Okay, I’ll give the man some credit as he had a reason for saying the things he said. Yes, it has been hard to find friends with whom I meet with on a regular basis, but when I think about it, I don’t even interact that regularly with my close friends back home. We all got things going on and I usually want to focus on a lot of stuff alone to begin with, so I don’t see this as an issue. In fact, the following weeks after that I had a couple meetups with people I have talked to in months, one being the friend I thought I had lost, and had a blast just catching up. It was legitimately saddening to think I may have lost contact with someone I had known for most of my life, and I will value my time maintaining these existing relationships even more going forward. I don’t, however, think this is a sign I should really strive at push myself out more (well, may I could a little more) than I already am.
Freshman year of college, I was really trying to put myself in whatever club I thought I might fit in to find my next extracurricular endeavor like I had with high school journalism. Even as I’m writing this, I think back to it and feel like people just understood something I didn’t about making friends. I was able to get to know a few people, but nothing would really last. Eventually, I’d just be going to the club for whatever personal enjoyment or hope of connecting I had left. As a sophomore, I sparingly pick two clubs for this go around: ones which weren’t as big as the ones I went to before. Way easier to talk to people. I have since just stuck with a cooking club, who’s circle tables alone I attribute as the cause of me talking to as many people as I did there, and soon I’ll be treasurer of the whole shebang. The last group of regulars I hanged with did fizzle out, but I have introduced myself to a new bunch this semester. They’ve all be pretty cool, and I’ve already got ideas to implement when I take the reigns as a club leader. I see freshman me as someone who looked toward other people’s friendship and thought that is what he wanted, but as I have already described, I’m not the type of guy to hang out with people every day after school. Yet, there was a part of me that thought I should be because it worked in high school.
I wanted to leave this off addressing a line from the previous blog: “this ain’t even about dating; honestly, it feels weird sometime thinking of me with someone (yes, I’ve never had a girlfriend, and it was twice my choice. This ain’t cope).” This is half the reason I wanted to make this post because 1.) that’s a little cringe and 2.) the thought of what if I had given them some time to date me pops up every now and then. The first time I rejected primarily because I wasn’t feeling any way for her. Sure, we were in the same friend group, but we never knew each other outside of that. The second time is a little more interesting. I don’t know when she notices me, but we were in the same math class. One day in the middle of the semester she gets the balls to try and sit next to me at lunch: I always sat alone at the time, so it was pretty easy. It took a few lunches of me apparently playing hard to get, as I started sitting with my brother in the back, that I and my brother’s friend noticed she fancied me. I don’t know how other people act when this happens, but with me being isolated since the school came out of lockdown after two years and having a quarter of the confidence I have now, it just kind of confused and stressed me out not knowing what to do with this information. Every day after, I felt like I was getting closer and closer to something I didn’t know if I wanted, and after five days of this going, on she asks me for my number which internally freaked me out. Let me just say, she is a nice girl who even at the time I didn’t she’d do anything malicious to me, but thinks just felt like they were going so fast that I immediately after getting home sent her an email (I never got her number, I wouldn’t see her till Monday, and I was a nervous reck who would have done things like this either way) to end the unreciprocated love. We chat once after that at a college fair, and I do wish that friendship could have lasted longer but we just drifted apart.
The last one in particular I wonder if something would have happened if I had calmed down and realized I always had control of the situation even as it progressed, but it doesn’t matter at this point. I have no feelings for neither of the two now nor anyone since high school. I don’t know what’s changed about me since then just that my last persisting crush was one I left behind senior year and kept it quiet till it passed just like the rest of them (I’m laughing as I write this; this isn’t sad to me). It does feel a little weird to think of having someone become closer than anyone ever has with me. Maybe because I’ve never actually been in such a relationship and therefore can picture myself doing these things with anyone, or I’m just built different. Yet another recurring thought.
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep
Ah, back so soon are we. Ahhhhhhh . . . . . . . . . . I got the feels today all the sudden. No ugly crying (been there, done that), but the forecast shows some clouds and low chance of rain later tonight. Thought I’d try collecting my thoughts here. When I was at my worst, I was lucky to have a teacher, one of the first I really connected with, there to console me, and that’s a relationship hard for a lot of guys to find. I’ve kind of taken a similar role with my friend from Kazakhstan, hearing him out when he’s dealing with scheiße. Crazy to think we met my first time on ome.tv (omegle type site) and talked for a whole hour.
The slump began when I went to text a friend I’d known since kindergarten on Instagram but hadn’t talked to in a month or two. I started looking back at the texts and realized he’s been fairly variable in when he responds coupled with my previous attempts to meet up with him again falling through in some way on his end. After texting him, for some reason, I decided to look through my other contacts and noticed a female name I didn’t recognize. Upon further inspection, it turned out to be an old friend of mine who had transitioned. This really hit me at the moment, recalling my time with her and remembering how the friendship just kind of fizzled out over the pandemic. A lot of my friendships kind of fizzled out during the pandemic.
