried to figure out the best solution to my problem. They had to prick my veins multiple times since i have shitty tiny blood vessels and they needed to get and IV in so i could have fluids (I was not eating or drinking and my mouth was super dry, which was not helping my health). By the time I was out, I had both inner elbows tapped, and both wrists tapped. (Which both hurt like a motherfucker). The IV line that “took” ended up being on the top of my right hand. I had a CAT scan to check my neck. It looked like an abscess that needed to be drained. On Thursday night, i had surgery to cut a small hole in the side of my neck to relieve the pressure and hopefully help clear out the infection.

First time going under the knife. Really interesting experience. I was speaking with the anesthesiologist about my concerns. I get severe motion sickness and I’ve heard that sometimes the anathesia will cause nausea and they assured me that everything would be fine. They have anti nausea meds they can add. And then they pumped it into my IV

And the last thing I remember is answering them saying the IV wasn’t hurting

Next thing I know, I was being woken up and told the procedure is over. Damn I wanted to do the whole “ count backwards from ten” before going under.

For all I know this happened but my brain decided not to put that short term memory into long term memory. Alas.

On the upside, I started to feel better immediately after. I was able to come home on Saturday afternoon and I slept better that night than i’d had in over a week. It was July 5th, the day after Independence Day.

Though it was bizarre watching fireworks out side the window of my hospital room the previous night, as I was still in the throes of pain from the surgery.

but now i’m anxious about insurance, which is the stupidest thing to be worried about. It’s ridiculous in America that we still have to worry about some future possible debt vs. trying one’s best to recover from a hospital stay.

America’s health care system sucks….

Also, at least I learned that opioids really FUCK ME UP.

I was given norco post-surgery (which is apparently hydrocodone and acetaminophen) and i basically had a panic attack while on it. i felt tetherless and floating and i hated not having something to ground me to reality. i could not feel *anything* except woozy and i hated it so much.

i know some people would adore being able to separate themselves from their pain and i know that’s who these meds are for but i guess my brain wants to feel something, even if it’s still pain, otherwise i don’t feel *real*. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but man, it was terrible and horrifying but i’m happy i experienced it weirdly so i don’t have to do that again

And then i heard from all the nurses saying basically “yeah that shit fucks you up lol”

Well then why did you give it to me???

Also thinking about how useless the 1-10 Pain Scale is for someone who has chronic pain. Like…i told the nurses at the hospital that my pain level was 3 and they didn’t hesitate to give me a dang opioid. But i’ve still stayed at work when i had a migraine at a pain level 7 and it was awful but i could still function?

And, yes, tolerance is completely subjective and i probably should’ve kept that in mind when using the Pain Scale and i know my own body more than the pros at the hospital, for some things

Like when i was woozy from the meds and the nurse kept telling me to look up and open my eyes bc the dizziness would just be worse if i had my eyes closed. My dude, if i lift my head too far back, i get dizzy spells and shutting my eyes is the best way to deal with dizziness for me….