### **Morning Pages** Vico must be really busy. I have withdrawal symptoms from not seeing any of his stories recently jk 😹 I realized earlier why my sister cried because of my poem: Trisha? Maybe. Days till December 25: 37. Days till New Year’s Day: 44. Time for a rewatch of Iron Man 3. Heart sorta broke reading my old Hypothesis annotations for Eng 22. And about Eng 22 first take in general. No matter, I’ll get it all back and some more when I get my hands on Dihexa!!! Hopefully this December. I’ll be on my way. And remember, you were not all that! DISCIPLINE! 39th in the Escape Pod queue. Still “Under Review” and at 5th in the Clarkesworld queue. Cannot wait to get my hands on DLPA that I’ve ordered. 10:30PMish: Cleaned my toilet, which took less than 3 minutes. Hopefully Fantabulosa! publishes FML! And/or Fancypants!!! Take two irons, two B vitamins every day. Take electrolytes before exercise later. 1:15PM: done cleaning floor and cutting toenails and fingernails. Got rejected earlier by Apex. 57 days till January 15, 2026, or the announcement for Clarion West scholars/fellows! I have a good feeling about this. Hopefully, hopefully. 27th in the Escape Pod queue. Never felt it more acutely than today and yesterday: that time is really fast. I will never get back that young feeling again. When I had my world turned upside down by John Green books and Michael Buble songs and Tumblr. That my parents will never be young again. That I am just watching my parents age and there’s nothing I can do about it. That they don’t get to enjoy their lives now that they’re almost 60. I have a good 20 years before it all goes downhill from there. I will be pushing 50 anyway by that time and it’ll be 2052 or 2053, who knows what the world will look like. Who knows if I’ll have migrated to another app or if Notion will be combined with a conglomerate surveillance app of some kind. Hope not. I will be so sad if something really bad happens to my life like a curveball that makes it all worse. Like a parent dying early. Please I hope I get to have a normal old age parents death, that’s the best case scenario. Please let that be my reality. I’ll only deal with the grief after. Later, I hope, when I’ll have expanded my reliance on other people so that I won’t feel so empty and dead and depressed without the feeling of that bedrock of unconditional care and love. I may not consciously rely on it now but I don’t know how much I rely on it, how much my parents are taking care of things so that I don’t have to, like money, like food, like cooking, like cleaning. I mean, those things are not the only reasons why I’m going to feel really bad and really hopeless without them. I love them, despite their flaws. I just want them to be set free from work, and hopefully get new hobbies besides work and taking care of capitalist world’s demands for money and resources. Thankfully my sister has her own income now so that’s a huge weight off. And they’ve paid off my last tuition, hopefully it’s the last. I just need Ma’am Marby to actually cooperate with my accessibility needs and it’s 19th today and she still hasn’t responded. Please!!! I’m already planning for when I’m 50! Imagine the foresight 23-year-old me wasn’t beset with. My frontal lobe is steadily maturing. 6:13AM: took armodafinil about 5 minutes ago. Giddy for December. Cannot wait!! CANNOT WAIT!! I can’t wait for Nov 30 too. That day I’ll really plan out my December full of lucky avenues and potential!!! It’s so close I can almost taste it. But I’m not out of the woods yet. I’m planning to write an entire novel (Unreal Image) _and_ a screenplay (Legacy Boys Don’t Need Sleep) _and_ write a scifi short story (_prangkahan_ story for CW 198). WOW THERE. And don’t forget the academic stuff too. An updated critical essay and field work and reflection paper for CW 198. Where will I find the time?? Oh wait, I have time. I have my armodafinils ready. I can’t wait for more money—angpao is really the only thing I’m relying on aside from the $100 from Garden Party Collective—that will fast-track my goals. Hopefully I get a thyroid test today. Vico posted yesterday!!! EEEEEEEEEEEP!!! 😜 When that day arrives, I will have prepared already. It won’t blindside me. I hope not. I can say I’ve been preparing since I was 27. That’s decades of mental preparation by then. I’ll make it. I hope. Old me, how are you really? I know you can’t talk to me anymore, but I can talk to you now. I hope you’re doing okay. If not, you’ll make it. I have faith you’ll do. You always come out on top. They don’t know us. I did not win Palanca nor Romeo Forbes. Hopefully it turns around in 2026. I really hope it pans out. I find it so funny now that I basically gave my parents so much hope on November 14, the CLOUD DAY BONANZA. I was just a happy little shit, blathering about my world-changing story and how science has yet to catch up to my ideas. I had a real glimpse of what my body is capable on two days of no sleep, and that’s extreme euphoria of unmatched levels. It felt like I won a trillion dollars, to be honest. I was just too happy. And my mom was too, and she was crying too because it’s real hope, that we’ll transcend our middle-classness and she’ll be able to give more to people when I’m rich. I have no choice now. I have to make it a reality. Yesterday I told them about how people who make Clarion West usually end up as career authors. I don’t know why I gave them so much hope, except that I really feel it this time, my story’s potential, that I can’t help but believe in it so strongly too! I have an excellent concept, intriguing science fiction elements and theories, and my characters are so magnetizing too! And I heard Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold 200 million units, and apparently so did Nancy Drew. I think I’m onto something here!!! If I even get a fraction of that, I’ll be so happy like a little nugget.