Author's Notes
A collection of brief notes that are constantly being stuffed inside this living book.
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A.N. | Insomnia thoughts
Damn. My chronic sleepiness turning into insomnia caught off guard. It shouldn't have, but it did. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with it, but--wow. Truly wasn't expecting this turn of events.
As I lay awake, waiting to feel any tug of the eyelids, I can't help but think think think. It's what I do best. So many mental blog posts written, so much negative self-talk spilled. I'm usually pretty bad at shutting it off when I'm trying to sleep, that's why I have to read until I can't keep my eyes open. Media is the thing that stops me from berating myself at night... But alas, it hasn't worked for the past couple of nights. To make matters worse, I'm not even particularly obsessed with my current readings. DNF'd a bunch of books.
Crap.
Also... I may want to break up not only with my SO but also with a couple of friends. Idk where this urge is coming from. Definitely never had that towards friends. Some say it might just be clinical depression, but how can we sure?
Haven't written any fiction in the past week... I hope I don't lose this spark again.
What else? Hm. I have a bit of a photo dump prepared. I'm on my Palma now so I'm not posting them now, but soon. Some snapshots of the past few weeks.
I'm going back home next Thursday and... I don't know how I feel about that. I miss my cats dearly. But other than that, I feel detached. That might be the meds speaking, dampening the feels. Idk.
I miss who I used to be, even if I was still a girl with dysthimia brute-forcing her way through life. At least I was functional. Now, not even that.
I wish I had cute and fun stuff to post here. I hate being this blogger just parroting the same stuff out of a bottomless pit of despair. Sorry abt that, folks.
Hopefully the photo dump is gonna be cute?
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A.N. | Fake dopamine
Why cant I like things a normal amount? Why so they have to be this all-consuming thing? Why am I back at maladaptive daydreaming? Why this yt channel is hurting me so much? Why can't I live a life, why do I just keep thinking about living it, about doing stuff that's impossible and out of my reach? And even thw stuff that would be possible... Why don't I do them?
I write and then I realize all that I'm writing is devoid of both soul and substance. I don't know anything about this life I'm writing about. I'm just a depressed shut-in that hates herself regardless of what friends and family might tell her. Hell, there are men who want to fuck me, who want to be with me beyond fucking me. And it's all meaningless still.
I'm the worst fucking person in my life. Nothing has damaged me as much as myself. No one has hurt me as much as myself. I have no reason to live like this. I had plenty of opportunities to get good jobs, to finance a house, to have a car, to have a fun social life. And I fucked it up for nothing. Because I'm a piece of shit.
Holy shit, I don't think I ever expected to be this miserable in my 30s. I don't know if I've ever felt this hopeless and lost.
Maintaining this body is a nightmare.
Working is a nightmare.
This life is a nightmare.
And my only sources of respite are turning out to be toxic and addicting.
Viver é insuportável.
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A.N. | YT videos I'm too sad to watch
So sad I don't even wanna watch what I wanna watch, u feel me?
For my own future reference, here's a list of videos I find interesting/want to watch but won't bc depression:
- Mary Cassatt: The Impressionist Who Painted The Mind by Nerdwriter1
- Inside the Life of Monocle Journalist Fernando in Soho, London by NEVER TOO SMALL
- We Ask An Astrophysicist About Alien Worlds ft. @dr.starkid | Smosh Asks by SmoshAlike
- can we all stop speaking like incels? by Mina Le
- Why Speaking Another Language Changes Your Personality by What Now? with Trevor Noah
- The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan’s “Cool” Problem by Broey Deschanel
- ESCRITA À MÃO: A neurociência por trás de um hábito que abandonamos by Antofágica
- CICLO ANNE CARSON: Eros: O Doce Amargo, a natureza paradoxal do amor e do desejo by Seiva
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A.N. | Eclipses
There's this eclipse happening today, and later this month, another one that, according to what I've read, will be visible in Brazil. In other times, maybe in another life, I would've been excited to watch the phenomena. Idk when it stopped being interesting to me. When did I lose the whimsy for eclipses?
