I think I have a job! Agreed on salary/benefits, waiting for a formal offer which will probably come on Monday. Excited to be done with this phase of my life, though I’m still going to be passively job searching for the next several decades because I guess that’s what you do. But I’m extremely happy to be getting my foot in the door! And hopefully I can financially stabilize over the next couple months and think further than a week in the future for the first time in my adult life.

I'm job searching and I'm terrified. My current work pays well but it's a part-time gig that doesn't offer enough hours, and I've just pulled the end of the meager savings I had out of my IRA to hopefully give me enough time to find something consistent with benefits. I have at least a few months, but nobody is offering anything to entry-level engineers. Everyone's looking for experience, and all the positions I see are for senior engineers. I'm throwing resumes at those positions anyway but I know it's fruitless. It just gives me a chance to feel like I'm doing something. In the meantime I'll keep spending my free time learning skills that will hopefully broaden my options. Neural nets, DSP, C. Next is probably getting a basic understanding of SQL.

Things are going well with the person I'm seeing--I think we're solidly in situationship territory. They only came out as a lesbian recently and as nonbinary even more recently than that, and they weren't intending to jump into something monogamous so quickly. I'm the first person they've really dated since coming to terms with all of that, and they've mentioned they still want to have more varied sexual experiences. The intimacy is good, the sex is really good, we text every day, our personalities mesh well, and we have fun going out. We're both reliable, considerate, and attentive to each other's needs in various contexts. We're both independent and want to live our own lives. I'm interrogating a lot of my beliefs around what it means to be with someone, what it means to label it, and what I'm actually looking for. Most of my needs are met. I'm just working on getting used to the idea that when spring/summer rolls around we might be fucking other people.

The stark acceleration of anti-trans and anti-queer legislation is terrifying on a deep level.

I also reconnected with an old friend who I hadn't spoken to since transitioning. It was good to see him again! I'm recognizing how important it is to have friends in your 30's. I'm hoping that when (if) my financial situation stabilizes I'll have some energy to make more.

My date Wednesday went really well! We split after eating and reconvened later for a dance party at a local park. It was wonderful until the DJ let us know that to wrap up his set he was going to play an original, and it turned out to be Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech remixed into a house track. When "free at last!" led into the drop and the DJ picked up the mic and told us we were all keeping the dream alive I started laughing so hard my abs cramped up. I immediately let my date know we had to leave because there's no way I'm ending up on some Instagram story in that context.

We made plans to grab coffee next week but we both ended up with covid, which it turns out really sucks. Now I'm quarantining and trying not to infect my housemate, but that might be a lost cause. Fortunately I got my fourth shot a month ago so it more or less just feels like a bad cold. My strategy of eating kratom to kill the cough and malaise has worked pretty well so far, and I ordered a few pints of ice cream so it's not a terrible weekend. I just wish I could leave the house.

Had a fling for a couple weeks and it got weird. Broke it off last Wednesday. Got way too drunk and killed it on the dance floor on Friday, and a woman with red hair told me I'm gorgeous and gave me her number. I woke up with her in my contacts as "Cuuuuuuuute (cutie)" with her number entered as the last name. Texted her and we're getting brunch tomorrow. A Wednesday I guess? Not sure if she even knows I'm trans--hard to have those conversations when you've spoken a sentence to each other and met while drinking in a fairly dark room. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic though! It's nice to make a connection the old fashioned way--dating apps are burning me out.

Now I'm back on the job hunt looking at full-time engineering positions, while scared to death to work full-time. I spent this summer part-time at my job, part-time on online courses trying to bridge the gap between what I know and what I need to know to get the work I want, and part-time on my mental health. I'm scared I won't have any energy left over after work to relax, take care of myself, and date. And I need to keep getting out and meeting people even if it gets weird. The pain of being alone becomes acute once you've spent even a moment with someone else.

I don't think people recognize how much work goes into being trans. I recently went through the process of changing my name and gender marker through the county court, the DMV, social security, and my voter registration, and changed my name with all my utilities, my credit cards, my nearly depleted retirement account, my car insurance (which then raised my premium), and my Xfinity account which was somehow the worst of all of them. That somehow took three half-hour phone calls. I spend an hour in therapy a week, I spend an hour or two decompressing from that hour, I spend a few hours a week just processing where I fit in the world, and I write a few thousand words in a text document that I bring to therapy so that I can try to squeeze a week of experiences into that hour of therapy to get help making sense of them. A backlog continually builds while I get help putting out fires in my day-to-day life but overall I guess I'm doing better. Some day I'll take the plunge and sign up for psilocybin-assisted therapy and get into the real shit but I can't imagine that happening for a while.

There’s really something quicksand-like about The Trans Issue, where it seems people engage and then become completely mired in it. J.K. Rowling’s dedicated her Twitter feed to it; Jordan Peterson has apparently decided it’s his central issue now. And the animus is just palpable. Like I think people just weren’t aware that within transness as a whole is an unimaginably deep well of shame, self-loathing and mental illness, and by engaging with it in this combative way they kind of inadvertently siphon off some of that energy to go process on their own.

I feel like there would be something kind of empowering about being centered in a Culture War if it weren’t just so fucking exhausting

Oh yeah? Gaze upon this:

I wonder who at the company an employee is supposed to reach out to in order to inform management that they need reimbursement for an abortion. What's the procedure in general for reimbursing costs for a specific, private medical treatment? Who is able to access this information?

Oh my goodness

Thanks! I think I will stick around, I’ve felt drawn more to long-form media and substantive discussions recently. I always liked the vibe here and am not totally sure why I faded out in the first place, but I’m sure it had to do with a hunger for dopamine-driven interactions starving out more depth-oriented ones.

Good luck with the last year of your MPH! I do think that in many ways this pandemic was a great time to go for a grad degree. We didn’t miss out on a lot being busy the past couple years haha

I’ve been listening to a lot of KAYTRANADA again recently, and some Syd (who I’m gonna see in a little over a week!)

This collab is probably my favorite track by each of them:

i haven't been on Hubski in over 3 years! I love that it's still active here. Since last time I've visited, I've transitioned genders and finished about 99% of a master's degree in electrical/computer engineering--still one week left before I graduate, but it looks like I'll probably have a 4.0 for the program. I can code in like five different languages now. Right now I'm knee-deep in the last data science project for a machine learning class, which involves predicting stock prices. Not totally my thing, but the problem-solving aspect is cool. My therapist let me know this week that they could give me an ADHD-I diagnosis. It gives me hope that I can look into medication and start getting my life together, and stop relying on semi-functional coping strategies and Indian modafinil to stay on top of my deadlines and obligations. I'm scared to death to try to get out there and find work this summer, but I think things will work out.

I also finally got glasses after four years of noticing my vision gradually deteriorate, and they're super cute! It feels good to see things in focus.