I had relied on my other more outgoing friends to invite me and integrate me into their circles all through to middle school, and while I had a blip my senior year actually stepping up and integrating myself into a group of people, I’m still finding myself struggling to bring relationships outside the original setting into something more. This ain’t even about dating; honestly, it feels weird sometime thinking of me with someone (yes, I’ve never had a girlfriend, and it was twice my choice. This ain’t cope).
(Like 20-30 minutes pass)
Aight, emotional me gone for now. Looking this over again, I think the fact that something so significant happened to someone I used to know along with my acknowledgement of how neglectful I am to my friendships has brought me to rethink how I should approach my relationships in the future. I should really try to check in on my peoples at least once a week of twice a month. I still know my Kazakh friend will talk with me and I met someone from my Indo class that goes to my uni, so I’ll start there. I had an idea in my head to try and contact this girl I met on the last day of high school because we suggested making plans to play switch games over that summer with another friend of mine at the time. I totally forgot about it, but maybe when I get back home I can try restarting that friendship. Even now I still look back at that last year and wonder why I felt so fulfilled in that year, but, in reality, I know why: I was active and open in a group of people passionate about the same thing I was. I just keep making excuses not to put myself out there.
This site was partially meant to be a safe zone for me to do that in, with only those who distantly know me through Instagram or randos on Neocities see my scheiße for the most part. Writing this out definitely helped me pull my thoughts together as to why I’m feeling this way. I usually try doing similar process in my head, but I’ve notice I’ll just be like “hmm, I don’t know” a lot. Having everything spewed out on a page makes it harder to get away from my problem. In other words, look forwards to more of my loner boy drama /s. I’ll probably post more stuff like this, but hopefully not as sad as this was. Special thanks to Clairo’s discography for being with me while writing this.
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep
Aight, been a bit since my last post. You guys see Civ 7 came out; I personally like the more styled vibe of Civ 6, but I really like how they’ve done the map . . . Anyway, let’s get into what’s been happening here. I got these collapsable text boxes directly from another site (forgot what site, but you can just inspect the page if you really need to have it). The hardest part was centering the damn thing, but that became redundant once I began making this place more flexible.
Not sure how noticeable this is, but I used the sadgrl template builder as a foundation for the rest (to the people on reddit saying using templates is defeats the purpose of Neocites, I did a lot of scheiße to make this website, okay; this ain’t no copy-paste sadgrl lookin’ ass website). Mainly I just wanted to make my site mobile friendly as I plan to promote it a bit on my socials, and I just happened to find out templates exist. Now, there were two aspects that took me way to long to do: making the navigation bar with images and putting the logo in the corner (I’m sadly serious about that last one. The main time waster was the design cause I decided I wanted a old screen look with those ambient lines, which involved me spending a while in Affinity Photo getting confused on what selection I’m masking cause I haven’t masked in a long time. My only qualm with these buttons now is they vary in height from page to page due to the page your on’s button being replaced with a home button. I might just leave a permanent home button now that I’m thinking about it. I also want to try bring the original pop out effect I originally had back, but right now I don’t know how to do that in a way that doesn’t push the original images out of the way. An alternative I was thinking of was the “absolutely useless cpu killing crt effect” Metamorphosis uses, but I still need to figure out a way to have it only effect images when hovered over.
We now move on to the logo. For some reason, despite the template saying exactly where to put images on the header, whenever I used “img” in the header area, it just shows an empty box with a border. Where does the image go? I don’t know, but when I associate a variable with logo and id the “img” to the variable, it shows with a border. Okay, now I just have to get rid of the border. Set border to none; border is still there. Checks image; Image has no border. AI couldn’t even find what was wrong. Eventually, an ingenious idea came to me: what if I just photoshopped it in the header? Boom, the pain is over; there is once again peace on earth.
From here on, I’m going to start working on adding content to this site. Probably going to start with a cooking guide. I want the cooking section to be like my version of Good Eats: teaching how to use ingredients with some recipes to get you started with. Half of it will likely just be me telling you to get $10 pressure cooker from a secondhand shop; mine was practically new when I bought it a year ago.
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep
NO, I have not forgotten about this site. I’m working on making this space more catered to mobile users by making some design tweaks to the sadgrl layout and turning it into what I have now but better, cause mobile and stuff. It’s taking me a bit, but I think I will have the main page done next week if I have time.
