junior year vignettes

i told you it was gonna be a crazy semester, yes, i also told myself the same thing. what i didn’t realize is it would be thrown into the deep end of the pool gasping for air (i can’t swim) crazy. they worked my ass to the bone i couldn’t even smile! so smile4anything … she was abandoned for some time due to a lack of smiles.

however, i thankfully just finished my finals and have one glorious month at home in which i want to block the world around me out and just write and code! so please expect more soon. and a redesign because i suddenly hate everything and want to tear the wallpaper down.

one of my friends refers to different moments she has as ‘vignettes’. as in ... imagine the world fades in and out of black and all you register are these little vignettes of your life. i’ve been really enjoying that metaphor lately and thus i have stolen it. too much happened this semester so these are a bunch of vignettes (not in any particular order) of the past couple months. none of it makes sense.

overview:

1. finals season of suffering, hell, misery, sadness, despair
2. i’ve been domesticated?
3. byler.
4. not asexual or lesbian but a secret third thing
5. wisdom teeth removal
6. texas and escaping my house and new york
7. i am a danger to myself or others

finals season of suffering, hell, misery, sadness, despair

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?

i know what it was. mostly it was the exam i deferred from last semester when i stopped taking my antidepressants (once again) and struggled to complete simple tasks. except this semester i also stopped taking my antidepressants. funny how life works out and you’re actually in a worse off place than you were when you deferred the exam.

regarding that evil exam, i want you to know i self studied the contents of an entire course in about a week and i did get an acceptable grade on the final. i’ll say it went pretty well, but the thing is i experienced mental torture for a week straight in which i didn’t do anything else but read the textbook. i tell myself i will never put myself through such a thing again, but then i do the exact same thing the next semester.

unfortunately, i am really really good at waiting until the last minute to do things and scrambling together a decent result. i’ve pushed it to such a degree that i think my college apps were all submitted a couple hours past the very hard deadline in DECEMBER, and i somehow got into college. i’ve never started studying for an exam more than a week in advance, and i write all my papers the day of. things just Should Not be working out for me, but somehow in the adrenaline and anxiety of pushing until the last possible second, my brain finally decides to function. and yes thank you for mentioning it i am planning to get tested for adhd.

i just get so angry at myself that this is how my brain works, because i really do enjoy my classes. every time i’m writing a final paper in one day or spending a few days cramming all the material, i think to myself that i really just wish i could have taken the appropriate time to really learn all this content that i genuinely care about.

it’s not like i spend the whole semester fucking around. this semester i really tried to take the procrastination thing more seriously, and i made a very strict notion/gcal ecosystem in which i set all fake early deadlines just so i could stop doing things at the last minute. that didn’t work out, because i would see a deadline and think, oh yeah it’s fake i actually have 2 more days, and NOT DO IT. i’m really at my wit’s end with myself! what the hell else am i supposed to do?

i also really need to start going to class, and to stop using my depression as an excuse. i don’t mean to say other people use it as an excuse, but i know i do. if i could just push through the crushing discomfort of showing my face in class and paying attention to lecture, i would probably be so much more on top of my schoolwork and much less passively suicidal. unfortunately, skipping class in college is addicting. the more you do it, the more you can’t Not do it, and it’s a horrible cycle. i strangely received a lot of texts checking in on my wellbeing from my classmates. i certainly appreciate it, it’s very kind, but i kind of forgot that other people actually perceive my presence or absence.

so that’s the situation with finals. they are in fact done now, and i swear i am going to spend the next month coming up with a master plan of how i will never skip a class again. i also need !!! to be medicated, okay! like girl i’m bored let’s take our antidepressants.

i’ve been domesticated?

shout out to my IN REAL LIFE FRIENDS riley and skyler, who are also TWINS!

something sinister has happened… so this semester i have had the wonderful joy of becoming more close with my friends riley and skyler. as an added plus, their dorm is like a 10 second walk away from mine, and my friend riley likes to get dunkin donuts every morning, so needless to say i have seen them a lot in the past couple of months.

i discovered that i love to sit at this one round table in the middle of their studio and very quietly do my work while they do their work in bed in what’s known as parallel play. the heating in my dorm also broke and it’s been a solid 50 degrees in there, so that was an added plus in spending several hours loitering in their room.

riley and skyler did something really horrible, which is introducing me to this game called stardew valley. i thought i was just going to play for a couple days before i inevitably get bored. oh how foolish i was. the thing about stardew valley is it’s kind of like crack cocaine. once you open the app, you’re not putting it down for several hours. i mean, you’re running your own farm, you have a partner and townspeople to take care of, you have a community center to fix. people rely on you. you can’t just let them down by closing out the app and like, working on your final, or something.

