Dear reader,

I haven’t yet decided what I want this blog to be, or what purpose I want it to serve. I am tired, down in the very core of my being, and I guess I’m hoping that writing my inner monologues down will help me make sense of things, or at least relieve the heavy brick of grief (more on that some other time) that’s sitting on my chest. The target audience of my writing is myself, but it helps me to be more honest and consider my thoughts with more of a conscience when there’s a chance someone else can read them. A public journal, if you will, without boundaries or expectations or the pressure of anyone asking me to be a certain way. Just a place to put my thoughts. In private, but not really, but also, who’s going to a read a blog these days, anyway? Not me.

I have no intention of reading over what I write. It’s not helpful for me, and the more I try to edit myself, the more I start to lie and try to seem better than I am, and that would be defeating the whole point of writing any of this at all. I’m so ridiculously tired of putting a good face on things. I simply refuse to do it. I’m verbally crossing my arms and stomping my foot like a pissy toddler. I won’t do it and you can’t make me. I bite my thumb at you, reader. But not really. I don’t mean to be rude or uncouth.

What I will tell you today is this: I looked in the mirror too long and my body turned into water and now I have no idea how I actually look but it sent me down a rancid spiral of feeling fat and ugly (what’s new?). If that doesn’t make sense to you then I envy your healthy mental state. I want to use a term to describe what I mean but it requires explanation. But hey, we’ve got plenty of time. Buckle up and bear with me.

The first necessary detail here is that my grandparents used to let us (make us?) watch a show called Howdy Doody. If you know what that is, I’m so sorry. If you don’t, fear not. I have resources. It’s an old TV show from the late 1940s featuring the ugliest puppet on the planet and a dude named Buffalo Bob Smith who (and I cannot emphasize this enough) does a terrible job ventriloquizing and together they run a variety show with some other people and puppets that don’t really matter and have nothing to do with this story.

This bad, bad boy is Howdy Doody himself, and he lived in a place called, you’ll never guess, Doodyville. Bear that in mind, it comes back later. (Side note: I’m writing this at night, alone in the dark, and I have genuinely always been afraid of puppets to some degree and googling pictures of this absolute king actually gave me a brief surge of rapid heartbeat. What a dish, what a doll.).

The second necessary detail is Rhett and Link, from Good Mythical Morning, in one of their very early videos, did a test where they stared at themselves in the mirror for an uncomfortably long time until their facial features seemed to visibly shift. This is a real phenomenon, discovered by an Italian psychologist named Giovanni Caputo, who reported that people who stare at themselves in the mirror for too long have been horrified to find that they start looking “extremely deformed, bloated, pig-like, and startlingly old.”.

Rhett and Link tried this experiment, and I specifically remember Link saying that his face started to look like Howdy freaking Doody. Now, this stuck out to me, not only because he was the only other person on the planet that I’d ever heard reference Howdy Doody, but also because the thought of slowly morphing into a super ugly puppet struck me as uncomfortable but also really funny.

Short story long, when I look in the mirror for too long like I did today I say that I sent myself to Doodyville, because everything gets weird and shifty and Howdy Doody-y when you stare too long. And it’s based in science. The more you know, amiright? Anyway, stay strong out there. Don’t look in the mirror for too long. Don’t send yourselves to Doodyville. Just glance at your reflection, say two nice things, and be cool about it.