I can't remember it, honestly. I remember being a teen with my dad and sister watching eclipses together tho. I remember doing it in school, too. I don't remember when I stopped caring. When I think on it, I just feel like I'm too tired to worry about it... I guess that's just adulthood with a twinge of dysthymia for ya.
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A.N. | My white hairs
I started getting white hairs when I turned 31. Now, at the ripe age of 37, they're still few and far between, I think you'd only notice them if you got closer to me. But regardless, contrary to a bunch of irl friends I have, they don't bother me at all. What bothers me is how un-curly they are. It's like together with the color, my hair is losing its curliness. That I do not appreciate. At all. I guess growing old will take away stuff you didn't even realize you had/cared that much about.
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A.N. | Facínora
Hoje lembrei da palavra "facínora", mas não lembrava o que significava. Precisei puxar o dicionário online pra conferir. Coisas que eu achava que estavam relacionadas à palavra: assassinato? gente importante? homens (sexo masculino)?
Eis a definição segundo o Caldas Aulete:
(fa.cí.no.ra)
- Diz-se de quem comete crimes com grande perversidade; CELERADO; FACINOROSO
- Pessoa cruel, que comete crimes com perversidade: "Era a derradeira esperança do facínora, seu último cartucho." (Monteiro Lobato, 'O engraçado arrependido', in Urupês)) [F.: Do lat. facinora, neutro pl. de facinus, oris, 'ação criminosa'.]
Acho que talvez eu tenha lido em contexto de grandes crimes históricos, daí a associação.
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A.N. | Daylight
I miss being outside. I miss pre-pandemic me. I miss public daylight events in the old downtown area that felt like this picture. The sun setting, some weird band playing on the stage, me and a couple of friends sitting by the riverside, the breeze keeping us cool.
Friends are now all living in other states or becoming parents or being so busy. Town Hall got really bad at organizing public events. Historical downtown became a slum, the riverside a dumpster.
I don't know how to go back to being who I used to be, I don't even know how the fuck I became... this.
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A. N. | Lately, on my mind
This is a non-exaustive list of stuff that’s crossed my mind in recent days. CW depression etc.
- Am I even a person? Sometimes I dont feel like a human.
- I want a completely different life that has absolutely nothing to do with me and which I had never truly considered until now and I hate myself for it. Or maybe it’s just escapism.
- I don’t know how to do anything.
- I wish I had played video games when I was a kid
- I wish I weren’t so full of shame.
- I have never put my heart into any project bc I’m too scarred from stuff going wrong, I dont have the soul to fail again.
- My brain doesn’t know how to feel happiness, it never did and it never will, apparently. This is gonna be my life until the end of my days. Time and time again, year in and year out, life circles back to this thought.
- Idk how I’m gonna pay to be alive for much longer… still can’t work and it’s nobody’s fault but my own.
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A. N. | Texting
Folks keep texting me, asking how I'm doing, why have I not texted back in so long, if I'm ok... I guess I should be grateful there are people in this world that care for me enough to insist in keeping in touch when I clearly am just a sucky friend, but all I want is to be left completely alone. I don't wanna answer to anybody. I'm already spending all of my energy in existing around the people who live with me, I can't afford interact with folks online.
Today I avoided everything again; didn't do anything I was supposed to do. That's a lie, actually. I just remembered I did reinstall Kubuntu on my SSD I got from my busted Geekom Mini PC and send a message about a late payment to a client.
Two things.
That's a lot, y'all.
I just wish people would stop texting me.
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A. N. | Today I dreamed of a river
Today I dreamed of a river. It's weird because for the past few months the only dreams I've had are sleep paralysis-inducing nightmares or me doing everything I've been putting off, work-related or otherwise.
