And what an absolute crock of shit it is. On one hand, we have a candidate who is supposedly left-leaning but would be seen as being to the right side of the center-right position in most European countries, not to mention some of the human-rights violation stuff like supporting Israel’s genocide efforts and somehow supporting whatever the hell is going on at the US border. On the other hand, we had a literal fascist felon who supposedly has a secret plan to become president even if he doesn’t win the election, running on a far-right platform that is more and more exactly the nazi platform. It’s fucking wild, let me tell you, to be a person in this country who has to help pick between these two miserable human beings. I mean, the choice is clear and super easy to make, but it sure feels bad that this is where my country is at. This asshole (Trump, to be specific) should have been laughed out of the area a decade ago. He should have been in prison even longer ago, given all the fraud. Only by the virtue of being a “rich” celebrity has he managed to get this far in life without any time in prison. The man’s a wannabe mobster and is so blatant about it that the entirety of US culture has shifted in order to not lose their minds over how much blatantly wrong and illegal stuff this man and his campaign for presidency have done over the last ten-ish years. I really wish I could say that I don’t and can’t understand how anyone could think of Trump as a viable president or as anything beyond someone who deserves life in prison, but I do and can because I’ve seen it happen. I watched it happen.
Continue readingMusing
Rose-Tinted Glasses In The Gathering Dusk Of A Quiet Night Alone
It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
Continue readingHalloween Costume Conundrum
It is a week before Halloween as I’m writing this. I have two Halloween parties on my calendar (on separate days) and am struggling to come up with a costume idea. I have my old fallback, which I haven’t worn since 2019, but it’s incredibly warm and not super great if I’m going to be indoors for the whole party since it involves wearing my heavy winter jacket. The last couple years, I’ve gotten by with some simple things, but they all took a little bit of planning to execute and I barely have enough executive function left at the end of my work days to keep up with my blog posts. I’m not going to spend any of that on figuring out a costume that I will inevitably need to order online after doing some lengthy shopping around since finding anything for a person built like me (tall, heavy, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered) is incredibly rare in the first place. I mean, I can barely find socks in stock that fit me outside of the incredibly basic plain white type. There’s no way I can buy any ready-made put-on-a-single-thing type costume and expect even the largest size to fit comfortably even if it is advertised as fitting someone with my general proportions. Well, at least the ones listed since few of those kinds of costumes include shoulder/chest measurements in their sizing charts, which is usually where things fall apart for me. So buying anything easy is out and most of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the years that I could slap together into some kind of closet costume just doesn’t fit anymore: a problem I encountered and partially solved last year, except that none of that clothing is good for anything other than actual casual wear. All the random odds and ends one accumulates through the years that can sometimes be compiled into some kind of rather mundane costume don’t fit my shoulders anymore and I don’t really feel like going as “the hulk after he has shrunk back to normal size.”
Continue readingTaking A Day Off: The Ups And Downs
You might think that, given how much I’ve been struggling to sleep and how I’m still fairly recently returned to the land of full consciousness and awareness after more than a month of forgetfulness and grey fog, I would take it easier on myself at work or even make use of my ample time off to cut myself some slack at work rather than continue to push myself to do as many fifty-hour work weeks as I can physically handle. You would be wrong, unfortunately, since my whole fifty-hour schedule exists for a multitude of reasons, only some of which have to do with the demands of my job. Sure, there’s tons of work to do and I currently need a bit more time every day to do the same amount of work that I used to do in shorter weeks, but I also need to cover my rent, buy groceries, and pay my bills as a single adult living alone. It’s expensive to do that in my city and in this modern era. I can’t tell you how many times my coworkers have expressed shock at how my monthly rent payments are higher than their mortgages because I stopped counting years ago when it became spiritually exhausting to hear that common refrain. So, in order to have any kind of comfort and to live in a space that won’t make me feel trapped and miserable constantly, I work longer weeks and have to carefully ration the weeks when I don’t get my ten hours of overtime since they inevitably result in a significant drop in income. It’s usually better to take full weeks off than partial ones since I won’t be getting overtime anyway, unless the day(s) off in question is a holiday, so I can actually get an extended rest. After all, if I’m not going to be able to get overtime for the rest of my days (I’d merely avoid the need to spend paid time off for taking a day away from work), what does it matter to me, financially, if I’ve worked some or all of the days in that week?
Continue readingPolitic Advertisements Are Like Intrusive Thoughts I Can’t Silence
I have not gone more than six hours without getting some kind of text, email, or mail advertisement about the upcoming presidential election. If we throw in general online advertisements, then I haven’t even gone an hour (and I know I should start spending less time online. It’s a difficult habit to break, but I’m getting there). Sure, both of these numbers exclude time I’m asleep, though even that time doesn’t change much if I include my dreams since I still get political advertisements invading those as well. Which is a wild thing to be happening considering I’ve still never once dreamed of being on the computer or using my cell phone. It’s mostly billboards in my dreams, but I also still get mail and hear people talking about the upcoming election, so I really can’t escape it except when I’m sleeping dreamlessly and you don’t really experience that passage of time so I refuse to count it. I probably wouldn’t mind as much if every single one of them didn’t assign absolutely dire and earth-shattering consequences to voting for whatever person the advertisement doesn’t want me to vote for. I already know that this election will have dire consequences and it’s abundantly clear that both results will probably have dire consequences because this is the US I’m talking about and we haven’t had an election that wasn’t choosing the shiniest of two turds (to quote an Epic Rap Battle of History that gets stuck in my head every election cycle) in longer than my living memory. I mean, I still remember when it was controversial to run attack ads at all and when people began to comment on how often attack ads showed up, but now that seems to be all there is. Endless, direly worded attack ads that are also attacking me.
