Mercurial Pressure
Internet round-up for the week of May 8, 2023
Good morning, and happy almost the end of Mercury Retrograde Friday!!
I don’t know if any of y’all have had a particularly shitty last couple of weeks, but I for one can say I’m really looking forward to the brain fog clearing off a bit and getting back to normal1.
To be fair, I may have created some of this week’s pain for myself, but I refuse to take responsibility for that. Whatever I didn’t like was definitely not my fault! A planet millions of miles away appearing to spin in reverse forced me to make a very stupid decision and overestimate my ability to do a bunch of hard manual labor!!
After my failed Facebook Marketplace excursion, *Mercury* suggested that I get rid of some of my clothes and try to make more room in our old dresser instead of buying a new one. Sure, it was crappy and old, but I could just refinish it! Easy!
First off, Mercury, why do I have to get rid of clothes my whole life?? I started taking my t-shirts out of the drawers and I felt like an EMT trying to rescue clowns from their overturned car. WHERE ARE THEY ALL COMING FROM?? I stg the shirts are undergoing mitosis in there. There’s no way I bought all of these. Also, they’re still in a massive pile in the corner of the bedroom right now — but don’t worry — I am going to go through them. Not today, because I’m going into the city later for dinner. And not tomorrow, because it’s Saturday, and that’s the Lord’s day. And probably not Sunday, because that’s also the Lord’s day. As for Monday — well, I am not making plans for next week at this time.
ANYWAY. The…refinishing seemed easy enough. Just sand off all the old crap2 and slap some more paint on it, and we’re good to go!
So Monday, I went over to Home Depot and picked up3 some sandpaper, paint, and some work gloves (gotta protect my sensitive widdle hands!). Then, I sat down out on our porch with the first drawer and started sanding.
After about an hour of sawing back and forth and slowly destroying every muscle and tendon in my right arm, I realized it wasn’t going to work. Damon suggested I get some paint remover, and it’d just “bubble up and come off.” So I, ordered paint remover and scrapers and would get them on Tuesday.
Tuesday, I got the additional tools and went to work. I slathered the orange-sherbet paint remover all over the entire thing and watched Survivor while I waited for it to work. And it did! Sort of! In some spots, the paint scraped right off. Others, I had to pick off tiny dime-sized flakes of paint one scrape at a time. Plus, it still had to be sanded. Again. Everything on me already hurt. My arms, from all the repetitive moving. My hands, from all the gripping. My calves, from all the squatting trying to get at different angles. I was the living embodiment of this image:
On Wednesday, I got up determined to fully prep the dresser for paint by the end of the day. I scraped and scraped and sanded and sanded for somewhere around 8 hours. I took a break in the middle for my therapy appointment, and my therapist said “I hope you can work at a pace on this project that will make it enjoyable for you,” which is honestly so sweet but I — ahem, *Mercury* — thought this whole thing was going to take me about a day so lol absolutely not, I’m already behind. Plus, did I mention my clothes are all over the floor?? By the time I got done that night I felt like I’d been run over by a dump truck — once nonchalantly, and then a second “did I hit something?” reverse flattening. We ended up getting into the apartment’s hot tub that night to soothe my aches (still using those amenities, even when it’s 57 degrees4).
Not to mention that no matter how much work I did, I just COULD NOT get all the paint off. There were spots where I just smoothed it the best I could with the sandpaper and reminded myself, “little imperfections remind people that it was done by hand,” which is a very nice way of saying “I’m so over this fucking thing that if one person says ‘you missed a spot’ I will literally explode into a massive supernova then turn into a black hole and take the entire Milky Way down with me.”
Yesterday, I finally got to the paint part, which was so easy and fun! I picked a dark grey, and the color seems to have covered a lot of imperfections. I’m actually thinking about using it on my face in place of my Hydro Grip primer. By about 3PM yesterday, the whole ordeal was finally done.
Here she is, in all her glory! Honestly, I think it turned out great if you don’t look at it very closely. (PLEASE DO NOT LOOK AT IT VERY CLOSELY.)
