It is incredibly easy for me to pass as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Other than being white, I’m none of those other things, but the only way to get anyone to see me as anything other than that is to actively force them to acknowledge my self-described identity. One of the reasons I’m not out at work, beyond the things that some of my coworkers have done or said that make me believe they might not be the most accepting people, is that I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to constantly correct people. When I came out to my friends, the ones I’m still friends with didn’t take much work to correct. Most of them were in the practice of using pronouns other than he/she in their daily lives and while some of them slipped up (and some still do), they catch and correct themselves most of the time. As far as I can tell, none of my coworkers practice using a wider-range of pronouns and none of them self-correct themselves. One of my ex-coworkers (for whatever reason, probably my years of isolation within the company, default to thinking of the people on my team as my coworkers and everyone else as fellow employees) who transferred off my team back in early 2021 uses they/them pronouns like I do and I constantly have to correct my coworkers when they come up in conversation. I do not expect that my coworkers would be any better when it comes to me and my pronouns, especially because I look exactly like your average Midwestern Cis-Hetero White Guy.
Continue readingMusing
The Future Fallout Media Would Sell Us
I started watching the Fallout TV show and it has me thinking about the future the Fallout series envisions. Unlike a lot of other post-apocalyptic fiction, most of the Fallout media doesn’t take place until decades or even centuries after the disaster has occurred. The on-going danger of said disaster has fallen to reasonable levels and while things aren’t pleasant for anyone who lives in the world, it is tolerable. More in some places than others. Throughout it all, though, is the constant messaging of humanity being doomed to repeat its past mistakes via on-going abuses of what power remains, conspiracies to hoard resources and technology for those deemed “worthy,” and the constant strife of people struggling to survive when there’s only so much to go around. All of which is a bit farcical once your suspension of disbelief ends or you start thinking about the world and its stories outside of the context of the video games they were originally created for. I mean, I enjoyed the episode of the show I saw and I still plan to watch the rest of it when I’ve got the time (and access to a PrimeTV account), but thinking about the way the narratives shift to accommodate what we’d expect from a TV show has really highlighted the ways the series doesn’t really work for me on any kind of deeper level. At least in terms of post-apocalyptic ideation. I still enjoy playing the games and will probably enjoy this show.
Continue readingGrilling Is The Reason For The Season
One of my favorite parts of the warmer months is backyard cookouts. I grew up with a father who enjoyed grilling and would grill at least once a week throughout the warmer months of most of my childhood (a habit that faded as I got older) and the act of grilling out has become indelibly printed on what my idea of “summer” is to the degree that I just don’t feel like it’s actually summer unless I’ve gotten a chance to grill out at least once. Or to eat when someone else grills out, as is most-often the case because I’ve lived in apartments all of my adult life and only one of them has allowed grills. So I’ve done what I can to guarantee myself at least one grill-out per summer, to make sure I get my fix, but sometimes that doesn’t happen until the end of the year. It really depends on when my local home-owning friends are available and what they’re up to on major US holidays, birthdays, and random nice weekends during the summer. It takes a lot of stars-aligning for grill-outs to happen without extensive planning, but they’ve been known to happen. I know that when I get my own house and have a basement/garage freezer for storing all kinds of extra stuff in the longer-term, I’m absolutely going to be the Spontaneous Grill-out Person. Someday.