as if the bliss of playing stardew valley with my friends wasn’t enough, they did something else. they bake chocolate chip cookies almost every night. they even give me a lot of those cookies. they’re FRESHLY BAKED and HOMEMADE! i mean i sit in a warm room with my friends in my line of sight, while playing my crack cocaine game and eating freshly baked cookies? why would i ever leave?

and i didn’t leave. for the last couple weeks of the semester, i swear to god i staked out their dorm to the point that i stayed there even when they would leave the room. i genuinely have no idea how i passed my finals, because nothing else except stardew valley, byler, and chocolate chip cookies has been on my mind for at least all of december. i have been having so much fun.

the evil state of ohio has taken them from me for the next month, but that does not stop me. i stole their chocolate chip cookie recipe and have been making cookies for myself and playing stardew valley in my childhood bedroom. it’s not the same though. it’s gonna be a long month.

all this to say that i miss you guys very much and i will see you spring semester!!!!!!!

byler.

this was inevitable.

since season ONE when i was arguably too young to be watching it, i have been obsessed with stranger things. i was there when it was niche… i was there for the july 4th 2019 80s explosion (you had to be there). i was particularly there for 2022, during which i got on stranger things twitter for the first time. and i am once again here now. stranger things is like this flesh eating virus that goes dormant in my brain until i hear my trigger words, ‘new season coming’, after which it starts eating away.

stan twitter is nothing new to me, and that probably isn’t much of a surprise. but fandom ship wars are honestly kind of new, because i don’t usually obsess over media with a love triangle. i honestly find most love triangles extremely boring and predictable. case in point .. the summer i turned pretty. (and i’m a bellyjere, i don’t careee)

i was a ride or die mileven when i joined sttwt in 2022, but i was slowly converted into being bylercurious through bits and pieces of evidence that just didn’t add up for a straight mike wheeler. even as a mileven — for which frankly there’s not much to do or fight over — i spent an absurd amount of time on twitter. summer 2022 was the summer i needed to be applying to colleges, but i was too busy in twitter spaces and botting polls and joining twitter group chats.

as i entered college, i let the whole thing go because stan twitter will genuinely ruin your life plans if you’re a crazy fangirl. but i couldn’t take people talking about stranger things who didn’t Get It like we crazy gay people did! so i did something rash and rejoined… and it has taken over me.

i am now a full crazed byler, and my entire 2026 rests on whether i will get my byler kiss on christmas. i am having way too much fun on twitter, and i’m glad i at least finished my finals before my mind got completely taken over by byler theories.

on that note, i unfortunately wrote like 20 pages worth of my thoughts on the byler/mileven love triangle, and i’m hoping i can get it out before volume 2 on thursday. please speak to me about all things byler, unless i got queerbaited, in which case let’s act like nothing ever happened okay.

not asexual or a lesbian but a secret third thing

something weird happened this semester and we’re gonna just have to get really comfortable with a lot of things really fast, okay? to make a long story short, i’m really confused.

i’ve always known i like women, even when i was in denial about what it would make me if i DID verbalize those feelings. my attraction to women is much stronger than the attraction i have to men. and yet i’ve never had a girlfriend and i’ve never actually even kissed a girl, not for real. it’s weird because even granting that i may have experienced mild homophobia when i was in high school for exploring that,, i now go to a women’s school so what the hell is my problem?

i can’t ignore my track history with men, as unfortunately i do seem to experience attraction to the opposite sex (pending). i’ve always moved pretty fast with them, all my firsts were with guys and i even had a long term boyfriend. then i spent all of last year of college messing around, for lack of a better term. to be clear, i am not ascribing any moral judgment to that action. i think that sexuality is natural and as long as you’re being safe there should be zero stigma around it. gen z is living through a very odd conservative puritanical wave but let’s not get into that right now.

anyways … upon further reflection and probably frontal lobe development, i came to the enlightening realization that i didn’t actually enjoy any of what i was doing. even while i was in the moment, i knew i didn’t actually want to be doing it .. ever… but for some reason, the thought which should logically follow — ‘why the hell are you doing something you take no pleasure in’ — didn’t form. it’s not like anyone was forcing me or giving me no choice but to do it. technically. but at the same time, men are not stupid. it’s obvious when someone isn’t enjoying themselves. i wasn’t …. but let’s not think too hard about it right now!

