I saw you walk out of the wall

cw: meds and med side effects, depression, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation, implied drug use, sexual harassment, etc.

2024 - carnival funhouse mirror
2023 - midday moon
2022 - senior year
2021 - I can make going to denny's sad (not posting these)
2020 - spring waits for no one
2019 - sometimes I hear the bell ringing
2018 - the man beneath the lamppost
2017 - How to Deal with the Buzzards Poking at Your Eyes
2016 - these are the words that are an offense to sanity

rip gubaidulina

maybe artists don't need to suffer to make art (march 15th)

"sure yeah, everything's on fire,
a lot of us are losing our jobs,
struggling to pay rent,
watching our infrastructure
and social services/backups
get gutted and sold off
to the highest bidder,
even our air and water
are getting more dangerous,
the world as we know it is changing
in ways we don't even be able
to understand for decades,
probably the rest our of lives,
but think of the silver lining,
a whole bunch of creators
will Suffer, and in Suffering
will get the inspiration they need
to go and make amazing art"
okay, have you like,
ever made anything in your life,
I'm talking texted a friend,
filled out an application,
sent an email to your boss,
picked up scraps of paper
and wrote/sketched something,
have you ever tried to do that
when you didn't want
to get yourself off your chair,
pull the blinds open,
brush your teeth,
take your medication,
open up the dishwasher,
water your plants,
grab the mail,
wipe down the kitchen counter,
cook yourself something,
all these relatively basic things
that still require Effort
and everything's too loud for you,
everything's too bright for you,
limbs all achy and numb,
brain either racing
or wiped out from all that racing,
much less pull itself together
and come up with something new,
even if repetitive and basic,
and remember it, put it down,
maybe share it with someone else,
that's a huge pain in the ass
even when you're doing alright,
isn't it?

a thing (one of the things)
that sucks about depression
is I keep catching myself
standing around forgetting
what I was going to do,
forgetting people's faces,
forgetting people's names,
forgetting things I've done
a thousand times already,
really just makes me
into a clumsier, more awkward,
brain full of holes
kind of person,
even when I'm trying
I just, stop, over and over,
even when I write something
it's scattered, cut up,
I forgot about it halfway through
and forget I ever wrote it
until a couple months later
scrolling through my stuff
and going oh right, that.
I need to scream and cry
my way to something like normal
before I can work on something
I'm actually happy with,
and that's assuming
I have friends to lean on
and can support myself financially
and don't have to do
all that living business first,
and/or it doesn't eat up
my entire day,
and I can't imagine
I'm alone on that.

and honestly, I don't think
you need to know something personally
to write about it -
hear other people out,
read/see/listen what other people have done,
what's the language
of sadness, anxiety, fear, etc.
and play off of that,
it can help on some level
to have gone through it personally,
but fiction's all about stuff
people would rather not deal with
in real life, if it can happen
in real life at all,
so like, do the concept justice,
put in that time and effort,
especially if you haven't
gone through it yourself,
but you don't have
to go through it yourself,
and you probably don't want to anyways.

dream a dead thing (march 31st)

he's easily my favorite composer -
maybe by runtime, by number of works,
definitely by a percentage
of everything a composer's made,
I've listened to his stuff
more than anyone else's,
he's got this almost cheesy
but sincere passion
shining through in his development,
the orchestration and/or counterpoint
building up to some grand climax,
the melody like a plane
breaking through the clouds,
I keep coming back to it,
find more of it to fall in love with,
play it back in my head
when I don't have my headphones around,
it's as close to home as music
could ever be to me.

rachmaninoff himself? eh.
don't think we'd have gotten along
if we'd ever met.
this was the guy who heard about
some probably not russian princess
making her way around Europe
and decided, sure, I'll fund her
to live in a hotel in america.
believed in her enough, I guess,
and/or wanted to cling on to
the old russia, the crown and church,
the mansions he'd grown up in,
the wealthy patrons and tutors
he'd depended on to kickstart his career,
a Russia that had been
just way too comfortable
mowing down people
waving crosses around,
singing the emperor's praises,
demanding just a few more rights
right outside his palaces;
had handed off guns and good lucks
to millions of peasants,
bodies to light the funeral pyre
of a war burning down the continent;
had arrested and sent off
whoever dared question the state
to some far off prison colony
in the middle of the tundra
to do harsh labor
for the rest of their lives, that russia.
and yeah, what replaced it
ended up being even worse,
and the real princess had been a teenager
who'd had basically nothing to do
with all those atrocities,
but I don't think I'd want
to deal with her legacy,
the royalists around her,
maybe I'd do some self-reflection
about my career to that point,
and if maybe I could try
to do things differently in america,
but that doesn't seem to be
what happened here.

