I really dislike electronic waste. I work for a company that produces electronics (coming up on my eight-year anniversary in about a month, actually) and I’ve never much cared for how much stuff gets thrown out. I have a cell phone that is over six years old because it still works alright and I don’t want to add it to the collection of useless old devices I’m holding onto because they’re all too old or too broken to be donated to any charities or to be given to anyone but I don’t want to just toss them out. I am still using a TV that is about a decade old and wasn’t even a very good TV at that, back when I got it, because it still works just fine and I don’t want to add it to my growing collection of TVs that sit in various rooms of my apartment should I ever, for whatever reason, want a TV in that room. I gave my old Switch away to a friend rather than sell it because it was old, heavily used, and I didn’t know how much more life it had in it. I still have all my old iPods. I still have all my old CD players and stereos. I don’t throw electronics out because I don’t want them to be added to the ever-growing piles of electronic waste, but I’m rapidly reaching the point where this kind of behavior isn’t sustainable anymore. So, when I built my new computer in July, I had no where to put my old computer, no desire to continue using it for anything, and I didn’t want to just throw it out.
Continue readingMusing
Trying (And Failing) To Rewatch Dexter
One of the results I’ve noticed from my decade and a half of therapy is that there are things that bother me now that didn’t bother me in the past. As far as I can tell, it’s a result of me being more in-tune with my own emotions and removing the callouses that had formed around my trauma so I could actually process it and properly heal. All of which means that certain actions in video games bother me more than they used to. Or that certain TV shows I once found fascinating at best and interesting at worst are more than I can stomach without some amount of emotional fortitude (which I am still running short on these days). Which is why I started and then quickly stopped rewatching Dexter when I ran out of stuff to watch on a really depressed day. Turns out watching a show all about a guy who ties down, tortures, and then murders people is too much for me to handle without feeling anxious and bad. Who would have thought that casually exposing myself to one of my own trauma triggers would be mentally distressing? What a surprise.
Continue readingA Rant About How Much Things Suck Today
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.
The Night And I
I needed a bit more time to work on this week’s Infrared Isolation chapter, so here’s a reflective and somewhat meditative piece I’ve been working on for a bit instead. Chapter 6 will go up next week on the 8th and you can enjoy this bit of non-fiction about my life and what I’ve done to fill my nights when my insomnia kept me from sleeping.
Continue readingTime To Settle In For The Long Haul
Today’s been a real shit show [I originally wrote this on the day the US Supreme Court dismantled Roe v Wade, but it’s felt true pretty much every day since then]. In the past few weeks of judicial bullshit, the Supreme Court Injustices have wrecked more shit on rights for citizens of the US than any other time in my life as a socially-conscious adult Human. If I hadn’t spent time a few weeks ago looking up ways to write about being incandescently furious, wounded, and positively apoplectic, I would be at a loss for words! Instead, I’ve got all these wonderful ways to talk about the grave injustices, loss of rights, and anti-democratic hanky-panky being pulled by the pro-fascism side of my country’s government. Still, even armed as I am with words aplenty, I can’t help but feel none of them are adequate to the task of describing how I feel in this moment.
Continue readingThis Tired Refrain
Not gonna lie, I was really hoping to start the month on better footing. I’m writing this on November first and pushing a bunch of other posts around so it can go up closer to the day I’m writing it, just so this doesn’t go up a week later and wind up completely detached from the reality in which I wrote it. Dunno how much I’ll be doing this, since I do want to keep things a bit more journal-y while working my way through Nation Novel Writing Month, but I expect I’ll also be tired, slightly overworked, and incredibly bad at editing anything as I write it. So we’ll see. I like to avoid posting error-filled blog entries if I can avoid it.
Continue readingHappy National Novel Writing Month!
National Novel Writing Month approaches. Well, it technically starts today, but I wrote this a week before you’re reading it, so it both approaches AND is here. I had originally planned to do a bunch of preparation for this month, as part of trying to get my creative energy and focus back, but I’ve fallen a bit short of my goals. I AM writing a blog post almost every day, or at least averaging out to six posts in seven days, but I had hoped to start October by writing an extra five hundred words a day in a book project. Which I haven’t done even once.
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