Anyway, I had my first Indo class today and its humbled and boosted my ego in different ways. Going in, I already suspected my talking would stumble a bit as I rarely get to practice conversation, but my pronunciation seems to be at least better than a few of the other students: rolling Rs and have an idea of the accents and letters from family interactions. What’s really getting my hopes up is that I’ve finally found a spot where I can practice speaking, which is hard to find (at least for free). It reminded me a lot of high school German with assignments and everything, and I remember doing decently well in the class, mainly just because I was only taking the class for a requirement. I still have some understanding of German and continue to look back at the class for ways to learn Indo, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
I’m considering trying to hit up one of my cousins to see if he’d be willing to practice with me. One of them, for the longest time, I had childhood memories of having little trouble talking with, but after meeting him last summer, I realized he was just talking through the other. He’s very shy about his English. I’ve tried in the past to expose him to the language while we played some Minecraft, but he’d rather type than try speaking. In the Indo class, we’ll eventually have to talk about someone from Indo, so maybe I can try getting him to talk again once he sees how far I’ve gotten. IDK
This whole thing just another self-reminder that just using Duolingo is kind scheiße: have multiple learning sources
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep
Selamat malam/good night greetings! It is 10:50 p.m (yesterday). as I am writing this, but I want to make this a regular thing, so here we are. Those of you who’ve seen the anime Nichijou probably know part of that opener, but, in case not, I’ve been trying to learn Indonesian. I’ve been at it for a few years now but only really took it somewhat seriously within the past year having done some lessons on The Indonesian Way course and got Anki on my phone for convenient flash cards. Anki has been the best help in my vocab. I used to exclusively use Duolingo like your usual bule, but there’s no good way to do a holistic review of the entirety of the learned vocab. Now, I just have the entire Duolingo list on Anki and just take flashcards sessions whenever I’m waiting for class.
Speaking of classes, I was looking through r/Indonesian one day and ended up finding free online classes for Indonesian by the Indo D.C. embassy. Honestly, there have been some learning opportunities on my campus that I have been letting pass by because my conversational skills are very single, simple sentenced, so I’m hoping that this opportunity ends up being like my experience taking German in high school: having assignments that encourage student conversations and really exercise proper grammar. I have tried basing how I learn Indonesian on how I learned German (well, I wasn’t fluent in to, and I certainly am not now), and while it has helped me find the current resource I use now, I’ve always felt having a dedicated class helped just that bit in immersing me in the language. The classes start in February, and no matter what happens, I’m going to try and pull of some conversations once the classes are over. My mom taught me scheiße and I refuse to continue sitting quietly in on the family Lunar New Year calls.
Today, though, I watched a video from maigomika, very slice of life type channel, and it brought back an epiphany I’ve had many-a-time: its those little things man! Like, not just in your home but everywhere that makes scheiße real. I always think back to my trip to Cancun as the worst vacation. When we first arrived, it was looking to be a fun time: staying at a nice resort and eventually we’d be going out to see the ruins, but as the week, went on everything slowly became more noticeably off. This resort burger is . . . hammy, there’s people who are “natives” as their job, HOLY SCHEIßE CHICHEN ITZA IS JUST A GIANT CRAFTS FAIR. I’m sure most people who go through are just looking to relax at the resorts, but all these small aspects piled up and made everything seem like a façade. Even on my trip to the Gili islands, a very touristy trio of islands in Indo east of Bali, there were Indonesians living right behind the small resorts in the center of the island. One of them even helped fix a bike we had borrowed from the place we stayed at.
These experiences have given me a longing to go somewhere no one ever talks about going. I’ve talked with my a few times about various trip ideas like a road trip to Alaska or a pilgrimage to the Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo, but there are two places that have really been on my mind: the Philippines and Kazakhstan. Both could involve people I know as a local guide, but the Kazakhstan one is the most interesting as I have only met my buddy from there online. We met on Ome.tv, talked and called occasionally over the past year, and I’ve shown him this website, so he might be reading this (Hi!). Haven’t told him about possible coming over, but it is a fantasy that you hear a lot about on the internet that, yes, has many dangers to it but could be really fun, maybe, hopefully? Nah, he’s a chill dude. I also really want to go there just so we can do a personal exchange of culture. When my cousin from Indo came to America for the first time last summer, she was excited to see things I took for granted. Looking back, there really aren’t a lot of places like your local American Target or Costco in Indo, and now I am wondering what I might find for myself in an average Kazakh town if I came to see my online buddy. Until then, I’ll be playing the points game towards the trip and remind myself the everyday things my cousin once only saw on Big Bang Theory.
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep
Yep, this site had been one of the main things on my mind as of late, despite having abandoned it for about a year. I have finally started coming back once my winter break hit, and while I obviously wouldn’t consider myself competent in site building, my complete vision of this site has started to seem ever more plausible. It’s gotten to the point where I’m looking through other sites’ source code and questioning the foundational code on my site. Codecademy’s courses were, and still are, fairly useful in getting to where my knowledge is today, but the pacing definitely contributed to my lack of interest for a while. First you learn html, then having completed an entire course you learn that you need to do another course to learn a whole other language to do all the cool stuff. I’m still mid-way through that second course, Codecademy’s CSS course, but I have little desire to continue right now after learning the box model. After figuring that out, most of what I wanted to do seemed possible and everything else has been searchable.
This website in general has brought me a lot of joy and self-worth as I have tried learning to code on-and-off many times and I get to create something of my own. Back in high school, I was obsessed with helping build-up our student media site, especially the news magazine’s segment which I was a part of. I was on there whenever I could looking at article analytics and aiding in the site’s design wherever I could. I want to grow this site into a project similar, if not better, to that experience but with a focus on me and my interest. Once this site’s more complete, I’m a go full blast on my socials and really get this going.
Yap Yap Yap,
Mr. Yep