Still alive!

Half marathon every week

I’m doing quite well in many aspects of my life compared to my peers, but I don’t really feel pride about any of it - I just consider myself lucky. Pride, to me, implies that the luck was somehow of my own making, but since I don’t believe in free will, that’s an incoherent concept for me. I can’t take credit for the kind of person I am.

If I had to mention something, though, I’d probably say I take pride in my work. Given the general quality of craftsmanship, customer service, and pricing in my industry, I’d say I rank fairly high - probably in the top percentages.

Proud of my kid. When he was in high school he wrote a large language model to parse documents for debate prep.

He graduated with his CS degree in 2018 and got his first real job with Intel, then Oracle, and is now a respected data scientist in the AI field, his papers are cited, he presents at big AI conferences…

I mean, he’s actively helping make all our lives demonstrably worse… but I’m still proud of him. :)

How resilient I’ve proven to be. I feel like I’ve been held down all my life but I got a college degree and now I’m going back for another one. I owe a lot of it to new family members.

I rode my bike three times today. Once for fun, once to go get groceries (cargo bike), and once to go to the store again because I forgot something. Then I made a nice fire in the firepit with this lovely hardwood we got from a house around the corner who was giving it away and flame grilled some steak and peppers, onions and squash. It was delicious.

I’m going through some really awful stuff at the moment, and it’s hard to feel proud of anything when I absolutely despise myself, but these are things I managed to convince myself are okay:

• Surviving this. I’m working very hard to get better, I have lots of regrets and getting better isn’t for the reason I want it to be, but I will succeed
• I helped start a transgender solidarity network, our first rally was the proudest moment of my life
• That time I tried to stop a coal ship from leaving port (it didn’t work but it did do a lot of other important things for the rest of the protest)
• I make a really mean creamed cauliflower and I always feel super proud when I get to make it and hear all these strangers say how good it is (it’s the easiest dish in the world, people are just addicted to salt)

My transition progress, my friend circle and my veganism.

I’m proud of how I handled my anger over current events.

I got sick of just complaining on the internet and feeling powerless, so I volunteered for town government. It’s an unelected position, unpaid, but it’s in something I’m passionate about. It’s tedious and slow, but we’re making incremental changes to make things better. I have real influence now on my immediate area and it’s helping me keep my sanity(?).

Writing free software that makes people happy, cooking food for free that makes people happy, helping people to preserve their freedom through privacy, using their rights, getting away from harmful relationships.

In short, helping people does.

Actually this question comes in handy for me. I really need to acknowledge my efforts more. So let’s see:

• Called in sick today. Did not risk that for more than a year, because of anxiety to loose my job. Acknowledged today that atm I need this physically and mentally, could literally not work because of exhaustion.
• Made some really nice progress in therapy in the last few months.
• Even if I am under (in my eyes) a lot of pressure I march on.
• Other than work I take mostly good care of my health.

Still happy to make it to work.

38 years on the “boo boo bus” (ambulance). I’m hoping to last until I make it 50 years.

I figured out the world of piracy which 10 year ago, I was very amateur at it.

And piracy helped me gained a lot of fun from the entertainment, and thus knowledge of movie/tv and “pop culture” stuff helps me understand a lot of the memes.

And I read a lot of stuff on Wikipedia about history, politics, and technology, while many of my peers from highschool (a few years ago) were busy on tiktok and instagram.

I now feel like I sort of understand the world better than 10 years ago which I have zero clue about wtf is going on in the world.

But needless to say, my life still suck. I have a lot of knowledge (relatively speaking, compared to my peers), but zero political power to change things… 🤷‍♂️

Not sure what good is knowing if I don’t have a throne and a kingdom to sit on to, say, stop climate change.

I’m just another puddle of depression…

When I see my friends, coworkers, neighbors, community, etc just being awesome to each other. Just little stuff like letting someone else have the last slice of cake, giving someone the rest of the jug of wiper fluid after filling up, returning their carts, apologizing for interrupting or bumping into someone, preventing someone from getting scammed, etc.

Right now, my first grade reading so well. They’re a reading machine & they love doing it. I want to foster that love of reading as much as I can.