Me: “HECK!”

Mariah: “When I was in grade school we had an assembly about finding the thing you like and learning to do it well. I’m. VERY good at grating cheese.”

Yes. Yes they are.

A bowl of grated cheese, captioned “this is not all the cheese” “I was too caught up in the moment to gather evidence of their power”

And lo! I went to cook the mushrooms and they’d BARELY begun to sweat when I turned around and Mariah had absolutely demolished all these giant bricks of cheese

And that’s when Mariah took a deep breath and performed The Reveal:
“I’ve never told you this, but three times a week for the last sixteen years, I’ve grated half a block of cheese onto a pan of popcorn and eaten that for dinner. I got this.”

Mariah and I offered to help make pizza for a large group, and there was SO MUCH CHEESE. Giant block of parmesan. Several pounds of mozzarella. I suggested we take the grating in shifts because this was gonna be hard on the wrist

I had the most Wisconsin version of that experience last night

You know that plotline where your friend is a superhero but you’ve got no idea until it’s 1 AM and you’re both stumbling home from the bar and you get attacked by muggers and your friend, in this hour of need, is forced to reveal that they’ve been training jiu-jitsu since age 3?

So then I imagined myself as the troll to compromise, even though I don’t actually like human chairs. Nothing wrong with a little out of character headcanon once in a while

Me: “But trolls are great!”

Guilt: “TYPICAL MONSTER FALLACY”

But then Guilt galloped in and was like 🚨🚨 “That chair belongs to a human person who may not want to be imagined as a troll. Bad thought! Crimes!” 🚨🚨

A chair under a bridge on some stones very close to the water

saw this chair under the bridge and was immediately and overwhelmingly charmed by the image of a bridge troll, maybe with bad knees, sipping tea on his human chair

Typical monster fallacy: assuming everyone would want to be a bridge troll

EXACTLY

Shoulder closeup

But still. Every time someone acknowledges my sleeve my brain goes “!!! ??? This person can see the future??”
And maybe it’s time to acknowledge that the future is finally now

More night sky tattoo extending onto my back

But customers at work comment on my tattoo now. And then they show me THEIR tattoos, which I absolutely love. Yes, share your decorations!

I settled into a rhythm of “ah, I am this kind of person but nobody can tell” and because my sleeve isn’t finished yet, I still think about it as like, a future thing?

Closeup of new grassy texture on my forearm

It feels strange when people can see my tattoo. I identified for DECADES as The Kind of Person who gets large tattoos, but I didn’t actually get them because of difficulty with
1. Dollars, and
2. Artist access for the style I wanted

Me with a partially finished tattoo. It’s black and white with the night sky and trees and some abstract water

Fifth session on my sleeve yesterday!

It took a village, but this cabbage will not go to waste

A cat with her nose pressed right up against my container of cabbage

And THEN, the cat who lives there and usually ignores me trotted right over in the kitchen and started meowing against my leg until I retrieved the cabbage

Then, when I got to their house, I found out their roommate had set an alarm on his phone to remind me of the cabbage

Sometimes I can be a little uuuuuhhh absent minded about things? But luckily my friends know this, so Lyric sent MULTIPLE reminders regarding the cabbage they left in fridge for me

The inevitable conclusion here is that I die, transform into a ghost, yell “YES!!” and, having wrapped up that loose end, immediately dissipate

My unfinished business is that I HAVEN’T BEEN A GHOST YET

Sam said my soul was unlikely to become trapped by unfinished business because I haven’t got much in the way of business at all, but listen: I have never transformed into a classic Halloween monster, and this is a travesty

Last night at dinner we were discussing who, upon death, would be the best candidate to leave a ghost

The back side of one of the patches, featuring one bazillion stitches

Still not ready for summer though. I gotta be a fatter squirrel about this

Me wearing a rust colored short sleeve button down with black oak leaf patches sewn down one side

Instead I’m buying sunscreen and searching ONCE AGAIN for shorts I don’t hate (impossible) and gathering Avatars of Autumn. This shirt reminded me of fall, but it didn’t go hard enough so I made leaf patches out of an old t-shirt and sewed them on with one bazillion stitches to stop the fraying

I feel like an industrious little squirrel preparing for winter, except summer is the season of dread and acorns won’t help with that

oh my god same??? you’re giving me FLASHBACKS here

Skeleton makeup

Skeleton o’clock