and anna anderson herself,
what was her deal?
did she think she was the princess?
did she know better?
did it even matter?
a factory worker, bomb maker,
had lost her friends and family,
clearly she wanted to be
someone else, someone important,
reinvent herself, give herself
some meaning to her life,
and whether or not she knew
that she was doing all that,
she got what she wanted,
learned how to be a princess
from the people who wanted one,
lived off them for
basically the rest of her life.
and honestly, I respect that more
than all the people
who'd heard the reports,
should've known better,
and poured their time and money
into a fantasy most of them
got tired of eventually.

oh god I'm one of those people who talks about their dreams (april 1st)

I've been having this dream for a while
where it's like oops, turns out
I never graduated high school,
there's a few classes I didn't take,
not sure why the school gave me a degree
or if they'll take it away now,
but I guess I'd better fit them
in between my college classes,
because yeah, usually I'm in college too.
and obviously my college classes
are way more of a pain in the ass,
plus I never actually went
to a public high school, it was online,
I figured out my own schedule
and had kind of flexible deadlines
on all of my assignments,
so guess what I care about more!!!
and I swear to god, every time
I have that dream, it's just
a little bit later in the semester,
I'm spending my time sitting around
scrolling through all those lessons
going nah I can deal with them later,
most of them don't even have assignments,
can probably bang out a month or two's
worth of work when I've got some spare time,
actually I can probably do some of these
next semester, won't hurt my GPA,
at least, would just hurt my high school one,
that shouldn't matter, should it,
I'm swallowing that sense of dread
trying to worm its way up my throat
because even in my dreams
I'm freaking out about shit.
I'm pretty sure at this point
I'm in my second dream semester,
swear I could remember the first one
wrapping up, me waiting on the grades,
and here I am, taking on more classes,
what happens when I'm done,
if I'm ever done? do I get to have
normal forgot a class in college dreams?

and I guess I'm hung up on it
because, like, it's supposed to be
the other way around, right?
I had a little freedom in high school -
mostly picking AP or honors classes -
but I was locked in the whole time,
I *knew* I was going to graduate,
I spent a ton of time writing up
my valedictory speech, kind of hard
to convince myself it wasn't happening!
then I went to college and whoops,
so many electives and programs,
why not pick up a minor while I was at it,
I had to go sit down with my advisor
most the way through every semester
so I could tell her what my plans were,
the progress I was making on my degree,
she'd sign off on it, and she'd give me
the passcode I needed
to even register for my classes,
my last semester I crammed in 19 credit-hours
just to tie up loose ends,
and I still had a short summer class
after my graduation ceremony,
you'd better believe I was afraid
I'd missed something somehow,
thought credits double-counted when they didn't,
forgot an elective or two along the way,
thought my research or AP credits
wouldn't count, it was a stingy school.
but noooo, dream about high school
and a diploma that doesn't even matter now,
I got my bachelor's years ago.

I don't want to read too much into dreams,
they're really just my brain playing around
like a kid in a sandbox mashing together
feelings and emotions and memories
to make kind of a crappy sandcastle,
but why does this keep coming up?
I guess I was in that online school
forever, most my life at that point,
all cooped up in my parents' house,
barely going outside for anything,
maybe I'm afraid that, now I'm
more or less on my own, something
might drag me back to that coffin,
or at least I'll never be able
to move on, never get to grow up,
always sixteen forever.

Spoiler

lol yeah at this point it's probably more like journaling or diary entries than poetry, my brain sure loves wandering places!! figures it'd fit well for a dream

nukes and yellowstone i (april 2nd)

me and my family's at a dave and buster's
on my younger brother's birthday,
we're sitting around the table
eating burgers and garlic fries,
and my mom's talking about these nuclear plants
they're planning on building in Wyoming
(she loves talking about them, it's
a Whole Thing, but that's a different story),
and my dad pipes up to say something like
but what if yellowstone erupts,
wouldn't it blast nuclear stuff everywhere?
and I flinch just hearing that
because like, jesus dude,
you're still obsessing over that?

