it's a nana special of crushed potato chips with melted butter sprinkled on top
yurrrp
just spatchcocked the turkey for tomorrow
down to 145 for the first time i can remember. progressing well with workouts. the tonsillectomy recovery was horrible for the first 5 or 6 days but then after that I've been golden. medication still working well. i made a whole turkey as practice for thanksgiving and it turned out perfect. life is good.
it turns out that if you constantly say that either you can't do anything about problems or that the problems don't exist, people view you as useless losers the party of adulting strikes again
tonsillectomy yesterday after a night in the ER -finally
I've been exercising and dieting again and so far I've lost 10 pounds, hoping to lose 10 more by new years - I'm gonna be down for 2 weeks in november for a tonsillectomy but it is what it is i screwed up the meniscus in my right knee when i was 16 and it's been giving me a little grief lately, but I'm just ignoring it for now and keeping at exercising and stretching until it starts interfering with anything important. i figure it'll be with me for the rest of my life and I'll be damned if i have surgery on it until I'm old and grey, so the only way out is through
the plan is to move to chicago in the summer so wish us luck
we need better jobs and we need to get out of our college town otherwise we never will, and chicago is a good kick in the pants i had to get the abscess needle drained and then cut open which was more painful than recovering from getting castrated to be honest, i took my first opiate the afternoon after they cut it - but hopefully it's all over it'll be an adventure anyway
the meds are working and the job is going great
we've had a car for 2 months and already we've fucked it up - i scratched the side paint on somebody's bike that was locked up next to a parking spot, and today my boyfriend had his foot slip off the brake and dented/scraped the hood on a chain fence in a parking garage. luckily both times there was no damage to anything other than our car, but it just sucks because it's a nice car that's only a couple years old, and it was in perfect shape when we got it. i hate the anxiety of having something that is so expensive and so easy to damage. i've been trying not to worry whenever either of us takes the car somewhere and it's not easy to do when stuff like this happens
busy work day but it might yet end early. on any day i only work until 3 at the latest anyway. when i get home it's hot dog mac and cheese for dinner. I'm stuck on some kind of africa kick so i might make it a pdf dive weekend project so it's not just skimming wikipedia and public documents the company that bought the old one is much better. i get paid more per hour and i can bill more time. it's only been since january but I'm averaging closer to 4 shifts a week so that helps a lot mood stabilizers have been doing me good, and some of my various ailments are fixed from getting off the SSRIs. next week i start the process of getting a CPAP because apparently i had sleep apnea all this time. yesterday i slept 4 hours after work and another 7 that night. based on all that I'm off the thyroid meds now because that was likely a bugbear got a new learner's permit again so me and the boywife can finally get licenses this year inshallah passed the 4 year dating anniversary a few months ago. about to hit the 6 year transitioning anniversary. getting out of the covid timehole has been strange. every year is messy in its own way. doing the open relationship since last summer has been great i think -the actual process of meeting new people is a pain in the ass and effectively a lottery on whether it pans out, but i've made some close friends* out of it and it's done a lot to limit the cabin fever and that sense of being a piece of shit. I'm glad me and my boyfriend were able to be together all through the lockdowns but after being effectively unemployed, depressed, and spending all day together for 2.5+ years it's nice to remember how to be human
š¯… š¯… shey laft mey reuuuuuses bouy tha steeeeyrsš¯… š¯… first job training starts early tomorrow morning i picked up a cat off the street and fed him and brought him to the vet and now he's mine, we named him funky little man was crusty it's easy to stay alive once you have inertia on your side
