(no subject)

The last week has been pretty rough for me, mental health-wise. It's a significant contrast to the few weeks before that. Yesterday, I decided that a significant portion of it is due to Miriam's upcoming doctor's appointment on Tuesday. That test isn't done yet, and even if it was, it's taken so long to get anywhere. I've had really high hopes that the new information from the x-ray will lead to a diagnosis and treatment, but as the date gets closer my anxiety about it has become serious enough to affect my day-to-day functioning.

I want so dearly for her to not hurt this much anymore. The prospect that maybe she will is devastating.

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Partly because I wasn't up to doing a lot else, I watched some anime yesterday. Specifically, the last 4 episodes or so of Do It Yourself!!, about a DIY club at a girls' high school and the friendships and connections between the girls who are part of it.

The majority was really light and happy, and there were often little tutorials about how some of the projects were being done, and it makes me happy to think that the show might help girls become more confident about their ability to make and do things. In that way, it was kind of like the way Long Riders! seemed to be inspiring girls to feel confident about bicycling, and I love them both for that.

Near the end, one of the characters, an American exchange student, leaves to go home. It turns out that her mother died some years ago and she lives with her dad, who's been quiet and withdrawn with her ever since. That was unexpected, especially given the tone of the show in general, and it really got me: I was crying my eyes out for a while afterward.

Serufu and Purin's friendship and relationship - seeing them openly caring about each other like they once did - had me crying happy tears near the end too. Maybe I'm prone to crying a lot right now though.
On a lighter note, the American exchange student is supposedly a native English speaker, and she says lots of things in English throughout the show. Friends, her English is *hilariously* bad. I got so many laughs out of listening to this "native English speaker" saying things in English that many native speakers wouldn't have a clue about the meaning of.

But then I thought about creating a show in the US with a Japanese character from Japan who supposedly speaks excellent Japanese but is played by an actor who has no Japanese fluency whatsoever, and it felt kind of awkward.

One last thing that I loved: one of the girls' parents run a hardware store called Waku Waku Wan Wan, which more or less translates to "excited barking," and the shop's logo is a dog holding a hammer in its mouth. I want to shop there!

(no subject)

I just looked at Train Girl's Facebook page. I haven't tried to see what she's been up to in a long time because I have strong, conflicted feelings about her. She has unfriended me, so I suppose I don't need to worry about whether or not and how to connect with her. I don't really understand what happened, and I still have that 1907 book on automobile repair that I brought up from Kenosha to give to her.

Meanwhile, an old friend of my dad's who I knew as a little kid, and who I connected with on Facebook after his death, posted a stupid anti-Biden meme on his wall. I left a polite note saying that it was nice to reconnect with him after my dad's death, but that as the target of orchestrated campaigns of violence and attempts to strip me of civil rights on the part of the Republican party, I didn't want to see this in my feed. Then I unfriended him.

I miss my dad so much. I wish I could talk to him about some of the stuff going on my life. And now it looks like Miriam's dad's health is in question. He's in his 80s, and is scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy because of the possibility of cancer. How could we deal with the loss of her father on top of everything else that's been happening?