man, when I was a kid and the basement
was just a bunch of concrete walls,
exposed pipes, and the boiler in the corner,
he shoved these buckets of MREs
(or something along those lines)
with some water filters, flashlights,
backup batteries, stuff like that
under the stairs, I bet they're
either still there or he shoved them
into some insulation in a gap
in the wall just behind the boiler.
and he'd always talk about escape plans,
hope in the car and drive south
for a good day or so, or maybe
hunker down in the house
and try to live off what we've got
when things finally die down,
swiss army knife? for the apocalypse.
changing a tire? for the apocalypse.
and I believed him too, like oh god,
there's this ticking time bomb
basically right next door to me,
when am I going to hear about
all the earthquakes popping up,
told when/where to evacuate,
what roads are just off the beaten path,
what's a good place to stop, or
what's the safest spot in the basement,
what things should I bring down there with me
(other than my stuffed animals and video games),
how do we clean up the ash afterwards,
do we grab water from the local creek,
how long is our food going to last us,
who'll come get us later, if anyone?

and at some point I did my reading
and realized, wait a minute, yellowstone erupts
every few hundred thousand years or so,
and none of the magma plumes are up to much right now,
like I guess things could change quickly -
we really only so much we know about the earth,
and predicting earthquakes and volcanoes
has always been a massive crapshoot,
surprise, look at this spot you didn't check -
but the odds of it happening while I'm alive
are so tiny, and even if it does,
I think we'd both just die, dad.
burn up in the fumes or choke on the smoke
or get crushed in the wall of rocks and ash
maybe before we even know it's coming,
or while we're trapped on a packed highway,
or hunkered down in basements
that weren't made to handle an explosion
that'd take out half the country,
would you even want to live in a world
after yellowstone erupts, dad?
millions dead, millions more injured,
everything we've ever known buried,
the world freezing, starving
while the volcano chokes the sky,
everyone fighting for scraps,
is that what you want, dad?
jesus christ dude, get a hobby,
I can't believe you're still here
clinging on to your prepper fantasies.
thanks for all the neuroses.

nukes and yellowstone ii (april 3rd)

I don't know what it is
about dave and buster's
that makes dad Like That,
but yeah, a while back,
we were waiting on our food,
and me and mom were talking about
this heavy element synthesis thing -
like element 118, 120 synthesis -
some scientists were planning
to switch to a slightly heavier ion beam
so they could use lighter, cheaper,
less radioactive, just easier
to get more of targets
(nucleosynthesis - it's like math,
but everything's exploding(tm)) -
and dad was so hung up
on the ion beam,
he just couldn't believe
you could turn a chunk of metal
into a stream of particles,
like, dad, that's the easiest part
of the entire process,
grab some shards of metal,
blast them with heat, crush them,
and with enough energy/force it's easy
to smash them into atoms,
rip electrons off those atoms,
boom, now they're charged atoms,
use magnets to pull them
towards the center of a target,
what's so hard to understand,
what are you hung up on,
he never even seemed to get
what I was saying,
much less agree with it,
just a little smile and a
"well if it makes sense to you"
that sounded, patronizing,
in every sense of the word,
maybe a bit conspiratorial,
like he thought all this stuff
was just made up, nobody's
actually discovered
all those elements, I was
in the pocket of Big Element.

this is my degree! I graduated
in chemistry a couple years back,
and sometimes it feels like
he doesn't take me seriously,
doesn't think I could possibly
know things that he doesn't,
he can think his way
through any kind of problem
with his super logical rational brain
steeped in financial advice reddit
and a parade of talking heads.
and boy has he ever said
plenty of deeply insulting shit.
like a few years ago
I sat down at the dinner table
and he said antifa
was putting concrete in the milkshakes
without a hint of irony.
dad, no, concrete is a very,
very specific mixture of substances,
it's really easy to mess it up,
stop it from hardening properly,
tossing a ton of sugar and milk in there
sounds like a recipe for nothing,
maybe taking some cream and dust to the face,
just wipe it off and move on,
also the dude saying that shit
is a weirdo who keeps hit lists
and passes them around to alt-right militias,
he's maaaaybe not a trustworthy source,
but some media show host picked up on it
and suddenly dad had strong opinions
on chemistry and material physics,
never asked me, why bother asking me,
clearly I'd just agree with him anyway.

nukes and yellowstone iii (april 4th)

even before I went to college,
I wanted to get into
not just chemistry,
but nuclear chemistry,
but not just nuclear chemistry,
but playing around
with the properties of elements
at the edge of the periodic table,
there's so many protons and neutrons
jammed into such a tiny space
that those atoms squish, flatten,
electrons flying around
at a fraction of the speed of light,
they don't behave like they should,
the normal rules don't apply to them,
our models can't describe them yet,
half of them barely last long enough
for us to identify them, like god,
that'd be a fun puzzle to crack.