Continue readingPreparing To Rest On A Long Weekend
It always feels a little paradoxical to me that I have to put so much effort into my attempts to rest and recover. This weekend, as I prepare for four days away from work, I’ve planned out the cleaning I will do, the groceries I will need, what activities I’ll have each day of my break, what errands I’ll run and when, and what treats I will allow myself as I invariably don’t want the food that’s in my apartment. I have pretty much everything planned out other than what time I’ll go to bed. Frankly, it was way more work to prepare for this weekend than I expected and I’m genuinely a little worried that I’m not going to get as much out of this weekend as I’d like. After all, I’m more burned out than ever, I’ve started getting bad lower back pains every time I sleep for more four or five hours at a time, and my entire body hurts despite doing what I’m supposed to do to counteract the two medications I’m taking that cause body and, somehow additionally, joint pain. It’s exhausting and I’m not sure taking a weekend to rest will actually do anything but leave me feeling like I’ve wasted a bunch of time doing nothing or like I’ve somehow gained nothing for the time I’ve spent. The latter of which might happen regardless, given my record for disasters striking post-vacation [here I am, editing this post on my second post-vacation day at work during what was supposed to be a chill week and disaster has already struck twice…], so it’s difficult to relax.
Continue readingStormy Thoughts The Morning After
Last night, as I settled in for what comfort I could manage while entirely without power (it was warm and humid, I wasn’t able to use any of my sound generators to cover up the noise of my neighbors, and I was entirely without access to my CPAP machine), I wound up spending a lot of time thinking. It’s difficult to avoid when you can’t fill the air with podcasts like you normally do because you need to save your phone’s battery, when your various electronic entertainments are all inaccessible, and when you’ve got no way to position a candle so that reading a book won’t strain your eyes more than your day job of staring at monitors already has. Not a lot to do other than consider spending my tablet’s battery to read or sit and think about what it means to be without power in the modern era. Which is pretty tempting, to be completely honest. I do enjoy a bit of inward contemplation and there’s nothing quite like staring out the window at the unquiet night sky as you consider modernity. As I went to do this, though, my mind already full of thoughts about an impenetrably dark sky, the darkness of a world without city lights, and the slow hum of people doing their best to live on despite the sudden darkness and silence of the world around them, I found out that this little idealized version of my situation didn’t actually exist.
Continue readingNotes From Within A Tornado Shelter
I had different plans for today’s post, but I’m currently sitting on the floor in the bathroom at work because it’s a designated tornado shelter (and the one I trust to be a bit safer than other nearby options). The tornado warning sirens have been silent for ten minutes now, but the weather report says they’ll last another forty-five minutes and there’s a good chance we’ll get a new set before these expire, given the way the storm front is moving (I turned out to be correct: we got a new warning that lasted an additional thirty minutes). Currently, the door is open as what seems like the only other employee in this part of the building is hanging out in the other bathroom doorway, the both of us scanning various radars and weather monitoring services while we talk about the likelihood of us getting hit by any of the potential tornados. Currently, the wind makes it look like they’ll all pass west and north of us, but the storm front took a pretty hefty push to the east, directly toward us, right as the sirens hit, so who knows. Know that, if you’re reading an entire post with the normal (low) number of spelling and grammar issues that I’ve survived and everything turned out some kind of fine [it did. No tornadoes even touched-down in my area. There were some hurricane-force winds, though, and I spent 24 hours without power after writing this post and eventually leaving for home between bursts of the storm].
Continue readingLooking Back On Three Years Of Eye Problems
It has now been two years since my eye problems were largely solved and over three since they began. I’ve mentioned it once or twice, but the original problem was mostly in the early stages of maintenance once my blog was up and running, even though it kept coming back a few weeks or couple of months after I finished treatment, despite my best efforts. For the last two years though, I’ve been taking a daily pill and putting in a sorta daily eye drop as the specialist I saw was completely unable to actually diagnose what had happened but did prescribe me the eyecare he determined I would need to care for the symptoms with the note that things would probably clear up on their own eventually, so long as I didn’t ignore the symptoms. Given that ignoring the symptoms could result in blindness (partial or full), I have been pretty motivated to keep up my routine over the years. After all, daily-ish eyedrops and an actually daily pill are a small price to pay to keep myself from going blind in one or more eyes, even if I still absolutely hate putting anything in my eyes despite the over three years of exposure I’ve had to the process. I’d rather confront that fear and discomfort every day than lose my vision.