I'm not a fan of Haidt. he asks good questions about internet mental health impacts on kids, but loads it with his political biases and takes cheap shots here at wokeness, campus crybabies, supposed tiktok antisemites, etc. it's easier for me to take his research concerns more seriously when the generation bashing is less present. for that reason I appreciate the first linked article in this list, and this rebuttal he lists there. The rest is fundamentally unserious and driven by media hysteria. He says he can't find young people to make counterpoints - that does not match my experience. anecdotally, my internet use came from extreme social isolation. i was homeschooled and had effectively no friends or peers beyond my older sister. i was socially crippled and depressed and anxious before i was even a preteen. the Internet was a godsend for me as soon as i had unfettered access to it around 8 or 9 years old. through the Internet, i received information about my gender and sexuality that led to me realizing i was transgender upon hitting puberty, which simply would not have happened otherwise. my situation is extremely common for any given societal deviant. but it's obviously not that simple. i was also exposed to things that were not at all appropriate for my age in ways that were not appropriately supervised or controlled. i saw graphic violence, child sex abuse images, heinous levels of bigotry, radicalizing fascist groups, and just a level of bad behavior that everybody here who haa used the Internet for a long time is familiar with. I eventually got into a serious of longdistance age-gapped relationships at 15-16-17 with people in their mid-20s that are emotionally complicated for me to understand and likely crossed the line into being abusive at times. the Internet is not safe. the question to me is whether on balance, the shift from physical to online life has been a negative or a positive for my generation. even with all the burrs and barbs of it, I would still wholeheartedly say yes. parents, schools, and authority figures have this need to control every aspect of kids lives, right up through when they're not kids anymore. It never ends. See Haidt's condemnation of college students. i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear, but it's also the best or only avenue to reclaim your autonomy when you're desperately seeking it. the kids aren't fucking, drugging, or making trouble. if some of their brains get cooked, I'm okay with that. i don't see how the solution is continued coddling - especially when the people proposing it seem to be so focused on how this generation is a bunch of neurotic snowflakes. my diagnosis is lighten up cetere autem censeo Google and Facebook esse delendam. just as a brief note: putting your toddler on an ipad all day is like sitting them in front of the TV, but also spinning a roulette wheel that could show them pregnant Elsa dying from getting the Spiderman vaccine. I'm not a doctor, but i think the problem here is not the Internet, it's not interacting with your child to teach/play with them. if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth. you control that yet. if they're old enough to be smarter than a golden retriever, and you let them use a few sites, they'll be fine. letting a teen go ham online will be fine, as long as they're not cutting class or something to do it. make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax. parents are bombarded with people telling them to be scared. you don't need to be
joie de vivre. you play for the love of the game and not to win. the only two things that can get you to learn a language as an adult is sheer necessity and love, and necessity only takes you as far as the grocery store and someday your kids might speak it. you need to love it because the more you learn, the more you discover you don't know. it's like the riddle of the hole: the more you dig, the deeper it gets. the stakes economically need to keep getting proportionally higher to justify the investment, but if it's not an investment to you, it doesn't matterWhy would you want to learn a language
taking notes for legal hearings -not as a real court monitor, but verbatim notes. I've been doing it for a couple months but I'm finally getting more shifts and making good money
there's a quote i like from a ceo i read: "all the GenZ employees at my company are bisexual and they all have long covid. I'll believe long covid is real when somebody who isn't bisexual has it." in the same vein, i will believe that woke media has gone too far when somebody that doesn't post on bari weiss's website says it there is no such thing as a news outlet without bias. there are no objective perspectives - even down to the AP newsline stories that are just "a train crashed in india today". you have to choose what to report on even before you worry about how to present it. there is no way to avoid it. so how do you appear unbiased? you bias yourself to the status quo and the opinions of powerful people. you appear rational by appealing to whatever is common sense - which is the same thing as whatever is the status quo. there's this weird self-flagellating antiliberalism going around that sees reluctant liberals disavowing their own political positions over and over. some people have internalized the idea that rightwingedness is of the people and leftwingedness is of the elite. it gives the senior financial editors and the oped columnists etc of the world so much airtime beyond their natural habitats. people aren't turning off NPR, they were never turned on to it. there are better echo chambers out there for people whose common sense, idols, and overton windows are different.