› pansyseed › diary

i wrote a big diary entry a few days ago when i thought the site overhaul was going to take a lot fewer days than it has to get finished, but during the time between writing it and starting completely over on my site redesign it has somehow already fallen out of step with what direction i want to take the diary section of the blog in the first place. i mean, for starters, it actually predates the idea of having a "diary" as a separate entity from a "blog."

speaking of the difference between the two, my intention is that the diary will be for, you guessed it, diary entries. while the blog on the other hand will, you'll never believe this, be for blog posts. the distinction between these two is that diary entries are intended to be more me-or-the-site-focused, whereas blog posts are like... calling them essays feels like overselling it. i mean, they're like blog posts. as opposed to diary entries. maybe this is less unintuitive than i'm making it out to be.

it also felt a little bit... corporate, almost? i tend to write in a more formal way overall when i talk at length, especially if it's for any kind of audience (even if it's just a one-on-one conversation), but it felt like i was giving a quarterly update to my board of directors or something. i guess if i ever need to tell someone about an expense report, i'm prepared.

i got a new laptop recently. my old one was broken pretty much out of the box, but still usable up until about a week ago. i opened it--with the intention of revisiting my neocities, actually--and the screen was completely broken. like, completely. just utterly unusable. and on top of that, it wouldn't load anything anyway. i couldn't even get to the login screen. i was lucky enough to be able to get a new one extremely quickly, though. it's not hp, and it doesn't have intel hardware, which is a huge win, because my last one had both. not to mention it has double the ram, a better screen, and a terabyte of storage. i would have been in hell trying to do everything for the site on the old computer. some pretty significant silver linings.

i've been sick for the past few days. i assumed it was the flu at first, then i lost my sense of smell, so i took a covid & flu a/b antigen test the next day and came back negative for all three. then the day after that (today, actually) my sense of smell mostly came back... on one side. that's a funny experience. my left nostril is sniffing like it's never sniffed before, frankly. but clearly the loss of smell was congestion. not that i'm happy to be so congested that i completely lose the ability to smell, but i'm at least glad it wasn't something more serious.

also, serious endorsement for the powers of nyquil. i took nyquil once and it (half-)restored my sense of smell. it also made me feel a little bit like a stick of chalk? but i think that's just me. i don't think that's something that would happen to most people. honestly i assume most people wouldn't understand what the hell that even means.

time is a really funny thing. it always feels both longer and shorter than it is, i think. it feels like it's, like, 6pm to me right now. and it feels like my move is eons out and happening tomorrow. some of the feelings of imminence are because i have barely packed anything at all. i haven't been packing like i should regardless but now that i'm sick i'm not in a state to be doing all of that anyway. but, to be honest, i've been going "oh g-d i need to start packing NOW" for months. so if i didn't want to be sick and panicking i should have actually been doing that when i was thinking it before.

in the original/old entry, i gave a bunch of general life updates from the past few years. but i never really got into the habit of talking about my life much on here before, so most of them felt kind of out of nowhere. like, i didn't even have that i was dating anyone anywhere on my site before. and now i'm coming back and being like, oh by the way i'm engaged. oh by the way i'm moving in with my long distance fiancees. like, what? obviously i'll still talk about the various events of my life in general, but i don't feel the need to make a point of a huge catch up and reintroduction type of thing.

one thing i will make a point of updating, although only buried in this post because i really do not want to make a whole thing out of it, is that one of my cats, angel, passed away in july of 2025. the seventh, specifically. she was nine, turning ten that year. her health had always been pretty fragile, honestly, so it was no small feat that she made it as long as she did. i was in phoenix with horizon (fiancees) when it happened, so i didn't get to see her in her final days. i'm grateful for it in a lot of ways, because i don't think i could have handled finding her. but i wish i had gotten to hold her one last time, y'know. if there's an afterlife, she's sleeping on my dad's legs in it. my little moonshadow.

if you're a previous viewer of the site, that's why the cats page didn't make a return with the overhaul, at least as of now. it feels really heavy to update it that she's gone in some way, or to remove her from it, or anything like that. it may return at some point in the future, but as of now, it's quietly riding off into the sunset (read: languishing in the old site files zip).

another page that isn't making a comeback as of now but for far less depressing reasons is the music page. that one i just know the specific tasks that would go into making it and they make me go aghhhh no. please. don't make me do that. so since no one is making me do that i'm not doing it. i probably will at some point, because i do really like it conceptually. i just don't want pretty much at all to have to choose music to put on it. or to think of how specifically i would be laying out the page. or anything else about it. into the boundless "to dos" and "would be nices" it goes.

by the way, what the hell was i thinking while coding this website before? seriously. i did everything in the most unintuitive, broken, and circuitous way possible. i'm sure in a lot of ways i still am, but good lord. i assume it must have something to do with my pre-existing html/css knowledge coming solely from editing tumblr themes? but i truly have no idea what was going through my head at the time. i can only assume the answer is "literally nothing."

also it was UGLY lmao. i know vaguely what was going through my head with the design choices, which was: "thinking of design choices is so hard." and i was right and that's still true now, but jeez i do not like the old design. i recognize if you're just joining us you have no point of reference for what i'm talking about, and you are not going to it's so ugly and broken. you are just going to have to trust me on this. i'm much, much happier with the current setup. i don't think i was ever happy with the old design, so that's a pretty good upgrade!

the one thing missing here from the original entry is extended gushing about my fiancees, so i'll leave you off with an excerpt from that so they can find it and bully me for being gay: "i still don’t know how i got this lucky. nearly every piece of good news in my life is tied directly back to them. everything feels easier and more vibrant with them. the whole world feels awash with color and warmth. i could not be luckier. i do not under any circumstances deserve this. selfishly, i will keep hold of it despite this."