I stepped outside today, in the most intense bout of instant regret I have had for a long time. Opening the front door was like stepping into the exhaust of a tumble dryer. Moist and hot, while windy.
Smith is the heat-resistant person in our union, so he put on his work clothes and headed out to cut the lawn. I, on the other hand, with 75% of my genes literally stemming from the Arctic Circle, hissed loudly at the heat and hurried inside again, pug closely in tow.
I went to my room and pug passed out beside me on the floor directly in the blasting air from the little AC we have in there. I can’t hear my own thoughts nontheless his calm snores over the AC, blasting for its life a couple of feet away, so I put on my headphones and loaded up my iPad with my morning entertainment. Unfortunately, it was a particularly bad day to have my headphones on, as egregious eating noises leaked out of them and into my horrified ears.
Today’s episode from the reaction channel I’m watching on youtube contained a so called mukbang. Otherwise my favourite guilty pleasure – overweight trainwrecks getting criticism and a fair share of constructive advice from snarky gay men.
It’s precisely what this overthinking, always 100mp/h running brain needs to balance itself out – just slow burn hours long streams with calm drama that I am absolutely not involved in in any way. The misophonia was screaming at the food noises in this particular episode but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s worth it. If I had watched the episode on the TV I wouldn’t have heard the noises at all over the AC. The irony isn’t lost on me.
We celebrated Midsummer’s yesterday, calm and steady. Two friends came over and we BBQed and chitchatted for hours. We enjoyed the hot evening on the patio, kitted with insect nets of course. There is no other way of spending time outside in the evenings in these parts.
And you don’t need to worry like ya’ll internationals do ever since the movie Midsummer came out; there were no human sacrifices.
I mean we’ve only made blood sacrifices during like two of my Midsummer’s, in all these 40 years on earth. The first one when I was a child, and my parent’s friends that owned the cabin we visited got two leeches in the lake. Ew.
The other time was 15 years ago when three of us was enacting life on an admirably cusiony lawn with drunk interpretative capoeira, and we all had to wash the accidental nosebleed we found ourselves covered in after the matches. We, of course, chose to do this in the lake seeing as it was light out and warm. Should we have been in a lake at 3 AM, not sober? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
Did the blood sacrifice save us from certain death in the lake? Yes.
Did the sacrifice also shelter us from the deathly glare from the neighbour looking out their window and seeing three bloodstained people climb their pontoon in the water? Probably.
Here, in 2026, things are good as well. A lot more complicated, and there’s national thunder warnings looming in the distance.
I will probably spend the day splayed out on the couch overthinking my creative projects and eating leftovers from the yesterday’s celebrations. I want to paint my project but the paint itself demands good ventilation and that means I would have to open a window or… go outside.
… Yeah no.