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not embassy staff, and I'm not a Russian agent, so my opinion doesn't matter, but this one has smelled to me like "Chronic Lyme Disease but for spooks" since it came out. the combination of symptoms that doctors can't figure out, the belief in a coverup, pinning it on secret russian weaponry - the whole thing is a tall claim with short proof. the simpler answer is that like chronic lyme, it's a collection of psychosomatic symptoms and random other ailments that get unified and blamed with this label. that doesn't make the symptoms not real, and it's got no more weight behind it than the spy weapon theory, but you can't prove a negative except by showing what isn't true. none of the studies so far have found anything. my views on this are colored by my biases, but without getting into any of the political side of it, i think that looking at the medical evidence and the announcements made by the US govt etc on this is enough to warrant caution at a minimum when things like this come out
just watched the redone cut of alien 3 and it was better than i expected - kind of odd compared to the other two and clearly the inferior to both, but it had its own something to it honestly the biggest negative for me was all the stuff with the alien which is kind of funny - i liked all the convicts and their weird behaviour, and the little thing with the doctor and ripley was cute even though there's never been a lezzier character to make straight - but there's no mystery to any of the horror elements and the action is really repetitive. i feel like it's a knock on the movie to have the best part be the character interactions when the writing is not standout great at any point the cgi and the compositing is pretty bad but it was the era for it and the practicals were pure and true like they needed to be i dunno, people make it sound to be awful and the director hates it, but i thought it was alright. i guess if you're grading on the curve of the first two then it's not good though
man in hat read a book something wrong head got cooked now i sit count the hours face looks off hit the showers
take a break take a day off take a shower take your time take a chance take another one take a slice take what's coming take it all took your time took a lot took too much took enough
2 things: 1. a lot of people are really embarrassing. that's not their fault, and you still shouldn't give them a hard time about it, but man. crying over roast beef because you're stressed about cooking it is really lame. 2. there but for the grace of god go I. I grew up fringe upperclass had a stay-at-home-mom who could cook and (through becoming a vegetarian, along with everything else) had the time/money/desire to make a waaaay broader variety of things than a anglocanadian midwestern household would have on the average. i loved to get in the kitchen as a kid. i loved to bake things and cook things. i loved, and still love, food and eating. i've also been "mentally unwell" in one way or another my entire adult life, and there's nothing that sucks the love out of you than coming home after however many hours of work and having to do yesterday's dishes because you didn't do them last night, because you had to do yesterday's dishes before making dinner, because ... preparing and cooking food is one of those invisible labors that, because everybody has to do it, gets its difficulty discounted. it's timeconsuming to plan, prepare, cook, and clean up after meals. generously it takes me an hour to do all that, if I'm doing anything more complicated than "combine premade fridge staples in pot" or "combine pantry things in pot" or the classic "grain and cheese in oven". sometimes i don't have an hour to spare. sometimes i don't have an hour in me. i've been roast beef tears girl before. sometimes the little things are what tip you over the edge. i held this one in the drafts because i wrote it before cooking dinner. i made a classic recipe of mine that i made hundred times during the pandemic, and i have it down to a military grade aluminum schedule so i decided to use it as a case study ingred. 1 can crushed tomatoes, 1 can black olives, 1 pound rigatoni, 3 cans tuna, and relevant accoutrements. start boiling salted water for pasta. fry up olives then tuna in some olive oil until mildly sizzled. add very generous # fish sauce, oregano, garlic powder, pepper, and red pepper flakes or equivalent ground red pepper. mix in tomato. let simmer and then cool to low. cook pasta and combine it and 1/3rd to 1/2 c pasta water when done to sauce. eat. it took me about 30 minutes to do all that and to clean most of the dishes. there's still the final pasta pot in the sink that sits even now at midnight. the rest is done. it's the power of an all pantry-meal. a cute name would be pasta Qttanesca. I've substituted too many things to make it italian friendly, but what do they know anyway
enjoying my first hot girl summer very much
