Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.
Continue readingUS Politics
Fixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.
Continue readingBlogging Through The Horrors
I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
Continue readingAn Exchange Of Beliefs To Reflect This Upcoming Political Era
Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 31
I’m out of blog posts, exhausted, and super depressed about everything going on in the world (which is why I’m out of blog posts, but I’ll write about that later). So, rather than try to kick my ass into gear in order to pretend that I’m still writing these a week ahead of time, I’m going to fully admit that I’m writing this on the eleventh, that I’m probably going to have to edit this after it posts tomorrow, and that all I can seem to do right now is take refuge in what scant comforts remain to me after I burned through them in the first year of the pandemic… [this is why I try to write them early enough that I can edit them before they go up since the rest of the post doesn’t really support this idea here]. The primary comfort amongst them being The Legend of Zelda and Majora’s Mask in particular. I feel a little weird, writing about it right now, but it also feels kind of appropriate given that it is a game about preventing the end of the world while the world is constantly ending. About finding joy or love or peace as the world falls down around your ears. About grief and endings and healing throughout them. I’m pretty sure that all the recent thoughts buzzing around my head are a result of something I read and a discussion I had rather than something I wrote, but it still feels like I’ve touched on this recently even though I have clear evidence I haven’t.
Continue readingA Bunch Of People Are Either Pro-Fascist Or Really Fucking Stupid. Or Both.
The last couple days have been rough. Rough enough that I’ve not only failed to fix my post buffer but let it entirely disappear. Sure, I’ve got drafts aplenty, but most of them are ideas from a week ago or from earlier this week, back when the world looked different. More anxiety-inducing, sure, but better. I’ve never handled uncertainty well because there’s really not much you can do about that, you know? Once you know, once the many possibilities have collapsed into a single reality, at least then you know what you’re dealing with. Today, though, as I’m wearily writing this post after a couple long nights of not sleeping very much, I miss the way I felt on Monday, as I went to bed before the day of the election. Sometimes uncertainty is better than reality. Not yet knowing is better than knowing. I’d rather go back to before I knew that the majority of US voters wanted fascism. Or at least were stupid enough to fall for the fascist con-man’s spiel. Because that’s the thing, you know? It is literally only one or the other at this point. There’s literally no excuse for choosing to vote for Trump other than wanting authoritarianism, fascism, bigotry, and hate to win, OR being too stupid to tell that the giant orange doofus is lying to you when he says that he’s not going to do all the things the people who are going to be in his administration say he’s going to do. Sure, he SAID he’s not going to ban abortion care, but he literally spent part of his presidency setting it up and is a part of the whole goddamn political party who has been relentlessly trying to do that ever since Roe v Wade. What the fuck did you think was going to happen?
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 readingLocal And State Elections Matter, Too
It feels strange to say this, but something not-terrible finally happened in my broader political scene. My state, good ol’ Once-A-Bastion-Of-Progressive-Policies Wisconsin, has managed to vote done a pair of proposed constitutional amendments that would have radically altered the way the state government works in what is a naked grab for power by the Wisconsin Republican party (which holds about two-thirds of the state senate and state assembly despite routinely losing popular votes) now that their horribly gerrymandered maps have been deemed unconstitutional and rewritten. They’re going to lose power over the next few elections and the massive voting power that Wisconsin has managed to mobilize in recent years despite the largely pessimistic outlook of its citizens can go from desperately denying them a supermajority to actually feeling represented by the political powers of the state. It sure would be nice to have a functional state government again, since almost nothing happens any more because the Republicans who control the senate and assembly just show up and immediately adjourn rather than actually do anything. They’re slowly losing their grip on the state’s governance and, thankfully, the voters of this state have seen through their transparent attempt to once again deny power to the governor (they tried to do something similar as the previous Republican governor, Scott Walker–may he suffer the same indignities he visited upon others–was on his way out) and voted against it. It is a relief and I’m glad it has been avoided, but even this moment of relaxation is overshadowed by just how precarious the future still looks. I wish I could just enjoy this win, but I can’t even think about it without being aware of just how we got to this point in the first place.
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