June 2024 in Review

June was worse than May, but I'll do a normal review entry for it anyway. Why not.

Health/Fitness

Lut had an appointment with a nutritionist in mid-April. She and Lut agreed on three modest goals: 1) eat vegetables once per day, 2) have restaurant meals no more than twice per week, and 3) eat fruit as a snack. We were doing pretty well at these for maybe two weeks, until the final health crisis began.

I have kind of stuck to the second one. Even while Lut was in the hospital and I gave myself permission to eat whatever, I didn't actually want to go to restaurants. I ate at Panera a few times. Twice, I think, I got a triple chocolate concrete for Lut while he was at the hospital, and had one myself at the same time. Once he asked me to pick up a small pizza, which I did, but I don't think I ordered anything for myself at that time. Maybe I did. Might've been a few other times that I ate out and don't remember, idk.

Since his passing, I've had three restaurant meals: Italian, Thai, and Mediterranean. All three with friends visiting from out of town. I like going out for food but not enough to do it by myself. I thought I liked it enough to get takeout but not so far. Lut loved fast food and often asked me to pick up some for him. Sometimes I'd get something for myself from a different place (there's very little fast food that I actually like better than eating at home). But even then it was common for me to pick up food for just him and make food at home for myself.

But that aside, all my other habits went to crap in May. I ate more chocolate and pastries. I stopped eating vegetables. I stopped exercising. 

In late June, I made some baby steps to improve again. I exercised two or three times. My Canadian friend came to visit (they're still here until 7/20), and we made the roasted cauliflower & garlic soup that Lut and I liked. (We've had four servings and have another four left to go). I've roasted asparagus spears and eaten some broccoli, too.

We'll see how it goes.

Writing

Wrote enough Apothecaria to keep posting through the month. So sixty-one entries from May 1 to June 30. Somehow Apothecaria is the thing I keep doing even with my loved ones literally dying. I haven't written anything else.

The Business of Writing

I started final edits on A Dragonling's Family in May and, amazingly enough, did some more editing in June. It was 48% complete at the end of June, somehow. I knocked out a lot of edits on June 29. I don't know why.

Gaming

I bought a new productivity game: "Spirit City: Lofi Sessions". It's mostly a timer app with ambience. But I have really wanted a timer app that would let me specify "x minutes working, y minutes break" and it does that. Plus the ambience is lovely: the imagery has your avatar lounging and working in a cozy bedroom with their magical animal companion.

It has a "habits" section that you can check off, so I put in four habits: exercise, write, edit, draw, and check off if I did any of each thing that day. So it's giving me motivation to clear at least one editing point per day on A Dragonling's Family, so that I can put down that I edited. I am down to 16 points left (after finishing several in July as well), so there's a non-zero chance that I'll finish it this month. And actually have to figure out what I'm gonna use for a cover.

Social

My friend Eliyahu came to visit on June 24 and is staying for about four weeks, until July 20. I don't know if there's anyone else for whom a four-week visit with me would be a good idea, but Eliyahu and I have known each other for over thirty years and I've always found them very easy to live with. It's been a very low-key visit. We make meals together and chat when the mood strikes, and mostly just sit in the same room and entertain ourselves on our respective computers. At the end of June, we took to going for walks in the morning. By the time I get up, it's already too warm outside, but it's not yet unbearably hot, and we both can use the exercise. 

So that's been lovely.

Reading

Still on the same fantasy romance manwha kick. I've tried a few manwha outside that genre -- action fantasy, modern romance -- but they haven't stuck. Rationally, I consider "reading comics" to be "reading", but I can tell my brain doesn't believe this because my brain fights with me over reading books and is perfectly happy to devour endless comics.

Most of the comics I've started are still in progress. I tend to pick comics to read based on "Tapas offered a reading event for this and it's a fantasy romance manwha", and most often the reading events are because it's a new comic or a new season of a comic -- and therefore by definition incomplete.  

But I have read two completed manwha: "The Monstrous Duke's Adopted Daughter" and "I Belong to House Castielo".

I've found the "romance fantasy" genre on Tapas to be much less focused on the "romance" part than the romance novels I've read. Both "Monstrous Duke" and "Castielo" were more about the female protagonist's family and her relationship with them than the romance. Both stories started when the protagonist was a child and followed her as she grew up. In both cases about two-thirds of the story took place while the protagonist is still a child and there's basically no romance involved. The male romantic lead is present in the story but in a non-romantic way. In "I Belong to House Castielo", the male romantic lead is introduced while the girl is 12 and he's a full-grown man and her bodyguard. All through the first two-thirds, I was like "I can't believe they're going to pair these two up for a romance; that seems like it'll be creepy and awkward." 

It was, indeed, creepy and awkward. As a romance, it's a failure for me. I kept reading it because the romance wasn't a major part of the story and I enjoyed the interactions with the rest of the cast.

I enjoyed "The Monstrous Duke's Adopted Daughter" much more. The male lead is still older than the female, but they meet when they're 12 and 15 (and don't date for several more years). It's not off-putting the way meeting at 12 and 22 is. The characters are better-developed, too, without the misogynistic undertones that many manwha have.

As someone who's mostly been reading queer content for the last several years, the extremely unqueer nature of the manwha I've been reading is weird, too. Everyone is cis. What's up with that. Where are all the enbys??? Never mind that all the romantic pairings are straight. And almost all monogamous. (I'm reading one where the protagonist isekai'd into a princess who kept a harem, but the protagonist has mostly been divesting herself of the harem. It's not clear that she's gonna end up in a monogamous relationship by the end, but it seems probable.)

Even aside from the unqueer content, there are other tropes I find off-putting, like "jealousy and possessiveness are romantic and endearing qualities". It reminds me of reading romances from the 70s and 80s: just a lot of gross/misogynistic behavior packaged as "romantic" because that was the trope and many readers were fine with it.

Some common tropes are wildly unrealistic but don't particularly bother me. For instance, many manwha protagonists have an early childhood filled with horrific levels of abuse, from which they are then rescued (this happened in both of the above comics). Once rescued and among a loving family, these formerly-abused children are grateful, generous, and sweet. They may have some traumatic associations, but no chronic behavioral problems. I used this trope in Frost and Desire myself, so I get the appeal: the idea that you can save someone and treat them well and afterwards their life will be perfect and they will never cause you any trouble. It's a nice fantasy. But I am pretty sure that most actual abused children wind up with a host of issues from it, many of which are not easy to live with for the people around them, either.

Goals Scorecard

I had no goals for June.

Of things not noted above: I paid my June bills.

July Goals

I don't really want any goals this month, either. "Help Lut" has been on my goal list for years and now it's not. I didn't ever want to cross that off the list.

• Pay July bills.
• Pay quarterly estimated taxes (I did this on July 3).

July Stretch Goals

• Have some idea of what I did in July.
• Edit A Dragonling's Family
• Work on cover for A Dragonling's Family
• Apothecaria
• Update the "Bored?" list so it's less likely to make me cry