and yeah, sophomore year, I reached out
to a professor doing that kind of work,
got a politely worded no, fair enough,
wrapped up some more classes and tried again,
got to do research junior and senior year,
spent my time testing out simulations
that fried one of my laptops
and growing metalloorganic crystals
that wouldn't dissolve in anything
no matter how hard I tried,
but I was having a hell of a lot of fun
slowly making sense of this stuff,
and yeah, niche field in a niche field,
really needed to go into grad school
if I wanted to keep going,
had a couple places lined up,
but god, I was exhausted
after four years of college,
I needed to take a break/make some money
in industry, come back again later.
the way things are panning out right now,
I'm probably better off having a stable job
with coworkers I like and decent pay
even in an economy dropping off a cliff
than being told, whoops, sorry,
I'm not getting the funding to do studies
or even stay in my department/the school.

but my parents, mom especially,
still like to send me articles
about some billionaires wanting
to set up cheaper, smaller,
decently efficient nuclear reactors
way out in wyoming and colorado,
by all the uranium mines
and the waste in superfund sites,
maybe feed that all back
into the system
and generate more energy,
a whole like 60-70% in common
with the kind of stuff I was interested in,
more than I figured
would come from the private sector.
and I appreciate they're thinking about me,
finding stuff they think I might like,
even if I don't think they'd be happy
if I ran out into the middle of nowhere
and camped out in the plains
with the sagebrush and antelope and rattlesnakes
and howling winds and turbines
and hazmat suits and geiger counters and lead blocks
and the breeder reactors
the only things keeping me company
(sounds really tempting to me now,
right when it's probably not happening anymore).
my parents can be cool people,
we get along alright most the time,
I don't want it to sound like
I *hate* them - I hate
a lot of the things they do,
I have a lot of issues with them,
and it's easier for me
to write poems complaining about stuff
because that's easier for me
to cling on to and spell out,
but they're trying to reach out
in their own way, at least.

october april october april october april (april 5th)

I don't know how to do it justice,
if that's something I can even do.
like, it's easy enough to talk about
the idea of grief, losing someone,
the void they left behind
in everyone they knew,
all the places they went,
if it's worth filling the gaps
or scooting them out of the way
so you can go back to living,
and they might grow when you're not looking
or they might just shrivel and fade away.
and then the idea of grieving someone
you barely talked to in the first place,
maybe finding out more about them
in death than you knew about them
in life, they're almost
a whole different person
in your mind now,
sure would've been nice
to meet that person, huh!

but like, I heard about all that
a long time before grandpa died,
I've read/watched plenty
of tragedies and what could've beens,
but I don't know, none of them,
and nothing I've written,
captures exactly how it hurts,
in big and little ways,
sometimes like picking a scab
until it breaks and bleeds again,
sometimes like a random bruise on my body
I don't know where it came from,
but even those similes,
and that whole void metaphor,
all make out grief and loss
to be this kind of defined,
neatly parceled out kind of thing,
and it's just more, fluid,
ebbs and flows, comes and goes,
not always clear it's there,
and some things only make sense
when I've had some room to breathe.

it hurts I know he's gone now,
he's ashes in an urn,
can't imagine he's still alive
like when I was in gooding
and my family shared
days and days of stories about him;
it hurts I can't bring myself
to feel much about it at this point,
I'm a bit too stressed out
and exhausted from being stressed out
because of the everything these days,
like damn, he got to peace out
in the last five minutes of normal;
it hurts thinking about
the Christmas cards grandma sends
every single year, and yeah,
it's just her name these days,
plus I've been hoarding them
on a shelf in my parents' house,
and I think she wrote down
pretty much everything on them herself,
grandpa didn't write his name,
but he was alive, damnit,
that's still a piece of him;
it hurts the way that
our lives keep on going,
like my cousin's had a kid,
grandma's thinking about
handing the house off to him,
my uncle adopted a new dog,
my brother's got a new job,
my other brother's
making his way through college,
I got to drive out
to the countryside with him
and get a look at some auroras,
that was pretty sick,
would've talked about it
with grandpa if I could've;
it hurts him and mom
can't do their whole
call each other first
each equinox or solstice thing,
I was thinking about picking it up,
but I don't know if that'd be rude;
and it hurts and it hurts
and it hurts and it hurts
and it hurts. I can't.
I can't! there's more things
I could drag up if I think about them,
but it'll never be all of it,
and it's all tied up into
so many other griefs and losses,
and they'll all get worse from here.

