Because today is the day most convenient for us to do so. My entire family gathered, and we did the usual things. No present for me, but that'll come. Got a card, got a cake, licked the cake batter bowl, cake was decorated with candles, candles were lit, song was sung, blew out the candles, got my cake and assigned a system of order for who would get cake (in this case, S; when that produced a tie, I decided on J because I wanted to avoid the center as much as possible letter-wise), watched a film, usual works.

Not in that order exactly but you get the idea. Now, I should clarify my birthday isn't for another two days; it's on Sunday. But we're celebrating today because it's the day all six of us could come. But now that the festivities have died down, I'm probably headed to bed soon. Was a long day, it's late, so I should sleep. <3

On the one hand, I started out developing something which I want to make come true: an anthropomorphic melon called Melony. Why my brain wanted to do that, I don't know, but all the same it is something I thought of during the course of this day.

Then came the drive to dance, where I heard some sad news: Chester Bennington had died. The name may or may not be familiar to you, so I'll just tell you he's one of the main members of (in fact being the frontman for) Linkin Park. (Also apparently Stone Temple Pilots for a couple of years.) Thiiiiiiis...makes him essentially a childhood idol of mine.

Like. I was really saddened by the loss of Chris Cornell. (Ironically enough they were apparently friends and today, the day Chester Bennington died, was Chris Cornell's birthday. They also sadly share the same cause of death from what I can tell.) He was a living local legend, who had passed away.

...But I don't think you understand just how important Linkin Park was to me. At the darkest part of my life, they were one of the bands I listened to in order to cheer myself up. They were one of the main bands I listened to in fact. Every day, I would go out of my way to listen to them.

More than that. Me ripping off Linkin Park songs is how I got into continuing songwriting. I had done poetry before, but it was me stealing from Linkin Park tunes which got me to actually start and keep going on writing well and true proper songs. To this very day I still am influenced by and can rip off from Linkin Park be it consciously or subconsciously because they just have that much influence over me as a lyricist.

Linkin Park songs got me through some tough times. Linkin Park songs helped to inspire me, helped to make me live. And today I learned that one of the main guys who had made that possible had died. The guy I spent my youth, my childhood, listening to, had died.

Not lightening my mood: at dance I discovered just how awful my feet are feeling. That pain that I mentioned? It still exists--it didn't go away. Now! It's not getting worse, mind you. Trust me, I know my body, I can tell, it's not getting worse so it's not a medical emergency. But I can also kinda sorta feel like it's not getting better, either.

More than that. I feel like I may have bruised the bottom of my feet, too. Or done something to damage a different part of my foot. Specifically, the ball of the feet, and more specifically, the index and middle toe balls of my feet, in that they have apparently been bearing most of my weight and are now complaining.

This is a separate problem from before, however, as I had the first without the second, so I feel like the issues are entirely unrelated, just...really sucking. Ow, my feet hurt in so many different ways. It's kinda disturbing just how many ways you can mess up your feet badly.

I wish this were more of a pleasant day but some days simply aren't as good as others.

Well I was gonna make an entry today about something but at some point whatever idea I had for one left my head. Prolly not helping matters: having a double-date with my girlfriends. We had a lot of fun today, but it also ate up alllllll of today, so.

​No detailed blog today!

I wanted to talk about souls. To do this, for me I find it simplest to start on the other end of the spectrum: the body and mind, and work my way up to the soul. So do forgive me, this might not sound so coherent at first; bear with me a bit and then you'll end up with some semblance of coherency by the end!

Basically, on the physical level, we have the mind and the body as two different things. The things are interlinked. The mind, for the most part, controls the body. It thinks, and it controls actions, and the body does those actions. But it's not entirely dominant over the body; it does not have full dominion over the body. The body is responsible for many physical things, which can have an influence over the mind.

Exhaustion for instance is an easy thing: if the body is tired, doesn't matter how much the mind is awake the mind will cave in eventually. Emotions are dual-level. Some emotions come from the mind and are then felt from the body, but other emotions come from the body and overwhelm the mind. In fact, emotions are almost something outside of both.

But basically. The point I'm making here is. The Mind Is (Mostly) Not A Plaything Of The Body; the body is mostly controlled by the mind but the mind can be influenced both positively and negatively by the body. For instance, a female mind in a male body often leads to dysphoria when the body gives distinctly-male-anatomy urges.