I’ve decided I’ll never refinish another piece of furniture as long as I live. If I need furniture redone, this is a service I will pay someone for. And I will pay any price they ask. ANY. PRICE. We must give more support to people who refinish furniture. They’re putting their bodies on the line every day to make sure we have cute dressers for our apartments. They deserve the world.
I spent the majority of my time this week focusing on a $20 piece of furniture (I guess it’s more like $80 now, with the materials I bought this week; that bougie bitch), but that didn’t stop me from spending time online while I was waiting for things to process and/or dry. So now: onward, to some happenings from the world wide web.
Bigolas Dickolas
This week, a Twitter user by the name of Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood tweeted this:
about the novella This is How You Lose the Time War (paperback is currently on sale on Amazon due to the event discussed here — I just bought it, and also will get like a single ha’penny if you buy it through this affiliate link) and it went extremely viral.
The novella was published in 2019 and won tons of awards! But now, 4 years later, it’s having a massive resurgence thanks to none other than one “Bigolas Dickolas.”
Most authors could only dream of getting the type of publicity that this single tweet has garnered for this novella. Here’s a fun interview with the author from Slate if you want to read more about the Bigolas Dickolas phenomenon.
Also, a good reason why everyone should have a ridiculous display name.
Writers, What’s Wrong With Us?
This perfectly depicts Phase 1 & 2 of my 3 Phase Writing Cycle™. It looks like this:
Phase 1: Wow this idea is so great and I am smart, I love it and me
Phase 2: WTF this is such a piece of flaming garbage, free me from this mortal coil
Phase 3: Acceptance/Submissions
Also, for writers and stationary enthusiasts: the JetPens list of the 42 Best Pens for 2023 was released this week! I spent way too much time reading up on all of these bad boys and patting myself on the back every time a pen I like and use was featured. 😊
California Drivin’
Shortly after moving out to California, my teammates and I were going on a little tour of some of the Google campuses. The one who’d recently relocated from New Jersey offered to drive us between a couple of buildings, so I hopped in the car along with her and two native Californians. Right after we got around some idiot who was going too slow and merged onto the highway, one of them said, “Don’t you think the drivers here are so awful?? Everyone’s so aggressive!” and the gal from Jersey and I started cackling so hard we both died.
Fortunately we were instantly resuscitated by the fact that she was actively driving at the time, but I have literally never heard anything so funny in my life. 90% of drivers in California are taking their sweet time and have only ever parked in between two lines successfully once, 5% of them are in Teslas5 going 120 miles an hour on the 101, and the other 5% are on motorcycles and actively want to die at any moment.
Randomly Selected Animal Cutie
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Who among us has not saved a piece of pizza to eat it cold the next day??? Put it back!! This is like yesterday when I went looking for a chocolate bar I’d left sitting in the same spot for two weeks and Damon had finished it off. I was coming back for that, dammit! I knew exactly where it was and how much was left! Next time I’m burying it in the flowerbed.
That’s it from me this week! I’ll be resting my old bones for a couple days and then maybe scaling this giant clothes mountain at some point down the road sometime in the future one day. Have a great weekend!!
K
I do not know what normal is.
Years ago, we bought this dresser for $20 at a yard sale in Chicago, scuffed it up with some sandpaper, and painted it dark gray. It lived in our bedroom for a year or so like that. Then we repainted the bedroom dark blue, and it looked out of place. So we decided to repaint it white. But we were exhausted, and all we had left was the paint we’d bought for the baseboards and a very fluffy roller, so we just ran it all over the dresser and it was left with a very un-dresser like bumpy texture. It lived like that for at least the last 10 years.
Literally “picked up”. I sat in my car while a nice gentleman brought my online order out to me, because you couldn’t pay me to go inside a Home Depot. There’s absolutely no way I’d be able to find what I needed, which means I’d have to ask someone, and speaking to a stranger on a Monday morning is an absolute non-starter.
WHERE IS SUMMER???
If I never have to hear that “booooooooooooooo” noise they make when they’re put into reverse or going slowly again it’ll be too soon.
Dresser looks great!!! V fancy!