failed to talk myself out of an A (april 6th)

do you know how long it took me
to accept a damn compliment?
it's really not that hard to do.
oh, you like this thing I made,
you're happy with my job performance,
you think I'm a great friend?
awesome, cool, glad you think so!!
I'm putting a lot of effort
into being a better person
doing stuff I'm proud of,
and it's nice knowing
that I'm on the right track
(that's super clinical,
but whatever, you get the idea).
not even a little but wait
do you have any problems,
is there anything concerning
I should know about,
you probably would've said
if it was an issue,
how about I just respect myself
and respect other people's
confidence in me,
instead of sputtering around going
nahh I didn't spend much time on this,
I don't really know what I'm doing lol,
all this is basic, I'm an amateur,
not really my best stuff, it's sloppy,
here's all the problems I have with it,
whoops, why does nobody
want to talk with me anymore
about everything I just told them
wasn't anything worth talking about?

I just had this bizarre fantasy
I clung on to forever,
if I'm just super humble
and downplay myself all the time,
I don't have to believe in myself,
be vulnerable in any way,
and other people won't think
I'm some kind of braggart,
maybe think I'm real cool
for being so dismissive about it.
and whoops, I was basically
strangling myself there
refusing to let myself
be proud of anything I did
for even a second, even if
I was legitimately happy with it.
god in the middle of college,
at the end of a semester,
I was giving a whole speech
to one of my professors
about how I didn't deserve an A,
my writing could've been stronger,
my presentations were clumsy,
I did everything you told me to
all on time, poured my heart
into all these little assignments
I actually found myself
having fun with, but nah,
just give me a B. and thankfully,
he sat my ass down and said no,
you're getting an A,
what are you even talking about?
and yeah, what the fuck?
maybe I'm allowed to be good at things
and argue I can be good at things
and accept some people
might disagree with that,
and that's perfectly okay,
I can take them seriously
and change how I do things,
or decide they're not worth my time
and move on with my life,
I can be my own person
and I can be worth a compliment.

yeah yeah yeah (april 7th)

I just can't imagine
not having some inner narrator,
monologue, voice in my head,
rattling off the words
on whatever I'm looking at,
getting fixated on
some idea or another,
going through a list of whatever
I need to get done today,
is all this taken care of,
did I double-check it
to make sure, because I forget
what I did sometimes,
and really should've done more,
nah, thinking like that
just sucks, doesn't it?
I should be nicer to myself,
give myself some room to breathe,
I worked my ass off today,
stepped out of my comfort zone,
reached out to some people,
even if I should be cleaning up the place
and shredding old bills
and god the old pill bottles
what do I do about them,
I can't keep hiding stuff
in the corners of my apartment,
it's picking up dust,
my allergies already suck,
just sniffling and coughing
and having some of those
heart palpitations again,
ew what if the crumbs
falling between the oven
and the counter attracts bugs,
I'm a couple stories above ground
and I keep the windows closed
all of the time, but I've seen
the odd spider every now and again,
they hunt flies, that's good,
but yeah, I'm exhausted right now,
I can figure that out later,
maybe pick a couple days
down the road to hammer
all that stuff out,
ugh, my neck's back at it,
should also spend more time tonight
stretching out my legs,
how are you supposed to lift stuff
when it's already over your head,
it's not good for my back
but like what else should I do,
etc. etc. forever.
when I wake up to when I sleep,
probably a novel's worth
of words in a day,
would suck to read it all
if I could though.

and normally it's fine,
helps me remember things
well enough, helps me
pass the hours at work
dealing with the same old,
but god, I get scared,
swamped with tasks,
wiped out enough
to get some brain fog,
it's a huge pain in the ass.
it's not even lucid anymore,
I wish I could switch it
between 100% on and 100% off,
because otherwise it's
yeahyeah yeah yeah yeah
I should've that's done
next is yeah next is
my brother hey my brother
brother brotherbrother
what was I oh
what's he okay done
just need to yeah is he good
got to carry this over
cart no cart yeah cart
what are those nerds
ugh adjust this yeah good
oh betting it's always
sports betting god
they all suck at it too
where did I put that
how much time left yeah
got to run yeah yeah yeah
am I missing the hood
lines turned off
that clean yet yeah
yeah it is ehhh yeah
yeah yeah do it tomorrow

