you and me in the stars (sinking in mercury)

[hiddenramen]

Good god, this website has a backend like trying to drive a Mars rover.

I guess we'll start this post, and this account, off with a good ol' fashioned plea for mercy: I've never had a Dreamwidth before, and this site drives with the finesse of a dilapidated cruise ship, so if I break anything via code-poking, or if I commit any Dreamwidth etiquette sins, please be gentle.

So, for starters, my name is Kenna: I'm named after my grandfather, which I always think is fun. My twitter is womb2tombs and my AO3 is tendertorn.

I was born in a little swamp-town called Hammond, Louisiana, about 45 minutes outside of New Orleans. It's mostly famous for having a devil-worshipping murder cult out in the woods that inspired the first season of True Detective, but the weather's nice, too.

(I'll throw the rest of the background stuff under a cut, since it's a bit long!)

My mother was an Irish-Cajun debutante who'd married her high school sweetheart in a lavish Catholic wedding, had 4 kids with him (in lavish Catholic fashion), and had then promptly learned—in what I would also argue to be a Catholic tradition— that her husband had been having an affair with her lifelong best friend.

In response to that, she promptly loaded my sister into the car, set his shed on fire, and left their southern Florida mansion for good.

Back in Louisiana, she ditched Catholicism, converted to paganism, and became an expert on heritage vegetables, working with my Aunt Regina for a couple years until she met my dad. (Regina is most notable, in our family, for trying to convince a cop that she didn't know that plant in her bathroom was weed, she swears, officer... despite the fact that she had a PhD in botany).

My dad, in comparison, was a farmboy turned hippie—he almost made it to Woodstock, back in '69, but got derailed on the way by some very potent LSD and a couple of hot hitchhikers—who'd had a colorful life full of accidental mob connections, hustling pool in all 50 states, and giving Bill Clinton a parking ticket during his ill-advised MP days.

By the time they met, both of my parents were divorcees over 40, and both had been told that there was no way in hell they could ever have any more kids.

When they found out about me, they went, "Well, shit." at the exact same time.

They moved to rural Missouri, where my dad was originally from, just a few years after I was born, intent on taking care of my Dad's elderly mother and hoping that the schools would be better up there. They bought 80 acres of land, most of which was forested, which conveniently came with a nice, homey little underground bunker. That's where I grew up—in a bunker, on an organic vegetable farm, with a pool-hustler dad and a mother who ran a grift online teaching zombie apocalypse preppers how to preserve vegetables.

It was pretty obvious, pretty quickly, that I was kind of a weird kid—I wouldn't be diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder until I was 17, and I wouldn't be diagnosed with ADHD until my twenties, but both were very much present in my childhood.

I used to think of myself as an alien, actually: a different species than the people around me, who could look like them and speak the language, but whose brain worked on a different frequency altogether. I filled entire notebooks with made-up stories about my homeworld, and about my "observations" about the humans around me.

I graduated high school about two years early, got a 32 on my ACT, got into two Ivy Leagues, then promptly attended none of them. Instead, I took a gap year, worked as a nanny for awhile, then moved to rural Appalachia with my family, where I worked my way through community college. I worked graveyard shifts at a chicken processing plant for 55+ hours a week, which gave me crippling industrial PTSD and an addiction to Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets, and studied American Studies, focusing on the historical constructions of race and class in the American South, as well as the history of labor in America.

I worked in campaign politics on and off for awhile, in various contexts, but formally exited the field completely in 2020. That's a post for another day, honestly—I could go on and on, and it's boring and messy. I'm happy to be out of the field, though: I miss the rush of it, I miss the thrill and the high, but I don't miss the lifestyle that came with it.

I've also worked as a shotgun-toting dive bar bartender, the clerk at a probably-haunted mob-front hotel, an exceptionally mediocre guitar player, a UX / UI designer at a tech startup, a waitress at a novelty restaurant, and a video game QA tester for Marvel. I'm currently living in Appalachia, after moving back to ride out the pandemic, and... ugh, god. These kinds of posts are always so hard, aren't they? Like. What do people even want to know?

As far as interests go, I'm into MDZS, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Dragon Age, The Expanse, comic books (mostly DC, but I'm also a slut for Stucky), fantasy novels, HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts: basically competitive swordfighting, it's rad), rock-climbing, kickboxing, archery (I used to compete a pretty high level, actually: mostly in recurve, barebow, and compound), and video games. Many, many video games. 

I'm 26, I'm bisexual, I speak 3.5 languages (English, Cajun French, Spanish, and some Mandarin), and I also write fantasy novels! I'm currently (slowly and begrudgingly) working on a high-fantasy story inspired by the West Virginia Mine Wars, which draws heavily from American history and folklore. It's super fun and I'm excited about it. 

Aside from that, I'm drawing a blank on what else to throw in here: I think this gives you a taste of the Experience, at the very least! I'm super, super laidback, and I love talking to people, so please never be scared to talk to me! I'm excited to meet everyone, and I hope we can build a cool fan community on here together!