The link between mind and body which also holds emotions is the spirit. The spirit is essentially the sum of the parts and then some when it comes to mind and body. The spirit self is our "true self" as it were. Our spirit selves can change over time as our perspectives of ourselves are altered. For instance, someone who is 20 years old probably doesn't have a spirit who looks like an 80-year-old; someone who is 80 years old might have a spirit that's 20 years old in appearance but is more likely some other appearance closer to their current form.

Our spirit selves always have the appearance of our mind's eye. A pre-transition transwoman isn't male in spirit, but rather, female. And appears that way more likely than not. Our spirit selves often are going to be relatively close to our own appearance more likely than not.

For instance, it could theoretically happen that a Caucasian blue-eyed short-haired blonde would have a spirit self that's dark-skinned, orange-eyed purple dreadlocks...but it's not very likely. More likely is simply a look close to what they see in their every-day body. 

To put it another way. The spirit is essentially the heart and core essence of a person. It is what we are, in the current moment. It is shaped both by our soul (our core personality which could never ever possibly change) and by the real world (our body/mind), in that it is a link between the two, shifting as we see things. 

I'm not quite sure if I'm describing these well enough (I feel like there's so much I'm leaving out), but that takes me to the final level: the soul. What is the soul, if not the heart of who we are? The soul is the heart of everyone we could ever be. In other words, whereas the spirit is "us in the current moment", the soul is "us in every possible moment". Because souls transcend space and time, existing outside those boundaries to me.

Souls represent us at the fundamental level, linking us to our spirits across any and every universe, existing in a form transcending what we'd know of being consciousness. Souls don't so much think or feel, as much as they do experience and then share. Souls share with other souls, and blend together. 

This is, loosely, where soulmates begin to form for me. Because souls that begin to blend together tend to be more compatible with one another. And because souls transcend space and time, it can even be possible for multiple people living at the same time to have part of a merged soul. In short. There are multiple people (not just a singular one) we can be compatible with on the fundamental level.

This is also why people who're soulmates can have relationships not last, too. Their souls might indeed be mated together, but that doesn't mean that in our universe at that particular time their vessels, their spirits, will experience the link between. So we can in fact have more than one soulmate, because souls tend to be a bit...flexible.

Now to be honest.
I'm not all too familiar with the anatomy of a soul.
This is all just my belief anyway, sure, yeah, but even for it just being my own belief, most of this is just speculation. I don't know the details. I don't know if I'm just making up stuff or if this belief in the system I'm describing is coming truly from me. But I hold it all the same.

Essentially in summary, souls exist in a form outside of our universe. The link to those souls is our spirits, which exist in our current universe. Our spirits are intangible and ever-changing, ever-evolving. Our mind and body are the physical vessels in which our spirits reside.

Our spirits also hold some traits which will remain true regardless of our mind/body and can even override them, e.g. a female spirit causes a female mind even if the body is male. But they're not immune to influence since a spirit may change appearance off of experiences from the mind and body. The soul is essentially the archive of the spirit as it were, both documenting and dictating much of what the spirit is, has been, and will be. And this archive seeks out other archives to cross-reference as it were.

This probably makes no sense.
But basically.
Not all love is between soulmates nor are soulmates going to necessarily always have love.
Yet the two have obviously a very huge overlap, in that--yes. Those who're soulmates with one another will find each other, will have love for one another, and will be able to make it work because they are connected on a deep, fundamental level and they know it. <3

I swear I've gotten worse at recording thoughts. I used to be so good at actually expressing things and actually writing down ideas here on the blog but now I'm consistently making entries past midnight where I'm posting minimal content. It's largely the same and I don't know how to get it back to being interesting again, though I'm a little bit tired so obviously not tonight.

...I mean. It could be worse. The other guard coulda been a girl; the opener coulda been one of the more insistent ones. Neither is the case but it's a good thing, since otherwise I might not have held together. As-is, it'll still be tricky enough for me. I didn't have breakfast made for me--this would be fine if I left myself time to make one, but I did not. I didn't have coffee fixed for me; same thing, only stronger: brewing coffee takes WAY too much time.

To top it all off...last night I basically got zero sleep. Oh, I went to bed plenty early enough. I shoulda gotten 4.5-5 hours' sleep. Not as much as ideal, mind you, but a normal, typical amount on a Saturday night (I can't go to bed before midnight) given how early I wake up on Sundays (6 AM).