But today I dreamed of just this wide, winding river, dark-colored, crimson, similar to the color I saw in the Amazon river. And it had so many tributary rivers along the way, but many had different colors (one was dark purple!) and depending where people and things were taken (I guess the current worked in reverse on the dream, you'd go up the tributary stream, not down to the main river), they turned bad or good or neutral.
It wasn't scary though. I was just floating.
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A. N. | Fellas,
Fellas, is it wrong to just wanna sit on a guy's face?
Sigh.
Hormones have been going crazy lately, idk if it's medication or what. All I know is that in the past I never had real crushes on famous personalities and now I feel like I'm gnawing at the bars of my enclosure every time I see this man on a video. 😩
To think in high school I had to pretend to have crushes to fit in. And now, as an old 36yo, I'm finally feeling like a teenage girl. Oh, the irony.
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A.N. | Surto de leve
Não dá nem pra surtar valendo nessa vida pós-moderna. Nem o braço do meu monitor tá se aguentando, qualquer digitação mais furiosa faz essa porcaria oscilar e eu fico tonta olhando pra tela sacudindo de leve.
Disgraça.
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A.N. | O futuro mudou
O futuro não é mais como era antigamente. Tá bem mais assustador olhar pra frente. Não dá pra saber onde se vai pisar daqui a três passos. E talvez nem dê pra chegar lá, talvez eu nem tenha mais sapato pra isso.
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A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: If I thought there was some god
If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched ’em like a father and cared for ’em like a mother…well, you wouldn’t catch me sayin’ things like ‘there are two sides to every question’ and ‘we must respect other people’s beliefs.’ You wouldn’t find me just being gen’rally nice in the hope that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’, Mister Oats, ’cos that’s what it’d be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just…is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.”She relaxed slightly, and went on in a quieter voice: “Anyway, that’s what I’d be, if I really believed. And I don’t think that’s fashionable right now, ’cos it seems that if you sees evil now you have to wring your hands and say ‘oh deary me, we must debate this.’ That my two penn’orth, Mister Oats. You be happy to let things lie. Don’t chase faith, ’cos you’ll never catch it.” She added, almost as an aside, “But, perhaps, you can live faithfully.”
Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
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A.N. | Inner peace, outer turmoil
I honestly don't know how to keep living anymore. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not gonna kms or anything, that thought doesn't even cross my mind but... there's truly nothing in my brain. There's no will to keep doing stuff in me. I have no idea where to go from here. It's been what, two, maybe three years? Three years since I stopped functioning. Started taking antidepressants, got diagnosed with ADHD, learned how much of my life, my self and my experiences were/are shaped by it and learned how some things are out of my control and learned to accept my shortcomings and I just... stopped.
Granted, I also stopped therapy bc can't afford that anymore, but I also don't know how much it was helping me at the time. I don't think I've ever found the therapist for me, you know. It's something costly and random, so very difficult to find. When the meds took away my panic and the understanding of ADHD replaced self-hate with clarity, a switch was turned off inside me. I can't work on anything anymore, I'm always behind schedule, always procrastinating it, nothing makes me just sit down and do the fucking work.
It took me all this paralysis time (three years!) to put all of this into words, in a way that I could understand, let alone others understand. I wish I could tell my clients to lie to me about deadlines and importance/urgency of tasks. I wish the whole entire world could lie to me, maybe then I would be able to function. Idk.
But I found this post on r/ADHDmeme and it truly is exactly what I'm feeling. Reading the responses was also sad -- nobody knows a way out of this. I just know I don't want to do anything ever.
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A.N. | A Hat Full of Sky: Wishes, wishes, wishes
Wishes, wishes, wishes, thought Tiffany, distracted, fumbling in her pockets for the bits to make a shamble. It’s not evil. It gives us what we think we want! And what do people ask for? More wishes! You couldn’t say: A monster got into my head and made me do it. She’d wished the money was hers. The hiver just took her at her thought. You couldn’t say: Yes, but I’d never have really taken it! The hiver used what it found – the little secret wishes, the desires, the moments of rage, all the things that real humans knew how to ignore! It didn’t let you ignore them!