Continue readingThe Sudden Fall Of Summer Weather
After months and months of summer, fall arrived in a single week. I had my AC on not that long ago and now I have to close my windows because it’s getting too cold in my apartment. And yet we’ve got temperatures in the seventies coming up next week [or in a day or two, as this post goes up]. It has been an absolutely wild Fall, so far, and I’m reminded of that Spring from a few years ago where we went from cold, wet, and snowy to hot and humid in a week and a half in May. We had exactly one week of Spring after a very long Winter and then went straight to Summer. Sure, we’ve had more Fall than that already, and it looks like we’re going to have plenty more as the temperatures change up and down (which is usually a sign that most of the heat it coming from the sun rather than from the weather and prevailing winds), but it was a rather drastic shift to go from weather routinely in the high seventies and eighties that rarely dropped into the fifties to weather dropping below freezing and barely breaking out of the fifties for a few days at a time. It looks like, finally, a couple weeks into October, Fall is here to stay.
Continue readingCoffee Grinders Hate This One Weird Trick!
On the same day (the day I’m writing this as I doze off in my office at home, barely able to keep my eyes open), both my coffee grinder and my kettle briefly met their end. I was able to get my coffee grinder working again by slapping it, but the fact that it failed three times in the few seconds I used it this morning means that I’m on the hunt for a new one [and have already picked one, by the time you’re reading this]. Then, later that evening, I went to de-scale my stovetop kettle and the handle broke right off. There didn’t appear to be much holding it on, in the first place, so I’m kind of surprised it lasted almost a decade. I was able to get it in usable condition, but I’ll need to be very careful with it since the handle is only holding on to one side now, and that’s the side that allows you to detach it from the metal for the purpose of cleaning the spout. I can’t help but imagine myself dropping it or having the kettle, full of boiling water, slip off the handle somehow while I’m moving it from the stove to where my French press is set up. It’s nightmarish, which means I’ll be ordering a new one tomorrow, no matter what. I don’t want to have to use this disaster waiting to happen any longer than I absolutely must in order to get the caffeine I require to survive each and every day right now. All in all, it has not been a great time for my ability to make my daily coffee and quart of iced tea (I got a PERFECT mason jar for the iced tea and the self-sealing nature of it means that loading it up with ice to chill out seals it perfectly for the trip from my apartment to my workplace) and I’m looking to improve my setup now that the appliances I’ve been using have both broken.
Continue readingThe Sleep(less) Saga Continues: This Time With Some Answers
While I took some time out yesterday to write about some good old Legend of Zelda stuff in hope of buoying my mood, it only helped a little bit and most of that got undone by sleeping only four hours again. So, rather than get stuck in a negativity spiral, I’m going to write about what’s going on in a more informative than claiming manner. Or, I should say, I’m at least going to try that. Only the writing of this post will actually tell if I manage it, which is uncomfortably close to the process of going through physical therapy to fix my back problems. All you can do is try and see if it works out the way you want. The parallel is pretty apt, too, since I am a decent writer and am directing this blog post and my physical therapist seems to know what he’s doing, so he’s guiding my treatment in a direction that should help with what he believes to be nerve compression. It sounds pretty tame for what it is, to be honest. Or at least for what it feels like. From what I can gather (and I apparently only get to see my physical therapist on days I’m incredibly exhausted and barely coherent, so my understanding might be lacking), the short of it is that sleeping on my old, bad mattress trained my muscles a certain way and that muscle training means that I’m currently putting a bunch of pressure on the major nerves on the right side of my spine (since I went from sleeping in a bowl with a curve that stretched those muscles open to sleeping on a properly supportive surface that keeps my back level and “tightly” closes those muscles on my nerves for hours at a time). It’s sort of like constantly pressing on the nerve in your elbow–your funny bone–for hours until it becomes painful. I’ve been given some exercises to do to help strengthen and stretch my muscles while relieving the pressure they place on my nerves, which will hopefully be enough to eventually counteract the pressure I’m still putting on them.
Continue readingEvery Time I Think Things Are Calming Down, A Rich Asshole Shows Up To Ruin Something
Every time I think the internet is going to calm down and I can maybe figure out some kind of plan for what I’m going to do once I’ve gotten enough sleep for complex thought and proper long-term planning, a new bit of bullshit breaks. To be completely honest, I figured that the guy running Automattic, that owns WordPress .com and Tumblr, and who also runs the WordPress Foundation (which owns and maintains the trademarks on WordPress and does some oversight on the open-source WordPress project), was at least some kind of asshole give the way that WordPress and Tumblr are doing their damnedest to sell user data to shitty plagiarism machines, but I really underestimated how much of an asshole he is. Turns out he’s allegedly trying to extort another company that he recently called out, threatening that he’d go “scorched earth” if they didn’t give in to his demands for changes to their business model or some kind of financial support. Reading some of these exchanges is absolutely wild and I’m really not sure how to feel about all of this, considering my plan to leave WordPress .com was to set up the open-source WordPress .org software on a different host. I’d even begun to do a bit of research about what hosts I could turn to, when the time came to make the change, and have bookmarked the research some of my friends on Cohost did for their own purposes. Now, I’m not as certain.
Continue readingFarewell, Sweet Cohost
Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
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