...It's just that I didn't actually sleep. This is different from staying up; I was actually in bed with my eyes closed so not staying up. This is different from having poor quality sleep (though that's a problem I can have, too!). This was me, flat-out tossing and turning for hours and being physically trapped awake. I never had so much as LIGHT sleep. Because with light sleep, you at least have dreams. I wasn't dreaming. Not once.

This isn't, "I remember nothing". When I've dreamed yet cannot remember anything, the memory of the dream still remains afterwards in spite of the contents being missing: I have an awareness that I was dreaming even if I don't remember what about. So I basically 100% ALWAYS know when I've had a well and true, proper, dream.

This is flat-out no dreams, because of no real sleep. My mind god chaotic mumblings and jumblings. I talked to myself a lot. Self-reflected. Much of which felt honest even if I'm not sure about it myself. I felt my mes were speaking to each other, but with an absolute lack of harmony, lack of control.

There was just no focus. There was just no direction, but not in the aimless wandering way, pleasantly drifting from one thing to the next. In the "can't actually lock onto something soothing". I was tense. I was stressed. I couldn't relax. It just was all-around unpleasant.

I'd honestly have preferred a nightmare. Nightmares are, after all, dreams, just bad ones. They're still subconscious though. And last night was all too conscious. I never stopped thinking. I couldn't focus/direct my thoughts, yet my thoughts still were racing: the worst of both worlds. And now, after that, I've got no food or coffee. So today will be hard to endure.

So work wasn't actually bad in of itself, save for one annoyance.
At the times that people usually come there was basically a ghost town.
At the times that nobody should be around, we were at almost a two-guard ratio of mostly kids, with it being all families seemingly randomly choosing to be around at that one time.

So it was busy overall, but not bad. It was actually pleasant and relatively restful.
And all the other problems I mentioned, I've been dealing with today. I've eaten a lot (a lot a lot), I've slept a little amount, I fully believe I will sleep like a log tonight (I believe that when I go to bed I will conk out quickly) meaning no need to worry about being safe...

...Essentially I'm saying that my girlfriends' first reactions to reading what I wrote this morning would probably be to panic even after the day had finished and I'm telling them not to because while I thought​ the day would be bad, it actually ended up turning out to not be.

In my defense, it was 7 AM at the time. I had one thing on my mind and one thing only: bed. (Okay, so. To be technical. Three things. The other two being my girlfriends. <3 But that's something almost always true since they're basically never ever out of my head and always in it.)

I'd say I'd make it up to you today, but to be honest: I'm not going to. We have family night tonight for some odd reason, and that means minimal contact for the most part.

I am such a bad person. I keep on slacking off on things that matter, things which're important, and procrastinate, put things off, the like. I'll manage to piece myself together somehow.

...Just to post​! But anyway, yeah, here's my blog entry.

It's not really developed yet, but I thought of dueling locations.
One, Eville, is a little town which is entirely populated by supervillains, either retired, on vacation, taking extended leave, raising children (hard to be a supervillain with the kids, after all), or up and coming in training. This place would have a school which essentially teaches supervillains a modified version of the evil overlord list, essentially how to be an evil villain while not being a stupid villain.

Two, Heropolist, is a city populated almost exclusively by superheroes, also largely retired, on vacation, taking extended leave, raising children, or up and coming in training. Unlike Eville, it does have a rather significant civilian population, in part attracted to how the schools there are the counterpart to Eville's school, in that they train competent heroes.

They not only train heroes in how to counter stupid villains, they go a step above and beyond to go teach how to counter smart villains. These schools also provide bystander classes (thus the appeal to civilians), in that they cover the dos and don'ts of getting involved with a supervillain.

I haven't really fleshed out this setting that much and what would be the details of it exactly.
But I think it's a really neat, fun idea in which there would be potential for a lot of hilarity in watching the two rival cities meet with one another. (Well one's a town, the other's a city, butstill.) And, yes. They do meet with one another rather frequently. Up to and including in high school sports. Eville's team is rather predictably The Villains from Eville Education Center (often called the Eville Villains); Heropolis has multiple schools but the most bitter rivalry is with Hero High's Crusaders.

It's just a world which I think would be a lot of fun to explore, but I haven't quite given it that thought yet.

So that means no entry today, just love. <3