Finally got a new pair of glasses. Now I can actually type.. god, my eyesight is so fucking bad I can't even see my laptop screen. That's what I get for staying inside playing video games all day for years, I guess. Not having glasses for well over 2 weeks was a nightmare, but I can finally blog about my vacation!

I went with my family to Virginia Beach. It's pretty cool for a tourist trap. The buildings all look really sick. It sucks that I couldn't really see them for most of the trip. That reminds me, I got Styro a bunch of stuff.. I should give it to him when I see him next. Forgot. Whoops. I was going to add photos to this but I don't really feel like it (plus there's a decent chance I'll doxx myself with those)

Days 1-3

Day 1: 10 hours in a stuffy car. I don't really want to talk about it. very stressful.

Day 2: We booked into this big, fancy hotel. It was right next to the beach, and it had 2 pools and a bunch of really big fancy stuff. After we booked into the hotel, I just really wanted to get to the beach.

It'd been years since I'd swam at all, much less in the ocean. So I jumped right in.. and the surf immediately knocked me over. My glasses got washed right off my face. I groped around in the sand and eventually found them.

I wouldn't be so lucky again. As I was hunting for shells in the sand, another wave caught me unawares and knocked me right over. But this time, they were gone for good. So I was freaking out big time. Who wouldn't freak out? I'm completely fucking blind without my glasses. I can't see more than 4 inches past my face. This was Day 2 of 7, and I'd essentially be completely blind without my glasses. I yelled out, asking if anyone'd seen them, but everyone pretended not to notice. Just the occasional sideeye of pity.

I stayed outside and tried to draw the beach like I planned to. It turns out figure drawing and observational sketching is hard when you can't see shit.

Then we had dinner. The in-hotel restaurant was good but was severely understaffed and we waited FOREVER to get food.

Day 3: Walked around on the boardwalk and looked for cool stuff. There were a lot of cool gift shops, but all of the souvenirs felt.. inauthentic. More inauthentic than usual. Sure, they had the usual assortment of magnets and keychains and beer-openers and lighters, but all of the figurines had the fakest spraypaint and giant MADE IN TAIWAN stickers. It's like they didn't even try to pretend this stuff had anything to do with Virginia Beach. They had cool jars of dyed seashells, but I remembered all of the stuff I read about seashell harvesting and how it's bad for seafloor health. So I ended up getting the cheesiest, most "I Just Learned Photoshop 2009" keychains for Styro. Just walked around all day. Ate some Vietnamese food for lunch (bun thit nuong- cold noodles with marinated pork and veg) and some thai food (red curry) for dinner. Overall very well rounded day.

Days 4-6

Day 4: I only remember bits and pieces of this day. I remember that we had pizza for lunch from the in-hotel restaurant, except they messed up our order 3 times (again, they were very understaffed and disorganized.). I remember that it rained the entire day so I took a nap. Later in the evening, I'd heard there was a concert on the beach. So i walked a mile there at 8pm. I sat on a bench real quick to tie my shoe. There was a guy smoking a cigarette next to me. He asked me how I was doing. I didn't say anything. He asked me how old I was. I said I was 14 (I'm not) and started tying my shoes faster. He asked me how school was going. If my parents were fighting or not. Said I could tell him anything.

I got my shoes on and got the hell out of there. It was smack in the middle between the concert (about a 2 mile walk ) and the hotel. It wasn't even a fucking concert. Just one guy with a guitar inside a restaurant I didn't want to go in.

I was scared to walk back to the hotel. it was past nine, the sun had set half an hour ago. I got this hispanic lady with a kid to walk me back. She was taking intermittent hits off a vape pen the entire time. It really did unnerve me. I mean, this random guy who thinks I'm underage thinks I'm a vulnerable kid and starts asking me all these weird questions? Yeesh. I almost cried that day. Going from a small-town to big-tourist-city environment means more people, and that's not always a good thing.

Day 5: Went out onto the beach before the sun rose. Found some skate eggs, dead hermit crabs, and loads of other debris on the beach. Storms wash up a lot of cool shit. Last day I swam on the beach- we headed back to Centerville after that, got some korean-chinese food. It was bad. The portions were massive. It was like, not made for human consumption. Like noone can eat that much fucking food.

