#i learnt all their names bc they were so fucking obnoxious

[otterjpg]

y'all i went to see lil nas x this evening and he was transcendental but my journey back was so hellish that its really ruined my night and i feel like shit...

im a nonconfrontational person but had to snap at this group of drunk adults multiple times on the train.

my friend uses a wheel chair and we were in the only carriage with an accessible space. so ofc a pack of drunk middle aged people crowded round us.

the lack of self awareness was astounding. the noise was a given but they also fully leant on me, kicked a wheelchair users legs multiple times by accident and didnt acknowledge nor apologise. cue me snapping for the first time when one of them leant on me, i moved, and she turned round and had the gall to ask "have i upset you?" wow samantha, what do you think?

then the guard asked them to turn their music down (bc ofc they were playing music) and they almost started a fight. when the guard left they put the music back on, and my friend had already gone into a full meltdown by that point, so i firmly asked them to calm down as my friend was obviously visibly distressed, a whole 2 feet away from them so really impossible not to notice.

from then on one of them kept staring at both me and my friend so unsubtly.

after I caught her staring at my friend, i proper locked eyes with her, which to me was a clear "youre staring too long, too obvious, please stop" but to her apparently translated to "oh dearest jackie. despite you and your compatriots having caused this, you are actually my only hope of helping my friend out of this. you see, he needs the soothing touch of a stranger - me and my other friend have very clearly not reached out to comfort him but thats only because we are counting on you, again, a stranger who caused this, to step in and stroke his hair instead. we totally havent left him to it because touching him will make everything 100x worse"

anyway then chaboy had to snap a third time 🙃

#i learnt all their names bc they were so fucking obnoxious #when i say adults i mean aged 40-65 btw #like. they all should have known better #what makes me the maddest is that the train carriages quitened and they could have moved down and given us space. but they DIDNT #theres only one wheelchair space we couldnt have moved #but they could of and just. didnt. at any fucking point

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

yknow it's funny how people perceive you and how you (or personality tests lmao) perceive yourself/you. like last week at my cadetship grad, the manager of it said in her blurb about me, that I was "naturally shy and quiet, but she came out of her shell, eventually"... some of the people in the group around this time last year found out that if you load me up on wine and shots, that im super loud, kinda obnoxious, and wild... and kept trying to drag me back out on town in sydney.... and to also say "im the sexiest bitch here!!!!" even to their families lmao... someone in the course even called me "charismatic" in feedback, and it stayed with me for the rest of the program.

from years 7-10 (early to mid high school in 2008-2011), I was known for being all edgy, wild "not giving a fuck what people think about you" and "marching to your own drum", weird, loud, funny..... you get the picture.... at the catholic school I was at.

back then, i was NEVER deemed as quiet or "shy" or "introverted" or "keeps to herself" etc etc.... actually, by year 10, when lame buzzfeed and other personality quiz sites started to spit out that I was introverted and gave me other readings that weren't extroverted (eg. I remember doing one about "what aussie animal are you???" and it gave me koala (extremely introverted, shy, and sleepy) instead of kookaburra or cockatoo (which were both extreme examples of extroversion))..... I got SO FUCKING ANGRY that those quizzes were basically calling me a killjoy and boring, bc I was a koala who was the above listed characteristics. like hell, my drama class kept telling me to pursue comedy or do stand up (im not that funny tbh, in hindsight) bc I was just so talkative, loud and such a show off jackass that.... yeah, I might as well be a stand-up comic, throw it at me.

but then, when I moved schools in 2012 to public school, I played the precocious, diligent, modest/placid (except for my group), and timid former catholic school girl they thought I was (but really wasn't- we all know how) so well for my teachers.... that I basically got asked frequently by my bio teacher before I went to tafe every second thursday, "I really can't see how you EVER excelled in drama, when you're so flighty and nervous???? what were your marks like??? you never talk in this class or get up and address the school, like a drama kid would..... what do you mean you were nearly a straight A student in drama??? what on earth??? again, you're so introverted and thoughtful here at *insert the schools name here* that you possibly couldn't excel in that subject????"

like mr garrel, pls consider that I HATE biology and resent this line of questioning very much. also, NEVER say any of that to my drama teacher, I'm sure he'd fight you at this point. moreover, consider that drama isn't in the subject selection for my year. plus, y'all need funding for new drama room equipment, so that's why I'm quiet. and finally, I've learnt that being the loud show-off, weird, "you march to your own drum" girl for the ENTIRE year group for the first 4 years of high school, was much too tiring.... so now I just limit it to my friend group only.

