the problem is that mom was a bit drunk this time. had i known this, i probably wouldn't have gotten in the car with her but i didn't notice until we got there. she's good at hiding it... most of the time.

see, this pumpkin patch has been attracting more and more people as the years go by. so the parking situation gets more and more difficult. it was... weird this year. they kept directing us to different lots and it was confusing. my mom's reaction to this -- getting frustrated and acting all passive agressive to the minimum-wage workers just trying to tell us where to go -- was how i realized she was drunk. this made me a bit upset, you know? i just wanted to have a good time with my mom by partaking in our beloved tradition and now she's freaking out. aaaand then she picked up on this and started saying i hate her, blaming herself for everything, saying she wishes she was dead, you get the idea.

this made me even MORE upset !! she does this all the fucking time. every time i think i've resonated with her she goes back to square one. it's exhausting trying to fix her. i realized only she can fix herself.

anyway... this parking lot was kinda far from the pumpkin patch, and there's no sidewalk to walk there so they'd have shuttle buses take us there. it was kinda cool honestly. i mostly listened to 100 gecs to distract myself from my mom's bs.

in line for the pumpkin patch, my mom quietly said all manner of horrible things about the people around us cause they cut in front of us in line. i felt so fucking embarrassed even tho i was the only person who could hear. i thought she was about to cry when we paid to get in. it's like $30 a person now. i get that it's expensive but...

once inside, we walked around. mom gradually sobered up and became more tolerable as we spent time there. there's lots of things to do; they got food, rides, a petting zoo, a thing where you can shoot little pumpkins out of this cannon thing, and of course pumpkins for you to pick, as well as some on tables if you don't feel like picking them yourself. i didn't want the food there, and the rides don't seem very safe so we just went to the petting zoo (well, it's not much of a petting zoo... you can't pet the animals anymore) and the pumpkin shooting thing. and then we picked out a few pumpkins. we got an orange one for my grandma, and my mom got a white one. i got some weird deformed-looking one.

after this, we got mcdonald's and went home. i wanted to go out to eat but it was too late for that. it wasn't as fun as it used to be but i still had a good time.