I’m still so pleased with how this piece turned out.

"I have fusion related kinks"

Everyone's first thought for some reason:

What I meant:

Illegal she's already married

you’d be surprised on how many people im married to

I am so full of love...............

Dating now I am 30 is so, genuinely, wonderful. I'm talking to her and we both agree, we just want to make meaningful connections, and if something grows from there, it's wonderful regardless.

I was talking to one of my married friends about how this guy said it was intimidating on how incredibly loved I was; up to that point, everyone noted it as like, a weapon or something, like I am so loved, be scared of that. And he smiles, and goes, "you are beloved. Some people are scared of that, but you'll find people who won't," he laughs, "you are beloved. Yeah."

She listens to me prattle on about a recipe I've perfected for years, that I can't eat because it contains things I'm allergic to in it. She pauses, and asks, "why did you spend so long perfecting it if you can't eat it? Why not make a recipe you can eat too?"

I tell her, it's not about me. It's the gesture that I made this for you. I wanted it to be as good as I could ever make it, and I've made it for you, and I will continue to make it for you.

She goes, "oh, it's made of your love."

July 2020

March 2023

My improvement after almost three years!

I was really proud of the first illustration in 2020 and I don’t want to mock the way I used to draw. I don’t think there’s a time when we stop learning and I’m looking forward to getting even better

crotch gem?

guys hot uquiz was just discovered but I'm taking it about 100 yrs too late. anyways everyone share how wifeable you are.

THE WIFE RATING SCALE 1929

i love re-consuming media i used to love when i was younger. like wow! child me still is in me i am holding her hand and keeping her safe and doing her favorite things with her!!!!

Beautiful from Ordinary Days

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

the wandering painter, part one

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Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

Zelda travelling around Hyrule after the Calamity and people are tripping over themselves to tell her stories about the Hero because they love that feral cryptid mad man and are so proud of him

'I met him when I was about to get eaten by a Hinox...he jumped off a horse, fired 12 arrows in the blink of an eye and then got smacked in the face with a tree...but then he came back and hacked away at it's legs with this stupidly big sword until it finally died'

'He was wearing this weird patched together mask that looked like a monster but he made enough curry for everyone so we didn't like to ask'

'But...the hero was a girl? She wore these lovely green silks and every time she came out of the Gerudo Canyon she had a bag full of electric safflina to sell to Beedle over there. The Gerudo think she's an amazing fighter, which says a lot, and she always thanked me for looking after her horses when she went into the desert'

'I swear to Hylia that he ran through here wearing nothing but his underwear and a mask shaped like a leaf...claimed he was looking for the Children of the Forest. Sorry, Princess, but I'm not sure he was quite right in the head at the time'

'He used to creep in here silently wearing this grey mask and with enough lizards and beetles that we could make enough elixirs to last for a month. Not sure I ever saw his face without it'

And the entire time Link is stood neatly dressed, three steps away, listening to every word and no one pays him the slightest bit of attention. Because none of them cotton on that 'prim and proper Royal Knight' Link and 'I will defeat this Lynel with a stick, a pot lid and a bucket load of adrenaline' Wild Child Hero is the same man. Especially with how many masks he owned.

When they walk away and are out of sight and earshot Zelda just raises her eyebrow with a smile and he is like '...I can explain...it made sense at the time'

in honor of last season’s poem being called “”end poem”” (all quotes mandatory) this season i made one out of pieces of the actual end poem

I keep talking to my friends and my family about community and how I'm looking at where I want to live, and how I've narrowed down to basically two areas- one would be down the road from my brother, and the other would be down the road from my best friend's partner, where she'll likely live with him if/when they get married.

Both are places I'm connected to ones I love and the future of that time with the ones I love. How wonderful to think I could invite my brother and his partner over for dinner on a weeknight, how could it be a bother, we only live five minutes apart? Or one day when my dearest friend has kids, hey I can come mind the kids for a bit, how about we walk down the road to the park?

And I wonder, as my parents did this, to move to be closer to family, my parents closest friends also moved to an entirely new city just to stay close to them. And I think about my grandmother, who moved from italy to here, and then moved state to state, where groups of families ended up moving and following to keep everyone within arm's reach? We always had and still do have large communities bc that connection always somehow drives us all together.

I sit and look at house plans. Two bedroom houses no longer take my eye, three bedroom layouts with space for a small yard hold my attention like "this could be the spare room, and there's where I'd plant my Nonna's fig tree in the yard. We'd have space for a dog here, and I'd have a double garage for someone else to be with me, too," like it feels instinctive that these are necessities. It absolutely will be.

I will build my own home, and I know people I love will be close by. It's exactly what's meant to be.