now, back in the present day.... yesterday, I did a chatbot interview for kmart. where after I answered the 5 questions of it, it emailed me the "personality insights" from my answers. one of the insights basically said that, "you have no problem being the centre of attention, and you generally gravitate towards people who have the same energy as you. but have you ever considered piping the fuck down??? bc this may scare people, bc you seem not to let them voice their opinions. learn to sit and listen to others more often and dim your natural Loud Personality™️. "

like, I guess it's "I contain multitudes" and everything else, where you turn on different parts of your personality for different situations. like at work last year, I very much wanted to be left alone to do my fucking assessments.... and eventually, wanted to get out into the field to do home visits (inspections) and shit for my assessments.... but the place I worked at deemed me "too shy" for fieldwork, and just stuck me on back office phones for the entire rest of my cadetship.

but throw me into the cadetship group, and everyone always made me the leader of group projects or activities with powerpoints (when quite a few of them already knew how to use powerpoint, but they didn't want to do it.... so they just passed it onto me and called me the "powerpoint whiz")... and obvs the one night where a few of them got me wasted and met Loud Ilona™️ , that I started this post with.

and I know work is NOT the place to be my super extroverted performer self, so I'll get quiet and mousy in the back... and most esp in the trainee/cadet position I was in.... bc that's how I learn most of the time. by being quiet and thoughtful and methodical (while also being impulsive).... which that place (and also the kmart test picked this up through "you're easily distracted and that ruins productivity. pls consider staying on task and caring about productivity levels") really didn't want me to be.

anyway, yeah. it's something I'll always be wary about, how my personality presents itself to different people.... and also what mood I'm in when I do personality tests or job interviews. also the

#life #about me #shut up ilona #ilona yaps about her life

[littlehungrywarrior]

there’s a lot of things about me that are fucking absurd and really cool, so when ppl ask me to tell them about myself, i break em out immediately (”my family heirloom is a severed head named oswald,” “I can see disney studios from my house,” etc) 

but just bc im bored and I feel like it, here’s some stuff about me that I dont think I’ve ever really talked about? not secrets, but just...mundane things that I don’t really ever say in favor of Ice Breaker™-type things 

I have a profound respect for mail services. When I was 7-8 years old, we watched a documentary in class about how the postal system works, its history, and about the various jobs involved. It was an extremely formative experience for me. I don’t send a lot of things over snailmail and so I’m not really sure how to express my respect and support but it’s definitely there. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to play the FallOut game where you’re a mail carrier, but I wanna... I wanna. 

Though I’ll claim to the ends of the earth that sports confuse me, I am a huge speed-running enthusiast. One hobby/interest/self-esteem exercise I have is that I really like to learn jargon/lingo involved with...anything, really. So I started watching speedruns to pick up the lingo and I just...became infatuated. I’m no expert but I’m %100 into it for more than the lingo at this point; I’ve long since got that covered. One of my favorite parts is golf-clapping along with other fans when something cool/impressive happens. 

I can’t sleep without a hat on. A beanie, specifically. When I was, like...5 or something, I was terrified of vampires, and for some reason I thought vampires bit the skull and not the neck. So I pulled my blankets up over my head at night. My parents thought this was dangerous (I might suffocate) so they gave me a hat to protect myself with. I’ve long since outgrown my fear of vampires (and learnt that they don’t typically bite skulls) but I’ve associated hats with nighttime safety for so long that I can’t fall asleep without one. In the event that I don’t have one, I can wear underwear on my head to suffice...and I think I wore a stuffed animal once somehow but idk. 

I’ve had my SPiN in genetics for so long that 5-year-old me used to infodump strangers at the grocery store. When I asked where babies come from, my dad got me a picture book written for kids specifically to answer that question. We still have it; my brothers used it, too. It starts by explaining pollination and then extends the same concepts to dogs and then humans. Most of the information is on pregnancy and fetuses rather than sex, and cell development immediately caught my fascination. I asked my parents for more information about this and they gave me some more microbiology stuff. Combine that with my animal obsession + budding interest in heredity and you’ve got a tiny obnoxious geneticist who wouldn’t stop telling random people in line at the grocery store about how chromosomes are passed on through haploid cells. Dad got real smug about it, it was fantastic. 

On a similar note (and I have no memory of how this actually happened), I more or less learnt to read spontaneously? All at once? Again, I have no clear memory of this until the part where I can read... My parents read to me every night but I never was able to do it myself. I had a huge library built into the wall at perfect me-height for reading. One morning, the summer I turned 5, I (according to legend) walked up to my parents, got their attention, said “I’m going to read now,” and then (this part I do remember) sat down and read every single book in that library over the course of two or three days. Super rough estimate, but it was somewhere between 70-200 books, with a variety of target ages ranging from 3 to 10-11. No chapter books, all pictures, but the second I was finished I wanted more books. My mom took me to the store to buy more and insisted I get a chapter book since I’d burnt through the picture books so fast. And that’s where I got my first Warriors book. 