A Hat Full of Sky, Terry Pratchett
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A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: This was a test
This was a test. Everything was a test. Everything was a competition. Life put them in front of you every day. You watched yourself all the time. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Oh, some of the priests said you got given marks afterward, but what was the point of that?Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett.
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A.N. | Carpe Jugulum: Nanny Ogg's hidden talent
One of Nanny Ogg's hidden talents was knowing when to say nothing. It left a hole in the conversation the other person felt obliged to fill.
Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett.
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A.N. | Open Web Fun
I've been having so much fun on the open web... Tinkering with my blog and my listography, reading blog posts by fellow netizens, just discovering things by going down resource lists and neighborhood rabbit holes and webrings... It's ridiculous how miserable social media makes us. And now every time I hear someone saying how they "hate the internet", I feel the urge to whisper: oh honey, it's not the internet that you hate, it's social media.
The internet is awesome.
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A.N. | A little bearblog housekeeping
Today I got around to updating a few links and chapters/notes around this living, ever-changing digital book. All cat pics are now properly tagged as /cats, and I've updated the Bear Blog tweaks master list with the link to its updated version on Start.me. And I've finally, finally listed all the tags on the Index page.
I've also added Blog of the Day on the Before You Go section. If you know of any other blog directories I'm missing, please let me know via my Guestbook or email!
Other than that, I still need to finish up the Portuguese navigation pages and, well, get back to actually writing in Portuguese. lol I wanna try a post in Portuguese once a month, see if I can get back into it. English is cool to keep my distance from real life and also to get across to more people, but...
I miss writing in pt.
I've also recently included a last.fm widget to my Currently sidebar. I've literally created a last.fm account just so I could have this, so I was really glad to see it worked pretty well! I wish there was one for video games too. I've heard you can use Google-Sheets-to-JSON to serve as an update tab but idk if I'm up for that.
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A.N. | I wanna do something that impresses you
Today I had a fight with my partner. We don't fight constantly, but when we do, it's always about the same things. Today we had one of these never-ending disagreements we always get into and... he said something that I'm not sure how I should respond to.
I don't wanna air his business to the internet, so I'll just say that he has had a very, very bad deal in life ever since he was born. Living is pretty rough for him, and therefore he feels he's "behind" in life. I guess most of us millennials do feel similarly, but to him this is so much more intense and bigger.
And today, in the middle of our arguing, he said: "I wanna do something that impresses you."
I'm not sure what that means exactly. I don't think he even knows, and despite it sounding sweet (maybe? Man, I don't even know @_@), I'm not sure it's the best frame of mind... or if I care for "impressive feats" from him? I don't know, guys. What's impressive for him might not be for me and vice-versa.
What am I supposed to do with this? We've been together for an entire decade now and he's never said anything like that to me before. I'm not sure how to take it.
Kicking off 2026 with a bang, I guess.
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A.N. | I live
Apparently it's been 1 week and five days since my last post. Weirdly, it feels like forever ago. A lot of things happened these past few days. A lot of work trips, conferences, social activities and many, many more. I miss blogging and updating my Listography almost daily, but I've been too drained to even think about it... Hope to get back to it soon though.
I've updated the bare minimum on my Listo just to remember the feeling and to let people know that I do, indeed, live.
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A.N. | Making a "good" decision can be exhausting
You have to think about so much stuff. You have to consider if you're being gullible, lied to, manipulated. You have to consider your right to privacy, your yearning to do some good even if it's small in the grand scheme of things.
I've been looking into the Ecosia and Ekoru search engines (and, by extension, the Ecosia browser) to see if it's actually a good alternative to my current internet set up (firefox/opera/duckduckgo/yandex) and... I've already spent one good hour with that. The brain is frying weighing privacy x environmentalism, if this conundrum even makes any sense (should I just keep supporting local environmental actions?) and good lord, we do really live in a dystopia.
