Month: July 2023

My Greatest Reading Struggle In My New Apartment

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I’ve been continuing to chew through books at a steady clip, though my pace has slowed down a bit since I finished moving. I can do other things easily now, so I am spreading my reading time out more and not going through a book every day or two. Now I’m down to a book or two every week. It’s about the same number of pages every week, seven or eight hundred, but sometimes that’s one book, sometimes that’s two books, and I’m sure I’ll find a monstrous book where that will only be a part of a single book. Most of that time is when I finish a game before I’m ready to go to bed, when I’ve got a meal that only takes one hand, when I’m killing time between things, and evenings when I want to avoid screen time. It’s nice, even if I’m mostly rereading books these days rather than digging through anything new, but I’ve been so stressed and tired over the past month that I wanted something familiar and simple rather than anything particularly trying. I did not want to find myself stressed out by not knowing what happens next. Which has definitely made for some mental rest, but it also means I haven’t had anything new to mentally chew on from my reading time. It also means most of my thoughts about my reading experience are a reflection on where I was and how I was sitting rather than the novels I was reading.

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Living In My Apartment One Month Later

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After nearly a month of being in my new apartment (at least it will have been a month as of when this goes up), things have continued to settle into a comfortable pattern. I’m still adjusting my apartment bit, since I prioritized rest and relaxation over finish up hanging art and string lights, but I’m getting close to being done. Plus, there’s some stuff you only ever figure out as you live in a place, like what constitutes an adequate number of curtains, which sections of the floor really need a carpet, whether or not you need more lamps (or just need to move around the ones you’ve already got), and so on. There’s plenty that I’m only figuring out as I move from my recovery period to my comfortable occupation period, so it might be a while before I’m one hundred percent done. I will say that sleeping without earplugs is great and that finally getting the right curtains set up (with two sets layered atop each other in my bedroom) has really improved my sleep. Now I just need to fix my horrible broken sleep schedule and I should be good to go. All those late nights from moving and then stress have really messed up my body’s sense of when to go to sleep.

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A Rant About How Much Things Suck Today

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I’ve got more coming on this on Friday, but the Supreme Court has once again decided that people need fewer rights, not more of them, by ruling on some absolute bullshit. Normally I say that because I’m too mad to go into detail or just don’t have the spoons to run through it all, but this time it is actual bullshit. They ruled on an entirely fictitious situation that had no place being in front of the supreme court and, as a result have not only removed protections from the LGBTQIA community, but basically signaled to all the bigots and their astroturfing financial masterminds that they can take whatever the fuck they want to the supreme court because having an actual legal case doesn’t matter anymore. Throw in all the other dumb shit that’s happened, the absolutely bananas-pants rulings this body of unelected partisan hacks has passed down, and the great issues the right-wing asshats are pushing in every single state, and maybe this country we live in isn’t worth celebrating. Maybe this country is bad. Why celebrate independence day when my freedoms, the freedoms of people like me, and the freedoms of so many people who didn’t have the privilege of being born white, masculine-passing, and (well, probably “lower” at this point) middle-class are being slowly stripped away?

I mean, hell, children are being “allowed” to work in factories because this capitalist machine is breaking down its populace into a bunch of cogs meant only to perform labor. Can’t have people getting an education or improving themselves. Gotta trap everyone in a cycle of poverty so the ruling class can stay seated at the top. Fuck, this country sucks. And it’s not like we’ve got a monopoly on this, either. So many countries are chasing profits and the capitalistic pipedream that is eternal growth by allowing themselves to put GDP and corporations ahead of doing right by their people. It’s disgusting and disheartening. Maybe we should just put a whole moratorium on celebrating countries until they actually get their shit together and stop making the world a worse place for everyone.

Originally, I wasn’t going to have a post for today. I was going to take a day off and continue the resting I’ve been doing since this is one of the few breaks I get to disentangle myself from the capitalist machine of constant labor. After Friday, though, I felt that this day can’t go unremarked. So yeah, fuck the bigots. Fuck your religious defense of bigotry. Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Fuck independence day specifically, because there’s going to be a lot of people out there celebrating this country who see the actions of the supreme court as a victory rather than the symptom of an ill and failing government that is allowing the wealthy few to rule the masses. A majority of whom, at worst, are totally willing to let people live their lives however they want so long as it isn’t endangering other people. Just as properly Good people are rare, so are Evil people. Now if only we could get all the Neutral folks to take a stand for letting people live in their harmless truths.

I’ll celebrate independence day again when I no longer feel ashamed of my country. Until then, fuck it, fuck the bigots, trans rights are human rights, and your religion isn’t worth shit when it comes to deciding the value of other people.