Hi I've been quiet for some time and I'm sorry about that! I'm still around keeping up with the people I watch and my friends on here, and I still frequent the site so if you want to contact me for any reason noting me on dA still works (though I'm equally as lurk-active on discord too!) I have been doing some art on the side, I just... have been rotten at remembering to upload any of that here. School and work are also taking up time as usual plus trying to work on personal projects. I feel bad for having become so inactive with all my rp groups too and do hope that my muse/enthusiasm for participating in that kind of stuff comes back at some point. In the meantime I guess you could say I'm on a hiatus and I am also sorry that I didn't make that official sooner P: I'm sure I'll get out of this funk in time.
But getting to why I wanted to make a journal in the first place: I kind of just wanted to remind the people I know to take care of themselves. I've been seeing more alerts for people (mostly young women) going missing in my state as well as neighboring states. I hate seeing things like this; and after what happened to my cousin a few years back, I've tried to be more aware of my surroundings and practice caution.
However there was an incident I experienced last week that I've tried to forget, but can't... really. It's been weighing on my mind and even though nothing serious happened and I might have just been reading too much into things, the need to talk about it hasn't gone away. So I'm going to assume that that's for good reason. Maybe this will be useful to some of you, idk
Anyway, before this happened I most often did my grocery shopping at night after work. I'd never worried too much about doing that because I live in a relatively safe area with very little incidents, but on this particular night I realized that a dark greenish car that had been driving behind me was turning into the plaza after mine. This is fairly normal, I'm not the only person who does their shopping at night, but what made me on edge was the way the car behaved. It was... slow, and pressed on the brakes at least a couple of times to keep itself from getting too close to mine. It felt like it was trying to give me a lot of space, to the point where it felt more gratuitous than the average polite driver. I tried to brush it off and continued into my store's parking lot.
It's a superstore so the parking lot is pretty huge. I drove around until I found a park close to the entrance and saw the car that had been behind me finding a park on the farther end. Except once I parked, it suddenly started up again and drove across the lot, into the same parking row as me.
I... really didn't like that, so I stayed in the car with my doors locked and waited for the other driver to go into the store first. He was a heavyset man who didn't look my way once, and as soon as I went inside and saw him already purchasing an item, I wondered if maybe I'd been too paranoid. Maybe he'd forgotten that this was the best spot to park for him to make a quick stop?
It was only the one item and he immediately went into self checkout. I, however, had a big list so I was in the store for a while.
When I did finally check out, I asked the cashier if someone would be able to walk me to my car and keep me company as I loaded my bags into it-- so they paged one of the workers to meet me out there.
I stepped outside, saw the employee waving to me in the parking lot, and then I saw a dark green car-- now in a closer spot to mine-- pull out and drive off.
And... I dunno. I really could have been overthinking all of this. There's more than one green car out in the world and this could have just been a series of weird and quirky actions piling up to paint a worse picture than what was actually going on, but who the f-ck knows??? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In any case. I'd like to just reiterate how important it is to remain aware of your surroundings and to make safe choices! As I stated before, I get off work late at night. However a coworker there walks me to my car every night and has done so for the past year. As soon as I felt unsafe at the grocery store, I asked for someone to do the same thing, and if I ever need to go at night again I'll be sure to make the same request.
And if you can, I'd like to ask that of you all as well. If you can help it, try to avoid running errands at night, especially in places without much people around. If you must, park near the entrance for a quick entry/exit. Don't be afraid to ask people to walk you out, and if the employees seem grouchy about it (the ones I dealt with were nice but y'know), don't let that stop you from asking. You don't need a smile, just an extra pair of eyes.
And you feel like something's funny about a situation, don't feel bad about being cautious! Better safe than sorry and all that.
I don't have a proper way to end this so uh
Hope everyone's having a good fall?