juushika

Ignoring the fact that I haven't done a personal post in so long that basic information is irrelevant; ignoring the fact also that the introduction is horribly worded (and I'm too lazy to rewrite it): the basic information meme, stolen from azhure.

You know how sometimes people on your friend's list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? since when were they working THERE? since when were they dating HIM/HER? since when?" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you *should* already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy mine below, erase my answers putting yours in their place then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration! One-word answers seldom help anyone out.

1. First Name: Jessica. I answer to Juushika/Juu as I've been using the name online for eight years; unless you're a very close friend I don't answer to Jess.

2. Age: 22.

3. Location: (Willamette Valley) Oregon, United States.

4. Occupation: Unemployed.

5. Partner? Devon, who I often refer to as the boy.

6. Kids: Only the fuzzy kind. I'm childfree.

7. Brothers/Sisters: One sister, Allie, who is three years my junior and in many ways my polar opposite. The boy's youngest brother lives with us most of the time. We're not close, but we have a good relationship.

8. Pets: Three guinea pigs, Dink, Kuzco, and Alfie. They have their own introduction page as well as numerous tagged entries throughout my journal.

9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life:
1. My mental health problems. I've been diagnosed with dysthymia , major depression, anxiety (unspecified), and agoraphobia, and have a history of self harming behavior. My major depression lead me to change schools and eventually drop out. My agoraphobia keeps me largely housebound. Currently I'm in a safe and low-stress living arrangement, so—for the first time in a long time—I'm largely happy and unstressed. However, I'm still prone to rapid declines.
2. Books. Reading, writing book reviews, and potentially writing my own novel—books occupy the steady majority of my time and energy. I read pretty widely (always non-fiction, preferring general lit, YA lit, classics, non-high fantasy, and good sci-fi; I often latch on to new subgenres and read them obsessively), I generally borrow instead of buy, and I read between two and six books a week. I'm a naturally critical reader, and so I write a lot of book reviews. I love it when those reviews lead to discussion, so feel free to comment! I'm also always adding to my to-read list, and recommendations are much appreciated.
3. My boyfriend. His name is Devon, I usually refer to him as the boy. We've been dating for five years and are just now living together for the first time. He is remarkably loving and patient, and puts up with my particular brand of crazy as if it were no difficulty at all. I love him very much.
4. Gaming/anime&manga/BPAL. I play RPGs, open world games, and Second Life. I loves shoujo/josei, sci-fi, and apocalyptic anime/manga, among others. I collect BPAL perfumes when I have the money and appreciate them very much. I do reviews of all of the above when mood and content strikes me.

10) Where and for what did you go to school for? Whitman College for two years before transferring to Reed College. I attended for about one year, broken by a leave of absence, before dropping out due to mental health reasons. I was an English major concentrating on Shakespeare, but I have no degree.

11) Parents? Mother and father, healthy, still married, and living about five minutes away. I have an on-and-off rocky relationship—largely related to my mental health issues—which is just beginning to improve.

12) Who are some of your closest friends? The boy is currently the only "close" friend I have, insofar as he's my best friend and our relationship exists offline. Most of my social networking occurs through the internet. I'm closer to some people than others, but they know who they are. ^_^ And the rest I'm always happy to get to know better. Regardless, these folk rarely come up on my LJ.

I met Devon when I was a sophomore in high school. My social group hung out in front of the auditorium, and for reasons I can't remember he began to do so as well. I was dating someone else at the time, and then broke up with him to date my ex-boyfriend from freshman year, and then broke up with him—and by the end of the year, I was fostering an embarrassing, immature crush on Devon. He was, at the time, gloriously arrogant (although he would probably disagree with me on that): he showed no interest and limited knowledge in what he didn't care about, but in what he did care about (which has always been computer science) he was over-educated and spoke so self-confidently that you were never sure if he was brilliant, or just bluffing very well as he pulled all of that tech-talk out of his ass.

I thought he was intriguing. I thought he was so intriguing that I spent the whole of the yearbook signing party (of course at the end of the year) jumping whenever I saw someone with a hairstyle similar to his because I was hoping it was Devon and I would get to see him again. It was the glorious giddy sort of high school crush where you don't expect anything to come of it, so you might as well enjoy it in its entirety. Over the summer that followed, however, I intentionally forgot about Devon and that crush. I wouldn't be seeing him for months, so it made no sense to think about him for months, and after a few weeks I'd put it behind me.

When school began again the next fall, any attempts to be over my crush were lost. I quickly fell back into my infatuation—and more, Devon seemed to notice me too, this time around. We had a class together, which is where he says he first became interested in me. After school, my social group used to ride my bus together and go walking, killing time before ishmael_ started work. Devon lived in the clear opposite direction, but started coming with us anyway, and we would wander aimlessly and talk. By way of our social group, Devon and I spent more and more time together. He found out I had a crush on him; I learned that he had a crush on me.

