hey if anybody knows of a grant that would let me just sit in a rocking chair at an old-times sanatorium for like three to six months, lmk

alternatively, if you know somebody who needs a junior-to-mid game programmer or scripter (I wrote a lot of a game that’s coming out on the Playdate this year), hmu

I want steady work that I can learn from along the way. I’m pretty burnt out on crash course 2-to-6-week contract jobs that require learning and creating something from scratch and then maybe never using that knowledge again :[

despite whatever diagnoses, explanations, or traumatic dislocations, despite pushing on regardless, endurance tests, or temporary triumphs

[omit 1000 words of similar because so far clarifying hasn’t really seemed to help]

I haven’t been at peace with myself for going on two decades. I haven’t been able to enjoy being this for very long at all. I haven’t found a place for me, to feel valued and contributing, to feel fulfilled and recognized.

I really want it! I want to be myself, use what’s best in me, and have enough money to stop worrying. I haven’t stopped worrying about money at any point in my adult life. Lots of people don’t. But I really want to. I made about $14,000 last year, despite working harder than ever. Used a lot to keep paying off debt. I survived the pandemic, so far. I have decent part time work right now, but somehow it’s not enough. Bills and debt keep asking for more! I want to keep my own place to live. I want to finally become myself. And I want to get paid just enough money doing something I’m good at to just relax for a little bit.

But I can’t. I have to keep doing more. Keep taking on work. Keep studying new skills for no money. It’s never been enough, no matter how many things I learn to do. Why? Should have moved to a big city, but I could never afford it. Should have applied to more jobs? Learned different things? Just keep going, almost there, nearly 35 years old and every year I’ve been told I’m almost there, I’m so close, one of these things is going to pay off. For some people, it happens! People who know less than I do about several of my domains make an exorbitant amount of money. Why not me?

I’m really tired right now, but I don’t get to stop. Just gotta keep going. And I will. But I am not happy about it.

SORRY FOR COMPLAINGIN

Edie Campbell, Alec: The Years Have Pants:

chronological order:

is how long you can keep the audience from figuring out there’s no story worth telling

just woke up thinking how funny it is that christianity teaches people to be afraid of certain numbers, words, and so many normal aspects of material reality!

there are mfs out there right now today who believe satan the devil is a real dude who is obsessed with making them do “bad” things, but that 90% of the living humans they’ve ever seen are somehow not real!!!

and that if they just do whatever some sweaty old fuck says they should, they’ll get a giant cookie after they’re dead! but somehow their instructions mostly consist of making themselves and everybody else more miserable now!!!!!

lol 🥲

... I wake up from a weeks-long dream, stagger back into reality, lose my intellectual coherence for a few hours, and then slowly coalesce back into somebody I'm supposed to be for a few hours before boredom devours me and I have to stun myself back into submission with entertainment so I can once again accept the unpredictable void.

...fun!

nice!!!

I just learned that Extreme.......... kicked ass

Molly Osberg, at Jezebel:

The existential terror hovers to varying degrees around the edges of these stories, and the anxiety about what comes next is real. But there’s still such a lack of useful language to describe what the hell happened, and what we’re supposed to be doing now. In the place of a shared sense of reality or collective expression of mourning, I see a torrent of advice on how a person who managed to survive can feel more self-actualized once they return to the shuffle between the office and after-work drinks. To me, this looks like denial, the first tentative step towards what I’m told are seven distinct stages of grief.

It’s always been true that the advice lifestyle writers offer tends to obscure more difficult realities. Financial bloggers recommend investing early and forgoing the morning latte as if thrifty habits could combat the forces that have conspired to grant 50 people control of almost half of the United States’ wealth. Tactics that claim to combat burnout or encourage self-care rarely dwell on how, exactly, most Americans have come to work harder for less money than in generations before. Most service journalism is a workaround, a way of rendering specific and material failures as issues of personal choice. There’s no life hack that gets around the knowledge your government was happy to let a vast swath of its population die, no radical acceptance of such a monumental chain of loss. Reading pages filled with recommendations on navigating a slightly altered future feels like receiving a missive from another world—a final and devastating cruelty that we’d all have to soldier on pretending the loss isn’t collective and omnipresent, that in the end not so much has really changed.

And anyway, recalibrating towards normal implies there’s something to get back to, that the pandemic was a thing with a tidy beginning and end. Covid-19 is not a phase or an era or a series of habits to be unlearned. It was a largely preventable horror that altered the fabric of reality and there are people responsible: For refusing aid, for lying about the threat, for profiting off of suffering. They’re the people best served by a country too traumatized to keep looking clearly at the dead, a dazed and defeated group of people invested enough in their own personal journeys towards normalcy they slowly begin to forget that this wasn’t just something that happened but was done, repeatedly and intentionally, to them.