upon coming to this realization, i suddenly felt deeply disgusted by the entire thing. i no longer wanted anyone to touch me in any way. i essentially just jumped from one extreme to another, and that’s how i got to where i am right now having not even kissed anyone in a year.

i don’t speak to men anymore because i’m mildly repulsed with them right now, but i don’t try with women because i am terrified and intimidated of all of them. my attraction to women just feels different, i don’t know how to explain it. maybe it’s the fact that i would genuinely be emotionally intimate with a woman, but i always keep an invisible wall up with a man because well.. you know. of course i would.

for a couple weeks i fully convinced myself i was a lesbian, but i thought about my intense celebrity crushes and realized i can’t be 0% attracted to men. i know that celebrity crushes are mentioned on the lesbian masterdoc but just let me have that please. i want to birth children one day.

then i realized, oh! i actually don’t need to label myself because no one is making me do that, and that’s why right now i am not bisexual or lesbian or asexual, but instead i am just Me and i am Figuring it Out.

i will give myself as much time as i need to ease back into what i hope will be a consensual and enjoyable intimate life, but also, come on dina you’re not gonna be surrounded by only women for much longer. we’ll see how this goes next semester.

wisdom teeth removal

did you know i have wisdom teeth? i didn’t either. furthermore, did you know i have 4 of them and they’re all sideways deep in my mouth under my gums? actually, i should say they were sideways because they’ve been removed.

so the dentist is kind of a supervillain in my life story. mostly because i really did have an evil dentist who made me cry of pain when she did simple cleanings on me, and very much berated me for having gum decay in the back of my mouth. then one day i just told her hey actually my gums are fucked up because of my silly little problem i USED to have that has nothing to do with how often i floss, and suddenly i’m making it awkward. and they say, “but you’re not doing that anymore, right..?”

i got a new dentist though! when i went to this new dentist, oh boy i was in for a shock. apparently i have 13, yes, thirteen, cavities. what could i possibly have done to garner this many cavities? I BRUSH MY TEETH. I FLOSS. I MOUTHWASH. is it one too many drunk cigs? is it all the red bulls i drank when i was 17? either way i can’t escape public humiliation over there.

now when i got my wisdom teeth out i was put on laughing gas, because obviously i had to be completely sedated for them to cut holes into my gums and yank my teeth out. notice how it’s called laughing gas. i expected to laugh. for some reason as soon as they were done with me i could not stop crying!!! good to know i will never try laughing gas recreationally. anyways, now there are these little holes in my mouth that are really annoying and food gets stuck in them and nevertheless i keep eating my takis.

texas and escaping my house and new york

i’m trying to not make this sound like a linkedin post. this past weekend i was honored to have the opportunity to go to [redacted] hackathon in dallas texas… etc etc. but i wanted to write because ummm life is kind of crazy recently and it won’t make sense unless i lay it out in words.

so as i just mentioned, yeah on friday i flew to texas for the first time ever! i’ve actually never been farther south than maryland before (except for orlando, but i don’t think that counts). also a number of other firsts - my first hackathon, my first time being flown out by a huge company, my first time having an onsite behavioral interview, my first time hearing a real texas accent. also people in texas actually wear cowboy hats. i kept seeing it in the airport.

i came in so so so very nervous. the cs majors from my neck of the woods are just a bit comically evil. but every single person i met was so genuinely kind, and i felt like everyone wanted each other to succeed. obviously there is an element of competition that is inevitable, like of course we wanted to get first place (and didn’t! that’s ok!) but at the end of the day, people were KIND. i can’t tell if it’s a texas thing or a [company] thing, but either way, now that i’m back in manhattan, i am definitely feeling the lack of that ‘thing’ i felt. mostly, i’m lucky to have the team and mentors that i did. i was definitely the least experienced in my group and felt quite nervous that i might be weighing them down somewhat. my flight was at 5am and by 9pm the same day, i was googling how to merge branches in git. my brain was total mush. but in spite of that, my team was so helpful and supportive and once again KIND.

if you’re not from new york even, you might be wondering what my fixation is on kindness. people are kind everywhere. i thought so too; but my trip made me realize i might have been in a bit of a northeast bubble all my life. on my uber back to dfw, i had a wonderful conversation with my driver, michael.

michael is a real ass texas native. funnily enough, he has never been north of washington dc (and i’ve never been south of it) so we got to talking about some regional differences and some general life lore. it started because i asked him about some dallas specific spots and ended up mentioning that i don’t know how to drive, because i live in nyc of course. he told me some crazy stories about growing up in east texas right next to the southern border.

