Awaken for a moment from your dark night

[ariad]

Happy Halloween! I'm on here because lately I have been feeling terribly noisy in my head and am therefore doing a sort of cleanse that includes reducing my time on Twitter dot com. Thus, I am in need of another outlet for my thoughts and another record of daily life, and where better than my original social medium* that is arguably better than Twitter for both of those things?

Yes, it's very noisy up here, and I consequently feel overwhelmed am unable to give my focus to tasks that deserve it, such as writing. When my mind is already filled with noise, it's so easy to dump in more noise and so difficult to clear it enough to work on anything requiring brainpower.

So I've set some resolutions for what I am calling No Noise November. I'm not necessarily aiming to last the month; I'm just going until I figure out how these new habits work for me. The resolutions are:

• Reduce Twitter dependency. On both my phone and my laptop, I've logged out of all accounts except my locked, and I've muted (nearly) everybody on my locked to break the habit of refreshing my feed every two minutes. I'm keeping the app on my phone for DMs and to pop onto friends' profiles directly when I wonder how they're doing. I'm very interested in the idea that it is possible to be friends with a person without having their thoughts injected directly into my brain twenty times a day. What a concept.
• Stop wasting time on YouTube. My YouTube dependency is bad. I essentially use it like TikTok, clicking video after video until I find two hours have elapsed without my noticing. I am banning myself from YouTube unless there is a specific video I am looking for on there, and even then, I gotta ask myself if I really need to watch it.
• Stop wasting time on AO3. God. Since getting back into Harry Potter, I keep finding logging on to AO3 at 11 pm to read a short little bedtime story—mainly Remus/Sirus, but it surprises even myself just how much shit I'll go for—and suddenly it's 2 am and I need to be awake in four hours. No AO3 after 9 pm if I have work the next day.
• Listen to less rock and pop music and more moody instrumental music. This resolution is similar to when I was having anxiety a couple of years ago and took a break from horror. I love rock and pop, but they are noisy genres. I think more clearly and more creatively when I listen to ambient music. I'm neutral on folk and R&B right now; they don't help me think, but they don't overwhelm my brain, either. I'm not going to delete rock and pop music entirely from my fall playlist because I still want to get to know these songs that interest me. But after several weeks of Zeal & Ardor, My Chemical Romance, Taylor Swift, and Lizzo, I'm shifting focus.

I think that will be it. Target the problem and leave the rest.

Halloween was nice. I had thought about going to a punk show called Hardcore Halloween on Saturday—I'd tossed around the idea of punching up my standard Hamburglar costume with a punk jacket and black metal makeup—but when the day came, I was tired and, as mentioned, mentally overwhelmed. Instead, I spent the day watching Taylor Swift interviews on YouTube (because I have a problem!!!!!), and on Sunday, I had the Sims in my Sims 2 Asylum Challenge throw a Halloween party. Today, I dressed as Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was a very last minute costume that absolutely nobody recognized, but I got good reactions to the makeup anyway, and more importantly, I had fun doing it.

* Edit: Oh my god, it was only after I posted this entry that I realized this isn't LiveJournal. Whatever. My Dreamwidth is my LiveJournal. It is effectively my LiveJournal.

Comments

[aranciata]

Your Cesare costume was so good. I feel it was fate that you would dress as Cesare, be Cesare. I still remember the Halloween-In-February party you had just before COVID kicked down the doors of existence and you had that film playing on your TV just for ambience. Before we watched Crimson Peak, of course. And that was my first time watching Crimson Peak!

I think your No Noise November idea is stupendous. Things are beamed into our brains so rapidly and so constantly while we are awake that sometimes it gets hard to even remember that we have, like, a body. Or maybe that's just me. I get so caught up in all of it that time just hurtles by, and countless things go unexpressed... and anything worth expressing is going to take some effort and some silence to coalesce. That's what I think.

I liked reading about your life and how you are doing. It's been so nice to see you get back into Harry Potter. Every time you tweet an excerpt from one of the books the memories of reading them on my childhood bed come rushing back. When Deathly Hallows came out I remember we—my mom, uncle, and me—were clearing out my grandpa's house because he had just died. My mom went out to Target to get me a copy as soon as they opened, and came back to the house with it and surprised me. She let me go upstairs into the guest room that was usually mine, and didn't make me help out with anything that day—just let me read. She brought up meals for me and everything. When Harry visited his parents' graves I cried harder than I have ever cried at a book...

Have you been able to do any writing yet? If you had a Patronus what would it be? Tell me a headcanon you have about Remus and Sirius. I love you friend xoxo!

[ariad]

dearest brella. i am so glad that i got to spend my last social event pre covid celebrating halloween with you. except that i then went to nashville and hung out with beth, but that was work and not halloween

i am enjoying no noise november!!!! i am very very bad about the youtube, and my twitter time is creeping back up, and i dont have a body i just have harry potter epubs, but i do think its a net positive not receiving ninety million takes per second. i should try to re-up and be more intentional about it again, at least until the end of november. but i think i can easily stay off my main twitter acct for longer bc i dont miss it lol

i like when you tell stories about your life. it is amazing to me that you remember things because i typically remember nothing at all. like that time you had stories about all the things in your room.

it took me 16 days but i finished a poem!!! i think. one line was kicking my ass for a long time, but i think i'm satisfied with it. i wrote two paragraphs of a fic for these violent delights by micah nemerever, but i'd have to reread the book to actually plot the fic lol. as it is, it's just a vibe. i don't know what my patronus would be, but one of my electives would be ancient runes, and the other is a coin flip between arithmancy and care of magical creatures. one of my beloved headcanons is that sirius likes to make fun of pureblood families by putting on a really posh accent and remus says to him "that's your normal accent"

i have a cat on my arm so typing is very hard right now