That was not the last time I read an entire library. In 7th grade, a friend of mine and I both had sex ed previously and so were allowed to skip that year’s sex ed on the condition that we spent that class in the school library. And together, we read the entire thing. Only what was on the shelves, though; nothing in the back. Actually, at one point on the last day, we’d already read every book in the place and we were bored, so we pulled some books out of the back to look at and none of them caught our interest. One of them was the first Hunger Games book WAY before it got popular. We’d never heard of it, both read the first 2 pages, didn’t like it at all, and put it back. You should’ve seen our faces when it suddenly blew up into a huge thing. The sad thing is, I remember a lot of books that I enjoyed but can’t find now because I can’t remember any specific titles or characters. We sped through everything to finish it all and didn’t really take a lot of time to absorb details so a lot of them are lost to the vague, hazy back of my memory. Still looking for that manga where the ninja kid...stops an evil scientist from...some kind of virtual world machine. There’s a piranha tank? And then the bad guy...gets sniped by a helicopter and falls off the roof, or something? Also there was a manga version of Maximum Ride, which I only remember by name because 2 chapters in it suddenly hit me that this was a comic version of a text-novel my mom was reading at the same time. I bought a handful of books from that library at the end of the year and still have them. 

I’ve only been in one play but something fucking sweet happened during production. I was Malvolio in Twelfth Night because, and I quote my drama teacher (who had known me for 8-ish years at that point and also who was smirking her ass off when she said this), “You’ll see why when you read the play.” She was not wrong and to this day that smug fuckin grin gives me life. Anyway, I was Malvolio, and you know that “Some have greatness thrust upon them” speech that everyone’s so inspired by? That speech is a fucking prank pulled on this asshole and it’s about bangin’. So the scene is that I dramatically read this “””love letter””” I’ve received and then run off to go embarrass myself. The speech is LONG and so I asked if I can just...actually have it written on the letter. And she said yes! So I wrote it down with intent of reading it off the letter. But opening night, the actress who was to place the letter grabbed the wrong paper and so I got just a blank sheet. Guess fucking what? We’d re-choreographed that scene so many times the night before that I slammed that shit anyway, word-for-fucking-word. And I was never mad at my friend for grabbing the wrong paper, so I say this in jest, but her punishment for grabbing the wrong paper is that the entire cast/production team did not hear the end of my pride for the entire week. For a timeframe reference, I was 12. 

When I was a kid I had a horse named Emmy. She was a rental horse. Actually, I think she was a pony? The way the rental worked was that she lived in a barn with a bunch of other horses. Her owners were a small business who gave riding lessons, but instead of just riding each session, one of the horses was “yours” (assigned by age, height, and temperament, not picked by the kid) to take care of while you were there and ride consistently every session. Essentially, she was only my pet when I was on the property. I can still ride but I’ve gotten rusty and I can’t do anything above a trot for more than a few seconds. Both times I’ve jumped have been accidents, once on Emmy and once on mom’s current horse, Meteor. I’ve fallen only once, and it was off Emmy. Mom’s going to be getting a gigantic thoroughbred soon and I’m both terrified and excited to ride this very large boy. 

I talk about this in person but not online because...why would it ever come up online?? I have worn the same style of red jacket every single time I leave the house since I was a pre-teen. It’s to the point where people will only recognize me if I’m wearing it. I had a friend in high school who was/is a really cool guy, we were seniors and we’d been close friends since freshman year. I had my jacket tied around my waist because of the heat. The school had two campuses a block apart and I was walking from one to the other to get something. Friend was walking from the other to the one, so we passed each other. Wordlessly. No wave, nothing. I was tired, it was hot, I didn’t really think anything of it. Then suddenly, a foot behind me, he freezes dead in his tracks and says my name with some kind of stricken shock. He had no idea it was me. At all. Keep in mind: my jacket? Tied around my waist. Not even off, just around my waist. Since then I’ve used this jacket thing to my advantage. Sparingly, I can take it off to sneak around. It’s like I’m invisible to people I know unless I say something and they hear my voice. It’s incredible. 

Going back to speed running, way before I knew that it was a thing at all, I taught myself to speedrun two games: The Lion King (PS2, not the impossibly hard one) and Putt Putt Saves The Zoo. As they were unofficial speedruns that I didn’t really call anything and just kinda did when I was bored, I never timed the latter, and I only timed the former once using my mom’s kitchen timer. It was a rough estimate since sometimes I paused and forgot to hit play for a few seconds, or I needed to pause but didn’t for a few seconds, and the timer only counted full minutes anyway, but I still remember the time: 35 minutes. I keep meaning to go back and re-teach myself to speedrun it, perhaps more professionally, and time it with more accuracy. I still remember all the strats but I can’t pull them off with as much fluidity as I could when I was still in practice. I also can, when watching both Lion King 1 and 2, still point out with frame-perfect accuracy exactly when a scene starts that was a cutscene in that game. 

wow writing this was fun and I kinda wanna do it again. ok 

#what do i tag this as #me?? #me