Hi! I exist!

So I got really, really depressed without maybe being fully aware of it in any sense other than feeling like the last time I was all the way awake was maybe 2019. I try to keep a diary, and there’s just gaps of entire months in which I… apparently existed. And I was working and going to social things and stuff so it wasn’t like I was in bed all day, I was totally contracting the right muscles to move my body around. I was like 99% alive. I don’t know if I’m better, but at least I’m writing this.

(To be clear if anyone worries: I am not in danger, I have people, this isn’t a cry for help, it’s just my excuse note for disappearing.)

The reason for this is that my life has become sort of a grand tour of the Omnicrisis. One workplace closed down due to COVID; the next had me doing COVID testing, triage, contact tracing, and ultimately vaccinations. I am genuinely proud of the work I did there during the worst of the pandemic, but it was exhausting. Then that job got shut down due to private equity malfeasance. So I got a new job, which I’m still at so I’m not giving details, but… it has turned out to also be highly exposed to the Omnicrisis.

Oh, and being transgender, that thing I thought was really fun when it was safer and you could say shit like “my gender today is incandescent frog… with a hint of lemon” without worrying about being screencapped by a domestic terror network? It turns out that was real so I’m kind of stuck with it but also half the country has decided to be actual Nazis about it.

(The wonderful thing about owning your own domain is that if anyone tries to be like “uh, if it doesn’t come from the Braunau region of Austria it’s just sparkling disagreement” in the comments, I can just fucking delete it.)

So yeah, I kind of ran entirely out of creative energy for some reason. Moral weakness, I usually figure.

But I have two pieces of good news to share!

---

First: I have three new friends! Mrs. Frisby is orange and white and the spitting image of old Cornflower (Z”L, love you forever babe), and she’s also a really good mouse. Mice tend to take some taming before you can handle them, but Mrs. Frisby was jumping in my hand and snuggling up on Day One.

Tess is brown and very small and she’s the engineer of the group, which is a thing mice can be. I mean I’ve seen this mouse build a culvert out of toilet paper tubes so she could tunnel under the water bottle without putting the spout out of reach. (I do not know why she needed to tunnel under the water bottle, but it was important.)

Constance is black and white and a bitey little monster taking a little longer to tame, but she remains a valued contributor to our team.

---

And secondly: I have a plan that will put actual content up here! I’m going to keep the blog alive even while I’m Going Through It, and also save a lot of writing and art that would otherwise be lost to defunct/might-as-well-be websites, by beginning Rerun Season. I’ll be scheduling reposts of things I made for other sites to go out every Friday morning. I’ll also try to do original things, but I can’t guarantee a schedule on that. I’ll aim for less than six months this time.