Continue readingWarm Feelings And Even Warmer Weather
I’m doing better this week. I’m still depressed, exhausted, and burned out, but I’m feeling a bit better about it right now than I have in a while. Work is still busy as hell and I’m still struggling to get enough sleep most nights, but it all feels so much more manageable, even during a week when I did a bit too much over the weekend and didn’t end it feeling much more rested than the week prior. As I’ve gone through a very busy and exhausting day at work that has nevertheless felt much less emotionally taxing than previous similar days, I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Not that much has changed, after all. I’m still not getting as much sunlight as I’d like and maybe less than ever since the warm, almost-summery weather we’ve been having means I can’t take my midday walks at all and the time that the UV level has finally dropped enough that I can safely take my walks has progressed passed 5pm. Sure, I’ve had my tabletop games more regularly than usual, but that can also be exhausting. I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution for my desire to continue blogging without supporting a company that would sell my work to a plagiarism machine. I haven’t even gotten to the point of being able to fall asleep at a better time most nights since the rise in ambient temperature has made it more difficult for my apartment to feel comfortable and cool at night (and I refuse to turn the AC on when temperatures are dropping into the 50s overnight. It just feels too wasteful). So, if nothing has changed, why do I feel better about all of it?
Continue readingLasting Lessons And The Impermanence Of Memory
One of the things my parents taught me when I was young was that anything you saw was in your mind forever. This phrase was always part of a moral lesson since the idea behind it, at least as they (and their incredibly conversative religious beliefs) intended it, was that sin and temptation was best avoided entirely because once it had gotten into you, you couldn’t entirely get it out. The only way to stay entirely free of those things was to avoid them entirely. It was a core aspect of why I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of TV shows on public broadcast television (even one glimpse of a swimsuit or bra, or even two people making out was enough to get it banned in our household the entire time I lived there), why I was only allowed to play video games that didn’t include Suggestive Themes (even though they were apparently just fine and dandy with violence of any kind), and of my complete failure of even an abstinence-only sex education (the perks of being home schooled is that your parents get to fail three times at teaching you about the birds and the bees, call it a complete education, tell you to Just Say No to touching women who aren’t related to you, and then never speak about it again). It even came up a bunch when I finally escaped the isolation of my home schooling and started asking questions about things I didn’t understand in high school. Better to avoid something entirely than to encounter it at all, since that’s how the devil slowly worked sin and evil into your once-pure mind (all of which is a pretty big contradiction of the orthodoxy behind the sacrament of confession in Catholicism).
Continue readingSpring Is Here To Stay And Other Weather Musings
After a bunch of temperatures bouncing between the sixties and freezing, the forecast has finally shifted into some proper spring weather. Some looming storms, days rising into the sixties and then falling into the forties overnight, an occasional day or two in the seventies, and some nice windy days. I’m looking forward to the weather continuing to improve, even if I can’t go on my walks at noon anymore because I get sunburn far too easily thanks to one of the medications I’m on (and will hopefully be off in another month or so). It’s nice to not have to run my heat or AC, to be able to leave my windows open all day long, and to be able to go to work in shorts and a t-shirt. And sometimes a zip-up hoodie. But mostly the shorts and t-shirt. Throw in how nice it is to leave work at half past seven in the evening while still having enough sunlight that I don’t need to turn on my headlights during my drive home and I’m honestly pretty happy with the weather. Which, you know, won’t cure my depression or anything, but it’s still nice to have and definitely won’t hurt it. Its a nice little thing to have at the end of what have become incredibly long and exhausting days at work. Turns out that things haven’t really slowed down since a couple weeks ago and while I’m less emotionally and mentally stressed because the sheer volume of Things To Do is lower than it was back then, the physical stress of the labor required to test the project I’m mostly working on has picked up the slack. I wish I got to do this work while getting fresh air and not wearing a mask to protect myself from what one of my coworkers insists is “just some Spring sniffles,” but I’ve found other ways to extract some fun from the work I’m doing.
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