Then we went to Alexandria. I got to go to the Torpedo Factory Art Museum. It's really cool, because it's an open-studio museum: 3 floors, 71 studios, all with artists working inside. All of them willing to have conversations about their work, how they got into art.. even if they're nervous, they're still excited to tell you about what they do. Obviously with impaired eyesight, I couldn't see much, but I still enjoyed talking to everyone. I wish I had more time to look around. Highlights (i wish I could go over everything I saw here, + I forgot most of their names):

-a painter that made all of her works with flower pigments as paint (Saya Benham)

-a leatherworker that made fandom cosplays and keychains with leather. you don't see fandom stuff with leather a lot, so it was very cool

-a painter that mainly painted various hams, sausages and cheeses. photos weren't permitted, and I get why. But I wish I had some because they were really cool.

-A mongolian painter who, despite the language barrier, showed me around his studio and all of the work in progress paintings he was working on. His paintings were really cool, and I spent a lot of time trying to find his studio before I stumbled upon it. Shoutout to Ganbaatar Choimbol!

Aside from that, Alexandria was boring. I say that having spent 2 hours walking around that day, nearly every shop was closed by 7:30PM and there was nothing to do. I loved the architecture but that's all there really was to see at that point.

Day 6: Started the day with a bagel from this very hipster jewish deli. My parents didn't get anything, largely because the ingredient combos were all so out-there and all over the place (I got a bacon, jalapeno and veggie cream cheese combo: another 'signature bagel' included peaches and potato chips).

For lunch we went to this crab place we'd been to a couple years back in Maryland. Literally everything there was delicious. Crabs, oysters (I still dislike them largely due to a bout of oyster-induced food poisoning a couple years back), po'boys and calamari.. so much food. God I love seafood. + some pie called "bumble pie"? It had a bunch of berries in it. Probably the best pie i've ever had. Pies never manage to get that tart/sweet balance right, but this really did it. The world of southern desserts is strange and unfamiliar to me.

And then for the 10 hour drive home. Not much to be said on that. Driving back home on the highway at 12am is still as visceral and dreamlike, as usual. Everything was both figuratively (and literally) a blur to me. I can't believe it was 2 weeks ago. Shit. Time really flies, doesn't it?

And that's everything I did on vacation, with details redacted for (a misguided sense of) privacy.

Other Stuff

+Hung out with Styro and some other friends and watched a movie outside. Got covered in mosquito bites. I definitely prefer conversations IRL to dming them, that's for sure.

++got Styro and some other friends to watch The Room (2003) with me. While I'd lost my eyesight, the only thing within visual range was my phone, so I figured instead of mindlessly scrolling I'd watch The Room and everything related to it (Disaster Artist, any and every Tommy Wiseau interview I could find). And then I figured I'd subject Styro to it too. That's how I feel about sharing most of my interests with my friends. "Subjecting" them to the awfulness of it all.

We've been watching other movies (for the sole purpose of writing reviews for them here) but they were so bad that we had nothing to say about them other than "oh yeah that sucks". Styro wants to write a review of this really bad 2010s cgi duck gamer movie instead. Good for him. Anyways, The Room is a masterpiece. One of the most enjoyable cinematic experiences ever. We were laughing our asses off the entire time. Haha. What a funny story, Cork!

+++every time there was a sex scene I set playback speed to 4x and put on "Hanna Barbera Cartoon Sound Effects". It greatly enhanced the experience. Really added an extra element of pleasure to the climactic moments.

++++ I cut out a lot from this entry. This isn't a place for me to blog about every depressive episode and/or panic attack I've had in the past week. Honestly, I'm glad I got my glasses back late so I didn't just pour my extremely intimate and uncomfortable feelings into this. The vacation was fun! Hanging out with Styro 2 days in a row was fun! I can deal with my problems on my own time. I have a lot of plans for this blog. Who knows what'll happen next. I'm trying to look on the bright side here.