i learned the other day that SSA hearing reporting was only privatized in 2017 - previously reporters would contract directly with the SSA, and now there are middleman companies like the one(s) i am working for it's difficult to find information about what happened but I'm wondering if it was a trump appointee scam or a costcutting thing. i don't know enough about the internal structure of the SSA to know it feels like a set of positions that would be ripe for some unionization if it wasn't a contractor job. I'm wondering whether it was ever in-house, or if it's always been on a contract level even without middlemen from this, it sounds like things have been cooked right from the get-go - these companies feel like a scam to get a grant and then coast until the nonmanagement catches up with them. I wonder whether the system will continue or whether they'll go back to the old way
monday night i attended my second meeting of a transfem support group thing in the city. it's a great feeling to be surrounded by other people who understand it, who you don't have to explain things to. it's interesting being surrounded by trans people from my age and decades older: people that i wouldn't otherwise feel like i'm peers with, but who i'm able to socialize with as equals. i connected with somebody there and we were friends instantly. it feels like we've known each other for a long time. yesterday we went out to a bookstore and then for lunch, which turned into her coming back to my apartment and us hanging out through dinner. it was a really great day. being a trans woman is a politically radicalizing experience. you go from the top of the social hierarchy to pretty close to the bottom. through forced exposure to empathy or through just sheer selfinterest, the trans overton window starts at rabid bidenite and ends somewhere left of stalin. turns out the way that a lot of troubled young boys get rescued from the neonazi pipeline is through estrogen i said the other night that we are living through the storm right now. trans people are the topic of every nitwit oped and the undercurrent behind this decade's cultural hysteria. we are being hung out to dry. but fundamentally, it's a reactionary wave driven by trans success. we're in the public eye because we're winning, and people don't like it. i was talking to my friend yesterday about it: we're both the same age (23), but even since we were kids hitting puberty and dealing with misunderstandings and discrimination, things have gotten so much better. people are trying to put us back in the dark, and i will burn in hell before i go
Huffpost had a good one for a change: What is undeniable, on the occasion of his death, is that millions of Argentinians, Bangladeshis, Cambodians, Chileans, East Timorese and others cannot offer their opinion on Henry Kissingerā€™s legacy or the world he helped create, because they died at the hands of the tyrants Kissinger enabled.Settling on an ultimate legacy for Kissinger is an enticing task ā€” one historians, foreign policy experts and journalists have sought to perfect for decades. It is a pertinent endeavor, too, for determining if Kissingerā€™s war crimes made him a particularly evil figure, or if they reveal that it is simply impossible to steer an empire the size of the United States for so long without doing some heinous things. Maybe both can be true.
lost in priorities leave it to pastor; tell yourself it's normal walking through ditches (i dug them to put you there) what's wrong with your legs? try leaping, like you don't know the answer humor me and be my monkey I'll look at you on the bus I'll look at you on the ground I'll be the one who makes you dirty I'll be the one to watch you wash your feet
trying mood stabilizers instead of antidepressants. i'm on the baby dose so far. turns out the antidepressants were causing a host of sexual and gastrointestinal dysfunctions that i only found out about after stopping them. i only switched because those mfers were Not Working worthless
he thinks that vaccines cause autism, brother! pro vaccine safety is a clear dogwhistle. you don't need to be pro safety on something that is near-universally safe. if you describe yourself as "pro armchair safety", that means that somebody's putting spikes on the chairs. the tactic of hiding behind "I'm just asking questions, further research is needed into the issue" is cowardly and is made without evidence on the actual position being taken. there is no evidence that vaccines cause or are linked to autism, but RFK JR has been saying it for decades. now he's repeating the canard that endocrine disruptors in the water are causing feminization and transgender-ization. there's no evidence that this is the case. why is he suggesting that "research should be done?" to seed the ground for calling transness artificial, man-made, and a medical illness. if i come out on stage and suggest that being molested as a child actually has hidden health benefits and that further research should be done, i don't get to say that I'm just asking questions. it would be obvious that i am a pedophile trying to drum up support. but it's easy to see that pedophilia is wrong, and apparently much harder to see that when it's about autists and trannies