leave your home (april 8th)

it's kind of wild sitting back
and realizing, hey,
it's been a while
since I've really
gotten brain fog. like,
it still kind of happens,
mostly if I've been
spending a few hours
playing a video game,
watching videos,
reading through essays
on someone's blog,
roaming wikipedia,
I'm also a tvtropes person
(not as much as I used to be,
because honestly reducing
whole stories into lists
of neatly separated
narrative elements
is kind of a boring way
to handle all that, plus
the site whiffed breaking down
some stuff I like,
and I had to remember
that there's human beings
slapping this all together,
and they don't always know
what they're talking about,
and I remembered I should like,
engage with things myself
instead of having someone
do the hard work for me,
but anyways!!),
then there's the times I'm
skimming through
piles of work safety documents
that got emailed to me,
sitting down for presentations,
adjusting machine settings -
basically staring at a screen
for way longer than I should,
and even then it's not really
brain fog, isn't it?
I can step away, drink some water,
open my eyes all the way
and stare off in the distance
until they start watering,
and that helps the pain
and helps me reset a bit,
about all I need to do
to go back to being, well,
about as normal as I can.

but when I was a kid,
I had to put with
the late afternoon
into early evening haze,
sitting by my computer
doing schoolwork
to the sound of
lawnmowers droning,
looking up to see
the sky a pale blue,
without even a wisp
of a cloud floating by,
drowning in sweat
up on the second floor
of a house with an AC
that wasn't built
to handle the april
to like october heat spells,
I had to go lie down
in my bedroom
every now and again,
crank the fan to high
and close the blinds
and drink some water
and shove my face in a pillow,
try to clear my head,
sometimes I just couldn't
and had to call it day,
sometimes I kept going
and felt like I was
watching myself type words
and solve math problems
until I had to lift myself
by the shoulders,
drag myself down
to the dinner table.
but hey, a combination
of glasses for eye strain,
adjusting the brightness
on my computer/laptop screen,
carrying a water bottle,
thyroid meds (whoops,
guess what one of the systems
of hypothyroidism is,
between that and my dad
having gone through
that whole process himself,
that's why I ended up
asking my doctor
to run some tests on me),
and finally getting out
of that house,
and even in college
my brain fog was a
you're obviously burned out
and/or it's past midnight,
stop working on this already deal,
and by now the whole thing's
gone from some kind of perfect storm
of completely wiped out
to oh, maybe I should just
do literally anything else.

fun and games with genetics i (april 9th)

do you ever think about how ancestry dot com,
the largest for-profit genealogy company,
was founded by a couple of mormons,
still has strong ties to the mormon church
(they love gathering that information to, uh,
the way my mom explained it to me
was baptizing a dead person
so that they'd end up in mormon heaven
whether they'd ever wanted that or not,
just one of many things
she was pretty uncomfortable with
visiting one of those
big salt lake city churches
with a mormon friend
who maybe wanted to convert her),
and ancestry dot com is also tied
to all kinds of finance companies
themselves tied to an administration
who's been big on collecting information
it can use to identify and deport people
in increasingly overtly fascist ways,
anyways, if I'd known all that,
maybe I wouldn't have bought a kit
and sent my literal DNA to ancestry dot com
a few years back, all to find out
uhhh basically nothing, surprise,
I'm white as hell, who could've seen that coming,
literally nothing there I couldn't already figure out
going back through online documents and records
and whatever my parents have lying around.
my parents also got tests, so awesome,
now we're all in the crosshairs!

and to add insult to injury, my parents
don't even seem to understand the situation,
are really obsessed with their results,
tell me whenever ancestry dot com updates theirs
with new phenotypes or lineages or whatever.
like wow, we're a little bit welsh,
a little bit norwegian, some swedish in there,
isn't it so cool how we cover
the entirety of north-northwestern europe,
and exactly nowhere else?
and christ, if you'd even click on the results
it'd give you pretty huge error bars,
a solid 10-20% difference between the minimum and maximum,
because the whole idea of being "from" somewhere,
sharing parts of genotypes with people who've tended
to live in a specific area for a while,
is really more of an art than a science,
which sucks for something
that's supposed to be a science, you know?
any narrow location range
without a shitton of data points
is at best misleading, at worst lying,
so maybe stop using this like it's white sprinkles
to throw on your vanilla ice cream
and read some boring as shit censuses
like I've been doing for the last ever!