Just after winter break, while it was pouring rain and miserable out, the two of us went walking together after school. We talked about how we had no plans to date anyone, but how we were still attracted to each other. The sky was gray, I borrowed his raincoat and still got soaked through, and by the end of the afternoon we decided to go out on a few dates and see if there was something there worth breaking our own rules. On our first date, we went and saw The Recruit. On our second date, we went out to sushi. On January 31st, we decided to make the relationship "official." Considering we were still in high school, it was a fairly mature way of going about things. For Valentine's Day, he bought me the best chocolate I've ever had and a bouquet of carnations—because I love them, and don't much care for roses. At the end of the year, although we had originally decided not to, he took me to prom—I wore a black dress and a beaded shawl, he was uncomfortable in a tux and dress shoes. A few nights later, the morning after the senior all night party, we sat in the back of a friend's car while we waited him to come back from an errand. Neither of us had slept. I told him that I kept thinking it, but felt like I wasn't supposed to say it: I loved him.

At the end of summer, we broke up. I was going off to school in Washington, and neither of us wanted to begin the next phase of our lives feeling tied down—we were afraid it would keep us from enjoying and engaging in our future and make us resent each other. The breakup was excruciating for both of us, but we went through with it and I went to Whitman single. We stayed in constant contact, and what we felt for each other never faded. It was painful to pretend otherwise.

That October, Devon and two of his friends came to pick me up from Whitman to drive home for my sister's birthday. On the drive back up, our car broke down just outside of Pendleton, and we were stranded there for six hours while someone could drive up from home to rescue us. While sweating, hot, and miserable, stuck in the middle of nowhere, Devon and I talked and by the end of the day, we had gotten back together. It was unintentional and avoidable: we didn't know how not to be together, how not to touch, how not to love.

Although it was precisely what we had tried to avoid, we began a long distance relationship while I was at Whitman and he was back home. We ate up phone minutes, talked online, and he came up one a month so that we could spend the weekend together. Looking back on it, we decided to date the start of our relationship from January 31st, 2003—the day we began to consider ourselves a couple. We don't count the breakup as time off or a restart because, despite all the best intentions, the heart of our relationship never changed.

We've been dating five years, and so there is of course much more to the story of my relationship with Devon, but lupanotte wanted to know how we met and how we fell in love—and so there's that. I could have told it differently; goodness knows there are words enough. Walking back from our second date, night had fallen and the ground was slick with rain, and the liquid spread of reflected street lamps put us in a black and white photograph, the distance blurred under the shortest depth of the field. When we sat down to talk about the state of our fledging relationship, he told me to look him in the eyes and see his pupils dilate as he looked into mine—see there the passion and pleasure that he found in the sight of me, and know that he meant it when he said he wanted to be with me. When we broke up, I cried, curled fetal, on my bedroom floor, and I felt as if I had no skin, only a raw-lipped gash that I had ripped myself. When we were trapped in Pendleton, he gave me a shoulder massage and then I leaned back into him, a movement so natural that I did it without thinking, and he wrapped his arms around me, and I was at peace.

There are many, many words—but that is the start of the story.

According to the responses to this meme, some of you (mostly the new and new-ish people) don't know what I look like. I find this ironic, as I'm a self-portrait photographer (currently on a sort of hiatus) and my face and, well, the rest of me is no stranger to the internet. I promised pictures to correct this deficit, and so I present: a picspam all about me.

I am female, 20 years of age, five foot almost one inch, heavier than I would like to be, hourglass shape, with red hair, blue eyes, and very fair freckled skin (and where there aren't freckles, there are birth marks and moles). In my self-portraits, I'm somewhat known for my curves: large breasts, a tiny tiny waist, and, um, "child-bearing" hips, though they shall bear no children. I have a severe sway back, but I've learned to correct it to a large degree through posture. I stand very straight and have a long torso, which helps make up for my intense shortness. (It's in my genes; plus I was anemic during my would-be growth spurt.) I carry a bit of extra weight, and I hate my legs passionately and rarely photograph anything below the waist. I'm of Scottish, Russian, and Dutch decent, and I have a Jew noise (not huge, but very well-defined), an oval face, and classic Scottish red hair and fair, freckled skin. I have very long hair: it's currently just below waist length and still growing. I take incredibly good care of it, and it has a wonderful color and sheen. By fair skin I mean well and truly pale: my veins are visible visible in my hands, arms, breasts, legs, and under eyes. I have dark under eye circles. I am an ever-recovering self-harmer, and my left arm and both thighs have a number of fading scars. Both my knees are covered in scars from two accidents, one running and one biking, when I was a kid. My eyes are blue (I always wished they were green) and I'm nearsighted, so I wear glasses when I'm out and about but take them off when studying, at the computer, or (often) taking pictures (in that case, because flash catches the glass).

But all of this is better explained in pictures, wouldn't you agree?


( The face behind the journal )

As stated way up there, I am an amateur self-portrait photographer. (I take portraits as well, but generally lack models.) After deviantART fired its founders I left the community and about the same time stopped taking photos, but I do want to go back some day (soon?). My galleries are still online, however, and you can feel free to check them out. Juushika is my safe account, with some artsy photos, self-portrait and otherwise, and a poem or two. Possession is my far more popular erotic gallery, and does contain BDSM, nudity, erotic photos, and other things that may or may not make you uncomfortable. I still sell prints there. I am very proud of this work despite the immaturity of some of it, and hope to add to this gallery some day. My website is TitleHere.Net and contains much of the content from the Juushika account as well as some older photos and more of my (old, immature) writing. None of these sites have been updated in some time.

And that, my friends, is me. Physically, at least.