Which reminds me of the casual Last of Us landscape I see around my city. First world dystopian fiction really is just third world realities with a pinch of sci-fi, isn't it.
Well, back to work now.
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A.N. | Back from the Amazon
Absolutely knackered. But happy. I can say that I saw the Black Sea and the Black River in the same lifetime. Which is crazy. But true.
Still can't believe it, even though it happened to me.
It's the dry season in the Amazon, which means the river level was way low and it's harder to access the riverside communities. I saw the most beautiful sights and the most heartbreaking ones. Protect the Amazon, guys.
I'm still wrapping my head on routine back home and unpacking. There's a lot of stuff that needs doing. Laundry. Rescheduling classes with my students. There's other two events coming up and at least one other work trip.
I'm scared about the future... because it gives me hope.
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A.N. | I love personal websites
I love visiting personal websites. It's been a good replacement for doom scrolling: web perusing. It inspires me and it makes me smile at all the little things people do. Cat stickers scattered around the webpage? You got it. Whimsical Paint-like digital art? Sure. A woodland book? Of course.
I constantly have a bunch of tabs open with personal web spaces I want to keep exploring further. Unlike algorithmic feeds, this side of the internet really is an adventure you got to explore (and earn) by yourself.
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A.N. | Everything is great
My post-COVID brain is working just great, I love it. Working is easy and fun and it brings joy. My body is healthy and free of aches and pains. World politics is a space of reasonable, level-minded individuals. The weather is fine, nothing to worry about. Big Tech is here to help humanity thrive; profit is not the focus. Homelessness is a thing of the past in my country and almost everywhere else; there are no mangy stray dogs or cats in sight. I can bike around without fearing for my life. At night, I'm not afraid of men.
It's fine. I'm fine. Everything is great.
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A. N. | Not Myself
I've been making a real effort to write down difficult emotions. To untangle this ball of feelings into strings of sentences. Verbalize hurt.
So here we go.
I still can't believe what happened in my life. I mean, I know it happened, I know it was real... But I can't believe they happened to me. I remember my first week after Trauma 1 happened. I realized I was super odd, not-myself at my internship job. I remember apologizing to my coworkers. I remember saying "sorry, this isn't really me". It's been almost twenty years since then... And I still feel like I'm not "me". I just realized that. I keep thinking "I miss being myself" and I never understood what that really meant until now. I miss it because I'm not myself anymore, and I guess... I guess I'll never be. I'm something else and I don't recognize myself. I don't like what I am.
I miss being myself.
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A.N. | people's little art on the internet
Sometimes I get this feeling in my chest when I'm looking at people's art on the internet, like I'm about to burst. But it's not big names or artists or anything like that that make me feel this, although I do appreciate their work as well. But not in this case. It's the art of people who are not artists who do it for me. People who are just doing it for fun, or maybe just hobbyists, sharing their little things that look amateur and loved and gorgeous. I feel like I want to reach across the screen and hug them. There's so much whimsy there, and there's so much power in whimsy. Gosh, I love people on the internet sometimes.
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A.N. | bearbloggin'
Paying for a pro account on bearblog makes me want to use all 10 available blog spots and just go crazy with it. I mean, I don't even have enough stuff to write in one singular blog, but that doesn't hinder my crazy ass imagination. Somebody stop me. I must be stopped.
Halp
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A.N. | tabletop gaming session
Today I had a couple friends over to play tabletop games. The night before, of course, I almost called off the whole thing. I love my friends, but I'm exhausted. My social battery has gotten worse with the years. However, I choked out that impulse and they came over. I had a stress migraine halfway through it, had to take my meds, but I'm still glad I didn't cancel. My pregnant friend came over and I hadn't seen her since, well, she got pregnant. The only problem with having girlfriends is that after they have kids they kind of disappear, which is totally understandable I guess. I still miss them though, so I gotta enjoy her while I can.
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