what surprised me the most is him telling me that i didn’t seem like a nyc girl, which would typically be almost insulting for me, because i try to identify so hard with this city and its culture. but i understood what he meant. he basically said that he knows i might be coming into texas with some stereotypes about how the people are (honestly yeah i did kind of assume they’d be gun wielding trump supporters) and that it’s quite different than it seems.

in all honesty, there is a lot i don’t fit in with or enjoy about the city. and i don’t mean something stupid like the rats or the sewage. first off, the rats never bother me, and of course a city is going to be dirty. that’s what happens when millions of people move through a small island daily. it’s more so the kind of person that the city makes me sometimes.

anyways, i ended up telling michael that i have this bucket list goal of driving through route 66. kind of random given that i can’t drive, and that i have literally no business out west. but michael said it was an awesome idea. what he actually told me was that i seem like a very sweet girl and that i’m high achieving (i guess because i had my [redacted] lanyard on) and that before i settle down to a big tech job and a husband and whatever, i should not forget my dreams and explore the world and experience as much of life as i can while i am still young.

in the back of my mind, i do have the desire to pack my bags and just start ancomming out in the middle of nowhere, just so i can say i did it. i also just want to see everything and be everywhere at once. unfortunately life gets in my way. i remember having an existential crisis in a similar vein over the summer and i kept crying to my mom saying, i feel like my life is already predetermined and i just don’t feel like living it. college→internship→college→job→job→get married→job→kids→retire. my whole life is going to be tech and that’s just so fucking boring. i don’t want to fix bugs and make slide decks for the rest of my life. my mom told me life is what happens in between those parts, and that things will work out in ways i don’t understand, but i’m not satisfied by that answer. i’m so sick of my environment sometimes and i want to just say fuck it and do something that no one told me to do or expects me to do. in reality, i probably won’t.

i am a danger to myself or others

ooopssss i accidentally ran out of my antidepressants. how did this happen. oh maybe because i ghosted my therapist and my psychiatrist and said whatever i’m fine everything is fine. now i’ve gotten myself into a little situation where i don’t go to class anymore and everything is piling up all the time.

i don’t like pulling the ‘dad’ card, ever, but i feel like i keep doing it and it’s stupid. i am not the one struggling in this situation. but this is my blog and i can say what i want and i need to stop apologizing for myself. i think that his condition is progressing a lot quicker than i was prepared for. how much can you really prepare, though, anyway? that’s why i try not to think about it until it slaps me in my face and then i have no choice.

the hardest part about caring for someone with alzheimer’s is the feeling of utter helplessness. it is one of the most scary illnesses in the world because there is really nothing you can do to stop it. not only that, but you can’t really slow down the progression. you’re mourning someone while they’re right in front of you, and every day bit by bit of someone you love is being robbed from you.

i like to have control over things in my life, but i think i’m actually in far less control than i like to believe. my therapist told me recently i have no agency, as in, i am not given any agency, in my day to day life. i guess she meant with my caregiving and family obligations, and my career aspirations and what not. but to me, that’s called being an immigrant. what else am i supposed to be doing in this situation?

if i think too much about my lack of control, i start to spiral. like yes i actually do live my life for other people’s pleasure, but what am i supposed to do with that thought? say i drop out of college. i ghost everyone. i go off the grid. every morning i wake up and do exactly what i want to do. i mean, first off, that’s impossible, because i am nowhere near financially independent, ESPECIALLY not in new york. and second, what exactly is it that i want to do? when i try to think about it, i realize i can’t separate and isolate some independent self i have outside of others’ projections of me.

my therapist suggested i practice taking agency over my life in maybe a less extreme fashion than i have in mind. she told me i seemed so quiet and soft spoken and asked me if i get angry, and how i release my anger. i thought that was pretty funny; i mean, among all my friends and family i am consistently known for how i argue. i will think i’m having a normal conversation and actually be screaming and cussing someone out. i don’t mean it!! obviously i’m not going to be screaming at my therapist, you know? that would be weird.

i prefer to project my anger internally. the soviet union genetics imparted a sort of perpetual guilt onto me in all senses of the word: in my productivity, my appearance, my demeanor. my own voice is my harshest critic, but that doesn’t mean i actually have self-discipline. it just means i spend the majority of my life having arguments with myself. i might also physically punish myself, at times, but that’s between me, myself, and my blog, isn’t it.