I went to the zoo with Brian's family (minus his dad) today. This was unexpected. Brian's mom paid for my lunch, which was nice, though I decided (regrettably) to get a kid's meal with tangerines in a container instead of waffle fries, and I had to suck on the burger for a few seconds before swallowing, because I still can't chew. I cannot recall a time when I was not in pain. This is an eternal suffering.

Then I took a nap, again. Love naps. I explored more indie gaming culture and made myself a Twitter, because I am stupid. I think I've realized about myself that while I am aesthetically drawn to handmade art — like sketchbook pages, graphite on wrinkled paper, crayons, etc. — I really am a child of the Internet, and I prefer creating and brainstorming in a virtual space more than with my hands. While there is a certain exhiliration that comes from producing work my own hands, I think it's easier to work with ideas and experiment when you have the entire universe of digital tools readily available. And I think, since starting this website, I've realized that it's actually very easy to make art that is idiosyncratic and intimate on the computer, whereas before I really only believed this was possible on paper and forced myself to maintain sketchbooks and collages and whatever. But I'm okay with making stuff on the Internet. NOT digital art — Internet art. Big difference.

Then we made a cake at my house. Apparently, one of my mom's coworkers told my mom that I "don't have a figure like [her's]," and that my mom absolutely this moment must tell me how women gain a lot of weight after giving birth (so I guess I should try to be very skinny, because now, if I gave birth in my present form, at 21 years old, I would be, just, really, hugely massive). Then my mom told me that I shouldn't eat cake. I decided to eat a quarter of the cake.

It's fine. I don't have to be beautiful. I hardly look in mirrors, and I never take selfies, and I avoid looking at recently-shot pictures of myself. It's fine.

I just wish my mom would stop looking at me like I am some freak-of-nature water buffalo who's replaced her daughter with some hideous, malformed blob of girl. Like, I'm never going to be hot — why does she want me to be so badly? I've been attractive at, like, two points in my life. But since puberty — since high school, really — I haven't been. It's fine. She just needs to calm the fuck down and stop feeling bad that I'm not attractive. There is more to life (and more to me) than beauty.

ANYWAY, god, fuck my life, and then after the cake LEANNE CAME SOMEHOW and it was pretty fun, and we watched Rick and Morty and forced her to play our game (PIGEOSO N THE GROUND FOREVER) and watched "The Bachelor in Paradise," which was awful. This was the last evening that Brian would see Carlos and Katie (they leave for Italy tomorrow, also this is why we got cake), and when Katie left she made a joke about having Brian pretend that the nearest pillow was her because she sleeps so often, and then later in the evening Carlos teared up and they hugged each other, tightly, three times. What strange friends.