Am I Allowed To Call This 'Pre-Halloween Yap Sesh'

9/10/25

In less than a month I’ll be turning 20! Holy fucking shit!

I have not done anything with my life! I did well in school and got my A-levels and I feel like nothing has been returned for it. Except for the crippling fear of dropping out of university. Which I haven’t attended yet.

Is this oversharing? I got accepted to a real nice place when I was 18 but I ended up dropping the course in favour of an admittedly well-needed gap year. I hadn’t had a job before, I had no money, no friends, no real world experience, and I figured that I didn’t want to figure all of these things out after being dropped in the middle of a new city with greater school responsibilities than I’d ever had thrown at me. Take a year off, start working, save up, and then get back on track. It’d look good on paper.

And here I am still at home!! Why? I wish I knew! Actually I do know. I didn’t find any jobs until halfway through the year, so I hardly have much in my bank, and while I was searching I convinced myself that no university would accept me. So basically I didn’t reapply. Don’t tell anyone that.

Even now, for whatever reason, I just can’t see myself doing well in life. I mean, the idea that I’ll have my own place to live and a stable job doesn’t feel achievable. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen to me, but I can’t picture anything good. That’s a little demotivating when it comes to my lifelong desire to get a degree, which I’ll have to pay off. Although I’m not too worried about student loan debt, it’ll get sorted.


It’s been a little over a year since I started teaching myself HTML and I’d say it’s been worth every second. Anything that makes my time online more productive is worth the effort, to be frank.

But! That sounded a lot more downtrodden than I wanted even despite my permanent mask of irony!! So to attempt to rephrase - I really have loved every second spent personalising my spaces and making sure that everything I say is genuine. I often worried that a lot of my interests were forced onto me by the web and now I feel a little more comfortable with myself now that I’ve been given the time to avoid 34GB worth of external influence shone into my retinas per day. I need to put active effort into sharing what I truly love. Not to be too dramatic but I feel like more of a rounded person than before, I know what I care about and what I don’t and life is a little slower and it feels incredible.

The only way to elaborate on this is to just… look at the rest of this site. I love everything here, even if some parts are a little neglected. :/


I considered putting this somewhere else but I’m starting to think that being able to put things like this down in a casual conversation (a conversation with who? Myself?) is a sign of progress. I kinda don’t have an issue with my old self harm scars anymore, and the vast majority of people don’t notice or care about them. I get treated the same when I roll up my sleeves in the store, and nobody will point them out if I’m hanging out with them. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but they’re mostly overwhelmingly positive. I still keep them from my relatives, though, that’s not a conversation I want to have any time soon. Glad this is something that I most likely won’t be bringing into my 20s.


With my birthday coming up in less than a month - the one to mark the end of my teen years, no less - I think I should allow myself to indulge in some stupid shit. I’m gonna look for some of the albums that I wanted when I was younger but thought I would regret later. If anything, I regret not buying From Under The Cork Tree back when it was all I listened to. I regret that the single volume of the Evangelion manga I bought 2-ish months ago was my first and only physical manga. I regret that the handmade pins of Rei and Lain I got from Etsy god-knows-when are the only pieces of merch I own for any show I’ve ever loved. I do have plenty of collections of memorabilia - keychains, crystals, I guess pens too? - but nothing… nerdy. Dumb. If you’re super young and reading this, just waste all your money on these things while you can. Make the most of it.

So, for a basic search list, that I want to find in person because I’m weird about buying things online -

Also for my birthday, I want to make a cake. I bake pretty often, so this isn’t some great endeavour; I’m actually hoping to use this chocolate cake recipe since I’ve already made it before and wow it was good! Small tip - you only need half the amount of sugar for the buttercream. I added a little extra cocoa to attempt to make up for it, and it came out fine.

…I should add extra cake tins to my wish list.


But before my birthday is Halloween!! Oh my god! I need to catch up on all the media I’ve been saving for this month.

Firstly, books. I already read Dracula for the first time much earlier this year, so I probably won’t be rereading it now. If I did opt to reread it, I’d like to try Dracula Daily. Maybe next year.

Also earlier this year, I finally found a copy of Audition by Ryu Murakami in my local Waterstones (I believe that’s Barnes and Noble if you’re in the US). Decided to take the bus to the nearest store after work instead of going straight home, and the rest was dumb luck. God, I’d wanted to read that one ever since I first heard of it. Apparently the movie adaptation is big in horror film circles, but I tend not to go there.

If you’re familiar with ‘booktok,’ which you will be if you discuss books online to any extent, you might’ve heard of In The Miso Soup blowing up over there. It was toted as extreme gore, so naturally my edgy little self had to go see what it was all about. The atmosphere wasn’t all that, but those few gorgeous scenes of violence were all it took to get me combing through the rest of the author’s work. As I’ve said a couple times, I prefer to find things in person, let them come to me organically, otherwise I probably would’ve burned through all his work at 16. Despite my preferences, I found an ePub of Piercing, which is one of the few that I never deleted from my phone. I’m not big on slasher films, but I sure seem to be hooked on what I’d describe as the readers’ equivalent.

And, again, despite myself, I may have bought a copy from Amazon, since I couldn’t find it elsewhere at the time.

Anyway, on the day I found Audition, I tried to make the most of my little trip, so I also got a tiny overpriced chai latte and brownie from a botanist-themed cafe. £8 in total, but fuck they were good. The only picture I have from the day has the note ‘never kill yourself’.

So! Back to my point. I’ve been saving Audition for this very month, and plan to binge read it in the next few days. On Halloween night, I want to watch the film also. I couldn’t get through more than half a book in one night, so I’ll stick to films for the 31st.

:D

This is the only piece of media that has any backstory, so the rest are as follows -

Note - the books here are my physical TBR for the month, i.e. books I already own. If I included anything and everything I want to read, this list would be half of the whole post. Also, if you’re looking for gory books and don’t already know about splatterpunk, check that out!

Other than this… I have no plans. I’ve started buying little chocolate bars for trick-or-treaters, and will get some smaller sweets for those who don’t want chocolates. I mean, if there’ll even be anyone who doesn’t want chocolate. Who on earth doesn’t want chocolate. Maybe I’ll dress up as a witch, too. All I really need is a long skirt. I already have black jumpers and a button up shirt, maybe I’ll pick up a cardigan to complete the look. Maybe I’ll upload it. I have never uploaded a picture of my outfits online in my life but I may make an exception for my little corner here.


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You might as well see how my books are stacked. I had to pull Piercing out of the center for that photo.

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