Spotty little mushroom person

2021-07-26T13:48:14Z

Not feeling great about my appearance lately. Specifically my skin and hair, but generally haven’t thought I looked great.

Last month I broke out pretty seriously, for the first time since I think the pandemic began. My Curology prescription, which had been doing pretty well by me, seemed to have abruptly stopped working, and my chin has been a spotty pink mess for weeks now. I made an appointment with an actual dermatologist who recommended an expensive prescription-only preparation which doesn’t seem to have made a dent in it, but since going away to see Bernie my use of it hasn’t been that consistent. I probably need to make sure I’m using it every night for a solid period of time before I’m sure it won’t do the job. But in the meantime, the spots are pretty bad, and right over my chin area where my skin is most showing its age. :-/ I’ve been trying not to fixate on it, but a year of Zoom calls has made me very aware of how my face is starting to change.

Sigh. Acne and sagging skin? Why do I have the worst of youth and age at the same time?

And I hate my hair. I’ve been growing it out from my short cut of the last several years, but I really don’t like the weird in-between stage it’s been in for months. I don’t know how to style it so it doesn’t look awkward, like I’m a little mushroom person. I think a lot about shaving it back down into a quiff, tall in the center and razored on the sides. I actually think I made it work, and I enjoyed having the aspect of a fierce bird. But as I’m aging, I think I might be getting too old for such a severe look. God knows I can’t function if boys don’t think I’m pretty, so I think I need to grow it out long again into something more femme. I have kind of missed having girlier hair. But I can’t get there without going through this awkward growing-out period. And if I shave it down again out of frustration, it’ll take even longer to get it long again. So I guess I’m stuck being patient and weird-looking a while more.

At least I’ve been in pretty good shape lately. Took a few pictures lately where that’s visibly on point, which makes me feel a bit better about things. I worked out really seriously during lockdown, probably the toughest workouts of my life, so I’ve got that going for me at least. However I basically did nothing over the two and a half weeks Bernie visited, so I feel so week and squishy right now. I need to get back in my good habit so dragging myself through the workout isn’t so painful. It took me a long time to build up the strength, and I really don’t want to lose it. Not to mention the slammin’ body it gave me.

Photoshop takes care of the pimples. If only my hair weren’t so mushroomy.

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Accomplishments I’m proud of in 2020

2021-01-02T03:48:14Z

This has been a hard year for everyone, and one we’re all happy to see the back of. But for me personally, I will admit it could have been a lot worse. I like solitude and dealt with social distancing a lot better than more gregarious people did, and my job was able to adapt to the work from home model fairly well. It meant I was able to keep safe and relatively happy even during difficult times.

I was also able to stay productive and creative. I used my increased time at home to make things, and I’m actually really proud of the things I made. I added in several activities I’d been wanting to make a habit for a long time. The end result was a lot of which I’m very proud to have done:

- read 38 books this past year.

- wrote a TON of things with Bernie.
— a new pilot script for an hour-long sci-fi show called From Dust.
— four episodes of a half-hour comedy called Dream Machine
— a radio adaptation with Jeremy Holstein of the Jeeves and Wooster story Pearls Mean Tears
— almost 20,000 words of a prose fan fiction about Steve Rogers’s post-Endgame life, His Part to Play.
— a new full-length Mrs. Hawking play, the Justin Hawking-centered comedic spinoff Gentlemen Never Tell.

- put together four staged readings recorded on Zoom of the four episodes of Dream Machine, which were incredibly fun and funny to perform.

- shot two full-length socially-distanced versions of the current Mrs. Hawking shows, part VI: FALLEN WOMEN, and the new spinoff GENTLEMEN NEVER TELL, by using a system of my own design

- increased my charitable giving by almost three hundred percent, to environmental and social justice causes.

- drew 251 portraits of various people, to practice my ability to recognizably capture human faces

- got into very good shape by taking on a challenging at-home workout routine

- successfully taught two classes entirely online, allowing most of my students to succeed despite the challenges

I didn’t do everything I wanted to do this year. But I did a lot, and I’m very happy that I managed what I did.

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All Eyes on Me

Spotty little mushroom person

Accomplishments I’m proud of in 2020